It's creepy, weird and under the ocean, so I've gotta give 2K some props for the concept. Those Big Daddies are horrifying tankers, loved'em to bits!
Indeed. The first time I had a Big Daddy come after me, something happened that I had never before experienced by playing a mere computer game: I ran and hid (in the game) not to avoid the annoyance of having my character get killed and having to respawn or reload, but just out of simple raw terror.
I also found it pretty difficult to "game" the AI. You know how you can exploit the computer's tendency to do dumb things so you can wipe out your enemies effortlessly? I didn't find many weaknesses in this game's AI. About the best I could do was set them on fire from afar and then hide until the fire went out, then repeat or do a normal frontal assault after they were weakened enough. Any other cheap tactics were pretty much intended by the game designers, like zap'n'whack or hacking security systems. And the Big Daddy AI was pretty tenacious; even if you ran through multiple doors, no matter where you tried to hide, they would pursue you relentlessly. This actually worked to your advantage if you set traps for them, but otherwise made them pretty tough to beat without lots of med kits and big weapons.
I should also mention that I appreciated the fact that the beginning weapon, the pipe wrench, remained a viable weapon (with upgrades) right up to the final boss.
Exploring was fun too. If you went through each level completing only the necessary objectives, you'd miss about half of the map. Lots of hidey holes with powerups, and many of them nonobvious. I liked the subtlety -- it was refreshing not to have the game designers hit me over the head to show off everything they did, instead I had to go looking.
Aside from the DRM, it's hard to point out where Bioshock went wrong. Yes, the supposed "choices" (rescue or harvest the Little Sisters) were somewhat limited, but the other complexities like gathering scrap for the U-Invent, the variety of widely disparate Plasmids, and the variety of methods for dispatching enemies (brute force, hacking, or sneaky tactics) still made it interesting.
you can have Troi, I'll be hangin' with 7 thankyouverymuch
Let's think about this. On one hand, you could have a woman who will assimilate you into her collective -- resistance is futile -- and on the other hand, you could have a woman who knows exactly what you want.
I'll stick with Troi, thanks.
Oh, man. I just went online and debated the relative merits of Trek women. I'm not sure if I should be proud, or ashamed.
Over the past eight years or so, I've occasionally ranted, and heard other people rant, about how I/we were just one more liberties-reduction away from moving to Canada, Europe, Antarctica, etc. But we generally just grumble for a while and then get used to the new "normal".
Mainly it's the lack of anyplace better that's holding me here. I've yet to find a place that combines the equivalent of 1st, 2nd, 4th, and 5th amendment rights in sufficient quantities.
If you know of any libertarian paradises though, please let me know.
Why do I have the feeling that all this will do is block many websites and services that have nothing to do with child pornography, inconveniencing thousands of innocent web users, while the paedophiles find new ways to trade child porn and are barely inconvenienced?
Now you know exactly how all those law-abiding gun-owning citizens feel about gun control.
I have two problems with this recommendation. First, the later Xanth novels (after Piers stopped starving and became rich), suck. Second, Piers is a dirty old man with a preoccupation with underage sex. A young kid, enjoying the Xanth stuff, might then read some of his other stuff and get a pretty screwed up idea of sex.
it's a good thing if my neighbor is discouraged from eating up 99% of the bandwidth with hundreds of simultaneous connections while I'm trying to work over ssh
Let him. Just make sure the router and switches prioritize traffic per-user, based on the number of packets they've sent/received in the last hour or 24 hours. You'll neither notice nor care if that other 99% is totally utilized or not used at all because your trickle of SSH packets will always zip to the front of the queue ahead of of your neighbor's torrents.
If you boot them off a floppy you can use all 4 IDE slots for drives and just round robin them until they are all complete.
Wouldn't it make more sense to do them in parallel? DOS probably couldn't do it (unless you wrote the app yourself) but perhaps you could PXE network boot to a small Linux shell (or waste one IDE slot on a Linux install/LiveCD), then fire off
But I fail to see who a properly administered and funded program can be outstripped by bakes sales at Our Lady of Perpetual Motion.
But that's just it. Our government can't properly administrate a welfare system. Our messed-up political (non)process pretty much guarantees failure.
The whole argument for supplanting a welfare system with a series of charities (religious or otherwise) is bogus because of one of the points you made. Specifically, the latter model can't scale to meet demand.
Welfare "demand" is artificially inflated anyway... heavily. If gov't welfare dried up tomorrow, you'd see millions of people hitting the job market -- those who are capable of working, but are too lazy to do so as long as they can sit on their butt and take free money from the government. The fraction remaining -- those who really do need the help -- are going to be few in numbers.
No, his failure to address the AIDS crisis didn't give people the information that they needed to know that they were at risk. AIDS exploded because there was no campaign in effect that told people how they could protect themselves.
Yeah, because people are far too stupid to realize that they can get diseases from having unprotected sex or sharing needles. Never would have figured that out on my own.
I respectfully disagree on one of those. All of those films sucked except for the first Resident Evil movie. I haven't played the game, so maybe the movie wasn't faithful, but it was still awesome.
If you take every accident, suicide, and domestic shooting and then compare them to the number of times that having a gun has prevented a death and or injury
Ok, let's do that. There are an estimated 830 thousand to 2.5 million defensive gun uses per year. Are you saying there are more than 830 thousand gun-related murders and accidents per year? Because the CDC puts that number closer to 30 or 40 thousand. If my math is right, that makes guns at least 20 times more likely to be used to defend life from the bad guys than to take it from the good guys.
Back to your original point,
Gun owners are far more likely to die from a gun shot than none gun owners. That is a statistical fact.
Sure, criminal gun owners are more likely to go down in a gunfight. However, law-abiding gun owners are less likely. The statistics do not differentiate between the two types of gun owners, which misses an important distinction.
Gun owners are far more likely to die from a gun shot than none gun owners. That is a statistical fact.
I'll call you on that. Cite please. Please restrict your numbers to law-abiding citizens defending themselves from violent attackers (i.e., exclude the druggies and gang bangers shooting each other) and I think you'll find that your intended argument doesn't hold water.
Additional CPUs shouldn't help latency all that much as long as the Operating System is multitasking properly.
What OSes are missing is pre-emptive multitasking -- for disk I/O. All I have to do is fire up one disk-intensive task (like, say, VMWare) and my 3GHz machine turns into a 386. Seriously, it can take 20-30 seconds to switch from Outlook to Firefox with 2% CPU and 50% memory utilization while VMWare hammers away shadowing the VM's RAM to disk.
OS programmers: please, please give the currently selected app priority for all disk I/O.
Just pointing out that car headlights can be much more effective that what we have in the States.
Anyway, I don't like streetlights because the glare hurts your night vision. I think it's safer to have good lights on the car that don't shine into your eyes.
I came across a large, black dog, midway between two streetlights. I swerved across the road, onto the shoulder, and narrowly missed a mailbox and a tree.
Always brake, never swerve to avoid a small animal such as a rabbit, cat, or dog. Better for the animal to die than to risk injury to a human on the sidewalk or the ones in the car.
I do feel that reflectors are ridiculously overpriced so I decided to make my own using PVC cut lengthwise and painted with fake chrome.
Actually somebody did some tests with a light meter, and found that white painted reflectors actually outperformed shiny silver ones, unless the silver one was faceted to (nearly) eliminate restrike.
The other major problem is just as you mentioned, I have never seen them in the correct temperature range.
I have seen "daylight" bulbs in stores that are noticeably bluish (6500K?), but yeah, true actinic ones are rare to nonexistent. Still, you can still save money by installing a bunch of screw-ins in combination with some actinic PCs.
What's to prevent malicious or mischievous people from going around to every crowded public venue in a city and inciting panic?
Again, there's no such thing as inciting panic. Whose fault is it when someone panics? The person panicking. You are in no way, shape, or form required to react a certain way (panic) when I say or do something (yell fire). Grow up and take some responsibility for your actions, you do have the ability to control yourself.
If it were legal to falsely claim there's a fire in a crowded building, why couldn't you also falsely report a kidnapping?
It's one thing to yell something in public and something else entirely to request services from public servants. I.e., yelling fire and calling the fire dept are two different things because people in the building hearing you yell can assess the fire danger for themselves and choose how to react, whereas the fire dept has an obligation to respond.
I hear you -- except for me, it was a Psion Series 3c. Big enough to edit text documents and spreadsheets (and play games), small enough to fit in a jacket pocket, and lasted forever on two AA batteries. With the advent of the smartphone and subsequent death of palmtops, I have yet to see anything that's the equivalent of the Psion.
Slashdot Mirror
Indeed. The first time I had a Big Daddy come after me, something happened that I had never before experienced by playing a mere computer game: I ran and hid (in the game) not to avoid the annoyance of having my character get killed and having to respawn or reload, but just out of simple raw terror.
I also found it pretty difficult to "game" the AI. You know how you can exploit the computer's tendency to do dumb things so you can wipe out your enemies effortlessly? I didn't find many weaknesses in this game's AI. About the best I could do was set them on fire from afar and then hide until the fire went out, then repeat or do a normal frontal assault after they were weakened enough. Any other cheap tactics were pretty much intended by the game designers, like zap'n'whack or hacking security systems. And the Big Daddy AI was pretty tenacious; even if you ran through multiple doors, no matter where you tried to hide, they would pursue you relentlessly. This actually worked to your advantage if you set traps for them, but otherwise made them pretty tough to beat without lots of med kits and big weapons.
I should also mention that I appreciated the fact that the beginning weapon, the pipe wrench, remained a viable weapon (with upgrades) right up to the final boss.
Exploring was fun too. If you went through each level completing only the necessary objectives, you'd miss about half of the map. Lots of hidey holes with powerups, and many of them nonobvious. I liked the subtlety -- it was refreshing not to have the game designers hit me over the head to show off everything they did, instead I had to go looking.
Aside from the DRM, it's hard to point out where Bioshock went wrong. Yes, the supposed "choices" (rescue or harvest the Little Sisters) were somewhat limited, but the other complexities like gathering scrap for the U-Invent, the variety of widely disparate Plasmids, and the variety of methods for dispatching enemies (brute force, hacking, or sneaky tactics) still made it interesting.
Let's think about this. On one hand, you could have a woman who will assimilate you into her collective -- resistance is futile -- and on the other hand, you could have a woman who knows exactly what you want.
I'll stick with Troi, thanks.
Oh, man. I just went online and debated the relative merits of Trek women. I'm not sure if I should be proud, or ashamed.
Shoot, I just spent all this time building a Farnsworth fusor for nothing.
Mainly it's the lack of anyplace better that's holding me here. I've yet to find a place that combines the equivalent of 1st, 2nd, 4th, and 5th amendment rights in sufficient quantities.
If you know of any libertarian paradises though, please let me know.
Now you know exactly how all those law-abiding gun-owning citizens feel about gun control.
At least RAH's characters were above the age of consent.
I have two problems with this recommendation. First, the later Xanth novels (after Piers stopped starving and became rich), suck. Second, Piers is a dirty old man with a preoccupation with underage sex. A young kid, enjoying the Xanth stuff, might then read some of his other stuff and get a pretty screwed up idea of sex.
Spot on with RAH and Aspirin's Myth books though.
Yes, overrides are a good idea, and I think Khan would agree with you:
"Sir, our shields are dropping!"
"Raise them!"
"I can't!"
"The override... where's the override?!"
*explosions*
Agreed. That's why I installed Extended Copy Menu so I can copy as plain text.
If I were an ISP, that's what I would do.
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hdb bs=1M &
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hdc bs=1M &
etc., substituting
Besides, 10,000 emergency kits and 142,000 pounds of supplies from private organizations seems like a pretty good start to me: http://www.lds.org/ldsfoundation/welcome/0,6892,407-1-0,00.html.
I respectfully disagree on one of those. All of those films sucked except for the first Resident Evil movie. I haven't played the game, so maybe the movie wasn't faithful, but it was still awesome.
Back to your original point,Sure, criminal gun owners are more likely to go down in a gunfight. However, law-abiding gun owners are less likely. The statistics do not differentiate between the two types of gun owners, which misses an important distinction.
http://www.google.com/search?q=defensive+gun+uses
OS programmers: please, please give the currently selected app priority for all disk I/O.
Just pointing out that car headlights can be much more effective that what we have in the States.
Anyway, I don't like streetlights because the glare hurts your night vision. I think it's safer to have good lights on the car that don't shine into your eyes.
I hear you -- except for me, it was a Psion Series 3c. Big enough to edit text documents and spreadsheets (and play games), small enough to fit in a jacket pocket, and lasted forever on two AA batteries. With the advent of the smartphone and subsequent death of palmtops, I have yet to see anything that's the equivalent of the Psion.