softweir

It isn't even an arch. Our eyes tell us that, but looking closely I see it as a solid chunk of rock with several steps that produce shadows that - at that angle and that angle only - appear to our eyes as a floating spoon with a shadow underneath.

Obsidian used a custom-written version of Unity 4 to do this. The basic Unity 4 couldn't hack it. Almost certainly Obsidian's Unity 4 would be useless for KSP.

Ninja'ed my edit.

Link doesn't work? You need: Better still, wrap the link in [noparse] ... tags to embed it in your post. Like: produces:[/noparse]

Thanks for linking that. But OW my eyes! They don't take kindly to viewing stereo pairs. Hint: A lot of people may well see the image too large on their screens, so should to zoom out to get the stereo pair small enough to view.

The whole concept of "stakeholder" is a very feeble one: it has very little effect except as a marketing or management gimmick. Quite often, when somebody uses the word "stakeholder" as in "we value all our stakeholders", there is a liberal dose of BS being applied. In any case, a customer is only a stakeholder in those goods and services he buys or is likely to buy. The owner of a Rolls-Royce car has no stakeholding in Rolls-Royce jet engines, only in that car and other RR cars he may purchase later. Aircraft manufacturers have a stakeholding in jet engines, but not cars. A Rolls Royce car owner who sent angry letters to the CEO about the pricing of a jet engine has no stakeholder's right to do so because he has no stake in that market, and RR will ignore him. Similarly a Boeing executive who criticises a motor car for its looks only has a stakeholder's right to do so if he is an owner or prospective purchaser. We are not stakeholders in the console market, only in the PC market. As and when console versions are released and you buy any of them, then you will become a stakeholder in Flying Tiger's ports and will have a stakeholder's right to criticise that port. Until then, you have the right to your opinions, as any person has, but no more. As stakeholders in Squad's PC game, our only interest is that Squad make money from this and use it to further development of KSP. They will.

There is only one issue I have with the OP: Why? Nobody on this forum is ever going to buy a console port of KSP*. We are PC gamers; that we are even here is proof of this. To divert resources from development and marketing in their target market would be (at best) silly and contentious. Why contentious? Because every scrap of text they post here will be analysed and creatively misunderstood and will create friction and bad feeling all round. They wouldn't dare to report anything or answer any questions without spending hours second-guessing how the critics and haters will interpret it. It would do nothing for their sales into the console market, would waste time, and would potentially create bad publicity. I think the very best approach they can have on these forums is the one they have adopted: a dignified silence. * OK, that's not quite true! Some people buy multiple versions of KSP as a way to demonstrate loyalty. I bought a second copy on Steam, partly out of loyalty, partly out of utility: I get to keep my KSP Store account and can download from there if need be. Nevertheless, most people will only buy one copy, and not many multi-copy-fans will have a console they can use to buy console versions.

Sorry, I didn't see that those very words I quoted were a link.

No. That was neither stated nor implied in the OP. The only context we have is "an offhand remark". Sorry, I didn't see that the words I quoted were a link!

Aaaaaand I chose the wrong option: I'm using Nvidia, NOT Intel! Got too much on my mind.

According to the BBC website, it's the scar where Curiosity drilled into the rock.

I assume that save/load clears whatever condition leads to the failure? ie, if you revert 4 times then save/load you then have to start the reverts all over from the beginning?

Another reason for not sending people is the extremely short time they can spend on the surface. Rovers can trundle around for months and years, allowing mission controllers to think, plan, analyse, change plans and get the maximum out of the hardware they send. Manned missions have to stick to very tight schedules, and if something interesting crops up then something else has to be scrubbed from the schedule to make time for it. Humans on Mars would also have a very limited range, and though they could explore within that range more efficiently they couldn't learn very much more than a rover could learn - and the rover could move on and explore many, many more sites. Further more, a human crew would have to spend days re-adapting to gravity after months at zero G, and that is time deducted from an already short time on the surface. No human crew could cover the amount of ground Curiosity has covered so far, and NOTHING like the ground Spirit and Opportunity covered. Men in a few days can get data a rover takes months to get - but the rover can be there for years. As for the intelligence of a human explorer - well how is he more intelligent than the team of researchers controlling the rover? Finally: if a rover goes wrong a few jobs are lost. But if a human dies, entire space programmes are put in danger. During the space-race governments were prepared to take the risk that brave explorers would be lost, but they are a lot more risk-averse these days and there are far more politicians who would use a catastrophe as an excuse to shut down space spending. Maybe this could be changed by the march of progress, but I suspect that rover technology will improve faster than the technology to send people to Mars, more cheaply, and reaping more science per mission. I believe that the only reason to go to Mars is to STAY on Mars: scratching the surface For Science is a very poor reason.

The other parts of the explanation are Convection, Solidity and water-flow separation. The magma is constantly, very slowly, convecting, in a way analogous to the way liquids convect when heated from below. (The difference is that the magma at any depth is effectively solid, it is only vast volumes of magma which are capable of rising.) This convection process brings heavy elements up to the sub-crust layers, and they get deposited there at places where new crust is forming. Next off, once heavy elements get trapped in the crust (whether they are in compounds or unreacted), they are locked in place and unable to move down. There is some degree of extra force due to their greater density, but it isn't enough to break the rock matrix they are in allowing them to slip through. Similarly, there is no process by which heavy elements can sink through the magma. While at the surface magma can liquefy, at depth, under pressure, it is effectively solid and lead and other heavy metals are effectively trapped within the magma matrix, unable to diffuse down through the magma. It is only once magma has risen high enough in the mantle that it liquefies that heavier elements can start to settle out, and that is usually only when the magma is on the point of converting into crust (or spewing out of a volcano) when they get trapped. Tectonic activity can affect the way minerals are presented in the crust. When a mountain range is lifted up due to the pressure of colliding tectonic plates, all minerals within the rock are lifted up, regardless of density. Finally, water tends to segregate different minerals within the crust. In many places at many times during the Earth's history there have been flows of cold water down into the lower crust where it tends to dissolve many minerals, including those that are not soluble at surface conditions but are soluble at great pressures and temperatures. The hot, mineral-rich water then rises, and deposits minerals at whatever depth is cool enough for them to precipitate out, without regard to their density. The same column of water can deposit many different minerals at different depths. This is how many heavy elements tend to end up in surface seams where we can mine them! So there are lots of reasons why dense minerals can be found at the surface of the Earth, but they all, ultimately, depend on the unimaginably vast reservoir of heat at the core. Things will be very different on worlds that have never had a liquid core. Such planets will have been effectively solid ever since they got warm enough for gasses and liquids to separate out from the rock matrix and for the rock to consolidate. In those cases, there is a good chance that minerals will be present in the rocks at almost uniform distributions throughout. The only possible cause for variation in density will be if there was variety in the composition of the rocks and dust that aggregated to form the planet in the first place, but this is likely to be small-scale variation in distribution rather than any large variation.

38.9 isn't too hot for a PC, so long as the cooling systems are working. Dust traps heat in computer components; so it would be a good idea to open your PC and blow all the dust off everything. Then find out how to set the heat alarm so it warns you at a higher temperature than 38.9C! Enjoy the heat while it lasts!

You are right, there is next to no chance a flaperon "just fell off" during flight. The 777 is incapable of pulling any kind of manoeuvre that would cause that to happen - it could only happen if ground crew were unbelievably sloppy and left it in a state unfit to fly. Many things make it clear that something was going very wrong in the cockpit. The pilots ceased to communicate with the ground. Somebody turned off the aircraft identification system. The plane took a course that was 90deg away from its planned course, and flew along the boundaries between national air traffic control zones, so none of them assumed responsibility for it. There was no SOS. When it was last spotted (by satellite), it was so far from land that there was no chance of it returning to land. Several experts have gone on the record to say that there was no conceivable combination of system failures that could cause all these things to happen, and that in their opinions everything we know was the result of deliberate action by a person in the cockpit. But what happened we will never know unless the search ships can find and retrieve the flight recorders. None of this is new, it is all information that has been gone over time and again. It is a virtual certainty that the plane impacted (deliberately or otherwise, under control or otherwise) into the Indian Ocean, and that the flaperon broke free at that moment and has taken this long to be washed ashore.

Confirmed by the Malaysians, but the French are more guarded in their statements leaving some doubt as to how sure investigators are that it is, in fact, part of flight MH370.

Indeed, some fruit do have a lot of sugar - thanks to generations of breeding for "sweeter" flavour! Fruit juice in particular, even if it hasn't had sugar added, is made from fruit varieties that are especially sweet and sugary, and juice made from concentrates is worse because only the very cheapest juices are reconstituted to their natural amount of water. If somebody is worried about giving up on juice, eat more veg to compensate - it'll be better for you. As you say, veg are an excellent filler, plus they have all sorts of compounds such as flavonoids which have other beneficial health effects. I'm not sure drinking water does much to suppress appetite, but at least it stops one drinking juice. Some recent studies suggest that eating two large meals a day is an easier way to lose weight than eating several small ones. It takes a lot of willpower to stop after eating a small meal, and that is when many dieters slip. A neat trick is to use your phone to photograph every meal and snack you take. In one study they wanted people to record their intake before starting a diet and once they were on the diet, and decided to get them to take pics as a quick way of recording things. To their surprise, most people lost some weight even before they got to start the diet because photographing their food made them more aware of what they were eating and more self-conscious about it, which helped their self-control! Never purge. That is the very worst way to lose weight - you eat the food, your body gets all prepared to digest it and store the carbs away, and then you dump it. One of the things the human body does to get ready for food is to produce insulin, which tells the liver it has got to absorb and store all the sugars you eat: when a meal is eaten and then purged, that leaves the liver absorbing sugars that haven't been eaten, so the "dieter's" blood sugar levels crash, making them feel even more hungry.

Most respondents seem to be assuming that there is some degree of honesty in the minds of the sellers. For all we know the ingredients in the actual pills could be chalk, sugar, salt, mud from the backyard of the "factory" where they were produced and where pigs are kept, or even high doses of warfarin - ALL these (and worse) have been found in pills bought over the internet from foreign suppliers. This applies to diet pills, fake Viagra, vitamins and many others. The makers use the cheapest ingredients and charge high prices, so it doesn't matter to them that each buyer only makes one purchase - there are millions of suckers out there. And if they only expect a buyer to make one purchase, there is no reason to keep that buyer alive. What is advertised as being in the pill need have no relation to what is actually in the pill. As others have said, there is only one way to lose weight: exercise more and eat less, both at the same time. There are ways to make it easier, such as cutting out sugar and sweeteners (both of which stimulate appetite), or switching to un-milled grains such as porridge oats; but there are no miracles.

Indeedy! KSP engines are magically enduring, and their tank refilling technology is lightyears better than anything that exists in the real world. The science in KSP is a lot better than most other games I can think of off the top of my head. KSP's science is definitely chewy, whereas most games are, at best, al dente. But it isn't hard science!

Other way round! The land warms up faster during the day than water (for various reasons) so generates thermal updraughts, and cooler air flows in from the sea to replace the rising air. During the night the land cools down faster, so now the thermals are more powerful over the water and air tends to flow out to sea. Of course this all assumes that all other causes for wind are weak enough to allow this: trade winds and other wind-generators will frequently force air to move contrary to the Littoral winds. Anyway: no wind in KSP. The flag has got wire stiffener in it, just the same as the American flags on the moon.

On the contrary - every major air incident in recent years due to mechanical fault has led to aviation authorities making recommendations for retrospective changes to the relevant hardware. Even minor incidents lead to changes. The list of changes made to aircraft and adjustments to designs in future builds is too long to list, but for instance: a Boeing 777 crashes (with no fatalities) on runway approach due to ice crystals in a heat-exchanger in the fuel lines of the Rolls-Royce Trent 895 engines. The heat-exchanger was redesigned and existing aircraft with that engine are retrofitted with the new design, and new Trent 895 engines are built with the upgrade. In the meantime, even before the cause was fully understood, operating procedures were put in place to reduce the chances of ice causing blockages. Boeing were also required to redesign the undercarriage attachment, because during that crash one of the fuel tanks was damaged when the undercarriage collapsed. Furthermore, air investigators spent months examining other engine designs to be sure a similar fault could occur. Manufacturers worldwide compile enormous manuals of "how not to build aircraft" that are kept in mind when new designs are being built. True: it won't stop makers trying completely new technologies and getting bitten in the arse, but they DO learn from the failures, and the next one will be due to something significantly different. If only car makers would do the same! The only thing aircraft manufacturers can't learn from is severe pilot error, or murder-suicide. They do make changes to cockpit design to try to reduce error, but ultimately nothing can make a job as complex as piloting an airliner error-free, because what keeps one pilot from making an error increases the chances that a different pilot will get something else wrong. This is why, even now, most air incidents are due to pilots making mistakes. (Let's not get started on airlines overworking pilots and employing under-experienced pilots! And nothing will ever be certain to prevent pilots going insane and committing a nasty and vicious murder-suicide.) Flying is one of the safest activities we ever undergo because of all this hard work and the very tough laws that force the work to be done. To say manufacturers never learn from problems, or that nothing ever gets done, is entirely missing the truth.

Judging by comments on the BBC website, experts are certain that the flaperon in question will have a serial number and the airline will have a record of that serial number in the paperwork for that aircraft. The question is: is the serial number at all legible? Will enough remain for a positive match to be made, even assuming it is from that aircraft?

The person who spotted the flaperon also found some luggage washed up on the same beach a couple of days previously. However on investigation there is nothing (no markings or anything of that nature) to prove it is from the plane, unlike the flaperon which will have a unique serial number stamped on it which can be traced to the plane it came from. There may have been several previous items of luggage that have been seen and ignored as rubbish: it took one well-informed individual who was in the right place at the right time and was prepared to spot something to find the flaperon and the luggage. If there is enough publicity surrounding the luggage then maybe more items will be spotted and reported, and maybe something will have details that identify a passenger, or the plane itself - boarding passes, passports, that sort of thing.

I have to agree with jwenting that your understanding of "platform-independent" doesn't agree with any definition I have come across. The phrase means that the Java specification was written in such a way that Java authors can be ignorant of the peculiarities of any particular platform, so long as they stick to basic Java calls and avoid OS calls native to a particular platform. If I write a "Hello World" program it will run on any platform for which there is a JVM, and I don't have to do have code-forks for it to run on both Windows and OSX. The exact same bytecode will run on any JVM. No changes. Platform independent. There's no profit in saying "each platform needs a different JVM" because JVMs have been written for just about any platform a person might want to run Java on. It's like saying that Rich Text Format is platform dependent because it needs RTF-authoring apps to be written for each platform. Java was never intended to be fast to execute, it was intended to be portable - in other words, it was intended to make porting it to different platforms fast. And as for "what is wrong with C"? Well the fact that even simple code needs to be rewritten to run on a second platform can get a bit expensive...