>> ^therealblankman:
I can't tell you how disappointed I am that nobody else is familiar with this epic quotation. Marvin Rules.
In reply to this comment by Mashiki:
Where is the earth shattering kaboom?

Quickly! Get my P-38 space modulator. We're going to fix this!

I agree, he's one of my favourites.

Yours now for 1 billion! But wait that's not all! Act now, and we'll throw in an extra bomb module! That's 1 Sabre Warrior plus 2 bomb modules for only 1 billion. Callers are standing by!

Yes, have got the PC version. I'm meaning to download some of the mods, but didn't even install the DLC stuff yet. I was originally going to wait until my Windows 7 got here to install the game, but...well, you know how that goes. So I've just been roaming around the Wastes, knocking over bandits and such. Once I get Windows 7 installed, I'll re-install, restore my saved game, and then probably go mod crazy. I think I had like 30-40 different tweaks running on Oblivion back when I was playing it.

I just wish Bethesda would make a zombie apocalypse game using there engine. Now THAT would be tight.

In reply to this comment by Drax:


And indeed VSBM, Fallout is freaking awesome. I highly recommend the wanderer's edition mod and some of Arwen's Tweaks (if nothing else her AI tweak module is WELL worth using. Some of her other tweak modules conflict with Wanderer's edition) if you're playing on PC. Those two mods alone up the immersion greatly and makes the game MUCH more balanced and challenging, but in no way unfair.

Westy,

Every once in a while I get a guy who screams orders over the mic.. go here.. stand there.. jump here.. pick that up.. throw that.. shoot it now.. shoot it after... They usually crack me up because once one little thing goes wrong they freak.

For me the fun of L4D is the team. 9 times out of 10 I find people I can work with, I just finished two awesome games tonight. The second team we had enough fun that we did a second campaign. And that for me is the charm of the game, figuring out who's the sharpshooter, who knows what they're doing, who needs to be watched and working through the game with everyone.

The only time I've not played expert is in VS, or a few times when I joined a RL friend. Expert seems about right to me. One screw up and you'll pay for it, you just gotta stay sharp and work with your team.

And indeed VSBM, Fallout is freaking awesome. I highly recommend the wanderer's edition mod and some of Arwen's Tweaks (if nothing else her AI tweak module is WELL worth using. Some of her other tweak modules conflict with Wanderer's edition) if you're playing on PC. Those two mods alone up the immersion greatly and makes the game MUCH more balanced and challenging, but in no way unfair.

Is it wrong to get a boner watching this? If so, I don't want to be right...

Srsly though, one of my favourite pieces of music ever and to see it done without computer modulation (and with the wonderful expressions she makes ; ) is fantastic.

>> ^GeeSussFreeK:
>> ^potchi79:
So you start a pulse jet with a leaf blower?

Mostly yes, the idea behind most jets is to compress incoming air with fuel. No spark is needed as the compression causes heat. The problem is you need the air already moving to start. The same is true of turbofan engines of most jet airplanes. In my day they used electric motors to start the fan blade spinning. Once they are up to speed, they feed enough air fast enough into the combustion chambers to keep it going. A leave blower is a lot easier to add to a project then an electric motor. If you look up DIY jet engines in youtube, you will see it as the staple for home brew jet starters.
Jets are much more "simple" then combustion engines as they are mainly self sustaining when up to speed. They are very complex in other ways though, like how to not melt down under extreme heat and such. A flame out at low speed typically spells doom for a jet...engine restarts when careening downward is not as experience you want in life.
One thing I have never understood about a pulse jet is how to ramp your speed up. With a turbofan, you just up the fan speed or fan blade pitch...with a pulse just I have no idea. Add more fuel maybe? If that were the case, then the max speed would be dictated by the explosion maximum. If your explosion is to great, you risk vibration annihilation or destruction of your combustion chamber...or you spit the hot air out the back end before the pulse can bring it back for re-ignition? Or perhaps it has to do with pulse modulation and changing how long you wait till your open the valve. The longer you wait, the more thrust you get before the next cycle? Dunno, pulse jets were always more of a curiosity than an area of study.
Edit: Jets are very similar to diesel engine as there is no spark needed...all the heat is gained through compression. Hope that isn't TMI at this point


than

Though your knowledge of jets is impressive. Let's really try to stomp this sign of the internet generation out, shall we?! Who's with me!?

>> ^potchi79:
So you start a pulse jet with a leaf blower?


Mostly yes, the idea behind most jets is to compress incoming air with fuel. No spark is needed as the compression causes heat. The problem is you need the air already moving to start. The same is true of turbofan engines of most jet airplanes. In my day they used electric motors to start the fan blade spinning. Once they are up to speed, they feed enough air fast enough into the combustion chambers to keep it going. A leave blower is a lot easier to add to a project then an electric motor. If you look up DIY jet engines in youtube, you will see it as the staple for home brew jet starters.

Jets are much more "simple" than combustion engines as they are mainly self sustaining when up to speed. They are very complex in other ways though, like how to not melt down under extreme heat and such. A flame out at low speed typically spells doom for a jet...engine restarts when careening downward is not as experience you want in life.

One thing I have never understood about a pulse jet is how to ramp your speed up. With a turbofan, you just up the fan speed or fan blade pitch...with a pulse jet I have no idea. Add more fuel maybe? If that were the case, then the max speed would be dictated by the explosion maximum. If your explosion is to great, you risk vibration annihilation or destruction of your combustion chamber...or you spit the hot air out the back end before the pulse can bring it back for re-ignition? Or perhaps it has to do with pulse modulation and changing how long you wait till your open the valve. The longer you wait, the more thrust you get before the next cycle? Dunno, pulse jets were always more of a curiosity than an area of study.

Edit: Jets are very similar to diesel engine as there is no spark needed...all the heat is gained through compression. Hope that isn't TMI at this point

There are also tons of vehicles in the game, I'm not sure why they didn't show em off in the trailer.

Battlefield 2 handled large maps, vehicles and voice commands so well, I reckon this sould be an engine that would do a WW2 game justice. Proper widescreen support with patch 1.5 also!

I'm still pissed they didn't name the module either Colbert or Serenity... Why even hold the vote, if you're just gonna ignore it and do whatever you want in the end?

>> ^Sarzy
Since this post has essentially become a complete free-for-all, I'm going to respond to this here even though it's pretty much off-topic at this point. I agree that drama is essentially human nature, but not necessarily in the way that it has manifested itself here -- in most online communities, if one member has a problem with another, they will hash it out between themselves. If it's something really serious, such as a truly offensive racial slur or the like, then the offended party might go to a moderator. Here, on the other hand, if someone is even moderately offended by another member, the immediate inclination seems to be to go to sift talk and to share a private dispute with the entire community. That's the difference.


I think in most online communities you know your comments are being monitored by moderators or subject to being reported to a moderator, usually via a handy button button to do just that. That does modulate a lot of what people say. Here, there are zero moderators. So people in general speak freely, like adults, which I think was the point. It was supposed to cultivate a mature community that would moderate itself and people who were offensive would find themselves banned or shunned into leaving or shutting the fuck up. For the most part it's worked really well. But there are going to be times when people disagree and what you may think is moderately offensive might have someone else totally pissed off. There are no moderators to report to, and since we have no siftquisitions, it comes to sift talk. There were frivolous siftquisitions but there's plenty of times people hit a "report to moderator" button on other sites that weren't right either. I guess I'm just saying that the reason people do this shit here is because we're supposed to be this community that moderates itself and so that means the community gets to see (and resolve) all the shit that moderators have to put up with. I don't think there's any more drama here than anywhere else, ours is just in the open.

Alot of people say EVE is boring, like a second job and so on. I understand that totally.

However it allows you to create your own emergent game play opportunities. I PVP mostly with an alliance based in low sec space. However I also trade components in High sec for the sheer enjoyment of manipulating one of them most largest, most complex virtual economies. It's not always explosions and large capital engagements, sometimes you are simply working out have to fit your ship for combat, or trying to make ISK to buy better modules and ships.

My main investment in the game is high tech research and development components, most of which I find in secluded magnometric sites, that need to be probed out using a triangulation method and a covert ops ship. This takes hours usually in dangerous systems where I could risk my ship. However the process is enjoyable to me, it hits that 2001/Blade Runner sci-fi setting for me. I dig the atmosphere.

But these moments of building up to large battles (heists, production completions, pirating, capital warfare whatever) only makes it that much more interesting, because I have invested time with the game, that ship and it's modules is perhaps weeks of mining, shooting, looting and trading. When I triumph with it I will feel elated. When I lose it I will feel crushed. There is real emotional investment with the assets. The reason so many people quit the game in emo-rage when their shiny new battleship gets jumped by a blob of pirates. The reason so many people play to kill others and see them emo-rage quit when their shiny carrier gets trapped in a large interdiction sphere and can't warp.

Thankfully CCP has reworked and keeps reworking the introduction tutorials to make it easier for new players now outlining career paths that pilots can take.

I still understand its not for everyone. It's not and it's good that way. Because they haven't diluted core elements of the game trying to become WOW.

i wonder if you could find something to ride down it on... but the angle is not designed.... to avoid an impact compression..

maybe a huge piece of foam/inflatable..? but you would probably get hurt more when the force transferred through the device... I think you would need.. something with such a large surface area and angled shape... that you would risk taking flight on the way down!

one of those manta ray things people fly on behind speedboats would be really crazy to watch on this thing!! if you made it, you would probably just totally pop it.. but it could lessen the impact... for one person for one ride...



if you insisted on using this 'slide'...starting at a lower height would seem the easiest way to avoid everlasting spine/hip/back trauma.

ooh, what about those crazy huge inflatable balls



but again you would probably do worse at the end if you were unrestrained inside... need to do it with a custom foam layer all around you... i think we may have a solution minus the potential to pop it! that would require a really well made zorb...

so: Kevlar Zorb with Memory Foam Encapsulation Module + Canal + team to remove you before you drown = WIN!

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

^From the outset you have to make an assumption that ETs are trying to make contact with other ETs. That might be a pretty irrational assumption- but it's one that we could easily make. After that, it's just a matter of finding the medium.

You're right, it could be something so far beyond us- that we have no way of grasping it.

All of our rapid advances in communication tech over the last 100 years has given us some species hubris that we are cutting edge- to a type III civilisation, we would be ants building nests - but even ants have a kind of ambition- so maybe we shouldn't lose hope.

Also, with regard to pulsars, or any stars for that matter- there could be barely discernible fluctuations in the light strength that would form a kind of modulation. The pulsar pattern might be the bigger signal saying "hey look at me" and then the subtle message comes after you know that's where to look. If I wanted to create a message beacon that many galaxies could tune in to, I would use something like a pulsar- so at least people would know where to look.

This snippet from the Wikipedia article on pulsars is very interesting:

In 2003 observations of the Crab nebula pulsar's signal revealed "sub-pulses" within the main signal with durations of only nanoseconds. It is thought that these nanosecond pulses are emitted by regions on the pulsar's surface 60 cm in diameter or smaller, making them the smallest structures outside the solar system to be measured.

The video was shot from the lunar rover camera and transmitted from the lunar rover's antenna. With the time delay in sending commands to the Moon, everything had to be carefully planned in advance and the tracking had to be done blind. I have attached some quotes from a website below. (Sorry for the long post..)
-----
The only photograph of the lunar liftoff was taken from Earth and had expectedly poor resolution. "Gene tried to persuade me to stay outside and take a really good picture of liftoff, but I politely declined," Schmitt joked.

As the third outing drew to a close, Schmitt clambered up the ladder of the Apollo 17 lander. Alone on the moon's surface, Cernan steered their battery-powered automobile a mile from the spacecraft and parked the rover so a video camera could record their Dec. 14 liftoff. As he climbed from the vehicle, Cernan bent down and traced the initials of his 9-year-old daughter, Tracy, in the soil. Then he literally hopped and skipped in the moon's low gravity back to the lander.

For Apollo 16 and 17, however, flight controllers did track the ascent stage. With the punch button command arrangement and a 3 to 4 second time delay, their command sequence had to be totally preplanned. I had worked with Ed Fendell for the Apollo 17 liftoff to get it exactly right for a long tracking shot. At liftoff, the action was perfect, but soon the image of the ascending capsule drifted out at the top of the frame. Ed was furious that, after all the calculations, we missed the mark. It was discovered later that the crew had parked the Rover buggy closer to the Lunar Module than was prescribed by mission plan, and the vertical tilting of the camera was too slow.
Whenever I see a clip of that liftoff I note, as the stage nears the top of frame, a cut to a film shot of the stage ready to dock with the command module. And I still think, "Darn, we could have followed that final liftoff 'til it was but a dot of light winking out as it headed for the mother ship."

http://www.ehartwell.com/afj/Apollo_17_quotes

^Crake: Sub sends signal to the "nuclear torpedo", which is connected by wire to the surface landing module, which relays the signal to the orbiting craft, which uses the powerful antenna array to send it to Earth. Complex and one-way communication, but nothing NASA hasn't attempted to solve before. Unless they send it in metric...

^cybrbeast: I'm aware of the Drake Equation and it's implications on finding life within our own solar system. But when we're going specifically into places where we expect life to be possible, it's best to be too cautious than to assume there's nothing there, imo.
As for the likelihood of life under all that ice with no sunlight: If you watch the entire film, you see that they are in fact following a team of ocean explorers which take subs to the deepest parts man can survive in, in order to find new life, new species and understand how life survives there at all.
Europa is believed to have a molten core (which is the reason there's an ocean there at all, presumably), and is not just a big slab of ice. If that's the case, there might be Thermal Vents there, which allow life to exist on Earth in environments previously thought to be impossible.

So I guess what I'm trying to say is, let's go on a mission to see if there's life on Europa, while actually preparing to find said life, and not just doing it to mark a checkbox and say "Europa? Meh, been there, done that, got the T-Shirt".