In a way of thinking, it's better insured than any house. If your house gets smashed up in a hurricane, insurance companies will do all sorts of stuff to not pay for all of it.
However, the government has been paying major money to repair damage to the shuttle fleet for years, including building new ones after the Challenger disaster. The taxpayer can't deny the government coverage, so government property becomes better insured for damage or destruction than any private or corporate property ever is.
It would seem so, but I can understand the point. There's been a lot of talk about hydrogen fuel cells the last few years, and very little about fusion. Its my fault for not being specific.
It's easier to budget $200 a month in insurance for the life of a house than to double the initial cost to make it hurricane proof. Unless you're close enough to the coast to get hit directly by storm surge, then in the long term, really destructive hurricanes aren't common enough to justify massive increases in building cost (better materials, more materials, and more difficult building processes) when you can get storm insurance.
If this were a time when the shuttle program was going strong and morale was high, it would get rebuilt.
However, this is a time when the program had a very major failure, when there hasn't been a shuttle launch for an extended period, when pulic opinion is against paying for the shuttle program, when the engineers want it replaced, when the beaurocrats don't want to pay for it (or its repalcement), when the government has its fingers in a lot of very expensive pots ranging from Social Security to Iraq. The threshold for completely abandoning the shuttle, or any other expensive program is much lower now than it would be in ideal conditions.
I meant reliable and sustainable fusion power, which releases a LOT more energy than a fuel cell reaction like that. That system for microwave transmission from orbital power stations would be ideal with fusion power, because it solves the heat problem: Just let it radiate into space.
It hasn't always gotten hit by hurricanes right after a major space flight disaster.
Think of it this way: If your hard drive fails, it's not THAT big of a deal. You can replace it and fix the problem.
Now think if that harddrive failed a few weeks after you had your motherboard fail. The harddrive failure would still cost the same amount to fix, but ends up being much more of a problem in your eyes, just because it happened while you were still coping with the first failure.
If you split the hydrogen out of water and then burn it, no, you won't get much energy. I was refering to reliable and sustainable fusion power, not fuel cells.
Like I said in my other post, I don't think NASA's going to be the ones replacing the space shuttle. It's hard to get governments to fund space travel for a few reasons. For one, many of its tangible rewards are very long delay. We haven't even begun to get to the real return on our investment, and there are just that many other projects that give faster results to show for their tax burden.
On the other hand, the end of the shuttle program wouldn't be half as bad now as it would have been, say, ten or fifteen years ago. With an X-Prize win almost at hand, commercial and private space travel is now a very real probability. The X-Prize competitors have spent tens of millions to develop manned space vehicles.
You don't spend $50 million to win a $10 million check unless you plan to make money with what you build. I've probably said this many times, but its still an important point to remember. There are now companies that are in position to pick up the slack from NASA. I personally expected that these companies would effectively put NASA out of business as they got going, not only launching satelllites and people, but even picking up scientific and exploration projects. Twenty years from now, NASA could end up being more of a scientist's club for the space industry, mainly planning scientific missions, which are then built and launced and probably at least partially funded, by the spaceflight companies.
We won't run out of raw materials that soon. A few that we really shouldn't be using anymore anyway, yes (there's plenty of oil to last a very long time, but most of what's left is locked up in shale deposits that take far more energy to extract than it can be burned for), but things like metals, silicon, and so on are in good supply for a good time yet. If we can get to the point that we rely on hydrogen instead of oil, or even uranium, then we'll have a virtually limitless fuel supply covering 70% of the planet up to several miles deep.
I doubt they (politicians and beaurocrats pulling the strings in NASA) ever planned to get it off the ground again. The direction NASA funding was going, I expect a lot of pencil pushers were relieved by the Columbia accident, since it made things a lot easier to shut down.
In Michigan, we're paying ~60 for DSL. SBC is charing $179 a month for 256k in some places (I'm paying $49.99 for $128). Charter charges a $25 extra fee if you have both basic cable ($42) and internet ($50) on your account in my area (although less than five miles away, the combined package costs under $40)
Sure, there are plenty of revolutionary technologies emerging, but these things take much, much longer than the press would have us believe.
I'd made another comment something along these lines: The world is too keyed to the quarterly report. Projects that go for two or three years without turning a profit or producing research material have a sad tendancy to get the axe.
Projects like the supercollider, space elevators, and quantum computing, space travel (especially manned), and so forth are heavily criticized, and it's almost impossible to explain to people the benefits we stand to gain from any of them, partially because many of those benefits we won't live to see.
The example I used in the other post was the wheel. When it first came around, it wasn't that much better than just heaping stuff on the back of an ox. It got more useful as time went by, but it really didn't hit its stride for thousands of years, and it finally came into universal use with the advent of the internal combustion engine, which eventually made wheel applications superior to nonwheel applications (horses, oxen, dogsleds) in virtually all situations.
Another example would be the X-Prize entries. I think the companies competing for the X-Prize have more vision than nearly any other. They're spending tens of millions competing for an award that will barely begin to cover their expenses, but they see the benefits five, ten, fifty years from now - benefits that NASA promised us thirty years ago but eventually just couldn't get the funding to deliver (again, because many politicians can't see the benefits hiding in the future, and would only fund space travel as a matter of national pride). Hopefully after the prize is won, none of the serious contenders will throw in the towel, and they'll use this as what it is: A dress rehearsal for the real competition for space business in the decades ahead.
But even the X-Prize and the business it will hopefully spawn is a limited timeframe project. I suspect that the people dedicating their lives to it will see viable spacecraft, and proabably even commercial success in their lifetimes.
Projects like the space elevator would be immensely rewarding when completed, but at this point, we can't even be sure if we'll see large scale building techniques sufficient to meet the challenge in our lifetimes, and even then, who knows how long it would take to build one. This is the sort of building projects that could span generations, and that's something we as a species haven't done in a very long time.
The Egyptians had religion to drive their builders to toil at projects they may never live to see finish. The Chinese had an immense and very real army roving their borders that would motivate their people to spend centuries building walls upon walls accross their country.
We only have the promise of great rewards - expected and unimagined - of completing these projects, most of which will require technolgoies we probably haven't even dreamed of yet to really be useful. And all that's gotten us is page upon page of quantum computer and space elevator jokes. At least quantum computers are treated seriously by researchers, which is a lot mroe than can be said for the space elevator.
When I first heard about HP making their own versin of the iPod, I was expecting them to sell it cheaper. I'm a bit confused that they're selling it at the same price. I mean, what's the difference?
I still like Penny Arcade's joke about the iPod: "The iPod doesn't skip!" "Neither does this. It's cusioned by $380 cash!"
I love mine, but the relative who bought it for me last Christmas spent WAY too much.
I used to keep a Republican website bookmarked because it was the only site that I knew that would load reliably over the dialup connection I had at the time that had email contacts for my local (Democratic) senator. Never saw any stink about it, but the site content vanished during the 2000 campaign and was replaced by a one-page Bush ad.
Definitely bullshit. Last time I flew (summer 2003), I had my leatherman pocketknife clipped to my belt. Seven stainless steel blades, aluminum case, pliers, screwdrivers, bottle openers, scissors, wire strippers, molex cutters. Hell, I don't think I've used anything on there except the flathead screwdriver, and I used that to pry open the plastic packaging on my new cell phone.
I walked through no less than six metal detectors with it and it never set them off. It went through X-ray machines and never raised an eyebrow. I carried it around Washington DC for five days, and only set off one alarm, and that was just the anti-theft alarm at a gas station.
I still don't know how I managed to carry that knife around without problem. Had I actually stopped to think of it, I would have left it home. I just put it on every day out of habit.
Oh, but my choice of reading material (Airframe by Michael Chriton) wasn't allowed on the plane. I had to put it away for the duration of the flight.
Rule one of abandonware: Do NOT even TRY to look at HOTU with IE. Mozilla won't install any of that shit, and displays the site perfectly (and even can handle their download script when IE chokes on it half the time.
Well, I don't have XM anymore, so I don't know, but I think my point still stands. There's a lot of other stations on XM, most of which are pretty much like all the local broadcast stations. Aslo, is the music on the "live" stations live, or just the people talking? Talk radio and DJ's are live on just about all stations, but live performances of music certainly can't count for a serious portion of broadcast music (FM, AM, or XM). And even if it did, timeshifting a broadcast you're authorized to see is still legal.
Then, the real applications come years or decades down the road, often from completely other sources.
Sort of like the wheel. I'm sure it was a very exciting thing at the time, but we really didn't get around to getting full use of it until the last five hundred years or so, and it's really took off with the advent of the internal combustion engine.
That's what I have to say to the people who criticize research on quantum computing and space elevators and such. Sure, its not going to turn a profit by next quarter, and I won't be in the least suprised if the companies working on it now never see a dime from it, but the applications will come, eventually, when we have the "engines" to go with them. We can already imagine many of the applications, and if there's one thing history has shown us, its that our imaginations are woefully inadaquate.
Not only are they playing word games, but they're not playing fair. These aren't performances being recorded, they're recordings themselves. When's the last time you heard of a live concert broadcast over XM? The only live broadcasts I see anymore are sports, news, and the occasional telethon.
My personal belief as to why they haven't had a working product is content. They say they have 33,000 titles lined up and so forth, and that it's all download-on-demand, when you want to play it. However, whenever they talk about specific games, it's either:
A. Very old games you'd find on an abandonware site (the launch title list they "released" for about an hour earlier this year) B. An upcomming title that a quick email to the developer of reveals is NOT being developed for the Phantom (Starcraft Ghost is the one that comes to mind first, but I remember others have graced the Phantom website).
33,000 games, but nobody's developing for it? Frankly, it sounds like suprnova.org to me, just a bit. It won't suprise me in the least if the thing is a hard-wired bittorrent client or something like it, and I'm going to either laugh or cry if users end up the ones getting sued for software piracy. Whichever one I do, I'll be doing it very hard.
Shush. Useless legislation that doesn't actually do anything new is what we need to get these fools to stop mindlessly demonizing video games. They'll think they've accomplished something for a while, and go on to work on some of the real problems facing society.
Comfortable? Maybe, but I'm far more familiar with Morrowind's system, as well as that in many traditional RPGs, and I'll never call any of them as streamlined as Fallout's.
The only time that Fallout's system is complex is at character creation, but even then, you don't have many things to deal with: Seven (mostly) fixed stats, three main skills, and up to two additional optional traits, but just looking at the descriptions, Gifted is a win-win trait, and besides that, you just pick the one most associated with the weapons or items you want to use (pistols, meelee, drugs, etc). The rest of the choices (age, sex, name) mean very little, although sex has a greater use in Fallout 2.
Each levelup, you get a set number of points to put towards raising skills, and every third (or fourth, if you picked the Skilled trait) you get to pick a perk, which is about the most complex part of the game, but after the first three, if you through the list, you can find out pretty quickly which ones are most powerful (100% critical hit rate, lower AP usage, etc are no-brainers).
Morrowind's system, you have to pick your race, birthsign, and sex, all of which effect skills, spells, stats, and NPC reactions to various extents. Given time and work (many hours of work), you can correct for almost any shortcomming in character creation, but it drastically effects your startout. In Fallout, all the wildly different characters I've tried, the only thing that can break a new character off-the-bat is crappy perception. Then you have to pick a primary stat, ten major skills, ten minor skills, and a combat style (combat, stealth, magic), which can have anywhere from -5 to +45 effect on your skills. The class selection is pretty much like taking the pre-made characters in Fallout, and you generally get characters that are too one-sided to be effective (even moreso than in Fallout, since it's much harder to make up for shortcommings once a character is started).
You have to plan which skills you level to make sure you get the benefit in the areas you want most before each level up, or you end up making nearly no advancement. It makes the difference between finishing the game easily with a level 15 character and barely squeaking through with a level 50.
In Fallout, jumping right in without reading the manual, I made a character and progressed through the main quests and just took what looked cool at each level up as I went, and had very little problem with the game as a whole, and only restarted once five minutes in when I decided low perception probably wasn't good. You tailor your progress to the game, not to the character system. Weapons not hitting well, put the next couple levels into my gun skill.
In Morrowind, after two failed character attempts, I painfully learned that the character system comes first, and the game necessities come second. Sure, I need better armor skills or I'm going to get my ass haned to me in a can, but when I do that, I end up getting two levelups with no help in any areas except endurance, which I really don't need now that I have so much better armor. So now it takes longer for my ass to get packaged up, but I'm still dead.
Yes, Fallout's is a better system than Morrowind's in my experience, but it has far less aspects to track, and those that it does have are less important to track, and the whole thing is much more straightforward, so you can pay attention to fragging mutants and not watching numbers. I never once kept notes on a character's stats in Fallout, but I ended up using a freaking spreadsheet to make sure my Morrowind character stayed where I wanted him.
But there's no pressure to maintain that. A few bad summers will kill off a great many people with poor heat tolerance, and vice-versa in the winter, but afterwards, the AC comes back on, and heat works again. Evolution requies selective pressure, which we circumvent with technology.
A more low-level example would be eyesight. A thousand years ago, nearsightedness was almost unheard of in general populations. They couldn't correct for it, and those who had it weren't good for very much. Ever since glasses were invented, the number of people with eyesight problems has increased as those that do can live normal, successful, healthy lives.
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In a way of thinking, it's better insured than any house. If your house gets smashed up in a hurricane, insurance companies will do all sorts of stuff to not pay for all of it.
However, the government has been paying major money to repair damage to the shuttle fleet for years, including building new ones after the Challenger disaster. The taxpayer can't deny the government coverage, so government property becomes better insured for damage or destruction than any private or corporate property ever is.
It would seem so, but I can understand the point. There's been a lot of talk about hydrogen fuel cells the last few years, and very little about fusion. Its my fault for not being specific.
It's easier to budget $200 a month in insurance for the life of a house than to double the initial cost to make it hurricane proof. Unless you're close enough to the coast to get hit directly by storm surge, then in the long term, really destructive hurricanes aren't common enough to justify massive increases in building cost (better materials, more materials, and more difficult building processes) when you can get storm insurance.
If this were a time when the shuttle program was going strong and morale was high, it would get rebuilt. However, this is a time when the program had a very major failure, when there hasn't been a shuttle launch for an extended period, when pulic opinion is against paying for the shuttle program, when the engineers want it replaced, when the beaurocrats don't want to pay for it (or its repalcement), when the government has its fingers in a lot of very expensive pots ranging from Social Security to Iraq. The threshold for completely abandoning the shuttle, or any other expensive program is much lower now than it would be in ideal conditions.
I meant reliable and sustainable fusion power, which releases a LOT more energy than a fuel cell reaction like that. That system for microwave transmission from orbital power stations would be ideal with fusion power, because it solves the heat problem: Just let it radiate into space.
It hasn't always gotten hit by hurricanes right after a major space flight disaster.
Think of it this way: If your hard drive fails, it's not THAT big of a deal. You can replace it and fix the problem.
Now think if that harddrive failed a few weeks after you had your motherboard fail. The harddrive failure would still cost the same amount to fix, but ends up being much more of a problem in your eyes, just because it happened while you were still coping with the first failure.
If you split the hydrogen out of water and then burn it, no, you won't get much energy. I was refering to reliable and sustainable fusion power, not fuel cells.
Like I said in my other post, I don't think NASA's going to be the ones replacing the space shuttle. It's hard to get governments to fund space travel for a few reasons. For one, many of its tangible rewards are very long delay. We haven't even begun to get to the real return on our investment, and there are just that many other projects that give faster results to show for their tax burden. On the other hand, the end of the shuttle program wouldn't be half as bad now as it would have been, say, ten or fifteen years ago. With an X-Prize win almost at hand, commercial and private space travel is now a very real probability. The X-Prize competitors have spent tens of millions to develop manned space vehicles. You don't spend $50 million to win a $10 million check unless you plan to make money with what you build. I've probably said this many times, but its still an important point to remember. There are now companies that are in position to pick up the slack from NASA. I personally expected that these companies would effectively put NASA out of business as they got going, not only launching satelllites and people, but even picking up scientific and exploration projects. Twenty years from now, NASA could end up being more of a scientist's club for the space industry, mainly planning scientific missions, which are then built and launced and probably at least partially funded, by the spaceflight companies.
We won't run out of raw materials that soon. A few that we really shouldn't be using anymore anyway, yes (there's plenty of oil to last a very long time, but most of what's left is locked up in shale deposits that take far more energy to extract than it can be burned for), but things like metals, silicon, and so on are in good supply for a good time yet. If we can get to the point that we rely on hydrogen instead of oil, or even uranium, then we'll have a virtually limitless fuel supply covering 70% of the planet up to several miles deep.
I doubt they (politicians and beaurocrats pulling the strings in NASA) ever planned to get it off the ground again. The direction NASA funding was going, I expect a lot of pencil pushers were relieved by the Columbia accident, since it made things a lot easier to shut down.
In Michigan, we're paying ~60 for DSL. SBC is charing $179 a month for 256k in some places (I'm paying $49.99 for $128). Charter charges a $25 extra fee if you have both basic cable ($42) and internet ($50) on your account in my area (although less than five miles away, the combined package costs under $40)
Heck, they have holes in thier budget bigger than those countries' budgets.
Sure, there are plenty of revolutionary technologies emerging, but these things take much, much longer than the press would have us believe.
I'd made another comment something along these lines: The world is too keyed to the quarterly report. Projects that go for two or three years without turning a profit or producing research material have a sad tendancy to get the axe.
Projects like the supercollider, space elevators, and quantum computing, space travel (especially manned), and so forth are heavily criticized, and it's almost impossible to explain to people the benefits we stand to gain from any of them, partially because many of those benefits we won't live to see.
The example I used in the other post was the wheel. When it first came around, it wasn't that much better than just heaping stuff on the back of an ox. It got more useful as time went by, but it really didn't hit its stride for thousands of years, and it finally came into universal use with the advent of the internal combustion engine, which eventually made wheel applications superior to nonwheel applications (horses, oxen, dogsleds) in virtually all situations.
Another example would be the X-Prize entries. I think the companies competing for the X-Prize have more vision than nearly any other. They're spending tens of millions competing for an award that will barely begin to cover their expenses, but they see the benefits five, ten, fifty years from now - benefits that NASA promised us thirty years ago but eventually just couldn't get the funding to deliver (again, because many politicians can't see the benefits hiding in the future, and would only fund space travel as a matter of national pride). Hopefully after the prize is won, none of the serious contenders will throw in the towel, and they'll use this as what it is: A dress rehearsal for the real competition for space business in the decades ahead.
But even the X-Prize and the business it will hopefully spawn is a limited timeframe project. I suspect that the people dedicating their lives to it will see viable spacecraft, and proabably even commercial success in their lifetimes.
Projects like the space elevator would be immensely rewarding when completed, but at this point, we can't even be sure if we'll see large scale building techniques sufficient to meet the challenge in our lifetimes, and even then, who knows how long it would take to build one. This is the sort of building projects that could span generations, and that's something we as a species haven't done in a very long time.
The Egyptians had religion to drive their builders to toil at projects they may never live to see finish. The Chinese had an immense and very real army roving their borders that would motivate their people to spend centuries building walls upon walls accross their country.
We only have the promise of great rewards - expected and unimagined - of completing these projects, most of which will require technolgoies we probably haven't even dreamed of yet to really be useful. And all that's gotten us is page upon page of quantum computer and space elevator jokes. At least quantum computers are treated seriously by researchers, which is a lot mroe than can be said for the space elevator.
When I first heard about HP making their own versin of the iPod, I was expecting them to sell it cheaper. I'm a bit confused that they're selling it at the same price. I mean, what's the difference?
I still like Penny Arcade's joke about the iPod:
"The iPod doesn't skip!"
"Neither does this. It's cusioned by $380 cash!"
I love mine, but the relative who bought it for me last Christmas spent WAY too much.
I used to keep a Republican website bookmarked because it was the only site that I knew that would load reliably over the dialup connection I had at the time that had email contacts for my local (Democratic) senator. Never saw any stink about it, but the site content vanished during the 2000 campaign and was replaced by a one-page Bush ad.
Definitely bullshit. Last time I flew (summer 2003), I had my leatherman pocketknife clipped to my belt. Seven stainless steel blades, aluminum case, pliers, screwdrivers, bottle openers, scissors, wire strippers, molex cutters. Hell, I don't think I've used anything on there except the flathead screwdriver, and I used that to pry open the plastic packaging on my new cell phone.
I walked through no less than six metal detectors with it and it never set them off. It went through X-ray machines and never raised an eyebrow. I carried it around Washington DC for five days, and only set off one alarm, and that was just the anti-theft alarm at a gas station.
I still don't know how I managed to carry that knife around without problem. Had I actually stopped to think of it, I would have left it home. I just put it on every day out of habit.
Oh, but my choice of reading material (Airframe by Michael Chriton) wasn't allowed on the plane. I had to put it away for the duration of the flight.
Rule one of abandonware: Do NOT even TRY to look at HOTU with IE. Mozilla won't install any of that shit, and displays the site perfectly (and even can handle their download script when IE chokes on it half the time.
Well, I don't have XM anymore, so I don't know, but I think my point still stands. There's a lot of other stations on XM, most of which are pretty much like all the local broadcast stations. Aslo, is the music on the "live" stations live, or just the people talking? Talk radio and DJ's are live on just about all stations, but live performances of music certainly can't count for a serious portion of broadcast music (FM, AM, or XM). And even if it did, timeshifting a broadcast you're authorized to see is still legal.
Then, the real applications come years or decades down the road, often from completely other sources.
Sort of like the wheel. I'm sure it was a very exciting thing at the time, but we really didn't get around to getting full use of it until the last five hundred years or so, and it's really took off with the advent of the internal combustion engine.
That's what I have to say to the people who criticize research on quantum computing and space elevators and such. Sure, its not going to turn a profit by next quarter, and I won't be in the least suprised if the companies working on it now never see a dime from it, but the applications will come, eventually, when we have the "engines" to go with them. We can already imagine many of the applications, and if there's one thing history has shown us, its that our imaginations are woefully inadaquate.
It sort of makes rolling around in money pointless if you do it before profit, though.
Not only are they playing word games, but they're not playing fair. These aren't performances being recorded, they're recordings themselves. When's the last time you heard of a live concert broadcast over XM? The only live broadcasts I see anymore are sports, news, and the occasional telethon.
My personal belief as to why they haven't had a working product is content. They say they have 33,000 titles lined up and so forth, and that it's all download-on-demand, when you want to play it. However, whenever they talk about specific games, it's either:
A. Very old games you'd find on an abandonware site (the launch title list they "released" for about an hour earlier this year)
B. An upcomming title that a quick email to the developer of reveals is NOT being developed for the Phantom (Starcraft Ghost is the one that comes to mind first, but I remember others have graced the Phantom website).
33,000 games, but nobody's developing for it? Frankly, it sounds like suprnova.org to me, just a bit. It won't suprise me in the least if the thing is a hard-wired bittorrent client or something like it, and I'm going to either laugh or cry if users end up the ones getting sued for software piracy. Whichever one I do, I'll be doing it very hard.
Shush. Useless legislation that doesn't actually do anything new is what we need to get these fools to stop mindlessly demonizing video games. They'll think they've accomplished something for a while, and go on to work on some of the real problems facing society.
Comfortable? Maybe, but I'm far more familiar with Morrowind's system, as well as that in many traditional RPGs, and I'll never call any of them as streamlined as Fallout's.
The only time that Fallout's system is complex is at character creation, but even then, you don't have many things to deal with: Seven (mostly) fixed stats, three main skills, and up to two additional optional traits, but just looking at the descriptions, Gifted is a win-win trait, and besides that, you just pick the one most associated with the weapons or items you want to use (pistols, meelee, drugs, etc). The rest of the choices (age, sex, name) mean very little, although sex has a greater use in Fallout 2.
Each levelup, you get a set number of points to put towards raising skills, and every third (or fourth, if you picked the Skilled trait) you get to pick a perk, which is about the most complex part of the game, but after the first three, if you through the list, you can find out pretty quickly which ones are most powerful (100% critical hit rate, lower AP usage, etc are no-brainers).
Morrowind's system, you have to pick your race, birthsign, and sex, all of which effect skills, spells, stats, and NPC reactions to various extents. Given time and work (many hours of work), you can correct for almost any shortcomming in character creation, but it drastically effects your startout. In Fallout, all the wildly different characters I've tried, the only thing that can break a new character off-the-bat is crappy perception. Then you have to pick a primary stat, ten major skills, ten minor skills, and a combat style (combat, stealth, magic), which can have anywhere from -5 to +45 effect on your skills. The class selection is pretty much like taking the pre-made characters in Fallout, and you generally get characters that are too one-sided to be effective (even moreso than in Fallout, since it's much harder to make up for shortcommings once a character is started).
You have to plan which skills you level to make sure you get the benefit in the areas you want most before each level up, or you end up making nearly no advancement. It makes the difference between finishing the game easily with a level 15 character and barely squeaking through with a level 50.
In Fallout, jumping right in without reading the manual, I made a character and progressed through the main quests and just took what looked cool at each level up as I went, and had very little problem with the game as a whole, and only restarted once five minutes in when I decided low perception probably wasn't good. You tailor your progress to the game, not to the character system. Weapons not hitting well, put the next couple levels into my gun skill.
In Morrowind, after two failed character attempts, I painfully learned that the character system comes first, and the game necessities come second. Sure, I need better armor skills or I'm going to get my ass haned to me in a can, but when I do that, I end up getting two levelups with no help in any areas except endurance, which I really don't need now that I have so much better armor. So now it takes longer for my ass to get packaged up, but I'm still dead.
Yes, Fallout's is a better system than Morrowind's in my experience, but it has far less aspects to track, and those that it does have are less important to track, and the whole thing is much more straightforward, so you can pay attention to fragging mutants and not watching numbers. I never once kept notes on a character's stats in Fallout, but I ended up using a freaking spreadsheet to make sure my Morrowind character stayed where I wanted him.
But there's no pressure to maintain that. A few bad summers will kill off a great many people with poor heat tolerance, and vice-versa in the winter, but afterwards, the AC comes back on, and heat works again. Evolution requies selective pressure, which we circumvent with technology.
A more low-level example would be eyesight. A thousand years ago, nearsightedness was almost unheard of in general populations. They couldn't correct for it, and those who had it weren't good for very much. Ever since glasses were invented, the number of people with eyesight problems has increased as those that do can live normal, successful, healthy lives.