They got farther than Somalia. They navigated the Cape of Good Hope and made it at least as far as Mali, which is just a quick loop away from Spain. There's even evidence that smaller expeditions made it along the Aleutians and to the northern Pacific coast of North America (evidenced by Chinese boat disign, the presence of wooden weapons and armor in tribes that had metalurgial knowledge, and even a strongly Oriental appearance of the inhabitants found there when Europeans arrived).
If they chose to continue to Europe, and met with resistance (as they likely would have), they had more than enough power to steamroll anything the weak feudal states there could muster against them.
Also, China did not conquer or colonize. They only went in, asked for gifts to the Emperor (with their massive ships that dwarfed anything Europe would make until the 1600's pointing tripple-rows of cannons at the locals) as they did from everybody that sought relations with China, traded for gold, silver, or novelties (including everything from tea to Giraffes), and left.
They stopped because of a major shift in Chinese ideology from an outgoing civilization that sought to establish strong merchant relations with other lands to a paranoid and isolationist country that holed themselves up behind massive walls and took on the mindset (fueled by the huge number of aggressive uncivilized tribes they found around them, especially the Mongols) that they were an island of civilization awash in a sea of barbarity. From then right up until the latter half of the 20th century, China basically took on the mindset that people who wanted what China had to offer, they better come to China, because China didn't need or want to go elsewhere for what they needed or wanted.
Can anybody remember the name of that old movie?
on
NASA's New Space Wheels
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Actually, science tends to drive science fiction - it's just that the general population is exposed to science fiction more than science fact, and the fact side of science spends a long time in the "Will it even work?" stage, where science fiction just skips to the "It works and it's really cool" phase before science gets to the "It works, but it sorta blows up on us most of the time" phase.
Sure, Jules Verne had submarines and spacecraft in his books, but there were actual ideas about space travel and submarine travel years ahead of him, and even a few working submarines. Even Star Trek and Star Wars' faster-than-light technologies were based on speculation on the subject (Star Trek's warp drive was based on the idea that you could somehow shorten the distance between two points, and Star Wars' hyperdrive was based on the idea that space has some underlying level in which distances are compressed, allowing you to travel between two points in real space in fairly short times by jumping back and forth between space and hyperspace)
As for lifting body craft, they're a fairly old idea. People have already mentioned that there were one or two X-plane lifting bodies, and Farscape isn't the only science fiction to have them. Star Trek Enterprise has one in their "history of travel" thing during the theme song.
Back in the 70's, there was a movie loosely inspired by the Apollo 13 mission (although definitely not based on it). In it, an Apollo craft was stranded in orbit, and there were several attempts to rescue the crew. One of them involved a four man lifting-body spacecraft that NASA managed to design, test, and build in a week thanks to the Mystical Magic of Cinema. (If I remember correctly, it was a Soviet Soyuz mission that finally succeeded, though). Can anybody remember the name of the movie? AMC or TCM or some old movie channel played it a few times when the Apollo 13 movie came out, but I haven't seen it since.
The cesium atom is just like the ruby from a ruby laser. There are other components, including, according to the article, at least two OTHER laseres, presumably of the multi-atom variety. So that begs the question: Is it really an accomplishment when you use two lasers to make a WEAKER laser?
Sounds like my cousin's parents. They bought him Carmageddon when it first came out (Take note that this game's box showed a red car with a giagantic saw blade welded to the roof running down a lawyer and an old granny walking her poodle) and then being utterly mortified that the game contained vehicular violence.
Maybe it's because I think all the GTA games after the first one sucked... but I don't remember GTA encouraging you to (In game, let along real life) shoot at passing cars. All it did was make explosions and attract police attention - and police attention is bad. Blow up a few motorists, and you have squadrons of them surrounding you with machine guns - and they have impeccable aim with those things - and then it's game over. Sure, the game rewards blowing up buildings, stealing cars, and beating people up, but (at least if you're playing to accomplish the goals the game sets for you) it tends to punish random acts of stupidity like that.
Bah. Ratings are the only thing they can do. You can't stop them from making something that is very popular and very profitable (key word).
Maybe parents should start suing the pron companies when their daughters get pregnant now. Of course, that's even more rediculous - it's people like me who can't get any in real life that watch porn.
See, the thing is, if you don't like a company or organization, it isn't your option to change the leadership of that company. If you don't like the way your country is run, it's YOUR country. The least you can do is vote, or if you don't have that option, just be glad that guns are very easy to get in nondemocratic countries.
Better watch out. I know a geek who weighs about 350 pounds and claims to have a black belt in STEP UP OUT MAH FACE, BITCH. Must be some kind of new-world martial art.
You buy all four shirts so instead of hiding the pizza and jolt stains, you just put on the next shirt. Or if you're really lazy, just put another one on over top of the stained one.
I know what OS I'M running. But I don't know what one your're running. Yet.
Re:So who's buying the SCO stock the execs are sel
on
SCO Volleys to Red Hat
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· Score: 1
It's more like buying your ex-wife's car so you can leave it sit in the driveway and she can go live in comfortable retirement for the rest of her life.
Darl doesn't give a damn who buys the stock - if IBM has 51% of SCO, he has the cash equivalent of that 51% in his pocket, and it's off to Jamaica for retirement.
SCO logic:
We have lawyers.
You have Linux.
Therefore Linux is in violation of copyright laws and all of its developers and users owe us money.
The major and minor premises are clearly true. The logci is really quite flawless, provided you assume that 6=3 and that that life is, in fact, a box of chocolate.
Microsoft and the RIAA are stupid in the same way every day. Nothing interesting. SCO, on the other hand, finds new ways to be stupid and hold its audience. Maybe Fox should contract these guys to make better TV shows?
If you need to make the connection between war and a game... Anyway, the difference here isn't so much cheating as power playing. The general effect would be like playing a game like Civilization in a situation where one player has a vast technological superiority. Cheating, on the other hand, creates a gap that can't exist normally. It would be the equivalent of Bush growing five hundred feet tall and just stepping on Baghdad.
I fully agree. I don't like either kind, but you're right, the effects of cheating in a Quake or Starcraft or any nonpersistent world game only last the duration of the game. Everyone starts off at the beginning next game. In persistent world games like Everquest, Runescape, or Dransik, the effects of cheating remain forever.
Power playing. I've seen it in all the MMO/persistent world games I've tried. There are people who see that they must win, even if there isn't a winning condition in the game parameters, there is still a certain level of ranking, even if it's informal among the community, where the richest or strongest players are most respected.
The challenge here isn't to be better at Quake, but to be able to cheat the best at Quake, that in itself is a game.
Being the best cheater? Sounds an awful like like the Cold War mentality - "We know HOW to build the Bomb, so let's build it before sombody else does." "We have the Bomb, now let's build more of them than anybody else." "We have lots of Bombs now, we better be ready to use it before somebody else does." Or mabye a bit more like professional wrestling. "Rules not winning it for you? Smack the ref upside the head with a folding chair!"
"It's just a game."
No shit, sherlock? You have no clue how much that sentence ticks me off - enough to make an account just to post this. Football is just a game, maybe I should start sneaking into locker rooms of teams playing against my school and dump strichnine in their gatoraide bottles, or put steel spikes in their jock straps. It's only a game.
I play an online RPG called Dransik, and cheaters have, at periods, been pretty rampant. The first, and most common, kind is bug abuse, which goes largely uncaught because it's nearly impossible to police fully unless the bug being used is one that would be noticed by other players (like bypassing safezones, committing crimes in view of NPC guards without the guards responding, etc). But the worst kind have been "hacers." There's a pretty popular program generally called a "speed hack" that messes with the computer's clock and makes it run faster (not just programs, but the system clock will also advance at nearly double speed). The problem is that, since all client-side operations of just about any game is timed by the CPU clock, this allows a player running the speedhack while playing a game to (depending on the nature of the game) faster unit/character movement, have much faster build/research times, faster rates of fire, faster item/skill use. In Dransik, these programs are used for everything from PKing (especially with ranged weapons - in cunjunction with a speedhack, a strong bow can't be countered except with a speedhack and a strong bow), to hunting (allows characters to outrun fast monsters), to tradeskills (a speedhacking miner, particularly with a macro, can initiate five or six operations before the item lock kicks in to freeze their inventory until the first one completes). Macros are widely used as well, particularly with trade skill bugs. There was a bug with the cooking skill when it was first introduced into the game, and people used macros to gain millions exp in the skill in a matter of minutes - with the regular side effect of crashing the servers (which was used by some people to initiate "timewarps," - where the server reverts to the last backup save - to recover lost items, or just to plain piss people off).
Cheating is nothing more than grief playing.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm assuming you aren't shooting to win the X-prise here? I mean, we WOULD have to bring him back in that case.
Geeze, why did six other people have to go and make the same joke in the twenty seconds it took to type?
Verisign has pulled a suprise victory in the California recall election.
They got farther than Somalia. They navigated the Cape of Good Hope and made it at least as far as Mali, which is just a quick loop away from Spain. There's even evidence that smaller expeditions made it along the Aleutians and to the northern Pacific coast of North America (evidenced by Chinese boat disign, the presence of wooden weapons and armor in tribes that had metalurgial knowledge, and even a strongly Oriental appearance of the inhabitants found there when Europeans arrived). If they chose to continue to Europe, and met with resistance (as they likely would have), they had more than enough power to steamroll anything the weak feudal states there could muster against them. Also, China did not conquer or colonize. They only went in, asked for gifts to the Emperor (with their massive ships that dwarfed anything Europe would make until the 1600's pointing tripple-rows of cannons at the locals) as they did from everybody that sought relations with China, traded for gold, silver, or novelties (including everything from tea to Giraffes), and left. They stopped because of a major shift in Chinese ideology from an outgoing civilization that sought to establish strong merchant relations with other lands to a paranoid and isolationist country that holed themselves up behind massive walls and took on the mindset (fueled by the huge number of aggressive uncivilized tribes they found around them, especially the Mongols) that they were an island of civilization awash in a sea of barbarity. From then right up until the latter half of the 20th century, China basically took on the mindset that people who wanted what China had to offer, they better come to China, because China didn't need or want to go elsewhere for what they needed or wanted.
Actually, science tends to drive science fiction - it's just that the general population is exposed to science fiction more than science fact, and the fact side of science spends a long time in the "Will it even work?" stage, where science fiction just skips to the "It works and it's really cool" phase before science gets to the "It works, but it sorta blows up on us most of the time" phase.
Sure, Jules Verne had submarines and spacecraft in his books, but there were actual ideas about space travel and submarine travel years ahead of him, and even a few working submarines. Even Star Trek and Star Wars' faster-than-light technologies were based on speculation on the subject (Star Trek's warp drive was based on the idea that you could somehow shorten the distance between two points, and Star Wars' hyperdrive was based on the idea that space has some underlying level in which distances are compressed, allowing you to travel between two points in real space in fairly short times by jumping back and forth between space and hyperspace)
As for lifting body craft, they're a fairly old idea. People have already mentioned that there were one or two X-plane lifting bodies, and Farscape isn't the only science fiction to have them. Star Trek Enterprise has one in their "history of travel" thing during the theme song.
Back in the 70's, there was a movie loosely inspired by the Apollo 13 mission (although definitely not based on it). In it, an Apollo craft was stranded in orbit, and there were several attempts to rescue the crew. One of them involved a four man lifting-body spacecraft that NASA managed to design, test, and build in a week thanks to the Mystical Magic of Cinema. (If I remember correctly, it was a Soviet Soyuz mission that finally succeeded, though). Can anybody remember the name of the movie? AMC or TCM or some old movie channel played it a few times when the Apollo 13 movie came out, but I haven't seen it since.
The cesium atom is just like the ruby from a ruby laser. There are other components, including, according to the article, at least two OTHER laseres, presumably of the multi-atom variety. So that begs the question: Is it really an accomplishment when you use two lasers to make a WEAKER laser?
Yeah, because we all know how much the army needs to blow up those goddamn hydrogen nucleii.
Sounds like my cousin's parents. They bought him Carmageddon when it first came out (Take note that this game's box showed a red car with a giagantic saw blade welded to the roof running down a lawyer and an old granny walking her poodle) and then being utterly mortified that the game contained vehicular violence.
Maybe it's because I think all the GTA games after the first one sucked... but I don't remember GTA encouraging you to (In game, let along real life) shoot at passing cars. All it did was make explosions and attract police attention - and police attention is bad. Blow up a few motorists, and you have squadrons of them surrounding you with machine guns - and they have impeccable aim with those things - and then it's game over. Sure, the game rewards blowing up buildings, stealing cars, and beating people up, but (at least if you're playing to accomplish the goals the game sets for you) it tends to punish random acts of stupidity like that.
Bah. Ratings are the only thing they can do. You can't stop them from making something that is very popular and very profitable (key word).
Maybe parents should start suing the pron companies when their daughters get pregnant now. Of course, that's even more rediculous - it's people like me who can't get any in real life that watch porn.
See, the thing is, if you don't like a company or organization, it isn't your option to change the leadership of that company. If you don't like the way your country is run, it's YOUR country. The least you can do is vote, or if you don't have that option, just be glad that guns are very easy to get in nondemocratic countries.
Better watch out. I know a geek who weighs about 350 pounds and claims to have a black belt in STEP UP OUT MAH FACE, BITCH. Must be some kind of new-world martial art.
You buy all four shirts so instead of hiding the pizza and jolt stains, you just put on the next shirt. Or if you're really lazy, just put another one on over top of the stained one.
By the same logic: I have a client who's server isn't working. Maybe I should drive five hours to see what their idiot ITS guys did to it THIS time.
I know what OS I'M running. But I don't know what one your're running. Yet.
It's more like buying your ex-wife's car so you can leave it sit in the driveway and she can go live in comfortable retirement for the rest of her life.
Darl doesn't give a damn who buys the stock - if IBM has 51% of SCO, he has the cash equivalent of that 51% in his pocket, and it's off to Jamaica for retirement.
SCO logic: We have lawyers. You have Linux. Therefore Linux is in violation of copyright laws and all of its developers and users owe us money. The major and minor premises are clearly true. The logci is really quite flawless, provided you assume that 6=3 and that that life is, in fact, a box of chocolate.
Microsoft and the RIAA are stupid in the same way every day. Nothing interesting. SCO, on the other hand, finds new ways to be stupid and hold its audience. Maybe Fox should contract these guys to make better TV shows?
If you need to make the connection between war and a game... Anyway, the difference here isn't so much cheating as power playing. The general effect would be like playing a game like Civilization in a situation where one player has a vast technological superiority. Cheating, on the other hand, creates a gap that can't exist normally. It would be the equivalent of Bush growing five hundred feet tall and just stepping on Baghdad.
I fully agree. I don't like either kind, but you're right, the effects of cheating in a Quake or Starcraft or any nonpersistent world game only last the duration of the game. Everyone starts off at the beginning next game. In persistent world games like Everquest, Runescape, or Dransik, the effects of cheating remain forever.
Power playing. I've seen it in all the MMO/persistent world games I've tried. There are people who see that they must win, even if there isn't a winning condition in the game parameters, there is still a certain level of ranking, even if it's informal among the community, where the richest or strongest players are most respected.
The challenge here isn't to be better at Quake, but to be able to cheat the best at Quake, that in itself is a game.
Being the best cheater? Sounds an awful like like the Cold War mentality - "We know HOW to build the Bomb, so let's build it before sombody else does." "We have the Bomb, now let's build more of them than anybody else." "We have lots of Bombs now, we better be ready to use it before somebody else does." Or mabye a bit more like professional wrestling. "Rules not winning it for you? Smack the ref upside the head with a folding chair!"
"It's just a game." No shit, sherlock? You have no clue how much that sentence ticks me off - enough to make an account just to post this. Football is just a game, maybe I should start sneaking into locker rooms of teams playing against my school and dump strichnine in their gatoraide bottles, or put steel spikes in their jock straps. It's only a game. I play an online RPG called Dransik, and cheaters have, at periods, been pretty rampant. The first, and most common, kind is bug abuse, which goes largely uncaught because it's nearly impossible to police fully unless the bug being used is one that would be noticed by other players (like bypassing safezones, committing crimes in view of NPC guards without the guards responding, etc). But the worst kind have been "hacers." There's a pretty popular program generally called a "speed hack" that messes with the computer's clock and makes it run faster (not just programs, but the system clock will also advance at nearly double speed). The problem is that, since all client-side operations of just about any game is timed by the CPU clock, this allows a player running the speedhack while playing a game to (depending on the nature of the game) faster unit/character movement, have much faster build/research times, faster rates of fire, faster item/skill use. In Dransik, these programs are used for everything from PKing (especially with ranged weapons - in cunjunction with a speedhack, a strong bow can't be countered except with a speedhack and a strong bow), to hunting (allows characters to outrun fast monsters), to tradeskills (a speedhacking miner, particularly with a macro, can initiate five or six operations before the item lock kicks in to freeze their inventory until the first one completes). Macros are widely used as well, particularly with trade skill bugs. There was a bug with the cooking skill when it was first introduced into the game, and people used macros to gain millions exp in the skill in a matter of minutes - with the regular side effect of crashing the servers (which was used by some people to initiate "timewarps," - where the server reverts to the last backup save - to recover lost items, or just to plain piss people off). Cheating is nothing more than grief playing.