Meh, I'm just waiting for them to release a Star Destroyer capital ship. Then I'm going to hire some minions in a fleets of scythes (sweet looking ship) and begin my career as a space pirate in style!

capitalism only really functions well (with regulation) in a world where resources are limited and a lot of manpower is needed to get things done. Thanks to technology, it's only a matter of time before resources are so easy to come by and manufacture into needed things that the supply and demand model will be obsolete.

I suspect that within 100 years, if not sooner, manual labor will be a thing of the past...unless you're an artist or something. Robots will be able to do virtually everything..and better than humans are capable of.

The only people who will still need to have jobs are engineers and maybe technicians, but even then, eventually robots will be able to repair themselves so maybe not even technicians will be needed. Hell, given enough time, nurses and many health care jobs won't be needed anymore because basic healthcare could be delegated to robots.

It's just a matter of time. We're already starting to see the effects of automation in the workforce, we just don't need as many people to get things done. Hell even technical jobs aren't safe because as computers get better and better, They'll be able to analyze certain things better than humans.

The question just becomes what do you do about it? A whole new economic model will be needed. Because we'll eventually be living in the world where unless you're in the academic top tier, you're just not going to be needed in the workforce. At the same time, again, because of technology, we're going to have the ability to feed and clothe AND shelter you for a minimal amount of effort so the prospect of being able to being born, living, and dying without ever NEEDING to work is a real possibility in the not so distant future.

Isn't that what you would call...a utopia? You want freedom? there it is. You'll be able to spend your time doing what you WANT to do instead of what you HAVE to do just to survive. I suspect at some point, there will have to be SOME procreation laws put into place to keep the population growth in check. But hell, even that won't be so bad once we have the ability to colonize other planets.

People will still work, they'll just do it because they want to do it, but they'll be jobs where they're not a necessity or anything. even in an age where a replicator can make all your food, people will still want to cook, or do other artisan style jobs.

But hey, we'll still need defense, gotta blow up or deflect any stray asteroid that comes near us. or just send a bunch of robots up to mine the rock to smitherines so we can use the resources to build our mighty space fleet and our other grand works That Dyson Sphere won't build itself after all

In other words, the human race....has won. isn't that a good thing?

lol, I can just picture it now.

Whole fleet of daleks, cybermen, weeping angels and whatever show up.

Capaldi: Pfssh, I'm from fucking Glasgow! I see scarier things just walking to the shops!

Ostracized to the community of the mad men. Dig it.

@TheFreak: I see what you're saying and I don't ostracize you (as much as you'd LOVE IT), but isn't it the tendency of the intellect to take moments of existence and dramatically augment them? Like a daydream memory only in your head.

BEGIN DRAMATIC MUSIC

The simple form of filming and interviewing this man is as overly dramatic as the scoring, if it were not skipped over by our technocratic brains. I say "our" because were it not for my obsessive hindsight into the comments of others, I'd have ignored these details, as well.

Perhaps the music stands out as more farcical because WE have fallen into the dead zone of normalized behaviors, memetic response; ignoring the obvious fact that a living man in a time now gone, was recorded on camera for all of the world to see and hear and gawk at.

All forms of tampering with that moment in time, including the recording of it -- which he advocated against in the form of "live in the moment" and "LOVE NOW" -- are merely augmentations of the majesty of biological existence; human reality. To be removed of context or placed into whatever context an intellect perceives as worthy.

And then to "CREATE" as is now manifest in our minds as any range of dramatic or mundane; having now been sifted for us to discern or merely to enjoy in passing. We can choose to enjoy fleetingly or dwell on with intellectual criticism, as much as we can ignore it.

Were I deaf, I'd have no understanding, but I'd still see this wild man.

END DRAMATIC MUSIC

I wouldn't say he inadvertently saved the fleet, since it had been his aim all along, though in another way than he turned out to save it. However, *ban.

Well, Sevastopol as a base for a Russian Baltic Fleet was established at a time when my neck of the woods was still part of the Holy Roman Empire. And since we also fucked the Russians over time and time again over the last 15 years, I'm inclined to not unleash the zombie plague just now.

'..the fleeting transient pointlessness of life on earth.'

What a lovely thought.

I agree-As sure as he was, anything can happen and this incarnation is precious and fleeting-

@enoch,

I think our gap is from very disparate world views and taking for granted we'll each work out for ourselves more than we do.

I used to really hang onto the saying that war is the ultimate failure of democracy. It resonated with me, and it seems to me that it's very much were you are coming from? Looking at history more and more though, I've come to see that saying is more the way we would wish our world to be, and not how it really is. Instead I see our history telling out the truth that diplomacy is the ultimate goal of war.

Peace is a fleeting and pretty much impossible state of existence for us it seems. The only time peace ever lasts is when war and conquest simply won't lead to greater gains than it. Time and time and time again history has shown that the only time war and violence weren't followed was when the gains from it were not worth the cost. How many times in history did an invading nation turn back because the other side stood back and refused to fight back? It just doesn't happen, get enough people united and they will use whatever method is to their greatest advantage, and all too often that is violence.

In Pakistan the taliban are making huge gains through violent repression of everyone that opposes them. It is extremely effective because those living in the region are unable to fight back for lack of unity and numbers. The Pakistani military meanwhile is unwilling to fight back, because they have more to gain by letting the taliban kill Pakistani civilians while the elected government is nominally 'in power'. Negotiation with the Taliban is impossible to my eyes unless and until their use of violence no longer benefits them. The fastest and surest way of accomplishing that is meeting them with that same force and ensuring they lose more than they gain with each attack.

It's a brutal, but also very simple assessment I think. It also leads to drone attacks being the one method of fighting back directly at them that leaves the least number of collateral casualties in it's wake. It takes more than a year for drones to kill as many people as the Taliban do in a month. Of those killed by drones, from 50-90%(depending who's counts you believe) are identifialy Taliban militants and leaders. That includes taking out the Taliban's top leader twice in the last 5 years with them, and if you include American actions in Pakistan in general, it nets Bin Laden as well.

I'd urge you not to take that as a western or American centric goal or objective. The thousands killed each month I list as justification and wanting protection for are nearly 100% Pakistani Muslims.

Aussie forces held the southern line till the Mericuns could get their new carrier fleets up and running.

Moral of the story: If your gonna go after Australia, dont get bogged down in a drawn-out stalemate...cause our friends will mess you up

The notion that if it was deployed 3 months earlier it would have changed the outcome of the war is a bit short sighted. By 1944 things had changed significantly against the Luftwaffe. Of the many different types of problems, two are the most straightforward here, shortage of fuel and Goering's obsession with bombers.

At this stage of the war in 1944, fuel was scarce enough to force flight schools to cut their training times to less than half of what they received in 1942, receiving on average 111 hours of flight and of that only 20 hours in the combat aircraft that they were to fly, the rest would be in a trainer. To give a contemporary comparison, in the US you need an absolute bare minimum of 190 hours to earn a commercial pilot's license which is usually done in the same type of trainer the Germans used, THEN you start working on the plane your "really" going to fly. Training deficiencies were already showing in 1943, when during the first half of the year they experienced the same number of losses to accidents as they did to combat. So you can imagine that new and even experienced pilots, transitioning from the relatively lower speed of their prop driven planes to high speed jets, would have problems in tactical use and even accident avoidance. Even the Me-262 suffered from flameouts caused by aggressive use of the throttle, something that prop planes can manage much better, would otherwise cause the flameout that killed the test pilot Ziller.

Even if deployed in large numbers as a fighter-bomber, the probable use would be as a bomber. Goering was very much a part of the "cult of the offensive" in the air that meant holding to the old WW1 notion of "The bomber always gets through". Though to be fair, the technology in this aircraft might very well have helped proved him right, he pushed this notion at the cost of the defense. He refused committing more resources to the fighter wings, so while the Ho-229 might have been considered a "fighter-bomber", its use may have been predominantly focused on the bomber aspect. This is actually exactly what happened to the Me-262 in its earlier days, its capabilities as a fighter were ignored and preference as a bomber, preferred. Why does all this matter? Because at this point, Germany wasn't able to come close to stopping the bombers breaking through their lines. They needed the flow to stop since it was already disrupting their existing production to produce the "what if" fleet of Ho-229s. Goering proved that the bombers were getting through thanks to his belief that his would instead.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defence_of_the_Reich

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adolf_Galland (The later part, when he commanded the fighter force)

I really do not look forward to old age. God dammit. Is this really the perception and perspective that mortality has in store for me? All I want is to be 80 years old and commanding virtual star-fleets from my bed-toilet.

Just think how handy a small fleet of these would have been around during prohibition.....across the lake from Canada in Michigan.

CreamK there got me riled with that developmentally-disabled rhetoric there Buck, I did not mean to down-vote your retort to his tirade.
All I read was blah blah blah guns, blah blah blah right, blah blah blah left, and my brain needed a Fleet, with natural Lavender scent & comfortable applicator tip

Just as in the old model, the unknown band down the road wouldn't have gotten signed.

The concept of business has been around just long enough (longer than anyone alive) that people take it for granted. A sense of entitlement has arisen where we have somehow gotten the idea that business is the natural order of things. Almost like a machine where you put your hard work in on one end, and cold hard cash comes out the other end - and if it doesn't, then it must be somebody else's fault.

This is no more apparent than in the publishing industries. For a couple of generations they fell into a business model that worked so well for them - the ability to reproduce and control the supply of creative works on a physical medium; and be able to stick a large margin on it, enabled by marketing drives - that they begun to believe that being paid for somebody's creativity is the normal way of things. How they have forgotten that the service they provided was in an absolute sense, extremely new and so fundamentally reliant on a handful of fleeting technologies that are neither natural or fundamental to the works that they published.

Now it is normal to listen and to share music and other media, in the same way that it wasn't 20 years ago. The same way that 20 years ago it was possible to control the supply of music on a magnetic tape or plastic disc in the same way that it wasn't 50 years before that.

The talent, skill, experience and hard work required to create things that other people find interesting or entertaining is no less appreciated now than it ever was; but the talent, skill, experience and hard work required to then turn that into a viable business is a completely separate thing that should not be taken for granted, and one must adapt to the way things are now; not the way they used to be, in order to be successful.

If you are a creative person and you find a way to make a living doing what you love best then you should be grateful for having that chance. If you can't stand the idea of people appreciating your work without paying you - then find something else to do.