Yeah, it's interesting how every story about a new technology ends up full of comments about how it's not a big deal, how it only works in a lab, how any real applications are decades away, etc... yet there's new faster, better, cooler, more efficient, etc... products coming out all the time.

That's not to say that if someone starts crowing about their exciting new discovery that you should automatically rush in and invest all your money in it, but technology does actually move forward, and not everything is complete BS. And when you're talking about a company like IBM, who have a respectable history of research and invention, I'm generally inclined to believe that they're at least on the trail of something interesting, and not just throwing big words out to try and impress people.

Many servers do have a general etiquette, but griefing is certainly common. There are mods out there that provide ways to protect areas/structures/chests and even to disallow access to sections of the world. It's currently still very limited though, it's basically a command line interface to set it all up, and there aren't any visual effects that let you know an area is protected. You just all of a sudden hit an invisible wall, or a block that you destroyed regenerates and gives you a protected message, etc.

Hopefully stuff like this will either be incorporated directly into the game in better ways, or the promised modding support will allow the mod makers to improve their work.

Lately I've been primarily playing on multiplayer servers, which up until yesterday had a bug where if you dropped your tools it would reset their damage to zero. I imagine that a mod that makes tools last forever will become available pretty soon and become rather popular.

I wouldn't say that there's less interaction necessarily in Minecraft, it's just that the interactions are simpler, but everywhere.

In SecondLife, you can build all sorts of crazy stuff, but to make anything worthwhile requires a lot more work, and oftentimes requires third-party software. You can make just about anything that you want in terms of shapes, and you have lots of options with the scripting, but debugging the scripting, aligning textures, etc. can take a ton of time, and is beyond the skill level of many people. Compare that to minecraft where you've got just a handful of pieces to build with, and the simple mechanic of just placing them where you want them. It's a much more immediate gratification way to create things, but there's enough capability in those basic pieces to make things as complicated as working computers within the game.

Another thing that is really cool about Minecraft is that you truly can interact with pretty much the entire world. Except for the bedrock that creates the bottom, you can destroy everything. While FPS games slowly inch forward with destructible buildings and deformable environments, in Minecraft you can dig a hole anywhere you want to, or create a mountain wherever you want. See that giant lake over there? You can fill that in if you feel like it. Compare that to Second Life, where in 99.5% of the game world you're not able to build anything, and even less of the landscape is editable for you.

And on a slightly more technical note, I've always found Second Life frustrating because of poor performance really limiting its potential. You've got a limited amount of prims, there's lag like crazy, flying around you constantly bump into things that your client hasn't rendered yet, etc. SL has been around for years and still has a ton of those immediately noticeable problems that will probably never get fixed. While Minecraft is less ambitious in many ways, that simplicity allows it to actually work.

While it sometimes can definitely become a grind, I think one of the big differences is that your resource gathering does have a lasting effect on the world. If you spend three hours digging up stone, you're going to leave a big hole in the ground, or a network of tunnels, or a cave, or whatever.

In more abstract terms, there's two basic ways to create in minecraft. There's additive, where you're stacking blocks to build something. And there's subtractive, where you're carving away at the existing landscape to create spaces or shapes. The subtractive method can leave you with lots of material for additive building.

That said, I find that your tools tend to wear out way too fast unless they're diamond, and diamond is rare enough that searching for it often feels like a chore.

Ok, but the "hard part" isn't just a bigger rocket, it's more the serious amount of time required to get there, and the resources required to keep a human being alive that long. You can take everything you need to last you on a trip to the moon.

There's a ton of problems to be solved, and testing the various solutions is going to be slow and really expensive. This isn't like Edison trying a thousand different materials before finding a proper filament for an electric lightbulb. You're talking about years of research, design, and testing. It's certainly not an impossible problem, but it's not the sort of problem that for-profit companies are itching to take on.

My argument isn't that space travel is impossible, or infeasible, or even a bad idea. Just that private companies aren't going to be the pioneers. There's not enough profit on Mars to take the financial risks.

Ok, but Apollo wasn't really good for much except a quick trip there and back. While I disagree that you could just "scale up" Apollo and go to Mars (turning a trip of a few days into years is rather significant), even if you managed to make it work, you're not going to turn a profit just by bringing back a couple hundred kilograms of mars rock.

Chemical rockets can only realistically scale up so far. The amount of hardware that you'd need to get into space for a trip to mars is huge.

I don't see the incremental steps between low earth orbit and serious interplanetary travel. The jump between them is huge, both literally in the distance you must travel, and figuratively, in the types of engineering challenges that need to be solved. And there's not many places worth stopping on the way.

I'm looking forwards to the commercialization of LEO. It's definitely going to be awesome, and I think that once it gets going it will get crowded up there relatively quickly. But the leap from LEO to Mars is huge, maybe even bigger than the leap from the ground to LEO.

I was commenting on interplanetary trips, not on spaceflight in general. There's definitely some shorter term, profitable enterprises available in low earth orbit. But the step from LEO to interplanetary travel is a lot bigger than most people think. It's not just a matter of scaling up, if it was, we'd have put people on mars decades ago. Also, the businesses that are finding success in LEO now have certainly benefited from the early exploratory work done by governments, they're not blazing a 100% new trail here.

I think my comments regarding the problems with fusion power are entirely valid when compared to interplanetary travel. Just like fusion, a mission to mars is decades from being practical, and even longer from being profitable. Whatever resources may be available for harvesting on mars/the moon/the asteroid belt/etc. are unlikely to compare cost-wise with the costs of extracting them on earth for quite some time. I don't see a path to profit there any time soon.

Sure, but those future changes are going to result from non-profit oriented exploration. There's just nowhere near enough knowledge about the resources available or the costs of extracting/shipping them for a for-profit business to invest. The upfront costs are enormous, the expected payoffs are very hard to calculate, and the various risks are immense.

A good analogy is fusion research. The amounts of money required to make serious progress are immense (although probably small compared to what a manned mars mission would cost), but the potential payoffs if you were successful are huge and obvious. And while there are various companies dabbling in it, you don't see huge projects from big companies pouring money into figuring it out. Mostly because it's such a risky investment that corporations can't justify it.

And if fusion power research can't pull in that kind of funding, then what hope does interplanetary exploration have? The costs are higher, the risks are higher, and the payoffs are questionable. Any CEO who tried to shovel serious money towards it would be replaced faster than he could write the first check.

No kidding. For maybe a week or so after I started playing FO3, I was having nuclear apocalypse related dreams pretty regularly. But if you have the time to get back to it, try and push through a little further. Once your character becomes a bit more capable and you get some in-game buddies, it stops being quite so depressing but you've still got the fun of the vast amounts of exploration available. Plus the storyline gets a bit more hopeful, and you meet some people who have personalities beyond just being an asshole.

I'm guessing that them revisiting it again has as much to do with nonstop volumes of emails that they're getting from fans.

Just be glad you're not watching a show about real science, where things tend to get retested many many times.

Almost nothing in this world is guaranteed. If complete certainty is a requirement for doing anything, then you're going to lead a very dull and pointless life.

Probably because true silence is pretty rare much of the time. Even if I turn off all the electronics, I've still hear the occasional car drive down the street, the A/C kicking on, the cats jumping off of the counter, etc. Having some background noise at a covers up all of those random noises, and just leaves a consistent background that's easy to tune-out.

As long as you don't cross the streams.