Gaming does not lend itself well to passive viewing.
Agreed - but that's because nobody has made a game with this specific aim in mind - yet. All games are designed so that they are enjoyable from the point of view of one player - not from the point of view of an observer. A game like Counter-Strike doesn't lend itself well to spectation because it's impossible to follow more than one person at once, but there might be three dozen people you need to keep track of to make sense of the flow of the game. Football, by comparison, is better, because you only need to keep your eye on one thing: the ball.
I am almost certain that very soon manufacturers will begin making games with the spectators in mind as well as the players. It's only a matter of WHEN somebody will realise there's money in it.
You really want to know why they do this? Because the day it's figured out is the day we will have working, practical, instantaneous teleportation. Sooner or later, all science fiction has to involve fiction of some kind!
Thanks for those comments, everybody above me. Now for the ACTUAL explanation.
In Terry Pratchett's book Strata there is a race called the "Ehfts". They are short fluffy things IIRC which nobody can quite understand. The quote is "Everybody thought Ehfts were funny, and nobody knew what Ehfts thought of anything". They get seen doing boring menial work, like sweeping floors. An Ehft computer is a room full of Ehfts, each one handling part of the mathematics. And Ehft books are very long strings with knots tied in them encoding the story. You read them by feeling your way along the string and feeling each knot. In the book, the protagonist, Kin Arad, "signs" an Ehft's book by tying a personalised knot on the end.
Strata features a sort of proto-Discworld in it. It's not a Discworld novel and the disc world featured is not the same one in the Discworld novels, but they are very much along the same lines. I like the novel, to be honest, I think it's a fun read. Ditto The Dark Side Of The Sun, which is Pratchett's other pre-Discworld scifi book.
More like 25 hundred years ago. It's a common misconception that people in Copernicus's time thought the Earth was flat. It was the notion that the Earth was the centre of the universe that Copernicus controversially challenged.
Slashdot comment #2,000,000 - 1st March 1999. It's unknown why the date of this comment is earlier than the previous one. My guess is the comments weren't numbered sequentially this early on in Slashdot's history and were renumbered at some later date.
My question is where I can actually find an unguarded DVD screener of this movie. Because simply downloading it isn't stealing - there's still a copy left at the other end which people can use.
I don't like the new definitions as they include quantum singularities. For example, if we collapsed the Earth into a black hole, it would still count as a planet (assuming the near-spherical event horizon of said black hole could be said to represent its shape).
Frankly, I can't believe they didn't think of this!
And how is it he got to this position and how long will he be allowed to remain?
Perhaps he's really good at astronomy, which, as we all know, is a very different skill from making up names for things?
This whole planet/pluton discussion is, at root, a marketing problem. Rocks in space don't much care what they're called, and neither do astronomers. It's not like it's something an astronomer needs to be trained in. Give the guy a break. He made a mistake.
they have to scale up the bad guys to compensate. Eventually the battle reaches a point where you can't even relate to it anymore
Oddly enough, 24 has this exact problem, and has done since season two. I've said it before and I'll say it again: Properly handled human drama is far, FAR more compelling than an abstract threat to {m/b}illions of faceless people, and "You killed my father" is a much more dramatic reason to want to kill someone than "I disagree with your country's foreign policies".
Stop rotating relative to what? If you're saying what I think you're saying, you mean the Earth would be tidal-locked so the same side always faces the Moon in the same way that the same side of the Moon always faces the Earth. In that case (and I'm pretty sure that would take several hundreds of millions of years), we would still have a Sun which rises and sets like normal every 672 hours (28 "days"). I think we - by which I mean life on Earth - could easily adapt to handle that over the course of a few megayears.
The Sun is about 25 times too small to go supernova. A red giant and a supernova are different things.
Fusion requires progressively more heat as you get to heavier and heavier elements. A star like the Sun can only get to... well, it can get past hydrogen, and once the hydrogen is used up it can burn helium too, but I think it peters out somewhere around carbon. There's not enough mass and hence not enough pressure and hence not enough heat to burn anything beyond that. Whereas a very heavy star can burn elements right up to iron (beyond that, you get NO energy out, so no element beyond iron can be fused). They build up a non-fusable core of iron which gets bigger and bigger until it becomes so big that it itself collapses under gravity to form a neutron star (or possibly a black hole). At this point the entire rest of the star falls on top of the neutronium core and explodes - that's a supernova.
You're mistaking a force (a continuous variation in momentum) for an impulse (an instantaneous change in momentum). Jumping is an instantaneous change (and what's more, it gets cancelled out immediately as you and Earth fall back together again). A continuous small force, however, is enough to move a planet.
Actually, probably not. Even where it is right now, Earth is almost on the boundary line between being swallowed and escaping (Venus is definitely gone, Mars definitely isn't). But as the Sun expands it will also become more luminous, which means the solar wind will increase. Over billions of years this will push Earth into a wider, safer orbit. It'll still get roasted to a crisp, but probably survive as a planet.
Photos of the Sun from that distance are very unremarkable IIRC. It just looks like a starfield. None of the planets are visible from that distance. At all. Which is sobering.
The pale blue dot photo which some of my sibling posters mentioned is well worth a look, however.
Yes, and by 1990 scientists predict we'll have four colonies on the Moon, ideal for family vacations.
Forgive my pessimism. I believe landing on the Moon is the greatest thing humans have ever done, and that the Voyager and Pioneer probes represent the peak technological achievement of our species. I believe space exploration is the most important thing ever. I am desperate for these new technologies to take us off this rock. But seriously, how long will we have to wait? A hundred years? Two hundred? At the current rate of progress these seem like low estimates indeed. Pick any hard science fiction book with a fictional future timeline and just look at the milestones which should have been and gone by now. Will we really be mining asteroids by 2500? Looking at the state of play on Earth right now, it's hard to keep believing.
Voyager is moving fast enough that that will never happen. It will escape the Solar System entirely. In some senses it already has. The real question is how long until it stops transmitting, and how long until it gets hit by a random chunk of space rock (the latter event probably coming MUCH later than the former).
Slashdot Mirror
If by "ultimate" we mean "likely to get the most posts", I always believed that the ultimate Slashdot headline would be "Creationists oppose Linux".
Agreed - but that's because nobody has made a game with this specific aim in mind - yet. All games are designed so that they are enjoyable from the point of view of one player - not from the point of view of an observer. A game like Counter-Strike doesn't lend itself well to spectation because it's impossible to follow more than one person at once, but there might be three dozen people you need to keep track of to make sense of the flow of the game. Football, by comparison, is better, because you only need to keep your eye on one thing: the ball.
I am almost certain that very soon manufacturers will begin making games with the spectators in mind as well as the players. It's only a matter of WHEN somebody will realise there's money in it.
You really want to know why they do this? Because the day it's figured out is the day we will have working, practical, instantaneous teleportation. Sooner or later, all science fiction has to involve fiction of some kind!
Is it really too much not to expect a link to the site in question in a story about that site? Sheesh.
Thanks for those comments, everybody above me. Now for the ACTUAL explanation.
In Terry Pratchett's book Strata there is a race called the "Ehfts". They are short fluffy things IIRC which nobody can quite understand. The quote is "Everybody thought Ehfts were funny, and nobody knew what Ehfts thought of anything". They get seen doing boring menial work, like sweeping floors. An Ehft computer is a room full of Ehfts, each one handling part of the mathematics. And Ehft books are very long strings with knots tied in them encoding the story. You read them by feeling your way along the string and feeling each knot. In the book, the protagonist, Kin Arad, "signs" an Ehft's book by tying a personalised knot on the end.
Strata features a sort of proto-Discworld in it. It's not a Discworld novel and the disc world featured is not the same one in the Discworld novels, but they are very much along the same lines. I like the novel, to be honest, I think it's a fun read. Ditto The Dark Side Of The Sun, which is Pratchett's other pre-Discworld scifi book.
Thank you and goodnight.
I'm gonna guess that the main difference here that in 1998, internet relationships weren't counted as "real" relationships.
It's always cool to hate things which are massively popular.
More like 25 hundred years ago. It's a common misconception that people in Copernicus's time thought the Earth was flat. It was the notion that the Earth was the centre of the universe that Copernicus controversially challenged.
Because sex is seen as a perverted thing to do. It's a vicious cycle. Nobody wants to raise uproar because in doing so you get branded.
You sure post a lot.
Isn't that the plot of Red Dwarf?
I know I do this every time but you know you love it. Here they are again for all you wackos. Every Millionth Slashdot Comment:
Slashdot comment #1,000,000 - 15th June 2000
Slashdot comment #2,000,000 - 1st March 1999. It's unknown why the date of this comment is earlier than the previous one. My guess is the comments weren't numbered sequentially this early on in Slashdot's history and were renumbered at some later date.
Slashdot comment #3,000,000 - 13th February 2002
Slashdot comment #4,000,000 - 2nd August 2002
Slashdot comment #5,000,000 - 2nd January 2003
Slashdot comment #6,000,000 - 20th May 2003
Slashdot comment #7,000,000 - 19th September 2003
Slashdot comment #8,000,000 - 16th January 2004
Slashdot comment #9,000,000 - 28th April 2004
Slashdot comment #10,000,000 - 18th August 2004. I can honestly say this is my favourite comment ever.
Slashdot comment #11,000,000 - 5th December 2004. My hat is off to evilmrhenry (542138) for finding this for me.
Slashdot comment #12,000,000 - 21st March 2005
Slashdot comment #13,000,000 - 7th July 2005
Slashdot comment #14,000,000 - 10th November 2005
Slashdot comment #15,000,000 - 27th March 2006 (predicted to be 1st March 2006)
Slashdot comment #16,000,000 - 29th August 2006 (predicted to be 11th August 2006)
Slashdot comment #17,000,000 - predicted by me, right now, to be 31st January 2007 - see you then!
Graph here.
My question is where I can actually find an unguarded DVD screener of this movie. Because simply downloading it isn't stealing - there's still a copy left at the other end which people can use.
Guilty of what? It's not a crime to have porn.
I don't like the new definitions as they include quantum singularities. For example, if we collapsed the Earth into a black hole, it would still count as a planet (assuming the near-spherical event horizon of said black hole could be said to represent its shape).
Frankly, I can't believe they didn't think of this!
Perhaps he's really good at astronomy, which, as we all know, is a very different skill from making up names for things?
This whole planet/pluton discussion is, at root, a marketing problem. Rocks in space don't much care what they're called, and neither do astronomers. It's not like it's something an astronomer needs to be trained in. Give the guy a break. He made a mistake.
Oddly enough, 24 has this exact problem, and has done since season two. I've said it before and I'll say it again: Properly handled human drama is far, FAR more compelling than an abstract threat to {m/b}illions of faceless people, and "You killed my father" is a much more dramatic reason to want to kill someone than "I disagree with your country's foreign policies".
Stop rotating relative to what? If you're saying what I think you're saying, you mean the Earth would be tidal-locked so the same side always faces the Moon in the same way that the same side of the Moon always faces the Earth. In that case (and I'm pretty sure that would take several hundreds of millions of years), we would still have a Sun which rises and sets like normal every 672 hours (28 "days"). I think we - by which I mean life on Earth - could easily adapt to handle that over the course of a few megayears.
The Sun is about 25 times too small to go supernova. A red giant and a supernova are different things. Fusion requires progressively more heat as you get to heavier and heavier elements. A star like the Sun can only get to... well, it can get past hydrogen, and once the hydrogen is used up it can burn helium too, but I think it peters out somewhere around carbon. There's not enough mass and hence not enough pressure and hence not enough heat to burn anything beyond that. Whereas a very heavy star can burn elements right up to iron (beyond that, you get NO energy out, so no element beyond iron can be fused). They build up a non-fusable core of iron which gets bigger and bigger until it becomes so big that it itself collapses under gravity to form a neutron star (or possibly a black hole). At this point the entire rest of the star falls on top of the neutronium core and explodes - that's a supernova.
You're mistaking a force (a continuous variation in momentum) for an impulse (an instantaneous change in momentum). Jumping is an instantaneous change (and what's more, it gets cancelled out immediately as you and Earth fall back together again). A continuous small force, however, is enough to move a planet.
Actually, probably not. Even where it is right now, Earth is almost on the boundary line between being swallowed and escaping (Venus is definitely gone, Mars definitely isn't). But as the Sun expands it will also become more luminous, which means the solar wind will increase. Over billions of years this will push Earth into a wider, safer orbit. It'll still get roasted to a crisp, but probably survive as a planet.
Photos of the Sun from that distance are very unremarkable IIRC. It just looks like a starfield. None of the planets are visible from that distance. At all. Which is sobering.
The pale blue dot photo which some of my sibling posters mentioned is well worth a look, however.
And for those of you who are noobs, here is how to install Linux on a dead badger.
Yes, and by 1990 scientists predict we'll have four colonies on the Moon, ideal for family vacations.
Forgive my pessimism. I believe landing on the Moon is the greatest thing humans have ever done, and that the Voyager and Pioneer probes represent the peak technological achievement of our species. I believe space exploration is the most important thing ever. I am desperate for these new technologies to take us off this rock. But seriously, how long will we have to wait? A hundred years? Two hundred? At the current rate of progress these seem like low estimates indeed. Pick any hard science fiction book with a fictional future timeline and just look at the milestones which should have been and gone by now. Will we really be mining asteroids by 2500? Looking at the state of play on Earth right now, it's hard to keep believing.
Voyager is moving fast enough that that will never happen. It will escape the Solar System entirely. In some senses it already has. The real question is how long until it stops transmitting, and how long until it gets hit by a random chunk of space rock (the latter event probably coming MUCH later than the former).