If the US and UK were to merge I think we'd wind up with two capitals rather than moving the Whitehouse from DC. I can't see it happening though, maybe a closer set of alliances between the US and UK, but not becoming a single nation.
Ha the british population wouldn't stand for merging with those crazy yankees!:-)
"Especially if such a project would show them how to handle paperwork or to deal with the local administration. It may not be _that_ much of a problem in the US, but e.g. in Germany the bureaucracy is really overwhelming."
I think the bureaucracy in Germany is pretty formidable, particularly the way they regulate the size of your TP!
yeahs its pretty predictable that my original post would get modded Flamebait. Hopefully some sensible moderator will spot this and rectify the situation or the Piquepaille debate will be trampled underfoot by the slashdot mob. Anyway I have reiterated my points more clearly here and in my journal.
I hate all these articles from Roland Piquepaille's blog. They strip the story down to the barest, blandest minimum; when you click through to the blog, you still have to then click on the links in the blog to read the story.
Maybe Piquepaille's articles are good if you don't have the time to read the full story. But if this is the case, what are you doing on slashdot? Slashdot is not for busy people.
Piquepaille is obviously making a mint with the advertising on his website from all the traffic from slashdot, so is he paying slashdot a cut of his advertising traffic? or is he cynically exploiting slashdot and doing not a lot of work for his advertising dosh? He certainly gets a lot of submissions accepted..
My final gripe is that it is always Roland himself who submits his own articles, never a websurfer who came across them and submitted them to slashdot on the basis they might be interesting to the slashdot audience. Self promotion.
Also can anybody think of a good (derogatory) nickname for Piquepaille?
Whats the point of linking to another blog? you still have to click on all the links in that blog to get to the article. Does Roland pay slashdot for the traffic slashdot sends his way? I guess this would explain why theres about so many articles which are really summaries of mr piquepailles articles.
also, the other thing that is fishy is that its always mr piquepaille himself who submits the articles, its never an interested websurfer who thought they might be of interest to the slashdot audience...
"You're misinformed. We *don't* build new nuclear weapons. We don't build old nuclear weapons either. We've signed treaties against testing or selling any of the stuff too."
two things:
1) GWB has set policies to actively pursue research into "soft" nuclear weapons
2) USA has signed treaties recognising the United Nations authority, but nonetheless invaded Iraq without a mandate from the Security Council.
Great, so now we have to have MP9 on our computers if we want SP2. The only media players i use are winamp for audio and media player classic for films. and ocasionally vlc if mpc doesn't work.
I hate windows media player with a passion as it is horrible bloatware that takes seconds and seconds to startup. Instead of 1s like media player classic.
I notice that gun crime in your country (UK) is going up at an unprecedented rate since you banned civilian firearm ownership, while gun crime in the US has been falling for years.
Gun crime has been increasing for a long time in this country, and when, exactly, did we ban civilian firearm ownership? Last time I checked civilians could own guns.
"There is absolutely no need for the posession of guns beyond the size required to bring down a rabbit/deer."
What reasoning have you? If it is lethality, either of those will kill a human too.
Even a paintball gun could kill you if it hit you in the eye. But for what reason would you need a bigger gun than to take out an animal?
Thinking about it, banning powerful guns AND small guns (ease of concealment) would be the way forwards. So it would be that much harder to walk up to someone with a bigger gun tucked down the back of your trousers.
If you make the argument that people should be allowed to possess guns, then you are also making the argument that a few drunken shootings, a few wife-beatings that turned into murder, a few children accidentally shooting themselves or their friend every year is an acceptable price to pay.
Which is roughly the same as saying that by allowing people to drive you are allowing a certain number of drink drive accidents, a certain number of road accidents is ok.
Where it is different however, is that to disallow people from driving is to potentially reduce their employability (smaller home-work distance) and therefore the economic competitiveness of a country.
It is not clear to me how reducing the number of guns* would reduce the economic competitiveness of a country, and it is not clear that there is any other argument for posessing guns that will justifies x amount of inevitable avoidable shootings.
* Obviously banning/reducing guns would have to be handled carefully when you have a situation where there are many guns in circulation, factories producing more guns. Because the outlaws who posoess guns and use them to facilitate crime will still continue to do this, with the added bonus that their victims will be less armed. A 30 year incremental tax increase on guns and particularly ammunition coupled with a gun amnesty that pays something in return for your gun even if only 10-15 could help. If bullets were all of a sudden taxed 30 per bullet, maybe things would be different.
actually a better analogy would the gun makers. Should we put gun makers in jail b/c their products are used to kill people?
Yes. The gun makers do not take reasonable precautions to ensure that their guns aren't used to kill people. In fact I don't believe they take any precautions.
There is absolutely no need for the posession of guns beyond the size required to bring down a rabbit/deer.
Personally I think the anti-BBC sentiment is spin.... Most people I know think the BBC is good for us. Yet, sadly, most people I know also believe what they're told by the media.
at my last job there were 6 of us in the pub one day and the topic of the BBC came up, everybody was slating it apart from me and my boss. I got the impression this was par for the course but who knows
>>> Yet more proof that the BBC license fee is an unmitigated Good Thing(TM).
>>WHY OH WHY are the only fuckers who realise this not resident in the UK?
>Oops! You got your words wrong. Instead of "realise", I think you meant to say, "think".
You are exactly the sort of person who doesn't "realise" how good it is!!!!!!
[I say realise because IMO, it is amazing and everyone who doesn't agree a) is wrong and b) hasn't fully considered the consequences of Sky et al. suddenly having 50% less competition
> Yet more proof that the BBC license fee is an unmitigated Good Thing(TM).
WHY OH WHY are the only fuckers who realise this not resident in the UK? the public tide in this country (UK) is more anti than pro, and Labour/TB have been doing their level best to destroy the BBC's credibility*. I on the other hand am very pro-BBC. The only slight problem I have with it is that the fee is the same for everybody (i.e. a poll tax).
* Whether or not Andrew Gilligan exaggerated his story, the government (and Alistair Campbell non-gov) made an enormous issue out of it in order to discredit the BBC, as the charter is coming up for renewal soon. The bastards.
"I've always found it anoying when I tell a crease or other 3d feature is just a texture. and hands are NOT mittens."
My pet peeve is when games render a curved surface as several lines (like a hexagon instead of a circle). I don't understand why some sort of a 3d bezier curve primitive isn't introduced. Having ACTUAL curves instead of lame approximations would go a very long way to improving the quality of the user experience, particularly for faces &c.
Having said this I am not clear how bump mapping works (I know its got something to do with improving the realism of models), but I am pretty sure that if it did what I am on about, you would notice the faces etc being rendered better.
"These people rely on outdated programs that they got from their animal ancestors. These people spend their time trying to get laid, eat more"
you snob. If you spend your time trying to do things you *want* to do such reading, solving maths problems etc., you are giving in to animalistic urges. If on the other hand you are doing things that aren't for you, such as helping other people perhaps then you are rising above the animal urges.
Or, to paraphrase, DO YOU SHIT? you dirty animal
I like: eating, studying, fucking, writing music, reading, fucking, chatting, computer games, drinking and last of all, fucking. Whether or not you like fucking as much as me (and whether or not you've had as much fucking as me) you're kidding yourself if you say that by having interests other than fucking you are less animal.
> Perhaps future sound cards will get a high speed DSP and do this in hardware.
EAX etc. cards are meant* to do things like alter the pitch, apply filters, panning and basic reverbs etc in hardware, as well as mixing. So game developers have no excuse not to have shit loads of samples all with different variations. It would be very interesting to see what the state of the art in game audio is like in 10 years time
* I say meant because I have never got my Soundblaster Audigy to work in hardware accelerated mode with any game, and my experiments with the on board effects show that they are pretty piss poor to say the least. Its got to the stage where creative's own drivers from their website refuse to install, but I digress.
Re:Where are the "Sound Acceleration" cards?
on
Cinematic Game Graphics
·
· Score: 2, Informative
You can hear halo doing this a little bit when you fire machine guns etc. Though theres loads of other sounds that sound exactly the same, e.g. warthogs crashing into a building. Why don't they put more effort in to this, I would have thought sound would be fairly important for a fps, given that it should allow you to place where you're being shot at from.
Slashdot Mirror
If the US and UK were to merge I think we'd wind up with two capitals rather than moving the Whitehouse from DC. I can't see it happening though, maybe a closer set of alliances between the US and UK, but not becoming a single nation.
:-)
Ha the british population wouldn't stand for merging with those crazy yankees!
"Especially if such a project would show them how to handle paperwork or to deal with the local administration. It may not be _that_ much of a problem in the US, but e.g. in Germany the bureaucracy is really overwhelming."
I think the bureaucracy in Germany is pretty formidable, particularly the way they regulate the size of your TP!
yeahs its pretty predictable that my original post would get modded Flamebait. Hopefully some sensible moderator will spot this and rectify the situation or the Piquepaille debate will be trampled underfoot by the slashdot mob. Anyway I have reiterated my points more clearly here and in my journal.
I hate all these articles from Roland Piquepaille's blog. They strip the story down to the barest, blandest minimum; when you click through to the blog, you still have to then click on the links in the blog to read the story.
Maybe Piquepaille's articles are good if you don't have the time to read the full story. But if this is the case, what are you doing on slashdot? Slashdot is not for busy people.
Piquepaille is obviously making a mint with the advertising on his website from all the traffic from slashdot, so is he paying slashdot a cut of his advertising traffic? or is he cynically exploiting slashdot and doing not a lot of work for his advertising dosh? He certainly gets a lot of submissions accepted..
My final gripe is that it is always Roland himself who submits his own articles, never a websurfer who came across them and submitted them to slashdot on the basis they might be interesting to the slashdot audience. Self promotion.
Also can anybody think of a good (derogatory) nickname for Piquepaille?
Whats the point of linking to another blog? you still have to click on all the links in that blog to get to the article. Does Roland pay slashdot for the traffic slashdot sends his way? I guess this would explain why theres about so many articles which are really summaries of mr piquepailles articles.
also, the other thing that is fishy is that its always mr piquepaille himself who submits the articles, its never an interested websurfer who thought they might be of interest to the slashdot audience...
so when does the new miror start?
"You're misinformed. We *don't* build new nuclear weapons. We don't build old nuclear weapons either. We've signed treaties against testing or selling any of the stuff too."
two things:
1) GWB has set policies to actively pursue research into "soft" nuclear weapons
2) USA has signed treaties recognising the United Nations authority, but nonetheless invaded Iraq without a mandate from the Security Council.
Great, so now we have to have MP9 on our computers if we want SP2. The only media players i use are winamp for audio and media player classic for films. and ocasionally vlc if mpc doesn't work.
I hate windows media player with a passion as it is horrible bloatware that takes seconds and seconds to startup. Instead of 1s like media player classic.
I notice that gun crime in your country (UK) is going up at an unprecedented rate since you banned civilian firearm ownership, while gun crime in the US has been falling for years.
Gun crime has been increasing for a long time in this country, and when, exactly, did we ban civilian firearm ownership? Last time I checked civilians could own guns.
no proof, though the paintball companies tend to make you sign over your life before they'll let you play, so that could count for something.
A paintball gun could take your eye out though, and there have been a few documented cases of people dying because the C02 canister exploded.
you're basically saying what I said at the bottom of my post
"There is absolutely no need for the posession of guns beyond the size required to bring down a rabbit/deer."
What reasoning have you? If it is lethality, either of those will kill a human too.
Even a paintball gun could kill you if it hit you in the eye. But for what reason would you need a bigger gun than to take out an animal?
Thinking about it, banning powerful guns AND small guns (ease of concealment) would be the way forwards. So it would be that much harder to walk up to someone with a bigger gun tucked down the back of your trousers.
If you make the argument that people should be allowed to possess guns, then you are also making the argument that a few drunken shootings, a few wife-beatings that turned into murder, a few children accidentally shooting themselves or their friend every year is an acceptable price to pay.
Which is roughly the same as saying that by allowing people to drive you are allowing a certain number of drink drive accidents, a certain number of road accidents is ok.
Where it is different however, is that to disallow people from driving is to potentially reduce their employability (smaller home-work distance) and therefore the economic competitiveness of a country.
It is not clear to me how reducing the number of guns* would reduce the economic competitiveness of a country, and it is not clear that there is any other argument for posessing guns that will justifies x amount of inevitable avoidable shootings.
* Obviously banning/reducing guns would have to be handled carefully when you have a situation where there are many guns in circulation, factories producing more guns. Because the outlaws who posoess guns and use them to facilitate crime will still continue to do this, with the added bonus that their victims will be less armed. A 30 year incremental tax increase on guns and particularly ammunition coupled with a gun amnesty that pays something in return for your gun even if only 10-15 could help. If bullets were all of a sudden taxed 30 per bullet, maybe things would be different.
Does the U.K. have their own version of the DMCA? Anyone know?
No but we will do soon.
actually a better analogy would the gun makers. Should we put gun makers in jail b/c their products are used to kill people?
Yes. The gun makers do not take reasonable precautions to ensure that their guns aren't used to kill people. In fact I don't believe they take any precautions.
There is absolutely no need for the posession of guns beyond the size required to bring down a rabbit/deer.
Can you add it while the server is on? Can you remove it again, while the server is on?
Hotplug?
P.S. I know what you're saying tho
who needs double hyperlinks? they're shit because they are so over-emphasised that they distract the eye from reading the line of text.
Coupled with the box that pops up if you make the mistake of moving your mouse over them, they're super-annoying.
In 5 minutes, I can add an 80GB HDD into a server. and power it up.
Personally I think the anti-BBC sentiment is spin. ... Most people I know think the BBC is good for us. Yet, sadly, most people I know also believe what they're told by the media.
at my last job there were 6 of us in the pub one day and the topic of the BBC came up, everybody was slating it apart from me and my boss. I got the impression this was par for the course but who knows
>>> Yet more proof that the BBC license fee is an unmitigated Good Thing(TM).
>>WHY OH WHY are the only fuckers who realise this not resident in the UK?
>Oops! You got your words wrong. Instead of "realise", I think you meant to say, "think".
You are exactly the sort of person who doesn't "realise" how good it is!!!!!!
[I say realise because IMO, it is amazing and everyone who doesn't agree a) is wrong and b) hasn't fully considered the consequences of Sky et al. suddenly having 50% less competition
> Yet more proof that the BBC license fee is an unmitigated Good Thing(TM).
WHY OH WHY are the only fuckers who realise this not resident in the UK? the public tide in this country (UK) is more anti than pro, and Labour/TB have been doing their level best to destroy the BBC's credibility*.
I on the other hand am very pro-BBC. The only slight problem I have with it is that the fee is the same for everybody (i.e. a poll tax).
* Whether or not Andrew Gilligan exaggerated his story, the government (and Alistair Campbell non-gov) made an enormous issue out of it in order to discredit the BBC, as the charter is coming up for renewal soon. The bastards.
ITs a fscking sales pitch! that entrepeneur is laughing all the way to the bank.
"I've always found it anoying when I tell a crease or other 3d feature is just a texture. and hands are NOT mittens."
My pet peeve is when games render a curved surface as several lines (like a hexagon instead of a circle). I don't understand why some sort of a 3d bezier curve primitive isn't introduced. Having ACTUAL curves instead of lame approximations would go a very long way to improving the quality of the user experience, particularly for faces &c.
Having said this I am not clear how bump mapping works (I know its got something to do with improving the realism of models), but I am pretty sure that if it did what I am on about, you would notice the faces etc being rendered better.
"These people rely on outdated programs that they got from their animal ancestors. These people spend their time trying to get laid, eat more"
you snob. If you spend your time trying to do things you *want* to do such reading, solving maths problems etc., you are giving in to animalistic urges. If on the other hand you are doing things that aren't for you, such as helping other people perhaps then you are rising above the animal urges.
Or, to paraphrase, DO YOU SHIT? you dirty animal
I like: eating, studying, fucking, writing music, reading, fucking, chatting, computer games, drinking and last of all, fucking.
Whether or not you like fucking as much as me (and whether or not you've had as much fucking as me) you're kidding yourself if you say that by having interests other than fucking you are less animal.
www.aria.co.uk
> Perhaps future sound cards will get a high speed DSP and do this in hardware.
EAX etc. cards are meant* to do things like alter the pitch, apply filters, panning and basic reverbs etc in hardware, as well as mixing. So game developers have no excuse not to have shit loads of samples all with different variations. It would be very interesting to see what the state of the art in game audio is like in 10 years time
* I say meant because I have never got my Soundblaster Audigy to work in hardware accelerated mode with any game, and my experiments with the on board effects show that they are pretty piss poor to say the least. Its got to the stage where creative's own drivers from their website refuse to install, but I digress.
You can hear halo doing this a little bit when you fire machine guns etc. Though theres loads of other sounds that sound exactly the same, e.g. warthogs crashing into a building.
Why don't they put more effort in to this, I would have thought sound would be fairly important for a fps, given that it should allow you to place where you're being shot at from.