The very many questions-not-worth-their-own-thread question thread XXIV

[Kyriakos]

Some (granted, very very famous) British actors are regularly the main stars in US films. For example Ralph Fiennes, Sean Bean, and that scottish guy from Trainspotting (no, i don't mean that other scottish guy from Trainspotting, who later on played adolph hitler ).

 

[Cutlass]

Sons of Anarchy, The Walking Dead and True Blood also have British leads. At this point, it's not really an exception, just a thing that sometimes happens.

(It's certainly more common than British producers casting American actors for British-accented roles.)

No, Whedon did that, casting 2 Americans to play Brits.

 

[Traitorfish]

Whedon is American, though, and American producers are willing to let American actors take a crack at British accents. (Less so these days, it must be said, presumably because they got sick of us whinging about it.) British producers almost never let Americans take on British-accented roles.

 

[PlutonianEmpire]

I have a problem. I recently purchased a laptop, and I cannot get programs to run on a full-screen resolution on it. Both Sim City 4 and Civilization 3 insist on squaring up. I've tried changing the resolutions in-game, it doesn't work. Huge margins on the sides of the screen remain black and unused. I've gotten it to happen before, on my old computer, which was a wider-than-normal screen, but a desktop. I'm nearly positive that I didn't do anything on it to make these programs do that. But how can I make this happen now?

Having re-installed SimCity 4, I'm having a similar problem, but with stretching instead of bars, and the options posted a few posts down were of absolutely no help at all. Not to mention that the in-game graphics keep auto-resetting to the defaults after every. single. game. start.

Any ideas?

 

[Azurian]

Having re-installed SimCity 4, I'm having a similar problem, but with stretching instead of bars, and the options posted a few posts down were of absolutely no help at all. Not to mention that the in-game graphics keep auto-resetting to the defaults after every. single. game. start.

Any ideas?

Have you tried running as administrator? Usually when your settings default is because of that.

 

[KMRblue1027]

Having re-installed SimCity 4, I'm having a similar problem, but with stretching instead of bars, and the options posted a few posts down were of absolutely no help at all. Not to mention that the in-game graphics keep auto-resetting to the defaults after every. single. game. start.

Any ideas?

SimCity 4 has a cmd hack to get widesceen. You can't do it from in game. You need to add this line on your target of your shortcut. -CustomResolution:enabled -r1600x900x32 -f. Just change it to w/e resolution you need (I think it crashes above 1080p though).

Also make sure you're set to hardware not software render. The setting get reset because the software render is only stable with very specific settings.

 

[PlutonianEmpire]

SimCity 4 has a cmd hack to get widesceen. You can't do it from in game. You need to add this line on your target of your shortcut. -CustomResolution:enabled -r1600x900x32 -f. Just change it to w/e resolution you need (I think it crashes above 1080p though).

Also make sure you're set to hardware not software render. The setting get reset because the software render is only stable with very specific settings.

Isn't that a steam command? I don't use or have steam. I install everything from disk.

 

[KMRblue1027]

Isn't that a steam command? I don't use or have steam. I install everything from disk.

No it's natively built into the program. I actually think you can't do the trick on steam.

 

[Synobun]

It's a Microsoft command.



You put it at the end of the Target field, after the ".

 

[PlutonianEmpire]

Heh, I had been using the "(for 1280x800)" in the target field instead, rather than the cmd line structure.

It works now, thanks.

 

[GinandTonic]

Has there been a thread with discussion of the recent Daily Mail fracas? Looked for one but couldnt find one.

 

[Cutlass]

Don't recall one. Go for it.

 

[Wrymouth3]

Has there been a thread with discussion of the recent Daily Mail fracas? Looked for one but couldnt find one.

It could be worse, Parliament could just decide that The Sun (trashiest newspaper in the world) is the most legitimate newspaper in Britain. The "Would You Let This Man Near Your Daughter" headline referring to Ben Zephaniah was uh, quite something.

 

[GinandTonic]

Right, i'll have a pop at it. Just cooking dinner so prob be tomorrow. TBH it's worth it for them letting Campbell out of his cage, and the "Velociraptor eating a sheep" interview. If anyone can be arsed to knock anything out tonight feel free.

 

[Samson]

If you work for an american company, and you get to expence things such as a taxi ride or a meal, can you expence the tip?

I work in the UK, and frequently have to go to the US to work. I cannot expence tips, so I either end up out of pocket for things that should be covered or I do not leave a tip when it is quite inappropriate to do so. I am interested how it works over their.

 

[Farm Boy]

Depends I think. I've worked at a place that let people expense tips, sometimes, and you would run into the problem where they would tip some stupidly high percentage because either they're really nice or they figure, screw it, it isn't their money. So it seemed like that level of generosity was only extended to, say, interview candidates that were traveling on the prospective employer's dime. I'd be surprised if it didn't vary from place to place though.

 

[really]

I was able to expense tips - it was generally better to get it on the printed bill though which wasn't always straightforward.

 

[PlutonianEmpire]

I was looking at some of the pages on Wiki when looking up stuff for a sci-fi project, and I noticed that some of the numbers containing exponents, have parenthesis, like this one for the Atomic Mass Unit: 1.660538921(73)×10^−27

What are the parenthesis surrounding the "73" meant to indicate?

 

[cardgame]

I would hazard a guess at there being 73 more decimals. I really don't know, haven't ever seen anything like that before.

 

[Kennigit]

normally that indicates significant figures.

i.e. they can't confidently say 1.66053892173 vs 1.66053892172. normally though I just see it on the last digit reported.

edit- you can see that on the page where the data is from, NIST:
http://physics.nist.gov/cgi-bin/cuu/Value?u|search_for=abbr_in!

so I guess that's the way they write the uncertainty instead of on the last digit. 1.6605389(2) would mean uncertainty on the last digit, but apparently they somehow have a way to characterise its uncertainty as being 0.000000073 * 10^-27