Its not so much single shocks that pose problems (although, yes, many people do claim so). Global warming will pose more problems for people than animals, I would suspect, since our technology effectively stops us from adapting genetically to changes in circumstance - we can harness fire faster than we can grow fur, invent the wheel faster than we can evolve faster running legs, and discover medicines faster than we can evolve immunities.
So, when those technologies fail us, we're left even more defenseless than we were to begin with. Very hot summers in many first-world countries lead to power grid failures because of the excessive drain by air conditioning. When that happens, many people are hospitalized or even killed because of the heat. The reverse happens in cold winters. When diseases develop resistance to our medicines, we get epidemics.
It finds a way, but not always fast enough. It's fine and dandy that one species has adapted while the climate changes around us, but how many others couldn't adapt to us fast enough?
I can see them trying to simplify it or automate it or something really dumb.
I don't see Bethesda making a simple RPG system. Morrowind's character system is considerably more complex than Fallout's, and is essentially experience-less.
On the contrary, I'm more worried about Bethesda bogging down Fallout's character system, since it's a very simple and streamlined system considering its depth.
Other dinosaurs also didn't live long. I've seen estimates that large sauropods didn't live over 30 to 50.
There's another reason they didn't evolve intelligence enough to escape their own destruction, as well. They fell into a lifestyle that didn't require it. Humans became intelligent partially because we didn't really have much else going for us. We weren't fast enough to catch prey, we didn't have furr to stay warm at night or dry in the rain, we didn't have the size to discourage predators or the strength to steal kills from them.
Dinosaurs have other things, though. Sauropods are fucking huge. They don't have to be smart, they're just plain big enough that very few other animals would mess with them. T.rex had its jaws, raptors had their claws and speed, hadrosaurs probably had a herd structure, stegosaurs, ceratopsians, and ankylosaurs had armor and weapons.
Herbivores don't really need intelligence. In fact, they're probably better off if they attack on reflex. The time they take to think things over could get them killed. Instead, like a horse, they see movement in their peripheral vision, and they kick you in the stomach. Good for the horse, bad for an unwary farm hand. Carnivores that have the sort of natural armament that tyranosaurs or raptors had only need intelligence on par with a canine or feline to be successful in hunting. More intelligence means more engergy being poured into the brain and not into other things.
Well, sorta yes and sorta no. There's argument both ways on the warm blooded/cold blooded issue. There's no general consensus either way. The evidence goes in different directions, and I don't really see anything here that would break the camel's back. (granted IANAP either)
Cold blooded animals do have a larger portion of their energy intake available for growth, but they also typically eat less, owing ot their inability to maintain the levels of activity a warm blooded predator can, grow slower because of that lower food intake, and live much longer. I don't know why on the last count, but a large tortoise can live well over 100 or 150 years, but the only land mammals that can survive over 70 without the aid of modern medicine are elephants.
T.rex grows very fast, but also (by modern standards) has a very short life span wether it's warm or cold blooded. Maybe its cold blooded and commits a great deal of energy to growth, maybe its warm blooded and has a monumental food intake - think of the size of a sauropod. Wether it hunted or scavenged them, even one dead sauropod could fuel this sort of growth in a group of T.rex for some time.
I think the team at Bethesda has their work cut out for them. This is mostly because there is almost nothing that they can do that will make the Fallout fans happy.
On the other hand, the way thins were looking, Black Isle couldn't make them happy either. I remember the rather heated feedback that Black Isle got, first when they said that Fallout 3 would have 3D graphics (although it would still take place in a 2D space like Fallou 1 and 2 did), and later when they wanted to make the combat real-time.
After that, they wanted to balance certain things. Balance is supposed to be a good thing, but the community hated it for some reason. I was stopped reading NMA-fallout.com's forums after the response to a Black Isle member mused about reducing the bonus from the Gifted trait so it would be an actual tradeoff like it was intended to be, and not a freebie.
Just about every new idea thought of - improved science skills, weapon creation/modification, decan and repair, more limited resources in the game world, even more grass on the ground brought some amount of backlash. I just don't think anything short of a remake of Fallout 1 will satisfy many of the hardcore fans.
I can think of a thousand things Bathesda can do wrong with Fallout 3, but the existing fanbase is too firmly set with the original engine. They have to realize that without renovating the game at just about every level, it won't go anywhere. An original-engine game would sell a couple hundred copies to the hardcore fans, but even the bulk of the original fanbase has moved on to more modern things. What the most vocal part of the Fallout community seems to want just isn't a viable game in 2004, especially not with the modding tools available for Fallout and Fallout 2.
Actually, their prey would most likely have been hadrosaurs and the like, wether they were hunters first or second. Sauropods were the elephants of their time. All evidence suggests that nobody messed with an adult unless it was sick or injured, and even then at thier own peril. I've seen pictures of a fossil allosaurus crushed to death under a young sauropod that didn't even stand as tall as it did and had a broken back. However, as with most herd animals, within their range, there'd usually be one or two fairly recent corpses laying around for the taking, and nobody's better at taking than T.rex.
I'm trying to find a link that isn't on a children's site. The major reason was speed. They couldn't move as fast as most bipedal herbivourous dinosaurds could. Some claims have been made that sauropods are about the same speed, and other that T.rex was faster.
Those tails coud easily break the sound barrier by turning their bodies. A monitor lizard can break a man's legs or back with their tail just by twisting their body slightly, and they're generally smaller than humans. Sauropods are much larger than T.rex, and even on the conservative measurement of things, the tips of their tails could break the sound barrier. If they were warm blooded, then that's even worse for the T.rex.
A swipe of the tail could crush their rib cage, snap their neck, break their legs, or crush their skull. Getting in close, they have to deal with getting their feet stepped on (broken legs and feet are generally terminal injuries for a hunter), and once they attack, there's the very real danger of the sauropod falling over on them, either a misstep while trying to flee, tripping over the T.rex itself, or intentionally rolling over the much smaller predator.
It comes down to the scale of a lion attacking a matriarch elephant. A lion *could* certainly survive taking one bite out of an elephant every day, but it wouldn't survive regular encounters with elephants for very long.
Lions are quite adept scavengers. They make relatively few large kills themselves (especailly lone males), but pretty much have their pick of kills from other large cats, hyenas, and wild dogs. Hyenas, on the other hand, despite common belief, are the truely fearsome hunters of the region. They have one of the higest success rates in hunting of any carnivore. So do the African wild dogs for that matter. Neither one, however, is very good at keeping their kills when a pride of lions happens by. Cheetahs have the same problem. They're very good at catching their own prey, but very bad at keeping it. Leopards particularly will steal their kills at every turn.
Herbivores have an easier time growing fast, though, since they can eat just about everything around them, and generally don't have to fight their food to the death.
Which brings me back to my scavenger point: This is another big of evidence that T.rex was at least partially a scavenger, especially with the sheer size of animals like sauropods. With herds of sauropods around, you'd expect a couple fifty-ton corpses laying around at any given time. That's more than enough to fuel that sort of growth in a large scavenger.
Which is part of my point that I do believe they were at least partially scavengers. Parts of sauropod bones have been found inside of T.rex skeletons. It would be like a pride of lions going after a healthy bull elephant if they killed it themselves. The cost in injury is far more than the food is worth.
Also, most of the recent research I've seen suggests that T.rex were pack hunters, or at least family-group hunters (adult mother, adolescents, and immature offspring). Their size doesn't really suggest they'd be sole hunters in itself, since by scale, they're not that much larger than much of their prey, and probably somewhat slower.
T-Rex could have simply scare away most other predators
I've read that lions will steal kills this way, as well. Some prides of lions almost never made their own kills, but instead waited for hyenas or wild dogs to make a kill, and then moved in. They're a bit bigger than most other animals want to mess with, so they have a good success rate doing this.
Scavenging mammals often will, but then again, so will most carnivorous mammals (watch a dog or cat eat grass sometime) if they're not getting enough meat. I think that's more a mammal thing, though. T.rex doesn't have the kind of teeth a canine or feline does, so I doubt it ate plants even to supplement its diet.
There have been a lot of people who believe that T.rex was a scavenger for a variety of reasons. They're clearly able to kill by sheer size, but I find it reasonable that that wasn't their main survival strategy.
A sparsely populated scavenger, particularly one that could still kill smaller prey (of course, by "small" in this case I'm still talking about things the size of a Buick) would have a much easier job eating that much.
Also, remember that the animal's their eating (wether scavenged or hunted) were as large, and in some cases much larger, than they were. A dead sauropod could likely feed several T.rex for some time after the kill, in the same way that a wolf pack can spend several days eating a large moose.
Frankly, I don't think that's a good idea. It would be one thing if he'd made the worm himself. At least then he would have marketable skills in programming and/or security. However, he just took the code to an existing virus and changed it in a very minor way. All this guy's got going for him right now is malicious intent, plagiarism, and a felony conviction. He's not going to be the one cleaning coffee spills out of my keyboard.
All this idiot did was make a few changes to somebody else's virus
Which makes him getting caught even worse. Had he actually written the virus, he would be able to get a job in computer secuirty after his sentence, like so many other hackers have. But, since he just took somebody else's work and made fairly transparent changes to it, he's got a few extra marks on him besides the "convicted felon" thing:
1. Plagist/code thief - not looking at a job programming, I think, if he can't write his own code. 2. Lame script kiddie - Had he made the virus, he would at least have potentially marketable skills. However, since he just rereleased an existing virus, he only wins for malicious intent, and I sure wouldn't want to be his administrator.
I don't know. Morrowind didn't let you pursue an entire lifetime. After you finish the main quest, nothing you do really effects things anymore. You can kill half of Vvardenfel, and people still hole you in abject awe. Plus, there are only two RPGs on the Xbox that I consider worth anthing (Morrowind and KOTOR), so it doesn't have to be revolutionary, if you ask me. Just good enough for me to unplug the PS2 for a couple weeks.
Don't forget obesity. That's big on the fear list these days, and has probably actually killed more people than bees, nuclear war, terrorism, or France.
The times are local time - wherever you are. The shower runs 24-7 for several days. Just go out at the darkest time of night and hope there aren't clouds.
The article says "as many as 200 meteors per hour", so:
200 meteors/3600 seconds = 1 meteor/18 seconds
So roughly 18 seconds per meteor. The reason they use per hour is that with something so random, the time between any two is wildly variable, and you need a large sample to get accurate rates. Just some statistical ass-covering, I guess.
As has been mentioned before, most of the competitors won't stop with the end of the competition. Many of them have far more than the $10 million already invested in their craft, and all are looking towards some kind of commercial application because they sure won't make a profit off the winnings.
I've said before that the X-prize itself would be more of an advertising token than a cash prize. When a few of these companies start selling a product a few years from now, one of them will get to put "Winner of the X-Prize for private spaceflight" on their billboards, and the rest won't.
Three hours would bore me, and I'm interested in this stuff. But remember, reality shows condense a week's worth of intereaction and confrontation between upwards of a dozen people into a one or two hour broadcast. That three hour spacewalk would be pretty exciting when they edit it down to five minutes.
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Its not so much single shocks that pose problems (although, yes, many people do claim so). Global warming will pose more problems for people than animals, I would suspect, since our technology effectively stops us from adapting genetically to changes in circumstance - we can harness fire faster than we can grow fur, invent the wheel faster than we can evolve faster running legs, and discover medicines faster than we can evolve immunities. So, when those technologies fail us, we're left even more defenseless than we were to begin with. Very hot summers in many first-world countries lead to power grid failures because of the excessive drain by air conditioning. When that happens, many people are hospitalized or even killed because of the heat. The reverse happens in cold winters. When diseases develop resistance to our medicines, we get epidemics.
It finds a way, but not always fast enough. It's fine and dandy that one species has adapted while the climate changes around us, but how many others couldn't adapt to us fast enough?
I can see them trying to simplify it or automate it or something really dumb.
I don't see Bethesda making a simple RPG system. Morrowind's character system is considerably more complex than Fallout's, and is essentially experience-less.
On the contrary, I'm more worried about Bethesda bogging down Fallout's character system, since it's a very simple and streamlined system considering its depth.
Other dinosaurs also didn't live long. I've seen estimates that large sauropods didn't live over 30 to 50.
There's another reason they didn't evolve intelligence enough to escape their own destruction, as well. They fell into a lifestyle that didn't require it. Humans became intelligent partially because we didn't really have much else going for us. We weren't fast enough to catch prey, we didn't have furr to stay warm at night or dry in the rain, we didn't have the size to discourage predators or the strength to steal kills from them.
Dinosaurs have other things, though. Sauropods are fucking huge. They don't have to be smart, they're just plain big enough that very few other animals would mess with them. T.rex had its jaws, raptors had their claws and speed, hadrosaurs probably had a herd structure, stegosaurs, ceratopsians, and ankylosaurs had armor and weapons.
Herbivores don't really need intelligence. In fact, they're probably better off if they attack on reflex. The time they take to think things over could get them killed. Instead, like a horse, they see movement in their peripheral vision, and they kick you in the stomach. Good for the horse, bad for an unwary farm hand. Carnivores that have the sort of natural armament that tyranosaurs or raptors had only need intelligence on par with a canine or feline to be successful in hunting. More intelligence means more engergy being poured into the brain and not into other things.
Am I off-base here?
Well, sorta yes and sorta no. There's argument both ways on the warm blooded/cold blooded issue. There's no general consensus either way. The evidence goes in different directions, and I don't really see anything here that would break the camel's back. (granted IANAP either)
Cold blooded animals do have a larger portion of their energy intake available for growth, but they also typically eat less, owing ot their inability to maintain the levels of activity a warm blooded predator can, grow slower because of that lower food intake, and live much longer. I don't know why on the last count, but a large tortoise can live well over 100 or 150 years, but the only land mammals that can survive over 70 without the aid of modern medicine are elephants.
T.rex grows very fast, but also (by modern standards) has a very short life span wether it's warm or cold blooded. Maybe its cold blooded and commits a great deal of energy to growth, maybe its warm blooded and has a monumental food intake - think of the size of a sauropod. Wether it hunted or scavenged them, even one dead sauropod could fuel this sort of growth in a group of T.rex for some time.
There's enough food there either way.
I think the team at Bethesda has their work cut out for them. This is mostly because there is almost nothing that they can do that will make the Fallout fans happy.
On the other hand, the way thins were looking, Black Isle couldn't make them happy either. I remember the rather heated feedback that Black Isle got, first when they said that Fallout 3 would have 3D graphics (although it would still take place in a 2D space like Fallou 1 and 2 did), and later when they wanted to make the combat real-time.
After that, they wanted to balance certain things. Balance is supposed to be a good thing, but the community hated it for some reason. I was stopped reading NMA-fallout.com's forums after the response to a Black Isle member mused about reducing the bonus from the Gifted trait so it would be an actual tradeoff like it was intended to be, and not a freebie.
Just about every new idea thought of - improved science skills, weapon creation/modification, decan and repair, more limited resources in the game world, even more grass on the ground brought some amount of backlash. I just don't think anything short of a remake of Fallout 1 will satisfy many of the hardcore fans.
I can think of a thousand things Bathesda can do wrong with Fallout 3, but the existing fanbase is too firmly set with the original engine. They have to realize that without renovating the game at just about every level, it won't go anywhere. An original-engine game would sell a couple hundred copies to the hardcore fans, but even the bulk of the original fanbase has moved on to more modern things. What the most vocal part of the Fallout community seems to want just isn't a viable game in 2004, especially not with the modding tools available for Fallout and Fallout 2.
Actually, their prey would most likely have been hadrosaurs and the like, wether they were hunters first or second. Sauropods were the elephants of their time. All evidence suggests that nobody messed with an adult unless it was sick or injured, and even then at thier own peril. I've seen pictures of a fossil allosaurus crushed to death under a young sauropod that didn't even stand as tall as it did and had a broken back. However, as with most herd animals, within their range, there'd usually be one or two fairly recent corpses laying around for the taking, and nobody's better at taking than T.rex.
I'm trying to find a link that isn't on a children's site. The major reason was speed. They couldn't move as fast as most bipedal herbivourous dinosaurds could. Some claims have been made that sauropods are about the same speed, and other that T.rex was faster.
Those tails coud easily break the sound barrier by turning their bodies. A monitor lizard can break a man's legs or back with their tail just by twisting their body slightly, and they're generally smaller than humans. Sauropods are much larger than T.rex, and even on the conservative measurement of things, the tips of their tails could break the sound barrier. If they were warm blooded, then that's even worse for the T.rex.
A swipe of the tail could crush their rib cage, snap their neck, break their legs, or crush their skull. Getting in close, they have to deal with getting their feet stepped on (broken legs and feet are generally terminal injuries for a hunter), and once they attack, there's the very real danger of the sauropod falling over on them, either a misstep while trying to flee, tripping over the T.rex itself, or intentionally rolling over the much smaller predator.
It comes down to the scale of a lion attacking a matriarch elephant. A lion *could* certainly survive taking one bite out of an elephant every day, but it wouldn't survive regular encounters with elephants for very long.
Scavengers don't have to wait. All they have to do is smell. There's always carrion to be found.
Lions are quite adept scavengers. They make relatively few large kills themselves (especailly lone males), but pretty much have their pick of kills from other large cats, hyenas, and wild dogs. Hyenas, on the other hand, despite common belief, are the truely fearsome hunters of the region. They have one of the higest success rates in hunting of any carnivore. So do the African wild dogs for that matter. Neither one, however, is very good at keeping their kills when a pride of lions happens by. Cheetahs have the same problem. They're very good at catching their own prey, but very bad at keeping it. Leopards particularly will steal their kills at every turn.
Herbivores have an easier time growing fast, though, since they can eat just about everything around them, and generally don't have to fight their food to the death. Which brings me back to my scavenger point: This is another big of evidence that T.rex was at least partially a scavenger, especially with the sheer size of animals like sauropods. With herds of sauropods around, you'd expect a couple fifty-ton corpses laying around at any given time. That's more than enough to fuel that sort of growth in a large scavenger.
Which is part of my point that I do believe they were at least partially scavengers. Parts of sauropod bones have been found inside of T.rex skeletons. It would be like a pride of lions going after a healthy bull elephant if they killed it themselves. The cost in injury is far more than the food is worth.
Also, most of the recent research I've seen suggests that T.rex were pack hunters, or at least family-group hunters (adult mother, adolescents, and immature offspring). Their size doesn't really suggest they'd be sole hunters in itself, since by scale, they're not that much larger than much of their prey, and probably somewhat slower.
T-Rex could have simply scare away most other predators
I've read that lions will steal kills this way, as well. Some prides of lions almost never made their own kills, but instead waited for hyenas or wild dogs to make a kill, and then moved in. They're a bit bigger than most other animals want to mess with, so they have a good success rate doing this.
Scavenging mammals often will, but then again, so will most carnivorous mammals (watch a dog or cat eat grass sometime) if they're not getting enough meat. I think that's more a mammal thing, though. T.rex doesn't have the kind of teeth a canine or feline does, so I doubt it ate plants even to supplement its diet.
There have been a lot of people who believe that T.rex was a scavenger for a variety of reasons. They're clearly able to kill by sheer size, but I find it reasonable that that wasn't their main survival strategy.
A sparsely populated scavenger, particularly one that could still kill smaller prey (of course, by "small" in this case I'm still talking about things the size of a Buick) would have a much easier job eating that much.
Also, remember that the animal's their eating (wether scavenged or hunted) were as large, and in some cases much larger, than they were. A dead sauropod could likely feed several T.rex for some time after the kill, in the same way that a wolf pack can spend several days eating a large moose.
Frankly, I don't think that's a good idea. It would be one thing if he'd made the worm himself. At least then he would have marketable skills in programming and/or security. However, he just took the code to an existing virus and changed it in a very minor way. All this guy's got going for him right now is malicious intent, plagiarism, and a felony conviction. He's not going to be the one cleaning coffee spills out of my keyboard.
Would you prefer he used all those cards to buy himself a small continent?
All this idiot did was make a few changes to somebody else's virus
Which makes him getting caught even worse. Had he actually written the virus, he would be able to get a job in computer secuirty after his sentence, like so many other hackers have. But, since he just took somebody else's work and made fairly transparent changes to it, he's got a few extra marks on him besides the "convicted felon" thing:
1. Plagist/code thief - not looking at a job programming, I think, if he can't write his own code.
2. Lame script kiddie - Had he made the virus, he would at least have potentially marketable skills. However, since he just rereleased an existing virus, he only wins for malicious intent, and I sure wouldn't want to be his administrator.
I don't know. Morrowind didn't let you pursue an entire lifetime. After you finish the main quest, nothing you do really effects things anymore. You can kill half of Vvardenfel, and people still hole you in abject awe. Plus, there are only two RPGs on the Xbox that I consider worth anthing (Morrowind and KOTOR), so it doesn't have to be revolutionary, if you ask me. Just good enough for me to unplug the PS2 for a couple weeks.
Don't forget obesity. That's big on the fear list these days, and has probably actually killed more people than bees, nuclear war, terrorism, or France.
Well, if you consider a 50-year-old conspiracy theory news, I can't say I'm sorry.
The times are local time - wherever you are. The shower runs 24-7 for several days. Just go out at the darkest time of night and hope there aren't clouds.
The article says "as many as 200 meteors per hour", so:
200 meteors/3600 seconds = 1 meteor/18 seconds
So roughly 18 seconds per meteor. The reason they use per hour is that with something so random, the time between any two is wildly variable, and you need a large sample to get accurate rates. Just some statistical ass-covering, I guess.
As has been mentioned before, most of the competitors won't stop with the end of the competition. Many of them have far more than the $10 million already invested in their craft, and all are looking towards some kind of commercial application because they sure won't make a profit off the winnings. I've said before that the X-prize itself would be more of an advertising token than a cash prize. When a few of these companies start selling a product a few years from now, one of them will get to put "Winner of the X-Prize for private spaceflight" on their billboards, and the rest won't.
Three hours would bore me, and I'm interested in this stuff. But remember, reality shows condense a week's worth of intereaction and confrontation between upwards of a dozen people into a one or two hour broadcast. That three hour spacewalk would be pretty exciting when they edit it down to five minutes.