So i'm obsessing on the piece of electronics @1:18. Id like to figure out exactly what it is model wise. It has Akai VW meters and directional play arrows. I have to assume that it's an Akai cassette deck with auto reverse. Anyone have a clue what model it might be.

I find it odd that in the future they will be using cassette decks

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Published on Apr 14, 2016

The aerobatics skills of Russian pilots over the US destroyer Donald Cook in the Baltic Sea left the Pentagon and other US official running for cover in Washington over “aggressive close interactions” with Russian fighters jets.
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Releasing the footage of Russian jet flybys in the vicinity of the destroyer, the US Navy said that its vessel has encountered multiple “aggressive flight maneuvers ...within close proximity of the ship,” some as close as 30 feet (10 meters) on Monday and Tuesday.

The set of incidents took place as the US ship, which had sailed from the Polish port of Gdynia, was conducting exercises with its NATO ally Poland in the Baltic Sea. The Navy announced that the SU-24 first flew over Donald Cook on Monday as US sailors were rehearsing “deck landing drills with an allied [Polish] military helicopter”. The numerous close-range, low altitude encounters were witnessed at 3:00pm local time, forcing the commander of the ship to suspend helicopter refueling on the deck until the Russian jets departed the area.

The next day, the Navy said, Russia caused concern among US sailors when a Russian KA-27 Helix helicopter flew seven times over the ship at low altitude in international waters at around 5:00pm. Some 40 minutes later, two Russian SU-24 jets allegedly made a further 11 “close-range and low altitude passes”.

“The Russian aircraft flew in a simulated attack profile and failed to respond to repeated safety advisories in both English and Russian. USS Donald Cook’s commanding officer deemed several of these maneuvers as unsafe and unprofessional,” the Navy said.

Judging by the videos released by the US Navy, the sailors were nonplussed by the Russian aerobatic skills. They gathered on the top deck of the destroyer to watch the Russian pilots.

“He is on the deck below the bridge lane...It looks like he’ll be coming in across the flight deck, coming in low, bridge wing level...Over the bow, right turn, over the bow...” the voiceover on the footage states in what looks more like an instructor’s advice on how to maneuver in open waters, rather than the panic that the central command presented it to be. At least on the video no one can be seen running for cover.

According to a US defense official who spoke with Defense News, sailors aboard the Donald Cook claimed that the Russian jets’ low altitude stirred waters and created wake underneath the ship. US personnel on the American vessels, also claimed that Su-24 was “wings clean,” meaning no armaments were present on the Russian jets that could have posed a threat to US operations in the Baltic.

Yet at the same time, the official noted, that this week's incidents are “more aggressive than anything we’ve seen in some time,” as the SU-24 appeared to be flying in a “simulated attack profile.”

The Russian overflights have caused panic over in Washington, with White House spokesman Josh Earnest calling the actions of the Russian pilots “provocative” and “inconsistent with professional norms of militaries.”

“I hear the Russians are up to their old tricks again in the EUCOM [US European Command] AOR [area of responsibility],” Operation Inherent Resolve spokesman Col. Steve Warren said during a briefing on Wednesday, adding that the US is “concerned with this behavior.”

“We have deep concerns about the unsafe and unprofessional Russian flight maneuvers. These actions have the potential to unnecessarily escalate tensions between countries, and could result in a miscalculation or accident that could cause serious injury or death,” the US European Command said in a statement.

In the meantime Adm. John Richardson, the chief of naval operations, thanked the US crew for keeping their cool during the stressful situation.

“Bravo Zulu to the crew of USS Donald Cook for their initiative and toughness in how they handled themselves during this incident,” the admiral said on Facebook.

Russia has yet to comment on the incidents but most likely the Russian air craft flew from the Kaliningrad region, bordering Poland. Kaliningrad is the headquarters of the Russian Baltic Fleet, which also includes the Chernyakhovsk, Donskoye, and Kaliningrad Chkalovsk air bases.

Description Credits: Russia Today

Video Credits: Defense Media Activity - Navy

Holy shit, Ricky and Julian had quite the exciting day, eh? Bubbles must have been below deck.

My 4 year old cat just recently started to eating his kills. A few weeks ago I watched him consume a rabbit. Last week I was chilling on the deck and he presented a dead mouse. A minute later there was only a puddle of blood.

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.

"The game we are playing we know as 'black jack', it bears no resemblance to the American game 'blackjack'.

The aim of the game is to get rid of your cards.
You remove one black jack from the deck, it plays no part in the game.
You start with 7 cards
Take 4 cards from the deck and lay them face up, these are your start cards, you then lay either the same suit or the same number on one of the start cards. If you have two or three of the same card, you can lay them all down in a single turn, if you cannot lay a card, you pick up from the face down deck.

If a player lays a king, the other player has to pick up 3 cards, a queen 2, a jack 1, an ace 4 and the 'black jack' 5. If the 2nd player lays a king on top of the 1st players card, then the 1st player has to pick up double the amount, in the case of a king, 6 cards, if the 1st player then lays yet another king, then the 2nd player would have to pick up 9 cards and so on."

@Phooz

@artician
Yeah, I'm always amazed when someone does get arrested and films it, and when they do get their phone back the data is untouched. There are apps out there that will upload your footage to a server, so knowing that maybe the cops know that and trying to delete it would only make them look even more guilty. Or maybe they are just so arrogant that they think it won't matter anyhow.

@bobknight33
If the cop they had on the show is correct then it doesn't matter what their unstated reason was. They broke police procedure by not telling them why they were being pulled over.
I suspect they didn't say anything because they really didn't have a good reason to pull them over, and when they saw that that they were being recorded they decided it was just better to keep their mouths shut.
Anything you say can and will be used against you, funny how it works both ways.
The cop they had on the show sounded fairly reasonable right up until he blew up over the race card issue. We need to stop fooling ourselves into thinking that things like race, class, gender, or ethnicity doesn't play a role in how we see each other, only then will the race card be shuffled out of the deck permanently.

@dag @newtboy @VoodooV

I do enjoy this site. I enjoy the posts and videos. I agree with some and disagree with others.


I don't complain to Dag when ever I am treated unfairly or a bad post is slandered against me. Even when I post video that clearly is to the disliking of most of this site and it gets yanked for having 3 down votes. I may think that is not fair but that's the rules, so be it.

As the minority on this site I could ask Dag to solicited more conservative viewpoints to this site but that would not be fair to ask him to help "stack the deck" for poor little ol me.

Liberals do not hold the majority view in America. Not by a long shot.
As of 2014
Conservatives 37%
Moderates 35%
Liberals 27%

So don't feel that you hold the majority opinion when you clearly don't.

Sifters may hold majority it here on the sift but in the real world Liberal ideas are a rightfully discarded ideas of crazy people.

Emperor Palpatine: Witness this FULLY OPERATIONAL battle station.

Tony Stark: We have a Hulk.

Hulk grabs Emperor and Bam-Bams him into the deck.

Hulk: Puny Sith.

Yeah, these things are death traps. They're so useless, the Navy has to send out OTHER helicopters to pre-scout landing zones for the Ospreys. Aside from that, the downblast from the rotors is so powerful, it makes work on a flight deck impossible during takeoffs and landings, as an added bonus, it also makes rappelling so dangerous Marines call it the "elevator of death".

Add to that the enormous cost of $72 million a unit a flight-speed too fast for escort helicopters and too slow for escort jets and a host of other problems and you have a very expensive and cool looking lawn ornament. 35 Billion dollars well-spent, Pentagon.

Douchebaggery of the highest order.

Tarantino is doing something really cool by bringing back the idea of the cinematic roadshow AND by making a film that is, by design, best seen with a 70mm projector (which only a few theaters in the country possess). Why does Disney care about ONE movie theater when they've got a worldwide release--especially as Star Wars is actually going to open in that theater anyway and be shown there for the first week, when the biggest returns will happen).

Seriously, I can't understand why Disney would do this, unless Tarantino royally pissed off some Disney executive who is now getting their revenge.

EDIT:

Was reading more about this on Reddit and learned that this likely happened because Disney is aggressively going to try to break the all-time box office record and therefore wants "all hands on deck" and the movie playing in as many theaters as possible.

Also, there are reports coming out that this was not a recent change but one that Disney forced through months ago, the evidence for this being that the Arclight theater in question was listed as available for the online pre-ordering of tickets for The Force Awakens over the holidays way back in October. However, it seems Tarantino was only informed of the change recently.