I tried playing the first Mass Effect and just couldn't get into it. I liked the world building and setting. The alien that prefaced everything he said with a statement indicating his intended emotional context was hilarious. But the game play just sucked. Maybe it was an issue of playing it on a PC but actually playing the game was tedious and just not fun at all. I think I only ever got in one session where I read a ton of the ingame encyclopedia stuff and expored all the conversation I could with that alien. But the next day I just couldn't bring myself to play it when I had tons of other games with fun gameplay.
I wouldn't bet on it. I had a friend who was enlisted as a computer programmer in the AF. When the Army was having trouble finding enough people to fill all the deployment slots they had to fill they started sucking up Air Force people to fill those slots. So my friend who's computer programming job ostensibly fell under the Communications umbrella got sent to some outpost in Afghanistan to be a radio operator and because he was a Sergeant was expected to know how to run a Comms center supporting all kinds of patrols out in the field that were taking fire, as well as go on those patrols and act as their radio man. To me that demonstrated just the kind of idiocy that you can get when it isn't your own ass on the line. Some moron decided that Army communications troops and Air Force communications trooops were identical and was perfectly content to endanger a couple hundred folks by using them as such.
They also deploy lots of people to work outside of their trained fields of expertise doing everything from escorting third country nationals to driving trucks on convoys. You should absolutely not join any branch of the military, including the Coast Guard, if you don't want to be potentially sent to whatever hell hole the government decides we need to wage war in. You may not be forced to take up arms and shoot at people but once you are in they own you and will send you wherever they want regardless of logic or principle.
I'm a hard determinist so I'll have to disagree. People are just as determinisistic as machines. Just because we are ignorant of the incredible intricacies of our own minds and bodies doesn't mean they are magically different and exempt from the laws of physics.
Except you don't need that kind of resolution across the entire field of view. You'd you need that kind of resolution in the center and as you get further away from that point you can have lower and lower resolution. I have no idea how you'd build a screen with that though. An alternative though would be to use lenses to take a smaller display and stretch it out to cover the full 210 degrees. That would also require some funny drivers though that would be squishing the outside 45 degree arcs or whatever into a narrower part of the the display than they proportionatly represent.
There are ways that it could be used for entertainment like that but I think it'd actually not end up being that well done. Consider that currently one of the more important elements of a movie is the skill with which it is shot. That is to say that the style and manner in which you record the actors can be as important as the story it's self. And it isn't just about making sure the viewer can see everything that is happening, often times not showing things on screen is just as critical as putting them front and center.
I suppose though that the advent of VR doesn't mean we can't have more traditional movies also. After all people still go to see broadway shows, operas, and plays.
It definitely counts as logged flight hours. When this whole thing started all of those pilots were officers, and trust me an officer pilot would never let a flight hour go uncounted because it directly affects their pay.
Flying drones actually does teach a pretty valuable skill in that it requires being able to fly purely via instrumentation. That said I don't know if it is still an issue but I knew a man who was a commercial airline pilot and it didn't really seem like that great of a gig. He was making somewhere around $35k a year flying out of a major metropolitan hub. Low wages usually indicates plenty of supply.
As the article you cite says, that was/is a practice of the CIA. The same is true for "Signature Strikes", or missling people that match your demographic target profile but haven't necessarily been observed doing insurgent things.
That said I'd wager that the stress of killing innocents, even if extremely rarely and by accident, weighs heavily on most of the USAF drone pilots. When you are actually in harms way it is a lot easier to justify your actions to yourself. But as a remote pilot thousands of miles from any threat I imagine that takes a toll.
Enironmental wise, the objection is likely based in the process of 3rd world countries cutting down forrests to plant monoculture palms for oil. Animals that relied on the forrest are then out of a habitat and since it's a monoculture the first disease or fungus that adapts specifically to those palm is going to wipe them out.
Healthwise I believe it's basically an issue of being an oil that is very high in saturated fat. Which is why it's so useful, the high saturated fat content allows it to be a solid at room temperature. Also one of the ways it is most commonly consumed is in fried dishes, the extreme heat of frying apparently changes the chemical content a bit and could make it less healthy than it would otherwise be. I don't know that it's particularly any worse than any of the possible substitutes.
The one thing that I saw in the videos for Doom 4 that I didn't like was the slow/stop time mechanic for weapon swaps. The weapon swap actually happened so fast that there didn't really look like there was any challenge to picking a weapon to use that you are good with and making it work in awkward situations. You can always swap to the perfect weapon for each situation/monster nearly instantly.
I think the progression through each map was still pretty linear but the maps were built such that it was less obvious. I remember in Doom exploring all over the place to find keys and doors to open. Most of the more recent games strike me as requiring a lot less exploring and instead give you only one direction to go the whole time. Very linear games can still be good though, I loved Return to Castle Wolfenstein and that was linear as hell.
Cops and DA's know what the rules are for getting a warrant also. And guess what, they still don't get anywhere near that kind of approval success. I might be willing to accept that the NSA has smarter than the average bears working for it, but enough to account for a better than 99% success rate? I doubt it.
I believe much of the HVAC system is actually much older than the Amiga. The Amiga was a replacement for an older refrigerator sized system which was decommissioned because of it's climbing costs. The old HVAC systems at the other buildings all rely on using radio modems to relay instructions. That radio modem system is actually thecrux of the problem as it is subject to interference from simple walkie talkies. Replacing those modems with something more modern is likely to be the expensive part of the project as it'll require custom hardware and who knows how much manpower to get it to work with the ancient systems. Replacing the Amiga that controls it all is probably going to be the smallest expense of the whole thing.
The problem is that the equipment at the 19 buildings is all built to use some kind of radio modem. Apparently retrofitting that equipment to use some more modern means of communication is going to be costly. They've tried to do it before and simply couldn't get around the requirement to continue using those radio modems. The radio modems are the heart of why it needs to be upgraded because they are prone to interference, for example the walkie talkies the staff use interfere and cause the system to not function properly. This equipment is all much older than the Amiga, which it's self was a replacement for another central control unit that was decommissioned because replacement parts were getting to expensive. The Amiga was a good fit because it was actually able to interface with a compatible radio modem.
I forgot to say that the radio modems are picking up interference from the walkie talkies used by the school system. Which means that they can't use their walkie talkies without messing up the environmental controls. Ordinarily I'd say they should just use some other communication devices. But it also means that the system is vulnerable to breakage from anyone else using the same frequencies or leaking into them.
Apparently it's a problem with how the control system communicates with the individual systems in the 19 buildings. It uses radio modems, which actually significantly predate the Amiga. The machinery in the individual buildings for whatever reasons can't be retrofitted to use some other form of communication. And the Amiga is the only thing around that can properly interface with the nessecary radio modems to issue commands.
The systems in the buildings are very old and complex. I am guessing that most of the cost of the new system is retrofitting all that stuff so that it can simply communicate with a more modern system. So it isn't actually the central control system that will be tremendously expensive.
It definitely sounds like there is a lot of room for improvement through insulation and such. I live in the deep south. My house has single pane, aluminum windows that don't even seal properly. I can feel heat radiating off of specific walls in the afternoon. And I know a few spots where I can feel outside air drafting into the house at a rather high rate. Even with all that my electric bill doesn't go much past $250 in the summer. And I leave my gaming PC running 24/7 and play constantly when I'm not at work.
My wife seems to be pretty good about avoiding those kinds of issues. What she does instead though is open every dumblink that she might possibly want to read later in a new tab or window. But then she apparently never goes back and reads any of it, or reads them and leaves them open for referencing from latter. She complains about her computer slowing down and I go look at it and she'll have dozens of tabs and windows going all at once.
It's what I do at home. And because I have a crappy electrical utility I can then always claim that the power probably blinked, giving me plausible deniability. The mailman loves me too, I rarely trim the hedge that engulfs the mailbox and try to check it at least monthly.
The thing that sets the FISA court apart from any other judge issuing warrants is that the evidence shows they act purely as a rubber stamp. Any court or judge who has never denied a warrant after having seen thousands of them is suspect. On top of that they've made their own secret interpretations of law that further show that their sole purpose is to rubber stamp the feds doing essentially whatever they want.
Most of the Amish I've met and interacted with use a lot of modern technology, just not in the home. I think the community near my parents actually allows the kids to run around with smart phones. I know the lumber mill my Father frequents is a pretty sizable operation, and likely couldn't keep up with business if they used only technology from centuries ago.
I was a kid when Doom came out and I remember it being a relatively large improvement over wolfenstein. The maps were much more complex, the levels were filled with triggered events, weapons were more diverse, enemies were more diverse, lighting was an actual thing, and I'm sure I'm missing many more things. I'll always love Wolfenstein games, but Doom kicked the genre into high gear, much like WoW did with MMO's.
I know that what you're saying was true historically but I don't know that it actually is the reason anymore. Technology has advanced quite a bit and even large saws like like the ones used to render logs into planks are capable of making much finer quality cuts. Hell, my father has a table saw now that makes such flawless cross grain cuts that you can slice off a quarter inch bit of wood so smooth that you can see the daylight shine through without having to sand it down or anything.
"2x4s, of course, aren't 2" by 4". They're approximately 1,5 by 3,5 inches."
Depends on who you're buying from. My Father purchases his lumber from an Amish lumber yard. They cut all their own lumber and anything you buy from them will be the size it is labeled as, if not slightly larger, and frequently cheaper than you can get elsewhere. My Father loves it and goes at least 40 minutes out of his way to do business with them.
As for using whatever measurements are offered, screw that. When I was overseas everything was listed in kilometers and I just did the simple math in my head for miles. The measures on all kinds of food products here in the USA have been listed in metric as well as imperial for a long time, and I don't know anyone that has started using the metric measures.
One of the biggest reasons I keep hearing for using metric is that it's easier. Imperial isn't really that challenging though. I could save a lot more effort by using velcro or slip on shoes, but I don't because it's a trivial amount of work to tie my shoes in the morning. Metric is like the Newspeak of measurement systems. I'll stick to using imperial wherever I please along with whatever anachronastic measures I want like rods, furlongs, and libraries of congress.
I never played Comanche but reading on wikipedia seems to indicate that there were a few things that made it possible.
1. The engine was coded in assembly, which means it could run much more efficiently than any higher level language, especially Java like Minecraft.
2. The terrain appears to be completely static so the game would only need to keep track of exposed voxels that would be potentially visible.
3. A review from the time of Comanches release seems to note that the controls are sluggish. I would wager that the controls were limited in their speed so that you wouldn't pan the camera too quickly and expose terrain that wasn't ready to be rendered. Most games today will just show you the partially rendered scene and update it as the engine plays catchup.
I'm also curious about the dimensions of the maps being used in games like Comanche. Minecraft started out at a height of 128 blocks, and a width and depth around the players camera determined by player settings but frequently hundreds of blocks. Now the map goes up to 256 blocks I believe. That works out to an obscene number of voxels to keep track of.
I've looked at the mod a bit but haven't tried it yet.
I've been stuck on 7 Days to Die instead. It gives a lot of the minecraft feel, being able to build and explore a voxel type world. But is much more of a survival FPS type game. It lacks a lot of the beauty of Minecrafts world generation though, and doesn't have anything like redstone yet.
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I tried playing the first Mass Effect and just couldn't get into it. I liked the world building and setting. The alien that prefaced everything he said with a statement indicating his intended emotional context was hilarious. But the game play just sucked. Maybe it was an issue of playing it on a PC but actually playing the game was tedious and just not fun at all. I think I only ever got in one session where I read a ton of the ingame encyclopedia stuff and expored all the conversation I could with that alien. But the next day I just couldn't bring myself to play it when I had tons of other games with fun gameplay.
I wouldn't bet on it. I had a friend who was enlisted as a computer programmer in the AF. When the Army was having trouble finding enough people to fill all the deployment slots they had to fill they started sucking up Air Force people to fill those slots. So my friend who's computer programming job ostensibly fell under the Communications umbrella got sent to some outpost in Afghanistan to be a radio operator and because he was a Sergeant was expected to know how to run a Comms center supporting all kinds of patrols out in the field that were taking fire, as well as go on those patrols and act as their radio man. To me that demonstrated just the kind of idiocy that you can get when it isn't your own ass on the line. Some moron decided that Army communications troops and Air Force communications trooops were identical and was perfectly content to endanger a couple hundred folks by using them as such.
They also deploy lots of people to work outside of their trained fields of expertise doing everything from escorting third country nationals to driving trucks on convoys. You should absolutely not join any branch of the military, including the Coast Guard, if you don't want to be potentially sent to whatever hell hole the government decides we need to wage war in. You may not be forced to take up arms and shoot at people but once you are in they own you and will send you wherever they want regardless of logic or principle.
I'm a hard determinist so I'll have to disagree. People are just as determinisistic as machines. Just because we are ignorant of the incredible intricacies of our own minds and bodies doesn't mean they are magically different and exempt from the laws of physics.
Except you don't need that kind of resolution across the entire field of view. You'd you need that kind of resolution in the center and as you get further away from that point you can have lower and lower resolution. I have no idea how you'd build a screen with that though. An alternative though would be to use lenses to take a smaller display and stretch it out to cover the full 210 degrees. That would also require some funny drivers though that would be squishing the outside 45 degree arcs or whatever into a narrower part of the the display than they proportionatly represent.
There are ways that it could be used for entertainment like that but I think it'd actually not end up being that well done. Consider that currently one of the more important elements of a movie is the skill with which it is shot. That is to say that the style and manner in which you record the actors can be as important as the story it's self. And it isn't just about making sure the viewer can see everything that is happening, often times not showing things on screen is just as critical as putting them front and center.
I suppose though that the advent of VR doesn't mean we can't have more traditional movies also. After all people still go to see broadway shows, operas, and plays.
It definitely counts as logged flight hours. When this whole thing started all of those pilots were officers, and trust me an officer pilot would never let a flight hour go uncounted because it directly affects their pay.
Flying drones actually does teach a pretty valuable skill in that it requires being able to fly purely via instrumentation. That said I don't know if it is still an issue but I knew a man who was a commercial airline pilot and it didn't really seem like that great of a gig. He was making somewhere around $35k a year flying out of a major metropolitan hub. Low wages usually indicates plenty of supply.
As the article you cite says, that was/is a practice of the CIA. The same is true for "Signature Strikes", or missling people that match your demographic target profile but haven't necessarily been observed doing insurgent things.
That said I'd wager that the stress of killing innocents, even if extremely rarely and by accident, weighs heavily on most of the USAF drone pilots. When you are actually in harms way it is a lot easier to justify your actions to yourself. But as a remote pilot thousands of miles from any threat I imagine that takes a toll.
Enironmental wise, the objection is likely based in the process of 3rd world countries cutting down forrests to plant monoculture palms for oil. Animals that relied on the forrest are then out of a habitat and since it's a monoculture the first disease or fungus that adapts specifically to those palm is going to wipe them out.
Healthwise I believe it's basically an issue of being an oil that is very high in saturated fat. Which is why it's so useful, the high saturated fat content allows it to be a solid at room temperature. Also one of the ways it is most commonly consumed is in fried dishes, the extreme heat of frying apparently changes the chemical content a bit and could make it less healthy than it would otherwise be. I don't know that it's particularly any worse than any of the possible substitutes.
The one thing that I saw in the videos for Doom 4 that I didn't like was the slow/stop time mechanic for weapon swaps. The weapon swap actually happened so fast that there didn't really look like there was any challenge to picking a weapon to use that you are good with and making it work in awkward situations. You can always swap to the perfect weapon for each situation/monster nearly instantly.
I think the progression through each map was still pretty linear but the maps were built such that it was less obvious. I remember in Doom exploring all over the place to find keys and doors to open. Most of the more recent games strike me as requiring a lot less exploring and instead give you only one direction to go the whole time. Very linear games can still be good though, I loved Return to Castle Wolfenstein and that was linear as hell.
Cops and DA's know what the rules are for getting a warrant also. And guess what, they still don't get anywhere near that kind of approval success. I might be willing to accept that the NSA has smarter than the average bears working for it, but enough to account for a better than 99% success rate? I doubt it.
I believe much of the HVAC system is actually much older than the Amiga. The Amiga was a replacement for an older refrigerator sized system which was decommissioned because of it's climbing costs. The old HVAC systems at the other buildings all rely on using radio modems to relay instructions. That radio modem system is actually thecrux of the problem as it is subject to interference from simple walkie talkies. Replacing those modems with something more modern is likely to be the expensive part of the project as it'll require custom hardware and who knows how much manpower to get it to work with the ancient systems. Replacing the Amiga that controls it all is probably going to be the smallest expense of the whole thing.
The problem is that the equipment at the 19 buildings is all built to use some kind of radio modem. Apparently retrofitting that equipment to use some more modern means of communication is going to be costly. They've tried to do it before and simply couldn't get around the requirement to continue using those radio modems. The radio modems are the heart of why it needs to be upgraded because they are prone to interference, for example the walkie talkies the staff use interfere and cause the system to not function properly. This equipment is all much older than the Amiga, which it's self was a replacement for another central control unit that was decommissioned because replacement parts were getting to expensive. The Amiga was a good fit because it was actually able to interface with a compatible radio modem.
I forgot to say that the radio modems are picking up interference from the walkie talkies used by the school system. Which means that they can't use their walkie talkies without messing up the environmental controls. Ordinarily I'd say they should just use some other communication devices. But it also means that the system is vulnerable to breakage from anyone else using the same frequencies or leaking into them.
Apparently it's a problem with how the control system communicates with the individual systems in the 19 buildings. It uses radio modems, which actually significantly predate the Amiga. The machinery in the individual buildings for whatever reasons can't be retrofitted to use some other form of communication. And the Amiga is the only thing around that can properly interface with the nessecary radio modems to issue commands.
The systems in the buildings are very old and complex. I am guessing that most of the cost of the new system is retrofitting all that stuff so that it can simply communicate with a more modern system. So it isn't actually the central control system that will be tremendously expensive.
It definitely sounds like there is a lot of room for improvement through insulation and such. I live in the deep south. My house has single pane, aluminum windows that don't even seal properly. I can feel heat radiating off of specific walls in the afternoon. And I know a few spots where I can feel outside air drafting into the house at a rather high rate. Even with all that my electric bill doesn't go much past $250 in the summer. And I leave my gaming PC running 24/7 and play constantly when I'm not at work.
My wife seems to be pretty good about avoiding those kinds of issues. What she does instead though is open every dumblink that she might possibly want to read later in a new tab or window. But then she apparently never goes back and reads any of it, or reads them and leaves them open for referencing from latter. She complains about her computer slowing down and I go look at it and she'll have dozens of tabs and windows going all at once.
It's what I do at home. And because I have a crappy electrical utility I can then always claim that the power probably blinked, giving me plausible deniability. The mailman loves me too, I rarely trim the hedge that engulfs the mailbox and try to check it at least monthly.
The thing that sets the FISA court apart from any other judge issuing warrants is that the evidence shows they act purely as a rubber stamp. Any court or judge who has never denied a warrant after having seen thousands of them is suspect. On top of that they've made their own secret interpretations of law that further show that their sole purpose is to rubber stamp the feds doing essentially whatever they want.
Possibly true but also just as likely to not be.
Most of the Amish I've met and interacted with use a lot of modern technology, just not in the home. I think the community near my parents actually allows the kids to run around with smart phones. I know the lumber mill my Father frequents is a pretty sizable operation, and likely couldn't keep up with business if they used only technology from centuries ago.
I was a kid when Doom came out and I remember it being a relatively large improvement over wolfenstein. The maps were much more complex, the levels were filled with triggered events, weapons were more diverse, enemies were more diverse, lighting was an actual thing, and I'm sure I'm missing many more things. I'll always love Wolfenstein games, but Doom kicked the genre into high gear, much like WoW did with MMO's.
I know that what you're saying was true historically but I don't know that it actually is the reason anymore. Technology has advanced quite a bit and even large saws like like the ones used to render logs into planks are capable of making much finer quality cuts. Hell, my father has a table saw now that makes such flawless cross grain cuts that you can slice off a quarter inch bit of wood so smooth that you can see the daylight shine through without having to sand it down or anything.
"2x4s, of course, aren't 2" by 4". They're approximately 1,5 by 3,5 inches."
Depends on who you're buying from. My Father purchases his lumber from an Amish lumber yard. They cut all their own lumber and anything you buy from them will be the size it is labeled as, if not slightly larger, and frequently cheaper than you can get elsewhere. My Father loves it and goes at least 40 minutes out of his way to do business with them.
As for using whatever measurements are offered, screw that. When I was overseas everything was listed in kilometers and I just did the simple math in my head for miles. The measures on all kinds of food products here in the USA have been listed in metric as well as imperial for a long time, and I don't know anyone that has started using the metric measures.
One of the biggest reasons I keep hearing for using metric is that it's easier. Imperial isn't really that challenging though. I could save a lot more effort by using velcro or slip on shoes, but I don't because it's a trivial amount of work to tie my shoes in the morning. Metric is like the Newspeak of measurement systems. I'll stick to using imperial wherever I please along with whatever anachronastic measures I want like rods, furlongs, and libraries of congress.
I never played Comanche but reading on wikipedia seems to indicate that there were a few things that made it possible.
1. The engine was coded in assembly, which means it could run much more efficiently than any higher level language, especially Java like Minecraft.
2. The terrain appears to be completely static so the game would only need to keep track of exposed voxels that would be potentially visible.
3. A review from the time of Comanches release seems to note that the controls are sluggish. I would wager that the controls were limited in their speed so that you wouldn't pan the camera too quickly and expose terrain that wasn't ready to be rendered. Most games today will just show you the partially rendered scene and update it as the engine plays catchup.
I'm also curious about the dimensions of the maps being used in games like Comanche. Minecraft started out at a height of 128 blocks, and a width and depth around the players camera determined by player settings but frequently hundreds of blocks. Now the map goes up to 256 blocks I believe. That works out to an obscene number of voxels to keep track of.
I've looked at the mod a bit but haven't tried it yet.
I've been stuck on 7 Days to Die instead. It gives a lot of the minecraft feel, being able to build and explore a voxel type world. But is much more of a survival FPS type game. It lacks a lot of the beauty of Minecrafts world generation though, and doesn't have anything like redstone yet.