Even though I am an agnostic I take issue with your phrase "Unfortunately, way too many people still cling to the idea that our world and all the species on it were created by some mystical being." While I would readily agree that there is plenty of evidence to suggest that the earth has certainly developed over billions of years and not thousands, it is well within possible bounds that a divine hand had a role in guiding the gradual process over such a span of time (and I do know many Christians who believe this as such). Of course even still, this is not science and should not be taught in science class but to say it is unfortunate that people believe in a creator seems a bit bigoted to me.
Honestly, I don't know if you understand what's going on here. This is a classic example of the system working. We have a plethora of comments here pointing out that you are not making any kind of logical point in regards to the parent article but merely repeating yourself over and over again. It is all revolving around you making a claim with no kind of logical evidence and other people shouting you down. Given that everything within this thread is put forth as mere opinion with little to none factual content to back it up you are essentially opening yourself up to a vote by the masses without providing anything to support yourself.
In this case the masses have decided that they are better off making all of the choices rather then some elitist group that supposedly knows better.
In regards to the strawman comment, I honestly don't think I misrepresented your opinion in this situation and furthermore I feel that you have used this excuse to ignore points I brought up in my post such as your phrase "self serving corporate propaganda" (which I regrettably misquoted, although my misquote did not alter the meaning of your statement) which is nothing but alarmist nonsense given that unless your a corporate board member "self serving" and "corporate" are generally not common ground. The phrase, however, is brilliant in regards to the fact that it contains so many alarmist buzz words.
Furthermore, your desire for the founders of slashdot to moderate the forums in places of the unwashed masses not only wreaks of elitism but does not logically hold together. If these are the same people that implemented the public rating system for comments and have kept it going for so long then obviously their judgment should be held as questionable by those who do not view this system as the most efficient. If they have such questionable judgment then they are obviously not fit to judge over such a large body of people.
So let me see if I get this right. There's some vast conspiracy amongst the randomly selected slashdot modders to cover up the truth and promote a "self server corporate agenda" (which unless you're a CEO or a board member of a corporation doesn't seem to make sense to me but what do I know?). The answer to this problem is to get rid of it so I have to root through every post some 13 year old kid makes to find something interesting or to place the modding system into the hands of some enlightened elite group of people who know better than everyone else. Is that it?
If so, my only question is who would choose these enlightened souls and / or who would they be?
OK, so we agree that we shouldn't go back until we have realistic goals then. My point in all of this is that the only reason I'm seeing NASA saying we should go is because China is going which is nonsense. Furthermore, with NASA blowing so much money on the space station they don't really have any resources to do anything up there even if they had a plan.
I kind of addressed this when I mention that I really don't think we're building any bases up there for quite some time. It's just not very practical right now with the technology we have available. I'm not talking about forever, I'm just saying right now there's just no reason to go up there.
I have heard absolutely zero talk about NASA doing any kind of work on the type of things you're talking about on their proposed trip the Moon. All I'm seeing is "We want to do it because China is doing it". Until we hear different then it's a waste of money.
If we want a social and/or technological challenge along these lines then why don't we try for Mars instead of doing something we've already done several times before? This seems more like a waste of money then some kind of general uplift to all of civilization.
So we should just send some people up there to walk around just because China is? What is the reason for Americans to go to the moon right now? What will they actually be doing up there? I'm not seeing anyone talking about this. All I'm hearing anyone saying is "China is going to the Moon so we should too" which is the equivalent of the old jumping off a bridge rational.
If American's are going up there to scout out a site for a planned Moon base that actually seems like it might do something useful then I'm all for another trip up there but all it sounds like right now is more of the exact same thing we've done quite a few times before.
What wasn't available was the knowledge of what one could do with semiconductors.
Exactly my point. We currently don't know how to do anything on the moon that is worth while and/or cost efficient so why bother to go there now? When we have a plan ready to set up a moon base either as a way point for further travel, to extract resources or for anything else you can think up, that's when we should start making trips back. Otherwise all we're doing is walking around and looking at rocks, something we've already done a number of times.
Bad analogy. We didn't run out of oil because of several factors: more oil was discovered, new technologies for mining existing oil were discovered, and as oil grows more scarse, demand for it declines. These people would have been right ignoring the prior factors. In comparison, all we know about lunar settlement is that if you don't try, you don't get there.
You're carrying the analogy too far. My only point with that was to point to another area in which experts have repeatedly made bad time estimates.
I disagree. I think spending money on this right now is like spending money developing micro ships in the 30s when what we should be developing is vacuum tubes, which is to say we're getting ahead of ourselves. We already know we can get to the moon, we've done it plenty of times. When we are closer to being able to actually do something useful there is when we should go back again.
Also, in regards to the 20 years figure for the course of your entire lifetime, there are plenty of Sci-Fi concepts that are like that. Virtually every Sci-Fi movie and TV show out there calls the time line too short for the technology they depict and plenty of "experts" have made the exact same mistakes. Shoot, according to some scientist from decades ago we should have already long ago hit peak oil and should be running out by now.
While I'm not even sure how what you're saying applies to what I said before I will say that we already know that they have ballistic missiles and have known this for decades.
Plus your "Slick Willy" nickname for Clinton is about as clever and overused as "Dubya" for Bush.
Right now all a trip to the Moon will get us is a bunch of guys walking around looking at stuff that Americans saw over 50 years ago. None of the things you're talking about are going to happen on the moon for at least 20 years (and I think that's a very conservative estimate), especially anything like manufacturing, so why go back now?
There seems to be an awful lot of concern over pushing forward boldly into the future involved in this but the only relevant rationnels for going right now I'm seeing is to beat China at something we've already beaten them at handedly which is just to get some one up there walking around.
My point is I don't think anyone would care about another trip to the moon. We did it over half a century ago, multiple times. I can see more impressive space flight at the theater nowadays.
So China is going to be able to do what we did over a half century ago, who cares? If you want us to do something inspirational then we should go to Mars. Moon trips aren't going to interest anyone. They're old hat. At least we might learn something new on a trip to Mars.
The question we all need to ask is why do we even need to go back? We're not building moon bases anytime in the near future and extracting resources is way to expensive for the foreseeable future.
Some one please tell me what possible reason we would have for even wanting to waste billions of dollars on another trip to the moon for. It's a big floating rock.
Why doesn't this effect Nintendo then? While their hardware is quite a bit cheaper to manufacture one would think that if the value of the US dollar had such a dramatic effect on the PS3s price it would push the Wii's price up a fair bit more.
My point was that the game is entirely too luck based. Most games I've seen pan out to the person who rolled the best, not the person who employed the best strategy.
There are a plethora of strategy games out there that match the simplicity of risk but are far less luck base. Wander down to your local game shop and ask around.
True, and perhaps with a smaller military, Saddam Hussein would've kept his tanks rolling into Saudi Arabia in 1991 because there would've been no one in a position to oppose him. And lets be clear...Iraq was "stable" because of tyranny and brutal oppression, ethnic and religious. The US "broke" Iraq, but it's not like we invaded Canada. Iraq was already a teapot about to boil over.
First off it could very easily have been an international coalition that stopped Saddam in 1991 and you can bet that if he had dared to enter Saudi Arabia it definitively would have been.
Second, as of right now most of the Iraqi people are far worse off than they were under Saddam (who I will agree was a horrible dictator) and given the effectiveness of their current government it looks like this is unlikely to change anytime soon.
As for the teapot bit, I have never heard of any evidence that there was any kind of boiling over eminent for the country. In fact that's half the reason we invaded Iraq, because our sanctions had failed to unseat Saddam. Of course it's possible I'm missing something so feel free to correct me on that last part.
"Funny how people forget things like the US military being first on the scene after the Tsunami hit...or world kept mostly free of piracy from the US navy. When the Somali civil war broke out and all the embassies were evacuated, guess who evacuated them? That's right, the US military. So yeah, the US military is a hegemony machine, but if the US wasn't doing a lot of those functions, someone else would need to, or the world would suffer for it."
This really goes both ways though. Our military is currently responsible for destabilizing what had been a fairly stable country, for very little cause. This has resulted in wide spread ethnic warfare in said country, thousands of deaths, and threatens to destabilize the entire region. Perhaps with a smaller military we would not have attempted this.
Despite being the first modern base building RTS I don't think most people remember Dune II.
However, I think the fuss is warented as it is exciting to see that Blizzard is updating their gameplay with new features, even if the "new" features are ones that have existed since the genre began. Furthermore, it looks like they are taking what was in Dune II forward a bit by allowing the player's performance in one mission to more greatly effect what their experience will be like in the next.
Slashdot Mirror
Even though I am an agnostic I take issue with your phrase "Unfortunately, way too many people still cling to the idea that our world and all the species on it were created by some mystical being." While I would readily agree that there is plenty of evidence to suggest that the earth has certainly developed over billions of years and not thousands, it is well within possible bounds that a divine hand had a role in guiding the gradual process over such a span of time (and I do know many Christians who believe this as such). Of course even still, this is not science and should not be taught in science class but to say it is unfortunate that people believe in a creator seems a bit bigoted to me.
Honestly, I don't know if you understand what's going on here. This is a classic example of the system working. We have a plethora of comments here pointing out that you are not making any kind of logical point in regards to the parent article but merely repeating yourself over and over again. It is all revolving around you making a claim with no kind of logical evidence and other people shouting you down. Given that everything within this thread is put forth as mere opinion with little to none factual content to back it up you are essentially opening yourself up to a vote by the masses without providing anything to support yourself.
In this case the masses have decided that they are better off making all of the choices rather then some elitist group that supposedly knows better.
In regards to the strawman comment, I honestly don't think I misrepresented your opinion in this situation and furthermore I feel that you have used this excuse to ignore points I brought up in my post such as your phrase "self serving corporate propaganda" (which I regrettably misquoted, although my misquote did not alter the meaning of your statement) which is nothing but alarmist nonsense given that unless your a corporate board member "self serving" and "corporate" are generally not common ground. The phrase, however, is brilliant in regards to the fact that it contains so many alarmist buzz words.
Furthermore, your desire for the founders of slashdot to moderate the forums in places of the unwashed masses not only wreaks of elitism but does not logically hold together. If these are the same people that implemented the public rating system for comments and have kept it going for so long then obviously their judgment should be held as questionable by those who do not view this system as the most efficient. If they have such questionable judgment then they are obviously not fit to judge over such a large body of people.
So let me see if I get this right. There's some vast conspiracy amongst the randomly selected slashdot modders to cover up the truth and promote a "self server corporate agenda" (which unless you're a CEO or a board member of a corporation doesn't seem to make sense to me but what do I know?). The answer to this problem is to get rid of it so I have to root through every post some 13 year old kid makes to find something interesting or to place the modding system into the hands of some enlightened elite group of people who know better than everyone else. Is that it?
If so, my only question is who would choose these enlightened souls and / or who would they be?
I'm lazy but still kind of care about what this article is talking about. Anyone care to let me in on what the various levels of xbox denote?
OK, so we agree that we shouldn't go back until we have realistic goals then. My point in all of this is that the only reason I'm seeing NASA saying we should go is because China is going which is nonsense. Furthermore, with NASA blowing so much money on the space station they don't really have any resources to do anything up there even if they had a plan.
I kind of addressed this when I mention that I really don't think we're building any bases up there for quite some time. It's just not very practical right now with the technology we have available. I'm not talking about forever, I'm just saying right now there's just no reason to go up there.
I have heard absolutely zero talk about NASA doing any kind of work on the type of things you're talking about on their proposed trip the Moon. All I'm seeing is "We want to do it because China is doing it". Until we hear different then it's a waste of money.
If we want a social and/or technological challenge along these lines then why don't we try for Mars instead of doing something we've already done several times before? This seems more like a waste of money then some kind of general uplift to all of civilization.
So we should just send some people up there to walk around just because China is? What is the reason for Americans to go to the moon right now? What will they actually be doing up there? I'm not seeing anyone talking about this. All I'm hearing anyone saying is "China is going to the Moon so we should too" which is the equivalent of the old jumping off a bridge rational.
If American's are going up there to scout out a site for a planned Moon base that actually seems like it might do something useful then I'm all for another trip up there but all it sounds like right now is more of the exact same thing we've done quite a few times before.
What wasn't available was the knowledge of what one could do with semiconductors.
Exactly my point. We currently don't know how to do anything on the moon that is worth while and/or cost efficient so why bother to go there now? When we have a plan ready to set up a moon base either as a way point for further travel, to extract resources or for anything else you can think up, that's when we should start making trips back. Otherwise all we're doing is walking around and looking at rocks, something we've already done a number of times.
Bad analogy. We didn't run out of oil because of several factors: more oil was discovered, new technologies for mining existing oil were discovered, and as oil grows more scarse, demand for it declines. These people would have been right ignoring the prior factors. In comparison, all we know about lunar settlement is that if you don't try, you don't get there.
You're carrying the analogy too far. My only point with that was to point to another area in which experts have repeatedly made bad time estimates.
oh no! I was typing this out quickly on a break from work and I made a mistake! Way to be a dick about it instead of just pointing it out!
I disagree. I think spending money on this right now is like spending money developing micro ships in the 30s when what we should be developing is vacuum tubes, which is to say we're getting ahead of ourselves. We already know we can get to the moon, we've done it plenty of times. When we are closer to being able to actually do something useful there is when we should go back again.
Also, in regards to the 20 years figure for the course of your entire lifetime, there are plenty of Sci-Fi concepts that are like that. Virtually every Sci-Fi movie and TV show out there calls the time line too short for the technology they depict and plenty of "experts" have made the exact same mistakes. Shoot, according to some scientist from decades ago we should have already long ago hit peak oil and should be running out by now.
While I'm not even sure how what you're saying applies to what I said before I will say that we already know that they have ballistic missiles and have known this for decades.
Plus your "Slick Willy" nickname for Clinton is about as clever and overused as "Dubya" for Bush.
Right now all a trip to the Moon will get us is a bunch of guys walking around looking at stuff that Americans saw over 50 years ago. None of the things you're talking about are going to happen on the moon for at least 20 years (and I think that's a very conservative estimate), especially anything like manufacturing, so why go back now?
There seems to be an awful lot of concern over pushing forward boldly into the future involved in this but the only relevant rationnels for going right now I'm seeing is to beat China at something we've already beaten them at handedly which is just to get some one up there walking around.
My point is I don't think anyone would care about another trip to the moon. We did it over half a century ago, multiple times. I can see more impressive space flight at the theater nowadays.
So China is going to be able to do what we did over a half century ago, who cares? If you want us to do something inspirational then we should go to Mars. Moon trips aren't going to interest anyone. They're old hat. At least we might learn something new on a trip to Mars.
The question we all need to ask is why do we even need to go back? We're not building moon bases anytime in the near future and extracting resources is way to expensive for the foreseeable future.
Some one please tell me what possible reason we would have for even wanting to waste billions of dollars on another trip to the moon for. It's a big floating rock.
Why doesn't this effect Nintendo then? While their hardware is quite a bit cheaper to manufacture one would think that if the value of the US dollar had such a dramatic effect on the PS3s price it would push the Wii's price up a fair bit more.
My point was that the game is entirely too luck based. Most games I've seen pan out to the person who rolled the best, not the person who employed the best strategy.
There are a plethora of strategy games out there that match the simplicity of risk but are far less luck base. Wander down to your local game shop and ask around.
True, and perhaps with a smaller military, Saddam Hussein would've kept his tanks rolling into Saudi Arabia in 1991 because there would've been no one in a position to oppose him. And lets be clear...Iraq was "stable" because of tyranny and brutal oppression, ethnic and religious. The US "broke" Iraq, but it's not like we invaded Canada. Iraq was already a teapot about to boil over.
First off it could very easily have been an international coalition that stopped Saddam in 1991 and you can bet that if he had dared to enter Saudi Arabia it definitively would have been.
Second, as of right now most of the Iraqi people are far worse off than they were under Saddam (who I will agree was a horrible dictator) and given the effectiveness of their current government it looks like this is unlikely to change anytime soon.
As for the teapot bit, I have never heard of any evidence that there was any kind of boiling over eminent for the country. In fact that's half the reason we invaded Iraq, because our sanctions had failed to unseat Saddam. Of course it's possible I'm missing something so feel free to correct me on that last part.
"Funny how people forget things like the US military being first on the scene after the Tsunami hit...or world kept mostly free of piracy from the US navy. When the Somali civil war broke out and all the embassies were evacuated, guess who evacuated them? That's right, the US military. So yeah, the US military is a hegemony machine, but if the US wasn't doing a lot of those functions, someone else would need to, or the world would suffer for it."
This really goes both ways though. Our military is currently responsible for destabilizing what had been a fairly stable country, for very little cause. This has resulted in wide spread ethnic warfare in said country, thousands of deaths, and threatens to destabilize the entire region. Perhaps with a smaller military we would not have attempted this.
Risk? Blech.
Why don't you just cut out the board and play craps. All both amount to is the roll of dice.
Doh, I didn't even think of Homeworld on that one. I haven't played the other.
Despite being the first modern base building RTS I don't think most people remember Dune II.
However, I think the fuss is warented as it is exciting to see that Blizzard is updating their gameplay with new features, even if the "new" features are ones that have existed since the genre began. Furthermore, it looks like they are taking what was in Dune II forward a bit by allowing the player's performance in one mission to more greatly effect what their experience will be like in the next.