Aye! The patent Armageddon our forefathers have predicted is finally coming to pass. Take heart, brothers and sisters, and let the mighty beasts wail and crash each other asunder, for though there will be much wailing and gnashing of teeth, aye, and many a lost source of income, we will be there at the end, to wage battle with the last, greatest Patent Troll left standing and umm... sic the anti-trust hounds upon it? Again? Oh, wait...
I'm still waiting (a day later) for someone in the FAA to come out and say that.
What's so hard? They know exactly where the news helicopter was, they know exactly where US Airways 808 was and where it was going at the time. They also know what other helicopter was there (it appears in the film) so they know exactly which way the cameraman was looking.
So why in the name of Pete aren't they coming out and saying "well, from what we see on our radar replays it was flight 808 out of Hawaii. Now quit yer yappin'."
Skylon was supposed to have hybrid ramjet/rocket engines, no? As opposed to a scramjet, I mean. A ramjet ceases to be useful around 5 mach or so, whereas a scramjet is supposed to top off at 20-something.
Hmm... how about skip-(power)gliding to gain speed once you get all the way up there? Go suborbital, let gravity slam you back down into thicker air at an angle shallow enough to ensure you're going back out like a pebble on a pond, fire up your scramjet again to skip back up, only a little faster this time... rinse, repeat.
It's perhaps impractical to do this with humans on board.
Maybe... it was a firing drill, pure and simple. If I were running a sub fleet, I'd make sure to include an element of training even into operational patrols. That element could well take the shape of impromptu drills.
I can well imagine a US boomer captain opening a sealed envelope with a "open on $date" sticker in which there are mission orders to the effect of: "within the next twenty minutes you SHALL make a practice launch towards Kwajalein, regardless of where in your assigned patrol area you happen to be and what else you happen to have going on at the time. So now you know why there isn't a nuclear warhead in tube 08:P. Cheers."
If it were my Navy and the drill would be inadvertently filmed, I'd play dumb, because acknowledging the exact position of one of my boomers would be dumber.
I'm sure NORAD could have come up with that one, seeing as how they are supposed to be monitoring every cubic inch of US airspace all the time. What simpler than to look at the radar plots and say "oh, that's the US Airlines 77 inbound from Hawaii" or whatever. Did they do that? Nope. Why not? Why not the FAA? Certainly someone must have asked them by now?
Still not sure what I'm supposed to see, what with all the clouds and stuff. Is it in the lower-right corner? A small white segment that elongates towards the left?
You're doing it wrong:). You don't really need a lot of money in the Zone as much of the nicest stuff is available as quest rewards and random drops. I found after a while I was mostly buying ammo and repairs, for which the occasional sale of a low-level artifact is more than sufficient.
I lurved the small inventory to death. Dragging around busted AKMs is REALLY not worth your time, so... don't do it. In STALKER you can (should?) let go of the packrat mentality that's been instilled into most RPG players (such as myself). You'll probably find an Obokan or an AK74-U lying somewhere just as your 5.56 ammo is running out and your nice, expensive IL86 is going to shit for wear. Don't get too attached to weapons, don't use a grenade where a pistol bullet would do.
Wanna be a little more strategic about your inventory? Establish stashes. Still wanna be a packrat? Use the tourist suit or the Exosuit, get a Goldfish or three.
Should you carry more than one weapon? Absolutely. Should you have more than, oh say, 250 rounds of assorted ammo on you at any one time? No, not really, not if you can shoot worth a damn and plan ahead a bit. Wanna be a sniper, CQB specialist, grenadier and rifleman all rolled into one? Go buy Crysis.
Dunno about the bugs - the game never crashed on me, other weirdness was generally absent except for a couple of quests that were scripted badly. I never once managed to get stuck into textures and all the invisible monsters were, well, invisible by design.
Clunky? You bet. The whole rigmarole with the weapon attachments got real old real fast. So did the quest-map-thing from hell.
Did I enjoy it? Hell yes. You're missing out, especially with the patches and the community-added stuff (vehicles!) and you may want to give it another try.
All that being said, Call of Pripyat was a right piece of shit, boring and linear as hell, possibly because the devs discovered that non-linear is hard to do properly and impossible to do in a rush and on a budget.
You missed the racist/specieist angle. The ruling class of the Empire seems to be all-human in those three movies, while the rebellion includes aliens in positions of authority.
Gorillas have great big canines, solid straight jaws and a saggital crest to crack open tough veggies. Humans do not have anything like saggital crests, quite to the contrary, they have smooth skulls and weak jaws - in fact, their bite is seriously underpowered for their size. This, along with their smallish canines and the weirdly-placed eyes (too far apart for a predator, too close together for a herbivore) says "opportunist", an animal that does not, as a rule, expect to have to kill, by tooth and claw, the meat it eats.
Oops. Sorry. Replying to myself so as to correct an error - it was patent infringement, not copyright infringement that spurred the birth of the Hollywood film industry.
THE MOVIES THEMSELVES. Remember... copyright infringement is THEFT (or so the fuckwits in Hollywood would like everyone else to believe - nevermind that Hollywood itself was created expressly to carry out massive-scale copyright infringement).
Don't go thinking that open-source hardware can't exist, now. That's just being pessimistic. However, it's probably for the best to start participating in the land-grab ASAP. Patenting programs is possible in the USA so... start patenting. Make a (software) process by which to turn a 3d printer into a car-hood-spewing machine, for instance.
1.File for a patent 2. Turn the rights over to the EFF. 4. Profit for everyone!
Some control is needed, primarily to "convince" people to give up some of their land so that the railway will pass through. Entirely within the scope of federal and/or state gov't powers in the USA as it stands.
The USSR never made Trabant. They did make some of the best trucks you'll ever see. No need to "restrict" anything either.
No need to control where people are allowed to move in a direct manner - people and industry naturally set up near roads, railways, canals.
True on the mandate - again, some land probably needs to be expropriated. In a national emergency (like, oh, say, a petrol shortage that's deeper and longer than what happened in the seventies), it might be possible to do on a large scale, all at once, soviet-style. Else, you just do a bit at a time - starting now.
One should build high-density rail only in high-density areas of course. Existing east-west rail corridors in the USA can probably handle lots of extra traffic. Dual-track is a must, electrifying the entire network is also a must. Want to see rail done quick, on the cheap, with good results in a large country that's sparsely populated (on average)? Look at how the USSR did it.
High-speed rail is a convenience, not a necessity. Even just moving most freight off the highway network would do a lot to address your country's dependence on oil and that can be done with "slow" rail.
A sudden drop-off in the production of oil will not wipe out the human race either, yet may kill many more than cancer does, per unit of time, until the population is reduced to sustainable levels. Think a billion or so people starving (oil is needed for fertilizers and to make diesel for agricultural machinery). Think Americans fleeing from suddenly-impoverished exurbs, deprived of medical care and security, with no way to commute to their city jobs that have mostly vanished anyway. Where will they go? Into the big city, of course, to live in shacks and scrape a living from drugs, prostitution, crime and just general dumpster-diving.
Perhaps you have not thought this through. It IS a race to the bottom and it does not matter whether a market is served by one or more producers.
Once one of the producers starts cutting corners to reduce unit costs (not prices, mind you, just costs), the others will follow (because the first one to cut will post a Great Quarter (tm) and so their shares will rise and everyone else's directors and CEOs will look like limp-dicks in the eyes of the almighty Shareholder) and before you know it, ALL the meat you could possibly buy is tainted with growth hormones, pesticides and/or antibiotics. Welcome to the miracle of the FreeMarket(sm).
Slashdot Mirror
Aye! The patent Armageddon our forefathers have predicted is finally coming to pass. Take heart, brothers and sisters, and let the mighty beasts wail and crash each other asunder, for though there will be much wailing and gnashing of teeth, aye, and many a lost source of income, we will be there at the end, to wage battle with the last, greatest Patent Troll left standing and umm... sic the anti-trust hounds upon it? Again? Oh, wait...
http://abclocal.go.com/kabc/gallery?section=news/local/los_angeles&id=7776159&photo=3
It may very well have been.
I'm still waiting (a day later) for someone in the FAA to come out and say that.
What's so hard? They know exactly where the news helicopter was, they know exactly where US Airways 808 was and where it was going at the time. They also know what other helicopter was there (it appears in the film) so they know exactly which way the cameraman was looking.
So why in the name of Pete aren't they coming out and saying "well, from what we see on our radar replays it was flight 808 out of Hawaii. Now quit yer yappin'."
Skylon was supposed to have hybrid ramjet/rocket engines, no? As opposed to a scramjet, I mean. A ramjet ceases to be useful around 5 mach or so, whereas a scramjet is supposed to top off at 20-something.
Hmm... how about skip-(power)gliding to gain speed once you get all the way up there? Go suborbital, let gravity slam you back down into thicker air at an angle shallow enough to ensure you're going back out like a pebble on a pond, fire up your scramjet again to skip back up, only a little faster this time... rinse, repeat.
It's perhaps impractical to do this with humans on board.
Maybe... it was a firing drill, pure and simple. If I were running a sub fleet, I'd make sure to include an element of training even into operational patrols. That element could well take the shape of impromptu drills.
I can well imagine a US boomer captain opening a sealed envelope with a "open on $date" sticker in which there are mission orders to the effect of: "within the next twenty minutes you SHALL make a practice launch towards Kwajalein, regardless of where in your assigned patrol area you happen to be and what else you happen to have going on at the time. So now you know why there isn't a nuclear warhead in tube 08 :P. Cheers."
If it were my Navy and the drill would be inadvertently filmed, I'd play dumb, because acknowledging the exact position of one of my boomers would be dumber.
So should the FAA. But they didn't.
I hear the beaches of Zanzibar are pretty effin' crowded this time of year
They've bigger problems of their own - not least of which is that the beaches of Zanzibar are getting mighty crowded.
I'm sure NORAD could have come up with that one, seeing as how they are supposed to be monitoring every cubic inch of US airspace all the time. What simpler than to look at the radar plots and say "oh, that's the US Airlines 77 inbound from Hawaii" or whatever. Did they do that? Nope. Why not? Why not the FAA? Certainly someone must have asked them by now?
Thank you.
Still not sure what I'm supposed to see, what with all the clouds and stuff.
Is it in the lower-right corner? A small white segment that elongates towards the left?
Maybe do a version with a red circle around the feature?
You're doing it wrong :). You don't really need a lot of money in the Zone as much of the nicest stuff is available as quest rewards and random drops. I found after a while I was mostly buying ammo and repairs, for which the occasional sale of a low-level artifact is more than sufficient.
I lurved the small inventory to death. Dragging around busted AKMs is REALLY not worth your time, so... don't do it. In STALKER you can (should?) let go of the packrat mentality that's been instilled into most RPG players (such as myself). You'll probably find an Obokan or an AK74-U lying somewhere just as your 5.56 ammo is running out and your nice, expensive IL86 is going to shit for wear. Don't get too attached to weapons, don't use a grenade where a pistol bullet would do.
Wanna be a little more strategic about your inventory? Establish stashes. Still wanna be a packrat? Use the tourist suit or the Exosuit, get a Goldfish or three.
Should you carry more than one weapon? Absolutely. Should you have more than, oh say, 250 rounds of assorted ammo on you at any one time? No, not really, not if you can shoot worth a damn and plan ahead a bit. Wanna be a sniper, CQB specialist, grenadier and rifleman all rolled into one? Go buy Crysis.
Dunno about the bugs - the game never crashed on me, other weirdness was generally absent except for a couple of quests that were scripted badly. I never once managed to get stuck into textures and all the invisible monsters were, well, invisible by design.
Clunky? You bet. The whole rigmarole with the weapon attachments got real old real fast. So did the quest-map-thing from hell.
Did I enjoy it? Hell yes. You're missing out, especially with the patches and the community-added stuff (vehicles!) and you may want to give it another try.
All that being said, Call of Pripyat was a right piece of shit, boring and linear as hell, possibly because the devs discovered that non-linear is hard to do properly and impossible to do in a rush and on a budget.
You missed the racist/specieist angle. The ruling class of the Empire seems to be all-human in those three movies, while the rebellion includes aliens in positions of authority.
Gorillas have great big canines, solid straight jaws and a saggital crest to crack open tough veggies. Humans do not have anything like saggital crests, quite to the contrary, they have smooth skulls and weak jaws - in fact, their bite is seriously underpowered for their size. This, along with their smallish canines and the weirdly-placed eyes (too far apart for a predator, too close together for a herbivore) says "opportunist", an animal that does not, as a rule, expect to have to kill, by tooth and claw, the meat it eats.
Oops. Sorry. Replying to myself so as to correct an error - it was patent infringement, not copyright infringement that spurred the birth of the Hollywood film industry.
THE MOVIES THEMSELVES. Remember... copyright infringement is THEFT (or so the fuckwits in Hollywood would like everyone else to believe - nevermind that Hollywood itself was created expressly to carry out massive-scale copyright infringement).
Don't go thinking that open-source hardware can't exist, now. That's just being pessimistic. However, it's probably for the best to start participating in the land-grab ASAP. Patenting programs is possible in the USA so... start patenting. Make a (software) process by which to turn a 3d printer into a car-hood-spewing machine, for instance.
1.File for a patent
2. Turn the rights over to the EFF.
4. Profit for everyone!
there is no step three, of course
By the numbers from the top.
Some control is needed, primarily to "convince" people to give up some of their land so that the railway will pass through. Entirely within the scope of federal and/or state gov't powers in the USA as it stands.
The USSR never made Trabant. They did make some of the best trucks you'll ever see. No need to "restrict" anything either.
No need to control where people are allowed to move in a direct manner - people and industry naturally set up near roads, railways, canals.
True on the mandate - again, some land probably needs to be expropriated. In a national emergency (like, oh, say, a petrol shortage that's deeper and longer than what happened in the seventies), it might be possible to do on a large scale, all at once, soviet-style. Else, you just do a bit at a time - starting now.
I should have said "a hypothetical" etc...
My bad. The rest of the argument stands.
One should build high-density rail only in high-density areas of course. Existing east-west rail corridors in the USA can probably handle lots of extra traffic. Dual-track is a must, electrifying the entire network is also a must. Want to see rail done quick, on the cheap, with good results in a large country that's sparsely populated (on average)? Look at how the USSR did it.
High-speed rail is a convenience, not a necessity. Even just moving most freight off the highway network would do a lot to address your country's dependence on oil and that can be done with "slow" rail.
A sudden drop-off in the production of oil will not wipe out the human race either, yet may kill many more than cancer does, per unit of time, until the population is reduced to sustainable levels. Think a billion or so people starving (oil is needed for fertilizers and to make diesel for agricultural machinery). Think Americans fleeing from suddenly-impoverished exurbs, deprived of medical care and security, with no way to commute to their city jobs that have mostly vanished anyway. Where will they go? Into the big city, of course, to live in shacks and scrape a living from drugs, prostitution, crime and just general dumpster-diving.
Perhaps you have not thought this through. It IS a race to the bottom and it does not matter whether a market is served by one or more producers.
Once one of the producers starts cutting corners to reduce unit costs (not prices, mind you, just costs), the others will follow (because the first one to cut will post a Great Quarter (tm) and so their shares will rise and everyone else's directors and CEOs will look like limp-dicks in the eyes of the almighty Shareholder) and before you know it, ALL the meat you could possibly buy is tainted with growth hormones, pesticides and/or antibiotics. Welcome to the miracle of the FreeMarket(sm).
Actually, TFA is assuming that.