Attacking IT infrastructure that is not attached to the government or military would probably fall under "total war"; which is a big no-no under Geneva.
The major difference between the US and other "first world" societies is that US politics very rarely includes the concept of "good will towards all". The notion, that "what is good for my neighbor is good for me" simply doesn't fly around here. Electing politicians on merit implies that we'd be electing people to serve the *public* trust, rather than our own individual interests.
Granted, I"m painting things with a broad brush, but that's pretty much the impression I get.
Why is it this way? I honestly don't know. It could have something to do with our frontiersman roots being so recent in our country's past - that we're still one nation of individual people, rather than an individual nation of one people.
I tried the free trial they have/had (?) and was dismayed at how penalized I was for beeing a newbie.
1) select waypoint for warp. 2) guide ship into hyperspace bridge 3) [alt+tab] to do something else for 5 minutes 4) mine asteroids 5) go to step 1
...and that got me through the newbie storyline, and I still didn't have enough ISK to do very much.
The insider tip is that you glom onto some friends of yours that are experienced and they "finance" you up a few rungs to get decent ships and tasks. The rest is all experience.
Pragma's Rule #1 of life: *never* cost someone more money than it takes for them to get rid of or replace you.
So nobody in their right mind would go through with this if they want to stay employed anywhere in the state. So they've provided an impossible project schedule as an estimate for this task. But hey, they never said it couldn't be done. Its just really hard to do. Game, set, match.
Meanwhile, the State Controller has a mortgage to pay...
I think what you're talking about is making sure that objects occlude light originating from the other side.
This is usually done via radiosity calculations performed on the map in a process akin to compiling a program: all the shadows are painted onto the map before the game even ships. Those details never change through the course of the game, which is a huge win from an efficiency standpoint. This is typically referred to as static lighting.
For everything else, the game engine has to more or less fake a radiosity implementation in some way as to create convincing lighting, shadows occlusions, etc. This is what is under discussion here. Any such solution will never be as good as the static radiosity pass for the map, and will take a huge chunk out of your CPU/GPU/RAM budget in the process. Either you back a simple non-obtrusive hack (a blurry black circle under your avatar that is a 'shadow') or you go the full monty and impose stiff rendering restrictions somehow (cut the poly count for all models in half). Anything in the middle will be dismissed as slipshod craftsmanship (e.g. "shadows" in Quake 2).
So in short: 100% dymamic lighting is not feasible for a game like Diablo since there's too much happening at any given point. You're not going to see 100-monster brawls *and* fully accurate lighting and shading at the same time for years to come. The Diablo fanbois will have to wait until realtime ray-tracing hits the desktop.
To be fair, you completely misrepresent this article that you linked. The aforementioned "pagan relics stored beneath the Vatican" is nothing more than a new archeological site. It's not some cache of pagan artifacts gathered from past crusades/missions or some such.
If you read the article you'll see that it is a ancient Roman necropolis that was discovered recently, quite by accident*, during the construction of a new parking garage for the Vatican. It even has the rather tongue-in-cheek name "Necropolis of the Parking Garage" ("Necropoli dell'Autoparco").
The fact the burial customs used were clearly non-christian/Catholic, is the only reason why the site is labeled as a Pagan site. Also, it is dated to around 23 B.C.-14 A.D, which dates it just before Christianity as a whole.
The Vatican even plans to open the site to the public. This quote best sums up how the Vatican feels on the matter:
"Everyone always thinks that if it's not about pure Christianity, the Vatican isn't interested," says Cristina Gennaccari, an archaeologist with the Vatican Museums. "But there are many pagan aspects of all things modern, and when it comes to archeology, especially religious archeology, there is really no room for distinction."
(* This kind of stuff happens all the time in Rome. It just so happens that the Vatican isn't in the habit of digging so deep.)
An interesting application of Grubbs' Catalyst is in the aerospace industry. A spaceship's hull is a necessarily very strong material, but over time small microcracks in the structure can form. A new material, with potential application in the construction of spaceship hulls, contains Grubbs' Catalyst, as well as capsules of dicyclopentadiene, which can undergo ring opening metathesis polymerisation. When a crack in the hull forms, the capsules are ruptured and come into contact with Grubbs' Catalyst, which polymerizes dicyclopentadiene and seals the crack.[7]
This poses an interesting concept: how to destroy something on the moon?
Say you're an astronaut tasked with removing a non-US flag from the lunar surface. What the hell do you do with it?
* You can't hide it in your return vessel - someone might find it. * You can't "space" it once on your return vector since it might be spotted, plus the airlock activity would show in the mission log. * Burning it is out of the question.
I guess that leaves "put it under a rock" as your only option, but someone could stumble upon it later anyway.
Seeing as how some weddings cost that much, it's real cheap.
I'll take two.
Re:I wonder who will play Aunt Madge
on
Batman Discussion
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· Score: 1
Yea, the performances and story both were far more nuanced than most action flicks.
For instance, you can see Dent get more and more ambitious as the Rico suit gets closer to fruition. Gordon actually looks sad when he's nominated as commissioner. Bruce almost seems to enjoy snubbing his guests at the fundraiser. And I'm pretty sure the Joker wanted to get caught up on that skyscraper, since he could count on batman to not do him in; I doubt his odds were that good with the SWAT. The movie ends with Batman as the villain.
Great stuff.
Re:I wonder who will play Aunt Madge
on
Batman Discussion
·
· Score: 1
Thanks for reminding me. You're absolutely right - his slide downward began with Gordon taking a bullet during the mayor's attempted assassination. In the moment, he kind of took his heroism to a new level and started to act like a vigilante.
The ethical dilemma on the two ferries toward the end of the flick was excellent.
The best part about that scene is what that particular dilemma is called, and who comes out on top of the moral heap. As soon as the Joker laid it all out, I realized that there was a joke in play that was way over everyone's head.
Re:I wonder who will play Aunt Madge
on
Batman Discussion
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
The Joker simply took advantage of Dent's vulnerability after having lost the love of his life. He explained to Dent that this happened due to the corrupt elements within the police force; that the "good guys" weren't all good.
The Joker also explained himself as little more than a "dog chasing cars" that "wouldn't know what to do once he caught one." He has no motivation for the destruction of Gotham other than sheer nihilism. As others have explained: he is a force of nature.
So, in that moment it was laid out for Harvey. The good weren't all good, and the bad not all bad.
Dent decided that this applied to himself as well. He then went on a vendetta, using his "lucky" coin as judge and jury, since sheer fate was the only form of justice left to him. --
I can't answer to the rumors, but I think that this may be a nod to Japanese Animation cultural influences in Western cinema and art.
I have seen several examples of characters in Anime where male sexual ambiguity is used explicitly in villains, usually in conjunction with some form of insanity. This is also heightened by cases where even the gender of the character isn't revealed until later in the series/movie, thanks to a highly androgynous character design and careful voice-acting.
Anyway, one could draw a line between homophobia and such a character design; I disagree with that. Personally, I see this as a kind of hint of "hypersexuality" - a complete lack of selectiveness for a mate - that suggests a very reckless personality, even at the most base and carnal level.
At the same time they could easily look for just relative levels of various compounds and come up with all kinds of neat statistics - kind of like that article that ran a while back about scientists testing the effluvia that came from the municipal supply.
That particular study revealed the kinds of street drugs and pharmaceuticals being consumed in suburban and urban environments. The conclusion was that you could profile the drug habits of a locale, strictly by sifting through the sewage. I'd imagine you could do the same from a urine dump.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, there's always MagFest. Its nowhere near as big (yet), but bring your D&D group or whatever - make of it what you will.
http://www.magfest.org/
Slashdot: News for Trolls. Memes that Matter.
Guy: Dude, you seem to be blinking an awful lot, are you okay?
Other Guy: Yea, its this damn "check eyeball" light in my contact lens - it keeps blinking on and off. Maybe I should go have it checked out.
Guy: Naw, you probably didn't have the cap screwed on tight enough when you took it out last night.
I was gonna say.
Attacking IT infrastructure that is not attached to the government or military would probably fall under "total war"; which is a big no-no under Geneva.
The major difference between the US and other "first world" societies is that US politics very rarely includes the concept of "good will towards all". The notion, that "what is good for my neighbor is good for me" simply doesn't fly around here. Electing politicians on merit implies that we'd be electing people to serve the *public* trust, rather than our own individual interests.
Granted, I"m painting things with a broad brush, but that's pretty much the impression I get.
Why is it this way? I honestly don't know. It could have something to do with our frontiersman roots being so recent in our country's past - that we're still one nation of individual people, rather than an individual nation of one people.
I'm glad someone posted about this.
I tried the free trial they have/had (?) and was dismayed at how penalized I was for beeing a newbie.
1) select waypoint for warp.
2) guide ship into hyperspace bridge
3) [alt+tab] to do something else for 5 minutes
4) mine asteroids
5) go to step 1
The insider tip is that you glom onto some friends of yours that are experienced and they "finance" you up a few rungs to get decent ships and tasks. The rest is all experience.
Here's the way I look at it.
Pragma's Rule #1 of life: *never* cost someone more money than it takes for them to get rid of or replace you.
So nobody in their right mind would go through with this if they want to stay employed anywhere in the state. So they've provided an impossible project schedule as an estimate for this task. But hey, they never said it couldn't be done. Its just really hard to do. Game, set, match.
Meanwhile, the State Controller has a mortgage to pay...
I think what you're talking about is making sure that objects occlude light originating from the other side.
This is usually done via radiosity calculations performed on the map in a process akin to compiling a program: all the shadows are painted onto the map before the game even ships. Those details never change through the course of the game, which is a huge win from an efficiency standpoint. This is typically referred to as static lighting.
For everything else, the game engine has to more or less fake a radiosity implementation in some way as to create convincing lighting, shadows occlusions, etc. This is what is under discussion here. Any such solution will never be as good as the static radiosity pass for the map, and will take a huge chunk out of your CPU/GPU/RAM budget in the process. Either you back a simple non-obtrusive hack (a blurry black circle under your avatar that is a 'shadow') or you go the full monty and impose stiff rendering restrictions somehow (cut the poly count for all models in half). Anything in the middle will be dismissed as slipshod craftsmanship (e.g. "shadows" in Quake 2).
So in short: 100% dymamic lighting is not feasible for a game like Diablo since there's too much happening at any given point. You're not going to see 100-monster brawls *and* fully accurate lighting and shading at the same time for years to come. The Diablo fanbois will have to wait until realtime ray-tracing hits the desktop.
You're all going to die down here.
So this begs an obvious question: why is NASA backing a completely new launch stack, instead of trying to put a manned capsule on a Delta rocket?
http://zzpat.tripod.com/cvb/oct_2006/pagan_graves_in_vatican_basement.html
To be fair, you completely misrepresent this article that you linked. The aforementioned "pagan relics stored beneath the Vatican" is nothing more than a new archeological site. It's not some cache of pagan artifacts gathered from past crusades/missions or some such.
If you read the article you'll see that it is a ancient Roman necropolis that was discovered recently, quite by accident*, during the construction of a new parking garage for the Vatican. It even has the rather tongue-in-cheek name "Necropolis of the Parking Garage" ("Necropoli dell'Autoparco").
The fact the burial customs used were clearly non-christian/Catholic, is the only reason why the site is labeled as a Pagan site. Also, it is dated to around 23 B.C.-14 A.D, which dates it just before Christianity as a whole.
The Vatican even plans to open the site to the public. This quote best sums up how the Vatican feels on the matter:
(* This kind of stuff happens all the time in Rome. It just so happens that the Vatican isn't in the habit of digging so deep.)
I'd like to second DaAdder's request. It would make one hell of a Slashdot story, if nothing else.
Thanks for dropping that link. Quoth Wikipedia:
Grubbs earned that Nobel and then some, I'd say.
This poses an interesting concept: how to destroy something on the moon?
Say you're an astronaut tasked with removing a non-US flag from the lunar surface. What the hell do you do with it?
* You can't hide it in your return vessel - someone might find it.
* You can't "space" it once on your return vector since it might be spotted, plus the airlock activity would show in the mission log.
* Burning it is out of the question.
I guess that leaves "put it under a rock" as your only option, but someone could stumble upon it later anyway.
Seeing as how some weddings cost that much, it's real cheap.
I'll take two.
Yea, the performances and story both were far more nuanced than most action flicks.
For instance, you can see Dent get more and more ambitious as the Rico suit gets closer to fruition. Gordon actually looks sad when he's nominated as commissioner. Bruce almost seems to enjoy snubbing his guests at the fundraiser. And I'm pretty sure the Joker wanted to get caught up on that skyscraper, since he could count on batman to not do him in; I doubt his odds were that good with the SWAT. The movie ends with Batman as the villain.
Great stuff.
Thanks for reminding me. You're absolutely right - his slide downward began with Gordon taking a bullet during the mayor's attempted assassination. In the moment, he kind of took his heroism to a new level and started to act like a vigilante.
The best part about that scene is what that particular dilemma is called, and who comes out on top of the moral heap. As soon as the Joker laid it all out, I realized that there was a joke in play that was way over everyone's head.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoner's_dilemma
The Joker simply took advantage of Dent's vulnerability after having lost the love of his life. He explained to Dent that this happened due to the corrupt elements within the police force; that the "good guys" weren't all good.
The Joker also explained himself as little more than a "dog chasing cars" that "wouldn't know what to do once he caught one." He has no motivation for the destruction of Gotham other than sheer nihilism. As others have explained: he is a force of nature.
So, in that moment it was laid out for Harvey. The good weren't all good, and the bad not all bad.
Dent decided that this applied to himself as well. He then went on a vendetta, using his "lucky" coin as judge and jury, since sheer fate was the only form of justice left to him.
--
For as we all know: money can't buy knives.
I can't answer to the rumors, but I think that this may be a nod to Japanese Animation cultural influences in Western cinema and art.
I have seen several examples of characters in Anime where male sexual ambiguity is used explicitly in villains, usually in conjunction with some form of insanity. This is also heightened by cases where even the gender of the character isn't revealed until later in the series/movie, thanks to a highly androgynous character design and careful voice-acting.
Anyway, one could draw a line between homophobia and such a character design; I disagree with that. Personally, I see this as a kind of hint of "hypersexuality" - a complete lack of selectiveness for a mate - that suggests a very reckless personality, even at the most base and carnal level.
See, that was their problem.
They needed to start with crazies from the get-go, then train them to be ultra-hard, remorseless, crime-fighters.
Don't worry chums, I have my Bat-grammar Nazi Repellent Spray right here on my Bat-Utility belt.
One spray from this canister will take care of him until the authorities arrive.
Man, what a crappy way to go.
At the same time they could easily look for just relative levels of various compounds and come up with all kinds of neat statistics - kind of like that article that ran a while back about scientists testing the effluvia that came from the municipal supply.
That particular study revealed the kinds of street drugs and pharmaceuticals being consumed in suburban and urban environments. The conclusion was that you could profile the drug habits of a locale, strictly by sifting through the sewage. I'd imagine you could do the same from a urine dump.
You'd need someone with an eye for science, but an intimate understanding of edible sea-creatures, and larger-than-life representations of the same.
Alton Brown is clearly the best choice here.