But none of your nano-augs were things like an arm cannon ripped off of Mega Man's arm... and DX2 made the existence of skull-guns canon (likely in reference to the Diamond Age, but I expect to see - and mod - one in this game).
Really, if you want to see what can be done with cyber and not nano, go look up Cyberpunk 2020 - the chromebooks, some of the fan-made cybernetics - sometime. I mean good god, they had the cyberarm chainsaw for chrissakes. Missile launchers, capacitor-lasers, silenced submachineguns, satellite uplinks, scuba gear, powered rollerblades... I could go on like this for a *long* time. DX2's nano-augs may have raw oomph on their side, but cybernetics will inevitably have more flexibility.
But what if we ran a cord of electrocyte tissue from one arm's fingertips to the other?
Maybe some kind of conductive secretions are released from modified sweat glands when you fire the charge. As a plus, the output of a cord that long will have pretty impressive voltage.
I can only imagine (and wince) what a hadoken style palm-strike with this added oomph would do if you busted someone in the ribs.
Trusted !=Trustworthy. In the intelligence community, a "Trusted Party" is a party that knows enough to backstab you. That is all "Trusted Computing" implies.
So other people can see the explosion, people you wouldn't trust with the necessary information to conduct the simulations - as that's usually enough to build one of their own.
Actually, they do have ASAT weapons. Remember the satellite we shot down after talk that the hydrazine tank would impact intact like an orbit-to-surface bomb?
Hm, actually, I'm suddenly detecting a new motive for that shootdown. I for one wouldn't like to give away the results of the first study on my new strategic weapons system... anyone hear about the idea to put kinetic weapons on sub-launched ICBMs?
The price was right. And I quote: "I rescued it from a dumpster five years ago." That's right, dumpterware. Part of the whole "Reduce, reuse, recycle" thing.
What you are seeing is the pulse-width-modulation dimming of the taillights applied with insufficiently high frequency. Cheap chinese flashlights like the Jetbeam C-LE (which has gone through three revisions prior to current - and is an absolutely excellent little LED torch) have been using increasingly high PWM frequencies to get around that; more expensive ones use current regulation (which averages the current of the PWM circuit over a few tenths of a second to produce a flat current (and therefore brightness) curve when viewed on an oscilloscope. The advantage of lower PWM frequencies is that the eye hands them off to the brain via a high-priority nerve link that results in people noticing them significantly (tenths of a second or so, IIRC) faster, theoretically reducing both the number and severity of accidents. The fact that many of them are bright enough to impair normal night vision seems to be lost on auto designers.
HID headlights have not gone away, but their implementations have been getting better - projecting beams on a down-angle so they don't nail people in the eyes, lowering the operating temperature of the bulb, making them less blue and more yellow-white without making them dimmer (actually, lower-temperature HID bulbs are more efficient than the blue-tinted ones). HIDs are popular for bulb life being insane, since headlight replacement was getting to be a significant drain in carmaker's warranty claims, and being brighter and having a longer effective range, which is good when there's no streetlights.
Entirely different is the blue-tinted halogen bulbs that are simply normal bulbs with a light blue paint applied - these are the ghetto-fabulous attempt to make it look like you've got an expensive HID conversion for an older car, and are about 30% dimmer than normal halogen headlights despite being harder on other drivers' eyes. I have no forgiveness for people who use these because they think it looks good.
Make Way for Dragons! by Thorarinn Gunnarsson is great. There's simply no other way to describe this as - other than to say that a 5-star rating doesn't quite do it justice. It's definitely more fantasy than sci-fi, but it was one of my favorite reads, ever. The rest of the series, Human, Beware! and Dragons on the Town are also both excellent. The prequel, Dragons' Domain is honestly a bit dark, but it's the sort of pyrrhic ending... I'll not spoil it.
These are simply excellently written and I can't recommend them highly enough.
Okay, so they encrypt their stream.
I break it - not "bloody copyright infringement" yet.
On the other hand, what I just did violates a completely separate bought-and-paid-for law.
Humans excel in one area - we are nature's greatest distance runners. If you put a man and a cheetah on a track, and they both started running in the same direction, the man would pause somewhere down the road when he caught up to the cheetah collapsed of heat stroke. Most four-legged mammals are sprinters; they will outrun humans for a while, but tire out faster. Hell, ancient man hunted by running herbivores to death -- they chased them until the gazelle died of heart attack or heatstroke.
That sir, is some fucking excellence in design. Pity most of us nowadays can't live up to it.
The rest of the argument is perfectly valid, and very interesting. I think it's something a great many people have independently derived, but that it hasn't had the discussion it deserved.
this is why I haven't bought any games without repeatedly being kicked by friends AND catching them on >50% off sales for Black Friday. And that was still a one-time event. I used to buy the better part of my games used - picking up things like Oni and Deus Ex 2 after the reviews have had time to have their say (and the game has gone out of print, usually). Now, I buy... a game a year?
I'm sick of this. I hate it that the entire market in my region has dried up, and I've basically had my favorite hobby starved out from under me. And Robert Jordan managed to kill my desire to read for the last few years, so I'm... losing hobbies left and right.
My biggish town has no shops - and believe me I've looked - and while there's Ebay, I usually find everything I play while browsing through the shelves. No charity shops here sell anything newer than Quake 3, and I'm lucky to find anything that isn't bottom-shelf (Cabbage Patch Girls games &c) at garage sales.
Same thing here, but it *was* a total buzzkill, when combined with other errors that were not resolved by replacing half my system piecewise.
I've still yet to play through my copy of HL2, and I've not yet even touched the episodes. I'll probably reinstall HL1 and download the last no-steam patch for it if I ever get bit by the HL bug again.
While true in the strict sense, I defy you to find a man-portable power source to run this that doesn't explode (not like gunpowder explodes, like a grenade explodes) as a standard part of its operation.
The solar system is in the middle of something called the "local bubble" - this region was created by an ancient supernova, and is defined by low-density interstellar medium.
Also, the ram field generates drag - consider that this is going to look a lot like a giant parachute of magnetic force in front of the ship, that's not very aerodynamic. The drag and the thrust for a conventional Bussard fusion ramjet limit top speed to about 12-14% of lightspeed, which is just about as doable using a conventional fusion rocket design without the ram field.
Also, the minimum operating speed of a ramjet is 1-6% of c.
A proton-proton fusion drive has an exhaust velocity of 12% c, so a proton-proton fusion Bussard Ramjet would have a maximum speed of 12% c. You may remember that a spacecraft with a mass ratio that equals e (that is, 2.71828...) will have a total deltaV is exactly equal to the exhaust velocity. So if a conventional fusion rocket with a mass ratio of 3 or more has a better deltaV than a Bussard Ramjet, what's the point of using a ramjet?
My group has switched to Savage Worlds, and everyone else hasn't looked back, but I'd rather play a low-level sorcerer in D&D than a low-level caster in Savage Worlds.
Nerf or nothing.
It's not the far side of the singularity yet, though we're definitely ramping up for the next one. It's not that the first-order knowledge and power has gone asymptotoic - to be fair, it's pretty close to that. It's that the second-order rate of change is going to go asymptotic soon, and we'll have to get used to that.
To be fair, I think spoken language, and then written language can both be argued as singularity events, as both reshaped the world, or at least our ability to relate to it.
Slashdot Mirror
But none of your nano-augs were things like an arm cannon ripped off of Mega Man's arm... and DX2 made the existence of skull-guns canon (likely in reference to the Diamond Age, but I expect to see - and mod - one in this game). Really, if you want to see what can be done with cyber and not nano, go look up Cyberpunk 2020 - the chromebooks, some of the fan-made cybernetics - sometime. I mean good god, they had the cyberarm chainsaw for chrissakes. Missile launchers, capacitor-lasers, silenced submachineguns, satellite uplinks, scuba gear, powered rollerblades... I could go on like this for a *long* time. DX2's nano-augs may have raw oomph on their side, but cybernetics will inevitably have more flexibility.
Mod parent both insightful and funny, please!
But what if we ran a cord of electrocyte tissue from one arm's fingertips to the other? Maybe some kind of conductive secretions are released from modified sweat glands when you fire the charge. As a plus, the output of a cord that long will have pretty impressive voltage. I can only imagine (and wince) what a hadoken style palm-strike with this added oomph would do if you busted someone in the ribs.
Trusted !=Trustworthy. In the intelligence community, a "Trusted Party" is a party that knows enough to backstab you. That is all "Trusted Computing" implies.
So other people can see the explosion, people you wouldn't trust with the necessary information to conduct the simulations - as that's usually enough to build one of their own.
Actually, they do have ASAT weapons. Remember the satellite we shot down after talk that the hydrazine tank would impact intact like an orbit-to-surface bomb?
Hm, actually, I'm suddenly detecting a new motive for that shootdown. I for one wouldn't like to give away the results of the first study on my new strategic weapons system... anyone hear about the idea to put kinetic weapons on sub-launched ICBMs?
The price was right. And I quote: "I rescued it from a dumpster five years ago." That's right, dumpterware. Part of the whole "Reduce, reuse, recycle" thing.
That is a very wide-band white LED. Wikipedia has a better look at it here.
Remember the famously short lifetime of OLEDs.
What you are seeing is the pulse-width-modulation dimming of the taillights applied with insufficiently high frequency. Cheap chinese flashlights like the Jetbeam C-LE (which has gone through three revisions prior to current - and is an absolutely excellent little LED torch) have been using increasingly high PWM frequencies to get around that; more expensive ones use current regulation (which averages the current of the PWM circuit over a few tenths of a second to produce a flat current (and therefore brightness) curve when viewed on an oscilloscope. The advantage of lower PWM frequencies is that the eye hands them off to the brain via a high-priority nerve link that results in people noticing them significantly (tenths of a second or so, IIRC) faster, theoretically reducing both the number and severity of accidents. The fact that many of them are bright enough to impair normal night vision seems to be lost on auto designers.
HID headlights have not gone away, but their implementations have been getting better - projecting beams on a down-angle so they don't nail people in the eyes, lowering the operating temperature of the bulb, making them less blue and more yellow-white without making them dimmer (actually, lower-temperature HID bulbs are more efficient than the blue-tinted ones). HIDs are popular for bulb life being insane, since headlight replacement was getting to be a significant drain in carmaker's warranty claims, and being brighter and having a longer effective range, which is good when there's no streetlights.
Entirely different is the blue-tinted halogen bulbs that are simply normal bulbs with a light blue paint applied - these are the ghetto-fabulous attempt to make it look like you've got an expensive HID conversion for an older car, and are about 30% dimmer than normal halogen headlights despite being harder on other drivers' eyes. I have no forgiveness for people who use these because they think it looks good.
Make Way for Dragons! by Thorarinn Gunnarsson is great. There's simply no other way to describe this as - other than to say that a 5-star rating doesn't quite do it justice. It's definitely more fantasy than sci-fi, but it was one of my favorite reads, ever. The rest of the series, Human, Beware! and Dragons on the Town are also both excellent. The prequel, Dragons' Domain is honestly a bit dark, but it's the sort of pyrrhic ending... I'll not spoil it. These are simply excellently written and I can't recommend them highly enough.
Okay, so they encrypt their stream.
I break it - not "bloody copyright infringement" yet.
On the other hand, what I just did violates a completely separate bought-and-paid-for law.
20 grams of antimatter?
They can also have the rest of the output, in the form of a high-energy (frickin') laser beam.
Humans excel in one area - we are nature's greatest distance runners. If you put a man and a cheetah on a track, and they both started running in the same direction, the man would pause somewhere down the road when he caught up to the cheetah collapsed of heat stroke. Most four-legged mammals are sprinters; they will outrun humans for a while, but tire out faster. Hell, ancient man hunted by running herbivores to death -- they chased them until the gazelle died of heart attack or heatstroke. That sir, is some fucking excellence in design. Pity most of us nowadays can't live up to it. The rest of the argument is perfectly valid, and very interesting. I think it's something a great many people have independently derived, but that it hasn't had the discussion it deserved.
Dell 1100 laser. Won't work without hacked Samsung (IIRC) drivers, and I don't call that compatibility. Full disclosure, I own a Macbook Pro.
this is why I haven't bought any games without repeatedly being kicked by friends AND catching them on >50% off sales for Black Friday. And that was still a one-time event. I used to buy the better part of my games used - picking up things like Oni and Deus Ex 2 after the reviews have had time to have their say (and the game has gone out of print, usually). Now, I buy... a game a year? I'm sick of this. I hate it that the entire market in my region has dried up, and I've basically had my favorite hobby starved out from under me. And Robert Jordan managed to kill my desire to read for the last few years, so I'm... losing hobbies left and right.
My biggish town has no shops - and believe me I've looked - and while there's Ebay, I usually find everything I play while browsing through the shelves. No charity shops here sell anything newer than Quake 3, and I'm lucky to find anything that isn't bottom-shelf (Cabbage Patch Girls games &c) at garage sales.
Show me where I can still buy secondhand PC games.
Same thing here, but it *was* a total buzzkill, when combined with other errors that were not resolved by replacing half my system piecewise. I've still yet to play through my copy of HL2, and I've not yet even touched the episodes. I'll probably reinstall HL1 and download the last no-steam patch for it if I ever get bit by the HL bug again.
While true in the strict sense, I defy you to find a man-portable power source to run this that doesn't explode (not like gunpowder explodes, like a grenade explodes) as a standard part of its operation.
My group has switched to Savage Worlds, and everyone else hasn't looked back, but I'd rather play a low-level sorcerer in D&D than a low-level caster in Savage Worlds. Nerf or nothing.
Because I can't spin a DVD by hand consistently at the right speed? Because electric toothbrushes clean better than manual ones?
It's not the far side of the singularity yet, though we're definitely ramping up for the next one. It's not that the first-order knowledge and power has gone asymptotoic - to be fair, it's pretty close to that. It's that the second-order rate of change is going to go asymptotic soon, and we'll have to get used to that. To be fair, I think spoken language, and then written language can both be argued as singularity events, as both reshaped the world, or at least our ability to relate to it.