I personally see hackers as codifying something even more beautiful, logical, and well-articulated than the mundane corporate programmer, delivering a much higher level of intelligence and complexity than most could understand As someone who used to hack away at stuff rather than designing it first (and I still do that usually, though if I'm going to do something fairly complex I sometimes plan it out on paper a bit first), and once had my code referred to as "twisted-hacked" by another coder (I think he was Brazillian or German, can't remember, it was 8 years ago.. I'm still not sure whether to be proud of the fact that my twisted-hacked code works, or ashamed of the fact that I am a bit of a self-taught cowboy when it comes to coding, despite having done CompSci at University since then where I should have picked up some nice boring safe habits - I do exception checks and have always run validation on my inputs at least..), I can't say I agree that hacked together code is particularly more beautiful, logical or well-articulated. I get way more kicks out of working out how to do something with less lines and logic flow, whereas hacked together stuff will usually have a lot of un-necessary detritus. If you then short-hand your code so much that it gets obfuscated and confusing again - especially if you have no comments to explain what is going on, or the reader has no clue about language specific operators like $_ in perl - then it can get back to seeming 'hacked together' though I suppose.
Surely more massive objects do accelerate towards the eart slightly faster than less massive ones, since the objects themselves will be exerting a gravitational pull on the earth themselves? So the natural human instinct to believe that heavier objects fall faster is semi-right (I say semi right because it's right, but for the wrong reasons!) in that case, just not observably so over short distances.
The handling/physics on Dirt seems pretty realistic to me. I had a few friends round and we tried dirt with my G25 (I'd previously just decided to use the controller until I had unlocked all the cars and tracks), and we were all over the place with the buggys:) I especially like how good the scenery interaction is, with rocks being really noticable problems for your suspension, and how metal barriers bend and crumple realistically. While I appreciate having good basic driving physics in games like Gran Turismo, it's a lot more fun when any damage you do to your car or the scenery is shown too:p I wouldn't think that much of the basic Dirt handling would have to change for an F1 sim, apart from maybe doing more in-depth modelling of high speed aerodynamics.
I've always found F1 kind of dull to watch, but recently saw the Top Gear episode where they sent the Renault F1 car round the Top Gear test track in under a minute (Ferrari Enzo does the track in 1:19), on a damp track no less! I'd never seen an F1 car on the same track as I'd seen normal road cars, so didn't actually have a decent concept of just how bloody quick they are, especially how they can keep crazy high speeds up in the corners with all the downforce they generate - you could pretty much see the car digging in and finding more grip as it accelerated out of the corners. I now have far more respect for F1 cars and their drivers, but I still find TOCA and rally driving much more interesting motorsports overall.
So true. I had a go in GT5: Prologue recently and think it does have pretty realistic handling when you set it to simulation, it's noticably less grippy at least. I set all the driving aids off (well I had traction control on something like setting 2/10) and my driving physics to 'simulation', then raced against a girl who hardly ever plays computer games (she was using arcade handling, ESP, traction control automatic gears, the lot..), then we both raced a couple of NSXs for a couple of laps, I only just managed to scrape ahead of her near the end of the second lap once I stopped locking up the brakes all the time and slowing down enough for the corners. We were only using sixaxis controllers rather than wheels, otherwise I would have been able to control it a bit better. I had been playing it a bit with a wheel for a couple of hours, before loaning it to a friend and that's where we tried out the 2 player. It's obviously a lot easier to use the wheel rather than the controller in sim mode without the driving aids, because you need to be a lot more delicate with your inputs. So GT5 seems like it's going to be pretty accurate in sim mode at least, Gran Turismo has always prided itself on being 'the real driving simulator'. I can't comment on the quality of race opponents though. I always used to just mod my car to hell and finish way ahead of everyone else with the first couple of games:p
But being able to use buttons to control a game is much more likely to mean that it has 'arcadey' physics, since any sudden braking, steering or accelerating is a poor idea in a race car if you want to keep good traction, and prolong the life of your tyres. If you were serious about your racing then you would have a wheel (I've got a G25 but I haven't got anywhere decent to mount it yet:/ ). To suggest that you'd get more control from a keyboard than from a PS3 controller is just a joke. You get full analog control of the wheels, brakes and accelerator with a Sixaxis controller. I have happily used the keyboard for input for a few racing games over the years, but I definitely wouldn't say that it gives the most precise control.
How do you know that the rock will continue to be a rock? What happens when it is carved into a statue or crushed into dust when you are not looking? I don't doubt the scientific method, but you have to make assumptions and have beliefs in a few basic things.
Do you believe that it's 24,901.55 miles? Because it's not a regular shape for one thing, and even if it was, you do have to just take someone else's word for it unless you have either measured it yourself, or have done some calculation involving your elevation and the the distance to the horizon.
Actually it says "$3.000,000.00 Million", so that's only 3 million no matter how many zeros you put after it. Putting 2 periods in there probably makes it an undefined value though:p
It's a bit easier to duck out of a ticket rather being caught by real policemen (as I was). Drunk driving isn't very common in the UK that I've seen. From what I hear of places like Texas it's just the done thing though. The point about animals (well, deer and such, not small stuff like rabbits and pheasants) is true in some places though, and you are going to end up hurt more at a higher speed (unless you're going reaaaaally fast and you just make it explode:P ).
Hehe. Well female priests/ministers don't sit so well with me either, but if they feel they want to hypocritically break the word of God while at the same time teaching it then that's up to them!
That's a really good point if you don't care about others aging back on earth, and if you're going off to colonise some new solar system then you probably don't actually care so much! In other situations it would suck though.
I concur:) I had thought of this for one universe simulated inside another, but I didn't really consider more universes being simulates inside that one, as that would just be silly. Which probably means that it's happening right now.
Considering that constantine was 4th century, and Transubstantation didn't come until 1215 (at least according to this link, then he probably didn't react at all:P The bible doesn't mean that the wine is real blood, yada yada, that's rather pointless and easily proven false by pumping someone's stomach or something. It's just symbolic..
It's kind of weird not being a Christian anymore but still holding strong views on certain Christian arguments:P
Somewhere in the article(s) it mentions that exponential increases in intelligence would probably equate to exponential increases in resources. We'll soon be needing more coffee than the arable land of the world can produce just to wake our smart-phones up in the morning!
Almost 40 years later the fastest any human has ever travelled is (drum roll) 11.09 km/sec on Apollo 10. It looks like, with luck, humans may again travel about as fast in another 20 years. The thing is that if you want to travel really fast, you really need somewhere to do it.. which we do have, but more importantly, you need somewhere to get to! We could probably build one of those laser driven vehicles, powered by solar cells, that would slowly accelerate a human faster and faster and faster until that human runs out of food or the vehicle gets close to the speed of light, but the thing is that we can't build anything that will accelerate quickly enough up to a useful speed (and then decelerate quickly on the other end) to even get to another star system right now - even achieving lightspeed travel doesn't do us that much good until we know more about how to survive in space for long periods of time..
So technically we could obviously go incrementally faster, we just don't have a real use for such speeds yet. However if we really could go faster - faster than the speed of light, then I'm sure there would be quite a few uses for it, perhaps mining missions to other planets or asteroids. Anyone who has ever seen Star Trek knows that sub-light travel is slow and inefficient:p (though impulse drives can get a starship very close to light speed IIRC, if not slightly over it for some weird reason..)
Sounds like someone is giving up on checking for dupes, or expects a little too much from a bunch of people who can't even RTFA after it's posted. Or possibly some nice *whooosh*es for me.
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Surely more massive objects do accelerate towards the eart slightly faster than less massive ones, since the objects themselves will be exerting a gravitational pull on the earth themselves? So the natural human instinct to believe that heavier objects fall faster is semi-right (I say semi right because it's right, but for the wrong reasons!) in that case, just not observably so over short distances.
The handling/physics on Dirt seems pretty realistic to me. I had a few friends round and we tried dirt with my G25 (I'd previously just decided to use the controller until I had unlocked all the cars and tracks), and we were all over the place with the buggys :) I especially like how good the scenery interaction is, with rocks being really noticable problems for your suspension, and how metal barriers bend and crumple realistically. While I appreciate having good basic driving physics in games like Gran Turismo, it's a lot more fun when any damage you do to your car or the scenery is shown too :p I wouldn't think that much of the basic Dirt handling would have to change for an F1 sim, apart from maybe doing more in-depth modelling of high speed aerodynamics.
I've always found F1 kind of dull to watch, but recently saw the Top Gear episode where they sent the Renault F1 car round the Top Gear test track in under a minute (Ferrari Enzo does the track in 1:19), on a damp track no less! I'd never seen an F1 car on the same track as I'd seen normal road cars, so didn't actually have a decent concept of just how bloody quick they are, especially how they can keep crazy high speeds up in the corners with all the downforce they generate - you could pretty much see the car digging in and finding more grip as it accelerated out of the corners. I now have far more respect for F1 cars and their drivers, but I still find TOCA and rally driving much more interesting motorsports overall.
So true. I had a go in GT5: Prologue recently and think it does have pretty realistic handling when you set it to simulation, it's noticably less grippy at least. I set all the driving aids off (well I had traction control on something like setting 2/10) and my driving physics to 'simulation', then raced against a girl who hardly ever plays computer games (she was using arcade handling, ESP, traction control automatic gears, the lot..), then we both raced a couple of NSXs for a couple of laps, I only just managed to scrape ahead of her near the end of the second lap once I stopped locking up the brakes all the time and slowing down enough for the corners. We were only using sixaxis controllers rather than wheels, otherwise I would have been able to control it a bit better. I had been playing it a bit with a wheel for a couple of hours, before loaning it to a friend and that's where we tried out the 2 player. It's obviously a lot easier to use the wheel rather than the controller in sim mode without the driving aids, because you need to be a lot more delicate with your inputs. So GT5 seems like it's going to be pretty accurate in sim mode at least, Gran Turismo has always prided itself on being 'the real driving simulator'. I can't comment on the quality of race opponents though. I always used to just mod my car to hell and finish way ahead of everyone else with the first couple of games :p
But being able to use buttons to control a game is much more likely to mean that it has 'arcadey' physics, since any sudden braking, steering or accelerating is a poor idea in a race car if you want to keep good traction, and prolong the life of your tyres. If you were serious about your racing then you would have a wheel (I've got a G25 but I haven't got anywhere decent to mount it yet :/ ). To suggest that you'd get more control from a keyboard than from a PS3 controller is just a joke. You get full analog control of the wheels, brakes and accelerator with a Sixaxis controller. I have happily used the keyboard for input for a few racing games over the years, but I definitely wouldn't say that it gives the most precise control.
How do you know that the rock will continue to be a rock? What happens when it is carved into a statue or crushed into dust when you are not looking? I don't doubt the scientific method, but you have to make assumptions and have beliefs in a few basic things.
Do you believe that it's 24,901.55 miles? Because it's not a regular shape for one thing, and even if it was, you do have to just take someone else's word for it unless you have either measured it yourself, or have done some calculation involving your elevation and the the distance to the horizon.
Actually it says "$3.000,000.00 Million", so that's only 3 million no matter how many zeros you put after it. Putting 2 periods in there probably makes it an undefined value though :p
The communist scum will do anything to avoid capitalism.
It's a bit easier to duck out of a ticket rather being caught by real policemen (as I was). Drunk driving isn't very common in the UK that I've seen. From what I hear of places like Texas it's just the done thing though. The point about animals (well, deer and such, not small stuff like rabbits and pheasants) is true in some places though, and you are going to end up hurt more at a higher speed (unless you're going reaaaaally fast and you just make it explode :P ).
Hehe. Well female priests/ministers don't sit so well with me either, but if they feel they want to hypocritically break the word of God while at the same time teaching it then that's up to them!
That's a really good point if you don't care about others aging back on earth, and if you're going off to colonise some new solar system then you probably don't actually care so much! In other situations it would suck though.
I concur :) I had thought of this for one universe simulated inside another, but I didn't really consider more universes being simulates inside that one, as that would just be silly. Which probably means that it's happening right now.
Considering that constantine was 4th century, and Transubstantation didn't come until 1215 (at least according to this link, then he probably didn't react at all :P The bible doesn't mean that the wine is real blood, yada yada, that's rather pointless and easily proven false by pumping someone's stomach or something. It's just symbolic..
:P
It's kind of weird not being a Christian anymore but still holding strong views on certain Christian arguments
So technically we could obviously go incrementally faster, we just don't have a real use for such speeds yet. However if we really could go faster - faster than the speed of light, then I'm sure there would be quite a few uses for it, perhaps mining missions to other planets or asteroids. Anyone who has ever seen Star Trek knows that sub-light travel is slow and inefficient
Oh great, now we need a "Poor Simpson's Trivia Knowledge" mod! The "Over-rated"s, they do nothing!
That should be around the time that they add the boldly sarcastic mod.
Sounds like someone is giving up on checking for dupes, or expects a little too much from a bunch of people who can't even RTFA after it's posted. Or possibly some nice *whooosh*es for me.
Sounds like there's an untapped market out there for 419 fax-scams!
This kind of article makes me wonder.. is science merely an 'upgrade' of religion...?