Hidalgo, who is against countries bringing their own units, stressed earlier this year that Paris organizers would not change course.
“I think we have to trust science on two counts,” she said. “The first is what scientists are telling us about the fact that we are on the brink of a precipice. And secondly, we have to trust the scientists when they help us to construct buildings in a sober way that allows us to make do without air conditioning.”
France has the highest percentage of nuclear power of any power grid in the world and its electricity is generated emitting a very low level of carbon dioxide.
According to this, France emits about a seventh the carbon dioxide per unit of power generated as the US does. We can use seven times as much electricity in Paris as back in the US and still have about the same carbon dioxide emissions.
On Sunday, a group of 250 Iranian legislators introduced a motion that requires the administration to designate the Canadian Army and federal police forces as terrorist organizations.
China is already selling two EVs using sodium ion batteries.
Sodium ion batteries won’t be a general drop-in substitute in vehicles for lithium.
It might be possible to use sodium-ion batteries in place of some not-energy-density critical lithium-ion applications (the way lead-acid is currently used for some lithium-ion applications), and that’d free up some materials for EV use.
However, sodium and lithium atoms have differences, two of which are relevant for battery performance. The first difference is in the so-called redox potential, which characterizes the tendency for an atom or molecule to gain or lose electrons in a chemical reaction. The redox potential of sodium is 2.71 V, about 10% lower than that of lithium, which means sodium-ion batteries supply less energy—for each ion that arrives in the cathode—than lithium-ion batteries. The second difference is that the mass of sodium is 3 times that of lithium.
Together these differences result in an energy density for sodium-ion batteries that is at least 30% lower than that of lithium-ion batteries [1]. When considering electric vehicle applications, this lower energy density means that a person can’t drive as far with a sodium-ion battery as with a similarly sized lithium-ion battery. In terms of this driving range, “sodium can’t beat lithium,” Tarascon says.
In time, sodium-ion batteries will improve, but their driving range will never surpass the top-of-the-line lithium-ion batteries, Tarascon says. He imagines instead that sodium-ion technology will fill specific niches, such as batteries for smaller, single-person electric vehicles or for vehicles that have a range of only 30–50 miles (50–80 km). Weil agrees, but he says that society may have to change the way it views automobiles. “We cannot only point to the technology developers and say, ‘We need more efficiency.’ It’s even more important to stress that we need more ‘sufficiency,’ which is people being satisfied with a small car,” he says.
Ukrainian energy facilities have come under a massive attack from Russia, in the latest onslaught targeting the country’s power grid, officials say....
Air defence systems shot down 12 of 16 missiles and all 13 drones launched by Russia at several regions through the night, the Ukrainian air force said.
I guess we’re progressively moving out of the Siemens-Energy-gets-contracts-to-replace-things-violently-interacting-with-Russian-missiles phase of the war and into the Lockheed-Martin-gets-contracts-to-replace-things-violently-interacting-with-Russian-missiles phase.
However, Katz later posted on X: “Israel cannot allow the Hezbollah terror organization to continue attacking its territory and citizens, and soon we will make the necessary decisions. The free world must unconditionally stand with Israel in its war against the axis of evil led by Iran and extremist Islam.”
It’s been years and I’m still not over the weirdness of governments announcing major positions via Twitter.
I don’t have a problem with Elon Musk as a person or him owning it – I wasn’t on the Elon hype train back when the progressive crowd was glamorizing him, and I’m not on the Elon-bashing train now that he’s making conservative statements and is unpopular with the progressive crowd. My problem is with the platform itself.
Message length
The thing doesn’t have the degree of message length limitation that it used to, but it’s still really short. Being concise is one thing, but this is at the level that it affects the format of the message.
Informality
Maybe it’s just me, but Twitter seems just intrinsically informal. There is virtually no form of communication that has traditionally been more-formal than state communications.
Security
This is the big one.
It really boggles my mind that a state would grant Twitter the status of being the medium for their announcements.
How secure is Twitter? I mean, I’m sure that Twitter’s engineers try to keep in secure, but I don’t believe that they have the kind of emphasis on security that, say, the people who are on TLS (which would secure a state website) do. What happens if someone compromises a state Twitter account, sends out a bogus message, and then manages to cut access off to the account for a period of time? At just the right time, like coups or something, that could have an enormous impact.
Twitter is a private company. Their responsibilities are not the same as a national government’s. Yes, they care about their reputation, and there are bounds on what they’ll do. But they were willing to cut off Trump. I can very much believe that under the right circumstances, they’d be willing to cut off officials or governments abroad. And it wouldn’t even be sanctions-level stuff, where it’s an extraordinary act – like, they can put together whatever ToS stuff they want, block people all the time. If I’m a government, I absolutely do not want Twitter to be able to cut off my communications. I don’t want whatever governments might be able to exert pressure on Twitter – and I guarantee that in a serious-enough situation, many would be willing to try – to induce that the communications be cut off. There are Twitter offices around the world. What happens if there’s a war on and some Twitter employees are taken hostage? Is the CEO going to say “let them die, keep the communications open”? Where are his obligations going to lie?
How vetted are the employees who have access to various levels of administrative access at Twitter? I would bet that there is a larger pool and that there is less vetting than the kind of people who have access to set operations at say, certificate authority operators or to cut international cable access at major ISPs, which collectively is comparable to the kind of control that an individual – who may-or-may-not be acting in line with the company’s aims as a whole – might have.
I strongly suspect that there are ways to manipulate Twitter, given sufficient use of bot accounts, to make material from malicious accounts be ranked highly. I’ve seen disinfo campaigns in the past. This is a problem that search engines share, but Twitter does real-time indexing of all content and I strongly suspect is a lot easier to induce wild ranking changes on.
Reading up on some of the more recent posts regarding VR on Linux, I’m wondering if anyone can give a quick rundown of the actual state of VR gaming on Linux for users of WMR headsets like the HP Reverb G2....
Based on the table at the above link, it sounds like there is experimental support for the display only, and no controller support.
Experimental 6DoF tracking support with external SLAM/VIO systems is upstreamed but still being worked on. Tested with RealSense D455 and Samsung Odyssey+, Reverb G2, Oculus Rift S.
"One of the biggest things with Unity and Unreal is that they’re constantly trying to grow. And to grow means they’re constantly adding new features because they want to add more user types. That ends in a polluted engine in terms of features. If you go to the bar at the top, you will see a lot of features and they have so many use cases. And now they’re also building for industrial digitisation, so they need to support that. So suddenly you have this large code, and maybe somebody is only using just 40% or 30% of it, but you need to make sure it’s stable and doesn’t crash.
Yes. But on the flip side, you also have a lot more resources to debug that codebase.
I think that there’s a fair argument that Unity or Unreal might not be ideal for a given game. But:
I am skeptical that game studios are generally better-off writing their own engine, particularly with graphically-spiffier games.
I think that the main case where doing one’s own engine is useful is when someone wants to do something that a game engine simply cannot do. I don’t think that just having one game studio implement 30%-40% of a shared engine from scratch with the goal of having a codebase that’s 30%-40% the current size makes a lot of sense in terms of saving development time. And even if new functionality is required, I’d still argue that if that functionality is at all reusable, it’d be a good idea into looking into spreading those costs over a number of games
In the past several weeks, I have watched dozens of sleek U.S. military planes descend over Toussaint Louverture International Airport in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, where I live. They were the first flights to land since gangs blockaded and halted commercial air traffic in March. U.S. news reports suggest that the aircraft contained...
By 2022, researchers estimated that about 200 gangs operated across Haiti. Of these, half were located in Port-au-Prince. The more influential gangs control large swathes of territory, including entire municipalities and communes.
PODGORICA, June 21 (Reuters) - A major power outage hit Montenegro, Bosnia, Albania and most of Croatia’s coast on Friday, disrupting businesses, shutting down traffic lights and leaving people sweltering without air conditioning in the middle of a heatwave....
EU won’t commit to answering whether games are goods or services.
I think I’d have a category for both.
You can’t call an SNES cartridge a service, but similarly, you can’t call, oh, an online strip poker service a good.
I suspect that most good-games have at least some characteristics of a service (like patches) and most service-games have at least some characteristics of a good (like software that could be frozen in place).
I think that the actual problem is vendors unnecessarily converting good-games into service-games, as that gives them a route to get leverage relative to the consumer. Like, I can sell a game and then down the line start data-mining players or something. I think that whatever policy countries ultimately adopt should be aimed at discouraging that.
I would imagine that from Israel’s standpoint, this means that if Gazans decide they want to attack someone involved in the system, it’s gonna be attacking other Arab countries as well, which is probably gonna not make said attackers very popular.
Summary: he told management that it’d take 18 months to do a good game, couldn’t do it in less then 12, and Interplay was, at that point, down to 6 months of cash.
Philippines soldiers used their “bare hands” to fight off Chinese coast guard personnel armed with swords, spears and knives in the disputed South China Sea, the country’s top military commander has said....
Bayou Bougaloo crowds reveled and splashed in the waterway at the music festival a couple miles south as the fisherman dangled a magnet the size of a hockey puck from a red rope off the Bayou St. John bridge.
He pulled a gun barrel from the bridge’s south side near its center, police said. He also retrieved a handgun on the bridge’s northeast side, near the water’s edge.
Then came a 15-pound dumbbell, tied to a shirt or cloth, which was padlocked around a human skull, police said. That skull was “fully decomposed, lacking a jaw or the top row of teeth,” New Orleans police said.
The NOPD did not immediately respond to questions regarding investigations of any decapitated crime victims.
On the whole, New York sounds like a better place to be magnet fishing than New Orleans.
Vladimir Putin said Russia and North Korea have ramped up ties to a “new level,” pledging to help each other if either nation is attacked in a “breakthrough” new partnership announced during the Russian president’s rare visit to the reclusive state....
That means that if Russia were to, say, declare war on the US - however unlikely that might be - NK would theoretically be in favour.
North Korea had a war with the US once, after they gambled incorrectly that the US would not respond to an invasion of South Korea. I doubt that Pyongyang would intentionally enter into another.
The bombing campaign destroyed almost every substantial building in North Korea. The war’s highest-ranking U.S. POW, U.S. Major General William F. Dean, reported that the majority of North Korean cities and villages he saw were either rubble or snow-covered wasteland. Dean Rusk, the U.S. State Department official who headed East Asian affairs, concluded that America had bombed “everything that moved in North Korea, every brick standing on top of another.” North Korean factories, schools, hospitals, and government offices were forced to move underground. In November 1950, the North Korean leadership instructed the population to build dugouts and mud huts and to dig tunnels, in order to solve the acute housing problem.
By the end of the campaign, US bombers had difficulty in finding targets and were reduced to bombing footbridges or jettisoning their bombs into the sea.
In May 1951, an international fact finding team from East Germany, West Germany, China, and the Netherlands stated, “The members, in the whole course of their journey, did not see one town that had not been destroyed, and there were very few undamaged villages.”
Who, North Korea? They might provide more artillery munitions. That’s not good for Ukraine. Like, there’s a direct cost in lives in munitions provided.
I’d bet that they still haven’t emptied their arsenals.
Russia? Russia can do a bunch of things that North Korea wants. North Korea wants access to food, energy, weapons technology, you name it.
a celebrity cook from Austria, tasked with feeding the new regime a healthy diet
“spiritual criteria” to pick out appropriate candidates for the future government
Heinrich XIII Prince Reuß, a pseudo aristocrat and estate agent whom the group intended to appoint as its interim leader.
Hildegard Leiding, 60, a member of the rightwing AfD party and an astrologer, who was allegedly destined to become the group’s “trans-communications minister”.
Together with a welder from the Bavarian rocker scene
The woman, who is said to have become radicalised during the pandemic and specialised in a method of predicting the future through reading eggs, known as oomancy, was expected to become the health minister.
The group had plans in place to kidnap Germany’s chancellor, Olaf Scholz, and parade him on television in the hope of winning more followers to their cause, prosecutors say.
This would not work well as a movie plot due to lack of believability.
The article is talking about the fact that Sudan is seeing a famine resulting from a civil war in Sudan where both sides are using food as a weapon by blocking transport in.
Setting aside the question of whether-or-not people are claiming this, what does your comment have to do with the article at all?
Were you intending to comment on a different article?
This is a war in Sudan. The US is not a party to the conflict. Are you claiming that blocking the food aid is being made possible by some form of military aid in the form of bombs?
The AI trials used a combination of “smart” CCTV cameras that can detect objects or movements from images they capture and older cameras that have their videofeeds connected to cloud-based analysis.
Enough of these linked together coupled with facial recognition, and Amazon’s got the means to track people at scale.
“I think it’s been about two or three times in the past six months we’ve allegedly been sunk, which we have not been,” Hill told The Associated Press during a recent visit to the carrier. “It is almost comical at this point. They’re attempting to maybe inspire themselves through misinformation, but it doesn’t work...
Taco Tuesday: Exactly what it sounds like. We had a CS (Culinary Specialist) that made some of the best Fajitas I have ever had in my life (and I was raised in West Texas by a hispanic family). All the fixings are provided as well.
“I think it’s been about two or three times in the past six months we’ve allegedly been sunk, which we have not been,” Hill told The Associated Press during a recent visit to the carrier.
They were submarine aircraft carriers able to carry three Aichi M6A Seiran aircraft underwater to their destinations.
reads further
It wasn’t an I-400 that bombed Oregon, but apparently Operation Cherry Blossoms at Night, Japan’s abandoned last-ditch plan to hit with the US with some form of strategic bombing, dropping bubonic plague bombs on population centers in the US, would have used an I-400. I don’t know how effective that would have been – the US had taken preemptive measures to work up anti-biological-warfare stuff earlier in the war – but at least potentially, that’s a considerable amount of hitting power.
The Russians rallied. The equivalent of at least two battalions with hundreds of infantry stormed the PJSC Volchansky chemical plant, on the Vovcha River’s right bank. Factories and other industrial facilities are often the locus of the fighting in Ukraine, as their big sturdy buildings can shelter troops and protect them from artillery and drones.
On the one hand, okay, I can buy that the building provides some level of protection.
On the other hand, this isn’t a steel mill. It’s a chemical plant. Assuming that it’s been in operation recently, it’s probably got, well, significant amounts of chemicals stored there. A lot of chemicals aren’t really the sort of things that you want to be right next to if you expect to have explosions going off nearby. Might not be great to breathe, or might be flammable or explosive.
You did, albeit not in the direction you’re thinking!
Just a day ahead of the peace conference, to which Russia was not invited, Putin articulated Russia’s demands for peace: Ukraine must give up the entire four regions that Russia occupies part of, demilitarize, and drop its aspirations to join the NATO defense alliance.
They also demanded that Ukraine “demilitarize” and permanently stay out of NATO, I assume because Russia would like to hold the threat of hard power over Ukraine and (a) isn’t willing to fight NATO and (b) has discovered that fighting a militarized Ukraine isn’t all that much fun.
I don’t know if the aim is honestly to look reasonable. Like, okay, take your earlier statement:
You assholes don’t even hold Kherson. And you want Ukraine to withdraw and give it to you, after having chased you out of the capital already, as part of the peace agreement?
It’s actually even more improbable than asking for it as part of the peace agreement. They’re demanding it as a precondition to start negotiations for a peace agreement. Like, the Dnipro River is a geographical barrier to Russia. Ukraine would have to withdraw from all of the territory, letting Russia’s forces across that barrier, and Russia says that then they would start talking about terms for peace.
The best time to visit Saudi Arabia is from October to February. This period is cooler, perfect for outdoor activities and sightseeing, and more affordable for a visit.
During the October-February period, Saudi Arabia experiences a lovely drop in temperature that makes it more comfortable for travelers. Highs range from 69F to 94F, so everything from the beach to camping in the mountains is possible!
The worst time to visit Saudi Arabia is in the summer, from June to August. Temperatures soar with little to no rain and hotels and flights are more expensive.
June, July, and August are the worst months to visit Saudi Arabia mainly because of the heat. Temperatures during the summer season range from 107F to 110F in Riyadh, but get as high as 130F in the desert.
Linux PC. Almost entirely on a desktop, though I’ve got a few games (Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead, Caves of Qud) that I’ll play on a laptop.
Very limited use of Android, if I’m away from a computer, for the mobility.
I’ve owned a few consoles, but the experience has consistently disappointed me.
Loading times are worse (well, maybe this has improved, but historically was a pain)
I can’t as trivially flip over to a wiki in a web browser. I smack a button, I’m on another workspace on my PC.
For some reason, a lot of “deep” games that one spends a lot of time learning, like strategy and milsims, don’t have much of a presence on consoles. I like a lot of entrants in those genres.
Games cost more than the PC. I mean, sure, the console vendor loses money on the hardware, has to make their money back on the games, but that especially makes consoles a bad buy if you’re going to get a lot of games.
The PC has more potential to be upgraded (though I’ll concede that consoles have generally improved here).
I’m not constrained by what the game developer wanted me to do; I can drop in with a memory editor and cheat in a game, can add mods to the game, have control over save state, etc.
The drawbacks of a PC are things that don’t really bother me:
You’ve got setup and configuration, which I’m gonna do anyway.
You’re more-likely to hit driver or hardware compatibility issues than on a console.
As for mobile…
I would be potentially willing to pay a lot more for mobile games than I do, but the entire commercial game infrastructure on Android is tied to getting a Google account, and I refuse to do that; I don’t want Google logging and data-mining what I do. So I almost-exclusively use open-source software on Android. And most good mobile games have made it to the PC.
Honestly, I was kind of unexpectedly disappointed with Android gaming (and this is even based on what I see in the Google Play Store).
Okay, the touchscreen isn’t a fantastic input medium for a lot of game genres, but I thought that stuff like multiple-choice choose-your-own-adventure games and gamebook-type games would see a huge renaissance, but some of the main games in that line have been…not that great; Choice of Games has a lot of titles, and some of the writing is good, but the gameplay mechanics are kinda disappointing.
Turn-based strategy games seemed like a good fit for the touchscreen, but as with the console, deep strategy games also haven’t been hugely in evidence. As best I can tell, there’s a strong focus on games that you can drop into for a few minutes while waiting in a line or something and then drop out of…which is fine, but really constrains the experience. I guess deckbuilders are okay, but the PC does fine there too.
A lot of Android games aren’t super-considerate of the battery. Some games that I like on the PC, like real time sim games (Oxygen Not Included or Dwarf Fortress) require constant load and just wouldn’t be a great match for a phone running on battery, even if they were present.
I’m not really into games that leverage location, which is one thing that a phone can do that other platforms can’t. I could maybe believe that there could be games that could leverage multi-touch support to do things that PCs can’t and really get a lot of good out of it, but I haven’t seen that.
The screen has major limitations in that few Android devices have a large screen (so they can’t expect to control a large portion of your visual arc) and on a touchscreen, your hands are going to be obscuring part of the screen, making things even more difficult for the developer.
Touchscreens have gotten better, but they just don’t have reliable, rapid response to input the way that the mouse-and-keyboard (which a PC is guaranteed to have) or a gamepad (which a console is guaranteed to have) have.
Android phones can take external peripherals, but it’s hard for a game to expect that they be present, especially since not everyone wants to haul a lot of hardware around with their phone. So you can get game controllers, earphones, a keyboard, or even an external projector, but it’s hard for a game to expect that you have them available.
I’m with you on wanting the big, upholstered chair, but also liking the desk.
I kind of wish that easy chairs at desks were more of a thing. As it is, a typical desk doesn’t really fit them: you have “office chairs” and “living room chairs”, and the two don’t meet much. Couple problems:
A big and top-heavy chair is gonna tip more easily, so you have to extend the base and casters.
A big chair isn’t gonna roll as easily, so you can’t push back from a desk.
For years, I’ve been thinking about switching to a table or workbench with a higher top or something.
I think that the answer probably has several elements.
Maybe the desk can just…go away. Desks are important for paperwork, were important for supporting heavy CRTs, but I rarely actually need one now.
Monitor goes on an table/desk/floor-mounted arm. I’ve been diong that, and I’m happy with it, but still have the “cubbyhole” desk from the CRT era. Maybe just swing the thing into place every time you sit down.
Keyboard and mouse need to be attached to the floor or chair, not the desk. This is a bit harder. There are keyboard and mouse trays, but if one reclines in a chair, they also tilt the tray, which I don’t want – the mouse surface has to remain horizontal. If you can live with a trackball or trackpad, that might be tolerable. It might be possible to have some kind of leveling attachment that fits over the arms, or have a free-standing keyboard/mouse tray that fits over the chair, pole on each side of it. Something like this. If reclining adjusts the required height of the keyboard/mouse and the mount is freestanding, then it has to be trivial to adjust the height.
Like, you’ve got an engine, which you paid a bunch of money to develop. But you’re only making one game at a time in it, which limits the return. If another carefully-selected studio were willing to use the engine and had Fallout rights, they could put out a game. You did that with Obsidian and Fallout: New Vegas was an enormous success.
The Royal Canadian Navy now finds itself in the unusual position of both shadowing Russian warships as a threat in the Caribbean and sharing an anchorage with them as a guest in the port of Havana — because Canada accepted an invitation to send a patrol ship to Cuba while the Russian navy is in town....
In the “show of strength” column, one also notes that unlike the Russian contingent, the Canadian warship (the HMCS Margaret Brooke, apparently) is not traveling in the company of an ocean-going tug (the Nikolay Chiker) to address the possibility that it breaks down and has to be towed back.
I don’t think that this is protecting it from Ukrainian attack, though. The Black Sea Fleet is the one at risk there. This will be from the Russian (kagis for Admiral Gorshkov) Northern Fleet, their Arctic ships.
Actually, the Northern Fleet is the one that the Canadians actually are most-likely to be the ones to have to pay attention to. The US can sail submarines under the icepack, but has very limited icebreaker capacity, can’t operate much by way of surface ships in the Arctic. That’s mostly on the Canucks and the Norwegians, as things stand.
EDIT: Apparently that might actually be a Ukrainian attack. I was in a conversation on this in !noncredibledefense the other day. Apparently, in the Soviet Union, Ukraine built all the big gas turbine engines for warships. (The Admiral Gorshkov uses a gas turbine engine.) Then Russia invaded Ukraine, and Ukraine decided that they weren’t going to be selling Russia any replacements or spare parts as long as that was going on. Russia built a gas turbine factory, UEC Saturn, but it’s very constrained in capacity, can’t produce new stuff at the rate Russia needs them, so it sounds like Russia is probably running engines longer than they’re supposed to be run.
The Earth’s magnetic field has alternated between periods of normal polarity, in which the predominant direction of the field was the same as the present direction, and reverse polarity, in which it was the opposite. These periods are called chrons.
Reversal occurrences are statistically random. There have been at least 183 reversals over the last 83 million years (on average once every ~450,000 years).
I mean, there are open-source clones, right, like Minetest, yes?
The angry Redditor wrote, “The fact they can just take away your license to the game like that is [expletive] insane. This is why I’ll never support DRMs, if a game has a DRM you do NOT own it. Only a license to temporarily play it.”
I mean, I get that complaint on a broader basis – and I think that that might be a problem moving down the line. If a company can buy a company that has sold you access to a game, and that company can cut off your access to that game, then they get leverage that they can use to extract other things out of you. Like, that is a real, legitimate issue. And it applies to anything that you buy digitally, not just games – books, music, software packages. If a vendor can change the terms on which you have access to the thing, they have ongoing leverage over the customer, and at some point, if a game isn’t generating an ongoing revenue stream, I can definitely imagine someone thinking “I can monetize this leverage”.
However, specifically for Minecraft, it seems kind of like complaining that someone is cutting off your access to Microsoft Solitaire. It might be annoying, but…you can go out and download a free and open-source package that can do essentially the same thing, yes?
Water in the Seine River had unsafe elevated levels of E. coli less than two months before swimming competitions are scheduled to take place in it during the Paris Olympics, according to test results published Friday....
Setting aside the water quality of the Seine, why are they swimming in an unchlorinated body of water in the first place? Has that happened before?
kagis
Apparently this is part of a PR campaign for Paris or something, as they had this big push to reduce sewage in it to the point where it could be used for the Olympics. And it sounds like this is the first time that they’re doing it in a river:
Paris’ Seine River, forbidden for swimmers for 100 years, gets Olympic reboot
By OlympicTalk
Published April 11, 2023 04:17 AM
Because as well as hosting outdoor swim races, the Seine is going to be the centerpiece of Paris’ unprecedented Olympic Opening Ceremony. For the first time, it will take place not in a stadium setting but along the river and its banks.
So it needs to be ready. Officials have been going after homes upstream of Paris and houseboats on the Seine that were emptying their sewage and wastewater directly into the river. An Olympic law adopted in 2018 gave moored boats two years to hook up to Paris’ sewage network. Sewage treatment plants on the Seine and its tributary, the Marne, are also being improved.
I wonder if they have swimming pools designated for use as backups if this doesn’t work out?
kagis
Apparently yes (no for an alternate location, but if the water quality is unacceptable, they plan to just defer the swimming races until it becomes acceptable):
But Rabadan also said there was no alternate plan: If the races must be postponed, organizers will simply wait a few days, test the water quality and try again.
The website is the result of many hours of work spent by devoted activists and sympathizers of what is probably the largest and most successful explicitly National Socialist organization in the world.
Hey everyone, I’m a big player of Space Games of all forms, and this mini-genre (or ‘theme’, if you prefer) really has a TON of range and depth, and is a very fertile ground for indie and unique projects. I was recently playing a game called Avorion, after owning it for years without ever really engaging with it, and...
There’s also a few “fleet command” games. These aren’t really “combat flight sims” like the above, because the player isn’t experiencing a flight sim from the ship, but like the “space RTS” genre, the third dimension really alters the dynamics. Maybe they’re somewhat-analogous to a naval fleet combat sim.
The only example of this genre that I’ve played would be Nebulous: Fleet Command, but I understand that there are a few more out there.
I just want a good cockpit sim with HOTAS support that doesn’t make me want to scoop out my own eyeballs whenever I think about loading it up again.
Atmospheric flight combat sims, and I haven’t played either much, but maybe Il-2: Sturmovik: Great Battles or DCS? Those kind of fit the “slap a lot of money on the counter, and we give you a hard sim with a lot of levers” bill.
I fucking love flying ships in that game with my HOTAS
I have a HOTAS setup too, along with pedals. And I’m kinda with you on wishing that there were good space flight combat HOTAS games. But…I’m skeptical that it’s gonna happen.
You need to have enough people running around with a dedicated throttle and flightstick to get sales up enough to make it worthwhile to focus a game on it.
I feel like the decline in flightsticks may have been a factor in moving away from the combat flight genre (both space and air-breathing), that the late '90s/early 2000s may be permanently the heyday.
My guess is that there are a number of factors:
Gamepads got analog thumbsticks and analog triggers. They aren’t ideal for flight sims, but that’s enough analog inputs that most people who aren’t absolutely devoted to the genre are going to just live with a gamepad rather than buying a bunch of extra input hardware that can only be used with that game.
During the 1990s, joysticks such as the CH Products Flightstick, Gravis Phoenix, Microsoft SideWinder, Logitech WingMan, and Thrustmaster FCS were in demand with PC gamers. They were considered a prerequisite for flight simulators such as F-16 Fighting Falcon and LHX Attack Chopper. Joysticks became especially popular with the mainstream success of space flight simulator games like X-Wing and Wing Commander, as well as the “Six degrees of freedom” 3D shooter Descent.[27][28][29][30][31] VirPil Controls’ MongoosT-50 joystick was designed to mimic the style of Russian aircraft (including the Sukhoi Su-35 and Sukhoi Su-57), unlike most flight joysticks.[32]
However, since the beginning of the 21st century, these types of games have waned in popularity and are now considered a “dead” genre, and with that, gaming joysticks have been reduced to niche products.[27][28][29][30][31]
The XBox gamepad became very common as a convention on the PC, whereas up until that point, it was more-common to have all kinds of oddball inputs, and it was expected that a player would set up the controls on a per-game basis. I think that not having to do input configuration made gamepad-on-the-PC more approachable, but it also made it harder to sell people on games that require actual input. HOTASes are still in the “setup required” family (and it’s good that they have the flexibility, as you can’t have a one-size-fits-all HOTAS setup). Maybe you could have Internet-distributed profiles for different hardware, choose something reasonable out of box, kinda like how Steam Input works.
Ubiquitous Internet access has made multiplayer more common than it was around 2000. If a game supports competitive multiplayer, then having configurable input (and macros and such) may be undesirable, because you want a level playing field. Game developers may not want to permit for a variety of inputs if it doesn’t make for a level playing ground and they’re doing multiplayer. There’s some game that I recall (Star Citizen?) where I remember players being extremely unhappy about changes being made that favored mouse-and-keyboard players over flightstick players.
Newer combat aircraft are fly-by-wire. There’s no mechanism to let one “feel” resistance, and so not much reason for flight sim games to do so either. For a while, there were force-feedback joysticks (we typically use “force feedback” today to refer to rumble motors, but strictly-speaking, it should refer to joysticks that push back against you). That was never a huge chunk of the market, but it was a reason to get dedicated hardware.
I assume that modern aircraft don’t need trim adjustment; having trim controls is another thing that you can add inputs for on-controller.
For space combat games, manipulating the throttle doesn’t have the significance that it does with an air-based combat flight sim. Like, you aren’t constantly storing and releasing kinetic energy as you ascend and descend. You don’t have much to crash into. Stalling isn’t a problem. Exceeding aircraft speed maximums isn’t a problem. A lot of space combat flight sims aren’t “hard sims”, so you don’t need to worry about things like engine overheating the way you might in Il-2 Sturmovik: 1946 (though I suppose that one could introduce dynamics for that; Starfield has a “peak maneuverability” speed, so there’s an incentive to reduce speed to do a turn before speeding back up).
Many space combat sims aren’t simulating existing hardware; developers are only going to introduce mechanics if it significantly adds to the gameplay. In Il-2 Sturmovik: 1946, I have a ton of controls that are there because they reflect real-world mechanical systems. Armored cowlings over air intakesthat can be set to variable levels of openness. Prop pitch. Fuel mixture. The only real analog I can think of in space flight combat sims are maybe “system energy levels”.
HOTAS is really limited to PC gaming. It’s not incredibly friendly to other video game hardware. With a console, you need to have the input hardware mounted somewhere, something that a living room couch isn’t as amenable to as a desk. With a mobile phone, you want to have the hardware with you, and so size is at a premium; I think that few people are going to want to lug around a throttle and flightstick with their phone, even if the hardware can technically handle it.
Some games are doing VR (e.g. Elite Dangerous) and in VR, I think that if the world does go heavily down the VR route – which it has not yet – that it’ll be likely that there will just be virtual controls using VR controllers rather than dedicated HOTAS input devices. The concept of only seeing the ship kinda isn’t an ideal match for the physical controls. Yeah, you don’t get tactile feedback, but it gives you a lot of flexibility in ship control layout. Now, yes, there’s a VR+HOTAS crowd like you; going all the way with inputs and outputs. But I don’t know how many people are willing to put the money down for a top-of-the-light flight sim rig, and video games have fixed costs and variable revenue, so they benefit from scale, getting a lot of people pitching in money. You really don’t want to target just a small market if you can avoid it.
I think that the best bet for broader HOTAS support down the line is one of the two:
Go low-budget. Yeah, a lot of flight sims are AAA…but I’m not sold that they absolutely need to be. I’ve played some untextured polygon games that are pretty good (like Carrier Command 2). I understand that BattleBit Remastered is considered pretty highly too. That’s a big whopping chunk of assets that just don’t exist. And if you do that, you can target a much smaller audience and still make a reasonable return. Just focus on flight mechanics or something. Maybe down the line, if there’s enough uptake, sell some kind of DLC with fancy assets.
Push HOTAS support out to some kind of game-agnostic software package. Like, say there were enough people who really wanted to play HOTAS games. Have an open-source “HOTAS app” that provides most of the functionality: distributing input profiles, linking together collections of devices, setting indicator LEDs, etc. The game just links up with that app, and doesn’t attempt to handle every device out there. It exposes a bunch of input values that can be twiddled, and some outputs. There’s some precedent for that kind of software; Steam Input, or (not input-specific) VoIP apps with game integration, like Teamspeak. Buttplug.io basically fills that “third-party open-source middleware” role for outputs for adult video games and sex toys.
Either way – push HOTAS out to a separate cross-input-device, cross-game software package, or going lower-budget, reduces the need to be mass-market, which – in 2024 – HOTAS isn’t.
Whatever the merits or flaws of Star Citizen as an individual game, I do think that the sheer amount of cash dumped into the thing by backers does demonstrate that there’s legitimately demand out there for a game in the space flight combat genre.
The Outer Worlds is in the same bucket as Starfield, but with fewer space-specific elements. Starfield has light space flight combat, though it’s not very sophisticated, more of a minigame. And Starfield has zero-G FPS bits. Oh, yeah, and you mention The Outer Worlds having fixed gravity – Starfield does have variable gravity. But if you removed that, you could make either Starfield or The Outer Worlds not set in space and it’d basically play the same way. Maybe you’d have to come up with some alternate explanation for alien animals and flora, like bioengineering or something, but lots of games have done that.
Paris wants an AC-free Olympic Village. Team USA and others aren't so chill with it (www.npr.org)
Iran to designate Canadian army as a terrorist entity (islamabadpost.com.pk)
Microsoft Flight Simulator: We're thrilled to celebrate 15 million pilots who have taken flight with us. (x.com)
https://sh.itjust.works/pictrs/image/a30da9d8-3219-4eaa-b7c7-f36336457d8c.png
The battle for lithium: US and China fight over Argentina’s white gold (english.elpais.com)
…...
Russia launches 'massive' overnight attack on Ukraine power grid (www.bbc.com)
Ukrainian energy facilities have come under a massive attack from Russia, in the latest onslaught targeting the country’s power grid, officials say....
Canada reportedly preparing to evacuate 45,000 citizens from Lebanon amid war fears (nationalpost.com)
WMR VR headsets on Linux
Reading up on some of the more recent posts regarding VR on Linux, I’m wondering if anyone can give a quick rundown of the actual state of VR gaming on Linux for users of WMR headsets like the HP Reverb G2....
IO Interactive's mission to speed up game development. The Hitman developer discusses the advantages of running its own tech and how it's looking to make games 'cheaper, faster and better'. (www.gamesindustry.biz)
U.S. Military Planes Are in Haiti. Haitians Don’t Know Why. (foreignpolicy.com)
In the past several weeks, I have watched dozens of sleek U.S. military planes descend over Toussaint Louverture International Airport in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, where I live. They were the first flights to land since gangs blockaded and halted commercial air traffic in March. U.S. news reports suggest that the aircraft contained...
Power outage hits Balkan states as heat overloads system, minister says (www.reuters.com)
PODGORICA, June 21 (Reuters) - A major power outage hit Montenegro, Bosnia, Albania and most of Croatia’s coast on Friday, disrupting businesses, shutting down traffic lights and leaving people sweltering without air conditioning in the middle of a heatwave....
Dead Game News: Response from the European Commission (www.youtube.com)
Alternative Invidious Link
Netanyahu says post-war Gaza needs inter-Arab sponsorship, deradicalization process (www.ynetnews.com)
Surprising, but sounds positive....
Fallout Creator Tim Cain Reveals Involvement in Cancelation of Original Fallout 3 (www.ign.com)
South China Sea: Filipino soldiers fought off Chinese 'with bare hands' (www.bbc.com)
Philippines soldiers used their “bare hands” to fight off Chinese coast guard personnel armed with swords, spears and knives in the disputed South China Sea, the country’s top military commander has said....
N.Y. couple finds safe filled with over $130K while magnet fishing in lake. (globalnews.ca)
Putin says Russia and North Korea will help each other if attacked, taking ties to a ‘new level’ (www.cnn.com)
Vladimir Putin said Russia and North Korea have ramped up ties to a “new level,” pledging to help each other if either nation is attacked in a “breakthrough” new partnership announced during the Russian president’s rare visit to the reclusive state....
Kim Jong Un welcomes Putin in North Korea (www.nbcnews.com)
Trial opens of ‘esoteric’ wing of alleged German coup plotters (www.theguardian.com)
GP, celebrity chef and astrologer among defendants in third trial linked to far-right Reichsbürger...
‘We need the world to wake up’: Sudan facing world’s deadliest famine in 40 years (www.theguardian.com)
Millions face disaster as Sudanese army and RSF accused of using food access as a weapon in on-going war...
Amazon-Powered AI Cameras Used to Detect Emotions of Unwitting UK Train Passengers (www.wired.com)
US aircraft carrier counters false Houthi claims with 'Taco Tuesdays' as deployment stretches on - AP (apnews.com)
“I think it’s been about two or three times in the past six months we’ve allegedly been sunk, which we have not been,” Hill told The Associated Press during a recent visit to the carrier. “It is almost comical at this point. They’re attempting to maybe inspire themselves through misinformation, but it doesn’t work...
Trying And Failing To Cross A River In Vovchansk, 400 Russian Troops Got Cut Off. Now They’re Surrendering. (www.forbes.com)
Russia’s northern offensive isn’t going well....
[May 29] Introducing the new Framework Laptop 13 with Intel Core Ultra Series 1 processors (frame.work)
Just sharing in case anybody has been waiting for an update from framework
Why does Asia scan to pay when the rest of the world taps? • The Register (www.theregister.com)
‘Ultimatums don’t work with Ukraine’ — Zelenskyy’s chief of staff responds to Putin’s peace proposal (www.politico.eu)
At least 14 pilgrims die during hajj pilgrimage amid soaring temperatures (www.theguardian.com)
favorite gaming medium?
hello hello!...
Todd Howard: 'We Don't Need to Rush' Next Fallout Game (insider-gaming.com)
Canadian warship sharing an anchorage with Russian vessels in Cuba (www.cbc.ca)
The Royal Canadian Navy now finds itself in the unusual position of both shadowing Russian warships as a threat in the Caribbean and sharing an anchorage with them as a guest in the port of Havana — because Canada accepted an invitation to send a patrol ship to Cuba while the Russian navy is in town....
Earth's core slows down rotation and reverses direction, effects of this phenomenal change on the planet (economictimes.indiatimes.com)
cross-posted from: lemy.lol/post/26714541
Minecraft players outraged as Microsoft deletes accounts that weren't transitioned (www.tomshardware.com)
Unsafe levels of E. coli found in Paris' Seine River under 2 months before Olympics (www.cbc.ca)
Water in the Seine River had unsafe elevated levels of E. coli less than two months before swimming competitions are scheduled to take place in it during the Paris Olympics, according to test results published Friday....
US designates Scandinavian neo-Nazi group and three leaders as terrorists (www.theguardian.com)
Thoughts on Space Games, Part 1: Top-5 AAA Games
Hey everyone, I’m a big player of Space Games of all forms, and this mini-genre (or ‘theme’, if you prefer) really has a TON of range and depth, and is a very fertile ground for indie and unique projects. I was recently playing a game called Avorion, after owning it for years without ever really engaging with it, and...