DrStalker

That was a really great piece of game design that grew out of a problem picked up in playtesting where some players didn't realize they were meant to keep the cube with them to solve multiple puzzles; they'd leave it behind and then get frustrated on the next puzzle.

So they added a heart to the texture and a few voice lines, and not only was that problem solved but they created one of the most memorable moments in the game by making people care about a cube and then having them get rid of it.

"While it has been a faithful companion, your Companion Cube cannot accompany you through the rest of the test. If it could talk - and the Enrichment Center takes this opportunity to remind you that it cannot - it would tell you to go on without it because it would rather die in a fire than become a burden to you."

Someone told Trump they left the EU so in his mind they aren't part of Europe anymore.

Surely the rules in the US would have to be the same; you can't enter the intersection on a red, but if you're already in there you can exit. Yellow is meant to be "only enter if you can't stop safely" not "if you enter now you'll get a fine if you don't speed up"

Why pay people to do this when you can make a CAPTCHA that requires them to do it for free?

Google must have a really good data set from all those "click the boxes containing X" tests they make people do.

Prevent you from playing the game.

At this point it would be easier to start a new company and import the positive things from Boeing. They've lost their "engineering first" mentality and that's not something that is easy to get back, and they may not be able to handle the financial losses involved in doing so after running as "money first" for so long.

I can remember it, I think in setups where the TV signal was passed through a VCR (so it could be recorded) and then into the TV. If the VCR detected there was no useful signal it would output a blue image instead of static.

Just showing raw static was much more common though.

I imagine such a weapon would be more of a suppressing fire tool than something intended to shoot accurately.

There are also coil guns, which present a different set of benefits and challenges than railguns: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coilgun

Was your character an orc?

As someone who used the ability to setup custom piece arrangements in Battlechess to see all the animations:

Place the enemy king in middle. Use four rooks at the edges of the board (two on the left, two on the top) to ensure the king can't move off his square. Give him a pawn to move to avoid a stalemate ending. Then place your desired checkmating piece where it can take one move and threaten the enemy king.

If he can get DOS installed and CDROM drivers working he should be able to install at least windows 95a. Windows 95b preferred to use its own drivers (or drivers loaded from a floppy disk) for such things, but the early versions felt more like a GUI running on top of DOS.

They also mention reduces ventilation needs; if mines don't have to handle diesel exhaust in confined underground spaces that's another win.

From memory setting a UID to 0 was a way to effectively have multiple root accounts on a system. sudo is a much better solution to the same problem so using uid 0 in this manner is not something I expect to see on any modern unix/linux system.

I buy glasses online from Zenni optical, who make them in China. (there are other companies that do this, but Zenni is the one Iv'e used) They start at $6 for frames and prescription lenses, and they have multiple styles under $20 that match the shape and look I prefer in my glasses.

It's really nice to have glasses cheap enough that I've got spare sets at home, at work and in the car; and not "my old set with the badly scratched up lenses" spares but "slightly different style frames" spares. It's hard to explain to someone that doesn't wear glasses just how much peace of mind you get from that.

You also become responsible for any unpaid property taxes, because they are attached to the property rather than to the person who owned it when the debt was incurred.

3D-printing ranges from fragile resin pieces to metal durable enough to use as rocket nozzles. This article was about 3D printed titanium, so the resulting piece is likely stronger than bone but weaker than machined titanium would be.

If the victim doesn't laugh with you afterwards then it's not a prank, it's just being an asshole.

Some storage systems work by holding a charge, and electrons have mass.

In practical terms it night as well be 0 but in silly discussions on the internet terms it's a very small non-zero value.

Some weather maps added purple to Australian heat maps a few years ago to fix that lack of range.

> Quartz crystals used to be hermetically sealed.

Are they sealed against helium though? It can get through a lot of materials that more common gases can't.

My family's first Pc has an LED to show turbo mode was on, and the second had a big green LED display that changed from 16 to 33.

Even without that the difference was very obvious, especially when playing games.

Tanks are called tanks instead of "Caterpillar Machine Gun Destroyers" so the initial design could pretend to be a project related to mobile water tanks which gave an excuse for needing lots of steel plates and engine components.

That story about the F-117/F117 is definitely plausible.

States have the right to make laws that agree with the ruling party.

I'd be much happier with 5 high quality megapixels instead of pushing megapixel count as an indicator of camera quality.

There are exceptions like the Foveon sensor where the red, green and blue sensors are stacked behind each other or monochrome sensors with interchangeable filters used in scientific applications, but those are not found in common consumer level cameras.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foveon_X3_sensor

Does this mean The Last Dangerous Visions will finally be released? Harlan sat on this since the 70s, holding rights to all the stories to be included but never actually publishing it.

They still need to take off from somewhere and land for refueling, though I expect they can have a much shorter take off and landing than a manned fighter even if they are not true VTOL.

The nature of Second Life makes optimization a challenge. The geometry is fully dynamic so you can't pre-compute line of sight or use a lot of other performance saving tricks. The people making things are not skilled with efficient 3D design, so even if there was a way to do things like remove hidden triangles from models most people would not use it. Textures get uploaded in ridiculous sizes for things that should be using low res sheeted textures.

And even if you manage to build yourself a nice efficient well designed island other people will show up with avatars wearing massively over-detailed jeweler with 4k textures on every surface and with a few buggy CPU-killing addons that fight each other to try and fix a few of Second Life's design problems, and suddenly your server is on it's knees begging for more CPU cycles while your grapics card is busy choking every time their avatar is near.

The short version is when people can build anything you'll get some amazing works but you'll also get a lot of poor quality, performance killing crap. I don't see VR changing that, but there is a place for a Second-Life life competitor that limits what people can do to hit a nice balance of performance vs. freedom.

That doesn't stop law makers from trying. Like the mess over small-breasted porn being banned in Australia in 2010:

> While the ACB claims that there is no blanket ban on small breasts as such, women over the age of 18 with small breasts who might look young ARE banned.

http://www.inquisitr.com/59633/australian-government-censor-...