What ever happened to good old swords and sorcery fantasy? No technology, no god-damn desert submersable castles (ala FF3, stateside). The only Final Fantasy title that even came close to doing this was the first one, at least the tiny bit of tech in it was truly alien to the world. (mind, I haven't seen all of the ones released in Japan) To this day FF1 is still my favorite of the series. FF2 started getting wierd, FF3 was just too much. I've watched people play 7 and 8 enough to know that I don't want to bother. The series stopped being "fantasy" somewhere in the middle of FF3, and turned more into "sci-fi" with one wierdo, usually the hero, still slinging a sword. Would somone please just shoot the idiot with the sword and be done with it? Afterall, which would you rather have, a magic sword that does shitloads of damage, or a magic mini-gat with each bullet doing shitloads of damage, and no kick. One cuts the enemy open if you can get next to them, the other turns the enemy to hamburger at 100 yards.
I agree, FF2 (FF4J) was the best in the series. FF3 (FF6J) was pretty good too, i was a little bothered by the increasing amount of tech, but the game and story was good enough to let it slide.
FF7 was a good game, but it wasn't really _Final Fantasy_, FF8 wasn't the best of games, and wasn't really Final Fantasy either.
Have you tried out FF9 though? It's crack for the old time FF fans. I only got partway through before my company went into crunch time and i ran out of time to play, but what i've got through so far has been excelent.
Haven't seen enough of FF10 yet to form an opinion of it.
We might, actually. It really depends on how Electronic Arts' deal with Square to handle distribution in the US gets handled. I'm suprised EA stock hasn't reacted to this news at all (down 55 cents at $67.75 at the moment) they might have just gained an whole new set of games to sell.
I'm also interested to know how much stock Sony will end up owning in the new company. I can't find any figures for how much stock Enix and Square have, but if we assume (for no good reason) that it will be equal amounts, and there will be no stock created independantly of the input from Enix and Square, Sony will end up owning about 8.3% of the new company.
Sadly, the book that was being planned before was a much more cost effective way of dealing with the problem. As you say, no one is going to convince the hardcode conspiracy theorists. However the book would explain the flaws in their arguments, so that people who aren't total nutcases won't be fooled.
This telescope thing just provides more photographic evidence which the conspiracy people will say was faked, and won't address the "flaws" that are always pointed out. And it probably costs more than the $50,000 NASA was going to fund for the book as well.
Hopefully the book will get written anyways, even without funding (that was the plan anyways, last i heard.) However it's sad that the the plan to actually educate people got tossed aside in favor of another stop down the "The pictures prove it!" "No they don't!" "Yes they do!" "No they don't" path.
Aha! NASA _knew_ that would happen with real photos, so clearly it was _intentional_ that they didn't paint in those parts of the crosses because they knew the photos would undergo intense scrutiny!
Clearly they wouldn't have been so stupid as to just forget to paint over those areas when they were doctoring them up, so _obviously_ those pictures were meant to fool smart people!
In conclusion, it is blatently obvious that because the crosshairs on those photos conform to what you would expect from a real picture, the pictures are definitely fake.
There, argued like a profesional (lunatic) if i do say so myself:)
Why do you care what Mother Nature thinks about your species? You're imagining that our existence is somehow our entry into a competition, and have anthropomorphized Mother Nature into a judge. This is a cobbled-together belief system designed to provide an atheist with the same sort of certainty of the meaningfulness of his existence that religion provides to the devout.
How have i anthropomorphized Mother Nature into a judge? Things can be successes or failures without a judge. You set up the rules beforehand, and the things that are the best according to the rules "wins" at the end.
Scientists created the theory of evolution to explain the way life works to the best of our knowledge. Things that pass on their genes "win," things that don't lose and die.
This isn't a certainty of meaningfulness. Is an intelligent species that dies out but leaves behind works of art and knowledge for another intelligent species to find a sucess? Not really according to evolution/mother nature/whatever you want to call it, but in another sense maybe they are.
Of course even just going by the criteria of species survival there are issues to work out. Every species dies off eventually, so is sucess a relative thing, based on how long they lasted before the went? Or maybe we're playing against almost impossible odds, and the only "winners" are those that make it to the end of the universe or beyond, which of the species we know of, only humans have even the remotest chance of doing.
It's all very subjective, and different people can accept different definitions, but i fail to see how believing that being alive is a good thing is a "cobbled-together belief system." Presumably if you didn't think the same thing, you would have removed yourself from the equation already.
They covered this in the faq. They said that underground "boats" might be a part of the solution, but that the nature of the unknown disaster might make the surface of the earth uninhabitable, which would make the problem of self-sustainemnt would still need to be dealt with, although the problems of low pressure and low gravity wouldn't exist anymore, and the problem of getting all the material and people to the site would be trivial in comparison.
The other point against it was that "Let's go live in space!" is a much better rallying cry than "Let's all go hide in a cave!"
Well, i'd say, wait till everyone on earth has finished killing themselves, then land again. Cool! Look! An earthlike planet in a good orbit around a G class star! Just might need a little terraforming depending on the nature of the annihilation.
The blurb is not really accurate. If you would actually _read the article_ you would see that they do _not_ want to save humanity from the Singularity. Rather, they want to save humanity from any major fuckups that happen on the way _to_ the Singularity. Or any fuckups that happen around that time or immediatly afterwards.
Presumably if all turns out for the best, the people on the lifeboat can join in afterwards. They don't need to be cut off totally from the rest of humanity, they just need to have a big enough buffer to control what enters their enviroment.
The singularity is usually considered to be the bend where it _starts_ shooting up almost vertically, not the (as you pointed out, nonexistant) point where it _is_ shooting up vertically.
Presumably "the vertical part" was a reference to that section of the graph, as opposed to the "flat" part at the begining or the "bend" in the middle, middle being defined here as the part between the vertical part and the horizontal part =)
So either the poster is on crack, or ve represents a new and radically different perspective on the Singularity than I have ever seen in print. Which is it?
Perhaps you missed out on Vinge's "Marooned in Realtime"?:)
In that book humanity reached a point in time equivalent to the Singularity... and all disapeared. There's a lot of theorizing about what eactly happened to them, and only _some_ of the ideas were good.
Vinge's essay is presenting what _he_ thinks the Singularity would be like, but he can't _know_ by definition. Maybe it will involve us downloading our brains into genetically created intelligent goo a la Greg Bear's "Blood Music."
And maybe it will be something bad. When you hit the singularity every single human will have the power of a god. Maybe one of them will go insane and blow up the entire species. Or that could happen while we're on our way to the singularity. All the Singularity means is that at some point in the future, we will literally have more technology than we can comprehend (at the moment at least.) Which would be more than enough technology to save the enviroment, explore the stars, and make life easy for every human in existance, and more than enough to kill us all too.
Screw the millions, according to current genetic theory, if you go back far enough (200,000 years i think it was?) there was at one point just one common mom. Although i'm really not sure how that worked, it seems that the the 50/500 rule would have killed us off, although perhaps that first ancestor had lots of daughters who eventually had kids with the male descendants of the rest of the tribe(s).
In his "Island in the Sea of Time" Trillogy S. M. Stirling "says" (or rather, one of the characters says) that the entire US on it's own, totally isolated from the rest of the world, could maintain one microchip plant after meeting all the rest of it's needs.
That sounds a little extreme to me, although i'm sure Stirling has done _far_ more research into the issue than i have. Off the top of my head, the two major factors that i can think of contributing to this figure, that the US is far more dependant on foreign oil than we like to think about (which would not necessarily be relevant in a space colony) and that the US is far more dependant on cheap overseas (or overborder) labor that we like to think about (which could very well be relevant in a space colony.)
That being said there's a lot of difference between the US suddenly being on it's own, and a colony that was designed from the begining to be self-sufficient.
Agreed, most people are stupid and probably wouldn't give a shit unless there were some bucks in it for them. However colonizing other planets is of value here on earth because humanity is here, and colonizing other planets is of value to humanity.
If we kill ourselves all off, we're a failure as a species. If we manage to colonize other planets, then we're a sucess by the only measure that Mother Nature really cares about.
That of course doesn't mean that there aren't other worthwhile endeavors, but it's pretty extreme to say that spreading out the species so we don't all go extinct has no value. It's like saying there's no value in a parent dying to save their children, or soldiers dying to save their nation.
No, we're counting on interplanetary colonization to save humanity from the Earth going boom.
Of course, we can do our best to save Earth also in the meantime, we're not like some video game where you can only research one thing at a time. If you're going to critisize wasted effort, i think there's a long list of trivial and useless stuff you'd have to go through before getting to spaceflight. Then entire entertainment industry for example is a much bigger was of energy than researching space colonies. If the amount of effort being put into spaceflight was enough to solve world hunger, don't you think we would have managed to dix that problem by now?
I'm not the one without a fire, those guys over there don't have a fire. I'll tell them how to make a fire, i'll try to help them out if i can, but in the long run i'm going to take my fire with me and move south to where it's warmer.
You're right, that model totally doesn't apply anymore. The reason we should be sending ships to outer space is because the Venusians are supposed to have gold and spices, so we should head straight to Mars and kill them all and take their treasure.
And then we could build some kind of giant weapon on the asteroid (rail driver, big ass laser, something or other) and call it the Slashdot Effect.
Or perhaps it would just be the system of propulsion, which just happens to obliterate whatever we happened to be around at the time as part of day to day operations:)
A lot of people would be against a space elevator out of fear of the damage done if it ever fell down. Of course those people would be unlikely to try and sabotage it once it was up.
What you'd need to worry about more is anyone who saw it as a symbol of the US/Western Civilization/Whatever group some terrorists have a grudge again. I don't think the 9/11 terrorists thought that the WTC was inherently bad for being a very tall building or something like that.
So jumping to the conclusion that we will have nanotechnology is meaningless, because nanotechnology means any number of things that cover the spectrum from the mundane to the fanciful.
Who are you accusing of jumping to this conclusion? The Lifeboat people? Or the person you originally responded to?
Neither one said we _will_ have nanotech, they both just said it was a possibility, and that if there is, there's the chance it could become extremely dangerous. (I read the posters comment as "A possible flaw is... that nanotech will be available," ie a possiblity, not a definite thing)
Arguing that nanotechnology can mean any number of things is meaningless. They've specified what type of nanotech they're worried about, the kind that could be turned into grey goo. Clearly they're not worried about the entire world being electroplated;)
The only thing i'd argue with is the assumption by the poster your responded to that if nanotech is developed, the lifeboat will be intercepted by near lights speed nanotech probes and therefore any disaster that happens to earth will happen to the lifeboat:
A: I suspect that the ability to create grey goo will occur before near light speed or beyond light speed travel is developed, so if a disaster happens, it's likely to happen before that point.
B: Even if it does happen afterwards, or the nanobots take a longer time catching up at sublight speeds, it's not likely the particular nanobots that are a threat will end up in space probes unless someone is intentionally trying to destroy all human life. The risk of grey goo is that it could be created by accident in an experiment, or be manufactured by (very, VERY insane) terrorists in a small lab. However building it with a time delay function and launching it into space would require both a lot of planning and a lot of resources.
C: As mentioned on the Lifeboat site, it's a lot easier to maintain security over a small area than a large one. Creating an active nanobot defense over the entire earth would be almost impossible, creating one in a spaceship/colony would be many orders of magnitude easier.
Almost every single one of these articles includes the name of the spammer. I'm just waiting for the followup article about one of these featured spammers describing how they got the crap beat out of them a la Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back, or waking up one night to find a stack of old servers burning in their front yard or soemthing.
So it passed by 800 votes. Last time I checked, the state constitution didn't say anything about initiatives being any less valid because they got voted in with a slim majority. If I-776 (reducing license tabs, etc.) had only passed by an 800-vote majority, would you be as eager to decry it?
I was decrying that even at the majority it passed at, although i might have complained a little more if the margin had been so narrow.
I played it at E3, and was too distracted by the crappy graphics to pay much attention to the gameplay. From what i could tell though it was very like Ocarina of Time, which i didn't really like the gameplay of. So i'm guessing that even if i get over the weird graphics, it will be a mediocre game at best for me. (Got about halfway through ToOT before giving up cause it just wasn't that fun.)
However the GBA Zelda looks awesome! I'm hoping it will be as in depth as Link to the Past, which is still fun to go back and play.
Modding should be banned? But i haven't even gotten to be a moderator even once yet! I want at least one chance to use some mod points before they get rid of the system:(
Slashdot Mirror
*pats his computer on the top of it's case* Don't listen to them Aerie, they're just stupid mean humans. :)
Hey! The coming out of the caves part wasn't our fault! Prometheus gave us fire all on his own, so he started it all! It's his fault! :)
I agree, FF2 (FF4J) was the best in the series. FF3 (FF6J) was pretty good too, i was a little bothered by the increasing amount of tech, but the game and story was good enough to let it slide.
FF7 was a good game, but it wasn't really _Final Fantasy_, FF8 wasn't the best of games, and wasn't really Final Fantasy either.
Have you tried out FF9 though? It's crack for the old time FF fans. I only got partway through before my company went into crunch time and i ran out of time to play, but what i've got through so far has been excelent.
Haven't seen enough of FF10 yet to form an opinion of it.
I'm also interested to know how much stock Sony will end up owning in the new company. I can't find any figures for how much stock Enix and Square have, but if we assume (for no good reason) that it will be equal amounts, and there will be no stock created independantly of the input from Enix and Square, Sony will end up owning about 8.3% of the new company.
This telescope thing just provides more photographic evidence which the conspiracy people will say was faked, and won't address the "flaws" that are always pointed out. And it probably costs more than the $50,000 NASA was going to fund for the book as well.
Hopefully the book will get written anyways, even without funding (that was the plan anyways, last i heard.) However it's sad that the the plan to actually educate people got tossed aside in favor of another stop down the "The pictures prove it!" "No they don't!" "Yes they do!" "No they don't" path.
Clearly they wouldn't have been so stupid as to just forget to paint over those areas when they were doctoring them up, so _obviously_ those pictures were meant to fool smart people!
In conclusion, it is blatently obvious that because the crosshairs on those photos conform to what you would expect from a real picture, the pictures are definitely fake.
There, argued like a profesional (lunatic) if i do say so myself :)
How have i anthropomorphized Mother Nature into a judge? Things can be successes or failures without a judge. You set up the rules beforehand, and the things that are the best according to the rules "wins" at the end.
Scientists created the theory of evolution to explain the way life works to the best of our knowledge. Things that pass on their genes "win," things that don't lose and die.
This isn't a certainty of meaningfulness. Is an intelligent species that dies out but leaves behind works of art and knowledge for another intelligent species to find a sucess? Not really according to evolution/mother nature/whatever you want to call it, but in another sense maybe they are.
Of course even just going by the criteria of species survival there are issues to work out. Every species dies off eventually, so is sucess a relative thing, based on how long they lasted before the went? Or maybe we're playing against almost impossible odds, and the only "winners" are those that make it to the end of the universe or beyond, which of the species we know of, only humans have even the remotest chance of doing.
It's all very subjective, and different people can accept different definitions, but i fail to see how believing that being alive is a good thing is a "cobbled-together belief system." Presumably if you didn't think the same thing, you would have removed yourself from the equation already.
The other point against it was that "Let's go live in space!" is a much better rallying cry than "Let's all go hide in a cave!"
Well, i'd say, wait till everyone on earth has finished killing themselves, then land again. Cool! Look! An earthlike planet in a good orbit around a G class star! Just might need a little terraforming depending on the nature of the annihilation.
Presumably if all turns out for the best, the people on the lifeboat can join in afterwards. They don't need to be cut off totally from the rest of humanity, they just need to have a big enough buffer to control what enters their enviroment.
Presumably "the vertical part" was a reference to that section of the graph, as opposed to the "flat" part at the begining or the "bend" in the middle, middle being defined here as the part between the vertical part and the horizontal part =)
Perhaps you missed out on Vinge's "Marooned in Realtime"? :)
In that book humanity reached a point in time equivalent to the Singularity... and all disapeared. There's a lot of theorizing about what eactly happened to them, and only _some_ of the ideas were good.
Vinge's essay is presenting what _he_ thinks the Singularity would be like, but he can't _know_ by definition. Maybe it will involve us downloading our brains into genetically created intelligent goo a la Greg Bear's "Blood Music."
And maybe it will be something bad. When you hit the singularity every single human will have the power of a god. Maybe one of them will go insane and blow up the entire species. Or that could happen while we're on our way to the singularity. All the Singularity means is that at some point in the future, we will literally have more technology than we can comprehend (at the moment at least.) Which would be more than enough technology to save the enviroment, explore the stars, and make life easy for every human in existance, and more than enough to kill us all too.
Screw the millions, according to current genetic theory, if you go back far enough (200,000 years i think it was?) there was at one point just one common mom. Although i'm really not sure how that worked, it seems that the the 50/500 rule would have killed us off, although perhaps that first ancestor had lots of daughters who eventually had kids with the male descendants of the rest of the tribe(s).
That sounds a little extreme to me, although i'm sure Stirling has done _far_ more research into the issue than i have. Off the top of my head, the two major factors that i can think of contributing to this figure, that the US is far more dependant on foreign oil than we like to think about (which would not necessarily be relevant in a space colony) and that the US is far more dependant on cheap overseas (or overborder) labor that we like to think about (which could very well be relevant in a space colony.)
That being said there's a lot of difference between the US suddenly being on it's own, and a colony that was designed from the begining to be self-sufficient.
If we kill ourselves all off, we're a failure as a species. If we manage to colonize other planets, then we're a sucess by the only measure that Mother Nature really cares about.
That of course doesn't mean that there aren't other worthwhile endeavors, but it's pretty extreme to say that spreading out the species so we don't all go extinct has no value. It's like saying there's no value in a parent dying to save their children, or soldiers dying to save their nation.
Of course, we can do our best to save Earth also in the meantime, we're not like some video game where you can only research one thing at a time. If you're going to critisize wasted effort, i think there's a long list of trivial and useless stuff you'd have to go through before getting to spaceflight. Then entire entertainment industry for example is a much bigger was of energy than researching space colonies. If the amount of effort being put into spaceflight was enough to solve world hunger, don't you think we would have managed to dix that problem by now?
I'm not the one without a fire, those guys over there don't have a fire. I'll tell them how to make a fire, i'll try to help them out if i can, but in the long run i'm going to take my fire with me and move south to where it's warmer.
You're right, that model totally doesn't apply anymore. The reason we should be sending ships to outer space is because the Venusians are supposed to have gold and spices, so we should head straight to Mars and kill them all and take their treasure.
Or perhaps it would just be the system of propulsion, which just happens to obliterate whatever we happened to be around at the time as part of day to day operations :)
What you'd need to worry about more is anyone who saw it as a symbol of the US/Western Civilization/Whatever group some terrorists have a grudge again. I don't think the 9/11 terrorists thought that the WTC was inherently bad for being a very tall building or something like that.
This kind of thing is a pretty typical response for a person who hears their questioning of a belief system questioned.
We could keep this up all day! :)
Who are you accusing of jumping to this conclusion? The Lifeboat people? Or the person you originally responded to?
Neither one said we _will_ have nanotech, they both just said it was a possibility, and that if there is, there's the chance it could become extremely dangerous. (I read the posters comment as "A possible flaw is... that nanotech will be available," ie a possiblity, not a definite thing)
Arguing that nanotechnology can mean any number of things is meaningless. They've specified what type of nanotech they're worried about, the kind that could be turned into grey goo. Clearly they're not worried about the entire world being electroplated ;)
The only thing i'd argue with is the assumption by the poster your responded to that if nanotech is developed, the lifeboat will be intercepted by near lights speed nanotech probes and therefore any disaster that happens to earth will happen to the lifeboat:
A: I suspect that the ability to create grey goo will occur before near light speed or beyond light speed travel is developed, so if a disaster happens, it's likely to happen before that point.
B: Even if it does happen afterwards, or the nanobots take a longer time catching up at sublight speeds, it's not likely the particular nanobots that are a threat will end up in space probes unless someone is intentionally trying to destroy all human life. The risk of grey goo is that it could be created by accident in an experiment, or be manufactured by (very, VERY insane) terrorists in a small lab. However building it with a time delay function and launching it into space would require both a lot of planning and a lot of resources.
C: As mentioned on the Lifeboat site, it's a lot easier to maintain security over a small area than a large one. Creating an active nanobot defense over the entire earth would be almost impossible, creating one in a spaceship/colony would be many orders of magnitude easier.
Almost every single one of these articles includes the name of the spammer. I'm just waiting for the followup article about one of these featured spammers describing how they got the crap beat out of them a la Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back, or waking up one night to find a stack of old servers burning in their front yard or soemthing.
I was decrying that even at the majority it passed at, although i might have complained a little more if the margin had been so narrow.
However the GBA Zelda looks awesome! I'm hoping it will be as in depth as Link to the Past, which is still fun to go back and play.
*goes and cries in the corner*