No they aren't. Most optics are refractive, which is the bending of light by passing it through a medium of a different density (a glass lens). Diffractive optics bend the light using diffraction gratings, which are tiny apertures about as wide as the wavelength of the light itself. By the combination of traditional refractive and new, expensive diffractive optics, chromatic aberration can nearly be eliminated. This is what is implied by a lens that has "diffractive optics". The elimination of chromatic aberration is one (of several) "holy grail" goals in the design of lenses.
Actually, an 8cm tungsten sphere would exert the same gravitational pull on any object 10cm away, regardless of the other object's mass. It would have an escape velocity of 0.013 cm/s or 1.3 microns per second -- which, while very slow, is certainly within the realm of feasability. Your hard drive heads move accurately with tolerances significantly smaller than that.
I calculated the escape velocity using the formula sqrt(2Gm/r):
sqrt((2)(6.6742x10^-11)(5.16)/0.4) = 0.00013m/s or 0.013cm/s
Except that a hemispherectomy isn't recoverable once your brain is developed. Although the wikipedia entry does not explicitly say so, it does suggest from the pediatric links and occasional use of the world 'child' that hemispherectomies only work on very young children, before their brains have developed to be reliant on both hemispheres.
Sorry, I don't trust any site that doesn't even understand how basic aerofoils work. An airplane wing does not produce lift because it is angled downwards, it generates lift almost purely because of its shape. The concept of the cambered wing is as old as flight itself. Flight would not be possible in the manner they describe for standard fixed-wing aircraft, why should I trust them that it's possible for their ornithopters?
MC = Molten Core. The first serious 40-player raid instance which marks the beginning of WoW's endgame progression. And generally takes several hours or even 10s of hours for an inexperienced raid group, hence the request for food.
"Whoring" by definition, is doing something you don't want to do because you want the money. Selling out one's principles. Copulating with a person with whom you wouldn't copulate if it weren't for the money.
If someone genuinely believes that Windows NT/2K/XP is inherently insecure by-design compared to other mainstream operating systems, and says so, and gets karma for it, then it's not whoring.
That seems like a wonderful way for a con-artist to get free trips across the country with impunity.
In other words, get real. No company would ever agree to that. The reverse, perhaps, if you were to pay for the trip and they pay you back if you decide to go with them...
But as a desktop solution, it never really advanced beyond the playgrounds of serious geeks, and it doesn't really look to me like it ever will.
I dunno. Looked at any of the more modern distros lately? SuSE, Fedora, Ubuntu, Libranet all spring to mind. I'm running Ubuntu as a desktop and while it's still behind OS X and Windows I'd at least call it 'competitive'. It's made great leaps and bounds since a year or two ago, and the new version is coming out very shortly which will probably put it yet another leap ahead.
By merit of the progress they've been making I think it's too early to say that Linux's desktop will not go anywhere. In my opinion it's catching up.
The problem is, the Democrats are equally foul, corrupt, and incompetent. So who am I supposed to vote for?
And Ross Perot throws his hat on the ground in frustration.
Seriously though. "Throwing your vote away" to the marginalized, independent candidates whenever you can is the only long-term solution. Voting cannot be simply about "this election, this candidate", sometimes you have to think long-term, no matter how dire the current situation may seem.
The problem was he was a drunk asshole who overstepped his bounds and lacked any sense of proportion. His manner got in the way of any real investigation. Which is unfortunate both for him and the country. I see no corollary in the current situation.
Um, well, aside from the word "drunk"... do you even have your eyes open?
Allow me to copy your paragraph nearly verbatim:
The problem with Bush's cronies was not that there were no terrorists, there were. The problem was they were ignorant assholes who overstepped their bounds and lacked any sense of proportion. Their manner got in the way of any real investigation. Which is unfortunate both for them and the country.
You're splitting hairs. Why do you bother having an nVidia card at all? What exactly does your nVidia card do for you that a 15-year-old Trident VGA card, or failing that a newer Matrox card, would not?
Maybe you don't NEED 3D, sure you can live without it, but if you don't think it's useful, then you're being silly. We live in a 3D world, it's silly to restrict our computers to 2 dimensional graphics. 3D is useful in everything from CAD to mapping to gaming, or simply displaying fancy graphics (give up on the elitism, eye candy matters)
it's sluggishly paced and the characters are mostly interchangeable towards the end game, despite their roles (or lack thereof in some cases) in the story.
You know, the same thing could be said about any of the later FF games. 8? Most definitely. 9? Pretty much, yeah. 10? Very much so. Even Final Fantasy 6(3) had the same issue due to the fact that anyone could use Espers to learn any and every spell, although at least the special abilities were somewhat unique and non-interchangable. But really, you rarely needed any special abilities once your raw damage output could reach up to of 9999 per turn or beyond with the Genji Glove and/or Offering. FF5 was *built* around the concept of having interchangable characters with the job system.
FF2 was the only North American FF game where your characters had hard, defined roles. Rydia was a caster, Cecil was a fighter, Rosa was a healer, and so on. Even though you could deck him out in White Mage equipment, there was no way to make Cecil become a caster, short of his tiny underpowered complement of white magic spells. Even if you tried to give her decidedly uber equipment and put her in the front row, Rydia would never be any good at melee fighting. Her stats simply did not allow it.
FF7 was and remains my favourite of the FF series. It was not my first, nor my last, but it is my favourite. I hated the Materia system, but I loved the characters and to a lesser extent the storyline. And I detect a note of truth in this guy's suggestion that Cloud was the ultimate geek hero. I think that to some extent I identified with him. I wanted him to save the world and get the girl, because that's what I would've wanted.
I don't think there was any need to be offensive about the way he said it, but I think there is some truth to what he's saying.
I think he was speaking a little bit tongue-in-cheek, but still, he does have a point.
Did the ad copy for Civ read "Learn history while commanding an empire!"? No it did not. When I think of a Civ game, my first thought is "That's a sweetass epic strategy game". The education just happens to be snuck in there. Many games have some educational aspects snuck in. They sell despite that, because no fuss is made about it during the sales pitch. Most people equate more educational with less fun. When playing most "somewhat educational" games, you find out about the educational bits afterwards. By then it's okay, because you already know the game is fun.
When you're trying to get someone to buy a game (or most anything else for that matter), education just doesn't sell. It never really has. Perhaps we should blame our education system for instilling us with a basic belief that education is not fun.
Here is an HTML chat client without Javascript. Here is an HTML chat client with Javascript. Javascript not required? Maybe if you really enjoy the stone age it's not required. Otherwise, yes, it is required and you'd be retarded not to use it.
I think he's referring to the fact that most of the energy is dissipated earlier, as the lightning strike is travelling through the ionized air. The "high resistance" portion of the journey. High resistance means high power/heat dissipation. Since the tower is in relative terms extremely low resistance, it would not be dissipating nearly as much power.
I agree in general with most of your post, but I take issue with the following statement:
As others have noted here already, Square Enix has managed to get Final Fantasy XI to work well across the PS2, PC, and 360, so the notion that they'd have to compromise a lot is just plain bogus.
As a hardcore Final Fantasy fanboi (look at my nick) I really wanted to love FFXI and was generally as much of an apologist as possible when it came to the game's many frustrations. However, I used to play Asheron's Call, and now play World of Warcraft, so I do know my MMORPGs and forget becoming compromised... FFXI was compromised right out of the gate. It was designed compromised. They knew they were going to launch it on PC and PS2, and they built it that way.
I don't know about you, but personally? I get tired of the saccharin, lovey-dovey junk very quickly.
In some cases you're right: GTA would've been just as fun without the murdering and gangsta themes.
But sometimes, after I come home from a stressful day at work, I WANT TO BLOW THINGS UP IN A VIDEOGAME, whether it's spaceships or robots or castles or cars or people. If that's wrong (it isn't) then lock me up right now because stress, and therefore my stress-relief methods, are not going away.
If the game with blowing things up also happens to be fun, then it solves two needs at once, and I will likely play it when I don't neccessarily feel like blowing things up, just because it's fun. And there's nothing wrong with that either.
Well, you can call my bluff if you want, but I play exactly 1 day a week, for roughly 4 hours, in one of my guild's weekly MC runs, and I have full epics except for trinket slots. They're not Tier 2 (1 piece) or even full Tier 1 (5/8 pieces) but they're all epic and I'm happy with what I've got, and I didn't really put in an unreasonable amount of time in MC to get them.
I admit I used to put in a lot more time, when I was levelling up. But now that I'm level 60, I'm very casual.
It's still worth my $15. Just barely. And the queue on Feathermoon was horrible, it's mostly gone now that they gave us the option of transfers to Rexxar for a week. A LOT of folks left.
Slashdot Mirror
No they aren't. Most optics are refractive, which is the bending of light by passing it through a medium of a different density (a glass lens). Diffractive optics bend the light using diffraction gratings, which are tiny apertures about as wide as the wavelength of the light itself. By the combination of traditional refractive and new, expensive diffractive optics, chromatic aberration can nearly be eliminated. This is what is implied by a lens that has "diffractive optics". The elimination of chromatic aberration is one (of several) "holy grail" goals in the design of lenses.
You think the phone company would just tell you who a line belonged to if you called them up?
Actually, if you're using Sprint, they've even got an automated system to do it for you!
Actually, an 8cm tungsten sphere would exert the same gravitational pull on any object 10cm away, regardless of the other object's mass. It would have an escape velocity of 0.013 cm/s or 1.3 microns per second -- which, while very slow, is certainly within the realm of feasability. Your hard drive heads move accurately with tolerances significantly smaller than that.
I calculated the escape velocity using the formula sqrt(2Gm/r):
sqrt((2)(6.6742x10^-11)(5.16)/0.4) = 0.00013m/s or 0.013cm/s
Except that a hemispherectomy isn't recoverable once your brain is developed. Although the wikipedia entry does not explicitly say so, it does suggest from the pediatric links and occasional use of the world 'child' that hemispherectomies only work on very young children, before their brains have developed to be reliant on both hemispheres.
Sorry, I don't trust any site that doesn't even understand how basic aerofoils work. An airplane wing does not produce lift because it is angled downwards, it generates lift almost purely because of its shape. The concept of the cambered wing is as old as flight itself. Flight would not be possible in the manner they describe for standard fixed-wing aircraft, why should I trust them that it's possible for their ornithopters?
MC = Molten Core. The first serious 40-player raid instance which marks the beginning of WoW's endgame progression. And generally takes several hours or even 10s of hours for an inexperienced raid group, hence the request for food.
Generally, they're just called "Europeans". Go figure.
Stop being ridiculous.
Everyone knows that all genres are ultimately just a ripoff of Pong.
"Whoring" by definition, is doing something you don't want to do because you want the money. Selling out one's principles. Copulating with a person with whom you wouldn't copulate if it weren't for the money.
If someone genuinely believes that Windows NT/2K/XP is inherently insecure by-design compared to other mainstream operating systems, and says so, and gets karma for it, then it's not whoring.
You're absolutely right. It's karma slutting!
That seems like a wonderful way for a con-artist to get free trips across the country with impunity.
In other words, get real. No company would ever agree to that. The reverse, perhaps, if you were to pay for the trip and they pay you back if you decide to go with them...
Pr0n is the 5ux0rs! We need 1337 h@x0r5 to pwn their warez, w00t, w00t!"
You spelled "teh" and "there" wrong. Or did you mean "they're"?
He also spelled "Wii" wrong.
But as a desktop solution, it never really advanced beyond the playgrounds of serious geeks, and it doesn't really look to me like it ever will.
I dunno. Looked at any of the more modern distros lately? SuSE, Fedora, Ubuntu, Libranet all spring to mind. I'm running Ubuntu as a desktop and while it's still behind OS X and Windows I'd at least call it 'competitive'. It's made great leaps and bounds since a year or two ago, and the new version is coming out very shortly which will probably put it yet another leap ahead.
By merit of the progress they've been making I think it's too early to say that Linux's desktop will not go anywhere. In my opinion it's catching up.
The problem is, the Democrats are equally foul, corrupt, and incompetent. So who am I supposed to vote for?
And Ross Perot throws his hat on the ground in frustration.
Seriously though. "Throwing your vote away" to the marginalized, independent candidates whenever you can is the only long-term solution. Voting cannot be simply about "this election, this candidate", sometimes you have to think long-term, no matter how dire the current situation may seem.
The problem was he was a drunk asshole who overstepped his bounds and lacked any sense of proportion. His manner got in the way of any real investigation. Which is unfortunate both for him and the country.
I see no corollary in the current situation.
Um, well, aside from the word "drunk"... do you even have your eyes open?
Allow me to copy your paragraph nearly verbatim:
The problem with Bush's cronies was not that there were no terrorists, there were.
The problem was they were ignorant assholes who overstepped their bounds and lacked any sense of proportion. Their manner got in the way of any real investigation. Which is unfortunate both for them and the country.
So you entirely agree with him, is what you're saying?
You're splitting hairs. Why do you bother having an nVidia card at all? What exactly does your nVidia card do for you that a 15-year-old Trident VGA card, or failing that a newer Matrox card, would not?
Maybe you don't NEED 3D, sure you can live without it, but if you don't think it's useful, then you're being silly. We live in a 3D world, it's silly to restrict our computers to 2 dimensional graphics. 3D is useful in everything from CAD to mapping to gaming, or simply displaying fancy graphics (give up on the elitism, eye candy matters)
And yes, Linux needs 3D, even if you don't.
it's sluggishly paced and the characters are mostly interchangeable towards the end game, despite their roles (or lack thereof in some cases) in the story.
You know, the same thing could be said about any of the later FF games. 8? Most definitely. 9? Pretty much, yeah. 10? Very much so. Even Final Fantasy 6(3) had the same issue due to the fact that anyone could use Espers to learn any and every spell, although at least the special abilities were somewhat unique and non-interchangable. But really, you rarely needed any special abilities once your raw damage output could reach up to of 9999 per turn or beyond with the Genji Glove and/or Offering. FF5 was *built* around the concept of having interchangable characters with the job system.
FF2 was the only North American FF game where your characters had hard, defined roles. Rydia was a caster, Cecil was a fighter, Rosa was a healer, and so on. Even though you could deck him out in White Mage equipment, there was no way to make Cecil become a caster, short of his tiny underpowered complement of white magic spells. Even if you tried to give her decidedly uber equipment and put her in the front row, Rydia would never be any good at melee fighting. Her stats simply did not allow it.
FF7 was and remains my favourite of the FF series. It was not my first, nor my last, but it is my favourite. I hated the Materia system, but I loved the characters and to a lesser extent the storyline. And I detect a note of truth in this guy's suggestion that Cloud was the ultimate geek hero. I think that to some extent I identified with him. I wanted him to save the world and get the girl, because that's what I would've wanted.
I don't think there was any need to be offensive about the way he said it, but I think there is some truth to what he's saying.
I think he was speaking a little bit tongue-in-cheek, but still, he does have a point.
Did the ad copy for Civ read "Learn history while commanding an empire!"? No it did not. When I think of a Civ game, my first thought is "That's a sweetass epic strategy game". The education just happens to be snuck in there. Many games have some educational aspects snuck in. They sell despite that, because no fuss is made about it during the sales pitch. Most people equate more educational with less fun. When playing most "somewhat educational" games, you find out about the educational bits afterwards. By then it's okay, because you already know the game is fun.
When you're trying to get someone to buy a game (or most anything else for that matter), education just doesn't sell. It never really has. Perhaps we should blame our education system for instilling us with a basic belief that education is not fun.
So because other people in other industries do it, that makes it okay? (In either industry, for that matter?)
Here is an HTML chat client without Javascript. Here is an HTML chat client with Javascript. Javascript not required? Maybe if you really enjoy the stone age it's not required. Otherwise, yes, it is required and you'd be retarded not to use it.
When I worked in a cubicle, I had a burning desire to play whack-a-mole with people like that.
Put your damn head back down, get back to work, and leave us busy and productive folks alone so we can get our jobs done, kthxbai.
I think he's referring to the fact that most of the energy is dissipated earlier, as the lightning strike is travelling through the ionized air. The "high resistance" portion of the journey. High resistance means high power/heat dissipation. Since the tower is in relative terms extremely low resistance, it would not be dissipating nearly as much power.
I could be wrong, though.
I agree in general with most of your post, but I take issue with the following statement:
As others have noted here already, Square Enix has managed to get Final Fantasy XI to work well across the PS2, PC, and 360, so the notion that they'd have to compromise a lot is just plain bogus.
As a hardcore Final Fantasy fanboi (look at my nick) I really wanted to love FFXI and was generally as much of an apologist as possible when it came to the game's many frustrations. However, I used to play Asheron's Call, and now play World of Warcraft, so I do know my MMORPGs and forget becoming compromised... FFXI was compromised right out of the gate. It was designed compromised. They knew they were going to launch it on PC and PS2, and they built it that way.
And IMHO, it was crap.
I don't know about you, but personally? I get tired of the saccharin, lovey-dovey junk very quickly.
In some cases you're right: GTA would've been just as fun without the murdering and gangsta themes.
But sometimes, after I come home from a stressful day at work, I WANT TO BLOW THINGS UP IN A VIDEOGAME, whether it's spaceships or robots or castles or cars or people. If that's wrong (it isn't) then lock me up right now because stress, and therefore my stress-relief methods, are not going away.
If the game with blowing things up also happens to be fun, then it solves two needs at once, and I will likely play it when I don't neccessarily feel like blowing things up, just because it's fun. And there's nothing wrong with that either.
Well, you can call my bluff if you want, but I play exactly 1 day a week, for roughly 4 hours, in one of my guild's weekly MC runs, and I have full epics except for trinket slots. They're not Tier 2 (1 piece) or even full Tier 1 (5/8 pieces) but they're all epic and I'm happy with what I've got, and I didn't really put in an unreasonable amount of time in MC to get them.
I admit I used to put in a lot more time, when I was levelling up. But now that I'm level 60, I'm very casual.
It's still worth my $15. Just barely. And the queue on Feathermoon was horrible, it's mostly gone now that they gave us the option of transfers to Rexxar for a week. A LOT of folks left.