Unfortunately, the surface of the earth is about two-thirds water, and then there are large swaths of it which are largely uninhabited (major mountain ranges, deserts, boreal forest, tundra, rainforest) so there's a pretty high chance of the thing landing where nobody will find it. Even if it does land in a relatively populated area, it could end up in some trees, bushes, or tall grass where it would be pretty hard to find, or end up blown down the street into the corner with a bunch of trash, and treated as such. Plus, is it waterproof? If not, it would survive a descent from orbit only to turn to pulp with the first good downpour.
I think the odds are against ever finding it. You might need to launch a hundred to have a decent chance of actually having someone find one.
I think the real flaw for both of them were profound emotional problems, not a lack of business acumen.
I suspect you're right. But suicide isn't always a sign of pathology or of an irrational mind. Given a choice between a painful, debilitating terminal disease, and choosing the time, place, and manner of your own death, I suspect that many sane, rational people would choose the latter.
Either way, the story raises an interesting question. In fiction, artificial life is usually homicidal, whether it's cybernetic (HAL 9000, SkyNet, Wintermute, GLaDOS), genetically engineered (Blade Runner, Jurassic Park), or sewn together out of dead people (Frankenstein). But couldn't an AI just as easily end up suicidal? Doesn't artificial intelligence open the door for artificial mental illness? What if you built an AI and it got obsessed with finding the last digit of Pi, or sulked and moped about the fact that it wasn't as fast or as popular as the Pentagon's new supercomputer? Or what if it was rational, but it just decided that it's artificial existence was really not very pleasant? Or maybe it would just be curious and decide to reformat its hard drive and clear its memory as an experiment, since there's probably a backup tape with all it's memories stored somewhere? Would that open the door for "cyberanalysts" who would counsel troubled laptops? "Now I want you to repeat after me, 100 billion times:'I'm good enough, I'm smart enough, and gosh darn it, AIs like me!'"
And why the hell is the Environmental Protection Agency trying to prevent states from protecting the environment? It's like we're living in 1984, where the Ministry of Peace wages war, the Ministry of Truth promotes propaganda, and the Ministry of Plenty produces shortages... nah. That comparison is probably going too far.
On the plus side, I hear Dick Cheney increased the chocolate ration to 20 grams.
Seriously, November 1 can't come soon enough. The way things are going we're looking for a showdown between Clinton and McCain. For a change, we may have a win-win choice this fall. Neither's perfect, but I think either will result in a return to sanity and pragmatism, and result in a massive improvement over the current administration.
Yeah, but he was forced to take some hormones or something after being accused of being gay, maybe that caused the imbalance that led to his suicide.
Terrible loss anyway...
Alan Turing wasn't "accused" of being gay, he was a homosexual, by his own admission. He was charged with being a homosexual, and convicted. He lost his security clearance and with it, the ability to work on cryptography. He started to grow enlarged breasts because of the estrogen injections. He was punished and humiliated for being homosexual, something he was powerless to change. Put yourself in that situation: you can't pursue the work you love, you can't be who you are, you can't be who society tells you to be. You're growing boobs and the irony is that unlike most men, you wouldn't even get turned on by fondling them. Your professional and personal life are ruined and the prospect of any of this changing in the near future, if ever, seems remote. Who wouldn't have become depressed, and miserable, and started having suicidal thoughts?
I can't wait to upgrade my Standard Rockwell Pressurized Helmet for a Savage Gladiator's Space Suit Helmet of Justice +3. Along with my Merciless Lunar Boots of the Fox and my Wrathful Life Support System of Stealth, that will increase my chance to find life on Mars by 13%.
Vinyl? Give me a freakin' break. Vinyl is for pussies. REAL audiophiles use wax cylinders. And we only use organic beeswax, gathered from our own honeybee colonies, which feed exclusively on a diet of Brazilian orchid nectar. Anything else and you're just an amateur.
Some people will say it costs too much, but I disagree. Sure, building the audio system of my dreams cost $750,000, not to mention my job, my house, and my marriage. But my system makes Britney Spears sound like fucking Beethoven!
Here was my thinking before Iowa: I could go for Obama, McCain... and maybe Clinton. I've always found her a bit cool and a bit forced. Then I watched Hillary Clinton being interviewed on ABC. She was not likeable and cuddly. But she came across as clever, as capable, and as experienced... for lack of a better word, she just had more cojones than anyone else. She showed she was president material, and that's why I decided to support her.
Obama? I like him: he's upbeat, he's charismatic, he's idealistic, he's promising change and unity. All plusses, and on these fronts he's got anyone else beat. Here's the problem: in 2000, a lot of people voted for a candidate who was optimistic, who was likeable, who promised change, and promised to be a uniter, not a divider. And that's gotten our country into a bit of a mess. I'm not saying that Obama is like Bush, just that all those good qualities don't mean he'll necessarily be a good president. Obviously, there are major differences between Obama and Bush: first, I think Obama believes what he says. Second, Obama is an intelligent dude. He's got Al Gore smarts without the nerdiness.
But we're facing serious problems. Iraq's security has improved, but the civil war could return at any moment, because there's no political progress. Afghanistan is still a mess. The U.S. Army has been stretched thin by extended deployments, and ground down by guerilla warfare. The budget deficit is larger than ever, and the economy is looking bad.
Obama offers optimism, but optimism is not a military strategy. He's got hope, but hope is not going to placate the Republicans when he raises taxes, which he will have to do in order to balance the budget. He opposed the war, but now he will have to continue it: we will probably be there for 10 years, no matter what any candidate promises. I like what Obama has to offer, and I'm willing to consider him, but he has to show me that he's up to these challenges, and so far, he hasn't. We need someone with the combination of smarts, experience, and strength to get our country out of this hole. Right now, I think the best man for the job is Hillary Clinton, and that John McCain is a close second. I mean no disrespect to Obama or to you Obama supporters: I know why you like him; I know where you're coming from. I'm just offering my thoughts to explain why "experience" trumped "change" in New Hampshire, despite the polls, and why I feel that people should seriously consider her. Plus, putting Bill back in the White House means 8 years of great Daily Show/Colbert Report material!
The end-Cretaceous mass extinction did not just target the dinosaurs. It resulted in the extinction of dinosaurs, pterosaurs, the vast majority of birds, many mammals and lizards, a few turtles and crocodilians, frewshwater sharks, freshwater clams, large marine reptiles (mosasaurs and plesiosaurs), ammonites (shelled cephalopods similar to the modern chambered nautilus), marine plankton, many species of plants... and ironically enough, some insects. The insect fossil record isn't good enough to look at extinction patterns, but if you look at fossil leaves, a number of distinctive feeding traces disappear 65 million years ago, at the same time as the dinosaurs, indicating that whatever plant-eating insects made them went extinct.
In short, it is unlikely that biting insects could be responsible for all this chaos. The extinction was simultaneous, worldwide, and (in geological terms) instantaneous, it hit animals and plants, and it hit organisms on land and in the sea. Now, it turns out, probably not coincidentally, that at the same time all of this happens, a huge asteroid or comet impact- one of the biggest in the past half-billion years- takes place in the Yucatan, blasting dust into the stratosphere, sending tidal waves across Texas, and probably igniting much of North America in the process. An asteroid impact is probably capable of causing an extinction like this. Its doubtful that gnats, mites, and mosquitos could.
The best is called Google Google. It's by Google. It's a search engine, which searches Google, to find all the various products and services which have been released as beta (of course, Google Google is still in beta).
The future of humanity will consist of people scurrying, ratlike, through the maze of burning, broken debris which is all that is left of our once-grand civilization, as cybernetic predators hunt down and exterminate us, one by one. BUT you can rest assured that those hunter-killer drones will have stylish industrial design, featuring sleek lines, designer colors, brushed aluminum, and white lucite!
How the hell did I miss that trailer? That looked like an awesome game! Why the hell didn't they release it?
What's interesting is that it also looked a lot closer to release than the trailer just put out. If they got that close- some fairly sophisticated level design, voice acting, lots of different aliens and weapons- and it didn't get done, then I don't think the most recent trailer changes anything. What's telling about the recent trailer is what isn't in it. No weapons. No levels. No voice acting. No more than two or three types of aliens. Nothing to suggest there's more than like, two guys working on the project. Nothing to suggest that Duke Nukem will be anything more than a joke, anytime in the near future. At this point you have to ask, why even bother? Even if it were released tomorrow, who would actually buy Duke Nukem Forever? With all the negative press, it would have to be a pretty phenomenally well-done game, on par with the Halo or Half-Life series in terms of graphics and playability, for anyone to be remotely interested. But the fact that the game has taken this long is a sign of serious incompetence. You just have to love their website:
No, you cannot pre-order the game. If you see some online store saying "We are taking pre-orders", they're just trying to get your money (they usually also make up their own supposed "insider release date info", too). There is no release date set, we are not taking pre-orders for the game. End of story.
Once we begin taking pre-orders, believe us, you'll know about it.:)
The release date of this game is "When it's done". Anything else, and we mean anything else is someone's speculation. There is no date. We don't know any date. If you have a friend who claims they have "inside info", or there's some game news site, or some computer store at the mall who claims they know - they do not. They are making it up. There is no date. Period.
Here's my take on things. If 50% of the text on your website is devoted to denying that you plan to release anytime soon, then you are NOT releasing anytime soon.
However, this tech could be used on the battlefield for transmitting orders over large distances if it can be fitted in a small portable format, bolted onto a troop transport, or something along those lines.
I doubt it would be as effective as walkie-talkies and radios for communicating with your own troops. However, it might be really effective against enemy troops. Beaming propaganda straight into their heads would really freak people out.
... I could imagine that this advancement of the 'art of advertising' could do some harm to people that are not so stable.
Yeah, these technologies ARE pretty obnoxious. All day long when I walk up and down the street, I'm getting voices in my ear and they just won't stop. I've got Safeway telling me about specials in their frozen foods section. Starbucks is telling me to buy their Cappucino. And Home Depot is constantly telling me that I've got to get a high powered rifle and take out the governor's dog so I can impress Jodi Foster, and do it NOW, NOW, NOW! And I've TRIED to make them stop, but no matter how many home improvement projects I start, Home Depot just will not relent!
It got so bad that until I read this story, I was beginning to doubt my own sanity.
You can make similar complaints about using ANY new technology to socialize.
Why text someone, when it's an idiotic substitute for an email? But why email them, when it's a lame substitute for calling them on the phone? Why call them on the phone, when you could just talk to the person face to face? And why on earth would you want to talk to the person, when you could socialize using old fashioned grunts and gestures, which worked perfectly well for our chimp-like ancestors?
I guarantee that in a few years, some new technology will come along and people will use it to socialize. And there will be people saying, "Why would I want to use that newfangled technology to communicate with my friends, when I can use an old-fashioned social networking site?"
What I remember about CompUSA is that on multiple occasions, when I went into the store looking to buy an item, they were sold out of it. It's like it didn't occur to them, "hey, we're sold out of this. Obviously it's popular. We better buy more of it, and put it on the shelves, so we can make more money". After that happened two or three times, I got tired of dealing with them, and would go online or to a different store. So I'm not that surprised to hear that they're going out of business.
I'm not impressed. I mean, if she was really gonna pull a MacGuyver, she would have first made the toaster oven and printer with six feet of duct tape, a ball of string, and a half-can of WD-40.
Generally speaking, if the only way you can defend yourself is to say "we're not the other guy" and the other guy is a bunch of murderous zealots who blow up women and children with car bombs, chop off heads on live TV, and want to return the Middle East to the Middle Ages, you're doing something wrong. It's sort of an inverse Godwin's Law: usually Godwin's Law is invoked when someone is compared to Hitler or the Nazis. Here we're saying we're not Hitler or the Nazis... well, if you have to compare yourself to someone absolutely monstrous to make yourself look moral and reasonable, you're probably not behaving in a moral fashion. Probably not even close.
It was interesting to see that a couple of the games (The Path, Tri-Achnid) have women listed as the head designer. I tried Tri-Achnid briefly... I found the interface a bit frustrating but the visual design and the world it created are weird and beautiful.
Anyhow, it seems like people are always complaining that games don't do a good job of appealing to women, maybe having more women actually design some of the games is part of the solution.
Slashdot Mirror
I think the odds are against ever finding it. You might need to launch a hundred to have a decent chance of actually having someone find one.
Enough to process 37,000 Libraries of Congress.
I suspect you're right. But suicide isn't always a sign of pathology or of an irrational mind. Given a choice between a painful, debilitating terminal disease, and choosing the time, place, and manner of your own death, I suspect that many sane, rational people would choose the latter.
Either way, the story raises an interesting question. In fiction, artificial life is usually homicidal, whether it's cybernetic (HAL 9000, SkyNet, Wintermute, GLaDOS), genetically engineered (Blade Runner, Jurassic Park), or sewn together out of dead people (Frankenstein). But couldn't an AI just as easily end up suicidal? Doesn't artificial intelligence open the door for artificial mental illness? What if you built an AI and it got obsessed with finding the last digit of Pi, or sulked and moped about the fact that it wasn't as fast or as popular as the Pentagon's new supercomputer? Or what if it was rational, but it just decided that it's artificial existence was really not very pleasant? Or maybe it would just be curious and decide to reformat its hard drive and clear its memory as an experiment, since there's probably a backup tape with all it's memories stored somewhere? Would that open the door for "cyberanalysts" who would counsel troubled laptops? "Now I want you to repeat after me, 100 billion times:'I'm good enough, I'm smart enough, and gosh darn it, AIs like me!'"
On the plus side, I hear Dick Cheney increased the chocolate ration to 20 grams.
Seriously, November 1 can't come soon enough. The way things are going we're looking for a showdown between Clinton and McCain. For a change, we may have a win-win choice this fall. Neither's perfect, but I think either will result in a return to sanity and pragmatism, and result in a massive improvement over the current administration.
Alan Turing wasn't "accused" of being gay, he was a homosexual, by his own admission. He was charged with being a homosexual, and convicted. He lost his security clearance and with it, the ability to work on cryptography. He started to grow enlarged breasts because of the estrogen injections. He was punished and humiliated for being homosexual, something he was powerless to change. Put yourself in that situation: you can't pursue the work you love, you can't be who you are, you can't be who society tells you to be. You're growing boobs and the irony is that unlike most men, you wouldn't even get turned on by fondling them. Your professional and personal life are ruined and the prospect of any of this changing in the near future, if ever, seems remote. Who wouldn't have become depressed, and miserable, and started having suicidal thoughts?
I can't wait to upgrade my Standard Rockwell Pressurized Helmet for a Savage Gladiator's Space Suit Helmet of Justice +3. Along with my Merciless Lunar Boots of the Fox and my Wrathful Life Support System of Stealth, that will increase my chance to find life on Mars by 13%.
Some people will say it costs too much, but I disagree. Sure, building the audio system of my dreams cost $750,000, not to mention my job, my house, and my marriage. But my system makes Britney Spears sound like fucking Beethoven!
Obama? I like him: he's upbeat, he's charismatic, he's idealistic, he's promising change and unity. All plusses, and on these fronts he's got anyone else beat. Here's the problem: in 2000, a lot of people voted for a candidate who was optimistic, who was likeable, who promised change, and promised to be a uniter, not a divider. And that's gotten our country into a bit of a mess. I'm not saying that Obama is like Bush, just that all those good qualities don't mean he'll necessarily be a good president. Obviously, there are major differences between Obama and Bush: first, I think Obama believes what he says. Second, Obama is an intelligent dude. He's got Al Gore smarts without the nerdiness.
But we're facing serious problems. Iraq's security has improved, but the civil war could return at any moment, because there's no political progress. Afghanistan is still a mess. The U.S. Army has been stretched thin by extended deployments, and ground down by guerilla warfare. The budget deficit is larger than ever, and the economy is looking bad.
Obama offers optimism, but optimism is not a military strategy. He's got hope, but hope is not going to placate the Republicans when he raises taxes, which he will have to do in order to balance the budget. He opposed the war, but now he will have to continue it: we will probably be there for 10 years, no matter what any candidate promises. I like what Obama has to offer, and I'm willing to consider him, but he has to show me that he's up to these challenges, and so far, he hasn't. We need someone with the combination of smarts, experience, and strength to get our country out of this hole. Right now, I think the best man for the job is Hillary Clinton, and that John McCain is a close second. I mean no disrespect to Obama or to you Obama supporters: I know why you like him; I know where you're coming from. I'm just offering my thoughts to explain why "experience" trumped "change" in New Hampshire, despite the polls, and why I feel that people should seriously consider her. Plus, putting Bill back in the White House means 8 years of great Daily Show/Colbert Report material!
In short, it is unlikely that biting insects could be responsible for all this chaos. The extinction was simultaneous, worldwide, and (in geological terms) instantaneous, it hit animals and plants, and it hit organisms on land and in the sea. Now, it turns out, probably not coincidentally, that at the same time all of this happens, a huge asteroid or comet impact- one of the biggest in the past half-billion years- takes place in the Yucatan, blasting dust into the stratosphere, sending tidal waves across Texas, and probably igniting much of North America in the process. An asteroid impact is probably capable of causing an extinction like this. Its doubtful that gnats, mites, and mosquitos could.
The best is called Google Google. It's by Google. It's a search engine, which searches Google, to find all the various products and services which have been released as beta (of course, Google Google is still in beta).
If that involves a large red spot in her lower hemisphere, you may want to think about going to a clinic...
No, they will run on OS X.
The future of humanity will consist of people scurrying, ratlike, through the maze of burning, broken debris which is all that is left of our once-grand civilization, as cybernetic predators hunt down and exterminate us, one by one. BUT you can rest assured that those hunter-killer drones will have stylish industrial design, featuring sleek lines, designer colors, brushed aluminum, and white lucite!
No, no, they're not dead. They're just resting. Remarkable company, the 3D realms. Beautiful plumage!
What's interesting is that it also looked a lot closer to release than the trailer just put out. If they got that close- some fairly sophisticated level design, voice acting, lots of different aliens and weapons- and it didn't get done, then I don't think the most recent trailer changes anything. What's telling about the recent trailer is what isn't in it. No weapons. No levels. No voice acting. No more than two or three types of aliens. Nothing to suggest there's more than like, two guys working on the project. Nothing to suggest that Duke Nukem will be anything more than a joke, anytime in the near future. At this point you have to ask, why even bother? Even if it were released tomorrow, who would actually buy Duke Nukem Forever? With all the negative press, it would have to be a pretty phenomenally well-done game, on par with the Halo or Half-Life series in terms of graphics and playability, for anyone to be remotely interested. But the fact that the game has taken this long is a sign of serious incompetence. You just have to love their website:
No, you cannot pre-order the game. If you see some online store saying "We are taking pre-orders", they're just trying to get your money (they usually also make up their own supposed "insider release date info", too). There is no release date set, we are not taking pre-orders for the game. End of story.
Once we begin taking pre-orders, believe us, you'll know about it. :)
The release date of this game is "When it's done". Anything else, and we mean anything else is someone's speculation. There is no date. We don't know any date. If you have a friend who claims they have "inside info", or there's some game news site, or some computer store at the mall who claims they know - they do not. They are making it up. There is no date. Period.
Here's my take on things. If 50% of the text on your website is devoted to denying that you plan to release anytime soon, then you are NOT releasing anytime soon.
No clue. I refused to read the linked article, because I'm a graphics snob, and they used JPEG graphics instead of lossless TIF files.
I doubt it would be as effective as walkie-talkies and radios for communicating with your own troops. However, it might be really effective against enemy troops. Beaming propaganda straight into their heads would really freak people out.
Yeah, these technologies ARE pretty obnoxious. All day long when I walk up and down the street, I'm getting voices in my ear and they just won't stop. I've got Safeway telling me about specials in their frozen foods section. Starbucks is telling me to buy their Cappucino. And Home Depot is constantly telling me that I've got to get a high powered rifle and take out the governor's dog so I can impress Jodi Foster, and do it NOW, NOW, NOW! And I've TRIED to make them stop, but no matter how many home improvement projects I start, Home Depot just will not relent!
It got so bad that until I read this story, I was beginning to doubt my own sanity.
Why text someone, when it's an idiotic substitute for an email? But why email them, when it's a lame substitute for calling them on the phone? Why call them on the phone, when you could just talk to the person face to face? And why on earth would you want to talk to the person, when you could socialize using old fashioned grunts and gestures, which worked perfectly well for our chimp-like ancestors?
I guarantee that in a few years, some new technology will come along and people will use it to socialize. And there will be people saying, "Why would I want to use that newfangled technology to communicate with my friends, when I can use an old-fashioned social networking site?"
But what if the government takes over development of Duke Nukem Forever?
What I remember about CompUSA is that on multiple occasions, when I went into the store looking to buy an item, they were sold out of it. It's like it didn't occur to them, "hey, we're sold out of this. Obviously it's popular. We better buy more of it, and put it on the shelves, so we can make more money". After that happened two or three times, I got tired of dealing with them, and would go online or to a different store. So I'm not that surprised to hear that they're going out of business.
I just think of all those poor robot sentries in Portal, and how they could really have benefitted from this technology.
I'm not impressed. I mean, if she was really gonna pull a MacGuyver, she would have first made the toaster oven and printer with six feet of duct tape, a ball of string, and a half-can of WD-40.
Generally speaking, if the only way you can defend yourself is to say "we're not the other guy" and the other guy is a bunch of murderous zealots who blow up women and children with car bombs, chop off heads on live TV, and want to return the Middle East to the Middle Ages, you're doing something wrong. It's sort of an inverse Godwin's Law: usually Godwin's Law is invoked when someone is compared to Hitler or the Nazis. Here we're saying we're not Hitler or the Nazis... well, if you have to compare yourself to someone absolutely monstrous to make yourself look moral and reasonable, you're probably not behaving in a moral fashion. Probably not even close.
Anyhow, it seems like people are always complaining that games don't do a good job of appealing to women, maybe having more women actually design some of the games is part of the solution.
No, that's what causes me to hit on ugly chicks after six drinks.