Well, there are lots of AI robot battling games out there, one of particular interest is the Europa Project: MindRover from Cognitoy, because it has been designed in such way that it should be, and is, rather easy to port the AI routines designed and simulated (in rather good 3D) into real robots. They even have extension pack that allows you to do exactly that, program your 'bot on computer, see how it does, and then transfer the program into lego mindstorms. Cool.
Go, try the demo, fall in love, and buy that. There used to be even Linux version, ported by Loki (R.I.P.), you could probably still grab that one somewhere... though, I'd suggest windoze version to get the developers some money, so maybe they'll able to make the MR 2 some day.
Not true, size of the phones does NOT correlate with population density - not every area on Europe is ultra densely populated.
If info I found on a quick google search is right, US has average population density of something like 30/km^2 or little less, and for example here in Finland we have average of
_17_ per square kilometer, yet we have biggest relative cell phone amount in the whole world, and yes, those phones are the miniature european GSM version - and they DO work almost anywhere, the two biggest operators have probably something like 99% coverage, or more.
To specify the second poster, phone/pda in Saint was Nokia Communicator 9000 - rather old one, by the way, has been out for years, and they have already made several new versions, major updates being 9110 and 9210, I'm not sure whether they are GSM 900 or 900/1800 phones, but are quite real. Be prepared to shell out quite a few bucks for it, though, here in Finland 9210 costs about one thousand euros.
"Merely" translation work? Well, it may be, that tech problems that totally prevent localizing are worse, but translating computer software is some damn tough job.
I've seen some of the results of "merely translating" to another western language, and the results are sometimes rather horrible.
Re:OK, let's kill soldiers instead.
on
The Drone War
·
· Score: 1
Yeah, sure, now that you've killed thousands of innocent civilians who had NOTHING to do with the whole freaking conflict, you think they are looking you and wondering that "look how nice those Americans are - they really had guts to send their machines to kill innocent people"?
Guess what. The only thing you've gotten yourself is thousands more of bitter young people who lost their relatives on the pointless "war". They want revenge. Only way to get it... is to become a terrorist. Congratulations! You've eliminated one, and gained thousands of more, and you call this a victory?
Nothing to worry about, 7.5 billion years is LOT of time, even with todays technology you could probably colonize whole damn galaxy by then, doesn't take longer than few thousand years at most to colonize nearby star and have it in good enough condition for it to send an own colony ship to next and each new solar system adds up to the process speeding up exponentially and in just about no time we are everywhere. Unless there is someone already there who doesn't like pesky hairless apes stealing their territory.
And what comes to taking other species... well, if we are continuing what we are doing now, there will be no other living things to worry about.
Anyway, we gotta go, even if Earth as a planet survives the cataclysm, nothing can live there anymore after the sun shrinks into a white dwarf, no matter how much greenhouse gases we'll pump into atmosphere (which probably doesn't exist anymore), it'll still be colder than the Pluto is now.
You can aerobrake (maybe you should try to train those monkeys to use metric system right from the beginning to avoid those unit conversion(tm) craters, though).
Or you can have as much fuel on board of those things that you have now, but use it ALL on delerating instead of only half, and get there twice as fast.
Or you can have half of the fuel and still get in as fast as now.
Sure, it doesn't work on the ISS (or was that IIS)), but it doesn't mean that whole idea is without merit.
Um, this _IS_ clarification, after the change, those people in the world do NOT have to suffer understanding the difference anymore - because there will no more be any difference, 1024 and 1000 are safely under their own units, EVERYONE (with a possible exception of americans, but who cares about them anyway), know from their everyday life with kilometers, kilograms and stuff, that kilo==1000, when you slam computer in their face and try to claim that kilo==1024, it's no wonder why they do not understand the difference - teaching a new unit, Ki, is a whole lot easier than trying to stay on tracks on one unit that has two different meanings.
Half-Life is actually based on the Q1 engine, not Q2, which has been open sourced for a long time now, but of course Valve, or anyone else using those, is under no obligations to OS their implementations, that have been purchased before this.
HL is still selling quite well, probably mostly because of CS, so no, I don't think we'll have free version for a while - you just don't kill a goose that lays golden eggs.
If you are thinking about Open Source hackers evolving the Q2 source so that it is compatible with HL... well, possible, but certainly not very likely, modifications done to the HL from base Quake source tree are huge, implementing those changes is no way going to be any easy task.
No, Valve would not have had give away whole Half-Life, only the modifications they did to the quake engine (maybe HL was a bad example, because for HL, Valve really did quite a bit of work on the engine too, something that used almost unmodified engine would be better), they could still sell the GAME, data files, just like ID is still not giving away those, even if the source has been opened.
So, in turn, people who did Gunman Chronicles could've taken HL engine for free, and build their game on top of it.
People don't buy game engines. Companies do buy game engines. Derivative games don't sell, you say? Well, think again, guess what for example Valve used for Half-Life? That's right, Quake, and they paid for it, probably quite a bit of money. And it's certainly not the only successfull non-id game using ID's engine, do you think they would've paid for that engine if it was right there under the GPL right after the Quake went out of the press?
So you really think, ID should just give away it's code for their competitors to use for free?
What are you guys smoking these days?
What makes you think nanites don't require any of the "stuff"? They need matter (and suitable one at that, just any molecule doesn't do) to replicate themselves, and they need energy to function, "food", water, heat, whatever you call it.
And as other poster told, using our own matter to make copies of itself, viruses do exactly that, or actually more, nanite has to do all the work itself - while the virus takes over existing factory (one of yours sells) and reprograms it with its own DNA to make more viruses - virii way is certainly more energy efficient, yet immune system can deal with most of them.
Only one thing is true, and probably pretty important one at that is the thing that all natural living things (yeah, I'd say self-replicating nanites can certainly be classified as living things) have some kind of self-preservation method, which the nanites don't, but genetically engineered microbe of mass destruction wouldn't need to have that either.
Re:Wow... that's a reeeeaaaal stretch.
on
Sklyarov Indicted
·
· Score: 1
Oh, he did? Guess then you should start making more jails damn fast - after all, if MS is eventually proven guilty there will quite a rush, because we need to convict every person working there for the crime the company they were employed by has made.
And what comes to stealing... you would be upset at the person who stole it, but would you go wild and demand that every employee of company that made the hammer thief used to shatter a window and break into your house should be hauled off for producing a tool that can be used for either good or evil? No, I dont think you would, but when it is not a hammer but a software then you do? Why is that?
Since when does working in a company y (in this case as a programmer) immediately makes you know every detail of the same companys marketing and sales divisions and their plans?
Dunno about the pr0n, but if this kind of things start to get more popularity, ISPs just change their user policies so that sharing the connection is not allowed, and drop your line if you do share it... of course city-wide network would still be nice but not nearly as neat as free (well not free, wlan cards and antennas are rather expensive) 'net.
Well, its rather simple - hey dont do it because it would add quite a lot of extra to already hard task of making the space craft, not to mention how much more money they would have to pour it, and the money is something they just dont have these days.
No need to splice, the powerlines are acting as antennas at the frequencies PLC is using, thus happily transmitting your precious data to everyone willing to listen... The companies have claimed to have solved the interference problems for who knows how long, but have they really? They can't deny the laws of physics whatever they do.
Sure it is, but just watching and letting their people die - especially if done by a government - which is, or at least should be, _there for the best of those same people_ - when they could prevent it, is FAR more repugnant.
Watching people die when you could do something is not murder, but its damn near, and that is certainly greater evil than mere stealing.
Not that it matters, VIA chipset is close enough in performance, so considerable lower prices of DDR SDRAM and probably the chipset itself in comparison to i850 and RDRAM give it quite a bit better price/speed ratio - as usual.
It said that they are planning to re-tool their production line, in other words, they are converting it to produce something else - Athlons, maybe, or something other that they think will be more profitable than the current product..
Stem cells have the ability to became any type of cell possible, and thus they can allow cloning of invidual body parts without cloning of whole humans... one doesn't need very good imagination to understand the possibilities of this...
Even though, it's not that easy, if the organ isn't cloned of your own cells, your body will reject it just as much as any organ donated by another human.
It's just.vbs virus, nothing pdf-specific here, except social engineering, this thing could just as well ride on a compressed file to avoid catch by vbs filters, yet, do I see headlines on slashdot about viruses in zip, bzip2, tar, gzip, compress, arj, rar, ace, lha..... and whatever of the bazillion formats? No, even though they are actually far more dangerous - anyone has a program to open those files, while only a few people use Adobe Acrobat.
Every other post seems to be afraid of the nanotubes running away wild killing of every one.
WAKE UP, guys. These things are _NOT LIVING_, and neither they are nanobots, and they _CAN NOT_ reproduce, or reprogram themselves to kill other cells.
Some of you idiots just don't get it, do you? No?
Well, that's no surprise, it just tells us that you are even more stupid than those ancient cavemans... at least they knew that mankind _CAN NOT SURVIVE WITHOUT NATURE_, we are a part of nature, which seems to be a point that you have forgotten, human is an animal as much as any of those killed ones, we depend on food, clean water and air just as well as they did, so far I haven't seen a human that can eat rocks, breathe air full of toxins and with no oxygen, and drink contaminated water... have you?
'Cause that's the world of future if we do what your kind of people seem to think is "right", and kill all living things besides ourself and continue poisoning the atmosphere and waters...
Dunno about you, but I prefer our children to be living normally, instead of forced to live in sealed domes, eating some hydrophonically grown food, because their ancestors (that would be us, guess twice are they going to like us because what we forced them into?) destroyed the world, turning it into some strange, dead, moon-like alien rock instead of our beautiful, living home planet.
We may well be superior by power, and cold, mathematical intelligence, compared to the rest of animals, but as we lack wisdom tho use that power and intelligence, we are stupid, very plain and simple. People must learn to think about long term consequences before the immediate benefit if we are going to survive.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, there are lots of AI robot battling games out there, one of particular interest is the Europa Project: MindRover from Cognitoy, because it has been designed in such way that it should be, and is, rather easy to port the AI routines designed and simulated (in rather good 3D) into real robots. They even have extension pack that allows you to do exactly that, program your 'bot on computer, see how it does, and then transfer the program into lego mindstorms. Cool.
Go, try the demo, fall in love, and buy that. There used to be even Linux version, ported by Loki (R.I.P.), you could probably still grab that one somewhere... though, I'd suggest windoze version to get the developers some money, so maybe they'll able to make the MR 2 some day.
Not true, size of the phones does NOT correlate with population density - not every area on Europe is ultra densely populated.
If info I found on a quick google search is right, US has average population density of something like 30/km^2 or little less, and for example here in Finland we have average of
_17_ per square kilometer, yet we have biggest relative cell phone amount in the whole world, and yes, those phones are the miniature european GSM version - and they DO work almost anywhere, the two biggest operators have probably something like 99% coverage, or more.
To specify the second poster, phone/pda in Saint was Nokia Communicator 9000 - rather old one, by the way, has been out for years, and they have already made several new versions, major updates being 9110 and 9210, I'm not sure whether they are GSM 900 or 900/1800 phones, but are quite real. Be prepared to shell out quite a few bucks for it, though, here in Finland 9210 costs about one thousand euros.
"Merely" translation work? Well, it may be, that tech problems that totally prevent localizing are worse, but translating computer software is some damn tough job.
I've seen some of the results of "merely translating" to another western language, and the results are sometimes rather horrible.
Yeah, sure, now that you've killed thousands of innocent civilians who had NOTHING to do with the whole freaking conflict, you think they are looking you and wondering that "look how nice those Americans are - they really had guts to send their machines to kill innocent people"?
... is to become a terrorist. Congratulations! You've eliminated one, and gained thousands of more, and you call this a victory?
Guess what. The only thing you've gotten yourself is thousands more of bitter young people who lost their relatives on the pointless "war". They want revenge. Only way to get it
Nothing to worry about, 7.5 billion years is LOT of time, even with todays technology you could probably colonize whole damn galaxy by then, doesn't take longer than few thousand years at most to colonize nearby star and have it in good enough condition for it to send an own colony ship to next and each new solar system adds up to the process speeding up exponentially and in just about no time we are everywhere. Unless there is someone already there who doesn't like pesky hairless apes stealing their territory.
And what comes to taking other species... well, if we are continuing what we are doing now, there will be no other living things to worry about.
Anyway, we gotta go, even if Earth as a planet survives the cataclysm, nothing can live there anymore after the sun shrinks into a white dwarf, no matter how much greenhouse gases we'll pump into atmosphere (which probably doesn't exist anymore), it'll still be colder than the Pluto is now.
You can aerobrake (maybe you should try to train those monkeys to use metric system right from the beginning to avoid those unit conversion(tm) craters, though).
Or you can have as much fuel on board of those things that you have now, but use it ALL on delerating instead of only half, and get there twice as fast.
Or you can have half of the fuel and still get in as fast as now.
Sure, it doesn't work on the ISS (or was that IIS)), but it doesn't mean that whole idea is without merit.
Um, this _IS_ clarification, after the change, those people in the world do NOT have to suffer understanding the difference anymore - because there will no more be any difference, 1024 and 1000 are safely under their own units, EVERYONE (with a possible exception of americans, but who cares about them anyway), know from their everyday life with kilometers, kilograms and stuff, that kilo==1000, when you slam computer in their face and try to claim that kilo==1024, it's no wonder why they do not understand the difference - teaching a new unit, Ki, is a whole lot easier than trying to stay on tracks on one unit that has two different meanings.
Half-Life is actually based on the Q1 engine, not Q2, which has been open sourced for a long time now, but of course Valve, or anyone else using those, is under no obligations to OS their implementations, that have been purchased before this.
... well, possible, but certainly not very likely, modifications done to the HL from base Quake source tree are huge, implementing those changes is no way going to be any easy task.
HL is still selling quite well, probably mostly because of CS, so no, I don't think we'll have free version for a while - you just don't kill a goose that lays golden eggs.
If you are thinking about Open Source hackers evolving the Q2 source so that it is compatible with HL
No, Valve would not have had give away whole Half-Life, only the modifications they did to the quake engine (maybe HL was a bad example, because for HL, Valve really did quite a bit of work on the engine too, something that used almost unmodified engine would be better), they could still sell the GAME, data files, just like ID is still not giving away those, even if the source has been opened.
So, in turn, people who did Gunman Chronicles could've taken HL engine for free, and build their game on top of it.
People don't buy game engines. Companies do buy game engines. Derivative games don't sell, you say? Well, think again, guess what for example Valve used for Half-Life? That's right, Quake, and they paid for it, probably quite a bit of money. And it's certainly not the only successfull non-id game using ID's engine, do you think they would've paid for that engine if it was right there under the GPL right after the Quake went out of the press?
So you really think, ID should just give away it's code for their competitors to use for free?
What are you guys smoking these days?
What makes you think nanites don't require any of the "stuff"? They need matter (and suitable one at that, just any molecule doesn't do) to replicate themselves, and they need energy to function, "food", water, heat, whatever you call it.
And as other poster told, using our own matter to make copies of itself, viruses do exactly that, or actually more, nanite has to do all the work itself - while the virus takes over existing factory (one of yours sells) and reprograms it with its own DNA to make more viruses - virii way is certainly more energy efficient, yet immune system can deal with most of them.
Only one thing is true, and probably pretty important one at that is the thing that all natural living things (yeah, I'd say self-replicating nanites can certainly be classified as living things) have some kind of self-preservation method, which the nanites don't, but genetically engineered microbe of mass destruction wouldn't need to have that either.
Oh, he did? Guess then you should start making more jails damn fast - after all, if MS is eventually proven guilty there will quite a rush, because we need to convict every person working there for the crime the company they were employed by has made.
... you would be upset at the person who stole it, but would you go wild and demand that every employee of company that made the hammer thief used to shatter a window and break into your house should be hauled off for producing a tool that can be used for either good or evil? No, I dont think you would, but when it is not a hammer but a software then you do? Why is that?
And what comes to stealing
Since when does working in a company y (in this case as a programmer) immediately makes you know every detail of the same companys marketing and sales divisions and their plans?
Well that's easy to answer - if you violate the policy you've agreed to, they have every right to cancel the deal - and your service.
Dunno about the pr0n, but if this kind of things start to get more popularity, ISPs just change their user policies so that sharing the connection is not allowed, and drop your line if you do share it... of course city-wide network would still be nice but not nearly as neat as free (well not free, wlan cards and antennas are rather expensive) 'net.
Well, its rather simple - hey dont do it because it would add quite a lot of extra to already hard task of making the space craft, not to mention how much more money they would have to pour it, and the money is something they just dont have these days.
No need to splice, the powerlines are acting as antennas at the frequencies PLC is using, thus happily transmitting your precious data to everyone willing to listen ... The companies have claimed to have solved the interference problems for who knows how long, but have they really? They can't deny the laws of physics whatever they do.
Sure it is, but just watching and letting their people die - especially if done by a government - which is, or at least should be, _there for the best of those same people_ - when they could prevent it, is FAR more repugnant.
Watching people die when you could do something is not murder, but its damn near, and that is certainly greater evil than mere stealing.
Well, it didn't in AquaMark.
Not that it matters, VIA chipset is close enough in performance, so considerable lower prices of DDR SDRAM and probably the chipset itself in comparison to i850 and RDRAM give it quite a bit better price/speed ratio - as usual.
It said that they are planning to re-tool their production line, in other words, they are converting it to produce something else - Athlons, maybe, or something other that they think will be more profitable than the current product..
A lot...
Stem cells have the ability to became any type of cell possible, and thus they can allow cloning of invidual body parts without cloning of whole humans... one doesn't need very good imagination to understand the possibilities of this...
Even though, it's not that easy, if the organ isn't cloned of your own cells, your body will reject it just as much as any organ donated by another human.
It's just .vbs virus, nothing pdf-specific here, except social engineering, this thing could just as well ride on a compressed file to avoid catch by vbs filters, yet, do I see headlines on slashdot about viruses in zip, bzip2, tar, gzip, compress, arj, rar, ace, lha..... and whatever of the bazillion formats? No, even though they are actually far more dangerous - anyone has a program to open those files, while only a few people use Adobe Acrobat.
Every other post seems to be afraid of the nanotubes running away wild killing of every one.
WAKE UP, guys. These things are _NOT LIVING_, and neither they are nanobots, and they _CAN NOT_ reproduce, or reprogram themselves to kill other cells.
Some of you idiots just don't get it, do you? No?
Well, that's no surprise, it just tells us that you are even more stupid than those ancient cavemans... at least they knew that mankind _CAN NOT SURVIVE WITHOUT NATURE_, we are a part of nature, which seems to be a point that you have forgotten, human is an animal as much as any of those killed ones, we depend on food, clean water and air just as well as they did, so far I haven't seen a human that can eat rocks, breathe air full of toxins and with no oxygen, and drink contaminated water... have you?
'Cause that's the world of future if we do what your kind of people seem to think is "right", and kill all living things besides ourself and continue poisoning the atmosphere and waters...
Dunno about you, but I prefer our children to be living normally, instead of forced to live in sealed domes, eating some hydrophonically grown food, because their ancestors (that would be us, guess twice are they going to like us because what we forced them into?) destroyed the world, turning it into some strange, dead, moon-like alien rock instead of our beautiful, living home planet.
We may well be superior by power, and cold, mathematical intelligence, compared to the rest of animals, but as we lack wisdom tho use that power and intelligence, we are stupid, very plain and simple. People must learn to think about long term consequences before the immediate benefit if we are going to survive.