No, nonliteral implementation is not the same as orthogonal projection. Orthogonal projection is like when someone transforms rectangular coordinate bears into polar bears. Nonliteral implementation is lawyerese for "I know copyright is supposed to protect the expression and not the underlieing ideas, but I can't win with that rule, so please let it cover the ideas this time".
(If I've timed it just right, this comment will make perfect sense as he comes down).
Or 'computer' geeks could offer these design and graphic geeks some respect. Assume the job might actually require some real thought or training, that they should be brought in on projects early, and that they might actually have good reasons for changes, even changes to core funtionality. Design in general is like web page design, but magnified. There are a lot of untalented and ill trained people out there who will do a job after a fashion, but there is also a top 10% or so who can turn out fully compliant HTML, shave 50% off a site's load times, and simultaneously give you a site that looks equally good even in some obscure browser you never heard of before. Same thing goes for interface design.
Check with an industrial firm, such as Ford or Phillips. You're likely to find that the people they call design engineers get pay, chances at promotion, and selection to management all at similar rates to the MEs or EEs they also employ. It's about being considered part of the first string, as much as it is about money.
Actually, The illuminati has been infiltrated to its topmost levels by Google. The're also outsourcing my job as an illuminated seer. It's moving from my formely secret fortress in the jungles of India to a seven mile tall mountain somewhere in Idaho, and I don't even have the budget to put frickin' lasers in the tiger's heads anymore. Fnordy-Fnordin-Darnit!
I hate to say this, but don't we owe Cmdr. Taco a spot of gratitude for not including a SCO story in the fakes? You have to admit, slashdot didn't sink as low as the theoretical nadir for AF this year.
The concept of Memes is likely overrated, not just a bit, but a great deal. First, Richard Dawkins, in his book "The Selfish Gene" both introduced the concept, and admitted that some of the very things which he had cited to prove his concepts about Genes cast some serious doubts on the idea of Memes. Since then, most of the people who have expanded on the idea of Memes appear to have not read page 209 of "TSG", where Dawkins admits that Memes have a much higher copying error rate than Genes, and that is a big hole in Meme theory. He argues that perhaps it will be proved later that this problem is illusory. Until someone actually does prove that 'trivial' point, there is literally no scientific basis for Memes. Second, there is a strong temptation to 'prove' that the person you disagree with is not thinking at all clearly, as that is easier than analyzing a whole arguement for what may be a very subtle, hard to find flaw, and accusing a person of being influenced by a Meme, (paticularly when you call it something derogatory, such as a thought virus), is yet another way of doing just that.
It's that well understood part that is the problem here. When you write "stole the words out of my mouth". I well understand it's a metaphore. We end up with no problem between us.
But what if your neighbor actually goes to court, trying to prosecute you for stealing her idea, instead of just saying it. Or if she simply walks up to you in a public place and calls you a thief, in front of witnesses, with no explanation?
Hey, all of a sudden, there IS a big problem between person A and person B. And if Person B automatically has the right to claim language cannot be controlled by law books, then Peson B automatticly wins the resulting Libel or Slander suit.
1. The power generation module weighs a bit under 120 lbs. by itself (37 modules with an aggregate weight of 53 Kilos), and the spent booster on it doesn't add much to that. The whole sattelite is much, much bigger. So letting the little bit fall in by itself assures it is an object small enough to burn up completely on re-entry, istead of possibly being shielded in a big ablative shell. 2. Kicking it into a higher orbit means it takes a lot of extra time to fall. In that 200 plus year period, a lot of the more intense radiation emmitters will decay, so it will come back several orders of magnetude less radioactive than it would if it fell when the parent craft did. 3. If they had launched it free and something had gone wrong, and it had fallen into the atmosphere immediately, the human race still would have benefitted from point 1 above, just not point 2. If the launch mechanism had not worked at all, THEN they would have lost the benefits of both points above. (And knowing a bit about the late Soviet era, lied about it if at all possible).
I don't think we can build the software he's describing in such a short time, but maybe it is a good goal rather than just an endorsement of VB style coding.
Look at the size of some data files. Audio, Video, databases with 10s of thousands of fields and millions of subjects. When the average data object was a book, libraries could use a card catalog with very a linear ruleset. (IOW the Dewey decimal system is much like a conventional programming algorythm). If a data object was an article in a magazine, an index that used one or two pages was generally sufficient.
As data objects have grown, AND the amount of information some user wants on them has grown in turn, we are coping by a linear (or pseudo-linear) scaleing up, which is somewhat like a magazine adding an index of all articles since publication, but only updating that index once a year or less.
But the user wants a non-linear amount of support. Not only is he, in effect, wanting to read more books, but he won't settle for the librarian saying "We have a copy, so if it's not on the shelf, it must be checked out.". Now he wants to know if there is a copy elsewhere, and if it's physically present or just recorded in that indexing system, and if it's a nearby library could they hold it for him until he drives over to get it, and so on.
Jumping from the metaphor to the situation. We have a choice. Either we code in a pseudo-linguistic form, or we find some other model. Coding in pseudo-languages means the software to handle a data object will get large, sometimes faster than the data itself. Many of us have been thinking in terms of data objects such as Video, where the software to let a user view a 2 hour movie doesn't have to be any larger than it is for a 30 second clip, and not recognizing the counter case, where above a certain size, we have to add indexes of indexes, then indexes of indexes of indexes. What happens when the CIA wants language translation software that can recognize colloquial usages? How long will we be 5 years from practical speech recognition or visual recognition software?
It can look ironic, can't it? In my own defense, I did the same thing once before. I pounced on one of the first studies to say smoking was hazardous to your health, and attempted to discredit several previous studies that contradicted them. Oh yeah, there were good, logical reasons for choosing that study over the others, and I turned out to be right.
I don't reccomend trying to define stealing in regular dictionary terms, when it's a legal definition that matters.
Alexander Pope wrote a very long poem, called "the rape of the lock". It's about a young woman's suitor trying to take a lock of her hair. He's not even a stalker or a thief, as this is all an elaborate game to impress her with how much trouble he will go to to woo her, and she isn't averse to being wooed, just enjoying the attention. Words can be stretched, sometimes a whole lot.
Here's a few reasons why I'd suggest you reconsider useing words such as stealing for copyright infringment.
1. All theft is criminal. Once, all copyright infringement was always a matter for civil courts only, and even now, only some forms are criminallized, since the late 90's. Was the US wrong for over 200 years before that, and still half wrong?
2. In the US, all infringment is under federal law. The Supreme court has ruled that the 50 states have no right to make or interpret copyright law. If infringment=theft, the Supreme's reasoning on this would limit the rights of the states to have their own laws on theft as well, or the states would need to insist they have te right to pass their own laws on infringment, so that they did not lose the authority to prosecute theft (and possibly other crimes - imagine if a state couldn't prosecute a man for murder, if he shot someone who was engaged in interstate trucking at the time in that state).
3. Federal law carefully puts infringment under a completely different title than all federal laws regarding theft. Titles are broad categories of law, intended to keep very different areas seperate. Appellate courts frequently compare one law to another, if both are under the same title, (for example if a cruel and unusual punishment defense is invoked) but are much more reluctant to compare across titles.
4. The US signed a treaty called Berne. It relates to civil violation of infringment, and by signing it we have agreed with 181 other nations that infringment is primarily a tort matter, as Berne stresses certain parts concern civil law only and have no authority to regulate the criminal laws of the signing nations, and yet bringing the US into compliance with Berne is cited as the base for much of this new legislation since then.
So the reason to call it not theft is, your legislators say it's not theft, the highest court in the land says it's not theft, just about everyone else in the world's governments says its not theft, except North Korea and the People's republic of Yemin and a few similar nations.
Now if you live somewhere besides the United States, the of course only some of these issues apply to you.
I represent the 80,00,000 people who won't buy a FPS without Mip Map Texturing, and who would like to say "Oooh, Shiny - Halflife 2, huh?. Well, maybe just this once..."
That "aside from the storyline" point shouldn't be just an aside in your post. I'd say WC 3, (and its expansion pack, Frozen Throne), focused most of their creativity on the races and army structure. Different races stop being simple stereotypes when only the elves can harvest lumber without cutting down forests, or the undead use ghouls both as basic combat troops and to gather resources while everyone else effectively has non-combat type peasants. There are at least 12 races and factions in WC 3, and no two appear to have functionally the same troops, buildings, and build trees. (I haven't crunched all the numbers to be sure of that, but it's certain that there are an aweful lot of special features, unique to each army list.
Races such as the Naga and Tauren (and the Panda Brewmeisters), each got fleshed out as genuinely different, and even stock types such as elves became the distinctive night elves and fire elves.
It reminds me of a lot of 40's era SF, where the author assumed one change (like sentient giant beetleoids), and then wrote a story that explored 20 consequences and not just one or two (like if there were giant beetloids, they'd probably live underground, so they would tend to run into undead there, so their magic might concentrate on undead summoning spells, so...). That projecting what a difference in one area really means to 10 or 20 other areas looks pretty creative to me.
The overwhelming majority of games also fall into the following categories:
Fantasy = Elves and Dwarves
Darkly Mature = Vampires and Zombies
Arcade Action = Antropomorphic Animals
Simulation = Intense Resource Management
It may take a genius to invent whole new categories, and maybe the first designer who looked at games such as Bard's Tale or the SSI silver box D&D series and realized most players were getting tired of having to draw maps on graph paper to finish them was a genius, but maybe it just takes a bit of dissatisfaction with the existing limits.
Right now, Id is designing to put back the hordes of monsters found in some levels of Doom and Doom 2, and taken out in Quake, because 100's of monsters/level with Quake's genuine 3D, improvements in lighting and such would have overloaded even high end home PCs of that era. Hordes of monsters is apparently something many first person shooter fans want.
What you're calling evolutionary change can broaden the market. I always liked finding secret areas in doom myself. When Hexen came out, based on the doom engine, it lost points with me because hanging around to search for optional secret areas meant fighting new monsters, as they were set to infinite respawn, and sooner or later they would drain you out of ammo if you loitered. It's a mere evolutionary change to make a game so that players can turn off such a feature, but it broadens the base the game is likely to appeal to.
"You forgot to accuse me of marching at the Seattle WTO protests carrying a 15' tall marionette puppet of a mongoose."
If you actually did that, post a link to the pictures. If you were writing poetry about TMI and doing interpritive dance at the same time, please try out for American Idol next iteration. You Rock.
1. Scale good "safe" windmill generation up to windfarms producing 100 Mw. 2. Model a 'loss of blade' accident, with the nearest large building being 10 full miles away from the wind farm.
Believe it or not, a piece of metal, the mass of a 747, tumbling end over end at 30 RPM and moveing at 600+ mph, is not something you want to have pass through your elemetary school (and as shrapnel after the initial contact, six blocks of brick buildings behind it).
That's not a worst case scenario. Worse is such a design within about the same range of a major city's high rise heart. Worse still is multiple timed/aimed blade failures, perhaps as a result of terrorism.
Carbon 14 is something that needs to be taken more seriously than it generally is. C 14 decays to nitrogen, so its stable decay endpoint is chemically different. How much chance is there of a single C 14 atom's cauasing a mutation if it decays inside a living creature? The answer is frequently treated as not a lot, compared to the stuff we've been calling really dangerous, like Plutonium, right?
Wrong. Since the DNA molecule has a carbon based backbone, the chance of a C 14 decay causing a mutation is 100%, IF that particular C 14 is in a DNA molecule (and in trillions of your and my cells, it is). Unless you can raise an organism on food containing only isotopically purified Carbon 12 sources from conception, there's not much can be done about this.
Deuterium (D-D) based fusion is just approaching its break even point, IF some as yet unconfirmed results in sonogram induced fusion at ORNL (Oak RIdge National Labs), Lawrence-Livermore, and other locales check out.
The "apparently benign gas" you are referring to is radioactive helium. It's benign in that 1. We're talking about radiation levels of 1/1,000th or so of the more serious fission byproducts. 2. Helium is chemically inert, so living things can't incorporate it into their tissues and it can't be concentrated up the food chain. 3. Helium leaks don't lay around on the ground where people can walk through them, pick some up on their shoes, etc.
"some of the other costs of coal are usually not counted for nuclear, such as mining."
And Vice Versa - Possible deaths from truck-car accidents involving trucks transporting nuclear fuel have routinely been included in estimates of the risks from nuclear power, while being omitted from coal.
the Mach 25 Orbital Dip Bomber. No, really. RAND corporation and DARPA were tossing that term around back in the 70's as a possibility if scram-jet research was funded.
I am not a lawyer, but I'll take a stab at this. Warning, this is part of a hypothetical discussion, and not intended to serve as actual legal advice.
In the United States, you could not be held criminally responsible for the consequences of someone else stealing your car. You could still have civil responsibility and be successfully sued, as civil law allows you to be found partly responsible without even criminal intent, and even if you are only held to be 5% responsible, if you're the only one the victims relatives can find to sue, you're the one that ends up paying. Unless your actions are so egregious as to constitute criminal neglegence, your liability would be limited to not include punitive damages, but that still means you could pay big-time.
The good news is, especially if the courts can catch the creep that rammed the restaurant, and sometimes even without him, you can often get a judgement that holds he is 100% responsible. Your best chance is if he is found guilty in a criminal proceeding, but even then, often is not always. If he is found not guilty for some reason, your chance of being held responsible in a subsequent civil case just went up.
Now, what does the average juror know about the difference between hardware and software firewalls? If they have the choice of blaming you for 5% and socking a "big, faceless, corporation" for the whole 100%, what will they do? Will they see your actions as the equivalent of accidently letting your normally friendly Shi-Tzu slip out the front door, or as you knew that Rottweiler was foaming at the mouth days ago?
None of the explanations we have seem all that simple. Guth's inflationary model requires that, if certain factors are truely random, there are an infinite number of non-observable parellel universes. Hawking's recent work postulates both a negative and an imaginary axis for time, neither of which we can observe. Half the black hole theorists (approximately), suggest that an expansionary process turns the inside of each black hole into a new universe, which again we can never observe.
Quantum Mechanics either postulates a pseudo-infinity of branching universes (which is a second kind of infinite set, unrelated to the inflationary model set, and which, again, we can never observe), or says that not only does the tree not make a noise if there's no one around to hear it, but the tree doesn't fall at all, rather it transitions outside of space-time from standing when you observed it earlier to already fallen when you observe it again.
Some forms of inflationary theory imply the universe is big enough to have yet another kind of pseudo-infinity associated, simply because if it is billions of times as big on each axis as the part we can observe, patterns as complex as our own galaxy or the whole observable universe must repeat in detail, many, many times. Some of the 'brane' theories add a second kind of true infinity, so if these are right, we're trying to describe something with two separate kinds of real infinity and two sets of enormously large numbers (i.e. 10 to the 10 to the 10 to the 10 to the 81st power) needed just to describe its dimensionality, and all occuring from unrelated causes.
Assuming some of the "random" factors are not really random in different cases may make the results simpler, but a "non-random cause", existing outside nature (we might even say superior to nature, or supernatural for short), is predicting something we can't observe either, and that something starts sounding like the price of simplicity is saying "God did it, and who are we to ask questions?"
God is not a scientific hypothesis, not in the sense that science says there is no God, but in the sense that if God exists, 'he' will not allow us to perform repeated experiments and get reproduceable results from them, and irreproducable results aren't science. So much for simple.
Slashdot Mirror
That's assuming the proper test for mental retardation is not being able to count to 14 - the 14th amendment that is.
No, nonliteral implementation is not the same as orthogonal projection. Orthogonal projection is like when someone transforms rectangular coordinate bears into polar bears. Nonliteral implementation is lawyerese for "I know copyright is supposed to protect the expression and not the underlieing ideas, but I can't win with that rule, so please let it cover the ideas this time".
(If I've timed it just right, this comment will make perfect sense as he comes down).
Or 'computer' geeks could offer these design and graphic geeks some respect. Assume the job might actually require some real thought or training, that they should be brought in on projects early, and that they might actually have good reasons for changes, even changes to core funtionality. Design in general is like web page design, but magnified. There are a lot of untalented and ill trained people out there who will do a job after a fashion, but there is also a top 10% or so who can turn out fully compliant HTML, shave 50% off a site's load times, and simultaneously give you a site that looks equally good even in some obscure browser you never heard of before. Same thing goes for interface design.
Check with an industrial firm, such as Ford or Phillips. You're likely to find that the people they call design engineers get pay, chances at promotion, and selection to management all at similar rates to the MEs or EEs they also employ. It's about being considered part of the first string, as much as it is about money.
Actually, The illuminati has been infiltrated to its topmost levels by Google. The're also outsourcing my job as an illuminated seer. It's moving from my formely secret fortress in the jungles of India to a seven mile tall mountain somewhere in Idaho, and I don't even have the budget to put frickin' lasers in the tiger's heads anymore. Fnordy-Fnordin-Darnit!
I hate to say this, but don't we owe Cmdr. Taco a spot of gratitude for not including a SCO story in the fakes? You have to admit, slashdot didn't sink as low as the theoretical nadir for AF this year.
The concept of Memes is likely overrated, not just a bit, but a great deal.
First, Richard Dawkins, in his book "The Selfish Gene" both introduced the concept, and admitted that some of the very things which he had cited to prove his concepts about Genes cast some serious doubts on the idea of Memes. Since then, most of the people who have expanded on the idea of Memes appear to have not read page 209 of "TSG", where Dawkins admits that Memes have a much higher copying error rate than Genes, and that is a big hole in Meme theory. He argues that perhaps it will be proved later that this problem is illusory. Until someone actually does prove that 'trivial' point, there is literally no scientific basis for Memes.
Second, there is a strong temptation to 'prove' that the person you disagree with is not thinking at all clearly, as that is easier than analyzing a whole arguement for what may be a very subtle, hard to find flaw, and accusing a person of being influenced by a Meme, (paticularly when you call it something derogatory, such as a thought virus), is yet another way of doing just that.
It's that well understood part that is the problem here. When you write "stole the words out of my mouth". I well understand it's a metaphore. We end up with no problem between us.
But what if your neighbor actually goes to court, trying to prosecute you for stealing her idea, instead of just saying it. Or if she simply walks up to you in a public place and calls you a thief, in front of witnesses, with no explanation?
Hey, all of a sudden, there IS a big problem between person A and person B. And if Person B automatically has the right to claim language cannot be controlled by law books, then Peson B automatticly wins the resulting Libel or Slander suit.
is the link that goes to the Office admin software that supports actually removing Office or parts therof.
Notice the name of the program: ORK.EXE
Who at MS is now working on ELF.EXE - Eliminate Linux Forever?
1. The power generation module weighs a bit under 120 lbs. by itself (37 modules with an aggregate weight of 53 Kilos), and the spent booster on it doesn't add much to that. The whole sattelite is much, much bigger. So letting the little bit fall in by itself assures it is an object small enough to burn up completely on re-entry, istead of possibly being shielded in a big ablative shell.
2. Kicking it into a higher orbit means it takes a lot of extra time to fall. In that 200 plus year period, a lot of the more intense radiation emmitters will decay, so it will come back several orders of magnetude less radioactive than it would if it fell when the parent craft did.
3. If they had launched it free and something had gone wrong, and it had fallen into the atmosphere immediately, the human race still would have benefitted from point 1 above, just not point 2. If the launch mechanism had not worked at all, THEN they would have lost the benefits of both points above. (And knowing a bit about the late Soviet era, lied about it if at all possible).
I don't think we can build the software he's describing in such a short time, but maybe it is a good goal rather than just an endorsement of VB style coding.
Look at the size of some data files. Audio, Video, databases with 10s of thousands of fields and millions of subjects. When the average data object was a book, libraries could use a card catalog with very a linear ruleset. (IOW the Dewey decimal system is much like a conventional programming algorythm). If a data object was an article in a magazine, an index that used one or two pages was generally sufficient.
As data objects have grown, AND the amount of information some user wants on them has grown in turn, we are coping by a linear (or pseudo-linear) scaleing up, which is somewhat like a magazine adding an index of all articles since publication, but only updating that index once a year or less.
But the user wants a non-linear amount of support. Not only is he, in effect, wanting to read more books, but he won't settle for the librarian saying "We have a copy, so if it's not on the shelf, it must be checked out.". Now he wants to know if there is a copy elsewhere, and if it's physically present or just recorded in that indexing system, and if it's a nearby library could they hold it for him until he drives over to get it, and so on.
Jumping from the metaphor to the situation. We have a choice. Either we code in a pseudo-linguistic form, or we find some other model. Coding in pseudo-languages means the software to handle a data object will get large, sometimes faster than the data itself. Many of us have been thinking in terms of data objects such as Video, where the software to let a user view a 2 hour movie doesn't have to be any larger than it is for a 30 second clip, and not recognizing the counter case, where above a certain size, we have to add indexes of indexes, then indexes of indexes of indexes. What happens when the CIA wants language translation software that can recognize colloquial usages? How long will we be 5 years from practical speech recognition or visual recognition software?
It can look ironic, can't it? In my own defense, I did the same thing once before. I pounced on one of the first studies to say smoking was hazardous to your health, and attempted to discredit several previous studies that contradicted them. Oh yeah, there were good, logical reasons for choosing that study over the others, and I turned out to be right.
I don't reccomend trying to define stealing in regular dictionary terms, when it's a legal definition that matters.
Alexander Pope wrote a very long poem, called "the rape of the lock". It's about a young woman's suitor trying to take a lock of her hair. He's not even a stalker or a thief, as this is all an elaborate game to impress her with how much trouble he will go to to woo her, and she isn't averse to being wooed, just enjoying the attention. Words can be stretched, sometimes a whole lot.
Here's a few reasons why I'd suggest you reconsider useing words such as stealing for copyright infringment.
1. All theft is criminal. Once, all copyright infringement was always a matter for civil courts only, and even now, only some forms are criminallized, since the late 90's. Was the US wrong for over 200 years before that, and still half wrong?
2. In the US, all infringment is under federal law. The Supreme court has ruled that the 50 states have no right to make or interpret copyright law. If infringment=theft, the Supreme's reasoning on this would limit the rights of the states to have their own laws on theft as well, or the states would need to insist they have te right to pass their own laws on infringment, so that they did not lose the authority to prosecute theft (and possibly other crimes - imagine if a state couldn't prosecute a man for murder, if he shot someone who was engaged in interstate trucking at the time in that state).
3. Federal law carefully puts infringment under a completely different title than all federal laws regarding theft. Titles are broad categories of law, intended to keep very different areas seperate. Appellate courts frequently compare one law to another, if both are under the same title, (for example if a cruel and unusual punishment defense is invoked) but are much more reluctant to compare across titles.
4. The US signed a treaty called Berne. It relates to civil violation of infringment, and by signing it we have agreed with 181 other nations that infringment is primarily a tort matter, as Berne stresses certain parts concern civil law only and have no authority to regulate the criminal laws of the signing nations, and yet bringing the US into compliance with Berne is cited as the base for much of this new legislation since then.
So the reason to call it not theft is, your legislators say it's not theft, the highest court in the land says it's not theft, just about everyone else in the world's governments says its not theft, except North Korea and the People's republic of Yemin and a few similar nations.
Now if you live somewhere besides the United States, the of course only some of these issues apply to you.
Or you should have mentioned Ponies...
I represent the 80,00,000 people who won't buy a FPS without Mip Map Texturing, and who would like to say "Oooh, Shiny - Halflife 2, huh?. Well, maybe just this once..."
That "aside from the storyline" point shouldn't be just an aside in your post. I'd say WC 3, (and its expansion pack, Frozen Throne), focused most of their creativity on the races and army structure. Different races stop being simple stereotypes when only the elves can harvest lumber without cutting down forests, or the undead use ghouls both as basic combat troops and to gather resources while everyone else effectively has non-combat type peasants. There are at least 12 races and factions in WC 3, and no two appear to have functionally the same troops, buildings, and build trees. (I haven't crunched all the numbers to be sure of that, but it's certain that there are an aweful lot of special features, unique to each army list.
Races such as the Naga and Tauren (and the Panda Brewmeisters), each got fleshed out as genuinely different, and even stock types such as elves became the distinctive night elves and fire elves.
It reminds me of a lot of 40's era SF, where the author assumed one change (like sentient giant beetleoids), and then wrote a story that explored 20 consequences and not just one or two (like if there were giant beetloids, they'd probably live underground, so they would tend to run into undead there, so their magic might concentrate on undead summoning spells, so...). That projecting what a difference in one area really means to 10 or 20 other areas looks pretty creative to me.
The overwhelming majority of games also fall into the following categories:
Fantasy = Elves and Dwarves
Darkly Mature = Vampires and Zombies
Arcade Action = Antropomorphic Animals
Simulation = Intense Resource Management
It may take a genius to invent whole new categories, and maybe the first designer who looked at games such as Bard's Tale or the SSI silver box D&D series and realized most players were getting tired of having to draw maps on graph paper to finish them was a genius, but maybe it just takes a bit of dissatisfaction with the existing limits.
Right now, Id is designing to put back the hordes of monsters found in some levels of Doom and Doom 2, and taken out in Quake, because 100's of monsters/level with Quake's genuine 3D, improvements in lighting and such would have overloaded even high end home PCs of that era. Hordes of monsters is apparently something many first person shooter fans want.
What you're calling evolutionary change can broaden the market. I always liked finding secret areas in doom myself. When Hexen came out, based on the doom engine, it lost points with me because hanging around to search for optional secret areas meant fighting new monsters, as they were set to infinite respawn, and sooner or later they would drain you out of ammo if you loitered. It's a mere evolutionary change to make a game so that players can turn off such a feature, but it broadens the base the game is likely to appeal to.
"You forgot to accuse me of marching at the Seattle WTO protests carrying a 15' tall marionette puppet of a mongoose."
If you actually did that, post a link to the pictures. If you were writing poetry about TMI and doing interpritive dance at the same time, please try out for American Idol next iteration. You Rock.
1. Scale good "safe" windmill generation up to windfarms producing 100 Mw.
2. Model a 'loss of blade' accident, with the nearest large building being 10 full miles away from the wind farm.
Believe it or not, a piece of metal, the mass of a 747, tumbling end over end at 30 RPM and moveing at 600+ mph, is not something you want to have pass through your elemetary school (and as shrapnel after the initial contact, six blocks of brick buildings behind it).
That's not a worst case scenario. Worse is such a design within about the same range of a major city's high rise heart. Worse still is multiple timed/aimed blade failures, perhaps as a result of terrorism.
Carbon 14 is something that needs to be taken more seriously than it generally is. C 14 decays to nitrogen, so its stable decay endpoint is chemically different. How much chance is there of a single C 14 atom's cauasing a mutation if it decays inside a living creature? The answer is frequently treated as not a lot, compared to the stuff we've been calling really dangerous, like Plutonium, right?
Wrong. Since the DNA molecule has a carbon based backbone, the chance of a C 14 decay causing a mutation is 100%, IF that particular C 14 is in a DNA molecule (and in trillions of your and my cells, it is). Unless you can raise an organism on food containing only isotopically purified Carbon 12 sources from conception, there's not much can be done about this.
Deuterium (D-D) based fusion is just approaching its break even point, IF some as yet unconfirmed results in sonogram induced fusion at ORNL (Oak RIdge National Labs), Lawrence-Livermore, and other locales check out.
The "apparently benign gas" you are referring to is radioactive helium. It's benign in that 1. We're talking about radiation levels of 1/1,000th or so of the more serious fission byproducts. 2. Helium is chemically inert, so living things can't incorporate it into their tissues and it can't be concentrated up the food chain. 3. Helium leaks don't lay around on the ground where people can walk through them, pick some up on their shoes, etc.
"some of the other costs of coal are usually not counted for nuclear, such as mining."
And Vice Versa - Possible deaths from truck-car accidents involving trucks transporting nuclear fuel have routinely been included in estimates of the risks from nuclear power, while being omitted from coal.
That was actually light from Venus reflecting off swamp gas. Please remain at home while representitives of the US Air Force explain this further.
the Mach 25 Orbital Dip Bomber. No, really. RAND corporation and DARPA were tossing that term around back in the 70's as a possibility if scram-jet research was funded.
I am not a lawyer, but I'll take a stab at this. Warning, this is part of a hypothetical discussion, and not intended to serve as actual legal advice.
In the United States, you could not be held criminally responsible for the consequences of someone else stealing your car. You could still have civil responsibility and be successfully sued, as civil law allows you to be found partly responsible without even criminal intent, and even if you are only held to be 5% responsible, if you're the only one the victims relatives can find to sue, you're the one that ends up paying. Unless your actions are so egregious as to constitute criminal neglegence, your liability would be limited to not include punitive damages, but that still means you could pay big-time.
The good news is, especially if the courts can catch the creep that rammed the restaurant, and sometimes even without him, you can often get a judgement that holds he is 100% responsible. Your best chance is if he is found guilty in a criminal proceeding, but even then, often is not always. If he is found not guilty for some reason, your chance of being held responsible in a subsequent civil case just went up.
Now, what does the average juror know about the difference between hardware and software firewalls? If they have the choice of blaming you for 5% and socking a "big, faceless, corporation" for the whole 100%, what will they do? Will they see your actions as the equivalent of accidently letting your normally friendly Shi-Tzu slip out the front door, or as you knew that Rottweiler was foaming at the mouth days ago?
None of the explanations we have seem all that simple. Guth's inflationary model requires that, if certain factors are truely random, there are an infinite number of non-observable parellel universes. Hawking's recent work postulates both a negative and an imaginary axis for time, neither of which we can observe. Half the black hole theorists (approximately), suggest that an expansionary process turns the inside of each black hole into a new universe, which again we can never observe.
Quantum Mechanics either postulates a pseudo-infinity of branching universes (which is a second kind of infinite set, unrelated to the inflationary model set, and which, again, we can never observe), or says that not only does the tree not make a noise if there's no one around to hear it, but the tree doesn't fall at all, rather it transitions outside of space-time from standing when you observed it earlier to already fallen when you observe it again.
Some forms of inflationary theory imply the universe is big enough to have yet another kind of pseudo-infinity associated, simply because if it is billions of times as big on each axis as the part we can observe, patterns as complex as our own galaxy or the whole observable universe must repeat in detail, many, many times. Some of the 'brane' theories add a second kind of true infinity, so if these are right, we're trying to describe something with two separate kinds of real infinity and two sets of enormously large numbers (i.e. 10 to the 10 to the 10 to the 10 to the 81st power) needed just to describe its dimensionality, and all occuring from unrelated causes.
Assuming some of the "random" factors are not really random in different cases may make the results simpler, but a "non-random cause", existing outside nature (we might even say superior to nature, or supernatural for short), is predicting something we can't observe either, and that something starts sounding like the price of simplicity is saying "God did it, and who are we to ask questions?"
God is not a scientific hypothesis, not in the sense that science says there is no God, but in the sense that if God exists, 'he' will not allow us to perform repeated experiments and get reproduceable results from them, and irreproducable results aren't science. So much for simple.