Maybe I'm misunderstanding, but why can nuclear power only supply base-load, instead of peak as well? I've certainly heard that solar and wind are unsuitable to supply base load, as they're not terrifically reliable, but never anything about nuclear being unable to scale to peak load.
It isn't practical to rapidly change the load on nuke reactors, because it takes a significant amount of time to ramp up and down power output. Also, it basically costs the same to run whether you are at 10% capacity or 100% capacity, so it makes sense to run them as near to full capacity as possible. Contrast that with something like a gas-fired powerplant, where you can ramp generation quickly and you are pretty much only paying for the gas you are burning.
Of course, France announced at the same time as this announcement that they will be going ahead with something like 1.5 billion euros funding renewable resources over the same period, so it isn't like they are putting all their eggs in the nuclear basket - just not abandoning it entirely as others are doing.
This July 4th weekend, millions of Americans will head to the air-conditioned confines of their local multiplex to take in Harry Potter, Captain America
Sounds good. I'm curious to see how they combined the fantasy wizardry of Harry Potter with the comic book antics of Captain America. I'm also curious to see whether they will address the back story - obviously there must be quite an interesting tale of how Harry abandoned his homeland and became a symbol of American values.
We will now proceed to the obligatory 579 posts as follows -
"This is bunk. In [Insert City], [carrier A] sucks donkey balls. [Carrier B] is much better!"
"Are you joking? [Carrier B] STINKS here in [City C]. I love [Carrier A]! "
"I wish I could just buy a phone that makes calls!"...followed by anecdotes about cell coverage, speed and pricing in Korea.
All true. But it would have been nice of them to say what cities in CA they tested in, rather than just lumping "the west" together as CA, AZ, NM without stating where they tested. How can I complain that they didn't include my nearest city if they don't even list the cities?
That said, I'm pretty sure I would fall under the "rural America" category anyway, so AT&T it is. Oh, and I don't have a data plan anyway, so I'll just stick to complaining about the price of data plans in general (and I will mostly refrain from whining that if I lived in Seoul I could download billions of bytes to my cell phone for pennies a day - or so I've heard).
Now there will be fleets of driverless trucks hauling trailers three at a time blasting across Nevada.
It is a great place to test this sort of thing, though. Once you get outside of Vegas and Reno the roads have very few turns or intersections to confuse our new robotic overdrivers.
This entire argument is based on the fallacy that bandwidth needs will grow forever. Its simply not true. Prior to double-digit megabit connections, there was always media that couldnt be delivered in real-time.. but now there simply isnt any media that cannot be delivered in real-time on 10+ mbit connections, and that includes 3D HD video.
DTS-HD on Blu-Ray offers bit rates up to 24.5 mbps, at least in theory, which is significantly faster than my ~5mbps "broadband" connection and faster than the 10+ mbits you mention. Of course, in practice I haven't actually seen anything go above about 6 mbps, but that's just the audio track. On high-end discs you are looking at another 30-35 mbps for the video portion of the stream, so really you would need at least a 40 mbps connection to match current blu-ray offerings.
Which isn't to say you are totally off, just that most people don't have access to an internet connection that would allow them to stream at the same quality current media offers - but we aren't terribly far off. I would need about an order of magnitude increase in bandwidth, for example.
Compare BTC to US Dollars, which likewise have "nothing of real substance". The big difference I can see is that one can pay tax in USD.
I see this claim a lot, but I think it is a little bit backwards. The value of the USD isn't in that they can be used to pay tax, it is that they are backed by the US Government, which imposes (and enforces) taxes. That is, while they are not backed by gold or some other set commodity, they are backed by the taxes collected by the US Government. So by extension, USD are backed by all of the physical goods produced, services rendered, and real estate owned in the U.S.
This is of course a simplification and not entirely accurate, but I think it makes a lot more sense than saying something is valuable because you can pay taxes with it.
c. Trusting up? Talk about being of very limited value. Just going to zero lift on landing is usually good enough. Using engine power to pin the craft to the ground has very limited utility.
Helicopters landing on ships often do this, except the "upward thrust" is provided by a cable and winch connected to the deck of the ship. It is very helpful in high wind/rough seas, stabilizing the helicopter as it descends and making sure a gust of wind or unexpected wave doesn't tip it off the side of the ship. I'm not sure that using a portion of the thrust of the engines to push the aircraft down would be quite as effective as the cable and winch, but it would probably allow more precise/rapid control response than only being able to apply thrust in one direction - assuming it can switch quickly enough.
I don't know about Q2, but in Q3 the hit box was the same size regardless of the skin. Naturally, it was still a bad idea to use a big one because you were more visible.
It was. The skin/model didn't actually matter, the hit box was still the same. Though it could be advantageous to have a smaller skin, just because people thought they actually had to hit the model instead of just near it.
I think this was also true for Unreal Tournament, although I have the feeling that the War Cow skin had the hitbox turned on its side or something - at least, people always seemed to have trouble hitting me when I used it.
From napster? A search for 128 kbit MP3 might be enough. Your legal ones are probably of higher quality.
I don't know, back in the days of l3enc that was the standard bitrate I encoded my ripped WAV files to, so not a good way to tell legal from illegal. Of course, I didn't do it that much in the early days since it was a pain and scour.net was easier, so if I were doing this it would probably be worth it to just delete and then re-rip any of my MP3s that are 10+ years old.
This scheme is nothing more then a cash grab. It does nothing useful for domain names. The cost of one of these is sky high ($185,000). There's no need being filled. It's just ICANN trying to get people who already have big websites to pay for another domain for the same site to keep someone else from registering it.
This stuff should not be run on a "how do we extort more money out of DNS" methadology.
This. I also want to know what they plan on doing with the additional millions of pure profit they will be making from their government imposed monopoly. Aren't they supposed to be non-profit? They're going to have to massively increase salaries to remain so.
Also, whatever happened to the egalitarian, level playing field of the internet? This move pisses me off coming and going. If you want to open up all these new TLDs, fine; do it. Let anyone and everyone register their own TLD for the price of a traditional TLD; there is no technical reason why it should cost 1,000 times as much for one of these. Alternatively, if you need to charge that much for your rigorous screening of applicants, then maybe it isn't such a good idea to offer the service in the first place - obviously they think it presents massive opportunities for fraud.
Either offer it to everybody at a reasonable price, or admit that it is a mistake and can the whole idea. Otherwise this is once again just a massive money grab on the part of ICANN.
I agree, I have numerous books well over 100 years old that are in fine shape, and they have spent their lives on the bookshelves of various ancestors who did not necessarily take great care of them.
That said, a lot of my paperbacks from the 80's and early 90's are in pretty bad shape, with yellowing pages and/or broken bindings (though others from the same period are fine). Even some hardbacks from that period are not holding up too well. Some publishers were using very cheap paper and binding materials that just don't last, though this seems to have gotten a lot better in the last 15 years.
One expert, who is part of the investigation and wants to remain anonymous because the inquiry is at an early stage, told The New York Times he wondered how the hackers could have known to breach security by focusing on the vulnerability in the browser.
He said: 'It would have been hard to prepare for this type of vulnerability.'
Wow. Yes, I can see how making accounts accessible via an unhashed URL is really something no one would have guessed would be a problem. Especially when the same technique is referenced explicitly in a recent blockbuster (The Social Network).
See, this is the real reason Firefox wants to get rid of the URL bar. Only hackers would directly enter a URL. Legitimate consumers will just follow the link to their account from their Facebook page.
"Hacking could be an act of war" (no matter how stupid that is, because any half-decent military system with anything "useful" should be COMPLETELY inaccessible from the Internet).
So you can only start a war if you attack military targets? As long as I stick to sinking commercial ships and destroying commercial enterprises there is no casus belli?
I think it absolutely obvious that in an age when electronic commerce is a major part of your economy, an attack on that commerce can be considered an act of war. This is stupidly obvious, but it doesn't mean that someone hacking Facebook accounts is going to start a war. Nor does it mean that probing attacks on military networks would automatically cause a war. However, if an identifiable party is attacking your infrastructure, electronic or otherwise, and has actual negative impact or threatens to substantially alter the balance of power in favor of the attacker, that absolutely provides a rationale for war.
Good for him but I don't know that I'd pick Gran Turismo as my top choice for a sim. Plenty of stuff on the PC, like anything from Papyrus, iRacing. I think Forza is even better. But good on him, nonetheless.
I'd have to say Forza is a step below GT still, at least in the actual driving department. That might change with 4, but right now I'd have to say GT still has a clear lead in the driving physics department.
I haven't actually tried iRacing, but there have definitely been sims on PC that offer better driving physics than GT (especially some of the Papyrus sims). I still prefer GT for the overall experience, though (yes, even the flawed GT5).
To be fair, I don't think the intent of bitcoin was a pyramid scheme, but more of a thought experiment brought to life - what if we had a currency which it was impossible to devalue? An interesting concept, but one which unfortunately ignores the ingenuity of people in gaming a system for profit, even or especially one which was designed to be fair. It is fascinating in fact to see people's reactions to such a currency - as I understand it the original idea was not to make lots of money in fiat currencies but to attempt to supplant them, however the value of bitcoins in fiat currency seems to have become a fixation... I wonder if the value they store can be negative:)
I think you give the creators far too much credit. While they like to tout the idea that it was designed to supplant current currencies, if you look at the way it was set up it is pretty clear that the inventors intentionally made it so that if it took off it would make them fabulously wealthy for essentially zero work. There's really no other reason to use the front-loaded distribution scheme they came up with, other than to enrich themselves. It was the hook they used to bring in other people - get in early before it becomes essentially impossible to profit from mining coins!
I agree that one of the reasons BitCoin has gotten so much attention is that it is a (somewhat) interesting idea; but the implementation makes it very clear that it is at least as much pyramid scheme as serious attempt at creating a new currency.
More shooters that aren't based in either modern times OR World War II. There are a lot of other conflicts in history that could serve as the setting for a decent FPS or open world game. Spanish-American War? World War I? Civil War? Revolutionary War? Korea? Vietnam?
Is it because they're afraid to show anyone other than Germans, Imperial Japanese, Terrorists, or Aliens in a negative light?
Vietnam has seen several games made (the last one I played was the half-assed Battlefield Vietnam, which would have been great if not for a few major issues). The Korean War is a largely forgotten war in the U.S.; yes, people know that it occurred, but there are very few that could name a single battle or really have a good understanding of the conflict. I do think there is a lot of space for really interesting gameplay there, but it would be tough to market compared to yet another WWII game - and the weapons and tactics are very similar to WWII, so it likely wouldn't be all that different.
Going back earlier, to Civil War and Napoleonic wars, FPS becomes very difficult to do. Tactics were very different, because you had weapons that were very slow to reload and fire, and generally required massed units working together as opposed to the more rapid, fluid small-unit tactics that lend themselves well to FPSes. I think it would be very interesting to try doing an FPS based in Napoleonic wars, but it would be tough to balance it so it doesn't just turn into a bunch of people running around knifing (or bayonetting) each other (on a related note, can we PLEASE get rid of the widely promulgated idea of instakills with knives?). Can you imagine trying to get a bunch of the kids that play Modern Warfare to sit still for twenty seconds while they reload, and actually work together in a team to mass fire on the enemy? Or the amount of complaining that the musketballs don't go where you aim? It might work as an indie title that appeals to a select group, but it would definitely be a hard sell.
So I agree, it would be nice to see some more variation in setting - but I think there are some solid reasons why this hasn't (for the most part) happened. People like running around alone or in small teams blasting away at the bad guys, and that just doesn't lend itself well to earlier wars that might otherwise be marketable. Hell, even the cool ideas introduced by Dice in Battlefield 1942 (artillery spotting) and Battlefield 2 (battlefield commander) have largely been abandoned even by Dice themselves, apparently because people are unwilling to do anything but run around and shoot people (yes, I miss medics who are the only way to heal, engineers that are the only way to repair vehicles, scouts that can place cameras for artillery spotting, etc. - you know, actual support roles).
There's a demo (I believe) and it's on Steam anyway.
It's kinda like a X-COM/UFO turn-based shooter but where both players turns are submitted independently and then played out simultaneously (so your perfect plan that you submitted may go awry because your artillery gets shot from behind before he can move by someone you couldn't see).
Each "turn" is 5-seconds of gameplay and you can only issue orders in between turns (and take as long as you like - it can be anything from 10 seconds to play-by-email timings until your opponents sends *their* turn) with the next 5 seconds decided by a central server depending on the orders given and what happens in the world in those 5 seconds.
Units are few and maps are all the same "electric blue" but with different layouts, objectives, mix of units, etc. Certainly good fun and very nice if you miss X-COM-by-email from the past.
Oh darn, I guess I won't be jumping on the cloud bandwagon since 50% of my computers (lappy Core 2 Duo [woe unto him who does not get the lappy reference]) are still on XP. I was looking forward to... well, I'm not really sure what iCloud does, but I'm sure it must be exciting since I see mention of it (but very little explanation) all over the place. Maybe it involves BitCoins?
Indeed. Remember how well it went for the Germans the last time they tried to phase something out....
Yeah, I heard the letter where Merkel first set forth her vision for completely removing Nukes from German society just sold for $150,000 or something. I think it is on display at the Oppenheimer-Einstein museum.
Indeed, I read the article about Germany's plan to phase out nuclear power, and honestly it felt more like a short term grab for political power in the wake of Japan's issues to get more votes from the antinuke/enviormental crowd than an actual plan with substance.
That's exactly what it started out as, an attempt to appeal to the borderline greens immediately before elections (which took place a week or two after the Japanese earthquake). I don't think it was successful (the greens did very well, I believe Merkel's Christian Democrats lost a lot of ground), but it looks like they've decided the drubbing they received just means they need to pander more to the Greens (which in my opinion, based on almost no knowledge of German politics, is unlikely to be successful).
Id suggest Star Control 2. It has action, adventure, and it teaches a lil about resource managment. I think the ending of that one would be reached.
I wouldn't have thought of it as an adventure game, but I suppose that is as fitting a genre as any. There is even a free remake(?) of it called The Ur-Quan Masters. Definitely worth trying out.
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe I'm misunderstanding, but why can nuclear power only supply base-load, instead of peak as well? I've certainly heard that solar and wind are unsuitable to supply base load, as they're not terrifically reliable, but never anything about nuclear being unable to scale to peak load.
It isn't practical to rapidly change the load on nuke reactors, because it takes a significant amount of time to ramp up and down power output. Also, it basically costs the same to run whether you are at 10% capacity or 100% capacity, so it makes sense to run them as near to full capacity as possible. Contrast that with something like a gas-fired powerplant, where you can ramp generation quickly and you are pretty much only paying for the gas you are burning.
Of course, France announced at the same time as this announcement that they will be going ahead with something like 1.5 billion euros funding renewable resources over the same period, so it isn't like they are putting all their eggs in the nuclear basket - just not abandoning it entirely as others are doing.
This July 4th weekend, millions of Americans will head to the air-conditioned confines of their local multiplex to take in Harry Potter, Captain America
Sounds good. I'm curious to see how they combined the fantasy wizardry of Harry Potter with the comic book antics of Captain America. I'm also curious to see whether they will address the back story - obviously there must be quite an interesting tale of how Harry abandoned his homeland and became a symbol of American values.
Or maybe I should learn to read ;)
We will now proceed to the obligatory 579 posts as follows -
"This is bunk. In [Insert City], [carrier A] sucks donkey balls. [Carrier B] is much better!"
"Are you joking? [Carrier B] STINKS here in [City C]. I love [Carrier A]! "
"I wish I could just buy a phone that makes calls!" ...followed by anecdotes about cell coverage, speed and pricing in Korea.
All true. But it would have been nice of them to say what cities in CA they tested in, rather than just lumping "the west" together as CA, AZ, NM without stating where they tested. How can I complain that they didn't include my nearest city if they don't even list the cities?
That said, I'm pretty sure I would fall under the "rural America" category anyway, so AT&T it is. Oh, and I don't have a data plan anyway, so I'll just stick to complaining about the price of data plans in general (and I will mostly refrain from whining that if I lived in Seoul I could download billions of bytes to my cell phone for pennies a day - or so I've heard).
Now there will be fleets of driverless trucks hauling trailers three at a time blasting across Nevada.
It is a great place to test this sort of thing, though. Once you get outside of Vegas and Reno the roads have very few turns or intersections to confuse our new robotic overdrivers.
This entire argument is based on the fallacy that bandwidth needs will grow forever. Its simply not true. Prior to double-digit megabit connections, there was always media that couldnt be delivered in real-time.. but now there simply isnt any media that cannot be delivered in real-time on 10+ mbit connections, and that includes 3D HD video.
DTS-HD on Blu-Ray offers bit rates up to 24.5 mbps, at least in theory, which is significantly faster than my ~5mbps "broadband" connection and faster than the 10+ mbits you mention. Of course, in practice I haven't actually seen anything go above about 6 mbps, but that's just the audio track. On high-end discs you are looking at another 30-35 mbps for the video portion of the stream, so really you would need at least a 40 mbps connection to match current blu-ray offerings.
Which isn't to say you are totally off, just that most people don't have access to an internet connection that would allow them to stream at the same quality current media offers - but we aren't terribly far off. I would need about an order of magnitude increase in bandwidth, for example.
Compare BTC to US Dollars, which likewise have "nothing of real substance". The big difference I can see is that one can pay tax in USD.
I see this claim a lot, but I think it is a little bit backwards. The value of the USD isn't in that they can be used to pay tax, it is that they are backed by the US Government, which imposes (and enforces) taxes. That is, while they are not backed by gold or some other set commodity, they are backed by the taxes collected by the US Government. So by extension, USD are backed by all of the physical goods produced, services rendered, and real estate owned in the U.S.
This is of course a simplification and not entirely accurate, but I think it makes a lot more sense than saying something is valuable because you can pay taxes with it.
It turns out that breasts contain high concentrations of magnetic material.
c. Trusting up? Talk about being of very limited value. Just going to zero lift on landing is usually good enough. Using engine power to pin the craft to the ground has very limited utility.
Helicopters landing on ships often do this, except the "upward thrust" is provided by a cable and winch connected to the deck of the ship. It is very helpful in high wind/rough seas, stabilizing the helicopter as it descends and making sure a gust of wind or unexpected wave doesn't tip it off the side of the ship. I'm not sure that using a portion of the thrust of the engines to push the aircraft down would be quite as effective as the cable and winch, but it would probably allow more precise/rapid control response than only being able to apply thrust in one direction - assuming it can switch quickly enough.
I don't know about Q2, but in Q3 the hit box was the same size regardless of the skin. Naturally, it was still a bad idea to use a big one because you were more visible.
It was. The skin/model didn't actually matter, the hit box was still the same. Though it could be advantageous to have a smaller skin, just because people thought they actually had to hit the model instead of just near it.
I think this was also true for Unreal Tournament, although I have the feeling that the War Cow skin had the hitbox turned on its side or something - at least, people always seemed to have trouble hitting me when I used it.
From napster? A search for 128 kbit MP3 might be enough. Your legal ones are probably of higher quality.
I don't know, back in the days of l3enc that was the standard bitrate I encoded my ripped WAV files to, so not a good way to tell legal from illegal. Of course, I didn't do it that much in the early days since it was a pain and scour.net was easier, so if I were doing this it would probably be worth it to just delete and then re-rip any of my MP3s that are 10+ years old.
This scheme is nothing more then a cash grab. It does nothing useful for domain names. The cost of one of these is sky high ($185,000). There's no need being filled. It's just ICANN trying to get people who already have big websites to pay for another domain for the same site to keep someone else from registering it.
This stuff should not be run on a "how do we extort more money out of DNS" methadology.
This. I also want to know what they plan on doing with the additional millions of pure profit they will be making from their government imposed monopoly. Aren't they supposed to be non-profit? They're going to have to massively increase salaries to remain so.
Also, whatever happened to the egalitarian, level playing field of the internet? This move pisses me off coming and going. If you want to open up all these new TLDs, fine; do it. Let anyone and everyone register their own TLD for the price of a traditional TLD; there is no technical reason why it should cost 1,000 times as much for one of these. Alternatively, if you need to charge that much for your rigorous screening of applicants, then maybe it isn't such a good idea to offer the service in the first place - obviously they think it presents massive opportunities for fraud.
Either offer it to everybody at a reasonable price, or admit that it is a mistake and can the whole idea. Otherwise this is once again just a massive money grab on the part of ICANN.
I agree, I have numerous books well over 100 years old that are in fine shape, and they have spent their lives on the bookshelves of various ancestors who did not necessarily take great care of them.
That said, a lot of my paperbacks from the 80's and early 90's are in pretty bad shape, with yellowing pages and/or broken bindings (though others from the same period are fine). Even some hardbacks from that period are not holding up too well. Some publishers were using very cheap paper and binding materials that just don't last, though this seems to have gotten a lot better in the last 15 years.
Cachet, not cache.
Cash is also acceptable.
And yet FTFA:
One expert, who is part of the investigation and wants to remain anonymous because the inquiry is at an early stage, told The New York Times he wondered how the hackers could have known to breach security by focusing on the vulnerability in the browser.
He said: 'It would have been hard to prepare for this type of vulnerability.'
Wow. Yes, I can see how making accounts accessible via an unhashed URL is really something no one would have guessed would be a problem. Especially when the same technique is referenced explicitly in a recent blockbuster (The Social Network).
See, this is the real reason Firefox wants to get rid of the URL bar. Only hackers would directly enter a URL. Legitimate consumers will just follow the link to their account from their Facebook page.
"Hacking could be an act of war" (no matter how stupid that is, because any half-decent military system with anything "useful" should be COMPLETELY inaccessible from the Internet).
So you can only start a war if you attack military targets? As long as I stick to sinking commercial ships and destroying commercial enterprises there is no casus belli?
I think it absolutely obvious that in an age when electronic commerce is a major part of your economy, an attack on that commerce can be considered an act of war. This is stupidly obvious, but it doesn't mean that someone hacking Facebook accounts is going to start a war. Nor does it mean that probing attacks on military networks would automatically cause a war. However, if an identifiable party is attacking your infrastructure, electronic or otherwise, and has actual negative impact or threatens to substantially alter the balance of power in favor of the attacker, that absolutely provides a rationale for war.
Good for him but I don't know that I'd pick Gran Turismo as my top choice for a sim. Plenty of stuff on the PC, like anything from Papyrus, iRacing. I think Forza is even better. But good on him, nonetheless.
I'd have to say Forza is a step below GT still, at least in the actual driving department. That might change with 4, but right now I'd have to say GT still has a clear lead in the driving physics department.
I haven't actually tried iRacing, but there have definitely been sims on PC that offer better driving physics than GT (especially some of the Papyrus sims). I still prefer GT for the overall experience, though (yes, even the flawed GT5).
To be fair, I don't think the intent of bitcoin was a pyramid scheme, but more of a thought experiment brought to life - what if we had a currency which it was impossible to devalue? An interesting concept, but one which unfortunately ignores the ingenuity of people in gaming a system for profit, even or especially one which was designed to be fair. It is fascinating in fact to see people's reactions to such a currency - as I understand it the original idea was not to make lots of money in fiat currencies but to attempt to supplant them, however the value of bitcoins in fiat currency seems to have become a fixation... I wonder if the value they store can be negative :)
I think you give the creators far too much credit. While they like to tout the idea that it was designed to supplant current currencies, if you look at the way it was set up it is pretty clear that the inventors intentionally made it so that if it took off it would make them fabulously wealthy for essentially zero work. There's really no other reason to use the front-loaded distribution scheme they came up with, other than to enrich themselves. It was the hook they used to bring in other people - get in early before it becomes essentially impossible to profit from mining coins!
I agree that one of the reasons BitCoin has gotten so much attention is that it is a (somewhat) interesting idea; but the implementation makes it very clear that it is at least as much pyramid scheme as serious attempt at creating a new currency.
Any gains they make will be eaten up by the rapidly increasing version number.
More shooters that aren't based in either modern times OR World War II. There are a lot of other conflicts in history that could serve as the setting for a decent FPS or open world game. Spanish-American War? World War I? Civil War? Revolutionary War? Korea? Vietnam?
Is it because they're afraid to show anyone other than Germans, Imperial Japanese, Terrorists, or Aliens in a negative light?
Vietnam has seen several games made (the last one I played was the half-assed Battlefield Vietnam, which would have been great if not for a few major issues). The Korean War is a largely forgotten war in the U.S.; yes, people know that it occurred, but there are very few that could name a single battle or really have a good understanding of the conflict. I do think there is a lot of space for really interesting gameplay there, but it would be tough to market compared to yet another WWII game - and the weapons and tactics are very similar to WWII, so it likely wouldn't be all that different.
Going back earlier, to Civil War and Napoleonic wars, FPS becomes very difficult to do. Tactics were very different, because you had weapons that were very slow to reload and fire, and generally required massed units working together as opposed to the more rapid, fluid small-unit tactics that lend themselves well to FPSes. I think it would be very interesting to try doing an FPS based in Napoleonic wars, but it would be tough to balance it so it doesn't just turn into a bunch of people running around knifing (or bayonetting) each other (on a related note, can we PLEASE get rid of the widely promulgated idea of instakills with knives?). Can you imagine trying to get a bunch of the kids that play Modern Warfare to sit still for twenty seconds while they reload, and actually work together in a team to mass fire on the enemy? Or the amount of complaining that the musketballs don't go where you aim? It might work as an indie title that appeals to a select group, but it would definitely be a hard sell.
So I agree, it would be nice to see some more variation in setting - but I think there are some solid reasons why this hasn't (for the most part) happened. People like running around alone or in small teams blasting away at the bad guys, and that just doesn't lend itself well to earlier wars that might otherwise be marketable. Hell, even the cool ideas introduced by Dice in Battlefield 1942 (artillery spotting) and Battlefield 2 (battlefield commander) have largely been abandoned even by Dice themselves, apparently because people are unwilling to do anything but run around and shoot people (yes, I miss medics who are the only way to heal, engineers that are the only way to repair vehicles, scouts that can place cameras for artillery spotting, etc. - you know, actual support roles).
There's a demo (I believe) and it's on Steam anyway.
It's kinda like a X-COM/UFO turn-based shooter but where both players turns are submitted independently and then played out simultaneously (so your perfect plan that you submitted may go awry because your artillery gets shot from behind before he can move by someone you couldn't see).
Each "turn" is 5-seconds of gameplay and you can only issue orders in between turns (and take as long as you like - it can be anything from 10 seconds to play-by-email timings until your opponents sends *their* turn) with the next 5 seconds decided by a central server depending on the orders given and what happens in the world in those 5 seconds.
Units are few and maps are all the same "electric blue" but with different layouts, objectives, mix of units, etc. Certainly good fun and very nice if you miss X-COM-by-email from the past.
So, basically a re-make of Robosport?
Oh darn, I guess I won't be jumping on the cloud bandwagon since 50% of my computers (lappy Core 2 Duo [woe unto him who does not get the lappy reference]) are still on XP. I was looking forward to... well, I'm not really sure what iCloud does, but I'm sure it must be exciting since I see mention of it (but very little explanation) all over the place. Maybe it involves BitCoins?
If there is anything SimCity taught me, it's to turn off disasters!
And Shift-FUND
Indeed. Remember how well it went for the Germans the last time they tried to phase something out....
Yeah, I heard the letter where Merkel first set forth her vision for completely removing Nukes from German society just sold for $150,000 or something. I think it is on display at the Oppenheimer-Einstein museum.
Indeed, I read the article about Germany's plan to phase out nuclear power, and honestly it felt more like a short term grab for political power in the wake of Japan's issues to get more votes from the antinuke/enviormental crowd than an actual plan with substance.
That's exactly what it started out as, an attempt to appeal to the borderline greens immediately before elections (which took place a week or two after the Japanese earthquake). I don't think it was successful (the greens did very well, I believe Merkel's Christian Democrats lost a lot of ground), but it looks like they've decided the drubbing they received just means they need to pander more to the Greens (which in my opinion, based on almost no knowledge of German politics, is unlikely to be successful).
Id suggest Star Control 2. It has action, adventure, and it teaches a lil about resource managment. I think the ending of that one would be reached.
I wouldn't have thought of it as an adventure game, but I suppose that is as fitting a genre as any. There is even a free remake(?) of it called The Ur-Quan Masters. Definitely worth trying out.