Couple notes for people who haven't read the paper:
1. Their scheme is not in-vivo (they're not actually working with DNA and proteins). It's a computational process that is based on the information transformations that occur inside a cell.
2. It's kind of cute and nifty, but not particularly applicable. They discuss weaknesses in the attack, but in a pretty handwavey way. The core problem is that their "encrypted text" will include their entire plain text, just split up into pieces. Secondly, it doesn't seem to offer anything particularly new when compared to traditional block ciphers.
3. Mathematically, this has nothing to do with biology. It's just loosely based on biological processes, and it's not really clear that these biological processes have anything particular to contribute to development of encryption. Transcription is just a mapping (from genomic DNA to mRNA), and translation is just a lossy mapping (from 3-tuples of mRNA to peptides). Mathematicians and cryptographers have been aware of generalized versions of these functions these for a long time (homomorphisms and reverse homomorphisms). There's not much new being introduced here.
Let's say that Fox runs an awesome show that develops a dedicated fan following. That's bad for FOX, because they no longer have control over that market segment. Good shows take time and effort, and passion and dedication by good people who will in general expect to receive respect for their creative output. That's bad for FOX executives because they suddenly have to consider the opinions and needs of a bunch of plebes at the bottom.
It's good to keep people hooked on perpetually churning set of "hot thing of the moment" shows based on replaceable talent and commodifiable appeal.
I mean, who cares if the top star in American Idol has a beef with the producers and walks out? They'll just film it and make more money running a special "Sandra breaks down and leaves!" episode. It's beautiful.
Good TV is a craft, not an assembly line. The assembly line is more efficient, it seems, and Fox has realized it.
We're not talking about not having null references at all. Nullable references are in fact very useful in many situations, as you point out.
The problem is that in many languages, it is not possible to describe a non-nullable type. I.e. a type that guarantees that the value it annotates is not null.
This is useful because the vast majority of actual code doesn't really deal with 'null' references, and in fact will break if 'null' references are passed in. Right now, there are two ways to ensure your code is safe:
1. make assertion-type checks everywhere. This is a pain in the ass to write and maintain compared to providing a non-nullable type. It's also slow to throw in unnecessary null checks everywhere during runtime.
2. don't check aggressively, but ensure in an ad-hoc way that all not-null preconditions are met. Basically, you just make sure to never call the relevant methods with null values. This has the problem that you have to keep track of EVERY SINGLE PLACE a null may be introduced and eventually find its way into the method. This may be easy in simple applications, but can become very tedious in large applications.
Providing a non-nullable type constructor saves all of those things. The compiler can ensure that a NULL never makes it into a variable marked not-null. You don't have to care about it. You can split your code up into the sections that are "pure" and sections that are "impure", and keep all your null-sanity-checking in the (what should be a relatively small) 'impure code', which calls into the pure code, with the compiler ensuring the calls are all valid.
No work, just a simple type annotation. That's the potential.
Doesn't the short fragment size produced by the Solexa machines negatively affect your ability to assemble them?
My impression of sequencing efforts is that while the Solexa platform is great for other analysis (say SNP detection, gene expression profiling, marker identification, etc.), but not the best tool for full-scale use in genome assembly.
I think you're being way too sensitive. We're not creepy at all. If only girls would understand that. Like this one girl I thought about a lot. I meticulously collected her hair over the course of weeks and used it to create a greeting card with the words "I'm thinking of you" spelled out using a mixture of her hair and my saliva.
Even after that gracious welcome, she dropped out of the class shortly after joining. Guess CS is not for chicks after all.
I realize it's somewhat cliche, but read the article. The current investigators were interested in this because hypothesized gas composition in volcanic eruptions would actually have been similar to the composition used by Miller. Furthermore, the article states that volcanoes often spur lightning strikes in the same area.
So they're claiming that the atmospheric conditions near erupting volcanoes WOULD, in fact, be similar to Miller's original composition, and that this environment itself generates a diverse array of organic building blocks, as well as providing the context for lightning strikes that may have compounded these productions.
Donnie Darko: Life isn't that simple. I mean who cares if Ling Ling returns the wallet and keeps the money? It has nothing to do with either fear or love.
Kitty Farmer: Fear and love are the deepest of human emotions.
Donnie Darko: Okay. But you're not listening to me. There are other things that need to be taken into account here. Like the whole spectrum of human emotion. You can't just lump everything into these two categories and then just deny everything else!
One thing we do in our internal network is to have two sets of names. One set is logically named and reflects a specific purpose. For example, "svn.internal.tld", "db.internal.tld", "web.internal.tld". 'svn' is the svn server, 'db' is the db server, and so on. The same machine can potentially be mapped to from many of these names (for example, 'svn' and 'db' may resolve to the same IP).
When we write our internal scripts and configure our software, hostnames are ALWAYS specified using the logical function names.
On top of this, each of the physical machines has a unique name for itself, following whatever arbitrary naming scheme we choose (in our case, it's fruits: lemon, orange, etc.). We use this name when talking about actual machines with problems (e.g. "lemon just went down").
It works well enough for us. When we move services, we don't have to change our internal scripts or configuration at all, just change the dns reference for the given service. The nicknames allow us to talk about each individual machine easily.
To add to your list, two films whose names are numbers, and two dark masterpieces:
Fellini's "8 1/2". Aronofski's "Pi".
Kubrick's "Dr. Strangelove" "Man bites dog" (a Belgian flick I rented on a whim, was both deeply disturbed and blown away by, don't know the director).
I grew up in Tamil Nadu.. close to the Kerala border (my family speaks a local dialect of Tamil mixed with Malayalam) and I just wanted to come in and nod my sad head at this fact.
I remember at least 6 types of bananas directly. My favourites were the little tiny ones (like 3 inches long, yellow, and fat).
Even discounting the bananas, there are dozens and dozens of fruit that I haven't had in years, and I miss dearly.
Wandering around as 8-year old in my grandparents mango groves, picking ripe mangos straight from the tree, dried sap still fragrant on their skin, biting into it and scraping the flesh off the skin with my teeth.. that was pure fucking heaven.
You saw where EVERYTHING you ate came from. I'd go play out on the beach and watch the fisherfolk bring in their catch on their tiny boats. Dragging their nets flopping full of fish back onto the beach from their boats. There'd be kids running around playing with the fish (myself included).
The butchers we went to for mutton was a shack on the side of the street, fresh cuts of meat lying bleeding out in the open. If a cut wasn't available, they'd get a goat out from behind the shed and slaughter it right there.
One sad things about north america is how the people in general are so profoundly disconnected from their food - particularly urbanites (I'm no different, I get my veggies and meat at the supermarket too). I think it makes a big difference in how you feel about your food, and how you treat your food habits. The few places where it's preserved on this content are on the ranches and farms - but that culture is slowly dying out.
So it goes.
By the way, it's still possible to find some good fruit in north america, you just have to change your fruit. Apples in India (esp. south india) are shit. All the ones I ever had were mealy and nasty. You get a superb apple selection in most supermarkets, from tart to sweet to crisp to fleshy. If you are attentive, you can find really nice quality: apples, pears, pineapple, oranges, grapes, plums, melons (canteloups to watermelon). Some of the melons are really hit and miss - sometimes it's shit sometimes its awesome.. I haven't been able to figure out how to tell if a melon is sweet before I buy it.
Sure, it's not nearly as good as back in kerala and TN, but it's better than nothing.
I'm thinking a charge of manslaughter would be tenable as well. The persona she created was a weapon (whether it was physical or not, it was the instrument used to do the damage) she used against the girl. The question of intent, whether she consciously attempted to get the girl to commit suicide or not, is more muddled. The motive may have been just pure sociopathic glee she was deriving from torturing the girl.
It's clear enough to any reasonable person that there was a high risk of injury or death as the result of the woman's actions, and she should have known that. At the very least, her intentional recklessness led to the forseeable death of another person. That sounds like solid basis for a charge of manslaughter.
DISCLAIMER: I'm not a lawyer and I don't know what I'm talking about)
There's a fundamental difference you're missing. The application of logic in law is always with a presupposed conclusion.
A defense lawer applying the logic of law MUST apply that logic in a way that it shows his client innocent or deserving of leniency - and that's his job. A prosecutor MUST apply the law's logic such that it shows that the defendant is guilty, and deserving of the punishment being sought. The conclusions are predefined.
Science is not (at least ostensibly) supposed to be like that. You apply logic and you get the conclusions you get. If you're trying to bend it and twist it to somehow fit your hypothesis, or take you to some predefined conclusions, then you're fundamentally subverting the process.
I don't agree with this. Ben Stein's opinions aren't worthless because he's not a scientist - they're wrong because they just don't have the necessary support.
Open source man, open source man, Doin' the things that copyleft can, What's he like? It's not important. open source man.
Is he a geek, or is he a terrorist? When he's on the internet does he distribute himself? Or does the internet distribute him instead? Nobody knows, open source man.
Iron man, Iron man. Iron man hates open source man. They have a fight, iron wins. Iron man.
Then it was too sweet. As I was eating it, morsel by morsel, I realized that they had used too much honey, and the taste not bearable. The cooks who prepared this oversweet meal cared too much about honey, and too little about meat. Also, the tea was bad, since it was mixed with rocks from the garden of overusedfuckingfoodanalogiesforchrist'ssakeSTOP. I am no longer HUNGRY.
True, but the richness of Go comes from the interplay of the moves permitted by an extremely SIMPLE set of moves. There are exactly 2 major rules and one minor rule in Go:
1. you take turns placing pieces. 2. pieces or groups of pieces "surrounded" by other pieces are captured. 3. the board state cannot be repeated in two successive moves.
From this simple specification emerges an amazingly beautiful game. There are particular structures and patterns which emerge with concrete properties, advantages and disadvantages. Watching interplay between these structures as a game evolves is like watching a dance.
Now, this is all true for chess as well, but the ruleset for chess obfuscates it and hides it. Go takes the idea of a strategy game and strips it down to the barest essentials. That's what makes it so amazing for me. The sheer purity of it, the intuitiveness of the rules, and the depth of play that emerges from that.
I'm an Indian. Chess is what I grew up playing. I love chess. I played it very frequently as a child and into my teens (and stopped playing after I got busy with school and also found it hard to find opponents in high school). I've spent hundreds of dollars on chess sets carved from ebony and sandalwood.
All that said, Go blew me away when I learned it. I suck at the game, but every play is intense. At the end of every game I feel like I've participated in something majestic. More so than I ever felt with chess. Go is certainly a richer experience than chess.
Slashdot lameness filter bypass: Reason: Don't use so many caps. It's like YELLING. Reason: Don't use so many caps. It's like YELLING. Reason: Don't use so many caps. It's like YELLING. Reason: Don't use so many caps. It's like YELLING.
Why go all the way to the top? You only have to go back a notch or two for the post about "black-clad riot police in cities like Portland act with absolute impunity".
A one-off comment in a post whose main thrust was more general, a good excuse to derail the conversation into whining territory.
The whole freakin' story is about crowd-control technology. Countless posts in the entire area have centered on "suppressing dissent," "freedom of speech," and many other topics related to the people-in-the-street context. But when someone else expressly mentions west-coast protest crowd control, I don't feel too far off talking about it ALSO.
No, the story is about a ray gun that causes pain and leaves no mark. There is a claim by one side that it is about crowd control, but the comment you were responding to was expressing a general fear of abuse of the weapons by police. This fear is valid, and is in no way assuaged by irrelevant comments about protestor behaviour.
I read all the way up to the top of the thread. The ONLY instance where he used any phrase that may be interpreted as referring to protests is the following:
"There's very good reason to be afraid of the use of such a device to stifle dissent."
In fact, it was YOU who initially brought up the irrelevant commentary about protestors, TWICE.
It's easy to whine about hippie protestors to try to distract people from your main argument when your main argument is "Hey, the police are OK, wide range pain guns are OK, don't worry.. THE HIPPIE PROTESTORS ASKED FOR IT".
Of course, nobody mentioned the protestors except for you. Fixation much?
How in heaven did you get from some guy being scared that he'll get pain rays used on him by an unaccountable belligerent police force, to irrelevant pithy commentary about protestors not making their case?
What the hell does that have to do with ANYTHING?
"I think protestors can be more persuasive if they act more civilly.. and that's why you shouldn't be afraid of pain guns!"
Do you understand how much of a freaking non-sequitur that is?
Here's the thing, there's probably not much that you need to personally apologize for (I'm guessing here.. I don't know you, who knows). What's missing is a national, formal acceptance of fault. Many in your country need to let go of the idea that accepting a mistake on the part of their country is tantamount to pissing on their graves of their ancestors.
Without an explicit acceptance of what your country ended up doing wrong, there is little hope of avoiding a repeat of the exact same thing in some other context. How are you, as a nation, going to educate your children so that they don't fall for the exact same trap when some tragedy strikes their country when THEY are the electorate? How is it possible to do this when every single time someone brings up a criticism, some weasel pops out of the waxwork to distract attention towards irrelevant actions by others? How is your personal apology going to combat that?
Your attitude seems to be one of putting things behind you and moving on.. which is understandable considering the embarassing trauma I'm sure you are suffering from.. but this is the wrong reaction to have. At the very least, your country owes it to the millions of people whose lives were ruined in part because of its actions, to examine what went wrong, reconcile with it, and put in place measures to avoid it. And don't for a second let yourself think that this expectation is somehow limited to just America. Every country has that obligation. Some may live up to that obligation, and others may not, but whether or not some other country holds itself up to a high standard shouldn't be a basis for excusing your own. It may seem to many that America receives an unfair amount of attention on this front.. but for christ's sake.. you're the most powerful nation in the world. Your influence affects EVERYBODY.. so OF COURSE people are going to scrutinize your actions more than the actions of others. You should welcome that, and rise to the challenge, and not run up a tree like a flayed cat.
Also, don't take this as me personally addressing you. I am speaking towards general tendencies I identify in your country's population, in your media, in your national social identity.
Now, I'm not sure abut your claim about America being the world's "greatest country", but I'd agree that your country has a many qualities that others could learn from, and that you have great potential.. for both good and bad. Your history is full of examples of both, and pointing out the bad does not detract from the good. Likewise, pointing out the good does not excuse the bad (and neither does pointing out the bad in others), and does not excuse the need for an honest self-appraisal amongst your citizens on the role their country plays in the world. This is one area where your people have been far too lax.
Libera... wait, you're using the American definition of liberal aren't you?
Amusing you Americans throwing around statements about naivety. Your whole country seems to be a pretty gullible lot. You were played like a twenty dollar whore, and half of you still don't realize it it. It'd be hilarious, really, if not for the people that hat to die because of that charming american airheadedness.
The reaction you exhibit is amusing. Caught with your pants down, you look around frantically to others you can throw blame on. The last best tactic available to you. "But.. but.. but... BOBBY STOLE COOKIES YESTERDAY, I SAW IT", you exclaim, your guilty willy waving free in the wind.
Anyway, it's not just France and Russia. We don't like you up here in Canada either. From what I can tell, Indians, Indonesians, Europeans (in general), South Americans, and Africans all think you're assholes too. Well.. at least you have Poland (actually, you don't.. most of the poles I've met think your country is full of assholes).
You better start digging through the internet now. It's gonna take a while to pull up dirt on every country in the world. I'm sure you'll find SOMETHING, and I'm sure that something will make you feel better about the horrible things your country has done, and you won't feel the need to really come to terms with it or apologize for it.
Slashdot Mirror
Couple notes for people who haven't read the paper:
1. Their scheme is not in-vivo (they're not actually working with DNA and proteins). It's a computational process that is based on the information transformations that occur inside a cell.
2. It's kind of cute and nifty, but not particularly applicable. They discuss weaknesses in the attack, but in a pretty handwavey way. The core problem is that their "encrypted text" will include their entire plain text, just split up into pieces. Secondly, it doesn't seem to offer anything particularly new when compared to traditional block ciphers.
3. Mathematically, this has nothing to do with biology. It's just loosely based on biological processes, and it's not really clear that these biological processes have anything particular to contribute to development of encryption. Transcription is just a mapping (from genomic DNA to mRNA), and translation is just a lossy mapping (from 3-tuples of mRNA to peptides). Mathematicians and cryptographers have been aware of generalized versions of these functions these for a long time (homomorphisms and reverse homomorphisms). There's not much new being introduced here.
-Laxitive
Let's say that Fox runs an awesome show that develops a dedicated fan following. That's bad for FOX, because they no longer have control over that market segment. Good shows take time and effort, and passion and dedication by good people who will in general expect to receive respect for their creative output. That's bad for FOX executives because they suddenly have to consider the opinions and needs of a bunch of plebes at the bottom.
It's good to keep people hooked on perpetually churning set of "hot thing of the moment" shows based on replaceable talent and commodifiable appeal.
I mean, who cares if the top star in American Idol has a beef with the producers and walks out? They'll just film it and make more money running a special "Sandra breaks down and leaves!" episode. It's beautiful.
Good TV is a craft, not an assembly line. The assembly line is more efficient, it seems, and Fox has realized it.
-Laxitive
We're not talking about not having null references at all. Nullable references are in fact very useful in many situations, as you point out.
The problem is that in many languages, it is not possible to describe a non-nullable type. I.e. a type that guarantees that the value it annotates is not null.
This is useful because the vast majority of actual code doesn't really deal with 'null' references, and in fact will break if 'null' references are passed in. Right now, there are two ways to ensure your code is safe:
1. make assertion-type checks everywhere. This is a pain in the ass to write and maintain compared to providing a non-nullable type. It's also slow to throw in unnecessary null checks everywhere during runtime.
2. don't check aggressively, but ensure in an ad-hoc way that all not-null preconditions are met. Basically, you just make sure to never call the relevant methods with null values. This has the problem that you have to keep track of EVERY SINGLE PLACE a null may be introduced and eventually find its way into the method. This may be easy in simple applications, but can become very tedious in large applications.
Providing a non-nullable type constructor saves all of those things. The compiler can ensure that a NULL never makes it into a variable marked not-null. You don't have to care about it. You can split your code up into the sections that are "pure" and sections that are "impure", and keep all your null-sanity-checking in the (what should be a relatively small) 'impure code', which calls into the pure code, with the compiler ensuring the calls are all valid.
No work, just a simple type annotation. That's the potential.
-Laxitive
Oh no! You were exposed to the same information from two different sources!
Call homeland security! This gross indecency must end!
Doesn't the short fragment size produced by the Solexa machines negatively affect your ability to assemble them?
My impression of sequencing efforts is that while the Solexa platform is great for other analysis (say SNP detection, gene expression profiling, marker identification, etc.), but not the best tool for full-scale use in genome assembly.
I think you're being way too sensitive. We're not creepy at all. If only girls would understand that. Like this one girl I thought about a lot. I meticulously collected her hair over the course of weeks and used it to create a greeting card with the words "I'm thinking of you" spelled out using a mixture of her hair and my saliva.
Even after that gracious welcome, she dropped out of the class shortly after joining. Guess CS is not for chicks after all.
-Laxitive
I realize it's somewhat cliche, but read the article. The current investigators were interested in this because hypothesized gas composition in volcanic eruptions would actually have been similar to the composition used by Miller. Furthermore, the article states that volcanoes often spur lightning strikes in the same area.
So they're claiming that the atmospheric conditions near erupting volcanoes WOULD, in fact, be similar to Miller's original composition, and that this environment itself generates a diverse array of organic building blocks, as well as providing the context for lightning strikes that may have compounded these productions.
Seriously, reading before commenting helps.
-Laxitive
Donnie Darko: Life isn't that simple. I mean who cares if Ling Ling returns the wallet and keeps the money? It has nothing to do with either fear or love.
Kitty Farmer: Fear and love are the deepest of human emotions.
Donnie Darko: Okay. But you're not listening to me. There are other things that need to be taken into account here. Like the whole spectrum of human emotion. You can't just lump everything into these two categories and then just deny everything else!
One thing we do in our internal network is to have two sets of names. One set is logically named and reflects a specific purpose. For example, "svn.internal.tld", "db.internal.tld", "web.internal.tld". 'svn' is the svn server, 'db' is the db server, and so on. The same machine can potentially be mapped to from many of these names (for example, 'svn' and 'db' may resolve to the same IP).
When we write our internal scripts and configure our software, hostnames are ALWAYS specified using the logical function names.
On top of this, each of the physical machines has a unique name for itself, following whatever arbitrary naming scheme we choose (in our case, it's fruits: lemon, orange, etc.). We use this name when talking about actual machines with problems (e.g. "lemon just went down").
It works well enough for us. When we move services, we don't have to change our internal scripts or configuration at all, just change the dns reference for the given service. The nicknames allow us to talk about each individual machine easily.
To add to your list, two films whose names are numbers, and two dark masterpieces:
Fellini's "8 1/2".
Aronofski's "Pi".
Kubrick's "Dr. Strangelove"
"Man bites dog" (a Belgian flick I rented on a whim, was both deeply disturbed and blown away by, don't know the director).
I have another idea. Get caught jaywalking 3 times, house arrest: be barred from the public streets forever.
Three strikes, you're out!
I grew up in Tamil Nadu.. close to the Kerala border (my family speaks a local dialect of Tamil mixed with Malayalam) and I just wanted to come in and nod my sad head at this fact.
I remember at least 6 types of bananas directly. My favourites were the little tiny ones (like 3 inches long, yellow, and fat).
Even discounting the bananas, there are dozens and dozens of fruit that I haven't had in years, and I miss dearly.
Wandering around as 8-year old in my grandparents mango groves, picking ripe mangos straight from the tree, dried sap still fragrant on their skin, biting into it and scraping the flesh off the skin with my teeth.. that was pure fucking heaven.
You saw where EVERYTHING you ate came from. I'd go play out on the beach and watch the fisherfolk bring in their catch on their tiny boats. Dragging their nets flopping full of fish back onto the beach from their boats. There'd be kids running around playing with the fish (myself included).
The butchers we went to for mutton was a shack on the side of the street, fresh cuts of meat lying bleeding out in the open. If a cut wasn't available, they'd get a goat out from behind the shed and slaughter it right there.
One sad things about north america is how the people in general are so profoundly disconnected from their food - particularly urbanites (I'm no different, I get my veggies and meat at the supermarket too). I think it makes a big difference in how you feel about your food, and how you treat your food habits. The few places where it's preserved on this content are on the ranches and farms - but that culture is slowly dying out.
So it goes.
By the way, it's still possible to find some good fruit in north america, you just have to change your fruit. Apples in India (esp. south india) are shit. All the ones I ever had were mealy and nasty. You get a superb apple selection in most supermarkets, from tart to sweet to crisp to fleshy. If you are attentive, you can find really nice quality: apples, pears, pineapple, oranges, grapes, plums, melons (canteloups to watermelon). Some of the melons are really hit and miss - sometimes it's shit sometimes its awesome.. I haven't been able to figure out how to tell if a melon is sweet before I buy it.
Sure, it's not nearly as good as back in kerala and TN, but it's better than nothing.
I'm thinking a charge of manslaughter would be tenable as well. The persona she created was a weapon (whether it was physical or not, it was the instrument used to do the damage) she used against the girl. The question of intent, whether she consciously attempted to get the girl to commit suicide or not, is more muddled. The motive may have been just pure sociopathic glee she was deriving from torturing the girl.
It's clear enough to any reasonable person that there was a high risk of injury or death as the result of the woman's actions, and she should have known that. At the very least, her intentional recklessness led to the forseeable death of another person. That sounds like solid basis for a charge of manslaughter.
DISCLAIMER:
I'm not a lawyer and I don't know what I'm talking about)
There's a fundamental difference you're missing. The application of logic in law is always with a presupposed conclusion.
A defense lawer applying the logic of law MUST apply that logic in a way that it shows his client innocent or deserving of leniency - and that's his job. A prosecutor MUST apply the law's logic such that it shows that the defendant is guilty, and deserving of the punishment being sought. The conclusions are predefined.
Science is not (at least ostensibly) supposed to be like that. You apply logic and you get the conclusions you get. If you're trying to bend it and twist it to somehow fit your hypothesis, or take you to some predefined conclusions, then you're fundamentally subverting the process.
I don't agree with this. Ben Stein's opinions aren't worthless because he's not a scientist - they're wrong because they just don't have the necessary support.
Open source man, open source man,
Doin' the things that copyleft can,
What's he like? It's not important.
open source man.
Is he a geek, or is he a terrorist?
When he's on the internet does he distribute himself?
Or does the internet distribute him instead?
Nobody knows, open source man.
Iron man, Iron man.
Iron man hates open source man.
They have a fight, iron wins.
Iron man.
Do you know why I got into Computer Science?
That's right, for the pussy.
Then it was too sweet. As I was eating it, morsel by morsel, I realized that they had used too much honey, and the taste not bearable. The cooks who prepared this oversweet meal cared too much about honey, and too little about meat. Also, the tea was bad, since it was mixed with rocks from the garden of overused fucking food analogies for christ's sake STOP. I am no longer HUNGRY.
True, but the richness of Go comes from the interplay of the moves permitted by an extremely SIMPLE set of moves. There are exactly 2 major rules and one minor rule in Go:
1. you take turns placing pieces.
2. pieces or groups of pieces "surrounded" by other pieces are captured.
3. the board state cannot be repeated in two successive moves.
From this simple specification emerges an amazingly beautiful game. There are particular structures and patterns which emerge with concrete properties, advantages and disadvantages. Watching interplay between these structures as a game evolves is like watching a dance.
Now, this is all true for chess as well, but the ruleset for chess obfuscates it and hides it. Go takes the idea of a strategy game and strips it down to the barest essentials. That's what makes it so amazing for me. The sheer purity of it, the intuitiveness of the rules, and the depth of play that emerges from that.
I'm an Indian. Chess is what I grew up playing. I love chess. I played it very frequently as a child and into my teens (and stopped playing after I got busy with school and also found it hard to find opponents in high school). I've spent hundreds of dollars on chess sets carved from ebony and sandalwood.
All that said, Go blew me away when I learned it. I suck at the game, but every play is intense. At the end of every game I feel like I've participated in something majestic. More so than I ever felt with chess. Go is certainly a richer experience than chess.
>> WHO IS SHE WEARING IT FOR?
Presumably herself.
Slashdot lameness filter bypass:
Reason: Don't use so many caps. It's like YELLING.
Reason: Don't use so many caps. It's like YELLING.
Reason: Don't use so many caps. It's like YELLING.
Reason: Don't use so many caps. It's like YELLING.
Why go all the way to the top? You only have to go back a notch or two for the post about "black-clad riot police in cities like Portland act with absolute impunity".
A one-off comment in a post whose main thrust was more general, a good excuse to derail the conversation into whining territory.
The whole freakin' story is about crowd-control technology. Countless posts in the entire area have centered on "suppressing dissent," "freedom of speech," and many other topics related to the people-in-the-street context. But when someone else expressly mentions west-coast protest crowd control, I don't feel too far off talking about it ALSO.
No, the story is about a ray gun that causes pain and leaves no mark. There is a claim by one side that it is about crowd control, but the comment you were responding to was expressing a general fear of abuse of the weapons by police. This fear is valid, and is in no way assuaged by irrelevant comments about protestor behaviour.
-Laxitive
I read all the way up to the top of the thread. The ONLY instance where he used any phrase that may be interpreted as referring to protests is the following:
"There's very good reason to be afraid of the use of such a device to stifle dissent."
In fact, it was YOU who initially brought up the irrelevant commentary about protestors, TWICE.
It's easy to whine about hippie protestors to try to distract people from your main argument when your main argument is "Hey, the police are OK, wide range pain guns are OK, don't worry.. THE HIPPIE PROTESTORS ASKED FOR IT".
Of course, nobody mentioned the protestors except for you. Fixation much?
-Laxitive
How in heaven did you get from some guy being scared that he'll get pain rays used on him by an unaccountable belligerent police force, to irrelevant pithy commentary about protestors not making their case?
What the hell does that have to do with ANYTHING?
"I think protestors can be more persuasive if they act more civilly.. and that's why you shouldn't be afraid of pain guns!"
Do you understand how much of a freaking non-sequitur that is?
Here's the thing, there's probably not much that you need to personally apologize for (I'm guessing here.. I don't know you, who knows). What's missing is a national, formal acceptance of fault. Many in your country need to let go of the idea that accepting a mistake on the part of their country is tantamount to pissing on their graves of their ancestors.
Without an explicit acceptance of what your country ended up doing wrong, there is little hope of avoiding a repeat of the exact same thing in some other context. How are you, as a nation, going to educate your children so that they don't fall for the exact same trap when some tragedy strikes their country when THEY are the electorate? How is it possible to do this when every single time someone brings up a criticism, some weasel pops out of the waxwork to distract attention towards irrelevant actions by others? How is your personal apology going to combat that?
Your attitude seems to be one of putting things behind you and moving on.. which is understandable considering the embarassing trauma I'm sure you are suffering from.. but this is the wrong reaction to have. At the very least, your country owes it to the millions of people whose lives were ruined in part because of its actions, to examine what went wrong, reconcile with it, and put in place measures to avoid it. And don't for a second let yourself think that this expectation is somehow limited to just America. Every country has that obligation. Some may live up to that obligation, and others may not, but whether or not some other country holds itself up to a high standard shouldn't be a basis for excusing your own. It may seem to many that America receives an unfair amount of attention on this front.. but for christ's sake.. you're the most powerful nation in the world. Your influence affects EVERYBODY.. so OF COURSE people are going to scrutinize your actions more than the actions of others. You should welcome that, and rise to the challenge, and not run up a tree like a flayed cat.
Also, don't take this as me personally addressing you. I am speaking towards general tendencies I identify in your country's population, in your media, in your national social identity.
Now, I'm not sure abut your claim about America being the world's "greatest country", but I'd agree that your country has a many qualities that others could learn from, and that you have great potential.. for both good and bad. Your history is full of examples of both, and pointing out the bad does not detract from the good. Likewise, pointing out the good does not excuse the bad (and neither does pointing out the bad in others), and does not excuse the need for an honest self-appraisal amongst your citizens on the role their country plays in the world. This is one area where your people have been far too lax.
Libera... wait, you're using the American definition of liberal aren't you?
Amusing you Americans throwing around statements about naivety. Your whole country seems to be a pretty gullible lot. You were played like a twenty dollar whore, and half of you still don't realize it it. It'd be hilarious, really, if not for the people that hat to die because of that charming american airheadedness.
The reaction you exhibit is amusing. Caught with your pants down, you look around frantically to others you can throw blame on. The last best tactic available to you. "But.. but.. but... BOBBY STOLE COOKIES YESTERDAY, I SAW IT", you exclaim, your guilty willy waving free in the wind.
Anyway, it's not just France and Russia. We don't like you up here in Canada either. From what I can tell, Indians, Indonesians, Europeans (in general), South Americans, and Africans all think you're assholes too. Well.. at least you have Poland (actually, you don't.. most of the poles I've met think your country is full of assholes).
You better start digging through the internet now. It's gonna take a while to pull up dirt on every country in the world. I'm sure you'll find SOMETHING, and I'm sure that something will make you feel better about the horrible things your country has done, and you won't feel the need to really come to terms with it or apologize for it.
-Laxitive