So tell me, where does that leave us when those sensory experiences become artificial and malleable?
Very, very interesting post. My guess would be that we'll be left exactly where we are now, but with an added element. We'll still trust our senses (or more accurately, our interpretation of our senses) above all. Those senses will just be technologically improved. There will still be cases where our senses are deceived, but that happens today (think camouflage, optical illusions and so on), these situations will just be different. We'll just include the hardware and software involved in our sensory augments in the black box of 'senses' that we must choose to trust.
Yeah, but the 45-byte program doesn't say "Hello World". In fact, there's no example that I can find in TFA that outputs that message or any other. So the summary is incorrect on its face. TFA doesn't show a simpler "Hello World" program; it doesn't show any sort of "Hello World" program at all.
Exactly. Sure, the initial example was what it says on the tin; a simple 'hello world' in C. Through the iterations, though, it lost every single part of that. I'd argue that the final implementation wasn't "simple" in any way except byte count, given that it required some in-depth knowledge of, and then bending of, the ELF spec. The final implementation was not simpler (to a human, given that it required some in-depth knowledge of, and then bending of, the ELF spec). It was not "hello world" (it just returned an integer), and it was not in C.
Apparently so. Also, the number of fanatics (ie. the ones who would stab you if you told them their religion wasn't real) seems to determine the ranking of the religion on the hierarchy of respect. So Islam is sitting there at the top because they have the largest number of believers who are willing to die in order to take infidels with them. Scientology is up there because even though their overall numbers aren't that huge, they have a lot of high level whack jobs. Christianity is fairly low since they don't believe in killing people so much.
In fact now I think of it, the age is really only important because the longer ago the prophet was, the easier people seem to find it to believe that some supernatural power was involved.
Not only that, only nerds would get excited about a STOCK response from HR about discrimination, and then post it on slashdot. Not trying to troll here, but HR folks aren't lawyers, and are trained to be extremely careful when it comes to possible litigation. In short, even the bad publicity makes it worthwhile for HR to apologize to this "Jedi" instead of saying something like "we only recognize jedis on active duty, with working light sabers".
I dunno about anyone else but I'm excited because it's an important legal precedent supporting my plan to take a week off work 'for religious reasons' when Starcraft 2 is released.
Let's see, doing a random dungeon awards 2 emblems of frost the first time you complete it each day. I'm sorry, but 14 emblems of frost won't buy you anything. All gear you can buy with those costs between 30-95 emblems. You will either need to do this a quite a bit longer, or get these though other means (such as doing the end game content with 9 or 24 of your friends).
Oh, I know about frost badges. My mage is in 3/5 T10.:) I didn't mean the "kill one guy seven times" figures exactly like that (although we could make a case for running one random heroic a day for 7 days giving you ~6 badges a run, enough for T9 head or shoulders). I meant the general design philosophy. I find it really jarring, personally, when quests require you to kill the same guy many times. The way they're going they might as well just make it "kill Hogger 10 thousand times and we'll give you all your Emblem of Triumph gear." The challenge level is the same.
The reason they have this once per day reward for doing the same dungeon, is to help keep a social atmosphere in the game (dungeons are set up to be done by 5 players).
Random dungeons aren't social. At best you get a 'hi' at the start of the dungeon and then it's silent for the rest of the run. Usually I'm gritting my teeth trying to tolerate the incompetence of the random fail DPSers I get.
Wow has set up the model of rewarding skill and dedication, having either will get you good gear, while having both will earn you slightly better gear.
This is true. Maybe it's stopping being the game for me quite so much.:/ I just wish they'd add a proper progression for 5-man groups, parallel to raids. They're sorta getting there with normal heroics, then ToC5, then ICC, but the gap in gear rewards between heroic ICC5s and heroic ICC25 is ridiculous. It's definitely harder tanking heroic Halls of Reflection than anything else I've yet done (up to Rot/Fester in ICC25).
For the uninitiated: There're only two remotely challenging 5-man dungeons (Halls of Reflection and, to a lesser extent, Pit of Saron). By repeatedly grinding the easier dungeons you can earn tokens to buy a set of gear that completely trivialises all but these two.
Sure, some raids are still challenging (I have yet to see an ICC PuG get past both Rotface and Festergut) but if you can't dedicate the 2 or 3 solid hours needed to raid, you're stuck with 5-man content which is designed around "push this same button 500,000 times while watching television and we'll give you the gear you need to raid."
This is actually why Blizzard held off introducing teleport-to-dungeon and teleport-to-battleground systems for so long. If you remove the need to travel through the actual world, then the world becomes (as you put it) just one huge glorified lobby for a 5-player co-op game.
The reason they found it necessary is that they've designed WoW more and more around mind-numbing repetitive grinding of intolerably easy dungeons. They need to stop pushing the "kill this same guy once a day for the next week and we'll give you a piece of gear" design and go back to "work a little bit on this long difficult quest chain."
In a programming contest memory leaks and such are meaningless.
Correct. Spitting out the right answer in a reasonable time is the only thing which is important.
In fact, algorithmic complexity is also nearly meaningless. O(n^3) solutions that you can code in 5 minutes win over the O(n lg n) solution that takes an hour to code up.
Correct for your example (meh, polynomial, that's good enough) but not for the questions they'll be asking in the test. It typically won't be a choice between O(n^3) and O(n log n), more like a choice between O(n^4) and O(n^n). And then they'll give you examples with n=3 and n=4, and their test case will have n=17.
As the summary says "Accepted languages" (presumably the competition rules), I would tend to agree. They're not going to ask your students to complete something that those languages cannot reasonably accomplish. Bad C++ code will be slower than halfway-decent Python code. Teach a good foundation, and let the chips fall where they may.
Agreed. I've done a couple of these programming competitions in my youth (heh:P ) and in my experience, the runtime limit is in place to force you to use a more efficient algorithm, not to force you to streamline your brute force approach. So there might be a problem that would take an hour to solve using brute force, or a couple of seconds using dynamic programming, for instance - choice of language isn't going to affect the performance appreciably compared to choice of algorithm.
For what it's worth, I too say Python. It's easy to learn, flexible, and executes fast enough.
My guess is that something that lives in water all the time shouldn't by hydrophobic. The water spiders primarily live in the air.
An otherwise dry, watertight boat hull would be fine, but if a boat hull were made of flesh, a hydrophobic coating probably wouldn't work so well. That's why fish are slippery, not hairy.
That's actually a very interesting point - I recall seeing something about using a permeated skin with micro-jets of air coming out of it to cut drag on trucks and airliners, maybe something similar could be done with boats (whether with air, water, or even oil).
Actually, I maintain that I'm the only person in the world (of course, you're free to join me now) who has won the game. All it requires is a little assertive confidence, and the clear admonition that of COURSE the rules don't apply to you because you've already won.
Winning the game is fun because you get to say "oh did I mention, I won the game" and hear people around you say "FUCK... I just lost the game."
It's this one. Or rather, they say nothing about efficiency or the intensity of the incident required for their 1 watt per inch 'solar hair'. At, say, 150uM diameter, an inch of this solar hair has an area of 12mm^2 and so a power density of 0.0835 W/mm^2. That's 83.5 kW per square meter, while sunlight maxes out at around only 1kW / square meter. Assuming 30% efficiency, you'd need a light amplification factor of around 240 to get this sort of power out of sunlight. I don't know of any solid material that wouldn't be vaporised by that level of incident radiation.
Whether or not he is, I am. My sister's doing her thesis on wear processes in ceramic fuel cell membranes, so I occasionally hear stuff about this sort of thing. They're a lot better than they used to be but lifespans are still on the order of a year, not a decade. (I'll ask her about it and post back if I can get a more authoritative answer.:)
While you make a compelling point that someone somewhere must have spotted this, you don't seem to have any explanations of the phenomenon under discussion.
Seems to me that this failed due to poor game balance, not due to any inherent problem with designing a game to cater to all of the Bartle types. They designed the game to reward PvP activity (for instance, being able to loot items from other players) on par with PvE, but they didn't tie the PvPers to PvEers socially.
They needed to give the PvE crowd a large gameplay advantage (via better gear, buff spells, improved abilities, whatever) that could be obtained via PvE, but that's not enough, because PvEers don't often like PvP. What they needed was to give a way for PvEers to bestow a gameplay advantage on friendly PvPers. That would naturally lead to PvEers 'hiring' mercenaries, paying them in gear or gold, to protect them. This in turn attracts the Socializer/Killer types who enjoy, and are good at, PvP, while still enjoying the social aspect. It gives the PvEers protection against griefers, adds an aspect of difficulty to the griefers' game, and gives a positive outlet for 'good guys' in PvP.
Exactly. This is why, despite all the young fit corporate execs bewailing "communism" every time public health care is brought up, it's actually far better than the alternatives.
Forcing everyone to purchase health insurance, an 'individual mandate', is a bad solution because it combines the worst of both worlds. It forces everyone to pay ('from each according to his capacity', huzzah!) but that money is then funnelled into private companies who care only about maximising profit. Making healthcare purely self-funded with the help of optional health insurance and obviously the young and fit aren't going to voluntarily subsidise the old and infirm.
The answer, in my book, is what we have here in Australia. Taxpayer-funded not-for-profit healthcare for everyone at limited or no charge. Private healthcare and health insurance is available for those who want it and can afford it, but the baseline is universally available. (They're trying to push people into private health cover now to make the budget look better, which is stupid, but the basic system works well.)
It was funny for the same reason that reductio ad absurdum is usually funny. It was also meant to demonstrate (as reductio ad absurdum often is) the inherent silliness of the logical construct in use.
Slashdot Mirror
So tell me, where does that leave us when those sensory experiences become artificial and malleable?
Very, very interesting post. My guess would be that we'll be left exactly where we are now, but with an added element. We'll still trust our senses (or more accurately, our interpretation of our senses) above all. Those senses will just be technologically improved. There will still be cases where our senses are deceived, but that happens today (think camouflage, optical illusions and so on), these situations will just be different. We'll just include the hardware and software involved in our sensory augments in the black box of 'senses' that we must choose to trust.
Yeah, but the 45-byte program doesn't say "Hello World". In fact, there's no example that I can find in TFA that outputs that message or any other. So the summary is incorrect on its face. TFA doesn't show a simpler "Hello World" program; it doesn't show any sort of "Hello World" program at all.
Exactly. Sure, the initial example was what it says on the tin; a simple 'hello world' in C. Through the iterations, though, it lost every single part of that. I'd argue that the final implementation wasn't "simple" in any way except byte count, given that it required some in-depth knowledge of, and then bending of, the ELF spec. The final implementation was not simpler (to a human, given that it required some in-depth knowledge of, and then bending of, the ELF spec). It was not "hello world" (it just returned an integer), and it was not in C.
:(
False advertising.
Apparently so. Also, the number of fanatics (ie. the ones who would stab you if you told them their religion wasn't real) seems to determine the ranking of the religion on the hierarchy of respect. So Islam is sitting there at the top because they have the largest number of believers who are willing to die in order to take infidels with them. Scientology is up there because even though their overall numbers aren't that huge, they have a lot of high level whack jobs. Christianity is fairly low since they don't believe in killing people so much.
In fact now I think of it, the age is really only important because the longer ago the prophet was, the easier people seem to find it to believe that some supernatural power was involved.
Not only that, only nerds would get excited about a STOCK response from HR about discrimination, and then post it on slashdot. Not trying to troll here, but HR folks aren't lawyers, and are trained to be extremely careful when it comes to possible litigation. In short, even the bad publicity makes it worthwhile for HR to apologize to this "Jedi" instead of saying something like "we only recognize jedis on active duty, with working light sabers".
I dunno about anyone else but I'm excited because it's an important legal precedent supporting my plan to take a week off work 'for religious reasons' when Starcraft 2 is released.
Let's see, doing a random dungeon awards 2 emblems of frost the first time you complete it each day. I'm sorry, but 14 emblems of frost won't buy you anything. All gear you can buy with those costs between 30-95 emblems. You will either need to do this a quite a bit longer, or get these though other means (such as doing the end game content with 9 or 24 of your friends).
Oh, I know about frost badges. My mage is in 3/5 T10. :) I didn't mean the "kill one guy seven times" figures exactly like that (although we could make a case for running one random heroic a day for 7 days giving you ~6 badges a run, enough for T9 head or shoulders). I meant the general design philosophy. I find it really jarring, personally, when quests require you to kill the same guy many times. The way they're going they might as well just make it "kill Hogger 10 thousand times and we'll give you all your Emblem of Triumph gear." The challenge level is the same.
The reason they have this once per day reward for doing the same dungeon, is to help keep a social atmosphere in the game (dungeons are set up to be done by 5 players).
Random dungeons aren't social. At best you get a 'hi' at the start of the dungeon and then it's silent for the rest of the run. Usually I'm gritting my teeth trying to tolerate the incompetence of the random fail DPSers I get.
Wow has set up the model of rewarding skill and dedication, having either will get you good gear, while having both will earn you slightly better gear.
This is true. Maybe it's stopping being the game for me quite so much. :/ I just wish they'd add a proper progression for 5-man groups, parallel to raids. They're sorta getting there with normal heroics, then ToC5, then ICC, but the gap in gear rewards between heroic ICC5s and heroic ICC25 is ridiculous. It's definitely harder tanking heroic Halls of Reflection than anything else I've yet done (up to Rot/Fester in ICC25).
For the uninitiated: There're only two remotely challenging 5-man dungeons (Halls of Reflection and, to a lesser extent, Pit of Saron). By repeatedly grinding the easier dungeons you can earn tokens to buy a set of gear that completely trivialises all but these two.
Sure, some raids are still challenging (I have yet to see an ICC PuG get past both Rotface and Festergut) but if you can't dedicate the 2 or 3 solid hours needed to raid, you're stuck with 5-man content which is designed around "push this same button 500,000 times while watching television and we'll give you the gear you need to raid."
This is actually why Blizzard held off introducing teleport-to-dungeon and teleport-to-battleground systems for so long. If you remove the need to travel through the actual world, then the world becomes (as you put it) just one huge glorified lobby for a 5-player co-op game.
The reason they found it necessary is that they've designed WoW more and more around mind-numbing repetitive grinding of intolerably easy dungeons. They need to stop pushing the "kill this same guy once a day for the next week and we'll give you a piece of gear" design and go back to "work a little bit on this long difficult quest chain."
In a programming contest memory leaks and such are meaningless.
Correct. Spitting out the right answer in a reasonable time is the only thing which is important.
In fact, algorithmic complexity is also nearly meaningless. O(n^3) solutions that you can code in 5 minutes win over the O(n lg n) solution that takes an hour to code up.
Correct for your example (meh, polynomial, that's good enough) but not for the questions they'll be asking in the test. It typically won't be a choice between O(n^3) and O(n log n), more like a choice between O(n^4) and O(n^n). And then they'll give you examples with n=3 and n=4, and their test case will have n=17.
As the summary says "Accepted languages" (presumably the competition rules), I would tend to agree. They're not going to ask your students to complete something that those languages cannot reasonably accomplish. Bad C++ code will be slower than halfway-decent Python code. Teach a good foundation, and let the chips fall where they may.
Agreed. I've done a couple of these programming competitions in my youth (heh :P ) and in my experience, the runtime limit is in place to force you to use a more efficient algorithm, not to force you to streamline your brute force approach. So there might be a problem that would take an hour to solve using brute force, or a couple of seconds using dynamic programming, for instance - choice of language isn't going to affect the performance appreciably compared to choice of algorithm.
For what it's worth, I too say Python. It's easy to learn, flexible, and executes fast enough.
My guess is that something that lives in water all the time shouldn't by hydrophobic. The water spiders primarily live in the air.
An otherwise dry, watertight boat hull would be fine, but if a boat hull were made of flesh, a hydrophobic coating probably wouldn't work so well. That's why fish are slippery, not hairy.
That's actually a very interesting point - I recall seeing something about using a permeated skin with micro-jets of air coming out of it to cut drag on trucks and airliners, maybe something similar could be done with boats (whether with air, water, or even oil).
Now THAT's what I call "equal opportunity". :D
Actually note this from the article :
Although he hasn't published the research yet, Sigmund said a variation of the surface also repels oil, a first for the industry.
What would you call that? Unctuophobic?
It all hinges on the topological properties of a sphincter.
That's disturbingly informative considering the visual it gives.
I don't speak enough languages to do more than guess at half of your post, but for what it's worth, I found it interesting. :P
*shakes fist at xkcd* ok ok so I'm not as original as I thought. :( Still...
The only winning move is not to play.
Actually, I maintain that I'm the only person in the world (of course, you're free to join me now) who has won the game. All it requires is a little assertive confidence, and the clear admonition that of COURSE the rules don't apply to you because you've already won.
Winning the game is fun because you get to say "oh did I mention, I won the game" and hear people around you say "FUCK... I just lost the game."
It's this one. Or rather, they say nothing about efficiency or the intensity of the incident required for their 1 watt per inch 'solar hair'. At, say, 150uM diameter, an inch of this solar hair has an area of 12mm^2 and so a power density of 0.0835 W/mm^2. That's 83.5 kW per square meter, while sunlight maxes out at around only 1kW / square meter. Assuming 30% efficiency, you'd need a light amplification factor of around 240 to get this sort of power out of sunlight. I don't know of any solid material that wouldn't be vaporised by that level of incident radiation.
New technologies virtually always go down in dollar cost, let alone inflation-adjusted dollar cost or opportunity cost, as they mature.
Whether or not he is, I am. My sister's doing her thesis on wear processes in ceramic fuel cell membranes, so I occasionally hear stuff about this sort of thing. They're a lot better than they used to be but lifespans are still on the order of a year, not a decade. (I'll ask her about it and post back if I can get a more authoritative answer. :)
If you replace 'suffer' with 'LIVE IN HOUSEBOATS' then global warming becomes AWESOME! :D
While you make a compelling point that someone somewhere must have spotted this, you don't seem to have any explanations of the phenomenon under discussion.
Seems to me that this failed due to poor game balance, not due to any inherent problem with designing a game to cater to all of the Bartle types. They designed the game to reward PvP activity (for instance, being able to loot items from other players) on par with PvE, but they didn't tie the PvPers to PvEers socially.
They needed to give the PvE crowd a large gameplay advantage (via better gear, buff spells, improved abilities, whatever) that could be obtained via PvE, but that's not enough, because PvEers don't often like PvP. What they needed was to give a way for PvEers to bestow a gameplay advantage on friendly PvPers. That would naturally lead to PvEers 'hiring' mercenaries, paying them in gear or gold, to protect them. This in turn attracts the Socializer/Killer types who enjoy, and are good at, PvP, while still enjoying the social aspect. It gives the PvEers protection against griefers, adds an aspect of difficulty to the griefers' game, and gives a positive outlet for 'good guys' in PvP.
Exactly. This is why, despite all the young fit corporate execs bewailing "communism" every time public health care is brought up, it's actually far better than the alternatives.
Forcing everyone to purchase health insurance, an 'individual mandate', is a bad solution because it combines the worst of both worlds. It forces everyone to pay ('from each according to his capacity', huzzah!) but that money is then funnelled into private companies who care only about maximising profit. Making healthcare purely self-funded with the help of optional health insurance and obviously the young and fit aren't going to voluntarily subsidise the old and infirm.
The answer, in my book, is what we have here in Australia. Taxpayer-funded not-for-profit healthcare for everyone at limited or no charge. Private healthcare and health insurance is available for those who want it and can afford it, but the baseline is universally available. (They're trying to push people into private health cover now to make the budget look better, which is stupid, but the basic system works well.)
It was funny for the same reason that reductio ad absurdum is usually funny. It was also meant to demonstrate (as reductio ad absurdum often is) the inherent silliness of the logical construct in use.
Nose hair? What I would 'av GIVEN to 'ave NOSE HAIR! Fists, you say? You 'av FISTS? Oh, you don't know what it's LIKE to be poor an' oppressed!