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[quote who="pigeonpigeon" reply="17" id="2006904"] I just remembered having read this a couple day ago and I wanted to respond. The reason why no sane person would try to get rid of radioactive waste by shooting it at the sun in a rocket is because if something happened to the rocket before it reached escape velocity, it would be a major disaster. All of the radioactive waste contained in the rocket would be released into the atmosphere. If it happened at a low altitude then a rela

[quote who="landisaurus" reply="2" id="2006170"] Yeah, I just imagined like you pick a few units then you select an enemy city and choose siege. They will then automatically leave your town, and do whatever needs to be done for that to work. When they've broken the walls or whatever, it would tell you and you'd be informed. Then click on the battle to go into tactics mode or whatever. [/quote] It had better not start the tact

Fusion itself isn't really that hard as long as you don't have the goal of creating energy. All you need is a really big electromagnet. As far as the LHC... Its magnets use superconduction due to the large energies involved, but the materials actually flying around in the tubes are FAR from cold. Superheated plasmas in fact. Or at least... they will be... They still gotta fix it :( The reason supercooling is used on the LHC magnets is because it is the ultimate liquid cooling system.

Cold fusion would be nice, but hot fusion will work also. The ITER project's main goal is to prove large scale energy production from fusion is possible. http://www.iter.org/ The best part about fusion power is it has virtually no hazardous waste products and very low radiation levels, since the only radiation comes from the slightly radioactive tritium used as fuel.

Watching 2 fleets of maximum size slam into one another with lasers, flak cannons, plasma weapons, railguns, and wave cannons firing![e digicons]:')[/e] So ya, what Tamren said... "The lazer guns that go pew pew pew. "

200 years is more than enough time. Based on ITER timetables on their site, the first economoical fusion power plants are expected to start being built around 2080 as long as ITER works out as expected, which it almost surely will. Technology is increasing at a rate which is faster and faster as time goes by. Just think about 200 years ago. We had just barely figured out steam engines, and the lightbulb was still a few years off (the earliest forms anyway, Edison's bulb didn't come until 1880

[quote who="Sevenix" reply="17" id="2004069"]Russel's teapot. Done. [/quote] Do not mistake complexity with untestability.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arctic_shrinkage "Computer models predict that the sea ice area will continue to shrink in the future, though there is no consensus on when the Arctic Ocean might become ice-free in summer; a common theory estimates between 2040 and 2100." "A 2007 study by Professor Wiesl

As for the pointless argument... I would say staring at a wall doing nothing and being bored is a lot more pointless than playing games. The main problem with the majority of M rated games is there is really nothing mature about most of them. Left 4 Dead I got for Christmas, only thing I would say is mature is the language used, and even that is not as bad as you would hear walking down a high school hallway. It is rated M for 'Blood and Gore,' 'Intense Violence,' and 'Language.' The

[quote who="USAF22" reply="4" id="2002252"] 2012 will be like Y2K. After it, everybody will be like, "WTF was all that about?" Aside from that, in 2009, I think people will finally start to see that Earth isn't warming because of us. [/quote] Well, the only reason Y2K turned out to be nothing was because we imported a bunch of tech guys from India to fix all our crap for us. [e digicons]:grin:[/e] 2009 will also be the year I

The main problem with DRM is that it in no way affects sales positively. If someone who always pirates their games is unable to, they will simply pirate another game instead. Most of the time though, the DRM is cracked and pirated versions of a game show up even before it is released. However, those who do want to buy the game will often get all sorts of hoops to jump through, which can put off quite a few people who object to being treated like criminals. Pirates are pirates and will al

[quote who="Neil Banfield" reply="16" id="2001669"]There could be a next gen Wii. [/quote] Hehe I bet they call it the 'Uss' I seriously don't see them coming out with a next gen Wii though. It seems to be a much different market they are selling to than MS and Sony, a market which doesn't really demand top of the line graphics and other shinies. Their market is primarily that of casual games, almost none of which could even be made to utilize the full potential of the Wi

Him being able to sense the passage of time led him to his fall, since the ability to sense the passage of time results in him focusing on the future more than the past and present. A good analogy would be this: Suppose the whole of space and time is like your computer screen. Now, in the model, each pixel represents a point in time. If you were to sense the passage of time and thus try to order it to your wishes, it would be chaotic as you moved from one point in time to the

The main reason people hate it is because of some of the nastier things it has been known to do... The older variations more so than newer ones have been known for doing everything from installing trojans to messing with files they aren't supposed to. One of the most notorius currently used DRM is Securom. Securom installs itself without any warning, and the files for it cannot be easily gotten rid of. And software which was unwanted by the consumer and installs itself without warning

Yep, they have to all at least show their next gen consoles, since current ones are getting very.... crusty. Any serious gamer knows PCs are currently WAY better than consoles as far as graphics and other techs. Consoles, due to their infrequent releases, follow more of a stairstep graph as far as their technology goes... PCs due to constant upgradable parts releases are more of an even line. Consoles are behind now, and will continue to be behind in technology until a new console release, wh

Don't forget SpaceX will be putting the Falcon 9 rockets into use as well as beginning testing of the Dragon capsule. 2009 looks to be the year in aerospace where everyone is testing and developing, getting ready for their full operations to start in 2010-2012. Well... aerospace companies that is. NASA isn't doin jack... they can't even afford their shuttles from the 70's.

Infinity, currently WIP, I would estimate a release date sometime in 2010, so dont get your hopes up for it anytime soon... It looks like it is shaping up to be an excellent game, the engine is almost done by the looks of it (the engine is being done by a single guy!) and as of last I've seen, he has started working on modeling the Earth. While there will be some custom built solar systems (like earth's system) most will be procedurally generated. Not entirely sure of the exact figure

[quote who="WOM" reply="20" id="1966403"]I've never BSOD'd in Vista and I don't think I ever did in XP either but when I had(shudder) ME, it was a daily occurrence. [/quote] Hehehe ME... http://xkcd.com/323/ I have Vista on my computer, no problems so far, although I have only had my computer for about 4 months. The interfaces are annoying at best compared to XP, but at least most of them allow you to hit alt to us

[quote who="Luckmann" reply="6" id="1996347"] Of course, you can't do that for -every- possible shape, without it coming out looking like spandex. [/quote] Well... Spandex is good enough for superman... ;D

True... but what I'm wondering about is whether there will be anything automatic, since the physics could cause some very odd results without automatic action taken. Something like this: Imagine the brown is the bear and the red is the armor... (front view) ___ / \ ------------ / &nbs

I have one question about this though... What if the armor doesn't fit? For example, the rear armor plate of that horse does not look wide enough to fit on a bear or other wide mounts. The armor on that horse looks very much like it is tuned specificly for horse, what sort of system would be used to adapt it for other mount shapes? Would the game alter the armor to fit another body shape? After all, as I understand it the whole purpose of this system is to fit different (player made) armor mo

"Zero G combat anyone?" Or one could take it to the opposite extreme... 50 G combat anyone? *watches units implode under their own weight*

"Is status of developed technologies stored in avatar? I mean once I got sword +9 it can be uses in another game." Yep, in GalCiv ship designs were saved, and would be shown when you have the technology researched to use it. For example, a ship which had a basic tiny hull, laser I tech weapons and ion II type engines would be hidden until the player researched the laser 1 tech and the ion engines 2 tech. I would guess we will have similar systems in place for Elemental.

Wow! I love that unit creator screen! It matches the hand drawn look of the zoomed out map [e digicons]:grin:[/e] "Another question, that kinda ties in: How are you going to deal with animations of customised units? Will each piece of equipment have to adhere to a size constrant to prevent swords clipping through shoulders or shields chomping into the neck of the riders mount?" Here is how it will be handled: https://forums.elemen

To get around any wait time required after victory, here is my suggestion: when the game detects the player owns over 80% of the cities or whatever on the map, it assumes victory is coming soon, and so uses any spare cycles to start calculating out the generation of the new empire. This game is turn based remember, and so when the player is doing things on his turn, almost no calculations are being done. All the calculations for what is done that turn is calculated in between turns. If t