swarms of robots.

:|

yeah ... i liked the casting in theory but then not so much in practice. i know what you mean.

i think my absolute favorite part is the destruction scene: the brutal, stomping musical queues as the camera zooms out from the rubble of arthur's home to outer space, giving a true sense of the mind-breaking scale of the vogon fleet, before it simply ploops the earth into oblivion.

Although uneven, the movie was not bad, with a few brilliant parts. it's not like it's "blasphemous" -- Adams himself wildly changed the story every time it switched mediums. It's got most of the best bits from the book, plus a new ending that does more than just stop (as the book does), and as a bonus it does a great job of capturing Adams' absolute love and fascination with life itself.

not saying it's great beginning to end, but acting like it's any more uneven than a lot of his books is silly.

"both sides are equally bad/dishonest/wrong" is the biggest political cop-out ever. it's sad that such pat vaguaries aren't instantly embarassing to the faces they so often fly out of.

you're citing one of the biggest duds of the year as proof the system works? good luck winning people over with that argument.

that would be a neat trick, considering .... anything.

ah yes and if we don't heed the lessons of hollywood blockbusters we are doomed to uh ...

more like 2000ms latency in practice.

to shoot down drones.

it's true that over the last 30 years, the prominence of dogfights in modern warfare declined for a variety of reasons (think of the kind of wars we were engaged in) but if there were a good reason to have them (say, manned aircraft were awesome at shooting down dimwitted, agile-but-slow-to-respond drones) then the practice would rise again.

your example assumes a zerg rush of drones can work together semi-coherently to overwhelm manned aircraft. perhaps you're right, and i don't doubt software could be designed for reasonably effective autonamous air combat.

but the argument in the OP is for replacing manned pilots with remote pilots, arguing that switch is ready now with existing tech. i stand by my assertion that hitting a stationary building on the ground is an entirely different thing than chasing, evading, or hitting another jet actively engaged in the same objective, and without this currently-non-existent (though possible) autonamous dogfight AI, the drones would lose.

no, i'm assuming existing technology, as the article is. if we want to come up with hypotheticals based on future-tech, all bets are off, of course. the article is advocating removing pilots due to existing technology replacing them.

well, in a dogfight, manned aircraft will easily trump remote-piloted aircraft, even with the maneuvability disadvantage. the reason is lag. i've read there is a 2 second delay between a remote operator's input and action by a drone. even assuming technology progresses and that lag is reduced, there are certain physical laws that can't be broken, and a delay is always going to exist. as any gamer knows, lag kills.

there is a world of difference between telling a drone to hit a fixed, stationary target versus piloting an aircraft through a dynamic set of circumstances.

so yeah, if all we ever want to do with our planes is hit-and-runs on stationary targets, then sure, we don't need manned aircraft anymore.

^ see title

"It was an Ident-i-Eeze, and was a very naughty and silly thing for Harl to have lying around in his wallet, though it was perfectly understandable. There were so many different ways in which you were required to provide absolute proof of your identity these days that life could easily become extremely tiresome just from that factor alone, never mind the deeper existential problems of trying to function as a coherent consciousness in an epistemologically ambiguous physical universe. Just look at cash point machines, for instance. Queues of people standing around waiting to have their fingerprints read, their retinas scanned, bits of skin scraped from the nape of the neck and undergoing instant (or nearly instant --- a good six or seven seconds in tedious reality) genetic analysis, then having to answer trick questions about members of their family they didn't even remember they had, and about their recorded preferences for tablecloth colours. And that was just to get a bit of spare cash for the weekend. If you were trying to raise a loan for a jetcar, sign a missile treaty or pay an entire restaurant bill things could get really trying.

Hence the Ident-i-Eeze. This encoded every single piece of information about you, your body and your life into one all- purpose machine-readable card that you could then carry around in your wallet, and therefore represented technology's greatest triumph to date over both itself and plain common sense."

Ford promptly knocks Harl unconscious and steals his ident-i-eeze, which he then uses to gain access to the Hitchhiker's main corporate accounts computer system.