OrbWeaver

It depends if the giant light is a shadowcaster or not. 2000 chair-shaped shadow volumes would slow performance quite a bit.

Well Slashdot is certainly not averse to posting anti-"war-on-terror" material, so I don't suppose that was the reason. Probably because a) it is Britain, rather than the USA, and because it hasn't actually passed yet, it is just going through the process (although they do sometimes post things that haven't yet come to pass).

I have to agree with obscurus to an extent. Much as I dislike the censorship and oppression of the Chinese government, I hate the lies and hypocrisy of western governments a whole lot more. Plus, at least the Chinese government implements its policies because it believes them to be in the national interest of China, rather than the US and UK governments that implement policies because they benefit corporate America.

I don't suppose it will be long before some corporate turd decides that turning off AutoPlay is illegal. Not that they will get anywhere. As far as I know the DMCA has gone to court twice in the USA - once by Lexmark, attempting to prevent other companies from refilling their cartridges, and once by a garage door manufacturer who wanted to outlaw the sale of replacement remote controls for their doors. Both lost.

Sounds familiar. T3 does that as well.

The funny thing is, America with its Bill of Rights still ends up as one of the most draconian regimes in the western world. I think there are two main things that prevent the UK from going too far down that road, even though there is no formal Bill of Rights. 1) Very good media, such as the BBC, that is not afraid to attack the government where necessary. The jingoistic fuming of Fox News and the like simply don't happen over here to any notable extent. 2) The parliamentary system which requires all new laws to be debated (not just voted for - properly debated) several times before they can be passed, allowing compromises to be made following criticism from the opposition (or even the government's MPs). There is also no special power granted to the Prime Minister - no veto or anything like that. I guess things like the EU and the European Court of Human Rights help to some extent as well.

I wonder if it would be possible to write a program/driver/service that would ensure that anything launched via AutoPlay would run with reduced privileges, under a special sandbox userid. There could then be an option to run the program with normal/Admin privileges if the user actually needed to (such as when installing a program).

Of course. Why do you think the government is so keen to introduce more "vocational" qualifications, and dumb down the entire education system with stupid league tables that nobody wants? Because an uneducated populace with no capacity for rational thought does not present an obstacle to the government's desire to extend its power.

See here: http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=167099&cid=13932333 for removal instructions. And no, I have not tested this and have no intention of doing so.

Except that even the masses will get pretty pissed off when Granny's Windows machine becomes unusable and can no longer burn CDs due to some malware that Sony has installed.

What exactly is the problem with falling crates in the D3 engine? I thought that standard Newtonian stuff like this was already implemented.

Obscurus: I tend to agree, when I see what the Australian government does I actually feel quite positive about the British one. sparhawk: Yep, that is a well-known tactic used by salesman, called the "door-in-your-face" technique. Basically you ask for something absolutely outrageous, then after the inevitable response you back down, say "I agree that was over the top, how about this?" and present something slightly less outrageous that was what you wanted all along. You get what you want, and your opponents thing they have accomplished something by getting you to "concede", even though you actually did nothing of the sort.

No. But we all know the British government doesn't give a monkey's about what anybody wants except themselves. This is after all the country where you can be convicted for typing in a URL. I expect a lot of this stuff would get struck down by the courts if it was ever used, but that still takes time and some poor sod has to suffer by being the test case.

Bingo. Nobody can ever know whether there is a god or not, and any guesses about the god's qualities that you care to make are more likely to be wrong than right (due to simple probability).

That's what I was referring to as well

From my limited understanding of OpenGL, the difference between drawing and calculating is whether the draw-to-frame flag is enabled or not.

Yes, but the effect of smoothing is achieved by modifying the normal vector - standard Gouraud shading for example calculates the lighting at the vertices (based on vertex normals) and then interpolates the shading over the face to create a smooth effect. It is already possible to modify the way the vertex normals are calculated (with the unsmoothedTangents global keyword), so it is not beyond the realms of possibility that the algorithm could be further modified by a property in the mesh.

I guess a smoothing angle would be the amount that the normal vector is rotated as it approaches the edge of a face - if there is no smoothing it is always perpendicular, if it is fully smoothed it is averaged over the adjacent faces, and if it is a little bit smoothed (20%) it is rotated slightly towards the edge but not enough to produce complete smoothing. I know nothing about how the Doom 3 engine calculates normal vectors though, so this is just speculation.

I agree entirely. The best part of life in my view is the knowledge that it won't last forever. As for reincarnation, if it is assumed that you will have no memory of your previous life (which it generally is - even those who believe in reincarnation don't generally remember what happened the last time around), then there is no distinction whatsoever between reincarnation and death.

I guess that depends on how the smoothing is implemented. If exporting from Blender you have to physically unweld points that must not be smoothed. It is possible that this is due to the exporter, but I am fairly sure the script does export a MESH_SMOOTHING key based on the setting for each vertex.

It does if you use ASE models. For LWO things may be different. True. If the model is actually meant to be round when viewed by the player, then you need about 32 sides to make it look convincing.

Remember that Doom 3 automatically smooths models. For round shapes you can get away with 8 or 9 sides, or even as few as 5 if you don't really see the end point.

You can use vertex colours in Doom 3 if you use Goofos' export script to export to a .ASE. I don't know whether the LWO exporter works or not.

There is that, as well as the dim lighting, sound effects, group hysteria and I wouldn't be surprised if they burned some sort of hallucinogenic incense as well.

I tried that - "Failed to create entity" is the response.