OrbWeaver

That sounds initially appealing, but it is very dangerous. The problem is that if you make the punishment for an offence equivalent to murder, then there is no rational reason for a person caught committing that offence not to murder in order to avoid conviction. For example, some people may consider rape to be such a heinous crime that it should be punished with life imprisonment. However, if you do this, what will happen is that rapists will simply kill their victims after raping them in order to remove the witness - and they will be no worse off for it because the punishment is the same in both cases.

So why do the women wear such clothes? Because they're comfortable, or provide better insulation against cold? I don't think so. Women who wear these clothes have just as much responsibility for the "objectification of women" as the men who look at them. People who act like objects can expect to get treated like objects.

Individual choice is what makes life worth living. I see very little point in being alive if you are just a servant to some higher authority that you did not choose and does not speak for you. Also, who is "society as a whole"? There is no group of people that can be said to speak for everybody - even elected governments are not necessarily representative and have their own agendas. When you talk about "society" making decisions, in reality this is just a certain group of powerful individuals making their own decisions which other people have to adhere to. The interesting thing is that people who hold the view that the "will of society" should overrule individual choice, only hold this view as long as "society" holds the same views they do. What if society decided that it would be better served if people did not waste their time making 3D models and cooking, and instead should be made to go out and do charity work (which is clearly a greater net benefit to society)?

I'm sure you've heard the saying "your right to swing your fist ends at my face". I respect people's right to do what they want in the privacy of their own home, as long as it is not directly harming other people. If they want to get stoned and collapse on their own sofa that's fine by me - if they try to drive while under the influence or get drunk and attack people in the street then they should be stopped. The law should take effect at the point where other people's rights are violated, and not before (this applies to everything, not just drugs). It is not hypocritical, merely balanced (or perhaps excessively liberal depending on your viewpoint). Are you assuming that the only reason people don't take drugs is because it's illegal, and if it was de-criminalised everybody would do it? This seems rather unlikely to me, particularly since most people have no objection with copying CDs for their friends or watching DVDs on Linux, both of which are also illegal.

I would tend to agree that drugs are a bad thing, but I don't agree that they should be prohibited. People need to be held responsible for their own choices, not protected by some arbitrarily-selected "common good" legislation which has a dangerous tendency to slip towards moral fascism (blasphemy laws, anyone?). However, I do believe people whose health problems are directly caused by drugs should be given a lower priority in the health service - why should genuinely sick people have to compete for attention in hospital with some idiot student having his stomach pumped?

Hell, Americans speak English but they still don't get a lot of British humour.

Alcohol is still used as a disinfectant in some circumstances. It is very cheap but also non-toxic, which makes it good for the sort of disinfectant you want in a first aid kit for cuts and scrapes, rather than the type you use to clean the bath. You can even use "drink" in an emergency, if you cut yourself and have only a bottle of brandy to hand. [OT: strange that my post disappeared from the forum, even after it was quoted in a reply]

Doom 3 should make it easier to avoid this problem though, with its Walk IK system etc. Certainly the ticks/trites were very believable, especially when compared with the spiders in T1/T2 which were not much better than the T3 cats in animation terms.

Beauty is in fact not much more than the number (1 + sqrt(5))/2 applied in various different ways to the human form (called the "golden mean"), plus a heavy dose of physical symmetry. It signifies youth and health, which are important qualities in choosing a mate since they increase the possibility of the offspring surviving. In short, men who did not like beauty would have been naturally selected out of the species a long time ago.

DDS works well for a lot of things, but for certain images it produces very nasty artifacts, particularly if you have diagonal lines or smooth gradients in the texture. With normal maps this can be particularly obvious, which is why Doom 3 in High Quality compresses diffusemaps but not normalmaps. You can see what a DDS-only game looks like if you play TDS - all of the textures are DXT1 and some of them look ghastly, particularly when light hits them at a sharp angle.

The Dark Mod could not use Source even if it wanted to, since Source does not offer a proper dynamic lighting model for thief-like games.

If you precreate the DDS files, do you still need the TGAs? Perhaps a "low bandwidth" version could be made with just DDS, rather than going TGA -> JPG -> TGA -> DDS which as Fingernail points out will look atrocious. If this isn't an option, how about a downscaled version with textures 256x256 and lower?

I don't think it is leather. It looks more like PVC or similar.

It is the same in my company - the department that produces software actually "licenses" its software internally for other accounts to use, at considerable cost. This never makes sense to me since "licensing" is just granting somebody a defense against what would normally be copyright infringement, and a company cannot infringe its own copyright.

56k users are more or less out of the game as far as downloading modern graphics content is concerned, unless you stick to 32x32 textures and 100-poly models.

It is more than likely that there is absolutely no communication or coordination between Sony BMG and Sony Electronics (or whatever it's called). If you think how disorganised even a single large company can be, this is nothing compared to two essentially separate companies that are linked only by name and overall ownership.

Is that compressed on uncompressed? With all my "mini-Darkmod" custom content my base folder is already about 200 megs uncompressed, although there is quite a lot of crap in there that I haven't yet got round to deleting. I will be very impressed in the final Dark Mod can fit on a CD, especially if there are a lot of 1024x1024 TGA normal maps.

It depends on the number of developers and the amount of time spent on the project. There is nothing "inherently" slow about OSS development; if a project is slow it is because not enough time is being put into it, perhaps because few people are interested in it. Projects like Blender, FireFox and Linux move very quickly. It was only a few years ago that there was no decent web browser available for Linux (most of them had problems with rendering in some way), and fonts looked absolutely crap. Now I use Firefox on all my computers and fonts in Gnome look way better than Windows.

I only use Windows for games. Everthing else (with the exception of looking things up on D3W, iddevnet etc) is done in Linux. Malware problem solved.

Er....I agree?

The fallout will be beneficial to anti-DRM efforts though, since "copy-protected CD" will become synonymous with "contains that software that damages you computer like Sony tried to use" in the minds of many buyers.

Chicken and egg problems do get solved, it just take time. OSS use is increasing, and more and more companies will take advantage of it as the market becomes viable. There is certainly a place for projects like ReactOS, but I would see them more as a stopgap measure rather than a permanent solution.

With a modern OS it would (you'd probably need over twice that just to load the terminal/command window), but in the days of DOS 3.3 where such games were common, you could get by quite comfortably with 640 k.

If a DOS-based text adventure requires 12 megs of RAM, the programmer deserves a slap.

I've heard that Sony disks are not very reliable at all (quite aside from Sony being assholes, which would put me off buying any of their products).