Or you could just have biased views about Christianity.
Faith is NOT belief without criticism. It is belief in something that cannot be proven, but that you believe AND that resists all logical attacks against it. It is very much belief WITH criticism.
Examples? Try reading C.S. Lewis. He wrote thousands of pages purely on the logical aspects of Christianity. He's not perfect, but there's lots of valid analysis of Christianity.
Or just try walking in on a good Bible Study. People spend 2-3 hours every week carefully analyzing the Bible, interpreting its message, deciding if/how it is relevant in today's society.
I have not yet met a Christian who has never doubted their faith - just about every person has, but because Christianity IS valid, they have all ultimately come to that conclusion.
Finally, you make yet another sweeping generalization when you say religious institutions are increasingly commercial. Christian charities are mostly completely separate from Christian for-profit companies, who are rarely actually supported by a church. (a good example is Christian music. Everyone I know has different preferences - no church would support one band!)
Certainly the WWII genre is overplayed, but you still need to keep in mind that for conflicts to be potential multiplayer games, the sides need to be somewhat equal.
For example, the colonial war. You state the problem yourself - you need a bunch more people playing Brits than Americans, while the Americans have much more fun, because they can snipe and be original, while the Brits just march around everywhere and obey orders. Not a game I'd want to play.
Or feudal Japan? Who would want to point and click a gun when you have swords with a ton of cool moves that go along? I wouldn't.
That said, I think there still are a lot of options. It would be good for game developers to be much more original... but not every conflict would work.
First of all, I would imagine the $5B stated for the Space elevator includes at least some R&D costs. At $100 million, the nanotube composite rocket contains none - in reality, the cost will be much higher.
Furthermore, consider the cost of lifting each set of cargo - just like the space shuttle is extremely expensive, the fuel for a nanotube rocket is going to be much more expensive than that of a space elevator, which doesn't need fuel to come with.
So in reality you have:
Space elevator: Maybe $5B, but pay it once and you've got the bulk out of the way.
Nanotube composite rocket: Billions to start out, >$.1B per rocket (my guess), and millions for each launch. Plus a lot more inspection and stuff.
I'm running it with 6 virtual desktops on an iBook 500Mhz w/ Panther, and it's both fast at switching desktops and has a nice low profile - just a couple icons in the top bar.
it sprayed a radioactive cloud that would have killed everyone for many hundreds of miles around
Give me a break. Killing everyone for hundreds of miles around means you're talking about an area hundreds of thousands of people live on. The wind isn't going to make that much of a difference.
Sure, it was bad - this story seems to be about as bad as it gets, though. And 15,000 dead over 14 years is quite a bit different than hundreds of thousands dying with no exceptions.
Oh, and finally, remember that the Chernobyl incident was due to incredibly stupid operations by the people there, in addition to a bad reactor design - neither of which apply to U.S. reactors. Three Mile Island wasn't a big deal because we do have the checks in place to stop the large accidents.
Re:Militarisation of space - one option
on
The Future of NASA
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Orbiting is not like flying over a country - after all, you can purposely do a 30 degree turn in a plane to avoid a country, but try doing that on a satellite and you'll run out of fuel in no time. So are you going to have to get the permission of 20+ countries for every non-geosynchronous object put in orbit?
For example, there's no chance that we could put a space station in geosynchronous orbit. So if China decides they don't want us to do any space station research, we'd have no way to develop it.
Note the one justification for going to the moon for military or economic purposes that the article gives - to mine helium 3 - still requires that we have working fusion reactors to process that helium. The article http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/helium3_0006 30.html has more information. Among other things, you also need to heat the surface to 800 degrees celsius to mine it.
Thus, a moon base by 2020 would have absolutely no connection to this in my mind. Frankly, you aren't going to get any militaristic benefit from going to the moon, other than cowing other countries into submission. And we should already be able to do that through other means...
All this, of course, is not to say that I don't support going back to the moon - I do, for scientific reasons - but as a military objective, this whole helium 3 thing is silly right now.
Actually, you're missing the main method sciences are using to try to detect gravity waves - laser interferometers. LIGO is the largest, in both Washington state and Louisiana.
These function by placing a mirror suspended by a thread on as tremor-proof a block as possible, so that it will resist any movement of the earth - some of which will be compression as a result of gravity waves. In a vacuum tunnel a ways away (a kilometer?) a laser is sent to bounce against the mirror, so you can detect the earth's compression from gravity wavees as the other mirror won't move.
Two of these tunnels are built at perpendicular angles, and the end result is, by figuring out vibrations in the laser, gravity waves are detected.
So far, they haven't detected any waves, but their equipment is continuously improving.
Slashdot Mirror
Faith is NOT belief without criticism. It is belief in something that cannot be proven, but that you believe AND that resists all logical attacks against it. It is very much belief WITH criticism.
Examples? Try reading C.S. Lewis. He wrote thousands of pages purely on the logical aspects of Christianity. He's not perfect, but there's lots of valid analysis of Christianity.
Or just try walking in on a good Bible Study. People spend 2-3 hours every week carefully analyzing the Bible, interpreting its message, deciding if/how it is relevant in today's society.
I have not yet met a Christian who has never doubted their faith - just about every person has, but because Christianity IS valid, they have all ultimately come to that conclusion.
Finally, you make yet another sweeping generalization when you say religious institutions are increasingly commercial. Christian charities are mostly completely separate from Christian for-profit companies, who are rarely actually supported by a church. (a good example is Christian music. Everyone I know has different preferences - no church would support one band!)
For example, the colonial war. You state the problem yourself - you need a bunch more people playing Brits than Americans, while the Americans have much more fun, because they can snipe and be original, while the Brits just march around everywhere and obey orders. Not a game I'd want to play.
Or feudal Japan? Who would want to point and click a gun when you have swords with a ton of cool moves that go along? I wouldn't.
That said, I think there still are a lot of options. It would be good for game developers to be much more original... but not every conflict would work.
First of all, I would imagine the $5B stated for the Space elevator includes at least some R&D costs. At $100 million, the nanotube composite rocket contains none - in reality, the cost will be much higher.
Furthermore, consider the cost of lifting each set of cargo - just like the space shuttle is extremely expensive, the fuel for a nanotube rocket is going to be much more expensive than that of a space elevator, which doesn't need fuel to come with.
So in reality you have: Space elevator: Maybe $5B, but pay it once and you've got the bulk out of the way.
Nanotube composite rocket: Billions to start out, >$.1B per rocket (my guess), and millions for each launch. Plus a lot more inspection and stuff.
Which turns the tables a good bit.
I'm running it with 6 virtual desktops on an iBook 500Mhz w/ Panther, and it's both fast at switching desktops and has a nice low profile - just a couple icons in the top bar.
Give me a break. Killing everyone for hundreds of miles around means you're talking about an area hundreds of thousands of people live on. The wind isn't going to make that much of a difference.
Sure, it was bad - this story seems to be about as bad as it gets, though. And 15,000 dead over 14 years is quite a bit different than hundreds of thousands dying with no exceptions.
Oh, and finally, remember that the Chernobyl incident was due to incredibly stupid operations by the people there, in addition to a bad reactor design - neither of which apply to U.S. reactors. Three Mile Island wasn't a big deal because we do have the checks in place to stop the large accidents.
For example, there's no chance that we could put a space station in geosynchronous orbit. So if China decides they don't want us to do any space station research, we'd have no way to develop it.
Thus, a moon base by 2020 would have absolutely no connection to this in my mind. Frankly, you aren't going to get any militaristic benefit from going to the moon, other than cowing other countries into submission. And we should already be able to do that through other means...
All this, of course, is not to say that I don't support going back to the moon - I do, for scientific reasons - but as a military objective, this whole helium 3 thing is silly right now.
If you read the article, it points out on page 3 that shopping malls, while private property, can still be forced to obverse freedom of speech.
These function by placing a mirror suspended by a thread on as tremor-proof a block as possible, so that it will resist any movement of the earth - some of which will be compression as a result of gravity waves. In a vacuum tunnel a ways away (a kilometer?) a laser is sent to bounce against the mirror, so you can detect the earth's compression from gravity wavees as the other mirror won't move.
Two of these tunnels are built at perpendicular angles, and the end result is, by figuring out vibrations in the laser, gravity waves are detected.
So far, they haven't detected any waves, but their equipment is continuously improving.