Advanced rifles skill, and preferably master, was essential to use the sniper rifle, possibly the most important weapon in the game (partly because it made your passage through some levels easy, more importantly because it was the best way to deal with other snipers). Seeing the most of the ammunition acquired along the way is rifle ammo, it's also a no-brainer for the inevitable combat situations. However, the other rifles and shotguns were significantly underpowered.
The combination of power recirculator and regeneration made most of the shielding enhancements redundant. (when you can regerate for pretty much zero cost faster than you can be damaged, why bother?). In fact, once you've got those, only snipers or heavy weapons can kill you.
The grenade skill was pretty useless - in fact, grenades were pretty useless except possibly the use of a gas grenade on the rescue mission.
The GEP gun was really, really useful with its standard rocket. All of the other heavy weapons were useless (though going up against the character with the plasma rifle was a bit tough).
You wonder how much GM, or Wal-Mart, spend on MS Office licenses. I'd reckon they could probably pay less to finish the open source office suite of their choice and use the spare change to get most of their custom Windows apps running using Wine.
On/., there are some fairly common beliefs about children that aren't as common in the general community:
Children, particularly as they get a little older, deserve some privacy.
Parents are overprotective.
That once parents get a hold of this kind of technology and use it with 4-year-olds, to track them down if they wander offthey're going to want to use it to monitor where their 15-year-olds go when they go out (which, IMHO, is a gross abuse of the technology).
More generally, it's the thin end of the wedge.
Sure, I've got no problems strapping it to a little kid at the beach (though, frankly, it's hardly necessary - child abduction by strangers is *very* rare). Its use with older children, though, concerns me greatly.
Further to your point, there is still a need for new algorithms.
There are plenty of real problems for which the "best" algorithm doesn't yet exist, and you come across them both in academia and in industrial settings.
Amelie was the sweetest, lightest bit of romantic fluff I've seen in a long while. There was far more violence in Monsters Inc than there was in Amelie, which isn't hard because there zero (that's right, zero, none, zip).
There were, however, a couple of sex scenes. One involves the main character having rather unsatisfying sex with a boyfriend, the camera close in on Amelie's face looking bored with the whole procedure. The next involves a sequence of brief vignettes depicting a variety of couples around Paris having an orgasm, in the context of Amelie sitting at the top of a hill (Montmatre?) wondering how many couples are having an orgasm at that instant. It's a very, very funny scene. Finally, Amelie plays matchmaker and two characters disappear off into the bathroom to have a quickie. This is depicted with their silhouette through the frosted glass and increasingly loud noises from the bathroom.
Now, sure, If I was a parent of an 11-year-old, I probably wouldn't take an 11-year-old to see it either (a 14-year-old, sure). But give them horrible nightmares? Only if they've had all manner of neuroses about sex drilled into them... oh, I forgot...
Future advances in technology will never make the performance of Java games acceptable (at least for shooters, flight simulators, big real-time strategy games and other CPU hogs). You'll always be able to go much faster with natively-compiled, non-garbage-collected languages that let you get closer to the hardware, and, therefore, make better-looking, better-playing games.
There would be areas of Antarctica that would be more like Mars than Utah with a constant hostile environment due to the extreme cold.
True, Antarctica would probably have more appropriate mean temperatures, but inappropriate daylight patterns: in summer, near 24-hour days and in winter, 24-hour nights. Any Mars landing would presumably be reasonably close to the equator.
The other big question of course is "Why". Why do this at all? Do people really think simulating and then visiting Mars is a possible step in permanent habitation? Our only chance of survival in THIS solar system is here on earth. And any planets revolving around other stars are too far away for us, right now. It's a disservice to get everyones hopes up for living on Mars.
Even if we don't colonize Mars permanently, there are several reasons to go. Most compelling is to go search for life, or past life, and if we find it examine its structure. If we find it and discover it and Earth life evolved from the same source, that tells us that life can make interplanetary (at least) journeys. However, if we find it evolved independently it would suggest life has a pretty good chance of evolving wherever conditions were right. I think it would be worth going just for that purpose.
Secondly, you assert that it's impossible to colonise Mars. I would argue that we don't really know one way or the other at this point, and a manned mission (or two) is the only way to collect enough data to find out.
The US economy's annual GDP is round about 10 trillion dollars, according to the CIA World Factbook. Government spending is about 1.7 trillion per year. Let's say we spend 200 billion over 10 years to do a Mars mission (NASA did a design reference mission that claims about 50 billion for a Mars program, but we'll be safe and quadruple it). That's 20 billion a year. Sounds a lot, doesn't it? It's about 1.2% of the annual budget.
The US could afford to start a Mars program (or go to the Moon, or land a whole bunch of probes on Europa) any time it wanted and wouldn't notice the cost. It's just that priorities lie elsewhere right now.
Also "proves" one important complexity result
on
Simpsons Guide to Math
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
If you watch that episode carefully you'll notice that the equation P=NP floating around. Whether this assertion (which, translated, is the question "is the set of decision problems defined in a certain way (roughly "easy to solve") the same as another set of decision problems defined in another way (roughly "easy to verify a solution, but possibly very hard to get a solution")) is true or not is the most famous unsolved problem in theoretical computer science. It's almost certainly not true, but proving it's not has turned out to be a bit of a doozy, to say the least.
I think this basically indicates that the Simpsons writers and animators are just as geeky as the/. readership.
GPS units can tell you your position with great accuracy, but they don't tell you which way north (or any other direction) is. To do that, you need a compass.
In terms of smog-causing, carcinogenic nasties etc, that's reasonably accurate - though Europe, Japan, Australia etc. are pretty much up with you (the same cars produce the same emissions whether they're in New York or New South Wales).
Where you're completely wrong is with regards to carbon dioxide emissions, the primary vehicular contributor to global warming. CO2 emissions are directly proportional to fuel consumption (no pollution control gear can make the CO2 go away), and the US market chooses larger and thirstier vehicles than every other significant market. No matter how much emissions gear you have on your Chevy Suburban, it's still a fuel-sucking greenhouse gas factory.
20. The Gartner Group issues trading cards featuring its analysts.,
Anybody know a a way to use trading cards as voodoo dolls? ". . . and that's for stealing your recommendations from the tech section of the Bumsteer Daily Braindump . . . ":)
It would be different, were the US doing something half-assed (which we often do) like threatening to selectively deny it to Europe...
If it was the EU who ran GPS satellites, do you reckon the US Congress would stand for the risk to their military potency, increasing parts of their economy, and civilian safety from the vagaries of EU bureauracy?
Last time I checked, you can't just brute force 3des for $5 million - the keyspace is just too large (2^112 is pretty damn big). You'd need some help along the way, like the differential attacks described elsewhere. Wouldn't you?
From what I've read, they cut down the keyspace by (for instance) forcing the algorithm to execute wrongly and thus revealing substantial information about the keys.
Whilst it's hardly at the level of requiring Java programmability, text messaging is one example of a very useful feature beyond your "wireless" and "phone". It's hugely popular pretty much everywhere but America. It's cheaper and quicker than making a voice call, and you can send and receive text messages in places where you couldn't make a voice call (bars, for instance).
My phone has some very basic PDA features as well - a simple appointment reminder. They work very well. I see no reason why more elaborate features wouldn't be even more useful.
We had a 35-foot sport fishing boat with a dedicated chart plotter (a much simpler and more reliable device than a PC), and there's no way we'd leave port without a set of paper charts as well. Aside from anything else, what if the system breaks?
Given the cost and reliability of paper charts, it would seem highly imprudent not to take at least a set of the most crucial ones.
Of course, forintercontinental shipping charts aren't terribly useful for most of the trip, though.
You didn't bother to read my comment properly. Yes, the US has the right to defend itself, and, if there is no alternative to prevent massive loss of life, use nukes to do it.
If you read the orginal poster I was replying to, he stated that a country that uses biological or chemical weapons against the United States "forfeits its right to exist". That's wrong. Those directly responsible have lost the right to exist. If we can arrest and try them, fine, otherwise kill them. That's entirely appropriate. But killing innocents when there's no reasonable alternative? I don't know what you call it, but I certainly call it mass murder.
And, no, I haven't served in the armed forces of my own country. I have a chronic disease that precludes me from military service. But if that were not the case, and my country needed to be defended, I would serve.
It WOULD be appropriate and utterly defensible to use nukes against a country that hit us with chemical or biologicals. Any such country foreits it right to exist.
No, it wouldn't. If nukes were the only way to ensure no further attacks occurred, sure. But to wipe out an entire people, most of whom weren't responsible, purely for revenge? That's unworthy of a civilized human being, and were you the person that ordered such a thing (or carried out such an order knowing you were deliberately mass-murdering civilians) you would be the worst war criminal since Hitler (and, yes, the analogy is relevant for once).
Re:They'll never get me
on
Penguin2Apple
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Basically, the idea is that you use a markup language to describe the structure of a document, and then (for any custom elements), you specify how to render that structure.
The idea is somewhat similar to DocBook, but it's more pragmatic in that it will give you tight control of elements where a human can make visual formatting better than the machine can.
Word can sort of do structural formatting with styles and templates, but it's very much a half-assed structural formatting system pasted over the top over the basic visual paradigm. LaTeX has it built in.
There a lot of "packages" - standard sets of formatting tools to lay out most things you'd ever want to do without the bother of having to design the format yourself. If you're doing anything vaguely mathematical, LaTeX's math-typesetting capabilities are unparalleled. Equation editor doesn't come within cooee. LaTeX's citation, cross-referencing, and sectioning abilities are extremely good.
LaTeX does have its downsides. Customizing the look of your document can be quite hard work, and it's not particularly well-suited to highly graphical documents it can include figures perfectly well, but its placement algorithms aren't great and highly graphical documents require a great deal of visual formatting that a visual tool is better at.
LaTeX (and TeX, which it is built on top of) is highly stable. You can be guaranteed that your documents will be editable and rewritable for generations into the future. Word's file format keeps changing, and more importantly embedded objects seem to not cope very well with version changes.
The other thing that can be important in some cases is that LaTeX is a batch system, and it's not hard to write computer programs to generate output in LaTeX format which can then be processed into high-quality layout. The Docbook tools do just this, IIRC.
LaTeX isn't for all applications. If your documents are long, structured, contain mathematics, require consistent formatting, and are for long-term use, LaTeX is the choice, no question. If you're sending out one-page marketing memos with colour and lots of pretty drawings, Word is far superior.
If you do decide to give LaTeX a try, you might need LaTeX : A Documentation Preparation System by Leslie Lamport (the designer of LaTeX), and possibly The LaTeX Companion, by Goossens, Mittelbach, and Samarin. They're a little expensive, though.
Re:They'll never get me
on
Penguin2Apple
·
· Score: 2
Me, I'd rather use my computer than learn my computer. LaTeX? Sure, I could use it, but why would I want to waste my time marking something up in LaTeX when I can open Word, type it out, spend four seconds formatting it the way I need, and then save it to any of five dozen file formats (most importantly, Word).
If you can format your document in four seconds, you're obviously tackling such simple documents you may as well be using Wordpad and aren't in a position to make an informed judgement as to the relative merits of LaTeX and Word for such tasks.
When you've edited something substantial (and but up against Word and the word processor paradigm's substantial limitations for such work), come back and talk to me.
Slashdot Mirror
You wonder how much GM, or Wal-Mart, spend on MS Office licenses. I'd reckon they could probably pay less to finish the open source office suite of their choice and use the spare change to get most of their custom Windows apps running using Wine.
Sure, I've got no problems strapping it to a little kid at the beach (though, frankly, it's hardly necessary - child abduction by strangers is *very* rare). Its use with older children, though, concerns me greatly.
True, but there's already another woman up on the same charge, apparently.
There are plenty of real problems for which the "best" algorithm doesn't yet exist, and you come across them both in academia and in industrial settings.
Whatever the Chinese are up to, it ain't ICBM building. They already have them.
Amelie was the sweetest, lightest bit of romantic fluff I've seen in a long while. There was far more violence in Monsters Inc than there was in Amelie, which isn't hard because there zero (that's right, zero, none, zip).
There were, however, a couple of sex scenes. One involves the main character having rather unsatisfying sex with a boyfriend, the camera close in on Amelie's face looking bored with the whole procedure. The next involves a sequence of brief vignettes depicting a variety of couples around Paris having an orgasm, in the context of Amelie sitting at the top of a hill (Montmatre?) wondering how many couples are having an orgasm at that instant. It's a very, very funny scene. Finally, Amelie plays matchmaker and two characters disappear off into the bathroom to have a quickie. This is depicted with their silhouette through the frosted glass and increasingly loud noises from the bathroom.
Now, sure, If I was a parent of an 11-year-old, I probably wouldn't take an 11-year-old to see it either (a 14-year-old, sure). But give them horrible nightmares? Only if they've had all manner of neuroses about sex drilled into them... oh, I forgot...
Go read the interview again, specifically the first paragraph. He *is* a marketroid, not a coder.
Future advances in technology will never make the performance of Java games acceptable (at least for shooters, flight simulators, big real-time strategy games and other CPU hogs). You'll always be able to go much faster with natively-compiled, non-garbage-collected languages that let you get closer to the hardware, and, therefore, make better-looking, better-playing games.
True, Antarctica would probably have more appropriate mean temperatures, but inappropriate daylight patterns: in summer, near 24-hour days and in winter, 24-hour nights. Any Mars landing would presumably be reasonably close to the equator.
The other big question of course is "Why". Why do this at all? Do people really think simulating and then visiting Mars is a possible step in permanent habitation? Our only chance of survival in THIS solar system is here on earth. And any planets revolving around other stars are too far away for us, right now. It's a disservice to get everyones hopes up for living on Mars.
Even if we don't colonize Mars permanently, there are several reasons to go. Most compelling is to go search for life, or past life, and if we find it examine its structure. If we find it and discover it and Earth life evolved from the same source, that tells us that life can make interplanetary (at least) journeys. However, if we find it evolved independently it would suggest life has a pretty good chance of evolving wherever conditions were right. I think it would be worth going just for that purpose.
Secondly, you assert that it's impossible to colonise Mars. I would argue that we don't really know one way or the other at this point, and a manned mission (or two) is the only way to collect enough data to find out.
The US could afford to start a Mars program (or go to the Moon, or land a whole bunch of probes on Europa) any time it wanted and wouldn't notice the cost. It's just that priorities lie elsewhere right now.
I think this basically indicates that the Simpsons writers and animators are just as geeky as the /. readership.
GPS units can tell you your position with great accuracy, but they don't tell you which way north (or any other direction) is. To do that, you need a compass.
Where you're completely wrong is with regards to carbon dioxide emissions, the primary vehicular contributor to global warming. CO2 emissions are directly proportional to fuel consumption (no pollution control gear can make the CO2 go away), and the US market chooses larger and thirstier vehicles than every other significant market. No matter how much emissions gear you have on your Chevy Suburban, it's still a fuel-sucking greenhouse gas factory.
Anybody know a a way to use trading cards as voodoo dolls? ". . . and that's for stealing your recommendations from the tech section of the Bumsteer Daily Braindump . . . " :)
If it was the EU who ran GPS satellites, do you reckon the US Congress would stand for the risk to their military potency, increasing parts of their economy, and civilian safety from the vagaries of EU bureauracy?
I don't think so.
From what I've read, they cut down the keyspace by (for instance) forcing the algorithm to execute wrongly and thus revealing substantial information about the keys.
Though I don't imagine this one has Rachael Leigh Cook and Claire Forlani in it . ..
My phone has some very basic PDA features as well - a simple appointment reminder. They work very well. I see no reason why more elaborate features wouldn't be even more useful.
Finally, tetris is *always* useful :)
Given the cost and reliability of paper charts, it would seem highly imprudent not to take at least a set of the most crucial ones.
Of course, forintercontinental shipping charts aren't terribly useful for most of the trip, though.
If you read the orginal poster I was replying to, he stated that a country that uses biological or chemical weapons against the United States "forfeits its right to exist". That's wrong. Those directly responsible have lost the right to exist. If we can arrest and try them, fine, otherwise kill them. That's entirely appropriate. But killing innocents when there's no reasonable alternative? I don't know what you call it, but I certainly call it mass murder.
And, no, I haven't served in the armed forces of my own country. I have a chronic disease that precludes me from military service. But if that were not the case, and my country needed to be defended, I would serve.
No, it wouldn't. If nukes were the only way to ensure no further attacks occurred, sure. But to wipe out an entire people, most of whom weren't responsible, purely for revenge? That's unworthy of a civilized human being, and were you the person that ordered such a thing (or carried out such an order knowing you were deliberately mass-murdering civilians) you would be the worst war criminal since Hitler (and, yes, the analogy is relevant for once).
The idea is somewhat similar to DocBook, but it's more pragmatic in that it will give you tight control of elements where a human can make visual formatting better than the machine can.
Word can sort of do structural formatting with styles and templates, but it's very much a half-assed structural formatting system pasted over the top over the basic visual paradigm. LaTeX has it built in.
There a lot of "packages" - standard sets of formatting tools to lay out most things you'd ever want to do without the bother of having to design the format yourself. If you're doing anything vaguely mathematical, LaTeX's math-typesetting capabilities are unparalleled. Equation editor doesn't come within cooee. LaTeX's citation, cross-referencing, and sectioning abilities are extremely good.
LaTeX does have its downsides. Customizing the look of your document can be quite hard work, and it's not particularly well-suited to highly graphical documents it can include figures perfectly well, but its placement algorithms aren't great and highly graphical documents require a great deal of visual formatting that a visual tool is better at.
LaTeX (and TeX, which it is built on top of) is highly stable. You can be guaranteed that your documents will be editable and rewritable for generations into the future. Word's file format keeps changing, and more importantly embedded objects seem to not cope very well with version changes.
The other thing that can be important in some cases is that LaTeX is a batch system, and it's not hard to write computer programs to generate output in LaTeX format which can then be processed into high-quality layout. The Docbook tools do just this, IIRC.
LaTeX isn't for all applications. If your documents are long, structured, contain mathematics, require consistent formatting, and are for long-term use, LaTeX is the choice, no question. If you're sending out one-page marketing memos with colour and lots of pretty drawings, Word is far superior.
If you do decide to give LaTeX a try, you might need LaTeX : A Documentation Preparation System by Leslie Lamport (the designer of LaTeX), and possibly The LaTeX Companion, by Goossens, Mittelbach, and Samarin. They're a little expensive, though.
If you can format your document in four seconds, you're obviously tackling such simple documents you may as well be using Wordpad and aren't in a position to make an informed judgement as to the relative merits of LaTeX and Word for such tasks.
When you've edited something substantial (and but up against Word and the word processor paradigm's substantial limitations for such work), come back and talk to me.
I know that. I was talking about the possibility of a "radiological bomb" - no nuclear detonation, just spraying fallout over a wide area.