Is it that time already? Comment #17,000,000 is a little early, having been predicted to occur on 31st January 2007. The rate of posting has clearly accelerated. Based on this I expect comment #18,000,000 on 25th February 2007. See you then! More here.
Actually you can extend the real line to include one extra "point at infinity". Once you've done this, which takes some mathematical finagling but does actually work, you can get sensible meaning out of things with infinity as their limit. On the extended real line 1/x is continuous. I think.
Why the hell could we go to the moon almost from scratch in the 1960's and do we need almost 20 years now?
Because we faked it! Come on, aren't you paying attention? The television-watching public demands a much higher quality of special effects. Crackly black and white footage of some clown lumbering down some steps won't cut it anymore! It takes time to create renders that good now.
Space travel is the most important thing ever. This is not exaggeration. If you consider the possible futures of the human race, there is one in which we never really escape our cradle and we live and die on this single planet. There is another where we go out there and we take the galaxy. We eliminate what is currently a single point of failure - we build those ships and we spend thousands of years sleepwalking our way to entirely new planets. Ten million years later the whole galaxy is ours. Every planet has a different kind of human on it with a different set of eyes.
In the first future we are all dead by the year 3000. In the other we, here in 2006, are less than 0.1% of the way through what will eventually become all of recorded human history.
Yes, this reads like so much science fiction. It looks like a grandiose vision of something which will never happen. And even if it does it will not happen in the lifetime of you, or your family, or even your country. But we have to look at the big picture, the biggest of all possible pictures. Even without warp drive and aliens and supralight communication it is still absolutely possible. It is a REAL possibility. And if it DOES happen, then the moment when we finally start living on the rock we weren't born on will become not a but the defining moment in human history. Everything will be divided between what went before that moment, and what went after. Now, that moment could be in less than a quarter of a century. It could be right now and we could be part of it. Don't you think that's worth it?
(To get the full effect, you might have to imagine a gentle kind of fanfare coming in during the last part of that.)
All we need is another space race and it'll be done inside a decade. Let's start fabricating evidence that the terrorists are planning their own moon base.
I agree with everybody's points - ordinarily, there is no reason to strip "non-notable" articles and information and "cruft" from the encyclopedia. But there are some other points to consider. For one thing, Wikipedia is supported by user donations and has no advertisements. All that hosting money has to come out of somebody's pocket. If the powers that be have a choice between paying to host large amounts of information on topics of very limited appeal/use, and saving money on bandwidth and storage by removing that information, then they have every right to select the second option, particularly if it means Wikipedia as a whole can remain more financially secure.
I like the idea of a passing civilisation landing and colonising the moon, then after a few years one of their kids is running around in the outskirts of their little "town" and they find some footprints... and a discarded lunar module. They figure out that the ship couldn't possibly travel between stars. Or even between planets. So where did it come from?
I think the real insight here is that reality is, in fact, biased. Therefore, any kind of accurate or balanced news reporting will have bias of some kind.
What I wanted to see in Episode III was the revelation of a final awesome Big Secret: Anakin Skywalker understands the Force REALLY well, SO well in fact that he knows he has to cross over to the Dark Side and back in order to restore balance. So he does it on purpose, and only manages to "come home" at the very, very last possible moment. But, it was not to be. Ah well.
I always thought that a franchise should increase the age of its target audience at the same rate that their target audience ages. The Star Wars prequels shouldn't have been aimed at 10-year-old kids, it should have been aimed at adults who'd grown up with Star Wars. They made the same mistake with the most recent Thunderbirds movie (which could have been SO GOOD if it was pitched higher) and I strongly suspect they're about to make the same mistake Transformers...
I never actually got around to writing the story about the scientists who build the world's first ever time travel receiver. See, there are no time travellers because they have nowhere to "land". You build one, and that's the earliest landing point anywhere in spacetime.
So what happens? Everybody in history turns up there. Literally every idiot who got hold of a time machine and decided to try to be the world's first known time traveller. Everybody appears at once, in a single instant.
This is the thing. It's preposterous that an object could travel in time all on its own. It needs the path built ahead of it. And so the VERY first thing you must build is a receiver.
Dolphins are more intelligent than humans. Why shouldn't they be intelligent enough to give consent to - well, if not marriage, at least sex? It's like on Star Trek when humans marry an aliens, only the physiological differences are greater. Also, you don't share a language. (Hmm, maybe it's more like marrying a Russian mail order bride or something.)
Yes, it IS freaky, but quite frankly, has anybody asked the dolphin? He may well have an opinion on the subject.
I've always thought similar things about time capsules.
There's simply no point in burying time capsules anymore. Reason being, our digitised textual and photographic records of any major time capsule's burial will probably survive just as well as the contents of the capsule itself, if not better. We won't need to dig the things up because we'll already know what's in there, who put it there, and why. It's all on record. So why bother?
What I've gleaned from, well, reading gaming magazines over the years is that you just need to get a single fact through your skull before joining this career: being a videogame journalist isn't playing videogames for a living, and being particularly good at videogames will not make you a better videogame journalist, or make the job more enjoyable. This not a fun gaming job. The majority of games are mediocre, and when you get home at night playing videogames will become the last thing you want to do. This is a *journalism* job - you should go for it only if you like the idea of journalism. You are *writing* for a living. Writing hard and fast and to deadlines.
Obviously there are people out there who love that idea, and I wish you the very best. I think it was Amiga Power whose policy towards hiring was that it was easier to teach a writer to play games than to teach a gamer to write? And they went down in history.
You can't wage a successful, finite war on an idea. [...] You can't gain ground in this battle. There is no big leader, no key figure, no enemy headquarter to be conquered to end the battle.
Well, it's good business sense, if you think about it. It works out a hell of a lot cheaper to persuade everybody in America that you went to war and won than to actually win it. As long as you spend less than say $500 per US citizen, it's all good.
To reduce clutter. I have a toolbar on my taskbar where I can launch any program I use regularly - FF, Notepad, Calculator, Word, whatever. I NEVER use the Start menu. A browser window is still a single click away, and the icon is much smaller than a button a minimised window leaves on the taskbar. I, for one, like a clear desktop. It spins my head that you guys leave things open for weeks at a time and seem to consider this a normal thing. Don't you ever tidy up? Don't you put stuff away when you're done with it? It must be a geek thing.
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Is it that time already? Comment #17,000,000 is a little early, having been predicted to occur on 31st January 2007. The rate of posting has clearly accelerated. Based on this I expect comment #18,000,000 on 25th February 2007. See you then! More here.
Actually you can extend the real line to include one extra "point at infinity". Once you've done this, which takes some mathematical finagling but does actually work, you can get sensible meaning out of things with infinity as their limit. On the extended real line 1/x is continuous. I think.
Because we faked it! Come on, aren't you paying attention? The television-watching public demands a much higher quality of special effects. Crackly black and white footage of some clown lumbering down some steps won't cut it anymore! It takes time to create renders that good now.
Serious answer: Communism. Not enough of it.
Space travel is the most important thing ever. This is not exaggeration. If you consider the possible futures of the human race, there is one in which we never really escape our cradle and we live and die on this single planet. There is another where we go out there and we take the galaxy. We eliminate what is currently a single point of failure - we build those ships and we spend thousands of years sleepwalking our way to entirely new planets. Ten million years later the whole galaxy is ours. Every planet has a different kind of human on it with a different set of eyes.
In the first future we are all dead by the year 3000. In the other we, here in 2006, are less than 0.1% of the way through what will eventually become all of recorded human history.
Yes, this reads like so much science fiction. It looks like a grandiose vision of something which will never happen. And even if it does it will not happen in the lifetime of you, or your family, or even your country. But we have to look at the big picture, the biggest of all possible pictures. Even without warp drive and aliens and supralight communication it is still absolutely possible. It is a REAL possibility. And if it DOES happen, then the moment when we finally start living on the rock we weren't born on will become not a but the defining moment in human history. Everything will be divided between what went before that moment, and what went after. Now, that moment could be in less than a quarter of a century. It could be right now and we could be part of it. Don't you think that's worth it?
(To get the full effect, you might have to imagine a gentle kind of fanfare coming in during the last part of that.)
All we need is another space race and it'll be done inside a decade. Let's start fabricating evidence that the terrorists are planning their own moon base.
I agree with everybody's points - ordinarily, there is no reason to strip "non-notable" articles and information and "cruft" from the encyclopedia. But there are some other points to consider. For one thing, Wikipedia is supported by user donations and has no advertisements. All that hosting money has to come out of somebody's pocket. If the powers that be have a choice between paying to host large amounts of information on topics of very limited appeal/use, and saving money on bandwidth and storage by removing that information, then they have every right to select the second option, particularly if it means Wikipedia as a whole can remain more financially secure.
Information is NOT free-as-in-beer.
I like the idea of a passing civilisation landing and colonising the moon, then after a few years one of their kids is running around in the outskirts of their little "town" and they find some footprints... and a discarded lunar module. They figure out that the ship couldn't possibly travel between stars. Or even between planets. So where did it come from?
Don't forget comic books!
Well, there's the videogaming exhibit at the Science Museum, if you happen to be in London sometime.
I think the real insight here is that reality is, in fact, biased. Therefore, any kind of accurate or balanced news reporting will have bias of some kind.
What I wanted to see in Episode III was the revelation of a final awesome Big Secret: Anakin Skywalker understands the Force REALLY well, SO well in fact that he knows he has to cross over to the Dark Side and back in order to restore balance. So he does it on purpose, and only manages to "come home" at the very, very last possible moment. But, it was not to be. Ah well.
I'll tell you what the real problem is. You can clone Jedi blood, do a complete blood exchange and acquire mastery of the Force artificially.
I always thought that a franchise should increase the age of its target audience at the same rate that their target audience ages. The Star Wars prequels shouldn't have been aimed at 10-year-old kids, it should have been aimed at adults who'd grown up with Star Wars. They made the same mistake with the most recent Thunderbirds movie (which could have been SO GOOD if it was pitched higher) and I strongly suspect they're about to make the same mistake Transformers...
I never actually got around to writing the story about the scientists who build the world's first ever time travel receiver. See, there are no time travellers because they have nowhere to "land". You build one, and that's the earliest landing point anywhere in spacetime.
So what happens? Everybody in history turns up there. Literally every idiot who got hold of a time machine and decided to try to be the world's first known time traveller. Everybody appears at once, in a single instant.
This is the thing. It's preposterous that an object could travel in time all on its own. It needs the path built ahead of it. And so the VERY first thing you must build is a receiver.
Dolphins are more intelligent than humans. Why shouldn't they be intelligent enough to give consent to - well, if not marriage, at least sex? It's like on Star Trek when humans marry an aliens, only the physiological differences are greater. Also, you don't share a language. (Hmm, maybe it's more like marrying a Russian mail order bride or something.)
Yes, it IS freaky, but quite frankly, has anybody asked the dolphin? He may well have an opinion on the subject.
At bewildering times like this I, personally, reflect back to comment #10,000,000.
(And the rest)
I've always thought similar things about time capsules.
There's simply no point in burying time capsules anymore. Reason being, our digitised textual and photographic records of any major time capsule's burial will probably survive just as well as the contents of the capsule itself, if not better. We won't need to dig the things up because we'll already know what's in there, who put it there, and why. It's all on record. So why bother?
What I've gleaned from, well, reading gaming magazines over the years is that you just need to get a single fact through your skull before joining this career: being a videogame journalist isn't playing videogames for a living, and being particularly good at videogames will not make you a better videogame journalist, or make the job more enjoyable. This not a fun gaming job. The majority of games are mediocre, and when you get home at night playing videogames will become the last thing you want to do. This is a *journalism* job - you should go for it only if you like the idea of journalism. You are *writing* for a living. Writing hard and fast and to deadlines.
Obviously there are people out there who love that idea, and I wish you the very best. I think it was Amiga Power whose policy towards hiring was that it was easier to teach a writer to play games than to teach a gamer to write? And they went down in history.
America has always been at war with terrorism.
Well, it's good business sense, if you think about it. It works out a hell of a lot cheaper to persuade everybody in America that you went to war and won than to actually win it. As long as you spend less than say $500 per US citizen, it's all good.
Yeah, and remember when that turned out to be baloney?
To reduce clutter. I have a toolbar on my taskbar where I can launch any program I use regularly - FF, Notepad, Calculator, Word, whatever. I NEVER use the Start menu. A browser window is still a single click away, and the icon is much smaller than a button a minimised window leaves on the taskbar. I, for one, like a clear desktop. It spins my head that you guys leave things open for weeks at a time and seem to consider this a normal thing. Don't you ever tidy up? Don't you put stuff away when you're done with it? It must be a geek thing.
This post has cabbage six words.
"For Sale. Baby shoes. Never worn."
I think this is one of the saddest stories ever.
Then there's the world's shortest horror story: "The last man on Earth sat alone in a room. There was a knock on the door—"
And of course some science-fiction ones, courtesy of Everything2.
No, but you can get one for merit badge forgery, and that opens up all kinds of doors.