Slashdot Mirror

The blog Colony Drop has been compiling quotes on the quake through the eyes of fans of Japan (and, more specificly, their cartoons), at their new website "Shit Otaku Say," which is recommended reading.

Whether you interpret what you read there as sad or funny is up to you.

I think a student phrased it perfectly.

Why stop there...

I couldn't stop myself from reading this post in Pixelfari.

Indeed, I've been chronicling this periodically up at http://obamaisthenewbush.tumblr.com/

This administration -- and the Justice Department in particular -- has been absolutely terrible on the right to privacy.

So much for HOPE, CHANGE, and PROGRESS.

My god you're right!

He could have made a rape joke.

http://thedailyindexed.tumblr.com/

See, the whole thing is actually a web site. When you pay 99c for the app on the iPad, you're buying a nice index.

Go through the indexed pages. Can you find me one story that's worth paying for, that offers value unavailable elsewhere?

But what I really want to know is...
How do fucking magnets work?

Like so! (alternative link.)

But what I really want to know is...
How do fucking magnets work?

Like so! (alternative link.)

"Real stupidity beats artificial intelligence every time.
        Terry Pratchett, Hogfather"

AI, in general, isn't what most people think it is. You can make a stupidly-hard-to-beat game where the opponent plays "perfectly" against you, with perfect timing and unencumbered by the physical constraints of a controller, and you get what happens in most of the Street Fighter series (or about any other fighting game), where the "hardest difficulty level" or end-boss is unbeatable, seems to always get off the perfect shot, block, tech hit, avoidance roll, etc, until you start abusing a game-breaking technique or bug yourself to beat the game. That's actually pretty easy.

What's harder is making a game AI that acts somewhat seemingly like real opponents, that makes real mistakes and leaves openings for the player to work with while not feeling like you're just handing them the game.

Of course, on most systems (Nintendo's underpowered consoles most of all), the designers don't even bother, they just code in whatever the AI they want and the altered difficulty levels give the enemy bigger guns, more health/armor, or just drop even more enemies in a level to chew through. Or else the difficulty levels leave the enemy alone, but screw with the player's health bar and damage output to much the same effect.

As we start dropping "AI" into other frontiers, it doesn't get much better. Translation AI is still relatively poor, able to handle some word-for-word translations passably but being lousy the moment you come across colloquialisms, figures of speech, neologisms, parallel synonyms, malapropisms, simply typos, failures of homonym (there/their/they're, our/hour, its/it's, principle/principal). There's a reason it's so easy to tell when you get a tech call response that's outsourced to somewhere in Asia - most of them know just enough Engrish to try to translate word-for-word what they want to say, and so they come up with constructions like "Tech support welcomes you, may I please know the problem you have today" that could just as easily come out of Babelfish or Google Translate.

For pure problem-solving and pattern-matching, AI's proceeding slowly. Maps and GPS routing have their benefits but are certainly not perfect yet. "Automatic response answers" chat stuff is best tossed in the garbage bin, usually right next to a company's crappily written FAQ page.

I'd never heard of Ayn Rand as a kid.

What? You never read The Objectivist Tree ?

"Sarah Palin has the crosshairs of a gun sight over our district and when people do that, they’ve gotta realize there are consequences to that action.”
--Gabrielle Gifford March 25, 2010, MSNBC Interview.

http://kateoplis.tumblr.com/post/2655554409/msnbc-talks-to-rep-gabrielle-gifford-about-the

w t f ...

I can see it now... "Oh.. but it was all 'jokes' ya know... for sure... nobody meant to shoot her. Its like crosshairs, like we joke about shootin a bear in Alaska!" -- Sarah Palin, predicted quote for future response to this event.

Like this, but with servers: What if dead bodies stayed where they died?

"Sarah Palin has the crosshairs of a gun sight over our district and when people do that, they’ve gotta realize there are consequences to that action.”
--Gabrielle Gifford March 25, 2010, MSNBC Interview.

http://kateoplis.tumblr.com/post/2655554409/msnbc-talks-to-rep-gabrielle-gifford-about-the

Cue millions of really disappointed teenage girls.

U mad?

claes.borgstrom@advbyra.se

Thomas.bodstrom@advbyra.se

(Should you chose to support the Swedish prosecutors, also aligned against Assange, their mail server is:

http://156.49.126.250/

The graphic for the day, from this site:

http://eriatarka.tumblr.com/

would be:

http://zero1infinity.tumblr.com/post/2300713684/justice

claes.borgstrom@advbyra.se

Thomas.bodstrom@advbyra.se

(Should you chose to support the Swedish prosecutors, also aligned against Assange, their mail server is:

http://156.49.126.250/

The graphic for the day, from this site:

http://eriatarka.tumblr.com/

would be:

http://zero1infinity.tumblr.com/post/2300713684/justice

Not to detract from your overall point, but Minecraft enters Beta in 5 days:

http://notch.tumblr.com/post/2175441966/minecraft-beta-december-20-2010

Carry on

This same site is reporting the TSA has integrated full body scanners with Facebook.

Now, if Slashdot wishes to be taken as seriously as Wonder-Tonic or The ONION ...

Epic lolz at the comments on that Facebook Integration link... SOOO many people think it's real.

This same site is reporting the TSA has integrated full body scanners with Facebook.

Now, if Slashdot wishes to be taken as seriously as Wonder-Tonic or The ONION ...

If you've seen the new Adobe Creative Suite, you can see the results of using Air to do more than a simple Pandora-like UI. They aren't pretty: http://adobegripes.tumblr.com/

[...] and that pi is bigger than 3. I wouldn't believe a scientist!

Sorry, but PI *ACTUALLY* is 4: http://28.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lbxrvcK4pk1qbylvso1_400.png

It's all in the eyes.

Actually, for non-wordish stuff, Tumblr.

yes indeed. I've been tunneling all my outbound traffic over a localhost SSH SOCKS proxy for years precisely because I don't want anybody else on the LAN (wireless or otherwise) to be able to sniff that traffic. my ISP sniffing, well, I'm stuck with that for non-HTTPS traffic - but I can prevent the rest. To wit: http://cleverhacks.tumblr.com/post/443759182/ssh-its-whats-for-dinner-or-socks-proxy-port and if you can't get out on anything but tcp/443, see also: http://cleverhacks.tumblr.com/post/816507010/ssh-over-ssl-tunneling

yes indeed. I've been tunneling all my outbound traffic over a localhost SSH SOCKS proxy for years precisely because I don't want anybody else on the LAN (wireless or otherwise) to be able to sniff that traffic. my ISP sniffing, well, I'm stuck with that for non-HTTPS traffic - but I can prevent the rest. To wit: http://cleverhacks.tumblr.com/post/443759182/ssh-its-whats-for-dinner-or-socks-proxy-port and if you can't get out on anything but tcp/443, see also: http://cleverhacks.tumblr.com/post/816507010/ssh-over-ssl-tunneling

http://fakescience.tumblr.com/post/1367356168/how-are-bees-organized shows how bees are organized to beat machines and anything else. [grin]

Android UI Utilities, it is no interface builder but good for prototyping before building the XML UIs

I think we must be doing it wrong around here... we usually can't even get games before the release date, much less get free rotting meat.

Even by the extremely low standards of video game journalism, Slashdot can't get any respect. Maybe you should think about focusing on the writing/editing. Or fix the awful bugs on this site that have been around for... well, decades at this point. (How about a rich text comment field? Let's join 2005!)

I thought Twitter was between two holes ... ??

http://30.media.tumblr.com/hnBdf3xhZn70lld3VLy3gSBUo1_400.jpg

I really hope some of the folks show up from Comic Con like the guy dressed up as Bender from Futurama, holding a sign that said "Kill all the humans."

Or some of the others...
http://29.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_l5x4p19Ghp1qa08g7o1_500.jpg

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

I am Daniel Colascione. I've placed a link to my resignation letter
below; I feel it adds another dimension to the debate on what happened
to Haystack. If anyone has questions, I'll do my best to respond here.
Let me note, also, that as part of my rejoining the project, I
insisted that we release the source under the GPLv3, and that we
engage in an open and honest dialogue with the security community. It
was too late, of course.

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----

iEYEAREC AAYFAkyP9 SwACgkQ17c 2LVA10Vtlx ACg6iE3K x2Cbzj3Hg CRO9k6msmz
tH8An iNSdKNga 6sOQWr8wX5 tlbCDRLPP
=s34t
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

(Note: the Slashdot lameness filter forced me to break up the signature; please remove the whitespace before verifying.)

My resignation letter.

Here are some links:
http://neteffect.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2010/09/09/one_week_inside_the_haystack

http://jilliancyork.com/2010/09/13/haystack-and-media-irresponsibility/

http://calixte.tumblr.com/post/1120185415/no-more-haystack - Lead Developers resignation Letter

http://www.oblomovka.com/wp/2010/09/14/haystack-vs-how-the-internet-works/

According to some info, the main developer, Daniel Colascione has quit the CRC and the Haystack project.

I am unsure if the e-mail is legit, but if it is, what will that mean? Will the existing codebase be released? No one seems to know.

As far as I can tell, the basic premise (use a variety of 'legitimate' traffic to not necessarily hide what you are doing, but increase the number of false positives to an unacceptable level) is not bad per se. Hopefully a project will get started to do just that.

Straw man. I never said it was because he was successful, but picture this: a small indie game making a few hundred bucks a week suddenly gets a 600,000 euro deposit. What does that look like to you? Paypal has a legal duty to prevent money laundering.

Looks to me like a business start up. Seeing as before paypal withheld their money and they made that announcement.
http://notch.tumblr.com/post/1075326804/hiring-some-people-getting-an-office-and-all-that

Which is on the article, that I guess you didn't read.

Dang, don't recall your posts from before today, but your seriously a negative person.

Unfortunately, I have to reply to myself.

From the developer's blog at http://notch.tumblr.com/ :

On the 25th, they limited my account for unspecified reasons (a suspicious withdrawal or deposit! ......... [edit:] Just to clear things up: I withdraw everything from paypal every week. They limited my account just as sales started spiking, so this money has accumulated since they limited the account.

SIXTY THOUSAND PEOPLE BOUGHT AN UNKNOWN GAME, WHICH IS IN *ALPHA*, IN JUST TWO WEEKS?????

I call serious bullshit on this whole thing.

Time Magazine reports ...

It was BookTwo that originated this story because that's written by the guy who put the book together (which was picked up by a blog which was picked up by The Awl which was picked up by Time's NewsFeed). Of course, we are talking about Time here. I found the images of what's actually inside very interesting but I would bet that the guy who used some simple code to create the Creative Commons work is probably the only person to tender cash for a physical copy.

Here's another complete rewrite reducing the whole article to:

-
Iraq War, eh???
-
All your oil are belong to U.S.
-
Stup up stoopid Americans

But you know what's really interesting? When Bridle compiled this used their lexer to transform the XML, he kept the IP address in the upper right of each edit. So the above edit's IP address is forever in print: 68.162.123.240 Of course if you had used a username to make an edit, that was put in place of the IP address.

This whole thing reminds me of the time lapse video done of the Virginia Tech shootings. Creative stuff you can do with Wikipedia.

I think that's the hard part.

Think about developing a handheld game that needs to work on all screen sizes (iPhone, iPad, Android, Simbian, etc etc....). There have been efforts to minimize these problems.

Then think about the UI for a web page or game. There have been some pretty successful results, while they are anything but simple.

Now think about adding a 3rd dimension to all those problems. It's not as easy as saying "just make it realistic". There is a reason why lives are spent on UI. It's not an easy task and it just got a 3rd Dimension.

Oh and was it just me or did anyone think it was just a 3D FPS (Like Tribes, Q3, you know.... All FPS?) and not a 3D Displayed FPS.

Where's tumblr fit in to all this?

Growing up with Intellivision rather than Atari apparently made all the difference when it came to game box art! The first 16-bit game system definitely made me appreciate games and game art at an early age

Intellivision game boxes actually were very representative of the game play, although obviously indulged to be more artistic in presentation than the actual 16-bit (or 10-bit the way you look at it) graphics were capable of at that time. Here are a few examples.

Some of the more crazy titles indulged a little more: like Astrosmash

Good, good, now, remind me again, which one became an icon of the entire concept of "video games"? I guess it DID make "all the difference".

Growing up with Intellivision rather than Atari apparently made all the difference when it came to game box art! The first 16-bit game system definitely made me appreciate games and game art at an early age

Intellivision game boxes actually were very representative of the game play, although obviously indulged to be more artistic in presentation than the actual 16-bit (or 10-bit the way you look at it) graphics were capable of at that time. Here are a few examples.

Some of the more crazy titles indulged a little more: like Astrosmash

Heh. I buy my shirts and jeans from walmart, drive a '70 Impala and live way out in the country so I don't have to be around people. And have a house full of Macs, ipods, an iphone and AppleTV. I'm also a tier 3 Windows tech. I just don't use it at home. Who cares what people think of what you wear, drive, or view porn on. If ya' like it, ya' like it.

Apple has been building a WiFi-based location database using data collected by the iPhone and other mobile devices since January 2008, and finally replaced Skyhook as his provider last April.

The real news is that Apple is building a universal mashup of location-based services related to traveling. This will include any service, preference, or purchase, you can make while traveling. The patent claim mentions a comprehensive list, including arrival notification, restaurant reservations, travel itinerary, airport maps, control seat services (audio, video, temperature, lights, entertainment), preferences (seating, flying times, meals, airlines, airports), access to 3rd party services, and more.

In this manner, through an integrated application, a travel service provider can maintain a constant connection between the travel service provider and the user. This can result in changing a user's travel experience from a fragmented and disjointed process to one that is instead seamless and fluid.

At one point they use the WhereTo application as a sample UI that could access the service. WhereTo is a wheel where you click to jump to Google Places. This does not mean they intent to patent the UI, but the technology behind it. I mean, read the damn thing:

Accordingly, through the integrated application, airport services can be searched for, browsed, viewed, and otherwise listed or presented to the user. For example, an interface such as interface 602 [602 refers to the Where To? drawing] can be provided on a user’s electronic device.

The UI is not the subject of the patent claim, but an example of how to use it.

WhereTo developers said This paragraph sounds like a claim that describes Where To?’s functionality pretty exactly. Yes, yours and the hundred more apps that also use the same service, but you didn't invent Google Places. Hell, if I design a cube interface tomorrow, I still didn't invent Google Places.

In the words of Brian Ford:

The real problem, as I see it, is that no one thought to approach FutureTap, and let them know that they’d be doing so. I deal with patent applications a lot at work because they’re often used as evidence in trials that I work on, and there’s no way around the fact that they’re hard to decipher. Bloggers are bound to read a lot into this, and a lot of the speculation is going to be based on a lack of information.

No, they obviously have funny cartoon animals.

This is the correct way to indicate non-terminal periods in TeX

When it comes to bugs and usability problems, Ubuntu run a much sharper bug tracker - it usually has coverage of almost any minor GNOME issue. Between Canonical and their users, It might have taken many man-hours to track down, discuss and identify a small usability bug, which might only result in a fix of a few lines of code. It's not about turning the screw, it's knowing which screw to turn. So counting lines of code as the only contribution is completely unfair to Canonical.

This doesn't just go for GNOME; the best discussion of kernel and firefox bugs usually ends up being hosted on Ubuntu, just because they have fostered the largest community of enthusiastic Linux desktop users.

Any evidence to back this up? Or are you just guessing?

I think it's the latter, plus a bit of the former. ;) This post has a chart of subsidies of various energy firms. This post with punny headline states the case for marginal producers: Vladimir's Energy Blog - Obama’s Energy Tax Will Even Tax Strippers TIME had this also LOL (unintended, I assume) headline in 1944: OIL: Subsidy for Strippers. "I call for a fixed deductable on pasties!"

Little of the subsidy cash would go to the big integrated companies. (They and the Oil Congressmen prefer Mr. Ickes' plan for a price boost.) OPA tailored its plan to fit only the small operators of the 200,000 "stripper" wells—the marginal producers who turn out some 15% of all U.S. oil. Squeezed between rising costs and OPA's ceilings many a stripper has been forced to plug his wells and go out of business. And once plugged, the wells are often ruined by salt water seepage.

So even 66 years ago these minor operators were making a substantial contribution to supply, and wanted some assistance to make their operations economical. We could have told them to just take it up the hindquarters of course, but that was way ahead of real consideration of the negative implications of using hydrocarbons. No other nation has drilled anything like the number of wells the US has: Distribution and Production of Oil & Gas Wells. Wells long given up for dead are reopened when the price rises high enough; some of the oldest in the country were fired up in 2008 when the price was on its uptick. We could repeal subsidies, but then the US would have to import more to make up for lost domestic production, putting us in competition with other nations and driving the price up to the point where the wells would be economical again anyway...likely there's a sweet spot somewhere. I'm not in favor of subsidizing the majors much, either. But these small fry are worth helping out while we transition away to something better. I'm waiting for the NOCs around the world to follow the US example, if that's possible given their societal constraints. Seems like a surefire way to boost their production and mitigate their declines a titch.

Imagine the fireworks! Talk about going out with a bang...

Some choose not to wait