The United States Air Force started out as a part of the U.S. Amry Signal Corps, and later evolved into the Army Air Corp... being commanded by a Captain (army... equivalent to a Lieutenant in the Navy) when that was formed no less. Many other countries also followed a similar pattern.
There was talk right before the Gulf War for the U.S. Army to take over the duties of flying and maintaining the A-10 fighters and perhaps even reconstituting the Army Air Corps (when went over like a lead balloon with the USAF). Army fighter planes aren't exactly a new idea and you can't say they don't exist. Nearly 100,000 men died in World War II wearing U.S. Army uniforms while flying/piloting airplanes and it disgraces their memory to suggest they never existed.
Or more likely I simply should have said something short and pity in response: Whoosh!
About the only other game I can think of that would be somewhat close to "hard science fiction" that I can think of is SpaceChem, as you need to use a modified periodic table in order to complete the challenges... and the "back story" sort of reads like a poorly written science fiction novel. However that game gets so close to an interactive science lesson that some real-world brick and mortar schools have even the audacity to include the game in their curriculum.
I suppose that if you think molecular level nano engineering projects are something that could happen on an industrial scale, perhaps SpaceChem reflects real chemistry.
Your point stands though. I saw a "game" that reproduced the Millikan oil drop experiment down to the most tedious detail including having to "record" the results in a journal. That takes the whole interactive science demo thing perhaps just a little bit too far (but it was still an interesting piece of software).
What is this obsession with making digital circuits in Minecraft? I don't get it. If you want to simulate a simple digital circuit then use any of a number of free or student-version or pirated simulators. I thought at first that people were actually building simple mechanical computers, but it turns out that it's nothing of the sort.
Other than the fact that these "digitial circuits" can be used for things like serial data communications between train stations or constructing a device that will build you a house (or one of a couple different mobs) from source materials in the game.
There are practical applications for these circuits, and you can hook some kids into the basics of circuit design in a piecemeal fashion. Besides, where else can you be building a circuit design and you have to kill off real (virtual) bugs in order to get the circuit to function? One Creeper in the wrong place can ruin a perfectly good CPU or even just a relay circuit. Or for that matter laying down wires in the middle of a blizzard.
There is villager AI that is quite good in Minecraft. It is called "Millenaire" villages though, that are by far and away much more developed than the Testificates. Kinniken just added warfare between different villages and allows "the player" to be able to act as a diplomat to either fester hostilities or try to smooth over relations along with a rather complex inter-village trading system. The monetary system has been in place for quite some time, including some very awesome blocks. I love the Japanese paper walls as well as the Mayan golden scroll work blocks. The thatch planking as a floor material is also worth looking at as well.
If that is all you are complaining about, I feel sorry for you. Perhaps Notch realizes that the fan-made mods have so totally surpassed anything he could do that he needs to move on to something else?
Heck, there is a chunk generation storage and rendering system made by mod developers which allows world height to be raised to 64k blocks and even renders faster than the current rendering engine. The serious fans have improved the game in many substantial ways and Mojang (aka Notch) is mostly re-implementing these fan-made ideas at the moment. Add in Optifine and some enhanced shaders that cast some impressive shadows at sunrise and sunset and you got a game that would blow you away.
Let Notch start and stop projects like nothing else. If that is all he does, he still should stay wealthy and a multi-millionaire. Once he gets those ideas going there are plenty of people who are willing to pick up the pieces.
The name may be a joke, but the game isn't. Notch has been doing some development work including creating a virtual machine that he claims to have on his development system running 4000 instances of that VM simultaneously with only 50% of his development machine CPU bandwidth in use. Some details about the VM can be found here:
He has been talking about this game for over a month, and a couple of days ago he tweeted out to his "fans" to give some name suggestions.
Almost everything on the "Mars Effect" website is pretty much a compilation of everything he has said about this game in terms of interviews, tweets, blog entries, and casual comments over a pint of beer in terms of his vision for the next big project he wants to be working on.
The game itself is very real, it is just that the name is something I strongly suspect and was something I noticed immediately after its name was announced. With Notch though, me might be saying "damn the torpedoes" and be willing to make everybody think it is a joke of a game too... if for nothing more than to get some fans off his back. Any time he makes reference to a website in his twitter feed, it often crashes to something like the Slashdot Effect in part because of how many people are following his tweets.
Most Star Trek scripts were written by a single author.
And re-written by the cast, producers, catering staff, and many other people (usually professional writers, but not always).
Yes, the original script was written by a single person, but by the time it shows up on the television screen in your home it has gone through the hands of a great many people. Any one of those can complain that "their contribution" wasn't properly compensated... particularly on a script that wasn't actually put into production.
The original script writer certainly deserves the primary credit for the script, but they aren't alone in who is adding or reworking the script.
Are they? This work is some 40+ years old. The copyright term probably expired. Did CBS renew it? There would have to be a record of this at the USPTO. Although, they have [and need to] renew copyrights on the series episodes that are well known, a script that was never made into an episode probably slipped under the "renewal radar".
Copyright laws changed about the time the original Star Trek television series was aired and produced. For earlier television series, the networks and/or the production studios which owned the show. This is also a change that happened about the time Star Trek was produced... it was Desilu Productions (aka Lucille Ball and her husband Desi Arnaz) which actually owned the show, and was "sold" to Paramount Pictures when the studio closed and through some other buy-outs and mergers ended up in the hands of CBS, rather than the network that originally broadcast the show which was in fact NBC (which is now owned by General Electric... well half of it at least... the other half is now owned by Walt Disney, Inc. as the American Broadcasting Company). The ownership by CBS is even relatively recent so it wasn't even theirs to renew when it was eligible even had the laws stayed the same.
BTW, I should also note that it isn't the USPTO that even deals with copyright. I know you are under the mistaken notion that there is something called "intellectual property". I'm sorry you've bought into the myth, and it is unfortunate that such miseducation exists. Copyright is something administered by the Librarian of Congress, which is not just in another agency but a whole different branch of the U.S. government (as the Librarian of Congress reports directly to the Speaker of the House and the President of the Senate, not the President of the Untied States). The "record" that something was copyrighted would be finding a copy of the script in the Library of Congress and a catalog record of that item. That is sort of how the Library of Congress has become one of the largest archives in the world as you are required to give a copy of your creative work to the library if you want copyright protection in the United States.
I do agree though that this is something which likely wouldn't have had its copyright renewed and that it should have entered the public domain some time ago.
The issue at hand is perpetual copyright and changes to copyright law that have made the current situation. Had the copyright laws that existed at the beginning of the 1960's (much less the original copyright act of 1790) still been in effect today, that script very likely would have entered the public domain and this entire conversation and thread would have been moot. For a "worthless property" (meaning the script itself) I highly doubt that CBS would have bothered to renew the copyright and it would have long ago had its copyright expire.
There is a reason for stuff like this to enter the public domain. I'm not talking theoretical issues here as well, as there have been television shows from the 1960's that have entered the public domain. A clear example of that can be found on Wikipedia with The Beverly Hillbillies. The first time I read the article, I was shocked to see an entire episode of the series was posted on the article, then I realized the episode was in the public domain (and could be put there by Wikipedia policy). It was sort of refreshing after a fashion to see something like that. Interestingly enough, this television series is also one that was "owned" by CBS once upon a time.
My point is that it was changes in copyright law that has led to this current situation in regards to the Star Trek script. It didn't need to be this way and as a matter of legislation initiatives and public policy I really don't think people should sit on scripts in this fashion for so long before it becomes something that is a cultural heritage for all. Constitutionally, it is supposed to be a time-limited monopoly.... but that time limit has now become essentially perpetual for eternity with no reasonable limit in sight. That hasn't always been the case in the American Republic (much less elsewhere in the world) and I don't think the case can be reasonably made that earlier "weaker" laws were necessarily harmful for artists and producers of television shows and movies.
If I have written something forty or fifty years ago and somehow you found that bit of prose I wrote, I really don't mind if you decide to do something with it. The incentive is for me to write something new right now, not sit and expect royalty checks for work I've done in the distant past. I think it should be the same for movie producers and composers as well, much less computer programmers. Do you really think that software written for the PDP-11 should still enjoy copyright protection today? I don't.
More wealth X fewer customers = reduced profits. So they try to squeeze harder, and they start using slave-labor metrics to guide their decisions, and the economy continues to become more and more suceptible to disruption as fewer and fewer people actually have the power to make choices in it. Seriously, what's the difference between Soviet bureaucrats and today's wealthy capitalists? Either way you've got 1% of the population planning the economy.
You are presuming a zero sum game, which wealth isn't... at least true wealth.
I also mentioned that personal liberty is the key. When you have, as you claim, "1% of the population planning the economy" you also don't have personal liberty.
"Western nations" don't have a monopoly over real wealth creation, and there is a very real possibility that they could collapse. The reason they will collapse is sort of what you are alluding to though, that personal liberties are being taken away and that ordinary citizens no longer can participate in the marketplace to be able to break monopolies and enforced restrictions on competition due to a government being bought by folks who hate humanity.
There do exist people who would like to be the wealthiest person in a society of people who barely are able to scratch out a living in the world, and others who wouldn't mind being the poorest in a society of mostly wealthy people and access to abundant resources in this universe. Which are you?
I'll also be the first to admit that liberty is being lost in western nations, and if anything that is why you aren't seeing much wealth creation either, and why this current generation of kids will likely not have access to the same kinds of resources that their parents had. Most of that is because people who could create that wealth are being stopped from following through with their ideas that might make a difference. That 99% if you want to be blunt. A small elite committee simply doesn't have the brains necessary to be able to make the judgements in terms of what may be successful or not.
Aren't the 1st world countries dependent on energy though? I mean, without oil nor gasI think there will be some serious issues pretty quickly. And please, no solar or wind power in your response. Nuclear either since 90% of the 1st world countries don't product any uranium.
If you throw out solar, wind, hydro, thermal, and nuclear energy, then you might have a point. I guess you need to throw out other sorts of innovation as well and go back to manual labor.... and a stone age level of technology of mainly hunter-gatherers and mass genocide of 99.9% of humanity while you are at it. That isn't my vision of the future though.
Seriously, this is a stupid argument and I don't accept your rejection of new innovations in terms of how energy is obtained and utilized. It might not be anything we are currently using at the moment, but if you give people personal freedom to innovate there will be opportunities that don't necessarily need to come from 3rd world countries.
More to the point, we don't need to have a petroleum based economy, and it is entirely possible to come up with other sources of energy for operating the machines we use every day and not just maintain but grow access to that energy. You, Pieroxy, aren't open to any new energy production methods, so I won't even bother suggesting anything specific.
Face it, if 3rd world countries simply stopped selling stuff to 1st world countries, those 1st world countries wouldn't starve or even go without luxuries.
Yeah? I guess those precious first world countries would crash and burn really hard if those folks here stopped selling anything to them: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OPEC
Other than the fact that the United States and Canada have more oil in the ground (don't read that as "proven oil reserves"... a different beast entirely) than all of the OPEC countries put together. The only reason oil is even being imported to North America is because of political reasons, not technical nor access to the raw resources.
There may even be good reasons to import the oil from Saudi Arabia rather than from ANWR, oil sands in Utah, or elsewhere, but America would do quite well without OPEC if push came to shove, and might even have enough to supply Japan and Europe at current production levels.
That doesn't even touch "alternative energy resources" that would certainly become profitable to work on. In effect, you've proven my point here again.
That said, the UK and all her allies have been having their asses repeatedly handed to them by a bunch of natives in Afghanistan for much of the last decade, which is significantly more recent than the Falklands War.
The reason why the UK "and her allies have been having their asses repeatedly handed to them by a bunch of natives in Afghanistan" is in part because they choose for international public relations purposes. Yes, it makes people angry to see imperialistic expansion, but had the British or Americans decided to conquer and even annex the Afghan people in even a manner like the native peoples of North America were subjugated, much less to deal with the country like the Romans dealt with their conquered provinces, Afghan rebels wouldn't even be a problem at all.
A good example of how the Afghan people could be treated can be found in this article on Wikipedia:
I'm not advocating such a policy, so don't mix my words up. Perhaps the current approach is better where on occasion the "natives of Aghanistan" might be able to get an occasional victory, and where the British and American forces in Afghanistan really don't care if they ultimately succeed in pacifying the country or not. But if the goal is to conquer and control a piece of territory, it can get quite rough for the "natives" that don't subject themselves to the new authority of that region.
I'll also add parenthetically that the Soviet Union (who didn't care about international public opinion or even what their own citizens thought of the war) was in reality defeated by America and not the Afghan people. Indeed I would argue that the same thing is sort of happening in Afghanistan today as well, where well established countries are financing and supporting the insurgency in Afghanistan and the supplies for the "rebel forces" in Afghanistan are coming from somewhere else. I'm not going to speculate where, just that it is.
That's a vast oversimplification, our standard of living is based on being able to hire people to work many hours for one of our hours. If you had to pay US wages to all the people that produce your goods then prices would be higher and your effective wealth lower.
This is so wrong it is almost humorous... except for the fact that many people believe it and don't understand where the wealth of 1st world countries come from.
No, the wealth of people in major industrialized countries comes from the ability to work more effectively and be able to perform tasks with less effort and to collectively be able to do things in less time or to produce more with the same amount of labor. This is usually done not through hiring slaves or paying people in 3rd world countries, but rather through designing machines or better manufacturing processes that people who live in countries with less wealth.
If you take how many farmers it takes to grow a bushel of wheat or corn in America vs. Ethiopia or Madagasgar, there is a huge difference. One farmer in America can feed nearly a thousand people out of his (or her) own labor. In Ethiopia, perhaps a dozen people. In practice this difference is even more exaggerated but the basic principle still hold true. This also applies to how cloth is manufactured, how lumber is harvested and machined down to be able to construct housing, and just about everything which can be imagined that is made by the hand of men.
Face it, if 3rd world countries simply stopped selling stuff to 1st world countries, those 1st world countries wouldn't starve or even go without luxuries. Many like the United States even historically didn't even depend much upon foreign trade and domestically has been able to produce just about everything it needed and then some. If these "wealthy countries" simply pulled in on themselves with an isolationist movement, they would still be wealthy and be able to tell these poorer countries to "get lost" or even "nuke themselves into oblivion" for all that matters.
Yes, in the short term there might be some inflation if suddenly goods and services from poorer countries stopped flowing into the wealthy countries. But they would recover and in fact the incentive to increase efficiencies in the factories that would at that point by necessity have to be domestic producers would likely improve to the point that overall wealth would even increase relative to the amount of labor that an ordinary worker would have to perform in order to maintain a given standard of goods, services, and supplies available to that individual citizen in that country. Over the long term, the wealthy would become even wealthier.
As for the poor countries, as soon as they told off the wealthy countries they would also be cut off from the wealth of those countries and be forced to make their own luxuries... which they may or may not be able to do. If anything, there would be short-term deflation and then they would spiral downward in a vicious cycle of economic collapse that would be hard to recover from.
You claim that creating more wealth is hard. Absolutely it is! It takes primarily the ability for letting people make their own decisions acted out on a massive scale so that eventually the best ideas can come forward. Bad ideas will be presented too, but those will eventually disappear in the marketplace of ideas... or simply in an open market in general that allows anybody to participate. If you are in a government or society that doesn't allow these ideas to come forth, that society will literally be poorer because of it. Individual personal liberty is the key to wealth creation. Some people simply enjoy living in poverty and I don't mind if they want to follow that as a sort of religion or philosophical principle. I just don't want to be forced at gunpoint to be one of them.
The SMEs aren't truly reusable, either. They did pretty much get a complete tear-down and rebuild after each launch. They're about as reusable as a Top Fuel dragster engine...
They are a whole lot sturdier than you would think. The reason why SSMEs needed a complete tear down is in part because NASA had the budget to do it, and because of some design compromises made late in the development of the Space Shuttle. If you ever saw a Shuttle flight and heard the main com channel, you would hear things like "go for 105% burn" or even slightly higher. In other words, NASA was pushing the SSMEs beyond their intended thrust rating on each launch. Had the Space Shuttle stuck with the intended thrust rate of say 80% of its rating and been more conservative on how those engines had been pushed, it is very possible that a Shuttle could have landed at KSC, had a minor "routine" vehicle review, and mounted up on another external tank for another flight in just a week or two without that engine overhaul after each flight.
Well, maybe it could have been more routine. There were other design compromises that made shuttle ground operations incredibly expensive, but the original design of the SSME was intended to be generally reusable and not what it became.
The Pratt and Whitney RS-68, developed in the late 1990s, handles LOX/liquid hydrogen and has more thrust than the SSME.
I can only hope they get the contract when the times comes up. Werner Von Braun's shop has been shut down far too long for NASA to do something like that "in-house" any more.
One of the chemicals used in the Space Shuttle was Hyrdazine, a chemical that is very dangerous and indeed toxic. It is also a chemical that I think is very wise to have removed before the shuttle is moved to a museum, hoping that the hose containing a small bit of the stuff might not come lose just as you have a touring group of a couple dozen 1st graders walking under the hose containing a few dozen pounds of the stuff.
The dangerous chemicals are there for a reason when it was in use, and while it was on a launch pad it had technicians that knew what to touch and what not to touch. That won't be the case in a museum which is a very different environment than sitting outdoors literally miles away from any other people than trained technicians who were explicitly looking for those kind of hoses to leak on a daily basis.
In other words, the hazardous substances argument is completely valid. Or perhaps you drink a glass of Hydrazine every night for supper.
Assuming the planned number of SLS launches uses up all of the available SSMEs then it is no real hardship to restart the production lines and make more of them as needed. They are not much more complex to build than any other fully-cryogenic motor currently constructed by various manufacturers especially with fifty years of experience since the first crude LOX/LH2 engines were built and flown.
Other than the fact that the assembly line which built these engines has been shut down for nearly three decades and many of the people who not just built the engines but also were involved with the engineering teams that designed them not only are retired but are pushing up daisies due to old age.... yeah, you might get that assembly line going again. It isn't going to get going again any time soon.
And "any other fully-cryogenic motor" won't fit the bill either. For engines of this size and magnitude, there hasn't been a new rocket motor built even designed for several decades besides the Merlin engines by SpaceX. Companies like Orbital and Lockheed-Martin are even using Russian engines because they don't have the engineers in-house to make them, It is a sad state of American aerospace engineering I'll admit, but the problem is that nobody is doing stuff like that because somebody somewhere thought that we had all of the missiles and rocket engines we would ever need for eternity. Commercial sales of American launchers is so pathetic that it might as well be non-existent as most non-government space launches have been done by either Russia, the ESA, or China (with India getting ready to enter the mix).
There is some hope for the future as there are dozens of much smaller engines (but still capable in theory of orbital spaceflight) that are under development in America, but nothing of the class or scale that would launch the SLS. I just don't see NASA willing to fly a rocket like the N1 that had over 40 rocket engines... which would again require a whole new rocket design.
BTW, as far as SpaceX and the "off the shelf components".... Elon Musk got so disgusted with the supply chain he could find that he brought most of the part production in-house and even purchased several sub-contractors outright and had them move their production facilities to El Segundo to be inside the plant or right next to it. My point is that the replacement of the SLS engine (aka replacing the SSMEs once they've all been used up) is going to need the same sort of effort... an effort that still has yet to be funded by the U.S. Congress no less. So we are talking about a hypothetical rocket engine that has yet to even receive funding much less have any engineers even be devoted to getting it built.
Perhaps instead they will simply purchase Merlin 2 engines for the SLS?
Regardless, I think it is a total waste of a valuable resource to throw away the SSMEs in such a fashion as is currently programmed to happen. This is the "official" path that NASA is taking for the manned spaceflight program, and the one thing that is being used to sacrifice nearly the rest of NASA's budget including deep space missions. The use of the SSMEs is done to "save money", but I fail to see how in the long term (aka 10-20 years) that is going to happen either. It will save over the short term (aka about 2-3 years) some money, but not much.
The sad thing is how those engines are going to be put back to work: As a component on the SLS rocket, where they will be shot into space and left to burn up in re-entry as yesterday's leftovers to be literally thrown away.
These engines are some of the most advanced rocket systems ever designed, and purpose built to be reusable, so the only design choice NASA has is to throw them away on expendable rockets?
Not only that, but when NASA runs out of SMEs for the SLS rocket, they will have to come up with a new engine at huge expense, put it through a testing regime, and more or less redesign the rest of the rocket as a whole new vehicle anyway. Even from a financial savings viewpoint I fail to see how that is going to save any money, much less how SpaceX (to give an example) will have spent less for its entire rocket program than NASA is going to spend on this "refit" after the SLS is used up. More like spend about 3x the amount of money that SpaceX has spent to date for everything they've done.
I don't know if I'll have the stomach to witness such waste when the SLS finally flies. Then again, I have significant doubts as to if that program is going to survive into the next presidential administration in America. It isn't even slated to fly until 2017 at the earliest, so it will be somebody other than Barack Obama as president and somebody other than Charles Bolden as administrator of NASA even if it does fly.
I'll be the first to admit that what Notch has developed is not release grade software, and their software testing model is non-existent much less any sort of efficiency. I've seen some mods that vastly improve Minecraft, but from the perspective of improved chunk generation and development and even display efficiency. Mods like Optifine are used not just for higher resolution textures, but simply to improve framerate even for lower resolution textures.
One difference to also keep in mind is that Notch has been able to somehow capture the imagination of a whole bunch of people. The raw software may be a pile of crap as you are so delicately putting it, but the raw ideas on how to develop the user interface and be able to interact with other players is also a big part of the overall design. The raw game design has been made now, and what is needed perhaps is to take the next step forward and do all of that stuff you are talking about to improve framerate and perhaps more importantly getting the server side to run much more efficiently. Things like mounted creatures (especially mounted dragons) are simply not even considered for implementation because the few tests with them have brought servers to their knees even when just a single user is on the server.
Then again, I've seen some optimization of older games like Doom and even Castle Wolfenstein modded for more modern systems and really efficient display tech that turned out to be amazing pieces of software engineering. Perhaps it will take that. There are some developers in the mod community who know enough about the game to really improve it... and hiring the Bukkit team is perhaps one of the best things that Mojang could have done.
He needs to address the destruction of the Minecraft bukkit community that he himself instigated.
Yeah, Bukkit is so fractured that it was the first "outside" piece of software updated to be compatible with the current release of Minecraft. How is that again?
I thought EVE Online already was the sandbox space/trading sim "done right"
Will it let you burn the land, or boil the sea?
or mod the game so the Death Star is taking out the U.S.S. Enterprise with the Battlestar Galactica at its flank? (and Col. O'Neil with Samantha Carter busy working to take out the main reactor core of the Death Star)?
The difference is that Notch not only has the talent to pull it off, but also the money to buy the help to finish it off if he wants to get onto the next cool thing. He even hired a separate CEO to manage the business and financial affairs so really the only thing he needs to do is simply write the software.
I think Notch could write a lame version of Pong and still sell over a million copies at the moment from his fanbase, so the fact it may be successful is almost irrelevant too.
Slashdot Mirror
The United States Air Force started out as a part of the U.S. Amry Signal Corps, and later evolved into the Army Air Corp... being commanded by a Captain (army... equivalent to a Lieutenant in the Navy) when that was formed no less. Many other countries also followed a similar pattern.
There was talk right before the Gulf War for the U.S. Army to take over the duties of flying and maintaining the A-10 fighters and perhaps even reconstituting the Army Air Corps (when went over like a lead balloon with the USAF). Army fighter planes aren't exactly a new idea and you can't say they don't exist. Nearly 100,000 men died in World War II wearing U.S. Army uniforms while flying/piloting airplanes and it disgraces their memory to suggest they never existed.
Or more likely I simply should have said something short and pity in response: Whoosh!
About the only other game I can think of that would be somewhat close to "hard science fiction" that I can think of is SpaceChem, as you need to use a modified periodic table in order to complete the challenges... and the "back story" sort of reads like a poorly written science fiction novel. However that game gets so close to an interactive science lesson that some real-world brick and mortar schools have even the audacity to include the game in their curriculum.
I suppose that if you think molecular level nano engineering projects are something that could happen on an industrial scale, perhaps SpaceChem reflects real chemistry.
Your point stands though. I saw a "game" that reproduced the Millikan oil drop experiment down to the most tedious detail including having to "record" the results in a journal. That takes the whole interactive science demo thing perhaps just a little bit too far (but it was still an interesting piece of software).
Perhaps. You really don't know what to expect on April 1st.
The CPU instruction set is real and has some thought put into it though.
What is this obsession with making digital circuits in Minecraft? I don't get it. If you want to simulate a simple digital circuit then use any of a number of free or student-version or pirated simulators. I thought at first that people were actually building simple mechanical computers, but it turns out that it's nothing of the sort.
Other than the fact that these "digitial circuits" can be used for things like serial data communications between train stations or constructing a device that will build you a house (or one of a couple different mobs) from source materials in the game.
There are practical applications for these circuits, and you can hook some kids into the basics of circuit design in a piecemeal fashion. Besides, where else can you be building a circuit design and you have to kill off real (virtual) bugs in order to get the circuit to function? One Creeper in the wrong place can ruin a perfectly good CPU or even just a relay circuit. Or for that matter laying down wires in the middle of a blizzard.
There is villager AI that is quite good in Minecraft. It is called "Millenaire" villages though, that are by far and away much more developed than the Testificates. Kinniken just added warfare between different villages and allows "the player" to be able to act as a diplomat to either fester hostilities or try to smooth over relations along with a rather complex inter-village trading system. The monetary system has been in place for quite some time, including some very awesome blocks. I love the Japanese paper walls as well as the Mayan golden scroll work blocks. The thatch planking as a floor material is also worth looking at as well.
If that is all you are complaining about, I feel sorry for you. Perhaps Notch realizes that the fan-made mods have so totally surpassed anything he could do that he needs to move on to something else?
Heck, there is a chunk generation storage and rendering system made by mod developers which allows world height to be raised to 64k blocks and even renders faster than the current rendering engine. The serious fans have improved the game in many substantial ways and Mojang (aka Notch) is mostly re-implementing these fan-made ideas at the moment. Add in Optifine and some enhanced shaders that cast some impressive shadows at sunrise and sunset and you got a game that would blow you away.
Let Notch start and stop projects like nothing else. If that is all he does, he still should stay wealthy and a multi-millionaire. Once he gets those ideas going there are plenty of people who are willing to pick up the pieces.
The name may be a joke, but the game isn't. Notch has been doing some development work including creating a virtual machine that he claims to have on his development system running 4000 instances of that VM simultaneously with only 50% of his development machine CPU bandwidth in use. Some details about the VM can be found here:
http://notch.tumblr.com/post/20056289891/start-classified-transmission
(note the date... not April 1st)
He has been talking about this game for over a month, and a couple of days ago he tweeted out to his "fans" to give some name suggestions.
Almost everything on the "Mars Effect" website is pretty much a compilation of everything he has said about this game in terms of interviews, tweets, blog entries, and casual comments over a pint of beer in terms of his vision for the next big project he wants to be working on.
The game itself is very real, it is just that the name is something I strongly suspect and was something I noticed immediately after its name was announced. With Notch though, me might be saying "damn the torpedoes" and be willing to make everybody think it is a joke of a game too... if for nothing more than to get some fans off his back. Any time he makes reference to a website in his twitter feed, it often crashes to something like the Slashdot Effect in part because of how many people are following his tweets.
Most Star Trek scripts were written by a single author.
And re-written by the cast, producers, catering staff, and many other people (usually professional writers, but not always).
Yes, the original script was written by a single person, but by the time it shows up on the television screen in your home it has gone through the hands of a great many people. Any one of those can complain that "their contribution" wasn't properly compensated... particularly on a script that wasn't actually put into production.
The original script writer certainly deserves the primary credit for the script, but they aren't alone in who is adding or reworking the script.
CBS is the current owner of the copyright.
Are they? This work is some 40+ years old. The copyright term probably expired. Did CBS renew it? There would have to be a record of this at the USPTO. Although, they have [and need to] renew copyrights on the series episodes that are well known, a script that was never made into an episode probably slipped under the "renewal radar".
Copyright laws changed about the time the original Star Trek television series was aired and produced. For earlier television series, the networks and/or the production studios which owned the show. This is also a change that happened about the time Star Trek was produced... it was Desilu Productions (aka Lucille Ball and her husband Desi Arnaz) which actually owned the show, and was "sold" to Paramount Pictures when the studio closed and through some other buy-outs and mergers ended up in the hands of CBS, rather than the network that originally broadcast the show which was in fact NBC (which is now owned by General Electric... well half of it at least... the other half is now owned by Walt Disney, Inc. as the American Broadcasting Company). The ownership by CBS is even relatively recent so it wasn't even theirs to renew when it was eligible even had the laws stayed the same.
BTW, I should also note that it isn't the USPTO that even deals with copyright. I know you are under the mistaken notion that there is something called "intellectual property". I'm sorry you've bought into the myth, and it is unfortunate that such miseducation exists. Copyright is something administered by the Librarian of Congress, which is not just in another agency but a whole different branch of the U.S. government (as the Librarian of Congress reports directly to the Speaker of the House and the President of the Senate, not the President of the Untied States). The "record" that something was copyrighted would be finding a copy of the script in the Library of Congress and a catalog record of that item. That is sort of how the Library of Congress has become one of the largest archives in the world as you are required to give a copy of your creative work to the library if you want copyright protection in the United States.
I do agree though that this is something which likely wouldn't have had its copyright renewed and that it should have entered the public domain some time ago.
The issue at hand is perpetual copyright and changes to copyright law that have made the current situation. Had the copyright laws that existed at the beginning of the 1960's (much less the original copyright act of 1790) still been in effect today, that script very likely would have entered the public domain and this entire conversation and thread would have been moot. For a "worthless property" (meaning the script itself) I highly doubt that CBS would have bothered to renew the copyright and it would have long ago had its copyright expire.
There is a reason for stuff like this to enter the public domain. I'm not talking theoretical issues here as well, as there have been television shows from the 1960's that have entered the public domain. A clear example of that can be found on Wikipedia with The Beverly Hillbillies. The first time I read the article, I was shocked to see an entire episode of the series was posted on the article, then I realized the episode was in the public domain (and could be put there by Wikipedia policy). It was sort of refreshing after a fashion to see something like that. Interestingly enough, this television series is also one that was "owned" by CBS once upon a time.
My point is that it was changes in copyright law that has led to this current situation in regards to the Star Trek script. It didn't need to be this way and as a matter of legislation initiatives and public policy I really don't think people should sit on scripts in this fashion for so long before it becomes something that is a cultural heritage for all. Constitutionally, it is supposed to be a time-limited monopoly.... but that time limit has now become essentially perpetual for eternity with no reasonable limit in sight. That hasn't always been the case in the American Republic (much less elsewhere in the world) and I don't think the case can be reasonably made that earlier "weaker" laws were necessarily harmful for artists and producers of television shows and movies.
If I have written something forty or fifty years ago and somehow you found that bit of prose I wrote, I really don't mind if you decide to do something with it. The incentive is for me to write something new right now, not sit and expect royalty checks for work I've done in the distant past. I think it should be the same for movie producers and composers as well, much less computer programmers. Do you really think that software written for the PDP-11 should still enjoy copyright protection today? I don't.
More wealth X fewer customers = reduced profits. So they try to squeeze harder, and they start using slave-labor metrics to guide their decisions, and the economy continues to become more and more suceptible to disruption as fewer and fewer people actually have the power to make choices in it. Seriously, what's the difference between Soviet bureaucrats and today's wealthy capitalists? Either way you've got 1% of the population planning the economy.
You are presuming a zero sum game, which wealth isn't... at least true wealth.
I also mentioned that personal liberty is the key. When you have, as you claim, "1% of the population planning the economy" you also don't have personal liberty.
"Western nations" don't have a monopoly over real wealth creation, and there is a very real possibility that they could collapse. The reason they will collapse is sort of what you are alluding to though, that personal liberties are being taken away and that ordinary citizens no longer can participate in the marketplace to be able to break monopolies and enforced restrictions on competition due to a government being bought by folks who hate humanity.
There do exist people who would like to be the wealthiest person in a society of people who barely are able to scratch out a living in the world, and others who wouldn't mind being the poorest in a society of mostly wealthy people and access to abundant resources in this universe. Which are you?
I'll also be the first to admit that liberty is being lost in western nations, and if anything that is why you aren't seeing much wealth creation either, and why this current generation of kids will likely not have access to the same kinds of resources that their parents had. Most of that is because people who could create that wealth are being stopped from following through with their ideas that might make a difference. That 99% if you want to be blunt. A small elite committee simply doesn't have the brains necessary to be able to make the judgements in terms of what may be successful or not.
Aren't the 1st world countries dependent on energy though? I mean, without oil nor gasI think there will be some serious issues pretty quickly. And please, no solar or wind power in your response. Nuclear either since 90% of the 1st world countries don't product any uranium.
If you throw out solar, wind, hydro, thermal, and nuclear energy, then you might have a point. I guess you need to throw out other sorts of innovation as well and go back to manual labor.... and a stone age level of technology of mainly hunter-gatherers and mass genocide of 99.9% of humanity while you are at it. That isn't my vision of the future though.
Seriously, this is a stupid argument and I don't accept your rejection of new innovations in terms of how energy is obtained and utilized. It might not be anything we are currently using at the moment, but if you give people personal freedom to innovate there will be opportunities that don't necessarily need to come from 3rd world countries.
More to the point, we don't need to have a petroleum based economy, and it is entirely possible to come up with other sources of energy for operating the machines we use every day and not just maintain but grow access to that energy. You, Pieroxy, aren't open to any new energy production methods, so I won't even bother suggesting anything specific.
Face it, if 3rd world countries simply stopped selling stuff to 1st world countries, those 1st world countries wouldn't starve or even go without luxuries.
Yeah? I guess those precious first world countries would crash and burn really hard if those folks here stopped selling anything to them: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OPEC
Other than the fact that the United States and Canada have more oil in the ground (don't read that as "proven oil reserves"... a different beast entirely) than all of the OPEC countries put together. The only reason oil is even being imported to North America is because of political reasons, not technical nor access to the raw resources.
There may even be good reasons to import the oil from Saudi Arabia rather than from ANWR, oil sands in Utah, or elsewhere, but America would do quite well without OPEC if push came to shove, and might even have enough to supply Japan and Europe at current production levels.
That doesn't even touch "alternative energy resources" that would certainly become profitable to work on. In effect, you've proven my point here again.
That said, the UK and all her allies have been having their asses repeatedly handed to them by a bunch of natives in Afghanistan for much of the last decade, which is significantly more recent than the Falklands War.
The reason why the UK "and her allies have been having their asses repeatedly handed to them by a bunch of natives in Afghanistan" is in part because they choose for international public relations purposes. Yes, it makes people angry to see imperialistic expansion, but had the British or Americans decided to conquer and even annex the Afghan people in even a manner like the native peoples of North America were subjugated, much less to deal with the country like the Romans dealt with their conquered provinces, Afghan rebels wouldn't even be a problem at all.
A good example of how the Afghan people could be treated can be found in this article on Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dakota_War_of_1862
I'm not advocating such a policy, so don't mix my words up. Perhaps the current approach is better where on occasion the "natives of Aghanistan" might be able to get an occasional victory, and where the British and American forces in Afghanistan really don't care if they ultimately succeed in pacifying the country or not. But if the goal is to conquer and control a piece of territory, it can get quite rough for the "natives" that don't subject themselves to the new authority of that region.
I'll also add parenthetically that the Soviet Union (who didn't care about international public opinion or even what their own citizens thought of the war) was in reality defeated by America and not the Afghan people. Indeed I would argue that the same thing is sort of happening in Afghanistan today as well, where well established countries are financing and supporting the insurgency in Afghanistan and the supplies for the "rebel forces" in Afghanistan are coming from somewhere else. I'm not going to speculate where, just that it is.
That's a vast oversimplification, our standard of living is based on being able to hire people to work many hours for one of our hours. If you had to pay US wages to all the people that produce your goods then prices would be higher and your effective wealth lower.
This is so wrong it is almost humorous... except for the fact that many people believe it and don't understand where the wealth of 1st world countries come from.
No, the wealth of people in major industrialized countries comes from the ability to work more effectively and be able to perform tasks with less effort and to collectively be able to do things in less time or to produce more with the same amount of labor. This is usually done not through hiring slaves or paying people in 3rd world countries, but rather through designing machines or better manufacturing processes that people who live in countries with less wealth.
If you take how many farmers it takes to grow a bushel of wheat or corn in America vs. Ethiopia or Madagasgar, there is a huge difference. One farmer in America can feed nearly a thousand people out of his (or her) own labor. In Ethiopia, perhaps a dozen people. In practice this difference is even more exaggerated but the basic principle still hold true. This also applies to how cloth is manufactured, how lumber is harvested and machined down to be able to construct housing, and just about everything which can be imagined that is made by the hand of men.
Face it, if 3rd world countries simply stopped selling stuff to 1st world countries, those 1st world countries wouldn't starve or even go without luxuries. Many like the United States even historically didn't even depend much upon foreign trade and domestically has been able to produce just about everything it needed and then some. If these "wealthy countries" simply pulled in on themselves with an isolationist movement, they would still be wealthy and be able to tell these poorer countries to "get lost" or even "nuke themselves into oblivion" for all that matters.
Yes, in the short term there might be some inflation if suddenly goods and services from poorer countries stopped flowing into the wealthy countries. But they would recover and in fact the incentive to increase efficiencies in the factories that would at that point by necessity have to be domestic producers would likely improve to the point that overall wealth would even increase relative to the amount of labor that an ordinary worker would have to perform in order to maintain a given standard of goods, services, and supplies available to that individual citizen in that country. Over the long term, the wealthy would become even wealthier.
As for the poor countries, as soon as they told off the wealthy countries they would also be cut off from the wealth of those countries and be forced to make their own luxuries... which they may or may not be able to do. If anything, there would be short-term deflation and then they would spiral downward in a vicious cycle of economic collapse that would be hard to recover from.
You claim that creating more wealth is hard. Absolutely it is! It takes primarily the ability for letting people make their own decisions acted out on a massive scale so that eventually the best ideas can come forward. Bad ideas will be presented too, but those will eventually disappear in the marketplace of ideas... or simply in an open market in general that allows anybody to participate. If you are in a government or society that doesn't allow these ideas to come forth, that society will literally be poorer because of it. Individual personal liberty is the key to wealth creation. Some people simply enjoy living in poverty and I don't mind if they want to follow that as a sort of religion or philosophical principle. I just don't want to be forced at gunpoint to be one of them.
The SMEs aren't truly reusable, either. They did pretty much get a complete tear-down and rebuild after each launch. They're about as reusable as a Top Fuel dragster engine...
They are a whole lot sturdier than you would think. The reason why SSMEs needed a complete tear down is in part because NASA had the budget to do it, and because of some design compromises made late in the development of the Space Shuttle. If you ever saw a Shuttle flight and heard the main com channel, you would hear things like "go for 105% burn" or even slightly higher. In other words, NASA was pushing the SSMEs beyond their intended thrust rating on each launch. Had the Space Shuttle stuck with the intended thrust rate of say 80% of its rating and been more conservative on how those engines had been pushed, it is very possible that a Shuttle could have landed at KSC, had a minor "routine" vehicle review, and mounted up on another external tank for another flight in just a week or two without that engine overhaul after each flight.
Well, maybe it could have been more routine. There were other design compromises that made shuttle ground operations incredibly expensive, but the original design of the SSME was intended to be generally reusable and not what it became.
The Pratt and Whitney RS-68, developed in the late 1990s, handles LOX/liquid hydrogen and has more thrust than the SSME.
I can only hope they get the contract when the times comes up. Werner Von Braun's shop has been shut down far too long for NASA to do something like that "in-house" any more.
One of the chemicals used in the Space Shuttle was Hyrdazine, a chemical that is very dangerous and indeed toxic. It is also a chemical that I think is very wise to have removed before the shuttle is moved to a museum, hoping that the hose containing a small bit of the stuff might not come lose just as you have a touring group of a couple dozen 1st graders walking under the hose containing a few dozen pounds of the stuff.
The dangerous chemicals are there for a reason when it was in use, and while it was on a launch pad it had technicians that knew what to touch and what not to touch. That won't be the case in a museum which is a very different environment than sitting outdoors literally miles away from any other people than trained technicians who were explicitly looking for those kind of hoses to leak on a daily basis.
In other words, the hazardous substances argument is completely valid. Or perhaps you drink a glass of Hydrazine every night for supper.
Assuming the planned number of SLS launches uses up all of the available SSMEs then it is no real hardship to restart the production lines and make more of them as needed. They are not much more complex to build than any other fully-cryogenic motor currently constructed by various manufacturers especially with fifty years of experience since the first crude LOX/LH2 engines were built and flown.
Other than the fact that the assembly line which built these engines has been shut down for nearly three decades and many of the people who not just built the engines but also were involved with the engineering teams that designed them not only are retired but are pushing up daisies due to old age.... yeah, you might get that assembly line going again. It isn't going to get going again any time soon.
And "any other fully-cryogenic motor" won't fit the bill either. For engines of this size and magnitude, there hasn't been a new rocket motor built even designed for several decades besides the Merlin engines by SpaceX. Companies like Orbital and Lockheed-Martin are even using Russian engines because they don't have the engineers in-house to make them, It is a sad state of American aerospace engineering I'll admit, but the problem is that nobody is doing stuff like that because somebody somewhere thought that we had all of the missiles and rocket engines we would ever need for eternity. Commercial sales of American launchers is so pathetic that it might as well be non-existent as most non-government space launches have been done by either Russia, the ESA, or China (with India getting ready to enter the mix).
There is some hope for the future as there are dozens of much smaller engines (but still capable in theory of orbital spaceflight) that are under development in America, but nothing of the class or scale that would launch the SLS. I just don't see NASA willing to fly a rocket like the N1 that had over 40 rocket engines... which would again require a whole new rocket design.
BTW, as far as SpaceX and the "off the shelf components".... Elon Musk got so disgusted with the supply chain he could find that he brought most of the part production in-house and even purchased several sub-contractors outright and had them move their production facilities to El Segundo to be inside the plant or right next to it. My point is that the replacement of the SLS engine (aka replacing the SSMEs once they've all been used up) is going to need the same sort of effort... an effort that still has yet to be funded by the U.S. Congress no less. So we are talking about a hypothetical rocket engine that has yet to even receive funding much less have any engineers even be devoted to getting it built.
Perhaps instead they will simply purchase Merlin 2 engines for the SLS?
Regardless, I think it is a total waste of a valuable resource to throw away the SSMEs in such a fashion as is currently programmed to happen. This is the "official" path that NASA is taking for the manned spaceflight program, and the one thing that is being used to sacrifice nearly the rest of NASA's budget including deep space missions. The use of the SSMEs is done to "save money", but I fail to see how in the long term (aka 10-20 years) that is going to happen either. It will save over the short term (aka about 2-3 years) some money, but not much.
The sad thing is how those engines are going to be put back to work: As a component on the SLS rocket, where they will be shot into space and left to burn up in re-entry as yesterday's leftovers to be literally thrown away.
These engines are some of the most advanced rocket systems ever designed, and purpose built to be reusable, so the only design choice NASA has is to throw them away on expendable rockets?
Not only that, but when NASA runs out of SMEs for the SLS rocket, they will have to come up with a new engine at huge expense, put it through a testing regime, and more or less redesign the rest of the rocket as a whole new vehicle anyway. Even from a financial savings viewpoint I fail to see how that is going to save any money, much less how SpaceX (to give an example) will have spent less for its entire rocket program than NASA is going to spend on this "refit" after the SLS is used up. More like spend about 3x the amount of money that SpaceX has spent to date for everything they've done.
I don't know if I'll have the stomach to witness such waste when the SLS finally flies. Then again, I have significant doubts as to if that program is going to survive into the next presidential administration in America. It isn't even slated to fly until 2017 at the earliest, so it will be somebody other than Barack Obama as president and somebody other than Charles Bolden as administrator of NASA even if it does fly.
I guess you should simply read what Notch said himself about this whole incident:
http://notch.tumblr.com/post/17681692985/hype
I'll be the first to admit that what Notch has developed is not release grade software, and their software testing model is non-existent much less any sort of efficiency. I've seen some mods that vastly improve Minecraft, but from the perspective of improved chunk generation and development and even display efficiency. Mods like Optifine are used not just for higher resolution textures, but simply to improve framerate even for lower resolution textures.
One difference to also keep in mind is that Notch has been able to somehow capture the imagination of a whole bunch of people. The raw software may be a pile of crap as you are so delicately putting it, but the raw ideas on how to develop the user interface and be able to interact with other players is also a big part of the overall design. The raw game design has been made now, and what is needed perhaps is to take the next step forward and do all of that stuff you are talking about to improve framerate and perhaps more importantly getting the server side to run much more efficiently. Things like mounted creatures (especially mounted dragons) are simply not even considered for implementation because the few tests with them have brought servers to their knees even when just a single user is on the server.
Then again, I've seen some optimization of older games like Doom and even Castle Wolfenstein modded for more modern systems and really efficient display tech that turned out to be amazing pieces of software engineering. Perhaps it will take that. There are some developers in the mod community who know enough about the game to really improve it... and hiring the Bukkit team is perhaps one of the best things that Mojang could have done.
He needs to address the destruction of the Minecraft bukkit community that he himself instigated.
Yeah, Bukkit is so fractured that it was the first "outside" piece of software updated to be compatible with the current release of Minecraft. How is that again?
Is Notch still making that happen?
Notch offered to be an investor, but it looks like they got enough money from Kickstarter that they don't need any outside investment (yet).
I thought EVE Online already was the sandbox space/trading sim "done right"
Will it let you burn the land, or boil the sea?
or mod the game so the Death Star is taking out the U.S.S. Enterprise with the Battlestar Galactica at its flank? (and Col. O'Neil with Samantha Carter busy working to take out the main reactor core of the Death Star)?
The difference is that Notch not only has the talent to pull it off, but also the money to buy the help to finish it off if he wants to get onto the next cool thing. He even hired a separate CEO to manage the business and financial affairs so really the only thing he needs to do is simply write the software.
I think Notch could write a lame version of Pong and still sell over a million copies at the moment from his fanbase, so the fact it may be successful is almost irrelevant too.