History would seem to be proving your wrong. When GM had the EV1's out on the road one of the perks was happy mechanics. They were much simpler and cleaner to work on than conventional cars. The battery packs will eventually need to be replaced but they should be getting cheaper and cheaper per watt stored as time goes by and technology improves. While pretty much the opposite seems to be true for ICE vehicles and their parts. The sheer number of moving parts in the average ICE power train compared to that in an electric car is a god indicator of how long it should last.
SWG before all the game changing patches had this. UO also was a levelless design. Eve Online also doesn't have levels, instead skills limit what you can or can't do with newbies being able to participate in useful ways within the first week.
If you transfer the advantage of power to equipment rather than inherent levels all you've done is moved the problem. This is visible in WoW where once at max character level it all becomes about gear iLevel.
This is a problem because some people want a game that is more about personal skill of execution. Where as other people want a game where character power progresses even if their personal execution skills stay the same. Almost every single RPG game I've ever played was a mix of these two systems.
That may be true of WoW now but in Vanilla and even to some extent in TBC the leveling game was much stronger. I knew very few people that didn't have a half dozen alts at various levels. TBC started to erode the leveling game by funneling all characters through the same set of zones. In Vanilla there was always a variety of zones you could play in at any particular level. So many people would play alts to see other content and see how a different class could handle the same challenges. The elimination of the leveling game is part of what has kept me from going back to WoW since I quit.
Yes, villagers will take materials and food straight to a market if it is closer than a barn or stockpile. The only problem with relying on that though is I am not sure if the vendors can then remove excessive amounts of stuff. So a market might get filled up with building materials and not have room for food, tools, coats, and firewood.
Each trading post has it's own set of merchants that will visit it. So the more trading posts you have the more merchants you will see in any given time span. I use three and I get at least that many merchants a year, often more, and it is rare for me to go a year without seeing one that sells stone and tools. The amount of goods that a merchant will have for trade seems to depend on your viallage size or something. I frequently see merchants with 1k or more stone for trade. I went all in a couple times early on and still have 2500+ unused stone and haven't bought any in probably 5 years. Have paience and make sure you keep a big stock of firewood and those wool coats for when you have the opportunity to buy stone, and then place it on order for every visit.
I don't take in Nomads anymore. They ubalance everything too quickly for my tastes and come with an extra chance of disease. I couldn't tell you how long they'll hang around waiting. Incidentally trading also brings an increase chance of disease. So make sure you have hospitals built along your main thourough fares.
I have cemetaries, I put them in where ever I can't fit something more useful. I don't worru about the the stone cost because I have that in abundance for the time being. That said all they affect is happiness, so if your villagers are happy enough for you then don't sweat it.
One of the primary problems I can think of with this plan is that it would likely require a Draft in order to rapidly fill the ranks. Most Americans of the appropriate age would probably be rather apathetic about the idea of our current government being replaced with a different one. On top of that if we ever end up needing to defend against an invasion you wouldn't have enough time to prepare for it. The pace of technology has advanced enough that China could probably succesfully land an invasion force before we could react. I'm thinking cargo container ships modified to covertly transport troops. If the average container ship can move 5k 40 foot containers, with ten men and their gear per container that'd give you a force of 50k per ship. Send a ship or two like that, all planned to arrive and unload within hours of each other to every major port and they'd likely be able to score a few footholds for a larger scale invasion.
I'm curious about what you believe limits the number of bases U2's can launch from? From what I've seen they can launch from extremely short runways. Landing might be more problematic since you need space for chase vehicles to catch up prior to actually stopping. Those things have so much wing surface compared to their mass though watching a takeoff is almost more like watching a hot air balloon launch than an airplane.
The issue with life insurance is that there are two vastly different types. Term insurance is where there is a very large payout in the event of death with a very small regular premium payment, but the insurance is only good for a short specified time frame and the premiums rise as the insured infividual ages.
I can't recall the name for the other type but it typically has much smaller values but is actually an investment, normally with a gaurunteed minimum interest rate. My parents took out such a policy for me as an infant, the value of which was their guess at what burial and funerary expenses would be if I died early. If I chose to cash out the policy now it would probably be worth two or three times as much as the intended original value.
Spreading is a good idea to a point as it can reduce damage from fires. Yes, the game will attempt to put workers near their place of employment but this seems to fall apart over time. I've seen a few suggestions for resetting work assignments so that people work and live in the same area. Reducing commute time is a huge boost to productivity.
If you use markets near clusters of homes the market vendors will pull the necessary resources from barns and stockpiles so that the other foks can get all their stuff from one place in one trip. So use markets to resupply people and otherwise place barns and stockpiles where they increase productiviy of the worker filling them up. So barns go near to fields, orchards, gathers, hunters, fishing docks, pretty much anywhere that you are producing something which can be stored in a barn. The same applies to stockpiles, put them near forresters, quarries, mines, and trading posts.
Yes, Hunting Lodges are critical early on so you can have clothing and the food doesn't hurt. But as you progress you will run out of areas that work for hunting as space gets scarce. Once you can get cattle, or sheep pastures producing you can ditch the hunters.
I've heard mixed results of asexual reproduction with pastures. I wouldn't take the risk on just one livestock animal. Buy as many as you can afford. They will increase in number much more rapidly. In fact I frequently purchase livestock to fill out new pastures because it gets them to actual production faster.
Herbalists do work better in forrests that arn't being cut, but I don't think it matters enough to worry about if your population has a good mix of food types available. I'm at over 200 total population and my people use less than 50 herbs total a year. I'm still relying on the first herbalist I built at the start of the game. I've got my inventory for herbs capped at 500 which should be plenty for a good long while.
Did I mention before that firewood is my favorite trading material? I've got four full time forrester stations fully manned planting and cutting. They produce around 1300 logs a year or more. That chops into 6200 firewood, only a portion of which needs to be used for heating homes. The rest I trade for stone, iron and steel tools. Stone and Iron because they are non-renewable and buying them is much easier and faster than quarrying or mining. I don't bother with coal and instead just buy the finished steel tools, which is probably a little wasteful but it means I don't need any blacksmiths on a regular basis and I can save iron for construction.
I believe the temperatures listed are simply the temps required in order to get the maximum contraction from the material. It is quite possible that lower temperatures would still result in enough change for some useful purpose. for example they have figured out some uses for clothing where when the wearer gets hot vents are pulled open by these special threads.
In fact many greenhouses already have vents operated through the same principle. Normally it's some metal though that as it heats it causes a venting panel to open. Depending on how hot it is the vent will open more or less. And this is also how old thermostats used to work. You had a bimetal spring that changed shape depending on temperature which actuated an electrical switch to turn the heat or AC on and off.
I think the key is that this has to potential to be much lighter weight and possibly less bulky than hydraulic systems. Prosthetic limbs and exo skeletons being a prime possibility for this kind of stuff. The only issue I can see is that they are talking about temperatures that would be dangerous for people. I believe those temperatures though are the point at which the material contracts to 50% of it's normal length. I suspect working with lower temperatures would work so long as you don't need that 50% change in length, maybe working with 25% instead.
The priority tool seems to be kind of buggy, in that sometimes it works like a charm and other times everyone still ignores my desires.
Builders will clear a site, the problem though is related to resource clearing orders. For whatever reason when you give a command to clear an area of stone, iron, or trees, that order takes precedence over just about everything else. So if you want your labourers and builders to work intelligently don't give big clearing orders unless they can be accomplished quickly or you like canceling them.
I did find a button to enable notificaitons of death due to natural causes. There is actually a text log window that gives you a lot of those notifications that I keep open all the time now.
Schools are BOSS! I always build one as soon as I am covered so far as food and shelter for the first winter.
I've found Fishing to be pretty lackluster except in the very early stages. So I sometimes will use one for the constant food, even though the amount is low.
I like to use a couple farms and at least one pasture for each type of livestock. Sheep are my favorite livestock as a single pasture puts out 1200 mutton and 60 or 80 wool each year, for just two herdmen. I haven't noticed any real difference in output from farms crops, although crops that finish faster might be better on average being less likely to freeze.
I always put a Gather Hut right on top of a Forrester station, with the forresters initially set to plant only. The Gatherers do better with full forrests so the forresters really help with that. Once the forrest is filled out and all stone/iron removed I let them cut also. I also put four houses in that cluster with a barn and small stockpile. Last time I looked the Gatherers in that setup were producing 600 - 700 per worker.
I like to use clusters like that wherever they will fit. The food is great and the wood gets fed to choppers who create mountains of firewood for trading purposes as well as heating. When just starting it is a good idea to put a hunting lodge and a herbalist in that mix, or even off on their own. Once you get cattle or sheep going though you can dump the hunters as they are inefficient and not worth it for the leather anymore.
I've tried Orchards a few times and the only reason I can think of to do it is for making alcohol. The first few harvests can be good but then production drops like a rock as the trees die off and are replanted. They just seem to inconsistent for me to justify.
I think one of the most important bits I've learned is that fully staffing buildings is important to efficiency. Expanding faster than you can afford to staff stuff is a waste of time and resources all around.
You are incorrect about the 9/11 bits. A number of the terrorists were known and being monitored right up until they crossed into our borders. There was actually an FBI agent working with the group monitoring them. He wanted to take what they had on them back to the FBI so they could track the terrorists. He was threatened with losing his career if he did so because whoever he was working with wanted the bust should there be one and they didn't want the FBI getting the headlines instead. So we ended up missing the chance to stop 9/11 over what amounts to agency level dick comparison issues. And as proof that this kind of distrust still exists and especially between our agencies and other nations agencies just look at the Boston Marathon Bombing where the Russians specifically warned the US authorities and yet nothing was done about it, not even passing it off to someone else to actually investigate.
The NSA being within the legislative branches oversight is a comical position to take. They have their own secret court of hand picked judges who have rubber stamped nearly every warrant placed before them in the last decade. There is no real process for appealing their decisions and they get to make secret interpretations of the law. That all amounts to US citizens being subject to the effects of secret laws and acts by government employees, to which they have no legal recourse.
The point is that Walmart is not a company that is just scraping by. It is a hugely profitable company. Someone did the math awhile back and found that they could double the wages of their work force and it wouldn't affect their profits in a noticeable way. Instead Walmart keeps wages low, and over hires so that employees can't even count on a regular 40 hours. As a result their employees have to rely on government welfare programs to survive. So everyone else in the US that pays payroll taxes is footing part of the bill for Walmarts extreme greed, whether or not we shop at their stores.
That is valid as long as the CEO is receiving stock options or something. It is possible though that Jobs wasn't receiving any stock as payment either given that he already was a part owner as a result of being one of the founders of Apple to begin with.
Additionally the market for labor is manipulated all the time by executive level decision makers. We have everything from the abuse of the H1B Visas to huge chains relying on social safety nets for their workers so they can run a hugely profitable company on minimum wage employees.
I might have gotten it wrong, but my reading of the article was that heating is actually what causes the spring to retract back into it's coiled shape, when it cools it relaxes.
Just order a new artificial muscle replacement pack on line. The huge break through here is that the materials area already commonly available and ridiculously cheap in the form needed. $5 for 1Kg of fishing line. Most of the stuff people have been testing for this kind of application are only really workable on tiny scales and use exotic and hence expensive materials.
I would go with the/. crowd being anomalous. The simple fact that most users here are even aware of the existence of indie game studios puts them in a different subset of game players. Just look at the numbers for things like players who frequent forums and read wiki's about their favorite games./. readers are a subset of a subset, and yes we are all subject to some group think, but that group thnk does differ significantly from the population at large. So I find it very believable that the commenters on a thread like this are going to have favorite games that other people have never even heard of.
For myself I'd have to say that my biggest time suckers for the last year have been Minecraft, Skyrim, Terraria, Don't Starve and as of yesterday I might be getting sucked into Banished.
Skyrim is a AAA game obviously and popular enough.
Minecraft is indie but probably the most wildly succesful indie game and possibly better known than Skyrim.
Terraria was pretty successful and popular so far as indie games go. Don't Starve is probably not as well known but also seems to have done well and I know a number of people that have liked and played it a good bit.
Banished is an indie that was released just yesterday. When I got my copy it was the number 1 seller on Steam but wasn't even listed on the front page. All those purchases were coming from people actively seeking it out and buying it. Those people knew about the game because they read hobbyist sites like this.
I helped kickstart M.O.R.E. and I'm really hoping for it to be the true MOO2 successor. MOO3 was attrocious. The real time space combat was impossible to properly control which meant leaving it to the AI. At which point there really isn't any point in not just having it give you the outcome based on some number crunching. They abolished the ability to micromanage things and instead made it a macro management game without bothering to make that readily transparent.
A. The ghost time limit mechanic pisses me off. The game, with an archaelogical setting, makes me want to explore each level to see what all is there. Instead I have to rush to try and find the exit.
B. I found the controls unworkable. There was some wierd key combo for picking up an item, like prone and something else. There was also no way to just let go of a ledge and drop, combined with the character automatically clinging to any ledge within reach. That particularly ill thought out bit makes it nearly impossible to drop down through a 1 block wide hole.
I was home sick all day and picked this up also. I've really enjoyed it so far. I have managed to not end up wiped out by any disasters yet at year 16. I however might have screwed it all through mismanagement. I didn't pay enough attention to the fact that the people in the settlements age 4 times faster than the game years roll by. Which snowballed with my ignorance of how housing and procreation work. Namely that couples won't pair up and have kids unless they can have their own house to live in. So I ended up with a geriatric population all happily living six to a house and not producing any more kids.
The game has four tutorials which I went through but none of them mention the advanced pace of aging and the housing requirements for population growth. Additionally the game will notify you when people die from starvation, cold, and vocational accidents, but it does not notify you of death from old age.
I'm really liking it so far though. Micromanaging my little mideval hamlet is really fun for some reason. And the sound track has been pleasant enough for me to not switch it off.
I liked Starbound enough when I tried it but last I checked it was still far behind Terraria. It has the potential to be better but I wouldn't say it's even on a level with it yet.
I've been doing security analysis stuff for close to six years now. And I've got to say this article doesn't surprise me in the least. We'll notify customers for months and years on end about serious and silly flaws in their system. We so rarely see any real effort to fix stuff that it is always shocking when someone actually loads a quarterly patch, even if it is nearly a year out of date. I always have to give a nervous giggle when our leadership brags on how secure our systems are, because one day I know I'm going to walk into the office and find that some major system was attacked through a known security hole.
Slashdot Mirror
History would seem to be proving your wrong. When GM had the EV1's out on the road one of the perks was happy mechanics. They were much simpler and cleaner to work on than conventional cars. The battery packs will eventually need to be replaced but they should be getting cheaper and cheaper per watt stored as time goes by and technology improves. While pretty much the opposite seems to be true for ICE vehicles and their parts. The sheer number of moving parts in the average ICE power train compared to that in an electric car is a god indicator of how long it should last.
SWG before all the game changing patches had this. UO also was a levelless design. Eve Online also doesn't have levels, instead skills limit what you can or can't do with newbies being able to participate in useful ways within the first week.
If you transfer the advantage of power to equipment rather than inherent levels all you've done is moved the problem. This is visible in WoW where once at max character level it all becomes about gear iLevel.
This is a problem because some people want a game that is more about personal skill of execution. Where as other people want a game where character power progresses even if their personal execution skills stay the same. Almost every single RPG game I've ever played was a mix of these two systems.
That may be true of WoW now but in Vanilla and even to some extent in TBC the leveling game was much stronger. I knew very few people that didn't have a half dozen alts at various levels. TBC started to erode the leveling game by funneling all characters through the same set of zones. In Vanilla there was always a variety of zones you could play in at any particular level. So many people would play alts to see other content and see how a different class could handle the same challenges. The elimination of the leveling game is part of what has kept me from going back to WoW since I quit.
Yes, villagers will take materials and food straight to a market if it is closer than a barn or stockpile. The only problem with relying on that though is I am not sure if the vendors can then remove excessive amounts of stuff. So a market might get filled up with building materials and not have room for food, tools, coats, and firewood.
Each trading post has it's own set of merchants that will visit it. So the more trading posts you have the more merchants you will see in any given time span. I use three and I get at least that many merchants a year, often more, and it is rare for me to go a year without seeing one that sells stone and tools. The amount of goods that a merchant will have for trade seems to depend on your viallage size or something. I frequently see merchants with 1k or more stone for trade. I went all in a couple times early on and still have 2500+ unused stone and haven't bought any in probably 5 years. Have paience and make sure you keep a big stock of firewood and those wool coats for when you have the opportunity to buy stone, and then place it on order for every visit.
I don't take in Nomads anymore. They ubalance everything too quickly for my tastes and come with an extra chance of disease. I couldn't tell you how long they'll hang around waiting. Incidentally trading also brings an increase chance of disease. So make sure you have hospitals built along your main thourough fares.
I have cemetaries, I put them in where ever I can't fit something more useful. I don't worru about the the stone cost because I have that in abundance for the time being. That said all they affect is happiness, so if your villagers are happy enough for you then don't sweat it.
One of the primary problems I can think of with this plan is that it would likely require a Draft in order to rapidly fill the ranks. Most Americans of the appropriate age would probably be rather apathetic about the idea of our current government being replaced with a different one. On top of that if we ever end up needing to defend against an invasion you wouldn't have enough time to prepare for it. The pace of technology has advanced enough that China could probably succesfully land an invasion force before we could react. I'm thinking cargo container ships modified to covertly transport troops. If the average container ship can move 5k 40 foot containers, with ten men and their gear per container that'd give you a force of 50k per ship. Send a ship or two like that, all planned to arrive and unload within hours of each other to every major port and they'd likely be able to score a few footholds for a larger scale invasion.
I'm curious about what you believe limits the number of bases U2's can launch from? From what I've seen they can launch from extremely short runways. Landing might be more problematic since you need space for chase vehicles to catch up prior to actually stopping. Those things have so much wing surface compared to their mass though watching a takeoff is almost more like watching a hot air balloon launch than an airplane.
The issue with life insurance is that there are two vastly different types. Term insurance is where there is a very large payout in the event of death with a very small regular premium payment, but the insurance is only good for a short specified time frame and the premiums rise as the insured infividual ages.
I can't recall the name for the other type but it typically has much smaller values but is actually an investment, normally with a gaurunteed minimum interest rate. My parents took out such a policy for me as an infant, the value of which was their guess at what burial and funerary expenses would be if I died early. If I chose to cash out the policy now it would probably be worth two or three times as much as the intended original value.
Spreading is a good idea to a point as it can reduce damage from fires. Yes, the game will attempt to put workers near their place of employment but this seems to fall apart over time. I've seen a few suggestions for resetting work assignments so that people work and live in the same area. Reducing commute time is a huge boost to productivity.
If you use markets near clusters of homes the market vendors will pull the necessary resources from barns and stockpiles so that the other foks can get all their stuff from one place in one trip. So use markets to resupply people and otherwise place barns and stockpiles where they increase productiviy of the worker filling them up. So barns go near to fields, orchards, gathers, hunters, fishing docks, pretty much anywhere that you are producing something which can be stored in a barn. The same applies to stockpiles, put them near forresters, quarries, mines, and trading posts.
Yes, Hunting Lodges are critical early on so you can have clothing and the food doesn't hurt. But as you progress you will run out of areas that work for hunting as space gets scarce. Once you can get cattle, or sheep pastures producing you can ditch the hunters.
I've heard mixed results of asexual reproduction with pastures. I wouldn't take the risk on just one livestock animal. Buy as many as you can afford. They will increase in number much more rapidly. In fact I frequently purchase livestock to fill out new pastures because it gets them to actual production faster.
Herbalists do work better in forrests that arn't being cut, but I don't think it matters enough to worry about if your population has a good mix of food types available. I'm at over 200 total population and my people use less than 50 herbs total a year. I'm still relying on the first herbalist I built at the start of the game. I've got my inventory for herbs capped at 500 which should be plenty for a good long while.
Did I mention before that firewood is my favorite trading material? I've got four full time forrester stations fully manned planting and cutting. They produce around 1300 logs a year or more. That chops into 6200 firewood, only a portion of which needs to be used for heating homes. The rest I trade for stone, iron and steel tools. Stone and Iron because they are non-renewable and buying them is much easier and faster than quarrying or mining. I don't bother with coal and instead just buy the finished steel tools, which is probably a little wasteful but it means I don't need any blacksmiths on a regular basis and I can save iron for construction.
I believe the temperatures listed are simply the temps required in order to get the maximum contraction from the material. It is quite possible that lower temperatures would still result in enough change for some useful purpose. for example they have figured out some uses for clothing where when the wearer gets hot vents are pulled open by these special threads.
In fact many greenhouses already have vents operated through the same principle. Normally it's some metal though that as it heats it causes a venting panel to open. Depending on how hot it is the vent will open more or less. And this is also how old thermostats used to work. You had a bimetal spring that changed shape depending on temperature which actuated an electrical switch to turn the heat or AC on and off.
I think the key is that this has to potential to be much lighter weight and possibly less bulky than hydraulic systems. Prosthetic limbs and exo skeletons being a prime possibility for this kind of stuff. The only issue I can see is that they are talking about temperatures that would be dangerous for people. I believe those temperatures though are the point at which the material contracts to 50% of it's normal length. I suspect working with lower temperatures would work so long as you don't need that 50% change in length, maybe working with 25% instead.
Thanks for the tip on how to release from a ledge, I'll have to give the game another go around some time.
The priority tool seems to be kind of buggy, in that sometimes it works like a charm and other times everyone still ignores my desires.
Builders will clear a site, the problem though is related to resource clearing orders. For whatever reason when you give a command to clear an area of stone, iron, or trees, that order takes precedence over just about everything else. So if you want your labourers and builders to work intelligently don't give big clearing orders unless they can be accomplished quickly or you like canceling them.
I did find a button to enable notificaitons of death due to natural causes. There is actually a text log window that gives you a lot of those notifications that I keep open all the time now.
Schools are BOSS! I always build one as soon as I am covered so far as food and shelter for the first winter.
I've found Fishing to be pretty lackluster except in the very early stages. So I sometimes will use one for the constant food, even though the amount is low.
I like to use a couple farms and at least one pasture for each type of livestock. Sheep are my favorite livestock as a single pasture puts out 1200 mutton and 60 or 80 wool each year, for just two herdmen. I haven't noticed any real difference in output from farms crops, although crops that finish faster might be better on average being less likely to freeze.
I always put a Gather Hut right on top of a Forrester station, with the forresters initially set to plant only. The Gatherers do better with full forrests so the forresters really help with that. Once the forrest is filled out and all stone/iron removed I let them cut also. I also put four houses in that cluster with a barn and small stockpile. Last time I looked the Gatherers in that setup were producing 600 - 700 per worker.
I like to use clusters like that wherever they will fit. The food is great and the wood gets fed to choppers who create mountains of firewood for trading purposes as well as heating. When just starting it is a good idea to put a hunting lodge and a herbalist in that mix, or even off on their own. Once you get cattle or sheep going though you can dump the hunters as they are inefficient and not worth it for the leather anymore.
I've tried Orchards a few times and the only reason I can think of to do it is for making alcohol. The first few harvests can be good but then production drops like a rock as the trees die off and are replanted. They just seem to inconsistent for me to justify.
I think one of the most important bits I've learned is that fully staffing buildings is important to efficiency. Expanding faster than you can afford to staff stuff is a waste of time and resources all around.
You are incorrect about the 9/11 bits. A number of the terrorists were known and being monitored right up until they crossed into our borders. There was actually an FBI agent working with the group monitoring them. He wanted to take what they had on them back to the FBI so they could track the terrorists. He was threatened with losing his career if he did so because whoever he was working with wanted the bust should there be one and they didn't want the FBI getting the headlines instead. So we ended up missing the chance to stop 9/11 over what amounts to agency level dick comparison issues. And as proof that this kind of distrust still exists and especially between our agencies and other nations agencies just look at the Boston Marathon Bombing where the Russians specifically warned the US authorities and yet nothing was done about it, not even passing it off to someone else to actually investigate.
The NSA being within the legislative branches oversight is a comical position to take. They have their own secret court of hand picked judges who have rubber stamped nearly every warrant placed before them in the last decade. There is no real process for appealing their decisions and they get to make secret interpretations of the law. That all amounts to US citizens being subject to the effects of secret laws and acts by government employees, to which they have no legal recourse.
The point is that Walmart is not a company that is just scraping by. It is a hugely profitable company. Someone did the math awhile back and found that they could double the wages of their work force and it wouldn't affect their profits in a noticeable way. Instead Walmart keeps wages low, and over hires so that employees can't even count on a regular 40 hours. As a result their employees have to rely on government welfare programs to survive. So everyone else in the US that pays payroll taxes is footing part of the bill for Walmarts extreme greed, whether or not we shop at their stores.
That is valid as long as the CEO is receiving stock options or something. It is possible though that Jobs wasn't receiving any stock as payment either given that he already was a part owner as a result of being one of the founders of Apple to begin with.
Additionally the market for labor is manipulated all the time by executive level decision makers. We have everything from the abuse of the H1B Visas to huge chains relying on social safety nets for their workers so they can run a hugely profitable company on minimum wage employees.
I might have gotten it wrong, but my reading of the article was that heating is actually what causes the spring to retract back into it's coiled shape, when it cools it relaxes.
Just order a new artificial muscle replacement pack on line. The huge break through here is that the materials area already commonly available and ridiculously cheap in the form needed. $5 for 1Kg of fishing line. Most of the stuff people have been testing for this kind of application are only really workable on tiny scales and use exotic and hence expensive materials.
I would go with the /. crowd being anomalous. The simple fact that most users here are even aware of the existence of indie game studios puts them in a different subset of game players. Just look at the numbers for things like players who frequent forums and read wiki's about their favorite games. /. readers are a subset of a subset, and yes we are all subject to some group think, but that group thnk does differ significantly from the population at large. So I find it very believable that the commenters on a thread like this are going to have favorite games that other people have never even heard of.
For myself I'd have to say that my biggest time suckers for the last year have been Minecraft, Skyrim, Terraria, Don't Starve and as of yesterday I might be getting sucked into Banished.
Skyrim is a AAA game obviously and popular enough.
Minecraft is indie but probably the most wildly succesful indie game and possibly better known than Skyrim.
Terraria was pretty successful and popular so far as indie games go. Don't Starve is probably not as well known but also seems to have done well and I know a number of people that have liked and played it a good bit.
Banished is an indie that was released just yesterday. When I got my copy it was the number 1 seller on Steam but wasn't even listed on the front page. All those purchases were coming from people actively seeking it out and buying it. Those people knew about the game because they read hobbyist sites like this.
I helped kickstart M.O.R.E. and I'm really hoping for it to be the true MOO2 successor. MOO3 was attrocious. The real time space combat was impossible to properly control which meant leaving it to the AI. At which point there really isn't any point in not just having it give you the outcome based on some number crunching. They abolished the ability to micromanage things and instead made it a macro management game without bothering to make that readily transparent.
Two things in spelunky really killed it for me.
A. The ghost time limit mechanic pisses me off. The game, with an archaelogical setting, makes me want to explore each level to see what all is there. Instead I have to rush to try and find the exit.
B. I found the controls unworkable. There was some wierd key combo for picking up an item, like prone and something else. There was also no way to just let go of a ledge and drop, combined with the character automatically clinging to any ledge within reach. That particularly ill thought out bit makes it nearly impossible to drop down through a 1 block wide hole.
I was home sick all day and picked this up also. I've really enjoyed it so far. I have managed to not end up wiped out by any disasters yet at year 16. I however might have screwed it all through mismanagement. I didn't pay enough attention to the fact that the people in the settlements age 4 times faster than the game years roll by. Which snowballed with my ignorance of how housing and procreation work. Namely that couples won't pair up and have kids unless they can have their own house to live in. So I ended up with a geriatric population all happily living six to a house and not producing any more kids.
The game has four tutorials which I went through but none of them mention the advanced pace of aging and the housing requirements for population growth. Additionally the game will notify you when people die from starvation, cold, and vocational accidents, but it does not notify you of death from old age.
I'm really liking it so far though. Micromanaging my little mideval hamlet is really fun for some reason. And the sound track has been pleasant enough for me to not switch it off.
I liked Starbound enough when I tried it but last I checked it was still far behind Terraria. It has the potential to be better but I wouldn't say it's even on a level with it yet.
I've been doing security analysis stuff for close to six years now. And I've got to say this article doesn't surprise me in the least. We'll notify customers for months and years on end about serious and silly flaws in their system. We so rarely see any real effort to fix stuff that it is always shocking when someone actually loads a quarterly patch, even if it is nearly a year out of date. I always have to give a nervous giggle when our leadership brags on how secure our systems are, because one day I know I'm going to walk into the office and find that some major system was attacked through a known security hole.
I was thinking more like "Trademark Crusher Saga"