Even if human life is cheap for them, technology isn't. You can't afford to have your shuttle burn up in the atmosphere because that means a millions of lost dollars (yes, I know they don't use dollars there) in lost equipment. Even cutting corners in safety like lowest-bidder harnesses means your million-dollar spacecraft may become a million-dollar paperweight because your pilots were killed from the shock of launch. The only place where a lack of regard for human life could come in handy would be experimenting to find the limits of human endurance for things like vacuum, temperature extremes, etc and volunteers might be in short supply.
Of course not, unless their contract said "We reserve the right to expel you for any reason whatsoever."
You'd have more of a point if most student handbooks didn't have a line that essentially means that. My favorite one was the prohibition of "any gang or cult related attire" in the public high school I attended. Gang attire... that just covers everything from T-shirts to 3-piece suits now, doesn't it? And that was used several times while I attended school to arbitrarily single out students the administration didn't like.
Although my favorite was still the line in our college's student handbook where it stated that the University could not be held at fault for any incident whether or not it was in fact the fault of the school. That clause got snuck in the semester after a kid died in a house fire on campus and there were whispers going around that a large number of smoke detectors on campus didn't work and that maintenance requests to have them fixed had been largely ignored.
Except the way that this works it with messing with the inner-ear balance. As I understand it, most sophisticated interrogation involves disorientation of the subject more than it does pain. Putting the person through 8 hours of feeling like they're whirling at high speed might work, particularly if coupled with other techniques.
PHB: And we'll need to have you wear this collar at all times so we'll know your location.
Dilbert (thinking): A collar... well, at least it's not a leash.
PHB: Oh, and you'll have to wear this 10-foot extension cord at all times too.
Ok, probably only roughly similar to the original dialogue... trying to summon it from misty memory.
A mouse is near perfect as aiming device, much faster and more accurate than a light gun.
And I think that's the crux of why people play online games with a mouse. You know exactly where you're aiming and have very fine control over it. Contrast it over a light gun which requires gross motor movements, sighting, and usually no firm idea of where exactly you're pointed at. I remember playing Operation Wolf on the Nintendo was virtually impossible with the light gun versus the control pad. And the various House of the Dead games are definitely easier with the mouse than with the light gun. ^_^ Although I still prefer Typing of the Dead... "Ever kill a zombie with your bare hands?"
In the end, a lot of it comes down to computer games being wish fulfillment. You don't want to be limitted by your crappy physical skills, so you use devices that simplify things. Although I highly enjoy playing shooting games in the arcade (particularly the Police 911 series... got to love the full control over dodging), using a mouse is still far easier. And really, what's more important? Being 133t and playing with a light gun for aiming in Quake? Or keeping from getting pasted by an utter n00b who's using his mouse to aim? (and yes, leetspeak used for dramatic emphasis)
Just cause you don't know about it doesn't mean it doesn't happen. I've got about 1.4g of assorted pdfs and htmls. Poor college students with a lot of time on their hands may find it worth their while to scan a textbook so that their friends/classmates/frat doesn't have to pay the exorbitant prices the bookstore wants. All it takes is one student to leak it on the web and everyone has it.
Meh, we just did it informally by lending the books out to each other. College textbooks are ridiculously overpriced so only the naive freshmen buy books from the bookstore where the book has been out for over a year. The rest of us are locating people who've been in the class and arranging to borrow the book, or to buy it off of them outright for a very cheap price. For that matter, there's a thriving industry for secondhand textbooks online. It's all legal and it still takes a big bite out of profit-mongering textbook publishers. Yes, it's a limitted audience out there (particularly as half of the engineering professors teach using their book), but the prices are still exhorbitant.
I didn't say it wasn't taken just that I made it up, i.e., it isn't a site I actually know and visit.
Right. Of course you don't visit that site. We believe you, really.
By the by, your sig block has a URL that doesn't resolve and I think you want to say a "pen and paper" RPG, not a "pen and pare" one, although goodness knows you could mean the second one... competition to reduce your character down their most basic description? "Dark, brooding hero. I win!" "Oh yeah? 3." *dead silence* "Well, Ok, so it's not a particularly good description..."
There's probably some canonical version way back there, but it's usually just quoted as a generic "protection scam" bit. You know:
{casually waves an electromagnet around} "You know, that's a nice harddrive you have there... would be a pity if anything were to happen to it like an electromagnet wiping the data. But me and the boys, we can protect you from all that."
If everyone is doing it for no profit anyway, then just do the whole performance in disguise (shouldn't be hard) and do it with minimal warning. Put the video on P2P and take personal vows of anonymity. Come to think of it... the vows probably wouldn't be necessary.;)
Och... and just get anonymous musicians to play without pay, anonymous set-builders to build without a budget, choreographers, costumes... *wry grin* While community theater is frequently a non-profit matter, there's still significant costs. It varies from theater to theater, but we've got two community theaters here in Newark. One, Licking County Players, operates as a non-profit. Actors, directors, choreographers, and techs work without pay. Musicians and set-builders get paid, although it's a fairly small amount. Their pay and the money for costumes and sets is budgeted by the board of directors and comes from ticket revenues. Still, it might very well be worthwhile... *shrug* I've thought about trying to do a movie version too, as it would simplify some of the stage directions (cuts allow us to transition from the cult church to Old Man Marsh's bog to the graveyard to the ocean as dictated in the script, the bit with Cthulhu at the end could be mocked up with digital effects) but then there goes a lot of theater versimilitude which keeps us from having to build realistic sets. ^_^ Plus also, recording the voices is easier to do with community theater as it's all one big soundstage. It's very tempting, but I don't have the resources or the drive to stage it all myself. I'm really not the directorial kind; I'm just an engineer who plays an actor on stage.
That said, as said before, I have taken some stabs at trying to figure out how to choreograph and stage the scenes, as well as finding music (Licensed musicals don't allow you to keep the music books so finding the proper orchestral accompaniment will be interesting). I've found MIDI files of the main Fiddler on the Roof songs, so theoretically I take those files and enter them into one of those scorewriter programs like MusicMaster or Lilypad so as to get my own music for the musicians. The theater has cheap rates for renting costumes to members of the theater. *wry grin* The stage is kind of in constant use for some rehearsal or performance, though, especially given we'd have to build sets. Given the usual budgets cited for the shows, I think I could finance it out of my own pocket, particularly if I can get another person or two to go in for it. (Set construction costs average around $300-500, sound effects and music are generally free from the royalty-free collections we have, costumes are cheap as aforementionned. Really, most of the costs for theaters are royalties. Last year, we paid over $5000 to perform Seussical. We sold out every night, so we made that back and then some, but it was scary going into a show knowing you had to sell out 6 of the 9 performances if you wanted to just recoup royalty costs)
I was just trying to carry on the mythos. Like all those university library records that include the Necronomicon and, a certain supposedly translated Floren fairy tale. Always funny when someone goes off trying to get hold of one of these.;)
Ah, much apologies then. Personally, I was good and well fooled for a long time after seeing the documentary. I recognized that the interviews were fake (I recognized the names) but it was a long while until I saw the quote from one of the webmasters about creating the lyrics for Shoggoth on the Roof. *gallic shrug* Eh, and I've never found that post again, so it could be there really is authenticity. It wouldn't be the first great work of literature written when the author was not quite in touch with reality. Large amounts of Coleridge and Poe were written in a drugged haze, supposedly. And I have a hard time believing Katamari Damacy wasn't written with plenty of psychedelic drugs, or by someone who's a bit unhunged. If nothing else, I wanted to believe that the play was real, perhaps even that the 8 mm footage they had was real, and they added the fake interviews to pad things out and make the 8 mm footage seem more exciting.
Is it still beastiality if the creature is only part mole, crow and ant, but partially decomposed human being? (Am thinking of where the daughters summon a Byakhee because they can't find a suitable boy).
Still, if you ever persuade a theatre to let you stage it and you need a Lavinia Whately, however...:)
Huh... I always kind of perceived that scene as being less a romantic liason and more of a "summoning dark forces because we're bored" thing. ^_^ Underscored by the "Asenath was here" scrawled in the tomb that Harley Warren found, of course... "It's horrible! It's terrible!" "What? What is it?" "There's nothing here but a bunch of old beer cans and a scrawl across the wall, 'Asenath was here'!"
*wry grin* I'll keep that in mind. Thing is, with the circles I usually track mud into, it would likely be community theater, which means no one gets paid; it's all for the love of the art and whatever padding it can be used as in one's acting résumé.
I've seen it - it's odd. There are recurrant rumours that somebody somewhere is actually going to stage it again!
Er... stage it at all. If you poke around the web enough, you find the authors of the website admitting to having written the manuscript themselves. Their "documentary" was a joke, with the more obvious bits being the famous actors from Lovecraft-based movies being interviewed.
But that said, I've had no luck getting the local community theaters to do it. Something to do with legal threats by the owners of Fiddler on the Roof. *wry grin* As parody, it's protected under fair use, but who can afford the legal battle? Besides which, it's got questionable content (sex, occultism, violence) paired off with a musical which many actors view as a true classic to be cherished. Lastly, after having read the libretto, I'm not sure how technically feasible it is. There are some pretty extreme set changes and the last scene requires a 2-story tall Cthulhu who can appear suddenly, pick up an actor, and smash the majority of the buildings on the set. I can think of a few theater dodges, but it would be pretty darn dodgy. Still, one of these days I'll convince someone...
Well, in theory, it's supposed to discourage them because fines will continue and increase if they continue such a practice. However, the companies are always able to switch to the next shady business practice.
I guess the question is, do those of us who have bought memory during this time get money back? My first impression would be no, as this is a criminal suit, not a civil suit. *shrug* If that's the case, I'm sure there will be some opportunistic^K altruistic lawyer who will file one on our behalf for a substantial legal fee^K^K^K^K^K pro bono.
Swim out and start fires on an entire naval fleet? And you are trying to debunk a myth? What, did they carry along some waterproof matches or did they hold the burning torches aloft?
Perhaps they used Greek fire?
I was not in our theater's production, but I know a bit about it.
Mrs. White is always played by a male. The ending is not set. There are four possible endings which involve different dialogue based on who killed Mr. Body. An audience member picks a card and ostensibly is the only person who knows what the ending will be. In actuality, of course, the cast member who has him pick has a method for knowing which card was picked. *wry grin* Had one exciting night, though, where the cast member doing this forgot which card it was by the time he got backstage. I can't remember exactly how they handled that. A subtle look-over-the-shoulder by the usher IIRC.
Basically, a group of teenagers did a shot-for-shot remake. Pretty impressive, I've heard, but of course it can't be elgally distributed, so I've never seen it.
Good question... if he were actually singing, it's a cover, and that's handled by an entirely different set of organizations. I don't really know how that's handled, but you've got me curious now.
don't understand that. Why would the record companies want me to get bored, go do something else, and then fail to click on any buy now links for great songs? At least if I'm there actively skipping, I might be actively buying. If I've tuned it down to background music, no sales will be happening.
My understanding of digital music licensing is that you have to pay per time the song is played. If you skip the first 10 songs after 10 seconds of play, this company is looking at having to pay a licensing fee for 10 songs, and this in under two minutes. It's not the record company's decision; it's this company.
It's a joke. ^_^ Then again, after the whole Amish Paradaise, Gangsta Paradise, Pastime Paradise debacle, it's not that unreasonable. Heck, I almost modded you informative without doing the fact checking...
Obviously, you've been living in a cave for the past, oh, 200 years, to not have noticed that when man (specifically Western Man, which now encompasses Japan, South Korea, Taiwan & soon India) puts his mind to technology, it invariably gets faster, better & all around more capable.
Personally, I'm curious as to whether, by the time that level of technological excellence comes along, it won't be decided that humans are much cheaper to put in than the robots. There was a sci-fi story along those lines, years and years ago. Somewhere in the farflung future, man was at war with expensive computer-guided bombs weaving their way through defenses. A common laborer, employed to make sure the bombs were well oiled, manages to figure out basic arithmatic, a skill which had apparently been lost over the years due to computers being so good at it. The end of the story was basically his superiors realizing that, instead of losing these hideously expensive computers, they could simply put a human in each bomb to use math to guide it to its destination. After all, human life is cheap and readily available. *wry grin* Probably written back in the day, when computers were the size of rooms and people assumed they'd get smaller, but would probably always be horribly expensive.
*grumble* Didn't close my EM tag properly, so I'll repost an improved copy. Incidentally, the initial post was less an insult and more of a joke, kind of along the lines of how the Daleks, horribly technologically advanced, were foiled by stairs for so many years. (And yes, I know that they later showed levitation abilities and now pretty commonly fly)
Obviously, you've been living in a cave for the past, oh, 200 years, to not have noticed that when man (specifically Western Man, which now encompasses Japan, South Korea, Taiwan & soon India) puts his mind to technology, it invariably gets faster, better & all around more capable.
Personally, I'm curious as to whether, by the time that level of technological excellence comes along, it won't be decided that humans are much cheaper to put in than the robots. There was a sci-fi story along those lines, years and years ago. Somewhere in the farflung future, man was at war with expensive computer-guided bombs weaving their way through defenses. A common laborer, employed to make sure the bombs were well oiled, manages to figure out basic arithmatic, a skill which had apparently been lost over the years due to computers being so good at it. The end of the story was basically his superiors realizing that, instead of losing these hideously expensive computers, they could simply put a human in each bomb to use math to guide it to its destination. After all, human life is cheap and readily available. *wry grin* Probably written back in the day, when computers were the size of rooms and people assumed they'd get smaller, but would probably always be horribly expensive.
Slashdot Mirror
Even if human life is cheap for them, technology isn't. You can't afford to have your shuttle burn up in the atmosphere because that means a millions of lost dollars (yes, I know they don't use dollars there) in lost equipment. Even cutting corners in safety like lowest-bidder harnesses means your million-dollar spacecraft may become a million-dollar paperweight because your pilots were killed from the shock of launch. The only place where a lack of regard for human life could come in handy would be experimenting to find the limits of human endurance for things like vacuum, temperature extremes, etc and volunteers might be in short supply.
You'd have more of a point if most student handbooks didn't have a line that essentially means that. My favorite one was the prohibition of "any gang or cult related attire" in the public high school I attended. Gang attire... that just covers everything from T-shirts to 3-piece suits now, doesn't it? And that was used several times while I attended school to arbitrarily single out students the administration didn't like.
Although my favorite was still the line in our college's student handbook where it stated that the University could not be held at fault for any incident whether or not it was in fact the fault of the school. That clause got snuck in the semester after a kid died in a house fire on campus and there were whispers going around that a large number of smoke detectors on campus didn't work and that maintenance requests to have them fixed had been largely ignored.
Ah, just use a beer scooter like the rest of us.
Except the way that this works it with messing with the inner-ear balance. As I understand it, most sophisticated interrogation involves disorientation of the subject more than it does pain. Putting the person through 8 hours of feeling like they're whirling at high speed might work, particularly if coupled with other techniques.
Dilbert (thinking): A collar... well, at least it's not a leash.
PHB: Oh, and you'll have to wear this 10-foot extension cord at all times too.
Ok, probably only roughly similar to the original dialogue... trying to summon it from misty memory.
And I think that's the crux of why people play online games with a mouse. You know exactly where you're aiming and have very fine control over it. Contrast it over a light gun which requires gross motor movements, sighting, and usually no firm idea of where exactly you're pointed at. I remember playing Operation Wolf on the Nintendo was virtually impossible with the light gun versus the control pad. And the various House of the Dead games are definitely easier with the mouse than with the light gun. ^_^ Although I still prefer Typing of the Dead... "Ever kill a zombie with your bare hands?"
In the end, a lot of it comes down to computer games being wish fulfillment. You don't want to be limitted by your crappy physical skills, so you use devices that simplify things. Although I highly enjoy playing shooting games in the arcade (particularly the Police 911 series... got to love the full control over dodging), using a mouse is still far easier. And really, what's more important? Being 133t and playing with a light gun for aiming in Quake? Or keeping from getting pasted by an utter n00b who's using his mouse to aim? (and yes, leetspeak used for dramatic emphasis)
Meh, we just did it informally by lending the books out to each other. College textbooks are ridiculously overpriced so only the naive freshmen buy books from the bookstore where the book has been out for over a year. The rest of us are locating people who've been in the class and arranging to borrow the book, or to buy it off of them outright for a very cheap price. For that matter, there's a thriving industry for secondhand textbooks online. It's all legal and it still takes a big bite out of profit-mongering textbook publishers. Yes, it's a limitted audience out there (particularly as half of the engineering professors teach using their book), but the prices are still exhorbitant.
Right. Of course you don't visit that site. We believe you, really.
By the by, your sig block has a URL that doesn't resolve and I think you want to say a "pen and paper" RPG, not a "pen and pare" one, although goodness knows you could mean the second one... competition to reduce your character down their most basic description? "Dark, brooding hero. I win!" "Oh yeah? 3." *dead silence* "Well, Ok, so it's not a particularly good description..."
{casually waves an electromagnet around} "You know, that's a nice harddrive you have there... would be a pity if anything were to happen to it like an electromagnet wiping the data. But me and the boys, we can protect you from all that."
Och... and just get anonymous musicians to play without pay, anonymous set-builders to build without a budget, choreographers, costumes... *wry grin* While community theater is frequently a non-profit matter, there's still significant costs. It varies from theater to theater, but we've got two community theaters here in Newark. One, Licking County Players, operates as a non-profit. Actors, directors, choreographers, and techs work without pay. Musicians and set-builders get paid, although it's a fairly small amount. Their pay and the money for costumes and sets is budgeted by the board of directors and comes from ticket revenues. Still, it might very well be worthwhile... *shrug* I've thought about trying to do a movie version too, as it would simplify some of the stage directions (cuts allow us to transition from the cult church to Old Man Marsh's bog to the graveyard to the ocean as dictated in the script, the bit with Cthulhu at the end could be mocked up with digital effects) but then there goes a lot of theater versimilitude which keeps us from having to build realistic sets. ^_^ Plus also, recording the voices is easier to do with community theater as it's all one big soundstage. It's very tempting, but I don't have the resources or the drive to stage it all myself. I'm really not the directorial kind; I'm just an engineer who plays an actor on stage.
That said, as said before, I have taken some stabs at trying to figure out how to choreograph and stage the scenes, as well as finding music (Licensed musicals don't allow you to keep the music books so finding the proper orchestral accompaniment will be interesting). I've found MIDI files of the main Fiddler on the Roof songs, so theoretically I take those files and enter them into one of those scorewriter programs like MusicMaster or Lilypad so as to get my own music for the musicians. The theater has cheap rates for renting costumes to members of the theater. *wry grin* The stage is kind of in constant use for some rehearsal or performance, though, especially given we'd have to build sets. Given the usual budgets cited for the shows, I think I could finance it out of my own pocket, particularly if I can get another person or two to go in for it. (Set construction costs average around $300-500, sound effects and music are generally free from the royalty-free collections we have, costumes are cheap as aforementionned. Really, most of the costs for theaters are royalties. Last year, we paid over $5000 to perform Seussical. We sold out every night, so we made that back and then some, but it was scary going into a show knowing you had to sell out 6 of the 9 performances if you wanted to just recoup royalty costs)
^_^ This is sounding scarily realizable.
Ah, much apologies then. Personally, I was good and well fooled for a long time after seeing the documentary. I recognized that the interviews were fake (I recognized the names) but it was a long while until I saw the quote from one of the webmasters about creating the lyrics for Shoggoth on the Roof. *gallic shrug* Eh, and I've never found that post again, so it could be there really is authenticity. It wouldn't be the first great work of literature written when the author was not quite in touch with reality. Large amounts of Coleridge and Poe were written in a drugged haze, supposedly. And I have a hard time believing Katamari Damacy wasn't written with plenty of psychedelic drugs, or by someone who's a bit unhunged. If nothing else, I wanted to believe that the play was real, perhaps even that the 8 mm footage they had was real, and they added the fake interviews to pad things out and make the 8 mm footage seem more exciting.
Is it still beastiality if the creature is only part mole, crow and ant, but partially decomposed human being? (Am thinking of where the daughters summon a Byakhee because they can't find a suitable boy).
Still, if you ever persuade a theatre to let you stage it and you need a Lavinia Whately, however... :)
Huh... I always kind of perceived that scene as being less a romantic liason and more of a "summoning dark forces because we're bored" thing. ^_^ Underscored by the "Asenath was here" scrawled in the tomb that Harley Warren found, of course... "It's horrible! It's terrible!" "What? What is it?" "There's nothing here but a bunch of old beer cans and a scrawl across the wall, 'Asenath was here'!"
*wry grin* I'll keep that in mind. Thing is, with the circles I usually track mud into, it would likely be community theater, which means no one gets paid; it's all for the love of the art and whatever padding it can be used as in one's acting résumé.
Chain Lightning - for wizards who can't just cast one.
Er... stage it at all. If you poke around the web enough, you find the authors of the website admitting to having written the manuscript themselves. Their "documentary" was a joke, with the more obvious bits being the famous actors from Lovecraft-based movies being interviewed.
But that said, I've had no luck getting the local community theaters to do it. Something to do with legal threats by the owners of Fiddler on the Roof. *wry grin* As parody, it's protected under fair use, but who can afford the legal battle? Besides which, it's got questionable content (sex, occultism, violence) paired off with a musical which many actors view as a true classic to be cherished. Lastly, after having read the libretto, I'm not sure how technically feasible it is. There are some pretty extreme set changes and the last scene requires a 2-story tall Cthulhu who can appear suddenly, pick up an actor, and smash the majority of the buildings on the set. I can think of a few theater dodges, but it would be pretty darn dodgy. Still, one of these days I'll convince someone...
Well, in theory, it's supposed to discourage them because fines will continue and increase if they continue such a practice. However, the companies are always able to switch to the next shady business practice.
I guess the question is, do those of us who have bought memory during this time get money back? My first impression would be no, as this is a criminal suit, not a civil suit. *shrug* If that's the case, I'm sure there will be some opportunistic^K altruistic lawyer who will file one on our behalf for a substantial legal fee^K^K^K^K^K pro bono.
Swim out and start fires on an entire naval fleet? And you are trying to debunk a myth? What, did they carry along some waterproof matches or did they hold the burning torches aloft?
Perhaps they used Greek fire?
Mrs. White is always played by a male. The ending is not set. There are four possible endings which involve different dialogue based on who killed Mr. Body. An audience member picks a card and ostensibly is the only person who knows what the ending will be. In actuality, of course, the cast member who has him pick has a method for knowing which card was picked. *wry grin* Had one exciting night, though, where the cast member doing this forgot which card it was by the time he got backstage. I can't remember exactly how they handled that. A subtle look-over-the-shoulder by the usher IIRC.
Basically, a group of teenagers did a shot-for-shot remake. Pretty impressive, I've heard, but of course it can't be elgally distributed, so I've never seen it.
Good question... if he were actually singing, it's a cover, and that's handled by an entirely different set of organizations. I don't really know how that's handled, but you've got me curious now.
don't understand that. Why would the record companies want me to get bored, go do something else, and then fail to click on any buy now links for great songs? At least if I'm there actively skipping, I might be actively buying. If I've tuned it down to background music, no sales will be happening.
My understanding of digital music licensing is that you have to pay per time the song is played. If you skip the first 10 songs after 10 seconds of play, this company is looking at having to pay a licensing fee for 10 songs, and this in under two minutes. It's not the record company's decision; it's this company.
Problem is, it's moderated to the limit already. We would need people to Overrate it and then mod it back up.
It's a joke. ^_^ Then again, after the whole Amish Paradaise, Gangsta Paradise, Pastime Paradise debacle, it's not that unreasonable. Heck, I almost modded you informative without doing the fact checking...
He did define it before using the acronym, but quite honestly, I missed it the first time reading through too.
Personally, I'm curious as to whether, by the time that level of technological excellence comes along, it won't be decided that humans are much cheaper to put in than the robots. There was a sci-fi story along those lines, years and years ago. Somewhere in the farflung future, man was at war with expensive computer-guided bombs weaving their way through defenses. A common laborer, employed to make sure the bombs were well oiled, manages to figure out basic arithmatic, a skill which had apparently been lost over the years due to computers being so good at it. The end of the story was basically his superiors realizing that, instead of losing these hideously expensive computers, they could simply put a human in each bomb to use math to guide it to its destination. After all, human life is cheap and readily available. *wry grin* Probably written back in the day, when computers were the size of rooms and people assumed they'd get smaller, but would probably always be horribly expensive.
*grumble* Didn't close my EM tag properly, so I'll repost an improved copy. Incidentally, the initial post was less an insult and more of a joke, kind of along the lines of how the Daleks, horribly technologically advanced, were foiled by stairs for so many years. (And yes, I know that they later showed levitation abilities and now pretty commonly fly)
Obviously, you've been living in a cave for the past, oh, 200 years, to not have noticed that when man (specifically Western Man, which now encompasses Japan, South Korea, Taiwan & soon India) puts his mind to technology, it invariably gets faster, better & all around more capable.
Personally, I'm curious as to whether, by the time that level of technological excellence comes along, it won't be decided that humans are much cheaper to put in than the robots. There was a sci-fi story along those lines, years and years ago. Somewhere in the farflung future, man was at war with expensive computer-guided bombs weaving their way through defenses. A common laborer, employed to make sure the bombs were well oiled, manages to figure out basic arithmatic, a skill which had apparently been lost over the years due to computers being so good at it. The end of the story was basically his superiors realizing that, instead of losing these hideously expensive computers, they could simply put a human in each bomb to use math to guide it to its destination. After all, human life is cheap and readily available. *wry grin* Probably written back in the day, when computers were the size of rooms and people assumed they'd get smaller, but would probably always be horribly expensive.