Agree with this. The effects look old, but they still carry the emotional punch when they need to. I can remember absolutely all of those scenes perfectly, so they clearly did something very right.

I got my girlfriend into it after what happened with Battlestar Galactica, and while the first season is a bit of a slog, she absolutely loved it after that.

Pretty sure we've got the last part covered in this thread quite aptly.

TNT is trickier still because adding the third nitro group is really unfavored by the straight up nitrating acid method. I'm pretty sure industrially you use some kind of metal catalyst to do it.

Here's the problem: there's a difference between desperate and starving. You can go a long time without food if you were previously well-nourished - upto 3 weeks or so with no real problems. Which means you have a long time to realize you're in trouble, rally your allies etc.

People think that people turn on each other at the drop of dime - but they don't. The first thing desperate people do is forge alliances they might otherwise not consider, and then go looking for a solution to their common problem. They might eventually fall to infighting, but so goes the entirety of human civilization. We are fundamentally a tribal species, if we weren't then there wouldn't be a civilization to fall in the first place.

And it's not like this is a particularly difficult benefit to sell to people either: if someone's stockpiled enough food for a year, and there's 10 of you, then you have enough food for over a month if you knock over their hamlet. Heck, you can sell this idea to people who might be morally opposed, because you can leave them enough food for a month, and reasonably expect to knock over another hamlet before that time is up.

The economics and history support the only sensible conclusion: people who go it alone die out. The Mongol horde wasn't so much a horde as one of the most well-organized and powerful empires for its time, it only seemed like a horde because every village was happy to sell out its neighbors and hope they would be passed over. And the exact same problem applies to survivalists: they think the way they do, because they've misunderstood some very important things about the human condition. Worse, they think they're smarter then everyone else which means they're constantly underestimating potential allies and actual enemies.

Actually the problem with people panicking is they tend to do the stupidest possible thing en masse. Ebola infection in a city - quick, cram on the buses and flee! Congregate in public places to stockpile supplies! Like 90% of the things people would try are the exact things which turn a mild, containable outbreak into a large one.

During a collapse the number of people who are desperate - by definition - is a lot bigger then those who have everything they need. Guess who's going down first? It's not going to be the guy who tries to supply them with things, it's going to be the guy with the lights on who keeps shooting at everyone near his property. An active threat to everyone.

Right. But if you can make a lo-fi game....why not sell it? Modding is dying because the market is getting a lot easier to access and the toolkits are getting easier to use. We're closing in on the point where a competent modding team is essentially a competent development team who definitely should sell the product they create from the outset.

I'd argue also it's a consequence of the mean age of gamers being somewhere in the 30s now. We all have disposable income - I don't have to pick "free" to have my product get seen by people anymore.

The placebo effect doesn't cure actual disease. It's controlled for because when you give someone anything, chances are they change a lot of their behavior and state of mind, and we know those things have actual impacts on the way the body reacts to stressors. But it won't result in a colony of bacteria tearing through your stomach to actually die off.

No doctor prescribes placebos, and we don't plan on treating people with placebos. We worry about them, especially because in cases of looking for improvement rather then easily quantifiable effects, its a big deal, and also because we know even with quantifiable effects, a subset of the population are likely to clear up an issue regardless of intervention.

*sigh*

Nobody cares which drive it is, because they're both conical microwave waveguides which would violate fundamental laws of physics if they worked, being tested in ways which uniquely will fail to ever test the fundamental claim and have trivial explanations for the observed behavior.

You can debunk by asking one simple question: did they test it in a vacuum? No? Then it doesn't matter what they saw unless they were producing staggeringly large amounts of anomalous force. You can get micronewtons out of the hot air coming off a CPU core.

They did not test it in a vacuum.

Go to the full paper, search for vacuum. See where that word never appears? In the experimental section describing their actual tests. Neither does "pressure". And yes, I've read the whole thing.

They describe the capabilities of the device, in such a way as to imply they tested in a vacuum. But they never did it - they never explicitly say they did it, and in the conclusions they then say they need to test in a vacuum because they couldn't because they didn't have vacuum rated RF amplifiers.

So no, no they did not test in a vacuum. They really try to hide it though.

Did the resistor have a reaction chamber around it? Maybe a conical structure which would only leak hot air through certain outlets, looking suspiciously like a rocket reaction chamber?

The original paper is wildly ambiguous about whether they actually tested the device in a vacuum. It seems apparent from the surrounding commentary and the paper that they clearly didn't (they describe the apparatus, they never say what the actual conditions they used it in are for the experimental section).

Which means they've proved precisely nothing. Microwaves and heat in a shaped chamber? It's just a wildly inefficient thruster.

No modding has gotten more expensive since Quake. The graphical fidelity expected today makes mods which can't reach it extremely jarring. If you can produce material of that quality, you're already basically good enough to work for a game company and get paid for it.

This has nothing to do with influencing people. This has to do with the real children who are harmed making them. It is noteworthy that the supreme court ruled recently that depictions of child pornography which are simulations - i.e. computer generated images - are not illegal to have.