Ahh, the original Mechwarrior. I played that game and was enraptured. It got me hooked on Battletech and Mech 2 sealed the deal. I've been a fan ever since, even when FASA died and Wizkids spat on the fans and turned it into PokeMageTech Darkage. At least Fanpro and Catalyst kept the faith on some level. It's not what it used to be, but I look back on it with great fondness. The thrill of new games and new books got me through some dark times in high school. Rest in Peace, Mechwarrior - may VLK-QA's sing you to your rest.
I love the way they realistically represent the way even minor vehicular accidents invariably erupt in a huge fireball. Or show the way cars skid around any corner taken at speed. Or reproduce the ability of people to walk away from ferocious car wrecks with little more than a manly scratch on the forehead. I would be greatly disappointed if they had failed to accurately depict the well-known physical reality of cars in favour of dramatic story-telling.
I imagine this process could be automated, with new competitors being fed from some sort of hopper. If the m&m breeding method is also amenable to automation, I imagine we could create an apparatus that would eventually yield the ultimate m&m with minimal interference.
I live in such a place and my landlord renovated and removed the phone line just before I moved in. I literally have a choice between comcast and tethering my PC to my phone 24/7. In fairness, though, after an abysmal period getting it installed, my internet service has been fairly benign (excepting the occasional 4 am drop-out of service, which is probably scheduled then anyway, and nobody but night-owls like me would even notice).
Even a cursory glance at how science works disproves your case. To start with, universities pay the bulk of academics' salaries. These are supplemented by grants from private bodies and government bodies to support work that they feel is valuable. Further more, many hoops must be navigated in order to see a shred of government money.
Finally, sadly you can't get that oh-so-valuable dribble without worthwhile lab time to test which bits are non-valuable dribble. A lot of the drool produced by scientists is actually quite worthless and flawed. The process is as follows:
Laboratories are highly-tuned apparatuses set up to extract the valuable drool milked from professors by their students. At weekly meetings, the students collect the drool on 'plots' and 'graphs' specially prepared for this purpose. In the lab, the students take the dribble and carefully distill the concentrated saliva to separate out the valuable fractions then bake them into what are called 'papers'.
These papers, once prepared, are taken back to the professor to be 'proofed', wherein the professor will produce further dribble, but of a much higher and refined grade than first obtained. This process is known as 'editing' and is a common technique used to refine otherwise coarse secretions across many industries. Once infused with the higher grade of slime, these papers are sent to a panel of judges to be assessed and certified. Only the very finest dribble is passed to be presented at fairs and meetings where these students show their prize professors and hawk the papers.
The very best papers may eventually be bought by investors who will take them and wring the saliva out of it and eventually incorporate it into any number of products. These include pharmacuticals, industrial lubricants, robots, batteries and computers. The uses of academic slime are truly limitless!
Over time, researchers exposed to the highest grade drool in the course of their work may begin to produce the dribbles themselves. When they are recognised as lucrative dribble producers, they will be put out to pasture themselves so that their valuable effusions may be harnessed. This is called 'tenure'.
Sadly, the commercial sphere does disproportionately benefit when it comes to invention. However, as they say, it's 10 per cent inspiration and 90 per cent perspiration. A lot of the wealthy inventors you see out there are such because they took their great idea and turned it into something marketable. There are quite a few It and engineering spin-offs that started as a lab project years back.
However, ultimately we still need to keep people who are great scientists doing science, rather than spending decades of their life trying to make a product just so they can enjoy a payday. I agree the system is broken, and I'm not sure how to fix it. However, freely publishing and giving correct attribution for work done seems to be a pretty straightforward benefit to both scientists and society in general.
Sadly, so much research gets done these days solely with products in mind that a lot of potentially valuable blue-sky research never happens.
I'm just going to clarify that, unlike how things work in the music industry, we don't get for the papers we publish directly - in fact, it's increasingly common to publish them on the net for free, or even to have to pay fees associated with have a paper printed in a journal. We only get advancement for the 'impact' our papers have, as ranked by institutions - the aptly named "impact factor" associated with journals and conferences. Through your list of publications and citations, faculties and committees decide whether to take you on as faculty or give you tenure.
Giving scientists credit for our work doesn't stop the world from benefiting from it in the slightest; it just makes it worthwhile for us to keep working.
I'll say upfront that I'm an academic and probably biased. However, I'm an insider looking out and I'd like to think I've got some idea of how academics works.
I would argue that academics don't put need for acknowledgment ahead of desire to further knowledge - they put the need to feed their families ahead of the desire to further knowledge. It may seem strange, but a scientist's merits are determined by the papers he or she writes, the things he or she discovers. If you do good science and someone rips you off and publishes it first, you don't say "Oh well, society still knows!" you say "Oh hell, I've wasted ten years of my life, now I won't advance in my field because everything I publish will be seen as derivative of some other guy's work".
So long as we live in a society that rewards people according to their productivity, scientists will need to demand recognition for their work. Their stock in trade is ideas and concepts - and they don't come cheap! How many truly original, ground breaking ideas do you have in a lifetime? A dozen, if that? Every idea is precious and when your livelihood depends upon being appropriately rewarded for them, you take citation very seriously indeed!
It may seem petty to the uninitiated, but so long as our incomes are tied to our papers, we have no choice but to publish or perish.
And the thing is, the GP isn't kidding. There is a long history stretching right back to Archimedes of the great minds of the day turning their inventiveness to warfare.
This is exactly why I refuse to buy games that require online activation. The presumption that I might be online and must connect to their server to install/play my game is anathema to the philosophy of controlling the things that I own. This extends to Steam, as well. I simply refuse to cede any control of the things I own merely so that I can use the latest shiney.
Does it mean I miss out on some of the latest and greatest games? Sure! But there are also a surprising number of games companies that do treat me like a valued customer and do produce software the just installs itself quietly in a single directory and lets you get on with things. I buy their products, sometimes because I just -have- to have the thing they've sold, and sometimes just to check out their latest work and to support a company that makes things I like.
Which is all well and good until the philosopher kings who wisely and benignly watch over the accreditation process are replaced by assinine bureaucrats in the pocket of lobby groups and special interests.
Suddenly P2P programs can't get accredited anywhere, regardless of their legitimate use because they 'don't meet standards' or other such vague explanation, and exorbitant fees are charged for processing applications that cut the smaller players out of the market.
I would oppose any measure that seeks to control access to the internet. I'll gladly tolerate spam and phishers if it means I can do what I goddamned well please with the internet I pay for.
More likely, he was shooting pictures of the families for footage of them waving and cheering a successful launch, but the unexpected explosion captured something entirely different. It's just where his camera was pointing at the time - I guarantee it was someone further up the chain who pushed to have that footage shown. No cameraman worth his salt would have missed filming the explosion itself - it was the Hindenburg of a generation.
Well, subjectively, have they "gotten away with" Iraq and Afghanistan? In 20 year's time, will there be a new generation of disaffected youth with a chip on their shoulder about the US who will again launch attacks in retaliation for the suffering caused? Just because the consequences aren't immediate doesn't mean they aren't coming. So too with the cyber attacks - I doubt the likes of Google will sit idlely by when people take pot-shots at them.
So they can just get away with it, right? Somehow I think what's -not- being said is far more interesting. I think the perpetrators will end up with more on their hands than they at first suspected when a bunch of IT powerhouses decide to start randomly hosing key pieces of their information infrastructure.
What makes computers great are their flexibility - it's an entire world to discover to someone young and new. Are we going to be in the insane situation where our children will need to dust off the old C64 from half a century ago just to learn the basics for themselves?
If all you've got is locked content on locked machines, you end up with mind firmly locked shut.
Treating this material differently is merely a way to punish people modern society considers "creepy." That's all.
As we rightly should! If today we allow this, then tomorrow it might be acceptable for fat guys in beards to dress in sailor moon outfits. And when we start to allow that, then humanity's slide into depravity will be unstoppable.
Slashdot Mirror
Ahh, the original Mechwarrior. I played that game and was enraptured. It got me hooked on Battletech and Mech 2 sealed the deal. I've been a fan ever since, even when FASA died and Wizkids spat on the fans and turned it into PokeMageTech Darkage. At least Fanpro and Catalyst kept the faith on some level. It's not what it used to be, but I look back on it with great fondness. The thrill of new games and new books got me through some dark times in high school. Rest in Peace, Mechwarrior - may VLK-QA's sing you to your rest.
I love the way they realistically represent the way even minor vehicular accidents invariably erupt in a huge fireball. Or show the way cars skid around any corner taken at speed. Or reproduce the ability of people to walk away from ferocious car wrecks with little more than a manly scratch on the forehead. I would be greatly disappointed if they had failed to accurately depict the well-known physical reality of cars in favour of dramatic story-telling.
Ask not what the space program can do for you, but what you can do for the space program.
I imagine this process could be automated, with new competitors being fed from some sort of hopper. If the m&m breeding method is also amenable to automation, I imagine we could create an apparatus that would eventually yield the ultimate m&m with minimal interference.
But what happens when they become too strong?
I live in such a place and my landlord renovated and removed the phone line just before I moved in. I literally have a choice between comcast and tethering my PC to my phone 24/7. In fairness, though, after an abysmal period getting it installed, my internet service has been fairly benign (excepting the occasional 4 am drop-out of service, which is probably scheduled then anyway, and nobody but night-owls like me would even notice).
Well, that puts me at two...
Even a cursory glance at how science works disproves your case. To start with, universities pay the bulk of academics' salaries. These are supplemented by grants from private bodies and government bodies to support work that they feel is valuable. Further more, many hoops must be navigated in order to see a shred of government money.
Finally, sadly you can't get that oh-so-valuable dribble without worthwhile lab time to test which bits are non-valuable dribble. A lot of the drool produced by scientists is actually quite worthless and flawed. The process is as follows:
Laboratories are highly-tuned apparatuses set up to extract the valuable drool milked from professors by their students. At weekly meetings, the students collect the drool on 'plots' and 'graphs' specially prepared for this purpose. In the lab, the students take the dribble and carefully distill the concentrated saliva to separate out the valuable fractions then bake them into what are called 'papers'.
These papers, once prepared, are taken back to the professor to be 'proofed', wherein the professor will produce further dribble, but of a much higher and refined grade than first obtained. This process is known as 'editing' and is a common technique used to refine otherwise coarse secretions across many industries. Once infused with the higher grade of slime, these papers are sent to a panel of judges to be assessed and certified. Only the very finest dribble is passed to be presented at fairs and meetings where these students show their prize professors and hawk the papers.
The very best papers may eventually be bought by investors who will take them and wring the saliva out of it and eventually incorporate it into any number of products. These include pharmacuticals, industrial lubricants, robots, batteries and computers. The uses of academic slime are truly limitless!
Over time, researchers exposed to the highest grade drool in the course of their work may begin to produce the dribbles themselves. When they are recognised as lucrative dribble producers, they will be put out to pasture themselves so that their valuable effusions may be harnessed. This is called 'tenure'.
And that's how science is done.
Sadly, the commercial sphere does disproportionately benefit when it comes to invention. However, as they say, it's 10 per cent inspiration and 90 per cent perspiration. A lot of the wealthy inventors you see out there are such because they took their great idea and turned it into something marketable. There are quite a few It and engineering spin-offs that started as a lab project years back.
However, ultimately we still need to keep people who are great scientists doing science, rather than spending decades of their life trying to make a product just so they can enjoy a payday. I agree the system is broken, and I'm not sure how to fix it. However, freely publishing and giving correct attribution for work done seems to be a pretty straightforward benefit to both scientists and society in general.
Sadly, so much research gets done these days solely with products in mind that a lot of potentially valuable blue-sky research never happens.
I'm just going to clarify that, unlike how things work in the music industry, we don't get for the papers we publish directly - in fact, it's increasingly common to publish them on the net for free, or even to have to pay fees associated with have a paper printed in a journal. We only get advancement for the 'impact' our papers have, as ranked by institutions - the aptly named "impact factor" associated with journals and conferences. Through your list of publications and citations, faculties and committees decide whether to take you on as faculty or give you tenure.
Giving scientists credit for our work doesn't stop the world from benefiting from it in the slightest; it just makes it worthwhile for us to keep working.
I'll say upfront that I'm an academic and probably biased. However, I'm an insider looking out and I'd like to think I've got some idea of how academics works.
I would argue that academics don't put need for acknowledgment ahead of desire to further knowledge - they put the need to feed their families ahead of the desire to further knowledge. It may seem strange, but a scientist's merits are determined by the papers he or she writes, the things he or she discovers. If you do good science and someone rips you off and publishes it first, you don't say "Oh well, society still knows!" you say "Oh hell, I've wasted ten years of my life, now I won't advance in my field because everything I publish will be seen as derivative of some other guy's work".
So long as we live in a society that rewards people according to their productivity, scientists will need to demand recognition for their work. Their stock in trade is ideas and concepts - and they don't come cheap! How many truly original, ground breaking ideas do you have in a lifetime? A dozen, if that? Every idea is precious and when your livelihood depends upon being appropriately rewarded for them, you take citation very seriously indeed!
It may seem petty to the uninitiated, but so long as our incomes are tied to our papers, we have no choice but to publish or perish.
Simple: just look at their results. Centuries ahead of their time gets you lasers and cloaking devices. Just crazy gets you Timecube
And the thing is, the GP isn't kidding. There is a long history stretching right back to Archimedes of the great minds of the day turning their inventiveness to warfare.
This is exactly why I refuse to buy games that require online activation. The presumption that I might be online and must connect to their server to install/play my game is anathema to the philosophy of controlling the things that I own. This extends to Steam, as well. I simply refuse to cede any control of the things I own merely so that I can use the latest shiney.
Does it mean I miss out on some of the latest and greatest games? Sure! But there are also a surprising number of games companies that do treat me like a valued customer and do produce software the just installs itself quietly in a single directory and lets you get on with things. I buy their products, sometimes because I just -have- to have the thing they've sold, and sometimes just to check out their latest work and to support a company that makes things I like.
Which is all well and good until the philosopher kings who wisely and benignly watch over the accreditation process are replaced by assinine bureaucrats in the pocket of lobby groups and special interests.
Suddenly P2P programs can't get accredited anywhere, regardless of their legitimate use because they 'don't meet standards' or other such vague explanation, and exorbitant fees are charged for processing applications that cut the smaller players out of the market.
I would oppose any measure that seeks to control access to the internet. I'll gladly tolerate spam and phishers if it means I can do what I goddamned well please with the internet I pay for.
Because, if we sat idlely by, unnewsworthy retards would sign any old thing into law. A law that we would have to obey.
Such bullshit will only 'never happen' so long as there are intelligent people sufficiently informed and mobilised to oppose it.
I've never reached the end; the final boss is too hard.
But the line will only take you as far as the round about at Barnard's star.
More likely, he was shooting pictures of the families for footage of them waving and cheering a successful launch, but the unexpected explosion captured something entirely different. It's just where his camera was pointing at the time - I guarantee it was someone further up the chain who pushed to have that footage shown. No cameraman worth his salt would have missed filming the explosion itself - it was the Hindenburg of a generation.
Well, subjectively, have they "gotten away with" Iraq and Afghanistan? In 20 year's time, will there be a new generation of disaffected youth with a chip on their shoulder about the US who will again launch attacks in retaliation for the suffering caused? Just because the consequences aren't immediate doesn't mean they aren't coming. So too with the cyber attacks - I doubt the likes of Google will sit idlely by when people take pot-shots at them.
So they can just get away with it, right? Somehow I think what's -not- being said is far more interesting. I think the perpetrators will end up with more on their hands than they at first suspected when a bunch of IT powerhouses decide to start randomly hosing key pieces of their information infrastructure.
Paraphrasing: "The subjective view is that you're right. The objective view is that you're wrong. Everybody must think the same way I do."
But then it won't be nearly as user friendly!
*is their flexibility. Ughh, just woke up and my spelling subsystem hadn't booted yet. C'est la vie.
What makes computers great are their flexibility - it's an entire world to discover to someone young and new. Are we going to be in the insane situation where our children will need to dust off the old C64 from half a century ago just to learn the basics for themselves?
If all you've got is locked content on locked machines, you end up with mind firmly locked shut.
Treating this material differently is merely a way to punish people modern society considers "creepy." That's all.
As we rightly should! If today we allow this, then tomorrow it might be acceptable for fat guys in beards to dress in sailor moon outfits. And when we start to allow that, then humanity's slide into depravity will be unstoppable.