It's that no one thought of and made popular a good name for the scandal ending with 'gate'. HotCoffeeGate?
Also, it's hard to get much out of a scandal with nothing but a faceless corporation- part of a good scandal is the very accusation is almost a scandal in itself (try saying to your co-workers, 'what do guys think of that traitor, Karl Rove?' vs. trying to explain the intricacies of Rockstar putting a hidden less-than-hardcore sex mini-game into a video game). The conservatives should have singled out the CEO or lead programmer or something and demonized a specific individual from earlier on.
what'd be really neat is a peak oil / singularity synchronicity / conjunction. However if PO happens before the TS it might throw off the schedule.
Maybe asymptotically decreasing oil supplies would exactly coincide with asymptotically increasing post-humanizating technologies that all run off oil. The two would neating cancel each other out, producing no dramatic economic collapses or mind-shattering transcendances and god-like super intelligent AIs or gray goo running amok- the gray goo has to stop for increasingly expensive gas so often it will be easy to defend ourselves from it even with these old-fashioned chemical brains.
But there is a problem with the peak oil theory. You can only estimate with what you think you have. What if there was more oil reserves elsewhere in unexpected places that hasn't been tapped yet?
Then you have to expend a lot of resources finding those reserves and extracting oil. The price of oil goes up to pay for it. There's probably a point of diminishing returns.
in my area if you want to recycle plastic bottles you need to take off the lids, remove the labels and make sure they are empty. What am I, the milk lady?... Who the hell has glass bottles? Can I put jars in here? Oh, only if I remove the lid and the label and clean out the jar. To hell with that.
Wasn't it you that said something in a grandparent post like: "People with no imagination see any change to the status quo as the end of the world. Thank god there's people who see change as an opportunity and a challenge." ?
people who make the "when the oil runs out" argument always presume that the current known deposits of oil are the only ones in the world.
We haven't found all the oil, we've probably just found most of it that is very cheap and convenient to get at- sources near people and near the surface.
If the cost of oil goes up slowly (if oil production from the cheap sources goes down gradually as they run out), it'll give a gradually increasing pressure to go out and find the new sources, and we'll all have to live with occasional increases in expense. If the cost goes up very quickly, because the governments was artificially subsidizing it or oil was being overproduced for some other reason, then you get much more dramatic problems later on that may not let you go find new sources. Managing the rate of change (either through government intervention or 'natural' market forces) is the key to a smooth and bloodless transition to more exotic oil sources.
Hell, with advanced genetic engineering we can make bacteria pump out plastic directly.
We can do this now, or we can do it after so-many Manhattan projects worth of technological progress (and is anyone even working on it that has decent funding- and who is to say we will be the ones to do it first)? And, even if we can do this eventually, it may be a very expensive process- no matter how extraordinary the process, there will always be a difference between resources that are just sitting out there 'for free' just under a desert, and ones where you have to manage a complicated process (with an complicated organism) through many steps, provide raw materials and energy (though photosynthetic plastic producing organisms may be possible) yourself rather than using processes that just happened on their own millions of years ago.
People with no imagination see any change to the status quo as the end of the world. Thank god there's people who see change as an opportunity and a challenge.
The problem is that latter sort of people may not have your best interests at heart, and may try to drive in a bunch of unwelcome changes to say your quality of life and your freedoms while saving you from some other problem. Change for the sake of change is fine for many things, but our way of life is very closely tied to the abundance of certain materials and energy sources. The status quo may not last, but I want the luxury of enough breathing room so that people will be able to make make rational choices that are to most everyone's benefit.
In short, recycling does allow reuse of some resources, but does not appear to damage less environment, or use less energy, or even consume much less space than just throwing everything away.
So you're saying that recycling allows reuse of resources, and takes up less space? Sounds like it's preferable to the other option then. Even if it came out the same, I'd rather be developing and deploying better recycling technologies (which might lead to something much further in the black in the future) than directing the same effort to endless landfills. Or maybe investing in earth-movers and related landfill equipment has more potential for spin-off technologies and there are better quality jobs there than the equivalent in recycling?
Because sex is, obviously, so much more damaging to the mind of a 17 year old than killing people.
This exact same sentiment comes up everytime censorship and movies or games come up. You can be having a conversation with co-workers and start placing bets on how many seconds until you hear someone say 'isn't it stupid how Americans think sex is worse than violence' and then bonus points when someone mentions how Europe gets it the other way around, enlighten souls that they are.
A few fundamentalist types do think sex is worse than violence, or others think violence is okay, but they are minority enough to be ignored. Movies and video games don't contain sex and violence, they contain depictions of sex and violence. And that is what people are reacting to when they want to censor stuff.
Most people know from a very early age that violence is wrong- pain is a very basic feeling, and once you can grasp that other people can feel pain like you feel pain there's an easy jump to not wanting to hurt other people. It takes a lot longer until a person has a relatively mature understanding of sex. Sex is much more complicated than violence- it's not inherently right or wrong, but it can range from very desirable to somewhat inappropriate to a despicable felony or a life or health threatening act (in the case of STDs). The fact that children are sometimes the result also complicates it, there's economic and social consequences for having children. It's all very context sensitive.
So just on that basis, let's assume the rational for censorship is to prevent certain ill effects- the severity of an ill-effect multiplied by the probability of an ill-effect resulting from viewing some media tells you how censorable it should be. (Not to say any censorship is okay, but let us just understand what motivates people to censor some things more than others)
As an example, I can watch Dr. Strangelove, or Independence Day, and although I may be slightly inclined to cause a nuclear holocaust or blow up major cities with giant ray guns (both of which would be at the top of the 'ill-effect' scale), the chance that I'll actually do that is very very close to zero. So they don't merit any censorship. Take watching someone get beaten with a flashlight- I know where I can find a flashlight, but again there's a fairly low chance I'll actually do that, so it merits a little more censorship.
Now I may watch something depicting sex, and I may very well go out and do something similar in real life. There may be negative consequences, so overall the if I was a little influenced by what I watched the whole thing rates more censorship, because the chance of ill-effects high enough to make up for the fact the ill-effects aren't that bad.
There's a few other motivations for censorship that aren't as strongly coupled to people getting hurt- for example usually people would rather only watch sex in relative privacy, whereas stylized Kung Fu could be put on giant outdoor televisions on busy street corners and nobody would feel the least bit uncomfortable to be watching it with their parents or whatever.
The obvious conclusion is that those things are all very expensive. Every hour spent trying to comply with a regulation is a non-productive hour. It's essentially, completely wasted.
One thing that would help the US is to consider these costs when deciding whether the government should regulate every action of every person at all times when they're at work.
California is simultaneously one of the largest economies in the world and also one of the most heavily regulated. It has all sorts of laws and regulations to protect health, workers, the environment, business of course, and lots of other things they value. There are many countries with very little laws at all, but they're hardly libertarian utopias.
It turns out that some regulations cost very little compared to the expenses of not having them. If people are getting killed and injured on the job or by faulty products, or if the health of the population is degraded by industrial poisons in the air or water, productivity tends to go down as a whole even though a few companies get temporarily reduced expenses.
I don't know about you, but I like eating meat that has been inspected- if you want to know what it is like in less regulation burdened countries, take it out of the fridge and hang it outdoors in the summer sun for a few hours before cooking it up a few degrees short of the e-coli killing temperature...
I'm not saying that regulation creates wealth, or that all regulation is good anymore than all regulation is bad- it's just that they are both are dependent on each other.
What the device should do, is somehow gather the average speed of cars in the area, and limit speed to the average so there are no careless speeders.
This solution doesn't at all follow from what you were saying. The device needs a low-pass filter on the speed monitor so that you can speed for brief periods, long enough to address all your examples. As an example, you could go 20 miles over the limit for say ten seconds, or a couple miles over for an hour.
they still can't come up with anything better than "NFL 2005.3b Reloaded...
It's kind of hard to see why they would be motivated to change an extremely successful business model. It's also helpful not to judge the diversity and novelty of electronic gaming by the one or two most successful franchises, but to actually actively look for some interesting games. Independent film aficionados don't whine about how the summer blockbuster releases are just sequels or remakes (actually they probably do, but they shouldn't), they go rent and talk about independent films- for games that is shareware, open source, mods, and some games released through normal channels.
I think the fact that this exact same comment (usually about sports games or FPSs) comes up every single article about the general state of gaming is because of laziness- people want the games that get the most advertisements and media coverage and biggest budgets to be the kind of game they want to play, and their obscure tastes to be forced upon everyone, instead of doing a little more digging to find games they like.
everytime I see a study that "proves" one thing, someone else comes out and "proves" the opposite.
I think this is only true for soft sciences, like where the results depend on surveys of people and similar. Oh, and sciences with impact on big industries. You'll notice the papers published by one side are funded by educational institutions or the public, and the contradictory ones are funded directly or indirectly by the industries being affected.
There are a lot more socialist and communist we-want-to-run-your-life liberal wacko's out there than there are many of the peace-love-and-rock-n-roll just leave everyone alone crowd anymore.
What is the basis for this assertion? I'm not even sure sure if the CPUSA holds yearly conventions, but I bet the turnout would be pretty bad compared to say a Grateful Dead concert. Oh right, there's a giant underground convention for the Socialist and Communist We-Want-To-Run-Your-Life Liberal Wacko party revealed to you by AM radio, they hold it on the internets and it is attended by millions.
It might be pretty cool if there were a lot of countries and companies out there with their own satellites, and they all didn't respect each others concerns for what should and should not be sold to anyone, or published freely. With a little credulity one could imagine a conflict (say, some military atrocity type thing in Africa) where open sourced satellite data is monitored by concerned citizens all over the world and collected results fed back to people in the region so they can get out of harms way or defend themselves- if there is no single nation or company uniquely responsible (and those parties are collecting data uniformly, not going out of their way to target a region), then the aggressor can't really point a finger or retaliate as easily and accuse anyone of taking sides.
Some forms of surveillance states may be pretty scary, but an open low granularity one where no one could get away with anything (no secret construction, no hidden deforestations, no large scale troop movements, forced relocations, etc.) to say 1-meter precision and (for example) 1-day or greater time resolution might actually put a damper one some kinds of Bad Things.
I think the key to people in general making better decisions (especially in a democracy), and the key to getting through the next century, is if all people have better situational awareness of the world around them and therefore awarenss the impact of their decisions- more and better satellite imagery for everyone to see, and extremely usable tools for accessing it is a step in that direction.
DLO (Digital Lifestyle Outfitters) are using their patent #6,591,085 to keep a PodBuddy, designed by DVForge, a product, competing with DLO's TransPod, off the market.
I, a person, of natural birth, think, this use of commas, a form of punctuation, is ridiculous.
Maybe this is the asthmatic kid from Malcom in the Middle submitting the story...
But most people who own HDTV's still play normal DVD's on them and somehow think they're running in High Density.
If I play a widescreen DVD in an regular set, I'm not seeing all 480 lines of resolution, but I do if I play it on a computer or on a HD tv. It's not as good as 1920x1080i but it still is higher definition.
Build it in parts here, assemble on the moon. Easier to launch a bigger ship from there.
Many people have already pointed out that it is pretty dumb to get something out of Earth's gravity well only to dump it into another gravity well (like the moon's).
The space station was also supposed to be a 'stepping-stone' to Mars. I think people should have figured out by now that any government program that takes more than a decade to complete has a very high chance of either being canceled or transformed into something with much less capability. Stepping stones don't seem to work unless the stepping stone can justify itself even if the later steps aren't taken.
The whole 'assemble things in some incredibly inconvenient or hostile environment' approach of the Moon and orbital assembly needs a very good reason for why one big ship is better than a series of small ones in order to justify the increase in cost. I guess the idea is to make the crew more comfortable by giving them more living room, but that doesn't seem sufficient to me.
go to a maximum security prison and asked some of the inmates about their childhood,I am willing to place a hefty wager that it was not computer games that made them angry and violent
But you imply that rather than regulate sales of video games we should regulate the entire process of raising children: the government should take children away from bad parents, subsidize education and police forces that create an environment in which children can grow up and focus on developing job skills rather than on escaping violence or coping with malnourishment or what-have-you- that's unfair competition with free market private schools and security firms! The Founding Fathers would be shocked should the government get involved in promoting the security and general welfare of the people, especially when it costs so much and is pretty hard work when you get right down to it.
I say, let parents raise their kids, and when they don't do their job right and their offspring are just leaches on society, just tell the next generation of parents to try a little harder- that works really good.
If the government spent half as much time getting guns off the street and making weapons unavailable to kids then half our problems would be solved right there.
Interestingly, if you google 'Rod Blagojevich' the first site is ilinois.gov and the top story at that site is about the creation of anti-gun-smuggling police units, which occurred several days before this videogame law. They've got their priorities straight, but the threshold at which lower priority items get made into legislation or not needs to be raised.
I for one am sick and tired of living in a nanny state
Then go join the political party that isn't in power- you'll find plenty of company complaining about not only whatever the ruling party is doing but also that the government shouldn't be involved in doing that thing pro or con at all. But as soon as your minority party wins the next election they'll forget all that BS they told you they were about and start spending money like crazy and enacting new laws to extend the role of government into aspects of your life that had been overlooked before.
I see Video Games as potentially being the ultimate storytelling platform.
I was just watching an episode of the IFC's 'A Decade Under The Influence', and a famous director from the '70s said something like "I'm not interested in stories. There are only 6 or 7 stories. I'm interested in behaviour." I think that's not saying that stories are unnecessary or can be sidelined, but that the interesting thing is behaviour- how characters act within a story. Games make that much more interesting than more rigid media because of the interactive element. (cue debate on story centric vs. sandbox style games, compromise on answer that that is synthesis of both...)
I recall watching the special features for the original Matrix and seeing how a 3d subway environment for the final fight was created from the set by taking a panoramic set of pictures. Likely that process wasn't realtime and could have required a lot of hand tweaking, but that is probably true of this software as well (slashdotted servers means I can't RTFA).
Slashdot Mirror
It's that no one thought of and made popular a good name for the scandal ending with 'gate'. HotCoffeeGate?
Also, it's hard to get much out of a scandal with nothing but a faceless corporation- part of a good scandal is the very accusation is almost a scandal in itself (try saying to your co-workers, 'what do guys think of that traitor, Karl Rove?' vs. trying to explain the intricacies of Rockstar putting a hidden less-than-hardcore sex mini-game into a video game). The conservatives should have singled out the CEO or lead programmer or something and demonized a specific individual from earlier on.
I don't see how you can call it self-sustaining if there's trade. It would seem to be precluded by definition.
Sustaining as in surviving, not as in sustaining a high quality of life with luxury goods and services.
what'd be really neat is a peak oil / singularity synchronicity / conjunction. However if PO happens before the TS it might throw off the schedule.
Maybe asymptotically decreasing oil supplies would exactly coincide with asymptotically increasing post-humanizating technologies that all run off oil. The two would neating cancel each other out, producing no dramatic economic collapses or mind-shattering transcendances and god-like super intelligent AIs or gray goo running amok- the gray goo has to stop for increasingly expensive gas so often it will be easy to defend ourselves from it even with these old-fashioned chemical brains.
But there is a problem with the peak oil theory. You can only estimate with what you think you have. What if there was more oil reserves elsewhere in unexpected places that hasn't been tapped yet?
Then you have to expend a lot of resources finding those reserves and extracting oil. The price of oil goes up to pay for it. There's probably a point of diminishing returns.
in my area if you want to recycle plastic bottles you need to take off the lids, remove the labels and make sure they are empty. What am I, the milk lady?... Who the hell has glass bottles? Can I put jars in here? Oh, only if I remove the lid and the label and clean out the jar. To hell with that.
Wasn't it you that said something in a grandparent post like: "People with no imagination see any change to the status quo as the end of the world. Thank god there's people who see change as an opportunity and a challenge." ?
people who make the "when the oil runs out" argument always presume that the current known deposits of oil are the only ones in the world.
We haven't found all the oil, we've probably just found most of it that is very cheap and convenient to get at- sources near people and near the surface.
If the cost of oil goes up slowly (if oil production from the cheap sources goes down gradually as they run out), it'll give a gradually increasing pressure to go out and find the new sources, and we'll all have to live with occasional increases in expense. If the cost goes up very quickly, because the governments was artificially subsidizing it or oil was being overproduced for some other reason, then you get much more dramatic problems later on that may not let you go find new sources. Managing the rate of change (either through government intervention or 'natural' market forces) is the key to a smooth and bloodless transition to more exotic oil sources.
Hell, with advanced genetic engineering we can make bacteria pump out plastic directly.
We can do this now, or we can do it after so-many Manhattan projects worth of technological progress (and is anyone even working on it that has decent funding- and who is to say we will be the ones to do it first)? And, even if we can do this eventually, it may be a very expensive process- no matter how extraordinary the process, there will always be a difference between resources that are just sitting out there 'for free' just under a desert, and ones where you have to manage a complicated process (with an complicated organism) through many steps, provide raw materials and energy (though photosynthetic plastic producing organisms may be possible) yourself rather than using processes that just happened on their own millions of years ago.
People with no imagination see any change to the status quo as the end of the world. Thank god there's people who see change as an opportunity and a challenge.
The problem is that latter sort of people may not have your best interests at heart, and may try to drive in a bunch of unwelcome changes to say your quality of life and your freedoms while saving you from some other problem. Change for the sake of change is fine for many things, but our way of life is very closely tied to the abundance of certain materials and energy sources. The status quo may not last, but I want the luxury of enough breathing room so that people will be able to make make rational choices that are to most everyone's benefit.
In short, recycling does allow reuse of some resources, but does not appear to damage less environment, or use less energy, or even consume much less space than just throwing everything away.
So you're saying that recycling allows reuse of resources, and takes up less space? Sounds like it's preferable to the other option then. Even if it came out the same, I'd rather be developing and deploying better recycling technologies (which might lead to something much further in the black in the future) than directing the same effort to endless landfills. Or maybe investing in earth-movers and related landfill equipment has more potential for spin-off technologies and there are better quality jobs there than the equivalent in recycling?
Because sex is, obviously, so much more damaging to the mind of a 17 year old than killing people.
This exact same sentiment comes up everytime censorship and movies or games come up. You can be having a conversation with co-workers and start placing bets on how many seconds until you hear someone say 'isn't it stupid how Americans think sex is worse than violence' and then bonus points when someone mentions how Europe gets it the other way around, enlighten souls that they are.
A few fundamentalist types do think sex is worse than violence, or others think violence is okay, but they are minority enough to be ignored. Movies and video games don't contain sex and violence, they contain depictions of sex and violence. And that is what people are reacting to when they want to censor stuff.
Most people know from a very early age that violence is wrong- pain is a very basic feeling, and once you can grasp that other people can feel pain like you feel pain there's an easy jump to not wanting to hurt other people. It takes a lot longer until a person has a relatively mature understanding of sex. Sex is much more complicated than violence- it's not inherently right or wrong, but it can range from very desirable to somewhat inappropriate to a despicable felony or a life or health threatening act (in the case of STDs). The fact that children are sometimes the result also complicates it, there's economic and social consequences for having children. It's all very context sensitive.
So just on that basis, let's assume the rational for censorship is to prevent certain ill effects- the severity of an ill-effect multiplied by the probability of an ill-effect resulting from viewing some media tells you how censorable it should be. (Not to say any censorship is okay, but let us just understand what motivates people to censor some things more than others)
As an example, I can watch Dr. Strangelove, or Independence Day, and although I may be slightly inclined to cause a nuclear holocaust or blow up major cities with giant ray guns (both of which would be at the top of the 'ill-effect' scale), the chance that I'll actually do that is very very close to zero. So they don't merit any censorship. Take watching someone get beaten with a flashlight- I know where I can find a flashlight, but again there's a fairly low chance I'll actually do that, so it merits a little more censorship.
Now I may watch something depicting sex, and I may very well go out and do something similar in real life. There may be negative consequences, so overall the if I was a little influenced by what I watched the whole thing rates more censorship, because the chance of ill-effects high enough to make up for the fact the ill-effects aren't that bad.
There's a few other motivations for censorship that aren't as strongly coupled to people getting hurt- for example usually people would rather only watch sex in relative privacy, whereas stylized Kung Fu could be put on giant outdoor televisions on busy street corners and nobody would feel the least bit uncomfortable to be watching it with their parents or whatever.
The obvious conclusion is that those things are all very expensive. Every hour spent trying to comply with a regulation is a non-productive hour. It's essentially, completely wasted.
One thing that would help the US is to consider these costs when deciding whether the government should regulate every action of every person at all times when they're at work.
California is simultaneously one of the largest economies in the world and also one of the most heavily regulated. It has all sorts of laws and regulations to protect health, workers, the environment, business of course, and lots of other things they value. There are many countries with very little laws at all, but they're hardly libertarian utopias.
It turns out that some regulations cost very little compared to the expenses of not having them. If people are getting killed and injured on the job or by faulty products, or if the health of the population is degraded by industrial poisons in the air or water, productivity tends to go down as a whole even though a few companies get temporarily reduced expenses.
I don't know about you, but I like eating meat that has been inspected- if you want to know what it is like in less regulation burdened countries, take it out of the fridge and hang it outdoors in the summer sun for a few hours before cooking it up a few degrees short of the e-coli killing temperature...
I'm not saying that regulation creates wealth, or that all regulation is good anymore than all regulation is bad- it's just that they are both are dependent on each other.
My Gamecube still gets 60 fps in most games all the time.
How do know what fps you're getting?
What the device should do, is somehow gather the average speed of cars in the area, and limit speed to the average so there are no careless speeders.
This solution doesn't at all follow from what you were saying. The device needs a low-pass filter on the speed monitor so that you can speed for brief periods, long enough to address all your examples. As an example, you could go 20 miles over the limit for say ten seconds, or a couple miles over for an hour.
they still can't come up with anything better than "NFL 2005.3b Reloaded...
It's kind of hard to see why they would be motivated to change an extremely successful business model. It's also helpful not to judge the diversity and novelty of electronic gaming by the one or two most successful franchises, but to actually actively look for some interesting games. Independent film aficionados don't whine about how the summer blockbuster releases are just sequels or remakes (actually they probably do, but they shouldn't), they go rent and talk about independent films- for games that is shareware, open source, mods, and some games released through normal channels.
I think the fact that this exact same comment (usually about sports games or FPSs) comes up every single article about the general state of gaming is because of laziness- people want the games that get the most advertisements and media coverage and biggest budgets to be the kind of game they want to play, and their obscure tastes to be forced upon everyone, instead of doing a little more digging to find games they like.
everytime I see a study that "proves" one thing, someone else comes out and "proves" the opposite.
I think this is only true for soft sciences, like where the results depend on surveys of people and similar. Oh, and sciences with impact on big industries. You'll notice the papers published by one side are funded by educational institutions or the public, and the contradictory ones are funded directly or indirectly by the industries being affected.
There are a lot more socialist and communist we-want-to-run-your-life liberal wacko's out there than there are many of the peace-love-and-rock-n-roll just leave everyone alone crowd anymore.
What is the basis for this assertion? I'm not even sure sure if the CPUSA holds yearly conventions, but I bet the turnout would be pretty bad compared to say a Grateful Dead concert. Oh right, there's a giant underground convention for the Socialist and Communist We-Want-To-Run-Your-Life Liberal Wacko party revealed to you by AM radio, they hold it on the internets and it is attended by millions.
So no, google don't have spy satellites (yet..)
It might be pretty cool if there were a lot of countries and companies out there with their own satellites, and they all didn't respect each others concerns for what should and should not be sold to anyone, or published freely. With a little credulity one could imagine a conflict (say, some military atrocity type thing in Africa) where open sourced satellite data is monitored by concerned citizens all over the world and collected results fed back to people in the region so they can get out of harms way or defend themselves- if there is no single nation or company uniquely responsible (and those parties are collecting data uniformly, not going out of their way to target a region), then the aggressor can't really point a finger or retaliate as easily and accuse anyone of taking sides.
Some forms of surveillance states may be pretty scary, but an open low granularity one where no one could get away with anything (no secret construction, no hidden deforestations, no large scale troop movements, forced relocations, etc.) to say 1-meter precision and (for example) 1-day or greater time resolution might actually put a damper one some kinds of Bad Things.
I think the key to people in general making better decisions (especially in a democracy), and the key to getting through the next century, is if all people have better situational awareness of the world around them and therefore awarenss the impact of their decisions- more and better satellite imagery for everyone to see, and extremely usable tools for accessing it is a step in that direction.
DLO (Digital Lifestyle Outfitters) are using their patent #6,591,085 to keep a PodBuddy, designed by DVForge, a product, competing with DLO's TransPod, off the market.
I, a person, of natural birth, think, this use of commas, a form of punctuation, is ridiculous.
Maybe this is the asthmatic kid from Malcom in the Middle submitting the story...
Hasn't George Lucas tried and failed at this already?
But most people who own HDTV's still play normal DVD's on them and somehow think they're running in High Density.
If I play a widescreen DVD in an regular set, I'm not seeing all 480 lines of resolution, but I do if I play it on a computer or on a HD tv. It's not as good as 1920x1080i but it still is higher definition.
Does anyone else think this mission will be the opening shot of an interplanetary war?
Build it in parts here, assemble on the moon. Easier to launch a bigger ship from there.
Many people have already pointed out that it is pretty dumb to get something out of Earth's gravity well only to dump it into another gravity well (like the moon's).
The space station was also supposed to be a 'stepping-stone' to Mars. I think people should have figured out by now that any government program that takes more than a decade to complete has a very high chance of either being canceled or transformed into something with much less capability. Stepping stones don't seem to work unless the stepping stone can justify itself even if the later steps aren't taken.
The whole 'assemble things in some incredibly inconvenient or hostile environment' approach of the Moon and orbital assembly needs a very good reason for why one big ship is better than a series of small ones in order to justify the increase in cost. I guess the idea is to make the crew more comfortable by giving them more living room, but that doesn't seem sufficient to me.
go to a maximum security prison and asked some of the inmates about their childhood ,I am willing to place a hefty wager that it was not computer games that made them angry and violent
But you imply that rather than regulate sales of video games we should regulate the entire process of raising children: the government should take children away from bad parents, subsidize education and police forces that create an environment in which children can grow up and focus on developing job skills rather than on escaping violence or coping with malnourishment or what-have-you- that's unfair competition with free market private schools and security firms! The Founding Fathers would be shocked should the government get involved in promoting the security and general welfare of the people, especially when it costs so much and is pretty hard work when you get right down to it.
I say, let parents raise their kids, and when they don't do their job right and their offspring are just leaches on society, just tell the next generation of parents to try a little harder- that works really good.
If the government spent half as much time getting guns off the street and making weapons unavailable to kids then half our problems would be solved right there.
Interestingly, if you google 'Rod Blagojevich' the first site is ilinois.gov and the top story at that site is about the creation of anti-gun-smuggling police units, which occurred several days before this videogame law. They've got their priorities straight, but the threshold at which lower priority items get made into legislation or not needs to be raised.
I for one am sick and tired of living in a nanny state
Then go join the political party that isn't in power- you'll find plenty of company complaining about not only whatever the ruling party is doing but also that the government shouldn't be involved in doing that thing pro or con at all. But as soon as your minority party wins the next election they'll forget all that BS they told you they were about and start spending money like crazy and enacting new laws to extend the role of government into aspects of your life that had been overlooked before.
I see Video Games as potentially being the ultimate storytelling platform.
I was just watching an episode of the IFC's 'A Decade Under The Influence', and a famous director from the '70s said something like "I'm not interested in stories. There are only 6 or 7 stories. I'm interested in behaviour." I think that's not saying that stories are unnecessary or can be sidelined, but that the interesting thing is behaviour- how characters act within a story. Games make that much more interesting than more rigid media because of the interactive element. (cue debate on story centric vs. sandbox style games, compromise on answer that that is synthesis of both...)
I recall watching the special features for the original Matrix and seeing how a 3d subway environment for the final fight was created from the set by taking a panoramic set of pictures. Likely that process wasn't realtime and could have required a lot of hand tweaking, but that is probably true of this software as well (slashdotted servers means I can't RTFA).