Posts by jrc14

Oculus Rift whiffed, VR fanbois miffed

Local service, not remote service

Point of detail: as far as I can see it's a local service, not a remote service.

Nevertheless, the whole thing is deeply unimpressive.

hive mind informs climate change believers and sceptics

"Not as much heat is reflected as you increase the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere" - Really?

I'm agnostic on AGW myself (I just wish someone could neutrally investigate the hypothesis) but actually there is a problem with that statement. As I add more silvering on the back of a mirror, the amount of reflected light increases ... until the mirror fully silvered, reflecting 100% of incident light. Thereafter, adding more silvering to the mirror will not increase the amount of light reflected.

Perhaps atomspheric CO2 behaves like this. Anyone who's ever used an IR spectrometer will know that CO2 only captures IR photons in a narrow ranges of wavelength - and perhaps at current CO2 concentrations (or half them, or double them) the atmosphere is already capturing 100% of the IR photons that have those wavelengths. Adding CO2 will, in this case, not increase the amount of heat retained in the atmosphere; those IR photons having the right wavelengths will be retained in the atmosphere anyway (and would be whether we halved or doubled the CO2 concentration), whereas those photons having the other wavelengths will be quite unimpeded by atmospheric CO2 whatever its concentration.

I'm quite aware that this argument only applies to CO2; other greenhouse gases (such as water) have much broader absorption peaks. But AGW was, last time I looked, an argument about CO2.

Elite:Dangerous goes TITSUP

Lazy journalism

Just gotta mention that I have been playing the game regularly through the Christmas/New Year period, and I have not experienced any of these issues. I know some players have been having troubles, and of course that needs fixing. But the impression (from the complaints on the forum, and from this rather lazy piece of journalism) would be that the game is unplayable. And that just ain't so.

Space Commanders rebel as Elite:Dangerous kills offline mode

The decision seriously affects only a few people who are forced by circumstances to spend time away from the always-connected world (military personnel, merchant navy and offshore workers, for instance). But a fair number of these people did back the game, explicitly because the off-line play feature was there, which meant that it was going to be a content-rich top tier game that was actually accessible to them. I can understand why they are disappointed at Frontier's decision, and angry at the shabby way that it was not-quite-announced.