vikingerik

Clarification: only Magic Kingdom has that extra step of train/ferry/bus transportation from the parking lot. For all the other parks at Disney World, you can drive in and walk to the entrance. (There are trams if you're far out, but you can also walk.)

Yes, Walt did want that extra step of separation from the real world. Then Disney realized the logistical problems with it and didn't repeat it for the other parks, but they're stuck with it at Magic Kingdom. (And it also acts as an upsell for the premium resorts that are positioned right next to Magic Kingdom in walking distance.)

I did too with Money Sunset for quite a while, but mostly gave up in the last couple years. Several of the online accounts stopped supporting exporting to QIF/OFX, and it's not worth the effort to type in everything manually or figure out another export/conversion process.

Diablo 1 had no running or speed mechanic, movement speed was always constant. Its expansion Hellfire allowed running in town but not in combat areas.

Diablo 2 (2000) added the sprinting mechanic with limited stamina, but it panned out as irrelevant for gameplay. The stamina supply easily ramps up to more than you ever deplete so you just always run. And players wanted it that way since no one wants to walk slower, and the monster speeds were later increased to be balanced against players always running.

PNG can be lossy. It can be done by first discarding some image detail, to make adjacent almost-matching pixel values actually match, to be more amenable to PNG's compression method. pngquant.org has a tool that does it.

There are usage cases where you might want lossy PNG over other formats; one is for still captures of 2d animated cartoon content, where H.264 tended to blur the sharp edges and flat color areas and this approach can compensate for that.

I agree, on where the flaws often make the games.

My example of that was Heroes of Might and Magic 2 vs 3. 3 is the legendary one that everybody remembers, but I actually liked 2 better. Sure, 3 is far superior for balance and AI and content... but for me, the unbalance of 2 was its charm. Trying to win with the underpowered knight castle, or against a far superior force with tactics like the blind spell that the AI wouldn't counter... that was the fun of the more primitive Heroes 2 and wasn't quite the same in the more developed 3. Less development in a game can actually make for more fun factor.

That happened because Voyager 2 went over Neptune's north pole rather than an equatorial trajectory. Both to get a look at a giant planet's polar regions, and because that would get it closest to the moon Triton. So Voyager 2's trajectory got bent southward out of the ecliptic plane as a result of that.

While I'm here: why didn't Voyager 2 continue to slingshot to Pluto? The answer is that its trajectory would have had to bend by about 90° at Neptune, which would have required an apex closer to Neptune's center of mass than the planet's own radius - it would have crashed into the planet instead.

Primates evolved six million years ago here. There are plenty of stars billions of years older than our sun (and still sufficiently enriched with heavy elements from prior stellar generations) where they could have, so that their signals would have reached us by now. The past light cone is everything you see in the sky. Even a million light-years from neighboring galaxies is small compared to the time scale of possibilities on the order of multiple billions of years.

This isn't likely. The Milky Way is 100k light years in diameter. That's tiny relative to the age of life. Animals comparable to humans in complexity have existed for something like 250 million years on Earth, and could have on planets of stars that formed billions of years before our sun. The possible timespan for signal-emitting life to have developed is many multiples of the timespan that signals take to cross the galaxy.

It's far more likely that signal-emitting life is so rare (or short-lived) so that they are separated by distances where their signals weaken to undetectability, than that we are the one fantastically lucky star to be the first among a hundred billion.

Star Trek showing all the rival civilizations exploring the galaxy at the same time makes no sense at all. It's far more likely that civilizations would arise separated by time of millions or billions of years, than that they would all be concentrated within a few centuries. (Trek does hint strongly that the explanation is panspermia, that life was seeded everywhere at the same time to account for the time-concentrated development.)

What we don't know is what makes signal-emitting civilizations cease to do so. But (if we aren't the fantastically unlikely first one) either something must, or they're so far apart that signals can't be detected between them.

The assume-good-faith answer to a speed limit dip like that is usually that the road has one or more intersections with some risk factor. Like limited visibility around a bend or hill, or a short merging/acceleration area, or prone to flooding in rain, or intersection with a bike trail. Of course, any particular spot like yours could be a police cash grab, but there are many places where something like that seems arbitrary but there is a real reason. Best to follow the signs, for conditions you might not know about.

Exactly the opposite for me. I would never tolerate contacts and hated wearing glasses too. I had Lasik, 18 years ago now, and absolutely glad I did.

For me the only significant downside is dry eyes (it damages the nerves that sense dryness so you don't produce as many tears), but that's manageable with eyedrops. I do notice my night vision getting slightly worse now in my late forties, but hard to tell if that actually had anything to do with Lasik or if it's just normal aging. No problems with driving at night yet, and eye exams tell me everything is normal.

It's not exempt. I don't trust Steam long term and so don't spend any significant money on it. I only ever buy cheap games for like $8 or less, where I know I'll get that much worth of gameplay in a short time frame and it won't bother me if the platform ever later enshittifies.

Gabe says that the platform will fail-open if ever necessary, that it would revert to offline DRMless functionality. I believe that he has that intention, but the realities of operating from receivership or assimilation by Microsoft would likely be very different.

Note that the "Earth-sized" condition in there is doing some heavy lifting. Earth is a factor of 40x more massive than the largest moon in our solar system. A body needs to be fairly close to Earth's mass to have enough gravity to retain liquid water on its surface. Not that it couldn't happen, but we currently don't have any known precedent for a moon that large.

Short answer, yes. But it's many frames, and over a time span of many nights and now weeks.

I managed to figure out hacking NES Game Genie codes pretty well at about 14, even without any documentation besides the Genie book itself.

I'd read enough library books about computers to understand binary and hexadecimal. So from the existing codes in the Genie book (like 5 lives / 99 lives / etc), I figured out how those values were coming from some of the letters defining binary/hex values. So I could extrapolate to more codes for different values. And from there I realized the other letters must specify the memory location, so I could bump that too and change some different stats that weren't in the book. I particularly had fun with Final Fantasy 1, where I figured out how to set inventory values and even tried out-of-range values and got items that didn't exist.

What I didn't know until years later was the difference between 6-letter (3 byte) and 8-letter (4-byte) codes. The additional byte in the longer code specifies a value such that the override takes place only if the memory location already equals that value. The purpose is to handle bankswitching (memory mappers), to have the code active only when the correct memory bank is. In practice, what this meant was that randomly trying 8-letter codes almost never did anything (1/256 that you happen to hit the right value) and so I only tried the shorter ones, and found a few weird effects from them.

Right. It's the multiple-endpoints principle. The extreme events feel overly frequent because we cherry-pick and only notice them. We never notice the other 99/100 of places that don't have a hundred-year flood in a year.

If slower qualifiers got better position, then what you'd get would be qualifiers deliberately trying to sandbag themselves for that. Such an incentive is never a good look for sports.

The best way I heard this put: Before we worry about terraforming Mars, maybe first we should stop Venusforming Terra.

Yeah, the headline is using "epidemic" clickbaitly just to mean widespread, not transmissible.

The classic real example of actual transmissibility was the Zip drive click of death. A bad drive would damage disks, which would in turn damage another drive they were put in. The case was rarer than people thought but did happen. https://www.grc.com/tip/codfaq4.htm

This is correct (if cells higher than 2048 are allowed, which varies by implementation.) But the game can still be represented in fewer than 16×18 bits, because not every board state is reachable. There can't be more than one cell with the maximum value. And if that is present, then there can't be more than one cell with the next-highest value, and so on. So you could devise some scheme to enumerate all reachable states and skip unreachable ones, and it would take fewer than 16×18 bits to indicate which one. The upper bound is at least bounded by ignoring representing the maximum value and then using 4 bits to indicate its necessarily singular position. There are also some other unreachable configurations, like if many copies of the same value are touching each other, since at least one pair of them would have been combined on the previous move.

There is a lossless JPEG spec and format, though use of it never caught on much: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lossless_JPEG

VGA on a Tandy 1000 wasn't all that unusual. Most if not all of the earlier Tandy 1000 models that had ISA slots could take a VGA card in them. The hardware worked fine (it's just memory bus accesses under 1mb and I/O port instructions), it just depended on software support to do anything with it. Tandy's magazine PCM often listed and rated add-in VGA cards. I remember reading of a later version of DeskMate that supported VGA resolution.

"Galaxies would be destroyed" is extremely misleading hyperbole. Nothing gets destroyed; at most a relatively tiny proportion of the mass hits the central black holes or gets flung out.

They'll get "destroyed" as much as pouring two drinks into the same cup "destroys" them. Nothing gets destroyed, you just get an intermingled mix.

This should be correct. For any cell that isn't green after your first guess, there's only one other possibility for its value.

Well, there is survivor bias there, of course; you don't see the ones that didn't learn to dodge...

I still use PSP 7. Not for anything serious or photo editing, but it's super fast and easy for anything simple like screenshot pasting and cropping. Although it doesn't handle a transparency channel well. For anything that needs that, I switch to Paint.net (and in truth Paint.net probably is superior overall, I just haven't bothered retraining my muscle memory to that rather than PSP.)

The map is from Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri, a game from 25 years ago, a spinoff of the Civilization series, where a colony ship from Earth lands on a planet orbiting Alpha Centauri. In the game's narrative, the colonists use "planetfall" to refer to the landing event and date.

Yes, there was. Electronic Arts owns the IP for Alpha Centauri and has stonewalled trying to do anything with it.

That would be one locale-invariant sort as I said. Sure, you can pick some way of doing it that's least-bad. The codepages are roughly sorted, but what we're debating is the cases where that fails some definition of correctness. The point is there can be no universally correct answer for sorting locales before the user picks one, because that can depend on already knowing the locale itself.

It's a circular dependency: how do you sort and list the locales or languages for someone to pick one, when by definition you don't know their locale yet?

You have to either make some best-guess approximation (IP geo, browser headers, etc) or use a locale-invariant sort, both of which will be wrong in some cases.

Because the components are Leice-ster, not Lei-cester. Same for Glouce-ster, Worce-ster etc. A very refined pronunciation might emit both "s" sounds, but colloquially they get smooshed together into one.