I now have a 50" HDTV, and it pains me to fire up any device that is 480p on it.
It's fuzzy.
I'm not complaining about number of polys or texture resolution, it's just that anything I play on it looks like someone smeared vaseline on my eyes.
The difference does not bother me. Noticeable, but, you know, I have a game to play, I really can't be terribly concerned with fuzzy edges as long as the game is good. Old movies are fuzzy too, it doesn't make them suck, it doesn't make them painful to watch. I guess to some people it does, but I think those people have some unresolved issues.
Yes, you bought an expensive TV and you want to use it to its full potential, I understand that. But you can't. So get over it, and figure out a way to move past your issues and get back to enjoying the games.
Absolutely it's important. I bought an Athlon64 4400+ EE instead of an Athlon64 4400+ because the energy efficiency means it's energy efficient (obviously), low heat (less obviously) and therefore my system is much quieter (even less obviously), and uses even less energy to run fans. Energy efficiency has a lot of benefits for a computer. Once people start realizing this and trying it, they will see the light. There's absolutely no reason for your computer to sound like a jet engine (or, as the fans wear out, like an angry lawnmower). It means less dust, less maintenance, longer life for components, it's silly not to consider energy efficiency when buying a CPU.
Now I'm just waiting for GPUs to go down the same road. I'm pretty sure my Radeon X1900 XT puts out ten times more heat and noise than the rest of my system combined.
Bioware was a lot bigger than Bethesda, and they just got bought. In fact I would consider Bioware to be probably the biggest 'independent' developer around. So I don't think Bethesda is immune. To quote Futurama, "Maybe you don't understand just how rich he is. In fact, I think I'd better put on a monocle."
yes, you can get more energy from the Sun, but how do you transmit it to Earth? The microwave (or whatever) beam will also fall of with the square of the distance.
No it most certainly doesn't. The kind of power loss I am talking about is the power loss due to dispersion. The sun radiates its light in all directions, so most of it is wasted. The further you go away from it, the more it has spread out and the smaller the available density of energy is.
A perfectly collimated laser or maser (admittedly a practical impossibility) does not disperse at all and would lose exactly *zero* energy completely regardless of distance (assuming space was a perfect vacuum, which for practical macro-scale purposes it certainly is). If you pointed a perfectly collimated laser at a galaxy 6 billion light years away, then in 6 billion light years, almost every single photon you fired in that direction would arrive, with all the energy you initially instilled them with. I'm sure we will have little trouble getting energy dispersion losses to be so small that distance is not an important factor.
Furthermore, it's been noted that Earth orbit is "halfway to anywhere in the solar system" (attributed to Heinlein). So we'll need serious orbital capability to build these things, regardless of where we put them.
That's exactly why it's silly to put them in Earth orbit. You'll get way more bang for your buck putting them somewhere closer.
There is no nighttime in space, nor any clouds, nor any seasons, nor any atmosphere. Solar panels in orbit deliver full power 24 hours a day 7 days a week 365 days a year with no need for fuel or maintenance. And they don't have to be, and probably shouldn't be, in orbit. Inject them into an orbit between Venus and Mercury, or closer still. Solar radiation falls off with the square of the distance. The closer we get them to the sun, the more power they will generate, by orders of magnitude.
Obviously it's not economical yet, or it would've been done already. But it has potential.
KotR/Mime was only really "needed" to kill Ruby and Emerald Weapon (the optional superbosses), and even then you could do it without if you were properly equipped and used the right tactics. Any other use of KotR is simply overkill, and as you noticed, a waste of your time.
With Sephiroth it's actually much faster to kill him with other techniques. Limit breaks will ruin him with extreme prejudice, even normal attacks with a 2x or 4x cut materia will make short work of him. And there are plenty of good magics in the game, too.
In any final fantasy game as you get closer to the end and more and more things start hitting the 9999 damage cap, the relative damage-per-second of your normal attacks starts increasing very quickly. By the end of the game everything other than "Attack" is just eye candy. That's just how the game is made.
Except in the case where the advancements make other people safe without necessarily making you much safer specifically. In that case, our peculiar brand of self-centered capitalism will actively avoid those sort of enhancements for many reasons, but most especially because no one will pay money to make someone else safe unless it's a side-effect of some other benefit.
I don't know whether you've read the rest of this thread, but $70 does not qualify as "very rich". Also, $70 to write off $220,000 worth of debt seems like a bargain to me.
The trick is making your physical model correct. They're still discovering things about how the strings actually vibrate while being played, mainly because there hasn't been a lot of research into this area, but also because it's not nearly as simple as high school physics teaches you. Even ignoring the strings, you'd have to have sensors to detect how the body of the guitar is being moved, and whether the neck is flexing. Tiny changes do make a difference, it's actually a very complex problem.
Of course it's a solvable problem, but... it's just probably not worth it for the mere convenience of not having to tune a guitar (which is really not that big a deal)
Depends on wavelength. Far infrared is indeed blocked by almost everything, but near infrared is not. Near infrared does not allow you to "see heat" the same way far infrared does, but organics (like skin, plants, etc) tend to reflect a lot of near infrared and generally be very bright in infrared light, whereas synthetic materials are usually quite dark and absorb most of the near-IR light that hits them. So it might be possible to differentiate the two using only near-infrared. Obviously it will not stop more cunning attempts at circumvention, but it could stop a guy from putting a cardboard dummy in the passenger seat.
That's unfortunately not a foolproof system if they're all running the same software. It is possible, perhaps even likely, that they will all fail in the same way at the same time for the same reason, leaving things completely out of control. See the Ariane 5 accident for a practical demonstration.
Clearly you've never tried to submit a modification to Windows software. Patch? What's patch? The preferred method of all Windows developers is: Cut And Paste!
The specific (and nearly impossible to perfectly replicate) sound that the vibrating strings make is the reason to play a guitar. Get rid of that and you might as well just use a synthesizer instead.
Nope, it wouldn't melt itself. Keep in mind that isotopes with longer half-lives (like U-234) as a general rule emit less radiation, and therefore produce less power. Also keep in mind that the half-life is only the point at which roughly half the material has decayed, it's actually decaying right from the beginning and will realistically never be entirely gone, it will just dwindle to small quantities. After 200 years you'll have only about 25% of your Pu-238 left, but almost all of the other 75% will still be U-234 because it decays so slowly. So your power output will go down in a fairly uniform way for a very long time, because you're pretty much just substituting Pu-238 directly into U-234 (which has such a long half-life compared to the time scale we're talking about it can almost be considered non-radioactive)
Because the slow-decaying U-234 (and to a lesser extent Th-230) acts like a buffer, only trace amounts of the lower elements in the decay chain will ever be produced at any given time, so while the power output could potentially start slowly rising again after many hundreds or thousands of years, it will almost certainly never again meet or exceed the original power output it was designed for when it was being powered by almost-pure Pu-238.
If all the U-234 spontaneously transformed into the powerful emitters like Po-218 or Pb-214 then certainly that's going to start releasing a ton of radiation very quickly, and it would probably melt itself. But that can't happen. No matter how radioactive the lower decay chain elements might be, they will never exist in more than tiny quantities because the U-234 creates them so slowly and they decay so quickly.
A lot of peanut allergies are really severe, and just the dust from someone a few seats over eating peanuts can cause a sometimes severe reaction.
Myth. Peanut allergies can be severe, but never that severe. If you were in a peanut processing facility, or the person a few seats over was smashing hundreds of peanuts into peanut butter, maybe. Just eating peanuts is going to produce an infinitesimally small amount of dust. The likelihood of inhaling even a single particle of dust in that scenario approaches zero, and is not far from the likelihood of inhaling a piece of peanut dust that was picked up on the wind from a chinese peanut factory and blown around the world and directly into your mouth. They are both statistically implausible. And even if it were to happen, a single piece of peanut dust is not enough, in any recorded case of peanut allergy, to cause even a noticeable reaction.
Enough peanut allergens can actually be transferred through saliva (kissing) to cause a mild reaction in the severely allergic but even that is very infrequent, and I can't find a single case of death as a result (No, the death of the Quebec girl had nothing to do with her peanut allergy, contrary to the media reports, it was a cigarette-induced asthma attack)
Asheron's Call was not like that. At least, it wasn't several years ago when I was still playing it. There were major updates every month, a whole plotline that changed with the players and their actions, with GM-run events, new weapons, dungeons, etc. Every month. Sometimes between monthly updates too, although that was normally reserved for bugfixes.
It was actually a pretty fantastic game. If it hadn't be interfering with my social/financial life I might still be playing it. Though I heard it started going downhill after I left, and the whole Asheron's Call 2 trainwreck was not a good omen.
For those who didn't pay attention in Chemistry 102, Beta radiation is very large (a free proton, AKA [1]H+)
For the both of you who apparently who didn't pay any attention in chemistry/physics, you've got everything all mixed up:
ALPHA particles/radiation/emissions are a HELIUM nucleus/ion (not hydrogen) consisting of two protons, two neutrons, and zero electrons. These are stopped by paper, plastic or skin, however if the emitter is ingested it can cause damage.
BETA particles/radiation/emissions are high-energy single electrons and can penetrate skin quite easily, causing damage and potentially radiation burns/sickness if exposed to large quantities.
Plutonium-238 is an alpha emitter pretty much all the way along its decay chain, making it a very safe and predictable form radioactive material.
Even a GPS map nevermind navigation on a cell phone would be invaluable to me. Whether using Public Transit, or walking somewhere, or simply if I ever get marginally lost, it would be fantastic. Gimme gimme gimme.
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I'd rather pay GST than those goddamn "brokerage" fees. I hate buying from the US.
I now have a 50" HDTV, and it pains me to fire up any device that is 480p on it.
It's fuzzy.
I'm not complaining about number of polys or texture resolution, it's just that anything I play on it looks like someone smeared vaseline on my eyes.
The difference does not bother me. Noticeable, but, you know, I have a game to play, I really can't be terribly concerned with fuzzy edges as long as the game is good. Old movies are fuzzy too, it doesn't make them suck, it doesn't make them painful to watch. I guess to some people it does, but I think those people have some unresolved issues.
Yes, you bought an expensive TV and you want to use it to its full potential, I understand that. But you can't. So get over it, and figure out a way to move past your issues and get back to enjoying the games.
Absolutely it's important. I bought an Athlon64 4400+ EE instead of an Athlon64 4400+ because the energy efficiency means it's energy efficient (obviously), low heat (less obviously) and therefore my system is much quieter (even less obviously), and uses even less energy to run fans. Energy efficiency has a lot of benefits for a computer. Once people start realizing this and trying it, they will see the light. There's absolutely no reason for your computer to sound like a jet engine (or, as the fans wear out, like an angry lawnmower). It means less dust, less maintenance, longer life for components, it's silly not to consider energy efficiency when buying a CPU.
Now I'm just waiting for GPUs to go down the same road. I'm pretty sure my Radeon X1900 XT puts out ten times more heat and noise than the rest of my system combined.
Bioware was a lot bigger than Bethesda, and they just got bought. In fact I would consider Bioware to be probably the biggest 'independent' developer around. So I don't think Bethesda is immune. To quote Futurama, "Maybe you don't understand just how rich he is. In fact, I think I'd better put on a monocle."
yes, you can get more energy from the Sun, but how do you transmit it to Earth? The microwave (or whatever) beam will also fall of with the square of the distance.
No it most certainly doesn't. The kind of power loss I am talking about is the power loss due to dispersion. The sun radiates its light in all directions, so most of it is wasted. The further you go away from it, the more it has spread out and the smaller the available density of energy is.
A perfectly collimated laser or maser (admittedly a practical impossibility) does not disperse at all and would lose exactly *zero* energy completely regardless of distance (assuming space was a perfect vacuum, which for practical macro-scale purposes it certainly is). If you pointed a perfectly collimated laser at a galaxy 6 billion light years away, then in 6 billion light years, almost every single photon you fired in that direction would arrive, with all the energy you initially instilled them with. I'm sure we will have little trouble getting energy dispersion losses to be so small that distance is not an important factor.
Furthermore, it's been noted that Earth orbit is "halfway to anywhere in the solar system" (attributed to Heinlein). So we'll need serious orbital capability to build these things, regardless of where we put them.
That's exactly why it's silly to put them in Earth orbit. You'll get way more bang for your buck putting them somewhere closer.
There is no nighttime in space, nor any clouds, nor any seasons, nor any atmosphere. Solar panels in orbit deliver full power 24 hours a day 7 days a week 365 days a year with no need for fuel or maintenance. And they don't have to be, and probably shouldn't be, in orbit. Inject them into an orbit between Venus and Mercury, or closer still. Solar radiation falls off with the square of the distance. The closer we get them to the sun, the more power they will generate, by orders of magnitude.
Obviously it's not economical yet, or it would've been done already. But it has potential.
KotR/Mime was only really "needed" to kill Ruby and Emerald Weapon (the optional superbosses), and even then you could do it without if you were properly equipped and used the right tactics. Any other use of KotR is simply overkill, and as you noticed, a waste of your time.
With Sephiroth it's actually much faster to kill him with other techniques. Limit breaks will ruin him with extreme prejudice, even normal attacks with a 2x or 4x cut materia will make short work of him. And there are plenty of good magics in the game, too.
In any final fantasy game as you get closer to the end and more and more things start hitting the 9999 damage cap, the relative damage-per-second of your normal attacks starts increasing very quickly. By the end of the game everything other than "Attack" is just eye candy. That's just how the game is made.
No, they decided to turn her life upside down and bankrupt her over lying to a jury. The MP3 collection was just the vehicle.
Except in the case where the advancements make other people safe without necessarily making you much safer specifically. In that case, our peculiar brand of self-centered capitalism will actively avoid those sort of enhancements for many reasons, but most especially because no one will pay money to make someone else safe unless it's a side-effect of some other benefit.
Correction: that would've been 60k and NO WOMEN better than his real life.
I don't know whether you've read the rest of this thread, but $70 does not qualify as "very rich". Also, $70 to write off $220,000 worth of debt seems like a bargain to me.
It's true, it works. I doubt anyone pirated E.T. the game... although anyone who bought it probably wished they had...
The trick is making your physical model correct. They're still discovering things about how the strings actually vibrate while being played, mainly because there hasn't been a lot of research into this area, but also because it's not nearly as simple as high school physics teaches you. Even ignoring the strings, you'd have to have sensors to detect how the body of the guitar is being moved, and whether the neck is flexing. Tiny changes do make a difference, it's actually a very complex problem.
Of course it's a solvable problem, but... it's just probably not worth it for the mere convenience of not having to tune a guitar (which is really not that big a deal)
Depends on wavelength. Far infrared is indeed blocked by almost everything, but near infrared is not. Near infrared does not allow you to "see heat" the same way far infrared does, but organics (like skin, plants, etc) tend to reflect a lot of near infrared and generally be very bright in infrared light, whereas synthetic materials are usually quite dark and absorb most of the near-IR light that hits them. So it might be possible to differentiate the two using only near-infrared. Obviously it will not stop more cunning attempts at circumvention, but it could stop a guy from putting a cardboard dummy in the passenger seat.
A vote for ron paul would also allow you to say "No, thanks" and if needed, get healthcare from someone else.
That's unfortunately not a foolproof system if they're all running the same software. It is possible, perhaps even likely, that they will all fail in the same way at the same time for the same reason, leaving things completely out of control. See the Ariane 5 accident for a practical demonstration.
Human beings have a rather unique IR signature that is very easily distinguishable from other heat sources.
Human beings also have a rather unique ability to find creative ways to beat challenges like that.
Clearly you've never tried to submit a modification to Windows software. Patch? What's patch? The preferred method of all Windows developers is: Cut And Paste!
Ugh. They've got a long ways to go.
The specific (and nearly impossible to perfectly replicate) sound that the vibrating strings make is the reason to play a guitar. Get rid of that and you might as well just use a synthesizer instead.
Did a rocket model enthusiast shit on your face recently?
One can only hope so.
Nope, it wouldn't melt itself. Keep in mind that isotopes with longer half-lives (like U-234) as a general rule emit less radiation, and therefore produce less power. Also keep in mind that the half-life is only the point at which roughly half the material has decayed, it's actually decaying right from the beginning and will realistically never be entirely gone, it will just dwindle to small quantities. After 200 years you'll have only about 25% of your Pu-238 left, but almost all of the other 75% will still be U-234 because it decays so slowly. So your power output will go down in a fairly uniform way for a very long time, because you're pretty much just substituting Pu-238 directly into U-234 (which has such a long half-life compared to the time scale we're talking about it can almost be considered non-radioactive)
Because the slow-decaying U-234 (and to a lesser extent Th-230) acts like a buffer, only trace amounts of the lower elements in the decay chain will ever be produced at any given time, so while the power output could potentially start slowly rising again after many hundreds or thousands of years, it will almost certainly never again meet or exceed the original power output it was designed for when it was being powered by almost-pure Pu-238.
If all the U-234 spontaneously transformed into the powerful emitters like Po-218 or Pb-214 then certainly that's going to start releasing a ton of radiation very quickly, and it would probably melt itself. But that can't happen. No matter how radioactive the lower decay chain elements might be, they will never exist in more than tiny quantities because the U-234 creates them so slowly and they decay so quickly.
A lot of peanut allergies are really severe, and just the dust from someone a few seats over eating peanuts can cause a sometimes severe reaction.
Myth. Peanut allergies can be severe, but never that severe. If you were in a peanut processing facility, or the person a few seats over was smashing hundreds of peanuts into peanut butter, maybe. Just eating peanuts is going to produce an infinitesimally small amount of dust. The likelihood of inhaling even a single particle of dust in that scenario approaches zero, and is not far from the likelihood of inhaling a piece of peanut dust that was picked up on the wind from a chinese peanut factory and blown around the world and directly into your mouth. They are both statistically implausible. And even if it were to happen, a single piece of peanut dust is not enough, in any recorded case of peanut allergy, to cause even a noticeable reaction.
Enough peanut allergens can actually be transferred through saliva (kissing) to cause a mild reaction in the severely allergic but even that is very infrequent, and I can't find a single case of death as a result (No, the death of the Quebec girl had nothing to do with her peanut allergy, contrary to the media reports, it was a cigarette-induced asthma attack)
Asheron's Call was not like that. At least, it wasn't several years ago when I was still playing it. There were major updates every month, a whole plotline that changed with the players and their actions, with GM-run events, new weapons, dungeons, etc. Every month. Sometimes between monthly updates too, although that was normally reserved for bugfixes.
It was actually a pretty fantastic game. If it hadn't be interfering with my social/financial life I might still be playing it. Though I heard it started going downhill after I left, and the whole Asheron's Call 2 trainwreck was not a good omen.
For those who didn't pay attention in Chemistry 102, Beta radiation is very large (a free proton, AKA [1]H+)
For the both of you who apparently who didn't pay any attention in chemistry/physics, you've got everything all mixed up:
ALPHA particles/radiation/emissions are a HELIUM nucleus/ion (not hydrogen) consisting of two protons, two neutrons, and zero electrons. These are stopped by paper, plastic or skin, however if the emitter is ingested it can cause damage.
BETA particles/radiation/emissions are high-energy single electrons and can penetrate skin quite easily, causing damage and potentially radiation burns/sickness if exposed to large quantities.
Plutonium-238 is an alpha emitter pretty much all the way along its decay chain, making it a very safe and predictable form radioactive material.
Even a GPS map nevermind navigation on a cell phone would be invaluable to me. Whether using Public Transit, or walking somewhere, or simply if I ever get marginally lost, it would be fantastic. Gimme gimme gimme.