Well, yes, any matter you throw at it (and energy converts neatly to matter too) can only cause it to grow. But there's still the problem of how much and how close.
But, really, let's do some simple maths.
Let's say we want to produce a black hole the size of a helium atom. You know, big enough to occasionally actually bounce into stuff and gobble it up. (Remember, only matter coming closer than the Schwarzschild radius is actually gobbled up.) It's not a big black hole, but it has the potential to grow. So we apply:
r = (2G/c^2) * m... Where the thing in brackets is approx 1.5 * 10^-27 m/kg. We'll want to get a hole measuring 3x10^-11 m. So we'd need a mass of 2x10^15 kg, or two millions of millions of metric tons.
Yep, that huge a mass will only gobble stuff up if it comes within 3x10^-11m of it. But it's a start, and as an evil genius you may have to start small;)
To produce that hole, the protons we throw at it, as a total, will have to have the equivalent of that much mass in energy.
Let's transform that into MeV though, since we are talking energy. 1MeV is about 1.8x10^-36 Kg. Let's round to 2x10^-36, since we're only doing a back-of-the-napkin calculation, and are only interested in rough ballpark figures. So we're talking about 10^51 MeV
If we got that energy from uranium, and assuming that we could (A) split every single U235 atom, and (B) capture 100% of the released energy, each atom split releases 180 MeV. (RL reactors don't come even close in both aspects.) Again, let's round it up to 200. (In my fantasy land, reactors are better than 100% efficient;)
That works out to about 5*10^48 uranium atoms split. Avogadro's number being about 6x10^23, that's about 10^25 moles of uranium. (Again, I'm only interested in the order of magnitude. Plus, we rounded up in the other direction before, so it evens up.) And a mole of U235 weighs 235 grams, or about half a pound or almost a quarter kilo.
We're talking about 2 to 3 times 10^24 kilos of uranium, or 2 to 3 times 10^21 _tons_ of U235. That's 2-3 thousand billions of billions of tons of U235. Or about a hundred thousands of billions of billions of reactor-grade enriched uranium. Completely used up in a 100% effective reactor.
So basically yes we _could_ make a bigger black hole by keeping throwing stuff at it, close to the speed of light, but the energy requirements are nuts even to get a hole the size of a helium atom. We don't even _have_ the kind of reactors and capacitors where you could split a hundred thousands of billions of billions of reactor-grade uranium and dump it all into just creating a black hole.
Well, the key isn't just mass, but also radius. Gravity (I'll go newtonian, just because I'm lazy) increased linearly with mass, but decreases with the square of the radius. So for example, if you packed something the mass of Earth in just half the size of Earth, the gravity on the surface would be 4 times that of Earth. Squeeze it into a quarter of the size of Earth and get 16 times the gravity on the surface. Squeeze it small enough and you have a black hole.
If you do the proper maths, the Schwarzschild radius of a black hole with the mass of Earth is about 9mm.
Which really means, don't think something that will suck matter and bend light spectacularly all the way to Alpha Centauri. It means that if light happens to go within 9mm of that singularity, it ain't coming out. But farther away, it's still a body with the mass of Earth. The moon's orbit will still have the same radius for example.
My approach, actually, is that if they have time to be surfing for cutesy screensavers on www.i-pwn-u.ru and follow links to www.xploits-r-us.ro and to re-confirm their ebay password 10 times a day, that's the problem: they have time. Forget addressing the symptoms, go for the root problem.
Me? I gave my parents WoW. Sure, it's just about as hard as giving them Linux, so you have to hit them when they're down. It's for their own good. I got mom when she was too sick to do anything else, and she contaminated dad from there. If that fails, mention that she can talk to you on group chat. It's funny what moms are prepared to do for a son as a captive audience:P
Fair warning, it takes some time investment. Be prepared to answer questions like, I swear to FSM I'm not making it up, "HOW DO I SWIM UP?? WHAT CAMERA? I DON'T HAVE A CAMERA TO ROTATE!! NO, I LOOKED IN ALL THE BAGS AND I DON'T HAVE A CAMERA!!! WHERE DO I BUY A CAMERA?" or, again, true to FSM quote, "HOW DO I GET OUT OF THIS CAVE?? NO, I DON'T SEE YOU! I CAN ONLY SEE THE TOP OF MY HEAD AND MAYBE 3 FT IN FRONT AND TO THE SIDES!!"
I can see you're dying to ask, "but couldn't I just teach them to use Linux, or heck at least Mozilla in the same time?" Not so fast, grasshopper. This time they'll actually be willing to learn. In the same month you can teach them to play WoW like a pro, or you can be running in circles around "how do I start IE? This paypal password site says I need IE and Javascript" and "why does this taxform.xls.exe attachment not start when I click it???" if you gave them Linux.
Fast forward about a year, and they don't even have time to sleep. No, really, they're only recently up to 5 hours sleep a night. Surf for cutesy IE toolbars and install crap? Good grief, they don't even have time to shop for groceries outside of wednesday mornings. I think they even lost some weight, what with the occasional wednesday when the servers are back on from 5 AM.
Ah, life is good.
'Course, this might cost them a few years off the life expectancy, but it's you or them, really. The hours to support their computers would have probably added up to the same number of years of your own life. Ask yourself this, really: do you want to spend that time supporting them or grinding your own epic gear? Thought so.
That's just stupid. Every computer I've seen within the last 5-6 years has come with some sort of zoom feature for the visually disabled. I know my computer (Alienware bought at the end of 2008) has an Ease of Access section in my start menu with a magnifier, narrator, on-screen keyboard, and voice recognition.
You probably realize that they're trivial to break, right?
Even as websites go, probably _the_ best example, is the old ('90's era) Ultima Online site, which literally had all text as pictures. Looked cool, like pages from an old scroll or codex, but if you think any software can read that (even an OCR would throw occasional fits), you probably are too optimistic. Ok, so most sites nowadays wouldn't go to such extremes, but having at least titles or buttons pre-rendered as buttons is one of those undead ideas that just won't stay dead and buried.
And, of course, it only becomes easier to screw up if you're using Flash, Java FX or pretty much any of the other tools that encourage artists to mix in cutesy effects and animations and pictures.
But even plain HTML and JavaScript can be a great obfuscation tool in the hands of the incompetent. Just make it a mess of DIV tags that no reader can sort to read right, for example.
Captchas too are becoming increasingly obnoxious, and they're popping up in places where they have no reason to be. E.g., it's happened again that I have to fill in a captcha to buy something online, and I'm thinking that's pretty silly, ffs. What are they defending against? Some bot buying me a present with my own credit card?
And you don't have to even be blind to have trouble with some captchas. I figure I still have pretty good eyes, and I'm doing 50-50 on some of them. And again, if you think any screen reader will be able to read a captcha rendered as a bitmap... well, let's just say that bots would have no trouble reading it too.
The option to have some numbers read at you is even worse, if you're not a native English speaker and have perfect hearing. I know last I've tried that option, the sounds was so post-processed and mixed with background noises (again, or speech recognition software would make easy work of the captcha), that I just went "huh? what?"
Except that's yet another case of talking out the arse without knowing what the real problem is.
The problem is: in many of those games with rubberbanding, there is already another mechanic for those tiers you describe. And the rubberbanding is nullifying the other mechanic. _That_ is what some of us complain about.
E.g., in the Gran Turismo series (and many similar games), the focus isn't on just jumping into a random race and having your 15 minutes of fun. You have to earn the car and the upgrades to qualify for the next league, and then even more upgrades to win in it. There is already a mechanic to simulate those leagues, and to justify why you should spend several days grinding your way through them. (Read: why you should play each of the few race tracks more than once.) Throwing in rubberbanding is nullifying all that, and turning it right back into a kiddie kart game. Suddenly it's hard not to notice that the whole tuning and upgrading aspect is bogus, since the opponents really are just tied to your car with rubberbands. What's the point in grinding to upgrade your engine HP by 50% when, effectively, every single opponent just got the same upgrade?
E.g., in Oblivion and generally an RPG, there's already a mechanic for simulating those leagues and tiers. It's called xp and levels. (Or skills, if it's skill-based a la Oblivion.) If your skill is too low to beat this opponent, you're supposed to go raise it somewhere else, and if it's too low, well, then just go fight something higher level instead. Do you understand that crucial aspect? There is no need to simulate those leagues and tiers in a game which already has another mechanic for just that. And adding some form of rubber-banding just makes the other mechanic a pointless waste of time. Why bother grinding your character to level 50, when effectively it gave you no advantage at all?
And it doesn't help that all too often it's done _badly_ too. E.g., since we're talking about Oblivion, the end opponent is actually a lot easier to beat if you somehow manage to get there as a level 3 character, than if you did all the quests and have a level 30 character. Effectively, you're better off if you skip 90% of the game and just do the absolute minimum that gets you through the short main quest arc. It's not that all that grinding and exploring and getting equipment doesn't give any advantage, it's that it actually becomes a disadvantage.
For #7, you'd find some people who would love that idea. But, I'd imagine by and large that would catch the ire of parents and church leaders. I doubt many companies would risk that kind of PR disaster.
What, you mean fundies would be _against_ a game that teaches the Bible? I would have thought they'd be all over it like clap on a cheap hooker;)
Good point. And in the spirit of lending a helping hand to the publishers, here is my own list of franchises which have been sadly overlooked when it came to making an MMO.
1. Zorro. Just think about it. For a start, you don't even need to pay the artists for more than one outfit for the players. You just need to figure out a way to need 25 Zorros for the final boss, and you're all set.
2. Tom and Jerry. This could be huge. Just think of the millions of children who have grown up on seeing the cat and mouse (and occasionally dog) hit each other over the head with frying pans, lead pipes, and just about everything except the kitchen sink. Actually, wait, I think they used the kitchen sink too. It could make the perfect PvP MMO. (And you may think that it would be limited to have just two races in an MMO and have it all happen in one house and its yard, but AION launched literally with one race per side and the zones aren't much bigger either.)
I for one can hardly wait to grind for the Epic Frying Pan Of Power, and whack a cat over the head with it. What? You're saying it's just me?
3. Barbie. Well, Mattel already proved that you can make money with Barbie games for little girls. (Mostly because the one buying the game is the father, whose idea of what game would a little girl want is a little fuzzy.) Now imagine the many possibilities in a MMO. Not only you can dress up your Barbie and pretend she's a fashion model, you can sit her together with other people's Barbies and have a tea party. Won't that be fun? Little girls love having tea parties with their dolls. (At this point if you're a father, you're supposed to nod and reach for your wallet.)
4. Debbie Does Dallas. Perfect for the few horny 14 year olds trying to cybersex every female character in sight... and for the many 40 year olds pretending to be a horny 14 year old. 'Nuff said.
5. Harvest Moon. All the fun of watering crops and brushing your pony, except in a massively multi-player setting. And if you get a 40 man group you can brush an epic pony.
6. Dallas. I believe more housewives worldwide have watched that soap opera than nerds have watched Star Trek. If they can make an MMO out of the latter, I don't see why they can't make one out of Dallas.
7. The Bible. Yes, you've heard that right. It sold more copies than all 6 Star Wars episodes and all SW books combined. And if you don't think it has MMO potential, you haven't read it.
E.g., the siege and genocide of Midian (not kidding, read Numbers) would make a great battleground. E.g., imagine the fun of an escort quest to get Lot out of Sodom. For that matter, of trying to get to Lot's house with your sphincter intact;) E.g., for a FedEx quest, recreate Jeremiah's treck to the Euphrates to bury his loincloth because the Lord told him to. (Again, I'm not kidding.) Etc.
It's not only about having the same bias, but sometimes also about evaluating the same criteria at all.
E.g., I've seen TFT monitor and TV reviews which didn't even go deeper than "ooh, this one looks glossier than that other one. Teh shiny is soo pretty! Kawaaaaiii!" Not an exact wording, but that was the general idea. At the end of the review I knew which looks prettier, and had a good idea of how good do the brushed aluminum buttons look against the shiny plastic frame. But I was left completely unenlightened about such "details" as latency or contrast.
I like to check behardware, for example, for monitor reviews because they actually measure ghosting and display lag with a fast camera, and provide comparisons on those criteria. It's not a case of same bias (sometimes my pick would be different than theirs), but that's genuinely information which 90% of the other sites don't provide at all.
Sorry, from my experience they still reveal more than the glowing endorsements.
See, we're not mindless bots. If Joe Random said "Game X is teh sux" or "Car Y is teh gay", it doesn't mean I'll take it as gospel. For a start, I will look into what his complaint is.
E.g., if it's as trivial as the complaints about the view angles on widescreen monitors in Bioshock, that's actually a good sign. People usually get to noticing that kind of details if there aren't more glaring faults to pan. That goes for astroturfing competition reviews too. If the product had more glaring problems, they'd latch on to those.
E.g., what he disliked, maybe I like, so it's actually factored in as "good" in my final decision. E.g., if someone were to pan a game for being turn-based and thus sooo 1990's, heck, I like turn based games. I'll buy it.
And other stuff is just information, again, to be judged and weighted by my own criteria.
But that's just the important part: it's information. Which all of those sites writing only the glowing endorsement parts, left out. They're only telling me half the story.
Dunno, I'm no Apple fan, but they look alike to me. Uncanny valley alike. Sure one is green and the other one is silver, but pretty much you could put one over the other and get almost the same outer edge, minus the bite on Apple's logo.
It's akin to making my own logo with thin aloe leaves wrapped around a ball and pretending it totally doesn't look like AT&T's logo. See, theirs is with blue stripes and mine is with green leaves. Who'd confuse that? Right?
Now maybe that's not close enough for infringement, but it seems to me like the kind of PR stunt that did bank on people noticing (and hopefully talking about) the similarity.
1) allow only player to make up environment and mob which have identical property and level than what is available for the concerned area
2) allow the player to make up item in value and quantity only to what is allowed to that area
UGC in MMo does not need to be *allow them to make everything* to be interresting. Already building your own area, with a few remoded mob/items would be enough to be a smash hit.
That's a good start, no doubt, but I fear that it still doesn't cover even a fraction of the problem spectrum. E.g.,
A. What do you do about offensive textures and meshes?
Do you allow the users to do any 3D editing? If yes, how do you prevent people from running around with a Black Russian cod piece? (Think: strap-on, for those who somehow missed Black Adder series 1.) For that matter, how about a cod-piece which isn't just a strap-on, but has a naked gnome impaled on it too? How do you prevent people from running around with plate armours which look like naked female meshes?
Unless you want to make the game AO from the start, that is.
How do you prevent people from having a giant penis monster as a custom animal in their areas? For bonus points, tamable. Sure, it'll have the same stats and xo as any other animal, but you're going to get a new one ripped by the media, as soon as some fundie mother goes questing with her pre-teen daughter in that area and tells the tear-wringing story of the trauma on every TV channel.
Just a map editor? How about a map which is a giant snow plain with "YOUR MOM SUCKS DICK!!!" written on it in 100 ft big letters?
B. What do you do about content which is, simply put, just crap?
It may not seem like a problem per se, after all, if you don't like someone's Smurf Massacre map, you can simply not go there, right? But now imagine you have a million players cheerfully churning crap content after crap content, until finding anything else is... well, an example of DDOS on a human.
Exactly that happened on COH with its ill advised "Mission Architect". Within weeks there were tens of thousands of user missions, the majority of which were simply farming exercises. Worse yet, the rating system didn't really help either: the best rated _maps_ were the simple farming exercises and exploits.
Let's face it, about 99% of the people vastly over-estimate their creative abilities. Just like, say, most people think they're funnier than they really are, most people really aren't that good at creating anything. Especially stories and quests.
C. What about other kinds of exploits? Sadly, with your plan you don't even cover all the exploits.
E.g., what's to keep one from making a map where (1) everyone is an undead, and (2) everyone is a melee fighter, no mages or even ranged fighters, and (3) everyone does strictly physical damage, and (4) if they have to spend some points on defenses, they're all dumped into fire, ice and nature protection. You probably got the idea by now, it's a paladin grind map. Sure, the mobs individually satisfy your points requirements for their level, but the mix is where the problem is.
(Again, there are a few thousand of user-created maps on COH which are exactly that kind of an exploit. In fact, by now finding any map where any enemies do any other kind of damage than physical and don't prefer melee, is a task akin to cleaning the Augean stables.)
E.g., how about, say, a map with a sorta Ziggurat in the middle, with the top accessible only via a spiral road winding around it... or by clever jumping between the road segments. It's the kind of thing that doesn't look like a blatant exploit at a superficial look, but it would actually be the perfect kiting map. The players could pull some boss npc and skip to the top, while the NPC follows the road up, then simply jump their way down and make the NPC follow the road in reverse.
Actually, I notice that most of his examples of where user-generated content was great, were _single_ player games or limited multiplayer games, not MMOs.
In single player games, for a start, nobody pushes their content on you. If you don't want to play someone's goatse map, just don't download it. In MMOs you inherently play on the same map as 10,000+ other players. (Quite literally in WoW's case for the most populated servers.) If I make my own tower shield with the goatse or two-girls-one-cup pic as custom texture, there's not much you can do to avoid seeing it.
And, well, just look at how much that link was popular on Slashdot. The goatse links are probably the main reason why in the meantime there's the name of the site in square brackets next to any link. At one point, if you didn't run into half a dozen goatse links and a rickrolling in one thread, it was a slow day.
And on Second Life there were quite a few attacks of the pink flying penises on someone else's event.
Let's face it, any game will have a population of trolls, and if you offer them even half a chance to push offensive stuff on unwilling victims, they _will_ do it.
Second, in single player games you don't ruin anyone else's day if you break balance. If you want to give your marines in Starcraft 2 a Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch or let the Zerg spawn Vorpal Bunnies, who cares? Even in limited multiplayer games, it's between you and the server's owner, and doesn't ruin anyone else's enjoyment.
In a MMO, you'd very soon see hunters with 100,000 HP damage photon cannons and rogues with dual insta-kill lightsabers in level 19 battlegrounds. 'Nuff said.
Third, the limited single-player games try hard to detect and prevent any differences that one side doesn't know about. If I want to give my marines insta-kill miniguns, either you install that mod too, or the game will refuse to connect. In effect there's a very strong element of opt-in. You have to aggree to my list of mods and actually actively install them too. You effectively have to opt-in for my changes. I can't spring unbalanced or unfair suprises on you.
In a MMO, everyone _has_ to play in the same world. The only way to not play in the same world where my hunter is running around with a tactical nuke launcher, is to stop connecting to that server.
Even on MUDs it wasn't that simple. Yes, maybe you cared about balance, lots of users didn't. But even that only scratches the tip of the iceberg.
Also most MUDs didn't have any real theme. You could have a smurf village next to a Red Dwarf area, next to a medieval D&D-type area, next to a modern day area, next to only the elder gods know what. The MUDs which did try to have a consistent theme, had a bitch of a time enforcing it, and it involved getting approval to add anything.
And even then you occasionally ended up with some bored/disgruntled higher-ranking wizard/builder/whatever-you-call-it adding a smurf area to a strictly-D&D-themed role-playing MUD as just a way of going out with a bang.
So if anyone just let users add stuff to WoW with no further checks, expect to see Halo troopers, next to SW stormtroopers, next to a Star Trek team, next to the penis-tentacled blob from heck and his army of japanese schoolgirl sex slaves.
And then occasionally there was stuff that was just offensive. E.g., I remember having a brief look on a mostly empty MUD and fairly quickly ran into one of the builders walking around showing up as "Wearing Xenia on his dick" if you looked at him. (Exact name changed, otherwise an exact quote though.) Turns out Xenia used to be one of the most popular players. Key words: used to. Apparently she didn't find it funny either.
Actually, I still say that a lot of them know at least enough to know they're lying, but even that's beside the point. They should at least know they're making buzzwords up, and that it _is_ lying to a customer.
What makes it odious in my eyes is that they essentially abuse those people's trust. We may argue about how smart it is to trust the guy getting a commission to do a fair analysis of your problem, but that's essentially what those customers are doing. Some old geezer comes and explains it all to the nice sales guy, not because he just wants to give the "I'm ripe for a con job" signals loud and clear, but because they trust that they'll be given a genuine solution to their problem. Because that's how the rest of society works.
If I go to a dentist with a cavity, I expect him to tell me what's the best course of action for that problem -- e.g., just fill the hole -- not to smooth talk me into pulling the tooth out and replacing it with an expensive implant. Sure, the implant would make him more money, but the underlying expectation is that he'll solve _my_ problem not his own mortgage problem.
If I hop in a cab and ask the guy to take me to the main railway station, I expect him to take either the shortest or the fastest route, or ask which of them. I do not expect him to just run in circles for more money, although he's on a commission too.
If I call a plumber for a leaking pipe, I expect him to do essentially the minimum that solves that problem, not take it as an opportunity to invent reasons why he should replace the piping in the whole house. And if he does come up with reasons why I should replace all of it -- e.g., because it's an old house and it's lead pipes -- I expect those to be real, honest-to-FSM reasons, not made up buzzwords that just have to sound real to make a sale.
Etc.
And if your dentist, or your cabbie, or plumber, or accountant, or lawyer, took it as just an opportunity to milk the last cent they can out of you with invented buzzwords, probably most people would take them to court. Because it _is_ blatant fraud and betrayal of trust.
But somehow when a computer sales clerk does it, nah, that's ok. Sorry, it looks the same to me.
Well, I was more like thinking small "mom and pop" shops, where people can still tell their arse from their elbow. They may not have some deep knowledge of either, but at least know what goes on the toilet when you need to take a dump. Or back to computers, to have read some benchmark site when they bought their own graphics card.
Basically: they may not be gurus, but they know enough to know when they're lying to a customer. And that's pretty much what I'm charging them with. Being conmen on a commision, and knowing they're conmen.
And by your friend's description, it sounds like your friend and his co-workers knew when they're lying to a customer too. Your friend quit because he couldn't stand doing it, at least some of his co-workers didn't. That's how you separate those with morals from those without.
But unfortunately the system is set up to reward the latter, not the former.
I think at least some of the computer salesmen know too. Sorry.
I'm sorry, but when I witness some computer store guy tell an old geezer that he _needs_ the latest top-end NVidia card to watch digital photos of his grandchildren, 'cause photos are video stuff and and a bigger video card is better for that, right?... or that buying the latest Intel CPU makes their Internet go faster... I know Hanlon's Razor, "never ascribe to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity", but it still trips my suspension of disbelief big time. Especially when I can have a more technical talk with that sales guy afterwards and see that, well, he may not be IBM research labs material, but he's not exactly the kind who thinks that Megaherz is what happens when you stick your fingers in the PSU either.
I don't know, after my experiences with flying in an airplane, I think I'd actually pay good money for a blimp ride instead... assuming that I actually get _some_ leg space on a blimp, I could live with it taking an hour longer in flight. Quite happily.
Plus, honestly, have you flown in the last 10 years or so? Between having to come an hour early just to make it through the byzantine controls and bureaucracy in time, and stuff like having to wait almost an hour on the runway because someone forgot to also load the luggage (for bonus points: it once happened in _both_ directions)... if an airship line can simplify that and maintain, say, a 200 km/h speed in a straight line, it might actually be faster on the whole. Well, for short to medium distance flights, anyway.
Well, maybe the SA-2 wasn't the best example. It was picked mostly for the sole merit of being old and cheap and available to everyone who ever wanted to buy one. There are some countries out there barely above third-world level that have a few of them.
All the AA guns I've mentioned can be aimed optically, without any radar. They're really WW2 technology which has been retrofitted to be guidable by radar too, but if that's not an option (for whatever reason), the crew can still look through a scope and madly crank to turn it, like you see in WW2 movies.
While I don't know about Afghanistan specifically, it seems to me like trying to use it anywhere near a country that's not already been soundly thrashed and left defenseless, is asking for trouble.
Yes, you're not going to hit it with an AK-47, but for example a SA-2 is going to hit you from 20 to 30 miles away (depending on the exact model), and up to 66,000 ft high. IIRC, if you're a large slow and non-maneuvering target, it can actually go quite a few more miles purely inertial at the end. (Pretty much like a dart with guiding fins.) Unless you're going to pack some equally oversized missile as counter-measures, no, you're not going to get much use out of targeting it before it targeted you. Though technically you will get such an early lock, because the targeting radar will lock on you at 40 miles or so, well before the actual missile actually launches, and the early warning radar from almost 200 miles.
It's an old and cheap missile, and it's probably the most exported missile. It's all over Eastern Europe, ex-USSR, China and IIRC in a few arab countries too.
Mind you, against a fast and low flying modern airplane, it's probably useless, and against helicopters even more so, since it has a 4 miles or so minimum range. But against a blimp? That thing was designed against the early cold war idea of big bombers flying high and not being able to maneuver much. A blimp is pretty much making its day again.
And if we're talking artillery, why bother with a howitzer on a slope, when half the world got one or more of this or this or even more likely this from the Soviets. I know at least Iraq had a lot of the latter.
Yeah, fat lot of good it did them against modern airplanes, but you show up in a blimp within 3-4 miles of one of those and you'll get a lot of holes fast.
So basically, as I was saying, yeah, if you just have to patrol the skies of Afghanistan or some other county you've already thrashed and conquered, and you know you'll never face anything heavier than a RPG or AK-47, it's great. But then the old WW1 Zeppelins would be just as great. And it pretty much doesn't matter if it has its own anti-radar missiles or not, because nobody will shoot a missile that high. The missiles that go that high (like the SA-2) aren't exactly concealed-carry sized, if you get my drift.
But that's about it. If this thing shows itself anywhere else, it doesn't matter how many anti-radiation missiles you pack on it. It's a big slow target, and just asking for it.
I did not ask whether it's "evil", whatever meaning that might have for a plant.
I did not ask whether such a mutation could theoretically happen in an imaginary alternate reality, via viruses or otherwise. (Though how many viruses can equally affect a bacterium _and_ a plant, now that's a better question.)
I did not ask whether _other_ mutations have been caused by viruses.
I asked for an example where just human selection by clueless farmers in the last 5000 years actually produced a plant that prouduces pesticides. Since that was basically the kind of handwaving I was answering to.
So unless you're going to answer that, well, nice try but non sequitur. I mean, but no banana;)
See, most GM crops aren't just selected to be bigger or hardier. Most of it actually has genes copied from various bacteria (e.g., Bacillus Thuringiensis) to produce its own pesticides, or to make it more resistant to higher levels of herbicides and/or pesticides.
Yes, they should be harmless to humans (though in a couple of cases they did also copy the gene for a strong allergen.) That's not what I'm talking about.
But if you're going to put the equals sign between that and human selection, I'm affraid I'll have to ask for evidence of even a single crop which started producing pesticides as a result of just selection by humans. I'm genuinely curious.
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Well, yes, any matter you throw at it (and energy converts neatly to matter too) can only cause it to grow. But there's still the problem of how much and how close.
But, really, let's do some simple maths.
Let's say we want to produce a black hole the size of a helium atom. You know, big enough to occasionally actually bounce into stuff and gobble it up. (Remember, only matter coming closer than the Schwarzschild radius is actually gobbled up.) It's not a big black hole, but it has the potential to grow. So we apply:
r = (2G/c^2) * m ... Where the thing in brackets is approx 1.5 * 10^-27 m/kg. We'll want to get a hole measuring 3x10^-11 m. So we'd need a mass of 2x10^15 kg, or two millions of millions of metric tons.
Yep, that huge a mass will only gobble stuff up if it comes within 3x10^-11m of it. But it's a start, and as an evil genius you may have to start small ;)
To produce that hole, the protons we throw at it, as a total, will have to have the equivalent of that much mass in energy.
Let's transform that into MeV though, since we are talking energy. 1MeV is about 1.8x10^-36 Kg. Let's round to 2x10^-36, since we're only doing a back-of-the-napkin calculation, and are only interested in rough ballpark figures. So we're talking about 10^51 MeV
If we got that energy from uranium, and assuming that we could (A) split every single U235 atom, and (B) capture 100% of the released energy, each atom split releases 180 MeV. (RL reactors don't come even close in both aspects.) Again, let's round it up to 200. (In my fantasy land, reactors are better than 100% efficient;)
That works out to about 5*10^48 uranium atoms split. Avogadro's number being about 6x10^23, that's about 10^25 moles of uranium. (Again, I'm only interested in the order of magnitude. Plus, we rounded up in the other direction before, so it evens up.) And a mole of U235 weighs 235 grams, or about half a pound or almost a quarter kilo.
We're talking about 2 to 3 times 10^24 kilos of uranium, or 2 to 3 times 10^21 _tons_ of U235. That's 2-3 thousand billions of billions of tons of U235. Or about a hundred thousands of billions of billions of reactor-grade enriched uranium. Completely used up in a 100% effective reactor.
So basically yes we _could_ make a bigger black hole by keeping throwing stuff at it, close to the speed of light, but the energy requirements are nuts even to get a hole the size of a helium atom. We don't even _have_ the kind of reactors and capacitors where you could split a hundred thousands of billions of billions of reactor-grade uranium and dump it all into just creating a black hole.
Well, the key isn't just mass, but also radius. Gravity (I'll go newtonian, just because I'm lazy) increased linearly with mass, but decreases with the square of the radius. So for example, if you packed something the mass of Earth in just half the size of Earth, the gravity on the surface would be 4 times that of Earth. Squeeze it into a quarter of the size of Earth and get 16 times the gravity on the surface. Squeeze it small enough and you have a black hole.
If you do the proper maths, the Schwarzschild radius of a black hole with the mass of Earth is about 9mm.
Which really means, don't think something that will suck matter and bend light spectacularly all the way to Alpha Centauri. It means that if light happens to go within 9mm of that singularity, it ain't coming out. But farther away, it's still a body with the mass of Earth. The moon's orbit will still have the same radius for example.
My approach, actually, is that if they have time to be surfing for cutesy screensavers on www.i-pwn-u.ru and follow links to www.xploits-r-us.ro and to re-confirm their ebay password 10 times a day, that's the problem: they have time. Forget addressing the symptoms, go for the root problem.
Me? I gave my parents WoW. Sure, it's just about as hard as giving them Linux, so you have to hit them when they're down. It's for their own good. I got mom when she was too sick to do anything else, and she contaminated dad from there. If that fails, mention that she can talk to you on group chat. It's funny what moms are prepared to do for a son as a captive audience :P
Fair warning, it takes some time investment. Be prepared to answer questions like, I swear to FSM I'm not making it up, "HOW DO I SWIM UP?? WHAT CAMERA? I DON'T HAVE A CAMERA TO ROTATE!! NO, I LOOKED IN ALL THE BAGS AND I DON'T HAVE A CAMERA!!! WHERE DO I BUY A CAMERA?" or, again, true to FSM quote, "HOW DO I GET OUT OF THIS CAVE?? NO, I DON'T SEE YOU! I CAN ONLY SEE THE TOP OF MY HEAD AND MAYBE 3 FT IN FRONT AND TO THE SIDES!!"
I can see you're dying to ask, "but couldn't I just teach them to use Linux, or heck at least Mozilla in the same time?" Not so fast, grasshopper. This time they'll actually be willing to learn. In the same month you can teach them to play WoW like a pro, or you can be running in circles around "how do I start IE? This paypal password site says I need IE and Javascript" and "why does this taxform.xls.exe attachment not start when I click it???" if you gave them Linux.
Fast forward about a year, and they don't even have time to sleep. No, really, they're only recently up to 5 hours sleep a night. Surf for cutesy IE toolbars and install crap? Good grief, they don't even have time to shop for groceries outside of wednesday mornings. I think they even lost some weight, what with the occasional wednesday when the servers are back on from 5 AM.
Ah, life is good.
'Course, this might cost them a few years off the life expectancy, but it's you or them, really. The hours to support their computers would have probably added up to the same number of years of your own life. Ask yourself this, really: do you want to spend that time supporting them or grinding your own epic gear? Thought so.
You probably realize that they're trivial to break, right?
Even as websites go, probably _the_ best example, is the old ('90's era) Ultima Online site, which literally had all text as pictures. Looked cool, like pages from an old scroll or codex, but if you think any software can read that (even an OCR would throw occasional fits), you probably are too optimistic. Ok, so most sites nowadays wouldn't go to such extremes, but having at least titles or buttons pre-rendered as buttons is one of those undead ideas that just won't stay dead and buried.
And, of course, it only becomes easier to screw up if you're using Flash, Java FX or pretty much any of the other tools that encourage artists to mix in cutesy effects and animations and pictures.
But even plain HTML and JavaScript can be a great obfuscation tool in the hands of the incompetent. Just make it a mess of DIV tags that no reader can sort to read right, for example.
Captchas too are becoming increasingly obnoxious, and they're popping up in places where they have no reason to be. E.g., it's happened again that I have to fill in a captcha to buy something online, and I'm thinking that's pretty silly, ffs. What are they defending against? Some bot buying me a present with my own credit card?
And you don't have to even be blind to have trouble with some captchas. I figure I still have pretty good eyes, and I'm doing 50-50 on some of them. And again, if you think any screen reader will be able to read a captcha rendered as a bitmap... well, let's just say that bots would have no trouble reading it too.
The option to have some numbers read at you is even worse, if you're not a native English speaker and have perfect hearing. I know last I've tried that option, the sounds was so post-processed and mixed with background noises (again, or speech recognition software would make easy work of the captcha), that I just went "huh? what?"
Except that's yet another case of talking out the arse without knowing what the real problem is.
The problem is: in many of those games with rubberbanding, there is already another mechanic for those tiers you describe. And the rubberbanding is nullifying the other mechanic. _That_ is what some of us complain about.
E.g., in the Gran Turismo series (and many similar games), the focus isn't on just jumping into a random race and having your 15 minutes of fun. You have to earn the car and the upgrades to qualify for the next league, and then even more upgrades to win in it. There is already a mechanic to simulate those leagues, and to justify why you should spend several days grinding your way through them. (Read: why you should play each of the few race tracks more than once.) Throwing in rubberbanding is nullifying all that, and turning it right back into a kiddie kart game. Suddenly it's hard not to notice that the whole tuning and upgrading aspect is bogus, since the opponents really are just tied to your car with rubberbands. What's the point in grinding to upgrade your engine HP by 50% when, effectively, every single opponent just got the same upgrade?
E.g., in Oblivion and generally an RPG, there's already a mechanic for simulating those leagues and tiers. It's called xp and levels. (Or skills, if it's skill-based a la Oblivion.) If your skill is too low to beat this opponent, you're supposed to go raise it somewhere else, and if it's too low, well, then just go fight something higher level instead. Do you understand that crucial aspect? There is no need to simulate those leagues and tiers in a game which already has another mechanic for just that. And adding some form of rubber-banding just makes the other mechanic a pointless waste of time. Why bother grinding your character to level 50, when effectively it gave you no advantage at all?
And it doesn't help that all too often it's done _badly_ too. E.g., since we're talking about Oblivion, the end opponent is actually a lot easier to beat if you somehow manage to get there as a level 3 character, than if you did all the quests and have a level 30 character. Effectively, you're better off if you skip 90% of the game and just do the absolute minimum that gets you through the short main quest arc. It's not that all that grinding and exploring and getting equipment doesn't give any advantage, it's that it actually becomes a disadvantage.
Hmm, good point.
They said the same about pinball ;)
What, you mean fundies would be _against_ a game that teaches the Bible? I would have thought they'd be all over it like clap on a cheap hooker ;)
Good point. And in the spirit of lending a helping hand to the publishers, here is my own list of franchises which have been sadly overlooked when it came to making an MMO.
1. Zorro. Just think about it. For a start, you don't even need to pay the artists for more than one outfit for the players. You just need to figure out a way to need 25 Zorros for the final boss, and you're all set.
2. Tom and Jerry. This could be huge. Just think of the millions of children who have grown up on seeing the cat and mouse (and occasionally dog) hit each other over the head with frying pans, lead pipes, and just about everything except the kitchen sink. Actually, wait, I think they used the kitchen sink too. It could make the perfect PvP MMO. (And you may think that it would be limited to have just two races in an MMO and have it all happen in one house and its yard, but AION launched literally with one race per side and the zones aren't much bigger either.)
I for one can hardly wait to grind for the Epic Frying Pan Of Power, and whack a cat over the head with it. What? You're saying it's just me?
3. Barbie. Well, Mattel already proved that you can make money with Barbie games for little girls. (Mostly because the one buying the game is the father, whose idea of what game would a little girl want is a little fuzzy.) Now imagine the many possibilities in a MMO. Not only you can dress up your Barbie and pretend she's a fashion model, you can sit her together with other people's Barbies and have a tea party. Won't that be fun? Little girls love having tea parties with their dolls. (At this point if you're a father, you're supposed to nod and reach for your wallet.)
4. Debbie Does Dallas. Perfect for the few horny 14 year olds trying to cybersex every female character in sight... and for the many 40 year olds pretending to be a horny 14 year old. 'Nuff said.
5. Harvest Moon. All the fun of watering crops and brushing your pony, except in a massively multi-player setting. And if you get a 40 man group you can brush an epic pony.
6. Dallas. I believe more housewives worldwide have watched that soap opera than nerds have watched Star Trek. If they can make an MMO out of the latter, I don't see why they can't make one out of Dallas.
7. The Bible. Yes, you've heard that right. It sold more copies than all 6 Star Wars episodes and all SW books combined. And if you don't think it has MMO potential, you haven't read it.
E.g., the siege and genocide of Midian (not kidding, read Numbers) would make a great battleground. E.g., imagine the fun of an escort quest to get Lot out of Sodom. For that matter, of trying to get to Lot's house with your sphincter intact ;) E.g., for a FedEx quest, recreate Jeremiah's treck to the Euphrates to bury his loincloth because the Lord told him to. (Again, I'm not kidding.) Etc.
It's not only about having the same bias, but sometimes also about evaluating the same criteria at all.
E.g., I've seen TFT monitor and TV reviews which didn't even go deeper than "ooh, this one looks glossier than that other one. Teh shiny is soo pretty! Kawaaaaiii!" Not an exact wording, but that was the general idea. At the end of the review I knew which looks prettier, and had a good idea of how good do the brushed aluminum buttons look against the shiny plastic frame. But I was left completely unenlightened about such "details" as latency or contrast.
I like to check behardware, for example, for monitor reviews because they actually measure ghosting and display lag with a fast camera, and provide comparisons on those criteria. It's not a case of same bias (sometimes my pick would be different than theirs), but that's genuinely information which 90% of the other sites don't provide at all.
Sorry, from my experience they still reveal more than the glowing endorsements.
See, we're not mindless bots. If Joe Random said "Game X is teh sux" or "Car Y is teh gay", it doesn't mean I'll take it as gospel. For a start, I will look into what his complaint is.
E.g., if it's as trivial as the complaints about the view angles on widescreen monitors in Bioshock, that's actually a good sign. People usually get to noticing that kind of details if there aren't more glaring faults to pan. That goes for astroturfing competition reviews too. If the product had more glaring problems, they'd latch on to those.
E.g., what he disliked, maybe I like, so it's actually factored in as "good" in my final decision. E.g., if someone were to pan a game for being turn-based and thus sooo 1990's, heck, I like turn based games. I'll buy it.
And other stuff is just information, again, to be judged and weighted by my own criteria.
But that's just the important part: it's information. Which all of those sites writing only the glowing endorsement parts, left out. They're only telling me half the story.
Dunno, I'm no Apple fan, but they look alike to me. Uncanny valley alike. Sure one is green and the other one is silver, but pretty much you could put one over the other and get almost the same outer edge, minus the bite on Apple's logo.
It's akin to making my own logo with thin aloe leaves wrapped around a ball and pretending it totally doesn't look like AT&T's logo. See, theirs is with blue stripes and mine is with green leaves. Who'd confuse that? Right?
Now maybe that's not close enough for infringement, but it seems to me like the kind of PR stunt that did bank on people noticing (and hopefully talking about) the similarity.
The Lighter Side of Tentacle Hentai
That's a good start, no doubt, but I fear that it still doesn't cover even a fraction of the problem spectrum. E.g.,
A. What do you do about offensive textures and meshes?
Do you allow the users to do any 3D editing? If yes, how do you prevent people from running around with a Black Russian cod piece? (Think: strap-on, for those who somehow missed Black Adder series 1.) For that matter, how about a cod-piece which isn't just a strap-on, but has a naked gnome impaled on it too? How do you prevent people from running around with plate armours which look like naked female meshes?
Unless you want to make the game AO from the start, that is.
How do you prevent people from having a giant penis monster as a custom animal in their areas? For bonus points, tamable. Sure, it'll have the same stats and xo as any other animal, but you're going to get a new one ripped by the media, as soon as some fundie mother goes questing with her pre-teen daughter in that area and tells the tear-wringing story of the trauma on every TV channel.
Just a map editor? How about a map which is a giant snow plain with "YOUR MOM SUCKS DICK!!!" written on it in 100 ft big letters?
B. What do you do about content which is, simply put, just crap?
It may not seem like a problem per se, after all, if you don't like someone's Smurf Massacre map, you can simply not go there, right? But now imagine you have a million players cheerfully churning crap content after crap content, until finding anything else is... well, an example of DDOS on a human.
Exactly that happened on COH with its ill advised "Mission Architect". Within weeks there were tens of thousands of user missions, the majority of which were simply farming exercises. Worse yet, the rating system didn't really help either: the best rated _maps_ were the simple farming exercises and exploits.
Let's face it, about 99% of the people vastly over-estimate their creative abilities. Just like, say, most people think they're funnier than they really are, most people really aren't that good at creating anything. Especially stories and quests.
C. What about other kinds of exploits? Sadly, with your plan you don't even cover all the exploits.
E.g., what's to keep one from making a map where (1) everyone is an undead, and (2) everyone is a melee fighter, no mages or even ranged fighters, and (3) everyone does strictly physical damage, and (4) if they have to spend some points on defenses, they're all dumped into fire, ice and nature protection. You probably got the idea by now, it's a paladin grind map. Sure, the mobs individually satisfy your points requirements for their level, but the mix is where the problem is.
(Again, there are a few thousand of user-created maps on COH which are exactly that kind of an exploit. In fact, by now finding any map where any enemies do any other kind of damage than physical and don't prefer melee, is a task akin to cleaning the Augean stables.)
E.g., how about, say, a map with a sorta Ziggurat in the middle, with the top accessible only via a spiral road winding around it... or by clever jumping between the road segments. It's the kind of thing that doesn't look like a blatant exploit at a superficial look, but it would actually be the perfect kiting map. The players could pull some boss npc and skip to the top, while the NPC follows the road up, then simply jump their way down and make the NPC follow the road in reverse.
Actually, I notice that most of his examples of where user-generated content was great, were _single_ player games or limited multiplayer games, not MMOs.
In single player games, for a start, nobody pushes their content on you. If you don't want to play someone's goatse map, just don't download it. In MMOs you inherently play on the same map as 10,000+ other players. (Quite literally in WoW's case for the most populated servers.) If I make my own tower shield with the goatse or two-girls-one-cup pic as custom texture, there's not much you can do to avoid seeing it.
And, well, just look at how much that link was popular on Slashdot. The goatse links are probably the main reason why in the meantime there's the name of the site in square brackets next to any link. At one point, if you didn't run into half a dozen goatse links and a rickrolling in one thread, it was a slow day.
And on Second Life there were quite a few attacks of the pink flying penises on someone else's event.
Let's face it, any game will have a population of trolls, and if you offer them even half a chance to push offensive stuff on unwilling victims, they _will_ do it.
Second, in single player games you don't ruin anyone else's day if you break balance. If you want to give your marines in Starcraft 2 a Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch or let the Zerg spawn Vorpal Bunnies, who cares? Even in limited multiplayer games, it's between you and the server's owner, and doesn't ruin anyone else's enjoyment.
In a MMO, you'd very soon see hunters with 100,000 HP damage photon cannons and rogues with dual insta-kill lightsabers in level 19 battlegrounds. 'Nuff said.
Third, the limited single-player games try hard to detect and prevent any differences that one side doesn't know about. If I want to give my marines insta-kill miniguns, either you install that mod too, or the game will refuse to connect. In effect there's a very strong element of opt-in. You have to aggree to my list of mods and actually actively install them too. You effectively have to opt-in for my changes. I can't spring unbalanced or unfair suprises on you.
In a MMO, everyone _has_ to play in the same world. The only way to not play in the same world where my hunter is running around with a tactical nuke launcher, is to stop connecting to that server.
Etc.
Basically it's not that simple at all.
Even on MUDs it wasn't that simple. Yes, maybe you cared about balance, lots of users didn't. But even that only scratches the tip of the iceberg.
Also most MUDs didn't have any real theme. You could have a smurf village next to a Red Dwarf area, next to a medieval D&D-type area, next to a modern day area, next to only the elder gods know what. The MUDs which did try to have a consistent theme, had a bitch of a time enforcing it, and it involved getting approval to add anything.
And even then you occasionally ended up with some bored/disgruntled higher-ranking wizard/builder/whatever-you-call-it adding a smurf area to a strictly-D&D-themed role-playing MUD as just a way of going out with a bang.
So if anyone just let users add stuff to WoW with no further checks, expect to see Halo troopers, next to SW stormtroopers, next to a Star Trek team, next to the penis-tentacled blob from heck and his army of japanese schoolgirl sex slaves.
And then occasionally there was stuff that was just offensive. E.g., I remember having a brief look on a mostly empty MUD and fairly quickly ran into one of the builders walking around showing up as "Wearing Xenia on his dick" if you looked at him. (Exact name changed, otherwise an exact quote though.) Turns out Xenia used to be one of the most popular players. Key words: used to. Apparently she didn't find it funny either.
And so on.
Actually, I still say that a lot of them know at least enough to know they're lying, but even that's beside the point. They should at least know they're making buzzwords up, and that it _is_ lying to a customer.
What makes it odious in my eyes is that they essentially abuse those people's trust. We may argue about how smart it is to trust the guy getting a commission to do a fair analysis of your problem, but that's essentially what those customers are doing. Some old geezer comes and explains it all to the nice sales guy, not because he just wants to give the "I'm ripe for a con job" signals loud and clear, but because they trust that they'll be given a genuine solution to their problem. Because that's how the rest of society works.
If I go to a dentist with a cavity, I expect him to tell me what's the best course of action for that problem -- e.g., just fill the hole -- not to smooth talk me into pulling the tooth out and replacing it with an expensive implant. Sure, the implant would make him more money, but the underlying expectation is that he'll solve _my_ problem not his own mortgage problem.
If I hop in a cab and ask the guy to take me to the main railway station, I expect him to take either the shortest or the fastest route, or ask which of them. I do not expect him to just run in circles for more money, although he's on a commission too.
If I call a plumber for a leaking pipe, I expect him to do essentially the minimum that solves that problem, not take it as an opportunity to invent reasons why he should replace the piping in the whole house. And if he does come up with reasons why I should replace all of it -- e.g., because it's an old house and it's lead pipes -- I expect those to be real, honest-to-FSM reasons, not made up buzzwords that just have to sound real to make a sale.
Etc.
And if your dentist, or your cabbie, or plumber, or accountant, or lawyer, took it as just an opportunity to milk the last cent they can out of you with invented buzzwords, probably most people would take them to court. Because it _is_ blatant fraud and betrayal of trust.
But somehow when a computer sales clerk does it, nah, that's ok. Sorry, it looks the same to me.
Well, I was more like thinking small "mom and pop" shops, where people can still tell their arse from their elbow. They may not have some deep knowledge of either, but at least know what goes on the toilet when you need to take a dump. Or back to computers, to have read some benchmark site when they bought their own graphics card.
Basically: they may not be gurus, but they know enough to know when they're lying to a customer. And that's pretty much what I'm charging them with. Being conmen on a commision, and knowing they're conmen.
And by your friend's description, it sounds like your friend and his co-workers knew when they're lying to a customer too. Your friend quit because he couldn't stand doing it, at least some of his co-workers didn't. That's how you separate those with morals from those without.
But unfortunately the system is set up to reward the latter, not the former.
I think at least some of the computer salesmen know too. Sorry.
I'm sorry, but when I witness some computer store guy tell an old geezer that he _needs_ the latest top-end NVidia card to watch digital photos of his grandchildren, 'cause photos are video stuff and and a bigger video card is better for that, right?... or that buying the latest Intel CPU makes their Internet go faster... I know Hanlon's Razor, "never ascribe to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity", but it still trips my suspension of disbelief big time. Especially when I can have a more technical talk with that sales guy afterwards and see that, well, he may not be IBM research labs material, but he's not exactly the kind who thinks that Megaherz is what happens when you stick your fingers in the PSU either.
I don't know, after my experiences with flying in an airplane, I think I'd actually pay good money for a blimp ride instead... assuming that I actually get _some_ leg space on a blimp, I could live with it taking an hour longer in flight. Quite happily.
Plus, honestly, have you flown in the last 10 years or so? Between having to come an hour early just to make it through the byzantine controls and bureaucracy in time, and stuff like having to wait almost an hour on the runway because someone forgot to also load the luggage (for bonus points: it once happened in _both_ directions)... if an airship line can simplify that and maintain, say, a 200 km/h speed in a straight line, it might actually be faster on the whole. Well, for short to medium distance flights, anyway.
Well, maybe the SA-2 wasn't the best example. It was picked mostly for the sole merit of being old and cheap and available to everyone who ever wanted to buy one. There are some countries out there barely above third-world level that have a few of them.
Still, pick another missile of your choice, then.
All the AA guns I've mentioned can be aimed optically, without any radar. They're really WW2 technology which has been retrofitted to be guidable by radar too, but if that's not an option (for whatever reason), the crew can still look through a scope and madly crank to turn it, like you see in WW2 movies.
While I don't know about Afghanistan specifically, it seems to me like trying to use it anywhere near a country that's not already been soundly thrashed and left defenseless, is asking for trouble.
Yes, you're not going to hit it with an AK-47, but for example a SA-2 is going to hit you from 20 to 30 miles away (depending on the exact model), and up to 66,000 ft high. IIRC, if you're a large slow and non-maneuvering target, it can actually go quite a few more miles purely inertial at the end. (Pretty much like a dart with guiding fins.) Unless you're going to pack some equally oversized missile as counter-measures, no, you're not going to get much use out of targeting it before it targeted you. Though technically you will get such an early lock, because the targeting radar will lock on you at 40 miles or so, well before the actual missile actually launches, and the early warning radar from almost 200 miles.
It's an old and cheap missile, and it's probably the most exported missile. It's all over Eastern Europe, ex-USSR, China and IIRC in a few arab countries too.
Mind you, against a fast and low flying modern airplane, it's probably useless, and against helicopters even more so, since it has a 4 miles or so minimum range. But against a blimp? That thing was designed against the early cold war idea of big bombers flying high and not being able to maneuver much. A blimp is pretty much making its day again.
And if we're talking artillery, why bother with a howitzer on a slope, when half the world got one or more of this or this or even more likely this from the Soviets. I know at least Iraq had a lot of the latter.
Yeah, fat lot of good it did them against modern airplanes, but you show up in a blimp within 3-4 miles of one of those and you'll get a lot of holes fast.
So basically, as I was saying, yeah, if you just have to patrol the skies of Afghanistan or some other county you've already thrashed and conquered, and you know you'll never face anything heavier than a RPG or AK-47, it's great. But then the old WW1 Zeppelins would be just as great. And it pretty much doesn't matter if it has its own anti-radar missiles or not, because nobody will shoot a missile that high. The missiles that go that high (like the SA-2) aren't exactly concealed-carry sized, if you get my drift.
But that's about it. If this thing shows itself anywhere else, it doesn't matter how many anti-radiation missiles you pack on it. It's a big slow target, and just asking for it.
You're answering the wrong question.
I did not ask whether it's "evil", whatever meaning that might have for a plant.
I did not ask whether such a mutation could theoretically happen in an imaginary alternate reality, via viruses or otherwise. (Though how many viruses can equally affect a bacterium _and_ a plant, now that's a better question.)
I did not ask whether _other_ mutations have been caused by viruses.
I asked for an example where just human selection by clueless farmers in the last 5000 years actually produced a plant that prouduces pesticides. Since that was basically the kind of handwaving I was answering to.
So unless you're going to answer that, well, nice try but non sequitur. I mean, but no banana ;)
See, most GM crops aren't just selected to be bigger or hardier. Most of it actually has genes copied from various bacteria (e.g., Bacillus Thuringiensis) to produce its own pesticides, or to make it more resistant to higher levels of herbicides and/or pesticides.
Yes, they should be harmless to humans (though in a couple of cases they did also copy the gene for a strong allergen.) That's not what I'm talking about.
But if you're going to put the equals sign between that and human selection, I'm affraid I'll have to ask for evidence of even a single crop which started producing pesticides as a result of just selection by humans. I'm genuinely curious.