That sounds awfully close to disrepecting Civilization 4.
Don't get me started on Civ4! I love the improvements, but I can't STAND the "downgrades". What's with the "vertical" map grid arrangement? Where's my usable fortresses? What happened to mines/plantations? Who turned all the leaderheads into bad comedians?
So, you're saying that in real life armies take turns, and only do one thing at a time? Or that soldiers and vehicles move from block a to block c, without walking through b?
No, what I'm saying is that when you're operating at the strategic level in real life, "thinking fast" is not a matter of split-second timing. The name "real time strategy" is nonsense. They've just created a tactical game and misnamed it. If you're giving orders at the "soldiers and vehicles moving from block a to block c" level, you're engaged in tactical maneuvers. Simply throwing in a couple laughable resource management elements ("harvesters"? gimme a break!) does not make it "strategic". Real strategic warfare is mostly about logistics. Real life strategic warfare happens at a scale of days, weeks, or months. Things move very slowly. Occasionally quick decisions have to be made, but the results of those decisions are still slow to materialize.
I know you're being sarcastic, but this is too far.
"When's the last time we had a decent turn-based strategy game?"
Oh, how about this week. Sword of the Stars just came out.
Civilisation 4, Field Commander (PSP) and Advance Wars DS are all pretty recent.
Like any decent curmudgeon-- or like any "whiny brat kid", like the GP poster-- I'm engaging in selective perception. Clearly both positions are exagerrated. Personally, my inner curmudgeon just wants a new and decent rendition of the original X-Com, a non-sucky sequel to Master of Orion 2 (damn you to HELL, Quicksilver!), and perhaps fresh version of Master of Magic. Sword of the Stars definitely looks interesting. Civ 4 was a bit of a disappointment for me, though. The 3D aspect seems gratuitous, the "vertical" map orientation (vs. the Civ3 "diagonal") is a dismal step backwards, and the leaderheads' speech has gone totally 'round the bend into idiotic stand up comedy. Worst of all, I have a "single fully advanced city vs. the world" scenario I made for Civ3 that I love to play that is utterly impossible to implement in Civ4 because they got rid of outposts/plantations!
Puzzle games ruined themselves. Putting syrup on the fence and chasing the cat is not a reasonable way to get a fake moustache.
Did you actually have the misfortune to play that game, or did you just read the article about "what's wrong with text adventure games" like I did? I've been looking for that article again and can't find it. One of my favorite lines ever on the subject of counter-intuitive puzzles is:
"The first step in impersonating a man without a mustache, is NOT to make a fake mustache."
Devs continue to make "throwback" games and sequels because that is what all gets bought mostly, nothing new ever goes anywhere anymore becasue the gaming demographic has aged and all you old fuckers hate change.
Hogwash! It's all you young whippersnappers that have ruined gaming with your short attention spans and aversion to thinking. When's the last time we had a decent turn-based strategy game? Nowadays all this "Rea-Time Strategy" crap is the rage. Real-time my ass! Did General Patton have only a fraction of a second to select and click a company of troops and send them in the right direction before they got clobbered by the krauts? What kind of stupid game requires lightining fast reflexes to execute strategy? C&C, I am looking in your direction! But no, you kids with your Mario-tuned twitchy monkey brains need that or you will get bored.
Don't even get me started on the watering-down of "puzzles" in modern games. The modern idea of a difficult puzzle is one that requires you to find eight levers (hidden beyond reflex-based "jumping puzzlre" obstacles) and push them all up (changing a red light to green) to open a door somewhere. You punks would WET YOUR PANTS if you saw the kind of monstrously devious crap we had to solve in our day. Plover's egg emeralds hidden beyond a crack your lamp doesn't fit through? Try THAT on for size!
Water splitting microbes -
Check out here, here or here.
Guess, your guess is wrong.
Be a little less sarcastic next time.
From your own links: "Certain photosynthetic microbes produce hydrogen from water in their metabolic activities using light energy." (emphasis mine)
Let me know when your chemistry/biology education has progressed far enough such that you: realize the amount of energy it would take to split an apocalyptic quantity of water is not available from a dilute energy source like the sun on anything less than a geologic time scale; understand that excessive concentrations of oxygen are poisonous to microbial life; figure out that these photosynthetic microbes split water as only half of their cycle, the other half requiring carbon. Bonus points for knowing the difference between viruses and bacteria (per the original example).
I guess I'm not wrong.
Invest in a little basic science education next time and maybe you won't assume the wrong point of objection.
a virus/bacteria gets created which splits water to its elemental components..
Let me guess: you slept through both biology AND chemistry class. If only you'd also included a rampant protozoa that "reverses the polarity of gravity", then we'd know you'd slept through physics too. A perfect trifecta.
Don't forget the age-old question about who will be around to take advantage of the seed vaults and stuff, too. If no humans are alive, no amount of DNA stored in a vault is going to bring the human race back unless there is an automated mechanism for doing so built into the vault.
All that inane blather about "DNA seed vaults" is people showing they're own personal fear of death. It's selff-preservation abstracted a few levels farther out. I've yet to see a compelling reason why we need to preserve humanity. It's just some twisted self-centered view of the world that spawns that mindset. The universe really and truly would get along fine without us. It did so just fine for millions of years before we came along. The only entity it would suck for would be the last human alive, and then only for a very short while, in the greater scheme of things. Seriously...we really don't matter, except to ourselves.
Of course, often times that solution is just waiting the disaster out, hoping to be one of the lucky survivors, and then replacing the drastic drop in population with a new generation after the smoke has cleared.
This is true. It's theorized that at one point several million years ago, humanity was reduced to no more than a thousand or so individuals who then went on to repopulate the planet(explaining our surprising lack of genetic variation).
Seriously though, what's people's weirdo fetsh with the "END OF THE WORLD!" Worrying about doomsday scenarios is something of a waste of time. Statistically a speeding automobile is more likely your personal doomsday mechanism than an alien invasion fleet! When you die, you die. Maybe you will die along with 99.99% of the earth's population... or maybe it'll be 100%... Point is, it sucks just as much to die falling down the stairs as it does to die as one of millions flash-fried by a supernova. What's the difference? Sure, maybe it offends the organic "procreative survival sense" our limbic brains are hardwired with, but so what? Our "monkey-brain" is offended when we make it eat salad instead of candy. It's all just single level above reflex down there, so its opinion is easily discounted.
People aren't actually worried all of humanity will die. What people are really afraid of is dying themselves. What is so important about humanity that one should find its complete extinction tragic when, as one is a human, one will not be around to mourn its absence?
Not as a paint, but as an overcoating - protecting the finish. Also this stuff is probably very viscous even at 0 shear. If you coated your car first with paint, then with "liquid armor" then the clear coat, you could concievably greatly enhance the durability of the finsh.
I eagerly await your patent on the process of getting a clear coat to stick to a liquid. That out to be worth billions. It's not "liquid armor" (in quotation marks)-- it is literally liquid.
I see that you do not have military field experience. Even if it would provide reasonable protection uniforms made using this technology would not be washable using normal laundry procedures, would have a short service life, would be heavy, and would not breath. Someday, this or another technology may advance to the point that ballistic uniforms may become practical; for now leave this technology to removable body armor.
It's always a hoot to read comments to these stories. Things like "why don't they make the whole uniform out of this", or "why don't they make them ALL carry one", or "why don't they just buy lots of the cheap taiwan-made civilian version of [critical piece of equipment] instead of making such expensive sturdy ones". They all make the Army infantryman in me shudder. Some things are only understandable by those for whom "manportable" is a very dirty word. Like the Marines I used to work with always said, "boots, utes*, and rifle-- all the rest is extra".
The liquid armor is absorbing the kinetic energy and using it to transform itself from a liquid state to a solid state. This change uses up some energy, no?
No, the state change takes very little energy. That's the idea. If it didn't, the projectile would push it aside like jello while it's still hardening.
A couple of friends of mine ran into a M60A2 tank with volkswagen beatle
Sheesh, I would not want to have their daily commute.
You're not kidding. Seriously, I had a similar commute once. Every day I had to drive this crappy light green Army-issue K car from the motor pool to the headquarters building so some colonel could have a car handy. It was five miles over tiny 2-lane base roads full of 2 1/2 ton trucks and assorted armored vehicles driven by dopey 18 year olds. When it snowed the roads got icy, and those deuce and a half drivers were all over the road...
The video pointed out that if the new armor was agitated, it would harden. This makes me wonder if the armor wouldn't be applied to the joint areas in order to prevent the armor from prematurely hardening and thus becoming less effective, if not ineffective.
Joints aren't generally armored anyway. Military body armor is generally just a vest. In the few applications where joints are armored, such as full-coverage EOD (bomb disposal) armor, the articulated joints are protected by means of overlapping layers that slide over each other.
Replace the misleading phrase "bounce off" with "rebound after impact with". The reason you don't see bullets ricocheting around is because 1) the rebound is very small compared to the initial velocity, and 2) the bullet generally penetrates a few layers of cloth and a couple layers of kevlar before stopping, essentially trapping the projectile where it hits.
You as a whole recieve a small overall impulse but the armor in front of your nuts will recoil more and smash your nuts in farther if the projectile bounces off compared to if the projectile sticks.
This is true, but not particularly relevant. The bullet rebounds at perhaps three, maybe four feet per second? Let's be ridiculously generous and say it goes flying off at an absurd fifty feet per second. The projectile struck at a velocity somewhere from 2300fps (7.62mmx39) to 3000fps+ (5.45mm or 5.56mm), so the rebound effect is a difference of a single percentage point or so. The effect of "rebound" is a fart in a thunderstorm. "Your nuts" will not hurt any less. This whole argument is stupid.
even more silly when you're 18 and legally an adult but can't "posess" alchol... but can man the 24 hour quicky mart for corporations or serve the stupid drunks!!!
Many (if not all) states prohibit persons under 21 from serving/selling alcohol. When's the last time you met an 18 year old bartender?
These systems work like any other public key encryption, they rely on the fact that there is a **private key** in the car that no one knows about.
Many of the systems aren't even that sophisticated. They use a simple rotating challenge-response method that is merely intended to communicate the key's unique ID number. If the unique ID has been previously programmed into the ECU, the car starts. Rather than anything so complex as encryption, they depend on the key manufacturer producing keys with RFID chips in a trackable, sequentially numbered fashion, with no mechanism or "going back" and making duplicates of previously used RFID numbers.
If you read the installation instructions, you find that this bypass system requires either one or two working keys to set up. Basically, it sits in-line with the reader and injects a working code previously "learned" from a good key.
I think HST was a lot like the Grateful Dead. Worshipped by a small but dedicated group of fans, mostly irrelevent to everybody else.
HST always seemed to me to be a carrier of a weirdly contagious sort of self-centered-ness, where neither he (HST) nor his fans could see past the curious myopic vision of HST himself. The best example, I think, is the book Hell's Angels. Here's this toady wierdo, shows up on his Triumph motorcycle and ingratiates himself into the biker gang. As the book progresses, HST thinks they're warming up to him and accepting him as one of their own, but any half-awake reader can see what's coming: these guys think he's a joke, and only haven't beaten the crap out of him and left him on the side of the road because his antics are still mildly amusing. It was clear to me by halfway through the book that the beating was coming, and the only person who didn't see it was that dumb bastard HST!
Slashdot Mirror
"The first step in impersonating a man without a mustache, is NOT to make a fake mustache."
1. Highly developed or complex.
I would say not so much a mistake.
Don't even get me started on the watering-down of "puzzles" in modern games. The modern idea of a difficult puzzle is one that requires you to find eight levers (hidden beyond reflex-based "jumping puzzlre" obstacles) and push them all up (changing a red light to green) to open a door somewhere. You punks would WET YOUR PANTS if you saw the kind of monstrously devious crap we had to solve in our day. Plover's egg emeralds hidden beyond a crack your lamp doesn't fit through? Try THAT on for size!
Let me know when your chemistry/biology education has progressed far enough such that you: realize the amount of energy it would take to split an apocalyptic quantity of water is not available from a dilute energy source like the sun on anything less than a geologic time scale; understand that excessive concentrations of oxygen are poisonous to microbial life; figure out that these photosynthetic microbes split water as only half of their cycle, the other half requiring carbon. Bonus points for knowing the difference between viruses and bacteria (per the original example).
I guess I'm not wrong.
Invest in a little basic science education next time and maybe you won't assume the wrong point of objection.
Seriously though, what's people's weirdo fetsh with the "END OF THE WORLD!" Worrying about doomsday scenarios is something of a waste of time. Statistically a speeding automobile is more likely your personal doomsday mechanism than an alien invasion fleet! When you die, you die. Maybe you will die along with 99.99% of the earth's population... or maybe it'll be 100%... Point is, it sucks just as much to die falling down the stairs as it does to die as one of millions flash-fried by a supernova. What's the difference? Sure, maybe it offends the organic "procreative survival sense" our limbic brains are hardwired with, but so what? Our "monkey-brain" is offended when we make it eat salad instead of candy. It's all just single level above reflex down there, so its opinion is easily discounted.
People aren't actually worried all of humanity will die. What people are really afraid of is dying themselves. What is so important about humanity that one should find its complete extinction tragic when, as one is a human, one will not be around to mourn its absence?
* "utilities", camouflage utility uniform
It returns to liquid just as fast as it turns to solid.
If you read the installation instructions, you find that this bypass system requires either one or two working keys to set up. Basically, it sits in-line with the reader and injects a working code previously "learned" from a good key.