...nobody in real life could afford four of Dr Grordbort's Infallible Aether Oscillators. (Although the one they're playing with in the video looks like the Righteous Bison, which is the budget model at a mere $100. Probably because when they were filming it they were afraid it'd get dropped.) http://drgrordborts.com/produc...

To be completely frank (which I'm not, my name's David), the thing I liked best about the HL series was the story. Which was interesting, and varied, and had some characters I really liked, and did a really, really good job of immersing me in the good but fairly abstract FPS game mechanics.

You don't get stories in multiplayer. Sometimes they can pretend there's a story, but it never really works.

I want to know how it ends. Years later, I'm still emotionally invested in Gordon (even though his entire character is inferred from the reactions of people around him!), and Alyx, and Barney, and Dr. Kleiner, and Eli, even D0g, Hedley Lamarr and the G-Man. I want to know how it ends, dammit, especially after the HL2e2 ending (which I am still pleased at having played unspoilered). I want to know more about the Combine and find out what they really want, and see their homeworld (where I'm sure the inevitable climax will be). I want to know who the G-Man really is. I want to know more about the vortigaunts (and hear them talk, which never fails to be hilarious). Basically, I just want to know.

Having a good game would be a bonus too. But mainly I just want the story.

I totally didn't know that! That's awesome!

Here's one I found with four components: http://solomonsmusic.net/FM_Cr...

I am curious how that tiny antenna can produce enough energy to drive even a crystal earpiece. Most crystal radios need huge antennae, don't they? And from the writeup it looks like the FM decoding more or less happens by accident as a side effect of signal interference.

If this really works, I reckon it should be possible to build a miniaturised FM crystal set into a pair of headphones. I wonder if you could do stereo?

...telling us to stay the hell away from their base on Ceres.

We should retaliate by beaming Youtube comments at them.

Apparently it uses 1.5mW at 1V.

You can get batteryless radios. Crystal radios (which don't necessarily contain a crystal) get all their power from the radio signal, and they're scarily simple. During the second world war foxhole radios were built out of a razor blade, a pencil, some wire and a set of headphones (instructions: http://www.bizarrelabs.com/fox...) Prisoner of war radios used coal

AFAIK, however, the much lower energy VHF signals for FM isn't capable of running an FM decoder, and probably not an earpiece either.

I wonder if a modern crystal earpiece could usefully pick up low-power AM transmissions from a cellphone in your pocket without spamming everyone around you with radio waves?

The compositing of effects onto live action was laughable --- you could tell when a scene was going to have CGI in it because it would suddenly go fuzzy as they dropped the resolution.

And at least in the first season, the choreography of the space sequences was incredibly stilted (Starfury moves onto screen right-to-left. Starfury comes to a halt in the middle of the screen. Starfury does a 180 degree turn and stops. Starfury fires cannon. Staryfury does another 180 degree turn. Starfury exits screen right-to-left). But that was because they simply didn't know to use technology properly, as CGI was brand new and they were basically making it up as they went along; they learned on the job and later seasons were pretty good.

...I wonder what happened to all their digital assets?

I just moved to Zürich from the United Kingdom. It's absolutely true --- kids will just randomly wander around on their own. Here, it would be considered weird for a six-year-old child not to go to school on their own, particularly if it were only a mile away.

One of the things that helps, I think, is that the culture here allows random adults to talk to random children. (Or, more accurately, the other way round, frequently incessantly, in Swiss German, which I don't speak.) If one gets lost, which is very unlikely given the amazing public transport system, they can just ask. This is very weird to someone from the UK, where it's pretty dangerous to even make eye contact with someone's child...

Plus, of course:

ken27238: What do you think SpaceX uses for testing software?
ElonMuskOfficial: Kerbal Space Program!

A rocket ought to be fairly resistant to bad weather --- they have many more times the control authority that an aeroplane has, due to sodding huge engines, and will be above it very quickly. They already have to deal with very strong winds blowing them sideways as they pass through the jetstream (at 100km/h plus), and they don't have air intakes to suck in rain.

Does anyone know whether the Falcon 9 can't take off in bad weather, or whether they won't do a launch in bad weather because they'll lose visual contact with the vehicle, which is critical for monitoring the performance of what is fundamentally a prototype?

Would the pony also have mod points?

...is a Debian userland on top of the BSD kernel. It lets you use all the tools you're used to while also getting all the FreeBSD kernel goodness, like in-kernel ZFS, etc.

It's still a work in progress and not all packages are built for it, but it works really well and is very pleasant to use; plus you get dpkg and apt.

Of course, one possible downside is that you don't get the BSD userland, which has a flavour all of its own. Whether you think this is a good thing or a bad thing is purely a matter of personal taste.

Skinkworks?

I, for one, welcome our new reptilian overlords!

For me it was Nicholas Montserrat's The Cruel Sea. A brilliant, brilliant book, but it was clearly written as therapy after a hellish time on the WW2 North Sea convoys, and by god it shows.

Peter Grant books: awesome, waiting for Foxglove Summer to show up. The Expanse: pretty awesome, although the authors have definitely been reading their Neal Asher; who these days pretty much defines the cheerful big-things-exploding-in-space genre.

Never heard of Scorpion. Never heard of the guy in the article. Sounds like I haven't missed much. And if you'll excuse me, I need to get on with Ancillary Sword...