It would be the same if any large customer hinted they wouldn't move to Windows 7. In fact I'm sure there are other large customers with an XP dependency that makes this sort of thing worthwhile.
Or more likely customers that think they've got an XP dependency - I've got some old software that is still built with Visual C++ 6. Actually it would probably work with later versions but they are slow and I don't have a license for them. Anyhow in Vista when you install VC98 it complains the application isn't compatible but it actually seems to run perfectly.
And what does it really cost Microsoft? Windows XP SP3 and Virtual PC are both sunk costs. All they're doing is offering people a free license in return for upgrading because at this point they really, really don't want a fiasco like Vista.
I think you're looking at things from a Carl Sagan like perspective where advanced civilistations are highly rational and benign. The real world isn't like that at all. The Europeans and the Japanese both had the technology to travel long distances and convinced themselves that they were some kind of master race, destined to rule what - to them at least - was the universe.
Most European cultures never met a civilisation which could stop them and built empires and got rich. The Japanese and Germans tried the same thing but much too late and were stomped by the Americans and their allies. Still they were very unlucky in meeting a much more advanced and fundamentally more principled competitor.
In my scenario it's quite plausible that a civilisation bent on slash and burn exploitation could grow to the point of invincibility before meeting a peer competitor. Now inside the civilisation people may worry about the wisdom of continued conquest, but no one would listen while it still seemed to be working. It's quite plausible, if life exists ubiquitously, that the universe is full of civilisations trying the same sort of trick, just like Earth upto 1900 was.
Which would explain the Fermi Paradox - advanced civilisations exist but those that broadcast their existence are quickly stomped by others.
You then launch a Bussard Ramjet to nuke the planet. The spacsehip builds a Krasnikov Tube as it goes.
Whoa, hold on for a minute. The energy required to distort space enough to form a Krasnikov Tube is _huge_. There's no way to accelerate something to 0.99c _and_ form a Krasnikov tube behind it using just a Bussard ramscoop. In fact, it might be impossible just to accelerate to 0.99c without a supplementary power source.
I think this is far too ruthless for humans to do and in any case the technology involved is highly speculative and some parts of it are probably not possible, but who says we're the nastiest species out there? Maybe there are much nasier civilisations with the requisite technology.
Why should a species with access to technology like this limit itself to colonizing previously-inhabited planets? They don't have to care about less-developed civilizations - they could simply pwn the whole galaxy within a few million years or so.
Actually you'd don't need the Krasnikov tube. The whole civilisation could travel in Bussard Ramjets. Why do it? Why invade countries for gold, oil or slaves when you could stay home and live sustainably?
Everything is about resources. In my hypothetical planet hopping civilisation planets provide the resources to build more ramjets. You'd send down engineers and machines, they'd strip the planet and turn it into another ships. The reason you target planets with technically advanced civilisations is that they by definition have the resources you need. Maybe you need to fight wars for ideological reasons too or the people in power might want the glory of 'civilizing the barbarians' or making them worship the right god.
It's not like human civilisations have never done this on Earth. In fact pretty much every famous civilisation was to some extend imperialist and didn't just stay home and live sustainably. Maybe there are predator civilisations and prey ones and the predatory ones more fit in Darwinian terms - i.e. they spread more widely, consume the prey and end up writing the history books and portraying themselves as superior.
Certainly the Europeans and Americans have historically been highly predatory and have obliterated scores of more peaceful but 'inferior' civilisations here on Earth. Why is a stretch to think that you couldn't do this on a bigger scale?
Something else occurs to me - you could build lots of Orion type craft to get the loot into orbit since you don't care about the biosphere after you leave. Once in orbit you build a ramjet and head off with lots of new ships plus anything of value (resources or slave labour) from the planet you sacked.
At a velocity like that, even the vaccuum of space suddenly becomes quite dense.
That's a plus point if you're using a Bussard Ramjet.
Actually consider the following scenario. You scan for planets with an oxygen atmosphere and then check for signs of a threatening civilisation.
You then launch a Bussard Ramjet to nuke the planet. The spacsehip builds a Krasnikov Tube as it goes. Then you have a route for ground troops or more likely bots to reach the planet quickly post explosion to mop up/enslave any survivors. Most likely humans would survive in shelters from a K-T type impact, but it would definitely mess up their defensive capability. Or you could use a few hundred smaller projectiles aimed at cities to cripple a technological civilisation without destroying the valuable biosphere - that way colonists could arrive without waiting for the biosphere to recover.
I think this is far too ruthless for humans to do and in any case the technology involved is highly speculative and some parts of it are probably not possible, but who says we're the nastiest species out there? Maybe there are much nasier civilisations with the requisite technology.
Best thing about it is that you don't need to worry about the environment - you could wreck the planet building bots, RKVs and ships to get your people to orbit and then head off to the next victim.
Actually I was joking about RKVs. What is interesting though is that they technology for an RKV doesn't seem too extreme.
From the RKV article on Wikipedia a 1kg Mass at 99% the speed of light has a energy of 135Megatonnes. The asteroid that killed the dinosaurs had an yield of 75 to 100 million megatonnes. So you'd need a 740 metric tonne projectile at 0.99c
A bussard ramjet would probably have a mass much more than this. I also think that you could probably figure out clever ways to get 740 tonnes to 0.99c if you were a high tech civilisation.
And you never know, maybe the reason we don't see any aliens is because they keep quiet and RKV any civilisations that look like they are near the technological level to RKV them first.
When I was in Munich one of the German engineers said something kind of profound about this.
In WWII the Germans managed to build V2's essentially from scratch in country that was by today's standards very low tech. Plus the allies were bombing everything constantly and the Nazi political leadership was absolutely the worst case imaginable.
Post World War II the Russians and Americans and some German scientists were able to go from V2s to ICBMs by 1957 - around twelve years. Once again the Russian engineers were working under a worst case political system and a very limited industrial base, and that didn't seem to delay them compared to the US. The US program was rather well run and had access to essentially unlimited resources.
Now the Russians sold V2 like rockets to places like Iraq, Syria, Iran, North Korea and so on. And all of those countries have then spent the next 57 years making very minor improvements to those rockets, despite the fact that some of them seem to have been aiming at fielding ICBMs and have had access to far more money and far better technology. Rogue state ballistic missile projects are remarkably unsuccessful.
Except that going to the moon in 1960 required lots of new technology. Going to the moon now requires some engineering of course - everything needs to be updated to use new technology rather than old. Still in comparison with doing it from scratch that shouldn't be as expensive.
Of course Nasa is a government bureaucracy and bureaucracies tend to find a use for every penny in the budget and every employee. If you ask them to do additional stuff, they want more cash to do that.
You really have to wonder what Nasa has spent most of the cash on. Most of the missions since 1960 were cheap and unmanned.
I'm sure such a version exists. Here in Taiwan when I watch American movies on HBO there's almost no violence or nudity, and the cuts looks to me like it was done professionally, i.e. the story is preserved and it's very hard to tell anything was removed unless you saw the US theatre version before.
I.e. there's a theatre version, an uncut DVD version and an Asian satellite version the cable here picks up. The uncut DVD version has all the offensive stuff, the Asian satellite one has none (because they want to show it in places like Singapore and China) and the US theatre version is somewhere in between. If I actually see movies at the cinema, I'm pretty sure I see the US theatre version.
I'd even suspect that you could show the uncut DVD version here legally. The reason they don't is commercial.
It just used the data that was already conveniently available from the combined Skynet/military database of the future. That's why all the terminators "coincidentally" look like actors.
Let's kill off the inbreds, and the government will prosper, and piracy will end.
I agree with killing off the inbreds, but I think a more likely outcome will be that Somalia will stay chaotic but the remaining warlords will just tell the pirates not to attack foreign ships.
The US can and should sink their ships and bomb their on shore bases. It can't and shouldn't get involved in trying to completely eradicate the warlords and civilize Somalia.
If all these politically correct traitors would just start mass suicides, we could go back to actually helping somewhere and winning wars against the bad guys, instead of prolonging every situation because clearly identified bad guys must be respected.
If the United States had been politically correct back in 1942, all you people would be speaking Deutsch.
I used to think these people were a threat, but actually they aren't. When the Democrats get elected they actually have the same sort of foreign policy as the Republicans when it comes to things like dealing with pirates, dictators and other scum. It's an endearingly American mix of high principle when they can afford it and a touch of high tech ruthlessness when pushed into a corner.
Basically the extreme left can rant and rave on the internet, and they are useful to the Democrats because they get people out to vote. However once the Dems are in office, they have no input into policy.
One thing people seem to miss is that Somalia shattered because of warlords. The warlords employ the pirates and get a cut of the loot. The pirates are actually very rich by Somali standards. Hell, they're probably not poor even by first world standards either.
I think-- and admittedly, this is just my guess-- that part of the hype was due to younger console players who'd never played games like System Shock or Fallout, and maybe haven't really played many FPS outside of Halo.
Encyclopedia Dramatica has a funny list of reasons why Halo is THE BEST GAME EVER! that includes things like "THE FIRST GAME WHERE U COULD SHOOT ALIENS! THE FIRST GAME WITH ZOMBIES" and so on.
Their only hope really is to get the game banned somewhere for promoting child abuse. The sales in the places it wasn't banned and online should more than cover the lost sales. I always thought they were going for this with Bioshock but these days people are so inured to this sort of thing it is very hard to provoke them.
Meh, I bought Bioshock and I played it right to the end. Graphically it was excellent, and the story was hokey but quite enjoyable. I'll probably buy the next one. The only reason I'm cynical is that they compared it to System Shock 2. Bioshock was not a bad game, but it's no SS2.
Those locks on PC's are supposed to stop coworkers from 'borrowing' expansion cards not crackers. If someone who really wanted to get into a machine had it, they'd just pick or break the lock.
That's why people say that if you have physical access it is always possible to pwn the machine.
He he, I'd advise you not to say that to a psychiatrist or you'll end up in a mental hospital.
Still I suppose that's more evidence of a conspiracy, right? You remind me of a line in Terminator where the psychiatrist says it's fascinating how intricate delusions are and how there is no external evidence needed to prove anything.
Maybe by roboticist he means someone that looks forward to Judgement Day when he will be able to sell out the rest of humanity for a fembot and a load of cool gizmos, rather than someone who is working in the field of robotics.
It is not the neo-cons that we have to worry about. It is which oligarchs have the reins of which legislators and judges. It is beginning to look like the oligarchs that control the Obama group are going to take our intellectual and cultural freedoms from us, rather than our constitutional freedoms.
You know the more I read stuff like this, the more I realise that I don't really have much of an objection to the Obama or the US Democratic party.
Slashdot Mirror
It would be the same if any large customer hinted they wouldn't move to Windows 7. In fact I'm sure there are other large customers with an XP dependency that makes this sort of thing worthwhile.
Or more likely customers that think they've got an XP dependency - I've got some old software that is still built with Visual C++ 6. Actually it would probably work with later versions but they are slow and I don't have a license for them. Anyhow in Vista when you install VC98 it complains the application isn't compatible but it actually seems to run perfectly.
And what does it really cost Microsoft? Windows XP SP3 and Virtual PC are both sunk costs. All they're doing is offering people a free license in return for upgrading because at this point they really, really don't want a fiasco like Vista.
I think you're looking at things from a Carl Sagan like perspective where advanced civilistations are highly rational and benign. The real world isn't like that at all. The Europeans and the Japanese both had the technology to travel long distances and convinced themselves that they were some kind of master race, destined to rule what - to them at least - was the universe.
Most European cultures never met a civilisation which could stop them and built empires and got rich. The Japanese and Germans tried the same thing but much too late and were stomped by the Americans and their allies. Still they were very unlucky in meeting a much more advanced and fundamentally more principled competitor.
In my scenario it's quite plausible that a civilisation bent on slash and burn exploitation could grow to the point of invincibility before meeting a peer competitor. Now inside the civilisation people may worry about the wisdom of continued conquest, but no one would listen while it still seemed to be working. It's quite plausible, if life exists ubiquitously, that the universe is full of civilisations trying the same sort of trick, just like Earth upto 1900 was.
Which would explain the Fermi Paradox - advanced civilisations exist but those that broadcast their existence are quickly stomped by others.
It's only a matter of time before people start calling Mike Godwin a Nazi too.
You then launch a Bussard Ramjet to nuke the planet. The spacsehip builds a Krasnikov Tube as it goes.
Whoa, hold on for a minute. The energy required to distort space enough to form a Krasnikov Tube is _huge_. There's no way to accelerate something to 0.99c _and_ form a Krasnikov tube behind it using just a Bussard ramscoop. In fact, it might be impossible just to accelerate to 0.99c without a supplementary power source.
I think this is far too ruthless for humans to do and in any case the technology involved is highly speculative and some parts of it are probably not possible, but who says we're the nastiest species out there? Maybe there are much nasier civilisations with the requisite technology.
Why should a species with access to technology like this limit itself to colonizing previously-inhabited planets? They don't have to care about less-developed civilizations - they could simply pwn the whole galaxy within a few million years or so.
Actually you'd don't need the Krasnikov tube. The whole civilisation could travel in Bussard Ramjets. Why do it? Why invade countries for gold, oil or slaves when you could stay home and live sustainably?
Everything is about resources. In my hypothetical planet hopping civilisation planets provide the resources to build more ramjets. You'd send down engineers and machines, they'd strip the planet and turn it into another ships. The reason you target planets with technically advanced civilisations is that they by definition have the resources you need. Maybe you need to fight wars for ideological reasons too or the people in power might want the glory of 'civilizing the barbarians' or making them worship the right god.
It's not like human civilisations have never done this on Earth. In fact pretty much every famous civilisation was to some extend imperialist and didn't just stay home and live sustainably. Maybe there are predator civilisations and prey ones and the predatory ones more fit in Darwinian terms - i.e. they spread more widely, consume the prey and end up writing the history books and portraying themselves as superior.
Certainly the Europeans and Americans have historically been highly predatory and have obliterated scores of more peaceful but 'inferior' civilisations here on Earth. Why is a stretch to think that you couldn't do this on a bigger scale?
Something else occurs to me - you could build lots of Orion type craft to get the loot into orbit since you don't care about the biosphere after you leave. Once in orbit you build a ramjet and head off with lots of new ships plus anything of value (resources or slave labour) from the planet you sacked.
At a velocity like that, even the vaccuum of space suddenly becomes quite dense.
That's a plus point if you're using a Bussard Ramjet.
Actually consider the following scenario. You scan for planets with an oxygen atmosphere and then check for signs of a threatening civilisation.
You then launch a Bussard Ramjet to nuke the planet. The spacsehip builds a Krasnikov Tube as it goes. Then you have a route for ground troops or more likely bots to reach the planet quickly post explosion to mop up/enslave any survivors. Most likely humans would survive in shelters from a K-T type impact, but it would definitely mess up their defensive capability. Or you could use a few hundred smaller projectiles aimed at cities to cripple a technological civilisation without destroying the valuable biosphere - that way colonists could arrive without waiting for the biosphere to recover.
I think this is far too ruthless for humans to do and in any case the technology involved is highly speculative and some parts of it are probably not possible, but who says we're the nastiest species out there? Maybe there are much nasier civilisations with the requisite technology.
Best thing about it is that you don't need to worry about the environment - you could wreck the planet building bots, RKVs and ships to get your people to orbit and then head off to the next victim.
Actually I was joking about RKVs. What is interesting though is that they technology for an RKV doesn't seem too extreme.
From the RKV article on Wikipedia a 1kg Mass at 99% the speed of light has a energy of 135Megatonnes. The asteroid that killed the dinosaurs had an yield of 75 to 100 million megatonnes. So you'd need a 740 metric tonne projectile at 0.99c
A bussard ramjet would probably have a mass much more than this. I also think that you could probably figure out clever ways to get 740 tonnes to 0.99c if you were a high tech civilisation.
And you never know, maybe the reason we don't see any aliens is because they keep quiet and RKV any civilisations that look like they are near the technological level to RKV them first.
Ok, idle speculation at best.
Then this scan won't find them and no preemptive Relativistic Kill Vehicle will be dispatched to their planet.
When I was in Munich one of the German engineers said something kind of profound about this.
In WWII the Germans managed to build V2's essentially from scratch in country that was by today's standards very low tech. Plus the allies were bombing everything constantly and the Nazi political leadership was absolutely the worst case imaginable.
Post World War II the Russians and Americans and some German scientists were able to go from V2s to ICBMs by 1957 - around twelve years. Once again the Russian engineers were working under a worst case political system and a very limited industrial base, and that didn't seem to delay them compared to the US. The US program was rather well run and had access to essentially unlimited resources.
Now the Russians sold V2 like rockets to places like Iraq, Syria, Iran, North Korea and so on. And all of those countries have then spent the next 57 years making very minor improvements to those rockets, despite the fact that some of them seem to have been aiming at fielding ICBMs and have had access to far more money and far better technology. Rogue state ballistic missile projects are remarkably unsuccessful.
Except that going to the moon in 1960 required lots of new technology. Going to the moon now requires some engineering of course - everything needs to be updated to use new technology rather than old. Still in comparison with doing it from scratch that shouldn't be as expensive.
Of course Nasa is a government bureaucracy and bureaucracies tend to find a use for every penny in the budget and every employee. If you ask them to do additional stuff, they want more cash to do that.
You really have to wonder what Nasa has spent most of the cash on. Most of the missions since 1960 were cheap and unmanned.
I'm sure such a version exists. Here in Taiwan when I watch American movies on HBO there's almost no violence or nudity, and the cuts looks to me like it was done professionally, i.e. the story is preserved and it's very hard to tell anything was removed unless you saw the US theatre version before.
I.e. there's a theatre version, an uncut DVD version and an Asian satellite version the cable here picks up. The uncut DVD version has all the offensive stuff, the Asian satellite one has none (because they want to show it in places like Singapore and China) and the US theatre version is somewhere in between. If I actually see movies at the cinema, I'm pretty sure I see the US theatre version.
I'd even suspect that you could show the uncut DVD version here legally. The reason they don't is commercial.
RFD is family friendly, it's like a feature length version of Nancy Reagan's "Just say no!" catchphrase.
It just used the data that was already conveniently available from the combined Skynet/military database of the future. That's why all the terminators "coincidentally" look like actors.
FTFY.
Let's kill off the inbreds, and the government will prosper, and piracy will end.
I agree with killing off the inbreds, but I think a more likely outcome will be that Somalia will stay chaotic but the remaining warlords will just tell the pirates not to attack foreign ships.
The US can and should sink their ships and bomb their on shore bases. It can't and shouldn't get involved in trying to completely eradicate the warlords and civilize Somalia.
Bullshit. If these guys were really liberation heros they'd be willing to sacrifice their personal interests for their country's.
If all these politically correct traitors would just start mass suicides, we could go back to actually helping somewhere and winning wars against the bad guys, instead of prolonging every situation because clearly identified bad guys must be respected.
If the United States had been politically correct back in 1942, all you people would be speaking Deutsch.
I used to think these people were a threat, but actually they aren't. When the Democrats get elected they actually have the same sort of foreign policy as the Republicans when it comes to things like dealing with pirates, dictators and other scum. It's an endearingly American mix of high principle when they can afford it and a touch of high tech ruthlessness when pushed into a corner.
Basically the extreme left can rant and rave on the internet, and they are useful to the Democrats because they get people out to vote. However once the Dems are in office, they have no input into policy.
One thing people seem to miss is that Somalia shattered because of warlords. The warlords employ the pirates and get a cut of the loot. The pirates are actually very rich by Somali standards. Hell, they're probably not poor even by first world standards either.
E.g. see this
http://www.boston.com/news/world/africa/articles/2009/04/11/somali_pirates_a_far_cry_from_buccaneers_of_old/
So saying the piracy is caused by 'extreme poverty and a shattered Somalia' is really missing the point.
I have two words for people who ask me if I regret voting for Big Brother: Emmanuel Goldstein.
or maybe
I have two words for people who ask me if I regret voting for George Bush: bin Laden.
Ever get the feeling you've been cheated?
I think-- and admittedly, this is just my guess-- that part of the hype was due to younger console players who'd never played games like System Shock or Fallout, and maybe haven't really played many FPS outside of Halo.
Encyclopedia Dramatica has a funny list of reasons why Halo is THE BEST GAME EVER! that includes things like "THE FIRST GAME WHERE U COULD SHOOT ALIENS! THE FIRST GAME WITH ZOMBIES" and so on.
Their only hope really is to get the game banned somewhere for promoting child abuse. The sales in the places it wasn't banned and online should more than cover the lost sales. I always thought they were going for this with Bioshock but these days people are so inured to this sort of thing it is very hard to provoke them.
Meh, I bought Bioshock and I played it right to the end. Graphically it was excellent, and the story was hokey but quite enjoyable. I'll probably buy the next one. The only reason I'm cynical is that they compared it to System Shock 2. Bioshock was not a bad game, but it's no SS2.
On the other hand, if the hacker has your laptop but you use full disk encryption, you're probably in the clear.
Those locks on PC's are supposed to stop coworkers from 'borrowing' expansion cards not crackers. If someone who really wanted to get into a machine had it, they'd just pick or break the lock.
That's why people say that if you have physical access it is always possible to pwn the machine.
He he, I'd advise you not to say that to a psychiatrist or you'll end up in a mental hospital.
Still I suppose that's more evidence of a conspiracy, right? You remind me of a line in Terminator where the psychiatrist says it's fascinating how intricate delusions are and how there is no external evidence needed to prove anything.
http://img359.imageshack.us/img359/6331/1213200576001uq2.jpg
Maybe by roboticist he means someone that looks forward to Judgement Day when he will be able to sell out the rest of humanity for a fembot and a load of cool gizmos, rather than someone who is working in the field of robotics.
It is not the neo-cons that we have to worry about. It is which oligarchs have the reins of which legislators and judges. It is beginning to look like the oligarchs that control the Obama group are going to take our intellectual and cultural freedoms from us, rather than our constitutional freedoms.
You know the more I read stuff like this, the more I realise that I don't really have much of an objection to the Obama or the US Democratic party.