Wish I had mod points. This is pretty much the key skill for any ambitious dream project in any discipline. You don't have to be a Renaissance Man, you don't need to be a modern day Da Vinci. You just need to find the right people and the ability to make them love you, laugh at your jokes and consider your great idea awesome.

The resource bottleneck is a limitation that only exists in tournament rules. Set up games where tournament rules specify that resources are infinite and Starcraft will play a lot differently (if the Zerg do not win early with a rush, they never win). Then it's down to knowing how long you can leap up the tech tree, how quickly you can build things, whether it's worth going for hordes of low-level squishies and doing a zerg rush or investing time in building a few top-tier superweapons and stomping all over the map.

This has been done in Dawn of War multiplayer for ages now, with maps/matches set up with infinite resources and the only way to win is complete annihilation of the other player(s). That led to an interesting Eldar tactic. Infinite resource games that disabled squad and vehicle caps and had an Eldar player, usually led to the Eldar player leaping up the infantry tech tree as fast as possible and then spamming Warp Spiders with Wraithlords, pretty much crushing everything.

What? daria42, have you been under a rock? That question is already answered!

You might remember a Slashdot article quite a ways back that talked about Wikipedia deleting entire entries where no one could definitively argue if it was "notable" content. One of them was an article detailing the weapons technology used by the Space Marines in the Warhammer 40K universe. Well now you can just type "w40k wiki" into Google and the very first search result is Warhammer 40K Wiki. It not only solves the problem of proving notability, but you can be assured that everything of relevance to the W40K universe will not be rejected by Wikipedia's nazis and is available in a conveniently cross-referenced database maintained by people who cherish the material.

If you are the gaming type, you can put in a game's title and the word 'wiki' after it as the terms for a Google search. The more popular or more dedicated fanbase it has, the greater the probability a Wiki was started for it. Some great examples are the Fallout Wiki, Star Wars wiki aka the "Wookiepedia", Star Trek wiki, Final Fantasy wiki and the Tekken wiki.....which covers quite a few the passions of the Slashdot community.

I'm not colour-blind at all. Just bog-standard male-pattern trichromacy.
But I wouldn't mind getting gene therapy which would introduce female-pattern tetrachromacy.

Preferably with the extra chromacy granting sensitivity to infrared. Superior nightvision, perhaps even a slight heat sense.

However UV and IR vision both, would make things we take for granted like flowers and all kinds of monitors and screens would all be perceived differently. If you're a dedicated photoshop user, then you've just screwed yourself because the Pantone range will not be what your average client perceives.

Hmmm...I wonder if you'd actually see the remote controls IR beam flashing around if you had IR vision....

Wish I had mod points. This is exactly what I suspect.

This judgement is just to set suitably exploitable precedent for further action months or years down the line.

What I expect is Sod's Law to take enthusiastic effect however. A totally unforeseen party of interests will (not might, will) exploit this precedent for their own ends, for better or worse and will cause more headaches than desired.

Whatever happens, it will continue to suck for the common man.

Did anyone else read the summary and suddenly think some scientist has gone an actually elevated the status of the Asari in Mass Effect from a horndog trope to sledgehammer blue alien lesbians into hard sci-fi...into the realm of 'egads!-it-could-happen?-ism'....???

Regardless of whether this was double-blind tested or not, I love what you've done and you have inspired me to consider making DIY audio equipment. I'm wondering how difficult open-air headphones are as a DIY project....?

I know I've always wanted a portable pocket-sized pre-amp and those are obscenely expensive when bought pre-made or on commission. There was a guy who used to take commissions for them on eBay but he quit as even with the decent money, it wasn't worth the time and effort.
I don't like modern 'clicky' or touch-screen volume controls. Give me an old fashioned rotary knob any day and some of that sweet cross-gain magic.

Do you have any resources like websites or books you could recommend?

Thanks in advance!

I am surprised High-C wrote that the AVN Expo nextdoor to the CES was a "curious coincidence". Maybe my sarcasm detector is on the fritz but I had the impression that every major geek convention in the US had an accompanying porn expo as it's neighbour. Practically a tradition. You go where the business is right?

This explains an annoying game engine "feature" in Dragon Age: Origins. During in-game engine scripted cutscenes, they would do that character-centric depth-of-field technique of 2D directors by having the character in perfect focus and the background fuzzed out.

Problem is it was done in the cheapest clumsiest way possible. It was like a pseudo-green screen effect except done with a lame alpha layer that was roughly the outline of the character speaking. Everything else looked like it had frosted glass in front of it.
But the alpha shadow wasn't perfect, particularly around the hair. You could see like a clear "window" through the "frosted glass" behind the character, revealing a perfectly rendered background. Furthermore, the transition from focus to blur was sudden, not gradual, further highlighting the alpha shadows presence. It totally destroys all cinematographic merit in all the cutscenes.

The irony is that when you leave the cutscene and go back into exploration mode, the blur disappears and you have perfect focal clarity in the game world at all distances. Probably one of the most stupid game design decisions I have ever encountered.

This.

I got my wonderful childhood memories of kung-fu qi-gong martial arts mysticism reduced to a satire of itself as "LOL! u hav magikal powers AIDS!"

What made it so ironic was this suspicion that it was an attempt by Lucas to make the Force less like new-agey ESP and more like Rupert Sheldrake's morphogenetic field science-y. Lets not even begin discussing how ridiculous this is in space opera fairy tale in the first place. It made it even more ridiculous and un-science-y.

While it was a mystical energy or qi or whatever, you only needed to loosely establish that it was some sort of universal constant like gravity and was not subject to time or space. Great. That's why Jedi can be any species. That's why anywhere in the universe can have it. That's why it can cheat physics a little bit. And it remains mysterious to reason.

But if it's some sort of mitochondria with magical powers...how do you explain it being present in every species known to possess force-sensitive individuals? Even between species with totally incomparable metabolic processes. How did it get across a huge universe in time to infect every sentient species available? How does mere mitochondria manage to send information outside of time-space contraints or c in order to allow things like precognition or telepathy? What factors govern whether or not you can be force-sensitive or not? If it's just to do with a population count, does this mean injecting more midi-chlorians into a subject can grant magical powers to a formerly non-sensitive individual? Would getting malignant midi-chlorian cancer turn you into an organic nuclear power plant? Where did they come from? If they are biological, are there different species of midi-chlorian? If they "talk" when you listen, what do they say? If telepathy is based on all midi-chlorian clusters somehow being able to sense one another and exchange information without any exchange of energy between population clusters i.e. bodies, then we are talking about some sort of weird quantum entanglement field that spans the universe.....aaaaaaaand ergo we're right back to the universal qi or new-agey ESP precedent set earlier. Only now, it's a fucking mess.

I got the PC version of DAO and it appears to be working fine so far. I'm even using mods from dragonagenexus.com, the same guy who did the TESNexus and Falloutnexus websites.

I would still advise you to wait anyway because the mods are still very basic and you'll likely get the current crop of DLC content bundled for free in a GOTY edition.

Yep, I facepalmed at that statement too. Unusual meat colour is one solution.

Seriously, once the process is proven and refined, we're going to see the livestock agriculture industry nosedive because the biggest label will be price. No farm costs, no veterinary costs, no agricultural taxes, no feed, no chemicals, no fertilizers, no (drinking) water, no barns required, no utility bills for all those barns and equipment and on and on the list goes. When all you need is some climate control, a nutrient soup and some custom made white-cell cultures (because even vat-grown tissue can catch a cold), vat-meat will be obscenely cheap.

Of course there will always be a market for "real" meat, but it will be reduced to boutique levels of industry. Farmers competing with breeds of livestock like they do with fruit and grain breeds for the discerning gourmand.

I am shocked that a website like this, filled with geeks, have forgotten to mention Forbidden Planet, the biggest comic and toy store in London - and I believe all of the UK. It's just a little bit south-east of Tottenham Court Road tube station.

I cannot recommend strongly enough the Transport For London journey planner. It'll give you excellent guidance on getting from point A to point B, complete with selecting which types of public transport you want to use.

It's not a bad idea to swing by Forbidden Planet on the way down to London's Chinatown. Found a nice thread here discussing Malaysian/Chinese cuisine in London.

Soho is directly north of Chinatown. Full of sex shops, gay bars, hole-in-the-wall strip joints and prime people-watching real estate. Best to go in the evening to really see the colourful people coming out. Have a pint at the The Ship in Soho. Wonderfully weird clientele. Old middle-aged punks, lesbian goths, dodgy looking ex-roadies, pensioner couples and gawking tourists who've heard about the pub.

Slightly north and a ways to the east of Chinatown is the Covent Garden area which is the heart of theatre in London and another great place to wander and people watch.

An enthusiastic bravo to Iain M. Banks being mentioned.

In his Culture series, he's got Artificial Intelligences that are god-like, apparently descended from computers left behind by a civilization so old and so advanced they literally "ascended" to the next plane of existence. They can be planetoid in size, enjoy non sequiturs for names and are so far off the end of the I.Q. scale that the speed of light itself became a limiting factor so their "CPUs" - if they could even be called that anymore - exist in a pocket dimension of hyperspace carried around within their main core.

Genetic Engineering is practically into the realm of magic, with geriatrism being a lifestyle choice rather than an inevitability, individuals regularly switch genders every few decades and have children - even as males complete with pseudo-womb - and in one story at least, completely changed species for ambassadorial purposes.

All this happens in a sandbox known as a Post-scarcity universe, which in itself is a fascinating social concept. Boredom is the last great enemy.

OO-TEE-DEEE!!!

No, wait...that was Jawas...

Dehn-gaaar? Ee-chi-wawa? Nub nub nub?