Zoraptor

There's an episode where a team is on a planet which is within an event horizon. In an amazing twist, and one of the few times in the series that it happens, problems with the Stargate ensue.

The event horizon is the critical thing- a black hole isn't really matter in the classical sense and doesn't 'collide' with stuff as it, theoretically at least, is a single point in space which has no volume at all. The thing it collides with is effectively the event horizon and after that it doesn't matter which way it goes 'cos all roads lead to the singularity. That's especially true for something small that ain't going to attract stuff gravitationally. Exactly what would happen if an event horizon of that size hit anything is a bit of a moot point (since it is exceeding unlikely that they are stable, basically it is one of those conundrums where the best evidence that they aren't is that the universe still exists) as it is smaller than even subatomic particles- as much as giving subatomic particles a volume makes any sense in the first place. It is an interesting philosophical question as to whether having a black hole smaller than a fundamental particle means that energy/matter would escape from it in a non-Hawking sense, but purely theoretical.

I think the big problem is that people simply cannot comprehend that just because something forms a singularity it doesn't actually mean that its gravity increases, just its gravity 'gradient'. A black hole with the mass of the moon has exactly the same mass as the moon and exerts exactly the same force, it's just that its mass is compressed so much that it also has an event horizon at some distance from its 'surface'. According to the great scientific repository that is wikipedia the radius of an event horizon ~ 2.95x Mobject/ Msun, in km So, for two lead atoms: 2.95x2x0.2072x6.02x10^-23 / 2x10^30 = 1.84x10^-50 m (including corrections for km -> m and g/mol to kg, hopefully, built in windows scicalc kept swapping negative exps to positive for some reason so I did them by eye in the end.) By way of comparison, the diameter of a hydrogen atom is 2.4 x 10^-10m. The diameter of its nucleus is on the order of 10^-15m. The event horizon of a two lead ion mass black hole is 100000000000000000000000000000000000 times smaller than a hydrogen nucleus (~proton), in other words. I really wouldn't lose any sleep over it. I shall now eagerly await the inevitable, someone with a physics degree coming in to critique my biologist's maths...

The LHC does plenty of things which don't happen in the upper atmosphere. There's a general dearth of lead ions colliding with each other at .99C in the atmosphere, as a general rule.

You can work out the energy involved- since the mass of a lead ion is known as is the velocity of the collision it is easy enough* to work out the maximum theoretical energy of the collision. And yeah, it ain't very high even given the extraordinarily high velocities because the mass of a single atom is extraordinarily low. Since the whole thing is cooled by liquid helium (IIRC it was the thing which caused the large delay by leaking into the system) and the experiment is by definition performed in a vacuum that amount of heat is not going to do much of anything. It also does use magnetic fields, just not for heat containment. They're used for focusing (perhaps accelerating too though I'm not sure of that, no doubt wikipedia has the answer) the beams of charged ions at each other. *just remember to use the relativistic physics rather than Newtonian

I think it is pretty much expected that there will be console versions, as I intimated earlier. But it is very unlikely that they will come out at the same time as the PC version as there ain't really much lead in time left for PR and the like even if they are quietly developing it already. A bit shy of 2 million copies sold. They did have a console version of the first game in development (well, more or less- there were differences) but it got put on indefinite suspension when the financial crisis started biting CDP's lines of credit.

4 million copies fine, apparently. I rather suspect the main problem with PC exclusive titles is convincing publishers that they will sell well enough without being multiplatform, hence the rather dodgy ports of essentially PC games like Risen. Still (nota bene, Morgoth) TW2 has got Namco-Bandai publishing so it ain't a problem for them.

PC only at this point. They have said that the engine is console friendly so console version(s) at some stage seems a possibility and there's always the chance of them completing the 'port' of the original too.

That and its much easier to make a 2D game than a fully voiced, 3D one. BG2 is a 3d game for development purposes as the levels were built in 3d (in Max, iirc) then rendered out and flattened. It is often easier to develop for 3d than 2d, too, eg it is easier to swap models and such in and out. Of course the ten year time difference and graphical developments/ size of the dev teams make the differences rather redundant. I'd strongly suspect that the development time for DA2 started from when the PC version finished rather than when the console versions were ready and the game went to market, which would make almost exactly a two year dev time. Otherwise the non-tech people (designers, writers) would not have much to do for those six months. It also would explain the Dragon Effect effect- they expected ME2 to sell better so tailored DA2 towards that. When it became apparent that DAO sold better than ME2 the sequel was ~ a year into development rather than a few months.

We have 100 metre sand dunes up by 90 mile beach. Only about two of them, and they are right next to the sea so it would be rather... limited.

I quoted one, Col. Dave Lapan, a couple of pages back, and he seemed fairly definitive. Also, coalition casualties have actually declined since the release of the first batch of leaks, as opposed to last year when they stayed roughly equal throughout the summer months. While there are certainly other factors at work that does very strongly suggest there has not been a significant increase in risk to coalition soldiers caused by the Afghan release. Lapan could be lying in the belief that admitting to deaths could discourage future/ current informants from supplying information, of course, but at present there isn't enough independent evidence to decide either way. That's something we'll only find out if a media organisation does some proper investigative work to check. So we probably won't find out.

It isn't really, is it? Isn't it still just what Patrick Mills believes* at this point and there hasn't been anything official either way? TESS/ USPTO still lists AP as being Sega's, with the confirmation date being only about six weeks ago (Sept 14 2010). While that ain't the be all and end all it is a fairly decent indicator in general. *I'm not saying he's lying or anything, he could simply be mistaken.

FTR that is pretty much exactly why I picked Fox News, ie solely because it is not likely to be accused of being anti American. It was a report on freely available public comments and I initially read it on the BBC, but a link from there might face an accusation of bias or not telling the whole story. There's no malice intended in the correction- normally a link from Newsweek (or the NYT, for that matter) would be fine as a source and there's no reason to expect it to be inaccurate. It just happened to be 'provably' wrong on this occasion.

Ye Gads Di, not everything is an Evil Plot to defame the US. If anything, as the debunking of that NYT article shows, the misrepresentation has been against NZ. There was never any serious chance of the production going elsewhere. They'd already spent $100 million on it which would almost all have had to be written off, pretty much all of the people Jackson has ever used on the technical and production side are NZers and changing places would delay the project by anything up to a year. There isn't so much a sense of entitlement as a feeling that the whole thing is a fiasco which could and should have been sorted out amicably six months ago over a beer and fish and chips if there had been a modicum of goodwill shown rather than an immediate leap to see who had the bigger Cheney followed by a series of typical vested interest pile ons.

EDIT: A quick read of the Ukraine Famine indicates that it's probably a great example of LoF denying an atrocity. You just did it right now XD Not read on wikipedia I hope. Their article was (and it seems, still is) of simply dreadful quality.

Technically GO did fight for the communists (POUM militia = militia of the Partit Obrer d'Unificacio Marxista). They were just the wrong type of communists for Stalin. The great irony being that he was simultaneously fighting for and against communism at one point.

Yeah, it's the sort of thing anyone who lives here instantly knows is wrong. To be fair though, if you don't live here you'd have no reason not to take what the NYT said at face value.

There's already an option for fewer fetch quests. Say "No sir" when asked to do them or just don't do them if received. [Really though, I know what you're saying and agree to an extent. But there's no point having something bug free and polished if everything else about it is small and mediocre]

New Zealand law allows collective bargaining. Reference (please note: .govt.nz in URL)

Bugs suck, but bugs can (and should) be fixed. They're also the inevitable consequence of any sufficiently complicated set of systems. A boring, generic, vanilla, unmemorable and unambitious game will be those things for all eternity. The one way to make sure you never reach the stars is to never even try shooting for them in the first place.

Actually the NZ union only asked for a meeting to discuss conditions. All the other stuff- boycott talk etc- came from the Australians so your claims that they shot themselves in the head are... incorrect. The sole thing the NZ union did wrong was not distance themselves from the Australians (by no means easy for them to do- if they were willing to try strongarming a large multinational like Warners they wouldn't have any problem blacklisting NZ union members who criticised them- quickly enough. And as I said, Warners has most certainly spun their own amount of bull. They said they'd never received assurances from the NZ union (ie, the union that actually matters) when they'd had them in writing for days and had in fact responded to that assurance asking the union to keep quiet about it. As for filming in the UK? Would not suggest one holds one's breath. If it ain't NZ then location work in Eastern Europe and post processing in NZ is far more likely.

An earlier batch of wikileaks documents dealt with Afghanistan already. Probably the most significant thing from the last few days was the rather quiet admission that there hasn't been any deaths of informants or such associated with the previous batch of leaks despite the dire assertions at the time.

Steam only cuts the middleman for Valve games. For everyone else it's just a different middleman to retail. Digital distribution makes (more) money because it's fundamentally better business wise than standard retail as its fixed costs are lower. What are these numbers pray tell? Supposedly at least the numbers for everything except retail are going up and the PC industry is growing. EX PCGA (potentially biased source, of course) In contrast, ex NPD.

I'm glad Paradox takes care to stagger their releases. If CK2, MMtG and DW came out in close proximity to each other I'd probably not have enough spare time to breathe let alone sleep.