Agreed. I used to be a PC only gamer (engineer, computer geek etc bla bla..) but since I got a PS3 I'm totally sold on consoles. Easy to use, comfortable to play from my couch, in general a better experience as a whole for me. It also fits nicely with my home theater system.
Sure, the PC can do all those things, but not as easily and would require more maintenance and configuration. Especially getting wireless controllers set up to work well with each game.
Sweden has a progressive tax system which pays for the move
While I don't know the details, I do know that a good chunk if not all of the cost is paid by the mining companies. Either way if tax money is being used that money is easily recouped in the form of taxes from the mining operation.
in Russia if you aren't connected to the government you're almost irrelevant, other than to be a moron to be manipulated to give Putin a shine of legitimacy.
I do see your point and I'm not surprised, I guess in Russia neither the mining company nor the government would pay for an operation like this, screwing over the local residents.
There are a few places in Sweden where entire towns are in the process of being gradually moved due to the expansion of neighboring mines. The thing is, these towns were built _because_ of those mines in the first place, generations ago. The citizens don't mind, they actually support it, since they know their towns would become ghost towns without the mines.
That being said, from the sound of things this town should have undergone similar procedures a long time ago. But there is more than one side to this type of situation.
Then there's the problem of shadowing/shading you pointed out. In a pure ray tracer, everything has that unnatural shiny/bright look. This is because you trace rays from the screen back to the light source. Works fine for direct illumination but the real world has lots of indirect illumination that gives the richness of shadows we see. For that you need something else like radiosity or photon mapping, and that has different costs.
Forgive my ignorance, but I don't quite understand why ray tracing can't handle indirect illumination. Wouldn't the traced ray modify the intensity and color of the (eventually found) light source with each bounce? Or is the problem that when you cast one ray per pixel you only get the contribution from a single light source in the end?
I'm not able to make any sense out of it either. The article says:
Stevens agrees, emphasizing his system is “subcritical.” This means no nuclear reaction occurs within the thorium. It remains in the same state...
Is he claiming that heating an element will cause it to decay more quickly?
I can't make any sense out of it right now.
The quoted statement doesn't make sense either. Subcritical only means that there is no self-sustaining nuclear reaction, not that there are no reactions taking place. I haven't RTFA but it sounds like whoever wrote it didn't understand what was going on.
The contact circles has me intrigued, especially if it will allow me to target messages to specific groups.
This feature alone makes it way better than facebook for me. It's so easy to send messages only to close friends, or colleagues, etc. And I can easily choose to only view messages from specific groups as well. With facebook it always feels like everything you write or do is visible to everyone. And everything someone else does is visible to me, which is not optimal either.
will be what happens when mining becomes prohibitively expensive or the 21 million coin limit is reached.
When the limit is reached, there will still be coin to be made from mining (though it wouldn't really be mining) from transaction fees. When mining become prohibitively expensive people will stop mining, which will decrease the difficulty and make it (slightly) profitable again. Either that or people don't stop mining and operate at a loss. Neither scenario has any impact on the usability of bitcoin.
I mean, seriously. Until I can purchase groceries, or pay my mortgage or utility bill, with this stuff, it's about as useful to me as WoW gold.
Yup, agreed. Doesn't mean it doesn't have a future though. Might not be likely, but not impossible either.
Be careful when a loop exits to the same place from side and bottom.