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You don't need to be a streetlawyer to predict Adequacy.org's future. The hand writing is on the wall: Adequacy faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for Adequacy.org because Adequacy is dying. Things are looking very bad for Adequacy. As many of us are already aware, Adequacy continues to lose site traffic.

Let's try to keep the facts and look at the numbers.

Slashdot leader Rob "CmdrTaco" Malda states that there are about 5000 semi-regular posters to Slashdot.org. How many users of Geekizoid are there? The ratio of Slashdot to Geekizoid posts is roughly in ratio of 100 to 1. Therefore there are about 5000/100 = 50 occasional Geekizoid posters. The ratio of Adequacy posters to Geekizoid posters is about 5 to 1. Therefore there are 50 * 5 = 250 occasional posters to Adequacy.org. This is approximately equal to the number of editors listed on Adequacy's website added to the eleven non-editors who read the site.

Traffic to Adequacy continues to diminish. In July 2001, Adequacy received approximately 160,000 pageviews. In August, Adequacy received only 80,000 pageviews. The number of pageviews in September (as of September 11) is 60,000, a
paltry 37% of its July traffic. At current rates, the amount of Adequacy traffic will hit 0 by the end of the year.

According to Netcraft, Adequacy's situation is grim. Due to the troubles of Speakeasy DSL, DoS attacks and so on, Adequacy was forced out of business and was taken over by JAT Computer Consulting which hosts another troubled website. Now JAT Computer Consulting is also dying, its corpse being turned over to another charnal house.

All major surveys show that Adequacy has steadily declined in readership. Adequacy is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If Adequacy is to survive at all it will be among right-wing maniacs, Libertarians, and trolls. Adequacy continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, Adequacy.org
is dead.

Before making a decision on any broadband provider, do yourself a favor and visit http://www.dslreports.com . And, after signing up with a provider, return the favor and report your experience there as well.

Oh...and should you happen to choose SpeakEasy (one of the highest rated ones), do me a favor and tell them pjwal referred you so I can get a free month ;-).

With a text-to-speech system, you can get voice output without having to worry about bandwith issues, poor quality sound, or people without a microphone.

With Netrek's RCD macro system, it's pretty nifty the things you can do. For example, a player who is in a base is hurt, and pushes a single key for generic distress, causing everyone on their team to get a message like:
F0->FED Help(SB)! 0% shd, 50% dmg, 70% fuel, WTEMP! 9 armies!
But your client will speak, "Base hurt, weapon temped", because all those numbers are a pain to listen to. Later the base is ok, so he pushes the same key.
F0->FED Help(SB)! 99% shd, 0% dmg, 99% fuel, 1 army!
Now the client just speaks, "Base is ok". The macros can have "if" statements based on the relevant values, e.g. if(damage>50) "hurt" else "is ok". It's a lot faster to just push a key than to say the relevant information. And if you don't have all the noise, you don't lose text communication with your teammates.

BTW, if it wasn't obvious, this is a shameless plug.

I agree; Your right, integration of knowledge is a higher problem. A friend of mine getting his PhD in Physics in Berkeley related a number of papers to me that said that even graduate physicists would resort back to Aristotilian models of the world (forced, natural, and animate motion, but mostly "forced motion") when confronted with problems that didn't match the ones they tackled in books.

But I think people who had a clear grasp through intuition and pictures would be better equipped to tackle the integration challenges.

One of my students came to class, and I asked him, "How's math going?" He replied, "Good, I just did great on a test on the Pythagorean theorem." I said, "Oh really? Did you show the teacher the proof I taught you?" He sort of looked puzzled, and said, "Hunh?" And I said, "Yeah, remember, 'Asquared + Bsquared + 2AB yadda yadda...'?" He said, "That's the Pythagorean Theorem?!"

The thing is, he knew this proof that I had shown him left and right, forward and backwards, inside and out. We'd gone over it several times. But since I didn't call it "The Pythagorean Theorem," he didn't have that link, and hadn't linked it up.

I also asked him, "If you have a spaceship at (5,3), and a missle headed toward it at (1,1), what's the distance between them?" He couldn't answer it. Then I gave him a triangle and asked for the length of the hypoteneus. He could do it. But he wasn't able to integrate the two ideas together until I manually showed him how. I remember having the same difficulties myself, a long time ago.

I think as humans, we're just really bad with our internal communication/thought and crossreferencing. It takes a certain degree of feeling like you have "ownership" of an idea, like you are holding it in your hand, and you are going to weild it like a weapon against all the other ideas and situations in the world. "Knowing how to get the length of a hypoteneus, how can we approach the problem of the distance between two points (positions specified by orthogonal vectors)".

I guess the thing is to make sure to ensure that students build a framework of interconnected ideas. I think the constructivist school of thought is a good idea; I wonder if there is a way to teach this a little more explicitly.

My cutoff is on March 1. I've currently got a 144k IDSL circuit, mainly because I'm 26480ft from my local CO. My ISP, Speakeasy.org , is giving me a "reimbursement" of sorts. Since I now have a dedicated pair ran out to my house, I'll be going the ISDN route. Bellsouth, my phone company, offers dual BRI's with POTS and caller id, call waiting compatibility for only $84/month (240hrs). Nothing like good 'ole ISDN. I'm just going to miss stat IP's and 144k channel speed.

I recently realized that, with the exception of Final Fantasy 9 (which is more of a story), I haven't played any games in a long time. "What am I doing?" I thought. I then realized that I was playing games, just other types of games: How can I help the Free Software movement, How can I maximize my contribution to society and self, how can I promote, learn about, and work on, groupware. Learning is also another type of game, that I play.

What's common to games? I liked the definition I read on the WorldForge project page: You've got a goal, you've got obstructions, and you try to meet the goal through the obstructions. And, that description matches the games that I play, video-game or otherwise (contributing, learning, etc.,.).

Now the question is: What seperates a game from Work? The description above seems to also describe work rather well. Almost by definition, I hate work, but I love games (Cosmic Encounters, for name-dropping). So what's the difference? For this, I draw on Taoism, that book "Flow" (John Carmak recently referenced it), and Miyamoto-sama, who emphatically repeated at GDC 1999 that the game-playing experience must be "comfortable". Perhaps the only difference between work and a game is that the game is comfortable, whereas the game is, well,... Work. I'm still working on this definition. (Mary Poppins said that with a spoonful of sugar, you just snap, and the job's a game. While I like this idea, I have trouble in the impementation; perhaps I'm just not snapping my fingers correctly. Maybe I need to meditate more.)

Given this description, what are the types of games that I'm interested in playing? Personally, I'm really interested in games that cross-over into the domain of my livelihood, and the livelihood of others around me. I'd like the principle of game-ness to shove out work-ness from my life. I wouldn't fret if work completely disappeared from my life. Computers fit the bill rather well. I've always considered the operation of computers to be something of a game, since I was a wee little one, and I've always had an intuition that it would pay the bills. (That intuition turned out to be right.) But still, there's a lot that's uncomfortable about it. It's just like when you're in the maze, and all the doors are locked, and there isn't a key in sight. You're absolutely stuck. You were slated to finish a programming task in 2 days, and it's taken you 2 WEEKS, and you still don't know how you're going to get out of it. This is an uncomfortable situation, and draws me out of the realm of the game, into the realm of work. Ugh. And I was trying so hard to get out of that realm. Where am I going with all of this? Well, I'm trying to establish the similarities and subtle differences between work and games, and then I'm trying to segue into how I think that we can structure things so that work can become more like a game. My ultimate goal is to get feedback from you, build interest in the subject, and have you send me links and other references to related lines of thought.

So, I've found this neat way of teaching that can make a game out of learning. It gives you immediate positive rewards, it helps out in the world (because you learn a valuable skill), and you don't get stuck with no keys and lots of locked doors, because it has a built in help line, that you can call on and get a quick piece of help.

The way I found I learned from Philip Greenspun. He uses problems and a community system as integral parts of the ArsDigita training program. It works like this: You have a number of problems, in gradually increasing difficulty, that the learner tackles. Lecture is rather secondary to the problem statements themselves. Lecture is useful, in so much as it helps with the problems. The problems are rather UNIX-like in that the goal is to teach the student one thing, and teach it well. Anyways, I've been working on installing the ACS, and it's been going well so far. Whenever I have a problem, I go to the web bulliten board, search for the problem. Most likely someone had it before, and I get the answer there. If not, I write an entry to the list, and within 5-15 minutes, get a reply. (Once I had to wait 6 hours, though...) The reply then goes on to the board, so that others can get the solution as well. In fact, it's like this with most of our online systems, except that the response time isn't as small, you have to sort through google entries, and usually you have to subscribe/unsubscribe to/from mailing lists, etc., etc.,.

Anyways, I've tried out the method of problem guides in the Fledging Unix Programmers class that I teach, and it's had excellent results. Problems show up when the difficulty between problems is too high, so I subdivide those intervals. It works great.

But what I'm really looking for is for other people to do the same thing.. There are a lot of times in my life where I have 2-3 hours spare, and I'd like to play a game in that time. I'd like a good set of 3-5 problems, workable within 2 hours total, that increase my knowledge about the Linux Kernel, PHP, How to use databases, link things up, make a small game, play with networking, etc., whatever. Do you know what I mean? (Please answer.) So what I'd like to have is, not so much HOW-TO's, but PROBLEM-GUIDE's. And support lines consisting of other people who are interested in the subject, and have completed the guides themselves. Well balanced problem guides. That way, I can play games on a daily basis that are comfortable, educational, and most importantly, fun.

"One of the best fundamental principles that anybody ever expressed to me about game design is that games should teach you how to play them."

If you don't believe me, try downloading my Netrek client Paradise-2000 and running the static glibc2.1 binary on a system with an older libc. Hostname lookups won't work. The problem is that glibc2.1's resolve code tries to access the dynamic library /lib/libnss_files.so.2, which doesn't exist on pre-glibc2.1 systems. Since this library isn't dynamically linked, it doesn't show up in the output of ldd, you can't statically link it when you compile the program. Rather, the /lib/libnss_* libraries are loaded with dlopen().

So I'm forced to compile three separate static versions of my program, and that doesn't even count glibc2.2 which I'm not using yet.

Another problem with static linking is one of efficiency. A statically linked program has it's own copy of the libc (huge) in the executable. Besides making the executable huge if you want to download it, it uses a ton of extra memory. Instead of using the copy of libc that is probably already in memory and shared with the processes you have running, the statically linked program needs to load its own private copy of the libc code into memory, which won't get shared with any other program. The result is the memory needs of your system would double or more if every binary you had was statically linked.

Here's another
e-text of the Lord of the Rings. But it seems to have mutated a bit ...

I wrote some code to run life on 3d surfaces. http://www.speakeasy.org/~morse/life

4 What difference does an electoral system make where the difference between the candidates is almost zero. We would be better served with a random lottery. Who cares about if a candidate gets 10% of the pop vote but 0 electoral votes. Isn't it much more serious when a candidate wins with say 45% of the total vote and that vote represents 45% of the people who can vote. One could say that you no longer live in a Democracy with numbers like that.

An excellent alternative to the current system is preferential voting. Ranking candidates ensures "that whoever wins the election will have the support of the majority of the electorate". That way I don't have to be afraid that my vote for Nader is going to get Bush elected. Whether this would encourage apathetic voters to return to the polls is another question.

Then there is porportional representation, but that doesn't work so well for single-position offices.

That's interesting; I've only received nothing but the kindest of service from SpeakEasy.

SpeakEasy is the most politically aware and open network, having made an explicit commitment to freedoms in their mission statement and terms of service. I had to turn down several ISP's (such as InternetConnect) because of their draconian TOS (which included that they can charge me $1,000 if I potentially infringe on IP). SpeakEasy is the only ISP I trust.

Just recently, Nader spoke at the SpeakEasy cafe off 2nd and Bell, downtown Seattle. SpeakEasy has lent the back room to Free Radio Seattle as well. If SpeakEasy isn't a safe ISP, I don't know who is.

I can also recommend Speakeasy. I've been with them for 10 months now and since they've added the NYC POP, have had very few problems (and most of those seem to be with COVAD rather than Speakeasy). Last time I looked at their terms of service it was basically no porn servers, no chat servers and they reserve the right to convert you to a commercial account if your bandwidth gets out of hand. Plus they'll give you multiple static IP addresses. As for those saying "just do it", I know that MediaOne in the Boston area not only does port scans, but also locks the connection to the MAC address of the network card requiring a phone card if you want to upgrade your machine (to a NAT server for instance!) And remember that just because the ISP lets you get away with it for now, once they've picked all of the "low hanging fruit", the next easiest source of money may be forced commercial upgrades.

This page spells out in painful detail why the Bakshi adaptation sucked, how many levels it sucked at, ad nauseum. It is well worth the read, IMHO, particularly for the people here who have hazier memories of the books and the films.

I had an opportunity to speak with Dr. de Garis over a year ago at a party thrown by an acquaintance of mine who had interviewed de Garis for a documentary on Nanotechnology and AI. I found Dr. de Garis intelligent, personable and amusing.

At the time he was rather pessimistic about the Robokoneko project, but mostly because of the cultural problems he was dealing with as a Britisher in Japan. However he claimed that the artificial neuron work was proceding well, even though they were doing it all with simulators. He predicted then that, before 2000, they would be creating silicon versions. From the information in the links it would seem that his prediction has come true. Only they are using FPGA chips instead of going to a foundry for CAM specific VLSI.

It is interesting to note that Dr. de Garis has made incredible progress by following a path the mainstream AI community has largely discounted -- that of modeling real neurons and real brain structures. I wonder what will come out of his next collaborative development at Starlab in Brussels? From his statements to me I would certainly hope he would find the living and working arrangements more congenial.

I do find it very interesting that he will be working with Lernout and Hauspie (developers of Voice Recognition software). The spin-offs from that may be more important than the original research!

Jack