There is no need for glider-based spacecraft. Wings are useless in space. "man-rated" launch vehicles cost something like $10k per pound to go to orbit. The extra pounds for wings are a massive waste of money and resources.
I suspect this has to do with the idea that anything except Single Stage To Orbit And Back is not a "real" spacecraft. And that requires controlled landing, which requires either power to slow descend or wings to glid with.
Basically, the designers remember those old (and new) sci-fi shows that have spacecraft that can land, take off, land again, take off again... with just some refueling somewhere along the line. And they are right: being able to do that would dramatically lessen the cost of space travel. Unfortunately, the limits of chemical power very likely make this impossible for anything short of a Nuclear Lightbulb design. And of course a Nuclear Lightbulb doesn't need wings, since it can do a powered landing with engines alone.
So, until we get rid of this childish fear of "nukular! wahh!", and actually build the NL SSTOAB rocket, expect to see lots more of such designs.
The original design--The Capsule--was the right idea! Why not build a re-usable capsule?
The Capsule is basically a reinforced airtight room with some heat protection at the bottom. It doesn't make sense to make that re-usable, especially since making it disposable allows you to use ablative heat protection, which is pretty much idiot-proof.
BTW. There sure has been a lot of space stories lately. I guess things are really starting to get moving again.
Yeah. We should attack routers for mesh routing, not netbooks.
Seriously, with all the three-strike and censorship laws popping up lately like poisonous mushrooms after a rain, the future of the Internet lays in mesh routing: rather than connect to an ISP, your router sends the packet to neighbour's router, which sends it to the noughbouring building, and so on. And with the laws that try to make this illegal, such routing is best carried out by insectbots, which would have many other uses too (such as fighting locusts).
This is not quite an insectbot yet, but still a step toward that direction. Perhaps a swarm of insectbots could be controlled by a larger "birdbot"?
Except that you never had free speech rights on someone else's website?
And so, by making everything someone's private property we can circumvent that pesky First Amendment. A brilliant plan, really; the Chinese still have lots to learn from us:).
I hate reading comments in most papers (and slashdot) where anonymous trolls spew the worst rhetoric just to get a rise out of people.
So don't read them. Or better yet, read them, learn to deal with them, and become a better person for it.
(BTW, good job here, it worked on me) If your bitching about a one-time.99 cent fee, then you need to get off the internet because of the electricity cost.
Ever heard of the story about the stick that broke the camel's back? Or how small streams become a river? How an ocean is just lots and lots of little droplets?
99 cents here, 99 cents there... It adds up.
I hope their plan works and others follow suit.
Indeed. If trolls like Socrates and Galileo were allowed to speak freely, where would we - hey, wait...
The plan is to make it easier to keep away anyone who says something the magazine owner doesn't agree with, thus making it a more effective propaganda tool. Nothing more, nothing less. Oh, is this a controversial opinion? Do I have to re-register?
Things like that are easily defeated with signing. They just sign the update with a bit of license key, update key, and a bit of random salt made during initial installation. Prevents you from copying purchased content to another installation.
Unless the another installation has been cracked, so it no longer checks the signature. This reduces this system back to regular DRM, which is routinely cracked.
This only thing any DRM system does - the only thing a DRM system can do - is hinder paying customers. That's all it's good for. A pirate is not bothered by disk checks, phoning home, signature checks, or any assorted crap, because it has been stripped away by the crack.
I don't know, I wouldn't categorize anything that's come so far as all that desperate in the grand scheme of things.
Really? A DRM system that requires a constant Internet connection for the game to run is not "desperate"?
Hypothetically, if a handful of the top game crackers somehow were sent to prison for it each year, do you think that would change anything? Certainly, games would still get cracked, but would it be every game, as reliably, as fast?
"Hypothetically" is a nice word. It allows one to make assertions about imaginary worlds - assertions which, because they are about imaginary worlds, are impossible to prove either way.
Bt no, any game that anybody bothers playing would still get disinfected, simply because DRM is annoying. A no-DVD path is pretty much a requirement to hassle-free gaming.
Along those same lines, I think it's a bit of an exaggeration to consider the assorted industries protection rackets,
They are. The standard operating procedure for a copyright enforcement organization is to pick random victims and threaten to sue them unless they pay a few thousand dollars to the organization; since lawsuits are beyond most people's financial means to defend against, and because there's always the possibility of being stuck with a hundred million dollar judgement against you - after all, it's "just" a civil court so you need to prove your innocence - people have little choice but to pay. That's how a protection racket operates.
or maybe it's a testament to how far the rule of law has come
Having a protection racket use law as their extortion tool makes mockery of the whole concept.
I feel reasonably confident that, say, a hundred years ago, someone would have disappeared or gruesomely executed the Pirate Bay principles.
Really? Because as I recall it, everyone from Edison to Disney was busy adopting - pirating, if you will - everything from technology to movies. Yet I don't recall any stories of anyone being "disappeared".
We're lucky to live in a time in which not all of these problems are solved by violence and intimidation.
Instead, they are solved by bribery and extortion. A big improvement.
Oh well, I guess it doesn't really matter. Copyright is effectively pretty much dead, thanks to the abuse of copyright organizations, and the resulting total lack of respect by the general public. The only real question is how long it takes for the legal system to admit this fact and let it go.
Piracy predates PC, as do measures used to fight it. It doesn't show any signs of lessening in the slightest. There comes a time when persistence becomes a synonym for stupidity.
Most people (particularly on/.) tend to think that when an organization goes after pirates, it's a case of them taking on the world.
Yes, it pretty much is. The number of people actively fighting DRM outnumber the people fighting piracy a thousandfold, if not millionfold.
The reality, however, is that there are a relatively small number of crackers, rippers, uploaders, webmasters, etc. that make piracy possible for the masses.
"Relatively small" number here means mere millions, rather than billions.
Pursuit of these individuals is hampered by international boundaries and various legal technicalities, but for years we have seen the slow but steady dissolution of those obstacles. The process is slow, but make no mistake...progress is being made.
No, pursuit of these individuals is hampered by the simple fact that it's impossible to track a small file back to its origin, and cracks are small files.
The Pirate Bay, for example, found a loophole that it was able to exploit for many years, but eventually that loophole was closed.
The Pirate Bay is still up and serving pirated content, you know.
Because there have been so few forms of DRM that have not been cracked, people assume that there will always be a way to crack the next one that comes out.
No, it's because there is no way to simultaneously make content readable and not readable by the same person. I trust that any DRM scheme will always be cracked because the opposite would require the DRM maker to have absolute omnipotence, that is, to be able to break the laws of logic. As it's debatable whether God himself has this kind of power, I think we can safely assume that a gaming company won't be pulling it off anytime soon.
Your average Joe may have the willingness, but not the ability to reverse engineer software while top engineers have the ability but not the motivation. Both traits are needed, however, and the combination of stronger DRM and social engineering (including law enforcement action) makes it increasingly difficult to produce persons willing and able to crack.
And yet pirate groups seem to have no trouble finding people both willing and able to disinfect software of various DRM-related annoyances. Your assertion that it's becoming "increasingly difficult" doesn't seem to have any basis in reality.
Still, this would be no less of a victory for the industry. Their victory is inevitable,
What world are you living in? The "industry" - various protection rackets, actually - are losing, and losing badly. Just why do you think they're resorting to such desperate measures?
and sadly, the arms-race that precipitated it will leave the rest of us with far fewer personal liberties than when it all started.
The "rest of us" will have more personal liberties due to the techniques developed by people needing to keep their identities secret. For example, Freenet can handle large files nowadays, even if it's still not as fast as BitTorrent.
The "fix" for that of course is to intercept the download off a legitimate installation, and package it such that you can download the update via torrent etc and run it locally to get the new content. But that's a lot more involved than simply shutting off a SN check with a tweak of a line or two of code.
No need for that. The new content has to be stored somewhere, so all you have to do is check the contents of the game directory before and after the update.
DRM is, to put it bluntly, a scam perpetrated on game manufacturers by DRM manufacturers.
This is a non sequitur. I never said it was cheap. I merely said it was effective. It's efficiency varies widely.
Given infinite resources, almost everything is "effective", since it gets your goal. Given finite resources, whatever gets your goal cheapest is "effective".
More likely we'd have a couple more half-developed launch platforms destined for cancellation.
The reason NASA projects get cancelled is that the funding gets cancelled. Give them a trillion dollars and a directive to colonize the Moon with it, and it'll get done.
Actually, at least two things intended were accomplished: One, Al Queda is no longer in effective control of Afghanistan. This goal was accomplished relatively quickly.
As soon as USA pulls off - as it has to do pretty soon, since the money to continue the war is running out - Taleban and Al-Qaeda will retake the country.
Two, Saddam Hussein is no longer running Iraq. You can argue all day about whether the latter goal was an important one, but it was accomplished.
Indeed. Of course, Saddam was a secular maniac, so with him gone Iraq is on its way to become a terrorist training ground, but hey: mission accomplished.
Both wars were badly managed, and the goals (besides those two) were pretty murky to begin with.
Yes, I get the feeling that the people in charge just wanted a war, and damn the consequences.
Until the nation which invests in the army waltzes in and takes over. Or some group hating that nation just starts blowing infrastructure up.
It takes far less money to defend than to attack. A nation that invests in its infrastructure can hold off nation that attacks, yet still increase the size of its economy, and eventually dwarf that nation even in military might.
Or some group hating that nation just starts blowing infrastructure up.
An army can't stop a terrorist group. You need intelligence services and police for that.
An item of faith among pacifists, particularly those protected by a government willing to use violence at a drop of a hat. But false; violence is quite effective, perhaps uniquely so; that's why all current systems of government are based on it.
Violence isn't effective. Quite the contrary, it involves tremendous costs; for example, the current running cost of Iraq and Afghanistan wars comes to over one trillion dollars - and let's not forget that these are wars against a hopelessly outmatched foe, and have actually failed to meet their objectives, for Al-Qaida and Taleban still exist and Iraq is far from a peaceful democracy. It's the threat of violence that's effective, but once you resort to actual violence, you'd better hope that you have some deep pockets to draw from.
Suppose you'd given trillion dollars to, say, NASA instead of blowing shit up? You'd be selling hot dogs at the Moon right now. Or maybe you'd prefer to have covered the Wall Street bailout with it? You'd still had over 300 billion dollars to spend on NASA, social security, or simply tax cuts. Instead, you used it all to blow shit up half the world over, and accomplished nothing except killing thousands of your people and possibly close to a million other people. And you call that effective? Hell, you could had put a billion dollar bounty on Osama's head; you'd almost certainly got him, and still had 999 billions left over.
This is what I've never understood about hawks: their position is completely irrational. Even if one adopts the position that the only thing that matters is homeland's power and glory, it's still irrational: a nation that invests its money on growing its economy will always beat one that invests in its army instead, simply because of compound interest. Getting involves in a war always weakens you, simply because you are wasting resources you could invest in making yourself stronger otherwise. Why are these people having such a problem understanding this?
There's obviously a comprimise between a small Chrono Trigger type production and the massive budget, overelaborate epics.
No, not really. If you have small budget, go for sprite-based graphics; don't do 3D unless you have the budget to do it well. Chrono Trigger still looks OK nowadays, while early 3D games look horrible.
Of course you can still leverage modern technology, for example use SVG to create your graphics so they can be scaled by resolution. However, it's only very recently that 3D graphics have caught up with 2D sprite-based ones - and arguably still haven't.
Or you could do like Okami did: they originally wanted realistic graphics, but the target platform simply didn't have the power to do that, so they went to an extremely stylized ones instead.
What I'm trying to say is: don't make compromises. Decide what you can do, do it well, and mercilessly scrap everything you can't. A Finnish game magazine once compared making a game to rearing a child Spartan style: everything that doesn't contribute to make the game better should be ruthlessly pruned. Everything that makes the game worse should definitely be pruned.
And, frankly, Chrono Trigger is about as epic as it gets:).
Doing away with the compulsion of graphics-focused games only needs to occur with one gaming house and for them to then attain success with a modestly budgeted title. Though the fixation on polygons is pretty entrenched, there is a hope that some will jettison that outlook and embark on making quality content.
Alternatively, we could expand the already-adopted graphic engine licensing to asset licensing. Is there any rational reason why everyone needs to redo textures, character models, animation and AI over and over again? Good old Neverwinter Nights spawned thousands of user-made modules, some of them true classics (Dreamcatcher comes to mind, as well as Demon and Kunoichi). Heck, Witcher used a modified version of hte engine.
Maybe the open source community should start developing a game engine; and I don't mean just the graphics engine but a "virtual actor" one, together with an asset library, so the game developer could simply say: "this character is an old Kung Fu master with a tick in right eye"?
Good graphics don't inherently require lots of effort per-game; it's simply that we are still doing things in low abstraction levels, where every game maker must worry about polygon count.
The indie games do hark back to about twenty years ago, often having a single, original concept that keeps one interested or even addicted for a time. It may be that indie developers play a part in reversing the 'progression' towards lifelike graphics with their own titles.
I hate to say this, but graphics matter. They, along with sound, help draw you into the game. That doesn't mean that you need extremely cutting-edge photorealistic graphics; if you did, manga would never have gotten popular. However, whatever style you choose, you have to do well within that style. Nethack can get away with text-mode graphics, because it's a roguelike (but I still prefer IMBgraphics charset, and back in DOS days there was a program that you could run prior to Nethack and made the whole thing look much better). Chrono Trigger still looks good today, because it's 2D sprite graphics, does that well, and modern filtering techniques enchance it further. However, early 3D games look horrible, because you can't help but compare them to modern ones.
What I'm saying is: graphics matter, so think very carefully what kind of graphics you can do well.
I always understood that Asimov's Three Laws were boundaries inside which the robots could act, but the decisions themselves were subject to limitations due to lack of information and lack of processing power
No, and that's precisely the problem: Asimov's robots don't have any kind of ethical - or any kind of - framework to base their decisions on besides the laws. As the result, Daneel ends up imprisoning Baley at one point, because he thinks he might be psychologically stressed by going outside, and the First Law (don't harm humans) trumps the second ("obey humans").
Thus, more intelligent robots could make better decisions, up to the point that they could create by themselves a new law, -i.e. Daneel R. creating the 0th Law.
It was Giskard who created the 0th Law, and promptly destroyed the Earth because he judged that to be in humanity's interests.
Right, if you think western civilization is so horrible why don't you move to africa where they don't have any rights and have to deal with real feudal warlords?
That's the direction we are heading towards. There's already private armies for hire. Corporations are citizens, and favoured far above real human beings. If I'm sued by one, I have little choice but to settle, whether I'm guilty or innocent; after all, I can't afford a legal battle - and what does that make courts, other than enforcers for protection rackets?
The truth of the matter is that the state is providing you with more rights then you can count, you're just too spoiled to notice.
It's good that you know these things based on a single post on Slashdot. I wish I was such a good judge of character.
Godwin's law doesn't state that Nazis can't be brought up, it just states that they will be brought up eventually.
Actually, it states that someone or something will be compared to Nazis or Nazi Germany eventually, in an attempt to engage in Reductio Ad Hitlerum.
Lately Nazism as a boogeyman has been surely but steadily replaced by Communism, mainly by the need to defend deregulation and other right-wing ideologies against rational arguments. I wonder what that should be called - Libertarian Fallacy? Reductio Ad Stalin? Free Market Fundamentalism?
Even if you are a fruitarian, aren't you eating aborted baby plants? Ending their poor lives before they could even really begin?
No. The whole reason plants make fruits is so that animals would eat them and shit out the seeds at some new location. Eating a fruit doesn't end a life, it gives it a chance to begin. In fact it could be argued that not eating a fruit causes the plant equivalent of miscarriage.
That said, unless you perform photosynthesis or live on a volcanic vent in the deep ocean, you survive only by killing and eating other living things.
You could become a carrion eater. No reason to do your own killing, when the world is full of things eager to do it for you.
Sooner or later, we'll move beyond a computer's AI capacity being like a child or baby. What will we do when artificial intelligences have a similar neural capacity to humans? Will we treat artificial life as comparable to human; or continue to see human life as more important?
That kinda depends on whether it's possible to decouple intelligence from personhood. In other words, does having a robotic car that's smart enough to get a sixpack of beer on the way to pick you up from work because it previously brought your mother-in-law from the airport mean that said car is a person?
Will we have robots like those that Isaac Asimov described with laws drummed into them not to harm people?
Hopefully never, since each and every Asimov's robot story is about how these laws fail miserably. A rigid adherence to a set of rules is simply not sufficient ethical framework for an intelligent creature.
Or in the end would we prefer our societies to be governed by people as our political systems have for generations?
Does it really matter? I have no say in how my society is governed; I doubt very much you do either. Maybe our current set of overlords are supplanted by a new one; maybe they won't. It doesn't make a difference to me, and I have no power to affect that either way.
Honestly, I don't know whether this is the Uncanny Valley manifesting, but that kid just creeps me out.
Yes, it's pretty creepy. And if people actually "connect" with it as the video claims, it's going to be horribly jarring when you run into the limits of the physics simulation and AI. Which you will - XBox doesn't have the kind of power to run either convincingly.
There's also the little bit about there being no actual game to be seen, but let's be generous and treat this as a tech demo.
On the contrary, Chrono Trigger, a simple RPG with graphics not much beyond classic Link to the Past, has so many memories with its 16-bit score and pixelated graphics.
If you have played Chrono Trigger, you already know the answer to all your suggestions:
"But... the future refused to change."
Besides, with the filters available in modern emulators, those old SNES games aren't pixelated anymore, but actually look pretty sharp. Hint, hint:).
It's my fault that Firefox freezes, despite me having coded neither Firefox nor the Javascript that interacted in this way?
The thing is, that modern JS has stopped assuming that its users are complete retards, because as you may know, this did not work out so well.
A bad assumption, IMHO. Most programmers are retards and write sloppy code. This whole problem is evidence of that.
So it leaves you the choice how the threading works, by just offering worker threads as a tool, and not enforcing them.
What are you talking about? I was referring to the browser; I couldn't care less if a particular page's scripts are multithreaded or not, just as long as the UI doesn't have to wait for them to finish whatever it is they're doing.
But if you don't use them, of course the code will stall everything. Just like with a normal desktop application. Who would have thought...:)
Guess what? A normal desktop application doesn't stall everything; even if it hangs, the rest of the mahcine will keep on chugging along just fine. That is what I want for Firefox: if your POS script freezes, fine; but the Firefox UI should still keep responding, allowing me to switch to other tabs and use them normally, and close the offending tab forcibly once I grow tired of its scripts getting their act together.
Slashdot Mirror
No, all spaceflight involves adjusting just your velocity vector, in the case of solar sailing by means of the sail. You can't adjust gravity vector.
I suspect this has to do with the idea that anything except Single Stage To Orbit And Back is not a "real" spacecraft. And that requires controlled landing, which requires either power to slow descend or wings to glid with.
Basically, the designers remember those old (and new) sci-fi shows that have spacecraft that can land, take off, land again, take off again... with just some refueling somewhere along the line. And they are right: being able to do that would dramatically lessen the cost of space travel. Unfortunately, the limits of chemical power very likely make this impossible for anything short of a Nuclear Lightbulb design. And of course a Nuclear Lightbulb doesn't need wings, since it can do a powered landing with engines alone.
So, until we get rid of this childish fear of "nukular! wahh!", and actually build the NL SSTOAB rocket, expect to see lots more of such designs.
The Capsule is basically a reinforced airtight room with some heat protection at the bottom. It doesn't make sense to make that re-usable, especially since making it disposable allows you to use ablative heat protection, which is pretty much idiot-proof.
BTW. There sure has been a lot of space stories lately. I guess things are really starting to get moving again.
Yeah. We should attack routers for mesh routing, not netbooks.
Seriously, with all the three-strike and censorship laws popping up lately like poisonous mushrooms after a rain, the future of the Internet lays in mesh routing: rather than connect to an ISP, your router sends the packet to neighbour's router, which sends it to the noughbouring building, and so on. And with the laws that try to make this illegal, such routing is best carried out by insectbots, which would have many other uses too (such as fighting locusts).
This is not quite an insectbot yet, but still a step toward that direction. Perhaps a swarm of insectbots could be controlled by a larger "birdbot"?
And so, by making everything someone's private property we can circumvent that pesky First Amendment. A brilliant plan, really; the Chinese still have lots to learn from us :).
So don't read them. Or better yet, read them, learn to deal with them, and become a better person for it.
Ever heard of the story about the stick that broke the camel's back? Or how small streams become a river? How an ocean is just lots and lots of little droplets?
99 cents here, 99 cents there... It adds up.
Indeed. If trolls like Socrates and Galileo were allowed to speak freely, where would we - hey, wait...
The plan is to make it easier to keep away anyone who says something the magazine owner doesn't agree with, thus making it a more effective propaganda tool. Nothing more, nothing less. Oh, is this a controversial opinion? Do I have to re-register?
Unless the another installation has been cracked, so it no longer checks the signature. This reduces this system back to regular DRM, which is routinely cracked.
This only thing any DRM system does - the only thing a DRM system can do - is hinder paying customers. That's all it's good for. A pirate is not bothered by disk checks, phoning home, signature checks, or any assorted crap, because it has been stripped away by the crack.
Really? A DRM system that requires a constant Internet connection for the game to run is not "desperate"?
"Hypothetically" is a nice word. It allows one to make assertions about imaginary worlds - assertions which, because they are about imaginary worlds, are impossible to prove either way.
Bt no, any game that anybody bothers playing would still get disinfected, simply because DRM is annoying. A no-DVD path is pretty much a requirement to hassle-free gaming.
They are. The standard operating procedure for a copyright enforcement organization is to pick random victims and threaten to sue them unless they pay a few thousand dollars to the organization; since lawsuits are beyond most people's financial means to defend against, and because there's always the possibility of being stuck with a hundred million dollar judgement against you - after all, it's "just" a civil court so you need to prove your innocence - people have little choice but to pay. That's how a protection racket operates.
Having a protection racket use law as their extortion tool makes mockery of the whole concept.
Really? Because as I recall it, everyone from Edison to Disney was busy adopting - pirating, if you will - everything from technology to movies. Yet I don't recall any stories of anyone being "disappeared".
Instead, they are solved by bribery and extortion. A big improvement.
Oh well, I guess it doesn't really matter. Copyright is effectively pretty much dead, thanks to the abuse of copyright organizations, and the resulting total lack of respect by the general public. The only real question is how long it takes for the legal system to admit this fact and let it go.
Piracy predates PC, as do measures used to fight it. It doesn't show any signs of lessening in the slightest. There comes a time when persistence becomes a synonym for stupidity.
Yes, it pretty much is. The number of people actively fighting DRM outnumber the people fighting piracy a thousandfold, if not millionfold.
"Relatively small" number here means mere millions, rather than billions.
No, pursuit of these individuals is hampered by the simple fact that it's impossible to track a small file back to its origin, and cracks are small files.
The Pirate Bay is still up and serving pirated content, you know.
No, it's because there is no way to simultaneously make content readable and not readable by the same person. I trust that any DRM scheme will always be cracked because the opposite would require the DRM maker to have absolute omnipotence, that is, to be able to break the laws of logic. As it's debatable whether God himself has this kind of power, I think we can safely assume that a gaming company won't be pulling it off anytime soon.
And yet pirate groups seem to have no trouble finding people both willing and able to disinfect software of various DRM-related annoyances. Your assertion that it's becoming "increasingly difficult" doesn't seem to have any basis in reality.
What world are you living in? The "industry" - various protection rackets, actually - are losing, and losing badly. Just why do you think they're resorting to such desperate measures?
The "rest of us" will have more personal liberties due to the techniques developed by people needing to keep their identities secret. For example, Freenet can handle large files nowadays, even if it's still not as fast as BitTorrent.
No need for that. The new content has to be stored somewhere, so all you have to do is check the contents of the game directory before and after the update.
DRM is, to put it bluntly, a scam perpetrated on game manufacturers by DRM manufacturers.
Given infinite resources, almost everything is "effective", since it gets your goal. Given finite resources, whatever gets your goal cheapest is "effective".
The reason NASA projects get cancelled is that the funding gets cancelled. Give them a trillion dollars and a directive to colonize the Moon with it, and it'll get done.
As soon as USA pulls off - as it has to do pretty soon, since the money to continue the war is running out - Taleban and Al-Qaeda will retake the country.
Indeed. Of course, Saddam was a secular maniac, so with him gone Iraq is on its way to become a terrorist training ground, but hey: mission accomplished.
Yes, I get the feeling that the people in charge just wanted a war, and damn the consequences.
It takes far less money to defend than to attack. A nation that invests in its infrastructure can hold off nation that attacks, yet still increase the size of its economy, and eventually dwarf that nation even in military might.
An army can't stop a terrorist group. You need intelligence services and police for that.
Violence isn't effective. Quite the contrary, it involves tremendous costs; for example, the current running cost of Iraq and Afghanistan wars comes to over one trillion dollars - and let's not forget that these are wars against a hopelessly outmatched foe, and have actually failed to meet their objectives, for Al-Qaida and Taleban still exist and Iraq is far from a peaceful democracy. It's the threat of violence that's effective, but once you resort to actual violence, you'd better hope that you have some deep pockets to draw from.
Suppose you'd given trillion dollars to, say, NASA instead of blowing shit up? You'd be selling hot dogs at the Moon right now. Or maybe you'd prefer to have covered the Wall Street bailout with it? You'd still had over 300 billion dollars to spend on NASA, social security, or simply tax cuts. Instead, you used it all to blow shit up half the world over, and accomplished nothing except killing thousands of your people and possibly close to a million other people. And you call that effective? Hell, you could had put a billion dollar bounty on Osama's head; you'd almost certainly got him, and still had 999 billions left over.
This is what I've never understood about hawks: their position is completely irrational. Even if one adopts the position that the only thing that matters is homeland's power and glory, it's still irrational: a nation that invests its money on growing its economy will always beat one that invests in its army instead, simply because of compound interest. Getting involves in a war always weakens you, simply because you are wasting resources you could invest in making yourself stronger otherwise. Why are these people having such a problem understanding this?
No, not really. If you have small budget, go for sprite-based graphics; don't do 3D unless you have the budget to do it well. Chrono Trigger still looks OK nowadays, while early 3D games look horrible.
Of course you can still leverage modern technology, for example use SVG to create your graphics so they can be scaled by resolution. However, it's only very recently that 3D graphics have caught up with 2D sprite-based ones - and arguably still haven't.
Or you could do like Okami did: they originally wanted realistic graphics, but the target platform simply didn't have the power to do that, so they went to an extremely stylized ones instead.
What I'm trying to say is: don't make compromises. Decide what you can do, do it well, and mercilessly scrap everything you can't. A Finnish game magazine once compared making a game to rearing a child Spartan style: everything that doesn't contribute to make the game better should be ruthlessly pruned. Everything that makes the game worse should definitely be pruned.
And, frankly, Chrono Trigger is about as epic as it gets :).
Alternatively, we could expand the already-adopted graphic engine licensing to asset licensing. Is there any rational reason why everyone needs to redo textures, character models, animation and AI over and over again? Good old Neverwinter Nights spawned thousands of user-made modules, some of them true classics (Dreamcatcher comes to mind, as well as Demon and Kunoichi). Heck, Witcher used a modified version of hte engine.
Maybe the open source community should start developing a game engine; and I don't mean just the graphics engine but a "virtual actor" one, together with an asset library, so the game developer could simply say: "this character is an old Kung Fu master with a tick in right eye"?
Good graphics don't inherently require lots of effort per-game; it's simply that we are still doing things in low abstraction levels, where every game maker must worry about polygon count.
I hate to say this, but graphics matter. They, along with sound, help draw you into the game. That doesn't mean that you need extremely cutting-edge photorealistic graphics; if you did, manga would never have gotten popular. However, whatever style you choose, you have to do well within that style. Nethack can get away with text-mode graphics, because it's a roguelike (but I still prefer IMBgraphics charset, and back in DOS days there was a program that you could run prior to Nethack and made the whole thing look much better). Chrono Trigger still looks good today, because it's 2D sprite graphics, does that well, and modern filtering techniques enchance it further. However, early 3D games look horrible, because you can't help but compare them to modern ones.
What I'm saying is: graphics matter, so think very carefully what kind of graphics you can do well.
No, and that's precisely the problem: Asimov's robots don't have any kind of ethical - or any kind of - framework to base their decisions on besides the laws. As the result, Daneel ends up imprisoning Baley at one point, because he thinks he might be psychologically stressed by going outside, and the First Law (don't harm humans) trumps the second ("obey humans").
It was Giskard who created the 0th Law, and promptly destroyed the Earth because he judged that to be in humanity's interests.
That's the direction we are heading towards. There's already private armies for hire. Corporations are citizens, and favoured far above real human beings. If I'm sued by one, I have little choice but to settle, whether I'm guilty or innocent; after all, I can't afford a legal battle - and what does that make courts, other than enforcers for protection rackets?
It's good that you know these things based on a single post on Slashdot. I wish I was such a good judge of character.
Is that really any different from regular humans?
"Don't touch me anymore! Not there! PLEASE! Let me go!"
Give the neighbours something to think about :).
Actually, it states that someone or something will be compared to Nazis or Nazi Germany eventually, in an attempt to engage in Reductio Ad Hitlerum.
Lately Nazism as a boogeyman has been surely but steadily replaced by Communism, mainly by the need to defend deregulation and other right-wing ideologies against rational arguments. I wonder what that should be called - Libertarian Fallacy? Reductio Ad Stalin? Free Market Fundamentalism?
Try to make up your mind.
No. The whole reason plants make fruits is so that animals would eat them and shit out the seeds at some new location. Eating a fruit doesn't end a life, it gives it a chance to begin. In fact it could be argued that not eating a fruit causes the plant equivalent of miscarriage.
You could become a carrion eater. No reason to do your own killing, when the world is full of things eager to do it for you.
That kinda depends on whether it's possible to decouple intelligence from personhood. In other words, does having a robotic car that's smart enough to get a sixpack of beer on the way to pick you up from work because it previously brought your mother-in-law from the airport mean that said car is a person?
Hopefully never, since each and every Asimov's robot story is about how these laws fail miserably. A rigid adherence to a set of rules is simply not sufficient ethical framework for an intelligent creature.
Does it really matter? I have no say in how my society is governed; I doubt very much you do either. Maybe our current set of overlords are supplanted by a new one; maybe they won't. It doesn't make a difference to me, and I have no power to affect that either way.
Yes, it's pretty creepy. And if people actually "connect" with it as the video claims, it's going to be horribly jarring when you run into the limits of the physics simulation and AI. Which you will - XBox doesn't have the kind of power to run either convincingly.
There's also the little bit about there being no actual game to be seen, but let's be generous and treat this as a tech demo.
If you have played Chrono Trigger, you already know the answer to all your suggestions:
"But... the future refused to change."
Besides, with the filters available in modern emulators, those old SNES games aren't pixelated anymore, but actually look pretty sharp. Hint, hint :).
And it fails miserably at that, having never once upheld my rights. But I guess some citizens are more equal than others.
It's getting harder and harder to see the state as anything but the feudal lord's private enforcer.
As opposed to our current society where only the strong have rights.
I see your Halting Problem and rise with Pre-Emptive Multitasking :).
It's my fault that Firefox freezes, despite me having coded neither Firefox nor the Javascript that interacted in this way?
A bad assumption, IMHO. Most programmers are retards and write sloppy code. This whole problem is evidence of that.
What are you talking about? I was referring to the browser; I couldn't care less if a particular page's scripts are multithreaded or not, just as long as the UI doesn't have to wait for them to finish whatever it is they're doing.
Guess what? A normal desktop application doesn't stall everything; even if it hangs, the rest of the mahcine will keep on chugging along just fine. That is what I want for Firefox: if your POS script freezes, fine; but the Firefox UI should still keep responding, allowing me to switch to other tabs and use them normally, and close the offending tab forcibly once I grow tired of its scripts getting their act together.