Supreme Commander was stable and polished out of the box, it had a couple of balance issues and bugs like anything, but was generally fairly good.
The Supreme Commander updates have been frequent, useful and quick to download and install. If it's anything like Total Annihilation the patches will keep on coming for years and will include new content as well as fixes.
Honestly, I don't find starting into an updater that annoying, but for what it's worth, Supreme Commander goes straight into the main menu. Does it even come with an updater? I've always downloaded my patches from my ISP's mirror. You don't even have to use their shitty GPGnet thing either.
I've played Supcom with a PC at the bottom of the specs and it worked fine on small levels and was still playable on big ones. It's required specs may be high, but then again so are the specs recommended on the box.
SupCom installed SecureRom at launch but removed it in v3223. They broke their own rule, but seem to have learned their lesson. Lets wait until they next release a full game to see if they are genuine in this.
SupCom is out on Steam which allows it to be downloaded in full.
I don't know if Gas Powered Games or THQ think I'm a criminal. A lot of people think I might be because of the way I dress.
SupCom can be played single player without an internet connection.
SupCom can be played without a DVD.
So that's eight passes, one unknown and one late resubmission. They are doing comparatively well.
Parents lose big when a company downsizes or restructures their benefits. This is an indirect form of age discrimination because older folks are more likely to have families.
If you're an older employee but have kids young enough for this service, it means that you've had plenty of time to get your capital together without kids, if not its your own fault. Companies usually pay more experienced employees more, even if they aren't any more productive than the newer ones. This is direct age discrimination since young people couldn't possibly have got the experience since they weren't born back then. I have a 22 year old friend with two kids because he had them young enough to be a proper father rather than being frail and tired by the time they reach their teens. He makes a fraction of what guys twice his age make and has no savings to back him up.
But getting back to the point, sure Google senior management are morons who can't manage a child care centre, but what does that matter? Employees don't have to send their child there and most often can't send their child there anyway because of limited places. There are other child care facilities, there is the option of one parent staying at home or both parents working a part week (depending on employer) or the employee can simply endure the price until the child is school aged, they can even leave Google like some sensibly have.
As for benefit restructuring, it doesn't sound malicious, after all, the employer is only hiring one member of the family. It would be nice if they encouraged their employers to have families by supporting them, especially the ones on smaller salaries and less savings, but its their choice. If you are concerned with health and dental coverage, apply for residency in a country that subsides it for their citizens, even the ones without comfortable middle class jobs with benefits. The tax isn't all that much higher and I think the atmosphere is better.
The Nazis had a van with a mobile gas chamber known as "Kaiser's Kaffeegeschäft" (Kaiser's Coffee shop) which was used for killing mentally disabled people, one step creepier IMHO.
As for the post-rapture chopping mobile, I don't remember that from the book of Revelation. What I remember is mostly stuff like locust with human heads and scorpion tails. The decapitation machine I always was afraid of was a vehicle from an illustration in The Lorax by Dr Seuss with ten arms, each holding an axe. Designed for logging and environmental destruction but easily employed for mass executions, it scared the living hell out of me.
Ummm, that's not a rebuttal. You're simply restating his point.
Not really, the "use the right tool for the job" argument sadly has come to mean "my platform is the right tool for the job". Thus by reiterating the point the post is actually contradicting the parent.
This is why if the RCMP find some dude cutting some random guy's head off with a knife they enter into a five hour standoff rather than just shooting the sick bastard and moving on. Look, I'm all for police accountability, but if you've got some dude holding a head, 40 people who see him did it and have given him an opportunity to come peacefully without the threat of a death penalty and you don't shoot the guy then you are a bunch of pussies.
In ordinary English, a hacker is somebody who hacks into a computer system.
Which is precisely what they are doing here. Does this stupid definitional debate have to follow the exact same path every time regardless of what the actual article is about each time? The point is THEY ARE BREAKING INTO COMPUTER SYSTEMS! They are hackers in all senses of the word from the definitions of those with a glider tattoo and an ESR poster to that of a tabloid sensationalist. They ARE hackers, nomatter what hackers means to you. The only difference is that they are doing it within the constraints of the law, but you can't say that a locksmith doesn't break into houses, surgeons don't cut people with knives and the military doesn't kill people simply because they are allowed to do it.
Yes, the Battlefield series skipped 2140 version numbers between the third and fourth instalments after going backwards 1940 versions between the first and third (the second wasn't numbered).
GoW (God, not Gears....I'm actually talking about GOOD games here).
Gears of war is not only a Third Person Action Game but is a good one also. Its control scheme is a fresh new take on gun combat games that feels different to anything before it. Why else do you think that every man and his dog has copied its combat control, sometimes well (Uncharted: Drake's Fortune) sometimes mediocre (Army of Two) and sometimes poorly (GTA4). Multiplayer, especially coop is extremely well executed, the single player campaign is interesting despite having a lot of similar stuff the whole way through it managed to present some very fresh challenges. If you like gritty shooters then it is definitely one of the biggest releases this decade.
The biggest issue it has is being published by Microsoft, which, departing from Epic's normal multi-platform releases was restricted to XBox for the first year and then windows a year after that, with a fairly mediocre port (with XBox buttons still in the interface) and using some windows XBox live Arcade port for multiplayer that never seems to work properly. See, that's the thing about Microsoft, they must have realised that I wasn't thinking enough about them to hate them at that point in time so they sold me some more software to renew my disdain.
However, that involves changing the code of a function (inlining it), and creating a new version for that call
Yep, that's what inlining is about, you compile a specialised version of a function as a part of its caller so that the optimising logic can see it as a single context and make speed gains across what formerly would be the boundaries between the functions. It generally wastes a little bit of memory but often gains some valuable efficiency in respect to execution time.
Avoiding a jump is something many people try to do. It helps keep the code you will be using in the cache.
CPUs these days tend to dump whole pages of memory into cache at a time since memory transfer much faster than lookup, if these multiple inlined functions were adjacently placed into the bytecode (as a switch for example), they would have to be extremely big to neutralise the caching gains.
And lastly, variables passed to functions are always declared on the stack.
The whole idea of inlining is so you can run the callee and the caller together through the compiler in a single pass, it won't have to push the arguments because it will know there and then exactly how they are coming out. If you have a fallback function that bounces off the vtable, you push the arguments on the stack then.
The male platypus actually has venomous spurs on the back of its hind legs, it hasn't been known to kill humans but can cause local paralysis and greater amounts of pain than the bites of many venomous snakes. There are pretty much no other example of anything like what the male platypus has, the sexual dimorphism of the trait, the fact that it's a spine like a poisonous fish not a tooth like all other venomous terrestrial creatures and of course the fact that it is a mammal (or close to it) of which there are very few examples of venom production(more info here) all make it unique.
The issue with them is that when people are lucky enough to find one (they are surprisingly common but also very secretive) they generally won't associate them with venom, even if they were taught about it before. They look comical and harmless so they handle them and get stung which I guess is fair enough. Ironically, a wild echidna (a spiky monotreme) is quite safe to touch (you still shouldn't do it, though I admit that I once couldn't resist the temptation during a trip through Tasmania).
For this you need a very particular dam. You can't use a run-of-river dam because they don't store water, you need also one who's lake bed is much higher than the turbines so that the dam still has head pressure when its empty which pretty much rules out any dam that was designed for irrigation. You need a decent sized lake at the level that the power turbines discharge to which is fairly rare since collecting water underneath would lessen the head difference. Most dams like this are being used for power storage already and the current grids are relatively stable; to build enough hydro systems to balance out wind where one could easily expect that national generation might drop to 30% of its designed output or less for extended periods of time one would need to build a lot more dams which of course smack around the environment in a way that would make a Captain Planet villain weep.
You also have to figure in the transmission losses to and from the dam, the inefficiency of the pump, the turbine, motor and the dynamo there will need to be several times as much power going into this system as coming out. Of course that does not mean wind couldn't be used to make this power, simply that you will need several times as many generators as its proponents claim, which would have a massive impact on the world as they and their associated transmission lines are installed.
Exactly, a town (or a grid) doesn't need energy it needs power. It doesn't matter how many Gigawatt hours something produces it is how many watts it produces when they are needed. A grid needs a certain current and if it doesn't get it things go wrong. It doesn't matter how much energy you harvest over the fiscal year, what matters is if your generation is keeping up with your consumption in a moment to moment basis. It takes hours to shut down a coal furnace and months to shut down a nuclear reactor so until meteorology comes far enough, these things will have to keep running whenever there is supposed to be load lest the grid brown out whenever the wind calms down. Currently, when these things spin, all that happens is the load on a turbine in some power plant reduces and its energy is dissipated in a cooling tower instead. If you want something that can pick up the slack for these things, you'll have to go oil, gas or hydro. This requires burning something rare, expensive and environmentally nasty or flooding a valley somewhere which is far worse than what we're doing now with coal and nuclear.
Re:I learned, you learned, he learned?
on
Second Person
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My favourite:
That's one of those irregular verbs, isn't it? I give confidential security briefings. You leak. He has been charged under section 2a of the Official Secrets Act.
For all of our American friends, those are quotes from Yes Minister, a popular British political comedy from the '80s, here's another one:
It's one of those irregularly declining words. I have an independent mind, you are an eccentric, he's round the twist.
There is a huge difference between not telling the truth and lying. Not telling the truth is declining to comment to keep a secret without being deceptive, in most countries that is always an individual's right outside of court and even inside court when you're the one on trial, a company also doesn't have that right when dealing with shareholders and certain commissions, but that's a different matter. Lying is saying something that you know to be false which is a completely distinct matter.
Now there are plenty of people out there who condone this in some circumstances, but it is my belief that if someone shows you enough respect to take your word at face value, then you owe it to them to allow them to make their decisions with the right facts nomatter the consequences. If Microsoft was to change the subject, or take another path in deception, like continuing to sling mud at Blueray that would just be sly because they had never given their word. But when you ask someone to trust you by making a public statement then say the opposite of what you know to be true, then it is nothing short of betrayal.
The 360 owners wouldn't be disadvantaged, it doesn't affect them if other people do or don't buy XBoxes. As for the MS shareholders, they own part of what Microsoft is really worth, not what it can be built up to through deception, if they can be better served through a lie who cares? That same lie is depriving shareholders of Blueray affiliated companys the value that their stock should have. As a whole, the world is almost always better served by truth.
The developers should never impose their belief on how a user should use the software.
It's not that simple, the developers shouldn't support functionality that they don't believe adds value to the software. Of course whether users want to keep using the software after its had the features they like taken out is a different matter entirely.
Not all user actions are good, some can make it more difficult for the user in the long term. If is not the software's responsibility to prevent the user from acting in an insecure, inefficient or disorganised manner, but simply to make doing things the right way easier. At the end of the day, all that matters is the user CAN do things how they want to (in this case dumping files to an un-organised directory) rather than encouraging the user to do so (by mapping a directory to the desktop).
After all, the desktop directory thing was a KDE decision to begin with, there is nothing in the system's hardware architecture that implies a desktop directory, nor is it part of Linux or any layer underneath KDE. Most Linux desktop managers don't do it that way and historically many other systems haven't either, Windows 3.1 used it as a task manager which seemed an appropriate enough use for it and I believe NeXTStep did it like that too. If KDE want to change what the desktop represents from a directory to something else, I say go for it.
Civ4 requires one to expand and progress fairly efficiently lest one be quickly wiped out by barbarians or opponents. Sure, there is room to try something different each time but generally, one must be far more concerned with doing the right things rather than doing new things or one will not have the time, safety or resources to play around.
The Elder Scrolls allows as much time as the player wants for screwing about but does not provide enough avenues for entertaining oneself without doing a fixed mission of some sort (at least in Oblivion and Morrowind, the ones I have played). Sure, you can just focus on side quests (of which there are a whole lot) but this is just a forking track, not actual free form content. You can focus on exploration, level advancement, dungeon raiding or inventory improvement but I never felt much challenge, excitement or thrill of doing much apart from the missions, the combat and movement are both too slow paced and rigid to stand up on their own without the missions keeping everything moving.
GTA is different, if you don't want to do a mission of any sort you can just ride around the city as dangerously as possible, or do insane stunts and try to survive them, or get into dangerous (6 star) situations with the local constabulary and try to evade them. The exploration is better since they provide incentives to find various things and hide them very creatively. San Andreas was the king of diversions since it had large amounts of races in every city, riding, driving, flying and boat schools, bicycle races on the mountain, a bmx track, truck driving missions, a shooting range, the triathlon, dating, the regular vehicle missions, dancing (in a car and out), valet parking, video games and a bunch of other stuff. You could also find the Graffiti in Los Santos, photo opportunities is San Fierro, horseshoes in Los Venturas and oysters all over the state if you want to explore. It even keeps track of your best stunts, police chases and stuff for you so you can go for increasing your high scores in any number of things without even doing a mission. If it wasn't for its awful graphics and painful "Yo down fo representin' da hood?" "Yeh dog, I always down mofo!" "Lets be rollin'!" business at the beginning it would be the greatest game ever made.
Homes collapsed under the weight of hornets' nests that died and hardened from the DDT
That's not logical in the slightest, hardened hornet's nests should dry out and get lighter, not heavier. Even if DDT somehow manage to double the weight of a hornet nest, if a house had almost enough hornets nests to collapse the roof by weight, the house would be uninhabitable anyway.
The houses really collapsed because DDT killed the parasitic wasps that kept certain thatch eating caterpillars under control. I read about that here.
while larger animals such as cats ended up with toxic levels of DDT from consumption of smaller creatures
Firstly, I find it unlikely that the rat population was controlled by domestic housepets, these "cats" do not refer to an indigenous species in the island but Felis Catus which were kept in houses. Secondly DDT isn't like mercury, it doesn't just accumulate in a predator's body and work its way up the food chain, it leaves the body. DDT just isn't all that toxic to mammals, it would take a hell of a lot to kill a cat. Sure, longterm exposure to DDT has effects, like an increase in cancer but nothing that could cause the local extinction of a whole cat population. Anyway, if DDT were killing the cat population, why not other species that eat small lizards and bugs, like rats for example? Finally, DDT stays around in the environment for a long time (one of its main controversial traits) why would these new cats simply not die?
Ecosystems are complex things and killing all the insects is such a huge thing that it's going to have some complex repercussions. Luckily Silent Spring came out a couple of years later and since it is now commonly accepted that DDT kills absolutely everything, they can just pin it on nasty DDT killing the cute fluffy kittens (because it's evil) and be done with it.
DVD looked good on virtually any TV (even older legacy sets), wheras Blu-ray players will (for most people) require the purchase of a new, potentially very expensive, HDTV.
Blueray looks fine on old 60cm CRT PAL TVs (I've tried it). Sure, the resolution isn't upped at all, but you still get nice things like Java interactive menus, online stuff (if your into all that of course) and more content on a single disc. It certainly looks no worse than DVD, more or less the same.
The two Blueray movies I have watched look absolutely stunning plugged into a $300 22" Samsung SyncMaster 226bw. Of course you'd need a real HD TV to watch it with more than 2 friends, but the idea that you can't enjoy 1080p (or 1050 pixels of that in the case of the SyncMaster) without spending $2k is simply ignorant. My cheap monitor on the other side of the loungeroom still looks appreciably nicer than a SD set of the same size sitting there and can be pulled up close when I'm watching movies alone or in a small group. At 30 degrees of ones field of vision DVDs start showing their problems, especially on hard edges.
Honestly, to me none of that matters because the reason I don't buy Bluerays is that I can only watch them on my PS3, I can't watch it on my Linux based PC or rip it onto my iPod Touch which are two ways I like to watch DVD. If the encryption is cracked I'll actually start buying large amounts of them right away.
Go to an entertainment district of a major city on a Summer Friday night, and you will find as many if not more cars in it that in the day.
Summer (1/4 of the year) * Friday (1/7 of the week) * night (1/2 of the day) = 1/56th of the year. Multiply that to the size of an entertainment district, which despite being called an "entertainment quarter" usually makes up a tiny fraction of a sprawling metropolis of dormitory suburbs and industrial areas. If this made up 1/3rd of all road use, I'd be very surprised.
Slashdot Mirror
So that's eight passes, one unknown and one late resubmission. They are doing comparatively well.
If you're an older employee but have kids young enough for this service, it means that you've had plenty of time to get your capital together without kids, if not its your own fault. Companies usually pay more experienced employees more, even if they aren't any more productive than the newer ones. This is direct age discrimination since young people couldn't possibly have got the experience since they weren't born back then. I have a 22 year old friend with two kids because he had them young enough to be a proper father rather than being frail and tired by the time they reach their teens. He makes a fraction of what guys twice his age make and has no savings to back him up.
But getting back to the point, sure Google senior management are morons who can't manage a child care centre, but what does that matter? Employees don't have to send their child there and most often can't send their child there anyway because of limited places. There are other child care facilities, there is the option of one parent staying at home or both parents working a part week (depending on employer) or the employee can simply endure the price until the child is school aged, they can even leave Google like some sensibly have.
As for benefit restructuring, it doesn't sound malicious, after all, the employer is only hiring one member of the family. It would be nice if they encouraged their employers to have families by supporting them, especially the ones on smaller salaries and less savings, but its their choice. If you are concerned with health and dental coverage, apply for residency in a country that subsides it for their citizens, even the ones without comfortable middle class jobs with benefits. The tax isn't all that much higher and I think the atmosphere is better.
The Nazis had a van with a mobile gas chamber known as "Kaiser's Kaffeegeschäft" (Kaiser's Coffee shop) which was used for killing mentally disabled people, one step creepier IMHO.
As for the post-rapture chopping mobile, I don't remember that from the book of Revelation. What I remember is mostly stuff like locust with human heads and scorpion tails. The decapitation machine I always was afraid of was a vehicle from an illustration in The Lorax by Dr Seuss with ten arms, each holding an axe. Designed for logging and environmental destruction but easily employed for mass executions, it scared the living hell out of me.
Not really, the "use the right tool for the job" argument sadly has come to mean "my platform is the right tool for the job". Thus by reiterating the point the post is actually contradicting the parent.
Like this? It was only a few weeks ago, I thought everyone would know what I was talking about. How often do people get decapitated in Canada anyway?
This is why if the RCMP find some dude cutting some random guy's head off with a knife they enter into a five hour standoff rather than just shooting the sick bastard and moving on. Look, I'm all for police accountability, but if you've got some dude holding a head, 40 people who see him did it and have given him an opportunity to come peacefully without the threat of a death penalty and you don't shoot the guy then you are a bunch of pussies.
I believe UK police are not armed for the vast majority of their duties.
Which is precisely what they are doing here. Does this stupid definitional debate have to follow the exact same path every time regardless of what the actual article is about each time? The point is THEY ARE BREAKING INTO COMPUTER SYSTEMS! They are hackers in all senses of the word from the definitions of those with a glider tattoo and an ESR poster to that of a tabloid sensationalist. They ARE hackers, nomatter what hackers means to you. The only difference is that they are doing it within the constraints of the law, but you can't say that a locksmith doesn't break into houses, surgeons don't cut people with knives and the military doesn't kill people simply because they are allowed to do it.
Because it will probably rise against the WRONG tyrant.
Yes, the Battlefield series skipped 2140 version numbers between the third and fourth instalments after going backwards 1940 versions between the first and third (the second wasn't numbered).
Gears of war is not only a Third Person Action Game but is a good one also. Its control scheme is a fresh new take on gun combat games that feels different to anything before it. Why else do you think that every man and his dog has copied its combat control, sometimes well (Uncharted: Drake's Fortune) sometimes mediocre (Army of Two) and sometimes poorly (GTA4). Multiplayer, especially coop is extremely well executed, the single player campaign is interesting despite having a lot of similar stuff the whole way through it managed to present some very fresh challenges. If you like gritty shooters then it is definitely one of the biggest releases this decade.
The biggest issue it has is being published by Microsoft, which, departing from Epic's normal multi-platform releases was restricted to XBox for the first year and then windows a year after that, with a fairly mediocre port (with XBox buttons still in the interface) and using some windows XBox live Arcade port for multiplayer that never seems to work properly. See, that's the thing about Microsoft, they must have realised that I wasn't thinking enough about them to hate them at that point in time so they sold me some more software to renew my disdain.
The male platypus actually has venomous spurs on the back of its hind legs, it hasn't been known to kill humans but can cause local paralysis and greater amounts of pain than the bites of many venomous snakes. There are pretty much no other example of anything like what the male platypus has, the sexual dimorphism of the trait, the fact that it's a spine like a poisonous fish not a tooth like all other venomous terrestrial creatures and of course the fact that it is a mammal (or close to it) of which there are very few examples of venom production(more info here) all make it unique.
The issue with them is that when people are lucky enough to find one (they are surprisingly common but also very secretive) they generally won't associate them with venom, even if they were taught about it before. They look comical and harmless so they handle them and get stung which I guess is fair enough. Ironically, a wild echidna (a spiky monotreme) is quite safe to touch (you still shouldn't do it, though I admit that I once couldn't resist the temptation during a trip through Tasmania).
For this you need a very particular dam. You can't use a run-of-river dam because they don't store water, you need also one who's lake bed is much higher than the turbines so that the dam still has head pressure when its empty which pretty much rules out any dam that was designed for irrigation. You need a decent sized lake at the level that the power turbines discharge to which is fairly rare since collecting water underneath would lessen the head difference. Most dams like this are being used for power storage already and the current grids are relatively stable; to build enough hydro systems to balance out wind where one could easily expect that national generation might drop to 30% of its designed output or less for extended periods of time one would need to build a lot more dams which of course smack around the environment in a way that would make a Captain Planet villain weep.
You also have to figure in the transmission losses to and from the dam, the inefficiency of the pump, the turbine, motor and the dynamo there will need to be several times as much power going into this system as coming out. Of course that does not mean wind couldn't be used to make this power, simply that you will need several times as many generators as its proponents claim, which would have a massive impact on the world as they and their associated transmission lines are installed.
Exactly, a town (or a grid) doesn't need energy it needs power. It doesn't matter how many Gigawatt hours something produces it is how many watts it produces when they are needed. A grid needs a certain current and if it doesn't get it things go wrong. It doesn't matter how much energy you harvest over the fiscal year, what matters is if your generation is keeping up with your consumption in a moment to moment basis. It takes hours to shut down a coal furnace and months to shut down a nuclear reactor so until meteorology comes far enough, these things will have to keep running whenever there is supposed to be load lest the grid brown out whenever the wind calms down. Currently, when these things spin, all that happens is the load on a turbine in some power plant reduces and its energy is dissipated in a cooling tower instead. If you want something that can pick up the slack for these things, you'll have to go oil, gas or hydro. This requires burning something rare, expensive and environmentally nasty or flooding a valley somewhere which is far worse than what we're doing now with coal and nuclear.
Those are both from the Torah, a piece of Jewish literature which Strauss Zelnick (if he's really a member of the Hitlerjugend) would oppose.
There is a huge difference between not telling the truth and lying. Not telling the truth is declining to comment to keep a secret without being deceptive, in most countries that is always an individual's right outside of court and even inside court when you're the one on trial, a company also doesn't have that right when dealing with shareholders and certain commissions, but that's a different matter. Lying is saying something that you know to be false which is a completely distinct matter.
Now there are plenty of people out there who condone this in some circumstances, but it is my belief that if someone shows you enough respect to take your word at face value, then you owe it to them to allow them to make their decisions with the right facts nomatter the consequences. If Microsoft was to change the subject, or take another path in deception, like continuing to sling mud at Blueray that would just be sly because they had never given their word. But when you ask someone to trust you by making a public statement then say the opposite of what you know to be true, then it is nothing short of betrayal.
The 360 owners wouldn't be disadvantaged, it doesn't affect them if other people do or don't buy XBoxes. As for the MS shareholders, they own part of what Microsoft is really worth, not what it can be built up to through deception, if they can be better served through a lie who cares? That same lie is depriving shareholders of Blueray affiliated companys the value that their stock should have. As a whole, the world is almost always better served by truth.
It's not that simple, the developers shouldn't support functionality that they don't believe adds value to the software. Of course whether users want to keep using the software after its had the features they like taken out is a different matter entirely.
Not all user actions are good, some can make it more difficult for the user in the long term. If is not the software's responsibility to prevent the user from acting in an insecure, inefficient or disorganised manner, but simply to make doing things the right way easier. At the end of the day, all that matters is the user CAN do things how they want to (in this case dumping files to an un-organised directory) rather than encouraging the user to do so (by mapping a directory to the desktop).
After all, the desktop directory thing was a KDE decision to begin with, there is nothing in the system's hardware architecture that implies a desktop directory, nor is it part of Linux or any layer underneath KDE. Most Linux desktop managers don't do it that way and historically many other systems haven't either, Windows 3.1 used it as a task manager which seemed an appropriate enough use for it and I believe NeXTStep did it like that too. If KDE want to change what the desktop represents from a directory to something else, I say go for it.
Civ4 requires one to expand and progress fairly efficiently lest one be quickly wiped out by barbarians or opponents. Sure, there is room to try something different each time but generally, one must be far more concerned with doing the right things rather than doing new things or one will not have the time, safety or resources to play around.
The Elder Scrolls allows as much time as the player wants for screwing about but does not provide enough avenues for entertaining oneself without doing a fixed mission of some sort (at least in Oblivion and Morrowind, the ones I have played). Sure, you can just focus on side quests (of which there are a whole lot) but this is just a forking track, not actual free form content. You can focus on exploration, level advancement, dungeon raiding or inventory improvement but I never felt much challenge, excitement or thrill of doing much apart from the missions, the combat and movement are both too slow paced and rigid to stand up on their own without the missions keeping everything moving.
GTA is different, if you don't want to do a mission of any sort you can just ride around the city as dangerously as possible, or do insane stunts and try to survive them, or get into dangerous (6 star) situations with the local constabulary and try to evade them. The exploration is better since they provide incentives to find various things and hide them very creatively. San Andreas was the king of diversions since it had large amounts of races in every city, riding, driving, flying and boat schools, bicycle races on the mountain, a bmx track, truck driving missions, a shooting range, the triathlon, dating, the regular vehicle missions, dancing (in a car and out), valet parking, video games and a bunch of other stuff. You could also find the Graffiti in Los Santos, photo opportunities is San Fierro, horseshoes in Los Venturas and oysters all over the state if you want to explore. It even keeps track of your best stunts, police chases and stuff for you so you can go for increasing your high scores in any number of things without even doing a mission. If it wasn't for its awful graphics and painful "Yo down fo representin' da hood?" "Yeh dog, I always down mofo!" "Lets be rollin'!" business at the beginning it would be the greatest game ever made.
Fact: anyone who prefaces a statement with "Fact:" sounds like an arrogant jerk, even if they are right.
Any argument is implicitly presented as a truth, stating that it is fact is redundant.
That's not logical in the slightest, hardened hornet's nests should dry out and get lighter, not heavier. Even if DDT somehow manage to double the weight of a hornet nest, if a house had almost enough hornets nests to collapse the roof by weight, the house would be uninhabitable anyway.
The houses really collapsed because DDT killed the parasitic wasps that kept certain thatch eating caterpillars under control. I read about that here.
Firstly, I find it unlikely that the rat population was controlled by domestic housepets, these "cats" do not refer to an indigenous species in the island but Felis Catus which were kept in houses. Secondly DDT isn't like mercury, it doesn't just accumulate in a predator's body and work its way up the food chain, it leaves the body. DDT just isn't all that toxic to mammals, it would take a hell of a lot to kill a cat. Sure, longterm exposure to DDT has effects, like an increase in cancer but nothing that could cause the local extinction of a whole cat population. Anyway, if DDT were killing the cat population, why not other species that eat small lizards and bugs, like rats for example? Finally, DDT stays around in the environment for a long time (one of its main controversial traits) why would these new cats simply not die?
Ecosystems are complex things and killing all the insects is such a huge thing that it's going to have some complex repercussions. Luckily Silent Spring came out a couple of years later and since it is now commonly accepted that DDT kills absolutely everything, they can just pin it on nasty DDT killing the cute fluffy kittens (because it's evil) and be done with it.
Blueray looks fine on old 60cm CRT PAL TVs (I've tried it). Sure, the resolution isn't upped at all, but you still get nice things like Java interactive menus, online stuff (if your into all that of course) and more content on a single disc. It certainly looks no worse than DVD, more or less the same.
The two Blueray movies I have watched look absolutely stunning plugged into a $300 22" Samsung SyncMaster 226bw. Of course you'd need a real HD TV to watch it with more than 2 friends, but the idea that you can't enjoy 1080p (or 1050 pixels of that in the case of the SyncMaster) without spending $2k is simply ignorant. My cheap monitor on the other side of the loungeroom still looks appreciably nicer than a SD set of the same size sitting there and can be pulled up close when I'm watching movies alone or in a small group. At 30 degrees of ones field of vision DVDs start showing their problems, especially on hard edges.
Honestly, to me none of that matters because the reason I don't buy Bluerays is that I can only watch them on my PS3, I can't watch it on my Linux based PC or rip it onto my iPod Touch which are two ways I like to watch DVD. If the encryption is cracked I'll actually start buying large amounts of them right away.