Ever since Space invaders. This was a Japanese game, so the imagery is a little difficult for westerners to comrehend, but the metaphors are there for those who take the trouble to look.
I read Space Invaders as a metaphor for nuclear war. Hiding behind the defences is futile: your only hope is an all-out aggressive strategy, wiping out the enemy before they hit you. And if that means destroying your own defences to get a clear line of sight then so be it.
Couldn't it also be argued that every single one of these games contributes on some level to the message "America is great - it's those foreigners you should fear and hate. Stay at home son, and join the US Army!" ?
But then again, everyone I knew who ever had a copy of Command & Conquer always preferred to play as the Soviets. I played an in-store demo of Medal of Honour - the Pacific war game - and was terribly disappointed that in the excellent Pearl Harbour sequence I could only play as the Americans. I WANT TO BOMB PEARL HARBOUR, DAMMIT!
Much of the fun of historical war games is what might have been. I want to march into Rome with a thousand elephants. I want to lead the Golden Horde to Paris. I want to hang Washington for treason. I want to land Spanish troops in England and dethrone the heretic queen.
Games in which you can only follow the glorious patriotic line are just not complete. You've got to have the chance to be the bad guy once in a while.
intelligence must be impartial to be worth anything
Which is why we're so glad to have found out that the British intelligence services were definitely not at all influenced by the fact that Number 10 wanted an excuse to go to war, and presented a wholly impartial and honest dossier with no exaggerations or subtly misleading statements.
Now, given Murphy's law I'm about to discover that Lord Hutton has mod points today...
Do you believe absolute moral truths exist?
Is absolute truth defined by the Bible?
Did Jesus Christ live a sinless life?
Is God the all-powerful and all-knowing Creator of the universe, and does he still rule it today?
Is salvation a gift from God that can't be earned?
Is Satan real?
Does a Christian have a responsibility to share his or her faith in Christ with other people?
Is the Bible accurate in all its teachings?
How strange. After answering all those questions I instinctively continued with 'Oh mama mia mama mia, mama mia let me go, Beelzebub has a devil put aside for me!'
Now we're dealing with two times when failure could kill thousands of people.
That, at least, is true. If something goes horribly wrong at launch then in a worst-case scenario the range officer can't destroy the rocket and a huge amount of metal and highly explosive fuel crashes into Miami. If the flyby goes badly wrong then the spaceprobe could strike the Earth at interplanetary velocity, and if ground zero happened to be a city then that, too, could kill thousands.
Not sure what all that has to do with the radioactives, though.
With two to the one-thousandth power pennies, he could buy Microsoft. And indeed all of Redmond. And Washington State. And the other forty-nine states. And all of the European Union, Japan and China. And the rest of the world. And then he could fund the wholesale terraforming and settlement of Mars, and still not have come close to spending it all...
Look at the people in the Olympics. By the sheer fact of being Olympic-level athletes they're already at the very far end of the bell curve. Even if I'd been in training all my life I could never run a hunded metres in under ten seconds or a mile in under four minutes, and neither could most of humanity. If you ban people from the Olympics because their genes give them an advantage over most of the human race, you might as well call the whole thing off.
According to the gas chromatograph, the secret ingredient is... love? Hey, who's been screwing with this thing?
Re:In case of emergency... break IP rights.
on
Open Source Life?
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· Score: 1
In the USA, laws do not ever ever grant rights.
Laws only limit rights that we already have.
Very well, let's rephrase. In such an emergency, we remove the limitations on everyone else's rights, so that the right to copy Wheat 2.0 is no longer restricted to EvilCorporation X but is now open to everybody.
It's sad, really; Rome lasted a thousand years, the British Empire lasted several hundred, but it looks like the good ol' USA is only going to last one measly century...
The Roman Empire lasted a thousand years. The Roman Republic did not.
I'm beginning to feel like some Athenian or Corinthian watching the Roman Republic slowly turn into the Roman Empire - and that's a terribly nervous feeling. Of course when the Romans come and take over they'll say that it's all for our own safety, that the Persians are a terrible threat...
What did the government p!ss away the money they 'saved' on?
Spending money on sending people to the moon and bringing them back alive was considered a waste, so instead they spent it on sending people to Vietnam and, er...
Incedently, I had always heard that a neutron star was between 1.4 and 3 solar masses. So, the fact that the article discusses it requireing less than 1.4 is curious...
1.4 solar masses is the limit for a core supported by electron degeneracy - a white dwarf. Stellar remnants exceeding this mass will collapse to form a neutron star.
The maximum mass of neutron stars is less well known; the properties of neutronium cannot easily be tested in the laboratory! The absolute maximum, assuming that neutronium is completely incompressible by any finite force, is about five solar masses. The reason is that in neutron stars general relativity comes into play, and pressure itself has gravity. We get an asymptote at about five solar masses, and even a hypothetical incompressible neutronium core has to collapse.
I know that DVD-A is encrypted with a new, strong encryption and that no rippers exist and according to hydrogenaudio.org probably will not exist untill home quantum computers..
I doubt it will be that hard. For a DVDA to be playable, the user must have the key to decrypt it. That key might be encoded on a chip on the circuit board in the player, or in the software on their computer, or wherever. That's the weak link - that's what hackers are going to go for.
All it takes is for someone to analyse that chip, or decompile that software, or find that a sloppy bit of programming leaves the key in memory in a plain form... and then it's cracked. Estimates vary, but it probably won't take too many Norwegian-Teenager-Hours to do.
Their insurance company will pay for the hole in the roof and couch and two holes in the ceiling.
What insurance policy covers meteor impacts? If there's anything in the world that might happen that could be called an Act of God, surely 'smiting with flaming rocks from the heavens' qualifies?
I forgot to turn off that Aki desktop image when my GF came to visit. Fortunately she noticed that Aki actually looks a lot like she does
Do not torment us, foul one! First, cruel and evil fiend, you taunt us with your Having a Girlfriend. Then, to rub the salt right into the already painful wound, you tell us she looks like Aki...
Slashdot Mirror
I read Space Invaders as a metaphor for nuclear war. Hiding behind the defences is futile: your only hope is an all-out aggressive strategy, wiping out the enemy before they hit you. And if that means destroying your own defences to get a clear line of sight then so be it.
But then again, everyone I knew who ever had a copy of Command & Conquer always preferred to play as the Soviets. I played an in-store demo of Medal of Honour - the Pacific war game - and was terribly disappointed that in the excellent Pearl Harbour sequence I could only play as the Americans. I WANT TO BOMB PEARL HARBOUR, DAMMIT!
Much of the fun of historical war games is what might have been. I want to march into Rome with a thousand elephants. I want to lead the Golden Horde to Paris. I want to hang Washington for treason. I want to land Spanish troops in England and dethrone the heretic queen.
Games in which you can only follow the glorious patriotic line are just not complete. You've got to have the chance to be the bad guy once in a while.
Which is why we're so glad to have found out that the British intelligence services were definitely not at all influenced by the fact that Number 10 wanted an excuse to go to war, and presented a wholly impartial and honest dossier with no exaggerations or subtly misleading statements.
Now, given Murphy's law I'm about to discover that Lord Hutton has mod points today...
How strange. After answering all those questions I instinctively continued with 'Oh mama mia mama mia, mama mia let me go, Beelzebub has a devil put aside for me!'
I wonder why that might be?
Oh, come on. There's no way NASA could possibly wreck the high gain antenna on a major planetary probe mission. That's just absurd.
That, at least, is true. If something goes horribly wrong at launch then in a worst-case scenario the range officer can't destroy the rocket and a huge amount of metal and highly explosive fuel crashes into Miami. If the flyby goes badly wrong then the spaceprobe could strike the Earth at interplanetary velocity, and if ground zero happened to be a city then that, too, could kill thousands.
Not sure what all that has to do with the radioactives, though.
Like it or not, there are unpatched holes in IE
You practice safe computing... and you use IE.
Someone mod this one +5 Funny.
With two to the one-thousandth power pennies, he could buy Microsoft. And indeed all of Redmond. And Washington State. And the other forty-nine states. And all of the European Union, Japan and China. And the rest of the world. And then he could fund the wholesale terraforming and settlement of Mars, and still not have come close to spending it all...
This is the USA we're talking about. What conventions?
Look at the people in the Olympics. By the sheer fact of being Olympic-level athletes they're already at the very far end of the bell curve. Even if I'd been in training all my life I could never run a hunded metres in under ten seconds or a mile in under four minutes, and neither could most of humanity. If you ban people from the Olympics because their genes give them an advantage over most of the human race, you might as well call the whole thing off.
According to the gas chromatograph, the secret ingredient is... love? Hey, who's been screwing with this thing?
Very well, let's rephrase. In such an emergency, we remove the limitations on everyone else's rights, so that the right to copy Wheat 2.0 is no longer restricted to EvilCorporation X but is now open to everybody.
So... you're telling Slashdot to go to some page and keep hitting refresh?
Reckless, don't you think?
Purely in a spirit of scientific inquiry, you understand...
The Roman Empire lasted a thousand years. The Roman Republic did not.
I'm beginning to feel like some Athenian or Corinthian watching the Roman Republic slowly turn into the Roman Empire - and that's a terribly nervous feeling. Of course when the Romans come and take over they'll say that it's all for our own safety, that the Persians are a terrible threat...
If being contactable means they have to spoil everyone else's enjoyment of the film, then...
Yes. Absolutely. I want to exclude these people from the cinema completely.
Spending money on sending people to the moon and bringing them back alive was considered a waste, so instead they spent it on sending people to Vietnam and, er...
After My Lai, it's very hard to have any sympathy for any Americans.
-- O. B. Laden
After the Rape of Nanking, its very hard to have any sympathy for any Japanese. -- O.B. Laden.
1.4 solar masses is the limit for a core supported by electron degeneracy - a white dwarf. Stellar remnants exceeding this mass will collapse to form a neutron star.
The maximum mass of neutron stars is less well known; the properties of neutronium cannot easily be tested in the laboratory! The absolute maximum, assuming that neutronium is completely incompressible by any finite force, is about five solar masses. The reason is that in neutron stars general relativity comes into play, and pressure itself has gravity. We get an asymptote at about five solar masses, and even a hypothetical incompressible neutronium core has to collapse.
Airships are incredibly cool things, as Indiana Jones proved.
Some people do seem to have great ambitions for lighter-than-air technology, though: these maniacs want to fly them to orbit...
I doubt it will be that hard. For a DVDA to be playable, the user must have the key to decrypt it. That key might be encoded on a chip on the circuit board in the player, or in the software on their computer, or wherever. That's the weak link - that's what hackers are going to go for.
All it takes is for someone to analyse that chip, or decompile that software, or find that a sloppy bit of programming leaves the key in memory in a plain form... and then it's cracked. Estimates vary, but it probably won't take too many Norwegian-Teenager-Hours to do.
What insurance policy covers meteor impacts? If there's anything in the world that might happen that could be called an Act of God, surely 'smiting with flaming rocks from the heavens' qualifies?
Do not torment us, foul one! First, cruel and evil fiend, you taunt us with your Having a Girlfriend. Then, to rub the salt right into the already painful wound, you tell us she looks like Aki...
Git git git git git.
No, that would be a Persocom.