razark

Sorry, I figured if you were going to talk nonsense, I'd join in. Were you actually seriously asking how HarvesteR and Maxmaps were representatives of the company?!? If that's not obvious, I don't know what to tell you.

The parrots the squawk in the evening are louder that the macaroni that fills my trousers.

If a representative of the company says "We will do thing", rather than "We intend to do thing" or "We want to do thing", is there a difference? If a representative of the company says "We are doing thing2", at location1, is it the same as a a representative of the company says "We are doing thing2" at location2? Or have words lost meaning again?

On the internet, is anything really gone? HarvesteR said, on 8 Jul 2013: https://web.archive.org/web/20130714022535/http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/entry.php/667-Procedural-Craters! The underlining is mine. Is that part a promise or not? The answer is left as an exercise for the reader.

Well, we have to do it. If the public found out that the moon landings were actually part of the coverup for our intervention in the Martian civil war, there's no telling what might happen.

Have you tried telling them actual NASA people play it?

The glorious thing about the English language is that there's no one in charge. Get enough people to use your definition, and it becomes as valid as any other definition. Literally. (Which is kind of annoying when trying to use language precisely.)

http://www.psychology-lexicon.com/cms/glossary/47-glossary-n/4302-nervism.html

Yes, the line between non-life self-replicating chemistry and life is probably a very fuzzy one. Perhaps someday, we'll have the opportunity to examine it. My distinction between abiogenesis and evolution was because this thread was concerned with "Has life begun to exist elsewhere?" and not "What form of life would exist elsewhere?".

And should be done anywhere we ever look. I completely agree with you on that. Microbes are probably the most abundant type of life likely to be out there. Yes, I am. But not in the outdated, disproven sense of "maggots come from rotting meat" sense.

By one (rather inaccurate) definition. Abiogenesis is the arising of life from non-life. Evolution is a process that affects life forms. If you're talking about a scientific theory, you need to use the scientific definition of theory, not equivocation. True. So you follow the simpler forms backwards, and you get to the point where they crossed from weird chemistry to life forms.

Evolution's not involved here. We're dealing with abiogenesis.

The Fermi Paradox annoys me. We start with "We don't know", then feed into a machine that asks a question, starts the answer with a bunch of repetitive "if"s, wrapped in speculative probabilities, bundling a little that we do know, compounding it with a bunch of things we don't, and finally grinding out "We still don't know".

The problem is that you're playing probability with very large numbers and assigning probabilities that you cannot possibly know. (I am, too, when I say that I think it is highly likely. That's why I try to express it as my opinion.) For example, you say "the probability of us being alone in the universe is about 1 in 1x100100" based on the number of planets/moons in existence. The counter to that is that we only have evidence of life existing in 1 in 100100 of those cases. Therefore, life is extremely rare. But then again, of all the solar systems we've examined in sufficient detail, 100% of them had life forms. Obviously, life is all but inevitable. Or: Of all the planet or moon surfaces we've visited, half of them had life. Therefore, it's an even bet whether life will exist somewhere. The problem with playing the probabilities is that we have an extremely limited sample set, and very little knowledge of what forms life could take. Nor do we actually have any way to actually predict how probable it is for life to occur. All we can say for certain is that it happened at least once. But we don't know how many times it has actually happened, and how many possible ways there are that it could happen, or what could prevent it from happening, etc. Instead of looking at the probabilities, I'd look at how quickly life arose after the earth formed. If it happened extremely quickly, that's an indication that the jump from chemistry to biology was a rather easy one to make, and therefore likely to occur again under similar circumstances. If it took a long time, you have the indication that it's either a complex process, or requires very rare events, and is therefore less likely to be repeated, even under favorable conditions. Another question is how common are the chemicals necessary for life (as we know it). If we find these chemicals to be in abundance, again, the more likely it is they will come together in the right way. Reliance on rarer elements again means that there is less chance for life (awki) to form. My understanding is that life appeared rather quickly from rather common elements. We've found certain more complex chemical building blocks in meteorites, as well. That all leads me to believe that life is probably pretty common as well. Add to that the possibility that "life" also includes forms we haven't even contemplated yet, and the likelihood that there's some[thing|one] else out there climbs even higher.

Strictly speaking, that's not evidence. No, they either exist or they don't. Our knowing about them has no bearing on their state. Without evidence, there's no reason to believe in them, however. Personally, I find it highly likely that there is other life out there, and I hope that some evidence will appear in my lifetime.

One is advised not to take everything extremely literally, nor to put too much into quotes from a decade ago. But once Doom and then Quake hit the scene, the variety of offerings in one genre became extremely saturated and in other genres, noticeably lacking. Perhaps the balance isn't as skewed as it once was, but I've largely stopped paying attention and am well on my way to becoming set in my ways. (Shakes fist and yells at kids to get off his lawn)

There's too damn many of them. How many FPS games does the market need? Why can't those companies come up with something new, or look into other genres, rather than doing the same thing over and over and over again?

No. It's two. The F-14 Tomcat and the F-4 Phantom II.

Because idiots like looking at pictures more than they like reading?

Pi isn't completely wrong. It's only halfway there.

So, apple, then?

We get it. Y'all both have big impressive ones. Now put them away.

Then you fail to understand my repeated distinction between the penalty and bonus. From a "this is a game" perspective, you are quite correct. From the "even though it's a game, it should still make sense" perspective, not so much. If I have a car that can, under the best ideal circumstances, go <X> miles on one gallon of gas, then even the best driver that exists cannot make it go <X+0.001> miles. However, a bad driver can make it go much less than <X> miles. The difference between a pilot bonus and an engineer bonus is that we have an actual hard baseline for spacecraft performance. The vehicle physically cannot do better than the physics says it can, but bad piloting can reduce it's performance. We do not have any such baseline for the maximum performance of the drill, since it's not tied to any actual physics, but is entirely an in-game abstracted process. But if it makes no difference, why are you so set that it should be a bonus, rather than the penalty?

You've convinced me. I'm now in support of penalties on lower level engineers, rather than bonuses for high level ones.

I'll give you this, of course. Making tons of metal float through the sky is amazing. So it's mostly a matter of looks? I've always been more interested in what they can do, rather than how they look. (And, frankly, I tend to find most airliners really tend to look the same. I don't really see enough difference between them to care. Which makes sense, since they're all really designed to do the same job.) Further, I can rarely go a day without seeing an airliner or twenty. They're simply not rare enough to peak my interest. Well, ok. That's cool. But, if I may point out, that one is doing one of the interesting bits of its job. If they're not taking off or landing, airliners are just kinda... boring, I guess. Routine. However, take that same 747, and make it do something else: or Much more interesting than a simple people-mover. Anyway, thanks for the input. We all have different things that interest us, and some of them just confuse the hell out of me.