I want to go back to OZ someday. Loved my visit in 2001 and the delightful people I met there. First two days were at the Byron Bay Bluesfest and there was a small hippie town nearby that I can't remember the name of [something like bin bin ... only not that]. I could picture myself there, especially now

I hate disagreeing with you, but I come at things differently. When I find an individual or new outlet is willing to wilfully obstruct and manipulate the truth, I stop trusting them and rarely waste my time with listening to it anymore. In the rare instance they have a story that seems important that isn't sourced anywhere else, or something otherwise unique I'll sometimes look, but always fact checking what is said. The amount of time that can be wasted on fact checking is why I largely dismiss strongly biased sources.

Fox and MSNBC are good examples, but RT puts them to shame.

Chris Hedges I was only familiar with in name, and not reputation. The fact he was speaking on RT was enough for me to dismiss him out of hand. The fact you seemed to think he was a lone credible individual got me to look further.

On looking further I'd encourage you to read Hedges own work form Nov 8, 2001:
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/11/08/world/a-nation-challenged-the-school-defectors-cite-iraqi-training-for-terrorism.html

Despite the fact he's appeared earnest and genuine in the instances you've seen him, and despite him seemingly bravely standing against the American administration and it being an act of character to speak out against the war, the above article seems to reveal Chris Hedges true nature. He was a paid lackey of American propaganda to prop up the lead in to the Iraq war, but at some point afterwards Russia paid better and now he's singing the tune of the current highest bidder.

I wish I could say I'm surprised to find it, but an RT report or opinion piece on why Russia is innocent of something turns out to be being forwarded by somebody clearly willing to be completely two faced when the money is good.

While I agree, being on RT does not mean the story is falsified, but it does mean you can't assume it's not.

When propaganda machines masquerade as news, you're better off just ignoring them, even though they will likely tell the truth every now and then. The issue is you can't tell, without extraordinary investigation, which is real reporting and which is pure propaganda, and which is a mixture. What this means is most people who get their news from these organizations will be constantly misinformed and less knowledgeable about the actual facts, having been duped by propagandists.

No reputable reporter would tarnish their reputation by joining one of these lie factories, IMO. That Chris Hedges ended up here means he made a HUGE mistake somewhere and is no longer working as an actual reporter but instead has become a purveyor of biased opinion.

What I think swayed tens of thousands of voters was the reporting of the underhanded collusion between Clinton and the DNC. Most didn't vote for Trump, they didn't vote for president at all, or went 3rd party.

What happened in 2001-2002 was the administration cherry picked and twisted intelligence to make a case for war against a country that had not attacked us, the intelligence community was not on board for the most part, and many declassified reports indicate they were not at all confident about WMD's or them having any hand in 9/11, contrary to the administrations public and zealous position at the time.....but that is why it is relevant. Trump has shown he'll take his own advice and viewpoint over intelligence professionals, so the idea that he'll lie about, twist, and ignore intelligence reports is relevant....he's already done so and he's not even president yet.

Comment hidden because you are ignoring dag. (show it anyway)

I'm talking about films that deal with science and the future with interesting insights that make you see the world in a different way.

Arrival
Bladerunner
2001
Moon
The Matrix

What do you mean when you say 'hardcore SF'?
2001? Star Wars? Bodysnatchers? Flash Gordon?

I'm personally just glad that at least someone in Hollywood knows how to make fun superhero movies. Outside a handful of Batman and X-Men movies, most superstuff is seriously lacking. I'm looking at you, Warner Bros.
But I get the fatigue. I suffered from it as well. I watch most of the TV shows.

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I could see little after-market characters being really popular. I love my Echo, but it's a little too monolith from 2001.

2 more comments have been lost in the ether at this killed duplicate.

I don't know about 2001, but there are some seriously low res textures in there and stiff animation. It certainly doesn't look much better than a modified version of the source engine.

Jesus. This is a 2016 game? It looks like it was made in 2001. No joke. Consoles are holding back gaming, or more specifically, AMD.

1999 on SomethingAwful, 2001 on Ebaums World.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Something_Awful
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EBaum%27s_World

Thus it was passed down to me...
It's believable.
Although I think there's really only been two golf moments like that in my life; the other being Tiger's hovering put at the 16th (?) at Augusta, that posed with its little Nike symbol for a good, long while before finally tumbling in---what was that---2001? 2000?

The short answer is "It depends!"

I know it's a crappy answer, but there are way too many parameters at play. There are many games today that have scripted scenes in them that are pretty cinematic. Think of GTA III, from 2001. The cut scenes in that game still outshine the actual gameplay of GTA V today.

If the scene is scripted, then all the animation, and camera movement can be fine tuned and all compute resources are pooled into the viewport of the camera. This allows the artists to focus all of the trickery on the shot itself, but not the rest of the world. From a PVS or scene-graph stand point, you have pretty much reduced the complexity to just what you are seeing.

I do not know how they made this demo and cannot comment on it with any authoritative capital. I've written 3D engines before (not for videogames though) and can comment on the technology I think I'm seeing here. My comments are just an opinion based on what I know. I do not have access to Unity and have never used it before. But here it goes:

For a scene like this, there should be reduced/canned computation in:

• Collision detection and response
  
• AI
  
• Animation / IK
  
• PVS
  
• Texture Atlasing
  

The shaders, unless they are geometry (the ripping of the skin/flesh in the Adam scene) could or could not be reduced in scope and complexity. I am not sure if they are scripted or dynamic. By scripted, I mean a geometry shader that reads vertex data from a VBO stream or some memory buffer instead of computing the vertices on the fly. It's still real-time, just not dynamic.

Most of the graphics you see here are standard applications of technology that's been around for a while:

• PBR shader
  
• Motion Blur Shader
  
• Depth of Field Shader
  
• Cascaded Shadow Maps Shader
  

The particle system seems pretty standard as well.

This is a great demo and I am extremely impressed with the art direction, but the engine itself is, after all, Unity with PBR for the characters, and maybe Global Illumation for the indoor scenes, which I believe they licensed from Geomerics.

Yowza! That wasn't MY experience landing in Auckland from Australia during Little Feat's April 2001 tour. They pulled out ALL the stops from dogs to a selected body search [one of the techs was detained because his glasses case smelled of marijuana!] The St. James Theater and the people we met there were delightful however and the country is absolutely stunning. I'd go back in a heartbeat [after fumigating my clothes and belongings of course] =o)

We have always been a gun violence culture up until the post WW2 era. Think frontier, wild west, duels, and mafia shootouts. We glorify violence everyday, we even give sickos who shoot up groups of people mass media coverage. For a person who wants to go out in a blaze of infamy, we are custom tailored to give them their last 15 minutes of 'fame'.

Again, we have a nebulous definition of what it takes to get on the watch list. I could be placed on it simply by stating something to the effect that "I support ISIS", even though I don't. Restricting people who manage to end up on a government list is the same as removing their right to a firearm after committing a felony offense, only you have removed every single bit of their right to a legal defense. There is no due process to being placed on a US watchlist, you get put on and fuck you if it was a mistake. Maybe they'll take you off later, who knows?

I am not going to defend a slippery slope argument on this, I don't have to. It's already happened in the years since 2001. The Patriot Act, meant to be a well intended set of rules to help us protect ourselves, has been perverted to lessen quite a few of our rights. Not only our rights, but other countries. We have violated their security, spied on their people and leaders, and we perform acts of war on their territories with impugnity. All because we lost two buildings and 2,996 people; a heinous act, but one our government exploited to put us into 2 wars with a death toll to people who may not even be our enemies that dwarf our loss. In short, we fucking have the slippery slope process down to a SCIENCE.

When and where did you see it? I saw it on 1/13/2001 @ 7 PM PST in Luxor, Sin City, and its MegaStar Tour in Honda/Anaheim Center (years later).