Prices need to be lowered on games as do development cycles, its inevitable. Someone will eventually come along and say "We're sticking with this engine and going to churn out 1 game every 6 months for $20 bucks a pop
We're talking to YOU here, Bioware! You evil swines! You sold me Neverwinter Nights no less than THREE TIMES! You sold me FOUR of Baldur's Gate! Do you have any IDEA how many hours of my precious life you've taken up with those things?
Gah. I don't know how they get away with it, really I don't.
This is fascinating. Does this factor of expansion of space apply uniformly to matter on the small scale too? Does it mean that atoms were 1000 times closer to each other at the epoch of recombination than they are now?
No, not as I understand it anyway. Atoms are bound together by a very strong electromagnetic bond, which is quite enough to hold them together against the expansion of the Universe. Planets, stars and galaxies are bound by gravity, and this force holds them together against the expansion of space. It's only on the extremely large scale that cosmic expansion predominates over the familiar forces of the universe.
Some have speculated, however, that if the acceleration of the Universe's expansion continues, there'll come a point when the stretching of spacetime overcomes first the gravity that holds the gravity together, then the gravity holding the stars and planets together, then the electromagnetic bonds that are the basis of normal matter, and finally the nuclear forces at the heart of the atom. This 'big rip' is a new, exotic scenario for the end of the Universe: Big Crunch wasn't really going to happen, and Heat Death was just getting old:-)
Surely not all that much nearer. We (objects with mass) would be travelling apart at a tiny fraction of light speed. We must have been about 13 billion light years apart already at the beginning for it to have taken that long for light to reach us?
It's not really a matter of matter here moving away from matter there; it's really the space between us stretching out. This is getting into the territory of General Relativity, with which I'm rather less familiar than I ought to be: please do check what I'm about to say against a book or reliable website...
The epoch of recombination - the time at which the background glow was emitted - is revealed by a quick scan of Google to be at a redshift of about 1000. This means that the wavelength of light emitted at recombination has been stretched out to 1000 times what it was originally - so the Universe as a whole has expanded by a factor of 1000 since that time.
So the point 13.7 billion light years away, whose light we now see as the afterglow of the Big Bang, was only 13.7 million light years away when the light was emitted - about six times as far off as the Andromeda galaxy is today. The light would have got here in 13.7 million years, but the distance kept growing and it ended up taking the thick end of fourteen billion years. I for one won't complain about the buses again...:-)
That's exactly the question I have as described in the parent. The light should have overtaken us long time ago and the earth can'y "out-run" the light from the original bang.
You're imagining the Big Bang as an explosion taking place in space. In this view there is an infinite, empty expanse of space, in which there is an explosion at one point which throws out all the material in the universe.
This view is wrong. If it was correct the galaxies would form a roughly spherical shell around an empty central region, at the very centre of which would be the Big Bang's 'ground zero'. We would therefore expect to see a great clustering of galaxies when we looked along the surface of this sphere toward our neighbours, and a great empty darkness 'above' and 'below' us. But this is not so; in fact the galaxies are very evenly distributed throughout all of observable space.
The Big Bang is more correctly viewed as an explosion of space, rather than in it. The Big Bang takes place simultaneously at all points in space, and it is space itself that expands thereafter, spreading out the contents of the universe and cooling the hot gas.
As a result, the light emitted from our region of the Universe in the Big Bang has indeed long since left the area, but we are now able to see the light emitted from the Big Bang in regions that are now some 13.7 billion lightyears away. Of course at the time they were much nearer than that...
We have, in fact, seen the Big Bang, or at least seen as close to it as we can ever hope to achieve. In the very early stages of the Universe, light could not propagate far; the universe contained a hot, dense gas of charged particles which was opaque to light. Once the electrons and protons combined to form hydrogen atoms, the gas became transparent and the light was released. This light has been greatly redshifted by the enormous expansion of space, and is now detected as a background glow of microwaves at a temperature of about 3 kelvin.
I wasn't asking how the god worked. I was asking how the logic worked: how is it that you will happily postulate God as the creator of Linus, just as you recognise Linus as the creator of Linux - but then feel no need to explain how this vastly more complex entity called God came into existence?
But truly, what will be a reason for an atheist of doing good? Not that I void the possibility, I know some atheists who are more decent in attitude than religious people.
What is your reason, as a religious person, for doing good? You deny that it's through fear of hell. What, then? Love of God? Very well: for myself I give the reply of Abou ben Adhem: I pray thee then, write me as one that loves his fellow men.
This is one reason why I believe in God. If there is no God, what's the point of doing good to others? Fear of the law?
If there is a God, what's the point of doing good to others? Fear of hell?
Seriously, if your only concept of right and wrong is based on the threat of punishment, whether by the State or by some deity, then you have real problems.
But, what is more sophisticated: a computer operating system; or, a living organism capable of creating that same computer operating system?
It gets worse. What is more sophisticated: a living organism capable of creating a computer operating system, or a god capable of creating a living organism capable of creating a computer operating system? And yet you seem prepared to accept the existence of a god without requiring an explanation for it. How does that work?
In case you hadn't noticed, these wackos aren't exactly taking 'non' for an answer and I don't think you'll be able to change their minds with some fine wine or escargot.
Excuse me, which wackos would these be? Al-Qaeda? I thought you were talking about Iraq. Saddam Hussein is an entirely separate wacko - and not a wacko who was particularly popular with the first set of wackos, either.
the director of the Russian space agency wants Russia to join the European Space Agency as an equal member!
As an equal member? Russia? This is the same Russia with the world's only reliable manned launch system (the Chinese pretty much copied it), who launched the European Mars probe because their rockets are cheaper and better than ours, whose technology is keeping ISS alive while NASA tries to pull itself back together?
Well, that's nice. So America's moral standard is now 'we're not as evil as Osama bin Laden', eh? I know this is a naive and old-fashioned view, but somehow I expected better.
What happened was the insertion of civilian ideologues into the analysis process. They cherry-picked what Bush wanted to hear, disregarded the rest, forced analysts to shut up or resign.
That could never happen over here. British intelligence would never do anything like that - adjusting their reports based on what the politicians wanted to hear? No, no, never!
No, really, never. Lord Hutton said so, don't you believe him?
Think "Spirited Away". It is appropriate for adults and kids, but doesn't feel like a kids movie with a few jokes thrown in for the parents.
Pixar are a Western firm, and have to live with the Western idea that all animation is for children. Ghibli are Japanese, and things work differently there.
But Pixar's kids' films bring parents into the cinema too. And they see that the films are in fact good, despite being 'for children'. And then the next time a Pixar film comes out those parents use the children as an excuse to go and see it. Pretty good business for Pixar, eh?
I remember seeing the start of A Bug's Life, watching this film for a while and then sitting up with a jolt because I realised that I was in fact watching Seven Samurai. Blimey.
Spirited Away you mention as an example, but I think it's more of a child's film than, say, Mononoke or Nausicaa. It reminds me of the books Through the Looking-glass or The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe - certainly intended for children, but not limiting itself to what is normally supposed to be 'childish'.
Presumably you believe it's crippled because you have to pay for it, which I have to say I find a poor argument.
Not necessarily.
Product A (commercial) is non-crippled, and non-free.
Product B (shareware) is crippled, and free (gratis).
Product C (GPL) is non-crippled, and free (both ways).
Product C is hence a non-crippled, free alternative to A. Non-crippled is not redundant, as there are other free alternatives to product A which are crippled: C's advantage over them is that it is non-crippled and free.
Train the US military to protect a population, instead of blowing it up.
This is their big problem in Iraq. Americans just don't do peacekeeping.
The usual pattern of things throughout the wars in Yugoslavia throughout the nineties was: Milosevic starts war. Atrocities commence. Americans start bombing, threaten to invade. Milosevic backs off. Yugoslavia gets a bit smaller. Europeans keep peace under UN flag.
The result of this is that the Americans end up with an army that's absolutely brilliant at invading countries and crushing opposition, but doesn't know its arse from its elbow in keeping order afterwards.
Of course, the Europeans didn't exactly cover themselves with glory in the Balkans. Srebrenica was an utterly appalling failure.
I hate this sort of thing. What's a Sunni child? What's a Shi'ite child?
You might as well say 'Take a Marxist child and a free-market libertarian child', or 'Take a scientific materialist child and a Cartesian dualist child', or 'Take a many-worlds theorist child and a Copenhagen interpretation child'. What do children know of what these things mean? Nothing. They're children. It's their parents who are Sunni and Shi'ite, or whatever else it may be.
if brits are so great, then why don't they get their arses out of northern ireland....
Because most of the Northern Irish don't want them out? Because the Republic of Ireland doesn't particularly want to take Northern Ireland off Britain's hands anyway?
the HMS bork bork bork is a joke... actually all naval vessles made in the last 60 years are a joke compared to the real battleships of WW-II.
WWII demonstrated the obsolescence of your old behemoths. Take the British and German fleets from the battle of Jutland: classic dreadnoughts, immense steel battleships with incredible armour and gigantic guns. Put them on one side. Take the HMS Ark Royal, a small aircraft carrier from the modern Royal Navy. Put that on the other side. Which side wins?
If you said anything other than Ark Royal you lose. Our good friends the Japanese demonstrated in 1941 what happens to traditional battleships when someone in an aeroplane has a go at them.
That's my belief. I'm not evangelizing to you... your choice is yours to make. You can think I'm crazy if you want... for the sake of argument, suppose I am... crazy. There's no God, there's no after life. I die and turn to dust. So... I "wasted" my life trying to be a "good" person. Not so bad, really. But... what if you are wrong?
Ah, bonjour M. Pascal! It's been at least ten minutes since I last heard that one. Of course, the problem with this is that it applies to the beliefs of every other loony on the street, not just to yours.
Personally, I don't go around believing things just because they come with big threats attached to them, and I think that pretending to believe in a god on such dishonest grounds is a far worse insult to that god than simply not believing, in addition to being quite reprehensible moral cowardice to boot.
Point is that S is huge and L, I and C are big enough that it has happened here, so yes I believe there will be intelligent life out there, but I have my doubts that they will be close enough to find, or even exist at the same time as us
Illogical, Captain. S is huge, but every other value is completely unknown. It's quite possible that L and I are so small that intelligence arose only once in the whole universe. Just because we're here doesn't mean that anyone else is.
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We're talking to YOU here, Bioware! You evil swines! You sold me Neverwinter Nights no less than THREE TIMES! You sold me FOUR of Baldur's Gate! Do you have any IDEA how many hours of my precious life you've taken up with those things?
Gah. I don't know how they get away with it, really I don't.
No, not as I understand it anyway. Atoms are bound together by a very strong electromagnetic bond, which is quite enough to hold them together against the expansion of the Universe. Planets, stars and galaxies are bound by gravity, and this force holds them together against the expansion of space. It's only on the extremely large scale that cosmic expansion predominates over the familiar forces of the universe.
Some have speculated, however, that if the acceleration of the Universe's expansion continues, there'll come a point when the stretching of spacetime overcomes first the gravity that holds the gravity together, then the gravity holding the stars and planets together, then the electromagnetic bonds that are the basis of normal matter, and finally the nuclear forces at the heart of the atom. This 'big rip' is a new, exotic scenario for the end of the Universe: Big Crunch wasn't really going to happen, and Heat Death was just getting old :-)
It's not really a matter of matter here moving away from matter there; it's really the space between us stretching out. This is getting into the territory of General Relativity, with which I'm rather less familiar than I ought to be: please do check what I'm about to say against a book or reliable website...
The epoch of recombination - the time at which the background glow was emitted - is revealed by a quick scan of Google to be at a redshift of about 1000. This means that the wavelength of light emitted at recombination has been stretched out to 1000 times what it was originally - so the Universe as a whole has expanded by a factor of 1000 since that time.
So the point 13.7 billion light years away, whose light we now see as the afterglow of the Big Bang, was only 13.7 million light years away when the light was emitted - about six times as far off as the Andromeda galaxy is today. The light would have got here in 13.7 million years, but the distance kept growing and it ended up taking the thick end of fourteen billion years. I for one won't complain about the buses again... :-)
You're imagining the Big Bang as an explosion taking place in space. In this view there is an infinite, empty expanse of space, in which there is an explosion at one point which throws out all the material in the universe.
This view is wrong. If it was correct the galaxies would form a roughly spherical shell around an empty central region, at the very centre of which would be the Big Bang's 'ground zero'. We would therefore expect to see a great clustering of galaxies when we looked along the surface of this sphere toward our neighbours, and a great empty darkness 'above' and 'below' us. But this is not so; in fact the galaxies are very evenly distributed throughout all of observable space.
The Big Bang is more correctly viewed as an explosion of space, rather than in it. The Big Bang takes place simultaneously at all points in space, and it is space itself that expands thereafter, spreading out the contents of the universe and cooling the hot gas.
As a result, the light emitted from our region of the Universe in the Big Bang has indeed long since left the area, but we are now able to see the light emitted from the Big Bang in regions that are now some 13.7 billion lightyears away. Of course at the time they were much nearer than that...
We have, in fact, seen the Big Bang, or at least seen as close to it as we can ever hope to achieve. In the very early stages of the Universe, light could not propagate far; the universe contained a hot, dense gas of charged particles which was opaque to light. Once the electrons and protons combined to form hydrogen atoms, the gas became transparent and the light was released. This light has been greatly redshifted by the enormous expansion of space, and is now detected as a background glow of microwaves at a temperature of about 3 kelvin.
I know a man from Kessel who thinks differently...
And why we in Britain aren't even allowed to rip CDs for private use.
I wasn't asking how the god worked. I was asking how the logic worked: how is it that you will happily postulate God as the creator of Linus, just as you recognise Linus as the creator of Linux - but then feel no need to explain how this vastly more complex entity called God came into existence?
What is your reason, as a religious person, for doing good? You deny that it's through fear of hell. What, then? Love of God? Very well: for myself I give the reply of Abou ben Adhem: I pray thee then, write me as one that loves his fellow men.
If there is a God, what's the point of doing good to others? Fear of hell?
Seriously, if your only concept of right and wrong is based on the threat of punishment, whether by the State or by some deity, then you have real problems.
I can't understand this - I never could. How can people choose to believe something?
It gets worse. What is more sophisticated: a living organism capable of creating a computer operating system, or a god capable of creating a living organism capable of creating a computer operating system? And yet you seem prepared to accept the existence of a god without requiring an explanation for it. How does that work?
Except a largish cometary impact.
Excuse me, which wackos would these be? Al-Qaeda? I thought you were talking about Iraq. Saddam Hussein is an entirely separate wacko - and not a wacko who was particularly popular with the first set of wackos, either.
As an equal member? Russia? This is the same Russia with the world's only reliable manned launch system (the Chinese pretty much copied it), who launched the European Mars probe because their rockets are cheaper and better than ours, whose technology is keeping ISS alive while NASA tries to pull itself back together?
Blimey. They're selling themselves short.
Well, that's nice. So America's moral standard is now 'we're not as evil as Osama bin Laden', eh? I know this is a naive and old-fashioned view, but somehow I expected better.
That could never happen over here. British intelligence would never do anything like that - adjusting their reports based on what the politicians wanted to hear? No, no, never!
No, really, never. Lord Hutton said so, don't you believe him?
Pixar are a Western firm, and have to live with the Western idea that all animation is for children. Ghibli are Japanese, and things work differently there.
But Pixar's kids' films bring parents into the cinema too. And they see that the films are in fact good, despite being 'for children'. And then the next time a Pixar film comes out those parents use the children as an excuse to go and see it. Pretty good business for Pixar, eh?
I remember seeing the start of A Bug's Life, watching this film for a while and then sitting up with a jolt because I realised that I was in fact watching Seven Samurai. Blimey.
Spirited Away you mention as an example, but I think it's more of a child's film than, say, Mononoke or Nausicaa. It reminds me of the books Through the Looking-glass or The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe - certainly intended for children, but not limiting itself to what is normally supposed to be 'childish'.
Not necessarily.
Product A (commercial) is non-crippled, and non-free.
Product B (shareware) is crippled, and free (gratis).
Product C (GPL) is non-crippled, and free (both ways).
Product C is hence a non-crippled, free alternative to A. Non-crippled is not redundant, as there are other free alternatives to product A which are crippled: C's advantage over them is that it is non-crippled and free.
This is their big problem in Iraq. Americans just don't do peacekeeping.
The usual pattern of things throughout the wars in Yugoslavia throughout the nineties was: Milosevic starts war. Atrocities commence. Americans start bombing, threaten to invade. Milosevic backs off. Yugoslavia gets a bit smaller. Europeans keep peace under UN flag. The result of this is that the Americans end up with an army that's absolutely brilliant at invading countries and crushing opposition, but doesn't know its arse from its elbow in keeping order afterwards.
Of course, the Europeans didn't exactly cover themselves with glory in the Balkans. Srebrenica was an utterly appalling failure.
I hate this sort of thing. What's a Sunni child? What's a Shi'ite child?
You might as well say 'Take a Marxist child and a free-market libertarian child', or 'Take a scientific materialist child and a Cartesian dualist child', or 'Take a many-worlds theorist child and a Copenhagen interpretation child'. What do children know of what these things mean? Nothing. They're children. It's their parents who are Sunni and Shi'ite, or whatever else it may be.
Because most of the Northern Irish don't want them out? Because the Republic of Ireland doesn't particularly want to take Northern Ireland off Britain's hands anyway?
WWII demonstrated the obsolescence of your old behemoths. Take the British and German fleets from the battle of Jutland: classic dreadnoughts, immense steel battleships with incredible armour and gigantic guns. Put them on one side. Take the HMS Ark Royal, a small aircraft carrier from the modern Royal Navy. Put that on the other side. Which side wins?
If you said anything other than Ark Royal you lose. Our good friends the Japanese demonstrated in 1941 what happens to traditional battleships when someone in an aeroplane has a go at them.
Ah, bonjour M. Pascal! It's been at least ten minutes since I last heard that one. Of course, the problem with this is that it applies to the beliefs of every other loony on the street, not just to yours.
Personally, I don't go around believing things just because they come with big threats attached to them, and I think that pretending to believe in a god on such dishonest grounds is a far worse insult to that god than simply not believing, in addition to being quite reprehensible moral cowardice to boot.
Illogical, Captain. S is huge, but every other value is completely unknown. It's quite possible that L and I are so small that intelligence arose only once in the whole universe. Just because we're here doesn't mean that anyone else is.
Yes, because everyone believes Lord Hutton, and Blair and his crew have been completely vindicated in this affair.