It's not all about your in-game skills. **** Absolutely not true.
If you take a midrange ship and fit it well enough to get those kills, you require a minimum of 9 months to train it and the sub-skills. Maybe 6 if you buy a "starter" character with all of the basic skills learned and put some heavy duty skill boosting implants on it.
I know. I've thought about starting a new character to just do PVP and it's a 6-9 month minimum to not get squashed like a bug.
Older characters have a huge advantage, pure and simple.
Sounds like Toyota is trying to create some bad press since it's no longer the only game in town.
FYI, hybrids like Honda is creating cost a lot less to own and maintain, especially for the 2nd and 3rd owners. EVs are even more cost-effective, at pennies per mile. They just normally lack the range and top-end speed. 30 miles at 50mph doesn't do a thing. But 200 miles and 120mph top speed is potentially viable.
The real litmus test, though, will be if the new EVs that Chrysler and the others are making will be available to purchase or whether they will be yet again the same "lease only" song and dance.
I just thought up a different but probably better device for this sort of mixing.
Make a version that is basically an ultrasonic tumbler. The idea would be that you could mix ingredients together on a very fine level. What got me thinking about it was my comment about Absenthe. I realized that it would be better to do this sort of thing *after* you added the sugar and water, because the sugar takes a significant amount of mixing to really create a smooth suspension of the ingredients and dissolve(which is why you generally have to use special quick dissolving sugar in mixed drinks). But without mixing in large amounts of ice or air to the equation.
You could test this pretty easily in a typical ultrasonic jewelery cleaner as well.
So basically there is no free lunch. Here's what I get so far from this discussion:
- It *might* make good wines a bit better, but cheap wines lack the ingredients/elements to ever become great. crap is crap and will remain that way.
- It won't work on anything distilled, because distilling effectively kills and stops the active yeasts and enzymes. Whiskey is a prime example of this in action. Once it's bottled, it's finished and effectively "set". The quote about an 10 year old bottle of 8 year old whiskey really being an 8 year old bottle that's gathered 2 extra years of dust was correct.
- It won't work on anything not sealed tightly. But if the bottle has carbonation in it, it may blow it up. Kind of a catch-22 here. The vibration will also most certainly vibrate the cork lose unless it's held in by a vise or other device.
So what I see it possibly being useful for are:
1 - Bottle fermented top quality beers. Yeast would have to still be present in the bottle. Would be tricky as to not blow the thing up, though. Maybe a minute at a time, then sit for a day or so.
2 - complex blends and spirits that still have a fair amount of the organic ingredients in them( Limoncello or Absenthe come to mind) Possibly Port or Sherry as well. The idea here would be to essentially mix the organics very finely into the alcohol. Moreso I'd wager with something that has sugar added to it in the process like Limoncello. It won't make the flavor better, just stronger and smoother.
Kind of how mixing dip or cake mix by hand isn't as good as a food processor or blender:)
3 - If you opened a bottle of wine and used this for a few minutes, it would very effectively agitate the wine similar I bet to letting it sit for a few minutes before serving. Might be a nice time saver and allow for less than optimal glasses to work.
Another cheap way to do this is to turn off the internet via Zone Alarm/firewall or whatever dialer you're using(if DSL). Most have an icon in the program tray that you can quickly click to disable your networking.
The thing will time out in about 20-30 seconds and ask you if you want to go into offline mode. You can then re-enable the internet after selecting this and the game will play without contacting Steam. This is great for games where you aren't playing online and want to keep your PC more secure. Or games where the CPU load is too high and you want to limit your background processes.(BioShock is a good example).
Easy, seamless, and it works. I like it that I no longer need to manually update games and download patches, have boxes cluttering my closet, or have to install. I just log in with a new computer and set it to download everything overnight. 30+ games in one big wad with no keys, inserting CDs, or other nonsense like Starforce and other system crippling copy protection - Steam games have that crud yanked out by default.
Plus, sometimes they have really good games for very little money. The new XCom pack is $15 and has 5 games. they used to be a total pain to get running at all(true of most DOS era games). Now they are simple to run and stable.
Also, consider the following: 1 - drop the projects. Unless they are stuff you did freelance or running your own business, showing off code that isn't yours to really show off looks kind of tacky. They've seen it and just don't care.
2 - play down the "experience" angle. List the job, but pass it off as something not that important that you did to pay the bills and get through school. Now you want a real job and will do anything at the bottom that gets you a potential future with the company. Play *up* the hard worker angle.
I think the problem is that either they are googling/facebooking/etc you or it's that you come off as a bit of an ass as if the job you did was important. In other words, if you take a small fry job and pimp it too much, they think you're conning them or too full of yourself.
And, as previously mentioned, if you get the the interview stage, it's the interview that you're blowing, and they've already round-filed 3/4 of the crud before even asking you back.
If this doesn't work, I suggest you might look at the IBEW. They are always hiring and their low-voltage program pays well. In California and a few other places you now need training from them to do commercial alarm, A/V, internet, and other installations. Or a contractor's license. You'll start at easily double what the tech support job paid, plus get full medical and a good pension.
With the economy about to implode, the fact is that nobody wants to hire anyone, and there are loads of people out there with better degrees and training wanting that job - any job...
You need to go back to school and get a Masters. Otherwise, you'll remain the low man on the totem pole and never be able to compete with the offshore workers and the DIYers who have certificates and so on but no college(which they also would likely hire over you). Take myself - I ran my own consulting firm for a decade and finally gave up as I could make the same money in a cubicle. The industry is flooded with ex-IT guys right now like me and we'll take your job in a heartbeat.
"Among the e-mails released as part of the records request in June were several from Frye asking a state official whether private e-mail accounts and messages sent to BlackBerry devices are immune to subpoena, then reporting the answer to the governor and her husband, Todd, who also uses a Yahoo! mail address."
She's screwed. She's using her personal address to ask if here blackberry account can't be subponea'd. It looks pretty conclusive to me that she was doing or planning to do bad things with her personal accounts to keep the courts from getting ahold of it easily. So says the Washington Post, and well, that's about as good as it gets.
http://library.findlaw.com/1999/Feb/22/131004.html Relevant discussion about this in legal terms. Actually quite readable. Note - the laws have been greatly strengthened by recent laws as well. Note how Alaska has stricter laws about this as well than most other states.
Except.. failure to keep copies of all emails is seen by default as the same as willfully destroying evidence.
You don't have the emails when the court asks for them, you lose or end up in jail, period.(current guys in charge excluded, of course, it seems) But "Executive Privilege" doesn't even apply to her. All public employees know about this sort of stuff, as do all corporations, as well.
I noticed that her sent items mailbox is blank. Deleting government emails and their responses is a clear violation of standard record retention policies. In a legal case, failure to keep records of emails is seen as a clear violation(same as willfully destroying evidence) and in a legal case, would result in a loss of said case or a summary judgment against you.
Where are the responses?
P.S. I deal with this in RL - keeping *everything* in case of a future legal challenge or in this case, a document/information request if you are a public official is well known and considered mandatory in business and government.
Given her track record of cutthroat competition and back-room politicking, you can all but guarantee that just about the first mistake McCain makes that could get him impeached, she'll be the one leaking the information. "To protect the people's interest" of course...
She'll do just about anything that she can to gain power.
But, yes, there does appear to be a mixing of private and job related emails, which is not supposed to happen.
I bet it's 90% likely that Vista's DRM is messing things up. Still Apple's fault, but come on - Using Vista is like driving a GM car. Lots of people do because it's what's available, but really... is it what you aspire to own?
Rate Plan Details
Included Data 5 GB
Additional data $0.00048/KB
Canadian Data $0.015/KB
International Data $0.0195/KB **** So that's.. 5GB max. Even at the lowest domestic rate, that adds up to 5,242,880 Kb. Times $0.00048
$2516.58 before they turn it off.
Holy crap that's usurious. The limit is set to an insane level and should be more like 100MB. That would give you a more reasonable $50 a month maximum and the poor guy who sent emails would try to send one picture and hit the limit. And be charged $1573. Still nuts, but not impossibly so.
He's clearly been looking at his counterparts in the U.K. TV industry for ideas. In plan language, it will lead to U.K. style mandatory taxes and fees.
For instance, if you own a TV set, they know it and require a license. And will fine you hideous sums if you don't cough up the fees. And they run around in vans that can detect if you have a radio or TV in your home.
Do we really want that for our music? I sure don't.
IIRC, the patent itself expired a few years ago(IIRC, 17 years for initial licensing), so the myriad of plastic polishes that came about in the mid to late 90s were mostly copies of this company's earlier work. Of course, they've not stood still, so they still are quite a bit ahead of their competition. Just ask anybody who works with boats or fiberglass - this is always at the top of their list.
And - it does refinish old car headlights extremely well. I know of a few people who find old ones at junk yards and make a tidy business on Ebay reselling them after they are de-yellowed.
I also recommend this product. This is basically the stuff that everyone else copies for plastic repair and refinishing. Except Novus has been making this since the 70s. Why pay a bunch of money for some fancy CD repair kit when it's really 1-2 ounces of this stuff(or something nearly identical) with a fancy applicator?
Note - you only need #1 and maybe #2. #3 is essentially plastic polishing compound(same as auto paint polishing compound in grit!) - use this on your yellowing car headlights and similar. This stuff has hundreds of uses - works on diamondcoat(pinball playfields), fiberglass, and of course, plastic.
Neither are good at finding specific personal pages if they are similar to something that is a roughly normal term. No big surprise here, though.
1:Type in say, anything in Google with "review" in it. Typically you want information on the newest processor or car or something, right? You get 20,000+ links to blog and responses and such on retailer sites instead of actual reviews from mainstream sites. Google is hideous here. Cuil filters out the blog blather. In fact, it seems to ignore blogs entirely, which is a godsend, really. I don't care what some idiot in the middle of nowhere thinks about a product. I want real magazine articles and analysis.
2:Cuil is worthless for any search that includes a location, though. Say, I want to run the same search but for Los Angeles(where I live) Ramen reviews. There's really only ONE major site that reviews this and is only about local places to eat.(ramaniac) Google pulls it up as #1. Cuil thinks I want names and addresses of every darn shop in the area and goes brain-dead on the "review" part. Ramaniac isn't in the first half dozen pages.
I used the word "review" as it is a good way to tell how the engines are filtering results as it covers a lot of potential meanings, yet has specific results depending upon the usage that almost always mean you don't want any of the other interpretations.
Google seems to focus on the verb or adjective for results and Cuil seems to look at the subject/noun. It's worth keeping in mind.(though for some searches, like the example I used, I'll be using Cuil instead) Cuil also does seem to do better with seeing excluded words more as topics than actual terms, so for instance, I can search for "Los Angeles Ramen Reviews -address" and get what I wanted originally. Google doesn't change at all that I can tell with that modifier.
P.S. I also tried a couple of specific names. Google is horribly bad at this. Cuil seems to understand that you are looking for sites with personal information and so on/trying to locate someone, especially if the name is similar to another more common name. I'll be using Cuil for personal and web page searches from now on as well.
Ie - I searched for "Handl". This is a specific Italian composer from almost 100 years before Handel. It pulled up only results for people with that name and of course, the composer and rejected "Handel". Google gave me the result I wanted but only 2-3 results, then spammed "Handel" responses. If I was looking for a friend with that last name, I'd be out of luck with Google. Google's "you're an idiot - you spelled that wrong and want THIS spelling instead" behavior bothers me a lot. I constantly find myself having to do "-(name) -(name) -(name)" to keep it focused.
I used to program for a long time and there were two schools of thought - but both involved a nice teal green. Our eyes see blue-green the strongest/are most sensitive to it.
The trick is the background. Given our oversensitivity to one color(it's close to the blue-green Slashdot uses for it's main page, actually), you can tone down the background quite a bit contrast-wise. White is out and so is black.
The best option then is a slightly blueish gray for backgrounds. Take a look at the menu bar under the main Slashdot banner. That sort of blue-gray or close to it.(bit darker is optimal, though Slashdot is close)
You'll have to fiddle with the brightness a bit to where it's comfortable. I like it reversed - darker grey and lighter almost whiteish teal. Kind of like an old school green CRT monitor, but without the insane radiation and brightness levels.
I looked at the pictures so far and I noticed that they are not identical.
But it is clear that someone was essentially tracing them/had the pictures next to them when they drew in the textures. Kind of like if you had a picture of an Escher drawing and tried to exactly duplicate it on the computer - just with your own mediocre skills(why the originals look better)
So *technically* not copying. But it's clearly lifting the other guys' materials and re-using their hard work to cut corners. My guess is that the artists were on an impossible schedule and started looking around for source material to use as "inspiration". Of course their bosses were clueless. They probably haven't ever played a computer game.
Watch for a "we've fired the artists and are re-doing the parts in question" type statement shortly.
Slashdot Mirror
It's not all about your in-game skills.
****
Absolutely not true.
If you take a midrange ship and fit it well enough to get those kills, you require a minimum of 9 months to train it and the sub-skills. Maybe 6 if you buy a "starter" character with all of the basic skills learned and put some heavy duty skill boosting implants on it.
I know. I've thought about starting a new character to just do PVP and it's a 6-9 month minimum to not get squashed like a bug.
Older characters have a huge advantage, pure and simple.
Sounds like Toyota is trying to create some bad press since it's no longer the only game in town.
FYI, hybrids like Honda is creating cost a lot less to own and maintain, especially for the 2nd and 3rd owners. EVs are even more cost-effective, at pennies per mile. They just normally lack the range and top-end speed. 30 miles at 50mph doesn't do a thing. But 200 miles and 120mph top speed is potentially viable.
The real litmus test, though, will be if the new EVs that Chrysler and the others are making will be available to purchase or whether they will be yet again the same "lease only" song and dance.
I just thought up a different but probably better device for this sort of mixing.
Make a version that is basically an ultrasonic tumbler. The idea would be that you could mix ingredients together on a very fine level. What got me thinking about it was my comment about Absenthe. I realized that it would be better to do this sort of thing *after* you added the sugar and water, because the sugar takes a significant amount of mixing to really create a smooth suspension of the ingredients and dissolve(which is why you generally have to use special quick dissolving sugar in mixed drinks). But without mixing in large amounts of ice or air to the equation.
You could test this pretty easily in a typical ultrasonic jewelery cleaner as well.
So basically there is no free lunch. Here's what I get so far from this discussion:
- It *might* make good wines a bit better, but cheap wines lack the ingredients/elements to ever become great. crap is crap and will remain that way.
- It won't work on anything distilled, because distilling effectively kills and stops the active yeasts and enzymes. Whiskey is a prime example of this in action. Once it's bottled, it's finished and effectively "set". The quote about an 10 year old bottle of 8 year old whiskey really being an 8 year old bottle that's gathered 2 extra years of dust was correct.
- It won't work on anything not sealed tightly. But if the bottle has carbonation in it, it may blow it up. Kind of a catch-22 here. The vibration will also most certainly vibrate the cork lose unless it's held in by a vise or other device.
So what I see it possibly being useful for are:
1 - Bottle fermented top quality beers. Yeast would have to still be present in the bottle. Would be tricky as to not blow the thing up, though. Maybe a minute at a time, then sit for a day or so.
2 - complex blends and spirits that still have a fair amount of the organic ingredients in them( Limoncello or Absenthe come to mind) Possibly Port or Sherry as well. The idea here would be to essentially mix the organics very finely into the alcohol. Moreso I'd wager with something that has sugar added to it in the process like Limoncello. It won't make the flavor better, just stronger and smoother.
Kind of how mixing dip or cake mix by hand isn't as good as a food processor or blender :)
3 - If you opened a bottle of wine and used this for a few minutes, it would very effectively agitate the wine similar I bet to letting it sit for a few minutes before serving. Might be a nice time saver and allow for less than optimal glasses to work.
1 - Will this work for bottle fermented beer? Given that it has an airtight seal, this might actually work.
Or it might cause it to explode from excess gas being created...(seems far more likely) Anyone have any scientific knowledge about this?
Another cheap way to do this is to turn off the internet via Zone Alarm/firewall or whatever dialer you're using(if DSL). Most have an icon in the program tray that you can quickly click to disable your networking.
The thing will time out in about 20-30 seconds and ask you if you want to go into offline mode. You can then re-enable the internet after selecting this and the game will play without contacting Steam. This is great for games where you aren't playing online and want to keep your PC more secure. Or games where the CPU load is too high and you want to limit your background processes.(BioShock is a good example).
Easy, seamless, and it works. I like it that I no longer need to manually update games and download patches, have boxes cluttering my closet, or have to install. I just log in with a new computer and set it to download everything overnight. 30+ games in one big wad with no keys, inserting CDs, or other nonsense like Starforce and other system crippling copy protection - Steam games have that crud yanked out by default.
Plus, sometimes they have really good games for very little money. The new XCom pack is $15 and has 5 games. they used to be a total pain to get running at all(true of most DOS era games). Now they are simple to run and stable.
Good advice.
Also, consider the following:
1 - drop the projects. Unless they are stuff you did freelance or running your own business, showing off code that isn't yours to really show off looks kind of tacky. They've seen it and just don't care.
2 - play down the "experience" angle. List the job, but pass it off as something not that important that you did to pay the bills and get through school. Now you want a real job and will do anything at the bottom that gets you a potential future with the company. Play *up* the hard worker angle.
I think the problem is that either they are googling/facebooking/etc you or it's that you come off as a bit of an ass as if the job you did was important. In other words, if you take a small fry job and pimp it too much, they think you're conning them or too full of yourself.
And, as previously mentioned, if you get the the interview stage, it's the interview that you're blowing, and they've already round-filed 3/4 of the crud before even asking you back.
If this doesn't work, I suggest you might look at the IBEW. They are always hiring and their low-voltage program pays well. In California and a few other places you now need training from them to do commercial alarm, A/V, internet, and other installations. Or a contractor's license. You'll start at easily double what the tech support job paid, plus get full medical and a good pension.
With the economy about to implode, the fact is that nobody wants to hire anyone, and there are loads of people out there with better degrees and training wanting that job - any job...
You need to go back to school and get a Masters. Otherwise, you'll remain the low man on the totem pole and never be able to compete with the offshore workers and the DIYers who have certificates and so on but no college(which they also would likely hire over you). Take myself - I ran my own consulting firm for a decade and finally gave up as I could make the same money in a cubicle. The industry is flooded with ex-IT guys right now like me and we'll take your job in a heartbeat.
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/the-trail/2008/09/17/palins_yahoo_account_hacked.html
This is from the Washington Post
"Among the e-mails released as part of the records request in June were several from Frye asking a state official whether private e-mail accounts and messages sent to BlackBerry devices are immune to subpoena, then reporting the answer to the governor and her husband, Todd, who also uses a Yahoo! mail address."
She's screwed. She's using her personal address to ask if here blackberry account can't be subponea'd. It looks pretty conclusive to me that she was doing or planning to do bad things with her personal accounts to keep the courts from getting ahold of it easily. So says the Washington Post, and well, that's about as good as it gets.
Odd that I can't get a single one of those to come up, but every other page on the internet works *just* fine.
http://wikileaks.org.nyud.net:8080/leak/sarah-palin-hack-2008/03.jpg
http://library.findlaw.com/1999/Feb/22/131004.html
Relevant discussion about this in legal terms. Actually quite readable. Note - the laws have been greatly strengthened by recent laws as well. Note how Alaska has stricter laws about this as well than most other states.
Except.. failure to keep copies of all emails is seen by default as the same as willfully destroying evidence.
You don't have the emails when the court asks for them, you lose or end up in jail, period.(current guys in charge excluded, of course, it seems) But "Executive Privilege" doesn't even apply to her. All public employees know about this sort of stuff, as do all corporations, as well.
A couple of the images have been Coral'd:
I noticed that her sent items mailbox is blank. Deleting government emails and their responses is a clear violation of standard record retention policies. In a legal case, failure to keep records of emails is seen as a clear violation(same as willfully destroying evidence) and in a legal case, would result in a loss of said case or a summary judgment against you.
Where are the responses?
P.S. I deal with this in RL - keeping *everything* in case of a future legal challenge or in this case, a document/information request if you are a public official is well known and considered mandatory in business and government.
Given her track record of cutthroat competition and back-room politicking, you can all but guarantee that just about the first mistake McCain makes that could get him impeached, she'll be the one leaking the information. "To protect the people's interest" of course...
She'll do just about anything that she can to gain power.
But, yes, there does appear to be a mixing of private and job related emails, which is not supposed to happen.
Perhaps the real problem, then, is with the iPod...
I have a nice Sandisk player and it has none of these issues, none of the DRM, and plays nicely with pretty much everything.
Oh - and it cost $100 or so less. Go figure.
I bet it's 90% likely that Vista's DRM is messing things up. Still Apple's fault, but come on - Using Vista is like driving a GM car. Lots of people do because it's what's available, but really... is it what you aspire to own?
Note - XP runs ITunes 8 just fine.
From the AT&T website about their plan.
Rate Plan Details
Included Data 5 GB
Additional data $0.00048/KB
Canadian Data $0.015/KB
International Data $0.0195/KB
****
So that's.. 5GB max. Even at the lowest domestic rate, that adds up to 5,242,880 Kb. Times $0.00048
$2516.58 before they turn it off.
Holy crap that's usurious. The limit is set to an insane level and should be more like 100MB. That would give you a more reasonable $50 a month maximum and the poor guy who sent emails would try to send one picture and hit the limit. And be charged $1573. Still nuts, but not impossibly so.
5Gigs is the problem.
Just go to their original open-source site and download it from there. No EULA at all other than the BSD one(which is fairly non-intrusive)
http://code.google.com/chromium/
You will need to compile it, though, but I suspect a compiled non-EULA version of it will be available for Windows very very soon.
He's clearly been looking at his counterparts in the U.K. TV industry for ideas. In plan language, it will lead to U.K. style mandatory taxes and fees.
For instance, if you own a TV set, they know it and require a license. And will fine you hideous sums if you don't cough up the fees. And they run around in vans that can detect if you have a radio or TV in your home.
Do we really want that for our music? I sure don't.
Heh.
IIRC, the patent itself expired a few years ago(IIRC, 17 years for initial licensing), so the myriad of plastic polishes that came about in the mid to late 90s were mostly copies of this company's earlier work. Of course, they've not stood still, so they still are quite a bit ahead of their competition. Just ask anybody who works with boats or fiberglass - this is always at the top of their list.
And - it does refinish old car headlights extremely well. I know of a few people who find old ones at junk yards and make a tidy business on Ebay reselling them after they are de-yellowed.
I also recommend this product. This is basically the stuff that everyone else copies for plastic repair and refinishing. Except Novus has been making this since the 70s. Why pay a bunch of money for some fancy CD repair kit when it's really 1-2 ounces of this stuff(or something nearly identical) with a fancy applicator?
Note - you only need #1 and maybe #2. #3 is essentially plastic polishing compound(same as auto paint polishing compound in grit!) - use this on your yellowing car headlights and similar. This stuff has hundreds of uses - works on diamondcoat(pinball playfields), fiberglass, and of course, plastic.
P.S. - Not for vinyl or rubber.
It definitely looks like it was designed by the same artists who make the ships in EVE. Very ugly and slightly misshapen.
Neither are good at finding specific personal pages if they are similar to something that is a roughly normal term. No big surprise here, though.
1:Type in say, anything in Google with "review" in it. Typically you want information on the newest processor or car or something, right? You get 20,000+ links to blog and responses and such on retailer sites instead of actual reviews from mainstream sites. Google is hideous here. Cuil filters out the blog blather. In fact, it seems to ignore blogs entirely, which is a godsend, really. I don't care what some idiot in the middle of nowhere thinks about a product. I want real magazine articles and analysis.
2:Cuil is worthless for any search that includes a location, though. Say, I want to run the same search but for Los Angeles(where I live) Ramen reviews. There's really only ONE major site that reviews this and is only about local places to eat.(ramaniac) Google pulls it up as #1. Cuil thinks I want names and addresses of every darn shop in the area and goes brain-dead on the "review" part. Ramaniac isn't in the first half dozen pages.
I used the word "review" as it is a good way to tell how the engines are filtering results as it covers a lot of potential meanings, yet has specific results depending upon the usage that almost always mean you don't want any of the other interpretations.
Google seems to focus on the verb or adjective for results and Cuil seems to look at the subject/noun. It's worth keeping in mind.(though for some searches, like the example I used, I'll be using Cuil instead) Cuil also does seem to do better with seeing excluded words more as topics than actual terms, so for instance, I can search for "Los Angeles Ramen Reviews -address" and get what I wanted originally. Google doesn't change at all that I can tell with that modifier.
P.S. I also tried a couple of specific names. Google is horribly bad at this. Cuil seems to understand that you are looking for sites with personal information and so on/trying to locate someone, especially if the name is similar to another more common name. I'll be using Cuil for personal and web page searches from now on as well.
Ie - I searched for "Handl". This is a specific Italian composer from almost 100 years before Handel. It pulled up only results for people with that name and of course, the composer and rejected "Handel". Google gave me the result I wanted but only 2-3 results, then spammed "Handel" responses. If I was looking for a friend with that last name, I'd be out of luck with Google. Google's "you're an idiot - you spelled that wrong and want THIS spelling instead" behavior bothers me a lot. I constantly find myself having to do "-(name) -(name) -(name)" to keep it focused.
I used to program for a long time and there were two schools of thought - but both involved a nice teal green. Our eyes see blue-green the strongest/are most sensitive to it.
The trick is the background. Given our oversensitivity to one color(it's close to the blue-green Slashdot uses for it's main page, actually), you can tone down the background quite a bit contrast-wise. White is out and so is black.
The best option then is a slightly blueish gray for backgrounds. Take a look at the menu bar under the main Slashdot banner. That sort of blue-gray or close to it.(bit darker is optimal, though Slashdot is close)
You'll have to fiddle with the brightness a bit to where it's comfortable. I like it reversed - darker grey and lighter almost whiteish teal. Kind of like an old school green CRT monitor, but without the insane radiation and brightness levels.
I looked at the pictures so far and I noticed that they are not identical.
But it is clear that someone was essentially tracing them/had the pictures next to them when they drew in the textures. Kind of like if you had a picture of an Escher drawing and tried to exactly duplicate it on the computer - just with your own mediocre skills(why the originals look better)
So *technically* not copying. But it's clearly lifting the other guys' materials and re-using their hard work to cut corners. My guess is that the artists were on an impossible schedule and started looking around for source material to use as "inspiration". Of course their bosses were clueless. They probably haven't ever played a computer game.
Watch for a "we've fired the artists and are re-doing the parts in question" type statement shortly.
Make a bunch of chess sets out of the various parts.
Something like this.
http://www.novica.com/itemdetail/index.cfm?pid=121771
The platters of could serve as the white squares maybe?