Diche Bach

[Moderator edit] do we really want a polity and a society more broadly where the texture of daily life and the biggest decisions we make as collectives are primarily influenced by 140 character sound bytes?

Gravity causes pubic grabbing(?) . . .

Twitter. Com'n humanity. We are better than this.

So everything in the universe is equidistant from the center of the universe? I find that very difficult to reconcile with common sense. When you say "all space is expanding" I suspect you are making a bit of a simplification there. My understanding is that things which are farther away _from us_ appear to be moving away _from us_ faster than objects that are closer _to us_. Moreover, I don't have the impression that the Sol system and everything within its immediate proximity (including the pixels on this screen, Trump's hair piece, and zooplankton in the Marianas Trench) are expanding at the same rate as the distant universe, eh? There are clusters and superclusters of galaxies whose relative attractive interactions are the subjects of study and whose "filament" like forms across the universe are the subject of various synthetic graphics. I also find that rather difficult to reconcile with the idea that everything "is" the center of the universe. Not to be confrontational, but yeah;

Where was the big bang? Where is the point in the observable universe from which everything inflated?

Stealth in Space is Possible

Many things are beautiful and in its totality the universe is beautiful, but there is much horror and ugliness mixed in. We recently had to euthanize our 17 year old Dachshund "Shiggle." It was just simply time and that was hard and we miss her, but that is actually the beauty of life. We had her for 15 years and it was beautiful; she was rescued from an early life of horror and an early death had we not found her. She came into our life from the Fulton County Animal Shelter, where my wife found her a veritable nervous wreck, almost no muscle mass, ears scabrous with sores, and lesions on her paws and belly . . . A puppy mill in which she was one of the breeding dogs had been raided and the criminal(s) arrested. She had apparently lived for most of her preceding two years of life in a small wire pen with a pan under it for excrement and her lack of muscle mass and skin ailments were the result of those two years spent in torture.

Ah yes, had not heard of Hayflicks Limit for over a decade! One interesting thing, the evolutionary biologist are fairly convinced that all of these processes are not merely a reflection of phylogenetic constraint or other inherent limits, but rather are (mostly) all specifically shaped by natural selection. Meaning: the processes by which each tissue type senesce are tuned to the range of life history parameters for the species. For example if you are a rabbit, there is no point allocating "resource" toward longevity, you're going to get predated rather soon anyway. Better to allocate those resources to rapid maturation and earlier fertility and fecundity. The "r vs. K" selection thing figures into it. So taking your points and extending the absurd question: what if we DID manage to control the process and repeal the absolute limit on how long animals can life?

It seems to me what it "is" is "Variable X" which must be introduced into mathematical models of the universe, otherwise the universe "Don't make no sense it'all!" I'm not a religious person, but I'm also not an atheist. It seems to me that it is unwise to believe that there is no such thing as an entity that is beyond our comprehension given that the universe itself (or "~95% of it" anyway) is in fact beyond our comprehension at this point. That said, I have my own theory on it: Dark Matter/Gravity and Dark Energy are simply the Flying Spaghetti Monster trolling someone in the universe (maybe even us, though we may be the least consequential of sentient beings in all the enormous quantity of galaxies).

There was "no reason to make" Blade Runner 2049, or a long list of other unnecessary sequels . . . Even when the general trend of such stinkers seems to be mediocre at best, you'll still find people chasing after the potential to capitalize on a popular brand. Hell, at this point, with the major changes in processing power, distribution mechanisms, the market(s) (meaning the extent and diversity of customer bases primarily but other factors too, such as the various "niches" for small quickie cheapo products ranging up to "AAA" products . . .), social media, etc., etc., I'd say that: virtually ANY game that has ever been made and did not well and truly KILL any semblance of possibility for a "sequel" is ripe for a sequel. Not only that, but plain and simple REMAKES! Jagged Alliance 1: as far as I know it was fairly popular, but not tremendous. From today's perspective, looking at it is about as much fun as watching the lights inside your refrigerator flicker. Jagged Alliance 2, didn't do so well and the company went out of business (partly because of the crash dynamics that afflicted so many developers in the late 1990s). Nonetheless, there is STILL to this day an active community of fans and modders and new releases to the Jagged Alliance 2 versions 1.13 mod are still being released routinely. Despite the commercial failure of Jagged Alliance 2, there have been something like a half-dozen spinoffs and sequels, including Hired Guns: the Jagged Edge; Jagged Alliance-Unfinished Business; JA-Crossfire, etc., etc. Coming forward to "recent years" (2012 being the last entry into the "series"):

Stealth being very difficult for a highly advanced solar system is entirely reasonable. Stealth being non-existent is silly under any circumstances. One does not have to be invisible to be stealthy. Stealth is just one variety of crypsis and crypsis can take on many forms. D-Day managed to be fairly cryptic despite a complete lack of "stealth" in the modern sense of the term. Human beings are far too cunning to presume that "no stealth is entirely reasonable." Still, it does seem reasonable that stealth would be quite problematic and require exceptional efforts and highly specialized (thus restrictive, expensive and niche designs) space ship engineering. With that in mind, leaving it out of the game seems like a perfectly reasonable design decision. But that is a design decision based on project scope and resources, not "realism." In a truly realistic space warfare sim, crypsis of various forms would be at least as paramount as it is today in modern international relations and quite possibly moreso by virtue of the vast distances, enormous populations and myriad hiding places.

Seem to recall some physicist or another who thinks that black holes "are" the other Universes in the multiverse or something like that. ADDIT: Okay I've got one that might flop given there are so few biological science types among you, but here goes. What would happen if human beings cells did not senesce past their prime age? There are a lot of sub-questions that would have to be addressed for that one, but I'll leave it at that and see if it gets any bites.

Dark Matter Emphasis added. Emphasis added

Yep. Pretty much same here: I've got my money's worth (>25 hours probably close to 50), but I don't know if I'll go any further with it. My main complaints. 1. He calls it a "realistic space warfare" simulator. Rather I think it is a "Space Combat simulator that attempts to be as naturalistic as possible based on a conservative set of assumptions, and some ridiculously constraining asssumptions (no stealth, no economy, no logistic, no population dynamics). 2. The lack of social /ecological/contextual dynamics severely limits the "realism" of any given simulation. 3. It doesn't perform so well when there are lots of fleets/missiles/drones traveling around. 4. The radiation effects of nukes seem to be highly underestimated. I've seen papers from the 1960s that estimated a 10kt bomb would irradiate everyone within 10+ miles and 1MT would extend that out hundreds of units of distance. 5.

Main reason Microsoft bought the IP was to promote their mobile device(s). So they would have been utter fools to have harmed the dynamic(s) within the user communitie(s).

I for one don't buy games that involve "pay to win." The title for this thread was a bit baity, but sure . . . the "pay to win" thing seems to be a cancer that is spreading through many aspects of the gamer industry. You can't blame them for trying. Main thing is: you can't blame us consumers for not falling for it.

I've resorted to a completely vanilla install of the latest version of the game (I retained an older heavily modded version if I dearly want to revert). Striking how much faster.

If it can't be grown, then it must be mined <--sticker on one of my geology profs doors back in the Paleolithic . . .

I'm down to 58GB left (~56 ish anyway) on my 1TB drive. I've got another drive in a box around here somewhere (bought it before I moved back in 2014 and have never dug it out). However, I dislike doing hardware installation (yes, that is right I just referred to plugging in and slaving another HDD as "hardware installation" :wimp:). I archived the whole directory and deleted the voluminous version so I do have it to fall back on. If I ever do install that extra HDD, the concept of how do I split my existing junk into two HDD is one of the main puzzles that adds inertia to my motivation.

I don't know C# at all. I know C++ a little bit. What I know so far is: "C is in there," meaning it is "inside C++." Meaning, anything C can do, C++ can do. I would assume this is also true for C# and that means: there is ultimately no insurmountable technical barrier to managing your memory however it needs to be managed to optimize performance for any given infrastructure. As far as i'm aware, most of the tools for memory management existed in C long before Stroustroup created C++. There are certainly features in C++ related to memory which do not exist in C, but my apprentice level comprehension tells me: even with just C, you can optimize a high-demand application to a very high degree. All that to say: I suspect if someone blames "Unity" for their C# games poor memory management, they are being "lazy." If being "lazy" = good profits, who can blame them?

C# == crap garbage collection. Or so I'm told. Yeah, the memory usage with this game (even Vanilla) as an execution session prolongs is not good . . . perhaps even borderline "quite bad." Add mods to the mix and it can quickly spiral into "very bad." ADDIT: one other thing, I'm not sure the "poor memory management" which KSP exhibits under even ideal conditions is "memory leakage" per se. Memory leak is a very specific thing. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/104/anatomy-of-a-memory-leak?rq=1 Personally, I would love it if more knowledgeable folks, especially developers who actually have access to the source code would chime in on these things.

Well at least caffeine is largely benign . . .

Well, amazingly, my modded and updated install seems to be working fine! I'll probably play a bit and then delete my backup copy that is still at the older version.

Sheeze, this thread got gruesome quickly. Sign of the times I guess. Things used to be so much simpler . . .

I THINK the plan was to have two cylinders in any "unit," rotating in different directions.