St. Goliath

Makes me wonder what kind of person would have a picture of somebody elses baby on the inside of their locker at work?

There is no such thing as a disk image when it comes to floppies... Just grabbing all the files from the disk is all there is to it. (you obviously never dealt with them in person) You are obviously not a Unix user. "Everything is a file". A floppy is just a block device like a hard disk or a tape drive. $ dd if=/dev/fd0 of=~/floppyimage Simply dump every sector of the floppy in order into a file that we can later load into a VM or dump on anothe floppy, preserving everything from the original device bit by bit. By the way, the company I work for recently ordered new buisness cards and my boss couldn't decide whether to write "junior" or "senior" software engineer on mine, so I got one that says "adult software engineer". I guess that title would go well with a job at S&M software.

Gordon probably wouldn't live long enough to see the end of that court hearing.

Friday

Teach foxes how to fly. Perform experiments to determine the aerodynamic properties of foxes at supersonic speeds. Write a reasearch paper about it. How can I get more sleep?

I didn't know where else to put this and didn't find another thread dedicated to the topic, so I put this here. (Just some thoughts on the weirdness of that we saw of Xen so far) What we observed so far (I heared people like lists): Platforms floating around in the void, some very rigid, others very porose without any immediate optical difference Bigger platforms with caves and glowing crystal structures scattered everywere A seemingly unidirectional force that seems to effect everything and appears to work just like we expect gravity to work on earth A levitating rock that does not react to strong air currents Teleporters everywhere Huge animals living in the middle of nothing with no apparent source of food around Lots of other weird shit that biologists will have to deal with (not my department) Some possible conclusions and theories: Gordon and the animals around can breathe, therefore the whole floating rock stuff must be embedded in a cloud of a gas containing at least oxygen. So far, we can't say anything more about that. There is some force that acts like gravity. Also, that levitating rock must be held in position by very strong forces if it simply levitates and does not react to the shock wave of an explosion in anyway whatsoever. In Half-Life and some of its extensions, it is mentioned that the Xenian crystals aid in teleportation. What if the crystals embedded in the rock contain very dense matter made of particles with a negative mass? What if the whole rock platform stuff is actually falling towards something massive (a gigantic planet/black hole/dark matter, whatever floats sinks your boat), but since large parts of the rocks have negative mass, the gravity acts on the platforms into the oposite directions, pushing them upwards, or at least making them fall slower than Gordon and everything else? Whenever Gordon was in free fall so far, we heard a (somewhat load) air flow. If that was an upward wind, it could make sense. If we have extremely dense materials and negative masses at our hands, we could also partially explain the rotating platforms and the levitating rock being held in position. For the teleporters, it could be assumed that most were made by intelligent life forms. Having all kinds of fancy/weird matters at hand probably made studying those and building teleporters easier for a society forced to deal with this environment, having a completely different historical approach to physics and mathematics than some guy on earth getting hit by an apple and inventing calculus. Regarding the Gonarch living in an environment without any obvious food source around. For one, I couldn't see any orifices on that thing were it could either consume food, or "unload" digested food. There must be some opening at the top through which the Gonarch squirts acid at enemies, but due to it's shape, it's quite impractical to use a hole at the top for consuming food. Also, living things on earth are usually symetric along a plane, but have one end where things go in and an opposite end where things go out. The Gonarch appears to be sort of symetric along a line. It is a disc with a blob and legs attached to it. It doesn't seem to have any identifyable oposing ends, so either it consumes and excretes food through some openings at the bottom, or maybe it isn't designed to eat food. Afterall, there are magic healing pools in Xen. What if, through eveolution, the animals got accustomed to not eatting anything but soaking in those pools instead? On the other hand, however, we saw some of the animals in Black Mesa chewing on dead scientists, so it might not be true for all animals. In conclusion, we need to perform further research on the topic, send more people (or preferably robots) to Xen, obtain samples to analize, perform experiments, obeservations and measurements.

While the 60 FPS version does look smother, I didn't exactly feel sick, but the rapid rotating gave me a weired tingly sensation in my head, somewhere above my eyes. This reminds me of a conversation I once had with a friend who said he played Half-Life 1 but never got around to even starting Half-Life 2, since every time he tried, he got a bad headache and nausea after a few minutes. When he finally reached the airbot sequence, it got so bad that he simply gave up on trying to play the game.

When I played Half-Life for the first time, I wondered if people working there had to do this every day to get to their offices/labs. There really is no other way to get to the upper level. Then again, it might be an alternative to coffe. You either arive at work awake and focused, or you're dead.

I just got home and saw the new video. Certainly made my day! Rewatching episode 55 previously reminded me of a video that might be helpful regarding "cross dimensional activity": JkxieS-6WuA The interesting part is roughly around 2:00

Banned for posting while having a seizure.

We don't know what that stuff actually is, besides the fact that it harms the player in the game. Define "poison". People call lots and lots of stuff "poison" and that doesn't mean it instantly kills you, or even harms you at all (for instance, I have a mushroom book around here that calls lots of things "toxic" that actually just do funny things with your mind), but before somebody starts arguing about that, there is an LD50 dose for everything, according to the Wikipedia article about NaCl, it has an LD50 of about 3000 mg/kg (i.e. if I somehow managed to eat 225 kg of salt at once, I would most likely die). Actually that's a thing that buggs me a little every time. If you wear a fully conductive suit, you could get hit by a bolt of lightning and not feel a thing (besides, of course, the extreme heat above your head and the loud bang that probably damages your eardrums). If Gordons suit is fully conductive it acts as a faraday cage, however if he is not wearing his helmet, there might be sparks around the collar, burning his skin (depending on the current). However since both the Vort and Gordon stand on a propperly grounded steel-concrete corridor, they are connected via a common ground and the current would probably use the floor to return to the source. This is just my initial guess, I would need to conduct a few test first tough. Anyhow, something like the aimed Vort-jolts as shown in the game could not be possible in the first place without the help of a strong magnetic field, you would have to factor in. Regarding the two generators in "Power-Up", where Gordon was afraight about getting his head exploded, if he stood right between them, wearing a full body metal suit, it would probably be safe. From the sparks we can tell, that there is a huge potential difference between the two, so the jolt would most likely exit the suit on the other side to hit the other generator. The only other likely case would be the jolt exiting throgh the bottom (metal-concrete floor again, the generator also stands on it). If a high current runns through the suit and exits through feet, we can only hope that the suit doesn't have any gaps. However, on the cover of the HL2 CD, Gordons MK V suit has a huge nonmetallic gap above the waist line, that a sparc would have to cross, turning "Gordon Freeman" into "Cordon Bleu".

Doesn't mention a copcar tough....

Nice that we could finally clarify this issue! Hm.... Actually no; and this terminology is a major cause of confusion when debating copyright law and related issues. If I steal something from you, you no longer have it. If I copy something, we both have identical versions. Thanks to computers and the internet, copyrighted works got almost completely detatched from physical goods, making "stealing" of copyrighted works impossible and mass distribution an easy thing that does not require any money or time investment and is available to everyone, thus making copyright law a serious issue. Supporters of printing-press-era copyright law and strong enforcement generally prefere using terminologies that create the mental image of physical goods (words like "stealing"). However, reuploading the videos could likely reduce the views of the original videos, what is a problem, since you financially depend on them. However, as copyright holder of his videos, Ross is free to use his rights and not grant everybody a permission to redistribute the videos if he preferes, as this is not the default with copyright law, it's just a common use case. If Ross sends a takedown notice, yes, otherwise no. To use YouTubes automated "content" (yet another one of those words) detection algorithms, you have to pay for it. Yes, definitely yes. The initial post of this thread is a little older. (September 2012). He couldn't have known that back then. I see. I must excuse for what may seem as a missfit legal/political discussion, but I'm myself trying to stay polite and objective, what is probably a lot easier for someone who isn't directly affected, actually writing this in another timezone thousands of kilometers away. Sincerely Dave

EECOM

Someone's having a bit of a delay on their end?