Dantius

Originally Posted By: Randomizer This used to be in the Yellow Pages: Boring -- see Civil Engineering Hey!

Originally Posted By: Death Knight D Pakman David Pakman Wakkawakkawakkawakkawakkka WHOMP WHOMP WHOMP WHOMP

It's really more a historical perspective of scientific development, but the Connections series with James Burke is an incredibly excellent general overview of the history of the development of a modern scientific society. He's also done The Day the Universe Changed, which is slightly more technical and more narrowly focused on science than Connections is, but I feel like it's not quite as good. I recommend starting with Connections 1, then going on to DTUC, and then seeing Connections 2&3 if you're still interested. 1 is worth a look regardless, though. It's probably my favorite documentary type thing ever.

Well, with a title like "The Fool and His Money", he just might be trying to pull one over his fans. Of course, I can't really imagine what he would stand to gain from doing that, but you never know sometimes.

Originally Posted By: HOUSE of S Not always. If your original work unequivocally refutes a decades-old, incorrect assumption, good luck getting it on to Wikipedia. Wikipedia's standards use a "scholarly consensus" model which is often effective, but has weaknesses. Since it can't actually evaluate sources or their context AT ALL, it has a hard time dealing with changes in the state of human knowledge, and it is also vulnerable to all published misinformation. So you're arguing that something like CERN's recent "discovery" of particles moving faster than the speed of light is something that should be put on Wikipedia and claimed to be fact, and all articles on relativity should be modified to reflect the fact? Should a preliminary discovery from some physicist somewhere about the existence of magnetic monopoles justify immediately changing the page on Maxwell's equations to reflect this new "fact"? Should the publishing of a new theory about how the Earth resides in a four-point time-cube merit inclusion? What about something like the hyped-up discoveries about "life on Titan"? There's a definite reason that original research is not allowed: Because if there exists a "decades-old" assumption that has survived challenges for that long, there's probably something to it, and articles about it shouldn't go gallivanting around incorporating every new bit of unverified unpublished un-peer-reviewed (is that even a word?) research like they've suddenly been brought down from Mount Sinai.

Originally Posted By: Actaeon For everything else, there's Wikipedia. There's a gentleman from MasterCard here to see you, Actaeon. He seems quite eager to speak to you.

Wikipedia has been more accurate and more reliable and way, way, WAAAAAY more comprehensive than Britannica for years now. I'm glad to see outdated relics of the 18th century replaced by better, faster, cheaper, and more accessible technology. So no tears for Britannica from me, no sir.

I played the G1 demo off of RealArcade a loooong time ago, the forgot about it for five years and picked it up in '07-'08 again when I was bored. Played through the games of the Geneforge series that was out at the time in like four months, and then buzzsawed through most of the rest of Jeff's games. I still haven't played A4 or most of A6 and Avadon, and I'm too lazy to get the virtualization software necessary to get Exile going working. Still a pretty good record, though, and in terms of entertainment value, Jeff is still behind only Bioware* and Bethesda on my "favorite developers" list

Well, it looks like Bioware has finally admitted to their mistake and is covering for it... ...By making an anime that will be so bad we forget about how much then ending sucked. How bad you ask? Well, for starters, here's the main character: Click to reveal.. We're done, Bioware. You hear me? FINISHED.

Originally Posted By: Master Ackrovan To Dantius: Othar Trygvassen is not me. You can tell because my PDN is "Dantius" and will always remain such. Click to reveal.. That said, I agree with what you say, though I could see the destruction of the Relays as a reaper as more "controlled demolition from inside" as opposed to "whipping a massive asteroid at it at an appreciable fraction of c", which is probably bound to produce a pretty big explosion anyways. Interestingly enough on a math note, I actually sat own and worked out the computation, and it turns out that the figure in the Codex of a 38 kiloton explosion checks out for a 20 kg dreadnought slug at that speed, meaning that they actually bothered to come up with internally consistent physics (energy is conserved, momentum is not) for the series. I can't really recall any other AAA soft-scifi games that bothered to do that (midichlorians! wooo!). Point for Bioware, I guess?

Originally Posted By: Numbering Unintentional —Alorael, who does, however, have some great bargains on a number of products for any interested members. Bargains that he has discovered while using the internet as a normal human being. He was absolutely not built expressly for the promulgation of said really amazingly good deals. You wanna buy some deathsticks?

Originally Posted By: Enraged Slith Just out of curiosity, which third do you think is good? Maybe it was because I had just played Avadon, but I was really disappointed with how Mass Effect turned out in spite of all its praise. Sovereign wound up saving the story for me, so it's disappointing to hear that Reapers are no longer the incomprehensible god machines they were portrayed as in the first. The first one. There were some flaws, sure, but mainly cosmetic in nature that a little thought could reason away, unlike ME2 or ME3's serious, gaping plot holes or characterization retcons.

Originally Posted By: Kendroxide Has anyone beaten it yet, how long is the game? I was kinda disapointed that ME2 was only 24 hours (I was on the second hardest difficulty). If its less then 30 hours, then I'll wait till it goes on sale. Well, it probably took me around 40 hours to beat it, and I did almost all of the sidequests and the DLC (collector's edition one with Javik, who was cool). Like most people who played it, I thought the game was excellent and polished and balanced and that the ending totally obliterated any chances I had of actually liking it. Click to reveal.. In fact, "totally obliterated" might be an understatement. The ending was so bad that, like the Star Wars prequels, it has adversely affected my ability to enjoy the third of the series that was good. I might as well just lay out my problems, any one of which would be sufficient to ruin the game, but all three of which pretty much destroy the trilogy: 1. Click to reveal.. (The Reapers) It's difficult taking the Reapers as an incomprehensible malevolent and intelligent foe bent on destruction of organic life now that we know that they're actually synthetics destroying organic life in order to stop organics from making synthetics... that destroy organic life. That had to be the stupidest justification for their actions possible. I mean, "Because we're super powerful, so why the hell not commit genocide?" would have been vastly more terrifying than a chain of reasoning a five year old could poke holes in. 2. Click to reveal.. (The kid) Speaking of five-year-olds, the entire use of the child as way to generate sympathy, and the child's reappearance as the conduit for the Catalyst to speak. If the entire point of the character is to generate sympathy, there's plenty of better characters to do that. Here's a few of the top of my head: The casualty on Virmire; either Saren or Nihlus (possibly both), Mordin, who's the one character in ME2 everyone was guaranteed to recruit; the player's LI (dead or alive); Anderson; a character from the player's origin/background that had previously been introduced a la Tabitha... the list goes on and on. Randomly picking a five-year-old, giving him three lines, shooting down his shuttle, and putting him into a dream sequence makes me want to punch him in the face for being a cheap shot at generating pathos instead of an actual character, not feel sorry for him. 3. Click to reveal.. (The choices) Eliminating any effect that your choices had in determining the final ending. I don't just mean that the choices you made in the previous games had no effect (they didn't, which is another problem). I mean that, regardless of which final option you picked, the endings were functionally identical other than the color. The basic sequence is: a. Shepard bravely sacrifices her/his life. b. Reapers are no longer a threat to Earth. c. Mass relays are destroyed, and no consequences of this are investigated at all. d. Everyone on the Normandy, including people who died via Harbinger's Thanix laser to the face, magically appear in a space Garden of Eden. e. After the credits, Buzz Aldrin appears. That's it. Period. In a game series where I made hundreds of hours of choices over nearly a half a decade, the final conclusion has been prewritten for me. I mean, how difficult would it be to just straight up crib Jade Empire's endings or KOTOR's endings and come up with something like this: PARAGON OPTION: You destroy the Reapers and settle down with your LI as a hero revered by all. RENEGADE OPTION: You wield the power of your fleets to take over the galaxy and become space-Emperor. STUPID OPTION: You allow the Reapers to wipe out the galaxy in order to become ascended as one and live forever.

(I originally wrote this as a PM, but in retrospect I realized that there might actually be other fans of the game that either hadn't said so here or just got on the ME bandwagon now.) So, what's your opinion on Mass Effect 3? Have you played/beaten it yet? What did you think about the ending? I'm totally starved for intelligent discussion on this, but this being the Internet, SW is probably my only non-RL source for such (and the two people I know IRL who are fans have either not bought it yet or haven't passed the Mars mission. Clearly they lack the proper dedication )

Originally Posted By: Trenton the Drake Lord Once again. BoG? Not unless you're secretly a millionaire who wants to bankroll Jeff's development of BoG so he's financially insured against the flop it will inevitably be.

Originally Posted By: Excalibur Originally Posted By: Verily we roll along Your symbols come out as gibberish We non-modly denizens do not have access to shiny HTML characters. Right. I propose that all STEM-educated people o the board be made mods, so we can better argue about equations with one another!

Shouldn't you, like, finish up the CRISIS thread game before you start a new won? I mean, IIRC I was in second place in that one, too!

Originally Posted By: The Mystic Originally Posted By: Vespers at Dawn Or he could just make Star Wars knockoffs. FYT

The iPhone probably lacks the graphic and processing power to make this a real possibility. The closest thing I've found, other than Rogue, is probably a title called The Quest. It's quite good, and reminiscent of early Elder Scrolls games. I think it's like five bucks or something, and you can get expansion packs for $2, even though they kind of suck after the third one or so.

Originally Posted By: Death Knight Its as if people automatically assume that you are like this lone weirdo/artemis entreri or something like that. Heck, artemis entreri had better morals than most of these people. It doesnt make sense. It does make sense, but only when you consider the fact that you're casually dropping metaphors from DnD novels to explain your single-ness.

Originally Posted By: Just what the doctor ordered Yeah, and there'll always be that guy in the Pentagon who could snap and hit the big red button; the trick is to keep those people out of the system. No, you can't get them all, there will always be corruption and the like, but it is possible to put those people in positions where they cannot do as much harm. That's exactly what a pinko water-fluoridating commie would say!

Originally Posted By: Lilith obviously the solution here is for every country to have nukes so that nobody can sanely declare war on anybody Because that's working out real well for Pakistan and India.

Christopher Marlowe. Dude was like the James Bond of the 16th Century, but spying on Catholics instead of SPECTRE*. I mean, you'd have to be a pretty good spy to be able to get the Queen's Privy Council to order universities around on your behalf, so he was probably more than competent at the whole cloak-and-dagger stuff.

Originally Posted By: Harehunter As for rest of them, they would not weep were it happen. I'm sure there's some quote or other about never assuming malice when apathy suffices as an explanation that I would put here if I had the time or inclination to find it. People would "not weep" about the destruction of Israel, as you put it, because frankly Israel is insignificant in the grand geopolitical scheme of things: it's not economically powerful, it has a population comparable to that of Tajikistan, which absolutely nobody cares about, it lacks the ability to project force beyond intimidating its already very weak neighbors, and it shows no desire to become anything more than an insular, isolate state in an effort to protect itself. If you think that the populace of Indonesia, for instance, (which just happens to be the largest Muslim country in the world and a legitimate democracy to boot, thank you very much) would "not weep" if Israel were destroyed, then it would be the same type of "not weeping" that the US populace would do if Tajikistan were wiped off the map- not because they were secretly joyful or schadenfreude-y, but because they wouldn't care either way, since it wouldn't affect them in the least. ----- And re Iran's threats: Nobody takes the seriously. Everybody important in foreign affairs circles realizes that if Iran really, really wants a nuke, they can get it and nobody (not even Israel or the US) can stop them. The fact that they aren't going all-out to do so indicates that Iran's leadership is not going to carry out their when they get one. This, of course, makes sense: Iran's leadership is like that of any other autocratic regime, in that they place their survival above their ideology (Hey, remember when the USSR nuked the US because they wanted to destroy capitalism and institute communism across the globe? Or when North Korea nuked South Korea? Or Pakistan nuked India (or vice versa)? No? Exactly.). Iran's populace is very hostile to their government, and all it would take is one little mistake on the part of the regime for things to start going very badly for those in power. The whole nuke thing is a last-ditch attempt for them to try and cash in on religious extremism and anti-antisemitism for a quick infusion of support, and the people aren't buying it anymore. Although it may not be showing signs of it quite so readily as Egypt or Algeria or Syria or Libya or whatever, Iran is rapidly sliding towards Arab Spring in spite of Khomeini, Ahmadinejad, and their ilk's attempt to stop it. I would be very surprised if Iran is still an "Islamic Republic" in five years, much less ten. But of course, that's just my opinion. Take from it what you may.

Originally Posted By: Dikiyoba (Plus, Avada Kedavra is an instant kill if it hits. Surviving a gunshot is fairly common, and even a fatal gunshot may still leave the opponent able to retaliate, so an amateur gun user certainly doesn't have an advantage over a trained wizard.) No, not really. I'm fairly sure we've been over this before on SW. Being shot just about anywhere that a person with a gun would be aiming for (that is not spraying bullets into a crowd, which might be were you got the misconception about "injuries") with anything much bigger than a .22 (i.e. pretty much every handgun or rifle) pretty much instantly kills, and hollow-point bullets can kill from shock even if they don't hit vital organs. The idea that I can take a bullet to the shoulder and just grit my teeth and move on comes from Die Hard, not reality. Shoulders and legs, areas that most people think are "survivable", actually contain vital arteries, and you'd be dead in minutes from blood loss, so unless you were practically shot in the operating room, you'd be dead. Second, if someone with a minimum of competency with a gun actually wanted someone else dead (like, say a wizard), they'd bother to put in a few hours of practice with a rifle (which is the easiest gun to learn to use), and then they'd just blast them in the chest from fifty or a hundred meters, which is a simple shot that leaves no chance for "retaliation". So to conclude, gun >>> wand, at least as a weapon. Wands still win out for actually useful stuff, though.