I agree with the parent, evangelism isn't fun in games unless it underpins a characters background or motivations. Diablo 1 and 2 are also good examples of religious mythology used well in games:
Assasins Creed 1 and 2 are also good examples. I believe the non-deity of Jesus is touched very lightly at one point with a reference to Arthur C. Clarke's: "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."
These games show that religion's effect on our society can be used to produce a compelling narrative, often with a focus on its evil side. What I personally would hate is to be fed self righteous propaganda. Let us hope we never see "The Passion of Christ: The Game - only on PS3" let alone a 3D rendering of Mohammad (actually, i'd like to see a developer have the balls to go there).
Quotes "I think you will find this issue has little traction with my constituents who are more concerned with real life issues than home entertainment in imaginary worlds" "I am concerned about the impact of this extreme content on children" "It is true this restricts liberty, however I am prepared to accept this infringement"
It's basically a long winded version of "will someone please think of the children!"
The NYtimes did an interesting article on something similar to this, it was about the exorbitant cost of text to speech devices for the speaking impaired compared to simple consumer solutions like the iphone.
Your post is very well researched and written but, after reading it a few times just to make sure, i think you were basing those calculations on the idea that we would communicate with the moon using a carbon nanotube/super conductor cable.
I have never heard that suggested before, i mean, we have stories about space elevators on slashdot all the time, but why would you think we would communicate with the moon using a cable?
Its movement relative to the earth would make this pretty much impossible. It also seems like an unnecessary waste of resources considered light is much faster.
Can you explain further? Why did you choose to communicate with the moon using a cable instead of microwave/radio?
The mathematics prize was interesting: Mathematics: Gideon Gono, governor of Zimbabwe's Reserve Bank, for giving people a simple, everyday way to cope with a wide range of numbers by having his bank print notes with denominations ranging from one cent to one hundred trillion dollars.
Humanity has picked all the low hanging fruits of technology. Penicillin was discovered by accident exuding from a common mould. Radioactivity was discovered by observing phosphorescent rocks. Rockets were essentially an engineering problem. The elements of electricity were discovered by men using scientific instruments they could build themselves.
The rate of discovery has not necessarily slowed, but i contend that it has become more difficult to discover and propagate new things. The cost to fundamental discovery ratio has risen considerably. People are no less intelligent then they were 20,50, 100 years ago, but to find something new takes considerably more man hours and investment. Take the memristor for example, a recent discovery, just reading the course of its discovery will help anyone understand why we don't have flying cars, teleporters and intelligent robots: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memristor. The Genome project is another good example of the scale needed to make important discoveries nowadays. Just ask anyone in medical research "what's taking so long" and you'll immediately understand the scale of the problem.
But let us not repeat the mistakes of past generations. A English scientist, I forget the name, once said at the turn of the 20th century that everything that can been discovered has been discovered, and all that was needed now was simply to dot the i's and cross the t's. How wrong he was.
Lets also not be ignorant of the power of the technology we hold in our hands now. For a price a person can own a phone that can take an incredibly clear image, tag it with the exact location on earth where it was taken and send to anyone anywhere reasonable speaking. A MRI machine can take incredible images inside the body without a single cut. Many of us take what we have for granted. Some might remember: everything is amazing, nobody is happy: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WXStPqhLmIk
The challenge now is propagation. Clean water, abundant food and shelter are still discoveries waiting to happen for a large portion of our species. Flying cars, e-ink newspapers and quantum computers are no concern to the child looking for food in a rubbish tip in Africa.
Still... many nerds hold onto hopes of a Singularity. Perhaps not to the scale many of its proponents imagine, but a AI may be able to deal with relationships and datasets that human brains simply cannot understand or have the patience for. Infact as slashdot covered earlier its already here: http://www.findmysoft.com/news/Artificial-Intelligence-Robot-Scientist-Adam/
It's like trying to get water from one bucket to another, but instead of using a pipe, having to turn it into steam and use a tennis racquet to force it into its new bucket.
Think of all the unnecessary processing that goes into the hand and eye coordination for data entry into a computer, or for the opposite case: all the visual processing that brain needs to do to in order to recognise symbols on a screen, form words and subsequently string those into coherent thoughts. Its utterly and completely inefficient. The only reason we find it acceptable is because at the moment it's the best system we have.
If we could either directly interpret thoughts accurately or feed information into the brain (a task of incredible complexity) we could drastically speed up all sorts of information processing tasks.
There is no question on whether it is man-made or just natural climate cycles. There is sufficient evidence to support the fact that it is a man made phenomenon.
Here is an interesting quote: "The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) concludes that increasing greenhouse gas concentrations resulting from human activity such as fossil fuel burning and deforestation are responsible for most of the observed temperature increase since the middle of the 20th century." Source: http://ipcc-wg1.ucar.edu/wg1/Report/AR4WG1_Print_SPM.pdf
Its also possible that my opening of a coke can will unsettle the quantum state of the water molecules vaporized in the air consequentially causing a pony to spontaneously appear. But as much as i wish it to be true, it aint going to happen (at least not for a really long time).
The whole point of the 65 million year cycle was not only the extinctions, but also the discover of elements in the ground only found as a result of asteroid impacts. Tha'ts why researches spend to much time trying to find a large mass that could disturb the Kuiper belt.
Why not stay in your own country and fight for those rights? Run as an independent for government. Organize resistance to the plans.
How about Australia or Canada?
I'm in Australia at the moment, broadband prices arn't amazing, and they're trying to implement a useless filter, but generally speaking the police are nice and we're universally known for hating our politicians (more then most countries).
Even if the government wanted to implement some scheme to restrict freedoms, it would mean they would have to actually go about doing some governmental work. That's something that rarely happens here. For example our *entire* government, including some state governments, spent the last two weeks trying to work out who made up some email about some car dealer.
We're also notoriously fickle when it comes to freedoms and politics. The public doesn't vote along party lines so much as they do for a lesser wanker (idiot).
IAACE (I am a Computer Engineer). I agree transistors will not be old news in 20 years, but i think you're looking too broadly. I believe the idea that they will be old news relates to their use in (high performance) computing. It really was from about the 1980's till now, around 20-30 years, for computers to get *really* popular.
Photonic Computing is really in the stage where transistors were in the 60's and 70's. We already have proven concepts and a good idea of where to go so i don't see the statement "it's that transistors will be old news in 20 years; " so completely outrageous.
The only thing i know for certain, is that all our predictions will be wrong.
For a game that looked as good visually and as a video demo, actual game play was incredibly disappointing. I agree with you on all of your points, though take care not to become to enraged when posting, you're just asking for people to mod you down.
If theres one thing i could add, the story was not enthralling at all. Even thoroughly reading the "journal" that is provided as the game progresses did not fill in the sense of bewilderment felt by the player. The story lacks any real impetus to push the player along. By the second section of the game it feels more like a job then fun.
The developers of Far Cry 2 could learn a lot from those of Fallout 3 (a perfect example of how an RPG/FPS can be accessible and have depth).
I think any of Peter F. Hamiltons works would make a good series of movies. They are more adaptable i think then Asimov's books, though nowhere near as classic in regard. Movies would ruin Asimov's positive mark on the genre if not done perfectly.
I feel the most likely books of Hamilton's to be made into possibly a Band of Brothers type series or trilogy would be the Commonwealth Saga: Pandora's Star and Judas Unchained.
They are both recent books, dealing with the invasion of a future human civilization by a hostile alien force. But much much more then that too. Personally its not the excellent mystery, action or space battle parts which captivate me, but the 'positive' and 'real' extrapolations of society that he paints, as opposed to alot of sci-fi which paint a rather dystopia or exotic view of the future.
It goes on to talk about their own private chip fab, and how they are using an inordinate amount of power. I can only assume they are running some major hardware...
Sins of a Solar Empire is also completely free of DRM.
It scored pretty much 9/10 in every review.
Sins of a Solar Empire is a science fiction real-time strategy computer game developed by Ironclad Games for Windows XP and Vista and published by Stardock Entertainment in February 2008.[1] Sins is a real-time strategy (RTS) game that incorporates some elements from 4X strategy games; promotional materials describe it as "RT4X."[2]
Stardock Entertainment are also responsibile for the proposed "Gamers Bill of rights"
The Gamer's Bill of Rights:
Gamers shall have the right to return games that don't work with their computers for a full refund. Gamers shall have the right to demand that games be released in a finished state. Gamers shall have the right to expect meaningful updates after a game's release. Gamers shall have the right to demand that download managers and updaters not force themselves to run or be forced to load in order to play a game. Gamers shall have the right to expect that the minimum requirements for a game will mean that the game will play adequately on that computer. Gamers shall have the right to expect that games won't install hidden drivers or other potentially harmful software without their consent. Gamers shall have the right to re-download the latest versions of the games they own at any time. Gamers shall have the right to not be treated as potential criminals by developers or publishers. Gamers shall have the right to demand that a single-player game not force them to be connected to the Internet every time they wish to play. Gamers shall have the right that games which are installed to the hard drive shall not require a CD/DVD to remain in the drive to play.
While i reguard many of your ideas with esteem i disliked how you attemped to hollow out the parents ideas for the future with every opertunity. Many of your answers were held to the idea that the parents described wishes for the future were either already here now, or unwarrented.
The problem with the technologies that are here now is that they are in very early days and using them is either cumbersome or difficult on a dayily basis, not to mention expensive. I do not deny that the technology exists for many of the items you decribe as answers to the parents, and i applaud your examples, but i question your design and technology knowlege when it comes it ergonomics and economics.
The second problem is your dismissal of some of the parents ideas. I will say this once. NEVER DISMISS IDEAS FOR THE SAKE OF OTHERS. Consider all possibilities. Do not alienate paths. When the laser was first invented it was seen a simple physics experiement, with no apparent use. Need i say more?. Whos to say we wont have cybernetic implants before we die? Who says cureing cancer with something like gene therapy wouldnt be overall better then preventing it with nanobots? and as for scanning ones brain to escape death, ignoreing philosophical arguments, never say that something is impossible, you'll only be more suprised when it happens.
Please, in the future add to other peoples ideas, do not disreguard them.
Slashdot Mirror
While not quite as sinister as your comment implies, Black and White is an excellent example of this and the topic in general.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_&_White_(video_game)
I agree with the parent, evangelism isn't fun in games unless it underpins a characters background or motivations. Diablo 1 and 2 are also good examples of religious mythology used well in games:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diablo_(video_game)
Assasins Creed 1 and 2 are also good examples. I believe the non-deity of Jesus is touched very lightly at one point with a reference to Arthur C. Clarke's: "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."
These games show that religion's effect on our society can be used to produce a compelling narrative, often with a focus on its evil side. What I personally would hate is to be fed self righteous propaganda. Let us hope we never see "The Passion of Christ: The Game - only on PS3" let alone a 3D rendering of Mohammad (actually, i'd like to see a developer have the balls to go there).
The parent is correct. As a fellow Australian I am just waiting for this guy to move on.
Someone wrote to him a couple of times before getting an extensive reply attempting to justify his position, consider reading it here [PDF]
http://bunnitude.com/misc/files/R18-Michael%20Atkinson.pdf
Quotes
"I think you will find this issue has little traction with my constituents who are more concerned with real life issues than home entertainment in imaginary worlds"
"I am concerned about the impact of this extreme content on children"
"It is true this restricts liberty, however I am prepared to accept this infringement"
It's basically a long winded version of "will someone please think of the children!"
The NYtimes did an interesting article on something similar to this, it was about the exorbitant cost of text to speech devices for the speaking impaired compared to simple consumer solutions like the iphone.
Heres the article, its quite interesting:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/15/technology/15speech.html
Your post is very well researched and written but, after reading it a few times just to make sure, i think you were basing those calculations on the idea that we would communicate with the moon using a carbon nanotube/super conductor cable.
I have never heard that suggested before, i mean, we have stories about space elevators on slashdot all the time, but why would you think we would communicate with the moon using a cable?
Its movement relative to the earth would make this pretty much impossible. It also seems like an unnecessary waste of resources considered light is much faster.
Can you explain further? Why did you choose to communicate with the moon using a cable instead of microwave/radio?
Actually BBC News has the most in depth coverage: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8285380.stm
The mathematics prize was interesting:
Mathematics: Gideon Gono, governor of Zimbabwe's Reserve Bank, for giving people a simple, everyday way to cope with a wide range of numbers by having his bank print notes with denominations ranging from one cent to one hundred trillion dollars.
Humanity has picked all the low hanging fruits of technology. Penicillin was discovered by accident exuding from a common mould. Radioactivity was discovered by observing phosphorescent rocks. Rockets were essentially an engineering problem. The elements of electricity were discovered by men using scientific instruments they could build themselves.
The rate of discovery has not necessarily slowed, but i contend that it has become more difficult to discover and propagate new things. The cost to fundamental discovery ratio has risen considerably. People are no less intelligent then they were 20,50, 100 years ago, but to find something new takes considerably more man hours and investment. Take the memristor for example, a recent discovery, just reading the course of its discovery will help anyone understand why we don't have flying cars, teleporters and intelligent robots: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memristor. The Genome project is another good example of the scale needed to make important discoveries nowadays. Just ask anyone in medical research "what's taking so long" and you'll immediately understand the scale of the problem.
There's also the cultural issues. The public is disinterested in science, roughly 50% of Americans don't believe in evolution, Only 53% of adults know how long it takes for the Earth to revolve around the Sun!. http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/03/090312115133.htm . There has also been a considerable shift since the 1970's away from basic research which is now seen as long term and unprofitable, when shareholders must have their profits now! http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/08/28/209220 http://science.slashdot.org/story/09/08/30/1512213/Where-Have-You-Gone-Bell-Labs?from=rss
But let us not repeat the mistakes of past generations. A English scientist, I forget the name, once said at the turn of the 20th century that everything that can been discovered has been discovered, and all that was needed now was simply to dot the i's and cross the t's. How wrong he was.
Lets also not be ignorant of the power of the technology we hold in our hands now. For a price a person can own a phone that can take an incredibly clear image, tag it with the exact location on earth where it was taken and send to anyone anywhere reasonable speaking. A MRI machine can take incredible images inside the body without a single cut. Many of us take what we have for granted. Some might remember: everything is amazing, nobody is happy: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WXStPqhLmIk
The challenge now is propagation. Clean water, abundant food and shelter are still discoveries waiting to happen for a large portion of our species. Flying cars, e-ink newspapers and quantum computers are no concern to the child looking for food in a rubbish tip in Africa.
Still... many nerds hold onto hopes of a Singularity. Perhaps not to the scale many of its proponents imagine, but a AI may be able to deal with relationships and datasets that human brains simply cannot understand or have the patience for. Infact as slashdot covered earlier its already here: http://www.findmysoft.com/news/Artificial-Intelligence-Robot-Scientist-Adam/
Not quite direct?
It's like trying to get water from one bucket to another, but instead of using a pipe, having to turn it into steam and use a tennis racquet to force it into its new bucket.
Think of all the unnecessary processing that goes into the hand and eye coordination for data entry into a computer, or for the opposite case: all the visual processing that brain needs to do to in order to recognise symbols on a screen, form words and subsequently string those into coherent thoughts. Its utterly and completely inefficient. The only reason we find it acceptable is because at the moment it's the best system we have.
If we could either directly interpret thoughts accurately or feed information into the brain (a task of incredible complexity) we could drastically speed up all sorts of information processing tasks.
Eating unhealthy foods causes health problems. News at 11. Try the new octo cheese burger while you're waiting.
Its a gas giant. Everything is vaporized except for possible a very dense metal core.
There is no question on whether it is man-made or just natural climate cycles. There is sufficient evidence to support the fact that it is a man made phenomenon.
I would direct you to the sources listed at the bottom of the wikipedia article on the subject: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_warming
Here is an interesting quote:
"The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) concludes that increasing greenhouse gas concentrations resulting from human activity such as fossil fuel burning and deforestation are responsible for most of the observed temperature increase since the middle of the 20th century."
Source: http://ipcc-wg1.ucar.edu/wg1/Report/AR4WG1_Print_SPM.pdf
Its also possible that my opening of a coke can will unsettle the quantum state of the water molecules vaporized in the air consequentially causing a pony to spontaneously appear. But as much as i wish it to be true, it aint going to happen (at least not for a really long time).
The whole point of the 65 million year cycle was not only the extinctions, but also the discover of elements in the ground only found as a result of asteroid impacts. Tha'ts why researches spend to much time trying to find a large mass that could disturb the Kuiper belt.
Why not stay in your own country and fight for those rights? Run as an independent for government. Organize resistance to the plans.
How about Australia or Canada?
I'm in Australia at the moment, broadband prices arn't amazing, and they're trying to implement a useless filter, but generally speaking the police are nice and we're universally known for hating our politicians (more then most countries).
Even if the government wanted to implement some scheme to restrict freedoms, it would mean they would have to actually go about doing some governmental work. That's something that rarely happens here. For example our *entire* government, including some state governments, spent the last two weeks trying to work out who made up some email about some car dealer.
We're also notoriously fickle when it comes to freedoms and politics. The public doesn't vote along party lines so much as they do for a lesser wanker (idiot).
IAACE (I am a Computer Engineer). I agree transistors will not be old news in 20 years, but i think you're looking too broadly. I believe the idea that they will be old news relates to their use in (high performance) computing. It really was from about the 1980's till now, around 20-30 years, for computers to get *really* popular.
Photonic Computing is really in the stage where transistors were in the 60's and 70's. We already have proven concepts and a good idea of where to go so i don't see the statement "it's that transistors will be old news in 20 years; " so completely outrageous.
The only thing i know for certain, is that all our predictions will be wrong.
You dont happen to have any spare tachyons do you?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcubierre_drive
Picasa is a popular image management program that has supported facial recognition since last year: http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/09/02/picasa-refresh-brings-facial-recognition/
I havnt used it, so im not sure how good it is.
If SimCity 2000 is anything to go by this venture will result in a massive fire, followed closely by an alien invasion.
Can you bring/use laptops? Is there a wireless access point or is that considered to much of a security threat?
For a game that looked as good visually and as a video demo, actual game play was incredibly disappointing. I agree with you on all of your points, though take care not to become to enraged when posting, you're just asking for people to mod you down.
If theres one thing i could add, the story was not enthralling at all. Even thoroughly reading the "journal" that is provided as the game progresses did not fill in the sense of bewilderment felt by the player. The story lacks any real impetus to push the player along. By the second section of the game it feels more like a job then fun.
The developers of Far Cry 2 could learn a lot from those of Fallout 3 (a perfect example of how an RPG/FPS can be accessible and have depth).
Then life would have stopped with bacteria.
I think any of Peter F. Hamiltons works would make a good series of movies. They are more adaptable i think then Asimov's books, though nowhere near as classic in regard. Movies would ruin Asimov's positive mark on the genre if not done perfectly.
I feel the most likely books of Hamilton's to be made into possibly a Band of Brothers type series or trilogy would be the Commonwealth Saga: Pandora's Star and Judas Unchained.
They are both recent books, dealing with the invasion of a future human civilization by a hostile alien force. But much much more then that too. Personally its not the excellent mystery, action or space battle parts which captivate me, but the 'positive' and 'real' extrapolations of society that he paints, as opposed to alot of sci-fi which paint a rather dystopia or exotic view of the future.
Folding@home is sustaining over 4.2 Petaflops and rising quickly.
You can see statistics here: http://fah-web.stanford.edu/cgi-bin/main.py?qtype=osstats
And a nice graph charting the rise here: http://img388.imageshack.us/my.php?image=foldinghome20kx2.png
I also enjoy reading the Wiki article on the NSA's headquaters: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Security_Agency#Facilities
It goes on to talk about their own private chip fab, and how they are using an inordinate amount of power. I can only assume they are running some major hardware...
Sins of a Solar Empire is also completely free of DRM.
It scored pretty much 9/10 in every review.
Sins of a Solar Empire is a science fiction real-time strategy computer game developed by Ironclad Games for Windows XP and Vista and published by Stardock Entertainment in February 2008.[1] Sins is a real-time strategy (RTS) game that incorporates some elements from 4X strategy games; promotional materials describe it as "RT4X."[2]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sins_of_a_Solar_Empire
Stardock Entertainment are also responsibile for the proposed "Gamers Bill of rights"
The Gamer's Bill of Rights:
Gamers shall have the right to return games that don't work with their computers for a full refund.
Gamers shall have the right to demand that games be released in a finished state.
Gamers shall have the right to expect meaningful updates after a game's release.
Gamers shall have the right to demand that download managers and updaters not force themselves to run or be forced to load in order to play a game.
Gamers shall have the right to expect that the minimum requirements for a game will mean that the game will play adequately on that computer.
Gamers shall have the right to expect that games won't install hidden drivers or other potentially harmful software without their consent.
Gamers shall have the right to re-download the latest versions of the games they own at any time.
Gamers shall have the right to not be treated as potential criminals by developers or publishers.
Gamers shall have the right to demand that a single-player game not force them to be connected to the Internet every time they wish to play.
Gamers shall have the right that games which are installed to the hard drive shall not require a CD/DVD to remain in the drive to play.
http://www.stardock.com/about/newsitem.asp?id=1095
Thats an easy problem to solve! Just wait for the technology to mature before purchas...Oh.
See Tachyons...
They are undetected theorised particles that travel faster then the speed of light. However physicists doubt their ability to carry information.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tachyon
While i reguard many of your ideas with esteem i disliked how you attemped to hollow out the parents ideas for the future with every opertunity. Many of your answers were held to the idea that the parents described wishes for the future were either already here now, or unwarrented.
The problem with the technologies that are here now is that they are in very early days and using them is either cumbersome or difficult on a dayily basis, not to mention expensive. I do not deny that the technology exists for many of the items you decribe as answers to the parents, and i applaud your examples, but i question your design and technology knowlege when it comes it ergonomics and economics.
The second problem is your dismissal of some of the parents ideas. I will say this once. NEVER DISMISS IDEAS FOR THE SAKE OF OTHERS. Consider all possibilities. Do not alienate paths. When the laser was first invented it was seen a simple physics experiement, with no apparent use. Need i say more?. Whos to say we wont have cybernetic implants before we die? Who says cureing cancer with something like gene therapy wouldnt be overall better then preventing it with nanobots? and as for scanning ones brain to escape death, ignoreing philosophical arguments, never say that something is impossible, you'll only be more suprised when it happens.
Please, in the future add to other peoples ideas, do not disreguard them.