well, the LHC has already been hacked.

http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/2008 ... filtr.html

No harm was done with the exception of a single file being deleted. And they apparently got caught one step away from completely controlling the whole shebang. haha.

That's awesome. Still, I can't imagine it to have been hard if they took only a week to get there.

Now if they had hacked the WoW mainframe and wiped everyone's character, destroying the backups in the process....THAT would have been impressive. See the waves of mass suicides follow (mostly Korea and Japan).

Nice one Ox, made me laugh.

lol...if someone is able to kill a server AND all the backups, the sysadmin should be tortured to death. There's a reason why you get secure offsite backups. It's hard to hack a tape in a safe.

Zero Cool could do it!!

Seriously though, imagine all those people all over the world, who spent years building their characters...all gone in one blow. There would be a disturbance in the force, like a million losers crying out and then suddenly being silenced.

I don't know if you know this, but before the LHC was built the Raegan administration ok-ed a design to build the Superconducting Supercollider, basically an atom smasher 3-4 times as powerful LHC. But it didn't pass Congress at the last moment and was abandoned.

It's actually relatively close to Satis

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supercondu ... n_Collider

Now he'll be the last of us to be sucked into a black hole. Bastage!

haha, yea, I knew about that. I was pretty bummed when it didn't happen. Go US Science! Once I take over, science will become more heavily funded. Well...I'll probably have this $100 billion research fund that I'll move around... first for hydrogen fueled cars, then space, then a super collider.

I say you build a space elevator first.

As for the project: the reason they refused funding in the end was because of the collapse of the Soviet Union, strangely enough. During the Cold War scientists could get funding on pretty much the craziest and most ambitious ideas imaginable (Star Wars Project anyone?), as long as there was some sort of Soviet countermovement. When the Soviets fell on their faces and stopped building their supercolliders, so did Congress figure "100 billion dollars?! fuck that shit!".

yea, it's a side effect of politics, I guess. As long as we're trying to compete against another (hopefully enemy) country, Congress has no problem feeding the project money because it's good press. Bah. I'd like to see a permanent chunk of the budget dedicated to science and then let some non-political entity distribute the funds.

Of course, when $100billion is involved, there's no such thing as a non-political entity.

Oh, and I'll leave the space elevator to Japan. Actually that sucker'll probably be built in latin america or something. Doesn't the anchor need to be in geosynchronous orbit?

Hmmh, did anyone else think of Rapture after reading Satis post?

Not having played Bioshock I must say: nope.


@ geosynchronous orbit: sure, but I don't think it would be too hard to kick some African country of a huge piece of land and start building.


Btw, the LHC is MIA until the beginning of next year. They ran into some serious technical problems.


http://gizmodo.com/5053763/lhc-offline- ... ng-of-2009

awww, that sucks. Oh well, we get to live for that much longer.

And wasn't rapture the result of unbridled capitalism?

Yeah, wasn't it built by a crazy scientist with lots of cash from rich people who then got to live in the place? Hardly sounds like Satis' government funded science project...he's not rich, or a scientist. Crazy, perhaps.

The idea behind Rapture was the non-existant government system, literally free market, unhindered and monitored, which eventually led to downfall of the entire system, thanks to the greed of one man. The author of Rapture sought freedom and the right to ones own effort, well the basic idea was that you get what you give and there is no tax on it to help the poor and so on. The eventual downfall resulted from another individual but i dont want to get into that too much, since it is the plot behind Bioshock. Suffice to say, the author and the greedy man are not the same.

Ah, ok. Thanks for not spoiling anything, too! I'm still planning in playing Bioshock so I was a little worried when I started reading your exposition.