It would take a VERY stupid street criminal to mug somebody who's got a real time record of both the approach and the crime. And there won't be time for a search to make sure ALL the recording equipment disappears along with the victim's purse or wallet.
Because it's recording to local storage, and not streaming over the 5G mobile network to a remote server.
'Give me the film' won't work when the footage is already on the next continent. Perhaps our best defence against the authorities who mean to monitor us at all times is to do just the same to them...
Attempting to film the entirety of the Silmarillion would be impossible. But there are some stories that might be worth doing: the tale of Turin Turambar, for instance.
I always felt that the Akallabeth might work well, perhaps as a TV miniseries: begin with the Elves under Gil-galad on the run from Sauron's armies, and then cut to the fleet of Numenor arriving in Middle-earth, and the capture and imprisonment of Sauron. Then the decline of their civilisation accelerates, Sauron rises to high power like a malignant Joseph in Egypt, the Elendili become marginalised and persecuted. At midpoint the assault on the West and the Downfall. Then the refugees establish the Kingdoms in Exile. We might see the construction of the Argonath, of Minas Anor, of Isengard... and then close on the return of Sauron to power and the formation of the Last Alliance, which brings us to where the movie trilogy began.
How does this affect the Linux Kernel? Isn't it (primarily) a US Copyrighted item, published with a license that allows people fairly free distribution requirements? Could (for example) Microsoft move their offices to Antigua, keep their IP (which is now Antiguan, not American) safe, and freely publish MS Linux?
Only if they first stripped out all contributions by non-US citizens, which would still be copyright of the author and only legal to distribute under the terms of the GPL. Including Linus. Good luck with that.
That caused so many fights you wouldn't believe it. When your supposed comrade goes off in the opposite direction, jams the scrolling and traps you in a corner with too many monsters...
"Get back over here!"
"No, it's this way - you get over here!"
"I CAN'T! Oh CRAP, you've got me killed now!" * throws punch *
(But forget the following ones; "1 Plus" is the best).
That would be Reinforcements, right? With the new graphics in Worms 2, it never felt quite the same. Less brutality, more comedy.
That said, one thing I like about more recent Worms games is how very different they can be depending on weapons selection. Try playing with unlimited Ninja ropes, unlimited shotgun, martial arts techniques, the baseball bat and nothing else. Tense, tactical manoeuvering, all about the accurate shot. Then try playing with everything switched on unlimited and double power. It becomes limited nuclear war, and victory comes through positioning your worms such that any opponent using a WMD against them will also kill some of his own team. The only defence against a Concrete Donkey is to be either directly above or directly below the enemy's worm.
Interesting example. I played through the original campaign once. Shadows of Undrentide twice. Hordes of the Underdark three times (once with each of the previous three characters).
But you buy NWN for the engine, not the campaign. So I'm playing a computer, but it's running player-written content. I've spent a whole more time in Shadowlords, Dreamcatcher and Demon than in all of the original modules... Is that so much worse than spending all my time in a game with other players, but running uninspired 'kill 500 rats'-style quests?
I was assuming we'd park it in LEO for easy access, that's the only way I could see it making any noticeable change in the tides. Even then it's a longshot.
Earth's radius is some 6400km, which is one-sixtieth of the Moon's orbital radius. Inverse square law gives us a factor of 3600. So, the Moon's influence will still be some 2000 times greater.
You wouldn't drop an asteroid into LEO anyway. Quite apart from the risk of hitting the planet, and the political difficulties of getting people to feel comfortable with your giant hammer rock over their heads, you lose half the advantage. You want to keep it quite high: no sense dropping it way into Earth's gravity well, where you'd need to pay energy to push material back out again after processing.
Are you seriously considering us picking up something the size of Phobos?
Would even Phobos even make a substantial difference?
Let's suppose we hijack a rock the size of Phobos. We brake it into geostationary orbit, which is some 42,000 km from the centre of the Earth. Phobos masses 1.08E16 kg.
Our existing Moon masses 7.35E22 kg, and orbits at 384,000 km.
So, the Moon is nine times as far away as our hypothetical Phobos, reducing its gravity by the inverse square law by a factor of eighty-one. But the Moon masses SEVEN MILLION TIMES what Phobos does. Tides due to Phobos would be insignificant.
Old intelligence is way better than no intelligence.
Bollocks. Ask Rumsfeld about the fine distinctions of military intelligence - he's got time on his hands now. 'No Intelligence' puts you in the position of an Known Unknown, which you can account for and you can be careful about. 'Old Intelligence' is an Unknown Unknown. You don't know where the opponent's weaknesses are but you THINK YOU DO. That's lethal. Especially when your opponent might know you're using Google Earth, and can then look at the same maps you're using, say 'Ah - he'll think we're weak HERE', and set up a nice trap for you...
Heck, Nintendo has been making multiplayer games decades ago with Mario Bros.
That was fun. Far more so when it was brought into SMB3. Timing your button press right to force a battle on your opponent's turn, stealing his extra-life cards and stealing his go. Happy days...
But how do you avoid the radiation on the way back down? Free fall?
Sure, why not? It worked for Apollo. The expensive part of a spaceflight is liftoff, and that's where a space elevator really helps. Even if you've got to bring along a capsule to come home, you've still saved the costs of a Bloody Huge Rocket to get to orbit in the first place.
Ayn Rand, who was the sole rebel against the single universal (and wrong) human conviction: the idea that morality consists of serving someone or something "greater" than ourselves.
Not the sole such rebel. IIRC, Anton LaVey, founder of the Church of Satan, had similar contempt for such ideas.
It turns out we can't get to India that way. Whew, thank goodness we didn't waste an insanely long and difficult journey just to come back and look stupid in front of Queen Isabella.
Clearly, our Asian election official was aware of the cults within his ancestral homeland which worship the Cthulhu. Recall from The Call of Cthulhu:
"What the police did extract, came mainly from the immensely aged mestizo named Castro, who claimed to have sailed to strange ports and talked with undying leaders of the cult in the mountains of China... There had been aeons when other Things ruled on the earth, and They had had great cities. Remains of Them, he said the deathless Chinamen had told him, were still be found as Cyclopean stones on islands in the Pacific... No book had ever really hinted of it, though the deathless Chinamen said that there were double meanings in the Necronomicon of the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred which the initiated might read as they chose, especially the much-discussed couplet: That is not dead which can eternal lie, And with strange aeons even death may die."
Plainly our man had had some contact with this oriental cult of the appalling ancient Things, and had come - or his family had come - to America fleeing these nightmares. Now he is working at a polling station, and a man comes to him with a ballot, with the dread name of CTHULHU scrawled at the top. Small wonder he reacted as he did!
Uh, if you'll excuse me, I need to go hide my D&D Player's Handbook.
The D&D Player's Handbook is fine. Wholesome old-fashioned fantasy stuff. Just as long as you don't have a copy of that dangerous GURPS Cyberpunk book...
PS1's played audio CD's and PS2's played regular DVDs but hardly anyone used them to do that.
You're kidding, right?
When PS2 came out in.uk, DVD was a pretty new format. Not many people had DVD players - only rich people, movie geeks, and tech early adopters had them. Then the PS2 came out. Suddenly millions of people buy a device to play games, and suddenly find they have a DVD player too. Overnight the DVD shelf space in all the stores expands enormously, and VHS dies off fast.
I'm convinced the PS2 drove DVD to the mainstream in the UK. Everyone I knew played their DVDs on PS2 for at least a year, until DVD players became widespread enough to supplant it.
PS3: Competition from Nintendo: A smaller, cheaper 'family friendly' console with a 'focus on gameplay.' released concurrently with the PS3."
In Europe, Wii is getting released Before Christmas, PS3 is getting released After Christmas, which I'd guess will be hugely important. That said, from what I hear from my contacts in the school playground (which is to say my little sister) the DS Lite is the must-have Christmas gift this year...
My questions are: 1) how thick was the remaining cloud layer, and 2) would it be possible to get a view of Saturn's surface?
Saturn is mostly gas; the planet as a whole is considerably less dense than water. There isn't really any solid surface to speak of; we generally consider the cloud tops to be the surface for all intents and purposes.
Somewhere way, way down there, there may be a solid surface of metallic hydrogen, or possibly crystalline carbon, and perhaps inside that a rocky core somewhat larger than the Earth, but that would be a long way below the layer in which visible storms take place, and at a pressure so great that no foreseeable technology could get a probe down there. Lots left to discover for our descendants, then.
I know damn well that when I've been playing a hell of a lot of GTA, as I walk down the street I see a flashy car parked up and I think 'Right, I'll have that...' and a moment later realise that actually, no, I won't because this is actually real.
That at least is harmless. Even though my reflexes get trained to look out for high-performance cars on the street, with intent to steal, I'm hardly likely to follow through. At most I'll twitch, as the reflex kicks in, and then feel vaguely embarrassed.
What worries me is what effect GTA might have on my driving. Reflexes trained on GTA are a BAD THING to have in a real car, where things can become lethal really, really fast. I've never caught myself having a GTA reaction while driving, but I can well imagine that it might happen. Nearest I've got, though, is finding that I notice roadside features that would make cool jump ramps and stuff:-)
Re:Something I wonder if I will ever understand...
on
Rumsfeld Stepping Down
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· Score: 1
Why do they obey a leader or a country to fight and kill each other, when each knows (whether through logic and reason, or by decree of religion) that killing is wrong?
It was a lie in Horace's day, it was a lie in the First World War, and it's a lie today, perhaps the filthiest lie ever told, but it continues to deceive enough people.
Oh, great. You just know some wingnut wackjob is going to latch onto this nugget of information and try and use it as "evidence" of racial superiority.
I'd love to see them try. "We're racially superior! 'Cos we're part Neanderthal!" Yeah, you look it too...
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Because it's recording to local storage, and not streaming over the 5G mobile network to a remote server.
'Give me the film' won't work when the footage is already on the next continent. Perhaps our best defence against the authorities who mean to monitor us at all times is to do just the same to them...
I always felt that the Akallabeth might work well, perhaps as a TV miniseries: begin with the Elves under Gil-galad on the run from Sauron's armies, and then cut to the fleet of Numenor arriving in Middle-earth, and the capture and imprisonment of Sauron. Then the decline of their civilisation accelerates, Sauron rises to high power like a malignant Joseph in Egypt, the Elendili become marginalised and persecuted. At midpoint the assault on the West and the Downfall. Then the refugees establish the Kingdoms in Exile. We might see the construction of the Argonath, of Minas Anor, of Isengard... and then close on the return of Sauron to power and the formation of the Last Alliance, which brings us to where the movie trilogy began.
Only if they first stripped out all contributions by non-US citizens, which would still be copyright of the author and only legal to distribute under the terms of the GPL. Including Linus. Good luck with that.
That caused so many fights you wouldn't believe it. When your supposed comrade goes off in the opposite direction, jams the scrolling and traps you in a corner with too many monsters...
"Get back over here!"
"No, it's this way - you get over here!"
"I CAN'T! Oh CRAP, you've got me killed now!" * throws punch *
That would be Reinforcements, right? With the new graphics in Worms 2, it never felt quite the same. Less brutality, more comedy.
That said, one thing I like about more recent Worms games is how very different they can be depending on weapons selection. Try playing with unlimited Ninja ropes, unlimited shotgun, martial arts techniques, the baseball bat and nothing else. Tense, tactical manoeuvering, all about the accurate shot. Then try playing with everything switched on unlimited and double power. It becomes limited nuclear war, and victory comes through positioning your worms such that any opponent using a WMD against them will also kill some of his own team. The only defence against a Concrete Donkey is to be either directly above or directly below the enemy's worm.
Interesting example. I played through the original campaign once. Shadows of Undrentide twice. Hordes of the Underdark three times (once with each of the previous three characters).
But you buy NWN for the engine, not the campaign. So I'm playing a computer, but it's running player-written content. I've spent a whole more time in Shadowlords, Dreamcatcher and Demon than in all of the original modules... Is that so much worse than spending all my time in a game with other players, but running uninspired 'kill 500 rats'-style quests?
Earth's radius is some 6400km, which is one-sixtieth of the Moon's orbital radius. Inverse square law gives us a factor of 3600. So, the Moon's influence will still be some 2000 times greater.
You wouldn't drop an asteroid into LEO anyway. Quite apart from the risk of hitting the planet, and the political difficulties of getting people to feel comfortable with your giant hammer rock over their heads, you lose half the advantage. You want to keep it quite high: no sense dropping it way into Earth's gravity well, where you'd need to pay energy to push material back out again after processing.
Would even Phobos even make a substantial difference?
Let's suppose we hijack a rock the size of Phobos. We brake it into geostationary orbit, which is some 42,000 km from the centre of the Earth. Phobos masses 1.08E16 kg.
Our existing Moon masses 7.35E22 kg, and orbits at 384,000 km.
So, the Moon is nine times as far away as our hypothetical Phobos, reducing its gravity by the inverse square law by a factor of eighty-one. But the Moon masses SEVEN MILLION TIMES what Phobos does. Tides due to Phobos would be insignificant.
If I remember correctly, the real action was on Phobos and in Hell, in that order.
Bollocks. Ask Rumsfeld about the fine distinctions of military intelligence - he's got time on his hands now. 'No Intelligence' puts you in the position of an Known Unknown, which you can account for and you can be careful about. 'Old Intelligence' is an Unknown Unknown. You don't know where the opponent's weaknesses are but you THINK YOU DO. That's lethal. Especially when your opponent might know you're using Google Earth, and can then look at the same maps you're using, say 'Ah - he'll think we're weak HERE', and set up a nice trap for you...
I mean, I got the mental image of a bunch of guys in Bombay using Google Earth to protect an online bookstore...
That was fun. Far more so when it was brought into SMB3. Timing your button press right to force a battle on your opponent's turn, stealing his extra-life cards and stealing his go. Happy days...
That's what we said to Canter and Siegel.
Sure, why not? It worked for Apollo. The expensive part of a spaceflight is liftoff, and that's where a space elevator really helps. Even if you've got to bring along a capsule to come home, you've still saved the costs of a Bloody Huge Rocket to get to orbit in the first place.
Not the sole such rebel. IIRC, Anton LaVey, founder of the Church of Satan, had similar contempt for such ideas.
Signed, the Basque Fishing Consortium
What the hell does that have to do with anything?
Not geeky enough, sir!
Clearly, our Asian election official was aware of the cults within his ancestral homeland which worship the Cthulhu. Recall from The Call of Cthulhu:
"What the police did extract, came mainly from the immensely aged mestizo named Castro, who claimed to have sailed to strange ports and talked with undying leaders of the cult in the mountains of China ... There had been aeons when other Things ruled on the earth, and They had had great cities. Remains of Them, he said the deathless Chinamen had told him, were still be found as Cyclopean stones on islands in the Pacific ... No book had ever really hinted of it, though the deathless Chinamen said that there were double meanings in the Necronomicon of the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred which the initiated might read as they chose, especially the much-discussed couplet: That is not dead which can eternal lie, And with strange aeons even death may die."
Plainly our man had had some contact with this oriental cult of the appalling ancient Things, and had come - or his family had come - to America fleeing these nightmares. Now he is working at a polling station, and a man comes to him with a ballot, with the dread name of CTHULHU scrawled at the top. Small wonder he reacted as he did!
Uh, if you'll excuse me, I need to go hide my D&D Player's Handbook. The D&D Player's Handbook is fine. Wholesome old-fashioned fantasy stuff. Just as long as you don't have a copy of that dangerous GURPS Cyberpunk book...
You're kidding, right?
When PS2 came out in .uk, DVD was a pretty new format. Not many people had DVD players - only rich people, movie geeks, and tech early adopters had them. Then the PS2 came out. Suddenly millions of people buy a device to play games, and suddenly find they have a DVD player too. Overnight the DVD shelf space in all the stores expands enormously, and VHS dies off fast.
I'm convinced the PS2 drove DVD to the mainstream in the UK. Everyone I knew played their DVDs on PS2 for at least a year, until DVD players became widespread enough to supplant it.
In Europe, Wii is getting released Before Christmas, PS3 is getting released After Christmas, which I'd guess will be hugely important. That said, from what I hear from my contacts in the school playground (which is to say my little sister) the DS Lite is the must-have Christmas gift this year...
Saturn is mostly gas; the planet as a whole is considerably less dense than water. There isn't really any solid surface to speak of; we generally consider the cloud tops to be the surface for all intents and purposes.
Somewhere way, way down there, there may be a solid surface of metallic hydrogen, or possibly crystalline carbon, and perhaps inside that a rocky core somewhat larger than the Earth, but that would be a long way below the layer in which visible storms take place, and at a pressure so great that no foreseeable technology could get a probe down there. Lots left to discover for our descendants, then.
I know damn well that when I've been playing a hell of a lot of GTA, as I walk down the street I see a flashy car parked up and I think 'Right, I'll have that...' and a moment later realise that actually, no, I won't because this is actually real.
That at least is harmless. Even though my reflexes get trained to look out for high-performance cars on the street, with intent to steal, I'm hardly likely to follow through. At most I'll twitch, as the reflex kicks in, and then feel vaguely embarrassed.
What worries me is what effect GTA might have on my driving. Reflexes trained on GTA are a BAD THING to have in a real car, where things can become lethal really, really fast. I've never caught myself having a GTA reaction while driving, but I can well imagine that it might happen. Nearest I've got, though, is finding that I notice roadside features that would make cool jump ramps and stuff :-)
It was a lie in Horace's day, it was a lie in the First World War, and it's a lie today, perhaps the filthiest lie ever told, but it continues to deceive enough people.
Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori.
I'd love to see them try. "We're racially superior! 'Cos we're part Neanderthal!" Yeah, you look it too...
"See you space Indian..."