I've seen a gunshot victim up close. In his case the bullet wound tightened itself up (there was no exit wound as the bullet was stopped by his femur) but that just meant that the bleeding was internal. After a minute he looked like he had a cantaloupe inside his thigh. If that blood had spilled out instead of staying inside his leg, well, it would've been quite a mess.
And we're talking about a single 9mm pistol round from a distance of several meters. Given the kind of ammunition you often pepper people with from much closer, video game enemies seem to have no more than a pint of blood in their entire body. Then again, neither have movie gunshot victims so i guess people expect little blood. (Or, as TV Tropes puts it, "reality is unrealistic".)
Remember that until recently, Skype for OS X was also stuck on version 2. Then we received version 5 and I immediately downgraded because any features Skype 5 may have don't outweigh the atrocious GUI. Still, they did start to deliver a new version.
Which is why I think whoever came up with this article is a genius. They certainly got a lot of attention for what amounts to tips on how to prepare for disasters in general.
Of course Israel is Israel. They're really good at killing people they perceive to be a threat for their country. I'd imagine that the IDF would lock down the country rather quickly and just shoot anyone who attempts to cross the border. Onve the zombies get in things get more difficult but if the infestation spreads elsewhere and they have a lead time of a few days I'd assume that Israel would be safe until they run out of bullets.
Of course their version of "safe" means "they shoot you if you try to enter" so it would still be a bad place to run to.
Well, at least Germany has a lot of gun clubs so you can expect just about everything above a village to have several people who can handle guns. Admittedly,.28 cal. rounds aren't going to do much against a zombie but then you have hunters and rangers (yes, we have those too), not to mention policemen, all of which have access to more serious armaments.
Our big problem is that we have a high population density so any infestation would spread rapidly and would be hard to contain.
By the way, if you want a real challenge, play some UFO: Enemy Unknown and then figure out a plan to handle a Chryssalid infestation. For those who don't know the game: The rules are similar except that after a few minutes each zombie turns into an alien that can run at a sustained ~35 km/h (~22 mph, although other people have estimated much higher speeds, with up to 70 mph top speed), has an exoskeleton comparable to tank armor and is strong enough to peel open a tank in under five seconds. And, of course, turns humans into zombies if it gets within melee range. And did I mention that killing a zombie just causes them to hatch sooner? Have fun.
Technically, so would a 200 MHz Pentium if you were exceptionally patient. However, most people do value their time enough to appreciate a setup that, for example, makes a transcode take one hour instead of six. A programmer working on something that takes long to compile will appreciate a setup that cuts his compilation time as he will end up compiling his program a lot. A web developer who uses virtual machines in order to test his website under various operating systems will appreciate it if a VM doesn't take ten seconds to respond to a click.
Even when only using "normal" applications it's all about how you use them: Someone who regularly watches Flash video on a non-Windows system will want a somewhat beefy CPU to get something resembling fluid playback (non-Windows Flash video is SLOW).
The question is: How much is your time worth, how much time do you lose by using a slower system and how expensive is a given set of components to upgrade (or a whole replacement system), including installation and setup time? If the cost of the components/replacement is less than the value of the time you lose then the upgrade is definitely sensible. Plus, there sometimes are some components that are neccessary, such as a large hard drive if you work with uncompressed video a lot.
In Germany I see a more heterogenous landscape: First there was ICQ, then MSN edged in but until now you have some social groups where only ICQ is used, some where only MSN is used and some where both are used (usually where the former ones overlap). Jabber is also surprisingly popular but again only in isolated groups. Likewise other IM services: They're ubiquitous in one place and unknown in the next. IM use is very much region- and community-specific.
Wasn't AIM just a rebranded ICQ, though? Or was that YIM?
Of course the real kicker was that the universal ammo clips weren't universal. You could fire 200 SMG shots and 10 sniper shots but not 400 SMG shots or 20 sniper shots. Clips were universal until you picked them up, at which point they magically became weapon-specific. It was really a crossbreeed between nonsensical form a tactical point of view (ME2's weapons were greatly inferior to ME1's due to the ammo limitation) and nonsensical from a plausibility point of view (why do the clips suddenly become weapon-specific when picked up?).
I found that unlimited ammunition mods made ME2 much more enjoyable. Of course it still lacked a lot of what made ME1 fun but at least the horrible gunplay got better. There are some games that make ammunition scarcity work but those are usually survival horror games - and Mass Effect is very definitely not one of those.
That's complete nonsense. Glass is not air-permeable. Of course one could mount the glass in some kind of frame that comes with a set of hinges or rails. I wonder if someone has a patent on that already...
It all depends on what you expect to do with the device. If you intend to regularly edit HD video without introducing too many compression artifacts you're going to have a lot of uncompressed video data lying around. In that case a lot of RAM and hard drive space are going to be important and a powerful CPU might help keep transcoding times bearable. If all you need are Office and a web browser, however, you can probably do fine with an Athlon, a gig of RAM and a 100 GB HDD.
When I specced out my desktop about two years back I assumed I'd be running Gentoo on it so I went for a semi-powerful Phenom II since that's relatively hard to upgrade and affects compilation times. Graphics were onboard (to save the cost for a discrete GPU) and RAM was on the low side to allow more money for the CPU (as I could easily upgrade it). Later it turned out that the desktop had been relegated to a pure gaming machine so I bought an old Geforce 8800 and some RAM. The result s a very adequate gaming rig for a reasonable amount of money even if the 8800 would've easily pushed it beyond its original budget.
Build towards what you expect you'll need. If your needs are extraordinary you often have to buy extraordinary gear. If not, you can get away with a lot cheaper components. It's like with audio systems: 20 USD PC speakers, 200 USD HiFi systems, 2000 USD audiophile speaker sets and however-expensive studio monitors all have their own niches in which they are appropriate. When used outside their niche they will either be found inadequate or have odd price/performance ratios as e.g. basic home users might fail to hear a noticeable difference between their HiFi system and the audiophile speaker set and would affix the same performance to their vastly different price tags.
Of course that doesn't change the fact that a lot of people have the requirement "compensate for my small ego", in which case that water-cooled i7 tower better have some glowtubes, too.
Of course this depends on who you are. Macs are highly attractive to German students, for example, because not only does Apple offer a student rebate but they also partner with a website offering even bigger student rebates. In extreme cases you can end up with about 40% off, which makes MBPs very price-competitive with just about everything.
Unfortunately, non-students have a harder time getting that kind of deal.
Cheaters. PCs, your own servers, these are all too vulnerable to cheaters and their hacks. Punk Buster used to do a pretty fair job back in the day, but when Valve and their completely POS STEAM set up with VAC...another POS, everything went right into the toilet. When the only way to compete is to use hacks yourself, the game is destroyed.
The proper way to prevent that is to distinguish between games playes via the matchmaking service and games played on ded servers like Blizzard used to do with Battle.net games vs. LAN games. The matchmaking mode can be made as secure as you like while the LAN/ded server mode allows people to cheat as much as they want. Everyone is happy.
Admittedly people will still try to cheat on the matchmaking service but you can ban their game's serial number if you find out. That would be a deterrent. You could even set up two matchmaking services (actually just a per-game flag) where one allows people to use cheats if they can get past the cheat prevention software and the other one will give increasingly long bans to cheaters.
The wrong approach is to force everyone onto the matchmaking service and declare that LAN parties are not something you want yourself associated with.
I am wanting to find a secure system to play in. I was hoping the PS3 would be free of these cheaters, but some punks have this burned down still. One of the posters is correct, it's going to destroy the industry, people will just leave. There are other things to do in life besides play computer games that are full of cheating waste of human skin punks.
I'm of the opinion that lack of a LAN mode is equally destructive, just to different people. No multiplayer without an internet connection means a game that occasionally simply refuses service to me (somethimes even in the middle of a LAN game) and no ded servers means a worse experience because I have to rely on machines halfway around the world to set up and manage my session fluently.
Cheaters are a non-issue because I usually only play with people I know and trust. Which is actually a much more effective cheating prevention system than PunkBuster or the arbitrary removal of multiplayer modes.
That may not be your situation but it's mine and it's the reason I might not buy Diablo 3 - with a broken multiplayer implementation like StarCraft 2 it's going to be of lesser value to me than the still-perfectly-fine Diablo 2, which I already own.
So a gaming league in Korea only allows games that don't have a LAN option? Perhaps Activision could instead release two versions of the game; one for casual gamers and a tournament version with LAN disabled. Then again, that would probably cost them more than just turning off LAN gaming for everyone and I don't expect more than the bare amount of customer care from Activision.
True. I didn't think of the fact that the States have a two-party system.
With "federal election" I meant elections for federal offices. For instance, the presidential elections all seem to happen around the same time and are often treated like a single election (even though they're neither one election nor is the president elected during them).
As for number 3: I'd go further and force the stations to show political ads for free, however they have to do so in a balanced manner (balanced per-time unit per-party*, not per-ad) and they have to allocate a set amount of their advertisement time. Also, every party needs to prove that their ads didn't cost more than X USD per election in total or the ads need to be pulled and the party is fined. Set X to something sensible like 10.000 USD.
Essentially make it so that advertisement costs are a non-issue for any party large enough to even register on a federal election as far as radio and TV are concerned.
* Limited to parties you will find on the ballot, of course. If you want to inject your own ads to distract people from those of the big parties you will need to form your own federally-electable party in order to do so. In Germany a satire magazine has actually pulled that off once but generally it should keep the airwaves reasonably clean.
That was back when the hard drive had a proprietary form factor so you had to buy the replacement from IBM (which probably wasn't such a big deal since the BIOS thing meant they weren't easily replacable anyway).
IBM did that for some older Thinkpad models. The result was that a defect on one of those tracks made your entire system unbootable - in fact, you didn't even get any BIOS beeps because the BIOS couldn't be loaded. I think I know why they stopped doing it like that...
Which isn't exactly surprising since a lot of the time you teach about that denomination's stance on things. If you want an equivalent course for atheists (as your choice of words reveals) you want "Werte und Normen", which is the comparative theology class I mentioned. And I haven't heard of a school that offers religion class that doesn't offer W&N.
Well, perhaps in Bavaria but Bavaria has always been rather special in those regards.
As for my sig: It's a combination of two classic/. memes written in the style of a SCUMM command line. Because hey, if/. was a LucasArts adventure you'd probably end up doing exectly what the sig says at some point.
As for the discussion system: It gets even worse when you accidentally click on a comment further up the tree. Then all child comments are collapsed and since/. doesn't save the state of each comment you have to expand each of them separately./. really isn't good at folding.
That's my point. Religious debate belongs in religion class. Classes like biology are no place for it.
I propose a three step plan:
1. Establish religion class in school.
2. Get the religion out of classes where it doesn't belong.
3. The fundies can shut up as they now have a forum where they can teach any "controversy" they feel like.
Slashdot Mirror
That's not a problem. The Germans are French Nazis.
And yes, I can say that because I'm German. Victoire intact! *marches off to the west to make France a part of France*
Because our bodies cease to function if certain requirements are not met. The more interesting questions are: How? And when?
I've seen a gunshot victim up close. In his case the bullet wound tightened itself up (there was no exit wound as the bullet was stopped by his femur) but that just meant that the bleeding was internal. After a minute he looked like he had a cantaloupe inside his thigh. If that blood had spilled out instead of staying inside his leg, well, it would've been quite a mess.
And we're talking about a single 9mm pistol round from a distance of several meters. Given the kind of ammunition you often pepper people with from much closer, video game enemies seem to have no more than a pint of blood in their entire body. Then again, neither have movie gunshot victims so i guess people expect little blood. (Or, as TV Tropes puts it, "reality is unrealistic".)
Remember that until recently, Skype for OS X was also stuck on version 2. Then we received version 5 and I immediately downgraded because any features Skype 5 may have don't outweigh the atrocious GUI. Still, they did start to deliver a new version.
Which is why I think whoever came up with this article is a genius. They certainly got a lot of attention for what amounts to tips on how to prepare for disasters in general.
Of course Israel is Israel. They're really good at killing people they perceive to be a threat for their country. I'd imagine that the IDF would lock down the country rather quickly and just shoot anyone who attempts to cross the border. Onve the zombies get in things get more difficult but if the infestation spreads elsewhere and they have a lead time of a few days I'd assume that Israel would be safe until they run out of bullets.
Of course their version of "safe" means "they shoot you if you try to enter" so it would still be a bad place to run to.
Well, at least Germany has a lot of gun clubs so you can expect just about everything above a village to have several people who can handle guns. Admittedly, .28 cal. rounds aren't going to do much against a zombie but then you have hunters and rangers (yes, we have those too), not to mention policemen, all of which have access to more serious armaments.
Our big problem is that we have a high population density so any infestation would spread rapidly and would be hard to contain.
By the way, if you want a real challenge, play some UFO: Enemy Unknown and then figure out a plan to handle a Chryssalid infestation. For those who don't know the game: The rules are similar except that after a few minutes each zombie turns into an alien that can run at a sustained ~35 km/h (~22 mph, although other people have estimated much higher speeds, with up to 70 mph top speed), has an exoskeleton comparable to tank armor and is strong enough to peel open a tank in under five seconds. And, of course, turns humans into zombies if it gets within melee range. And did I mention that killing a zombie just causes them to hatch sooner? Have fun.
Bonus points for not using nukes.
Technically, so would a 200 MHz Pentium if you were exceptionally patient. However, most people do value their time enough to appreciate a setup that, for example, makes a transcode take one hour instead of six. A programmer working on something that takes long to compile will appreciate a setup that cuts his compilation time as he will end up compiling his program a lot. A web developer who uses virtual machines in order to test his website under various operating systems will appreciate it if a VM doesn't take ten seconds to respond to a click.
Even when only using "normal" applications it's all about how you use them: Someone who regularly watches Flash video on a non-Windows system will want a somewhat beefy CPU to get something resembling fluid playback (non-Windows Flash video is SLOW).
The question is: How much is your time worth, how much time do you lose by using a slower system and how expensive is a given set of components to upgrade (or a whole replacement system), including installation and setup time? If the cost of the components/replacement is less than the value of the time you lose then the upgrade is definitely sensible. Plus, there sometimes are some components that are neccessary, such as a large hard drive if you work with uncompressed video a lot.
In Germany I see a more heterogenous landscape: First there was ICQ, then MSN edged in but until now you have some social groups where only ICQ is used, some where only MSN is used and some where both are used (usually where the former ones overlap). Jabber is also surprisingly popular but again only in isolated groups. Likewise other IM services: They're ubiquitous in one place and unknown in the next. IM use is very much region- and community-specific.
Wasn't AIM just a rebranded ICQ, though? Or was that YIM?
Of course the real kicker was that the universal ammo clips weren't universal. You could fire 200 SMG shots and 10 sniper shots but not 400 SMG shots or 20 sniper shots. Clips were universal until you picked them up, at which point they magically became weapon-specific. It was really a crossbreeed between nonsensical form a tactical point of view (ME2's weapons were greatly inferior to ME1's due to the ammo limitation) and nonsensical from a plausibility point of view (why do the clips suddenly become weapon-specific when picked up?).
I found that unlimited ammunition mods made ME2 much more enjoyable. Of course it still lacked a lot of what made ME1 fun but at least the horrible gunplay got better. There are some games that make ammunition scarcity work but those are usually survival horror games - and Mass Effect is very definitely not one of those.
That's complete nonsense. Glass is not air-permeable. Of course one could mount the glass in some kind of frame that comes with a set of hinges or rails. I wonder if someone has a patent on that already...
It all depends on what you expect to do with the device. If you intend to regularly edit HD video without introducing too many compression artifacts you're going to have a lot of uncompressed video data lying around. In that case a lot of RAM and hard drive space are going to be important and a powerful CPU might help keep transcoding times bearable. If all you need are Office and a web browser, however, you can probably do fine with an Athlon, a gig of RAM and a 100 GB HDD.
When I specced out my desktop about two years back I assumed I'd be running Gentoo on it so I went for a semi-powerful Phenom II since that's relatively hard to upgrade and affects compilation times. Graphics were onboard (to save the cost for a discrete GPU) and RAM was on the low side to allow more money for the CPU (as I could easily upgrade it). Later it turned out that the desktop had been relegated to a pure gaming machine so I bought an old Geforce 8800 and some RAM. The result s a very adequate gaming rig for a reasonable amount of money even if the 8800 would've easily pushed it beyond its original budget.
Build towards what you expect you'll need. If your needs are extraordinary you often have to buy extraordinary gear. If not, you can get away with a lot cheaper components. It's like with audio systems: 20 USD PC speakers, 200 USD HiFi systems, 2000 USD audiophile speaker sets and however-expensive studio monitors all have their own niches in which they are appropriate. When used outside their niche they will either be found inadequate or have odd price/performance ratios as e.g. basic home users might fail to hear a noticeable difference between their HiFi system and the audiophile speaker set and would affix the same performance to their vastly different price tags.
Of course that doesn't change the fact that a lot of people have the requirement "compensate for my small ego", in which case that water-cooled i7 tower better have some glowtubes, too.
Of course this depends on who you are. Macs are highly attractive to German students, for example, because not only does Apple offer a student rebate but they also partner with a website offering even bigger student rebates. In extreme cases you can end up with about 40% off, which makes MBPs very price-competitive with just about everything.
Unfortunately, non-students have a harder time getting that kind of deal.
Cheaters. PCs, your own servers, these are all too vulnerable to cheaters and their hacks. Punk Buster used to do a pretty fair job back in the day, but when Valve and their completely POS STEAM set up with VAC...another POS, everything went right into the toilet. When the only way to compete is to use hacks yourself, the game is destroyed.
The proper way to prevent that is to distinguish between games playes via the matchmaking service and games played on ded servers like Blizzard used to do with Battle.net games vs. LAN games. The matchmaking mode can be made as secure as you like while the LAN/ded server mode allows people to cheat as much as they want. Everyone is happy. Admittedly people will still try to cheat on the matchmaking service but you can ban their game's serial number if you find out. That would be a deterrent. You could even set up two matchmaking services (actually just a per-game flag) where one allows people to use cheats if they can get past the cheat prevention software and the other one will give increasingly long bans to cheaters. The wrong approach is to force everyone onto the matchmaking service and declare that LAN parties are not something you want yourself associated with.
I am wanting to find a secure system to play in. I was hoping the PS3 would be free of these cheaters, but some punks have this burned down still. One of the posters is correct, it's going to destroy the industry, people will just leave. There are other things to do in life besides play computer games that are full of cheating waste of human skin punks.
I'm of the opinion that lack of a LAN mode is equally destructive, just to different people. No multiplayer without an internet connection means a game that occasionally simply refuses service to me (somethimes even in the middle of a LAN game) and no ded servers means a worse experience because I have to rely on machines halfway around the world to set up and manage my session fluently. Cheaters are a non-issue because I usually only play with people I know and trust. Which is actually a much more effective cheating prevention system than PunkBuster or the arbitrary removal of multiplayer modes. That may not be your situation but it's mine and it's the reason I might not buy Diablo 3 - with a broken multiplayer implementation like StarCraft 2 it's going to be of lesser value to me than the still-perfectly-fine Diablo 2, which I already own.
[rather transparent trolling]
Here, have a cupcake.
So a gaming league in Korea only allows games that don't have a LAN option? Perhaps Activision could instead release two versions of the game; one for casual gamers and a tournament version with LAN disabled. Then again, that would probably cost them more than just turning off LAN gaming for everyone and I don't expect more than the bare amount of customer care from Activision.
True. I didn't think of the fact that the States have a two-party system.
With "federal election" I meant elections for federal offices. For instance, the presidential elections all seem to happen around the same time and are often treated like a single election (even though they're neither one election nor is the president elected during them).
As for number 3: I'd go further and force the stations to show political ads for free, however they have to do so in a balanced manner (balanced per-time unit per-party*, not per-ad) and they have to allocate a set amount of their advertisement time. Also, every party needs to prove that their ads didn't cost more than X USD per election in total or the ads need to be pulled and the party is fined. Set X to something sensible like 10.000 USD.
Essentially make it so that advertisement costs are a non-issue for any party large enough to even register on a federal election as far as radio and TV are concerned.
* Limited to parties you will find on the ballot, of course. If you want to inject your own ads to distract people from those of the big parties you will need to form your own federally-electable party in order to do so. In Germany a satire magazine has actually pulled that off once but generally it should keep the airwaves reasonably clean.
I'm from Old Europe. I was just making suggestions as to what the Americans could do to get rid of fundies messing with school curricula.
That was back when the hard drive had a proprietary form factor so you had to buy the replacement from IBM (which probably wasn't such a big deal since the BIOS thing meant they weren't easily replacable anyway).
IBM did that for some older Thinkpad models. The result was that a defect on one of those tracks made your entire system unbootable - in fact, you didn't even get any BIOS beeps because the BIOS couldn't be loaded. I think I know why they stopped doing it like that...
And according to /. popular opinion, they are worse.
FTFY
Which isn't exactly surprising since a lot of the time you teach about that denomination's stance on things. If you want an equivalent course for atheists (as your choice of words reveals) you want "Werte und Normen", which is the comparative theology class I mentioned. And I haven't heard of a school that offers religion class that doesn't offer W&N.
Well, perhaps in Bavaria but Bavaria has always been rather special in those regards.
How about Thunderbolt? Uses Mini DisplayPort plugs and should do networking.
As for my sig: It's a combination of two classic /. memes written in the style of a SCUMM command line. Because hey, if /. was a LucasArts adventure you'd probably end up doing exectly what the sig says at some point.
/. doesn't save the state of each comment you have to expand each of them separately. /. really isn't good at folding.
As for the discussion system: It gets even worse when you accidentally click on a comment further up the tree. Then all child comments are collapsed and since
That's my point. Religious debate belongs in religion class. Classes like biology are no place for it.
I propose a three step plan:
1. Establish religion class in school.
2. Get the religion out of classes where it doesn't belong.
3. The fundies can shut up as they now have a forum where they can teach any "controversy" they feel like.