Though, oranges will probably be the wrong crop to try this first. They are not that labour intensive. The income per square mile and margins are also not that great.
But I think that's the point (or one of them). The two arguments are actually in favor of using robots:
First, if the margins are not great then it might be preferable to use (presumably cheaper) robots that (usually expensive, even for immigrants) human labor: Even though the cost of humans is not as great as other crops, it's more tempting to apply robots for small margins. The farmers are interested in removing as large a section of the marginal cost, not the largest absolute cost.
Assume I can reduce 90% of labor costs. I'm more likely to want to apply this when the labor costs are 50% of the profit (oranges, low labor costs, but even lower profit), rather than 30% of the profit (bananas, more profit, but even more labor intensive), even if the the 50% of the first profit (oranges) is 50 k$ and 30% of the profit (bananas) is 80 k$. In effect, an orange producer is raising his margins by.5*.9, and a banana producer is rising his margins by.3*.9.
(This works only because I can't pick the crop for a certain terrain because of climate. It changes how interested two different producers are to the tech, not to the type of crop. Of course, once it's proven, the tech will be extended to everything. And it only works for some pair of numbers, of course.)
Second, it's presumably easier to build robots to pick crops that are less labor intensive.
I hate to spoil a perfectly fine elaborated joke, but the movie producers were not really wrong. The vehicles one would expect in a post-apocalyptic dystopia are those at the top of the (performance*maintainability) curve _at_ the time of the _apocalyptic event_.
So, accepting the producers of the movie imagined a soon-to-come apocalypse, they wouldn't expect cars significantly more advanced than the cars made at the time of the movie's release.
Also, even if the Mad Max films were made now, the maintainability part of the equation above would disqualify hybrids simply because (a) it's much harder to hack and fix a hybrid with a hammer in a post-apocalyptic garage and (b) it's pretty much impossible to replace the batteries when they go out four or five years after the apocalypse. Not to mention what the EMPs one would expect in such an event would do to the circuits...
I don't think it was meant to be funny. I see your point, many downloaded iTunes because of the iPod. But I myself downloaded at least half a dozen times iTunes by mistake, trying to download QuickTime. I was half-way through a hate-mail to Apple when I finally found the stand-alone download.
No, that is silly. It wouldn't even have crossed my mind to use something bigger than a Ford Ka for two adults, a kid and two cats. Do you own lions or something?
(No, really. That last bit was a joke, but come on!)
It's a bit more complicated, but you can do that safely. I took all the keys off my keyboard, opened it up, took the logic & cable away, and put the keys and the body in the washing machine. (Actually, I put the keys in the _laundry_ machine in a pouch, and the body in the dishwasher.) Mine also had a pair of thin plastic sheets under the keys, with (probably) graphite criss-crossing circuits, and I washed that part by hand with soap for fear of breaking the traces.
It air-dried just fine in a few hours, and worked just right after assembly. Only issue is that now it's _too_ squeaky-clean; either there's some calcareous deposit under the keys from the water, or there used to be some sort of lubricant that washed up. Anyway, they're literally squeaky sometimes;)
Yes, the post is genuine, and yes, he did reply to a mail with a version of the document. There are a few pages enumerating quite sincerely the risk factors (at least, pretty much everything I know of, and a few more), though there aren't any quantitative data. (I.e., it states some breakthroughs are necessary, but not at all their magnitude, though I suppose that needs a much more technical document.)
However, I don't have any real experience with such documents. At least it _looks_ reasonable.
As far as attacking the HDMI stream: good luck doing real-time encoding of a raw, uncompressed HDTV stream. Currently, that requires extremely expensive hardware (if it even exists).
(1) You don't have to encode it real-time. (1') You don't even need to record it to disk uncompressed in real-time. (It may be convenient, but not necessary. You can record snippets to RAM, dump them to disk, rewind and continue. And encode it any now and then.)
(2) Hardware may be expensive now, but it gets cheaper quickly. Consider there already exist "consumer" HDTV cameras.
Of course, it's easier to crack the players and decrypt the stream. Of course, it's hard to capture and re-encode the movie from HDMI. But the question is, is it too hard to do?. Since you only need to do it once per movie, my guess is no.
But unless my understanding of how DNS works is much worse than I thought, don't I need another DNS server to connect my resolver to? I can't connect it to the root servers directly, can I?
I think he just meant that OpenDNS dislikes the sudden (and advantaged) competition. Anyway, I'm not sure I'd call "stealth" a page that has the owner's (Dell's) branding. It's not even hidden, it's just automatic. (Yes, if you're a beginner you don't know that it's optional, but that's true of WMP, the Flash plugin and Java, too.)
Nevermind, that wasn't why I answered. When you say you "have the option of switching away to other forwarders", do you mean there's something like OpenDNS that doesn't do that messy redirect?
I want a DNS that tells me when it doesn't find something, not try guessing. It's hugely annoying when the Java applications I work on (or SSH for that matter) try to connect to the OpenDNS search engine whenever I mistype an URL. My ISP provides absolutely abysmal DNS service (it takes it a minute to find Google...) so I resorted to using the DNS of a random ISP I found by accident. But I don't have any guarantee that one will hold, and it's pretty far anyway.
This is a much better post than the one I answered with. Here you're actually debating. While my debating skills are certainly far from perfect, your first post was only a pre-digested bundle of oratory--repeated at least once almost verbatim in the discussion above.
A bit of ad-hominem in the first sentence, a couple of half-truisms mixed with unsupported statements, a bit of demonization (and what I think is a straw men argument---sorry, I'm not formally trained in debating, I get some of the terms mixed up), all finished with a generalization not supported by anything... No alternative given, no solutions.
That's a critique only in the most barren sense of the word: ie, "It's bad, and I think it's really, really bad. You can't support that, can you?"
Sorry to criticize. I'll stick to the arguments from now: 0) I wasn't refuting anything. I was trying to point out on one hand--though maybe it wasn't necessary--that "slavery" is not an absolutely defined term, and in a careful analysis it can pop up in unexpected places. As to your answer, allow me to generalize it a little: Most governance systems purport to support certain ideals---including liberty---and _can_ result in the opposite. That's perfectly true, but to criticize libertarianism you have to show that (a) it always goes that way or (b) it goes that way much more often and quicker than other governing systems. You didn't show any of that, you just stated that it is "necessarily" so.
(Allow me to explain a bit on that: criticizing a feature of something without context and an alternative is not very useful. It's like saying that planes are dangerous _and_ you shouldn't use them for transportation because they can fall from the sky and go boom, ignoring the fact that it's in fact the safest way of traveling. (I don't know if that's really so, it's just an example.) It _is_ a useful critique for trying to improve flight safety, but not to ban flights.)
1) Almost right, but two fatal flaws: (a) you simplify a complex process (a system of social governance) to a couple of feedback loops, then claim that the limit of those loops is a certain degenerate state---which is true, but only for the very simplified model. (b) You half-acknowledge that the loops can be broken when you ask for proof why the system won't fail. This is valid, in math, but unfortunately _no_ system of social governance can be proved. For scientific proofs you need observation, theories, and experiments. We have lots of the former two, but not much of that last one.
I realize up to here I'm criticizing your comments rather than supporting libertarianism. That was sort of my point: I'm not supporting libertarianism, I was just pointing out that your critique is lacking.
But allow me to try a bit of a supporting argument:
No real system of governance is rigidly defined by a couple of simple rules. Different ideologies (eg, libertarianism) are defined by a few simple ideals; people have many ideals, they try to reach them, and after a while their government becomes laking enough in another ideal direction that people notice that, in fact, the old ideals are not enough. So new ideologies snap up supporting those ideals.
The point is that you can't fulfill all ideals. You pick some, to define a direction. The trick is to recognize that the ideology is different from reality: the other ideologies are not swept out, they exist too. Every ideology has extreme limit cases, but society tries to balance them to remain in the 'acceptable' zone, and strive for the 'better' zone---however hard that may be to define. You just have to consider the complexities of life not explicit in the model. For instance:
2) No, not everybody absolutely needs food, water, shelter and medicine. You need the first two to live---but some people choose not to live. This means that some things are sometimes for some people more important than living. Second, medicine didn't exist for a long time, and some people refuse to use it even now. Again, shelter means
(0) You seem to consider being a slave a very bad thing. (Not that I disagree.) The opposite of slavery is liberty. Libertarians just realized that you don't need to have a human owner to be a slave. You can just as well be the slave of a system, of a bureaucracy, of a collective or a society or a state. Consider China or the Soviet Union or Cuba: many resources are "not owned" (I assume by that you mean they're "owned by everyone"), the "equitable" distribution of wealth and basic necessities are "guaranteed" --- but those people were (and are) slaves in many aspects. (Yes, you could say those are just bad implementations of sound principles. What makes you think it _can_ be well-implemented?)
(1) When all resources are owned...
(a) It's not necessary that there are people who own nothing.
(b) As a special case, as long as every man owns his own work ability he is not a slave.
(c) Slavery is defined as one person owning someone else's work. The exact opposite of that is liberty: the guaranteed right to work what you want to.
(d) Supposing some resources are not owned, what then? They can be just as unaccessible for any number of reasons. In particular, they can simply be consumed.
(2) If right to basic necessities are not guaranteed...
(a) The definition of basic necessities is not the same for everyone. If you have N people and food for N/2, how do you guarantee the basic necessity of eating?
(b) No, you can't get me do anything by denying my basic necessities. Just because they're not guaranteed (by who?) doesn't mean
- I can't strive to obtain them myself.
- Someone else may want to help me.
- You don't ever need my work (why would you want me as a slave if my work isn't useful for you?)
- I might prefer death to doing something I don't want. Many slaves did.
(3) You want a world where a small owning class controls...
(a) If I would, so what? It's my will against that of six+ billions.
(b) If everyone wanted it, so what? You can't have everyone part of a small owning class, right? This means that the non-owning class is by definition larger, and "owns" the vast majority of work potential (including violence).
(4) That is what libertarianism necessarily leads to.
(a) No, it doesn't.
(b) That is what communism necessarily leads to.
(c) That is what monarchy necessarily leads to.
(d) That is what socialism necessarily leads to.
(e) That is what anarchism necessarily leads to.
(f) That is what feudalism necessarily leads to.
(g) Note: that was just an obnoxious way of showing that you replaced an unproved but vaguely intuitive theorem with an axiom. Without a rigorous justification ---and that's hard as hell to do--- that statement is practically useless. One can make any number of such statements, including their negations, all of which can be supported with rational arguments. One obviously needs a more subtle approach.
By the way, I'm not a libertarian. But your argument was just so obnoxiously wrong--twice--I just had to say something.
Well, if you've been expecting a revolutionary rather than an incremental expansion in a game called "Starcraft II", that was a _bit_ unreasonable in my opinion, especially considering the company's history.
I agree I'd like the game to have some truer-scale, tactical aspect that uses 3D more (eg, canyons, ravines, rivers, etc), but I don't think this would happen in the "normal" multiplayer. After all, it's an RTS and people expect it to work at least sort-of like the other *craft games.
But on the other hand, even Warcraft III had some of those aspects. The multiplayer and most of the campaigns were "classic" RTS, but part of the horde mini-campaigns in Frozen Throne were quite closer to my hopes. The terrain was closer, with larger buildings. I can only hope something like that will be part of the game.
I realize you're looking for something different, though, but with all due respect, if you're looking for something radically different from Starcraft you shouldn't be looking at Starcraft II.
You didn't watch the gameplay enough. It has units that can 'blink' over terrain differences (ok, so that was in Warcraft III), huge quadrupedal units five times taller than Zealots that can actually step over and stand above human-sized units without colliding (except with each other), and can step over high terrain. There are human units with jumpjets that can fly over terrain differences -- and I wouldn't be surprised if they can jump over units or buildings.
This is not just a gimmick, it can change a lot the way you think about defenses and choke-points.
There are huge improvements in the armor/damage type that changes the balance a lot. The scale _is_ different, as you'll see that there are hugely more Zerlings and very few Battlecruiser-scale units in a scene, and it _was_ a balanced fight. You can also see at some point a four or five level see-saw when similar sized groups of a certain type of unit were slaughtered by another kind, which in turn were slaughtered by another kind (all groups of about the same size). Which means you have to think very well of tactics, too.
The difference in build strategy is significantly changed by new ways of extending the Protoss psionic matrix, and I'm convinced similar updates to the other races will make them even more different. (It's clear from the videos that the Terran buildings' move ability is used to good effect, there was nothing shown about the Zerg though.)
Granted, these are not huge, fundamental changes. It's probably on the scale of the changes between the Diablo games: nothing fundamental, but it amounts to orders of magnitude in fun and complexity.
And yes, you can zoom and apparently look around things. I for one can't wait to try the "commando" missions inside buildings and huge ships, or the RPG-like missions like the bonus maps for Warcraft III. Maybe even some planetary-scale sterilization from orbit as in the books:D
Also, Dyson spheres are not transparent, and must necessarily be (much) larger than the stars they "wrap". Thus eventually we should see them eclipsing something bright. It's not easy, but I'm sure it'd be detectable. (Remember we've noticed planets by the way they eclipse their stars.)
As you post implies, I think, the energy of the star can't be _absorbed_; the Dyson sphere would become increasingly hot. Even if the energy is "used", either it escapes or the sphere gets warmer.
This is very weird. The letter says that (I paraphrase): "you're offering the blah-blah processing key on your site" and then since this (I paraphrase again) "is a device primarily intended to circumvent a technical protection measure" you are in violation of the DMCA, cease and desist, blah-blah.
But, the key itself is a device primarily intended to be used in the normal operation of the disc. It's present in all legal players, it's created by the same guys who created the protection measure. In some way, it is part of the protection measure. It seems illogical.
It's like I sold a key that can open all locks of a class, which I received when I bought the lock, and someone would claim that the key is a device "primarily intended to circumvent other locks".
It has the potential to be better at turning itself off when not in use, though; the simple fact that it'll be used for many things means it can afford a bit more intelligence.
The fact that it's supposed to be "universal" means there will be a single power-drain. (Consider that all those lazy users now have many wall-warts plugged in all the time.)
Slashdot Mirror
First, if the margins are not great then it might be preferable to use (presumably cheaper) robots that (usually expensive, even for immigrants) human labor: Even though the cost of humans is not as great as other crops, it's more tempting to apply robots for small margins. The farmers are interested in removing as large a section of the marginal cost, not the largest absolute cost.
Assume I can reduce 90% of labor costs. I'm more likely to want to apply this when the labor costs are 50% of the profit (oranges, low labor costs, but even lower profit), rather than 30% of the profit (bananas, more profit, but even more labor intensive), even if the the 50% of the first profit (oranges) is 50 k$ and 30% of the profit (bananas) is 80 k$. In effect, an orange producer is raising his margins by .5*.9, and a banana producer is rising his margins by .3*.9.
(This works only because I can't pick the crop for a certain terrain because of climate. It changes how interested two different producers are to the tech, not to the type of crop. Of course, once it's proven, the tech will be extended to everything. And it only works for some pair of numbers, of course.)
Second, it's presumably easier to build robots to pick crops that are less labor intensive.
Maybe he's using a Dvorak keyboard? aoeui...
You're cheating! I'm sure the performance factor would keep at least some cars above that. And then, there are sandals too ;)
I hate to spoil a perfectly fine elaborated joke, but the movie producers were not really wrong. The vehicles one would expect in a post-apocalyptic dystopia are those at the top of the (performance*maintainability) curve _at_ the time of the _apocalyptic event_.
So, accepting the producers of the movie imagined a soon-to-come apocalypse, they wouldn't expect cars significantly more advanced than the cars made at the time of the movie's release.
Also, even if the Mad Max films were made now, the maintainability part of the equation above would disqualify hybrids simply because (a) it's much harder to hack and fix a hybrid with a hammer in a post-apocalyptic garage and (b) it's pretty much impossible to replace the batteries when they go out four or five years after the apocalypse. Not to mention what the EMPs one would expect in such an event would do to the circuits...
I don't think it was meant to be funny. I see your point, many downloaded iTunes because of the iPod. But I myself downloaded at least half a dozen times iTunes by mistake, trying to download QuickTime. I was half-way through a hate-mail to Apple when I finally found the stand-alone download.
No, that is silly. It wouldn't even have crossed my mind to use something bigger than a Ford Ka for two adults, a kid and two cats. Do you own lions or something?
(No, really. That last bit was a joke, but come on!)
It's a bit more complicated, but you can do that safely. I took all the keys off my keyboard, opened it up, took the logic & cable away, and put the keys and the body in the washing machine. (Actually, I put the keys in the _laundry_ machine in a pouch, and the body in the dishwasher.) Mine also had a pair of thin plastic sheets under the keys, with (probably) graphite criss-crossing circuits, and I washed that part by hand with soap for fear of breaking the traces.
;)
It air-dried just fine in a few hours, and worked just right after assembly. Only issue is that now it's _too_ squeaky-clean; either there's some calcareous deposit under the keys from the water, or there used to be some sort of lubricant that washed up. Anyway, they're literally squeaky sometimes
Yes, the post is genuine, and yes, he did reply to a mail with a version of the document. There are a few pages enumerating quite sincerely the risk factors (at least, pretty much everything I know of, and a few more), though there aren't any quantitative data. (I.e., it states some breakthroughs are necessary, but not at all their magnitude, though I suppose that needs a much more technical document.)
However, I don't have any real experience with such documents. At least it _looks_ reasonable.
In case anyone is still wondering, this is very probably genuine. I checked it with their site.
(1) You don't have to encode it real-time. (1') You don't even need to record it to disk uncompressed in real-time. (It may be convenient, but not necessary. You can record snippets to RAM, dump them to disk, rewind and continue. And encode it any now and then.)
(2) Hardware may be expensive now, but it gets cheaper quickly. Consider there already exist "consumer" HDTV cameras.
Of course, it's easier to crack the players and decrypt the stream. Of course, it's hard to capture and re-encode the movie from HDMI. But the question is, is it too hard to do?. Since you only need to do it once per movie, my guess is no.
Yes, I think I got it now. Thanks!
I'm not using Windows, and I already have a DNS resolver which I've been using only as a cache for other DNS servers.
Somehow it never crossed my mind that it would be actually possible and reasonable to connect to the root DNSs. Thanks!
Well, I guess I should have know it by your signature ;)
But unless my understanding of how DNS works is much worse than I thought, don't I need another DNS server to connect my resolver to? I can't connect it to the root servers directly, can I?
I think he just meant that OpenDNS dislikes the sudden (and advantaged) competition. Anyway, I'm not sure I'd call "stealth" a page that has the owner's (Dell's) branding. It's not even hidden, it's just automatic. (Yes, if you're a beginner you don't know that it's optional, but that's true of WMP, the Flash plugin and Java, too.) Nevermind, that wasn't why I answered. When you say you "have the option of switching away to other forwarders", do you mean there's something like OpenDNS that doesn't do that messy redirect? I want a DNS that tells me when it doesn't find something, not try guessing. It's hugely annoying when the Java applications I work on (or SSH for that matter) try to connect to the OpenDNS search engine whenever I mistype an URL. My ISP provides absolutely abysmal DNS service (it takes it a minute to find Google...) so I resorted to using the DNS of a random ISP I found by accident. But I don't have any guarantee that one will hold, and it's pretty far anyway.
This is a much better post than the one I answered with. Here you're actually debating. While my debating skills are certainly far from perfect, your first post was only a pre-digested bundle of oratory--repeated at least once almost verbatim in the discussion above.
A bit of ad-hominem in the first sentence, a couple of half-truisms mixed with unsupported statements, a bit of demonization (and what I think is a straw men argument---sorry, I'm not formally trained in debating, I get some of the terms mixed up), all finished with a generalization not supported by anything... No alternative given, no solutions.
That's a critique only in the most barren sense of the word: ie, "It's bad, and I think it's really, really bad. You can't support that, can you?"
Sorry to criticize. I'll stick to the arguments from now:
0) I wasn't refuting anything. I was trying to point out on one hand--though maybe it wasn't necessary--that "slavery" is not an absolutely defined term, and in a careful analysis it can pop up in unexpected places. As to your answer, allow me to generalize it a little: Most governance systems purport to support certain ideals---including liberty---and _can_ result in the opposite. That's perfectly true, but to criticize libertarianism you have to show that (a) it always goes that way or (b) it goes that way much more often and quicker than other governing systems. You didn't show any of that, you just stated that it is "necessarily" so.
(Allow me to explain a bit on that: criticizing a feature of something without context and an alternative is not very useful. It's like saying that planes are dangerous _and_ you shouldn't use them for transportation because they can fall from the sky and go boom, ignoring the fact that it's in fact the safest way of traveling. (I don't know if that's really so, it's just an example.) It _is_ a useful critique for trying to improve flight safety, but not to ban flights.)
1) Almost right, but two fatal flaws: (a) you simplify a complex process (a system of social governance) to a couple of feedback loops, then claim that the limit of those loops is a certain degenerate state---which is true, but only for the very simplified model. (b) You half-acknowledge that the loops can be broken when you ask for proof why the system won't fail. This is valid, in math, but unfortunately _no_ system of social governance can be proved. For scientific proofs you need observation, theories, and experiments. We have lots of the former two, but not much of that last one.
I realize up to here I'm criticizing your comments rather than supporting libertarianism. That was sort of my point: I'm not supporting libertarianism, I was just pointing out that your critique is lacking.
But allow me to try a bit of a supporting argument:
No real system of governance is rigidly defined by a couple of simple rules. Different ideologies (eg, libertarianism) are defined by a few simple ideals; people have many ideals, they try to reach them, and after a while their government becomes laking enough in another ideal direction that people notice that, in fact, the old ideals are not enough. So new ideologies snap up supporting those ideals.
The point is that you can't fulfill all ideals. You pick some, to define a direction. The trick is to recognize that the ideology is different from reality: the other ideologies are not swept out, they exist too. Every ideology has extreme limit cases, but society tries to balance them to remain in the 'acceptable' zone, and strive for the 'better' zone---however hard that may be to define. You just have to consider the complexities of life not explicit in the model. For instance:
2) No, not everybody absolutely needs food, water, shelter and medicine. You need the first two to live---but some people choose not to live. This means that some things are sometimes for some people more important than living. Second, medicine didn't exist for a long time, and some people refuse to use it even now. Again, shelter means
You seem to like those axioms a lot.
(0) You seem to consider being a slave a very bad thing. (Not that I disagree.) The opposite of slavery is liberty. Libertarians just realized that you don't need to have a human owner to be a slave. You can just as well be the slave of a system, of a bureaucracy, of a collective or a society or a state. Consider China or the Soviet Union or Cuba: many resources are "not owned" (I assume by that you mean they're "owned by everyone"), the "equitable" distribution of wealth and basic necessities are "guaranteed" --- but those people were (and are) slaves in many aspects. (Yes, you could say those are just bad implementations of sound principles. What makes you think it _can_ be well-implemented?)
(1) When all resources are owned...
(a) It's not necessary that there are people who own nothing.
(b) As a special case, as long as every man owns his own work ability he is not a slave.
(c) Slavery is defined as one person owning someone else's work. The exact opposite of that is liberty: the guaranteed right to work what you want to.
(d) Supposing some resources are not owned, what then? They can be just as unaccessible for any number of reasons. In particular, they can simply be consumed.
(2) If right to basic necessities are not guaranteed...
(a) The definition of basic necessities is not the same for everyone. If you have N people and food for N/2, how do you guarantee the basic necessity of eating?
(b) No, you can't get me do anything by denying my basic necessities. Just because they're not guaranteed (by who?) doesn't mean
- I can't strive to obtain them myself.
- Someone else may want to help me.
- You don't ever need my work (why would you want me as a slave if my work isn't useful for you?)
- I might prefer death to doing something I don't want. Many slaves did.
(3) You want a world where a small owning class controls...
(a) If I would, so what? It's my will against that of six+ billions.
(b) If everyone wanted it, so what? You can't have everyone part of a small owning class, right? This means that the non-owning class is by definition larger, and "owns" the vast majority of work potential (including violence).
(4) That is what libertarianism necessarily leads to.
(a) No, it doesn't.
(b) That is what communism necessarily leads to.
(c) That is what monarchy necessarily leads to.
(d) That is what socialism necessarily leads to.
(e) That is what anarchism necessarily leads to.
(f) That is what feudalism necessarily leads to.
(g) Note: that was just an obnoxious way of showing that you replaced an unproved but vaguely intuitive theorem with an axiom. Without a rigorous justification ---and that's hard as hell to do--- that statement is practically useless. One can make any number of such statements, including their negations, all of which can be supported with rational arguments. One obviously needs a more subtle approach.
By the way, I'm not a libertarian. But your argument was just so obnoxiously wrong--twice--I just had to say something.
Hell, it doesn't even have a subtitle!
(at least not yet)
I agree I'd like the game to have some truer-scale, tactical aspect that uses 3D more (eg, canyons, ravines, rivers, etc), but I don't think this would happen in the "normal" multiplayer. After all, it's an RTS and people expect it to work at least sort-of like the other *craft games.
But on the other hand, even Warcraft III had some of those aspects. The multiplayer and most of the campaigns were "classic" RTS, but part of the horde mini-campaigns in Frozen Throne were quite closer to my hopes. The terrain was closer, with larger buildings. I can only hope something like that will be part of the game.
I realize you're looking for something different, though, but with all due respect, if you're looking for something radically different from Starcraft you shouldn't be looking at Starcraft II.
This is not just a gimmick, it can change a lot the way you think about defenses and choke-points.
There are huge improvements in the armor/damage type that changes the balance a lot. The scale _is_ different, as you'll see that there are hugely more Zerlings and very few Battlecruiser-scale units in a scene, and it _was_ a balanced fight. You can also see at some point a four or five level see-saw when similar sized groups of a certain type of unit were slaughtered by another kind, which in turn were slaughtered by another kind (all groups of about the same size). Which means you have to think very well of tactics, too.
The difference in build strategy is significantly changed by new ways of extending the Protoss psionic matrix, and I'm convinced similar updates to the other races will make them even more different. (It's clear from the videos that the Terran buildings' move ability is used to good effect, there was nothing shown about the Zerg though.)
Granted, these are not huge, fundamental changes. It's probably on the scale of the changes between the Diablo games: nothing fundamental, but it amounts to orders of magnitude in fun and complexity.
And yes, you can zoom and apparently look around things. I for one can't wait to try the "commando" missions inside buildings and huge ships, or the RPG-like missions like the bonus maps for Warcraft III. Maybe even some planetary-scale sterilization from orbit as in the books :D
Also, Dyson spheres are not transparent, and must necessarily be (much) larger than the stars they "wrap". Thus eventually we should see them eclipsing something bright. It's not easy, but I'm sure it'd be detectable. (Remember we've noticed planets by the way they eclipse their stars.)
As you post implies, I think, the energy of the star can't be _absorbed_; the Dyson sphere would become increasingly hot. Even if the energy is "used", either it escapes or the sphere gets warmer.
Nah, we need foldspace engines first, and a Butlerian jihad maybe. Spice is only useful for navigation, and we still have computers.
Because they might look like that: http://urbainalpain.punt.nl/upload/fat_nurse.jpg
This is very weird. The letter says that (I paraphrase): "you're offering the blah-blah processing key on your site" and then since this (I paraphrase again) "is a device primarily intended to circumvent a technical protection measure" you are in violation of the DMCA, cease and desist, blah-blah.
But, the key itself is a device primarily intended to be used in the normal operation of the disc. It's present in all legal players, it's created by the same guys who created the protection measure. In some way, it is part of the protection measure. It seems illogical.
It's like I sold a key that can open all locks of a class, which I received when I bought the lock, and someone would claim that the key is a device "primarily intended to circumvent other locks".
It has the potential to be better at turning itself off when not in use, though; the simple fact that it'll be used for many things means it can afford a bit more intelligence.
The fact that it's supposed to be "universal" means there will be a single power-drain. (Consider that all those lazy users now have many wall-warts plugged in all the time.)