And that folks, is the difference between NASA-cam and your average gas-station-cam, which, on average, can't identify Bigfoot if it were robbing the place.
Clearly this just means that people on crime shows will just sent the gas-station footage to NASA, so that they can blow it up and see Bigfoot. Problem solved.
Yeah, I realize that. The problem is that I don't run the servers. I join them, and if I ever join a server that's down by one or two people it seems to always be one or two reserved slots.
I mean, I'm not going to quit playing or anything, but it'd be nice if Valve would realize that people have been using admin plugins to do this kind of stuff since--what? The Quake 2 days? It seems like just the kind of thing they would implement into their otherwise intelligent server browser system. Then again, the reason the plugins exist is because the games don't have features like voting and ranking and stuff that people want. It's really extremely bizarre. For all the other innovations that Valve pushes, they don't have these basic features that most modern FPSes have. And they've shown that they can roll out changes to all their Source-engine games at once.
Well, but those of us who played older versions of these games and realized that they were broken in certain ways are disappointed to see that they won't be getting any more "patches," so to speak, to their favorite edition of the game.
It's like being a huge Battlefield:Vietnam fan, and then Battlefield 2 and Battlefield 2142 come out. You like BF:V, and don't like BF2142, and so you don't buy or play BF2142--but it does mean that you're stuck with the BF:V gameplay that you have, rather than getting fixes or updates that the game might sorely need. And it still means that you're disappointed that they took the games in a direction that you don't like. Not playing the new game doesn't really remove the disappointment, and it does make it tough to find new people to play the old game with. Naturally, this makes a person want to complain--it's perfectly natural, and it's just as natural to dislike complainers, which is why this "don't like don't play" attitude is to some extent understandable.
From everything that I've heard about 4th edition--honestly, it's not much--it's been compared to the "WoW" of D&D. The game at least pretended, at one time, to be about role-playing--which is why your character stats were generated randomly in the default system. The statistical distillation of the game mechanics, though, inevitably resulted in the same kind of treatment happening to D&D as happens to every other game out there--people thoroughly and empirically evaluate every practical combination of weapons and skills and items that they can think of, and then everyone plays with the most efficient ones. For an MMO, where the player is in a battle with the developers to minimize the time commitment (whereas the developers have a vested interest in maximizing the time it takes to do everything), it makes a sad kind of sense. For a game that is nominally about telling a story with rules, it really runs contrary to the spirit of the game.
But, honestly, if that's how people _want_ to play these games, it's really not for me to tell them how to do so. Admittedly, newer CRPGs do include content that really forces you to build the most effective characters possible if you want to experience everything the game has to offer. Beyond that, since a multiplayer CRPG really doesn't have the same GM-player dynamic as a tabletop D&D game, it's really not possible to "correctly" role-play a fighter with a strength of ten--you just end up getting killed in combat and unable to pass any of the rigidly-defined skill checks. This prevents you from making fun progress in the game, whereas in a tabletop even failure should give you an opportunity to role-play something fun, if the GM and the players are imaginative enough to do it.
Actually, that's exactly what I figured they would do: move the magnet or the device in and out of the permanent field, or around inside a gradient field, or something. But then you would have to power the device that moves the magnet, and you're not going to get enough power out of the device to do that, or else you're violating the laws of thermodynamics. So, since you have to power a motor or a piezoelectric transducer, I'm not really sure what application this device has that couldn't be better served by whatever's powering the motor.
Reserved slots--or, really, the way the server browser handles them.
I don't actually have a problem with reserved slots themselves. They have no value to me, and I've never been kicked out because someone else who had a reserved slot joined. My problem is that the server browser doesn't understand reserved slots, and shows servers whose "public" slots are full as having free space to join. Steam has a rather good server browser that refreshes quickly and has other nice features, but joining servers only to go through the entire motions of connecting and _then_ being told that I can't play because there isn't actually a slot for me is annoying. It also breaks the functionality that auto-retires full servers, which is a very nice feature.
Maybe it's a pet peeve of mine. On one other site I go to once in a while, pretty much everybody complained about getting into this kind of server once in a while--one of the ones that reports being full but is actually empty. I haven't once ever had that particular problem. It's a strange situation.
Spintronics is a little too far out of my ken (I was always more of a radiation physicist, where everything comes in nice little packages instead of fields), but if I'm reading the paper correctly, they're saying that they can apply a static magnetic field to one of these devices and then can measure a voltage drop across a resistor hooked up to the device. They can get a few millivolts from a 1.2 Tesla field, which persists for at least ten minutes but does decay in that time frame. When they remove the magnetic field, the voltage disappears.
I guess my question is that if the field is static, where is the energy coming from that drives the current giving rise to the voltage? I'm also wondering how one regenerates the voltage after it discharges completely.
In this day and age, if Nokia really is that important of a part of the country's economy, the lawmakers could probably get away with calling them economic terrorists.
That ship sailed days ago. I really would consider actually buying the stupid mini-expansion and giving Bethesda more money--even though I very recently was certain I wouldn't even purchase FO3--if I didn't have to jump through their lousy software hoop.
I bought into EA's worthless content delivery system for the BF2142 expansion. That ended up taking me for the biggest ride of my gaming life. I don't really want to go through that kind of trash again, and I don't like supporting badly-implemented content delivery systems.
It's really a flaw with the engine that Oblivion and Fallout share. It was also a problem in Morrowind to a degree. That kind of narrative consistency is not something that Bethesda's latest games do well--even if you ignore the 72-hour-refresh. It is very immersion breaking, but it's not a surprise that it's happening.
You can hold down the "use" key on a drinking fountain, toilet, or urinal, and you'll constantly drink from it. It only takes a few seconds at one of those "5 HP | 24 rad" urinals to get that quest taken care of--and there's a bathroom within a stone's throw of Moira's.
The only way that Crysis ever registered on my gaming radar was that it was a DX10-only game, and therefore required Vista, and therefore I would probably not play it in the foreseeable future.
The proponents of the machine get it accepted by lawyers using shaky, anecdotal claims; they foist it onto a desperate witness in a dramatic case of murder; then when the judge cites the technology as a deciding factor, they use that as evidence the device has "official approval" and therefore works.
It wasn't Fallout, where health items are rare, cost a fortune, and come with some of the side effects of actual drugs.
Maybe FO wasn't this way, but in FO2, I ended the game with 40 super stims that healed tons of damage and then hurt you a little bit afterwards. That was more than enough stims to kill a person with the side-effects alone, and I don't know any drugs whose side effects include losing ten hit points. Not to mention that you could in one random encounter find the most powerful healing items in the game--which had no side effects--literally laying on the ground. I'm not going to say that healing items were as common in FO2 as they were in D2, but I never really had to ration my healing items the way I rationed my bullets.
I would be very amused if this turned out to be a prelude to an attempt to do away with inventory management as it's known in Diablo right now.
I know End of Fiscal year for some people is going on.
I think he might've forgotten that a lot of college-going people are getting prepared to _return to college._ I've got to move, go through TA orientations, present my internship presentation, and I'm finding out if my grant came through or not.
It's somewhat interesting to note that as we've moved from scientific paper to phonebook to slashdot, the quality of whiskey required to make the reading interesting has increased from unqualified whiskey, to good whiskey, to fine whiskey.
My noticing this and then posting about it is itself proof that I have no whiskey of any quality on hand.
Avalanche photodiodes of certain semiconductor materials have been around for a while now. I believe the novel part of this research is that they're confirming other researchers' data showing that lead selenide semiconductors can exhibit electron cascade effects.
I'm reminded of the bank run depicted in the Jungle, only with less panic.
Of course, that scene depicted people with absolutely no disposable income desperate to get their money back in their own hands, whereas--minus the hysteria--this scene depicts people desperate to put their money into someone else's hands. How far we've come.
Will someone please tell me that the first line of this article is just speculation on the part of the editors and not a massive "Snake dies" MGS4 spoiler?
Slashdot Mirror
So, wait, this isn't a Russia-USA cold war, it's an Earth Governments-Astronaut cold war?
Or is it a cold war three-way: USA-Russia-Astronauts?
And that folks, is the difference between NASA-cam and your average gas-station-cam, which, on average, can't identify Bigfoot if it were robbing the place.
Clearly this just means that people on crime shows will just sent the gas-station footage to NASA, so that they can blow it up and see Bigfoot. Problem solved.
Yeah, I realize that. The problem is that I don't run the servers. I join them, and if I ever join a server that's down by one or two people it seems to always be one or two reserved slots.
I mean, I'm not going to quit playing or anything, but it'd be nice if Valve would realize that people have been using admin plugins to do this kind of stuff since--what? The Quake 2 days? It seems like just the kind of thing they would implement into their otherwise intelligent server browser system. Then again, the reason the plugins exist is because the games don't have features like voting and ranking and stuff that people want. It's really extremely bizarre. For all the other innovations that Valve pushes, they don't have these basic features that most modern FPSes have. And they've shown that they can roll out changes to all their Source-engine games at once.
If you don't like it, don't play it.
Well, but those of us who played older versions of these games and realized that they were broken in certain ways are disappointed to see that they won't be getting any more "patches," so to speak, to their favorite edition of the game.
It's like being a huge Battlefield:Vietnam fan, and then Battlefield 2 and Battlefield 2142 come out. You like BF:V, and don't like BF2142, and so you don't buy or play BF2142--but it does mean that you're stuck with the BF:V gameplay that you have, rather than getting fixes or updates that the game might sorely need. And it still means that you're disappointed that they took the games in a direction that you don't like. Not playing the new game doesn't really remove the disappointment, and it does make it tough to find new people to play the old game with. Naturally, this makes a person want to complain--it's perfectly natural, and it's just as natural to dislike complainers, which is why this "don't like don't play" attitude is to some extent understandable.
From everything that I've heard about 4th edition--honestly, it's not much--it's been compared to the "WoW" of D&D. The game at least pretended, at one time, to be about role-playing--which is why your character stats were generated randomly in the default system. The statistical distillation of the game mechanics, though, inevitably resulted in the same kind of treatment happening to D&D as happens to every other game out there--people thoroughly and empirically evaluate every practical combination of weapons and skills and items that they can think of, and then everyone plays with the most efficient ones. For an MMO, where the player is in a battle with the developers to minimize the time commitment (whereas the developers have a vested interest in maximizing the time it takes to do everything), it makes a sad kind of sense. For a game that is nominally about telling a story with rules, it really runs contrary to the spirit of the game.
But, honestly, if that's how people _want_ to play these games, it's really not for me to tell them how to do so. Admittedly, newer CRPGs do include content that really forces you to build the most effective characters possible if you want to experience everything the game has to offer. Beyond that, since a multiplayer CRPG really doesn't have the same GM-player dynamic as a tabletop D&D game, it's really not possible to "correctly" role-play a fighter with a strength of ten--you just end up getting killed in combat and unable to pass any of the rigidly-defined skill checks. This prevents you from making fun progress in the game, whereas in a tabletop even failure should give you an opportunity to role-play something fun, if the GM and the players are imaginative enough to do it.
Actually, that's exactly what I figured they would do: move the magnet or the device in and out of the permanent field, or around inside a gradient field, or something. But then you would have to power the device that moves the magnet, and you're not going to get enough power out of the device to do that, or else you're violating the laws of thermodynamics. So, since you have to power a motor or a piezoelectric transducer, I'm not really sure what application this device has that couldn't be better served by whatever's powering the motor.
Reserved slots--or, really, the way the server browser handles them.
I don't actually have a problem with reserved slots themselves. They have no value to me, and I've never been kicked out because someone else who had a reserved slot joined. My problem is that the server browser doesn't understand reserved slots, and shows servers whose "public" slots are full as having free space to join. Steam has a rather good server browser that refreshes quickly and has other nice features, but joining servers only to go through the entire motions of connecting and _then_ being told that I can't play because there isn't actually a slot for me is annoying. It also breaks the functionality that auto-retires full servers, which is a very nice feature.
Maybe it's a pet peeve of mine. On one other site I go to once in a while, pretty much everybody complained about getting into this kind of server once in a while--one of the ones that reports being full but is actually empty. I haven't once ever had that particular problem. It's a strange situation.
Spintronics is a little too far out of my ken (I was always more of a radiation physicist, where everything comes in nice little packages instead of fields), but if I'm reading the paper correctly, they're saying that they can apply a static magnetic field to one of these devices and then can measure a voltage drop across a resistor hooked up to the device. They can get a few millivolts from a 1.2 Tesla field, which persists for at least ten minutes but does decay in that time frame. When they remove the magnetic field, the voltage disappears.
I guess my question is that if the field is static, where is the energy coming from that drives the current giving rise to the voltage? I'm also wondering how one regenerates the voltage after it discharges completely.
In this day and age, if Nokia really is that important of a part of the country's economy, the lawmakers could probably get away with calling them economic terrorists.
That ship sailed days ago. I really would consider actually buying the stupid mini-expansion and giving Bethesda more money--even though I very recently was certain I wouldn't even purchase FO3--if I didn't have to jump through their lousy software hoop.
I bought into EA's worthless content delivery system for the BF2142 expansion. That ended up taking me for the biggest ride of my gaming life. I don't really want to go through that kind of trash again, and I don't like supporting badly-implemented content delivery systems.
My question is how I'm supposed to purchase it without Live.
It's really a flaw with the engine that Oblivion and Fallout share. It was also a problem in Morrowind to a degree. That kind of narrative consistency is not something that Bethesda's latest games do well--even if you ignore the 72-hour-refresh. It is very immersion breaking, but it's not a surprise that it's happening.
You can hold down the "use" key on a drinking fountain, toilet, or urinal, and you'll constantly drink from it. It only takes a few seconds at one of those "5 HP | 24 rad" urinals to get that quest taken care of--and there's a bathroom within a stone's throw of Moira's.
The only way that Crysis ever registered on my gaming radar was that it was a DX10-only game, and therefore required Vista, and therefore I would probably not play it in the foreseeable future.
The proponents of the machine get it accepted by lawyers using shaky, anecdotal claims; they foist it onto a desperate witness in a dramatic case of murder; then when the judge cites the technology as a deciding factor, they use that as evidence the device has "official approval" and therefore works.
The scientific method it ain't.
The 3M Pocket Projector Protector
(sorry)
It wasn't Fallout, where health items are rare, cost a fortune, and come with some of the side effects of actual drugs.
Maybe FO wasn't this way, but in FO2, I ended the game with 40 super stims that healed tons of damage and then hurt you a little bit afterwards. That was more than enough stims to kill a person with the side-effects alone, and I don't know any drugs whose side effects include losing ten hit points. Not to mention that you could in one random encounter find the most powerful healing items in the game--which had no side effects--literally laying on the ground. I'm not going to say that healing items were as common in FO2 as they were in D2, but I never really had to ration my healing items the way I rationed my bullets.
I would be very amused if this turned out to be a prelude to an attempt to do away with inventory management as it's known in Diablo right now.
I know End of Fiscal year for some people is going on.
I think he might've forgotten that a lot of college-going people are getting prepared to _return to college._ I've got to move, go through TA orientations, present my internship presentation, and I'm finding out if my grant came through or not.
It's somewhat interesting to note that as we've moved from scientific paper to phonebook to slashdot, the quality of whiskey required to make the reading interesting has increased from unqualified whiskey, to good whiskey, to fine whiskey. My noticing this and then posting about it is itself proof that I have no whiskey of any quality on hand.
Finally, for reasons no one has found, the fecal mass is changing.
Shit always gets deeper.
Be written by oldsters who used VB for years and can't be bothered to change?
Avalanche photodiodes of certain semiconductor materials have been around for a while now. I believe the novel part of this research is that they're confirming other researchers' data showing that lead selenide semiconductors can exhibit electron cascade effects.
I'm reminded of the bank run depicted in the Jungle, only with less panic.
Of course, that scene depicted people with absolutely no disposable income desperate to get their money back in their own hands, whereas--minus the hysteria--this scene depicts people desperate to put their money into someone else's hands. How far we've come.
Will someone please tell me that the first line of this article is just speculation on the part of the editors and not a massive "Snake dies" MGS4 spoiler?
But if Fermilab were the ones who punched those binding holes in the page, they might've made a message of that sort unreadable.