There are many, many disappoints I have with Half Life 2. One of them is that I didn’t care about the characters, and that’s partly because they respawn. In Half Life 1, the scientists and Barnies are little more than stick figures like you say, but when they die they die and they don’t come back. You might meet a…

Did you play Far Cry when it first came out? It was about 6 months before Half Life 2, and while its physics may not have been quite as good, they were of the same order in my view. I would do things like shoot cables to see how the thing they were suspending moved without the support. It’s why I wasn’t so impressed…

Um, no? I’m not saying anything about America, nor am I generalising about Italy. I’m just answering the question as to why she came up with a name during the interrogation. You think that because she wasn’t water-boarded, it was fine? No, what happened to her at the police station wasn’t fine. There are right and…

At that point she’d been interrogated for several days, often without a proper translator, and was exhausted to the point of not thinking straight. The police lied to her, and claimed to have evidence that didn’t exist, and then asked her to explain it. She tried to figure out a possible explanation and said, “maybe…

I’m not sure if it was owned by Spacecom or by Israel Aerospace Industries. IAI built it, they were insuring it at the time, and the final payment for it would only be made after it had made orbit and passed its final acceptance tests. I suspect that until that final payment was made, it was still technically property…

People make mistakes in the heat of the moment, sure, but Jessica has plenty of time to think about this stuff, and she does come up with plans. They just don’t make much sense. It’s not that she’s stupid, really, it’s that she’s inconsistently stupid.

“way too many of the comments criticize her for being a bitch and physically unattractive” — I just read the thread. I only see one comment making that point, by kevinkylekeath. Are you saying that one comment is “way too many”?

Well, for me, her not realising she was immune to Gilgrave until many episodes after the audience realised it was stupid. Also her knowing she could neuter him with a sound-proofed room, but not realising she (or her colleagues) could wear headphones until very late. I thought her plan to make him reveal his powers on…

Really? Why?

I think the problem is that they’re competing with real human actors, who are relatively cheap and look great. It’s hard to make virtual porn look good. It’s practical for still images, but for moving images it looks wrong unless you do a lot of work in simulating muscles and bones under the skin, the way the skin…

It’s not the taboo, directly. It’s that too many people have no qualms about pirating it. When so much is available for free, people think you’re stupid to pay for porn.

One of the reasons I loved Quake more than Quake II is that the first has enemies that are varied and full of character, while the second has enemies that are all variations on the theme of robot.

I struggle to understand why some people prefer third-person. Your question confirms that part of it is people wanting to see Lara Croft’s butt while they play. Especially games based around a property, like a Bond or some other film; they licenced the character so they make you look at the character. It doesn’t work…

For me the problem is less “games became too gamey” and more games becoming too cinematic. They want to show you nice visuals, which is a fine goal, but often the way they do it breaks immersion. In DX:HR, for example, it has cool take-down sequences but they are shown in 3rd person rather than 1st. The advantage is…

The investigation is needed to understand what caused the incident and to prevent it ever happening again. There’s a lot that’s not understood about it.

Did you even look at the video? The issue is not whether explosions happened later during the incident, but whether the initial event proceeded slowly enough to allow escape. It’s pretty clear from the video, and knowledge about how the Dragon 2 abort works, that it did. This was a survivable disaster.

He didn’t say “human life”. There’s a lot living in sewer water.

Assuming what? What Musk says here is apparent from the video. The fire spread slowly enough that Dragon 2 could have escaped. Here’s the video, with commentary, including about Dragon 2 at the end:

Not just the jump to multi-cellular. The jump from Prokaryotic to Eukaryotic is also hard and took billions of years. This discovery means it took even longer than we thought before.

Indeed. SpaceX never had a failure they didn’t learn from. I don’t think they’ve ever failed the same way twice.