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Comment: Re:Sigh (Score 1) 1070

by Sibko (#36382888) Attached to: Have We Reached Maximum Sustainable Population Size?

The fact is that there are not infinite resources.

Practically speaking, there ARE infinite resources. The problem is that we are too busy focusing solely on Earth. We have an entire solar system we can exploit for resources. All it requires is a government to think ahead instead of leaving the space industry to flounder.

Comment: Re:Sounds 'Too' Good? (Score 5, Insightful) 101

by Sibko (#35904986) Attached to: Leaked Activision Memos Compare <em>CoD</em>, <em>Guitar Hero</em>
Sounds more to me like you're jumping on a bandwagon and hating what they do regardless of what they do. For example, this quote:

If you really step back and dispassionately look at any measurement—sales, player engagement, hours of online play, performance of DLC—you can absolutely conclude that the potential for this franchise has never been greater.

and you say:

Wow, they sure think highly of themselves. Do they actually use this type of self promotion & recognition internally?

Well you know what bub, was anything they said there actually incorrect? No! It wasn't! The series has a huge playerbase, sells well, engages people for hundreds of hours in multplayer. By every metric they use, the game excels and has the potential to be even better. So how about you set aside your elitist bias and preconceived notion and look at reality when it bites you in the ass. Call of Duty is popular, millions of people like this game, and the execs know that, and judging by this memo they seem to know that they need to improve their product for it to continue selling.

Your entire post can be summarized as: "Stop liking the things I don't like!"

Comment: Oh yeah, this is just GREAT (Score 2) 68

by Sibko (#35904928) Attached to: Synthetic Skin Could Replace Animal Subjects'
Let's use synthetic skin that almost certainly doesn't fully reflect the effects on an actual human or animal!

What if that new face cream you've got turns out to be a contact poison that only effects the liver? This fancy synthetic skin come with a liver? Oh it doesn't?

Sounds to me like a cost cutting measure by the company that is going to result in less safe skin care products, and their marketing is playing off the animal rights angle so people don't question it.

I understand the desire to cut out animal testing, and I fully support that. But the human body is complex, some chemical that makes your skin smooth or clears your nostrils might also cause nerve tissue damage. We quite simply cannot match the complexity of the human body synthetically right now, it is foolish and naive to think that you can test a chemical on only one part of the body and ignore all the other parts because they're not related.

Comment: Re:Co-op? (Score 2) 136

by Sibko (#35730354) Attached to: Gearbox Boss Bemoans Superfluous Multiplayer Modes

How many games these days really do offer co-op gaming? I mean, so far I haven't seen a SINGLE game in years that offers the ability for you to play through the story mode with a friend/spouse/etc. No, they're all just rehashes of CTF or deathmatch, and those are stuffed in every single god damn game, regardless of whether it makes sense or not. But why, oh, why no co-op, ever?

Some of us aren't interested in competitive gaming against random *sshats, instead some of us wish to be able to share the story campaing with a close person. There's plenty of games that actually would offer huge amounts of fun if there was co-op included. A great, deep and insightful story is all the more worth it if you can share the tale with someone, but you don't always even need that; I remember back in the days when Unreal 1 was still new. The story was nothing too fancy or epic, it was mostly just a straight-forward FPS game. But when you set the difficulty level up a notch and joined in a co-op game it felt like a totally new experience compared to single-player. I think we eventually played it through something like 5 or 6 times, simply because it was fun every time.

Or am I just the odd one in the bunch again for wishing for good ol' co-op mode in games?

Um, Halo?

I mean, pretty much every single thing you're pining for is in every Halo game. Shit I can't even count the number of hours I've spent playing co-op through all five of them. On a bang/buck point alone those games have been the single best entertainment purchases I have ever made.

Comment: What about Venus?? (Score 1) 145

by Sibko (#35425804) Attached to: Scientists Give NASA Planetary Marching Orders
Why is it always Mars this, Mars that?

In every way, shape, and form, Venus is a better target to explore than Mars.

It is closer to us, it has a thicker atmosphere that allows actual sizable payloads to be landed Unlike Mars, it is closer to the sun with more usable solar energy, it has a habitable zone in its upper atmosphere that is the most earth-like environment within our solar system, it has nearly the same gravity as Earth, and there is SO MUCH we still don't know about Venus.

We could colonize Venus with simple aerostat habitats, essentially floating sky cities or zeppelins, which remain bouyant in the upper venereal atmosphere at Earth-normal pressure and temperature, with said habitats creating water, oxygen, lifting gas, and rocket fuel solely out of the H2SO4 in the atmosphere and power from the sun. We could use the increased solar flux to power orbital factories, smelters, and foundries, while putting mineral-rich asteroids into orbit around Venus for mining - a location where a mistake and planetary impact won't end humanity. We could even Terraform, in a realistic timeframe the upper atmosphere to something that's breathable to humans, and then start seeding it with Earth-based life.

On top of that we can research an environment where a run-away global warming effect has taken place and see how that compares to Earth, and explore an incredibly alien surface with robots, possibly even performing tele-mining operations for materials and resources.

Anything we could do on Mars, we can do on Venus better.

Comment: Re:Surprising (Score 1) 279

by Sibko (#35030380) Attached to: Physicists Call For Alien Messaging Protocol
Sadly, [or not, depending on your outlook] aliens within a hundred lightyears probably won't be able to detect us by our radio signals.

Journalists, knowing very little of science, make the mistake of assuming that the only part of the equation that matters here is the speed the signal travels at, and how long it's been traveling for. Ergo you get "ZOMG we sent out radio signals a hundred years ago, that means anything within a hundred lightyears can see us!"

What they don't seem to consider is the strength of the signal. Thanks to the inverse square law, any signal we blast into the cosmos is going to get fainter and fainter the further it travels. Eventually you get to a distance where the signal is imperceptible above the noise of the universe itself. Now, said aliens could still have some pretty impressive detecting gear - radiotelescopes the size of planets? Who know! But chances are they don't, and we've gone completely unnoticed.

Comment: Re:It is all in who the victim is.... (Score 1) 417

by Sibko (#34211728) Attached to: Palin E-Mail Snoop Gets Year In Prison

Kernell cranked the system up to 11 trying to take down a vice presidential candidate of the US... and got burned. You break the law trying to subvert a presidential election and you should get your ass handed to you.

Except he didn't. I was watching the thread the guy posted on 4chan going "LOL LOOK AT WHAT I GOT ACCESS TO GUISE, SHOULD I POST SOME EMAILS!??!?"

And then he gave everyone the password and some whiteknight immediately changed it and notified the authorities.

You'd think that if he were trying to discredit Palin he would've, oh I don't know, saved all the emails and posted them somewhere? The guy was an idiot, but a malicious idiot he was not. He wasn't part of the "left" he wasn't told to politically assassinate Palin and end her chances at election. He was an idiot who thought it'd be funny to break into a presidential candidates' email and brag about it to people on 4chan. Do you know what the catchphrase "for the lulz?" means? That's what this was at its heart. No more motivation than "oh man it'd be fucking ace if people got to see Palin's emails." She just happened to be the low hanging fruit with a bad password.

It still amazes me how this story has been twisted by demagogues to be completely different from what actually happened.

Comment: Re:Maths ? (Score 1) 376

by Sibko (#33468712) Attached to: <em>Hurt Locker</em> File-Sharing Subpoenas Begin

This will be the new Hollywood business model.

a) e) When it bombs, sue 10,000 John Does because you know they can't afford to defend themselves.

Anybody see a flaw?

Yes, actually. You've made the mistake in assuming they're only going to go after people if the movie bombs. They're obviously trying to cover the costs of this movie. [5000 people, each sued for $2900 = $14.5 million, movie cost $15 million] So it's not going to matter if the movie bombs or not, they're going to sue people just because it means covering some of their costs and increasing their overall profit.

Comment: Re:Good news and Bad news (Score 1) 204

by Sibko (#32344122) Attached to: Airship Inflated To Create Monster "Stratellite"

The moon is the El Dorado of helium-3

This is a commonly parroted meme, but it's simply not true. Helium 3 on the moon measures about 0.01ppm - you need to dig up around 100 million tons of lunar regolith to get one ton of Helium-3. Sorry to say, that's neither cost effective nor net-energy positive. The moon will never be mined for Helium-3. Ever. Especially not when there are multiple gas-giants in our solar system with Helium-3 floating in their atmosphere's that could simply be scooped up.

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