Bay 12 Games Forum

... I'm not really sure I'd call most liberals I've heard talking about the subject of israel anti-zionist, though. I've not really heard much ideological objection to the concept of a jewish state, or, strictly speaking, the continued existence of israel. Or even objection to anti-terrorist activities from it, necessarily. The beef that consistently comes up is the whole slaughter of non-combatants, destruction of civilian infrastructure, significant and consistently horrifically immoral action, etc., etc.

Wanting israel to stop being a gigantic dick isn't exactly wanting it to be leveled or whatev'. If all israel was doing was preventing terrorist attacks and maintaining its structural integrity, there would not be nearly as much complaint on the subject. But it's been doing considerably more than that, and with considerably more material support from the US end than a lot of americans would prefer, considering what that money's being used in support of.

Yeah, it's one of those things that are kinda' important to remember when talking about future developments in automata -- while humans are pretty good at a lot of things in a subjective sense (relative to other "natural" entities), we're really kinda' terrible at most everything in something approaching an objective sense (from the perspective of maximal efficiency or effectiveness). There is basically nothing a human can do that a machine will not, eventually, be able to do better, and, in all likelihood, cheaper (though that usually comes a fair amount of time after the better side of the equation).

And that holds true for pretty much everything else. Evolution is kind of a terrible engineer -- really good at what it does, but really bad at actually achieving goals beyond that particular focus, solving problems, etc. Machines -- AI, expert systems, simple automated systems, whatever -- are almost certainly going to eventually replace... well, basically everything. Because they're better at it (it being whatever task or tasks are being considered) than we can be. Since they're, y'know, specifically built for it, whereas more or less nothing else is. Barring some kind of catastrophe or specifically sabotaging ourselves in that arena, the question of humans being effectively replaced in all roles is not a question of if, but when.

... and we kinda' want that to happen, imo. Means we can goof off, do whatever, and still avoid starving to death in the streets. Probably. It's certainly a greater likelihood of success than pretty much any other scenario for eliminating human suffering. Chance of robot apocalypse, sure, but at least in the scenario of a robot apocalypse there's (probably) a legacy left behind, as opposed to all the other sorts.

... to be fair, there wasn't really all that much sci-fi in spelljammer. It was just fantasy in space. With those awesome hippo dudes.

Ooh. Whoops.

... well, seconding it, then, I guess.

Also apparently the 2008 space-based RTS thing has an amazing soundtrack. It's been a while since I've actually seen someone go through with putting massive space battles set to classical in a video game.

... Zero-K is a Spring game >_>

There's always Spring~

... or WZ21k. Whatevs. Though if folks were going for a TA legacy game, spring-stuff is probably a bit more accessible than Supcom. What with the whole free thing. _{it's also a smidgen easier on the hardware, so weaker computers have a better chance of joining in >_> I'm not saying I can't really run supcom... but I can't really run supcom}

Also yeah, back home, time available, etc. For a few days, at least. Probably.

Robot traffic cams. It makes all the difference.