You are completely missing my point. I know F1 cars don't exceed 200 mph because it is more valuable to have the downforce in the corners--that was the point I was making. Downforce equals drag, which takes power to overcome . If an F1 car gets more power, the team will use that power to increase the downforce rather than increase the top speed. Hence why no F1 car exceeds 200 mph. Granted this all goes out the window if you allow active aerodynamics, which is why F1 bans it.

But THIS car is clearly sacrificing downforce (and therefore handling) in order to achieve a high top speed. Remember, downforce=drag. In order to achieve a top speed of 248 with only 750 HP, you have to have a very low downforce car. Which is stupid unless you are at Bonneville. You could get around this with active aero, bu there is no mention of this in any of the articles.

A Bugatti Veryon takes something like 300 hp to cruise at 200 mph in low-drag mode. It takes the remaining 700 to push all the way to 250. You are vastly underestimating how much more power it takes to increase your speed, at high speed. Drag increases by the square of velocity.

With turbocharging and a large budget, you can make as much horsepower as you want from an engine. During the infamous turbo era of F1, engines with 1.5 liters of displacement were generating well in excess of 1000 HP.

That said, I don't think a 750 HP car can go 248 MPH without *serious* aerodynamic compromises. Look at the difference between the Koenigsegg with and without a rear wing as tested on Top Gear--the wing dropped the top speed by something like 20 MPH, but improved the track time significantly. There's a reason modern F1 cars actually top out at around 200 MPH--anything above that and you are better off using the extra power to generate more downforce.

Indeed. The book suggests, and I agree, that effectively HeLa is it's own species. it was already abnormal for a human cell, being cancerous, and since then various mutations have taken it even farther from the normal human genome.

Another for Wings3D for a beginner. It's free, fast, easy to learn and use, but be warned it does have limitations. Most notably it cannot do boolean operations. like subtracting one shape from another. There are supposed to be mods that allow this, but I've never gotten them to work.

Jesus, overreact much?

Did I say Chess was a stupid game? Did I say Go is a superior game? Did I say my opinion is in any way superior to anyone else's opinion?

No. I said I don't like chess, and I like Go. I brought up Go as an aesthetic and mechanical contrast to Chess, and because other people had already brought it up before me. As two of the major board games in the world, for better or for worse, it's a logical choice for contrast. Chess is a perfectly good game, I just don't like it for various abstract aesthetic reasons to do with the construction of complexity. I like Go because it fits my sense of aesthetics better. Other people are perfectly entitles to their opinions.

You, on the other hand, appear to have a massive chip on your shoulder about the issue. I admit some of the Go evangelists are massive wankers, but I seriously resent you lumping me into that category for what I thought was a relatively mild expression of preference backed up by a purely subjective course of reasoning. Frankly, you are trying to push your own opinion onto me far harder than i was trying to push my opinion on to anyone.

Kind of ties in with why I don't like chess: its complexity is largely arbitrary. You can easily make a near-infinite variety of chess-like games by just defining a random tesselated playing space, a random number of different pieces, and a random set of rules governing their movements. There's nothing really "special" about the standard rules of chess that significantly distinguish it from any of these other chess-like variants, excluding the obviously trivial or unplayable ones.

Go, on the other hand, has a set of rules so simple that it is very hard to make variations of the game. There are versions played on different topologies, or with variations in how scoring is calculated, but the basic rule of "place pieces to surround area to score points" is so basic that it can't be changed without fundamentally changing the game. Yet out of that simplicity and (for lack of a better word) non-arbitrary-ness comes a depth of gameplay that is at lest equal to chess.

Why is it that people think Jesus=God? What part of "Jesus, the son of God" is unclear? I mean, we're all geeks here and so by and large probably not very religious, but it's a pretty fundamental error to be making about one of the largest religions in the world. Even given unfamiliarity with the details of the Holy Trinity, which is admittedly a non-trivial theological concept, it should be obvious that since God created the Universe (and everything in it) first, and Jesus was born later, Jesus is obviously not God and is not responsible for making the fish, just for multiplying them.

And now, back to our regularly scheduled programming.

Yeah, that was it. I mostly wanted it for the Saturn and the Dreamcast (Nights and Bangai-O for the win!), but the collection as a whole has brought me many hours of enjoyment. Small world indeed! Or at least, small internet.

I guess you're right. Incidentally, aren't you the person I bought a big collection of video game consoles from a few years ago? Not that you would remember me, specifically, but your name rings bells.

I never had much problem with the buggy sequences myself, but that may be because I've been playing racing games since the SNES and Genesis and have experience with digital steering.

Anyway, for dedicated racing games, you can buy a steering wheel and have even better control than an analog stick. A cheap no force-feedback wheel only costs around $20-40 and works great for arcade-style racers.

http://xkcd.com/651/

One word: Botnets. If everyone that used a computer on the internet was educated in how to avoid downloading malicious software, how to recognize when their computer may be infected, and how to remove said malware, we could put a major dent in the proliferation of botnets, which I think everyone will agree are one of the prime real threats to global cybersecurity today.

Remember: it may take one hacker to program a botnet, but its takes thousands of ignorant people to run one. A little required education could go a long way. The exact implementation of a "computer licence" may need some work, but there are some real possible benefits.

Of course, this style of gameplay has existed for years in the form of Progress Quest, the fire-and-forget RPG.

http://www.progressquest.com/

Some back of the napkin calculations say that to lift a 1-oz. DVD (that they can't play) into orbit on the shuttle costs about $500.

Agreed. Use a good popup and script blocker, and install adblock and show her how to use it so she can block images and things if she wants to. You may want to do a little surfing on the seedier websites and seed adblock with any major porn advertisers yourself, if you like.

Anything she sees beyond that point will be because of a deliberate action on her part, i.e. clicking on a link.