Personally, I hated that. The aiming system was a great improvement, but let's be honest: most of the time, you're Z-targeting, making the ease of aiming almost entirely irrelevant. Having to shake the controller to swing the sword was just plain annoying. Not annoying enough to prevent me from playing through the game, but annoying none-the-less.
Yeah, I think it's pretty clear that Zelda, being a GC game originally, is not a great showcase for the wiimote's potential as an essential gameplay element. Yet at the same time Zelda's aiming, or the entire Elebits control scheme, make it clear that this potential is there and that it is real. I too look forward to what developers are going to do with it in the future.
I actually enjoyed Twilight princess for Gamecube more because it was easier to use a controller than the wiimote.
Okay, granted I've only played Wind Waker and Ocarina with the 'Cube controller, but from all accounts the control system of Twilight for the GC is basically the same as those two games... and I have to say I formed a firm and completely opposite opinion the very second I acquired the slingshot. It is so vastly superior to the old control system that just thinking about going back to the old analog stick method of aiming makes me cringe.
What was it you didn't like? Waving the wand to swing your sword instead of hitting A?
I can't understand why the Wii is flying off shelves so fast... there really aren't many good reasons to have one at this time...
It's not that hard to understand. Remember that thing you said about subjectivity? Yeah, well, your opinion that the Wii isn't a ton of fun doesn't reflect what most people think. People aren't buying Wii's because it looks "Oh so sweet"; that's the reaction people have to Hi-Def PS3 graphics, not waving a remote around like you're a fool. People buy a Wii because they play it at a friend's house and have a blast waving a remote around like a fool.
I know many are excited about the wii... but I would LOVE to stop hearing people declare the Wii a revolution and the new breakthrough in gaming that will usher in a new era of interactivity. I just haven't seen it... and the blockbuster titles for the Wii could have easily been done on the other consoles.
Try Elebits. This game shows a level of interactivity that is not just engaging, it would also be impossible to recreate on another console in a sane way. Trauma Center is another game that while it would be possible to create for a traditional console it would be zero fun to play. Maybe you won't like the games themselves, but they clearly show the ability of the Wii to create experiences that would be tough to impossible to create on other systems.
And these are just early titles with us currently sitting in the traditional post-launch drought while all the game companies that wrote off Nintendo this generation get their act together. Remember that the DS also suffered from the same criticisms early on as being a gimmick with little more than mini-games to show what the console could do. Give developers time to figure out the new and more complicated control scheme.
The Wii certainly has fun titles... but could I please stop hearing how it will revolutionize gaming? At best, it will be a companion to traditional controller gameplay.
Right, just like the analog stick is a companion to the traditional D-pad. And surely you can make the same games with a D-pad that you can with an analog stick, they'd just be more awkward and less responsive. Sure "revolution" or "new era" may be overblown especially depending on how you interpret those words. But when the next generation of consoles comes out, and every one of them has motion-sensing technology, Nintendo will have once again re-defined what we think of as the "traditional" controller.
Most people don't want to live in a place that's covered in solar panels and windmills far as the eye can see...
As opposed to... suburban rooftops and utility poles as far as the eye can see? Are black shingles really that much more attractive than black solar panels? Are windmills so much more unsightly than utility poles and power lines running everywhere?
All the large-scale wind farms I've seen are in places where there's barely anyone living anyway. I really have to wonder who is complaining about it.
And on a related note, neither windmills nor solar panels are benign - they both have a subtle effect on the environment... there's always a tradeoff with energy generation.
The only one that springs to mind is the industrial processes to manufacture solar cells, and that's bad but seriously, industrial pollution is rampant and people who act like the production of solar cells/hybrid car batteries are a deal-breaker never seem to account for the processes involved in mining coal, building a car, or whatever the status quo is in addition to the pollution created by using said coal plant or ICE car.
Or did you mean something like the solar energy being turned into electricity instead of warming the environment? Because it's all going to be released as heat in the end anyway.
Wind power I'll admit has a subtle effect, as you're taking energy from the wind... Frankly I find it hard to imagine we could put up enough windmills to counter the effect of all the trees we've chopped down, but of course that's just speculation and we aren't putting windmills only where trees used to be.
With all that said, for personal / household use solar has much promise, assuming the price can be reduced further, such as panels on roofs, etc to help people augment their energy needs.
Depending on where you live, solar panels are already a good option if you can afford the up-front investment; they will more than pay for themselves by the time they need to be replaced. Lowering the price will certainly make them even more appealing, and also I think we need to come up with better small (as in household) scale energy storage so that you aren't as dependent on the weather that day. There are a lot of folks working on both problems; neither seems out of reach at this point. I'm very hopeful about the future of solar power.
Bush and Gonzales absolutely fit the definition, if you consider that they must begin with the existing political and economic reality in this country. Just because the U.S. hasn't been turned into Mussolini's Italy now doesn't mean that they have nothing to do with fascism!
How many times have Bush and Gonzales put forward the idea that the President has essentially unlimited executive power? How many times has Gonzales supported as his official legal opinion the idea that the laws of the U.S. do not apply to Bush, that he can wield "executive privilege" to act outside the law any time the President feels it's necessary? The idea of Bush being a dictator with complete power is something both Bush and Gonzales support.
Forcible suppression of the opposition? Hello?! The entire point of the current DoJ firing scandal is that the attorneys were fired because they wouldn't persecute political opponents of the President, and wouldn't give political allies of the President a pass. Wielding the legal apparatus of the country against opponents is forcible suppression.
Economically, fascism is really about merging commercial and political power. With an entrenched free market economy, there's little any would-be fascist could do. Instead, we just have the former CEO and still stock-option-holding of one of the largest defense contractors as our Vice President, and that company is being handed hundreds of millions in no-bid contracts. Look at the Iraq war, and you'll see that Halliburton is practically a branch of our military.
Aggressive nationalism really needs no comment. Replace racism with religious prejudice and homophobia, and we're done.
Honestly, the fact that despite their clear fascist desires Bush and Gonzales have not completely up-ended the country and turned it into an overtly fascist state does not mean they never had those fascist desires (despite expressing them openly), it means that for all its faults our country is still resilient enough to survive fascist wanna-bes in office. If you really don't think Bush and Gonzales fit the definition of fascists, then you either haven't been paying attention, or you are completely baffled as to why attempted murder is a crime.
Uh, if they gave a flying fudge about bad publicity John Carmack wouldn't have posted a blog entry detailing all the bad assumptions and decisions that caused the crash. They've already deliberately put out all the bad PR you could ask for; what more is a video going to do to them?
Why do you think Armadillo needs good PR anyway? They are not a commercial venture. And the X-Prize Cup that they are competing for doesn't consider your success/failures before the actual prize attempt either, much less your PR spin on such, they only care about success or failure in an official attempt.
The word "Translation" in your post should be translated as "Blindfolded Rectal Extraction".
And to think, they want us all to ride in these things commercially....
Actually if you want something that is more akin to the airline industry, a "space tourism/transport" type thing with certified pilots and strict regulations regarding maitenance schedules and such, then you should be looking at Scaled Composites and Virgin Galactic. They are the ones trying to turn this into industry.
Armadillo is more like the cowboy spaceman notion of Star Wars or Firefly, where a few skilled amateurs operate and maintain their own space craft much like a street racer would maintain their own car, cruising around space as they please. Not very surprising that cowboy space craft made by even wealthy amateurs in their spare time is a more distant dream than large corporate conglomerates creating vessels for space tourism.
Carmack's work is fantastic from that standpoint. The amount of knowledge he is creating for the amateur rocketry field is astounding. And yes, the amateur's way is going to involve more explosions than the careful, highly-financed corporate way. Of course the amateurs are careful too, knowing their way is more explodey and not wanting to die more than anyone else. This is why Armadillio haven't actually had anyone sit on one of these things while they're testing it.:P
Given that, I don't think he's asking anyone else to ride on it any time soon.:P
On another note, I have been very impressed with the safety methodologies of Scaled Composites. It's epitomized to me by the design of Space Ship One which causes it to automatically (as in aerodynamically) orient itself correctly for reentry, even if it begins reentry in the worst possible orientation. Burt Rutan -- who man years ago (X15 project?) saw a test pilot die in reentry due to incorrect orientation -- is very much into the "safety by inherent design" and I applaud that.
With music, Apple's iTunes service is now the third largest retailer of music in the country, with no disc or booklet or anything that comes with your downloads. (Okay, a very few downloads have downloadable booklets, but those are few and far between.) I see very little difference between movies and music in this respect.
That's because the iPod has replaced the disc/discman combo as people's notion of the physical media. It has a lot of the same advantages, like being able to take it over to a friend's to share, while being even more portable. The difference between music and movies is that an iPod is perfectly sufficient for enjoying music, because all that really matters is being able to produce sound. How many people actually watch movies on their iPod? It's a piece of crap as a movie watching device; it would be fine for a plane trip but that's about it. The only reason most people own one is because they stopped selling iPods without that capability.
And I'm not following your "less dependent on a device" argument. With physical media, you're not only dependent on the device, you're dependent on the media not to get messed up, scratched, or otherwise destroyed.
But with physical media, you're not dependent on the device at all. The player itself has nothing to do with your movie collection any more than your TV does, or the patch cables between them. If your DVD player breaks, you can still take the movie to a friend's and it works just fine. You can buy a replacement DVD player, rent one, or borrow one, and it plays your DVDs with zero hassle the second you plug it in.
If you download movies to a hard drive, and that hard drive fails, your movies are gone. Not just one, like if a DVD gets scratched, but all of them. If your service isn't retarded, you can re-download them, but that's a non-trivial exercise for the forseeable future of broadband in America. Thinking just about my movie collection, which is not very big compared, and my broadband connection, which at 6Mbit is about the best you can get in a non-commercial plan around here, and it would take over 150 days to re-aquire it. Oh yeah, real simple there. That's totally easier than spending half an hour driving to Best Buy and back. And that's assuming my internet connection stays up for 150 days. Because now not only does my movie collection depend on the storage device that contains it, it also depends on my ISP.
It's a huge difference. With one case, you need to replace your player and then you're done. With the other, you need to replace your player and then re-aquire all of your movies at our current piss-poor broadband speeds.
Start with the fact that the whole "Red Riding Hood" thing was a metaphor for menstruation and puberty and I don't think it'll take long to find the hidden sex in the story:)
I appreciate the informative link to the term Bowlderize, but I would like to add that just because that term applies does not mean that no other term applies. In this case, censorship applies perfectly well. It is not the case that censorship only occurs if its the government doing it, no matter what your friendly neighborhood libertarian would like you to believe.
The weirdest instance of censorship I've ever heard was on a radio station that was playing Live's "Lightning Crashes", and they censored the word placenta.
Why does this matter? I wouldn't miss 8 stars that I could see, what's the point in analyzing thousands of pages of data to determine that there is one more star out there that I can't see.
For you? No point at all. Convenient that you aren't being asked to do any of the analysis then, isn't it?
Of course, I personally don't think that Blu-ray or HD-DVD will win the format war. The next major format is not media at all; it's network delivery of content. Ten years from now, the concept of having to put a disc into a drive to watch a movie will seem quaint.
I doubt that in the next ten years the network providers in this country will get their heads out of their asses -- apparently their asses are full of our money and they see no reason to perform the rectal-cranial extraction -- enough to actually make this a practical choice much less a reality.
Besides, people still like their plastic discs. People still like to own things, physical things. Lots of reasons why it will still be useful -- less dependent on a particular device that could fail, easier to bring something to a friend's, easier to browse through while someone else is watching TV.
But I don't think BluRay or HDDVD will win the format war either. The current war is untenable and if they continue, they'll both lose. Consumers barely want a replacement for DVD anyway, much less one where they can only watch half of the available movies and have to worry about whether a given movie is supported by their player or if they buy a gift does the person they are buying for have HD or Blu type players? The only feasible way to get people to adopt either format en masse is to make players that support both. At which point, HD or BluRay becomes largely meaningless from the point of view of the customer and both can succeed without killing the other. Some studios will release on HD-DVD, others on BluRay, and you won't care you'll just know you have a "next-gen" player that will play the movie.
You know what is strange is that I had a friend who very much liked to "grind". When we'd start our sessions, the first thing he'd do is head out of town and start walking in a huge circle around it, hoping to run into random monsters. No matter what kinds of hints I dropped that he may find more useful things to do by schmoozing with the bartender or checking the posted bulletins in town square, he preferred to just go wander through the countryside,
If I wanted him to go on an actual structured "adventure", then I had to have it literally assault him in the woods.
1) The repair goo is just a theory until it is proven. To expect it to work, when they really need it, without actual testing is to ignore Murphy.
Uh, I think it was Murphy who cast the deciding vote not to pursue the repair mission. If they did then one way or another the astronaut's lives would be depending on that goo. You want them to do that just for the sake of seeing what will happen?
2) The plan to access the underbelly of the shuttle is not dependable. If it were, then we would not have lost this chance to test the goo.
Where'd Murphy go? No, a plan to extend a 100-foot robot arm around the shuttle with 500 lbs of astronaut + suit on the end is not "dependable", neither is trying to do the delicate repairs wearing a space suit. Such is life in the final frontier. If they try, and they end up damaging the tiles further, then they could make the situation much worse.
I agree that NASA is not prepared to deal with folks who think that they should be working on cheap and dependable access to space. This is not so much magic as just hard work and a long term commitment in a different direction.
No, what I meant is people who aren't willing to hear something like "we think the shuttle will survive reentry but we can't guarantee it, and we don't want to fix it just to 'be safe' because fixing it might kill them too". As if only had NASA been better prepared there'd be an option with no risk of death.
We're a very long way from "cheap an dependable", whether to you that means airline or car levels of safety. This is the "expensive and nasty" phase. That's why they have limited options, and why their plans seem jerry-rigged. There's not exactly a lot of other robot arms or shuttle maintenance facilities available. Merely having the option to try to repair something like the shuttle's heat shield while in space is an achievement in this environment.
The way to prepare for an emergency is to practice.
This isn't practice. The only way to test the procedure is by actually putting the lives of the crew on the line in the attempt. Just like every time in the future the shuttle's tiles are damaged, they have to make a decision to risk reentry or risk the repair. Some things you can't "practice" without the risk. You can't "practice" taking chemotherapy, and you can't "practice" not destroying the shuttle's tiles in an EVA mission to repair them. You can gain experience by actually doing it, but you have to consider the risks. This is real life space travel, and NASA has to make real life risk assessments as though actual lives are on the line because they are.
Well it's not offensive when you put it like that, but it's still not right. They are still considering the lives the astronauts at the expense of the shuttle. Their analysis and simulation said that with the present damage the worst that will happen is that the shuttle's wing might be damaged and require lengthy, expensive repairs on the ground. That's the money angle. They could try to patch the damage and prevent this, but EVA is dangerous and these repairs are difficult, if it ends up causing more damage to the delicate tiles then all the astronauts' lives are in danger. On-the ground repairs, no matter how expensive, are a better option.
Aren't these this kind of things that all that money and testing were supposed to account for?
They are accounting for them... in the risk/benefit analysis of attempting the repair vs hoping their analysis of the tile damage is correct.
The risk/reward angle, is definitely valid and probably spot on. However, I can't shake the feeling that NASA simply doesn't have faith in there own repair techniques. It would make me very nervous if there was a warning label on a repair kit that said, "Last Resort Warning: Only use if you're pretty sure you're gonna die anyway."
I would be extremely alarmed if they had "faith" in their repair technique. Doing anything in space is very difficult. Repairing something as complex yet delicate as the shuttle is extremely difficult, very dangerous, and could easily make things worse. And that's after they spent all the time, money, and effort to devise a scheme to even make it possible in the first place.
So yeah, it may pretty much be a repair technique with a "Last Resort Warning" sticker on it. That may also be about as good as you're going to get when we're talking about fixing the shuttle's tiling while in orbit. Is this better or worse than a repair kit with the same warning on it, but you open it and it's just a note that says "Kiss your ass goodbye"?
I think of the space shuttle as an extension of our experimental aircraft programs, and a lot of astronauts were former test pilots so that's pretty fair. An ejection seat on a jet is a Last Resort, and they are notorious for severely injuring or even killing pilots who use them. Yet given the parameters of what they're doing they aren't bad, and if you have to use one it's either risk injury or death ejecting, or face certain death going down with the plane. That's the kind of situations astronauts have to deal with, pushing the frontiers of human survivability. There are no easy answers in space, pretty much everything has the possibility of killing you, and in this case I'm glad they're saving the "Oh Shit" lever for some other time when the risks on reentry seem worth the risks of a repair mission.
So is this the point where we starting hearing that blocking ads is just like running out of the store with a pair of blue jeans? I mean really...
Yes, absolutely. Already we have TV execs and MPAA representatives saying that watching TV -- broadcast or cable -- without watching the ads is theft. Like if you hit the mute button to talk with your girlfriend, or get up to use the bathroom, you might as well have gone into Jack Valenti's house and grabbed a vase off his mantle. The mentality is already there in the heads of the ones who own the media, and by virtue of that they can keep slamming us with the concept over and over until people actually believe it.
And from their perspective it makes perfect sense. In all these cases, including this website, the "product" they make their money from is your eyeballs pointed at their advertisors' ads. By depriving them of that product you are hypothetically depriving them of their product, which could hypothetically affect their advertising revenue. And you damn well better believe that to these people hypothetical money they could have gotten is the same as money they had in their pocket and then lost.
Pretty soon billboard owners will start to claim that you are stealing from them for not looking at their billboards while you are driving.
The funniest part to me? When he says that firefox users are an insignificant number, and spend even less money, so barring them isn't harmful... But the upside of barring them is somehow huge? How is that possible?
After the last shuttle loss, they were supposed to come up with a way to inspect and repair on orbit.
They did. They are able to inspect the tiles, that's how we have all those photographs and other data about it that allowed them to decide that the danger was minimal. They did come up with a repair method, but they haven't been able to actually try it, and it's very dangerous. You don't just hop out into the vacuum and go scurrying around the belly of the shuttle near all those delicate tiles just for practice. It's an emergency repair. If they determined that this was an emergency, they would have gone out and repaired the tiles.
Looks like they got caught unprepared, even after a severe warning.
The only thing they were unprepared for is people who think that NASA should have somehow magically eliminated all space-born danger.
You know, I know nobody RTFAs anymore, but even TFS made it clear that they determined major risk and the only reason to do a spacewalk would be to prevent the shuttle's aluminum frame from sustaining damage that would be costly to repair.
They decided it was not worth risking an astronaut's life to repair the shuttle just to potentially save on repair costs.
In other words THEY ARE MORE CONCERNED WITH LIVES THAN COSTS YOU ASSHOLE.
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Personally, I hated that. The aiming system was a great improvement, but let's be honest: most of the time, you're Z-targeting, making the ease of aiming almost entirely irrelevant. Having to shake the controller to swing the sword was just plain annoying. Not annoying enough to prevent me from playing through the game, but annoying none-the-less.
Yeah, I think it's pretty clear that Zelda, being a GC game originally, is not a great showcase for the wiimote's potential as an essential gameplay element. Yet at the same time Zelda's aiming, or the entire Elebits control scheme, make it clear that this potential is there and that it is real. I too look forward to what developers are going to do with it in the future.
I actually enjoyed Twilight princess for Gamecube more because it was easier to use a controller than the wiimote.
Okay, granted I've only played Wind Waker and Ocarina with the 'Cube controller, but from all accounts the control system of Twilight for the GC is basically the same as those two games... and I have to say I formed a firm and completely opposite opinion the very second I acquired the slingshot. It is so vastly superior to the old control system that just thinking about going back to the old analog stick method of aiming makes me cringe.
What was it you didn't like? Waving the wand to swing your sword instead of hitting A?
I can't understand why the Wii is flying off shelves so fast... there really aren't many good reasons to have one at this time...
It's not that hard to understand. Remember that thing you said about subjectivity? Yeah, well, your opinion that the Wii isn't a ton of fun doesn't reflect what most people think. People aren't buying Wii's because it looks "Oh so sweet"; that's the reaction people have to Hi-Def PS3 graphics, not waving a remote around like you're a fool. People buy a Wii because they play it at a friend's house and have a blast waving a remote around like a fool.
I know many are excited about the wii... but I would LOVE to stop hearing people declare the Wii a revolution and the new breakthrough in gaming that will usher in a new era of interactivity. I just haven't seen it... and the blockbuster titles for the Wii could have easily been done on the other consoles.
Try Elebits. This game shows a level of interactivity that is not just engaging, it would also be impossible to recreate on another console in a sane way. Trauma Center is another game that while it would be possible to create for a traditional console it would be zero fun to play. Maybe you won't like the games themselves, but they clearly show the ability of the Wii to create experiences that would be tough to impossible to create on other systems.
And these are just early titles with us currently sitting in the traditional post-launch drought while all the game companies that wrote off Nintendo this generation get their act together. Remember that the DS also suffered from the same criticisms early on as being a gimmick with little more than mini-games to show what the console could do. Give developers time to figure out the new and more complicated control scheme.
The Wii certainly has fun titles... but could I please stop hearing how it will revolutionize gaming? At best, it will be a companion to traditional controller gameplay.
Right, just like the analog stick is a companion to the traditional D-pad. And surely you can make the same games with a D-pad that you can with an analog stick, they'd just be more awkward and less responsive. Sure "revolution" or "new era" may be overblown especially depending on how you interpret those words. But when the next generation of consoles comes out, and every one of them has motion-sensing technology, Nintendo will have once again re-defined what we think of as the "traditional" controller.
Most people don't want to live in a place that's covered in solar panels and windmills far as the eye can see...
... there's always a tradeoff with energy generation.
As opposed to... suburban rooftops and utility poles as far as the eye can see? Are black shingles really that much more attractive than black solar panels? Are windmills so much more unsightly than utility poles and power lines running everywhere?
All the large-scale wind farms I've seen are in places where there's barely anyone living anyway. I really have to wonder who is complaining about it.
And on a related note, neither windmills nor solar panels are benign - they both have a subtle effect on the environment
The only one that springs to mind is the industrial processes to manufacture solar cells, and that's bad but seriously, industrial pollution is rampant and people who act like the production of solar cells/hybrid car batteries are a deal-breaker never seem to account for the processes involved in mining coal, building a car, or whatever the status quo is in addition to the pollution created by using said coal plant or ICE car.
Or did you mean something like the solar energy being turned into electricity instead of warming the environment? Because it's all going to be released as heat in the end anyway.
Wind power I'll admit has a subtle effect, as you're taking energy from the wind... Frankly I find it hard to imagine we could put up enough windmills to counter the effect of all the trees we've chopped down, but of course that's just speculation and we aren't putting windmills only where trees used to be.
With all that said, for personal / household use solar has much promise, assuming the price can be reduced further, such as panels on roofs, etc to help people augment their energy needs.
Depending on where you live, solar panels are already a good option if you can afford the up-front investment; they will more than pay for themselves by the time they need to be replaced. Lowering the price will certainly make them even more appealing, and also I think we need to come up with better small (as in household) scale energy storage so that you aren't as dependent on the weather that day. There are a lot of folks working on both problems; neither seems out of reach at this point. I'm very hopeful about the future of solar power.
Bush and Gonzales absolutely fit the definition, if you consider that they must begin with the existing political and economic reality in this country. Just because the U.S. hasn't been turned into Mussolini's Italy now doesn't mean that they have nothing to do with fascism!
How many times have Bush and Gonzales put forward the idea that the President has essentially unlimited executive power? How many times has Gonzales supported as his official legal opinion the idea that the laws of the U.S. do not apply to Bush, that he can wield "executive privilege" to act outside the law any time the President feels it's necessary? The idea of Bush being a dictator with complete power is something both Bush and Gonzales support.
Forcible suppression of the opposition? Hello?! The entire point of the current DoJ firing scandal is that the attorneys were fired because they wouldn't persecute political opponents of the President, and wouldn't give political allies of the President a pass. Wielding the legal apparatus of the country against opponents is forcible suppression.
Economically, fascism is really about merging commercial and political power. With an entrenched free market economy, there's little any would-be fascist could do. Instead, we just have the former CEO and still stock-option-holding of one of the largest defense contractors as our Vice President, and that company is being handed hundreds of millions in no-bid contracts. Look at the Iraq war, and you'll see that Halliburton is practically a branch of our military.
Aggressive nationalism really needs no comment. Replace racism with religious prejudice and homophobia, and we're done.
Honestly, the fact that despite their clear fascist desires Bush and Gonzales have not completely up-ended the country and turned it into an overtly fascist state does not mean they never had those fascist desires (despite expressing them openly), it means that for all its faults our country is still resilient enough to survive fascist wanna-bes in office. If you really don't think Bush and Gonzales fit the definition of fascists, then you either haven't been paying attention, or you are completely baffled as to why attempted murder is a crime.
Uh, if they gave a flying fudge about bad publicity John Carmack wouldn't have posted a blog entry detailing all the bad assumptions and decisions that caused the crash. They've already deliberately put out all the bad PR you could ask for; what more is a video going to do to them?
Why do you think Armadillo needs good PR anyway? They are not a commercial venture. And the X-Prize Cup that they are competing for doesn't consider your success/failures before the actual prize attempt either, much less your PR spin on such, they only care about success or failure in an official attempt.
The word "Translation" in your post should be translated as "Blindfolded Rectal Extraction".
And to think, they want us all to ride in these things commercially....
:P
:P
Actually if you want something that is more akin to the airline industry, a "space tourism/transport" type thing with certified pilots and strict regulations regarding maitenance schedules and such, then you should be looking at Scaled Composites and Virgin Galactic. They are the ones trying to turn this into industry.
Armadillo is more like the cowboy spaceman notion of Star Wars or Firefly, where a few skilled amateurs operate and maintain their own space craft much like a street racer would maintain their own car, cruising around space as they please. Not very surprising that cowboy space craft made by even wealthy amateurs in their spare time is a more distant dream than large corporate conglomerates creating vessels for space tourism.
Carmack's work is fantastic from that standpoint. The amount of knowledge he is creating for the amateur rocketry field is astounding. And yes, the amateur's way is going to involve more explosions than the careful, highly-financed corporate way. Of course the amateurs are careful too, knowing their way is more explodey and not wanting to die more than anyone else. This is why Armadillio haven't actually had anyone sit on one of these things while they're testing it.
Given that, I don't think he's asking anyone else to ride on it any time soon.
On another note, I have been very impressed with the safety methodologies of Scaled Composites. It's epitomized to me by the design of Space Ship One which causes it to automatically (as in aerodynamically) orient itself correctly for reentry, even if it begins reentry in the worst possible orientation. Burt Rutan -- who man years ago (X15 project?) saw a test pilot die in reentry due to incorrect orientation -- is very much into the "safety by inherent design" and I applaud that.
With music, Apple's iTunes service is now the third largest retailer of music in the country, with no disc or booklet or anything that comes with your downloads. (Okay, a very few downloads have downloadable booklets, but those are few and far between.) I see very little difference between movies and music in this respect.
That's because the iPod has replaced the disc/discman combo as people's notion of the physical media. It has a lot of the same advantages, like being able to take it over to a friend's to share, while being even more portable. The difference between music and movies is that an iPod is perfectly sufficient for enjoying music, because all that really matters is being able to produce sound. How many people actually watch movies on their iPod? It's a piece of crap as a movie watching device; it would be fine for a plane trip but that's about it. The only reason most people own one is because they stopped selling iPods without that capability.
And I'm not following your "less dependent on a device" argument. With physical media, you're not only dependent on the device, you're dependent on the media not to get messed up, scratched, or otherwise destroyed.
But with physical media, you're not dependent on the device at all. The player itself has nothing to do with your movie collection any more than your TV does, or the patch cables between them. If your DVD player breaks, you can still take the movie to a friend's and it works just fine. You can buy a replacement DVD player, rent one, or borrow one, and it plays your DVDs with zero hassle the second you plug it in.
If you download movies to a hard drive, and that hard drive fails, your movies are gone. Not just one, like if a DVD gets scratched, but all of them. If your service isn't retarded, you can re-download them, but that's a non-trivial exercise for the forseeable future of broadband in America. Thinking just about my movie collection, which is not very big compared, and my broadband connection, which at 6Mbit is about the best you can get in a non-commercial plan around here, and it would take over 150 days to re-aquire it. Oh yeah, real simple there. That's totally easier than spending half an hour driving to Best Buy and back. And that's assuming my internet connection stays up for 150 days. Because now not only does my movie collection depend on the storage device that contains it, it also depends on my ISP.
It's a huge difference. With one case, you need to replace your player and then you're done. With the other, you need to replace your player and then re-aquire all of your movies at our current piss-poor broadband speeds.
Start with the fact that the whole "Red Riding Hood" thing was a metaphor for menstruation and puberty and I don't think it'll take long to find the hidden sex in the story :)
I appreciate the informative link to the term Bowlderize, but I would like to add that just because that term applies does not mean that no other term applies. In this case, censorship applies perfectly well. It is not the case that censorship only occurs if its the government doing it, no matter what your friendly neighborhood libertarian would like you to believe.
The weirdest instance of censorship I've ever heard was on a radio station that was playing Live's "Lightning Crashes", and they censored the word placenta.
The mind boggles.
Why does this matter? I wouldn't miss 8 stars that I could see, what's the point in analyzing thousands of pages of data to determine that there is one more star out there that I can't see.
For you? No point at all. Convenient that you aren't being asked to do any of the analysis then, isn't it?
Just like in real life!
Of course, I personally don't think that Blu-ray or HD-DVD will win the format war. The next major format is not media at all; it's network delivery of content. Ten years from now, the concept of having to put a disc into a drive to watch a movie will seem quaint.
I doubt that in the next ten years the network providers in this country will get their heads out of their asses -- apparently their asses are full of our money and they see no reason to perform the rectal-cranial extraction -- enough to actually make this a practical choice much less a reality.
Besides, people still like their plastic discs. People still like to own things, physical things. Lots of reasons why it will still be useful -- less dependent on a particular device that could fail, easier to bring something to a friend's, easier to browse through while someone else is watching TV.
But I don't think BluRay or HDDVD will win the format war either. The current war is untenable and if they continue, they'll both lose. Consumers barely want a replacement for DVD anyway, much less one where they can only watch half of the available movies and have to worry about whether a given movie is supported by their player or if they buy a gift does the person they are buying for have HD or Blu type players? The only feasible way to get people to adopt either format en masse is to make players that support both. At which point, HD or BluRay becomes largely meaningless from the point of view of the customer and both can succeed without killing the other. Some studios will release on HD-DVD, others on BluRay, and you won't care you'll just know you have a "next-gen" player that will play the movie.
So while they have no legal weight other than age verification at the point of sale a la movies
Which is to say, no legal weight whatsoever. Just making that clear.
Wars not make one great!
But rocket-powered bionic arms do!
You know what is strange is that I had a friend who very much liked to "grind". When we'd start our sessions, the first thing he'd do is head out of town and start walking in a huge circle around it, hoping to run into random monsters. No matter what kinds of hints I dropped that he may find more useful things to do by schmoozing with the bartender or checking the posted bulletins in town square, he preferred to just go wander through the countryside,
If I wanted him to go on an actual structured "adventure", then I had to have it literally assault him in the woods.
He also has had a string of great girlfriends, which I can't put into D&D terms because I don't know the system for seduction, but you get the point.
Me either, but I've done some research and maybe we can share notes. For starters, it looks as though no D20s are involved. I know, it's bizarre.
Initial test indicates they are not safe for driving if there are pedestrians carrying cans of Mountain Dew.
Don't worry. Anyone who is drinking Mountain Dew is into extreme sports and Car Dodging is an extreme sport if you ask me anyway.
1) The repair goo is just a theory until it is proven. To expect it to work, when they really need it, without actual testing is to ignore Murphy.
Uh, I think it was Murphy who cast the deciding vote not to pursue the repair mission. If they did then one way or another the astronaut's lives would be depending on that goo. You want them to do that just for the sake of seeing what will happen?
2) The plan to access the underbelly of the shuttle is not dependable. If it were, then we would not have lost this chance to test the goo.
Where'd Murphy go? No, a plan to extend a 100-foot robot arm around the shuttle with 500 lbs of astronaut + suit on the end is not "dependable", neither is trying to do the delicate repairs wearing a space suit. Such is life in the final frontier. If they try, and they end up damaging the tiles further, then they could make the situation much worse.
I agree that NASA is not prepared to deal with folks who think that they should be working on cheap and dependable access to space. This is not so much magic as just hard work and a long term commitment in a different direction.
No, what I meant is people who aren't willing to hear something like "we think the shuttle will survive reentry but we can't guarantee it, and we don't want to fix it just to 'be safe' because fixing it might kill them too". As if only had NASA been better prepared there'd be an option with no risk of death.
We're a very long way from "cheap an dependable", whether to you that means airline or car levels of safety. This is the "expensive and nasty" phase. That's why they have limited options, and why their plans seem jerry-rigged. There's not exactly a lot of other robot arms or shuttle maintenance facilities available. Merely having the option to try to repair something like the shuttle's heat shield while in space is an achievement in this environment.
The way to prepare for an emergency is to practice.
This isn't practice. The only way to test the procedure is by actually putting the lives of the crew on the line in the attempt. Just like every time in the future the shuttle's tiles are damaged, they have to make a decision to risk reentry or risk the repair. Some things you can't "practice" without the risk. You can't "practice" taking chemotherapy, and you can't "practice" not destroying the shuttle's tiles in an EVA mission to repair them. You can gain experience by actually doing it, but you have to consider the risks. This is real life space travel, and NASA has to make real life risk assessments as though actual lives are on the line because they are.
I think this happened before he died. If not, it could explain why they're so pissed!
Well it's not offensive when you put it like that, but it's still not right. They are still considering the lives the astronauts at the expense of the shuttle. Their analysis and simulation said that with the present damage the worst that will happen is that the shuttle's wing might be damaged and require lengthy, expensive repairs on the ground. That's the money angle. They could try to patch the damage and prevent this, but EVA is dangerous and these repairs are difficult, if it ends up causing more damage to the delicate tiles then all the astronauts' lives are in danger. On-the ground repairs, no matter how expensive, are a better option.
Aren't these this kind of things that all that money and testing were supposed to account for?
They are accounting for them... in the risk/benefit analysis of attempting the repair vs hoping their analysis of the tile damage is correct.
The risk/reward angle, is definitely valid and probably spot on. However, I can't shake the feeling that NASA simply doesn't have faith in there own repair techniques. It would make me very nervous if there was a warning label on a repair kit that said, "Last Resort Warning: Only use if you're pretty sure you're gonna die anyway."
I would be extremely alarmed if they had "faith" in their repair technique. Doing anything in space is very difficult. Repairing something as complex yet delicate as the shuttle is extremely difficult, very dangerous, and could easily make things worse. And that's after they spent all the time, money, and effort to devise a scheme to even make it possible in the first place.
So yeah, it may pretty much be a repair technique with a "Last Resort Warning" sticker on it. That may also be about as good as you're going to get when we're talking about fixing the shuttle's tiling while in orbit. Is this better or worse than a repair kit with the same warning on it, but you open it and it's just a note that says "Kiss your ass goodbye"?
I think of the space shuttle as an extension of our experimental aircraft programs, and a lot of astronauts were former test pilots so that's pretty fair. An ejection seat on a jet is a Last Resort, and they are notorious for severely injuring or even killing pilots who use them. Yet given the parameters of what they're doing they aren't bad, and if you have to use one it's either risk injury or death ejecting, or face certain death going down with the plane. That's the kind of situations astronauts have to deal with, pushing the frontiers of human survivability. There are no easy answers in space, pretty much everything has the possibility of killing you, and in this case I'm glad they're saving the "Oh Shit" lever for some other time when the risks on reentry seem worth the risks of a repair mission.
So is this the point where we starting hearing that blocking ads is just like running out of the store with a pair of blue jeans? I mean really...
Yes, absolutely. Already we have TV execs and MPAA representatives saying that watching TV -- broadcast or cable -- without watching the ads is theft. Like if you hit the mute button to talk with your girlfriend, or get up to use the bathroom, you might as well have gone into Jack Valenti's house and grabbed a vase off his mantle. The mentality is already there in the heads of the ones who own the media, and by virtue of that they can keep slamming us with the concept over and over until people actually believe it.
And from their perspective it makes perfect sense. In all these cases, including this website, the "product" they make their money from is your eyeballs pointed at their advertisors' ads. By depriving them of that product you are hypothetically depriving them of their product, which could hypothetically affect their advertising revenue. And you damn well better believe that to these people hypothetical money they could have gotten is the same as money they had in their pocket and then lost.
Pretty soon billboard owners will start to claim that you are stealing from them for not looking at their billboards while you are driving.
The funniest part to me? When he says that firefox users are an insignificant number, and spend even less money, so barring them isn't harmful... But the upside of barring them is somehow huge? How is that possible?
After the last shuttle loss, they were supposed to come up with a way to inspect and repair on orbit.
They did. They are able to inspect the tiles, that's how we have all those photographs and other data about it that allowed them to decide that the danger was minimal. They did come up with a repair method, but they haven't been able to actually try it, and it's very dangerous. You don't just hop out into the vacuum and go scurrying around the belly of the shuttle near all those delicate tiles just for practice. It's an emergency repair. If they determined that this was an emergency, they would have gone out and repaired the tiles.
Looks like they got caught unprepared, even after a severe warning.
The only thing they were unprepared for is people who think that NASA should have somehow magically eliminated all space-born danger.
You know, I know nobody RTFAs anymore, but even TFS made it clear that they determined major risk and the only reason to do a spacewalk would be to prevent the shuttle's aluminum frame from sustaining damage that would be costly to repair.
They decided it was not worth risking an astronaut's life to repair the shuttle just to potentially save on repair costs.
In other words THEY ARE MORE CONCERNED WITH LIVES THAN COSTS YOU ASSHOLE.