I agree with both arguments: In my examples it doesn't look natural (and having such a boring box is really a worst-case but serves well to show the effect very clearly), but on the other side it must be seen in context (like others said before). While nature doesn't have "translucent" materials, this soft edge can be interpreted as a transition you can often see in the real world: be it, that a little bit of sand and dust from the ground sticks on the base of the object or just a variation of the ground-height which avoids an unnatural straight line between the two "elements".
It is of course a hack, and it doesn't work perfectly fine when looking so close at the box, but in my eyes it works very well for e.g. the stones. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to overwrite the shader to disable the blending in the game. I'd have loved to show how Deus Ex looks Without this effect.
maybe i'm doing something wrong, but when i click a link or enter a url, i always get errors like "Error 500. Dejavu.org 2006-05-10: We are having some problems after a disk failure, will fix asap. Sorry/Pär
SSL negotiation failed:"
Not sure...is this a joke because the error message is from 2006?