You are correct. In point of fact, around 90% of the time when you hear that "X gives you cancer" what you should instead read it as is "X causes cancer to happen sooner". Usually this means that exposure to risk factor X reduces your ability to fight off cancer. You've probably got a few carcinogenic cells in you right now that are going to be killed off before they do you any harm. Obviously this doesn't apply in every single case - ionizing radiation falls into that other 10% that really does cause cancer directly - but when you see cancer linked to, say, stress, that falls under the other 90%.
I don't think that tissue regeneration will cause cancer to happen more frequently, for two reasons. The first is that the healing process in humans already accelerates cancer. As do certain immune responses. Essentially, every bit of damage you pick up over your lifetime accelerates the inevitable rise of carcinogenesis by some tiny amount. Regeneration, done correctly, probably won't worsen this.
The second reason is that the reason mammals don't regenerate naturally has to do with speed, not safety. The healing process in mammals essentially slaps a quick patch over the damage in order to get you healthy sooner; we call this patch a scar. Regenerating vertebrates (amphibians, some reptiles) take longer to heal, but heal more completely, which is substantially more viable when you're cold blooded and can go a few days without more food. At some point in our distant evolutionary past, scarring became a more viable approach to damage, as it fixed us up sooner, so selection pressure favored the scarring over the regenerating. Lack of regeneration in humans is a matter of what worked in the wild for our ancestors, not what works today, where the injured have plenty of time to recuperate, and don't run the risk of starvation or predation.
I've worked in an electronics store. Let me tell you - typos on the box? Not a sign of phony merchandise. At least not in and of itself. A surprisingly large number of legitimate items have such errors, and usually the only people who notice are the depot/stock/merchandising/receiving staff.
Half the time the products or packaging in question are made somewhere in southeast asia (china, usually) so the culprit is the language barrier for the QA people. The other half, the problem is they just didn't care. A few thousand boxes get shipped with a minor typo in the fine print, because nobody bothered to check. Usually they'll just sell the ones with the error, since the customers almost never notice, and correct the spelling/grammar/whatever the next time the packaging gets redesigned.
Also, having different packaging for the same SKU isn't unusual, due to the frequency of redesigns. So you have an item, which looks identical out of the box, but which comes in two or three different types of box. This is doubly true of anything going on display, since the packaging is supposed to by eye-catching, and never stays the same for long.
Even if they could determine how many copies were pirated, an illicit download does not necessarily equal a lost sale. Some of those downloads for sure could have been sales, but in my experience (and that of the malcontents I sometimes call my friends), many people download the game, play it for 20 minutes, decide it's not for them, uninstall, delete and move on. On the other hand, there are also those that download it, play it for 20 minutes, decide that yes, they like it, and then purchase it. It's not black and white.
I'm not disagreeing with any of the points you raised. My point was more about getting a message across to the industry, in language the suits will understand.
Look at it another way. You and I both know piracy is not a black and white issue. The executives making the decisions re:DRM don't. To the suits at the top, it is a simple us-versus-them fight, with the paying customers losing regardless of who "wins".
Piracy won't convince them they've made a bad decision. Sales lost to boycotts, or bad reviews due to DRM, or angry hate mail, are another matter. Make it such that the DRM used here hurts them badly enough, and they'll back away from it.
They can estimate bittorrent based on the number of seeds and leeches on torrent trackers just by looking at isohunt or doing a tally from something like Bit Che. That's the majority of your pirated copies of games right there, which should give you a good estimate of a total number pirated.
Thank you, you beat me to it.
An addendum to this point I'd like to make is that the numbers you pull from torrent trackers are meaningless by themselves. To arrive at a useful comparison, you need to examine the rates for many different games to get a sense of what's normal.
If someone wants to find out why their game did poorly, they can compare the ballpark number of downloads to the industry average, to find out if it was pirated more extensively. If piracy is not found to be the root cause, but backlash from the DRM is, that should get our point across.
What, you honestly think a single one of them is going to go to "Looks like we fucked up with the DRM" when "Those damn pirates got us again!" is available for them to shift the blame to? You think the fact that it probably isn't true means a damn?
"Looks like those damn pirates got us again" only works as an excuse for flagging sales when the piracy rate rises. When the rate remains the same, and sales flag, this excuse is untenable.
Yes, some idiot PHB will look at the falling sales numbers and say "look! Pirates!" without examining the facts. Idiots will always ignore contradictory evidence, and management has no shortage.
But someone will, at some stage, take it into their head to look at the piracy rates and sales figures for games with draconian DRM. What will they see? Hopefully, they'll see an unexplained loss in sales not matched by a rise in piracy. That will tell them something. As will the inevitable tide of hate mail, doggedly bad product reviews and general bad PR.
You think a game company has never backed away from DRM schemes in the face of lost sales? It's happened before, and will happen again. EA did more or less exactly that.
But alright, lets take your point of view as fact for a moment, and assume Ubi's upper management has their heads so far up their asses they can't see they're driving away customers. What happens when Ubisoft losses too many customers? They die. Or at least pull out of the PC market. Someone else moves in.
Well if that happens then they blame the pirates for lost sales, which is the current way game companies deal with poor sales.
Piracy rates are can be tracked. They'll know, to within a moderately narrow margin of error, how many copies were pirated, and they'll know exactly how many were sold. Both numbers will have been estimated prior to launch by the bean counters.
If the game fails to reach its sales quota, but is pirated more extensively than anticipated, what that tells them is that even more extreme anti-piracy measures are needed. The difference between sales figures and sales projections will be treated as "lost sales", with the blame placed on the rising piracy figures.
If the game tanks, and the piracy rates are no higher than expected, that sends a different message. It tells them that the piracy rates aren't to blame for the "lost sales" - customer boycotts are.
The only way to kill DRM in the long run is to convince the people making the decisions that it's costing them more money than it's worth. Don't buy or pirate Ubisoft's crap. Don't give them money or mindshare. Write them off as a loss, and buy games from publishers who don't treat their paying customers this way. Either they'll learn to do better, or the publishers who don't saddle their games with this crap will out-compete the ones who do in the long haul.
You guys are assuming that because a crack was made available in less than 24hrs that this somehow means that Ubisoft isn't going to make much money on the game. I'm sure the devs expected it to be cracked, maybe even quickly - but they'll still make good money from these games. Users are lazy... many aren't willing to troll warez sites to find the crack... many don't even know how.... sure, they'll lose money from people who crack the game instead of buying it, but they'll still make a lot more from those that dont know how, or don't bother.
They already lost my money. I was halfway interested in AC2. Didn't buy it because of the DRM. Didn't pirate it. I have no intention of doing either.
This is a case where voting with your wallet is the way to go. If they see dropping sales figures as compared to the first game that aren't matched by rising piracy figures, then that tells them that some people out there have ethical reasons not to pirate, and are opposed enough to intrusive DRM crap not to purchase. A pirate doesn't interest them, but a lost customer does.
Seems to me like the correct solution (from their perspective) ought to be to release a game with tons of DRM, sell it for awhile, then disable the DRM once it's no longer profitable. This is, of course, if they intend to stay in business and wish to avoid alienating customers from future purchases.
Been done at least once that I know of. UT2004 (IIRC) shipped with a DRM scheme that required a CD to be detected in the drive. Within a month, they patched this functionality out. Essentially, they reasoned they'd look good to the customers by doing this, and any good the DRM did in delayed cracked copies from finding their way onto the net was over and done with - even if the DRM worked on the launch day (which is a big if), you can bet in a month it'd be long cracked.
Can someone cite a case of this actually happening?
Aspirin Kleenex Zipper
All trademarks, once upon a time. All genericized now. Satisfied? You don't keep a trademark by filling for it and forgetting about it - and thank god for that, since we have enough trouble with patent trolls doing more or less exactly that. Trademarks need to be actively defended, lest they fall into public domain.
Doesn't make what Activision did right especially since, as noted above, the trademarks were in fact approved by Vivendi, and should have been transferable as such without the danger of failure to defend.
(All examples care of 30 seconds on wiki, though I knew what I was looking for).
Sorry, didn't mean to say you had. You did only leave a one line post, so I didn't assume what your position was.
I did assume that the position of most of the people commenting on this story would be in favor of pirating the game, and when I wrote my post the story was still at around 3-5 comments, yours included, so I attached my reply to yours. Sorry if that got taken as disagreement, as I think you and I have the same view on the matter.
I'll go a step further. I'm not buying this game. I'm not pirating this game. This game is not getting my money, my time, or my tactic approval.
This is something that just bugs me about the attitude some people have about DRM and piracy. People will take the approach of "this DRM sucks, ergo I'm going to pirate it, instead of paying for it". This isn't a boycott, nor is it voting with your wallet. This is taking the approach that two wrongs make a right, and that pirating the game somehow "punishes" the makers of it for the sin of screwing over legitimate users.
Want to send a message? Do what I'm going to do. Don't touch the copybroken crap with a ten foot cable.
Because make no mistake, piracy rates for a game are measurable. If the game is popular, and pirated extensively, then the message sent to the publishers is that the DRM system, however extreme, still isn't "enough". That an even more extreme measure is needed to turn those hypothetical pirated copies into sales figures. And the developer still gets acknowledged as having made a game good enough for you, the pirate, to want it. If they think they can make a paying customer out of a pirate by making the game unpirateable, then they'll got to great lengths to do exactly that.
The only way to break DRM in the long term is to vote with your wallet, and simply ignore the very existence of companies that cross the line the way Ubisoft has. They need to be told, and have that information backed by hard data, that DRM is hurting their sales by making the legit users leave (you know, the people who actually pay for the game?)
Broadly speaking, I'd expect those living in deserts to find other solutions. You don't wear the same clothes in two diametrically opposite climates - why would that change simply because the cloth is high tech?
The obvious, not yet developed choice for people in a hot environment would be cloth with embedded solar collectors. If you want to hedge your bets, bring some of each, and dress for the climate as needed. Of course, all of this takes for granted the affordability of such solutions, but to be blunt I don't see either one becoming the norm in the next 10-20 years anyway.
Hmmm... That is an interesting example. Though I'd quibble a bit with the "more dangerous to people" part, as I seriously doubt an organism that expends energy on a non-survival activity like binding phosphorus could survive in the wild (in the contaminated environment it would at least lack for competition). What you're describing is more likely to simply render the reclamation process useless, by making the end result just as uninhabitable as the beginning.
Mind you, that is still a very undesirable result. Perhaps it could be averted through careful testing - i.e., run a few million generations of the bacteria through their paces in a controlled environment, functionally the same as the environment they're meant to be used in, and see what comes up. Something as drastic as a major change in the water chemistry could be noticed, and corrected, before more widespread use.
Also, as these are derived from an existing strain, it would be useful to check if that strain has ever produced such a result, or if it's even biologically possible. Remember that they normally go for heavy metals.
Ugh, second time I've had to make this point. Reread this line from my post:
Harmless before, was mutated, now dangerous.
Get the progression? So no "every living thing on earth" is not an answer to the exercise, since a vast majority of lifeforms that we now consider dangerous were plenty dangerous a generation ago, and the generation before that.
Also.
Sunlight is radiation you know....
The only ionizing component in sunlight is UV. It may all be "radiation", but the overwhelming majority of what reaches the earth's surface isn't ionizing, and therefor isn't mutation inducing.
UV's capacity to penetrate even thin shielding is pretty limited. Anything living underwater, or underground, or inside another life form will be protected. In the case of large lifeforms that reproduce sexually, the gametes will generally be internal, enough so to render UV's contribution to mutation negligible.
And pretty much everything on the earth's surface has had about 3 billion odd years to evolve to cope with UV.
Sorry, no, those examples aren't what I asked for.
To begin with, animals that reproduce sexually get an overwhelming majority of their genetic diversity from recombining genes from both parents. Random mutation, while present, is a minor factor in their evolution (how minor is a source of continued debate). All of your examples fall into this category.
Further, while they did likely mutate due to radiation at some point (you're quite right that the rate of radiation induced mutation is not zero), they don't meet the criteria of "harmless before, was mutated, now dangerous". Specifically, all of the examples you gave were apex predators, descended from a long line of large predatory animals, all of them likely dangerous.
In the case of the T-Rex, it's entirely possibly the species' ancestors were more dangerous, since Tyrannosaurs are generally thought to have been more opportunists than hunters - evolution made them less deadly, even as they got larger.
Anyway, I get your point that every extant species has at least some traits imparted by radiation induced mutation, and wasn't arguing otherwise. I merely wished to show that radiation isn't a relevant force in making otherwise harmless bacteria into pathogens, despite what Hollywood science has to say.
Find me a species, mutated by radiation, that subsequently became dangerous to human beings. Anything at all. I don't care what kingdom, genus, family, what-have-you; anything from a virus to an animal. Harmless before, was mutated, now dangerous. Should be easy, with such a broad mandate - there has to be at least one example that will serve to support your point, right?
Nope. While there are plenty of deadly lifeforms on this planet, mutation via exposure to radiation does not make them deadlier. Conversely, overuse of antibiotics (to give one example) has made bacteria deadlier, or at least harder to cure.
"Mutation" is one of those idiot words - it has a very specific meaning in biology, one that has no resemblance to the way non-biologists habitually use it. Most mutations are detrimental to the organisms survival. The only circumstances under which this is not the case is where the mutation occurs in conjunction with selection pressure that favours the mutant. Bacteria, even parasitic ones, do not benefit from being deadly - lethality is not a survival trait for pathogens.
Actually, outside of the espionage business, I'm not sure I can think of classified military tech that remained secret until obsolescence. Not saying it hasn't happened (we might never know after all), or that they don't do their best to keep stuff secret, but once the grunts get ahold of something, you can bet it'll become common knowledge very quickly.
The stuff that does get kept secret is the stuff that never enters widespread use, or only requires the knowledge of a few highly placed people to deploy. Spy planes and satellites, failed prototypes, software, bioweapons, strategic command and communication systems - those can be hidden. Anything destined for the front lines can't stay secret for long.
Of course, you could have meant the successful prototypes will remain hidden from the public, but you did say "until they're already obsolete", which suggests they've passed the prototype stage, entered production, and fallen behind the curve.
Even if they haven't been shipped with armour attached, this sort of technology is perfect for military armour, as the folks in the US are undoubtedly aware. The primary limiting factor in armour is weight. A soldier can only carry so much, can't afford to be slowed down, and already has many kilos of equipment, none of which are going away. To provide decent support against most military weapons requires fairly heavy armour - a kevlar vest isn't going to cut it here. Plus, you've got to balance weight with coverage; a full body suit is far more effective than a vest, yet weights at least twice as much.
If a given soldier can march with another 80-odd kilos, most of it reinforced ballistic fabric overlaid by hardened strike plates, his survivability goes through the roof. Put a powered exoskeleton underneath, and put the armor overtop, and what you've got is the best compromise between standard infantry and a light armoured vehicle.
The major limiting factor these days isn't the exoskeleton itself, which has been demonstrated to work. The biggest hurdle now is a power source, preferably an efficient or else easily refueled one. Can't have your grunts in the field constantly needing to find a wall socket or a gas station.
(Disclaimer: I am not the person you asked, but the question is interesting to me.)
No tech he mentioned was directly applicable to chemical rocket motors, though all are highly, highly relevant to spaceflight, enough so that I think his point is valid.
But just to answer the question you actually asked, namely how those technologies might be useful for propulsion:
1. Advanced materials engineering is applicable to making a better rocket motor, doubly so if it leads to materials that weigh less and/or can withstand higher temperatures. These same materials are useful in too many other applications to count, but he mentioned the aeronautics industry as a field that requires both properties.
2. Magnetic monopoles, if they exist (which is dubious, but another discussion), and if they could be synthesized in quantity (even less likely) would be applicable to the construction of ion drives, or any other propulsion system that uses magnetic fields.
3. Fusion reactors could be applicable to spacecraft, either as a heat source for a reaction mass (water, for instance), or as a direct drive flame. The latter is much harder to achieve than the former, given that all our research at the moment centers on the idea of a fusion power generator, which can be useful as a heat source, but probably can't be adapted into an engine as such. Either could potentially be a propulsion breakthrough, and would meet the criteria that fission drives never did - namely acceptability to the general public.
I'd argue that R&D in various other fields could benefit spaceflight in the long term, even if we were to cease launching rockets altogether. Where I'd quibble with the GP is that expertise left unused is often lost. One of the reason NASA is struggling today is that they haven't built a new manned spacecraft in decades, and in a way they've forgotten how. You can't just go back and look at old blueprints, you need the people who made those blueprints to explain to the young'uns why they did it the way they did.
So I'd be in favour of keeping a manned space program going, if for no other reason to keep the knowledge needed alive for the next span of human history. I don't expect anything great will result from it within the next century, though perhaps we'll do better in the longer term.
It is easy for us on Slashdot to see how stupid this is. But you are talking about a country where a large portion of the population prides themselves in being ignorant and rejecting good science for 'alternative theories'.
I think you should use "or", meaning the logic XOR. Those are not the same things.
I would also like to add that some of our "good science" were an "alternative theory" in the past.
I read 'alternative theories' (his quotes) to mean pseudoscience.
In which case, no, very little of our 'good science' ever was. I could cherry pick one or two examples that support your point (plate tectonics is the biggie), but the vast, vast majority of the hard sciences are additive, not alternative. Scientific theories from a hundred years ago or more are still accepted; we've merely added newer, deeper theories that expand them. See the relationship between classical physics and quantum mechanics for a good example of this - basic principals like thermodynamics and the laws of motion are theories that date back to the dawn of modern science, yet are still applicable today.
You never, ever get the brand spanking new theory that invalidates the old. Not in any field of established science (you do get that happening quite a bit in emergent fields, which EM physics is most assuredly not). The brand spanking new theory is generally just the next layer of regression - the next level down from the existing theory. "Okay we understand matter is made of atoms, now what are they made of?" - that sort of thinking.
Pseudoscientific theories have died out time and again, and new ones take their place. From perpetual motion to Lamarckism, fabrications unsupported by reality have been cast aside, and forgotten by most (people really ought to pay more attention to history, often as it gets repeated). The point is; the 'alternative science' of today does not become the 'good science' of tomorrow.
Apparently I can't just walk into any ol' country club. I have to show my membership card. I get my membership card by applying. Part of the application process is showing some form of ID, another part is laying down a bunch of moneys, being in good standing, blabla. How come that is legal, then?
As a result - and I know the answer is 'no', but I'm curious as to -why- it is 'no' - couldn't any ol' bar simply offer 'guest membership' by means of, say, a stamp / wrist band, where the 'membership process' includes showing some form of ID, costs the patron, say, $2 (which goes toward a complimentary membership drink), and the membership duration lasting the entirety of the patron's stay?
Part of the answer is, we give country clubs far less grief than they're due, because many of their members are influential. And they still catch hell when they enforce membership rules that are very obviously racist, though that happens less often than you might think.
However, in this specific case, you're comparing apples and oranges - the situation in BC is not akin to a country club barring non-members. Once the law gets involved in a situation like this (which it did, since they were tying the scans to police databases), the system becomes subject to legal oversight. Cops, legislators and the like are bound by higher laws concerning basic rights for the people, which were very obviously being violated here.
Well, to play devils advocate for a minute, if the options are 1) no system, 40% casualties or 2) potentially dangerous system, 5% casualties, then I'd call option 2 an improvement, at least from a conservation standpoint. From an animal rights POV... not so great.
Anyway, a bat repellent speaker doesn't absolutely have to be a brute force approach. What about broadcasting their own sonar waves back at them, such that they get the mistaken impression there's a solid object in their path, and avoid it accordingly?
Nor is either compound produced by burning hydrogen. For that matter, you get no CO, nor CO2 from burning aluminum or magnesium powder, or any number of other flammable materials.
I think you meant "carbon monoxide is a product of any form of incomplete carbon combustion" in your original post. Not all combustion needs to involve carbon.
Slashdot Mirror
You are correct. In point of fact, around 90% of the time when you hear that "X gives you cancer" what you should instead read it as is "X causes cancer to happen sooner". Usually this means that exposure to risk factor X reduces your ability to fight off cancer. You've probably got a few carcinogenic cells in you right now that are going to be killed off before they do you any harm. Obviously this doesn't apply in every single case - ionizing radiation falls into that other 10% that really does cause cancer directly - but when you see cancer linked to, say, stress, that falls under the other 90%.
I don't think that tissue regeneration will cause cancer to happen more frequently, for two reasons. The first is that the healing process in humans already accelerates cancer. As do certain immune responses. Essentially, every bit of damage you pick up over your lifetime accelerates the inevitable rise of carcinogenesis by some tiny amount. Regeneration, done correctly, probably won't worsen this.
The second reason is that the reason mammals don't regenerate naturally has to do with speed, not safety. The healing process in mammals essentially slaps a quick patch over the damage in order to get you healthy sooner; we call this patch a scar. Regenerating vertebrates (amphibians, some reptiles) take longer to heal, but heal more completely, which is substantially more viable when you're cold blooded and can go a few days without more food. At some point in our distant evolutionary past, scarring became a more viable approach to damage, as it fixed us up sooner, so selection pressure favored the scarring over the regenerating. Lack of regeneration in humans is a matter of what worked in the wild for our ancestors, not what works today, where the injured have plenty of time to recuperate, and don't run the risk of starvation or predation.
I've worked in an electronics store. Let me tell you - typos on the box? Not a sign of phony merchandise. At least not in and of itself. A surprisingly large number of legitimate items have such errors, and usually the only people who notice are the depot/stock/merchandising/receiving staff.
Half the time the products or packaging in question are made somewhere in southeast asia (china, usually) so the culprit is the language barrier for the QA people. The other half, the problem is they just didn't care. A few thousand boxes get shipped with a minor typo in the fine print, because nobody bothered to check. Usually they'll just sell the ones with the error, since the customers almost never notice, and correct the spelling/grammar/whatever the next time the packaging gets redesigned.
Also, having different packaging for the same SKU isn't unusual, due to the frequency of redesigns. So you have an item, which looks identical out of the box, but which comes in two or three different types of box. This is doubly true of anything going on display, since the packaging is supposed to by eye-catching, and never stays the same for long.
Even if they could determine how many copies were pirated, an illicit download does not necessarily equal a lost sale. Some of those downloads for sure could have been sales, but in my experience (and that of the malcontents I sometimes call my friends), many people download the game, play it for 20 minutes, decide it's not for them, uninstall, delete and move on. On the other hand, there are also those that download it, play it for 20 minutes, decide that yes, they like it, and then purchase it. It's not black and white.
I'm not disagreeing with any of the points you raised. My point was more about getting a message across to the industry, in language the suits will understand.
Look at it another way. You and I both know piracy is not a black and white issue. The executives making the decisions re:DRM don't. To the suits at the top, it is a simple us-versus-them fight, with the paying customers losing regardless of who "wins".
Piracy won't convince them they've made a bad decision. Sales lost to boycotts, or bad reviews due to DRM, or angry hate mail, are another matter. Make it such that the DRM used here hurts them badly enough, and they'll back away from it.
They can estimate bittorrent based on the number of seeds and leeches on torrent trackers just by looking at isohunt or doing a tally from something like Bit Che. That's the majority of your pirated copies of games right there, which should give you a good estimate of a total number pirated.
Thank you, you beat me to it.
An addendum to this point I'd like to make is that the numbers you pull from torrent trackers are meaningless by themselves. To arrive at a useful comparison, you need to examine the rates for many different games to get a sense of what's normal.
If someone wants to find out why their game did poorly, they can compare the ballpark number of downloads to the industry average, to find out if it was pirated more extensively. If piracy is not found to be the root cause, but backlash from the DRM is, that should get our point across.
What, you honestly think a single one of them is going to go to "Looks like we fucked up with the DRM" when "Those damn pirates got us again!" is available for them to shift the blame to? You think the fact that it probably isn't true means a damn?
"Looks like those damn pirates got us again" only works as an excuse for flagging sales when the piracy rate rises. When the rate remains the same, and sales flag, this excuse is untenable.
Yes, some idiot PHB will look at the falling sales numbers and say "look! Pirates!" without examining the facts. Idiots will always ignore contradictory evidence, and management has no shortage.
But someone will, at some stage, take it into their head to look at the piracy rates and sales figures for games with draconian DRM. What will they see? Hopefully, they'll see an unexplained loss in sales not matched by a rise in piracy. That will tell them something. As will the inevitable tide of hate mail, doggedly bad product reviews and general bad PR.
You think a game company has never backed away from DRM schemes in the face of lost sales? It's happened before, and will happen again. EA did more or less exactly that.
But alright, lets take your point of view as fact for a moment, and assume Ubi's upper management has their heads so far up their asses they can't see they're driving away customers. What happens when Ubisoft losses too many customers? They die. Or at least pull out of the PC market. Someone else moves in.
Well if that happens then they blame the pirates for lost sales, which is the current way game companies deal with poor sales.
Piracy rates are can be tracked. They'll know, to within a moderately narrow margin of error, how many copies were pirated, and they'll know exactly how many were sold. Both numbers will have been estimated prior to launch by the bean counters.
If the game fails to reach its sales quota, but is pirated more extensively than anticipated, what that tells them is that even more extreme anti-piracy measures are needed. The difference between sales figures and sales projections will be treated as "lost sales", with the blame placed on the rising piracy figures.
If the game tanks, and the piracy rates are no higher than expected, that sends a different message. It tells them that the piracy rates aren't to blame for the "lost sales" - customer boycotts are.
The only way to kill DRM in the long run is to convince the people making the decisions that it's costing them more money than it's worth. Don't buy or pirate Ubisoft's crap. Don't give them money or mindshare. Write them off as a loss, and buy games from publishers who don't treat their paying customers this way. Either they'll learn to do better, or the publishers who don't saddle their games with this crap will out-compete the ones who do in the long haul.
You guys are assuming that because a crack was made available in less than 24hrs that this somehow means that Ubisoft isn't going to make much money on the game. I'm sure the devs expected it to be cracked, maybe even quickly - but they'll still make good money from these games. Users are lazy ... many aren't willing to troll warez sites to find the crack ... many don't even know how .... sure, they'll lose money from people who crack the game instead of buying it, but they'll still make a lot more from those that dont know how, or don't bother.
They already lost my money. I was halfway interested in AC2. Didn't buy it because of the DRM. Didn't pirate it. I have no intention of doing either.
This is a case where voting with your wallet is the way to go. If they see dropping sales figures as compared to the first game that aren't matched by rising piracy figures, then that tells them that some people out there have ethical reasons not to pirate, and are opposed enough to intrusive DRM crap not to purchase. A pirate doesn't interest them, but a lost customer does.
Seems to me like the correct solution (from their perspective) ought to be to release a game with tons of DRM, sell it for awhile, then disable the DRM once it's no longer profitable. This is, of course, if they intend to stay in business and wish to avoid alienating customers from future purchases.
Been done at least once that I know of. UT2004 (IIRC) shipped with a DRM scheme that required a CD to be detected in the drive. Within a month, they patched this functionality out. Essentially, they reasoned they'd look good to the customers by doing this, and any good the DRM did in delayed cracked copies from finding their way onto the net was over and done with - even if the DRM worked on the launch day (which is a big if), you can bet in a month it'd be long cracked.
Can someone cite a case of this actually happening?
Aspirin
Kleenex
Zipper
All trademarks, once upon a time. All genericized now. Satisfied? You don't keep a trademark by filling for it and forgetting about it - and thank god for that, since we have enough trouble with patent trolls doing more or less exactly that. Trademarks need to be actively defended, lest they fall into public domain.
Doesn't make what Activision did right especially since, as noted above, the trademarks were in fact approved by Vivendi, and should have been transferable as such without the danger of failure to defend.
(All examples care of 30 seconds on wiki, though I knew what I was looking for).
I can tell you're a gamer because you misspelled "tacit" as "tactic", but other than that your post is dead-on.
Actually, what that should probably tell you is that I depend far too much on the spell checker :-)
Sorry, didn't mean to say you had. You did only leave a one line post, so I didn't assume what your position was.
I did assume that the position of most of the people commenting on this story would be in favor of pirating the game, and when I wrote my post the story was still at around 3-5 comments, yours included, so I attached my reply to yours. Sorry if that got taken as disagreement, as I think you and I have the same view on the matter.
I'll go a step further. I'm not buying this game. I'm not pirating this game. This game is not getting my money, my time, or my tactic approval.
This is something that just bugs me about the attitude some people have about DRM and piracy. People will take the approach of "this DRM sucks, ergo I'm going to pirate it, instead of paying for it". This isn't a boycott, nor is it voting with your wallet. This is taking the approach that two wrongs make a right, and that pirating the game somehow "punishes" the makers of it for the sin of screwing over legitimate users.
Want to send a message? Do what I'm going to do. Don't touch the copybroken crap with a ten foot cable.
Because make no mistake, piracy rates for a game are measurable. If the game is popular, and pirated extensively, then the message sent to the publishers is that the DRM system, however extreme, still isn't "enough". That an even more extreme measure is needed to turn those hypothetical pirated copies into sales figures. And the developer still gets acknowledged as having made a game good enough for you, the pirate, to want it. If they think they can make a paying customer out of a pirate by making the game unpirateable, then they'll got to great lengths to do exactly that.
The only way to break DRM in the long term is to vote with your wallet, and simply ignore the very existence of companies that cross the line the way Ubisoft has. They need to be told, and have that information backed by hard data, that DRM is hurting their sales by making the legit users leave (you know, the people who actually pay for the game?)
Broadly speaking, I'd expect those living in deserts to find other solutions. You don't wear the same clothes in two diametrically opposite climates - why would that change simply because the cloth is high tech?
The obvious, not yet developed choice for people in a hot environment would be cloth with embedded solar collectors. If you want to hedge your bets, bring some of each, and dress for the climate as needed. Of course, all of this takes for granted the affordability of such solutions, but to be blunt I don't see either one becoming the norm in the next 10-20 years anyway.
Hmmm... That is an interesting example. Though I'd quibble a bit with the "more dangerous to people" part, as I seriously doubt an organism that expends energy on a non-survival activity like binding phosphorus could survive in the wild (in the contaminated environment it would at least lack for competition). What you're describing is more likely to simply render the reclamation process useless, by making the end result just as uninhabitable as the beginning.
Mind you, that is still a very undesirable result. Perhaps it could be averted through careful testing - i.e., run a few million generations of the bacteria through their paces in a controlled environment, functionally the same as the environment they're meant to be used in, and see what comes up. Something as drastic as a major change in the water chemistry could be noticed, and corrected, before more widespread use.
Also, as these are derived from an existing strain, it would be useful to check if that strain has ever produced such a result, or if it's even biologically possible. Remember that they normally go for heavy metals.
Ugh, second time I've had to make this point. Reread this line from my post:
Harmless before, was mutated, now dangerous.
Get the progression? So no "every living thing on earth" is not an answer to the exercise, since a vast majority of lifeforms that we now consider dangerous were plenty dangerous a generation ago, and the generation before that.
Also.
Sunlight is radiation you know....
The only ionizing component in sunlight is UV. It may all be "radiation", but the overwhelming majority of what reaches the earth's surface isn't ionizing, and therefor isn't mutation inducing.
UV's capacity to penetrate even thin shielding is pretty limited. Anything living underwater, or underground, or inside another life form will be protected. In the case of large lifeforms that reproduce sexually, the gametes will generally be internal, enough so to render UV's contribution to mutation negligible.
And pretty much everything on the earth's surface has had about 3 billion odd years to evolve to cope with UV.
Sorry, no, those examples aren't what I asked for.
To begin with, animals that reproduce sexually get an overwhelming majority of their genetic diversity from recombining genes from both parents. Random mutation, while present, is a minor factor in their evolution (how minor is a source of continued debate). All of your examples fall into this category.
Further, while they did likely mutate due to radiation at some point (you're quite right that the rate of radiation induced mutation is not zero), they don't meet the criteria of "harmless before, was mutated, now dangerous". Specifically, all of the examples you gave were apex predators, descended from a long line of large predatory animals, all of them likely dangerous.
In the case of the T-Rex, it's entirely possibly the species' ancestors were more dangerous, since Tyrannosaurs are generally thought to have been more opportunists than hunters - evolution made them less deadly, even as they got larger.
Anyway, I get your point that every extant species has at least some traits imparted by radiation induced mutation, and wasn't arguing otherwise. I merely wished to show that radiation isn't a relevant force in making otherwise harmless bacteria into pathogens, despite what Hollywood science has to say.
I have an exercise for you.
Find me a species, mutated by radiation, that subsequently became dangerous to human beings. Anything at all. I don't care what kingdom, genus, family, what-have-you; anything from a virus to an animal. Harmless before, was mutated, now dangerous. Should be easy, with such a broad mandate - there has to be at least one example that will serve to support your point, right?
Nope. While there are plenty of deadly lifeforms on this planet, mutation via exposure to radiation does not make them deadlier. Conversely, overuse of antibiotics (to give one example) has made bacteria deadlier, or at least harder to cure.
"Mutation" is one of those idiot words - it has a very specific meaning in biology, one that has no resemblance to the way non-biologists habitually use it. Most mutations are detrimental to the organisms survival. The only circumstances under which this is not the case is where the mutation occurs in conjunction with selection pressure that favours the mutant. Bacteria, even parasitic ones, do not benefit from being deadly - lethality is not a survival trait for pathogens.
You've been getting your biology from Hollywood.
Actually, outside of the espionage business, I'm not sure I can think of classified military tech that remained secret until obsolescence. Not saying it hasn't happened (we might never know after all), or that they don't do their best to keep stuff secret, but once the grunts get ahold of something, you can bet it'll become common knowledge very quickly.
The stuff that does get kept secret is the stuff that never enters widespread use, or only requires the knowledge of a few highly placed people to deploy. Spy planes and satellites, failed prototypes, software, bioweapons, strategic command and communication systems - those can be hidden. Anything destined for the front lines can't stay secret for long.
Of course, you could have meant the successful prototypes will remain hidden from the public, but you did say "until they're already obsolete", which suggests they've passed the prototype stage, entered production, and fallen behind the curve.
Even if they haven't been shipped with armour attached, this sort of technology is perfect for military armour, as the folks in the US are undoubtedly aware. The primary limiting factor in armour is weight. A soldier can only carry so much, can't afford to be slowed down, and already has many kilos of equipment, none of which are going away. To provide decent support against most military weapons requires fairly heavy armour - a kevlar vest isn't going to cut it here. Plus, you've got to balance weight with coverage; a full body suit is far more effective than a vest, yet weights at least twice as much.
If a given soldier can march with another 80-odd kilos, most of it reinforced ballistic fabric overlaid by hardened strike plates, his survivability goes through the roof. Put a powered exoskeleton underneath, and put the armor overtop, and what you've got is the best compromise between standard infantry and a light armoured vehicle.
The major limiting factor these days isn't the exoskeleton itself, which has been demonstrated to work. The biggest hurdle now is a power source, preferably an efficient or else easily refueled one. Can't have your grunts in the field constantly needing to find a wall socket or a gas station.
(Disclaimer: I am not the person you asked, but the question is interesting to me.)
No tech he mentioned was directly applicable to chemical rocket motors, though all are highly, highly relevant to spaceflight, enough so that I think his point is valid.
But just to answer the question you actually asked, namely how those technologies might be useful for propulsion:
1. Advanced materials engineering is applicable to making a better rocket motor, doubly so if it leads to materials that weigh less and/or can withstand higher temperatures. These same materials are useful in too many other applications to count, but he mentioned the aeronautics industry as a field that requires both properties.
2. Magnetic monopoles, if they exist (which is dubious, but another discussion), and if they could be synthesized in quantity (even less likely) would be applicable to the construction of ion drives, or any other propulsion system that uses magnetic fields.
3. Fusion reactors could be applicable to spacecraft, either as a heat source for a reaction mass (water, for instance), or as a direct drive flame. The latter is much harder to achieve than the former, given that all our research at the moment centers on the idea of a fusion power generator, which can be useful as a heat source, but probably can't be adapted into an engine as such. Either could potentially be a propulsion breakthrough, and would meet the criteria that fission drives never did - namely acceptability to the general public.
I'd argue that R&D in various other fields could benefit spaceflight in the long term, even if we were to cease launching rockets altogether. Where I'd quibble with the GP is that expertise left unused is often lost. One of the reason NASA is struggling today is that they haven't built a new manned spacecraft in decades, and in a way they've forgotten how. You can't just go back and look at old blueprints, you need the people who made those blueprints to explain to the young'uns why they did it the way they did.
So I'd be in favour of keeping a manned space program going, if for no other reason to keep the knowledge needed alive for the next span of human history. I don't expect anything great will result from it within the next century, though perhaps we'll do better in the longer term.
It is easy for us on Slashdot to see how stupid this is. But you are talking about a country where a large portion of the population prides themselves in being ignorant and rejecting good science for 'alternative theories'.
I think you should use "or", meaning the logic XOR. Those are not the same things.
I would also like to add that some of our "good science" were an "alternative theory" in the past.
I read 'alternative theories' (his quotes) to mean pseudoscience.
In which case, no, very little of our 'good science' ever was. I could cherry pick one or two examples that support your point (plate tectonics is the biggie), but the vast, vast majority of the hard sciences are additive, not alternative. Scientific theories from a hundred years ago or more are still accepted; we've merely added newer, deeper theories that expand them. See the relationship between classical physics and quantum mechanics for a good example of this - basic principals like thermodynamics and the laws of motion are theories that date back to the dawn of modern science, yet are still applicable today.
You never, ever get the brand spanking new theory that invalidates the old. Not in any field of established science (you do get that happening quite a bit in emergent fields, which EM physics is most assuredly not). The brand spanking new theory is generally just the next layer of regression - the next level down from the existing theory. "Okay we understand matter is made of atoms, now what are they made of?" - that sort of thinking.
Pseudoscientific theories have died out time and again, and new ones take their place. From perpetual motion to Lamarckism, fabrications unsupported by reality have been cast aside, and forgotten by most (people really ought to pay more attention to history, often as it gets repeated). The point is; the 'alternative science' of today does not become the 'good science' of tomorrow.
Apparently I can't just walk into any ol' country club. I have to show my membership card. I get my membership card by applying. Part of the application process is showing some form of ID, another part is laying down a bunch of moneys, being in good standing, blabla.
How come that is legal, then?
As a result - and I know the answer is 'no', but I'm curious as to -why- it is 'no' - couldn't any ol' bar simply offer 'guest membership' by means of, say, a stamp / wrist band, where the 'membership process' includes showing some form of ID, costs the patron, say, $2 (which goes toward a complimentary membership drink), and the membership duration lasting the entirety of the patron's stay?
Part of the answer is, we give country clubs far less grief than they're due, because many of their members are influential. And they still catch hell when they enforce membership rules that are very obviously racist, though that happens less often than you might think.
However, in this specific case, you're comparing apples and oranges - the situation in BC is not akin to a country club barring non-members. Once the law gets involved in a situation like this (which it did, since they were tying the scans to police databases), the system becomes subject to legal oversight. Cops, legislators and the like are bound by higher laws concerning basic rights for the people, which were very obviously being violated here.
Well, to play devils advocate for a minute, if the options are 1) no system, 40% casualties or 2) potentially dangerous system, 5% casualties, then I'd call option 2 an improvement, at least from a conservation standpoint. From an animal rights POV... not so great.
Anyway, a bat repellent speaker doesn't absolutely have to be a brute force approach. What about broadcasting their own sonar waves back at them, such that they get the mistaken impression there's a solid object in their path, and avoid it accordingly?
Not nearly as much as one equipped with napalm. I only wish I was joking...
Nor is either compound produced by burning hydrogen. For that matter, you get no CO, nor CO2 from burning aluminum or magnesium powder, or any number of other flammable materials.
I think you meant "carbon monoxide is a product of any form of incomplete carbon combustion" in your original post. Not all combustion needs to involve carbon.