2012 when the world is scheduled to end in most mythologies?
Most mythologies? Can you list them? I thought that only some mythologies even included an end-of-the-world scenario, and of those, almost all are wise enough not to give a date. So I'm puzzled by this claim. Can you specify which mythologies include an end of the world in 2012, so that we can see whether they form a majority?
If they remake the movie "12 Angry Men" (like everything else these days), the story will be about 12 angry men who are kept locked up in a jury room with no access to their online porn.
At least one of those men was angry because he was missing a baseball game. Same thing, different decade.
This. Python gives us back something we haven't seen since we were little kids typing commands into BBC BASIC: a command line interpreter. If you type in "print 'hello'" to Python, it will do just that right on the screen immediately. Isn't that the first step we all took? It's important, psychologically. A computer is an expensive, complex, obscure and intimidating machine. But interacting with it like this shows us the truth: that the computer is in fact a total idiot that will do exactly what it is told, and we can tell it to do whatever we please.
Then we learn how to string commands together in a row, and that's our first program. Then we learn how to make a loop, so we can make the computer print 'boobies' over and over. And twenty or thirty years on, here we all are...
Wraiths are a better bet for an all-Death player. You can start the game with the necessary spell, begin casting on turn 1, and clean up every other wizard while they're still exploring the land with their first Swordsmen unit. IIRC, shadow demons weren't flying or water walking.
My favoured cheese for MoM was the overunity crafter. Artificer + Runemaster, I think it was: Artificer gets you crafting spells at half casting cost, Runemaster gets you all arcane spells at 25% off casting cost, and crafting spells are arcane. Net result, you craft at 75% off, but when you break an item on the anvil you get 50% of its list price back. That's twice what it cost you to create.
Overunity Crafter is slower than Wraith Rush, but I find it's more fun. You keep making and breaking magic items to build up a monster mana pool, recruit your first hero, equip him with truly epic gear, and then you go out and pwn.
I remember reading in a FAQ long ago, that somebody had calculated a possible wizard build that would be able to summon Storm Drakes for free. To achieve this without cheating would require some lucky breaks from high-value Myrran nodes to get the necessary extra Sorcery books, and if you can beat a big Myrran sorcery node then you've probably won the game already and don't *need* that kind of cheese, but still, what a concept...
Second-hand copy? Good luck, anybody who actually owns one will not part with it unless they're quite mad. Fortunately, it's available on every abandonware site in the world.
And yes, everyone else who's replying and wondering if it's some obscure Civ mod: Master of Magic is Civ 1 with wizards and dragons and trolls, and though incredibly unbalanced and broken in a million ways it is awesome.
Maybe they need "Lebensraum", because there are not many planets that sustain life?
You're a spacefaring civilisation capable of building an interstellar invasion fleet, and you're living on planets? Planets - those huge objects with totally predictable orbital paths, at the bottom of a deep gravity well? The ones that you might as well paint a big red target on and shout 'POINT THE RELATIVISTIC KILL VEHICLES HERE, GUYS!' And where 99.99999% of the usable mineral resources are miles down and under fantastically high pressure? Those things?
Wow. You know, I'd have thought that the art of creating artificial habitats in space would be one that a civilisation would master long before they get to the point of interstellar colonisation and conquest. I guess I was wrong.
Actually, the movie (and book) got the name from the NATO terminology for the Soviets' new super-fighter. The project that resulted in this aircraft began in the late eighties. Of course, back in the Cold War intelligence reports from the USSR were patchy, and nobody was quite certain whether the documentation they were seeing referred to conceptual designs for a future fighter, or to an actual flying prototype. It was just on the edge of plausibility that there was a real Firefox out there, not just a prototype.
It was the same in America: design and planning work on what became the F-22 began in 1981.
Because, presumably, they will want to sell the aircraft or a derivative of that aircraft.
That, and prestige. The Russians want to portray themselves to the world as technological peers of the West. It's good for business, it's good for the image of Russia overseas. If a Russian engineering firm is competing for business with American or German companies, then it's good for Russia to have a reputation for competence in advanced engineering projects such as this.
Equating our current foreign policy with "colonialism" accomplishes nothing other than to demonstrate your ignorance of both geopolitics and world history.
According to your posts around this thread, our current foreign policy is to use military force to keep the brown people pacified so that we can safely make money exploiting their resources.
Now, stop me if I'm wrong, but... well... that's colonialism. That's EXACTLY what the European maritime empires were all about.
If you're a rocket scientist there'll still be plenty of work in America. But once the rockets are up, well... where they come down? That's not your department.
You can't have it both ways -- you either get great hardware for cheap with restrictions on it, or great hardware for a more reasonable cost and the freedom to do whatever you want with it.
I think you'll find we can have it both ways, if we can only defeat the restrictions!
I mean it as something where we don't exist at all outside of the simulation, other than maybe as some processes running in a data center (or someones bedroom closet). While I dont spend my days thinking about that, I think its a lot more likely thing than there being some invisible, everything knowing, a man who created everything somewhere in the space who listens to everyones wishes and tricks around with them.
I don't know about you but if I were running a universe simulation I'd be pretty tempted to fuck with people in it too. I mean, you've played The Sims, right? Doesn't the Old Testament god sound just like some kid who takes away the exit from the swimming pool just to watch the fun?
(3) Particles dont interact gravitationally in practice. Other atomic forces are 38 or more magnitudes larger.
Now this is a part I find interesting, and I don't think I've ever read a serious treatment of it. Collide two protons at CERN and create a black hole of mass (2*proton mass + collision energy), and charge +2e. You now have an extreme Reissner-Nordstrom black hole, whose electric charge predominates over its gravitational field. Are we looking at a naked singularity here?
Or if not; even so, let the charged black hole interact with matter nearby. It approaches some atomic matter in the wall of the particle accelerator. The first thing it encounters is the electron cloud that forms the surface of the wall. Now, does it swallow electrons into its event horizon? Unlikely. Surely instead it will pull the electrons into orbit about itself, like any other particle? You'd get a black hole with two electrons orbiting it, it would look like a rather overweight helium atom. And that would be the end of it. So its nucleus has an event horizon, what of it? Nothing approaches the nucleus because it's shielded by the electrons.
What use is a robot if you shoot one in the camera with a paintball ?
Just at a guess, it would have more than one camera. Depth perception, you know? I mean, what fool would build an armoured mechanical killing machine with a totally exposed single point of failure like that?
Of course they'll be tested. Chances are any giant war robot vulnerable to pwnage by h4xx0rz will not be pwn3d by enemy action, but by rival giant robot manufacturers who don't like the competition and want to make sure it fails. Then their giant robots can save the day and thereby secure funding for the foreseeable future.
Word of advice: always make sure that the root password on your giant war robots is extremely secure. Short dictionary words just won't cut it here.
The most society changing robot on the rise is the... vacuum cleaner? Was that a joke?
Well, I'd dispute that it can be called a robot, but the difference it made to society was enormous. The vacuum cleaner, and the washing-machine; the amount of domestic labour these eliminate is quite incredible.
I'm not really worried. I'm sure we'll hear about some 'bot wiping out it's own platoon in the next decade, and that will be the end of semi-autonomous killbots.
Because that doesn't happen already with humans from time to time. IIRC, in the invasion of Iraq, more British soldiers were killed by Americans than by Iraqis.
(In case you didn't know, in Britain the definition of 'city' is that it contains a cathedral. Otherwise it's just a big town.)
A cathedral, or a royal charter. This leads to some unusual situations, like St David's in Wales - a cathedral and a few houses, which collectively form Britain's smallest city. Owing to another historical quirk whereby the official city boundaries were never redrawn even as the real boundaries sprawled endlessly outwards, Britain's second smallest city is in fact London.
That is the state of creatives in the year 2010. They honestly can not think of anything new, and only plunder the past for its riches.
This is why Disney are doing the world a favour by repeatedly buying copyright extensions. It forces people to come up with their own creative original stories - you know, like Disney did - rather than ripping off other people's stories that just happen to be old enough to no longer be protected. Thanks to Disney, creative artists now have the kind of long-term protection that Hans Christian Andersen, Rudyard Kipling and Lewis Carroll never enjoyed, whereas cheap rip-off merchants who only plunder other people's ideas can no longer ply their grimy trade.
Telling me the key length is a big hint. But 5,632 bytes is only about 11 repetitions of your key. That means I have 512 separate Caesar ciphers to crack, with a ciphertext of 10 or 11 characters each. Even Sherlock Holmes needed more than that to solve the puzzle of the Dancing Men.
Feel free to carry on using your not-so-one-time pad, though. The larger the data set relative to the key, the easier it gets. Once you give the attacker enough data to make frequency analysis possible on the 512 separate Caesar ciphers, then your Vigenere cipher is gone.
For starters, try Pleiads and Orion nebula. If my guess of your position is close enough, you should be able to see both just after the sun sets completely, together with Jupiter. Mars and Saturn should come up much later.
Slashdot Mirror
Most mythologies? Can you list them? I thought that only some mythologies even included an end-of-the-world scenario, and of those, almost all are wise enough not to give a date. So I'm puzzled by this claim. Can you specify which mythologies include an end of the world in 2012, so that we can see whether they form a majority?
At least one of those men was angry because he was missing a baseball game. Same thing, different decade.
Did he transfer to the Rebel ground forces or something? I thought he was in command of a fleet, not an army.
Then we learn how to string commands together in a row, and that's our first program. Then we learn how to make a loop, so we can make the computer print 'boobies' over and over. And twenty or thirty years on, here we all are...
Wraiths are a better bet for an all-Death player. You can start the game with the necessary spell, begin casting on turn 1, and clean up every other wizard while they're still exploring the land with their first Swordsmen unit. IIRC, shadow demons weren't flying or water walking.
My favoured cheese for MoM was the overunity crafter. Artificer + Runemaster, I think it was: Artificer gets you crafting spells at half casting cost, Runemaster gets you all arcane spells at 25% off casting cost, and crafting spells are arcane. Net result, you craft at 75% off, but when you break an item on the anvil you get 50% of its list price back. That's twice what it cost you to create.
Overunity Crafter is slower than Wraith Rush, but I find it's more fun. You keep making and breaking magic items to build up a monster mana pool, recruit your first hero, equip him with truly epic gear, and then you go out and pwn.
I remember reading in a FAQ long ago, that somebody had calculated a possible wizard build that would be able to summon Storm Drakes for free. To achieve this without cheating would require some lucky breaks from high-value Myrran nodes to get the necessary extra Sorcery books, and if you can beat a big Myrran sorcery node then you've probably won the game already and don't *need* that kind of cheese, but still, what a concept...
And yes, everyone else who's replying and wondering if it's some obscure Civ mod: Master of Magic is Civ 1 with wizards and dragons and trolls, and though incredibly unbalanced and broken in a million ways it is awesome.
Correlation
Causation
The difference between the two
You're a spacefaring civilisation capable of building an interstellar invasion fleet, and you're living on planets? Planets - those huge objects with totally predictable orbital paths, at the bottom of a deep gravity well? The ones that you might as well paint a big red target on and shout 'POINT THE RELATIVISTIC KILL VEHICLES HERE, GUYS!' And where 99.99999% of the usable mineral resources are miles down and under fantastically high pressure? Those things?
Wow. You know, I'd have thought that the art of creating artificial habitats in space would be one that a civilisation would master long before they get to the point of interstellar colonisation and conquest. I guess I was wrong.
It was the same in America: design and planning work on what became the F-22 began in 1981.
That, and prestige. The Russians want to portray themselves to the world as technological peers of the West. It's good for business, it's good for the image of Russia overseas. If a Russian engineering firm is competing for business with American or German companies, then it's good for Russia to have a reputation for competence in advanced engineering projects such as this.
According to your posts around this thread, our current foreign policy is to use military force to keep the brown people pacified so that we can safely make money exploiting their resources.
Now, stop me if I'm wrong, but... well... that's colonialism. That's EXACTLY what the European maritime empires were all about.
If you're a rocket scientist there'll still be plenty of work in America. But once the rockets are up, well... where they come down? That's not your department.
Oh, yes... they can smear the reputation of Anonymous. I think the phrase someone once coined for that was 'pissing into an ocean of piss'.
I think you'll find we can have it both ways, if we can only defeat the restrictions!
I don't know about you but if I were running a universe simulation I'd be pretty tempted to fuck with people in it too. I mean, you've played The Sims, right? Doesn't the Old Testament god sound just like some kid who takes away the exit from the swimming pool just to watch the fun?
Now this is a part I find interesting, and I don't think I've ever read a serious treatment of it. Collide two protons at CERN and create a black hole of mass (2*proton mass + collision energy), and charge +2e. You now have an extreme Reissner-Nordstrom black hole, whose electric charge predominates over its gravitational field. Are we looking at a naked singularity here?
Or if not; even so, let the charged black hole interact with matter nearby. It approaches some atomic matter in the wall of the particle accelerator. The first thing it encounters is the electron cloud that forms the surface of the wall. Now, does it swallow electrons into its event horizon? Unlikely. Surely instead it will pull the electrons into orbit about itself, like any other particle? You'd get a black hole with two electrons orbiting it, it would look like a rather overweight helium atom. And that would be the end of it. So its nucleus has an event horizon, what of it? Nothing approaches the nucleus because it's shielded by the electrons.
Just at a guess, it would have more than one camera. Depth perception, you know? I mean, what fool would build an armoured mechanical killing machine with a totally exposed single point of failure like that?
Word of advice: always make sure that the root password on your giant war robots is extremely secure. Short dictionary words just won't cut it here.
Well, I'd dispute that it can be called a robot, but the difference it made to society was enormous. The vacuum cleaner, and the washing-machine; the amount of domestic labour these eliminate is quite incredible.
Because that doesn't happen already with humans from time to time. IIRC, in the invasion of Iraq, more British soldiers were killed by Americans than by Iraqis.
A cathedral, or a royal charter. This leads to some unusual situations, like St David's in Wales - a cathedral and a few houses, which collectively form Britain's smallest city. Owing to another historical quirk whereby the official city boundaries were never redrawn even as the real boundaries sprawled endlessly outwards, Britain's second smallest city is in fact London.
That'll just get you in trouble again, for violating Pressdram's copyright in their celebrated letter to Arkell.
This is why Disney are doing the world a favour by repeatedly buying copyright extensions. It forces people to come up with their own creative original stories - you know, like Disney did - rather than ripping off other people's stories that just happen to be old enough to no longer be protected. Thanks to Disney, creative artists now have the kind of long-term protection that Hans Christian Andersen, Rudyard Kipling and Lewis Carroll never enjoyed, whereas cheap rip-off merchants who only plunder other people's ideas can no longer ply their grimy trade.
Telling me the key length is a big hint. But 5,632 bytes is only about 11 repetitions of your key. That means I have 512 separate Caesar ciphers to crack, with a ciphertext of 10 or 11 characters each. Even Sherlock Holmes needed more than that to solve the puzzle of the Dancing Men.
Feel free to carry on using your not-so-one-time pad, though. The larger the data set relative to the key, the easier it gets. Once you give the attacker enough data to make frequency analysis possible on the 512 separate Caesar ciphers, then your Vigenere cipher is gone.
Oh, and here's a tip:
Saturn is worth staying up for.