Gorth

...and here I thought faith was human fears. Religious people fears that there is no higher purpose, no justice and no accountability for what you did in life. Atheists fears that there is some kind of higher purpose, that there is justice and terrified by the thought of being held accountable for their actions. Agnostics are just afraid of taking a stand. I believe people will lead good lives and be "good persons" because they are inclined to do so, as part of who they are, the way they were raised and a number of other circumstances all playing together to create people whose total is greater than the sum of their parts.

Playing a bit more XCOM. Getting close to the end I think...

Just a thought, when Texas secedes from the Democratic Peoples Republic of America, you better start signing mutual defense treaties. There is bound to be one of more Mexican populist politician who wants to promise the liberation of the Mexican province of Texas during some election

You know Oby, you really need to get out more (if you honestly thought that was a valid metric for service to a country) Didn't serve in the armed forces, just did my time in the Civil Defense (the draft, love it hate it, it sometimes makes the decision for you). Did get to kill a few fires

That guy is creepy

*Gasp!* "Perhaps the highest profile difference between the new version and the older DirectX 11 is that DirectX 11.1 has native stereoscopic 3D support"... a truly essential feature in next-gen gaming. How could I possibly have tolerated the flat look of my games the last 25+ years??? I can no longer see any reason not to rush out and wave my credit card at Microsoft and yell "Charge!" Joking aside, you had me worried for a moment there Morgoth

Not ruling that out as a possibility, but if they are like corporate management elsewhere in the world, they will have timed it to coincide with an event where they can cut cost and wash their hands at the same time. It wasn't us, it was the evil government that made us do it. Similar things happened in Australia with carbon taxes, suddenly energy prices got an astronomical price hike, trying to wipe it off on the carbon tax (despite even non-economists being able to do the math, the taxes could in no feasible way account for the amount that prices increased), European corporations used the introduction of the Euro currency as an opportunity to "round up" prices rather than trying to actually convert prices etc. If you can score a few points on the bottom line and pass blame elsewhere, your shareholders will love you. Politics is not the only dirty business

I think people are mixing up their terminology sometimes. CGI is pretty much everything your computer shows on screen. I suppose the discussion is about how it was rendered, using the game engine and renderer versus using the same or similar assets rendered in another application ("pre-rendered" or FMV sequences)?

Thanks Enoch. Interesting situation. You are basically saying, doing nothing will automatically increase taxes. Sort of sucks when you are not the party in power and want to be seen actively doing something to improve your candidates changes next election. The horse trading is going to be interesting

I've heard people mentioning the 'fiscal cliff' a few times. Can anybody explain to a fiscal layman what's up?

Star Wars' decline started with 'Return of the Jedi'. Beginning with the Muppet Show in Jabbas palace and ending with Ewoks I must shamefully admit that I once bought a Star Wars dvd set (the collection featuring all 3 original movies in the original cinematic release versions, i.e. "unenhanced" by digital frippery). I haven't watched any of the movies that the new guys have been working on, but I'm genuinely curious to see what direction they are taking it: Its roots or the episodic merchandise advertising (or something completely new?).

Sweet music for an old "flash site hater". Haters gonna hate after all

Words of wisdom. I've been so drunk that it took 48 hours to sober up, but never in my life had a headache as a result. Whichever way you do it, make sure you are hydrated enough before crashing for the night.

Right idea, wrong place... Existing Sui Generis Thread Kickstarter projects in general

As the saying goes, make sure you kill it with fire! Badly store food kills more people than spiders and snakes, yet nobody screams for help and jumps up on a table when opening the fridge...

No >_ (That's where Is topped playing FO3 and never finished the game)

I'm not complaining. The only flash site I visit voluntarily these days is youtube... *pats his trusty ancient nokia dumb-phone*

To be honest, I mostly used it to do some sandbox experiments with 'A's and 'B's existing in a little world (my screen) and teach them different behavior. Aggressive, evasive, that kind of thing. Stimulus was stuff like food and survival versus pain and extinction. It was trying to take rules based (with memory) AI based logic in a different direction (or rather a different approach). I ran out of time though. Work. Work always gets in the way of fun

If I remember correctly, THQ are not the ones financing the project, they are the distributor (and presumably responsible for marketing, lobbying etc.). Still, it would be nice if for once Obsidian could just release a game without a lot of drama

Kinky lol. Should that be sexa-? Or hex-? Six-core? I'll give the Ubuntu link a shot, thanks. Last time I seriously spent time Linux it was Red Hat that was all the rage. I like virtual machines because they are easily disposable and easily replaceable if you end up in a state of fubar of your installation.

One of the first things I ever built as a "self taught" C64 programmer (several years before I signed up for CS at the university) was a two-pass assembler, basic was just too slow Does building your own DMA hardware using only 74xx series of chips count as qualification for handling boolean math? I had no problems constructing my own neural networks and train them (when I was younger). It would be interesting to see how it perform on quantum computers. I once developed (as part of a team) a programming language for distributed processing on a network of Unix machines for calculating humongous arrays (wave simulation), but it didn't really involve any math, just logic and an understanding of grammar and processes. What people feed into the arrays and do with the results was less important for me I guess the coding itself was never really what interested me as much as the analysis and design process. Implementation is just a tool to realize your ideas. Besides, you can get people to help you with the coding

Never underestimate the sweet tears of despair! I just deal in stuff that doesn't require much in the way of math. I've always had a knack for geometry and trigonometry (because I can mentally visualize it and model it in my mind), but stuff like trying to figure out the correct Fourier transformation of a function leaves me drooling and moaning

Not playing much at the moment and when I do, it's mostly XCOM. I've been diverting a bit of my precious spare time to add some paint jobs to two of my Warhammer armies (Skaven and Empire) after "completing" them with some OOP models purchased on ebay.

Kinky Let's just say, the feedback from people whose opinion I trust on such matters has been pretty 'meh' so far. Windows 7 may not be one of the 7 wonders of the world, but I think I'm going to stick with it until Windows 9. Might check out the current crop of Linux distributions in the meantime. Virtual machines are such a nice thing

Entirely anecdotal, but I suck at math (a nice way of saying 'a complete disaster') and made modestly successful career out of development Maybe my natural affinity for languages and transforming problems into something I can visualize (in my mind) and express with the tools at hand may have helped. It sure wasn't math.