Slashdot Mirror

erice pointed out:

Both the article and the summary but not the actual paper make the claim that the only birds to survive were flightless. The actual paper talks about the demise of arboreal species. This makes sense as it is difficult for a tree-dwelling species to survive if the trees have gone. It does not follow that the survivors were necessarily flightless. Today most ground-dwelling species retain the ability to fly. And many of these have long, sturdy legs. Given that these kinds of birds don't tend to fly much, it is reasonable that many of these would adapt to a purely flightless lifestyle in the absence of predation. It does not follow that birds had to learn to fly all over again. Even if it took hundreds to thousands of years for the forests to recover, there should still be populations that retain flight ability allowing them to radiate back into the trees quickly.

If you were not already modded to +5 Informative, I'd've given you +1 Insightful for the above observation.

The Guardian's very brief summary was obviously written by a journalist who did not understand the paper on which he was reporting. Like you, I actually read the thing. As is typical of scientific papers on paleontological hypotheses, it's pretty careful about constraining its conclusions to what the actual evidence suggests. It was The Guardian's reporter who jumped to the conclusion that because "arboreal species" were apparently made extinct by the Chixiculub bolide impact meant only flightless birds survived. Had he lived in the country, in areas where quail and other ground-nesting birds are common, he would have learned otherwise.

But, hey, what can you expect from city folk with no scientific background ... ?

(Posting as AC only so as not to undo prior upmods in this thread.)

--

Check out my novel ...

If you want a bunch of USB C cables, here's a five pack for 16 bucks: https://www.amazon.com/WUXIAN-...

I guess my point was that it was another thing about it that I just didn't care for at this point in the technology cycle.

I'm old enough to remember when computing devices came with both the legacy and the new connector for awhile ...

If you want a bunch of USB C cables, here's a five pack for 16 bucks: https://www.amazon.com/WUXIAN-...

Why bother with going to church to confess? The Catholic Church could sell a "Confession App" for Alexa. There is already one for Android:

https://www.amazon.com/Web4u-C...

If you confess to anything really criminal, the Alexa Confession App can forward it to the police. This wouldn't break any vows, since Alexa didn't take any vows.

Is Alexa Catholic . . . ? Does the Pope shit in the woods . . . ?

I assume what happened was they triggered the "send a voice message" function in their conversation and their Echo device's volume was turned down and didn't hear the Echo activation beep or see the light. Based on this guide, all you have to do is say something that sounds like "Alexa send a voice message to XXX" and if XXX is a unique contact id, then the Echo sends it without further confirmation.

https://www.amazon.com/gp/help...

To send a voice message using a supported Echo device

        1 - Say, "Send a message to [contact name]."
        2 - If the name is similar to other contacts in your address book, Alexa repeats the name back for you to confirm.
        3 - Once you confirm the name, Alexa prompts you for the message.
        4- When you've finished talking, Alexa sends your voice message.

Now I bothered to look for more than 5 seconds, it turns out there's quite a few 64GB laptops.
https://www.amazon.com/Laptops...
Some of them are even around the $2000 mark.

Be wary though; the J1900 in that box doesn't support AES-NI. While PfSense will work great on it today, the next major release is going to require those instructions. Something like this would work better for PfSense past version 2.5.

tepples inquired:

Then why is there no option for "I prefer not to specify my location and am fine with not viewing any regionally restricted videos"?

The workaround is:

Turn off GPS. Grant the requested permissions. Open Settings, Apps, Youtube. Tap on Permissions, Location. Tap Deny.

I did it years ago. It works ...

(Posting as AC only so as not to undo prior upmods in this thread.)

--

Check out my novel ...

c6gunner explained:

You don't need to uninstall it; android let's you disable system apps so they never run. Sure, they still take up space on the device but, due to the way the phones are partitioned, that's space you can't use anyway. So the only advantage of uninstalling vs disabling is that if you could uninstall it you wouldn't see the icon any more.

You can also drag the icon toward the top of your screen, and (you should) get the option to Remove it (which just transfers it to the gallery, but does remove it from your screen).

Also, c6gunner, it's "lets," not "let's," in this context. "Let's" is a contraction of "let us," whereas "lets" is a synonym for "allows." I'm a writer. Proper spelling punctuation and grammar are part of my toolbox ...

(Posting as AC only so as not to undo prior upmods in this thread.)

--

Check out my novel ...

alexhs suggested:

No need to freak out, just say "hell no", and when their mobile usage drops close to 0, it's FaceBook that will freak out...

It already dropped dramatically with the #deletefacebook movement, right ? Right ?

People are stupid. That goes double for millenials, who stare blankly when you suggest they only use a desktop browser to access FB, and ask, "What's a desktop browser?".

I've never installed FB's app on my phone, and I never will. As for my desktop(s), I only sign in from one.

It's on a VPN, I use Adblock and NoScript - and I have a NoScript ABE entry that blocks access by FB scripts on third-party websites, so their scripts only run on FB itself:

• Site .facebook.com .fbcdn.net
  Accept from .facebook.com .fbcdn.net
  Deny INCLUSION(SCRIPT, OBJ, SUBDOC)

I also never take quizzes, participate in surveys, or play games on FB. Because, hell no ...

(Posting as AC only so as not to undo prior upmods in this thread.)

--

Check out my novel ...

On measure of whether a country is authoritarian is whether it kills other people to get what it wants.

Where in the World Is the U.S. Military? Quote: "... the United States ... maintains nearly 800 military bases in more than 70 countries and territories abroad... Britain, France and Russia, by contrast, have about 30 foreign bases combined."

Book: Base Nation: How U.S. Military Bases Abroad Harm America and the World

Another way to measure authoritarian control: Is the U.S. truly a democracy? Or is most government control hidden from voters? Most U.S. citizens have little or no knowledge of how much taxpayer money the U.S. military spends.

I think you slipped a few orders of magnitude there. I get 17 days for "the initial part." Intuitively, your numbers don't make sense: there is no way that satellite has 100Gbps downlink, or even anywhere in that neighborhood, so the time to download the dataset over a 100Gbps link should not be an appreciable fraction of the total 46-year program duration.

That said, sneakernet may be a better approach here.

Untangle Home It is $50 per year for home use, and includes all of the premium features, at a fraction of the cost. Untangle is easily comparable to the other retail security appliance vendors, but it is Much easier to configure. Many of the admins that favor a "lock out everything" mindset do not appreciate Untangle because it does not take that approach. But that makes it easier for the home-gamer to setup and fine tune. There will be a definite learning curve because there are so many more features available. For hardware, I recommend; A barebone headless pc that can be kitted out for $230 or less.

I've been loving my older ASUS wifi router. If I were buying one today, I might get something like this model:

https://www.amazon.com/RT-ACRH...

The unplugged one.

Not necessarily.

You should always follow safety practices appropriate for each type of tool.

LMFAO.... More proof that even an unplugged router can cause serious pain and misery in the wrong hands.

The unplugged one.

Not necessarily.

You should always follow safety practices appropriate for each type of tool.

It depends on your needs and your budget. If you're a typical home user that doesn't have people specifically targeting them then your needs are very different than a corporate executive who is regularly hit with espionage attempts.

I'll answer for a typical home user: Turris Omnia. It's a bit pricey ($339 on Amazon), but it runs a modified version of OpenWRT. It's easy-to-use, reasonably powerful in terms of features and capabilities, and is updated frequently.

It is interesting to ask just how good a password needs to be this year. Cracking a password involves computing many hashes, and because of bitcoin, specialized hardware exists to do this very very quickly. For example, there is AntMiner 9 that does 14TH/s while consuming 1.3kW. It will not, of course, crack passwords, but we can probably assume that similar hardware exists on the black market that can. So, how long does your password need to be to counter threats like this?

An average identity theft results in $1343 in profit for the thief. A thief equipped with AntMiner9-equivalent hardware will be able to run it for about a year at current electricity prices. A year is about 2^25 seconds. 14TH is approximately 2^44, 44 bits. Together that's 69 bits of password strength required before a brute force attack becomes unprofitable.

According to wikipedia's password strength table, 69 bits can be achieved with 11 character case sensitive alphanumeric + symbols password. With single-case alphanumeric, 14 characters would be needed.

So, how many of you smart ones use a password this long on some random website? What, nobody? Of course not. Nobody will be able to remember many 14 character passwords. Use a password manager! Don't let your friends use the web without a password manager!

to 'sink' 8kW into a battery in an 8 hour day, you need a thousand watts of solar. which is a single mid-size panel.

Most of your calculations are pretty good. However, I have not seen any 1000 watt solar panels on the market. Medium mid-sized panels are 100 watts. Large panels are 250 watts.

So, you would not need one mid-sized panel. You would need 10! That's a lot of area, and a lot of money. It's more difficult than you think.

I use mine about 60/40 desktop/laptop. I have this 39 inch 4K display at both home and work, which connects to my MacBook Pro with USB-C. This gives me about 5 square feet of screen real estate, enough to fully display an editor, debugger, browser, and test window, all with no overlap, and 20 inches of vertical text. I use this ergonomic keyboard for long hours of RSI-free typing. But I also use my laptop as a laptop while commuting, in meetings, and in bed.

I use mine about 60/40 desktop/laptop. I have this 39 inch 4K display at both home and work, which connects to my MacBook Pro with USB-C. This gives me about 5 square feet of screen real estate, enough to fully display an editor, debugger, browser, and test window, all with no overlap, and 20 inches of vertical text. I use this ergonomic keyboard for long hours of RSI-free typing. But I also use my laptop as a laptop while commuting, in meetings, and in bed.

When you have an attendee using OSX... it almost works sometimes.

The problem with S4B on OSX is that it doesn't reconnect when people log in, making the whole thing nearly useless. Whats the point of an IM system that is almost always logged out? (And we used Lync/S4B mostly for IM, conference calls were secondary).

For all the rhetoric about "oh Skype's ailing because of focus on business needs", S4B compares poorly with pretty much all of its business oriented competitors.

Oh, there are other products similarly poor, though that at least has first class OSX support.

https://www.amazon.com/Bare-Fa... is a far better book, and it's not even fiction. It's the tale of a grifter, conman, and the gullible idiots who follow him.

An Anonymous Coward burbled:

"Mission: Earth (Ten Volumes)" by L. Ron Hubbard. Amazing science fiction series.

If by "amazing" you mean "amazingly bad, to the point of being unreadable," then I wholeheartedly concur.

It's a series so staggeringly badly-written that only a Scientologist so utterly, slavishly devoted to the Cult of Elron that he (or she - after all, there are plenty of female idiots, too) not only drank his entire serving of Kool-Aid, but got down on his knees and begged for seconds.

I've been a science fiction fan since a month after I learned the alphabet, at the age of six. I've despised L. Ron Hubbard's incompetent, adolescent power fantasy version of SF since my first encounter with it at the age of seven or so, because it's all badly written (and I do mean ALL of it) - and none of it is based on a single scintilla of actual science. In place of the at-least-tangential connection with scientific knowledge that underlies the work of such Golden Age, space opera exponents as E. E. Smith, Edmund Hamilton, and Jack Williamson, Elron didn't bother with all that science-y, fact-ish stuff. Apparently that was labor he couldn't be bothered to perform - so he simply made shit up, instead.

But that's not the real reason you should avoid reading Hubbard's mindless drivel. The real reason - or, at least, the major reason - is that everything he wrote is, without exception, awkwardly-constructed, pointlessly grandiose, and just plain stupid.

Mind you, I was a mere seven years old when I reached that conclusion.

Nothing of his that I've read since has altered my opinion of his work in any way. Not his Ole' Doc Methuselah stories, not Battlefield Earth (which I forced myself to trudge through, because it was an Astroturfed NYT bestseller, and because I don't believe it is either fair or ethical to criticize a book you haven't read), not his magnum dopus, Dianetics: The Modern Science of Bullshit and Handwaving. And Mission: Earth is no exception to the rule.

It's all terrible.

If you disbelieve me; if you think somehow that nothing could even possibly be that bad, by all means, read it for yourself. Or try to, at any rate.

But do me, yourself, and the world at large a favor, if you will: don't buy any of Elron's gawdawful books. Not one. Instead, borrow a copy from your local public library. At least that way his estate - which is to say the Church of Scientology - doesn't get a single penny of your hard-earned money. Or buy a copy at a garage sale, or a Friends of the Library sale (because, once again, Scientology doesn't make a cent on sales of secondhand books). Don't even use your Amazon Prime privileges or your Kindle Unlimited account to read the ebook version for "free" (because, believe it or not, Amazon pays per-page royalties to authors when you "borrow" books).

Trust me on this. It'll make an unbeliever of you. I guarantee it ...

(Posting as AC only so as not to undo prior upmods in this thread.)

--

Check out my novel ...

Do we really need numeric keypad? I haven't touched it in the past 20 years. I learned about it by accident: https://www.amazon.com/967428-... -- a separate numeric keypad ended up never being used. It's just there to create clutter and make finding the Enter key difficult.

https://slashdot.org/~bobbied opined:

If that's how they think they can win votes, by holding useless votes, then power to them. Even if it passes, it won't be signed by Trump.

Sadly, I agree that's the likeliest outcome.

I'm afraid though, if this is their wedge issue this go around, they got problems bigger than Trump.

It's not - and let's hope they merely append it to the teetering stack of more cogent arguments available, rather than try to make it their tentpole issue.

The most important political fact for both Democrats and non-troll /. members to keep in mind is that, however necessary to the future growth and universal availability of the Internet as we know it (and to the evolution of the 'net as we will experience it in the future) may be - and I'm pretty sure that the majority of us agree that it's crucial - the fact is that the VAST majority of American voters simply don't care.

Complex, nuanced, and, especially, technical issues are beyond their comprehension. In my experience, most of them will fight tooth, nail, and pocketknife to avoid either educating themselves on the topic, or being educated on it by someone else. They'll turn the channel, mute the post, switch to that lolcat video they've been saving for a special occasion - anything to keep from having to actually think.

Becaue thinking is hard. Americans just don't do hard, anymore.

And, honestly, as a society, we never really did ...

(Posting as AC only so as not to undo prior upmods in this thread.)

--

Check out my novel ...

ShanghaiBill opined:

Non-violent offenders do not belong in prison.

Prompting a courageous Anonymous Coward to respond:

Is that a reference to the poor persecuted drug users? At least when they are locked up, they are not pouring money into the Mexican drug cartels' pockets.

You really, really need to read Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Sam Quinones' book Dreamland: The True Story of America's Opioid Epidemic. It's essentially the story of how Perdue Pharmaceuticals created the opioid epidemic in the USA by misrepresenting to the FDA, Congress, and doctors across the country how "harmless" prescribing powerful opiod narcotics was, even for chronic pain.

Based strictly on Perdue's bullshit, doctors - especially high school and college sports medicine doctors - prescribed amounts of Perdue's high-purity hydocodone medication high enough to guarantee addiction in athletes, housewives, and victims of trauma (auto accidents, falls, etc.) over long periods of time. When schools and insurance companies cut them off from those pharmaceutical sources, they turned in droves to Mexican brown heroin - which a whole new coop-style drug cartel operating out of the region around Xalisco supplied, using a fleet of drivers and a central dispatcher in each city they expanded into to bring the heroin to their customers with virtually zero risk of being caught making a deal.

Those drug addicts whose lives you so casually dismiss were almost all created by Perdue's lies, and multi-billion-dollar, direct-to-physicians marketing campaign. They're junkies, yes. But most of them are victims of deliberate pharmaceutical industry malfeasance, not deliberate actors.

Full disclosure: I have no affiliation with Sam Quinones, nor do I have any affiliate relationship with Amazon. If you buy his book via the above link, I get exactly zero dollars - or any other consideration - from the sale. (And you can get it from any other major bookseller, if you prefer not to make Jeff Bezos any richer, btw.) I simply believe it's essential reading for anyone who's interested in how the hell this country found itself in this mess to begin with, and who's responsible for getting us here ...

There is a book called "Avogadro Corp: The Singularity Is Closer Than It Appears", where basically the Avogadro Corporation is the functional equivalent of Google and they accidentally create an A.I. via an email language optimization program. https://www.amazon.com/Avogadr...

Abortion doctors are contentious, so they must be making obscene profits?

Here's some suggested reading to help you with your problem.

It's ALL of those people's fault that I got busted for shoplifting, or selling crack, or whatever.

Let us know how awesome it is when it's your dumb ass in the slammer due to the actions of corrupt cops or prosecutors.

93 Escort Wagon opined:

When you eliminate the requirement to avoid running into things, the problem gets a LOT simpler!

Thanks for clarifying the fact that you have no meaningful, personal experience driving on rural (for which read "dirt") roads.

The thing is - and I speak from some years' experience living on such a road - they are absolutely not dependably free of obstructions. In fact, probably the most common obstruction drivers run into (a phrase I mean literally here) is deer.

See, deer routinely behave in what can best be described as "suicidal" ways. (I choose not to say "irresponsible ways," instead, because anyone who expects a wild animal to behave responsibly from a human perspective should not be permitted to cross the street without close, adult supervision - for his or her own protection.) They are infamous for leaping out into the path of oncoming drivers so abruptly - and often from within thick, concealing, roadside vegetation - that it's literally impossible for the human to react in time to avoid colliding with them (because there's a hard, physiological limit on the round-trip speed of nerve impulse transmission from the eye to the brain and back out to the motor nerves of about a half second).

No matter how attentive you are to road conditions and the effects of weather and ambient light levels on visibility, the damned deer will manage, without warning, to place themselves squarely in your path, in close enough physical proximity to guarantee you will hit them. Rural residents live and drive in mortal terror of the fucking things - and that fear is absolutely justified ...

(Posting as AC only so as not to undo prior upmods in this thread.)

--

Check out my novel ...

An Anonymous Coward noted;

That's FUD. You can't just come in and vote.

Prompting superwiz to respond:

Not legally. But there is no active enforcement of laws which prohibit it. There is incidental enforcement. It's the difference between a traffic ticket and a domestic violence call. There is a dedicated police force to actively enforce moving violations. There is no dedicated police force to catch illegal voting. But if someone notices and reports it (like a domestic disturbance), then it gets prosecuted. And without active enforcement, there is simply no way of knowing how frequently fraudulent voting happens.

Absolutely incorrect.

There is, in fact, a "police force" charged specifically with identifying, preventing, and reporting in-person fraudulent voting. Different states give them different titles (Ohio - where I currently live - calls them "election judges"), but they all share that responsibility, in addition to being obligated (under oath) to check prospective voters' names against the most-current precinct rolls, lead them to the next available voting booth and either hand them a paper ballot, or instruct them in the operation of an official mechanical- or computer-based voting machine, ensure, after they have cast their ballots, that they are properly inserted into the sealed ballot box, or that they have properly submitted their ballots by throwing the final lever, or confirmed their choices by pressing the Cast Vote "button" on a voting terminal's touch screen (and then pressing the one that confirms their desire to finalize their votes, as well - and I have personally had to chase inattentive voters down in the polling location's parking lot, and persuade them to return to the booth to personally press that final button, because election judges are forbidden by law from doing it for them).

If an election judge (or someone in another state that gives such officials a different title that, nonetheless, charges them with those same duties) suspects a prospective voter is attempting to vote illegally, he/she has both the right and the legal obligation to challenge that voter's right to cast a ballot, to refuse to allow him/her to cast a regular ballot, and to allow him/her, under official protest by a sworn elections official, to cast only what is known as a "provisional ballot" (the voter's credentials for which, I assure you, will be closely examined by senior election officials at the county election headquarters, before that ballot is removed, face down, from the clearly-labelled, sealed envelope that bears the provisional voter's verifiable identification information, and is deposited in a ballot box to be counted anonymously, only after it is commingled with other, unchallenged ballots from that precinct - or else be discarded after having been determined to be illegitimate and therefore ineligible for inclusion in the count of votes cast in that election).

And, should that first, precinct-level, elections judge suspect deliberate attempted vote fraud by the voter in question, he or she is also legally obligated to summon sworn (i.e. - badge-and-gun-carrying) law enforcement personnel (typically a county sheriff's deputy) to detain and, should the responding officer(s) decide such action is warranted, arrest and transport to jail the suspect, pending the filing of charges against him/her.

So, I repeat, your statement is absolutely incorrect. Utterly, completely, and egregiously so ...

(Posting here as AC only so as not to undo prior upmods in this thread.)

--

Check out my novel ...

An Anonymous Coward proposed:

We should set a limit on campaign spending and have more robust debates rather than fucking Ads.....

The problem with your proposal is that SCOTUS has essentially outlawed restrictions on third-parrty, Federal-level campaign spending, and has awarded corporations, as fictitious "persons," the unrestricted right to political free speech. Oh, and it also ruled (back in 1976!) that money and free speech are the same thing, for campaign spending purposes.

All of those decisions were 5/4 votes, split purely along party lines, btw. (I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader to guess which justices voted in favor of no limits, corporate political free speech rights, and money being interchangeable with actual speech.)

Essentially, that means the ONLY way to accomplish what you suggest is via a series of Constitutional amendments (because SCOTUS is likely to rule that the question of corporate free speech rights is a separate issue from that of limits on donations to, and spending directly by, and/or on behalf of candidates) - which require a two-thirds majority vote of both houses of Congress in favor of referring them to the individual state legislatures for votes on ratification AND a vote in favor of ratification by two-thirds of the 50 state legislatures - the completion of which, since 1917, typically has been constrained by a congressionally-mandated time limit (incorporated into the text of the proposed amendment itself), within which it must be accomplished. (The length of that time limit is entirely up to the congress that votes to refer it to the states, although it appears to be possible for a succeeding Congress to extend or potentially even rescind that limit, should it so decide. In that regard, Wyoming challenged the constitutional legality of the 3-year extension of the original 7-year time limit which Congress granted backers of the Equal Rights Amendment, but the extension expired without the minimum number of states having voted to ratify, before SCOTUS - which had voted to expedite Wyoming's appeal - had the opportunity to actually hear the case, and the justices then ruled it to have been mooted, and declined on that basis to hear it. The resolution of that question is therefore still firmly stuck in the "undecided" class.)

So I'm afraid your no-doubt-well-intentioned "solution" - as is the case with so many others - falls under the jurisdiction of what is often now called Mencken's Law, the original version of which (taken from the third chapter of the 1920 edition of the great man's collection of essays entitled "Prejudices: Second Series") in part reads:

... there is always a well-known solution to every human problem - neat, plausible, and wrong.

(Posting as AC only so as not to undo prior upmods in this thread.)

--

Check out my novel ...

o what end? They didn't have a patch kit, there was no rescue rocket on standby.

Go read Comm Check. A Shuttle was close enough in pre-lauch prep that it could have been viable for a rescue. It would've required Columbia to power down everything and extend consumables as long as possible along with a faster-than-normal prep of the rescue Shuttle, but it was withing the bounds of possible. NASA simply decided not to even try.

Not quite what you're thinking of, but I love the Bug-A-Salt, which fires a near-invisible puff of table salt at flying insects. Better than a flyswatter, doesn't splatter the bug, but brings them down. Also good for spiders that sends my lady screaming. Nowadays, when she sees a spider, she screams, and then grabs the Bug-A-Salt and downs the spider. Take that!

It's so great that I actually hope to see some houseflies around the home. Disappointingly, they have generally steered clear.

" respected Wall Street analysts...."

That is exactly how the Wall Street racket works, by selling fake expertise on the basis of reputation.

Musk's disrespect for Wall-Street is certainly warranted. Analysts claim to possess expert knowledge which will yield higher returns, when really their returns are worse than a dumb strategy such as ETFs. Retrospective comparisons of analysts picks to passive investment show analysts perform worse.

Investment firms are a scam. Do not be a sucker and a victim. Read about investment from someone who is not trying to extract money from you.

That Musk moved the price of Tesla shares by blowing off analysts just shows how many idiot investors there are. When idiots sell their Tesla stock because Musk hurt the feelings of the con artists, the smart move is to buy Tesla.
   

Ex professional game developer here. (I've shipped games on PS1, PS2, PC, Wii, DS, and helped numerous companies with their PS3 engines and toolchain. Left the professional industry in 2011 for a stable paycheck but I do my own (indie) game programming and design now, am a hardcore gamer, and help fellow game developers with advice.)

Sorry for the LONG read, but think I can lend some information that will be insightful and not inciteful. =P

> why we still haven't seen modders, foss developers and artists get together to build their own games.

We have, but on a limited scale.

TL:DR;

* Tech Hurdle
* Too many cooks in the kitchen
* Co-dependency upon the Game Engine and everything else
* Theory vs Implementation
* The "good" modders get "poached"

The LONG answer:

There are numerous reasons for this:

* Tech Hurdle

The first hurdle was the tech hurdle. Up until recently writing a "general purpose engine" was folly. Was the game 2D or 3D? If 3D, you HAD to optimize for indoor or outdoor environments for the most part with various kludges to support the other. If you notice both Unity and Unreal now offer a "2D" mode -- Unity with 2D Game Kit and Unreal with Paper2D

Examples where tech matters:

Trying to do "dense jungle environments" in a 3D shooter was basically a recipe of framerate FAIL until Crysis came along:

Doctor, it hurts when I do this.
Don't do that!!

We "solved" this problem by basically throwing more money at hardware (GPU / CPUs)

How does the engine handle the "contradictory" nature of transparency?

* Opaque objects can be rendered front-to-back using the hardware's "Early Z Test".
* Transparent objects need to be rendered back-to-front so you get the correct colors.

How does an engine handle thousands of lights?

* Deferred rending "solves" this problem but doesn't work for transparency. DOH!

People are using hybrid approaches of Forward Render vs Deferred Render. If the "big boys" are STILL figuring this out, Unity 2018.1 with their High Definition Render Pipeline (HD RP) (Preview) -- what chance does amateurs have? Yes, we see engines like Irrlicht but that is a steep learning curve for non-technical people.

We've seen SOME limited success. Back when Quake 2 was popular we Cube 2: Sauerbraten as a good example of the community coming together to produce something "good."

Open Source engines have typically performed like crap. I've posted in the past

how Mike Acton reviewed Ogre 1.9's OrgreNode.cpp pointing out its horrible design and performance.

As a result Orge 2.x game up with a gameplan -- they put together a PDF of how OOP screwed their performance over.

Turns out, Mike Acton was right. They ended up with a 5x performance increase by ditching OOP and using DOD.

How many people own Jason's quintessential engine development book Game Engine Architecture? How many understand it?

* Too many cooks in the kitchen.

C++ is "good" example of "Design by committee." Everybody has their favorite pet peeve bloating the core user experience until it is an over-engineered clusterfuck.

You'll notice that almost all of the

I never said there isn't reason to use a higher quality cable than the cheapest piece of shit that can be cobbled together and sold with the HDMI logo on it, whether earned or not. It's not like there aren't counterfeits out there or anything.

I did say, however, that if you already have good enough SNR to actually get the whole signal, a better cable isn't somehow going to get you more information than what you're already getting.

Seriously, look at the marketing for some of these cables. Please tell me what the fuck you are getting out of this $1500 HDMI cable that you don't get from a $30 cable which is probably overpriced as well, because Belkin. Please explain what properties the first one has, beyond a level of price gouging that the pharmaceutical industry wishes they could get away with, that somehow increase signal quality above a certified cable from a reputable manufacturer at 1/50 of the cost.

This is of course an extreme example of what I was referring to, but there's no shortage of $100 cables that do exactly what a cable that costs 1/3 the price would do in the exact same environment and equipment. Previously performed testing would tell us that there is no difference as long as you are receiving adequate signal, and using magic cables that purport to come close to superconductivity for the close to the price of actual superconducting materials are nothing but a colossal waste of money, sold by modern-age hucksters plying on people's ignorance seeded by an analog past where the cable quality only suffers diminishing returns, rather than a threshold of garbage-signal-versus-adequate-signal that we get with digital communications.

Some people want to argue that all of this is somehow brilliant political maneuvering on Trump's part, but that's being far, far too gracious. He may not be the type of complete idiot that much of the media would like to portray him as, but that doesn't make him some kind of chess master playing a highly skilled game that leaves his opponents caught in any number of clever snares.

Trump wrote (or ghost wrote) the art of making the deal. If nothing else he's had a lot of experience negotiating. It's not that he's a brilliant chess master, he's just experienced with standard negotiating tools and tricks. These are normal tricks but most people don't know them. You can learn them pretty easily in this book, although actually using them can take practice.

Maybe Sun-Tzu's art of War

Or, maybe DJ Trump's The Art of the Deal

It sounds like you are in an area where potential matches are very limited. You are not willing to move so you need to find someone who will move to you. I know people who have had great success with foreigners. The culture in other parts of the world can be very different. It may well be that a foreign culture suits you better.

From your other posts it is clear you live in the US, and have for at least 15 years. That suggests to me you are a US citizen. There are women all over the world who would love to marry an American and move to the US. I recommend looking in a country that is on the US visa waiver program so she can visit you in person before you start down the path of marriage and immigration.

If you aim for a foreigner one big concern will be scammers that are just looking for money or a ticket to the US. One key rule is to not send any money (you can make an exception for customs duties and immigration fees). Another is to make sure she spends a couple hours per day chatting with you online. If she has to spend a couple hours per day working on a relationship where the only return is the possibility of a long-term relationship she is probably the real deal. If she is just using you to get to the US it will likely be evident during the months of online chatting the two of you would engage in.

Also take note of the site/service you meet your mate on. If it is classified as an international marriage broker certain steps need to be followed or immigration will not let her into the country.

To immigrate you have to prove the two of you have a bona fide relationship. So you should keep a log of all email/texts/instant messages you send, a log of when all online chats start and stop, keep a copy of all receipts especially travel related. You will have to prove you have met in person (unless your religion prohibits it) so take lots of pictures together. You will need other documents as well. Visa Journey has great documentation on the whole process.

I also recommend you read How to Win Friends & Influence People. It is a classic book and a great read. It is aimed at salesman but the advise is good for everyone. I have seen it quoted by celebrities, politicians, and even a US Supreme Court justice. Some of your posts would have been written very differently if you had applied the book's advise. There is a good chance many of your online dating messages would have been written different as well.

Not just look, are marketed as: https://www.amazon.com/Mchoice...

...crap that is broadcast on it all day, every day. Right wing political rants, conspiracy theorists, and religious kooks have taken over all the space between the baseball games.

Remember when the Left decided to beat the Right at their own game? That was fun, I love to watch the movie that tracked the rise and fall of Air America, Left of the Dial.

• the Amazon Prime Visa card which gives 5% back on all purchases from Amazon. It's rewarded as credits you can apply to new purchases on Amazon, so has an effective 4.75% cash back rate. So if you spend more than about $2100/yr on Amazon (going up to $2500/yr @ $120 for Prime), it's actually more expensive not to get Prime.
• Prime Photos which gives you unlimited cloud storage of photos of any size. Photos are the most common "irreplaceable" data that people lose when their single backup (e.g. external HDD) dies. I highly recommend a second backup to a cloud service (where the hosting company takes care of hardware failures for you). And if you're a photographer with a huge library that needs backing up, this is the only unlimited storage I've found at a reasonable price. Google's unlimited photo storage requires downsizing everything to 2048x2048 or smaller.

It's a story written by Paul Mavrides, you've honestly never heard of the Church of the SubGenius or Bob Dobbs? You should have gotten a copy in your Nerd Starter Pack. Sad, you are missing out on some really good comedy. Here's a link https://www.amazon.com/Book-Su...

It's horrible, but if the alternative is a year kept packed in too small a space and having your testicles sliced off while you're awake, it's probably preferable.

Modern animal husbandry practices employ non-surgical emasculation tools

that leave the testes in situ, by crushing and severing the vas deferens. They can be - and almost always are - used by farmhands with no veterinary training.

I've watched this procedure performed on older calves. It appears to be only briefly painful. The new steers go back to grazing 30 seconds later, and the infection rate following the procedure is nearly zero.

I have to admit the crunching sound of the tool in operation made me wince, though ...

(Posting as AC only so as not to undo prior upmods in this thread.)

--

Check out my novel ...

I paid $1750 for my 130" 4K/HDR/60Hz "TV", but it's a projection TV: https://www.amazon.com/Optoma-...

https://www.amazon.com/Lutefisk-Lover-Gift-Basket/dp/B00TXQQRPE/

You've basically described Amazon Locker, except the crate is bought and owned by Amazon, and they give you a key code to open it instead of using a key. It's available in my city and is pretty convenient for returns (my neighborhood is safe enough I don't mind packages being left at my door). The closest locker is just a block away, so is much quicker than a trip to Staples to drop off a UPS package. The biggest problem is it's so popular the nearest locker is frequently full, so I often have to go to the second closest which is about the same distance as Staples. But I can put the package I'm returning into the locker immediately, whereas I usually have to wait 3-10 minutes for a Staples employee to show up to scan and process my UPS package.

Instructions to delivery service: Just move dead body over to the side if package will not fit between legs.

Passing this along: Amazon sells Body Bags ...

They already do that. Just not on a giant scale yet. There's one in the little city I live in.

Hop onto google maps and type in "Amazon Locker".