resu_nimda

There are 50,000 and 60,000 acre tracts owned by separate logging companies near me, and that’s a small part of one county in northern California.

Point being that 10,000 acres isn’t actually as much land as it sounds like, when it comes to forest land.

I took a bit of dramatic liberty in connecting that to their present-day efforts, but I could definitely see it being a part of company lore encouraging unconventional marketing strategies.

It’s definitely possible to imagine a scenario where a handful of people or “the government” somehow witnessed the only fleeting evidence of its existence in our atmosphere, but it still seems exceedingly unlikely.

1) I don’t think the analogy of ambling around our backyards holds for space travel. Space is vast and largely empty, it would be astronomically unlikely for anyone to casually wander over to earth from another star or galaxy.

2) We only treat ants that way because we already know about them. People have noticed them and studied them at great length. A person who doesn’t know that other animals exist on earth would probably be incredibly fascinated by them and likely try to communicate with them.

They're not, but they're also somewhat orthogonal to "UFO culture." You're describing a philosophical/sociopolitical discussion that isn't really informed by a blip on a grainy video frame.

The question that's more relevant to UFOs, in my opinion, is "Why would these aliens, with their unimaginably superior technology, travel all the way here and reveal themselves in such asinine ways?" Did they intend to come all this way to do some cryptic and spooky display for a small number of people? Did they simply slip up and briefly drop their cover?

I just don't see it. I fully believe that, if there were aliens out there with such capabilities, and they came to earth, they would either conceal themselves fully or reveal themselves intentionally (and not just to a handful of people in a remote area).

The main challenges I see are:

1) With any given simulation, it’s going to take a long time before something really noteworthy emerges, and until then how do you know you’re on the right track?

2) What is the fitness function? This has always stumped me. How do you create artificial resources and competition and life and death to drive evolution?

Or maybe it was and they tweaked it well enough to work. It's been a while, my memory could be off. I don't know if it would have been prohibitive on the GameCube to have audio of every line (there were a lot), but I wouldn't put it past them to have done so.

Now that I think about it, I feel like this is what CSS Zen Garden was all about. You have to embrace the fact that you’re gonna sit there tweaking margins and experimenting with various incantations.

You want to build applications? Use whatever freakin tool or platform your users will adopt. Don't be constrained by pointless prescriptivism.

A central service where you can easily manage many subscriptions, with integrations into other websites. There are a lot things I would pay for if I didn't have to go through the process of creating and managing yet another account. If it was just a one-click add/remove.

News websites come to mind. I would also use a "buy access to this article for 50 cents" feature. It just has to be frictionless.

The major players might not want to give up the money from people buying subscriptions and not using them much or forgetting to cancel them, but that seems like a lunch ready to be eaten.