When I signed up around a year ago (to their "Premier" service) there were no limits.
Since then they've introduced throttling, traffic shaping, removed their binaries, and the latency for games screws up more than it used to.
It's annoying when a company changes the contract every few months to screw you, and you can't reject it to keep your old one. The only option is to leave, which is by no means hassle free.
I've posted on their forums to get some kind of explanation but all I heard was that all the limits they imposed are good for me. They didn't see the point that I was making about them changing the contract every few months to a service that now is totally opposite what I signed up for.
Why is it with everything BUT climate change we opt to play it safe? When we think we can make a difference on saving lives of people from our nation (whichever that is), we actually try to save them.
A hospital attempts to save lives of people that are almost certainly going to die (from cancer patients to people with multiple gunshot wounds in the chest), because we know from experience that a small percentage will survive. With terrorism, we play it safe aswell. In general, we play it safe when we _know_ that people will die unless we try to save them. People will get insurance to protect them, even though it's unlikely they will need to claim it. The correlation is that we never play it safe when we haven't experienced terrible loss. We don't see the risk until people start dying.
Look at NASA's Columbia and there were engineers that were concerned about the risk of the tiles being knocked off. They were pretty much ignored because there are many things that COULD go wrong with a shuttle and you cannot rule everything out. The lesson we learned from that is that we cannot decide the probability of something happening before it has happened without some sort of similar event occuring in the past. And therefore with climate change, we cannot see the risk. We cannot quantify it as we haven't experienced it yet (well the really bad stuff).
Every first time disaster follows this process:
1. Quiet warnings from people with authority(e.g. FBI intelligence in 911 hijackings, engineers in Columbia accident, geologists(?) in Katrina hurricane, going back further the Nazis were warned about in the early 30s but again the politicians weren't concerned) 2. No-one REALLY listens, because if everyone listened to all the warnings we would never get anywhere, as we'd be busy fixing all possible signs of danger 3. Lots of people die 4. Mass reaction and political consensus goes to preventing disaster in first place 5. Public complains that nothing was done when there were warnings 6. Systems are setup to investigate why people died, who's responsible, and what we can do in future 7. Insurance companies put figures to the odds of the disaster occuring again, having investigated all variables that affect the chance of said disaster happening
The problem obviously is that climate change is on such a large scale that our current way of dealing with disasters just doesn't work. The only way I can think of solving this is to "Play it safe". And then at least we know we did everything we could, rather than looking for people to blame when X% of the world's land mass disappears under the oceans.
Thats just plain wrong. The rifle bullet doesn't even get close to the 20km/s+ of a meteor impact. The fastest speed I know about is around 4km/s for large guns. Even these guns don't really simulate an impact . It's like comparing a car hitting a wall at 10mph and then saying well all cars will survive relatively intact. Maybe your rifle bullet travels at 1 km/s. Then its about 10 to 80 times off the velocity of a meteor. Looking at existing meteorites is the only way to confirm or deny the chance of bacteria surviving. And that has only weak evidence so far of being confirmed.
Mass and density are far more important. Its these two things that determine largely wether a meteor will explode, burn up, or impact. A stoney object is much more likely to burn up/explode as it isn't as dense as resistant to breaking up as a metallic one. I only think that chemical analysis can be done on meteors that are within a small window of mass depending on their composition, density and trajectory. I'm sure the centre of many meteors are intact, but how many of these have held life? There are many thousands on Earth that are intact, but they are fairly small. ONly the martian ones apparently may have life in them, but that life has long been fossilised.
"Of course mass matters! I mean, a meteor the size of a grain of sand is going not to get through the atomosphere is it? What I meant was that above a certain size, mass is, of course, irrelevant. It has nothing to do with the so-called 'friction' (which is actually adiabatic heating), which was what you were stating."
The mass (and composition and trajectory) determines if a meteor explodes, burns up, or slams into the surface. To improve the chances that a meteor hits the surface, it needs to have a fairly steep trajectory and be made of heavier materials. If the object has a large percent of volatiles and skims through the atmosphere then it is more likely to burn up or airburst (like tunguska). And I don't know what your obsessions is which "adiabatic heating". As far as I can tell all meteors leave a trail of very hot gas, so the energy is not in a closed system. Don't you mean Ram Pressure instead of 'friction'?
"The point about the rifle bullet is only that it indicated that bacteria can survive tremendous decelerations. You brought up the irrelevant matters of heat and mass. I don't know why. Do you have some philosphical objection to the idea of meteor delivery of microorganisms to planetary surfaces?"
I said that the shock from deceleration was not the important factor in wether bacteria could survive, and a small rifle bullet doesn't even show that bacteria can survive meteor type decelerations. I originally said that we need to use a supercomputer to model the solar system from the protoplanetary disk onwards to calculate the hit rate of meteors (their characteristics) and the time frames. So I don't think that is philosphical.
"I fail to see why you are arguing - everything I have stated is perfectly clear. The fact that the centres of meteors retain their original structures provide conclusively that there is no major heating of their centres - there simply isn't time. And this effect (above, of course, a minimal size) is not affected by mass."
I'm arguing because you insisted on saying that mass was irrelevant and that it was a question of force and not heating. I have shown you that it's been a factor of heating and therefore mass/velocity/density/composition that has put a large constraint on the size of meteors that could get to the planet surface. If you do a bit of digging around you will see that most asteroids are stoney and that under 100m they burn up or explode. Only around 5% are thought to be heavy metals, which would hit at a smaller size. http://idisk.mac.com/mpaineau-Public/paine_tsunami _asteroid99.pdf
Asteroids larger than 1km can cause global damage. So there is a fairly small window of asteroid size and composition that can make it through intact. For all the millions of asteroids that hit our skies only a few will have the right features to have the chance of transporting life here.
Then of course the impact into the ground itself varies for many reasons. I'm sure this limits things further. I think the only ones we can count on being suitable are those that "fall into people's back yards". They are usually a few kg in weight by the time they land, having eroded during the fall, due to ram pressure. So really the mass is very important, depending on the composition.
So now you are agreeing with me? It started with me saying that there were constraints on the meteor due to varying masses altering the probablility bacteria could survive. And now you say exactly the same thing.
Look at this statement you just wrote: "Remember, large meteors get through the entire atmosphere in a matter of only a few seconds. If you think that this is enough time for heat to penetrate to the centre of a reasonably sized meteor, you don't know physics."
You said it was force that mattered, not mass. But now you keep talking about "larger meteors". It's nice to know that you have changed your mind without even realising it. So my original point about the rifle bullet analogy being irrelevant still stands.
If only the air gets hot and not the rock, then how do you explain this quote:
"The heat generated by compression of air in front of the meteor as it travels through the atmosphere is immense, and most meteors completely burn up or explode before they can reach the ground." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tunguska_event - scroll down to Meteor Airburst
So obviously a significant amount of energy goes into heating the meteor, enough to cause a devastating kiloton+ explosion. The heavier and less dense the meteor, the larger the potential airburst. And as the quote says most meteors burn up completely or [if they are large enough], they explode.
Oh no wait, wikipedia is wrong according to you? Sorry my mistake.
I think you've lost track of the point i have been trying to make. That is, the kinetic energy mostly is transferred into heating the object, and therefore the mass is directly related to that. YOu go off on a tangent explaining something related but not actually a relative to anything I've been trying to get across.
"No, this is poor physics. The friction is nothing whatsoever to do with the mass. It is to do with the roughness of the surface. Also, smaller meteors don't get hot because of friction - they get hot because they compress the air in front of them, and compressed things heat up. Larger meteors get hot because the energy of motion get changed to heat when they hit the ground."
I really don't think you understand basic physics. Tackle the problem like this: K.E.=.5m(v^2) Most of the K.E. has to be transferred into heating, unless you have some other idea of where the kinetic energy is going? As you said compression of the air causes heating, I mean friction of air against air. With very fast moving objects hitting into an atmosphere, the air doesn't have time to move out of the way.
The only way I can think of is to use an array of trapped Entangled photons, that can be switched at either end. That would remove the largest bottleneck in latency between major sites, e.g. ISP to data centre where the game servers are located. And in theory playing on the other side of the world could be as fast as playing within the same country.
Going off on a tangent, does anyone know if there's a way to detect these photons compared to non-entangled ones? I only ask because surely for SETI, it would make sense to be looking for something that can provide instant communication?
I think mass is more important than force. The force isn't in question, the friction and therefore mass is. A heavier object causes more friction as it takes more energy to slow down. Bacteria are more resitant to force than they are to high temperatures.
And also, meteors are asteroids that have simply started raining down onto the Earth. Generally small asteroids the size of rifle bullets won't make it through the atmosphere due to the friction. And of course if the asteroid is too big then there's an airburst or a impact into the ground. Both of which could easily kill cells due to the extreme heat and pressure.
Firstly, it's of several orders of magnitude lighter.
It also doesn't travel at tens of km per second like an asteroid does.
These two factors contribute to the friction of the impact into the atmosphere of a planetoid. Even Mars' weak atmosphere is enough to prevent the "air" from being able to move out of the way of the asteroid. This results in the asteroid heating up as there is nowhere for the energy from the friction to escape to ("air" is a bad conductor).
The final point is that the angle of incidence to the planet can affect the deceleration and therefore the amount of heating the asteroid experiences.
I don't think the problem ever was the impact force, just the heating the asteroid experiences. Also, any asteroid that heats up too much becomes a nuclear bomb, as happened in Siberia last century.
So basically there is a constraint on the variables that allow bacteria to survive. I'm guessing that bacteria can probably make the journey to all parts of the solar system as there have been enough asteroid impacts to make it likely.
i think the real question is: how long can they exist in space and still reanimate? It could take thousands of years, even with many asteroid ejections, to hit another object in the solar system. So to answer that you need to model the solar system from a starting configuration of many N body gravitational systems. This could then be used to work out the probability of an asteroid hitting the Earth, ejecting various chunks into space and at least one hitting another planet(esimal) with the right constraints on the asteroid and the planet etc.
I'd say RTS games are good as they are usually based on small groups of players. You can often play against AI teams which can help balance things out. Also, some RTS don't require much of a learning curve to have fun. Rome: Total War is one, you can play online against teams, but it's rare to lose badly even with bad tactics. There's no base building, you just choose your army and attack the enemy. Obviously to win a lot requires tactics, but you can win with luck many times if you do cav charges with cataphracts:] A lot depends on your enemy, and you can always take some poor AI players on.
Other games I reccommend are Need for Speed series, and team based FPS (counterstrike is strangely addictive to new players even though they often get bad scores).
For longer gaming sessions maybe try a MMORPG like Guild Wars, as it doesn't require grind.
On consoles I'm not sure what's good thesedays. I personally liked Soul Calibur on DC for battles with players of varying skill. Mainly because button bashing can work in SC sometimes.
So to sum up:
Pick up and play games: Beat 'em ups, Racing, some RTS (like Rome), team oriented FPS
In depth games: MMORPG, some RTS (like C&C zero hour)
I would avoid the following: Deathmatch, MMORPG grind type games, God games (like Civ IV)
I agree partly with what you say as I think in general it applies, but my personal experience was very different.
I spent a year of school learning BASIC on the Acorn Archimedes, but found it hard to pick up. The next year I started my project from scratch and began writing it in Visual Basic. I found VB much easier to use and the tutorials a great help. I managed to get a B grade for the project and decided I should continue my programming at Uni. So off to Uni I went, and to my shock we had to learn Java...using emacs....on redhat 6.2. I realised I had no proper understanding of programming and needless to say I didn't pass all of my exams. Obviously with hind-sight it would seem that my problems were evident at the start with BASIC. Anyway, a few months after leaving uni I somehow got a job as a software programmer, in... VB 6.0. and SQL 2k
I had to brush up as I hadn't done much VB for a few years. However, I did struggle and after the trial was up I decided to leave as I was really slow and took a lot of flak from my work colleagues. At this point I finally chose to give up on being a programmer and so I went back to Uni to study a completely different degree. I graduated last summer and have been unemployable in anything but menial jobs in supermarkets etc (I can't even get admin work!).
This isn't an intentional rant it's more of a counter to every post I've read modded 3+. As the posts I've read have been either for VB or against it but without actual experience or knowing anyone that has started in VB and failed pretty badly. I can honestly say I've never really understood functions, classes or OO in general. It's not from lack of trying, it's just I can't get my head round it but procedural languages I can do more.
So yes, VB (pre.net) I can say for certain is a bad beginning language as you will never know if you have the potential to become a programmer, and really that is what counts. The new.Net I've had a look at and I find it a lot harder to understand as it resembles Java more than it resembles the old VB. However, I still don't think VB.net is close enough to a real language as it has SO many automatic things for you. I managed to write a small program in.Net without really knowing what I was doing when I was autocompleting, I just tried something that looked like thw right word(s) and used trial and error. Doing that seemed to work so it still doesn't force you to learn and understand programming.
Therefore I have to conclude that VB (and VB.net to a lesser extent) is useless for a beginner that wants to BE a programmer. If you are already a programmer then it's a great tool to quickly make client GUIs. If you are hobbyist then it's fine to use, but really as a hobbyist the hobby is programming and VB isn't really programming as you don't need to understand much to actually use it.
To sum it up, I wish I had never learnt VB and then I would have almost certainly failed my BASIC project and never attempted a career in programming.
I was voted the spammiest player in the UK. Teamfortress was tactical but most of the time it didn't matter if you lived or died, only when the flag was on the move.
Now I play CSS/CS and I think it's a lot tougher than TF, because a kill/death is so important and it can happen so easily. A fire fight usually lasts around a second and then the round is often decided. It's better than Quake dm though, as minor skill differences aren't exaggerated. I remember in TF/Q3f I could beat most players in 1v1, but in dm I was really bad. Where am I going with this....Not sure I guess i mean to say teamfortress better portrayed a persons skill than CS and DM, with the latter increasingly increasing the gap between similar skilled players.
To create a black hole you either neither a lot of mass or a lot of inertial mass (i.e. something moving at very high speeds) colliding. The LHC (next gen atom smasher) may create very small black holes that only last for very short periods, but at the scales involved the dominant force isn't gravity and therefore the black holes would "evaporate".
The fusion reactors don't have the necessary velocity of collisions to create a miniture black hole, and the high temperatures work against gravity, much like the reason our Sun doesn't collapse into a black hole is that high temperatures cause an outward pressure that holds the thing in an equilibrium.
Slashdot Mirror
That the Virtual World net assets will inevitably become more valuable than Real World (tm) assets?
FPS:
Deus Ex (original, not the sequel called invisible war)
Alien Vs Predator
God Games:
Sim City 4
Black & White
RTS:
C&C Generals/Zero hour expansion
Rome: Total War
RPG:
Neverwinter Nights
Baldur's Gate II (bit dated but probably best RPG made)
Dungeon Seige (this is RPG/RTS)
Seriously http://www.starwreck.com/
When I signed up around a year ago (to their "Premier" service) there were no limits.
Since then they've introduced throttling, traffic shaping, removed their binaries, and the latency for games screws up more than it used to.
It's annoying when a company changes the contract every few months to screw you, and you can't reject it to keep your old one. The only option is to leave, which is by no means hassle free.
I've posted on their forums to get some kind of explanation but all I heard was that all the limits they imposed are good for me. They didn't see the point that I was making about them changing the contract every few months to a service that now is totally opposite what I signed up for.
I guess I'll have to change ISP at some point.
Why is it with everything BUT climate change we opt to play it safe? When we think we can make a difference on saving lives of people from our nation (whichever that is), we actually try to save them.
A hospital attempts to save lives of people that are almost certainly going to die (from cancer patients to people with multiple gunshot wounds in the chest), because we know from experience that a small percentage will survive. With terrorism, we play it safe aswell. In general, we play it safe when we _know_ that people will die unless we try to save them. People will get insurance to protect them, even though it's unlikely they will need to claim it. The correlation is that we never play it safe when we haven't experienced terrible loss. We don't see the risk until people start dying.
Look at NASA's Columbia and there were engineers that were concerned about the risk of the tiles being knocked off. They were pretty much ignored because there are many things that COULD go wrong with a shuttle and you cannot rule everything out. The lesson we learned from that is that we cannot decide the probability of something happening before it has happened without some sort of similar event occuring in the past. And therefore with climate change, we cannot see the risk. We cannot quantify it as we haven't experienced it yet (well the really bad stuff).
Every first time disaster follows this process:
1. Quiet warnings from people with authority(e.g. FBI intelligence in 911 hijackings, engineers in Columbia accident, geologists(?) in Katrina hurricane, going back further the Nazis were warned about in the early 30s but again the politicians weren't concerned)
2. No-one REALLY listens, because if everyone listened to all the warnings we would never get anywhere, as we'd be busy fixing all possible signs of danger
3. Lots of people die
4. Mass reaction and political consensus goes to preventing disaster in first place
5. Public complains that nothing was done when there were warnings
6. Systems are setup to investigate why people died, who's responsible, and what we can do in future
7. Insurance companies put figures to the odds of the disaster occuring again, having investigated all variables that affect the chance of said disaster happening
The problem obviously is that climate change is on such a large scale that our current way of dealing with disasters just doesn't work. The only way I can think of solving this is to "Play it safe". And then at least we know we did everything we could, rather than looking for people to blame when X% of the world's land mass disappears under the oceans.
http://d2fusion.com/images/fuel.jpg
Check it out. It's suddenly eased my mind. For a minute I thought it was a scam, until I saw the milk float.
Isnt U235 weapons grade?
Thats just plain wrong. The rifle bullet doesn't even get close to the 20km/s+ of a meteor impact. The fastest speed I know about is around 4km/s for large guns. Even these guns don't really simulate an impact . It's like comparing a car hitting a wall at 10mph and then saying well all cars will survive relatively intact. Maybe your rifle bullet travels at 1 km/s. Then its about 10 to 80 times off the velocity of a meteor. Looking at existing meteorites is the only way to confirm or deny the chance of bacteria surviving. And that has only weak evidence so far of being confirmed.
Mass and density are far more important. Its these two things that determine largely wether a meteor will explode, burn up, or impact. A stoney object is much more likely to burn up/explode as it isn't as dense as resistant to breaking up as a metallic one. I only think that chemical analysis can be done on meteors that are within a small window of mass depending on their composition, density and trajectory. I'm sure the centre of many meteors are intact, but how many of these have held life? There are many thousands on Earth that are intact, but they are fairly small. ONly the martian ones apparently may have life in them, but that life has long been fossilised.
"Of course mass matters! I mean, a meteor the size of a grain of sand is going not to get through the atomosphere is it? What I meant was that above a certain size, mass is, of course, irrelevant. It has nothing to do with the so-called 'friction' (which is actually adiabatic heating), which was what you were stating."
i _asteroid99.pdf
The mass (and composition and trajectory) determines if a meteor explodes, burns up, or slams into the surface. To improve the chances that a meteor hits the surface, it needs to have a fairly steep trajectory and be made of heavier materials. If the object has a large percent of volatiles and skims through the atmosphere then it is more likely to burn up or airburst (like tunguska). And I don't know what your obsessions is which "adiabatic heating". As far as I can tell all meteors leave a trail of very hot gas, so the energy is not in a closed system. Don't you mean Ram Pressure instead of 'friction'?
"The point about the rifle bullet is only that it indicated that bacteria can survive tremendous decelerations. You brought up the irrelevant matters of heat and mass. I don't know why. Do you have some philosphical objection to the idea of meteor delivery of microorganisms to planetary surfaces?"
I said that the shock from deceleration was not the important factor in wether bacteria could survive, and a small rifle bullet doesn't even show that bacteria can survive meteor type decelerations. I originally said that we need to use a supercomputer to model the solar system from the protoplanetary disk onwards to calculate the hit rate of meteors (their characteristics) and the time frames. So I don't think that is philosphical.
"I fail to see why you are arguing - everything I have stated is perfectly clear. The fact that the centres of meteors retain their original structures provide conclusively that there is no major heating of their centres - there simply isn't time. And this effect (above, of course, a minimal size) is not affected by mass."
I'm arguing because you insisted on saying that mass was irrelevant and that it was a question of force and not heating. I have shown you that it's been a factor of heating and therefore mass/velocity/density/composition that has put a large constraint on the size of meteors that could get to the planet surface. If you do a bit of digging around you will see that most asteroids are stoney and that under 100m they burn up or explode. Only around 5% are thought to be heavy metals, which would hit at a smaller size. http://idisk.mac.com/mpaineau-Public/paine_tsunam
Asteroids larger than 1km can cause global damage. So there is a fairly small window of asteroid size and composition that can make it through intact. For all the millions of asteroids that hit our skies only a few will have the right features to have the chance of transporting life here.
Then of course the impact into the ground itself varies for many reasons. I'm sure this limits things further. I think the only ones we can count on being suitable are those that "fall into people's back yards". They are usually a few kg in weight by the time they land, having eroded during the fall, due to ram pressure. So really the mass is very important, depending on the composition.
So now you are agreeing with me? It started with me saying that there were constraints on the meteor due to varying masses altering the probablility bacteria could survive. And now you say exactly the same thing.
Look at this statement you just wrote:
"Remember, large meteors get through the entire atmosphere in a matter of only a few seconds. If you think that this is enough time for heat to penetrate to the centre of a reasonably sized meteor, you don't know physics."
You said it was force that mattered, not mass. But now you keep talking about "larger meteors". It's nice to know that you have changed your mind without even realising it. So my original point about the rifle bullet analogy being irrelevant still stands.
If only the air gets hot and not the rock, then how do you explain this quote:
"The heat generated by compression of air in front of the meteor as it travels through the atmosphere is immense, and most meteors completely burn up or explode before they can reach the ground." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tunguska_event - scroll down to Meteor Airburst
So obviously a significant amount of energy goes into heating the meteor, enough to cause a devastating kiloton+ explosion. The heavier and less dense the meteor, the larger the potential airburst. And as the quote says most meteors burn up completely or [if they are large enough], they explode.
Oh no wait, wikipedia is wrong according to you? Sorry my mistake.
I think you've lost track of the point i have been trying to make. That is, the kinetic energy mostly is transferred into heating the object, and therefore the mass is directly related to that. YOu go off on a tangent explaining something related but not actually a relative to anything I've been trying to get across.
"No, this is poor physics. The friction is nothing whatsoever to do with the mass. It is to do with the roughness of the surface. Also, smaller meteors don't get hot because of friction - they get hot because they compress the air in front of them, and compressed things heat up. Larger meteors get hot because the energy of motion get changed to heat when they hit the ground."
I really don't think you understand basic physics. Tackle the problem like this: K.E.=.5m(v^2)
Most of the K.E. has to be transferred into heating, unless you have some other idea of where the kinetic energy is going? As you said compression of the air causes heating, I mean friction of air against air. With very fast moving objects hitting into an atmosphere, the air doesn't have time to move out of the way.
The only way I can think of is to use an array of trapped Entangled photons, that can be switched at either end. That would remove the largest bottleneck in latency between major sites, e.g. ISP to data centre where the game servers are located. And in theory playing on the other side of the world could be as fast as playing within the same country.
Going off on a tangent, does anyone know if there's a way to detect these photons compared to non-entangled ones? I only ask because surely for SETI, it would make sense to be looking for something that can provide instant communication?
I think mass is more important than force. The force isn't in question, the friction and therefore mass is. A heavier object causes more friction as it takes more energy to slow down. Bacteria are more resitant to force than they are to high temperatures.
And also, meteors are asteroids that have simply started raining down onto the Earth. Generally small asteroids the size of rifle bullets won't make it through the atmosphere due to the friction. And of course if the asteroid is too big then there's an airburst or a impact into the ground. Both of which could easily kill cells due to the extreme heat and pressure.
The rifle analogy isn't really appropriate.
Firstly, it's of several orders of magnitude lighter.
It also doesn't travel at tens of km per second like an asteroid does.
These two factors contribute to the friction of the impact into the atmosphere of a planetoid. Even Mars' weak atmosphere is enough to prevent the "air" from being able to move out of the way of the asteroid. This results in the asteroid heating up as there is nowhere for the energy from the friction to escape to ("air" is a bad conductor).
The final point is that the angle of incidence to the planet can affect the deceleration and therefore the amount of heating the asteroid experiences.
I don't think the problem ever was the impact force, just the heating the asteroid experiences. Also, any asteroid that heats up too much becomes a nuclear bomb, as happened in Siberia last century.
So basically there is a constraint on the variables that allow bacteria to survive. I'm guessing that bacteria can probably make the journey to all parts of the solar system as there have been enough asteroid impacts to make it likely.
i think the real question is: how long can they exist in space and still reanimate? It could take thousands of years, even with many asteroid ejections, to hit another object in the solar system. So to answer that you need to model the solar system from a starting configuration of many N body gravitational systems. This could then be used to work out the probability of an asteroid hitting the Earth, ejecting various chunks into space and at least one hitting another planet(esimal) with the right constraints on the asteroid and the planet etc.
**Similarly, whitehouse.org and whitehouse.gov coexist. Indeed, there are probably hundreds of parody sites that work in a similar way.**
You can also try whitehouse.com!
I'd say RTS games are good as they are usually based on small groups of players. You can often play against AI teams which can help balance things out. Also, some RTS don't require much of a learning curve to have fun. Rome: Total War is one, you can play online against teams, but it's rare to lose badly even with bad tactics. There's no base building, you just choose your army and attack the enemy. Obviously to win a lot requires tactics, but you can win with luck many times if you do cav charges with cataphracts :] A lot depends on your enemy, and you can always take some poor AI players on.
Other games I reccommend are Need for Speed series, and team based FPS (counterstrike is strangely addictive to new players even though they often get bad scores).
For longer gaming sessions maybe try a MMORPG like Guild Wars, as it doesn't require grind.
On consoles I'm not sure what's good thesedays. I personally liked Soul Calibur on DC for battles with players of varying skill. Mainly because button bashing can work in SC sometimes.
So to sum up:
Pick up and play games: Beat 'em ups, Racing, some RTS (like Rome), team oriented FPS
In depth games: MMORPG, some RTS (like C&C zero hour)
I would avoid the following: Deathmatch, MMORPG grind type games, God games (like Civ IV)
And we use kph! and i never measure my weight in stones.
I agree partly with what you say as I think in general it applies, but my personal experience was very different.
.net) I can say for certain is a bad beginning language as you will never know if you have the potential to become a programmer, and really that is what counts. The new .Net I've had a look at and I find it a lot harder to understand as it resembles Java more than it resembles the old VB. However, I still don't think VB.net is close enough to a real language as it has SO many automatic things for you. I managed to write a small program in .Net without really knowing what I was doing when I was autocompleting, I just tried something that looked like thw right word(s) and used trial and error. Doing that seemed to work so it still doesn't force you to learn and understand programming.
I spent a year of school learning BASIC on the Acorn Archimedes, but found it hard to pick up. The next year I started my project from scratch and began writing it in Visual Basic. I found VB much easier to use and the tutorials a great help. I managed to get a B grade for the project and decided I should continue my programming at Uni. So off to Uni I went, and to my shock we had to learn Java...using emacs....on redhat 6.2. I realised I had no proper understanding of programming and needless to say I didn't pass all of my exams. Obviously with hind-sight it would seem that my problems were evident at the start with BASIC. Anyway, a few months after leaving uni I somehow got a job as a software programmer, in... VB 6.0. and SQL 2k
I had to brush up as I hadn't done much VB for a few years. However, I did struggle and after the trial was up I decided to leave as I was really slow and took a lot of flak from my work colleagues. At this point I finally chose to give up on being a programmer and so I went back to Uni to study a completely different degree. I graduated last summer and have been unemployable in anything but menial jobs in supermarkets etc (I can't even get admin work!).
This isn't an intentional rant it's more of a counter to every post I've read modded 3+. As the posts I've read have been either for VB or against it but without actual experience or knowing anyone that has started in VB and failed pretty badly. I can honestly say I've never really understood functions, classes or OO in general. It's not from lack of trying, it's just I can't get my head round it but procedural languages I can do more.
So yes, VB (pre
Therefore I have to conclude that VB (and VB.net to a lesser extent) is useless for a beginner that wants to BE a programmer. If you are already a programmer then it's a great tool to quickly make client GUIs. If you are hobbyist then it's fine to use, but really as a hobbyist the hobby is programming and VB isn't really programming as you don't need to understand much to actually use it.
To sum it up, I wish I had never learnt VB and then I would have almost certainly failed my BASIC project and never attempted a career in programming.
I was voted the spammiest player in the UK. Teamfortress was tactical but most of the time it didn't matter if you lived or died, only when the flag was on the move.
Now I play CSS/CS and I think it's a lot tougher than TF, because a kill/death is so important and it can happen so easily. A fire fight usually lasts around a second and then the round is often decided. It's better than Quake dm though, as minor skill differences aren't exaggerated. I remember in TF/Q3f I could beat most players in 1v1, but in dm I was really bad. Where am I going with this....Not sure I guess i mean to say teamfortress better portrayed a persons skill than CS and DM, with the latter increasingly increasing the gap between similar skilled players.
If it hits anything it will slow down and go into a lower orbit.
Surely the golf ball will hit the station (or anything else in a stable orbit) at whatever speed it is launched at. It's basic Newton's Laws isn't it?
So the ball will hit at a fairly low speed.
And yeah retrograde orbits are really a waste of energy in LEO.
Thanks for the reply. How many servers do you use to route traffic through? Can you give a rough outline of your network with a diagram? :]
To create a black hole you either neither a lot of mass or a lot of inertial mass (i.e. something moving at very high speeds) colliding. The LHC (next gen atom smasher) may create very small black holes that only last for very short periods, but at the scales involved the dominant force isn't gravity and therefore the black holes would "evaporate".
The fusion reactors don't have the necessary velocity of collisions to create a miniture black hole, and the high temperatures work against gravity, much like the reason our Sun doesn't collapse into a black hole is that high temperatures cause an outward pressure that holds the thing in an equilibrium.