Admittedly, I often do too, but as a tangential activity to actually completing the game as originally intended.

I always spend some time exploring the limits of the box when getting a new game! With Prototype and inFamous kicking around at the moment, it's happy times.

I believe this actually is where gaming is going though, to a very real physics model which takes away the feeling of artificial limits.

Where necessary, limits can be placed on the gaming through outside factors, e.g. in a military game, unacceptable civilian deaths leading to failure, or in a GTA type game, the feds arriving.
I think to make the experience feel unlimited, these limits need to be applied through such in-game factors, rather than certain skyscrapers being magically indestructible.

It should be easy in most cases to work the story to provide the necessary incentives, say putting one of your side's key characters in the skyscraper with the bad guys, preventing all-out destruction.

There does come a point to enjoyable gaming where we, the players, have to choose to embrace the story, rather than vandalizing the sandbox we are playing in.

I can forgive the banking, as it is due to the ships maneuvering thruster arrangement. They are often depicted as four thrusters (two up, two down) near the front of the ship, and sometimes an opposing four at the back.
Firing opposing pairs of thrusters causes roll, firing both up / both down causes pitch, so the only logical way to turn is to bank and then pitch up.
This layout saves having another pair of thrusters to allow turning without rolling, plus you only need to account for stress in two directions, rather than three, plus the torsion of the rolling action.

Out of interest, what do you think the "Subscribe" button is for?

And when all the good sites on the internet have disappeared, the people who made them will be back on business on pay sites taking subscriptions.
Better to just get paid directly for quality content, than splitting it with a whole mountain of third parties.

Oh wait, the content isn't so great that people will pay for it? Bummer.

If they take this "simulated shooting causes real shootings" logic further though, surely it means the next step will be to ban violent video games and then movies?

Surely your first thought was "can I hack it to run my own code?"

Yeah, you have got me wondering now quite how out of spec you have to be. As you say, if it is all well crimped and terminated, it should be a pretty small ratio even in the worst situation.

I originally mentioned the reflection issue because I did see a real problem with this on some embedded hardware we developed, but it turned out to be the (cheap and nasty) kit at the other end of the cable causing the issue.

Kind of sad I don't have access to the scope we borrowed any more!

Matching it to the frequency is BAD in this situation. The point is that bad termination leads to reflections, and if your cable is a multiple of the wavelength, and you chuck some patterns which happen to repeat down it you can see some effects.

Yes, it depends very much on the bit patterns going down it, the cable length being a close multiple of the wavelength and the termination being poor, but it is not hard to engineer a situation where you can actually see the effect.

As you say, in the real world, with decent termination, no sharp bends in the cable and decent cable you would hope the SnR would always be way on the acceptable side of the line though.

Not quite sure how talking about the characteristics of UTP regarding reception of external noise relates to standing waves on CAT5 cables?

I was just pointing out to the AC above that UTP cables do have different behaviour as you change the length. If you fancy a fun experiment, get a fast enough scope, and some 100M Ethernet kit and see what happens as you change the length of the cable by small increments relative to the wavelength (100MHz = 3m).

I'm well aware of how to crimp CAT5 and how UTP works though, thanks all the same.

You've never come across standing waves on transmission lines?

Yes, your EE theory is all well and good when you have perfect impedance matches.

Welcome to the real world, where standing waves on transmission lines do exist, and you can choose lengths carefully based on the frequency going down it.

I believe that was not the comparison he was making.

The point was that if you earn more than $20/hour it is a waste of your valuable time to be making cables whilst you could be doing the work you are paid to do.

Still would not validate.

Theirs is digitally signed and has date stamps in.

I think the only options is to use something like bindiff, which excludes comparisons of much of the PE metadata.

Ah glad someone else wanted to point this out too.

I work with touch screens pretty much daily and even small temperature changes cause the calibration to drift by a few centimeters on a 17" screen.

If I lived in the US, indeed, I would feel compelled to sign up, uniform up and join the forces if my home country were being unfairly invaded.

And yes, I do believe they would be justified in killing anyone who is not demonstrably surrendering unconditionally at that point.

A tad extreme, but also the safest way to wage war in a difficult situation for the invading force. That actually is the point of invading a country, to achieve compliance within the current populace, assuming you want to keep them alive.

If you're losing in a war in an invaded area, and you are not a soldier, generally you are given the choice of surrendering or dying.

I'm not sure what your idea of a fair war is? Care to explain?