How many people here have in the last couple of years actually tried to type on a Model M?
Sure, I type on one daily. It's a fairly new one (mnf 1995), the one I use at home is older. I just wish they'd made one with all the Mac keys so I could use it properly with my powermac as well. (Sure I use it anyway and just remap option onto the control key. But now I can't easily ^C break when I'm sshed into another box)
Why would you assume that people rave about a keyboard that they don't use?
If Microsoft produces a Bluray add-on like they did with HD-DVD drive it is going to be about the same price as the original HD drive and this would possibly be attractive to Xbox360 owners although like the HD-DVD drive it would be not be that popular especially when the total costs are greater than that of a PS3. This is up to the customer since they do have a choice.
If Microsoft brought out an Xbox360 with inbuilt BD/DVD/CD drive they are going to alienate many millions of people who already own an Xbox360
Obviously, if Microsoft comes out with Blueray video support they should offer it both as an all-in-one new model and as an add-on drive.
The new xbox competes head to head with the PS3 for new owners, because now they are closer feature-wise, and both integrated clean single box game + blueray machines. But the extrenal upgrade drive is still a cheaper option to get Blueray for the existing 360 owners (but I'm sure it would be cheaper for new customers to buy the new xbox than it would be to buy and existing xbox model and the extrnal Blueray).
Kind of like they did with the 360 Elite. It was new model with a 120gb hard disk, but they also sold that 120gb disk separately so existing owners could upgrade without buying a new xbox.
What is the need for a remote if you can use telekinesis? Does superman fly southwest?
Please, you know that three quarters of the functions can only be done with the remote. At this point you're lucky if you can even change the station without the remote.
There was one particularly sweet mission profile that let you really rack up the points too; I think it was in the "warm war" state where you could pretty much take out any target you wanted but not get swarmed by hostiles or reprimanded upon return.
My favorite mission profile (at least for the 2nd game, I don't remember now if it also worked in the first one) was to get a cold war mission with a double photo recon. Load up the other payload bay with extra fuel, go snap your picts, then set autopilot waypoints to orbit around inside enemy territory until you hit bingo fuel.
Sure, in real life that kind of nonsense would get you court-martialed. But in the game you got points for every minute you flew in enemy territory, so it would net you a congressional medal on honor pretty much every time.
Bigger Government contracts to research higher miles-per-charge for cars. Performance based. Now we start pushing for conversions of the big haulers (big rigs), as well as pushing them to bio diesel with emphasis on converting used veggie oil, etc.
Since current diesel electric trains are almost 4 times as efficient (gallons per ton/mile) as trucks I'd have your hypothetical bigger government start by canceling out some of the existing subsidized infrastructure for trucks* and increase subsidizing of infrastructure for freight trains. By mostly converting from long haul trucking to long haul train and using trucks for semi-local deliveries you immediately get a big improvement.
And rail lines are vastly easier to electrify that big rigs.
*(Sure a lot of that infrastructure is also for cars, but they can certainly add taxes or road fees specifically to trucks to reduce the economic incentive to use them without reducing the infrastructure for personal cars)
You know perfectly well that the news would be: "Manhattan has been contaminated with radioactive Uranium dust.". Lines like "The radiation level is entirely harmless." and "There is no reason to panic, the radioactive dust will not affect your health." might appear in the article, but it would be after the "continued on A7" hyperlink.
And even then the line would probably be more like:
"Government spokemen claimed that 'The radiation level is entirely harmless.' and 'There is no reason to panic, the radioactive dust will not affect your health'."
While it would be a nice demonstration of ASAT capability, I would think that if the US really has the capability that it would be better to keep it secret. Why tip your hand?
My understanding is that they will be shooting a Navy SM-3 missile. That's the missile component of the Aegis Ballistic Missile Defense System (basically the counter-part to the Army's Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) ballistic missile defense system).
The fact that an exo-atmospheric intercept missile, designed to hit warheads abover earth's atmosphere, is also capable of hitting a satellite in very low orbit ain't exactly a big secret.
Master of Orion 2 used signed int for Research Points. If they went over 2^15 (~=32k), you would end up with negative research points. And they were tallied to total research without problem, so every turn your research would slip further away. Kind of silly since 32k RP would be quite easy to reach in a long running game in a well-sized galaxy. In fact it was possible to reach it with Psilon in tiny galaxy.
One of the later patches fixed that (patch 1.4 IIRC). (Of course I only found that patch years after the game was released.) That same patch also vastly improved the upgrade ship function, since it would let you pick a current ship class as a target instead of forcing you to hand pick the upgrades for each ship. Very handy if you want to upgrade your whole fleet. (But you could still do one off customizations if you wanted, you just weren't forced to)
Prior to that, if I was playing Psilon on a huge galaxy, and was maxing out all my planets prior to finishing the game I would normally have overflowed the Research Point integer twice and had enough left over to be significantly positive again. So somewhere around 150,000 RP (out of 32,000 max)
...theo other giant rats, such as Amblyrhiza Inundata from Anguila?
Well, (according to wikipedia; use appropriate grains of salt) the Amblyrhiza Inundata grew between 50 and 200 kg, and according to the linked article (yes, I must be new here) this new giant rodent was believed to be 1000 kg.
So quite a bit bigger than the Amblyrhiza Inundata.
Oh, and just to be clear, I think that (at least as of now) the better choice is the first one. "assume the threat is (and will remain) limited, and can be dealt with by intelligence gathering and normal police work. (Discover the terrorists before they attack, and/or be willing to accept the very rare successful attack)"
The most vulnerable period for an aircraft is during takeoff and landing. Simply ensure a high level of security at airports during these phases of flight, instead of dumping billions into protecting from one type of attack.
Yes, securing airports is an important, nay critical, part of aircraft security.
But if you are legitimately worried about people shooting man portable anti-aircraft missiles (MANPADs) at airlines simple airport security isn't a very practical defense.
Running some off the cuff numbers: Assume a 747 departs an airport at 250 knots, and 2000 feet/min climb rate (pulled from some random webpage). Assume that the MANPAD has approximately the engagement ceiling of the Stinger 15,000 feet; but for positioning and attack angle reasons assume that 10,000 feet is the effective engagement ceiling.
Even after accounting for the vertical portion of the climb the 747 is still traveling horizontally at approximately 248 knots, and will take 5 minutes to climb to 10,000 feet. It covered almost 24 miles horizontally in that 5 minutes.
Which means that if you rely entirely on airport security to protect against MANPADs the exclusion zone around the airport would be roughly 25 miles in diameter. Security would need to be able to ensure that no one was able to transport a MANPAD within that circle (and remember we're talking about a missile that could easily fit across the back seat of a car, and which can be ready to fire in a couple of minutes)
That just isn't a practical requirement. You'd basically have to seize and demolish all the houses within that zone, pull up all the roads, place the airports parking beyond that zone with security checkpoints performing preliminary screening of large baggage before allowing people to enter the zone. And as an example, the exclusion zone for IAD (Dulles International Airport) would include part of the edge of Washington DC!.
So if you are worried about MANPADs your semi-realistic choices are; 1) assume the threat is (and will remain) limited, and can be dealt with by intelligence gathering and normal police work. (Discover the terrorists before they attack, and/or be willing to accept the very rare successful attack) 2) Equip aircraft with countermeasures.
>>If British drivers don't want to be seen by the cameras, why can't they just engage their cloaking devices?
Duh. Every British Sci-Fi geek knows that those things are bloody unreliable. They tend to get stuck in the wrong mode, such as the form of a mid-20th century police box.
What kind of sci-fi geek would get a cloaking device confused with a chameleon circuit?
In "Skunk Works" about Lockheed's black projects program- U2, SR-71, F-111, etc (a GREAT read btw) Ben Rich said they found scorched specks on some SR-71 canopies that turned out to be bugs that they figured were lofted to 100,000ft in nuclear tests.
Lockheed skunk works developed the F-117 Nighthawk stealth fighter, not the General Dynamics F-111 Aardvark tactical fighter/bomber (emphasis on bomber)
Hmm, that's unfortunate. What's so great about having less precision? And they present it like somehow reading dialog is a bad thing. IMO, the more dialog the better. And since I can read faster than I can listen, I'd rather have it all printed anyway
I'm not sure you really have less precision. How many dialog trees offer more than 6 options anyway?
And I can see your point about reading faster than listening, that's the case for me as well. On the other hand, for selecting my side of the dialog it does break the flow to read 4 to 6 full sentence (or multi-sentence) choices that are totally different from one another. I can see where it could flow faster to just pick in essence from: I agree, I disagree, I'm skeptical, etc. Once you do that you still get the your full sentence expressed, you simple don't see the full text of all the unchosen options. The more interesting bits of the dialog are the NPC responses, since they include new information, and those are still fully intact (although spoken, which does slow down delivery).
And from the little I've seen watching my friends play Mass Effect, there is still plenty of pure written material outside the dialog mechanism.
4) Don't have a point system. Where did people get the idea that you have to have a point system for online transactions? Just charge people whatever the item is worth and you won't have "people buying 1 point."
Not as low as 1 point, but I've seen some things on XBL marketplace for 20 points. That works about to about $0.25. Not exactly cost effective to handle as a credit card transaction.
So assuming that Microsoft doesn't want to hand out credit to every xbox live member, there are only two practical ways to handle this. 1) Artificially bundle cheap content together until there is enough of it that the cheapest collection or item you can buy is expensive enough to be cost effective to handle as a credit card transaction. -or- 2) Force people to pre-pay in large enough increments that it's cost effective to handle as a credit card transaction. But once you've done that it doesn't much matter if you track that pre-paid value in dollars, points, credits, or Galleons/Sickles/Knuts.
But doesn't this assume that the spam is addressed to multiple recipients? 99% of the spam I get is addressed only to me
I think the confusion here is that you (and many other posters) are trying to evaluate this as a personal anti-spam product.
But its really designed to be a corporate product. So even if the each spam email contains only one recipient they all go through the corporate email server, allowing it see all the various recipients a given sender is emailing.
And there were even hints that the software stored on your corporate mail server might be sharing some information with a central data store, allowing it to get the score of all the recipients that the sender is sending to on any network that is a customer of this product. (So it doesn't matter so much if your company only has 10 people to average across because it is somehow cross checking against the global dataset which is tens of thousands of recipients.)
Apparently the A-5 had a little problem of its own... nuclear bombs were designed to be "pooped out" of the weapons bay (a tunnel above and between the engines), but sometimes they tended to get caught in the wake, so to speak, and follow the airplane for a little while. There were also a few incidents of them pooping out during a catapult launch, leaving the bombs sitting on the carrier deck.
An F-14 once shot itself down during a test-firing of the AIM-7; the missle came back up and hit the aircraft right after ignition. Crew bailed out safely, IIRC. The aircraft was later modified with stronger ejectors.
Could be worse. Back in '56 an F-11 Tigershot itself down with its onboard cannon. Let's just say going into a supersonic decent, in a straight line, after firing, isn't the world's brightest idea.
How is this hard to understand? No offense, but it's spelled out right at the beginning of that particular level why you're being referred to as an android. The room with all the turrets is a room designed for testing androids, but because of a problem with the human testing counterpart to that room, you're forced to complete the android version instead
That's what Glados tells you, but interestingly there are hints elsewhere in the game that indicate that the "combat android" level is a normal part of the training process.
The levels have large white glowing level info displays near their beginnings. Those displays show an icon shorthand representation of the skill you will need to master on the current level, and also in a much lighter grey, future skills. One of those future skills is an icon of a firing turret.
violence is really on the cartoony side... It's not realistic at all, there's very little blood, absolutely no gore, and when people die they just fall over, as opposed to being ripped apart or dismembered.
Unless you have the cowbell skull game modifier enabled. In which case the violence is on the cartoony side, when grunts die their heads disappear into a burst of colored confetti and there is much rejoicing.
It takes the military to come up with a REALLY stupid idea. We can develop better solar cells, or improve battery technology, or maybe put up more wind energy farms, but why not put the solar cells in space and beam the power down in focused beams with some sort of Buck Rogers scheme
Well, there are some general advantages from putting solar collectors in space, no atmospheric attenuation, no cloud cover, and if you can pick the orbit correctly limited or no night. So you get more full sun conditions than even the best ground solar array.
And since this is the military and they are talking about relatively small amounts of power (compared to most fixed power plants) I imagine the ability to retarget the power delivery beam is a big plus in their book. And not because they want to use it as some kind of "death ray".
This is a power source that could be directed to forward bases to provide power in areas where the power system is nonexistent, unreliable, or subject to denial of service (Think IEDs on the transmission towers).
Sure there are a couple of countries that have the capability to destroy an orbital power station; but that's much smaller than the list of countries that have the capability to blow up a terrestrial power station / distribution system.
So the military gets a power source sufficient to power a base that is (ideally) reliable, without the logistic problems of transporting fuel into a potentially hostile area, and uses a transmission system that is very difficult to attack.
I cannot play it for twenty minutes then stop, only because I cannot choose when I save and I cannot be sure I will be allowed to save my game when I need. Yeah, it breaks the game flow, players can exploit the save, blah blah blah... I'm still trying to figure out why I shouldn't be allowed to play a japanese style RPG only 20 minutes in a row. And please, realize than even FF4 to FF5 on GBA have quick save. If a GBA can quick save, why a PS2 could not? I don't care if it takes a whole memory card as long as I can have the damn instant save.
This is annoying. I can see why they want to space out the save points, but it messes with your ability to play on your time and stop when you want to. Maybe the game designers should compromise and build two different save functions into the game.
One would be the normal FF style save which you can go back to at any point, but can only save at save points. The other would be a 'pause' save. You can use it at any point to save your position, but once you un-pause the game the pause point is gone. You can re-pause whenever you want, but you can't going back to a pause point after un-pausing.
That would keep the penalty for dying, by forcing you back to your last normal save, but still allow you to start and stop playing whenever you wanted without losing progress.
Two things. First you point out that the F-22 R&D ran up a huge overage, and that is certainly true, feature creep and long lead times can bloat R&D, but some of that is just an inherent risk to developing new technology. But your solution to the fact that the F-22 is too expensive (largely due to its huge R&D overhead that must be recouped) is to build less capable aircraft but change them more often. So you want a lot more R&D programs; each of which is just as prone to overruns or delays? Seems counterproductive.
Second, the USAF doesn't just need fighters that can dominate in a pure air-to-air setting, but also fighters that can survive to do so in the face of potential enemies full air-defense networks. The F-15 is a great fighter, and and probably hold its own air-to-air against almost anything in the sky for the next 10+ years. But potential enemies are realizing that and investing in systems that combine fighters with extensive and capable surface-to-air missile systems. Some of the most recent Russian designs are really impressive. You need fighters that can survive in heavily defended areas to keep enemy fighters off of whatever strike aircraft are taking on the SAM defenses. And F-15s aren't ideal for that, since they aren't stealthy. If the SAMs were suppressed, then the F-15 could tangle with the enemy's less capable fighters, but if the fighters aren't suppressed they can help defend the SAMs. You need to the ability to handle both at once (which is more or less the worst case scenario).
Slashdot Mirror
Why would you assume that people rave about a keyboard that they don't use?
The new xbox competes head to head with the PS3 for new owners, because now they are closer feature-wise, and both integrated clean single box game + blueray machines. But the extrenal upgrade drive is still a cheaper option to get Blueray for the existing 360 owners (but I'm sure it would be cheaper for new customers to buy the new xbox than it would be to buy and existing xbox model and the extrnal Blueray).
Kind of like they did with the 360 Elite. It was new model with a 120gb hard disk, but they also sold that 120gb disk separately so existing owners could upgrade without buying a new xbox.
Sure, in real life that kind of nonsense would get you court-martialed. But in the game you got points for every minute you flew in enemy territory, so it would net you a congressional medal on honor pretty much every time.
And rail lines are vastly easier to electrify that big rigs.
*(Sure a lot of that infrastructure is also for cars, but they can certainly add taxes or road fees specifically to trucks to reduce the economic incentive to use them without reducing the infrastructure for personal cars)
Sure you will. And it'll be a story on misapplied breakthroughs in robotic self-coordination and movement.
"Government spokemen claimed that 'The radiation level is entirely harmless.' and 'There is no reason to panic, the radioactive dust will not affect your health'."
The fact that an exo-atmospheric intercept missile, designed to hit warheads abover earth's atmosphere, is also capable of hitting a satellite in very low orbit ain't exactly a big secret.
Prior to that, if I was playing Psilon on a huge galaxy, and was maxing out all my planets prior to finishing the game I would normally have overflowed the Research Point integer twice and had enough left over to be significantly positive again. So somewhere around 150,000 RP (out of 32,000 max)
So quite a bit bigger than the Amblyrhiza Inundata.
Oh, and just to be clear, I think that (at least as of now) the better choice is the first one.
"assume the threat is (and will remain) limited, and can be dealt with by intelligence gathering and normal police work. (Discover the terrorists before they attack, and/or be willing to accept the very rare successful attack)"
But if you are legitimately worried about people shooting man portable anti-aircraft missiles (MANPADs) at airlines simple airport security isn't a very practical defense.
Running some off the cuff numbers:
Assume a 747 departs an airport at 250 knots, and 2000 feet/min climb rate (pulled from some random webpage).
Assume that the MANPAD has approximately the engagement ceiling of the Stinger 15,000 feet; but for positioning and attack angle reasons assume that 10,000 feet is the effective engagement ceiling.
Even after accounting for the vertical portion of the climb the 747 is still traveling horizontally at approximately 248 knots, and will take 5 minutes to climb to 10,000 feet. It covered almost 24 miles horizontally in that 5 minutes.
Which means that if you rely entirely on airport security to protect against MANPADs the exclusion zone around the airport would be roughly 25 miles in diameter. Security would need to be able to ensure that no one was able to transport a MANPAD within that circle (and remember we're talking about a missile that could easily fit across the back seat of a car, and which can be ready to fire in a couple of minutes)
That just isn't a practical requirement. You'd basically have to seize and demolish all the houses within that zone, pull up all the roads, place the airports parking beyond that zone with security checkpoints performing preliminary screening of large baggage before allowing people to enter the zone. And as an example, the exclusion zone for IAD (Dulles International Airport) would include part of the edge of Washington DC!.
So if you are worried about MANPADs your semi-realistic choices are; 1) assume the threat is (and will remain) limited, and can be dealt with by intelligence gathering and normal police work. (Discover the terrorists before they attack, and/or be willing to accept the very rare successful attack) 2) Equip aircraft with countermeasures.
And I can see your point about reading faster than listening, that's the case for me as well. On the other hand, for selecting my side of the dialog it does break the flow to read 4 to 6 full sentence (or multi-sentence) choices that are totally different from one another. I can see where it could flow faster to just pick in essence from: I agree, I disagree, I'm skeptical, etc. Once you do that you still get the your full sentence expressed, you simple don't see the full text of all the unchosen options.
The more interesting bits of the dialog are the NPC responses, since they include new information, and those are still fully intact (although spoken, which does slow down delivery).
And from the little I've seen watching my friends play Mass Effect, there is still plenty of pure written material outside the dialog mechanism.
So assuming that Microsoft doesn't want to hand out credit to every xbox live member, there are only two practical ways to handle this.
1) Artificially bundle cheap content together until there is enough of it that the cheapest collection or item you can buy is expensive enough to be cost effective to handle as a credit card transaction.
-or-
2) Force people to pre-pay in large enough increments that it's cost effective to handle as a credit card transaction. But once you've done that it doesn't much matter if you track that pre-paid value in dollars, points, credits, or Galleons/Sickles/Knuts.
But its really designed to be a corporate product. So even if the each spam email contains only one recipient they all go through the corporate email server, allowing it see all the various recipients a given sender is emailing.
And there were even hints that the software stored on your corporate mail server might be sharing some information with a central data store, allowing it to get the score of all the recipients that the sender is sending to on any network that is a customer of this product. (So it doesn't matter so much if your company only has 10 people to average across because it is somehow cross checking against the global dataset which is tens of thousands of recipients.)
Could be worse. Back in '56 an F-11 Tiger shot itself down with its onboard cannon.
Let's just say going into a supersonic decent, in a straight line, after firing, isn't the world's brightest idea.
The levels have large white glowing level info displays near their beginnings. Those displays show an icon shorthand representation of the skill you will need to master on the current level, and also in a much lighter grey, future skills. One of those future skills is an icon of a firing turret.
In which case the violence is on the cartoony side, when grunts die their heads disappear into a burst of colored confetti and there is much rejoicing.
And since this is the military and they are talking about relatively small amounts of power (compared to most fixed power plants) I imagine the ability to retarget the power delivery beam is a big plus in their book. And not because they want to use it as some kind of "death ray".
This is a power source that could be directed to forward bases to provide power in areas where the power system is nonexistent, unreliable, or subject to denial of service (Think IEDs on the transmission towers).
Sure there are a couple of countries that have the capability to destroy an orbital power station; but that's much smaller than the list of countries that have the capability to blow up a terrestrial power station / distribution system.
So the military gets a power source sufficient to power a base that is (ideally) reliable, without the logistic problems of transporting fuel into a potentially hostile area, and uses a transmission system that is very difficult to attack.
[sar]Yeah, total waste of money.[/sar]
One would be the normal FF style save which you can go back to at any point, but can only save at save points.
The other would be a 'pause' save. You can use it at any point to save your position, but once you un-pause the game the pause point is gone. You can re-pause whenever you want, but you can't going back to a pause point after un-pausing.
That would keep the penalty for dying, by forcing you back to your last normal save, but still allow you to start and stop playing whenever you wanted without losing progress.
Two things. First you point out that the F-22 R&D ran up a huge overage, and that is certainly true, feature creep and long lead times can bloat R&D, but some of that is just an inherent risk to developing new technology. But your solution to the fact that the F-22 is too expensive (largely due to its huge R&D overhead that must be recouped) is to build less capable aircraft but change them more often. So you want a lot more R&D programs; each of which is just as prone to overruns or delays? Seems counterproductive.
Second, the USAF doesn't just need fighters that can dominate in a pure air-to-air setting, but also fighters that can survive to do so in the face of potential enemies full air-defense networks. The F-15 is a great fighter, and and probably hold its own air-to-air against almost anything in the sky for the next 10+ years. But potential enemies are realizing that and investing in systems that combine fighters with extensive and capable surface-to-air missile systems. Some of the most recent Russian designs are really impressive. You need fighters that can survive in heavily defended areas to keep enemy fighters off of whatever strike aircraft are taking on the SAM defenses. And F-15s aren't ideal for that, since they aren't stealthy. If the SAMs were suppressed, then the F-15 could tangle with the enemy's less capable fighters, but if the fighters aren't suppressed they can help defend the SAMs. You need to the ability to handle both at once (which is more or less the worst case scenario).