More and more developers seem to be using the existing engines (i know you used Unreal 3 for Rev 60, Unity, UbiArt, etc) which makes sense given the huge number of features they provide with little initial development cost and common tool sets/plugins used by other developers. Do you think there is much future in developers using custom engines for games (both indie and non-AAA) or do you think it will continue to become more uncommon for common genre games as you start at a larger and larger feature 'deficit' by having to redevelop the features on your custom engine, let alone porting issues, leaving only vert large/profitable houses (Naughty Dog, Insomniac, EA, etc) to be able to bear the time/$ costs?

By definition, computers are scalable. Need more performance? Add more processing units/memory.

BZZZT, WRONG.

This is where you can stop reading, folks.

If you can project in advance exactly how much something will cost to build, that means by definition you're not doing anything novel because if you're doing anything new, you don't know what kinds of problems you'll run into.

Well, the VLHC would be novel, so there's gonna be unexpected costs.

Oh god, why did you have to mention Albert Lea to Rapid City? I was finally putting the neverending ads for Wall Drug out of my mind... Of course, a robot would ignore them and I'd have been reading, so that'd have been a plus...

No one is being killed by the 5v on the USB bus. The problem is the counterfeit chargers are often poorly designed and can fail in a way that shorts the USB cable to the AC power.

There was an excellent teardown & analysis of a cheap charger last year that pointed out serious safety issues.

The funny part is back in the old days of medicine doctors and researchers were interested in finding cures and creating cures. Today it is all about making a profit and continuing to make profits.

Yeah, greed is totally a modern invention brought about by The Evil Corporations. I think my eyes just rolled a full 360*.

All you'll do is generate a huge amount of data that adds nothing of value, because the data you're modelling from comes from the tiny pieces of data you already now, no *new* insight is gained from taking that data and modelling more copies of it.

Much like there's no point building weather prediction computers, since all we do is put data we already have from weather stations into them, and no point building FEM simulators for structural engineering since we already know how a single girder acts under stress.

Or... could it be that multiple simple elements can interact in ways that are not meaningfully predicted by an understanding of individual elements? NAW!

Recently they added the ability to also buy the audiobook version and the app *syncs your place* so you can switch between the two formats. That's a pretty amazing idea.

But the app doesn't help the author. He said he had a Nook. Thanks to the recent firmware update people with a Nook Color or Nook HD can get then app, but if you have the eInk based "normal" Nook, you're just out of luck.

As DRM goes, Amazon has done an excellent job of reducing annoyance. They don't try that "you can only read this book on 2 devices, ever." stuff that we've seen elsewhere. But I get the feeling the only reason Amazon's DRM is so unobtrusive is they were so overwhelmingly powerful they could force publishers into a relatively consumer friendly system. We're lucky Amazon cares more about selling books than trying to wring money out of Kindle hardware sales, or the DRM would have been a lot worse.

Oh, yes, wanting the kids you raise to be your own offspring can only be the result of a totem pole of arrogance up the ass. There's absolutely no biological or instinctual reason people might feel that way.

Zealots like you are the worst enemy of your cause, whatever unlucky cause you inflict yourselves upon.

The video says that the wind is manually entered by the operator. I find it odd that it shows the temperature and barometric pressure. Is that really useful information when you're lining up a shot?

After watching their little YouTube clip, I wonder how useful this is. Placing the aiming dot seems really similar to aiming in the first place, I guess the only difference is you don't have to compensate for gravity/etc. I found it conspicuous that they didn't show their simulated target moving in the video. Can this only help with a stationary target? It seems like it would screw up your aiming if half the time you had to do it manually (compensating for everything) and half the time the system handled it.

The SCOTUS opened the doors to unlimited big-money influence in its Citizens United decision, and when given an opportunity to acknowledge that this was one of the worst decisions in SCOTUS history when a Montana law came before it by appeals, they refused 9-0.

Until the SCOTUS has turned over almost entirely during an era of greater social responsibility, you can look forward to any meaningful attempt to stop the influence of big money to be shot down under the banner of CU. Or the Constitution is amended. Which, given that outright supermajorities of both Democrats and Republicans oppose it - the only similarly near-unanimous agreement I can think of is the declaration of war after Pearl Harbor - is not actually terribly far fetched.

Because "weather" is not "climate."

Weather is what it is out right now. Feel free to dig through graphs of past temperature records, and you can satisfy yourself that no day of the year will have the same temperature, humidity, rainfall, or anything graph on two successive years. Climate is the time-averaged expectation value and ignores anything on shorter than several year scales at the very least.

It's not even that simple, as there are many characteristic timescales involved in the climate, not just one. For example, the pacific decadal oscillation and atlantic mean oscillation occur over decade timescales and have an enormous impact on rainfall levels throughout north america.

There's two big things that used to come out of fossil fuel smokestacks: CO2 and aerosols. CO2 increases the atmosphere's opacity to mid IR (thereby trapping heat), while aerosols scatter light in the upper atmosphere and generally prevent light/heat from reaching the surface.

Pollution controls have gone a long way towards reducing aerosol emissions, but CO2 continues to be dumped freely. So we see slight warming before the mid 20th century, then a levelling off, now expect faster warming.

Wall Street has plenty of things they are scared of, and plenty of things they ought to be scared of.

People having the ability to turn astonishingly expensive plastic fiber into pitifully low-quality plastic doodads is not one of them.

Open source is a nice idea, but I'll take thoroughly documented, reliable PIC hardware and IDE over an Arduino any day of the week, but I'm getting off topic...

Just like to say, there's nothing inherently wrong with the Arduino's hardware (the fact that a stm32f4-series device of comparable price is about two orders of magnitude more powerful notwithstanding). But their silly "hide the reality of microcontrollers" IDE and most-C language made me intensely stabby. I guess what I'm saying is, get an stm32. Or msp430 if you're ok writing in windows only.