Okay, lots of comments here have brought up the issue that hydrogen won't magically make our energy needs go away, because hydrogen (in a form usable for producing energy) isn't just lying around where we can pick it up the way petroleum and coal and other fuel sources are.
This is correct, if we switch all teh internal combustion engines over to hydrogen, we'll still need energy to produce the hydrogen. And yes, at first a lot of that hydrogen might be produced by burning or refining petroleum fuel at plants and then shipping the hydrogen to refueling stations.
This does not mean that hydrogen is useless, or that we should deveop ethanol or methanol vehicles instead, or any of the other alternatives suggested.
Hydrogen is the simplest form in the series of energy carries we've been progressing along. We started out with wood, then moved to coal, then petroleum. Each of those is a hydrocarbon, and as we've progressed up the chain there's been more and more hydrogen and less and less carbon. Each step is more efficient at storing energy than the last, and hydrogen is that last step we can take before moving on to something complety different.
Although we can't find it naturally, hydrogen is relatively easy to produce given another source of energy, and as stated, it's very efficient at storing the energy you put into it. This means that hydrogen makes an ideal energy currency.
A long time ago, before there was money, people used barter to get what they needed. You might trade 1 goat for ten chickens. Some cultures eventually devolped a pseudo-currency where everything would be equated to a certain number of one thing, everything had a certain value in chickens for example. After awhile, minted currency was developed that turned this idea into an abstract form. The money was artifically produced and assigned a certain value, and by using this abstract currency people didn't have to carry chickens around anymore.
Petroleum is a pseudo-currency, like a chicken. We've all agreed that (for the most part) petroleum is the standard, and that's what we use to run our internal combustion engines. You can't toss a couple of logs in your gas tank and have your car work, and most cars aren't happy with having methanol poured in them without some adaptions being made.
Hydrogen actually carries the energy with it, which in some senses makes it a pseudo-currency, but the fact that it can be artifically produced using other sources of energy makes it more like a real currency in my opinion, which makes it very similar to electricity.
No one is particulary concerned that if we run out of coal our computers will stop working because there would be no more electricity. We'd build more hydropower plants and more nuclear power plants, and more people would install solar cells on their houses. There might be a period of changeover, but because electricity is an energy currency we'd be able to adapt quickly. If all of the sudden we ran out of oil however, most people are convinced (with good reason) that it would be a disaster)
However if all inernal combustion engines used hydrogen, another energy currency, then we could handle the issue in the same manner as a lack of coal. Other production methods would ramp up to meed the increased demand, and after a period of minor difficulty, everything would be back to normal.
Similarly, no one worries that if fusion power is developed into a workable form that their TV won't be compatible with it anymore. The electric grid is designed so that any source of power can be hooked in. Likewise, your car wouldn't care where the hydrogen came from. If you want to be extra green and produce your own hydrogen using methanol so you don't have to worry about the enviromental effects of petroleum being used, go ahead, your car won't notice.
Along with this increased versatility the centralized production would bring with it imporved efficiency. Petroleum based internal combustion engines are horribly inefficient, and efforts at improving fuel efficiency have only begun to address that. If the petroleum currently being used at cars was instead being refined into hydrogen at centralized plants, not only could more efficient methods of generating power be used at the refinery, but it would be much easier to deal with the polution at a single point source.
The most important point of hydrogen is the freedom it gives us from a single source of energy. Using hydrogen doesn't mean that we would necessarily stop using petroleum, but it would mean that we _could,_ and to some extent we wouldn't have to deal as much with the messiness inherent in petroleum internal combustion engines. Just like the existance of currency doesn't meant that you have to give up owning chickens, but it does mean that you can if you want, and you don't need to carry them with you when you go to the store anymore.
However, if you convert cars to hydrogen, then you can start producing hydrogen with methanol or ethanol. Hydrogen could be a generic energy commodity, like electricity. The only way an alternative energy source for cars is going to catch on is if it's widespread and ubiquitous. No one wants to drive up to a gas station and figure out which of the eight pumps does (ethanol/methanol/gasoline/petroleum/hydrogen/elec tricity/whatever) And the gas companies don't want to deal with that kind of infrastructure.
Hydrogen is good because it can be produced using any energy soruce. Once all the cars are using it, then we can figure out what the most enviromentally friendly way of producing it is.
Even assuming we make no other changes, it's far easier to control pollution from a single source than from many thousands or millions of sources.
Burn the petroleum at a refinery to produce the hydrogen, which then gets shipped out to "gas" stations to fuel cars. It's much easier to filter and control the pollution produced at the refinery than it would be to control pollution produced by petroleum using cars. It's quite possible that generators could be designed that are more efficient than the engined currently in cars (since those are horribly inefficient.)
Furthermore, when new technologies that reduce pollution are implemented, it's relatively easy to upgrade a small(er) number of refineries. As pointed out in the article, there are a _lot_ of older cars out there, and every time an improvement in fuel effificeny or pollution reduction is made you have to wait a long time for it to filter down.
And that's completly ignoring the fact that if the cars are using hydrogen, we don't _have_ to use petroleum as the original source of energy. We could have many different sources producing hydrogen. If OPEC raised oil prices, hydroelectric facilities or nuclear power plants or other sources could increase production to keep the price of hydrogen down. Or if we found that some other method of production was cheaper we could do away with petroleum all together.
Once cars have been decoupled from a direct dependence on petroleum, all kinds of possibilites open up. Why do you think electricity is the other big energy currency we use? It's very generic, and it doesn't matter to the user where it came from. Imagine the difficulties if your computer had to run on a specific brand of electricity (hydroelectric, coal, nuclear, etc)
How is the SpaceWar behaviour discontinuous? It only looks that way to us as observers because our view is stationary. It could be easily reprogramed so that the view stayed centered on the ship and you would see the star and other ship disapearing into the distance behind you and reapearing in front of you.
If the universe does work in the way proposed in the article, and you had a ship capable of traveling many _many_ times the speed of light, observers who stayed behind on earth would see the same behavior (ignoring relativity for the moment of course.) "Oh look, it disapeared off in some direction to galactic north. Oh look, it 'magically' reapeared to the galactic south!"
Do you remember that scene in Starship Troopers "DO YOUR PART", with the kids squashing the bugs? Mirror that in people buying duct tape and plastic to "be prepared" in the event of terrorism. It freaks the hell out of me.
Or people pouring out bottles of French wine in the streets because the French _dared_ to disagree with us about something! We helped them out in WWII! Don't they know we own their souls for the rest of eternity?
Re:Whoa, too many things to clarify
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Defining "Planet"
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· Score: 1
Well.... Ceres's shape is too distorted. [spaceflightnow.com] Its shape is not spherical enough to be like regular planets. And, to get really technical, no planet is really a sphere [regentsprep.org]. Due to rotation, all planets have a slightly distorted shape.
I think saying "the shape of the body is determined by the force of gravity and all other acting forces rather than by the internal structure of the object" would be a more technical definition if you're going to be nitpicky.
If you reshaped the earth into a cube, gravitational forces would pretty quickly smooth it out into a sphere again. (The difference between the diamteres of the equator and poles is less than 0.3%, i'd like to see you make something more sphereical than that =)
I'm not sure if Ceres should qualify, but the nice thing about the proposed rule is that it can be tested. Once we get to Ceres, we can make more accurate measurements of it's size, shape, structure, mass, and density. At that point it will be possible to determine with pretty good accuracy what would happen if Ceres was deformed into another shape.
And actually, it doesn't look that distorted to me. Saturn is the fastest rotating planet, and it's made of gas to boot, so it's diameter varies by more than 10%. It looks to me like Ceres could fit easily within that range, although what's more important is the _reason_ for the distortions.
In other words, simple definitions based on size are inadequate. Also, since they're debating whether or not Pluto is a planet, the criteria that it orbits the sun may also be inadequate.
A planet is something which: orbits a star AND is round AND is larger than an arbitrary size AND.. what? The above criteria still allows for a lot of things to be planets that aren't.
Pluto pretty clearly orbits the sun, when people argue that it shouldn't be a planet they claim that it's too small, or it's orbit is too eccentric. No one has tried to claim that it doesn't actually orbit the sun.
I agree though that we shouldn't be redefining what's a planet or not in our own system. All nine planets should be grandfather-claused in no matter what more scientific definitions we come up with later, and the bodies we currently consider asteroids and planetoids should be excluded for the same reason.
The scientific definition that Basri is proposing is a good one. It's easy to test for and it makes logical sense. It has to be big enough that gravity forces it into the shape of a sphere (given allowance for bulges due to rotation and any moons) and it's primary must be a star.
This does include some things that we wouldn't normally think of as planets, but i think it's the only clear-cut definition that we can come up with.
The most blatant technical issue i've run into is that the game does not handle being minimized very well. If i alt-tab out of it and come back, there's garbage all over the screen, and i have to scroll the map around and/or mouse over the buttons to get them to redraw. This in itself i could deal with, however if some other task steals control and forcibly minimizes the game (AIM does this frequently, and some other programs have done it on occasion) when i return to the game there's just a blank screen with a message that says something along the lines of "DirectX Surface Lost." Nothing i've figured out will get it back into a good state, i have to keep hitting the esc key and try to guess where the invisible "quit" button is to exit out and restart the game.
The AI does _everything_ for you, sometimes even when you tell it not to. I have autocolonization turned off, but after awhile new colonies started springing up on their own on new planets in systems i controlled, and ocacsionally in entirely new systems. (Often in systems i decided not to colonize for good reason, because all the planets sucked)
The AI does a crappy job on the military build queue, as noted in other posts, it builds _way_ too many troop ships and marines. It seems to do a better job on the infrastructure development, although I've not tried stealing away control from that aspect yet to see how i do.
Research and production are well steamlined, for the AI. You set percentages for different areas of research, and that's about it. Even examining the research tree to see how you're doing is difficult. Each research project has about five seperate stages from knowing nothing about it to being able to use it. Each of these stages is announced for each project in all areas of research. Once these projects are finished the AI immediatly starts building any new improvements on every area of every planet. You also get told when every one of these projects are completed. The result is that every turn you get a few dozen reports in your SitRep dealing with nothing but "Technology X is now viewable," "Research on Technology Y is complete," "Technology Z has entered prototyping," "Construction of Q has finished on Phazon III," etc, etc, etc, ad infinitum. After several turns of this you just don't care anymore. You look down through the list and think, "Hmmm, some planet i own just finished constructing an automated thingamajig, i didn't know i could build those. I don't even have any idea what it is or what it does. Oh well, the AI seemed to think it was a good idea."
It would have been far preferable if there were a lengthy build queue, and the ability to plan out and save generic queues in advance. Just about every 4x game has that feature now days, but if Moo3 does i haven't found it yet. This would have given you some sense of interaction. When a new building was researched, you'd look at it, decide which queues to stick it in, and actually feel like you had some involvement.
The ship construction tool allows you a lot more control, but is akward to use, and a lot less fun that ship construction was in MoO and MoO2.
The encyclopedia sucks if you're trying to look up specific information. A lot of planets have specials on them, however i have no idea what "Ancient Battle Damage" means and what effect it will have on a colony i build there. I've tried using the search function in the encylopedia, and found nothing. I've tried searching on everything i can think of relating to the topic, and nothing returns any results. Mousing over the special should give you at least a rudimentary description, and clicking on it should take you to the (non-existant as far as i can tell) encyclopedia entry.
When you encounter enemy ships or planets, your choices are usually "sit there," and "attack." There is no option to break off an run away before combat. If you do want to run, you have to choose to control combat, intercept the fleet (or choose to bombard the planet and hope they choose to defend) and then order the retreat once combat starts and hope the enemy isn't fast enough to do some damage to you before you warp out.
Diplomacy is nice, but not as good as Civ3. I've had fleets from neutral empires hover around some of my systems, which counts as a blockade, keeping supplies from other planets from reaching it. However there was no diplomacy option i could find to ask them to leave the system, and i didn't want to attack them without provocation and screw our relations. Once my planet had starved to death the other fleet choose to attack my remaining ships. Luckily i won, and was able to send another colony ship to restart the colony. Despite the fact that the other empire choose to attack my ships it did not start a state of war between us. A lot of that seems to happen, unlike in Civ3. I've had multiple combats with and spent several turns coexting peacefully with in the same system as empires the i officially had no diplomatic contact with, and no idea of how to initiate contact. When contact was initiated they didn't seem to care if i'd been blowing their ships up beforehand or not.
I've not had a great deal of experience with combat, but what little I've had has seemed akward, unclear, and not very fun, which is why i usually just cede control to the AI.
All in all, the AI does a pretty good job of playing the game by itself, and seems to resent you trying to take control of anything yourself. It seems like taking direct control would be fun, if you didn't have to fight the AI to do it, and there were tools to do so in the way you wanted (saved build queues and better ship design!)
I may be a little bit under read when it comes to the law, but here in australia I was under the impression that ignorance is no excuse. In fact I was under the impression that this was the attitude of courts world wide, can't image a court going "ahhh well you didn't know murder was a crime. Off you go then, and don't do it again.".
There is a BIG difference between ignornace of the law and ignorance of the crime. If you run over someone with a car and kill them, you will get laughed out of court if you tell them "I was ignorant of the law that says you can't kill people." However if you say "I was ignorant of the fact that the person was lying under my car when I pulled out of the parking spot" you've got a much better chance of getting off.
If the ISPs can prove that they didn't know what their users were doing, or even just show reasonable doubt that that is the case, then they should be off the hook. Saying, "We knew they were downloading copyrighted mp3s and movies, but we didn't know that was illegal," wouldn't get them anywhere however.
Everyone seems afraid that if the subscribers fot to post during the preview time, they'd rack up all the karma just from being early in list of comments. I'm not sure how well this idea would work in practice, but in theory it seems interesting.
Instead of letting a user choose the sort order for comments, (how many people ever change it from it's default value?) when a user first looks at the comments for a post, a random number should be determined such that half(?) the time the top level of comments are posted in reverse chronological order. (ie the same as "Newest First" half the time and "Oldest First" the other half)
This is depending on the "people are lazy" idea, but if that holds true, then half the people reading the comments, including the people with mod points, would see the posts at the bottom which frequently go unmoderated.
Ideally a static number would be generated for logged in users such that they always saw the comments in a post in the same order, no matter how many times they opened it. ((UserID + PostID) mod 2?)
A less complicated version would be to enforce reverse chronological order for everyone, which would remove any focus from the earliest posts up until the point everyone started automatically scrolling to the bottom of the page.
And if you wanted to leave everyone with a choice, keep the Sort Order options but make the default one of the above ("Newest First" or "Random") and reset everyone to the default. Depending on how lazy people were, a lot of them might stick with it.
I like this idea, and was going to suggest it myself if no one else did.
Anonymous posts have value, and should be allowed after the post goes mainstream. However if subscribers get the right/privledge to post early, they should also have some responsiblities to go along with that. They should be willing to stand up for anything they want to be able to say before anyone else has a chance to speak up.
Hopefully this would kill the First Post phenomenon, or at least reduce it significantly, and that's on top of the already big reduction due to people having to pay to get FP.
My criticism isn't that Microsoft wants to get into the arcade buisness, it's their belief that "The arcade titles influence the kind of console games that fans buy."
Personally i think that's a fallacy. The number of console games that have been influenced by _recent_ arcade games is very small. The strength of arcades currently is games that would be difficult to reproduce at home on a console. DDR is a a good example of this. They've got pads you can use to play the game at home, but the people i know who are into DDR and own the game at home still prefer to go to the arcade and play it there when possible.
Microsoft can make money in the arcades, but only if it comes up with original ideas for games that would be hard to recreate on the console itself. Trying to influence what console games people want to buy is in large part doomed to failure. I don't think people go to arcades to play games they could play on a console anymore.
Before you mod that as flamebait, hear me out. I loathe the Shuttle and the NASA bureaucracy, but I'd fly on one tomorrow if NASA gave me the chance.
"Then two decades from Gagarin, twenty years to the day.
Came a shuttle named Columbia, to open up the way.
And they said she's just a truck, but she's a truck that's aiming high.
See her big jets burning, see her fire in the sky."
Can we make a class-action lawsuit against the DoJ in order to get them to buy us Japanese PS2s, since they seem intent on stopping us from using cheaper modchips for no good legal reason?:)
if you think the major facets of your personality are based on how much you feel pain and how well you taste things. I'd like to think that human personalities have a bit more depth to them than that.
What? Geeks don't drive cars? First i've heard of it. I suppose motorheads don't use computers either?
Personally i don't like power locks, power windows, powerer everything else. However I do like having a cd player, and I'd also like having a hybrid or a fuel cell car.
And by the way, if you wanted to have nothing between you and the driving experience, shouldn't you also remove the suspension and the windshield? And maybe you should get a hand crank model so you don't have the starter and alternator interfering with the experience. I'm not sure what Model-Ts go for these days, but you might want to look into one.
Just because i _like_ a particular stage in the evolution of cars doesn't mean that i'll try to fool myself into thinking that it's somehow the most natural stage.
has a beer EVER tasted better than in a locker room after a hard-fought win???
Why yes actually, it tastes even better when you don't drink it at all.
Is this one "Perfect" too?
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Giant Mecha News
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· Score: 3, Informative
Do they mean to say the "Neon Genesis Evangelion - Perfect Collection" actually wasn't perfect? Oh yeah, must have been that glaring lack of the movies.
Of course when you compare the $170 price of that boxed set (or $145 at amazon, or $127.50 at barnes and noble) to this whopping $322 price tag, it seems a little more perfect after all. How many disks does the set have anyway? For that price it better have at least 16.
Then again i supose it beats the $12.63 they want you to pay for just the new and improved first episode.
What qualifies this as a "BIZARE" experiment, and stated in both the article itself and the slashdot writeup?
As stated in the article itself and as many other posts here have indicated, people have _knwon_ for quite a long time that ultralow frequency sound has an effect on people. So someone came up with an experiment to test exactly what that effect is, complete with control group and everything.
Neither the thing they are testing nor the method used to test it seem particularly bizare to me.
Slashdot Mirror
This is correct, if we switch all teh internal combustion engines over to hydrogen, we'll still need energy to produce the hydrogen. And yes, at first a lot of that hydrogen might be produced by burning or refining petroleum fuel at plants and then shipping the hydrogen to refueling stations.
This does not mean that hydrogen is useless, or that we should deveop ethanol or methanol vehicles instead, or any of the other alternatives suggested.
Hydrogen is the simplest form in the series of energy carries we've been progressing along. We started out with wood, then moved to coal, then petroleum. Each of those is a hydrocarbon, and as we've progressed up the chain there's been more and more hydrogen and less and less carbon. Each step is more efficient at storing energy than the last, and hydrogen is that last step we can take before moving on to something complety different.
Although we can't find it naturally, hydrogen is relatively easy to produce given another source of energy, and as stated, it's very efficient at storing the energy you put into it. This means that hydrogen makes an ideal energy currency.
A long time ago, before there was money, people used barter to get what they needed. You might trade 1 goat for ten chickens. Some cultures eventually devolped a pseudo-currency where everything would be equated to a certain number of one thing, everything had a certain value in chickens for example. After awhile, minted currency was developed that turned this idea into an abstract form. The money was artifically produced and assigned a certain value, and by using this abstract currency people didn't have to carry chickens around anymore.
Petroleum is a pseudo-currency, like a chicken. We've all agreed that (for the most part) petroleum is the standard, and that's what we use to run our internal combustion engines. You can't toss a couple of logs in your gas tank and have your car work, and most cars aren't happy with having methanol poured in them without some adaptions being made.
Hydrogen actually carries the energy with it, which in some senses makes it a pseudo-currency, but the fact that it can be artifically produced using other sources of energy makes it more like a real currency in my opinion, which makes it very similar to electricity.
No one is particulary concerned that if we run out of coal our computers will stop working because there would be no more electricity. We'd build more hydropower plants and more nuclear power plants, and more people would install solar cells on their houses. There might be a period of changeover, but because electricity is an energy currency we'd be able to adapt quickly. If all of the sudden we ran out of oil however, most people are convinced (with good reason) that it would be a disaster)
However if all inernal combustion engines used hydrogen, another energy currency, then we could handle the issue in the same manner as a lack of coal. Other production methods would ramp up to meed the increased demand, and after a period of minor difficulty, everything would be back to normal.
Similarly, no one worries that if fusion power is developed into a workable form that their TV won't be compatible with it anymore. The electric grid is designed so that any source of power can be hooked in. Likewise, your car wouldn't care where the hydrogen came from. If you want to be extra green and produce your own hydrogen using methanol so you don't have to worry about the enviromental effects of petroleum being used, go ahead, your car won't notice.
Along with this increased versatility the centralized production would bring with it imporved efficiency. Petroleum based internal combustion engines are horribly inefficient, and efforts at improving fuel efficiency have only begun to address that. If the petroleum currently being used at cars was instead being refined into hydrogen at centralized plants, not only could more efficient methods of generating power be used at the refinery, but it would be much easier to deal with the polution at a single point source.
The most important point of hydrogen is the freedom it gives us from a single source of energy. Using hydrogen doesn't mean that we would necessarily stop using petroleum, but it would mean that we _could,_ and to some extent we wouldn't have to deal as much with the messiness inherent in petroleum internal combustion engines. Just like the existance of currency doesn't meant that you have to give up owning chickens, but it does mean that you can if you want, and you don't need to carry them with you when you go to the store anymore.
Maybe it's just a pipe-dream, but I'd like to see people break away from their dependence on big multinational corporations to some degree.
Hydrogen is good because it can be produced using any energy soruce. Once all the cars are using it, then we can figure out what the most enviromentally friendly way of producing it is.
Burn the petroleum at a refinery to produce the hydrogen, which then gets shipped out to "gas" stations to fuel cars. It's much easier to filter and control the pollution produced at the refinery than it would be to control pollution produced by petroleum using cars. It's quite possible that generators could be designed that are more efficient than the engined currently in cars (since those are horribly inefficient.)
Furthermore, when new technologies that reduce pollution are implemented, it's relatively easy to upgrade a small(er) number of refineries. As pointed out in the article, there are a _lot_ of older cars out there, and every time an improvement in fuel effificeny or pollution reduction is made you have to wait a long time for it to filter down.
And that's completly ignoring the fact that if the cars are using hydrogen, we don't _have_ to use petroleum as the original source of energy. We could have many different sources producing hydrogen. If OPEC raised oil prices, hydroelectric facilities or nuclear power plants or other sources could increase production to keep the price of hydrogen down. Or if we found that some other method of production was cheaper we could do away with petroleum all together.
Once cars have been decoupled from a direct dependence on petroleum, all kinds of possibilites open up. Why do you think electricity is the other big energy currency we use? It's very generic, and it doesn't matter to the user where it came from. Imagine the difficulties if your computer had to run on a specific brand of electricity (hydroelectric, coal, nuclear, etc)
If the universe does work in the way proposed in the article, and you had a ship capable of traveling many _many_ times the speed of light, observers who stayed behind on earth would see the same behavior (ignoring relativity for the moment of course.) "Oh look, it disapeared off in some direction to galactic north. Oh look, it 'magically' reapeared to the galactic south!"
The "Cell" chip is not ready yet, it still needs to find and absorb Androids 17 and 18.
Or people pouring out bottles of French wine in the streets because the French _dared_ to disagree with us about something! We helped them out in WWII! Don't they know we own their souls for the rest of eternity?
I think saying "the shape of the body is determined by the force of gravity and all other acting forces rather than by the internal structure of the object" would be a more technical definition if you're going to be nitpicky.
If you reshaped the earth into a cube, gravitational forces would pretty quickly smooth it out into a sphere again. (The difference between the diamteres of the equator and poles is less than 0.3%, i'd like to see you make something more sphereical than that =)
I'm not sure if Ceres should qualify, but the nice thing about the proposed rule is that it can be tested. Once we get to Ceres, we can make more accurate measurements of it's size, shape, structure, mass, and density. At that point it will be possible to determine with pretty good accuracy what would happen if Ceres was deformed into another shape.
And actually, it doesn't look that distorted to me. Saturn is the fastest rotating planet, and it's made of gas to boot, so it's diameter varies by more than 10%. It looks to me like Ceres could fit easily within that range, although what's more important is the _reason_ for the distortions.
A planet is something which: orbits a star AND is round AND is larger than an arbitrary size AND.. what? The above criteria still allows for a lot of things to be planets that aren't.
Pluto pretty clearly orbits the sun, when people argue that it shouldn't be a planet they claim that it's too small, or it's orbit is too eccentric. No one has tried to claim that it doesn't actually orbit the sun.
I agree though that we shouldn't be redefining what's a planet or not in our own system. All nine planets should be grandfather-claused in no matter what more scientific definitions we come up with later, and the bodies we currently consider asteroids and planetoids should be excluded for the same reason.
The scientific definition that Basri is proposing is a good one. It's easy to test for and it makes logical sense. It has to be big enough that gravity forces it into the shape of a sphere (given allowance for bulges due to rotation and any moons) and it's primary must be a star.
This does include some things that we wouldn't normally think of as planets, but i think it's the only clear-cut definition that we can come up with.
The AI does _everything_ for you, sometimes even when you tell it not to. I have autocolonization turned off, but after awhile new colonies started springing up on their own on new planets in systems i controlled, and ocacsionally in entirely new systems. (Often in systems i decided not to colonize for good reason, because all the planets sucked)
The AI does a crappy job on the military build queue, as noted in other posts, it builds _way_ too many troop ships and marines. It seems to do a better job on the infrastructure development, although I've not tried stealing away control from that aspect yet to see how i do.
Research and production are well steamlined, for the AI. You set percentages for different areas of research, and that's about it. Even examining the research tree to see how you're doing is difficult. Each research project has about five seperate stages from knowing nothing about it to being able to use it. Each of these stages is announced for each project in all areas of research. Once these projects are finished the AI immediatly starts building any new improvements on every area of every planet. You also get told when every one of these projects are completed. The result is that every turn you get a few dozen reports in your SitRep dealing with nothing but "Technology X is now viewable," "Research on Technology Y is complete," "Technology Z has entered prototyping," "Construction of Q has finished on Phazon III," etc, etc, etc, ad infinitum. After several turns of this you just don't care anymore. You look down through the list and think, "Hmmm, some planet i own just finished constructing an automated thingamajig, i didn't know i could build those. I don't even have any idea what it is or what it does. Oh well, the AI seemed to think it was a good idea."
It would have been far preferable if there were a lengthy build queue, and the ability to plan out and save generic queues in advance. Just about every 4x game has that feature now days, but if Moo3 does i haven't found it yet. This would have given you some sense of interaction. When a new building was researched, you'd look at it, decide which queues to stick it in, and actually feel like you had some involvement.
The ship construction tool allows you a lot more control, but is akward to use, and a lot less fun that ship construction was in MoO and MoO2.
The encyclopedia sucks if you're trying to look up specific information. A lot of planets have specials on them, however i have no idea what "Ancient Battle Damage" means and what effect it will have on a colony i build there. I've tried using the search function in the encylopedia, and found nothing. I've tried searching on everything i can think of relating to the topic, and nothing returns any results. Mousing over the special should give you at least a rudimentary description, and clicking on it should take you to the (non-existant as far as i can tell) encyclopedia entry.
When you encounter enemy ships or planets, your choices are usually "sit there," and "attack." There is no option to break off an run away before combat. If you do want to run, you have to choose to control combat, intercept the fleet (or choose to bombard the planet and hope they choose to defend) and then order the retreat once combat starts and hope the enemy isn't fast enough to do some damage to you before you warp out.
Diplomacy is nice, but not as good as Civ3. I've had fleets from neutral empires hover around some of my systems, which counts as a blockade, keeping supplies from other planets from reaching it. However there was no diplomacy option i could find to ask them to leave the system, and i didn't want to attack them without provocation and screw our relations. Once my planet had starved to death the other fleet choose to attack my remaining ships. Luckily i won, and was able to send another colony ship to restart the colony. Despite the fact that the other empire choose to attack my ships it did not start a state of war between us. A lot of that seems to happen, unlike in Civ3. I've had multiple combats with and spent several turns coexting peacefully with in the same system as empires the i officially had no diplomatic contact with, and no idea of how to initiate contact. When contact was initiated they didn't seem to care if i'd been blowing their ships up beforehand or not.
I've not had a great deal of experience with combat, but what little I've had has seemed akward, unclear, and not very fun, which is why i usually just cede control to the AI.
All in all, the AI does a pretty good job of playing the game by itself, and seems to resent you trying to take control of anything yourself. It seems like taking direct control would be fun, if you didn't have to fight the AI to do it, and there were tools to do so in the way you wanted (saved build queues and better ship design!)
What, you're going to believe _scientists_ over the opinions of the Slashdot rumor mill? :)
There is a BIG difference between ignornace of the law and ignorance of the crime. If you run over someone with a car and kill them, you will get laughed out of court if you tell them "I was ignorant of the law that says you can't kill people." However if you say "I was ignorant of the fact that the person was lying under my car when I pulled out of the parking spot" you've got a much better chance of getting off.
If the ISPs can prove that they didn't know what their users were doing, or even just show reasonable doubt that that is the case, then they should be off the hook. Saying, "We knew they were downloading copyrighted mp3s and movies, but we didn't know that was illegal," wouldn't get them anywhere however.
Instead of letting a user choose the sort order for comments, (how many people ever change it from it's default value?) when a user first looks at the comments for a post, a random number should be determined such that half(?) the time the top level of comments are posted in reverse chronological order. (ie the same as "Newest First" half the time and "Oldest First" the other half)
This is depending on the "people are lazy" idea, but if that holds true, then half the people reading the comments, including the people with mod points, would see the posts at the bottom which frequently go unmoderated.
Ideally a static number would be generated for logged in users such that they always saw the comments in a post in the same order, no matter how many times they opened it. ((UserID + PostID) mod 2?)
A less complicated version would be to enforce reverse chronological order for everyone, which would remove any focus from the earliest posts up until the point everyone started automatically scrolling to the bottom of the page.
And if you wanted to leave everyone with a choice, keep the Sort Order options but make the default one of the above ("Newest First" or "Random") and reset everyone to the default. Depending on how lazy people were, a lot of them might stick with it.
Anonymous posts have value, and should be allowed after the post goes mainstream. However if subscribers get the right/privledge to post early, they should also have some responsiblities to go along with that. They should be willing to stand up for anything they want to be able to say before anyone else has a chance to speak up.
Hopefully this would kill the First Post phenomenon, or at least reduce it significantly, and that's on top of the already big reduction due to people having to pay to get FP.
That's what was said above, they're considering it, they haven't implemented it yet.
Personally i think that's a fallacy. The number of console games that have been influenced by _recent_ arcade games is very small. The strength of arcades currently is games that would be difficult to reproduce at home on a console. DDR is a a good example of this. They've got pads you can use to play the game at home, but the people i know who are into DDR and own the game at home still prefer to go to the arcade and play it there when possible.
Microsoft can make money in the arcades, but only if it comes up with original ideas for games that would be hard to recreate on the console itself. Trying to influence what console games people want to buy is in large part doomed to failure. I don't think people go to arcades to play games they could play on a console anymore.
And yes, i have read the article.
"Then two decades from Gagarin, twenty years to the day.
Came a shuttle named Columbia, to open up the way.
And they said she's just a truck, but she's a truck that's aiming high.
See her big jets burning, see her fire in the sky."
Hmmm, it seems like if you make a product whose name ends in "x" you're much more likely to have it end up becoming a generic :)
Can we make a class-action lawsuit against the DoJ in order to get them to buy us Japanese PS2s, since they seem intent on stopping us from using cheaper modchips for no good legal reason? :)
Or I could be reading it from work on a saturday afternoon.
if you think the major facets of your personality are based on how much you feel pain and how well you taste things. I'd like to think that human personalities have a bit more depth to them than that.
Personally i don't like power locks, power windows, powerer everything else. However I do like having a cd player, and I'd also like having a hybrid or a fuel cell car.
And by the way, if you wanted to have nothing between you and the driving experience, shouldn't you also remove the suspension and the windshield? And maybe you should get a hand crank model so you don't have the starter and alternator interfering with the experience. I'm not sure what Model-Ts go for these days, but you might want to look into one.
Just because i _like_ a particular stage in the evolution of cars doesn't mean that i'll try to fool myself into thinking that it's somehow the most natural stage.
Why yes actually, it tastes even better when you don't drink it at all.
Of course when you compare the $170 price of that boxed set (or $145 at amazon, or $127.50 at barnes and noble) to this whopping $322 price tag, it seems a little more perfect after all. How many disks does the set have anyway? For that price it better have at least 16.
Then again i supose it beats the $12.63 they want you to pay for just the new and improved first episode.
As stated in the article itself and as many other posts here have indicated, people have _knwon_ for quite a long time that ultralow frequency sound has an effect on people. So someone came up with an experiment to test exactly what that effect is, complete with control group and everything.
Neither the thing they are testing nor the method used to test it seem particularly bizare to me.