Ceres, Vega, etc. A number of asteroids are spherical.
The Moon is not a planet because it doesn't dominate it's orbital slot around the sun, although sometimes the Earth/Moon system is called a "double planet" because the moon has a profound effect on the earth (they both in fact orbit around a point about 2000 miles below the earth's surface - halfway from the crust to the core, approximately). However, larger moons around the gas giants don't evenget that much distinction because they have negligble effect on their parent planet, which outsizes them hundrds of times over.
This guy attacks lots of layman's arguments against Pluto as a planet, but he COMPLETELY igores THE KEY argument among SCIENTISTS (the people who actually get to say wether it's a planet or not) against both Pluto and Sedna as planets: They DO NOT have planetary orbits. They both have cometary orbits. Plus, Pluto and its moon Charon are known to be composed of the same material as comets, and Sedna is strongly believed to be. They're freaking big comets, but they're still comets.
Go to Saginaw. The police here said the going rate was about $10. The undercover police officers even said some men paid (successfully) with stacks of quarters, and attempts at barter are often successful.
I know somebody who had one of those in the 80's. Expensive as hell, too. Also hard to work, although we found that spinning ourselves around on rotating bar stools for a few minutes would put us into a half-unconcious state that worked quite well for the system. They called it an ESP kit, but now that I know more about electronics, it was really a stripped down EEG rigged up to the potentiometer speed control of a standard off-the-shelf slotcar racetrack. The lower your EEG readings, the faster it went. The higher they went, the slower the car went.
The highpoint of that is that those people would eventually all die of starvation, or be forced back into the real world to eat and shattering their illusions.
Even when the virtual world becomes able to feed you, it'll still cost money (electricity, and whatever nourishment it pumps into you), and it'll work just like a drug addiction. It'll give you pleasure, but it'll drain you financially until you can no longer afford it, but need it to function.
It's probably a good thing, if you look at it from an unethical, amoral, and sadistic point of view. Modern medicine has removed most of the selective pressure from our species. Look at the number of people wearing corrective eyewear now, compared to 50 to 100 years ago. Probably 2/3 of my classmates wear glasses or contacts. Five hundred years ago, we would have stepped on a snake, fallen down a well, or wandered into a bear's den by this age; but modern science keeps us alive and breeding up more blind people.
Mechanical limbs would certainly be an eventual goal, but even in the meantime, it could be used to control electric wheelchairs. I imagine my uncle Danny would have a much less painful life if he didn't have to drag himself around in his wheelchair like he does (he only has full control of his right leg, none of his left, and limited control of his right shoulder, so he can't control an electric wheelchair, but he can maneuver one with his good leg).
That's what they thought, and why it was so easy for people to try the game. But the game was more than just an audiovisual game, it directly effected their brains, releasing a powerful surge of pleasure (complete with suddenly relaxing muscles, dialating pupils, and a heavy sigh - sort of an electronic orgasm, the way the actors portrayed it) when you got the disk things into the wierd conical wormlike things.
If you've read Richter 10, or The Terminal Man, or even read about the experiments with hooking the pleasure centers of a rat's brain up to a button, you'd know the addictive power that that can have.
A rat hooked up to the aforementioned device will eventuall stop eating, drinking, and will ignore receptive female rats to push the button repeatedly, because the electrical jolt to the brain's pleasure centers produces a far stronger pleasure than any normal stimulus ever can.
In The Terminal Man, the guy's brain eventually learned to manufacture false seizures to trigger the same sort of electrical impulses from his implant.
In Richter 10, many people became endophin addicts when their bodies learned to produce headaches on demand to trigger endorphin rushes from their anti-migraine implants.
The Game was the same sort of thing, while holodecks were just glorified video games - they certainly produced pleasure, and anything that produces pleasure can prove addictive, and the people in Star Trek clearly have to have a level of self control to prevent that; but The Game operated directly on the brain, and could produce far greater feelings of pleasure than is possible normally, and thus far harder to resist.
I know you meant it as a joke, but I'm in an anal-retentive mood today, so I have to pick at it.
The game is controlled by brainwaves, but the input is still "old fashioned" screen and speakers. The brainwaves are only output, and are read by one of those caps that psychology majors like to stick on your head and plug into a suitcase to make you think they're doing something important when in fact, it's the student inteviewing you who is the subject of some ingeniously designed experiment.
The doubleclick ads would still inundate you, but they'd be on screen. You'd just have to tune your brainwaves properly to click the X and close them. Maybe the ad companies could rig up a way to deliver a mild electric shock to your nipples every time you closed an ad, though, so eventually we'd be conditioned not to close them.
It's open source (GPL) so if it doesn't work, you can fix it.
Am I the only one struck by a bit of irony here? You spend all day looking for a compiler, then you download it, and in order for it to work... you have you recompile it.
I call it the "self-proliferating directory" system.
Its based on a storage unit I call a "directory." A directory usually starts when I spill food on the carpet, and throw a book or something over it to cover it up. When I have something that needs storage, I put it on an existing directory.
The "self-proliferating" part comes into play when a directory reaches about four to six feet tall. By that time, it usually collapses, at which point I sort of shove it around until it forms several smaller directories.
Things that don't get stacked well are kept in a large directory between the couch and the wall.
I've never lost a thing using this system. It's all in this room... somewhere...
It's also never stopped the aforementioned "respectable" from lining up around the block. I remember an editorial in my local news paper discussing a series of polls conducted among its readers on wether they felt pornography should be illegal, and another six months later on wether they used pornographic materials (keeping in mind they do log the phone numbers of the people who phone in to take part in these polls).
A fairly high portion (like 80%) of the respondents to the second poll had taken part in the first. A vast majority of those, over 90%, had said pornography should be illegal in the first poll, but well over half had admitted in the second poll to using pornographic material.
Obviously, there's a considerable number of people in this sample that use porn, but will tell you it's wrong if you ask (and I'll bet that at least some of those that denied looking at porn lied), because there's a social and religious stigma attached to pornography.
The paper's done simmilar paired polls, usually separated by several weeks or months, that show the same overlap - people who say Harry Potter books are anti-Christian, but read them; people who say evolution violates their religion and destroys morality, but believe in it; people who say that lack of religious devotion is destroying our youth, but havn't been to church in a decade.
People say gaming is dangerous, turns kids into ticking time bombs, teaches us to kill and hate and kill dogs to have orgasms and such because that's a popular thing to say. Games are a popular thing to attack. Certainly, some of them believe what they're saying, but I think a lot of them are saying it to be popular like all those famous people who get on TV and make so much noise about how bad video games are.
They haven't done one with gaming, but I think I'll send a letter to the editor asking them to, rather than repolling people on who they're going to vote for every day. I have a feeling it'll line up the same way.
Stop worrying about it, and talk to your peers, not the establishment.
Our "peers" are not neccessarily on our side either. The Baby Boomers and Gen-X'ers have taught their children, and their children are our peers. Even most of those that DO play games don't see anything beyond the barrel of their rocket launcher, and they feed back into the existing stereotypes of gam(ing/ers).
and you have to be a Grade-A USDA Prime cut DUMBASS to download it. Most of the times I've seen it, the file size is under a megabyte, and titled something like "DIABLO 2 ISO.exe" or "FREE STOLEN XXX BRITTANY SPEARS FUCKS PARIS HILTON OMG IT PWNZ0R.exe" or the like.
Unless they've gotten suddenly smarter, and started imbedding it in an ISO image along with dummy files to look like the actual game download, they're not going to catch the majority of pirates, who are smart enough to know that UT2k4 isn't going to download in five minutes.
Actually, there is a need to tailor gameplay strategy to avoid the stuff. There are a number of events in the game that can result in you accidentally becomming exposed (hang around Anglea Bishop too much, for example), there are several factions you will litterally have to gun your way through if you're not careful in refusing to buy it.
As to why a player would shoot up with it to begin with: The game never says anything about its adverse effects until long after you've been exposed (and even then, it's a hard event to work). Before its existence becomes really apparant, a new player would already be well aware of drugs like Psycho, RadAWay, Mentat, and Buffout, and would know that a lot of times, suffering out withdrawal is more than worth it for the temporary gains. The game does tell you that using jet heightens the senses, increases strength, speeds mental processes, dulls pain, speeds metabolism, improves poion and radiation resistances. The potential as a superdrug is pretty impressive, and the game appears to establish a pro-drug logic before you encounter Jet. By the time you realize your mistake, it's too late.
Actually, it's a blatant example of #1. They took an unheard-of (in th US anyway) brand, replaced it with a world-famous brand, and whored it out to the masses. The same goes for most of the non-platformer Mario games - Dr. Mario was just rebranding a Tetris variant with the Mario name, for example. Mario Golf, maybe Super Smash Brothers, and the Mario RPG games would fall into #2, though.
Paraphrasing it in terms of a common AIDS test I did some statistics work on in a class once:
The test has a 1/10,000 false-positive rate. It's very rare that anybody without AIDS will be misreported as having AIDS.
That looks very good, no?
Now think of it this way: Out of hundred positives, furthur (more expensive) testing relveals about ten true positives.
So, if you test HIV positive, and go through the emotional distress of emergency testing and treatment, there's a 90% chance you never had the disease to begin with.
Now. Let's be conservative, and say this only works for US citizens. That's over 300,000,000 people. There are maybe a few dozen terrorists in that 300,000,000. For the sake of argument, let's say 100. For the sake of argument, we'll say a 1/10,000 false positive - which most government standards considers a phenomenally successful test rate. That's 0.00003% true positive, with a.01% false positive..01/.00003=.03 chance that a positive is correct, and a 97% chance that they're wasting money.
On top of this, this isn't like the AIDS test. There's nothing in a person that tells you he's a terrorist, so you can never get 100% detection on true-positives, so while you're detaining a thousand passengers a day for a one in thirty thousand shot at catching a terrorist, terrorists are slipping through the net every day.
Re:It's Open Mic Night at the Astrophysics Lounge!
on
Melting Europa
·
· Score: 1
If we caught it the first time. Take this for consideration:
A few stray E. Coli hitch a ride to Europa. The probe doesn't find any life whatsoever, since there was nothing there, and the E. coli we sent there by mistake are too few to register. But, as all these missions inevitably do, it does provoke questions that lead to a follow up mission.
The follow up mission happens about ten or fifteen years later. Those E. coli have had that time (at three generations per hour, if they continue to divide at the rate on earth, this is about 250,000 to 400,000 generations) in a very stressfull environment (which is known to promotes mutation in life "as we know it") that is saturated with radiation above and beyond anything on Earth (which some bacteria can still survive, and which promotes more mutation).
It's entirely possible that what we find the second time would not look like anything we're familiar with at first glance, although 250,000 generations probably isn't enough to completely erase signs of the genetic link between E. coli and the Europan strain. The first time we find the life, we'll think it's native, and since we didn't expect to find anything substantial after the first mission, the second probe only had rudimentary biological facilities, so all we know for sure is that there is a strain of prokaryote on Europa with simmilar structures to bacteria from Earth.
So, the third mission is sent - another ten or fifteen years pass - to do a genetic analysis of the Europan strain. By this time, the bacteria have had twenty to thirty years (500,000 to 750,000 generations) to adapt, and fifteen years set in our minds as ET, before we realize that we contaminated Europa.
The same thing could be going on on Mars even now - or could have started decades ago, for all we know: Bacteria from Earth, carried by mistake on our spacecraft, struggling for survival. They'll only start to spread and be discovered after they've mutated in some way that makes them able to thrive in the environment (and then, they need time to spread to where the newer probes are, since none of them have landed in the same areas as the old Viking probes).
Xenogears: On one hand, it has the technology-destroying-mankind undertones that Squaresoft put into every game they made, but at the same time, it's pretty suggestive on the religious plane too.
The basic backstory: Very ancient civilization makes giant robots for war. The largest of these robots ends the war, and destroys most of said civilization. Less ancient civilization discovers this robot centuries later, and worships it, calling it God. God and man live together in paradise, and God provides everything man could ever desire. Then, man creates "giants" (more robots) in mimicry of God. God is angered, and war breaks out. When God fears man will destroy him, he hides man's giants from him and flees into the sea. Modern civilization finds the giants, remembers stories about God from the past, and starts fighting over access to the ruins where God sealed the giants, trying to find and control God.
And don't think it's an accident that they include numerous references from the bible.
Fallout II: It doesn't do a great job of handling slavery and prostitution, which are major themes in the game, but it does an impressive job with addiction.
A major part of the game is a drug called Jet. When you use it, you get a brief boost to your character. However, when it wears off, your stats drop below their normal levels, and you need another dose to attain normal levels. When that wears off, they drop furthur. If you ignore the withdrawal for too long, your stats continue to drop until your character becomes useless, so you need to keep getting more and more jet the longer you're addicted.
There are others, but most handle serious issues in a very child-like way. While they're not bad games because of this, in my opinion, they can't be considered serious handlings of real problems.
If you want a game on addiction, try out Fallout II. When you get to the Den, buy some jet and shoot up. Jet has a nearly 100% addiction rate, and unlike all the other drugs in Fallout, the withdrawal effects are severely impairing - plus, they don't go away.
Once you're addicted to jet, most of your game effort will go towards getting enough jet to keep your stats from dropping multiple points. The first turn of every combat sequence will be devoted to using jet and getting your stats up to their normal levels instead of attacking. You need to take a few shots before NPC dialogs for the same reasons. And all the time, you're driving your karma down to the point that only the jet dealers will talk to you anymore.
If you can't get through the quest to find the jet antidote (which requires high doctor skills and intelligence, neither of which you're likely to be able to maintain while on jet), eventually you'll be forced to start killing farmers, homeless people, and merchants in random encounters in hopes that they drop some jet, or enough money to buy some.
I accidentally made a female elf character in an MMORPG. I was stuck with a clearly masculine name on a clearly feminine character for the longest damn time, so I just told people I was a crossdresser.
Nah. Blackjack.
At least with Infinium, if you time it right, you can cash in on their pump-and-dump. The company doesn't have to succeed for its stock to be profitable, provided you're not hung up on morals and ethics and laws and dumb shit like that.
Heck, if you're really lucky, you can short it and then cover the sell at a nickle a share when everybody realizes they've been had.
Played Duke 3d in middle school? Hell I was in middle school when DNF was ANNOUCNED. I'll be out of college in a year. I have a bet going - if DNF comes out before I graduate, I have to buy copies for all my friends (wether or not they win in that case is left as an excercise for the reader).
'Focused [game-only] publishers will always lead...
The focused [game-only] publisher in question needs to put out the game they've been leading for seven years now before they talk about leading the market ahead of the conglomerates.
Slashdot Mirror
Ceres, Vega, etc. A number of asteroids are spherical.
The Moon is not a planet because it doesn't dominate it's orbital slot around the sun, although sometimes the Earth/Moon system is called a "double planet" because the moon has a profound effect on the earth (they both in fact orbit around a point about 2000 miles below the earth's surface - halfway from the crust to the core, approximately). However, larger moons around the gas giants don't evenget that much distinction because they have negligble effect on their parent planet, which outsizes them hundrds of times over.
This guy attacks lots of layman's arguments against Pluto as a planet, but he COMPLETELY igores THE KEY argument among SCIENTISTS (the people who actually get to say wether it's a planet or not) against both Pluto and Sedna as planets: They DO NOT have planetary orbits. They both have cometary orbits. Plus, Pluto and its moon Charon are known to be composed of the same material as comets, and Sedna is strongly believed to be. They're freaking big comets, but they're still comets.
Go to Saginaw. The police here said the going rate was about $10. The undercover police officers even said some men paid (successfully) with stacks of quarters, and attempts at barter are often successful.
It's been tried. He's had three of them specially built, but he's been unable to control any of them.
I know somebody who had one of those in the 80's. Expensive as hell, too. Also hard to work, although we found that spinning ourselves around on rotating bar stools for a few minutes would put us into a half-unconcious state that worked quite well for the system. They called it an ESP kit, but now that I know more about electronics, it was really a stripped down EEG rigged up to the potentiometer speed control of a standard off-the-shelf slotcar racetrack. The lower your EEG readings, the faster it went. The higher they went, the slower the car went.
The highpoint of that is that those people would eventually all die of starvation, or be forced back into the real world to eat and shattering their illusions.
Even when the virtual world becomes able to feed you, it'll still cost money (electricity, and whatever nourishment it pumps into you), and it'll work just like a drug addiction. It'll give you pleasure, but it'll drain you financially until you can no longer afford it, but need it to function.
It's probably a good thing, if you look at it from an unethical, amoral, and sadistic point of view. Modern medicine has removed most of the selective pressure from our species. Look at the number of people wearing corrective eyewear now, compared to 50 to 100 years ago. Probably 2/3 of my classmates wear glasses or contacts. Five hundred years ago, we would have stepped on a snake, fallen down a well, or wandered into a bear's den by this age; but modern science keeps us alive and breeding up more blind people.
Mechanical limbs would certainly be an eventual goal, but even in the meantime, it could be used to control electric wheelchairs. I imagine my uncle Danny would have a much less painful life if he didn't have to drag himself around in his wheelchair like he does (he only has full control of his right leg, none of his left, and limited control of his right shoulder, so he can't control an electric wheelchair, but he can maneuver one with his good leg).
That's what they thought, and why it was so easy for people to try the game. But the game was more than just an audiovisual game, it directly effected their brains, releasing a powerful surge of pleasure (complete with suddenly relaxing muscles, dialating pupils, and a heavy sigh - sort of an electronic orgasm, the way the actors portrayed it) when you got the disk things into the wierd conical wormlike things.
If you've read Richter 10, or The Terminal Man, or even read about the experiments with hooking the pleasure centers of a rat's brain up to a button, you'd know the addictive power that that can have.
A rat hooked up to the aforementioned device will eventuall stop eating, drinking, and will ignore receptive female rats to push the button repeatedly, because the electrical jolt to the brain's pleasure centers produces a far stronger pleasure than any normal stimulus ever can.
In The Terminal Man, the guy's brain eventually learned to manufacture false seizures to trigger the same sort of electrical impulses from his implant.
In Richter 10, many people became endophin addicts when their bodies learned to produce headaches on demand to trigger endorphin rushes from their anti-migraine implants.
The Game was the same sort of thing, while holodecks were just glorified video games - they certainly produced pleasure, and anything that produces pleasure can prove addictive, and the people in Star Trek clearly have to have a level of self control to prevent that; but The Game operated directly on the brain, and could produce far greater feelings of pleasure than is possible normally, and thus far harder to resist.
I know you meant it as a joke, but I'm in an anal-retentive mood today, so I have to pick at it.
The game is controlled by brainwaves, but the input is still "old fashioned" screen and speakers. The brainwaves are only output, and are read by one of those caps that psychology majors like to stick on your head and plug into a suitcase to make you think they're doing something important when in fact, it's the student inteviewing you who is the subject of some ingeniously designed experiment.
The doubleclick ads would still inundate you, but they'd be on screen. You'd just have to tune your brainwaves properly to click the X and close them. Maybe the ad companies could rig up a way to deliver a mild electric shock to your nipples every time you closed an ad, though, so eventually we'd be conditioned not to close them.
It's open source (GPL) so if it doesn't work, you can fix it.
Am I the only one struck by a bit of irony here? You spend all day looking for a compiler, then you download it, and in order for it to work... you have you recompile it.
I call it the "self-proliferating directory" system.
Its based on a storage unit I call a "directory." A directory usually starts when I spill food on the carpet, and throw a book or something over it to cover it up. When I have something that needs storage, I put it on an existing directory.
The "self-proliferating" part comes into play when a directory reaches about four to six feet tall. By that time, it usually collapses, at which point I sort of shove it around until it forms several smaller directories.
Things that don't get stacked well are kept in a large directory between the couch and the wall.
I've never lost a thing using this system. It's all in this room... somewhere...
It's also never stopped the aforementioned "respectable" from lining up around the block. I remember an editorial in my local news paper discussing a series of polls conducted among its readers on wether they felt pornography should be illegal, and another six months later on wether they used pornographic materials (keeping in mind they do log the phone numbers of the people who phone in to take part in these polls).
A fairly high portion (like 80%) of the respondents to the second poll had taken part in the first. A vast majority of those, over 90%, had said pornography should be illegal in the first poll, but well over half had admitted in the second poll to using pornographic material.
Obviously, there's a considerable number of people in this sample that use porn, but will tell you it's wrong if you ask (and I'll bet that at least some of those that denied looking at porn lied), because there's a social and religious stigma attached to pornography.
The paper's done simmilar paired polls, usually separated by several weeks or months, that show the same overlap - people who say Harry Potter books are anti-Christian, but read them; people who say evolution violates their religion and destroys morality, but believe in it; people who say that lack of religious devotion is destroying our youth, but havn't been to church in a decade.
People say gaming is dangerous, turns kids into ticking time bombs, teaches us to kill and hate and kill dogs to have orgasms and such because that's a popular thing to say. Games are a popular thing to attack. Certainly, some of them believe what they're saying, but I think a lot of them are saying it to be popular like all those famous people who get on TV and make so much noise about how bad video games are.
They haven't done one with gaming, but I think I'll send a letter to the editor asking them to, rather than repolling people on who they're going to vote for every day. I have a feeling it'll line up the same way.
Stop worrying about it, and talk to your peers, not the establishment.
Our "peers" are not neccessarily on our side either. The Baby Boomers and Gen-X'ers have taught their children, and their children are our peers. Even most of those that DO play games don't see anything beyond the barrel of their rocket launcher, and they feed back into the existing stereotypes of gam(ing/ers).
and you have to be a Grade-A USDA Prime cut DUMBASS to download it. Most of the times I've seen it, the file size is under a megabyte, and titled something like "DIABLO 2 ISO.exe" or "FREE STOLEN XXX BRITTANY SPEARS FUCKS PARIS HILTON OMG IT PWNZ0R.exe" or the like.
Unless they've gotten suddenly smarter, and started imbedding it in an ISO image along with dummy files to look like the actual game download, they're not going to catch the majority of pirates, who are smart enough to know that UT2k4 isn't going to download in five minutes.
Actually, there is a need to tailor gameplay strategy to avoid the stuff. There are a number of events in the game that can result in you accidentally becomming exposed (hang around Anglea Bishop too much, for example), there are several factions you will litterally have to gun your way through if you're not careful in refusing to buy it.
As to why a player would shoot up with it to begin with: The game never says anything about its adverse effects until long after you've been exposed (and even then, it's a hard event to work). Before its existence becomes really apparant, a new player would already be well aware of drugs like Psycho, RadAWay, Mentat, and Buffout, and would know that a lot of times, suffering out withdrawal is more than worth it for the temporary gains. The game does tell you that using jet heightens the senses, increases strength, speeds mental processes, dulls pain, speeds metabolism, improves poion and radiation resistances. The potential as a superdrug is pretty impressive, and the game appears to establish a pro-drug logic before you encounter Jet. By the time you realize your mistake, it's too late.
Actually, it's a blatant example of #1. They took an unheard-of (in th US anyway) brand, replaced it with a world-famous brand, and whored it out to the masses. The same goes for most of the non-platformer Mario games - Dr. Mario was just rebranding a Tetris variant with the Mario name, for example. Mario Golf, maybe Super Smash Brothers, and the Mario RPG games would fall into #2, though.
Paraphrasing it in terms of a common AIDS test I did some statistics work on in a class once:
.01% false positive. .01/.00003=.03 chance that a positive is correct, and a 97% chance that they're wasting money.
The test has a 1/10,000 false-positive rate. It's very rare that anybody without AIDS will be misreported as having AIDS.
That looks very good, no?
Now think of it this way: Out of hundred positives, furthur (more expensive) testing relveals about ten true positives.
So, if you test HIV positive, and go through the emotional distress of emergency testing and treatment, there's a 90% chance you never had the disease to begin with.
Now. Let's be conservative, and say this only works for US citizens. That's over 300,000,000 people. There are maybe a few dozen terrorists in that 300,000,000. For the sake of argument, let's say 100. For the sake of argument, we'll say a 1/10,000 false positive - which most government standards considers a phenomenally successful test rate. That's 0.00003% true positive, with a
On top of this, this isn't like the AIDS test. There's nothing in a person that tells you he's a terrorist, so you can never get 100% detection on true-positives, so while you're detaining a thousand passengers a day for a one in thirty thousand shot at catching a terrorist, terrorists are slipping through the net every day.
If we caught it the first time. Take this for consideration:
A few stray E. Coli hitch a ride to Europa. The probe doesn't find any life whatsoever, since there was nothing there, and the E. coli we sent there by mistake are too few to register. But, as all these missions inevitably do, it does provoke questions that lead to a follow up mission.
The follow up mission happens about ten or fifteen years later. Those E. coli have had that time (at three generations per hour, if they continue to divide at the rate on earth, this is about 250,000 to 400,000 generations) in a very stressfull environment (which is known to promotes mutation in life "as we know it") that is saturated with radiation above and beyond anything on Earth (which some bacteria can still survive, and which promotes more mutation).
It's entirely possible that what we find the second time would not look like anything we're familiar with at first glance, although 250,000 generations probably isn't enough to completely erase signs of the genetic link between E. coli and the Europan strain. The first time we find the life, we'll think it's native, and since we didn't expect to find anything substantial after the first mission, the second probe only had rudimentary biological facilities, so all we know for sure is that there is a strain of prokaryote on Europa with simmilar structures to bacteria from Earth.
So, the third mission is sent - another ten or fifteen years pass - to do a genetic analysis of the Europan strain. By this time, the bacteria have had twenty to thirty years (500,000 to 750,000 generations) to adapt, and fifteen years set in our minds as ET, before we realize that we contaminated Europa.
The same thing could be going on on Mars even now - or could have started decades ago, for all we know: Bacteria from Earth, carried by mistake on our spacecraft, struggling for survival. They'll only start to spread and be discovered after they've mutated in some way that makes them able to thrive in the environment (and then, they need time to spread to where the newer probes are, since none of them have landed in the same areas as the old Viking probes).
Xenogears: On one hand, it has the technology-destroying-mankind undertones that Squaresoft put into every game they made, but at the same time, it's pretty suggestive on the religious plane too. The basic backstory: Very ancient civilization makes giant robots for war. The largest of these robots ends the war, and destroys most of said civilization. Less ancient civilization discovers this robot centuries later, and worships it, calling it God. God and man live together in paradise, and God provides everything man could ever desire. Then, man creates "giants" (more robots) in mimicry of God. God is angered, and war breaks out. When God fears man will destroy him, he hides man's giants from him and flees into the sea. Modern civilization finds the giants, remembers stories about God from the past, and starts fighting over access to the ruins where God sealed the giants, trying to find and control God. And don't think it's an accident that they include numerous references from the bible. Fallout II: It doesn't do a great job of handling slavery and prostitution, which are major themes in the game, but it does an impressive job with addiction. A major part of the game is a drug called Jet. When you use it, you get a brief boost to your character. However, when it wears off, your stats drop below their normal levels, and you need another dose to attain normal levels. When that wears off, they drop furthur. If you ignore the withdrawal for too long, your stats continue to drop until your character becomes useless, so you need to keep getting more and more jet the longer you're addicted. There are others, but most handle serious issues in a very child-like way. While they're not bad games because of this, in my opinion, they can't be considered serious handlings of real problems.
If you want a game on addiction, try out Fallout II. When you get to the Den, buy some jet and shoot up. Jet has a nearly 100% addiction rate, and unlike all the other drugs in Fallout, the withdrawal effects are severely impairing - plus, they don't go away.
Once you're addicted to jet, most of your game effort will go towards getting enough jet to keep your stats from dropping multiple points. The first turn of every combat sequence will be devoted to using jet and getting your stats up to their normal levels instead of attacking. You need to take a few shots before NPC dialogs for the same reasons. And all the time, you're driving your karma down to the point that only the jet dealers will talk to you anymore.
If you can't get through the quest to find the jet antidote (which requires high doctor skills and intelligence, neither of which you're likely to be able to maintain while on jet), eventually you'll be forced to start killing farmers, homeless people, and merchants in random encounters in hopes that they drop some jet, or enough money to buy some.
I accidentally made a female elf character in an MMORPG. I was stuck with a clearly masculine name on a clearly feminine character for the longest damn time, so I just told people I was a crossdresser.
Nah. Blackjack. At least with Infinium, if you time it right, you can cash in on their pump-and-dump. The company doesn't have to succeed for its stock to be profitable, provided you're not hung up on morals and ethics and laws and dumb shit like that. Heck, if you're really lucky, you can short it and then cover the sell at a nickle a share when everybody realizes they've been had.
It's 5.80 now, but the split's already taken place, back in January. The article says "the second of the year."
... the P/E ratio on this stock.
Played Duke 3d in middle school? Hell I was in middle school when DNF was ANNOUCNED. I'll be out of college in a year. I have a bet going - if DNF comes out before I graduate, I have to buy copies for all my friends (wether or not they win in that case is left as an excercise for the reader).
'Focused [game-only] publishers will always lead ...
The focused [game-only] publisher in question needs to put out the game they've been leading for seven years now before they talk about leading the market ahead of the conglomerates.