My three least favorite plot complications are time travel, amnesia, and anything having to do with a "prophecy."
Well, given time travel, then prophecies kind of come with the territory. It's just a matter of context really. I'm a time traveller, you're a prophet, he/she/it is a fraud.
I'd add to the list of annoying plot complications 'controlled by an evil alien entity'.
"it's okay to copy a CD owned by a family member" does not equal "it's okay to offer a copy to 1,000,000 of your closest friends on P2P."
Offering is one thing, but actual copies are another. Nobody ever seeds to a ratio of 1,000,000. Look at the typical seeding ratio of the typical BitTorrent user, and there you have the number of close friends they've copied the CD on to. Me, I usually cut it out around 2.0, but some torrents just don't have enough traffic to get that high in any reasonable time...
More importantly, britain has the world's nastiest chemical and biological weapons.
Specifically, the deep fried Mars Bar.
More seriously, some of what Porton Down came up with in the fifties was just scary. Ever heard of VX? World's most hideous poison. Made in England. And we sold the recipe to the Americans, in exchange for, er... the blueprints to the hydrogen bomb.
And of course we know those "surgical strikes" never go astray, killing wedding parties or friendly forces, right?
From what I've seen in the news, these have generally been the fault of the guys picking out targets, not of the technology. Precision is very good now - the bomb hits exactly what it was supposed to hit. Unfortunately, that isn't always something it was a good idea to be shooting at.
Historically: 'OK, British troops there, enemy troops there... FIRE!... oh, shit, we missed, and those Brits look really pissed off.'
Nowadays: 'OK, bunch of guys down there... are they Americans? No? OK, FIRE!... oh, shit, there are allies in the area? Shit, we're going to jail...'
I am sick of this Terminator-like and Star Wars-like technology. When do we get the actual Terminators and Tie Fighters?
This gloriously evil-looking helmet goes along with the F-35 Lightning II fighter. Have you seen what those things are capable of? It's a supersonic fighter jet which can stop dead at will and hover in mid-air, and which has a radar signature about the size of a small duck.
And there are plans to fit them with fricking lasers. LASERS.
I mean, seriously. What more do you want? This is about the coolest jet ever flown. F-22, Typhoon, sure, very fast, very flashy, nice planes, but the F-35 really is something straight out of Macross.
I've been seeing this article everywhere and the thing that strikes me as odd is this is being developed mostly by the US but the article just kind of glosses over that.
The story seems to have originated at the Daily Mail, a far-right UK tabloid (that's probably, oh... slightly left-of-centre by US standards) which has a tendency towards the jingoistic. 'British Pilots Get Awesome Scary Technology' is the kind of thing they're keen on, although they'd usually prefer 'British Pilots Don't Get Awesome Scary Technology Because Of Labour Government' if they could get it.
The F-35 project is mostly American, but there is a substantial British component to it; according to the Wikipedia article BAE Systems are producing, among other things, the electronic warfare systems and flight control software. So it's quite likely that this nifty helmet thing is in fact British.
No, the F-35 is more of a stealth fighter than the Harrier, which is actually being replaced by the Eurofighter Typhoon. BAE is in-fact involved in the development of the F-35 as well.
I thought the general idea was that Typhoons would replace Tornadoes, while JSFs would replace Harriers? They were looking into a navalised Typhoon for use on the new carriers, but I'm not sure what became of that.
There are potentially a lot of reasons to want to be in the military, but the way a helmet LOOKs should NOT be one of them.
No, but it is one of them nonetheless. Militaries have always recruited in part on having a really smart uniform in which you'd look really, really good - that one goes back millennia. And I reckon the opportunity to wear a badass TIE-fighter style helmet with awesome cyber-vision kit will indeed be a bonus for RAF recruitment. That thing is really cool.
With the cold war over, and the major super powers having no one to have air battles with, is it really necessary to spend huge amounts of money to fight an enemy that doesn't exist? I mean, back in the Cold War, it made sense-ish, but since the current battle is against "terror", and "terror" doesn't have an air force...
The Russians are probing European air defences again; I think it was just last month one of their bombers was intercepted over the North Sea by the new RAF Typhoons. Used to happen all the time in the Cold War - just testing how watchful the West really is, how quick to respond to an intruder. Nothing outright hostile, just a... friendly... reminder that they're there. North Korea is opening up to outside business investment and to tourism from the South to Mt Paektu, but on the other hand they've been playing with nukes lately, so that one could go either way. Not so long ago there was the war in Yugoslavia, right on our doorstep, yet little got done about it till the Yanks got involved - that was embarrassing. Belarus is run by a weirdo who keeps trying to re-establish the Soviet Union despite the fact that the Russians want as little to do with him as possible. The president of Turkmenistan is an egomaniac who makes Kim Jong Il look positively humble, though he seems content to keep to his own frontiers. Any day now our esteemed allies could drag us into a war with Iran. And it's probably only a matter of time before we have to do something about Zimbabwe.
Sure, today we're mostly fighting Iraqi rebels, against whom the air force can do relatively little - but that won't be the case forever. Britain gets into an awful lot of fights.
It's in their EULA that you're not supposed to change its software
Good. Now, why would I have to agree to a licence to use a phone? If I own it, it's mine to do as I please with.
As I understand it, the theory behind software EULAs is that in order to use most software, you must first copy it to the hard disk, and to do so would ordinarily be a copyright violation, and hence you require a licence. But I'm not copying any software when I buy an iPhone - I'm just using an existing copy, made by the manufacturer. I don't need a licence for that, any more than I need a licence to read a book - and I have as much right to modify the contents of the iPhone's memory as I do to scrawl my name all over each page of a book I buy.
one of my 2 iRiver H140's is made up from 3 broken units I bought off eBay
Three broken H140s exist? What happened? Did the owners take a hammer and chisel to the things? Because given the kind of abuse mine has suffered over the years with absolutely no ill effect save some chipping of the surface layer, that's what it would take.
Better yet, the guys at the call centre are marked down if they hang up on a mark, and also marked down for a poor number of calls per unit time and a poor sales percentage. So you might actually manage to get a telemarketer fired - or at least cut his commission.
This has the effect of making life more miserable for telemarketers as a whole, and thus makes it harder and more expensive for the companies to find staff. If everyone did this, we might even be able to make the whole practice uneconomical!
Evolution doesn't give a shit about how individuals die; all that matters is that the survivors continue to breed.
On the contrary: all evolution is, is individuals living, breeding and dying. Now, how many of my individual ancestors, in every generation all the way back to the first replicating molecule four billion or so years ago, died like this guy without first breeding?
Exactly zero.
Natural selection indeed - beginning, it seems, with himself. A well thought out manifesto indeed.
... He's a school shooter-upper. Love that movies list. Oh, and that music list. And fuck, he even likes Nietzsche.
Word of advice, you fuckwit: the Will to Power does not involve random murder. Nor does killing a bunch of people including yourself count as a good move, evolutionarily speaking.
Shit. If I didn't know he'd actually done it, I'd think this was a joke. You couldn't get a more perfect stereotype of the school shooter. This is just made for the media - I almost wonder if he wrote this on purpose, to give them something to chew on afterwards...
Interesting, but... questionable. I'm not convinced that he's fully worked through the relativistic field equations - the physics here is very nineteenth-century and occasionally naive.
Digging up more research on it is indeed a good idea. The chap who runs metaresearch.org reckons that the GPS satellites don't actually correct for gravitational time dilation, because there's no such thing; this is news to everyone else. There's some interesting commentary on the matter here, an article on the fascinating subculture of relativity deniers (who seem an even odder bunch than the creationists).
And in a totally gratuitous ad hominem, it appears he also thinks the Mars Face is artificial.
So far as I can see, his chief complaint with general relativity's predicted speed of c for propagation of gravitational changes is that gravitational aberration ought to destabilise orbits, producing a net torque and a change in angular momentum. As a matter of fact this is what relativity predicts - hence all the investment in experiments to detect gravitational waves carrying away angular momentum from binary pulsars or what have you. However, the effect is small, since most of it cancels out thanks to some more subtle effects, leaving it only really detectable in cases of high gravity or high acceleration.
by the sounds of it, the wobble on this thing is just a mess- probably a lot like what our solar system's wobble looks like from the outside.
Probably worse than ours. The Solar System is dominated by two planets. An astronomer looking back at us from 55 Cancri with the same technology would detect Jupiter, and probably Saturn. If he's patient enough to watch for a couple of orbits, he might just spot Uranus and Neptune too.
The other planets wouldn't be detectable to our technology. They'd see a system with four planets, not eight. So their five is, in a sense, already ahead of our own system.
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Well, given time travel, then prophecies kind of come with the territory. It's just a matter of context really. I'm a time traveller, you're a prophet, he/she/it is a fraud.
I'd add to the list of annoying plot complications 'controlled by an evil alien entity'.
Offering is one thing, but actual copies are another. Nobody ever seeds to a ratio of 1,000,000. Look at the typical seeding ratio of the typical BitTorrent user, and there you have the number of close friends they've copied the CD on to. Me, I usually cut it out around 2.0, but some torrents just don't have enough traffic to get that high in any reasonable time...
Specifically, the deep fried Mars Bar.
More seriously, some of what Porton Down came up with in the fifties was just scary. Ever heard of VX? World's most hideous poison. Made in England. And we sold the recipe to the Americans, in exchange for, er... the blueprints to the hydrogen bomb.
Have you looked at the targeting record of human pilots lately?
From what I've seen in the news, these have generally been the fault of the guys picking out targets, not of the technology. Precision is very good now - the bomb hits exactly what it was supposed to hit. Unfortunately, that isn't always something it was a good idea to be shooting at.
Historically: 'OK, British troops there, enemy troops there... FIRE!... oh, shit, we missed, and those Brits look really pissed off.'
Nowadays: 'OK, bunch of guys down there... are they Americans? No? OK, FIRE!... oh, shit, there are allies in the area? Shit, we're going to jail...'
This gloriously evil-looking helmet goes along with the F-35 Lightning II fighter. Have you seen what those things are capable of? It's a supersonic fighter jet which can stop dead at will and hover in mid-air, and which has a radar signature about the size of a small duck.
And there are plans to fit them with fricking lasers. LASERS.
I mean, seriously. What more do you want? This is about the coolest jet ever flown. F-22, Typhoon, sure, very fast, very flashy, nice planes, but the F-35 really is something straight out of Macross.
The story seems to have originated at the Daily Mail, a far-right UK tabloid (that's probably, oh... slightly left-of-centre by US standards) which has a tendency towards the jingoistic. 'British Pilots Get Awesome Scary Technology' is the kind of thing they're keen on, although they'd usually prefer 'British Pilots Don't Get Awesome Scary Technology Because Of Labour Government' if they could get it.
The F-35 project is mostly American, but there is a substantial British component to it; according to the Wikipedia article BAE Systems are producing, among other things, the electronic warfare systems and flight control software. So it's quite likely that this nifty helmet thing is in fact British.
I thought the general idea was that Typhoons would replace Tornadoes, while JSFs would replace Harriers? They were looking into a navalised Typhoon for use on the new carriers, but I'm not sure what became of that.
No, but it is one of them nonetheless. Militaries have always recruited in part on having a really smart uniform in which you'd look really, really good - that one goes back millennia. And I reckon the opportunity to wear a badass TIE-fighter style helmet with awesome cyber-vision kit will indeed be a bonus for RAF recruitment. That thing is really cool.
The Russians are probing European air defences again; I think it was just last month one of their bombers was intercepted over the North Sea by the new RAF Typhoons. Used to happen all the time in the Cold War - just testing how watchful the West really is, how quick to respond to an intruder. Nothing outright hostile, just a... friendly... reminder that they're there. North Korea is opening up to outside business investment and to tourism from the South to Mt Paektu, but on the other hand they've been playing with nukes lately, so that one could go either way. Not so long ago there was the war in Yugoslavia, right on our doorstep, yet little got done about it till the Yanks got involved - that was embarrassing. Belarus is run by a weirdo who keeps trying to re-establish the Soviet Union despite the fact that the Russians want as little to do with him as possible. The president of Turkmenistan is an egomaniac who makes Kim Jong Il look positively humble, though he seems content to keep to his own frontiers. Any day now our esteemed allies could drag us into a war with Iran. And it's probably only a matter of time before we have to do something about Zimbabwe.
Sure, today we're mostly fighting Iraqi rebels, against whom the air force can do relatively little - but that won't be the case forever. Britain gets into an awful lot of fights.
Good. Now, why would I have to agree to a licence to use a phone? If I own it, it's mine to do as I please with.
As I understand it, the theory behind software EULAs is that in order to use most software, you must first copy it to the hard disk, and to do so would ordinarily be a copyright violation, and hence you require a licence. But I'm not copying any software when I buy an iPhone - I'm just using an existing copy, made by the manufacturer. I don't need a licence for that, any more than I need a licence to read a book - and I have as much right to modify the contents of the iPhone's memory as I do to scrawl my name all over each page of a book I buy.
I think where you put 'It's' you meant 'If it was'.
Nobody's questioned this part yet. Why does everyone think terrorists will have expired visas?
Three broken H140s exist? What happened? Did the owners take a hammer and chisel to the things? Because given the kind of abuse mine has suffered over the years with absolutely no ill effect save some chipping of the surface layer, that's what it would take.
This has the effect of making life more miserable for telemarketers as a whole, and thus makes it harder and more expensive for the companies to find staff. If everyone did this, we might even be able to make the whole practice uneconomical!
On the contrary: all evolution is, is individuals living, breeding and dying. Now, how many of my individual ancestors, in every generation all the way back to the first replicating molecule four billion or so years ago, died like this guy without first breeding?
Exactly zero.
Natural selection indeed - beginning, it seems, with himself. A well thought out manifesto indeed.
Word of advice, you fuckwit: the Will to Power does not involve random murder. Nor does killing a bunch of people including yourself count as a good move, evolutionarily speaking.
Shit. If I didn't know he'd actually done it, I'd think this was a joke. You couldn't get a more perfect stereotype of the school shooter. This is just made for the media - I almost wonder if he wrote this on purpose, to give them something to chew on afterwards...
Sorry. We haven't yet contacted any alien species with sufficient tentacles for that to be a realistic scenario.
Digging up more research on it is indeed a good idea. The chap who runs metaresearch.org reckons that the GPS satellites don't actually correct for gravitational time dilation, because there's no such thing; this is news to everyone else. There's some interesting commentary on the matter here, an article on the fascinating subculture of relativity deniers (who seem an even odder bunch than the creationists).
And in a totally gratuitous ad hominem, it appears he also thinks the Mars Face is artificial.
So far as I can see, his chief complaint with general relativity's predicted speed of c for propagation of gravitational changes is that gravitational aberration ought to destabilise orbits, producing a net torque and a change in angular momentum. As a matter of fact this is what relativity predicts - hence all the investment in experiments to detect gravitational waves carrying away angular momentum from binary pulsars or what have you. However, the effect is small, since most of it cancels out thanks to some more subtle effects, leaving it only really detectable in cases of high gravity or high acceleration.
If an object 1.5 million kilometres away has a neighbouring quasar, you have bigger worries than communication.
Perhaps not, but our descendants might. We don't have to stay human forever.
Probably worse than ours. The Solar System is dominated by two planets. An astronomer looking back at us from 55 Cancri with the same technology would detect Jupiter, and probably Saturn. If he's patient enough to watch for a couple of orbits, he might just spot Uranus and Neptune too.
The other planets wouldn't be detectable to our technology. They'd see a system with four planets, not eight. So their five is, in a sense, already ahead of our own system.
To a very, very close approximation, we're missing all the extrasolar planets. We've yet to discover a single one outside our own Galaxy :-)
The Extreme Edition actually exists? Shit. I though Jhonen was joking...
Habbo was fun back in the day, but it's not been the same since they closed the pool.