No, but WE are asking the smart question: if so MANY women choose to avoid those fields - WHY. What is it about those fields that make so many women prefer to stay the hell away from it ?
Now, based on available evidence, we have a strong theory about what the answer may be - a theory you definitely do not agree with. Now a rational answer would be to posit and alternative theory, or show that somehow, the evidence for our theory is false.
You have made no attempt to do either - you tried to derail the conversation by focusing on something else entirely. You accuse us of trying to force choices on women - which is the exact OPPOSITE of trying to fix things which force choices on women. But you never addressed the evidence for our theory, and you posited no alternative hypotheses to explain the phenomenon and the evidence. I can therefore only conclude that you are incapable of doing so. If we're wrong- you've done absolutely nothing to correct us, if we're right, all you've done is tried ot delay us fixing the problem. That is a very sensible thing to do... if you are part of the problem.
> The judge could only sentence for the lesser crime he agreed to.
And you conveniently forget that, that lesser crime is liable for a sentence of up to 10 years. To give 6 months on a crime with an up-to-10-years sentence requires very, very strong mitigating circumstances. A judge who does that is effectively saying "this person has pled guilty, or technically broken a law, with no malicious intent and his actions really shouldn't be a crime but since I'm forced to punish him I'll give him a rap on the knuckles".
Now there are certainly times when that is exactly the appropriate thing for a judge or jury to do. There are definitely times when lenience from a court is exactly what a free society demands. Giving the teacher in the Scope's trial a 1 dollar fine was the best outcome possible under a bad law. The reason we give courts in free countries such discretion is exactly because we believe they need to be able to show mercy or leniency at times. The single most immoral thing about tough-on-crime laws and the drug was has been the proliferation of mandatory-minimum-sentences which remove that discretion.
Brock Turner was NOT however an example of the kind of case for whom that discretion exists. Turner was exactly an example of the kind of person who should have faced the full might of the law. Here was a rapist asshole - who still shows absolutely no remorse, whose father described his rape as "20 minutes of action" and blames the whole thing on "drinking and promiscuity" (there is no crime in promiscuity - but sexual acts with a drunk person who cannot consent is not promiscuity - it is rape). A crime which evoked such horror in passersby that they intervened, tackled him and held him down until police arrived to try and rescue his victim (people tend not to readily get involved in crimes that don't affect them personally - doing so shows how upsetting that scene must have been). This was a case with extreme aggravating circumstances. The judge would be fully justified to reject the plea bargain and insist Brock faces up the original charge sheet and stands trial (whatever he pleads) but having accepted the bargain - the judge OUGHT to have given him the maximum allowed sentence. Preferably in a maximum security prison where he had high odds of experiencing lots of bigger men than himself treating him with the same complete lack of respect for his bodily autonomy that he had shown that poor girl.
It may not be his fault- but he is fully aware of this fact - and directed them against an innocent person. That amounts to attempted murder with a deadly weapon. Just because the weapon in this case happens to be the police changes nothing - using the police as a weapon isn't even new. Ever heard of "suicide by cop" ?
" manufactured outrage"... so you mean the scandals aren't real ? Trump didn't use money from his foundation to bribe two state DA's not to prosecute him for fraud ? Trump didn't brag about grabbing women by the pussy without asking permission ? Michael Flynn did NOT resign in disgrace possibly setting the record for briefest cabinet tenure in history just last week?
I can only conclude that you live in a different universe to the rest of us. Where Flynn wasn't fired because he was never hired because your president hired competent people to help pursue his entirely sane policies. Well good luck to President Sanders and I hope he makes your reality even more advanced - from the fact that you can now browse the web in entirely different universes I would say his policies are already paying off since you must be several decades ahead of us technologically !
Not wanting to sleep with women doesn't preclude being misogynistic. Indeed, there has long been a misogynist element in gay culture - which a lot of gay men have called out. And, in case you were wondering, being funny (to you) does not mean it isn't misogynistic either - and it's truthfulness is highly debatable. It's pretty much impossible for so generalized an idea to possibly be true. Hell - it's based on ideas that are inherently inconstant. There is no one thing people who like to sleep with women find attractive. Some lesbians prefer butch women, some prefer femme women - and often (but hardly exclusively) these prefer each other - why do you think that men would be any less individual in their tastes ?
Just because society tells me I'm supposed to be attracted to the women on the sports illustrated cover doesn't mean I'm ever going to be - I'm not and I never will be. Since there is no definition for "attractive" that goes beyond the specific person using the word - any concept based on it MUST be false for the roughly 4 billion other people he was talking about.
There's nothing borderline about Breitbart's bigottry, though they are more upfront with their misogyny than their racism. "Birth control makes women unattractive"... fucking hell... now there's an article written by somebody who, if he has ever gotten laid, will never get laid again (At least, not by a women who is both conscious and consenting).
In the same way it's offensive if a white person uses the n-word but black people use it off each other all the time. And until recently anybody calling one of us a "geek" would be acting extremely offensively towards all of us - and deserve to get punched, but we called EACH OTHER that all the time (in an interesting twist - as geek entertainment went mainstream - apparently the word became generally acceptable).
Pro Palestine does not equal anti Jew. It may equal anti-zionist but then liberals tend to be anti-nationalism period. That includes Jewish Nationalism as much as it does, say, American nationalism.
Hell, I personally know quite a lot of anti-Israel, pro-palestine Jews who would be terribly offended at the suggestion that by virtue of their ethnicity they are compelled to be in favor of an appartheid regime that denies basic human rights to a vast population, and who actually support either full and equal rights for Palestinians in Israel or a Palestinian state free of Israeli control.
Did you think all Jewish people today would still believe what their grandparents believed 70 years ago? That an ethnic homeland is a fundamental pre-requisite to freedom ? The liberals have long stopped believing that in general - and Jewish liberals tend to agree. At least, those under 40 do.
And you're assuming nefarious motives with no evidence for them ? It's perfectly reasonable not to call of drought measures after a single case of flooding - if the rainy season keeps up and it's still claimed at the END - then there is grounds to be upset. Right now, the realities of the drought are by no means solved. Farmers still have to recover from years of bad crops, one flooding storm doesn't fix that. Dams and reservoirs need to get full, animal and plantlife has to recover. Until they do - you're still dealing with the results of the drought and it is insane to end mitigation procedures.
This has been the worst drought in living memory (unless you know somebody who is 118 years old - because that's how far the records reliably go and no other el nino drought in that time was this bad), it didn't just affect California either. In South Africa food prices are up 25% (and more in some cases) and food imports had to increase almost 70% due to crop and livestock losses, in neighboring Madasgar at least 4 million people have been killed by this drought. There are 6 year old children there who have never had a bath in their lives. What little water there is gets drunk - and people are litterally eating rocks because every crop has failed for years, and even the wild plants are gone. So is the livestock - Madagascar is in the midst of the worst famine in it's history because of this drought. Do you really think one big flood and all that just goes away ? Now it looks like this El Nino cycle is broken, there is hope that the drought will end this year in all the regions affected - but it's effects will not be over tomorrow or even next months. Try next September or so - when everywhere affected has had their rainy seasons. If they all have good seasons throughout - THEN you can say the drought is over.
>Of course, even though much of California is washing away, just last week the Sacramento bureaucrats declared we're still in a drought.
You can't be sure they're wrong. Droughts are commonly broken by flooding events - but a flooding event may not mean the end of a drought. It depends how much more rain is coming. A few floods in the middle of a drought generally fails entirely to actually RELIEVE the drought.
Now it's likely the drought WILL be ending since that terrible El Nino does appear to have been broken - but it would indeed by very premature to declare that it is broken.
They already do. The things you're thinking off - are extradition treaty's but those ONLY apply if the action in question is a crime in BOTH countries. No extant extradition treaty anywhere in the world will allow you to be extradited for something which is legal in the country where you did it. No government would sign one - it would effectively reduce them to nothing but a vassal state.
So unless there is also a UK law that prohibits you from trying to undermine US foreign policy - you can't be extradited for doing it.
While, indeed, the AGI technique was a Z-buffer, the methodology used for it was completely unlike that used in other algorithms.
They used the 16-colors of the display to create viewable depth-maps. Here's how it worked. You started with a scene image, which was normally colored as you wanted it to appear. Then you had a special program which you loaded with - and repainted it using the 16-color pallet. The Y-Axis was divided into 16 stripes (this was 320x200 days so minus the status bar and menu bar each stripe was around 11pixels high (for a total display height of about 180 pixels).
The player's Z-axes was determined based on which 11-pixel strip his feet was in (same for any other interactive objects or characters). So 16 possible depths, and 16-colors in the map-image. The map was never shown to the player, but as the player moved around the scene, it was used in the movement/collision calculator. as you moved it checked the pixels which pixels of the map overlapped the coordinates of the player sprite (the full rectangle). Say you were in the center stripe (depth 8). If the pixel had a color of 7 or lower, it was drawn OVER your character, 9 or higher and your character was drawn over the pixel (things that were behind you). If it was 8 you would collide against it and be shifted back until the rectangle no longer overlapped - bumping against the wall effect.
This particular way of doing a Z-buffer was pretty unique to Sierra because it fundamentally relied on the specific hardware abilities/limitations of the PC platform at that time. You could conceivably use the same approach today and get extremely fine-grained control over depth due to how many colors we have -but there are far easier ways to do that (like simply storing the Z-coordinate for each pixel in an object before you render it). More-over when it came out - it was the first system ever developed which allowed the player in games to move in front or behind objects. I'm happy to believe you that there were Z-buffer tech that predated Sierra and even PC's - but interactive Z-buffer matched collision control in a game was Sierra's great breakthrough. It was first used in the original Kings Quest - and that was such a massive success that they created an entire generation of games on the AGI engine.
There's still a lively community of enthusiasts developing AGI games using modern-day remakes of the engine (which also allows playing the original Sierra games on modern systems). ScummVM includes an AGI interpreter though they lifted the code directly from Sarien.
Sierra abandoned AGI by the early 1990s to make way for a new engine with new abilities that would be drive their next generation of games and be able to make use of SVGA technologies. This was the much-loved SCI engine - which was ScummVM's original focus - and the base of such important historical games as Phantasmagoria. SCI created a whole new generation of amazing games but it was also the beginning of the end of Sierra's reign. Ken and Barbara's little home business had grown big and corporate and they were also now facing some serious competition in the adventure game genre from the likes of LucasArts which had famous IP's like Indiana Jones to work with, and a massive budget. The company in 1995 was perhaps the single most successful gaming company in the world. Within ten years they would be defunkt, bankrupt and finally bought out by ActiVision.
That sad history aside though - there is no doubt that Ken and Barbara were among the most important pioneers in gaming history - above all they deserve credit for a key realization: that the best games combined great storytelling with the best experience the technology you can do. Barbara had, had the idea for the company after loving text-adventure games - and realizing how much fun they would be with pictures. Ken, the programmer, worked to create those - but she remembered why the games were good even BEFORE they had graphics: great stories.
Kings Quest was a technological marvel - but it also had a really fun story. That remains the dual-pillars of the best games to this day - and marked the transition from "space invaders" style games which were storyless button-mashers to games-as-art.
No other countries with popular vote systems have such a requirement - why do you assume the US would ? Lets imagine a scenario where Stein or Johnson actually get votes and the final tally ends up say Trump: 31% Clinton: 32% Johnson: 36%
In any popular vote country Johnson would be president. Most popular vote countries are vote-for-the-party and the party chooses the leader systems- which has it's own flaws, but the point stands. The current Tory government in the UK only got 38% of the vote in the last election, yet they rule with complete control.
That's the problem with first-past-the-post. Personally I believe that the best system is the one South Africa uses for local-government elections (and should really extend to provincial and national government) where 50% of the seats are elected by "won the district" and 50% are appointed by the parties divided up according to their share of the over-all vote in the city. That ensures that the smaller parties get some seats even if their votes are too scattered to win any particular district, while also ensuring there are people in the council who are directly accountable to the voters and not chosen of some party roll.
It's not surprise that local-government is where the ANC dropped below 50% for the first time ever, and actually lost a number of major metros they had ruled ever since the constitution came into effect in 1994. If the opposition parties do well in those cities, and lives improve there - then you can expect them to lose a lot of power in 2019. I think they'll still be the ruling party - but they already lost the power to unilaterally write constitutional ammendments - and I suspect after 2019 they won't be able to pass any law without at least one other party supporting it.
Well, firstly, Trump made the hand-size thing a part of the issues when he boasted about them during a debate. It's not wrong to attack somebody on personal grounds when they, themselves, made those personal grounds part of the discussion.
More practically - Trump hates any and all criticism, he can't take it, and that's why mocking him is an important a part of resisting his worst ideas as protest is - indeed it's why the right to mock him is enshrined in the constitution. In his case it's even more effective a strategy than usual.
>Didn't Nancy Pelosi undermine GWB's foreign policy objective of isolating Syria when she went there in 2007?
That depends entirely on what she did there, I'm not familiar with the events so I can't say. Maybe.
>Or the 47 republican senators who wrote to Iran in 2015. I'm familiar with that event and yes, yes they did and they SHOULD have been prosecuted for it.
Just because a law is badly enforced, perhaps even badly written, does not mean it's not a law. It doesn't even mean it's not a law that serves a vital purpose - at best it means the law is in dire need of an update.
Others have already answered well. I will simply add this: the democrats didn't ignore those people, hell the dems have been fighting for them their entire existence. It's the one liberal thing the democrats were doing even BEFORE the civil-rights-act realignment when all the liberal republicans joined the democrats. But the problems they are facing now is not something the democrats COULD have fixed. It's beyond the capabilities of government to alter global economic realities. Trump can't do it either, and the republicans attempt to repaint themselves as the friend of the working class isn't going to work either. It cannot be done. Government should have offered them alternatives - viable alternatives - and the democrats sure tried. Clinton's proposal was to offer programs for cheap and easy retraining to help the rust-belters transition to areas of the economy where there are job growth - like green energy.
I did read an interesting article recently that rather explained how somebody so far removed from everything they believed in managed to get the religious right to vote for him - and the short version is, he didn't. The evangelicals didn't vote for Trump - they voted for Pence.
>So ok, apparently "It's illegal for a private citizen to engage in diplomacy for the US." That's a rather exceptional oversimplification. It's more accurate to say it's illegal for any person to undermine US foreign policy. That republican senate letter to the Iranians was actually illegal under the Logan Act as well. But it could be simpler. Say the president institutes sanctions against Dumbfuckistan to punish it's dictatorial leader for killing thousands of his own citizens. But in the meantime, some wealthy wall-streeter really likes the leader of Dumbfuckistan - so he goes and sends him a few million dollars to keep his personal coffers full during the sanctions. That's a crime. And well it should be.
>But as you've pointed out, he's not part of the executive or authorised to speak on their behalf. So nothing he says or promises can be considered relevant to the running of the country, so surely he's immediately in the clear purely because he is a private citizen.
And the fact that he would soon be part of the executive branch and able to deliver- changes that whole picture, it goes from "What I would do if I had the power" to "what I am going to do when I have the power" which is straight up undermining the elected president of the united states in foreign policy - an area over which the constitution gives him and his cabinet exclusive authority.
>If he has standing then he's not a private citizen. If he doesn't have standing then he's not engaging in diplomacy. You don't need standing to undermine, or engage in, diplomacy - all you need is a reason for the foreign power to take you seriously.
>I'm fucking confused. Yes. Yes you are, but you're even confused about what you're confused about.
Slashdot Mirror
No, but WE are asking the smart question: if so MANY women choose to avoid those fields - WHY. What is it about those fields that make so many women prefer to stay the hell away from it ?
Now, based on available evidence, we have a strong theory about what the answer may be - a theory you definitely do not agree with. Now a rational answer would be to posit and alternative theory, or show that somehow, the evidence for our theory is false.
You have made no attempt to do either - you tried to derail the conversation by focusing on something else entirely. You accuse us of trying to force choices on women - which is the exact OPPOSITE of trying to fix things which force choices on women. But you never addressed the evidence for our theory, and you posited no alternative hypotheses to explain the phenomenon and the evidence.
I can therefore only conclude that you are incapable of doing so. If we're wrong- you've done absolutely nothing to correct us, if we're right, all you've done is tried ot delay us fixing the problem. That is a very sensible thing to do... if you are part of the problem.
In the final tally 11-million more people voted against him than voted for him. That's a fucking avalanche.
>which generally carries a much lesser penalty.
Where the hell is THAT true ? In practically every legal system in the free world attempted murder carries the EXACT SAME penalties as actual murder.
> The judge could only sentence for the lesser crime he agreed to.
And you conveniently forget that, that lesser crime is liable for a sentence of up to 10 years. To give 6 months on a crime with an up-to-10-years sentence requires very, very strong mitigating circumstances. A judge who does that is effectively saying "this person has pled guilty, or technically broken a law, with no malicious intent and his actions really shouldn't be a crime but since I'm forced to punish him I'll give him a rap on the knuckles".
Now there are certainly times when that is exactly the appropriate thing for a judge or jury to do. There are definitely times when lenience from a court is exactly what a free society demands. Giving the teacher in the Scope's trial a 1 dollar fine was the best outcome possible under a bad law. The reason we give courts in free countries such discretion is exactly because we believe they need to be able to show mercy or leniency at times. The single most immoral thing about tough-on-crime laws and the drug was has been the proliferation of mandatory-minimum-sentences which remove that discretion.
Brock Turner was NOT however an example of the kind of case for whom that discretion exists. Turner was exactly an example of the kind of person who should have faced the full might of the law. Here was a rapist asshole - who still shows absolutely no remorse, whose father described his rape as "20 minutes of action" and blames the whole thing on "drinking and promiscuity" (there is no crime in promiscuity - but sexual acts with a drunk person who cannot consent is not promiscuity - it is rape). A crime which evoked such horror in passersby that they intervened, tackled him and held him down until police arrived to try and rescue his victim (people tend not to readily get involved in crimes that don't affect them personally - doing so shows how upsetting that scene must have been).
This was a case with extreme aggravating circumstances. The judge would be fully justified to reject the plea bargain and insist Brock faces up the original charge sheet and stands trial (whatever he pleads) but having accepted the bargain - the judge OUGHT to have given him the maximum allowed sentence. Preferably in a maximum security prison where he had high odds of experiencing lots of bigger men than himself treating him with the same complete lack of respect for his bodily autonomy that he had shown that poor girl.
>It was this way LONG before Trump came to power.
True - but don't think for one second that he does not fully intend to capitalise on it, and make it worse so he has even more to capitalise on.
Credible does not mean "real".
It means "likely to be real".
Real can only be determined AFTER you show up. Credible determines IF you show you up - and to a lesser extent how you show up.
It may not be his fault- but he is fully aware of this fact - and directed them against an innocent person. That amounts to attempted murder with a deadly weapon.
Just because the weapon in this case happens to be the police changes nothing - using the police as a weapon isn't even new. Ever heard of "suicide by cop" ?
They replaced the intern with a badly trained and quite incontinent labradoodle last week.
" manufactured outrage" ... so you mean the scandals aren't real ? Trump didn't use money from his foundation to bribe two state DA's not to prosecute him for fraud ? Trump didn't brag about grabbing women by the pussy without asking permission ? Michael Flynn did NOT resign in disgrace possibly setting the record for briefest cabinet tenure in history just last week?
I can only conclude that you live in a different universe to the rest of us. Where Flynn wasn't fired because he was never hired because your president hired competent people to help pursue his entirely sane policies. Well good luck to President Sanders and I hope he makes your reality even more advanced - from the fact that you can now browse the web in entirely different universes I would say his policies are already paying off since you must be several decades ahead of us technologically !
Not wanting to sleep with women doesn't preclude being misogynistic. Indeed, there has long been a misogynist element in gay culture - which a lot of gay men have called out. And, in case you were wondering, being funny (to you) does not mean it isn't misogynistic either - and it's truthfulness is highly debatable. It's pretty much impossible for so generalized an idea to possibly be true. Hell - it's based on ideas that are inherently inconstant. There is no one thing people who like to sleep with women find attractive. Some lesbians prefer butch women, some prefer femme women - and often (but hardly exclusively) these prefer each other - why do you think that men would be any less individual in their tastes ?
Just because society tells me I'm supposed to be attracted to the women on the sports illustrated cover doesn't mean I'm ever going to be - I'm not and I never will be. Since there is no definition for "attractive" that goes beyond the specific person using the word - any concept based on it MUST be false for the roughly 4 billion other people he was talking about.
Just because the people being called it weren't able to punch, doesn't mean the people using it didn't deserve to be punched.
There's nothing borderline about Breitbart's bigottry, though they are more upfront with their misogyny than their racism. "Birth control makes women unattractive"... fucking hell... now there's an article written by somebody who, if he has ever gotten laid, will never get laid again (At least, not by a women who is both conscious and consenting).
In the same way it's offensive if a white person uses the n-word but black people use it off each other all the time. And until recently anybody calling one of us a "geek" would be acting extremely offensively towards all of us - and deserve to get punched, but we called EACH OTHER that all the time (in an interesting twist - as geek entertainment went mainstream - apparently the word became generally acceptable).
Pro Palestine does not equal anti Jew.
It may equal anti-zionist but then liberals tend to be anti-nationalism period. That includes Jewish Nationalism as much as it does, say, American nationalism.
Hell, I personally know quite a lot of anti-Israel, pro-palestine Jews who would be terribly offended at the suggestion that by virtue of their ethnicity they are compelled to be in favor of an appartheid regime that denies basic human rights to a vast population, and who actually support either full and equal rights for Palestinians in Israel or a Palestinian state free of Israeli control.
Did you think all Jewish people today would still believe what their grandparents believed 70 years ago? That an ethnic homeland is a fundamental pre-requisite to freedom ? The liberals have long stopped believing that in general - and Jewish liberals tend to agree. At least, those under 40 do.
And you're assuming nefarious motives with no evidence for them ? It's perfectly reasonable not to call of drought measures after a single case of flooding - if the rainy season keeps up and it's still claimed at the END - then there is grounds to be upset. Right now, the realities of the drought are by no means solved. Farmers still have to recover from years of bad crops, one flooding storm doesn't fix that. Dams and reservoirs need to get full, animal and plantlife has to recover. Until they do - you're still dealing with the results of the drought and it is insane to end mitigation procedures.
This has been the worst drought in living memory (unless you know somebody who is 118 years old - because that's how far the records reliably go and no other el nino drought in that time was this bad), it didn't just affect California either. In South Africa food prices are up 25% (and more in some cases) and food imports had to increase almost 70% due to crop and livestock losses, in neighboring Madasgar at least 4 million people have been killed by this drought. There are 6 year old children there who have never had a bath in their lives. What little water there is gets drunk - and people are litterally eating rocks because every crop has failed for years, and even the wild plants are gone. So is the livestock - Madagascar is in the midst of the worst famine in it's history because of this drought. Do you really think one big flood and all that just goes away ?
Now it looks like this El Nino cycle is broken, there is hope that the drought will end this year in all the regions affected - but it's effects will not be over tomorrow or even next months. Try next September or so - when everywhere affected has had their rainy seasons. If they all have good seasons throughout - THEN you can say the drought is over.
>Of course, even though much of California is washing away, just last week the Sacramento bureaucrats declared we're still in a drought.
You can't be sure they're wrong. Droughts are commonly broken by flooding events - but a flooding event may not mean the end of a drought. It depends how much more rain is coming. A few floods in the middle of a drought generally fails entirely to actually RELIEVE the drought.
Now it's likely the drought WILL be ending since that terrible El Nino does appear to have been broken - but it would indeed by very premature to declare that it is broken.
They already do. The things you're thinking off - are extradition treaty's but those ONLY apply if the action in question is a crime in BOTH countries. No extant extradition treaty anywhere in the world will allow you to be extradited for something which is legal in the country where you did it. No government would sign one - it would effectively reduce them to nothing but a vassal state.
So unless there is also a UK law that prohibits you from trying to undermine US foreign policy - you can't be extradited for doing it.
No. None of them broke the law. UK citizens are not subject to US law and cannot break it unless they happen to be inside the US at the time.
While, indeed, the AGI technique was a Z-buffer, the methodology used for it was completely unlike that used in other algorithms.
They used the 16-colors of the display to create viewable depth-maps. Here's how it worked. You started with a scene image, which was normally colored as you wanted it to appear. Then you had a special program which you loaded with - and repainted it using the 16-color pallet. The Y-Axis was divided into 16 stripes (this was 320x200 days so minus the status bar and menu bar each stripe was around 11pixels high (for a total display height of about 180 pixels).
The player's Z-axes was determined based on which 11-pixel strip his feet was in (same for any other interactive objects or characters). So 16 possible depths, and 16-colors in the map-image. The map was never shown to the player, but as the player moved around the scene, it was used in the movement/collision calculator. as you moved it checked the pixels which pixels of the map overlapped the coordinates of the player sprite (the full rectangle). Say you were in the center stripe (depth 8). If the pixel had a color of 7 or lower, it was drawn OVER your character, 9 or higher and your character was drawn over the pixel (things that were behind you). If it was 8 you would collide against it and be shifted back until the rectangle no longer overlapped - bumping against the wall effect.
This particular way of doing a Z-buffer was pretty unique to Sierra because it fundamentally relied on the specific hardware abilities/limitations of the PC platform at that time. You could conceivably use the same approach today and get extremely fine-grained control over depth due to how many colors we have -but there are far easier ways to do that (like simply storing the Z-coordinate for each pixel in an object before you render it). More-over when it came out - it was the first system ever developed which allowed the player in games to move in front or behind objects. I'm happy to believe you that there were Z-buffer tech that predated Sierra and even PC's - but interactive Z-buffer matched collision control in a game was Sierra's great breakthrough. It was first used in the original Kings Quest - and that was such a massive success that they created an entire generation of games on the AGI engine.
There's still a lively community of enthusiasts developing AGI games using modern-day remakes of the engine (which also allows playing the original Sierra games on modern systems). ScummVM includes an AGI interpreter though they lifted the code directly from Sarien.
Sierra abandoned AGI by the early 1990s to make way for a new engine with new abilities that would be drive their next generation of games and be able to make use of SVGA technologies. This was the much-loved SCI engine - which was ScummVM's original focus - and the base of such important historical games as Phantasmagoria. SCI created a whole new generation of amazing games but it was also the beginning of the end of Sierra's reign. Ken and Barbara's little home business had grown big and corporate and they were also now facing some serious competition in the adventure game genre from the likes of LucasArts which had famous IP's like Indiana Jones to work with, and a massive budget.
The company in 1995 was perhaps the single most successful gaming company in the world. Within ten years they would be defunkt, bankrupt and finally bought out by ActiVision.
That sad history aside though - there is no doubt that Ken and Barbara were among the most important pioneers in gaming history - above all they deserve credit for a key realization: that the best games combined great storytelling with the best experience the technology you can do.
Barbara had, had the idea for the company after loving text-adventure games - and realizing how much fun they would be with pictures. Ken, the programmer, worked to create those - but she remembered why the games were good even BEFORE they had graphics: great stories.
Kings Quest was a technological marvel - but it also had a really fun story. That remains the dual-pillars of the best games to this day - and marked the transition from "space invaders" style games which were storyless button-mashers to games-as-art.
No other countries with popular vote systems have such a requirement - why do you assume the US would ? Lets imagine a scenario where Stein or Johnson actually get votes and the final tally ends up say
Trump: 31%
Clinton: 32%
Johnson: 36%
In any popular vote country Johnson would be president. Most popular vote countries are vote-for-the-party and the party chooses the leader systems- which has it's own flaws, but the point stands. The current Tory government in the UK only got 38% of the vote in the last election, yet they rule with complete control.
That's the problem with first-past-the-post. Personally I believe that the best system is the one South Africa uses for local-government elections (and should really extend to provincial and national government) where 50% of the seats are elected by "won the district" and 50% are appointed by the parties divided up according to their share of the over-all vote in the city.
That ensures that the smaller parties get some seats even if their votes are too scattered to win any particular district, while also ensuring there are people in the council who are directly accountable to the voters and not chosen of some party roll.
It's not surprise that local-government is where the ANC dropped below 50% for the first time ever, and actually lost a number of major metros they had ruled ever since the constitution came into effect in 1994. If the opposition parties do well in those cities, and lives improve there - then you can expect them to lose a lot of power in 2019. I think they'll still be the ruling party - but they already lost the power to unilaterally write constitutional ammendments - and I suspect after 2019 they won't be able to pass any law without at least one other party supporting it.
Well, firstly, Trump made the hand-size thing a part of the issues when he boasted about them during a debate. It's not wrong to attack somebody on personal grounds when they, themselves, made those personal grounds part of the discussion.
More practically - Trump hates any and all criticism, he can't take it, and that's why mocking him is an important a part of resisting his worst ideas as protest is - indeed it's why the right to mock him is enshrined in the constitution. In his case it's even more effective a strategy than usual.
>Didn't Nancy Pelosi undermine GWB's foreign policy objective of isolating Syria when she went there in 2007?
That depends entirely on what she did there, I'm not familiar with the events so I can't say. Maybe.
>Or the 47 republican senators who wrote to Iran in 2015.
I'm familiar with that event and yes, yes they did and they SHOULD have been prosecuted for it.
Just because a law is badly enforced, perhaps even badly written, does not mean it's not a law. It doesn't even mean it's not a law that serves a vital purpose - at best it means the law is in dire need of an update.
Yes... and the only thing bigger than his inauguration was the death toll at Bowling Green.
Others have already answered well. I will simply add this: the democrats didn't ignore those people, hell the dems have been fighting for them their entire existence. It's the one liberal thing the democrats were doing even BEFORE the civil-rights-act realignment when all the liberal republicans joined the democrats. But the problems they are facing now is not something the democrats COULD have fixed. It's beyond the capabilities of government to alter global economic realities. Trump can't do it either, and the republicans attempt to repaint themselves as the friend of the working class isn't going to work either. It cannot be done. Government should have offered them alternatives - viable alternatives - and the democrats sure tried. Clinton's proposal was to offer programs for cheap and easy retraining to help the rust-belters transition to areas of the economy where there are job growth - like green energy.
I did read an interesting article recently that rather explained how somebody so far removed from everything they believed in managed to get the religious right to vote for him - and the short version is, he didn't. The evangelicals didn't vote for Trump - they voted for Pence.
>So ok, apparently "It's illegal for a private citizen to engage in diplomacy for the US."
That's a rather exceptional oversimplification. It's more accurate to say it's illegal for any person to undermine US foreign policy. That republican senate letter to the Iranians was actually illegal under the Logan Act as well. But it could be simpler. Say the president institutes sanctions against Dumbfuckistan to punish it's dictatorial leader for killing thousands of his own citizens. But in the meantime, some wealthy wall-streeter really likes the leader of Dumbfuckistan - so he goes and sends him a few million dollars to keep his personal coffers full during the sanctions. That's a crime. And well it should be.
>But as you've pointed out, he's not part of the executive or authorised to speak on their behalf. So nothing he says or promises can be considered relevant to the running of the country, so surely he's immediately in the clear purely because he is a private citizen.
And the fact that he would soon be part of the executive branch and able to deliver- changes that whole picture, it goes from "What I would do if I had the power" to "what I am going to do when I have the power" which is straight up undermining the elected president of the united states in foreign policy - an area over which the constitution gives him and his cabinet exclusive authority.
>If he has standing then he's not a private citizen. If he doesn't have standing then he's not engaging in diplomacy.
You don't need standing to undermine, or engage in, diplomacy - all you need is a reason for the foreign power to take you seriously.
>I'm fucking confused.
Yes. Yes you are, but you're even confused about what you're confused about.