Uh huh. Your Wikipedia reference is somewhat selective - you ignore the paragraphs immediately following the section you quoted, which cast that section in a rather different light. The talk page for that article also disinclines the reader to take either side too seriously.
But that's beside the point. I'm well aware that the Castro regime has a brutal side. But it's a Care Bear convention compared to many regimes enthusiastically supported by the US - I'm thinking especially of Pinochet in Chile and of the Nicaraguan Contras, who routinely raped their democratic opponents, flayed them alive and left them to bleed to death hanging from trees by the roadside.
Again: what is it with Cuba? I can understand why the US establishment hates them - they're pretty much the only state in the Americas to have stood up to the US and lived to tell the tale. But I doubt that's the usual angle taken when the subject comes up.
Genuine question - what is it with you guys (I'm assuming you're USian) and Cuba? Sure, it's hardly an ideal state, but holding it up as some sort of Satan incarnate strikes me as flat-out bizarre. Speaking as a Brit, I'd quite like to visit Cuba sometime - I think it'd be interesting - but I wouldn't voluntarily set foot in the USA in the current climate.
Is this something that gets drummed into you at school? Or via Fox News? Or what?
Hmm. I accidentally read the flamebait-modded AC spoiler at the bottom of these replies, but TBH I'm quite glad I did. I doubt I'd have got it any time soon, and it's not an 'interesting' solution. I'd be pissed off if I'd spent any significant amount of time on it.
I also don't see what the name of the puzzle has to do with anything, possibly because IANAFlorist. Is there some crucial piece of information about roses I was lacking?
all it would require is for AOL to proxy all HTTP requests, find the ones for the banner ads, then redirect those to an MSN banner advert server [...] very difficult for Google to spot
Why difficult? It'd be trivial for Google to get an AOL account, set up a webpage to show only a known set of Google-served ads, and look at that page in the AOL browser in the presence of independent witnesses. If any ads show up that aren't in the known set... bingo, smoking gun.
Unless the proxy shows the same ads, in which case why would the advertiser care?
I trust encyclopdias because I know that they were written by reputable people (look at the list of authors), I know that they have editors
I know of one very senior academic who wrote a detailed entry for Britannica. The editors, reasonably enough, reserve the right to edit for style, and did so, sending the revised version back to the academic for approval. Unfortunately, the style changes had altered the sense of the article to the point where it was no longer accurate. The academic pointed this out and asked for the text to be corrected. The editors refused. Rinse. Repeat. Ultimately, the text went out in its factually incorrect form, and the academic refused to let them put his name to it.
Sh*t happens everywhere.
Wikipedia [...] can be done at absolutely no cost.
It can also be corrected at absolutely no cost. There's a trade-off here.
the entire human population was reduced to 15,000 individuals at one time
Interesting, I didn't know that. When was this? More specifically, was this early enough that "the entire human population" was still just a fraction of "the entire hominid population"?
Even with just "natural causes" to contend with, the vast majority of hominids did NOT make it and we damn near didn't, either.
My belief was that most of the "other" hominids were done for by Homo Sapiens or its forbears, rather than "natural causes" in its modern sense. That said, IANAAnthropologist and am almost certainly wrong.
Quoth patio11: The question is what it brings to the table that you can't already get from client side apps or java applets. I don't have the answer to that one.
Phenomenally easy deployment and upgrading. This is a big deal with corporate customers. The company I work for is still stuck supporting 6-year-old versions of thick client apps, just because getting customer IT departments to upgrade is like getting blood out of a stone. No such problems with Web apps, and AJAX makes them sufficiently responsive to be acceptable.
I'm not 100% sure why Java applets aren't similarly acceptable, but in practice they're not. Many of the more paranoid (this is in the financial industry) refuse to install any kind of plugin, period.
Similar thing with end-users, in some ways. I browse with Flash and Java disabled, and if some site requires them, well, so long, thanks for playing. I don't have any such objection to AJAX sites. Arguably irrational or inconsistent, but there you go.
Many thanks for posting such a detailed and informative explanation. Exactly what's needed when trying to understand the behaviour of a commercial or pseudo-commercial oganization; femme be damned, cherchez l'argent.
If you're going for small form factor, why on earth would you want a cube? Surely the ideal is more of a thin credit-card shape, so that it'll fit conveniently in pockets. Not to mention offering more surface area for sensibly-sized controls.
I suppose this is marginally more convenient than the "caltrop", "shuriken" and "mousetrap" form factors, but it's a close thing.
They were pissed that it cost so much to make, while "reality" was dirt-cheap and selling like hotcakes
I'm interested - are studio bang-per-buck decisions like this really sensible in the long run, or only for the next quarterly statement? Firefly was certainly expensive to make compared to reality shite, but I can't see reality shite being good for reruns or overseas syndication or wildly successful DVD sales in the way that Firefly has proved to be.
No; it's completely new. Same core cast, but all-new script, storyline, SFX etc. It's set some time after the end of the series; there's a short comic just appearing now to bridge the gap.
You might also have mentioned that the front-end for your DMD compiler (the reference implementation of the language) is also Free (GPL/Artistic).
It's also unusually comprehensible even to a compiler-illiterate like me. At least, compared to GCC source, of which even a brief glimpse ages you ten years.
We should go and tell them what we think about Claria and Gator, not to mention their general business ethics.
On the contrary, we should encourage them to integrate obnoxious adware into every aspect of the browser and OS. If that doesn't persuade the world to switch, nothing will.
Good argument, but it still sounds a little off to me. Possibly because I really couldn't give a flying fsck about Mickey - the real loss is in "collateral damage", all the non-Disney good stuff that was lost to the world as a side-effect of their keeping the Mouse. Since Disney haven't appropriated this other stuff for their own use, it doesn't sound like stealing.
The snippet you quote reads "seven bank employees and alleged ring leader", not "seven bank employees including alleged ring leader". They may all be crooks, but I don't see a conflict of interest per se.
Can two entities share a conciousness and still be just like 'you'? Any answer other than 'No' is clearly absurd so something went wrong along the way during our experiment
Good to see you're approaching the question with an open mind.
Personally I see nothing at all absurd about multiple copies of a conscious mind-state, each of which is (initially at least) just like me. There's no "sharing" going on.
As the grandparent poster says, I don't see how you can deny such a possibility without lapsing into Cartesian dualism. Did you actually have an argument, or were you just hoping that we'd take your "clearly absurd" on faith?
I'm not at all sure I buy that. I've never heard of "cone-tracing", but crude raytracing of simple-to-intermediate scenes at almost-realtime framerates is alreadypossible on consumer hardware, and the factors when you start scaling up quality are, I thought, pretty well understood. Samples per pixel and number of "bounces"; both linear complexity.
There's certainly work to be done on improving realism, but it's mostly on the human stuff that we're very sensitive to, particularly hair modelling and subsurface scattering in skin. The general algos strike me as "good enough" already. Animation tends to be the weak link these days.
"If, within the next few years, we see some really good rendering engines - cone-tracer + radiosity (or better) at speeds fast enough for live-action"
Huh? What does speed have to do with anything? It's not as if they're compositing in the CGI in realtime. If production time is the worry, just buy a bigger render farm.
Slashdot Mirror
Understood. Thanks for the informed post.
Uh huh. Your Wikipedia reference is somewhat selective - you ignore the paragraphs immediately following the section you quoted, which cast that section in a rather different light. The talk page for that article also disinclines the reader to take either side too seriously.
But that's beside the point. I'm well aware that the Castro regime has a brutal side. But it's a Care Bear convention compared to many regimes enthusiastically supported by the US - I'm thinking especially of Pinochet in Chile and of the Nicaraguan Contras, who routinely raped their democratic opponents, flayed them alive and left them to bleed to death hanging from trees by the roadside.
Again: what is it with Cuba? I can understand why the US establishment hates them - they're pretty much the only state in the Americas to have stood up to the US and lived to tell the tale. But I doubt that's the usual angle taken when the subject comes up.
Genuine question - what is it with you guys (I'm assuming you're USian) and Cuba? Sure, it's hardly an ideal state, but holding it up as some sort of Satan incarnate strikes me as flat-out bizarre. Speaking as a Brit, I'd quite like to visit Cuba sometime - I think it'd be interesting - but I wouldn't voluntarily set foot in the USA in the current climate.
Is this something that gets drummed into you at school? Or via Fox News? Or what?
It used to be I could find what I was looking for in the first page of hits.
I can still manage that most of the time. You need to give up on the Britney Spears fixation and get into sesquipedelian monkey porn.
Update: I've discovered that Google returns six hits for sesquipedelian monkey porn. Sometimes the Web is just plain scary.
But hey, it still fits on the first page.
Hmm. I accidentally read the flamebait-modded AC spoiler at the bottom of these replies, but TBH I'm quite glad I did. I doubt I'd have got it any time soon, and it's not an 'interesting' solution. I'd be pissed off if I'd spent any significant amount of time on it.
I also don't see what the name of the puzzle has to do with anything, possibly because IANAFlorist. Is there some crucial piece of information about roses I was lacking?
all it would require is for AOL to proxy all HTTP requests, find the ones for the banner ads, then redirect those to an MSN banner advert server [...] very difficult for Google to spot
Why difficult? It'd be trivial for Google to get an AOL account, set up a webpage to show only a known set of Google-served ads, and look at that page in the AOL browser in the presence of independent witnesses. If any ads show up that aren't in the known set... bingo, smoking gun.
Unless the proxy shows the same ads, in which case why would the advertiser care?
I trust encyclopdias because I know that they were written by reputable people (look at the list of authors), I know that they have editors
I know of one very senior academic who wrote a detailed entry for Britannica. The editors, reasonably enough, reserve the right to edit for style, and did so, sending the revised version back to the academic for approval. Unfortunately, the style changes had altered the sense of the article to the point where it was no longer accurate. The academic pointed this out and asked for the text to be corrected. The editors refused. Rinse. Repeat. Ultimately, the text went out in its factually incorrect form, and the academic refused to let them put his name to it.
Sh*t happens everywhere.
Wikipedia [...] can be done at absolutely no cost.
It can also be corrected at absolutely no cost. There's a trade-off here.
the entire human population was reduced to 15,000 individuals at one time
Interesting, I didn't know that. When was this? More specifically, was this early enough that "the entire human population" was still just a fraction of "the entire hominid population"?
Even with just "natural causes" to contend with, the vast majority of hominids did NOT make it and we damn near didn't, either.
My belief was that most of the "other" hominids were done for by Homo Sapiens or its forbears, rather than "natural causes" in its modern sense. That said, IANAAnthropologist and am almost certainly wrong.
Quoth patio11: The question is what it brings to the table that you can't already get from client side apps or java applets. I don't have the answer to that one.
Phenomenally easy deployment and upgrading. This is a big deal with corporate customers. The company I work for is still stuck supporting 6-year-old versions of thick client apps, just because getting customer IT departments to upgrade is like getting blood out of a stone. No such problems with Web apps, and AJAX makes them sufficiently responsive to be acceptable.
I'm not 100% sure why Java applets aren't similarly acceptable, but in practice they're not. Many of the more paranoid (this is in the financial industry) refuse to install any kind of plugin, period.
Similar thing with end-users, in some ways. I browse with Flash and Java disabled, and if some site requires them, well, so long, thanks for playing. I don't have any such objection to AJAX sites. Arguably irrational or inconsistent, but there you go.
Many thanks for posting such a detailed and informative explanation. Exactly what's needed when trying to understand the behaviour of a commercial or pseudo-commercial oganization; femme be damned, cherchez l'argent.
Are these quotas for applications examined, or for applications accepted?
If you're going for small form factor, why on earth would you want a cube? Surely the ideal is more of a thin credit-card shape, so that it'll fit conveniently in pockets. Not to mention offering more surface area for sensibly-sized controls.
I suppose this is marginally more convenient than the "caltrop", "shuriken" and "mousetrap" form factors, but it's a close thing.
I'm sure i'm missing some others here....
Well, yes.
4) Change your name to Roland Piquepaille.
They were pissed that it cost so much to make, while "reality" was dirt-cheap and selling like hotcakes
I'm interested - are studio bang-per-buck decisions like this really sensible in the long run, or only for the next quarterly statement? Firefly was certainly expensive to make compared to reality shite, but I can't see reality shite being good for reruns or overseas syndication or wildly successful DVD sales in the way that Firefly has proved to be.
No; it's completely new. Same core cast, but all-new script, storyline, SFX etc. It's set some time after the end of the series; there's a short comic just appearing now to bridge the gap.
Watch the trailer and see for yourself.
You might also have mentioned that the front-end for your DMD compiler (the reference implementation of the language) is also Free (GPL/Artistic).
It's also unusually comprehensible even to a compiler-illiterate like me. At least, compared to GCC source, of which even a brief glimpse ages you ten years.
We should go and tell them what we think about Claria and Gator, not to mention their general business ethics.
On the contrary, we should encourage them to integrate obnoxious adware into every aspect of the browser and OS. If that doesn't persuade the world to switch, nothing will.
Wasn't there a "Victims of Harlan Ellison Support Group" at one point? I seem to recall Dave Langford writing about it in the dim and distant past.
Good argument, but it still sounds a little off to me. Possibly because I really couldn't give a flying fsck about Mickey - the real loss is in "collateral damage", all the non-Disney good stuff that was lost to the world as a side-effect of their keeping the Mouse. Since Disney haven't appropriated this other stuff for their own use, it doesn't sound like stealing.
Maybe vandalism would be a better description?
As I understand it, it's impossible to "steal" from the public domain.
+1 Funny, though.
The snippet you quote reads "seven bank employees and alleged ring leader", not "seven bank employees including alleged ring leader". They may all be crooks, but I don't see a conflict of interest per se.
Can two entities share a conciousness and still be just like 'you'? Any answer other than 'No' is clearly absurd so something went wrong along the way during our experiment
Good to see you're approaching the question with an open mind.
Personally I see nothing at all absurd about multiple copies of a conscious mind-state, each of which is (initially at least) just like me. There's no "sharing" going on.
As the grandparent poster says, I don't see how you can deny such a possibility without lapsing into Cartesian dualism. Did you actually have an argument, or were you just hoping that we'd take your "clearly absurd" on faith?
Source?
I'm not at all sure I buy that. I've never heard of "cone-tracing", but crude raytracing of simple-to-intermediate scenes at almost-realtime framerates is already possible on consumer hardware, and the factors when you start scaling up quality are, I thought, pretty well understood. Samples per pixel and number of "bounces"; both linear complexity.
There's certainly work to be done on improving realism, but it's mostly on the human stuff that we're very sensitive to, particularly hair modelling and subsurface scattering in skin. The general algos strike me as "good enough" already. Animation tends to be the weak link these days.
"If, within the next few years, we see some really good rendering engines - cone-tracer + radiosity (or better) at speeds fast enough for live-action"
Huh? What does speed have to do with anything? It's not as if they're compositing in the CGI in realtime. If production time is the worry, just buy a bigger render farm.
"If they did, they'd have a cross-platform browser and it could remain closed source."
Why on earth would Microsoft want a cross-platform browser? The primary purpose of IE is to lock people into Windows.