Yes, this is kind of like "of course the remote is in the last place you look, why would you keep looking once you found it?"

A little more than a year ago I was working on a very space-constrained device: only 2kb of program flash (an attiny23 for those curious). I had to use libusb with this, which ate up a huge portion of that space. My first shot at the main program put me over the limit by almost 500 bytes. By the time I was done, I had packed the program + the usb lib into the program flash with 4 bytes to spare.

Man, was that fun.

Thank you for mentioning this. Things have to get to their destination somehow, and if you replaced these ships with their equivalent carrying capacity of another form of transport you would probably get even more pollution.

They could use scrubbers or switch to a different fuel when they're near a heavily populated area.

This and "disrupt", please.

I think that if we, as a community, innovate on our rhetoric we can really disrupt the overuse of "innovate" and "disrupt".

Ah, thank you. I was starting to get a bit of vertigo on how prescient this was, I felt like I was reading The Machine. Now that I know it's satire it makes a lot more sense.

Thank you for saying this, it's exactly what I've been thinking since the start.

Maybe that's true, but the fetishization of 'disruption' is getting a little ridiculous. I'm certainly downloading this.

This fetishizes bullshit.

Tell me when you next launch bullshit product, bro.

To be fair, based on some of the other statements I've seen attributed to Churchill, I wouldn't be surprised if he had actually said that.

I recall a case where the courts did not agree with you. I can't remember names or many details, but the gist was that some guy realized that one of the pages was taking an fdat argument that was his userid, and by simply incrementing that number he could retrieve the data of any user he wanted. He presented his findings to the company (something major, like AT&T maybe), and they immediately sued him. He fought in court saying he wasn't malicious and was "white hat" as you say, but I believe he was convicted.

Does anyone remember this case?

Weev. Search HN, there are hundreds of conversations about that case.

Indeed, he was sent to prison.

My grandfather said that he went broke twice in his life: once when he was sued, and once when he sued someone else. Lawsuits are expensive, and if this game isn't making enough money to warrant that money-sink, they might end up putting themselves in an even worse position.

This is why there needs to be some kind of indie developers' (/ artists'?) union which can afford to fight the big companies abusing their position.

When I get into conversations about what space combat would really be like (if it ever even happens), I usually cite this book, and summarize the combat in one sentence: "The ships are taking evasive actions for shots which will hit them in 3 months." That's usually all it takes to make them really understand that space is nothing like you see in Star Wars.

On the other hand though, Heinlein makes a good case for interplanetary war never happening in Time Enough For Love. "The second best thing about space travel is that the distances involved make war very difficult, usually impractical, and almost always unnecessary. This is probably a loss for most people, since war is our race's most popular diversion, one which gives purpose and color to dull and stupid lives. But it is a great boon to the intelligent man who fights only when he must — never for sport."

An interesting digression, but he also makes the case for why a common currency between planets is completely impractical (like was mentioned in the news a year or so ago). The entire book is a great read, and it's probably tied for 1st in my list of favorites.