ah, i wrote a diesel truck simulator in 1993 for Pi Technology: there is actually much more to it than that. with a bigger engine with higher torque it is possible to have the vehicle drive more often in its peak torque range where it has either better acceleration or better fuel economy or both.

with a smaller engine the effect you mention - that people put their foot to the floor - means that the engine has to rev its nuts off and thus operates waaay outside of its efficiency band.

you need to watch that program. have you watched the program yet? what did the program get across to you, and can you put it better than i can?

before making *any* judgement you *need* to watch the program on 5th gear which covers exactly this question in some detail. basically the test was designed originally for people driving sensibly, and it was designed i think well over 20 possibly even 30 years ago. so it has a very *very* gentle acceleration and deceleration curve. gentle acceleration because that is not only fuel-efficient but also the cars of that time simply could not accelerate that much, and gentle braking because again that is more fuel-efficient but also because if you had drum brakes they would overheat.

people no longer drive sensibly: they are more aggressive with other drivers (not keeping a safe distance), they put their foot down hard on the accelerator and they put their foot down hard on the brake. also as the cars are more reliable they tend to not maintain them properly: until i watched another program on 5th gear about how badly old oil affects fuel economy and the lifetime of the engine i had absolutely no intention of changing oil regularly in the decade-year-old cars i buy.

so, in effect, people should stop complaining and start driving in more fuel-efficient ways... *regardless* of how aggressive the person behind them gets when they set off from the lights at the same acceleration rate as a 40 tonne cargo lorry. that's the other person's problem.

i love descent, and i love that it's now software libre. i hope the guy who maintains d2x has stopped being an idiot by including patched versions of standard libraries such as libsdl without providing an option to replace them and forcing the patched versions to overwrite pre-installed software, but yes - awesome.

the thing about descent was that it was the first game with 6 degrees of freedom. i actually bought a special joystick that was capable of dealing with it (one designed for flight simulators) and after 2 to 3 weeks of practicing i was competent at side-motion circular slides firing at a target at the centre. the first 2 weeks were spent mostly getting motion sickness and having the nose of the craft bashed against a corner :)

it was also fun to watch spectators swaying from watching the screen! but, again, after a couple of weeks you got used to it, both as a player and as a spectator.

yeah - to those people who set up LAN parties: i hear ya :) i did the same. i think the lowest spec i got away with was a 486 SX 25 with 12mb of RAM, setting the screen to 320x240 and it was just about tolerable. i had to use 10-Base-T with terminators for goodness sake - what the heck i was doing with 5 networked computers in my house back in 1996 with just a 28kbaud modem i _really_ don't know!

so yes, absolutely: descent (the software libre version *or* a commercial version) gets my vote... *as long as* it has a community portal similar to that of Dark Reign, with a chat room so that people can meet other players, set up a match and play. that is bizarrely what's missing from bzflag: although bzflag has an in-game chat it doesn't hatve out-game community chat, very odd.

also, it would be awesome to see planetary-surface action as well, not just in mines (no matter how large). i always felt a little claustrophobic and the attack vectors would be very different in free space... interesting to think about the possibilities here, hmmm :)

The NSA probably wanted more time to exploit it.

we need an extra poll option: there needs to be a man walking in front of the vehicle holding a red flag:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L...

14 billion? That's less than it costs to supply that little adventure in the Iraqi desert with toilet paper!!!

that I can sue the NSA for trying to crack my machines and that the USA will extradite the NSA employees to the UK so that they can be tried in our courts ? Do the people at the USA DOJ understand the meaning of the word ''irony'' ?

This is more outlandish than even something that most political satire writers would have dreamed up.

BT do not resell bandwidth to the Internet, it operates a packet switching network over ATM that connects you to your ISP. You ISP connects you to the Internet and might filter or throttle some sites. BT does not look inside the ATM packets that travel over its network and so does not throttle some traffic - in theory anyway.

BT also operates as an ISP which is probably where the confusion lies.

That US lap dog's EU membership has become a cancer that's been festering for decades. Nowadays they're almost nothing beyond that.

Look at what Jim Cameron's brother Mike does for a living. Extreme stuff like that is in the family's blood.

It'll turn out just like how they abandoned Firewire once there was finally enough hardware on the market to even take note of it.

no not pam_ssh. not "ask for a 2nd passphrase at a 2nd prompt which is entered into the ssh system to unlock the ssh key" - have ABSOLUTELY NO login credentials AT ALL, and LITERALLY use the success/fail of the ssh passphrase (or gpg passphrase) unlocking *AS* the login. no /etc/shadow, no password field in /etc/passwd - nothing BUT unlock the gpg or ssh key.

so what's the difference between the NSA's plan and Hydra's plan in Captain America Winter Soldier? absolutely nothing as far as i can tell. can anyone tell me if i am mistaken?