One of the bits that really struck that home to me was the first episode (I think) where Serenity drops from space into a planet's atmosphere, and suddenly you can hear the roar of the engines. It's possibly a little too sudden, but I think we can handwave that by saying the ship was dropping pretty quickly.
Also, if I remember correctly, isn't there a steady thrum all the time they're on the ship and flying in deep space? The thrum of the engines as heard from inside the ship (I know the external shots are all silent, apart from music).
I have this wonderful mental image of a group of IRA guys meeting after Al Quaeda started using suicide tactics and one of them saying "Ye want us tae blow ourselves up nae? Fook dat!" and going home.
Re:Actually it is 14/3
on
Happy Pi Day
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· Score: 1
It's only pi day if you use the American notation...
Yeah, I used it again over the weekend and looked at that setting - despite having stopped in the middle of my walk at a cafe for 20 minutes, there was no "0 mph" section. I was going to say that I now suspect what it does is only plot the times when you're moving, similarly to giving a "moving average" speed as well as an overall average, but I've just checked, and whilst it quotes a total time of 1:45 and a moving time of 1:25, the graph shows 1:45, with no 0 mph section.
So, yeah. I think it's broken! Sorry to have mislead!
MyTracks does something funny with the graphs - instead of plotting speed/time, it plots speed/distance by default - you can switch to speed/time if you wish. This means that on the default setting it actually/can't/ show you having stopped.
This is interesting in comparison to my attitude... I mostly agree with you - I don't buy things because they're "cool" or because I think they'll make people think I'm "better", however I do have a smartphone (HTC Desire - paying just over £20/month for 2 years for it with plenty of data and calls) and I've got a nice car (Mazda MX-5 - because it's great fun to drive, not because I'm trying to impress people).
I think the important thing is realising where the line is between buying something for yourself and buying something for everyone around you.
Exactly! I agree with you entirely here. When I'm at work, it makes almost no difference what the conditions outside are like. I can hear rain drumming on the roof, but that's about it.
Ideally, I'd like to have an hour of light for getting up and driving to work in the morning and the rest in the evening for going for a walk, sitting in the garden or at the very least, reducing my home electricity bill. Obviously that's not possible, so I'd be quite happy to sacrifice the early morning sun for more evening sun.
In fact, the ideal would be to have "bedtime" defined as sunset, so define 23:30 as being sunset, and build the rest of the day from that. I accept this would be far too complicated to implement in real life, but any adjustments that bring us closer to that ideal are worth making, imnsho.
I know what you mean about the long boring bit before the difficult bit - I was replaying X-Wing Alliance recently, and there's one mission where you have to fly to an enemy space station, then park on top of it for a while shooting fighters that are flying at you. The shooting the fighters while motionless bit is really difficult, but the bit that caused me to stop playing in frustration was the 5 or so minutes of flying from the start of the mission to get to that bit again.
On the flip side, saving/too/ often does spoil the game as well. Maybe a good compromise would be for it to take 5 seconds or so to save, during which time your character's vulnerable. That would allow you to save just before a difficult fight, but would prevent you saving every time you managed a kill.
On the (other) flip side, I found in the Half Life games that I didn't tend to save mid fight, because it's really hard to reorientate yourself quickly enough to avoid whoever's shooting at you. You need a second or two after loading to get your frame of reference back.
If the players live in different places or don't play with their family/housemates (I don't live with my friends, when I lived with my family, I didn't like the same games as my brother or sister) then you require 4 consoles and 4 copies of the game for multiplayer. Oh, and the console versions are more expensive...
I always thought that (one of) the causes of 10 year relationship, 1 year marriage syndrome was that they start off happy in the relationship, then after a number of years the relationship starts to fall apart, but they don't want to let it go, so they get married thinking that'll save it. But of course, after they get back from the honeymoon, they're still the same people in the same situation, and so the marriage doesn't last.
It's a slightly less tragic version of having kids to save a marriage...
When I saw the headline, the Cockeyed one was my very first thought.
Yes, well before the Archimedes one and certainly before Mythbusters, which I think is very much an American phenomenon.
I do go round roundabouts without slowing down (much!), but then I drive a lightweight Japanese roadster. I wouldn't recommend trying this in the average American car! I only really need to slow down when the visibility's reduced by buildings or plants.
If you go to Amazon, you can buy an upgrade copy of OS X. You can use this on any machine which came with an OS X license, which essentially means a Mac.
At least, that's how I believe it works. I've never actually owned a Mac...
I'm currently with Three. I originally signed up for the standard HTC Desire plan, which got me 500MB (plus enough minutes), but when I phoned them up to ask for more data, they gave me an extra 2GB without additional charge. That said, I don't think I've gone over the 500MB yet - I've not been using as much data as I expected to.
As for network quality, they seem to always be either very good (excellent signal, HSDPA) or very bad (no signal), and very rarely anywhere in between. So it depends whether you live in the middle of a city, I guess...
I would have expected Blackberries to get pushed out into the business niche as well, but I know a huge number of teenage girls (and a few older people) with them, largely because they're the cheapest smartphone available - I think you can pick one up on PAYG for about £100, which is under half the price of the cheaper Android phones. So, I think RIM are going to continue to do pretty well at the bottom end of the market - at least until very cheap Android phones start to appear.
You say they're uniquely American, but they're depressingly popular in the UK as well...
Not so much the retarded American truck sized ones, but there are a lot of Range Rovers, BMW X5s, Porsche Cayennes and so on around here. Mostly (badly) driven by mum with one tiny kid in the back seat. Sigh. I have to weave in and out of a lot of them trying to work out how to park outside schools on my cycle to work.
I agree - I'm just posting to add the other thing that nobody's mentioned yet...
The rails sing when a train's approaching. I've waited at level crossings a few times when the barriers have come down, and well before you can hear the rumble of the train, you can hear a fairly high pitched tone from the tracks, similar to running your finger round a wine glass. In my experience, that's the first and most obvious sign of an approaching train.
Asimov already did that, in (I think) Robots and Empire. The 4th book in the Elijah Bailey series anyway. The Solarians had programmed their robots that having a Solarian accent was an essential part of being human, so anyone who sounded foreign was fair game.
You're sort of right... It's not straight line acceleration that's fun, but cornering, which as any physicist will tell you is also an acceleration. Not having to slow down for corners is even better.
(I also have an MX-5, or Miata to the Americans in the audience, although mine's a bit newer than the GP's and still has most of its 140 horsepower)
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One of the bits that really struck that home to me was the first episode (I think) where Serenity drops from space into a planet's atmosphere, and suddenly you can hear the roar of the engines. It's possibly a little too sudden, but I think we can handwave that by saying the ship was dropping pretty quickly.
Also, if I remember correctly, isn't there a steady thrum all the time they're on the ship and flying in deep space? The thrum of the engines as heard from inside the ship (I know the external shots are all silent, apart from music).
I have this wonderful mental image of a group of IRA guys meeting after Al Quaeda started using suicide tactics and one of them saying "Ye want us tae blow ourselves up nae? Fook dat!" and going home.
It's only pi day if you use the American notation...
So I guess that makes it American Pi day.
But then, so does people calling copyright infringement theft...
I bet if people stop referring to copyright infringement as theft then the people who correct them when they do will stop too.
Next up, Tehcyder criticises the police for investigating a murder as "They only do that every single fucking time there's a murder"
This assumes that there are men out there who don't leave their laundry lying around...
Yeah, I used it again over the weekend and looked at that setting - despite having stopped in the middle of my walk at a cafe for 20 minutes, there was no "0 mph" section. I was going to say that I now suspect what it does is only plot the times when you're moving, similarly to giving a "moving average" speed as well as an overall average, but I've just checked, and whilst it quotes a total time of 1:45 and a moving time of 1:25, the graph shows 1:45, with no 0 mph section.
So, yeah. I think it's broken! Sorry to have mislead!
MyTracks does something funny with the graphs - instead of plotting speed/time, it plots speed/distance by default - you can switch to speed/time if you wish. This means that on the default setting it actually /can't/ show you having stopped.
This is interesting in comparison to my attitude... I mostly agree with you - I don't buy things because they're "cool" or because I think they'll make people think I'm "better", however I do have a smartphone (HTC Desire - paying just over £20/month for 2 years for it with plenty of data and calls) and I've got a nice car (Mazda MX-5 - because it's great fun to drive, not because I'm trying to impress people).
I think the important thing is realising where the line is between buying something for yourself and buying something for everyone around you.
Exactly! I agree with you entirely here. When I'm at work, it makes almost no difference what the conditions outside are like. I can hear rain drumming on the roof, but that's about it.
Ideally, I'd like to have an hour of light for getting up and driving to work in the morning and the rest in the evening for going for a walk, sitting in the garden or at the very least, reducing my home electricity bill. Obviously that's not possible, so I'd be quite happy to sacrifice the early morning sun for more evening sun.
In fact, the ideal would be to have "bedtime" defined as sunset, so define 23:30 as being sunset, and build the rest of the day from that. I accept this would be far too complicated to implement in real life, but any adjustments that bring us closer to that ideal are worth making, imnsho.
He was recruited by Tony the Tiger to form the FIELD alliance, the nemesis of the Liger organisation.
I know what you mean about the long boring bit before the difficult bit - I was replaying X-Wing Alliance recently, and there's one mission where you have to fly to an enemy space station, then park on top of it for a while shooting fighters that are flying at you. The shooting the fighters while motionless bit is really difficult, but the bit that caused me to stop playing in frustration was the 5 or so minutes of flying from the start of the mission to get to that bit again.
On the flip side, saving /too/ often does spoil the game as well. Maybe a good compromise would be for it to take 5 seconds or so to save, during which time your character's vulnerable. That would allow you to save just before a difficult fight, but would prevent you saving every time you managed a kill.
On the (other) flip side, I found in the Half Life games that I didn't tend to save mid fight, because it's really hard to reorientate yourself quickly enough to avoid whoever's shooting at you. You need a second or two after loading to get your frame of reference back.
If the players live in different places or don't play with their family/housemates (I don't live with my friends, when I lived with my family, I didn't like the same games as my brother or sister) then you require 4 consoles and 4 copies of the game for multiplayer. Oh, and the console versions are more expensive...
I always thought that (one of) the causes of 10 year relationship, 1 year marriage syndrome was that they start off happy in the relationship, then after a number of years the relationship starts to fall apart, but they don't want to let it go, so they get married thinking that'll save it. But of course, after they get back from the honeymoon, they're still the same people in the same situation, and so the marriage doesn't last.
It's a slightly less tragic version of having kids to save a marriage...
When I saw the headline, the Cockeyed one was my very first thought. Yes, well before the Archimedes one and certainly before Mythbusters, which I think is very much an American phenomenon.
I do go round roundabouts without slowing down (much!), but then I drive a lightweight Japanese roadster. I wouldn't recommend trying this in the average American car! I only really need to slow down when the visibility's reduced by buildings or plants.
If you go to Amazon, you can buy an upgrade copy of OS X. You can use this on any machine which came with an OS X license, which essentially means a Mac.
At least, that's how I believe it works. I've never actually owned a Mac...
What do you mean, if?
As for network quality, they seem to always be either very good (excellent signal, HSDPA) or very bad (no signal), and very rarely anywhere in between. So it depends whether you live in the middle of a city, I guess...
I would have expected Blackberries to get pushed out into the business niche as well, but I know a huge number of teenage girls (and a few older people) with them, largely because they're the cheapest smartphone available - I think you can pick one up on PAYG for about £100, which is under half the price of the cheaper Android phones. So, I think RIM are going to continue to do pretty well at the bottom end of the market - at least until very cheap Android phones start to appear.
Not so much the retarded American truck sized ones, but there are a lot of Range Rovers, BMW X5s, Porsche Cayennes and so on around here. Mostly (badly) driven by mum with one tiny kid in the back seat. Sigh. I have to weave in and out of a lot of them trying to work out how to park outside schools on my cycle to work.
The rails sing when a train's approaching. I've waited at level crossings a few times when the barriers have come down, and well before you can hear the rumble of the train, you can hear a fairly high pitched tone from the tracks, similar to running your finger round a wine glass. In my experience, that's the first and most obvious sign of an approaching train.
And I deliberately don't call them "news"papers.
Asimov already did that, in (I think) Robots and Empire. The 4th book in the Elijah Bailey series anyway. The Solarians had programmed their robots that having a Solarian accent was an essential part of being human, so anyone who sounded foreign was fair game.
(I also have an MX-5, or Miata to the Americans in the audience, although mine's a bit newer than the GP's and still has most of its 140 horsepower)
Which is a complete joke, given the amount of energy used in making a new car. It makes even less sense an an ecological move than as an economic one.