I'm a hardcore bicyclist. I realized years ago that the solution to controlling the urge to speed in motorized vehicles was to make the process physically "painful" or stressful, in the same way that trying too hard to bicycle up a mountain can make a rider bonk and have to give up or slow down and pace himself. Increasing energy expenditure can't be endless, it has limits, it has consequences. In the case of cycling, the consequence is obvious, but in motorized vehicles it's not so obvious: more gas burned, more pollution produced. It's far too easy to ignore or not even notice those consequences.
This is one practical implementation of my idea, it seems. I'd always imagined requiring a high-voltage hookup to the driver in order to be able to start and drive the car, and increasing the voltage if the driver started to drive unreasonably fast. This is admittedly a bit more practical.
Reading David Pogue's review - who by the way is no particular friend to the open source movement and didn't even criticize Glide's DRM - it becomes clear that the reality of Glide is seriously out of sync with this article's hyping of it.
I have to wonder how large a PayPal "donation" the author DotNaught got from Glide for prostituting his integrity like this.
... and AllBrands.com. I discovered they had refurbed Dyson vacuums at substantial discounts off new ones, and set my mind to buy one. After refreshing my memory about the stats of each model, I narrowed it to a choice between a DC07 "Animal" and a DC07 "Full Gear". The price difference between the two was $20.
Other than color, there's no physical difference between those two vacuums and kits when new at all; they're identical. The only difference is the addition of an extra year to the warranty, for the sum of an extra $30. Since I knew that there were no physical differences between the two kits, I had every reason to think that AllBrands knew that as well; since there was a $20 difference in the price, I made the reasonable conclusion that the extra warranty was included even with the refurbed "Full Gear". The basic warranty on them was stated to be six months, so I expected to come away with 18 months of warranty from Dyson.
When it arrived, I found out different: it was limited to the basic six month warranty with no addition. I immediately called Dyson and learned that indeed it only had a six month warranty; I *also* learned that Dyson sells BOTH refurbed models to retailers AT THE SAME PRICE, because of course Dyson knows full well that they are same, lacking a difference in warranty.
Thus, Dyson had in fact sold both models to AllBrands for the same price, no $20 or any other difference. I contacted AllBrands, explained all that I had learned, and asked how they would like to resolve the matter? I suggested that, in the interest of fairness, they might consider refunding me the difference. They agreed to discuss the matter and get back to me.
The result was this: not only did AllBrands refund ME the $20 difference, they also reduced the price on the "Full Gear" model to make it equal to the "Animal", so that no one else in the future would be taken for a ride! I expect that when the stock of one or the other runs out AllBrands may simply stop carrying one of the two models.
... the idea I've had in my head for an energy efficient AC adapter that would actually be OFF when it's not plugged into something: a simple relay in front of the primary transformer coil, two extra wires in the cord and a modified plug to close an AC circuit across them when it's plugged in. When it's unplugged the relay isn't tripped and AC never energizes the primary coil. Doesn't even require an explicit on/off switch! It's so damned simple even I thought of it, and IANAEE. For the sake of space you might even be able to replace the mechanical relay with some sorta power transistor (though that might create more waste heat, dunno).
*WAY* too many devices that aren't even miniaturized use AC adapters now, like printers and scanners. Why the f**K didn't the lazy bastards just put the little transformer inside the chassis where it could be BEHIND the on/off switch? I can forgive AC adapters where miniaturization is the whole point, but when a device is already large enough that keeping the transformer inside it would require a trivial increase in dimensions, there's just no bloody excuse!
Why was this idiotic sound bite modded up... because you WISH it were true? It's not. Do I have to repeat the logic again, as I [1]have[2]before?
The last time: "Another environmental shell game that hides the real cost of the scheme. EVERY form of stored potential chemical energy has an initial and equal, or even greater, cost in energy to [create and] store it in the first place. This was true of petroleum, though we didn't have to expend that energy ourselves, the Earth's geologic processes expended it for us over millions of years."
"It's also true of this process. There's only a single sentence in that entire article that hints at that cost: 'The solid waste product of the process, in the form of metal oxide, will later be collected in the fuel station and recycled for further use by the metal industry.'"
"What that means, properly interpreted, is that more energy is going to have to be expended behind the scenes in a factory somewhere to convert the metallic-oxide 'waste product' back into usable metal. Where's the savings?"
"This reminds me of the nut [Ron Gremban] who thought he was being environmentally conscientious by installing $3000 worth of batteries in his Prius to cut down on the gasoline that HE had to burn personally... never mind the fact that it meant that some POWER PLANT somewhere was having to burn an equal or greater amount of fossil fuel to create the electricity that would travel down the wires - at considerable attenuation - to allow him to recharge those batteries."
"This is all a song and dance designed to make us 'feel good' about continuing to be Good Little Consumers."
That's about all this is. Is it really worthy of patents?
Merger stupid, breakup even stupider!
on
Ma Bell is Back
·
· Score: 1
As I told the CPUC during the pre-merger hearings: the merger is a bad idea, but not for the reason they might expect me to argue. See, AT&T should never have been divided in the first place.
Communications are part of the national (and global) public infrastructure, just as surely as are the roads on which we drive our cars and bicycles, right? Do the construction companies who build and maintain those roads get to own them, control them, charge fees for access to them? No, of course not! The public, each one of us collectively, owns those roads. THose construction companies are mere contractors, hired by US to build the roads FOR US. They get paid well for their efforts, but they don't get to own what they build. Lockheed, Boeing, and McDonnell Douglas have never owned the hardware they built for NASA and the Armed Forces, have they?
Why, oh why, is telecommunications any different? Why have the companies who helped build that infrastructure for us been allowed to own and control their respective pieces of it? Why are they allowed to reap unfair profits from something that effectively belongs - or should belong - to all of us?
So, the merger wasn't a bad idea per se; it was a bad idea because it doesn't go far enough, and merely compounds the stupidity of 30 years ago. What the CPUC and FCC *should* be doing is "nationalizing" all the telecom entities, as a huge nonprofit agency perhaps similar to the USPS. THAT would be a good idea.
... that hides the real cost of the scheme. EVERY form of stored potential chemical energy has an initial and equal, or even greater, cost in energy to store it in the first place. This was true of petroleum, though we didn't have to expend that energy ourselves, the Earth's geologic processes expended it for us over millions of years.
It's also true of this process. There's only a single sentence in that entire article that hints at that cost: "The solid waste product of the process, in the form of metal oxide, will later be collected in the fuel station and recycled for further use by the metal industry."
What that means, properly interpreted, is that more energy is going to have to be expended behind the scenes in a factory somewhere to convert the metallic-oxide "waste product" back into usable metal. Where's the savings?
This reminds me of the nut who thought he was being environmentally conscientious by installing $3000 worth of batteries in his Prius to cut down on the gasoline that HE had to burn personally... never mind the fact that it meant that some POWER PLANT somewhere was having to burn an equal or greater amount of fossil fuel to create the electricity that would travel down the wires - at considerable attenuation - to allow him to recharge those batteries.
This is all a song and dance designed to make us "feel good" about continuing to be Good Little Consumers.
Multi-booster heavy-lifter rocket designs not terribly different from the proposed heavy-lift system here were detailed in Popular Science in the 70's or 80's. I recall seeing the article myself.
Sadly, the Shuttle never fully lived up to its intended purpose; its alleged advantages became curses instead. It wouldn't be unfair to say that NASA's "detour" with the Shuttle, combined with public ignorance, is what set space colonization back almost three decades.
Using these much simpler rocket systems makes much better economic sense. Use these heavy-lifter rocket systems to finally get orbital or Moon-based manufacturing and construction facilities built, and then focus on dedicated interplanetary craft that aren't subject to the same nasty design requirements as STO craft. Planetary gravity wells are the biggest design problem facing spacecraft designers. Once we have a space elevator system, we may no longer need to fret so much over having "reusable" STO craft.
And full of himself. He's looking for justifications for his sinful little pleasure, sinful not because it actually is but because HE believes it is. He's embarrassed by his enjoyment of role-playing and needs to rationalize an explanation that will help him get past his shame.
As for me, I was always judged to be an above average and definitely outside-the-box coder, but I *HATE* role-playing games; in fact, I've been in the habit of disabling or sidestepping the socio-political elements of every computer game I've ever played.
If there's any connection between coding and role-playing, it's an inverse one: socially inept types engaging in a "safe" form of social interaction that doesn't carry the usual consequences. It's a form of social training; that's why they still call it "role playing", duh!
Me, I don't want to learn those rules: I find most "social" behavior offensive, demeaning, and above all manipulative.
I have an ancient Braun toothbrush from the 90's - still working because I've dismantled and replaced the NiCad battery more than once - that uses the same "inductive" technique to recharge it. It has a tiny coil in the base of the toothbrush, and a larger "primary" coil in the holder being fed by AC.
It's a deconstructed TRANSFORMER, nothing more.
Heck, for that matter, I lately bought an "inductive" cooktop... which I understand has been all the rage in non-USA parts of the world for some time.
Isn't that enough to destroy any credibility he might have otherwise had? If the dumb jackass had simply been honest - assuming he truly was well-intentioned and meaning only to protect himself - he would likely have never even found himself charged or in court.
This is an example of a smart guy who first made a dumb choice further compounded by a REALLY bad one.
If you wanna be trusted, it helps to bloody tell the truth!
I give it one star: it's not even close to passing as "funny" for me. The CGI is fine and I could live with the subtitles and language I don't grok, but it's just not funny*. The Finnish apparently have a rather strange sense of humor. Maybe it's all those darkless days that makes them think unfunny stuff is so hilarious it's worth wasting seven years to "put on film"? Somebody should send them a copy of 'Serenity' subtitled in Finnish, so they'll know what GOOD humor is like.
Mark
* The opening scene has a ship captain stepping out of a latrine that opens directly onto the bridge (gee, how handy for those moments of terror when you'd otherwise pee your pants), closing his pants zipper in full view of the bridge crew and then stepping down and dragging a trail of toilet paper to the captain's chair, with the Plinkon(?) tactical officer snickering in response.
I had a few reciprocal insights to share with Mr. Kern, after reading his article:
Mr. Kern:
I read your article, "Confessions of an Engineering Washout", submitted to TCS. By the time I'd finished the second sentence, I had a pretty good idea what the rest of the article would reveal of your nature; I was thus not surprised by what followed.
Unless you're a really bad lawyer or writer, you're a manipulator of language and people. That's what non-technical writers and lawyers do for money: manipulate people's perceptions, typically using emotion as much or more than logic, facts, or reason. That skill also enables major episodes of SELF-delusion, as you apparently learned during your abortive attempt in the sciences. You were never high-functioning autistic enough to be a natural engineer or scientist.
No doubt you are now doing what you do best, though from an engineer's perspective, at least, the world would be better off with a whole lot less of all that communication wasted for no other purpose than to "persuade". Engineers tend to only speak when there's something important to say; they have no interest in changing others' minds about anything. Changing one's mind is the job of the listener. If the evidence is compelling, there's no need for all that semantic mumbo-jumbo.
Mark
Re: a chance to showcase hypocrisy
on
Ask Sid Meier
·
· Score: 1
Mr. Meier has a chance to really showcase some hypocrisy if he answers this question, considering his involvement with Alpha Centauri: a spiffed-up but nevertheless thinly-veiled rip-off of the Empire games, first created by Mark Baldwin in the Seventies on a mini, IIRC. Recognition of that might lead a critically-minded person to question the true degree of originality in the other works to which Meier has affixed his name.
This is nothing new, of course, but sometimes this incremental evolution isn't properly recognized and people who are merely stepping-stones in the process wind up getting more credit than they've really earned. Take Master of Orion and all the other 3X/4X computer games which both preceded and succeded it: they can almost all trace their roots back to a BOARD GAME first published in 1972 (Stellar Conquest, by Steve Jackson).
Errrr... thanks? I think that constituted a compliment, but it was pretty well encapsulated and abstracted. Still, it's almost as warm and fuzzy as being modded-up.:-)
Is the real goal of the gaming industry, as implied and self-alleged for decades, really to produce the "perfect game"? After all, what would be the end result of producing the perfect game, in particular one lacking frustrations and having endless replayability?
The result would be an initial surge in sales followed by a slow decline, as fewer and fewer new customers existed. Sure, new children being born might offset the decline, but how much and for how long? There's increasing evidence that global birth rates may be declining even without acts of god or genocidal outbursts.
Nope... the real point of the gaming industry is to produce IMPERFECT games, including new games which continue to repeat mistakes whose lessons should have been learned long ago. Imperfect games leave one frustrated or bored or both, and longing for the Next Big Thing, almost eager to part with $50 at a time for even a vague promise of pardon from one's prison of boredom.
If we want to see a resumption of effort to produce increasingly perfect games, there needs to be a revolution, one which puts design decisions back fully in the hands of the actual game developers, and not in the hands of venture capitalists, whether one calls them that or "game publishers". Likely this revolution will involve the Internet and some form of self-publishing and perhaps development financing coming directly from eager potential players as donations, something analogous to what's predicted for music artists in particular.
The worst thing that can ever happen to a privately-owned company with a carefully crafted long-term mission is to give into monetary pressures to go public and announce an IPO. The IPO represents the beginning of the end for that long-term vision, because the shareholders have no investment in that vision beyond what monetary profit they can receive from it, and a belief that said profit will be forthcoming on a timetable that suits THEIR desires. If the original company goal expressed any altruism, it's a guarantee that the company's new remote masters won't share that altruism.
That is what has happened to game development: the altruism and bliss of creation is gone, replaced by greed and concentration of wealth.
The very existence of this article, and the holoscience.com article which it references, is an example of social engineering and underhanded advertising, trying to give their debated-and-rejected ideas more credibility by publishing and thus claiming a "controversy" that doesn't (or no longer) exists. I'd fully expect this tactic from people emotionally invested in, say, Intelligent Design "theory", but this is coming from an unexpected quarter. The motivation here should be ridiculously obvious.
I'm very ashamed for the integrity of Slashdot at the moment.
We live in a world stuffed to the gills with six and a half billion mindlessly horny other humans, many of whom are living a laughably unsustainable lifestyle, complete with fertility specialists and Cialis and Viagra and children born to fifty-something mothers... and making them all less fertile is a bad thing???
What your department needs is Klingon rites of succession. The Peter Principle doesn't work so well when your subordinates' likely response to your incompetence is a batleth to the back of the neck.
This guy's accomplishment is a very small demonstration of what a full-fledged open-source ECONOMY might be able to do. Everything might in fact be much less costly.
Quoth me: "Open source: it's not just about software any more."
Since Mars has no magnetosphere, that being the reason why Mars has almost no atmosphere to speak of now, why even bother trying to create one? It'll all just blow away again. Further, it's not like ANY living thing is gonna be takin' a stroll on the Martian surface even if the temp was a balmy 50 degrees... because it would get fried by the solar radiation! Again, it's that pesky lack of a magnetosphere.
Perhaps, instead of farting around with greenhouse gases, they should be figuring out a way to use detonated subterranean nukes or some other wild scheme to re-melt Mars' mantle and core, and with luck restart the magnetosphere.
Slashdot Mirror
Corporate "charity" is a myth. It's always been conditional on a promise of free advertising or an otherwise enlarged profit margin.
I'm a hardcore bicyclist. I realized years ago that the solution to controlling the urge to speed in motorized vehicles was to make the process physically "painful" or stressful, in the same way that trying too hard to bicycle up a mountain can make a rider bonk and have to give up or slow down and pace himself. Increasing energy expenditure can't be endless, it has limits, it has consequences. In the case of cycling, the consequence is obvious, but in motorized vehicles it's not so obvious: more gas burned, more pollution produced. It's far too easy to ignore or not even notice those consequences.
This is one practical implementation of my idea, it seems. I'd always imagined requiring a high-voltage hookup to the driver in order to be able to start and drive the car, and increasing the voltage if the driver started to drive unreasonably fast. This is admittedly a bit more practical.
Reading David Pogue's review - who by the way is no particular friend to the open source movement and didn't even criticize Glide's DRM - it becomes clear that the reality of Glide is seriously out of sync with this article's hyping of it.
I have to wonder how large a PayPal "donation" the author DotNaught got from Glide for prostituting his integrity like this.
Mark
... and AllBrands.com. I discovered they had refurbed Dyson vacuums at substantial discounts off new ones, and set my mind to buy one. After refreshing my memory about the stats of each model, I narrowed it to a choice between a DC07 "Animal" and a DC07 "Full Gear". The price difference between the two was $20.
Other than color, there's no physical difference between those two vacuums and kits when new at all; they're identical. The only difference is the addition of an extra year to the warranty, for the sum of an extra $30. Since I knew that there were no physical differences between the two kits, I had every reason to think that AllBrands knew that as well; since there was a $20 difference in the price, I made the reasonable conclusion that the extra warranty was included even with the refurbed "Full Gear". The basic warranty on them was stated to be six months, so I expected to come away with 18 months of warranty from Dyson.
When it arrived, I found out different: it was limited to the basic six month warranty with no addition. I immediately called Dyson and learned that indeed it only had a six month warranty; I *also* learned that Dyson sells BOTH refurbed models to retailers AT THE SAME PRICE, because of course Dyson knows full well that they are same, lacking a difference in warranty.
Thus, Dyson had in fact sold both models to AllBrands for the same price, no $20 or any other difference. I contacted AllBrands, explained all that I had learned, and asked how they would like to resolve the matter? I suggested that, in the interest of fairness, they might consider refunding me the difference. They agreed to discuss the matter and get back to me.
The result was this: not only did AllBrands refund ME the $20 difference, they also reduced the price on the "Full Gear" model to make it equal to the "Animal", so that no one else in the future would be taken for a ride! I expect that when the stock of one or the other runs out AllBrands may simply stop carrying one of the two models.
That's a company with some ethical cajones.
Mark
... the idea I've had in my head for an energy efficient AC adapter that would actually be OFF when it's not plugged into something: a simple relay in front of the primary transformer coil, two extra wires in the cord and a modified plug to close an AC circuit across them when it's plugged in. When it's unplugged the relay isn't tripped and AC never energizes the primary coil. Doesn't even require an explicit on/off switch! It's so damned simple even I thought of it, and IANAEE. For the sake of space you might even be able to replace the mechanical relay with some sorta power transistor (though that might create more waste heat, dunno).
*WAY* too many devices that aren't even miniaturized use AC adapters now, like printers and scanners. Why the f**K didn't the lazy bastards just put the little transformer inside the chassis where it could be BEHIND the on/off switch? I can forgive AC adapters where miniaturization is the whole point, but when a device is already large enough that keeping the transformer inside it would require a trivial increase in dimensions, there's just no bloody excuse!
... in the quaint little town of Redmond, Washington instead of anywhere in Japan! Did the guys at JPL *ever* screw up that bad? Ever?
The last time: "Another environmental shell game that hides the real cost of the scheme. EVERY form of stored potential chemical energy has an initial and equal, or even greater, cost in energy to [create and] store it in the first place. This was true of petroleum, though we didn't have to expend that energy ourselves, the Earth's geologic processes expended it for us over millions of years."
"It's also true of this process. There's only a single sentence in that entire article that hints at that cost: 'The solid waste product of the process, in the form of metal oxide, will later be collected in the fuel station and recycled for further use by the metal industry.'"
"What that means, properly interpreted, is that more energy is going to have to be expended behind the scenes in a factory somewhere to convert the metallic-oxide 'waste product' back into usable metal. Where's the savings?"
"This reminds me of the nut [Ron Gremban] who thought he was being environmentally conscientious by installing $3000 worth of batteries in his Prius to cut down on the gasoline that HE had to burn personally... never mind the fact that it meant that some POWER PLANT somewhere was having to burn an equal or greater amount of fossil fuel to create the electricity that would travel down the wires - at considerable attenuation - to allow him to recharge those batteries."
"This is all a song and dance designed to make us 'feel good' about continuing to be Good Little Consumers."
That's about all this is. Is it really worthy of patents?
As I told the CPUC during the pre-merger hearings: the merger is a bad idea, but not for the reason they might expect me to argue. See, AT&T should never have been divided in the first place.
Communications are part of the national (and global) public infrastructure, just as surely as are the roads on which we drive our cars and bicycles, right? Do the construction companies who build and maintain those roads get to own them, control them, charge fees for access to them? No, of course not! The public, each one of us collectively, owns those roads. THose construction companies are mere contractors, hired by US to build the roads FOR US. They get paid well for their efforts, but they don't get to own what they build. Lockheed, Boeing, and McDonnell Douglas have never owned the hardware they built for NASA and the Armed Forces, have they?
Why, oh why, is telecommunications any different? Why have the companies who helped build that infrastructure for us been allowed to own and control their respective pieces of it? Why are they allowed to reap unfair profits from something that effectively belongs - or should belong - to all of us?
So, the merger wasn't a bad idea per se; it was a bad idea because it doesn't go far enough, and merely compounds the stupidity of 30 years ago. What the CPUC and FCC *should* be doing is "nationalizing" all the telecom entities, as a huge nonprofit agency perhaps similar to the USPS. THAT would be a good idea.
... that hides the real cost of the scheme. EVERY form of stored potential chemical energy has an initial and equal, or even greater, cost in energy to store it in the first place. This was true of petroleum, though we didn't have to expend that energy ourselves, the Earth's geologic processes expended it for us over millions of years.
It's also true of this process. There's only a single sentence in that entire article that hints at that cost: "The solid waste product of the process, in the form of metal oxide, will later be collected in the fuel station and recycled for further use by the metal industry."
What that means, properly interpreted, is that more energy is going to have to be expended behind the scenes in a factory somewhere to convert the metallic-oxide "waste product" back into usable metal. Where's the savings?
This reminds me of the nut who thought he was being environmentally conscientious by installing $3000 worth of batteries in his Prius to cut down on the gasoline that HE had to burn personally... never mind the fact that it meant that some POWER PLANT somewhere was having to burn an equal or greater amount of fossil fuel to create the electricity that would travel down the wires - at considerable attenuation - to allow him to recharge those batteries.
This is all a song and dance designed to make us "feel good" about continuing to be Good Little Consumers.
Multi-booster heavy-lifter rocket designs not terribly different from the proposed heavy-lift system here were detailed in Popular Science in the 70's or 80's. I recall seeing the article myself.
Sadly, the Shuttle never fully lived up to its intended purpose; its alleged advantages became curses instead. It wouldn't be unfair to say that NASA's "detour" with the Shuttle, combined with public ignorance, is what set space colonization back almost three decades.
Using these much simpler rocket systems makes much better economic sense. Use these heavy-lifter rocket systems to finally get orbital or Moon-based manufacturing and construction facilities built, and then focus on dedicated interplanetary craft that aren't subject to the same nasty design requirements as STO craft. Planetary gravity wells are the biggest design problem facing spacecraft designers. Once we have a space elevator system, we may no longer need to fret so much over having "reusable" STO craft.
And full of himself. He's looking for justifications for his sinful little pleasure, sinful not because it actually is but because HE believes it is. He's embarrassed by his enjoyment of role-playing and needs to rationalize an explanation that will help him get past his shame.
As for me, I was always judged to be an above average and definitely outside-the-box coder, but I *HATE* role-playing games; in fact, I've been in the habit of disabling or sidestepping the socio-political elements of every computer game I've ever played.
If there's any connection between coding and role-playing, it's an inverse one: socially inept types engaging in a "safe" form of social interaction that doesn't carry the usual consequences. It's a form of social training; that's why they still call it "role playing", duh!
Me, I don't want to learn those rules: I find most "social" behavior offensive, demeaning, and above all manipulative.
I have an ancient Braun toothbrush from the 90's - still working because I've dismantled and replaced the NiCad battery more than once - that uses the same "inductive" technique to recharge it. It has a tiny coil in the base of the toothbrush, and a larger "primary" coil in the holder being fed by AC.
It's a deconstructed TRANSFORMER, nothing more.
Heck, for that matter, I lately bought an "inductive" cooktop... which I understand has been all the rage in non-USA parts of the world for some time.
So what exactly is new and unique about this?
Mark
Isn't that enough to destroy any credibility he might have otherwise had? If the dumb jackass had simply been honest - assuming he truly was well-intentioned and meaning only to protect himself - he would likely have never even found himself charged or in court.
This is an example of a smart guy who first made a dumb choice further compounded by a REALLY bad one.
If you wanna be trusted, it helps to bloody tell the truth!
I give it one star: it's not even close to passing as "funny" for me. The CGI is fine and I could live with the subtitles and language I don't grok, but it's just not funny*. The Finnish apparently have a rather strange sense of humor. Maybe it's all those darkless days that makes them think unfunny stuff is so hilarious it's worth wasting seven years to "put on film"? Somebody should send them a copy of 'Serenity' subtitled in Finnish, so they'll know what GOOD humor is like.
Mark
* The opening scene has a ship captain stepping out of a latrine that opens directly onto the bridge (gee, how handy for those moments of terror when you'd otherwise pee your pants), closing his pants zipper in full view of the bridge crew and then stepping down and dragging a trail of toilet paper to the captain's chair, with the Plinkon(?) tactical officer snickering in response.
I had a few reciprocal insights to share with Mr. Kern, after reading his article:
Mr. Kern:
I read your article, "Confessions of an Engineering Washout", submitted to TCS. By the time I'd finished the second sentence, I had a pretty good idea what the rest of the article would reveal of your nature; I was thus not surprised by what followed.
Unless you're a really bad lawyer or writer, you're a manipulator of language and people. That's what non-technical writers and lawyers do for money: manipulate people's perceptions, typically using emotion as much or more than logic, facts, or reason. That skill also enables major episodes of SELF-delusion, as you apparently learned during your abortive attempt in the sciences. You were never high-functioning autistic enough to be a natural engineer or scientist.
No doubt you are now doing what you do best, though from an engineer's perspective, at least, the world would be better off with a whole lot less of all that communication wasted for no other purpose than to "persuade". Engineers tend to only speak when there's something important to say; they have no interest in changing others' minds about anything. Changing one's mind is the job of the listener. If the evidence is compelling, there's no need for all that semantic mumbo-jumbo.
Mark
Mr. Meier has a chance to really showcase some hypocrisy if he answers this question, considering his involvement with Alpha Centauri: a spiffed-up but nevertheless thinly-veiled rip-off of the Empire games, first created by Mark Baldwin in the Seventies on a mini, IIRC. Recognition of that might lead a critically-minded person to question the true degree of originality in the other works to which Meier has affixed his name.
This is nothing new, of course, but sometimes this incremental evolution isn't properly recognized and people who are merely stepping-stones in the process wind up getting more credit than they've really earned. Take Master of Orion and all the other 3X/4X computer games which both preceded and succeded it: they can almost all trace their roots back to a BOARD GAME first published in 1972 (Stellar Conquest, by Steve Jackson).
Nope... for that you'd need a couple Buffalo TeraStations.
Errrr... thanks? I think that constituted a compliment, but it was pretty well encapsulated and abstracted. Still, it's almost as warm and fuzzy as being modded-up. :-)
Is the real goal of the gaming industry, as implied and self-alleged for decades, really to produce the "perfect game"? After all, what would be the end result of producing the perfect game, in particular one lacking frustrations and having endless replayability?
The result would be an initial surge in sales followed by a slow decline, as fewer and fewer new customers existed. Sure, new children being born might offset the decline, but how much and for how long? There's increasing evidence that global birth rates may be declining even without acts of god or genocidal outbursts.
Nope... the real point of the gaming industry is to produce IMPERFECT games, including new games which continue to repeat mistakes whose lessons should have been learned long ago. Imperfect games leave one frustrated or bored or both, and longing for the Next Big Thing, almost eager to part with $50 at a time for even a vague promise of pardon from one's prison of boredom.
If we want to see a resumption of effort to produce increasingly perfect games, there needs to be a revolution, one which puts design decisions back fully in the hands of the actual game developers, and not in the hands of venture capitalists, whether one calls them that or "game publishers". Likely this revolution will involve the Internet and some form of self-publishing and perhaps development financing coming directly from eager potential players as donations, something analogous to what's predicted for music artists in particular.
The worst thing that can ever happen to a privately-owned company with a carefully crafted long-term mission is to give into monetary pressures to go public and announce an IPO. The IPO represents the beginning of the end for that long-term vision, because the shareholders have no investment in that vision beyond what monetary profit they can receive from it, and a belief that said profit will be forthcoming on a timetable that suits THEIR desires. If the original company goal expressed any altruism, it's a guarantee that the company's new remote masters won't share that altruism.
That is what has happened to game development: the altruism and bliss of creation is gone, replaced by greed and concentration of wealth.
Welcome to progress.
The very existence of this article, and the holoscience.com article which it references, is an example of social engineering and underhanded advertising, trying to give their debated-and-rejected ideas more credibility by publishing and thus claiming a "controversy" that doesn't (or no longer) exists. I'd fully expect this tactic from people emotionally invested in, say, Intelligent Design "theory", but this is coming from an unexpected quarter. The motivation here should be ridiculously obvious.
I'm very ashamed for the integrity of Slashdot at the moment.
We live in a world stuffed to the gills with six and a half billion mindlessly horny other humans, many of whom are living a laughably unsustainable lifestyle, complete with fertility specialists and Cialis and Viagra and children born to fifty-something mothers... and making them all less fertile is a bad thing???
Drawback my flabby ass.
What your department needs is Klingon rites of succession. The Peter Principle doesn't work so well when your subordinates' likely response to your incompetence is a batleth to the back of the neck.
This guy's accomplishment is a very small demonstration of what a full-fledged open-source ECONOMY might be able to do. Everything might in fact be much less costly.
Quoth me: "Open source: it's not just about software any more."
Since Mars has no magnetosphere, that being the reason why Mars has almost no atmosphere to speak of now, why even bother trying to create one? It'll all just blow away again. Further, it's not like ANY living thing is gonna be takin' a stroll on the Martian surface even if the temp was a balmy 50 degrees... because it would get fried by the solar radiation! Again, it's that pesky lack of a magnetosphere.
Perhaps, instead of farting around with greenhouse gases, they should be figuring out a way to use detonated subterranean nukes or some other wild scheme to re-melt Mars' mantle and core, and with luck restart the magnetosphere.
NO MAGNETOSPHERE = NO LIFE