One could just as easily argue that purchasing US dollars from banks is also gambling. It's not truly a possession in that it has no intrinsic value. Now if you had money that was actually backed by say gold then you might have a point.
On a side note, why couldn't a gambling house say that they are doing very short term high margin investments? I think it would be really cool to have a slot machine where you pick which stock to invest in, pull the handle, wait for the line to go up or down however far you feel like it, and when you let go it cashes out.
Yes we are geeks. Let's do what we're good at. We can create an entirely new media system to publish music not offered by the RIAA. Online music ratings systems to popularize music to people with common interests, wireless access points streaming user chosen programming, valuable and anonymous IP traffic, USB key exchange programs. Let them squeeze. The more you tighten your grip, RIAA, the more customers will slip through your fingers.
Yeah, I saw the amasci site about 4 or 5 years ago, and have been employing it for quite a while. Actually I have 1 change to it: My longer following distance is the sum of my following distance plus the following distance of the two cars ahead of me. If the cars ahead of me are tailgating, then I follow much further back than if they're sanely spaced. Yes, I have seen people jump into the hole in front of me. It is hard sometimes to let them do this, because it's obviously due to their selfishness. What's amusing however is to watch them get so frustrated when they realize they're worse off because the lane they're now in is slower than the one they left. Another thing that I have pro-actively tackled is the issue where merging lanes cause big slowdowns. What is happening is that the traffic in a merge lane moves so much faster than the rest of the freeway that it causes big slowdowns in the lane to the left of it. What I do is to stay in the merge lane and match speeds not with the car ahead, but with the car to the left of me. Ticks off the people behind me to no end, but I rationalize that they're just being selfish in trying to get ahead of the people directly to the left of them. Heh, even had someone merge, then try to match speeds with me to prevent my merge. What this does is even out the flow of the freeway that is being merged onto at the expense of slowing down the merge lane to the same speed. Bottom line: Traffic is caused by selfishness.
The only reason Apple was smelling so good in the recent past is because Microsoft stank up the place so badly. Back in the bad old days buying clones (Non-IBM) machines running Windows was "stickin it to the man", well both men, because of the terrible monopolistic anti-competitive business practices Apple used. Apple was the one that established the standard of Sue first, ask questions later, and Microsoft learned from the best. You young whippershnappers of today seem to forget these things. Now get off my lawn so I can trim the weeds around my Linux powered Natalie Portman shrine.
This isn't some Gramma Jenkins being harassed by the RIAA, this is Radio. Do they have any idea what kind of a campaign radio stations could put up? They're not annoying the little guys, they're putting the screws to the very people that can bring down their whole house of shady business dealing cards. Daily ad campaigns, call your congressman, outright propaganda, complete with suppressing/twisting anything the RIAA has to say about it. It's the MEDIA they picked on this time. I think the proper terminology is "biting the hand that feeds you".
That's exactly right. They're losing the marked to Firefox, so they're playing catch-up by making IE standards compliant. Next step will be extend and destroy in one swell foop with Silverlight.
Yeah, like I alluded to, a light gas gun is a more better choice than water. At that depth water pressure may be used instead of gunpowder in the SHARP design.
Responding to the other posts: >AC: Quite apart from the friction problem (at 5 degrees, we're talking about 11 times as much force pushing you against the >tube as pushing you forward -- I suspect the optimal angle is much closer to vertical) No, water pressure on the outside of a a vertical tube becomes way too much too quickly to get any appreciable length out of the tube. Like you pointed out, at 30 miles long, 20 degrees is too steep with a depth of 10.3 miles. One of the nice parts about getting the tube lower would be the lessened effects of ocean currents at the surface. I don't know how much lower ocean currents would affect it though: If that tube is not realllly straight then the friction problem and possibly lateral g-forces would be significant issues.
Several people mentioned friction: I don't know what to say to that, other than that SHARP guns seem to work ok. They reach 1/2 the speed without any problems albeit being much shorter. No-one mentioned the 50G deceleration the spacecraft would experience exiting the muzzle into 14.7psi air, but this site does, and proposes hydrogen injection as the solution.
Toddestan: The reference to a proposed Antarctica gas gun is here.
Joeytmann: I'm not a materials person either, however if the Trieste can hit the deepest spot in the ocean, surely a simple straight seamless tube can do the same. I'd actually be more worried about stress from ocean currents weakening the sides of the tube enough to cause it to buckle. Try this: Take an aluminum can, and very carefully stand on it. It was easier to do on the thicker, older cans, but can still be done if you're careful and/or light weight. Then tap gently on the wall of the can.
The setup: 30 mile long tube buried at a shallow angle, say 5-20 degrees. This lowers the pressure requirements at the bottom end of the tube. Pressure (every 33 feet per 14.7 psi) Depth = sin(20)*length in feet = 24,100 psi Acceleration = 5G, d = 1/2*a*t^2, therefore T = 44.5 seconds. V = Acceleration * time, therefore V = 7110 ft/s 1 m/s = 3.28 ft/s Delta-v to low orbit is 8600 M/s, or 28000 ft/s
So this method will give us 1/4 of the delta-v needed to get to low orbit.
If an ocean contour could be found that somewhat matched the angle involved, the tube buoyancy and alignment problem could be solved by anchoring it to the sea floor.
12G at 50 miles, 20G@30 miles give 14kft/s (1/2 low orbit delta-v) 50G @ 50 miles gives 29kFt/s, more than enough for LEO if you ignore drag. This class of launch tubes would be suitable for refueling geo-synch shuttles.
62 mile tube @ 10 degrees (similar idea as the 100km launcher proposed for Antarctica) gives 25kPSI, 9k deltav @ 4 g.
I'm not sure if it would be easier to build a straight tube in Antarctica or in the Ocean. One other problem is that once you surpass the speed of sound in a medium you no longer receive thrust from it. Speed of sound in water is 1482 m/s, or 4862 feet/s, so you would need to start pumping a hot gas, either rocket exhaust or hot hydrogen into the tube once you passed 4.8kft/sec.
Actually the submersion idea is brilliant. The piece missing is the launch tube. Build a 30 foot diameter tube 2 miles deep, with a piston on the bottom. Put brakes on the piston that will limit the acceleration down to about 5G. Empty the piston of water, lower spacecraft onto piston, when you launch just let the piston rise. The thousands of PSI of water pressure should give the spacecraft a significant amount of speed by the time it reaches the surface, light off rocket at a higher altitude than normal so the nozzle can be optimized for a higher altitude burn. I'll work on the math for this.
I think it's more along the lines of how much new information you store. When you're older your brain throws more information away because the compression dictionary is larger, more sophisticated and accurate. The other, scarier reason is that our memory is no longer working as well as when we were younger. My guess of how our brains measure time is based on how many pieces of information we remember for that period. For scary/adrenaline packed moments our brains store more info so we can sort through it later in case we can be safer next time it occurs.
It's not so much that we "think faster" but that we "remember more".
Actually most of the maps are symmetrical, so if you flipped the map around too or swapped map textures you should be able to keep all the aesthetic functionality.
Rocket launchers may do some damage, but it was the 1-2-3-4 punch soldiers employed in TFC that is missing here. (1: Rocket, knocks them towards 2: your grenade aimed at where they were herded by your rocket which launches them into the air where 3: & 4: shotgun blasts finish their airborne bodies off. Could be 2 rockets before the grenade, depends on whether or not you'd entered the area primed.) Seems to be a lot easier to get away from a soldier in TF2 than TFC, which is why you'd see them doing more damage but not more kills.
My advice: Don't bother with TF2, all it will do is tarnish TFC's memory. TF2 is Team FPS for little children and nooblets. TF2 doesn't allow nearly as much skill-based improvement as TFC does. They removed grenades to get rid of spam, but completely forgot just how badly that screws over the medic and scout classes. It's sad too, in the trailer you clearly see the demo with a mirv.
Also TF2 is a huge lag-fest, rockets take longer to fire, players don't move smoothly etc, etc etc. And before you say I have a lousy system just shut it, I have SLI. I guess I'm not so much down on TF2 as I am disappointed in it. The environment and graphics are so tremendously improved that to have the gameplay drop so badly makes me really sad.
What you SHOULD NOT miss is Portal. Oh my gosh, that was the most fun 5 hours I've had in years.
- [RiCE]EMPeror - Played TFC for something like 7 years
Test your child for color-blindness. Was talking to my co-worker the other day, he has 20/10 vision and color blindness. Turns out color blind people were picked for door gunners in choppers in Vietnam because they aren't fooled by camouflage.
I designed several Warcraft 3 maps for the hardcore audience incl. Traps & Towers TD. I did mostly Tower Defense type maps, but I did work on a couple of RPG's. What I found is that play-testing the maps takes humongous gobs of time, but was pretty much the only way to significantly balance the levels out. It is important to get feedback from other players, listen to their complaints, but you need to remember that they Want it to be challenging. It follows that the game will have a higher replay value for them if they lose in a way that is preventable (given more time, knowledge, skill). My key points to level design: Unlock new skills at appropriate times. Increase the difficulty of the tasks in such a way as to require the player to use his skills in a synergistic manner. In the later levels you need to assume that the player has mastered the basic skills, and design the game such that the player is experimenting with different combinations of skills. Each skill should be tuned to work best under its own set of circumstances. For example if the skills are guns, then one gun would be a sniper rifle, another a shotgun. Each has their uses, each can be considered equally powerful in their prescribed usage, but each would be a poor substitutes for the other. For Co-op play, set it up so that playing together is about 1/3 easier than playing solo. The reasons for this is that communication between players is not 100%: if you made it the same difficulty the players would end up letting each other lose more often than playing solo. If it were 100% easier then it wouldn't be challenging enough. You gotta aim for the players losing slightly less often than playing solo.
In order to satisfy all those, it takes tons of feedback and play-testing. Keep a notepad handy when you play the levels, and jot down notes to remember which parts you need to fix. Then you won't forget to fix them when you're working on the level.
One thing I wish I had added to my maps were a change of pace. The other maps had little mini-games to give the players a break in the action. Extra puzzles, different types of games, levels without any monsters, switching between co-operative and deathmatch all are methods to give the players a break so that when they come back to the level it's fun again.
Oh and about realism being the be-all and end-all, have a look at the (unrealistic) atmosphere in Team Fortress 2, it's AWESOME!!! Only drawback is that TF2 is a dumbed down playskool version of TFC.
Actually I did play with the serial MRAM's back when I was an embedded systems engineer, they were pretty cool. As I recall they didn't have the write cycle count issues that EEPROMs had and had way faster write cycle times.
Need I say more? Ok, Dynamically Linked Libraries (.DLL files) are loaded up once and reused for each running copy of the application. The OS IS smart enough to reuse the code for two "different" copies of the same program.
Slashdot Mirror
One could just as easily argue that purchasing US dollars from banks is also gambling. It's not truly a possession in that it has no intrinsic value. Now if you had money that was actually backed by say gold then you might have a point.
On a side note, why couldn't a gambling house say that they are doing very short term high margin investments?
I think it would be really cool to have a slot machine where you pick which stock to invest in, pull the handle, wait for the line to go up or down however far you feel like it, and when you let go it cashes out.
Yes we are geeks. Let's do what we're good at. We can create an entirely new media system to publish music not offered by the RIAA. Online music ratings systems to popularize music to people with common interests, wireless access points streaming user chosen programming, valuable and anonymous IP traffic, USB key exchange programs.
Let them squeeze.
The more you tighten your grip, RIAA, the more customers will slip through your fingers.
Yeah, I saw the amasci site about 4 or 5 years ago, and have been employing it for quite a while.
Actually I have 1 change to it:
My longer following distance is the sum of my following distance plus the following distance of the two cars ahead of me. If the cars ahead of me are tailgating, then I follow much further back than if they're sanely spaced.
Yes, I have seen people jump into the hole in front of me. It is hard sometimes to let them do this, because it's obviously due to their selfishness. What's amusing however is to watch them get so frustrated when they realize they're worse off because the lane they're now in is slower than the one they left.
Another thing that I have pro-actively tackled is the issue where merging lanes cause big slowdowns. What is happening is that the traffic in a merge lane moves so much faster than the rest of the freeway that it causes big slowdowns in the lane to the left of it. What I do is to stay in the merge lane and match speeds not with the car ahead, but with the car to the left of me. Ticks off the people behind me to no end, but I rationalize that they're just being selfish in trying to get ahead of the people directly to the left of them. Heh, even had someone merge, then try to match speeds with me to prevent my merge. What this does is even out the flow of the freeway that is being merged onto at the expense of slowing down the merge lane to the same speed.
Bottom line: Traffic is caused by selfishness.
What are they waiting for? Christmas?
The only reason Apple was smelling so good in the recent past is because Microsoft stank up the place so badly.
Back in the bad old days buying clones (Non-IBM) machines running Windows was "stickin it to the man", well both men, because of the terrible monopolistic anti-competitive business practices Apple used. Apple was the one that established the standard of Sue first, ask questions later, and Microsoft learned from the best. You young whippershnappers of today seem to forget these things. Now get off my lawn so I can trim the weeds around my Linux powered Natalie Portman shrine.
This isn't some Gramma Jenkins being harassed by the RIAA, this is Radio. Do they have any idea what kind of a campaign radio stations could put up? They're not annoying the little guys, they're putting the screws to the very people that can bring down their whole house of shady business dealing cards. Daily ad campaigns, call your congressman, outright propaganda, complete with suppressing/twisting anything the RIAA has to say about it. It's the MEDIA they picked on this time.
I think the proper terminology is "biting the hand that feeds you".
That's exactly right. They're losing the marked to Firefox, so they're playing catch-up by making IE standards compliant. Next step will be extend and destroy in one swell foop with Silverlight.
Help me out here, is that supposed to be modded funny or insightful?
Hmm, hydrofoil sounds interesting. One of the problems with that is control. You're multiplying 2 very tricky control problems by each other. Some sailing speed records were set by hydrofoils though. Hydrofoils need a certain minimum speed to get out of the water, and it takes a lot of power to lift the ship up to get into the lower power requirement hydrofoil planing. I doubt that a ship that large has enough power to get it up on plane. Maybe use air injection? (see http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi=B6V4F-4B4YVX3-2&_user=10&_rdoc=1&_fmt=&_orig=search&_sort=d&view=c&_acct=C000050221&_version=1&_urlVersion=0&_userid=10&md5=2c70f5a8d0ade5705385e73f96d9f542)
Yeah, like I alluded to, a light gas gun is a more better choice than water. At that depth water pressure may be used instead of gunpowder in the SHARP design.
Responding to the other posts:
>AC: Quite apart from the friction problem (at 5 degrees, we're talking about 11 times as much force pushing you against the >tube as pushing you forward -- I suspect the optimal angle is much closer to vertical)
No, water pressure on the outside of a a vertical tube becomes way too much too quickly to get any appreciable length out of the tube. Like you pointed out, at 30 miles long, 20 degrees is too steep with a depth of 10.3 miles. One of the nice parts about getting the tube lower would be the lessened effects of ocean currents at the surface. I don't know how much lower ocean currents would affect it though: If that tube is not realllly straight then the friction problem and possibly lateral g-forces would be significant issues.
Several people mentioned friction: I don't know what to say to that, other than that SHARP guns seem to work ok. They reach 1/2 the speed without any problems albeit being much shorter. No-one mentioned the 50G deceleration the spacecraft would experience exiting the muzzle into 14.7psi air, but this site does, and proposes hydrogen injection as the solution.
Toddestan: The reference to a proposed Antarctica gas gun is here.
Joeytmann: I'm not a materials person either, however if the Trieste can hit the deepest spot in the ocean, surely a simple straight seamless tube can do the same. I'd actually be more worried about stress from ocean currents weakening the sides of the tube enough to cause it to buckle. Try this: Take an aluminum can, and very carefully stand on it. It was easier to do on the thicker, older cans, but can still be done if you're careful and/or light weight. Then tap gently on the wall of the can.
You are absolutely right.
Instead of using water as the propellant directly, have the water press against a piston that compresses hot hydrogen.
The seal issues have been addressed for the HARP gun:
http://www.dunnspace.com/harp.htm
http://www.astronautix.com/lvs/sharp.htm
http://www.astronautix.com/lvfam/gunnched.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light_Gas_Gun
I don't know if heat buildup is more of an issue with a longer, lower G force tube.
The setup:
30 mile long tube buried at a shallow angle, say 5-20 degrees. This lowers the pressure requirements at the bottom end of the tube.
Pressure (every 33 feet per 14.7 psi) Depth = sin(20)*length in feet = 24,100 psi
Acceleration = 5G, d = 1/2*a*t^2, therefore T = 44.5 seconds.
V = Acceleration * time, therefore V = 7110 ft/s
1 m/s = 3.28 ft/s
Delta-v to low orbit is 8600 M/s, or 28000 ft/s
So this method will give us 1/4 of the delta-v needed to get to low orbit.
If an ocean contour could be found that somewhat matched the angle involved, the tube buoyancy and alignment problem could be solved by anchoring it to the sea floor.
12G at 50 miles, 20G@30 miles give 14kft/s (1/2 low orbit delta-v)
50G @ 50 miles gives 29kFt/s, more than enough for LEO if you ignore drag.
This class of launch tubes would be suitable for refueling geo-synch shuttles.
62 mile tube @ 10 degrees (similar idea as the 100km launcher proposed for Antarctica) gives 25kPSI, 9k deltav @ 4 g.
I'm not sure if it would be easier to build a straight tube in Antarctica or in the Ocean.
One other problem is that once you surpass the speed of sound in a medium you no longer receive thrust from it. Speed of sound in water is 1482 m/s, or 4862 feet/s, so you would need to start pumping a hot gas, either rocket exhaust or hot hydrogen into the tube once you passed 4.8kft/sec.
Actually the submersion idea is brilliant. The piece missing is the launch tube.
Build a 30 foot diameter tube 2 miles deep, with a piston on the bottom. Put brakes on the piston that will limit the acceleration down to about 5G. Empty the piston of water, lower spacecraft onto piston, when you launch just let the piston rise. The thousands of PSI of water pressure should give the spacecraft a significant amount of speed by the time it reaches the surface, light off rocket at a higher altitude than normal so the nozzle can be optimized for a higher altitude burn. I'll work on the math for this.
I'd heard there was a boxer that could read a 45 rpm record easily. I'm guessing his brain was wired or built differently.
I think it's more along the lines of how much new information you store. When you're older your brain throws more information away because the compression dictionary is larger, more sophisticated and accurate. The other, scarier reason is that our memory is no longer working as well as when we were younger. My guess of how our brains measure time is based on how many pieces of information we remember for that period. For scary/adrenaline packed moments our brains store more info so we can sort through it later in case we can be safer next time it occurs.
It's not so much that we "think faster" but that we "remember more".
Actually most of the maps are symmetrical, so if you flipped the map around too or swapped map textures you should be able to keep all the aesthetic functionality.
Rocket launchers may do some damage, but it was the 1-2-3-4 punch soldiers employed in TFC that is missing here.
(1: Rocket, knocks them towards 2: your grenade aimed at where they were herded by your rocket which launches them into the air where 3: & 4: shotgun blasts finish their airborne bodies off. Could be 2 rockets before the grenade, depends on whether or not you'd entered the area primed.)
Seems to be a lot easier to get away from a soldier in TF2 than TFC, which is why you'd see them doing more damage but not more kills.
My advice: Don't bother with TF2, all it will do is tarnish TFC's memory.
TF2 is Team FPS for little children and nooblets.
TF2 doesn't allow nearly as much skill-based improvement as TFC does. They removed grenades to get rid of spam, but completely forgot just how badly that screws over the medic and scout classes. It's sad too, in the trailer you clearly see the demo with a mirv.
Also TF2 is a huge lag-fest, rockets take longer to fire, players don't move smoothly etc, etc etc. And before you say I have a lousy system just shut it, I have SLI.
I guess I'm not so much down on TF2 as I am disappointed in it. The environment and graphics are so tremendously improved that to have the gameplay drop so badly makes me really sad.
What you SHOULD NOT miss is Portal. Oh my gosh, that was the most fun 5 hours I've had in years.
- [RiCE]EMPeror - Played TFC for something like 7 years
Test your child for color-blindness.
Was talking to my co-worker the other day, he has 20/10 vision and color blindness. Turns out color blind people were picked for door gunners in choppers in Vietnam because they aren't fooled by camouflage.
I designed several Warcraft 3 maps for the hardcore audience incl. Traps & Towers TD. I did mostly Tower Defense type maps, but I did work on a couple of RPG's. What I found is that play-testing the maps takes humongous gobs of time, but was pretty much the only way to significantly balance the levels out. It is important to get feedback from other players, listen to their complaints, but you need to remember that they Want it to be challenging. It follows that the game will have a higher replay value for them if they lose in a way that is preventable (given more time, knowledge, skill).
My key points to level design:
Unlock new skills at appropriate times.
Increase the difficulty of the tasks in such a way as to require the player to use his skills in a synergistic manner. In the later levels you need to assume that the player has mastered the basic skills, and design the game such that the player is experimenting with different combinations of skills.
Each skill should be tuned to work best under its own set of circumstances. For example if the skills are guns, then one gun would be a sniper rifle, another a shotgun. Each has their uses, each can be considered equally powerful in their prescribed usage, but each would be a poor substitutes for the other.
For Co-op play, set it up so that playing together is about 1/3 easier than playing solo. The reasons for this is that communication between players is not 100%: if you made it the same difficulty the players would end up letting each other lose more often than playing solo. If it were 100% easier then it wouldn't be challenging enough. You gotta aim for the players losing slightly less often than playing solo.
In order to satisfy all those, it takes tons of feedback and play-testing. Keep a notepad handy when you play the levels, and jot down notes to remember which parts you need to fix. Then you won't forget to fix them when you're working on the level.
One thing I wish I had added to my maps were a change of pace. The other maps had little mini-games to give the players a break in the action. Extra puzzles, different types of games, levels without any monsters, switching between co-operative and deathmatch all are methods to give the players a break so that when they come back to the level it's fun again.
Oh and about realism being the be-all and end-all, have a look at the (unrealistic) atmosphere in Team Fortress 2, it's AWESOME!!! Only drawback is that TF2 is a dumbed down playskool version of TFC.
- EMPY
Now all they need now is faster WOM
Actually I did play with the serial MRAM's back when I was an embedded systems engineer, they were pretty cool. As I recall they didn't have the write cycle count issues that EEPROMs had and had way faster write cycle times.
Dog-slow video cards can't even ray-trace properly yet.
http://www.intel.com/cd/ids/developer/asmo-na/eng/dc/games/245711.htm
http://www.theinquirer.net/en/inquirer/news/2007/04/23/intel-shows-off-raytraced-quake-4
I, for one, welcome our new virtual ray-traced underlings.
DOH! And I was wondering who it was that was causing global warming!
There's that word again; "heavy". Why are things so heavy in the future? Is there a problem with the earth's gravitational pull?
Need I say more?
Ok, Dynamically Linked Libraries (.DLL files) are loaded up once and reused for each running copy of the application. The OS IS smart enough to reuse the code for two "different" copies of the same program.