[…]and also a whole range of casus belli to pick from[…]

Would the plural of "casus belli" be "casi bellorum"? Any Latin scholars out there better than I that can confirm or deny?

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I’d say it’s possible to expect to be fighting a better land war in Asia before the end of the year.

You fool! You've committed one of the classic blunders! Never start a land war in Asia! :P

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Came here to give a shout-out to Defense Grid 2—I'd never been into tower defense games until the original Defense Grid came out (back when I was on Windows), then I was hooked. :D (Too bad that one was never ported…)

DG2 runs on my Debian testing setup with an nVidia GTX 750 Ti just fine; I fired it up to check before writing this post and before I knew it it was 2.5 hours later. :whistle:

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Hoping to try out Don't Starve Together with a friend this weekend, he's played it a lot and I've watched him a little but never felt like trying it myself until he gifted me it just this past week. I'll be going in with basically no knowledge of what to do, so it should be "fun" for him. :P

That and probably some more Human: Fall Flat. Such a fun game.

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Wait, so…the news yesterday is that AMD is working with Intel to create integrated graphics solutions to add to Intel CPUs, correct? And now Intel is turning around and going to start competing with AMD (and nVidia of course) in the discrete GPUs market? Huh? :S:

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Quoting: FurorIt's crossplatform multiplayer?

Yes. I got to try it out with my friend playing on Windows this weekend, and we had a blast. I can only imagine the chaos that would come from actually having eight people playing at once!

Some highlights included:

• Grabbing the other person and throwing them off the map (which just respawns you at the last checkpoint, so no big deal, but still hilarious). It seems a bit like Gang Beasts (which I haven't actually played, only watched), where you can control each hand and its ability to grasp independently.


• My friend trying to swing across a gaping chasm on a rope, Tarzan-style…and missing the other end by inches and falling in. :D


• Learning how to climb ledges—there's a really awesome system where you raise your hands above your head, jump to catch the ledge, then look down to pull yourself up. It actually feels like you're the one doing the climbing, not just pushing a button to tell your character to do it. Jumping off a ledge hundreds of feet high and desperately catching another one to pull yourself up on to makes you feel like Indiana Jones.


• Both of us walking together up a pivoting see-saw to jump to a ledge, simultaneously realizing it was pivoting under our weight, and leaping in sync to catch the ledge and pull ourselves up. Just needed some epic music and an explosion in the background to come out of an action movie. :D

I recorded the entire session, so I hope to have a video of the funnier bits up at some point soon-ish.

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Quoting: EikeI don't think so. It's not forbidden not to have competitors - it's forbidden to abuse the powers that come with it.

While I agree with this, from a practical point of view, if you have no competitors it's very easy for anyone to label anything you do that they disagree with as "abusing your monopoly" even if you have no intention of doing so. Keeping a nominal competitor around just so they have someone to point to and say "See? We're not the only game in town!" could be a very pragmatic move on Intel's part.

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Just picked this up for me and a friend to try out this weekend when it went on sale. I'm looking forward to it! :)

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Well, it's taken me a while to get here; I contributed to a number of Kickstarters several years ago* and still occasionally buy an Early Access game, but as mentioned only if I think it'll be worth its price to me now, and keep in mind that it might not ever get updated. (As an astronomer I always keep in mind that a meteorite could vaporize the dev team tomorrow, no matter how much I trust them! :P)

*and had, on the whole, a pretty good success rate with it with a few games I've backed already out (Rain World, Reassembly) and a few more in active development and quite fun to play right now (Parkitect, RimWorld), but one or two in…"indefinite development" have soured me a bit on the idea.

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Quoting: TheRiddickAnd if you look at Earth via a telescope you would think its blue and the surface is blue also. ;)

Which is over 70% correct. ;) But that's a terrible comparison because Mars doesn't have A) vast bodies of liquid water, B) highly-visible and reflective clouds, or C) plant life, all of which make the Earth a vastly more complicated system to analyze.

Quoting: slaapliedjeBesides, from what I'd read it wasn't the ground really that was reddened, but the sky as well. http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-YXyFj3wFBTY/U9WVMrJT9sI/AAAAAAAAFGU/TIIXmyIQHno/s1600/Slide84.JPG [External Link]

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/outthere/2013/03/20/what-color-is-the-red-planet-really/ [External Link]

That photo is flat-out wrong, as explained in the very article you linked, which explains it well: color balance is a pretty subjective thing. Does any digital camera actually reproduce colors as we actually see them? No. It just records photon counts on a CCD through different filters, which we process with software to try to get colors that roughly approximate what we see with our eyes. Process the resulting image and you can make it look however you like, which is what those "blue sky" images are: skewed with a white balance to make the scene look like it would on Earth to help geologists better identify geological features. The article itself points out that the first photo in it—of a reddish, ocher-ish Mars—is explicitly processed to be as close to "what a typical cell phone camera" would take from the same location.

Yes, it's true that Mars doesn't look quite as saturated red as those first Viking images did (which is what the left image in the linked photo is from). But that's entirely due to advances in digital photo color processing methods, not some shadowy coverup by NASA.

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