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Comment Re:Ok for MMOs, perhaps... (Score 1) 190

by AlbinoClock (#30753584) Attached to: Game Endings Going Out of Style?
There's a big difference between extending the plot past the original ending (as with any game with expansions) and not having an ending at all. The climax is still a bit part of a game, even it has 20 expansions. You can't really have a story without having some form of plot resolution.
The Military

Submission + - Aging Nuclear Stockpile Good for Decades to Come

Submitted by pickens
pickens writes: The NY Times reports that the Jason panel, an independent group of scientists that advises the federal government on issues of science and technology, has found that the aging nuclear arms are sufficient to guarantee their destructiveness for decades to come, obviating a need for a costly new generation of more reliable warheads. Senator Jon Kyl of Arizona and other Republicans have argued that concerns are growing over the reliability of the United States’ aging nuclear stockpile and that the possible need for new designs means that the nation should retain the right to conduct underground tests of new nuclear weapons. The warheads were originally designed for relatively short lifetimes and frequent replacement with better models but such modernization ended after the United States quit testing nuclear arms in 1992, and all weapons that remain in the arsenal must now undergo the refurbishment process, known as life extension. The Jason panel found no evidence that the accumulated changes from aging and refurbishment posed any threat to weapon destructiveness, and that the “lifetimes of today’s nuclear warheads could be extended for decades, with no anticipated loss of confidence” but added that federal indifference could undermine the nuclear refurbishment program. “The study team,” the report said, “is concerned that this expertise is threatened by lack of program stability, perceived lack of mission importance and degradation of the work environment.”
Idle

Submission + - Bomb-Proof Wallpaper Developed (inhabitat.com)

Submitted by MikeChino
MikeChino writes: Working in partnership with the U.S. Army Corp of Engineers, Berry Plastics has rolled out a new breed of bomb-proof wallpaper. Dubbed the X-Flex Blast Protection System, the wallpaper is so effective that a single layer can keep a wrecking ball from smashing through a brick wall, and a double layer can stop blunt objects (i.e. a flying 2×4) from knocking down drywall. According to its designers, covering an entire room takes less than an hour.
Google

Google Wave Backstage 132

Posted by kdawson from the movie-by-peter-weir dept.
As Google Wave is about to be released to 100,000 beta testers tomorrow, reader snitch writes in with a link to an in-depth interview with Dhanji Prasanna, whose title is Core Engineer. It covers some of the technologies, tools, and best practices used in building Wave. "InfoQ: Would you like to give us a short technical outline of what happens to a message (blip) from the moment a user types it in the web client, until becomes available to every one else that is participating in that wave — humans or robots? ... Dhanji: Sure, a message written in the client is transformed into a series of operations that are sent to the server in real time. After authenticating and finding the appropriate user session, the ops are routed to the hosted conversation. Here these ops are transformed and applied against other incoming op streams from other users. The hosted conversation then broadcasts the valid set of changes back to other users, and to any listening robots. This includes special robots like the ones that handle spell checking, and one that handles livesearch (seen in the center search-panel), as well as explicit robotic participants that people have developed. Robotic participants write their changes in response to a user's and these are similarly converted into ops, applied and re-broadcast."

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