Assuming the process is something akin to the Groundwater Replenishment System in Orange County, CA, those shouldn't be a major problem. I'm too lazy to look up the treatment plant in this story, but I'd guess that the article leaves out a few steps in the treatment process, including some sort of advanced oxidation process. At the GWRS in CA, that would be a hydrogen peroxide / UV step that oxidizes the crap out of anything that might make its way through the RO process -- which isn't much, except for possibly neutrally charged, small molecules. Further, it if it's a well run wastewater collection system, there should be source control measures in place to minimize a lot of nasty stuff, like heavy metals and toxins, as that throws off advanced wastewater treatment processes as well.
My understanding was that there was a chance it might make things worse. If the mud didn't actually slow the leak, but was pushed out as fast as it was applied, there was the fear it might further damage the already broken valve. So, rather than a partially open valve somewhat checking the flow of oil, you'd have a fully open pipe.
Except, at least with the deal we got from So Cal Edison, we give them the right to shut off our air conditioner in exchange for a discount on our summer electric bill. I don't recall exactly how much of a discount on the energy they gave us, but considering that they never once actually killed our air con during the summer, I have no complaints whatsoever.
personally I think its gonna end up being a situation like "Sure you can play without subscribing - but you'll never get any of the good items you'll need to kick ass or even beat the game."
Based on the last Hellgate story we had (the interview with Roper), this doesn't sound to be the case. The free online play is the exact same game you get if you play single player. The only difference between free and pay, is that the monthly subscribers get a "bonus", which at launch is a slightly larger stash, an extra character slot, and what sounds like the ability to acquire vanity items (slightly better or differently colored items).
Also based on that interview, it sounds like some of the things the submitter suggested were pay-only aren't. To quote Roper: "It's for free having that same experience online with your friends. And then we also give you access to a bunch of stuff. Like community things like being able to join guilds, trading items, auction houses; all those kinds of things that we never even had with Diablo 2." Stuff above and beyond that is for the monthly subscribers.
This isn't necessarily such a bad idea. In Irvine, the big tech center of Southern California, the Irvine Company is building luxury apartment complexes adjacent to new office space. The best part is that it's also across the street from a large retail / entertainment center. So people literally live where they can work and play. I don't see anything wrong with this idea. At least for people who chose apartment living.
That can't be true. Modern medical advances, as well and sanitation, have raised the average life expectancy in the U.S. considerably over the past hundred years. So, an average certainly can be raised or lowered, but it still doesn't change the fact that half the population lies on either side of it (well, that's really the median, but I'm not going to be that picky.)
In defence of the original author, a generation is typically taken to be 25 years (or perhaps 22). And if we use Earth day as the awakening of the environmetal movement in the US, that's 36 years ago, which is about a generation and a half. That's a perfectly excusable round-off in my book. Heck, if we go back to '62 with the publication of Silent Spring, that's still less than 2 generations.
In addition to Schilling's love of Everquest, he also started his own company to produce supplements/scenarios/modules for various tactical board games like Advanced Squad Leader. I wouldn't be surprised if one of this new company's first games is some sort of tactical combat ala Myth or a more traditional RTS game. Given Salvatore's involvement, it'd likely be some sort of Fantasy based venture.
Of course it isn't updated with data from yesterday. A cursory glance at the scale of the graph shows that the minor tick marks represent quarters, and there's only 1 tick mark in 2006 showing. Thus, we've got reliable 2006 data through a bit after the first quarter (likely through May and maybe into June). You can clearly see that it's starting to rise at the end, and if we had the data, we'd certainly see the July peak.
And just because it doesn't have the latest data, doesn't invalidate it's use for trendspotting. It merely won't tell you what the latest fad is.
Amen to immersive physics. In HL2 there's a lever puzzle, where you've got to put enough weight on one end in order to use the lever to get to a higher ledge. That was a fairly cute little puzzle to demonstrate picking up and dropping of objects as well as the power of in-game physics. (There's actually a couple different variations of this puzzle throughout the game.) Ep1 has a similar puzzle, but no where near enough weight lying around to keep it counterbalanced. So you've got to come up with a different solution. Stumped me for a while, until it suddenly popped to mind. As I was trying it, I though there was no way it was going to work. Surprisingly it did. When that happens in a game, you know they've achieved something special.
The biggest downside to the immersive physics and the interactible world is that the developers have to cheat and put invisible walls in at certain places to keep you following their idea of how a scene is to be carried out. A good example of this in Ep1 is the queen antlion attack. You jump down into the warehouse and if you've moved enough boxes around, you can climb back into the room you came from. However, there's a ledge that Alyx jumps to, at the same height as your room. If you move the boxes over there, you'll find that you aren't allowed to jump on that ledge. The developers wanted you on the ground getting batterred, rather than up on a ledge taking potshots at their big bad monster.
For an example of what I mean, go look at the construction and design of a public school building, and then go find a private building. You'll notice the private building is a far better building.
Bad example, at least here in California. While the private building may be more asethetically pleasing, the public school building is held to very high engineering standards and if I'm not mistaken goes through an entirely separate and stricter review than most other buildings (from a civil / structural point of view).
The worst case scenario is quite likely, given that the hard drive was found separate from the computer, as described here:
Both the laptop and hard drive ended up for sale at a black market just north of Washington D.C., near a subway station outside the Beltway near Wheaton. We're talking about the kind of market that is literally run out of the back of a truck, one official said. Fortunately, a buyer purchased both components at this black market, keeping the missing hardware together.
Is it really that interesting to watch such a simulation if it doesn't interact with other models of the same quality?
Sure. Being able to take the together the basic building blocks (atoms), arrange them into molecules (amino acid residues), which then can be chained together (macromolecules), which fold accurately depending on the various electrical, hydrophobic, and van der Waals forces (proteins), which further interact properly with their neighbors and form stable complexes (capsid subunits) which can all be put together to make a complete shell (the capsid), which you can then stuff with the nucleic acid (which istself is made up of various molecules) and observe how all this interacts is incredibly amazing. The fact that they do it, and do it (reasonably) right by itself is an achievement.
As for this being a simulation of life, the discussions above do a good job suggesting how muddy that water is (I'm in the viruses aren't alive camp). But as a simulation of what it is, it's amazing.
I suppose the next step would be to properly model a portion of the cell wall of the host organism and observe on an atomic level how the various forces interplay to induce infection and actually shoot the genetic material into the cell. If they can model a virus, then a portion of a cell wall shouldn't be more than a few orders of magnitude in difficulty.
Yes, under the proper conditions. Stack emissions are primarily CO2, NOx and various sulfur compounds. What primarily keeps algae levels in check in the environment are various micronutrients (phosphorous, nitrogen, iron). Given that smokestack emissions should be fairly defined composition, it should be straight forward to supply the exact amounts of additional nutrients to stimulate growth without overpopulation problems. Besides, this is an engineered process, not simply dumping emissions into a river.
You are under the mistaken belief that Uwe Boll makes movies to make a profit. He doesn't. Apparently German tax laws are quite screwy and investors get to write off all of their expenses. Here's one site that explains the idea:
When you disseminate all the boring legal business law surrounding it the bottom line is this - the German investors in a movie only pay tax on any RETURNS the movie makes, their investment is 100% deductible, so the minute the movie makes a profit, said investor has to start paying tax. Plus the investors can actually borrow money to put towards investment and write that off too.
So, Boll doesn't make movies to make money. He makes them to lose money.
Regardless of whether the point is to target terrorists, there needs to be some check on the powers. In an unchecked society, we kidnap people off the streets in Germany, rendite (?) them to Afghanistan for several months, where we torture them and then realize it was all a case of mistaken identity, so we drop them off in Albania. The DOD starts keeping tabs on anti-war protestors. The President starts writing executive orders which allow the NSA to spy on American citizens. The "no torture" bill that passes is great, until the military decides to re-write the army field manual and then classify it, so we can't even say what torture is.
All in the name of protecting us from "terrorists"
Can't honestly say I know a whole lot about the Patriot Act, but Glenn Reynolds discussed it in his msnbc blog today. He quotes another blog which basically states that only about 1% of the Patriot Act is expiring due to the non-reauthorization. And that futher, much of the reauthorization would have put limits on the egregous non-expiring stuff. So, this is a mixed bag. Not sure if it's a victory or not. It's a symbolic victory, but perhaps not substantial...
I think the simplest reply to this is to refer to yesterday's article on casual gaming. Popcap does tremendous business. They're bringing in nongamers and gamers alike with their offerings. True, popcap uses an existing platform (the PC, internet) to entice people. But their experiences suggest that if you set the entry bar low enough people will flock to it. I think the increasing market of the handheld controllers that plug into TVs (20 classic atari games on a joystick), also suggests that it isn't hard to get nongamers (or grown-up, reformed gamers) into gaming.
As for Nintendo chasing non-gamers, I think that's a misconception. What they're doing is making a system that plays great games, but is intuitive enough to appeal to non-gamers. The various mortal kombat type games with their 6 button control schemes can be unweildy. Now imagine a 2 button scheme, kick and punch. Hold a button down and wiggle your controller high, mid or low, and you've made the game far far more intuitive. Just because something is simple to use doesn't mean it can't have depth.
Obviously there's the perception image that Nintendo has to overcome. But a radical controller design will attract people's attention. If they couple that with a range of games at launch then they could do quite well.
um, no. re-read your link. according to what you linked to, 1 Eurpoean billion = 1,000,000,000,000. which is most certainly not 1 million. however, i think most of the world now uses the definition of 1 billion = 1000 million
according to this chart, the only engineering remaining is chemical and biomedical. everything else (Civil and Environmental Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Computer Engineering) gets cut. That's an extremely dramatic cut.
My suggestion is to leave ship. Sure you could stick it out, but with the program being eliminated, there's little incentive for faculty to stay (they'll all be looking for jobs elsewhere), and less incentive for the school to spend money on student support (computers, etc.). End result is that you'll likely have a lot of classes taught by part-time folks who are being recruited at the last minute when every untenured junior faculty doesn't show up for spring semester (because they've also abandoning ship).
This is a fairly coool invetion. First, coloring bubbles is hard work, the dye doesn't spread evenly, so you have clear bubbles with a colored bottom. That's cool chemistry right there. Then, the other cool portion of the work is that this dye degrades in the presence of air. So when you get colored bubbles all over your clothes, a few minutes after being exposed to air, the color is gone. It degrades faster if friction is involved. Article mentions all sort of positive uses for this second half of the invention; in particular, using it in children's toothpaste. Toothpaste turns teeth red, and the red fades after the kid has brushed for 30 seconds, letting you know when you can stop.
Re:Hmmm.... Big chain bookstores do carry the book
on
Dungeons and Shadows
·
· Score: 1
That is unusual, as all of the B&N near me (Southern California) have at least 1 shelf full of role-playing books (mostly D&D). Local Borders also stocks a variety of RPG texts, as well.
Parent's comment isn't insightful, it's wrong. Take a look at the last few Zonk reviews: Serious Sam II - 5/10 Black and White II - 7/10 Ultimate Spider Man - 7/10 Dragonshard - 8/10 Burnout:Revenge - 9/10 We Love Katamari - 8/10 Sims 2 Nightlife - 7/10
So, while it's clear that most reviewed games get high praise (why waste your time writing a full fledged review for something you felt was a waste of your time to begin with); it's also clear that there is some sort of metric being applied and not just a "let's give it an 8".
Slashdot Mirror
Assuming the process is something akin to the Groundwater Replenishment System in Orange County, CA, those shouldn't be a major problem. I'm too lazy to look up the treatment plant in this story, but I'd guess that the article leaves out a few steps in the treatment process, including some sort of advanced oxidation process. At the GWRS in CA, that would be a hydrogen peroxide / UV step that oxidizes the crap out of anything that might make its way through the RO process -- which isn't much, except for possibly neutrally charged, small molecules. Further, it if it's a well run wastewater collection system, there should be source control measures in place to minimize a lot of nasty stuff, like heavy metals and toxins, as that throws off advanced wastewater treatment processes as well.
According to his own website, GRRM hasn't even finished it yet. I'm not believing anything about this book until I can buy it.
My understanding was that there was a chance it might make things worse. If the mud didn't actually slow the leak, but was pushed out as fast as it was applied, there was the fear it might further damage the already broken valve. So, rather than a partially open valve somewhat checking the flow of oil, you'd have a fully open pipe.
Except, at least with the deal we got from So Cal Edison, we give them the right to shut off our air conditioner in exchange for a discount on our summer electric bill. I don't recall exactly how much of a discount on the energy they gave us, but considering that they never once actually killed our air con during the summer, I have no complaints whatsoever.
Based on the last Hellgate story we had (the interview with Roper), this doesn't sound to be the case. The free online play is the exact same game you get if you play single player. The only difference between free and pay, is that the monthly subscribers get a "bonus", which at launch is a slightly larger stash, an extra character slot, and what sounds like the ability to acquire vanity items (slightly better or differently colored items).
Also based on that interview, it sounds like some of the things the submitter suggested were pay-only aren't. To quote Roper: "It's for free having that same experience online with your friends. And then we also give you access to a bunch of stuff. Like community things like being able to join guilds, trading items, auction houses; all those kinds of things that we never even had with Diablo 2." Stuff above and beyond that is for the monthly subscribers.
This isn't necessarily such a bad idea. In Irvine, the big tech center of Southern California, the Irvine Company is building luxury apartment complexes adjacent to new office space. The best part is that it's also across the street from a large retail / entertainment center. So people literally live where they can work and play. I don't see anything wrong with this idea. At least for people who chose apartment living.
That can't be true. Modern medical advances, as well and sanitation, have raised the average life expectancy in the U.S. considerably over the past hundred years. So, an average certainly can be raised or lowered, but it still doesn't change the fact that half the population lies on either side of it (well, that's really the median, but I'm not going to be that picky.)
In defence of the original author, a generation is typically taken to be 25 years (or perhaps 22). And if we use Earth day as the awakening of the environmetal movement in the US, that's 36 years ago, which is about a generation and a half. That's a perfectly excusable round-off in my book. Heck, if we go back to '62 with the publication of Silent Spring, that's still less than 2 generations.
98 and three-quarters of a cent. You buy four songs from Zune and you've saved a whole penny!
In addition to Schilling's love of Everquest, he also started his own company to produce supplements/scenarios/modules for various tactical board games like Advanced Squad Leader. I wouldn't be surprised if one of this new company's first games is some sort of tactical combat ala Myth or a more traditional RTS game. Given Salvatore's involvement, it'd likely be some sort of Fantasy based venture.
Of course it isn't updated with data from yesterday. A cursory glance at the scale of the graph shows that the minor tick marks represent quarters, and there's only 1 tick mark in 2006 showing. Thus, we've got reliable 2006 data through a bit after the first quarter (likely through May and maybe into June). You can clearly see that it's starting to rise at the end, and if we had the data, we'd certainly see the July peak.
And just because it doesn't have the latest data, doesn't invalidate it's use for trendspotting. It merely won't tell you what the latest fad is.
Amen to immersive physics. In HL2 there's a lever puzzle, where you've got to put enough weight on one end in order to use the lever to get to a higher ledge. That was a fairly cute little puzzle to demonstrate picking up and dropping of objects as well as the power of in-game physics. (There's actually a couple different variations of this puzzle throughout the game.) Ep1 has a similar puzzle, but no where near enough weight lying around to keep it counterbalanced. So you've got to come up with a different solution. Stumped me for a while, until it suddenly popped to mind. As I was trying it, I though there was no way it was going to work. Surprisingly it did. When that happens in a game, you know they've achieved something special.
The biggest downside to the immersive physics and the interactible world is that the developers have to cheat and put invisible walls in at certain places to keep you following their idea of how a scene is to be carried out. A good example of this in Ep1 is the queen antlion attack. You jump down into the warehouse and if you've moved enough boxes around, you can climb back into the room you came from. However, there's a ledge that Alyx jumps to, at the same height as your room. If you move the boxes over there, you'll find that you aren't allowed to jump on that ledge. The developers wanted you on the ground getting batterred, rather than up on a ledge taking potshots at their big bad monster.
For an example of what I mean, go look at the construction and design of a public school building, and then go find a private building. You'll notice the private building is a far better building.
Bad example, at least here in California. While the private building may be more asethetically pleasing, the public school building is held to very high engineering standards and if I'm not mistaken goes through an entirely separate and stricter review than most other buildings (from a civil / structural point of view).
Is it really that interesting to watch such a simulation if it doesn't interact with other models of the same quality?
Sure. Being able to take the together the basic building blocks (atoms), arrange them into molecules (amino acid residues), which then can be chained together (macromolecules), which fold accurately depending on the various electrical, hydrophobic, and van der Waals forces (proteins), which further interact properly with their neighbors and form stable complexes (capsid subunits) which can all be put together to make a complete shell (the capsid), which you can then stuff with the nucleic acid (which istself is made up of various molecules) and observe how all this interacts is incredibly amazing. The fact that they do it, and do it (reasonably) right by itself is an achievement.
As for this being a simulation of life, the discussions above do a good job suggesting how muddy that water is (I'm in the viruses aren't alive camp). But as a simulation of what it is, it's amazing.
I suppose the next step would be to properly model a portion of the cell wall of the host organism and observe on an atomic level how the various forces interplay to induce infection and actually shoot the genetic material into the cell. If they can model a virus, then a portion of a cell wall shouldn't be more than a few orders of magnitude in difficulty.
Yes, under the proper conditions. Stack emissions are primarily CO2, NOx and various sulfur compounds. What primarily keeps algae levels in check in the environment are various micronutrients (phosphorous, nitrogen, iron). Given that smokestack emissions should be fairly defined composition, it should be straight forward to supply the exact amounts of additional nutrients to stimulate growth without overpopulation problems. Besides, this is an engineered process, not simply dumping emissions into a river.
So, Boll doesn't make movies to make money. He makes them to lose money.
Regardless of whether the point is to target terrorists, there needs to be some check on the powers. In an unchecked society, we kidnap people off the streets in Germany, rendite (?) them to Afghanistan for several months, where we torture them and then realize it was all a case of mistaken identity, so we drop them off in Albania. The DOD starts keeping tabs on anti-war protestors. The President starts writing executive orders which allow the NSA to spy on American citizens. The "no torture" bill that passes is great, until the military decides to re-write the army field manual and then classify it, so we can't even say what torture is.
All in the name of protecting us from "terrorists"
Can't honestly say I know a whole lot about the Patriot Act, but Glenn Reynolds discussed it in his msnbc blog today. He quotes another blog which basically states that only about 1% of the Patriot Act is expiring due to the non-reauthorization. And that futher, much of the reauthorization would have put limits on the egregous non-expiring stuff. So, this is a mixed bag. Not sure if it's a victory or not. It's a symbolic victory, but perhaps not substantial...
I think the simplest reply to this is to refer to yesterday's article on casual gaming. Popcap does tremendous business. They're bringing in nongamers and gamers alike with their offerings. True, popcap uses an existing platform (the PC, internet) to entice people. But their experiences suggest that if you set the entry bar low enough people will flock to it. I think the increasing market of the handheld controllers that plug into TVs (20 classic atari games on a joystick), also suggests that it isn't hard to get nongamers (or grown-up, reformed gamers) into gaming.
As for Nintendo chasing non-gamers, I think that's a misconception. What they're doing is making a system that plays great games, but is intuitive enough to appeal to non-gamers. The various mortal kombat type games with their 6 button control schemes can be unweildy. Now imagine a 2 button scheme, kick and punch. Hold a button down and wiggle your controller high, mid or low, and you've made the game far far more intuitive. Just because something is simple to use doesn't mean it can't have depth.
Obviously there's the perception image that Nintendo has to overcome. But a radical controller design will attract people's attention. If they couple that with a range of games at launch then they could do quite well.
um, no. re-read your link. according to what you linked to, 1 Eurpoean billion = 1,000,000,000,000. which is most certainly not 1 million. however, i think most of the world now uses the definition of 1 billion = 1000 million
according to this chart, the only engineering remaining is chemical and biomedical. everything else (Civil and Environmental Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Computer Engineering) gets cut. That's an extremely dramatic cut.
My suggestion is to leave ship. Sure you could stick it out, but with the program being eliminated, there's little incentive for faculty to stay (they'll all be looking for jobs elsewhere), and less incentive for the school to spend money on student support (computers, etc.). End result is that you'll likely have a lot of classes taught by part-time folks who are being recruited at the last minute when every untenured junior faculty doesn't show up for spring semester (because they've also abandoning ship).
This is a fairly coool invetion. First, coloring bubbles is hard work, the dye doesn't spread evenly, so you have clear bubbles with a colored bottom. That's cool chemistry right there. Then, the other cool portion of the work is that this dye degrades in the presence of air. So when you get colored bubbles all over your clothes, a few minutes after being exposed to air, the color is gone. It degrades faster if friction is involved. Article mentions all sort of positive uses for this second half of the invention; in particular, using it in children's toothpaste. Toothpaste turns teeth red, and the red fades after the kid has brushed for 30 seconds, letting you know when you can stop.
That is unusual, as all of the B&N near me (Southern California) have at least 1 shelf full of role-playing books (mostly D&D). Local Borders also stocks a variety of RPG texts, as well.
Parent's comment isn't insightful, it's wrong. Take a look at the last few Zonk reviews:
Serious Sam II - 5/10
Black and White II - 7/10
Ultimate Spider Man - 7/10
Dragonshard - 8/10
Burnout:Revenge - 9/10
We Love Katamari - 8/10
Sims 2 Nightlife - 7/10
So, while it's clear that most reviewed games get high praise (why waste your time writing a full fledged review for something you felt was a waste of your time to begin with); it's also clear that there is some sort of metric being applied and not just a "let's give it an 8".