Have you heard of the athropic principle? You kinda obviously don't know what it entails.
Anyway, who says I'm not a doubter myself? My comment doesn't have enough info either way.
For the record, I think the issue is open...but considering the size of the universe, Occams razor and the fact that I don't hold the earth to be a special thing in the universe, I lean more towards the 'we are not alone' school of thought...but then again, proving me wrong is impossible, whilst proving me right is ass simple as finding one other planet with life:)
Heh...the problem is you need all cars to be wired or you have no workable system (for current and ten-years-in-the-future tech). Still, with a deadline five years in the future, all cars should be able to have such a system installed before it's put into use.
As for those traffic lights, google for a project "Green Light" (I believe) being done in Utrecht, the Netherlands. They're doing research and implemntation of a smart traffic light scheme.
Doesn't matter; the fact that life was sustainable on two planets opens up the possibility to doubters that there could be life on more. The counter-anthropic principle states that we aren't special in the universe anyway, so if we find evidence to back it up, then there you go.
Sorry, but I call all those suns much more concentrated than the big bang; true, you had all energy in one place...but then again, you had all places in one place:)
Fact remeains, that there is much more structure to be observed in the current universe than when it was a singlularity.
Don't beleive me? Look at the universe; best theories state that we're going from a highly ordered state to a chaotic state. But looking at the big bang theory, we see a singularity with infinite temperature and infinite pressure (which I'd say is quite a chaotic environment) leading to what we see now; planets and solar systems and galacies and clusters and globular clusters; a highly ordered state of affairs.
And looking at the temperature, it seems as if the universe has already experienced 'heat death'...a quite consistent 3 Kelvin...again, a quite ordered state.
Anyway, that still doesn't change the fact that all our observations of the universe point to the fact that perpetual motion machines aren't feasable.
's a (sc)ramjet you're talking about. An Aussy demonstrated one (after NASA couldn't get it's 1e3x more expensive one to work).
But that's not perpetual motion, and would never be mistaken as such. See, the thing is we're not midlle ages alchemists, and we know that a) it takes a whole lot of energy for a ramjet to be built and also taken to the hight it needs to perform (ie the oxygen needs to be sufficiently rare to self combust due to the pressure-increase the shape of the 'jet' intake causes by compressing it) and b)the thing'll not stay up indeffinitely due to the fact that the air friction will disintegrate it in the end.
That's because they where impossible to engineer at the time.
But with perpetual motion, there is no question of engineering, but of the basic princilples of the universe as we know it...as far as we know, due to everything we observe, there is a loss of energy due to heatloss, energy which is expressed as sound or energy which is expressed as light, any or all of these lost to the surrounding environment. The only way to create a perpetual motion device is to find a way to convert all of the above to kinetic energy. But all energy conversion we can and have observed (right down to the quantum level) suffer energy loss due to differently expresses kinds of energy occuring when the energy of a system is converted.
So it could happen (a perpetual motion device) but it runs contrary to all we have observed of the universe, and if you could make one, we'd have to rethink/all/ we know of science.
From what I hear though, there is little to fear. The EU patents on software won't allow any patenting of business methods (no one-click patent unless you describe a very specific way of programming it).
The only thing which is still in danger is the fact that innovative methods of whatever might be patented...which I don't mind, as long as the lenght of the patent is reasonable (one or two years should be sufficient in the world of software).
You know, normaly I'd be nice about this, but since I'm drunk and didn't get laid tonight I won't be:)
Fuck you. Do your research. There are warships of the US Navy running windows NT near exclusively (except for firecontrol, and firecontrol only, because it's embedded, which is run by QNIX).
Yeah, the armed forces need office, email etc...but they do also use windows boxes for critical apps like navigation, command and control etc.
So it comes down to the fact that the navy is not smarter than me, and not only that, I'm not a MS basher (shit, I use it myself! It's a good desktop OS, if you use 2k/xp...better than linux by far), I'm just better informed than you are.
Moron.
Again, sorry fopr the harshnes..but I had a good night out, and then there;'s you telling me I don't know wtf I'm talking about. Use google, there's pics and even movies! out there showing I'm right...
"They aren't a business. They can't afford to code up every little thing when they need it and they need to know that they can depend on somebody else to fix any problems that might come up."
'scuse me, but a company that makes it's own multi-million dollar AAA computer game/for recruiting purposes/ AND gives it away/should/ be coding their own stuff.
Not only that, but the armed forces/are/ a business. They work with budgets, have an IT department, hell, they even have an electronic warfare department which handles computer attacks too. Furthermore, when you use these systems to deploy nukes and other highly damaging weapons, do you want a stable system or do you rely on windows?
And before you ask, yes, I'm running winXP, because it costs shit for me via the university and it's stable enough for me. It would be a different situation if I where directing lethal ordinance...but I'm not.
What this kind of thing needs to really kick off is kind of like exactly a next gen 3d, FPS-like frontend to IRC.
It has to be FPS-like to satisfy the market-penetration target; it has to be easy to use. It has to have IRC as a backbone so it's usefull (for chat, file transfers etc). OS so people can tinker with it (but in the same way that linux works, with one or a couple of master architects, so all 'kernels' work).
But to really kick in I imagine something which works with hubs (as in channels on an irc server). Anyone can create a hub, which could accomodate as many users as the hardware allows. These hubs would be seperate worlds (an analogy would be seperate habitat domes on the moon or something) which use 'portals' to connect to other hubs.
But what would make this really work is the ability to import and integrate 3d objects into this world, while the world is running. This would allow you to create a little shack to your own design, add a character or whatever. But you have to be able to add user content. Of course, that means two things; broadband only and cpu's powerfull enough to do dynamic BSP calculations...but with peer-to-peer and distributed computing, I thinks those kinds of problems can be solved quite nicely.
I do agree with you; the AI in Homeworld was 'teh suck', as they say:)
What they really needed was an easier difficulty setting (in the end I needed a trainer to finish the game...first game I ever needed that for), and it would also have been nice if they hadn't scaled the enemy strenght in the levels, so if you salvaged ships correctly, you'd have an advantage for once.
And for multiplayer, they should most definitely have upped the cost of repair corvettes.
As for the asteroid level, is that the one where you jumped into an asteroid field and had asteroids incoming while you traveled 'on rails'? I thought that was one of the easier levels:) Just move all non-combat ships behind the mothership, set your harvesters to harvesting and your fighting ships into a couple of massed, evasive, wall formation groups and shoot the incoming asteroids...and move 'em every so often so your larger ships don't get crushed. I didn't lose a single ship that way.
""Oh, hey... you guys, you there in Iraq... build a government."
Actually, that's exactly the way to do it; set up a provisional gevernment of natives of all the tribes, then set a deadline by which democratic elections should be held and then let that government sort out the country in the way it wants to be sorted out.
What you don't do is set up a cabal led by a general with a quite shady reputation, who is part of a country that the afore mentioned government hates, then set up a string of military bases which will stay there indefinately and award all kinds of oil deals to your own companies...because then you have effectively turned that country into a vassal state.
I mean, doesn't the US learn? It is the very fact that there are still US bases in Saudi Arabia which caused (or at the very least formed the rationale and the recruiting pitch) Bin Laden to plan 9-11.
By staying where it's not wanted, the US is only breeding more terrorists.
If the US is so good, why does Halliburton have contract to build and exploit bases in Iraq for the next ten years? What is the US still doing in Iraq at all? Selfgovernance has to start somewhere and somewhen...
Partly that's because the sactions basically amounted to a weapon of mass destruction all by themselves; at least a million people died as a direct result of those sanctions...more than died in Hiroshima, iirc. Not only that, but very strange things found themselves on the 'restricted due to dual use' list...and do remember, the US killed more civilians in Iraq than died in the WTC attacks.
Your conclusion is dubious at best. I mean, if it where that simple, then friendly fire would never happen, 'cause hey, there is no good reason to bomb friendly troops, right?
Wake up to the realities of life, the frank un-trainedness of troops being one of those. Sure, for the SAS and/or other special ops units this might be true, but the rest are 'just' grunts with guns. I dunno if you looked at cnn at the time, but I saw 18 year old girls and boys (NOT men and women) trying to subdue large crowds with only a squad at most. That is how mistakes like that are made...which means it's (in)directly the theatre commanders fault for undercommitting troops to that area.
Case in point, Shakespeare. His plays where at the time nothing more than popular entertainment; read 'em, and you'll laugh at the soap-opera elements in there, as well as the shit/piss/fart jokes.
What differentiates him though is that his use of language is used so masterfully as to make deep, insightfull comments on the nature of humanity. But the plays themselves where made for the 'plebs'.
Did you just sit back and watch the battle unold on the 'Gardens of Kadesh' (eighth level, I believe) level, too? Bloody brilliant storytelling, that game...
Funny you should mention Miyamoto...he always contends that his games are popular in great part due to their ambience (which is expressed in it's art direction, mostly).
You can this in Zelda, but also in games by others, like Metal Gear Solid, Homeworld, etc...all games which are considered great are so as much due to gameplay as due to the fact that they have consistent, engaging and, for want of a better word, beautifull ambiance.
The quote at the top of your post is so unture, and is getting more untrue every generation of hardware we get.
Look at topics covered at the Game Developers Conference (GDC) and many other conferences/ articles like it, where developers speak out. Games and movies are overlapping in many, many ways. Production values, voiceovers (==the cast), music, production values, storyboarding, art direction. These are but a few of the many disciplines which originate in movies and which techniques are being directly used in the games industry. Many gamedevelopers are now using film techniques.
Not only that, but games and movies are actually judged nearly the same way too: they have to be engaging. Not even fun, as such (survival horror games are scary, as are horror movies), just engaging. Further more, the 'metric' by which they're judged follow the same guidelines, as outlined above; a movie, as well as a game, is judged on the cast, the music, the overal production values, the art direction etc. But as usual the sum is more than the total of it's parts, as one can see with movies like The Blair Witch Project and games like GTA3 (lower overal production values [in this case the picture/gfx quality isn't exactly up to snuff], but they don't need to be).
As you can see, many of the propertiews which lead to a good movie also lead to a good game. Sure, there are distinguishing marks for either (seeing as one is passive, the other active), but the similarities between the two are much more than skin deep.
For me, GTA3 doesn't qualify as art for the simple reason that it doesn't deal with the human condition. The 'story' doesn't teach or illuminate on any level. It's good fun, but art...? GTA: Vice City might be a step closer, but again the insight into humanity is lacking...and that's the litmus test for art, I gather. A game like Homeworld comes closer, with it's story about homecoming, hatred and different philosophies (the level Gardens of Kadesh illuminates the oddities in human nature, looks bloody awesome and plays great).
But then again, the underlying reason is that games have to be fun first. If they're not, they don't make money. Just like movies. However, this doesn't mean that a game still can't be art if it's fun and makes money.
Me, I'd posit that games like Homeworld approach art; it might be fun to play, it might have made money, but after playing the level 'Gardens of Kadesh' the story was elevated to art, imo, same as a good novel.
Slashdot Mirror
's true...and the speed of light in the atmosphere is faster than that in a vacuum (how's that for counter inuitive :) ).
Have you heard of the athropic principle? You kinda obviously don't know what it entails.
:)
Anyway, who says I'm not a doubter myself? My comment doesn't have enough info either way.
For the record, I think the issue is open...but considering the size of the universe, Occams razor and the fact that I don't hold the earth to be a special thing in the universe, I lean more towards the 'we are not alone' school of thought...but then again, proving me wrong is impossible, whilst proving me right is ass simple as finding one other planet with life
Heh...the problem is you need all cars to be wired or you have no workable system (for current and ten-years-in-the-future tech). Still, with a deadline five years in the future, all cars should be able to have such a system installed before it's put into use.
As for those traffic lights, google for a project "Green Light" (I believe) being done in Utrecht, the Netherlands. They're doing research and implemntation of a smart traffic light scheme.
Doesn't matter; the fact that life was sustainable on two planets opens up the possibility to doubters that there could be life on more. The counter-anthropic principle states that we aren't special in the universe anyway, so if we find evidence to back it up, then there you go.
Sorry, but I call all those suns much more concentrated than the big bang; true, you had all energy in one place...but then again, you had all places in one place :)
Fact remeains, that there is much more structure to be observed in the current universe than when it was a singlularity.
Ah, but entropy depends on your point of view.
Don't beleive me? Look at the universe; best theories state that we're going from a highly ordered state to a chaotic state. But looking at the big bang theory, we see a singularity with infinite temperature and infinite pressure (which I'd say is quite a chaotic environment) leading to what we see now; planets and solar systems and galacies and clusters and globular clusters; a highly ordered state of affairs.
And looking at the temperature, it seems as if the universe has already experienced 'heat death'...a quite consistent 3 Kelvin...again, a quite ordered state.
Anyway, that still doesn't change the fact that all our observations of the universe point to the fact that perpetual motion machines aren't feasable.
's a (sc)ramjet you're talking about. An Aussy demonstrated one (after NASA couldn't get it's 1e3x more expensive one to work).
But that's not perpetual motion, and would never be mistaken as such. See, the thing is we're not midlle ages alchemists, and we know that
a) it takes a whole lot of energy for a ramjet to be built and also taken to the hight it needs to perform (ie the oxygen needs to be sufficiently rare to self combust due to the pressure-increase the shape of the 'jet' intake causes by compressing it) and
b)the thing'll not stay up indeffinitely due to the fact that the air friction will disintegrate it in the end.
That's because they where impossible to engineer at the time.
/all/ we know of science.
But with perpetual motion, there is no question of engineering, but of the basic princilples of the universe as we know it...as far as we know, due to everything we observe, there is a loss of energy due to heatloss, energy which is expressed as sound or energy which is expressed as light, any or all of these lost to the surrounding environment.
The only way to create a perpetual motion device is to find a way to convert all of the above to kinetic energy.
But all energy conversion we can and have observed (right down to the quantum level) suffer energy loss due to differently expresses kinds of energy occuring when the energy of a system is converted.
So it could happen (a perpetual motion device) but it runs contrary to all we have observed of the universe, and if you could make one, we'd have to rethink
Screw that; if it where real (and it can't, as sure as this sentence exists) he can do all the work again and still be a millionaire.
Haven't you noticed? English AND american aren't consistent at all! It's one and all quirk; just ask anyone who's had to learn it :)
From what I hear though, there is little to fear. The EU patents on software won't allow any patenting of business methods (no one-click patent unless you describe a very specific way of programming it).
The only thing which is still in danger is the fact that innovative methods of whatever might be patented...which I don't mind, as long as the lenght of the patent is reasonable (one or two years should be sufficient in the world of software).
You know, normaly I'd be nice about this, but since I'm drunk and didn't get laid tonight I won't be :)
Fuck you. Do your research. There are warships of the US Navy running windows NT near exclusively (except for firecontrol, and firecontrol only, because it's embedded, which is run by QNIX).
Yeah, the armed forces need office, email etc...but they do also use windows boxes for critical apps like navigation, command and control etc.
So it comes down to the fact that the navy is not smarter than me, and not only that, I'm not a MS basher (shit, I use it myself! It's a good desktop OS, if you use 2k/xp...better than linux by far), I'm just better informed than you are.
Moron.
Again, sorry fopr the harshnes..but I had a good night out, and then there;'s you telling me I don't know wtf I'm talking about. Use google, there's pics and even movies! out there showing I'm right...
"They aren't a business. They can't afford to code up every little thing when they need it and they need to know that they can depend on somebody else to fix any problems that might come up."
/for recruiting purposes/ AND gives it away /should/ be coding their own stuff.
/are/ a business. They work with budgets, have an IT department, hell, they even have an electronic warfare department which handles computer attacks too.
'scuse me, but a company that makes it's own multi-million dollar AAA computer game
Not only that, but the armed forces
Furthermore, when you use these systems to deploy nukes and other highly damaging weapons, do you want a stable system or do you rely on windows?
And before you ask, yes, I'm running winXP, because it costs shit for me via the university and it's stable enough for me. It would be a different situation if I where directing lethal ordinance...but I'm not.
What this kind of thing needs to really kick off is kind of like exactly a next gen 3d, FPS-like frontend to IRC.
:)
It has to be FPS-like to satisfy the market-penetration target; it has to be easy to use. It has to have IRC as a backbone so it's usefull (for chat, file transfers etc). OS so people can tinker with it (but in the same way that linux works, with one or a couple of master architects, so all 'kernels' work).
But to really kick in I imagine something which works with hubs (as in channels on an irc server). Anyone can create a hub, which could accomodate as many users as the hardware allows. These hubs would be seperate worlds (an analogy would be seperate habitat domes on the moon or something) which use 'portals' to connect to other hubs.
But what would make this really work is the ability to import and integrate 3d objects into this world, while the world is running. This would allow you to create a little shack to your own design, add a character or whatever. But you have to be able to add user content.
Of course, that means two things; broadband only and cpu's powerfull enough to do dynamic BSP calculations...but with peer-to-peer and distributed computing, I thinks those kinds of problems can be solved quite nicely.
If only I knew how to program
I do agree with you; the AI in Homeworld was 'teh suck', as they say :)
:) Just move all non-combat ships behind the mothership, set your harvesters to harvesting and your fighting ships into a couple of massed, evasive, wall formation groups and shoot the incoming asteroids...and move 'em every so often so your larger ships don't get crushed. I didn't lose a single ship that way.
What they really needed was an easier difficulty setting (in the end I needed a trainer to finish the game...first game I ever needed that for), and it would also have been nice if they hadn't scaled the enemy strenght in the levels, so if you salvaged ships correctly, you'd have an advantage for once.
And for multiplayer, they should most definitely have upped the cost of repair corvettes.
As for the asteroid level, is that the one where you jumped into an asteroid field and had asteroids incoming while you traveled 'on rails'?
I thought that was one of the easier levels
""Oh, hey... you guys, you there in Iraq... build a government."
Actually, that's exactly the way to do it; set up a provisional gevernment of natives of all the tribes, then set a deadline by which democratic elections should be held and then let that government sort out the country in the way it wants to be sorted out.
What you don't do is set up a cabal led by a general with a quite shady reputation, who is part of a country that the afore mentioned government hates, then set up a string of military bases which will stay there indefinately and award all kinds of oil deals to your own companies...because then you have effectively turned that country into a vassal state.
I mean, doesn't the US learn? It is the very fact that there are still US bases in Saudi Arabia which caused (or at the very least formed the rationale and the recruiting pitch) Bin Laden to plan 9-11.
By staying where it's not wanted, the US is only breeding more terrorists.
If the US is so good, why does Halliburton have contract to build and exploit bases in Iraq for the next ten years? What is the US still doing in Iraq at all? Selfgovernance has to start somewhere and somewhen...
Partly that's because the sactions basically amounted to a weapon of mass destruction all by themselves; at least a million people died as a direct result of those sanctions...more than died in Hiroshima, iirc.
Not only that, but very strange things found themselves on the 'restricted due to dual use' list...and do remember, the US killed more civilians in Iraq than died in the WTC attacks.
Your conclusion is dubious at best. I mean, if it where that simple, then friendly fire would never happen, 'cause hey, there is no good reason to bomb friendly troops, right?
Wake up to the realities of life, the frank un-trainedness of troops being one of those. Sure, for the SAS and/or other special ops units this might be true, but the rest are 'just' grunts with guns. I dunno if you looked at cnn at the time, but I saw 18 year old girls and boys (NOT men and women) trying to subdue large crowds with only a squad at most. That is how mistakes like that are made...which means it's (in)directly the theatre commanders fault for undercommitting troops to that area.
Case in point, Shakespeare. His plays where at the time nothing more than popular entertainment; read 'em, and you'll laugh at the soap-opera elements in there, as well as the shit/piss/fart jokes.
What differentiates him though is that his use of language is used so masterfully as to make deep, insightfull comments on the nature of humanity. But the plays themselves where made for the 'plebs'.
Did you just sit back and watch the battle unold on the 'Gardens of Kadesh' (eighth level, I believe) level, too? Bloody brilliant storytelling, that game...
Funny you should mention Miyamoto...he always contends that his games are popular in great part due to their ambience (which is expressed in it's art direction, mostly).
You can this in Zelda, but also in games by others, like Metal Gear Solid, Homeworld, etc...all games which are considered great are so as much due to gameplay as due to the fact that they have consistent, engaging and, for want of a better word, beautifull ambiance.
The quote at the top of your post is so unture, and is getting more untrue every generation of hardware we get.
Look at topics covered at the Game Developers Conference (GDC) and many other conferences/ articles like it, where developers speak out. Games and movies are overlapping in many, many ways. Production values, voiceovers (==the cast), music, production values, storyboarding, art direction.
These are but a few of the many disciplines which originate in movies and which techniques are being directly used in the games industry. Many gamedevelopers are now using film techniques.
Not only that, but games and movies are actually judged nearly the same way too: they have to be engaging. Not even fun, as such (survival horror games are scary, as are horror movies), just engaging.
Further more, the 'metric' by which they're judged follow the same guidelines, as outlined above; a movie, as well as a game, is judged on the cast, the music, the overal production values, the art direction etc. But as usual the sum is more than the total of it's parts, as one can see with movies like The Blair Witch Project and games like GTA3 (lower overal production values [in this case the picture/gfx quality isn't exactly up to snuff], but they don't need to be).
As you can see, many of the propertiews which lead to a good movie also lead to a good game. Sure, there are distinguishing marks for either (seeing as one is passive, the other active), but the similarities between the two are much more than skin deep.
For me, GTA3 doesn't qualify as art for the simple reason that it doesn't deal with the human condition. The 'story' doesn't teach or illuminate on any level. It's good fun, but art...? GTA: Vice City might be a step closer, but again the insight into humanity is lacking...and that's the litmus test for art, I gather. A game like Homeworld comes closer, with it's story about homecoming, hatred and different philosophies (the level Gardens of Kadesh illuminates the oddities in human nature, looks bloody awesome and plays great).
Yup; I have to agree.
But then again, the underlying reason is that games have to be fun first. If they're not, they don't make money. Just like movies. However, this doesn't mean that a game still can't be art if it's fun and makes money.
Me, I'd posit that games like Homeworld approach art; it might be fun to play, it might have made money, but after playing the level 'Gardens of Kadesh' the story was elevated to art, imo, same as a good novel.