If you’re familiar with this kind of stuff, do you think this could lead to cheaper and smaller hyperspectral cameras?

I really hate the chrome and blue cyber lights they replaced the forerunner architecture with in this and the 343 Halo games.

The weird brushed metal / almost stone like appearance of the original material gave the impression of something monolithic and ancient. Yeah, there were some holograms hovering in front of walls, but these were always hidden inside structures, becoming more numerous as you went deeper underground, as if to imply that you’re entering some sacred space or getting closer to something secret. In either case I think the structures had a quiet dignity that contrasted strongly with the Covenant’s very loud bright blue and green aesthetic (even the aforementioned holograms were pale and less saturated compared to the Covenant stuff).

Instead we get something that looks like it belongs in a fucking gamer PC or some pimp’s car.

I agree with the premise of this post, that car infrastructure is generally ugly and unpleasant, but I have to point out that this is doing the same thing that people do with every picture of an urban area that they want the viewer to dislike, which is make sure its taken on the most humid overcast day possible. To its credit though this isn’t during the fall, so at least there’s leaves on the trees.

That sounds pretty entertaining, reminds me of when DOOM Eternal and Animal Crossing New Horizons came out near each other and people made memes and fanart with both of them.

(art by third_cookie)

That guy in the comic saying “roofs are impossible” is every American about every single topic.

Does it take more land than a solar array? What about a coal plant + its open pit mines, or a nuclear plant + its waste storage?

I have literally never heard of space even remotely being an issue for grid storage before, except in the context of pumped hydro sites. Why are people suddenly whining about how it can’t fit into a closet? Are they under the impression that this is how the grid works right now? Do they think there needs to be a gas peaker plant in every substation or else the grid collapses?

You might be interested in this drink.

It’s the wrong frequency to cook anything.

The idea that microwave ovens use some specific frequency that’s good for cooking is a myth.

Dielectric heating occurs over a very broad range of frequencies. What actually matters is the energy density of the EM field. A microwave oven cooks food because its putting more than 1000 watts into a small confined space, your cellphone doesn’t because its transmitter is shooting less than 1 watt into the open air (where the energy density quickly diminishes by the square cube law).

Maybe they could be synced using RF over fiber. This has been proposed as candidate technology for 6g wireless networks, to enable cell free massive MIMO.

That would mean that you would need to run optical fiber to each of them, though we’ve already seen fiber drones spool out kilometers of the stuff as they fly.

EDIT: I just remembered this interesting article about doing radio interferometry over a fiber network using cheap quartz oscillators instead of atomic clocks. My (layman’s) understanding is that the quartz oscillators are good enough over a few milliseconds, but will fall out of sync with each other over longer time spans. Meanwhile the fiber optic reference signal (distributed from a central atomic clock) can be kept correct on average by reflecting the reference back down the fiber and doing active correction of the changing path length (caused by thermal fluctuations and vibrations along the fiber) but will be incorrect on a millisecond-to-miliscond basis because of light speed lag and the path length being a moving target. So they use the quartz oscillators over small time scales and use the fiber reference signal to keep them synced over long time scales. Surprisingly the article says they actually get a better sync this way than with using multiple atomic clocks.

So perhaps something like that is possible.

I think its a combination of that and games moving from community run servers (named things like “Gregz Hangout | Gungame 24/7 | No isms” ) to just clicking a matchmaking button and being dropped into a match with a bunch of people you’ve never seen before and will never see again after that game is over.

With the server model occasionally people join or leave, but you’ll likely see most of the same people over several matches and maps. And if you rejoin that server another day because you liked it you might see that some of those people came back for the same reasons that you did.

• It says in the article they were selling them. I think this is illegal in most countries with planned economies because they don’t want a capitalist market to develop in parallel with the planned system (the entire point of economic planning was to eliminate markets after all).
• They were producing their computers using components that were stolen from government factories. This wasn’t a novel design, and the name wasn’t their’s either, they were just assembling CoBra computers (itself a clone of the British ZX spectrum) outside of the factory they were normally produced in, using the same components the factory used to produce them.

I should note that the article also says that ordinary people couldn’t ‘purchase’ (exchange vouchers for) these computers, so this is the only way they would be able to attain one. The government hadn’t allocated any of them for use by the general population. So, make of that what you will.

UK is US-lite.

Some sodium ion batteries use an aqueous electrolyte, meaning they’re full of water.

Seeing as how I’ve worked with thick pieces of wood every time I’ve built a fire, I’ve “tried it” thousands of times.

You can’t light thick wood on fire with a match.

The usage rates in Japanese cities are among the highest in the world, as are the punctuality and reliability of the intercity trains.

Could the system be less convoluted? Absolutely. But IMO most European countries aren’t in much of a position to criticize given that they aren’t even willing to step up to the plate to anywhere near the same degree, to say nothing of North America.

Now, one might argue that this has more to do with city form than it does with the quality of the PT infrastructure, but that is infrastructure too, and those two types of infra are two sides of the same coin. And yeah, the city form isn’t completely perfect either, but when it comes to moving a greater proportion of people in the safest and most energy and space efficient way, the numbers are just higher than most other places.

Their public transportation and a lot of their other infrastructure is advanced, their IT infrastructure is not.

In more concrete terms, if I can buy Diablo 2 (pay fixed cost), get a really good item drop (random chance value outcome), and sell my Steam account to someone who wants that item (money in, money out), why would that be different than that same flow with a loot box?

One potential difference is that you can play Diablo 2 as many times as you want.

So, its a lot less like inserting a coin to buy a chance at a capsule machine and a lot more like buying the whole machine. With every copy of the machine having the same capsules inside it. In your analogy you can say the previous owner already got a few capsules out, but you can also open the machine if you want and put them back inside, or change the machine’s contents.

I’m really sad that it’s not a STALKER-like.

I really want to wander around the abandoned colony looking at things and reading logs without being in a time limited multiplayer match.