Okay, I was off by a bit, though only by around 1 order of magnitude. Mea culpa, I shouldn't have trusted my memory.
Now in the Luna surface He3 is only at.01ppm
Didn't know the concentration of He-3 was so low, though if that's an average based on the entire lunar surface, it might vary enough by region to allow for higher concentrations at a suitable mining site.
OTOH, it's not like its got any geological reason to be concentrated the way terrestrial ores do (noble gas + deposited by non geological processes), so that may be wishful thinking on my part.
Also the ash from DD is He3
Actually, IIRC it can either be He-3 or Tritium, though in the latter case it would likely burn immediately, meaning the end waste products of a D-D fuel cycle would be a mix of He-3 and He-4. Again, I'm going from memory here, but a quick search corroborates what I recalled.
Anyway, the point of a He3-D fuel cycle is that it's aneutronic, whereas a pure Deuterium cycle isn't. Meaning there's little advantage over a basic D-T reactor, save for the fact you don't need to breed the Tritium.
Not really applicable to the discussion, unfortunately.
The amount of He-3 needed to fuel a hypothetical fusion power plant is small. Like "a handheld tank per year" small - that's the kind of energy density we're talking about here.
A lunar mining operation to get the fuel and bring it back to earth would cost a fortune in terms of dollars to grams. Uncut cocaine would be cheaper. The only reason mining the moon for He-3 makes sense is because the quantities needed are small enough that the fuel cost in dollars per watt is pretty reasonable. But you would not be using lunar helium as a cryogenic liquid or lifting gas, period.
...because it's at least 20 years until the mining operation will be possible to start.
Actually, that's pretty pessimistic.
The last time we went to the moon, it took around twelve years of R&D, using tech that's positively antiquated by modern standards, and with no precedent whatsoever to show that it was even possible to send a person to the moon and bring them back alive.
If we were to repeat that process now, we'd have the advantage of automation, precedent and over half a century of R&D to start with. And since we're talking about a mining operation, we could remove the human factor altogether, and rely on teleoperated machines (granted there's that three second delay to contend with, but there are workarounds). The total amount of He-3 fuel needed to make the trip worthwhile is small, and an unmanned return vehicle could use methods not suitable to human spaceflight.
Not that I wouldn't like to see more work on manned spaceflight mind you, but I think you're overestimating the amount of infrastructure needed for this kind of work.
You know, this actually is somewhat promising news. It means that, if the Tories gauged it right, this is enough of an issue for the voting public to keep it from becoming law. Either they're worried about voters getting pissed off at new copyright restrictions, or they realize that bowing to international pressure from the US makes them look weak, which their rivals won't hesitate to exploit.
Either way, as long as a minority government remains in place, it means there's less chance of a pseudo-DMCA ever becoming law.
We may recall things differently, but when I was growing up and CDs were the "new" thing, it was assumed only that they'd substantially outlast cassette tapes (which degraded after a few years of regular use), not that they'd last a hundred years. Perhaps the "hundred years" claim was marketing hyperbole and the outlasting cassettes was the more reasonable widely accepted version.
In that regard they've done just fine; a CD that hasn't been scratched or damaged is still readable after at least a couple decades. CD-Rs and the like are a different story; I printed disks back when having a CD-R drive was atypical that are no longer readable today.
Go click on "dr" bobs user page. The name and high UID alone should be a clue. Yes, he is a troll, and yes, he is specifically posting chiro/alt-med comments that he knows will get a reaction. Further to this, the entire thread above this post should serve as proof that it's working.
Honestly, it never ceases to amaze me the number of otherwise intelligent people who will fall for a troll posting deliberate flamebait. At least this one is more subtle than most.
Actually, that would make good scifi, at least of the soft-ish variety. Possibility: a story in which an observation station in the outer solar system picks up the atomic bomb blasts in '45 and alerts someone to come investigate, with a two-year lag in arrival explained by the alien spacecraft taking that long to get here (it'd have to be FTL, two light years is too close for anything else).
It even makes sense if the arriving scout ship aims for the American southwest and not Japan; they'd be going for the Trinity site first.
The most logical ways I've seen of resolving this are:
1) There are no aliens, at least not of the tool using, technological, civilized, space-faring variety.
2) There were aliens; intelligence tends to self-destruct.
Or, my personal favourite:
3) There are aliens, but the galaxy is huge, and they stick to their own corner of it.
This third one makes sense if you assume that there is no "silver bullet" approach to interstellar spaceflight, and that it really would take the wealth of several planets to send a large interstellar craft at a significant fraction of lightspeed. In this interpretation, we can't "see" intelligent life, because it isn't proximate to our star system, and hasn't expanded beyond their own.
If the nearest civilization is five hundred lightyears distant and doesn't leave their solar system, then they could easily have existed there for the last X megayears undisturbed.
A Dyson Sphere would block visible light, but radiate in the infrared with just as much energy as the star it encloses. What you'd see from a distance is a stellar object too cold and too large to be a star, but still highly visible.
But this assumes that anyone out there is crazy enough to build one of those things in the first place.
If we wanted to announce ourselves, we don't need a nuke. A radio beam would suffice. If we wanted more of a "flare", that could be seen by everyone, a powerful, repeating omnidirectional pulse in a specific wavelength would attract more attention than a nuke, if only because it leaves less room for doubt.
Actually, it'd have to be pretty dire waste to make sending it into space the best option, unless the civilization in question has ridiculously low launch costs or is already living and producing waste in space (both possible, mind you). I could see disposal of the worst kind of unreprocessable nuclear waste in this manner, but just about nothing else.
If you did have waste that was that bad, I doubt you'd want to keep it in orbit. Spending a little extra delta-v to boost it into the nearest gravity well (even just a moon) would be worthwhile.
Presupposing the energy from an atomic detonation is even detectable across interstellar distances, we'd still need to be extraordinarily lucky in terms of timing.
On Earth, the only above-ground nuclear detonations, ever, occurred in the twentieth century, specifically 1945-1980 or thereabouts. I'm not including underground tests, as they aren't as easy to spot from a distance (they're easy to detect here on earth via seismograph, but that doesn't apply to the discussion) . If something out there were looking at us with a telescope, they'd need to be tuning in sometime in that three and a half decade time period, or else they'd miss the fireworks. If they were looking at light that left before 1945, they'd see nothing; if they tuned in their telescopes now and received light that left in 1985 they'd see nothing.
For nuclear detonation to work as a sign of intelligence, one of three things must be the case. The intelligent life in question is engaged in above-ground nuclear testing. Which we abandoned with good reason, and I can't imagine they'd be any different, so the window of opportunity is brief. Or the intelligent life is using nuclear explosions peacefully, as in an Orion engine or asteroid mining. In which case they're probably doing plenty of other things we could just as easily spot. Or the intelligent life is not so intelligently blowing themselves up in nuclear warfare.
Actually, calling them "elite Randian/Libertarian survivors" is even wronger than all that. They were practising collectivism in the face of starvation, what with the whole "take all the essential resources and ration them out according to need". At one point in the book these "Randian/Libertarians" that the GP was talking about exile a man for hoarding gasoline, which is so far removed from the kind of thing you'd see in a Rand novel that it's practically a diametric opposite.
Parent is right, GP is badly, badly wrong; Lucifer's Hammer was not a Randian screed.
"Nuclear power" in the vernacular sense means "power generating fission reactors". Mostly because those are the only tech presently used to harness nuclear reactions for electricity. Informally, virtually every member of the public hears "nuclear" and understands it to mean "fission", assuming they know what fission is.
I am aware that a hypothetical fusion power plant would "nuclear" in the sense of the word used by physicists, however I do not generally refer to them as "nuclear power plants" to avoid confusion. When precision in language gets in the way of clarity, clarity should always come first; being correctly understood matters more than being technically correct when dealing with non-experts.
I remember reading early reports in the immediate aftermath of the quake that suggested it was a global record breaker. Later, these were retracted or forgotten once hard data started circulating (it's actually somewhere on the order of the fifth largest on record).
It's entirely possible that either A) the passage the GP quoted was written before the facts become known or B) Pournelle was going by memory and wasn't up to date on where this quake actually ranked.
I'm not even pro-nuclear (I'd call it the lesser of two evils), and even I take exception to the assumption that the realists about Fukushima (or Chernobyl for that matter) must be nuclear industry shills.
There is a general trend of alarmist hysteria surrounding nuclear power, and slashdot is one of the few places I read where there are people basically telling the alarmists to stow it. A few of these people shouting down the anti-nuclear sentiment are strongly biased in favour of nuclear power, but most are simply more informed about the risks involved than the general public. Dismissing the anti-alarmist commentators as "nuclear industry PR folks" is essentially throwing reason out the window in favour of fear.
(Just to preempt the inevitable accusation that I am "one of them", my own view is that nuclear power plants should be built in lieu of coal power plants. See the "lesser of two evils" sentiment above. I'm all in favour of solar homes and where local conditions permit I support hydro, geothermal or other means of power collection. In the long run I think fusion offers our best hope. Nuclear power is a stopgap.)
Obvious question though: Does the pirate version include the game's DLC?
TFA notes the problem was with savegames containing DLC content. Put another was, legitimate customers who own "DA:O vanilla" were fine, legit customers who owned "DA:O deluxe" were screwed.
Of course this highlights the real problem. Dragon Age is a single player game. It doesn't need an online component, except for patches and achievements, neither of which should involve any risk of savegame lockout when the servers crash. The sole reason for having severs that can render savegames unloadable in the first place was copy protection for the DLC (not copy protection for the basic campaign), and a fundamental rule all game developers should follow is: Don't let anti-piracy measures get in the way of playing or enjoying the game. Any anti-piracy measure that can fail in this manner should not be included in the first place.
Also, frankly, they'd have never included DLC savegame lockout as a feature if EA hadn't made it company policy to focus on DLC as their financial holy grail. If they wanted to, they could easily make single player DLC work on a machine that isn't connected to the internet. Do they really need additional copy protection for additional content? Are there really paying customers out there who'll buy the game for $40 and pirate the DLC to save less than $5?
You allege that this weapon will only be used to kill "other soldiers" not civilians.
Nowhere do I allege that. I instead allege that the weapon's nature is defensive, rather than offensive, and that a weapon designed to defend a ship from armed attack is a poor choice for going on the offensive with. I think I specifically said it was a "poor choice" for committing war crimes with, not that it was an impossible choice.
Perhaps an example will help. If a destroyer has cruise missiles, SAMs, and this new laser, and is tasked with destroying a building, it will use cruise missiles. And perhaps innocents will die in the explosion. Tasked with shooting down a high flying aircraft it will use SAMs. And perhaps they'll mistake a jetliner for a bomber, and innocents will die. The destroyer is quite capable of collateral damage.
Conversely, if tasked with defending itself from short range fast moving threats (small armed boats are TFA's example, but let's assume missiles would be another possibility), it will use the laser. The ship is just as capable of killing civilians (which is the action here you're concerned about) without the laser as it is with, and the laser does not aid it in this task.
You brought up the example of the destruction of flight 655 but that was carried out by missile; what we're talking about here is more akin to a CWIS. You cannot find an example of a CWIS system being used offensively, because, frankly, they'd be a terrible choice for the job. It's not a moral thing, it's a practical one.
(None of this has anything to do with the question of whether the laser is worth spending this much money on. I think it's an over-engineered solution, but that's just my opinion. See my previous post where I called the project "pork".)
Beyond that, I also pointed out that this is a Navy project, and the Navy is an inherently aggressive structure
"Inherently aggressive"? What does that even mean?
If you mean "armed", then I fail to see what the big deal is. They are a branch of the armed forces.
Are you alleging their only role is offence? Because I already raised the defence of Britain in WWII as a counterpoint to that - a case where the use of naval force was both necessary and defensive.
You seem to be having trouble understanding me
I take that to be a thinly veiled insult, and, frankly, rude. I have no trouble understanding you, I just don't agree with you.
But for the price, it isnt useful for anything else either. Unless you consider enriching "defense" contractors useful of course.
That's another discussion, and one better left elsewhere in the thread. I (kinda) agree with you in that I think it's a bit, uh, "porky" not unlike many other military R&D projects.
However it was the sort of accident that could only happen because we poured enormous amounts of resources into building a massive Navy which we certainly didnt need for defense, and then sent it halfway around the globe to bully other nations.
Which is neither here nor there in respect to my argument.
GP alleges that the tech is bad because it will be used to kill people (with a sarcastic "killing people is okay as long as cool tech is involved" remark).
I responded that, as the tech will be used to defend soldiers from other soldiers, in a kill or be killed scenario, this is hardly a bad thing; the dead are not unwitting civilians who had the bad fortune to call a warzone home. This was my argument, clearly spelled out.
It is not therefor a refutation on your part to discuss the evils of military overspending or American imperialism. You're not addressing the point being raised, you're going off on your own someplace.
Also, you badly need to reexamine the role of British naval supremacy in the second world war. The channel is neither wide enough, nor difficult enough, to pose much of a barrier to landing troops, and fixed coastal fortifications are not adequate in and of themselves. Having a powerful navy made damn sure the war stayed on the continent or in the air. Granted, times have changed, but not nearly enough to write off the defensive value of naval forces.
People have been using "bus load of nuns" as a shorthand for "group of innocent people" since long before 1980. Nuns rank right alongside orphans as obvious innocents.
So no, I was not referencing "that actual nun incident". This is the first I've run into that particular case, though I might well have seen it before and simply forgotten it.
I'm not even going to try and untangle the run on sentence at the end of your post. Other than to remark that you clearly need to check the soles of your shoes for soapboxes.
The 299 people that were on Iran Air 655 might disagree with you on that.
"Isn't very useful for carrying out war crimes" I said. Not "cannot be used".
And anyway, that wasn't either a deliberate act of murder, or an malfunction of the weapon system; that was a combination of bad judgment and misidentification. It wouldn't have made any difference what weapon system the ship had. Any weapon can kill the wrong people if it's aimed the wrong way.
And a navy is absolutely useful for defence, go ask the Brits. Force projection beyond coastal waters is a key aspect of a sound defensive strategy.
Also, lasers don't bounce back at the attacker they way they do in fiction. A mirror is essentially armour against lasers, but unless you can aim the beam back in the time it takes for the mirror to melt, it isn't a weapon reflector.
And so what if the target can be armoured against laser fire? It can also be armoured against conventional weapons, and yet I don't see battleships making a comeback anytime soon. Armour, like all design decisions, is about trade offs, often weighed against cost and mobility.
Eh, it's the bloody navy. Who exactly are they going to vaporize?
You can complain about cool technology "killing people" in the context of, say, dropping bombs on cities. In that case you've got a clear argument that the weapon in question can and will be used in a way that will leave innocent civilians dead, since it's not like shrapnel knows the difference between the barracks and the orphanage. However, a weapon useful only against military targets, for instance a laser to slag warships, missiles and aircraft, isn't very useful for carrying out war crimes, and isn't likely to mistake a bus-full of nuns for an enemy aircraft carrier.
Bottom line, if the people being killed are hostile armed forces in a time of war, not killing them gives them the opportunity to kill you instead.
Excellent point. You really do need confirmation of positive results, since there are plenty of ways a positive result can be false.
It is possible for a positive result to be resoundingly definitive, such as the "lead balloon" example. In that case, the proof was irrefutable; there floats a balloon made of lead. Not all positive results are that cut and dried.
Eh, I'd include "someone who does scientific research" under "someone who follows the scientific method". You can't call it "scientific" research if you aren't following the scientific method after all. So I'd agree with you, but point out that my criteria implicitly included yours.
Slashdot Mirror
306 kg of He3 per year
Okay, I was off by a bit, though only by around 1 order of magnitude. Mea culpa, I shouldn't have trusted my memory.
Now in the Luna surface He3 is only at .01ppm
Didn't know the concentration of He-3 was so low, though if that's an average based on the entire lunar surface, it might vary enough by region to allow for higher concentrations at a suitable mining site.
OTOH, it's not like its got any geological reason to be concentrated the way terrestrial ores do (noble gas + deposited by non geological processes), so that may be wishful thinking on my part.
Also the ash from DD is He3
Actually, IIRC it can either be He-3 or Tritium, though in the latter case it would likely burn immediately, meaning the end waste products of a D-D fuel cycle would be a mix of He-3 and He-4. Again, I'm going from memory here, but a quick search corroborates what I recalled.
Anyway, the point of a He3-D fuel cycle is that it's aneutronic, whereas a pure Deuterium cycle isn't. Meaning there's little advantage over a basic D-T reactor, save for the fact you don't need to breed the Tritium.
Not really applicable to the discussion, unfortunately.
The amount of He-3 needed to fuel a hypothetical fusion power plant is small. Like "a handheld tank per year" small - that's the kind of energy density we're talking about here.
A lunar mining operation to get the fuel and bring it back to earth would cost a fortune in terms of dollars to grams. Uncut cocaine would be cheaper. The only reason mining the moon for He-3 makes sense is because the quantities needed are small enough that the fuel cost in dollars per watt is pretty reasonable. But you would not be using lunar helium as a cryogenic liquid or lifting gas, period.
...because it's at least 20 years until the mining operation will be possible to start.
Actually, that's pretty pessimistic.
The last time we went to the moon, it took around twelve years of R&D, using tech that's positively antiquated by modern standards, and with no precedent whatsoever to show that it was even possible to send a person to the moon and bring them back alive.
If we were to repeat that process now, we'd have the advantage of automation, precedent and over half a century of R&D to start with. And since we're talking about a mining operation, we could remove the human factor altogether, and rely on teleoperated machines (granted there's that three second delay to contend with, but there are workarounds). The total amount of He-3 fuel needed to make the trip worthwhile is small, and an unmanned return vehicle could use methods not suitable to human spaceflight.
Not that I wouldn't like to see more work on manned spaceflight mind you, but I think you're overestimating the amount of infrastructure needed for this kind of work.
You know, this actually is somewhat promising news. It means that, if the Tories gauged it right, this is enough of an issue for the voting public to keep it from becoming law. Either they're worried about voters getting pissed off at new copyright restrictions, or they realize that bowing to international pressure from the US makes them look weak, which their rivals won't hesitate to exploit.
Either way, as long as a minority government remains in place, it means there's less chance of a pseudo-DMCA ever becoming law.
We may recall things differently, but when I was growing up and CDs were the "new" thing, it was assumed only that they'd substantially outlast cassette tapes (which degraded after a few years of regular use), not that they'd last a hundred years. Perhaps the "hundred years" claim was marketing hyperbole and the outlasting cassettes was the more reasonable widely accepted version.
In that regard they've done just fine; a CD that hasn't been scratched or damaged is still readable after at least a couple decades. CD-Rs and the like are a different story; I printed disks back when having a CD-R drive was atypical that are no longer readable today.
Note to anyone who thinks spun is joking:
Go click on "dr" bobs user page. The name and high UID alone should be a clue. Yes, he is a troll, and yes, he is specifically posting chiro/alt-med comments that he knows will get a reaction. Further to this, the entire thread above this post should serve as proof that it's working.
Honestly, it never ceases to amaze me the number of otherwise intelligent people who will fall for a troll posting deliberate flamebait. At least this one is more subtle than most.
Actually, that would make good scifi, at least of the soft-ish variety. Possibility: a story in which an observation station in the outer solar system picks up the atomic bomb blasts in '45 and alerts someone to come investigate, with a two-year lag in arrival explained by the alien spacecraft taking that long to get here (it'd have to be FTL, two light years is too close for anything else).
It even makes sense if the arriving scout ship aims for the American southwest and not Japan; they'd be going for the Trinity site first.
The most logical ways I've seen of resolving this are:
1) There are no aliens, at least not of the tool using, technological, civilized, space-faring variety.
2) There were aliens; intelligence tends to self-destruct.
Or, my personal favourite:
3) There are aliens, but the galaxy is huge, and they stick to their own corner of it.
This third one makes sense if you assume that there is no "silver bullet" approach to interstellar spaceflight, and that it really would take the wealth of several planets to send a large interstellar craft at a significant fraction of lightspeed. In this interpretation, we can't "see" intelligent life, because it isn't proximate to our star system, and hasn't expanded beyond their own.
If the nearest civilization is five hundred lightyears distant and doesn't leave their solar system, then they could easily have existed there for the last X megayears undisturbed.
A Dyson Sphere would block visible light, but radiate in the infrared with just as much energy as the star it encloses. What you'd see from a distance is a stellar object too cold and too large to be a star, but still highly visible.
But this assumes that anyone out there is crazy enough to build one of those things in the first place.
If we wanted to announce ourselves, we don't need a nuke. A radio beam would suffice. If we wanted more of a "flare", that could be seen by everyone, a powerful, repeating omnidirectional pulse in a specific wavelength would attract more attention than a nuke, if only because it leaves less room for doubt.
Actually, it'd have to be pretty dire waste to make sending it into space the best option, unless the civilization in question has ridiculously low launch costs or is already living and producing waste in space (both possible, mind you). I could see disposal of the worst kind of unreprocessable nuclear waste in this manner, but just about nothing else.
If you did have waste that was that bad, I doubt you'd want to keep it in orbit. Spending a little extra delta-v to boost it into the nearest gravity well (even just a moon) would be worthwhile.
Presupposing the energy from an atomic detonation is even detectable across interstellar distances, we'd still need to be extraordinarily lucky in terms of timing.
On Earth, the only above-ground nuclear detonations, ever, occurred in the twentieth century, specifically 1945-1980 or thereabouts. I'm not including underground tests, as they aren't as easy to spot from a distance (they're easy to detect here on earth via seismograph, but that doesn't apply to the discussion) . If something out there were looking at us with a telescope, they'd need to be tuning in sometime in that three and a half decade time period, or else they'd miss the fireworks. If they were looking at light that left before 1945, they'd see nothing; if they tuned in their telescopes now and received light that left in 1985 they'd see nothing.
For nuclear detonation to work as a sign of intelligence, one of three things must be the case. The intelligent life in question is engaged in above-ground nuclear testing. Which we abandoned with good reason, and I can't imagine they'd be any different, so the window of opportunity is brief. Or the intelligent life is using nuclear explosions peacefully, as in an Orion engine or asteroid mining. In which case they're probably doing plenty of other things we could just as easily spot. Or the intelligent life is not so intelligently blowing themselves up in nuclear warfare.
Actually, calling them "elite Randian/Libertarian survivors" is even wronger than all that. They were practising collectivism in the face of starvation, what with the whole "take all the essential resources and ration them out according to need". At one point in the book these "Randian/Libertarians" that the GP was talking about exile a man for hoarding gasoline, which is so far removed from the kind of thing you'd see in a Rand novel that it's practically a diametric opposite.
Parent is right, GP is badly, badly wrong; Lucifer's Hammer was not a Randian screed.
"Nuclear power" in the vernacular sense means "power generating fission reactors". Mostly because those are the only tech presently used to harness nuclear reactions for electricity. Informally, virtually every member of the public hears "nuclear" and understands it to mean "fission", assuming they know what fission is.
I am aware that a hypothetical fusion power plant would "nuclear" in the sense of the word used by physicists, however I do not generally refer to them as "nuclear power plants" to avoid confusion. When precision in language gets in the way of clarity, clarity should always come first; being correctly understood matters more than being technically correct when dealing with non-experts.
I remember reading early reports in the immediate aftermath of the quake that suggested it was a global record breaker. Later, these were retracted or forgotten once hard data started circulating (it's actually somewhere on the order of the fifth largest on record).
It's entirely possible that either A) the passage the GP quoted was written before the facts become known or B) Pournelle was going by memory and wasn't up to date on where this quake actually ranked.
I'm not even pro-nuclear (I'd call it the lesser of two evils), and even I take exception to the assumption that the realists about Fukushima (or Chernobyl for that matter) must be nuclear industry shills.
There is a general trend of alarmist hysteria surrounding nuclear power, and slashdot is one of the few places I read where there are people basically telling the alarmists to stow it. A few of these people shouting down the anti-nuclear sentiment are strongly biased in favour of nuclear power, but most are simply more informed about the risks involved than the general public. Dismissing the anti-alarmist commentators as "nuclear industry PR folks" is essentially throwing reason out the window in favour of fear.
(Just to preempt the inevitable accusation that I am "one of them", my own view is that nuclear power plants should be built in lieu of coal power plants. See the "lesser of two evils" sentiment above. I'm all in favour of solar homes and where local conditions permit I support hydro, geothermal or other means of power collection. In the long run I think fusion offers our best hope. Nuclear power is a stopgap.)
Obvious question though: Does the pirate version include the game's DLC?
TFA notes the problem was with savegames containing DLC content. Put another was, legitimate customers who own "DA:O vanilla" were fine, legit customers who owned "DA:O deluxe" were screwed.
Of course this highlights the real problem. Dragon Age is a single player game. It doesn't need an online component, except for patches and achievements, neither of which should involve any risk of savegame lockout when the servers crash. The sole reason for having severs that can render savegames unloadable in the first place was copy protection for the DLC (not copy protection for the basic campaign), and a fundamental rule all game developers should follow is: Don't let anti-piracy measures get in the way of playing or enjoying the game. Any anti-piracy measure that can fail in this manner should not be included in the first place.
Also, frankly, they'd have never included DLC savegame lockout as a feature if EA hadn't made it company policy to focus on DLC as their financial holy grail. If they wanted to, they could easily make single player DLC work on a machine that isn't connected to the internet. Do they really need additional copy protection for additional content? Are there really paying customers out there who'll buy the game for $40 and pirate the DLC to save less than $5?
You allege that this weapon will only be used to kill "other soldiers" not civilians.
Nowhere do I allege that. I instead allege that the weapon's nature is defensive, rather than offensive, and that a weapon designed to defend a ship from armed attack is a poor choice for going on the offensive with. I think I specifically said it was a "poor choice" for committing war crimes with, not that it was an impossible choice.
Perhaps an example will help. If a destroyer has cruise missiles, SAMs, and this new laser, and is tasked with destroying a building, it will use cruise missiles. And perhaps innocents will die in the explosion. Tasked with shooting down a high flying aircraft it will use SAMs. And perhaps they'll mistake a jetliner for a bomber, and innocents will die. The destroyer is quite capable of collateral damage.
Conversely, if tasked with defending itself from short range fast moving threats (small armed boats are TFA's example, but let's assume missiles would be another possibility), it will use the laser. The ship is just as capable of killing civilians (which is the action here you're concerned about) without the laser as it is with, and the laser does not aid it in this task.
You brought up the example of the destruction of flight 655 but that was carried out by missile; what we're talking about here is more akin to a CWIS. You cannot find an example of a CWIS system being used offensively, because, frankly, they'd be a terrible choice for the job. It's not a moral thing, it's a practical one.
(None of this has anything to do with the question of whether the laser is worth spending this much money on. I think it's an over-engineered solution, but that's just my opinion. See my previous post where I called the project "pork".)
Beyond that, I also pointed out that this is a Navy project, and the Navy is an inherently aggressive structure
"Inherently aggressive"? What does that even mean?
If you mean "armed", then I fail to see what the big deal is. They are a branch of the armed forces.
Are you alleging their only role is offence? Because I already raised the defence of Britain in WWII as a counterpoint to that - a case where the use of naval force was both necessary and defensive.
You seem to be having trouble understanding me
I take that to be a thinly veiled insult, and, frankly, rude. I have no trouble understanding you, I just don't agree with you.
But for the price, it isnt useful for anything else either. Unless you consider enriching "defense" contractors useful of course.
That's another discussion, and one better left elsewhere in the thread. I (kinda) agree with you in that I think it's a bit, uh, "porky" not unlike many other military R&D projects.
However it was the sort of accident that could only happen because we poured enormous amounts of resources into building a massive Navy which we certainly didnt need for defense, and then sent it halfway around the globe to bully other nations.
Which is neither here nor there in respect to my argument.
GP alleges that the tech is bad because it will be used to kill people (with a sarcastic "killing people is okay as long as cool tech is involved" remark).
I responded that, as the tech will be used to defend soldiers from other soldiers, in a kill or be killed scenario, this is hardly a bad thing; the dead are not unwitting civilians who had the bad fortune to call a warzone home. This was my argument, clearly spelled out.
It is not therefor a refutation on your part to discuss the evils of military overspending or American imperialism. You're not addressing the point being raised, you're going off on your own someplace.
Also, you badly need to reexamine the role of British naval supremacy in the second world war. The channel is neither wide enough, nor difficult enough, to pose much of a barrier to landing troops, and fixed coastal fortifications are not adequate in and of themselves. Having a powerful navy made damn sure the war stayed on the continent or in the air. Granted, times have changed, but not nearly enough to write off the defensive value of naval forces.
People have been using "bus load of nuns" as a shorthand for "group of innocent people" since long before 1980. Nuns rank right alongside orphans as obvious innocents.
So no, I was not referencing "that actual nun incident". This is the first I've run into that particular case, though I might well have seen it before and simply forgotten it.
I'm not even going to try and untangle the run on sentence at the end of your post. Other than to remark that you clearly need to check the soles of your shoes for soapboxes.
The 299 people that were on Iran Air 655 might disagree with you on that.
"Isn't very useful for carrying out war crimes" I said. Not "cannot be used".
And anyway, that wasn't either a deliberate act of murder, or an malfunction of the weapon system; that was a combination of bad judgment and misidentification. It wouldn't have made any difference what weapon system the ship had. Any weapon can kill the wrong people if it's aimed the wrong way.
And a navy is absolutely useful for defence, go ask the Brits. Force projection beyond coastal waters is a key aspect of a sound defensive strategy.
Also, lasers don't bounce back at the attacker they way they do in fiction. A mirror is essentially armour against lasers, but unless you can aim the beam back in the time it takes for the mirror to melt, it isn't a weapon reflector.
And so what if the target can be armoured against laser fire? It can also be armoured against conventional weapons, and yet I don't see battleships making a comeback anytime soon. Armour, like all design decisions, is about trade offs, often weighed against cost and mobility.
Eh, it's the bloody navy. Who exactly are they going to vaporize?
You can complain about cool technology "killing people" in the context of, say, dropping bombs on cities. In that case you've got a clear argument that the weapon in question can and will be used in a way that will leave innocent civilians dead, since it's not like shrapnel knows the difference between the barracks and the orphanage. However, a weapon useful only against military targets, for instance a laser to slag warships, missiles and aircraft, isn't very useful for carrying out war crimes, and isn't likely to mistake a bus-full of nuns for an enemy aircraft carrier.
Bottom line, if the people being killed are hostile armed forces in a time of war, not killing them gives them the opportunity to kill you instead.
Excellent point. You really do need confirmation of positive results, since there are plenty of ways a positive result can be false.
It is possible for a positive result to be resoundingly definitive, such as the "lead balloon" example. In that case, the proof was irrefutable; there floats a balloon made of lead. Not all positive results are that cut and dried.
Eh, I'd include "someone who does scientific research" under "someone who follows the scientific method". You can't call it "scientific" research if you aren't following the scientific method after all. So I'd agree with you, but point out that my criteria implicitly included yours.