LukeTim

The issue should be less about "helping the poor", and more about eliminating being poor as a possibility... thereby no needing to help anyone since they can then help themselves. A fantastic welfare policy I recently discovered from The Green Party in the UK reads thus: "Everyone to receive a basic Citizen's Income to allow everybody to make meaningful choices between paid employment, part-time work, self employment, volunteering and encourage a better balance between work and everyday life." ie, work is no longer something that must be done for the sake of survival - security is guaranteed - but it is something we can choose to do because it is meaningful to us. I know people are going to comeback and say "somebody has to do the jobs nobody wants to" and things like that... but who said those jobs had to be done solely by specific individuals? I do probably need to consider this more before a fully formed idea can take shape in my head... but I firmly believe that to hold people's lives to ransom, until they work for it, is wrong, and we need some immense change to stop it... because it is no longer necessary.

I dunno... perhaps I'd laugh at you saying this is science fiction if I had understood a word you just said.

My first major Redstone Project (and the only one I finished, really): A 2 bit adder/multiplier with 7 segment display for output... PC Minecraft, but honestly does that really matter?

I don't know about you, but I have never felt any urge even remotely approaching that... and I am pretty sure that a large (>95%) percentage of people don't feel any such urge either. Reading your post was a really depressing experience. I'll give you credit for the commercial sub-orbital flights around the world, though. That is definitely going to happen. London to Sydney in 30 minutes AND a view of the Earth from an altitude of 500km?... Yes please. Anyway, I think that chemical energy (unless you count batteries) is on its way out... it will either have a much lesser presence by 2070 or will have virtually gone completely. In its place will be early forms of Fusion energy (how about a rocket powered exclusively by a controlled fusion reaction? Much like Orion but with much less nuclear fallout), more renewable energies (some much more efficient and effective ion thruster designs), and perhaps some very early matter-antimatter solutions. Heck, with NASA looking at Warp Drives now, we could have seen those at work (short distances and small objects, probably) by 2070.

Another cool thing that I guess would come with cities would be artificial lights on the dark side of Kerbin.

Given that Unity uses PhysX, surely the physics simulation is already accelerated on NVidia cards...

I know it's unlikely to happen due to the potential computational complexity of having this on a planetary scale, but cities with destructible buildings would be amazing. Sitting in sandbox mode firing rockets at Kerbin's capitals in order to reduce them to rubble would be pretty fun. Maybe launching multiple warheads into orbit, and coordinating a simultaneous strike... Y'know, just for fun.

Ahh, I was thinking supersonic ≡ speed of sound at sea level... which I guess isn't true.

To be fair, if any of those Astronauts go EVA, they are essentially doing exactly that... Making Felix not the first.

"... Alright, seen it now. Let's go home, lads."

GPU overheat can cause complete shutdown. My GPU's overheating kept shutting down my PC... I updated the drivers and the temperature management was better so it stopped happening.

We should be going mostly Nuclear whilst we look at ways to make a totally renewable solution a viable option. Really frustrating that ignorant "environmentalists" insist that Nuclear is a worse option than Fossil Fuels.

I would totally do it if I had the chance... would be awesome.

In just under 40 minutes Felix Baumgartner is going to be the first person to reach supersonic speeds in freefall, falling from a height of 120,000 feet. And you can watch it, Live. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vkJ5ItzEq3M&feature=player_embedded

Well, if the magnet is strong enough then I can't imagine why not... provided you could ensure somehow that the force is always attractive, so it is then an effective allegory for gravity, you wouldn't want one magnet spinning around and starting to repel the other away. I guess monopoles could achieve this, though I don't know whether they exist at a macro scale.

I had thought that when I have children I will name my first daughter Luna, and my first son Sol (after The Moon and The Sun, respectively, of course)... then I'll think of the rest as they come... hopefully, I will only have one of each... but Miranda (a moon of Saturn, I believe? EDIT: nope, it's a moon of Uranus) would be another good girl's name.. Titan (another moon of Saturn) or Triton (moon of Neptune) might just work for a boy, but I might have to keep thinking on that one... Anyway, Solar System bodies would be my theme, is all I am saying. EDIT: Larissa is another good girl's one from Neptune... and Ariel from Uranus... Elara, from Jupiter... Rhea, Saturn... Actually, most of them are good girl's names, not many good boy's ones.

I don't get it... There is a closed portion of Windows 8 through the Apps and such, but it's still just as open as any other Windows version.

Being a Computer Systems Engineer I am sort of half Computer Scientist half Electronic Engineer... so I guess I belong in this thread. I use Windows 8 on my PC, which I have hooked up to a Monitor in my living room (next pay day I am getting a 40" LCD-LED, though... then I'll really be set up)... the new UI on Win8 really suits the media PC... Plus, programming in VS whilst sitting on my sofa is actually surprisingly comfortable. I do also have Windows Vista and Win7 installed on separate Hard Disks in my PC, but I suspect they won't get much attention now I have Win8... which I just learned this evening has PowerShell installed by default, which is awesome. On my little netbook I do have Windows 7 Starter Edition installed but I tend to use Lubuntu because it's so much faster... How they can sell netbooks with Windows 7 installed when the little things can barely boot into it is beyond me... and this is with a 2GB RAM upgrade... plus, with Lubuntu I have stuff like GCC which makes it easy to do some C programming when I get bored... if I tried on Windows the whole thing would probably lock up when trying to compile Hello World. At the moment I am trying to implement my own audio codec... just for fun.

True artificial intelligence, which is indistinguishable from genuine human intelligence, is very possible... and so are artificial emotions (And emotions are incredibly, ridiculously important to a social species like ours... without them we would not have any of the technology or civilization we have today). To suggest, however, that these artificial intelligences will be operating on devices anything like the computers we have to day is just naive. We cannot begin to imagine the sort of computing devices which will be in existence in 100 year's time... let alone 1000.

An Arduino isn't going to last very long in orbit, dude. The extreme temperatures coupled with the huge amounts of radiation would kill that thing in no time... same with the camera. Well, especially with the camera at least with the MCU you can stick it in a Lead Box. You would need to look at more expensive, very high quality (probably designed specifically for applications in space) devices.

It might be interesting to see how many people who download the game without paying end up actually buying the game because they like what they play. With a lot of us here on the forum, we were here long before the game went paid... and so we sort of knew what to expect from the full release and were therefore more willing to part with the cash. However, nowadays, as the demo and full release get separated by a wider and wider gap I can understand, from the point of view of wanting to know what you're going to get, why somebody might pirate the game before spending any of their money. Perhaps that's naive... and I certainly don't mean to sound as though I condone it... just to say that I understand it from that point of view. What I don't understand is pirating it, liking it, but not paying for it because you're just cheap. If you can afford a computer to run the game, you can afford the money to buy the game.

Could you upload that save file? I would love to fly through all that and see all the stuff whizzing by at huge speeds.

Why can't I do a mission like this? One day... One day I'll sit down and plan everything out properly... then I'll do a proper mission like this and it'll go off perfectly. Well done, Moach. Very impressive.

IDGI... Is that how a Warp Drive works? That's not how I understood it...

Yeah, it frustrates me too when people dismiss him and his ideas. I know I'm not the smartest person in the world, and I don't know much about the subjects he addresses, but I find Sam Harris' reasoning to often be very difficult to argue against.