It also implies that all seeds are honest. Oh, and that it takes as long to count 2^24 votes as it does to count 2 votes, unless I'm misreading you - my coffee hasn't kicked in yet.:P
What's really stupid is when people assume that fudged election numbers are only off by a few percent, and that only a few key results are fudged. That's the way an idiot would do it, but anyone remotely intelligent (or remotely smart enough to hire someone who WAS intelligent) would tweak all the results. Especially in the case of electronic voting, where there's no physical record of the votes. Start with current polls, and just nudge the numbers to give small, statistically probable swings across the board.
If the election was properly rigged, you wouldn't be able to tell via this kind of statistical analysis.
There's a guy around here somewhere with a sig that says "the grey goo scenario already happened; the earth is covered in self-replicating nanobots". He's right, too.
Thinking about it pragmatically, we can build machines that far out-scale animals, but going in the other direction you can't just build things bigger with stronger materials. I can see man-made nanobots being more effective than living cells, but not by more than a couple of orders of magnitude.
Yeah, Python is great because it's so easy to extend with native code. You can do all the heavy lifting (which often isn't particularly complicated) with C(++) and do all the algorithmically complicated stuff in Python.
As for teaching FORTRAN, well, it's still used a bit in scientific computing, so it's not a dead loss. It does seem a bit like teaching engineering students to smelt wootz steel, though.
You weren't around back in those days, were you? It's OK, I wasn't either. But my mum was, and she's told me a lot of stories about that era of computing, and for maybe 5 years was Australia's expert on COBOL. You see, back then, typing was something done by secretaries, and secretaries were women. So mere 'programming' was a woman's job. It wasn't until people realised that computers were handling (and generating) huge, huge volumes of money that men shouldered women aside and set up shop as the stereotypical software developers. Which is a pity, because it'd be awesome if coding were something you could do 'to meet chicks', like vet studies or psychology or nursing.;)
(I think the era that the GP was referring to is slightly after this phase, but there still would have been more women in the technical side than there are today, percent-wise. I know mum has lots of stories about punch cards and at one stage I believe actually entered a program via a plug board.)
There's also the caverns under Karazhan, which you can only get into via mild exploiting (sit in a corner and get another player to duel you and cast a 'fear' spell on you, you have a chance for the 'run around like a headless chicken' code to actually run you through a closed gate). It's surprisingly creepy down there.
Also remember that, with Vehicle to Grid technology (which is something AC Propulsion was pushing 10 years ago), EVs can actually help with load balancing by powering household electrics during peak time and then charging offpeak.
When Federal funding ran out, all the domestic automakers dropped their electric car prototypes including the alt-fuel & hybrids - the ones that would have had real promise.
When the California Air Resources Board gutted their ZEV program by allowing mild hybrid vehicles to count towards the quota, you mean? The moment the changes were passed, GM crushed all the EV1s they could get back, which was virtually all of them. One of the few surviving ones was given to a university with the drivetrain removed, and they still required the university to sign a contract agreeing to never drive the thing on the road. They also built only 200 EV1s and then claimed that there was no demand for the cars because they only sold 200 of them.
Sorta - rapid prototyping also kinda falls under the same description he used.
In the GP's context:
Agile Development:
Design phase costs 20% of the Implementation phase.
Implementation phase costs 500x the Build phase.
Initial design phase produces specs detailing a plasticine model of the outside of the Real Thing.
Subsequent design phases involve speccing plastic and/or metal sheets to attach to the original model, possibly replacing some of the plasticine.
Subsequent implementation phases involve an awful lot of hot glue and duct tape.
(On the other hand, I worked in an Agile shop for a year and it was probably the best run software house I've worked in, in terms of development practices etc. That said, I believe that's more to do with the quality of the technical leads than the methodology chosen.)
Stop thinking about me when I was in school, you freak!:P
Apologies if chirality is the wrong word for the context - 'handedness' wouldn't have worked as a near-homophone for 'chivalry' while still building on the dexter/sinister wordplay earlier. I was sacrificing an already dead language on the altar of funny, OK?:P
Why would you need a 12-year-old? Find any consenting adult female who is willing to participate (hint: there are millions of them), and then remap the mocap onto whatever model you want. Just because they used mocap to create the visuals of Gollum in LotR, for instance, doesn't mean Andy Serkis had to be a several-hundred-year-old devolved halfling...
There will always be the odd problem with 'crazy person see, crazy person do'. He watched Dexter - if he hadn't, he'd have watched some other show involving a serial killer and the result would have been much the same.
If it is ok to murder in games it should be OK to rape. Nothing wrong with it, and I have no reason to be anonymous!
This is something I've never understood. Why is it OK for a PG-13 type game to have the player mowing down hundreds of realistic-looking human enemies with an automatic rifle, but the moment there's any sexual content whatsoever the game is banned and there's a moral panic? Take the Hot Coffee GTA mod for example, the game is all about killing people and blowing shit up, and then there's an outcry over a scene where adults have consensual relations?
I'm not condoning actual rape in any form, but surely a simulation of such a thing running on someone's computer can't be worse than an equally detailed simulation of killing and then dismembering someone with a chainsaw? In extreme cases, it may even be a way for sexual misfits to satisfy their urges without harming actual, living people, letting them be functional members of society.
No domestically waring race would divert resources to traveling almost infinite distances looking for a new fight.
Whuh? How'd you get that? I don't see an event like the invention of a practicable hyperdrive having that sort of effect on us war-crazy buggers, why should it affect aliens that way?
Slashdot Mirror
It also implies that all seeds are honest. Oh, and that it takes as long to count 2^24 votes as it does to count 2 votes, unless I'm misreading you - my coffee hasn't kicked in yet. :P
What's really stupid is when people assume that fudged election numbers are only off by a few percent, and that only a few key results are fudged. That's the way an idiot would do it, but anyone remotely intelligent (or remotely smart enough to hire someone who WAS intelligent) would tweak all the results. Especially in the case of electronic voting, where there's no physical record of the votes. Start with current polls, and just nudge the numbers to give small, statistically probable swings across the board.
If the election was properly rigged, you wouldn't be able to tell via this kind of statistical analysis.
There's a guy around here somewhere with a sig that says "the grey goo scenario already happened; the earth is covered in self-replicating nanobots". He's right, too.
Thinking about it pragmatically, we can build machines that far out-scale animals, but going in the other direction you can't just build things bigger with stronger materials. I can see man-made nanobots being more effective than living cells, but not by more than a couple of orders of magnitude.
Um, Intel's down to 0.18 microns. That's 180 nanometers, which is definitely nanoscale. Better yet, this NAND flash is 34 nanometers.
Yeah, Python is great because it's so easy to extend with native code. You can do all the heavy lifting (which often isn't particularly complicated) with C(++) and do all the algorithmically complicated stuff in Python.
As for teaching FORTRAN, well, it's still used a bit in scientific computing, so it's not a dead loss. It does seem a bit like teaching engineering students to smelt wootz steel, though.
Do you REALLY want to refer to your rocket car by a numerical IP address? O.o
You weren't around back in those days, were you? It's OK, I wasn't either. But my mum was, and she's told me a lot of stories about that era of computing, and for maybe 5 years was Australia's expert on COBOL. You see, back then, typing was something done by secretaries, and secretaries were women. So mere 'programming' was a woman's job. It wasn't until people realised that computers were handling (and generating) huge, huge volumes of money that men shouldered women aside and set up shop as the stereotypical software developers. Which is a pity, because it'd be awesome if coding were something you could do 'to meet chicks', like vet studies or psychology or nursing. ;)
(I think the era that the GP was referring to is slightly after this phase, but there still would have been more women in the technical side than there are today, percent-wise. I know mum has lots of stories about punch cards and at one stage I believe actually entered a program via a plug board.)
Do you REALLY want to assign your rocket car's IP address by hand? O.o
There's also the caverns under Karazhan, which you can only get into via mild exploiting (sit in a corner and get another player to duel you and cast a 'fear' spell on you, you have a chance for the 'run around like a headless chicken' code to actually run you through a closed gate). It's surprisingly creepy down there.
Well, if he was having a pizza of thickness 'a' and radius 'z'...
They're not "drawing" power from the antenna. They're just scooping up some of the power that's already being splashed around.
I, for one, welcome our new Ad-Supported Wireless Power Ducks.
Also remember that, with Vehicle to Grid technology (which is something AC Propulsion was pushing 10 years ago), EVs can actually help with load balancing by powering household electrics during peak time and then charging offpeak.
Oh leave him alone! Just because he accidentally a word...
When Federal funding ran out, all the domestic automakers dropped their electric car prototypes including the alt-fuel & hybrids - the ones that would have had real promise.
When the California Air Resources Board gutted their ZEV program by allowing mild hybrid vehicles to count towards the quota, you mean? The moment the changes were passed, GM crushed all the EV1s they could get back, which was virtually all of them. One of the few surviving ones was given to a university with the drivetrain removed, and they still required the university to sign a contract agreeing to never drive the thing on the road. They also built only 200 EV1s and then claimed that there was no demand for the cars because they only sold 200 of them.
It will be happened; it shall be going to be happening; it will be was an event that could will have been taken place in the future.
Sorta - rapid prototyping also kinda falls under the same description he used.
In the GP's context:
Agile Development:
Design phase costs 20% of the Implementation phase.
Implementation phase costs 500x the Build phase.
Initial design phase produces specs detailing a plasticine model of the outside of the Real Thing.
Subsequent design phases involve speccing plastic and/or metal sheets to attach to the original model, possibly replacing some of the plasticine.
Subsequent implementation phases involve an awful lot of hot glue and duct tape.
(On the other hand, I worked in an Agile shop for a year and it was probably the best run software house I've worked in, in terms of development practices etc. That said, I believe that's more to do with the quality of the technical leads than the methodology chosen.)
Stop thinking about me when I was in school, you freak! :P
:P
Apologies if chirality is the wrong word for the context - 'handedness' wouldn't have worked as a near-homophone for 'chivalry' while still building on the dexter/sinister wordplay earlier. I was sacrificing an already dead language on the altar of funny, OK?
Why would you need a 12-year-old? Find any consenting adult female who is willing to participate (hint: there are millions of them), and then remap the mocap onto whatever model you want. Just because they used mocap to create the visuals of Gollum in LotR, for instance, doesn't mean Andy Serkis had to be a several-hundred-year-old devolved halfling...
It seems chirality is not dead after all... ;)
There will always be the odd problem with 'crazy person see, crazy person do'. He watched Dexter - if he hadn't, he'd have watched some other show involving a serial killer and the result would have been much the same.
If it is ok to murder in games it should be OK to rape. Nothing wrong with it, and I have no reason to be anonymous!
This is something I've never understood. Why is it OK for a PG-13 type game to have the player mowing down hundreds of realistic-looking human enemies with an automatic rifle, but the moment there's any sexual content whatsoever the game is banned and there's a moral panic? Take the Hot Coffee GTA mod for example, the game is all about killing people and blowing shit up, and then there's an outcry over a scene where adults have consensual relations?
I'm not condoning actual rape in any form, but surely a simulation of such a thing running on someone's computer can't be worse than an equally detailed simulation of killing and then dismembering someone with a chainsaw? In extreme cases, it may even be a way for sexual misfits to satisfy their urges without harming actual, living people, letting them be functional members of society.
"Amusement parts"? I'm not sure where you're going with this one...
What would an alien civilization able to travel to earth consider a "resource"?
Allotropic iron? :)
Yeah but the sun keeps dodging. Damn sneaky sun.
No domestically waring race would divert resources to traveling almost infinite distances looking for a new fight.
Whuh? How'd you get that? I don't see an event like the invention of a practicable hyperdrive having that sort of effect on us war-crazy buggers, why should it affect aliens that way?