If, as I suggest in my other post on this article, we piece the illusion via overloading the system with computations it must perform, the creator may be forced to start "simplifying" the laws of physics in observable ways.
1) Beware! The simulation may be simplified by exterminating the experimenting species(es?). This has already been used in a short story by Niven ("Rotating Cylinders and the Possibility of Global Causality Violation") about Tipler Cylinders - closed time-like loops in the presence of massive, infinite, fast-rotating cylinders. Look up Tipler Cylinders on wikipedia for full details.
2) The creator may also slow down the simulation (from the higher level perspective) time step, which would be undetectable in-game. Thus, one day may be like unto only five hundred years, rather than the original one thousand. I did something like this, when I varied the timestep on my lunar launch mission simulation in Computational Physics I by the derivative of gravity (with a minimum timestep to allow crashes into the Moon's center to complete)(although I *did* have to Ctrl-C the program a few times before I realized that was the problem; do you *want* Him to do that to us, if this is true?).
Alternately, He may use up His computer time budget, and we will be shut down by His department.
3) Perhaps He has already planned the simplification. I.e., the Big Rip, when dark energy blows up the Universe so fast that each elementary particle eventually sees itself alone in its own Universe.
You seem to be confusing the Singularity, a geometric point in the center of a black hole, with the event horizon, where particles can never escape (not quite the same as the region of infinite red shift, for a rotating black hole, but close). The charge of a black hole is, like its mass and spin, a property that escapes cosmic censorship (unlike baryon number, any internal geometry, etc.). Thus your positively charged black hole WOULD repel proton and positrons, and attract anti-protons and electrons, thus tending to neutralize itself over time. OTOH, it might be interesting to check what the effect of a few 1000 tons of excess protons would be; perhaps it is small enough to be sustained. I would guess that the Hawking Radiation would neutralize any overall charge fairly quickly, though.
IANA Physicist, but I did waste three years of my parent's money majoring in it.
The New York Times seems to think Apple has designed the ideal techie retail store.
These people have never been to a Fry's. If you've never been to one, picture this: they sell porn and energy drinks within 20 feet of each other.
The New York Times, like many of the rest of us, is at least a 16 hour drive from the nearest Fry's. That, alone, would make Fry's less than the ideal techie retail store.
MDI sucks, there's a reason everyone is pushing to get rid of it. Even MS is encouraging we leave MDI behind.
Well, if that isn't proof that MDI is better, I don't know what is.:-)
Seriously, when WORD started creating new windows for new documents, I assumed that the programmers must have been given ~3000 pixel wide graphics cards with wall-sized monitors, because there was no way that it worked well on a normal screen, myoptic but fairly corrected eyesight, and three or more full-sized docs. If one window didn't interfere with the others, it might have been eventually been an acceptable trade-off, but they still seem to share unreasonable delays, too (I haven't had the newer MS-Word crash, yet, but I don't stress it as I did in earlier jobs, either). Having this "advance" spread to browsers is definitely not on my wish list.
Screw you and your disappointment, what were the grosses from it? I googled, and it looks like $600 million worldwide. Not the expected $1 billion, but it probably made its nut, and moreso.
Hollywood doesn't care about art (at least in the big pictures) but box office (and sometimes other ancilliary rights, after Lucas became independently Croesus from keeping the Star Wars merchandising rights). After all, they are in the movie *business*, not the movie non-profit organization(s).
> I know it is heresy to say this, but Tolkien was a crappy writer.
1) Are you saying this on the basis of The Hobbit and the Lord Of The Rings, Farmer Giles, The Silmarillion, or the Unfinished Tales?
2) Remember, before him, there was just Lord Dunsany, The Worm Ourouboros (forget the author), and maybe Evangeline Walton's prose version of the Mabinogion. Are you criticizing him because he overused things that he invented, and then were done to death by others? I had a friend who hated Jimmy Hendrix because he was just a warmed over version of Ozzy Osbourne's guitar player (forgot his name, too. Not my best day), utterly ignoring who came first.
3) Crappy writer compared to whom, in the fantasy field (no good comparing him to Hemingway or Spllane, frex)?
If you would still believe in god, would you believe that god made our new alien visitors too? Or is god's creation limited to humans?
Don't be stupid. He created the other forms of life on this planet (via evolution, if you ask me),so why SHOULDN'T He have created them.
Now, if they turned out like the lizardmen that James Blish dreamed up in (I think) "A Case Of Conscience" -- that might be an interesting development. But then, they would all disappear when the first Jesuit exorcised them, so it would still work out.
Offhand, I'd guess Zork. "You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike."
IIRC, that particular puzzle is somewhat random so keeping notes between games will actually screw you over there.
That was Colossal Cave, aka Adventure.
Speaking only for the 1977 version on a DEC-20, it was fixed, just complex. We (well, two other guys in the group) mapped it over the course of two weekends. Of course, the pirate could make mapping hell by moving stuff (items dropped to ID the room) around randomly.
How highly enriched? Weapons grade is supposedly over 90% (IANA Nuclear Weapons Designer, or Physicist, though). I owuld presume that they call it Highly Enriched at 40%, so that could be a lot of leeway.
Bayer, which invented aspirin, was the pharmacutical unit of I.G. Farben, which started from coal tar distallates and grew into a company that made *anything* associated with chemistry. Thus, naturally, I.G Farben also made the poison gas that the Germans used in WWI. Because of things like this (and the perception that it was so successful that no one could compete against it), I.G. Farben was broken up after WWI into a half dozen companies, one of which was Bayer. OTOH, the Bayer Aspirin trademark was seized in the USA as war reparations and assigned to some small manufacturer (which naturally grew to be a major). Bayer still made the Bayer Aspirin used by the rest of the owrld, though. About 10 years ago, Bayer GMBH bought the US company that owned the trademark, so Bayer Aspirin is now made by Bayer, again, ruining a great Believe-It-Or-Not entry.
But the GP poster's joke went over your head, too. Bush hasn't been speaking English, but Etruscian? He was blaming everything on Bush with everything so broad as to ridicule those who just blame him for losing the regspect of the French Intellectual class, or the love of the Arab Street, or causing the Internet Bubble to burst.
I also didn't understand the dangers of a robot killing frenzy (a proven scientific fact!) until I read Asimov.
But Asimov only had one robot killing frenzy in his entire Robot series (although one other story LOOKED like it might devolve into one, soon after). You must mean Robert Silverberg.
Or else you are thinking of the movie version of I, Robot (version like The Thing was a version of Who Goes There?). But that would be silly.
So how can we fix this? We need higher-profile game reviewers and for that to occur we need more games to be viewed as art
They need not be viewed as art, just as something worth reviewing. Car magazines do not view the average car as art, but some can still produce valid reviews.
When the reviewer puts his name on the article, and appears often enough to get a reputation, readers will be safe from paid reviews (providing that they check into the magazines that reviews reviewers:-).
> And you know why they used the liev virus vaccine?
Because it gives better immunization than dead viruses, of course. Who would want to take reshots every ten years, in case of decreasing immunity, when one sugar cube gives lifetime immunity, guaranteed?
The Salk vaccine is not better than the Sabin, until the vacination rate nears unity. Even if he DID do all his work at my alma mater.
On a similar note, I know someone who thinks that because Toshiba sold components to Japanese interests during WW2, that's sufficient reason to boycott Toshiba to this day
Unless I am really mistaken, wasn't Toshiba a Japanese company during WW2? If they hadn't sold components to Japanese interests, who would they sell to? The Americans? That would get them executed.
I suppose that he doesn't take Bayer Aspirin anymore because of their complicity in WWI gas attacks on the Western Front?
> I can go to the store and buy the shiniest new > video game with realistic physics and lighting > for about 50 bucks, but if I want an office > suite I have to pay $300?
Supply and Demand, maybe? Who would thinkingly pay $300 for a game (although several $1000's for a games machine and only playing a few games, so as to become an expert in them, passes through the mind filter - some people:-) , whereas Business Software is supposed to be bought by businesses (who make money, unlike teachers and students).
> Isn't this the first thing the government should > be looking out for? I bet Microsoft could charge > $20 for Office and still make money.
So? It isn't the government's job to set prices (in the USA, while not in a world war), just to maintain a non-coersive situation. So, that Microsoft has a monopoly isn't illegal, or that they charge what you feel is too much, just that they do not use their monopoly position to destroy any competitors, some of which may sell something similar for more and some for less.
And, yes, it looks like the Federal Government fell down on that job, so far. OTOH, computers were small potatoes when the damage started, and it wasn't worth the effort (it was thought). Maybe it required a generation raised on them to tell exactly how MS cheated, versus just giving volume discounts.
> I mean who really cares about Internet Explorer, it's free.
No, its price is just built into Windows. If you use Windows you always pay it even if you never use any browser (you think), let alone IE.
> Why isn't it their DUTY to cast of Islam and return to their pre-Islamic tribal society?
Mesopotamia was hardly a tribal society when the Arabs conquered it. It was part of the (Neo-)Persian Empire (which had been the Parthian Empire until some Persian seized the throne. Neo-Persian, to differentiate it from the one that Alexander defeated), and had been civilized since before there was writing to let us date it.
The current tribal nature is from emulating the conquering Arabs, and the devastation left by the Mongols, who destroyed (or let die) much of the desert agriculture, and thus the supporting civilization. In fact, most of the so-called Iraqi Arabs are no more Arab than the French are Germanic Franks, or inhabitants of Turkey really Turkmen.
we would have either finished off the NVA (which would not have triggered WWIII - the Chinese, not the Russians were the main supporters of the NVA)
Umm, backwards. The Russians were the supporters of the North (and became quite unpopular there after it was over, when they started acting like the Ugly American stereotype), not the Chinese (who were supporting the Khmer Rouge, though). A full invasion of the North might have ticked off the Russians, a bit, but it was NOT a central concern of theirs, just as the fall of South Vietnam did not cause us to escalate to WWIII. With a bit of good diplomacy, the Chinese might have accepted a unified Vietnam that didn't plan to go anywere.
Not that we knew that, at the time. We were still thinking in terms of monolithic Communism, rather than the USSR as Imperial Russia ruled by Czar Leonid I, and Imperial China ruled by Emperor Mao, with both stuck with nominally Communist economies.
Slashdot Mirror
1) Beware! The simulation may be simplified by exterminating the experimenting species(es?). This has already been used in a short story by Niven ("Rotating Cylinders and the Possibility of Global Causality Violation") about Tipler Cylinders - closed time-like loops in the presence of massive, infinite, fast-rotating cylinders. Look up Tipler Cylinders on wikipedia for full details.
2) The creator may also slow down the simulation (from the higher level perspective) time step, which would be undetectable in-game. Thus, one day may be like unto only five hundred years, rather than the original one thousand. I did something like this, when I varied the timestep on my lunar launch mission simulation in Computational Physics I by the derivative of gravity (with a minimum timestep to allow crashes into the Moon's center to complete)(although I *did* have to Ctrl-C the program a few times before I realized that was the problem; do you *want* Him to do that to us, if this is true?).
Alternately, He may use up His computer time budget, and we will be shut down by His department.
3) Perhaps He has already planned the simplification. I.e., the Big Rip, when dark energy blows up the Universe so fast that each elementary particle eventually sees itself alone in its own Universe.
> If you cannot detect something at all with light or gravity effects, then it very likely isn't there.
But you CAN detect dark matter effects from gravity, just not (we think) from E-M effects like light.
You seem to be confusing the Singularity, a geometric point in the center of a black hole, with the event horizon, where particles can never escape (not quite the same as the region of infinite red shift, for a rotating black hole, but close). The charge of a black hole is, like its mass and spin, a property that escapes cosmic censorship (unlike baryon number, any internal geometry, etc.). Thus your positively charged black hole WOULD repel proton and positrons, and attract anti-protons and electrons, thus tending to neutralize itself over time. OTOH, it might be interesting to check what the effect of a few 1000 tons of excess protons would be; perhaps it is small enough to be sustained. I would guess that the Hawking Radiation would neutralize any overall charge fairly quickly, though.
IANA Physicist, but I did waste three years of my parent's money majoring in it.
The New York Times, like many of the rest of us, is at least a 16 hour drive from the nearest Fry's. That, alone, would make Fry's less than the ideal techie retail store.
I am assuming that http://shop1.outpost.com/ac/storelocator/index.jsp is the correct URL to find store locations?
Well, if that isn't proof that MDI is better, I don't know what is. :-)
Seriously, when WORD started creating new windows for new documents, I assumed that the programmers must have been given ~3000 pixel wide graphics cards with wall-sized monitors, because there was no way that it worked well on a normal screen, myoptic but fairly corrected eyesight, and three or more full-sized docs. If one window didn't interfere with the others, it might have been eventually been an acceptable trade-off, but they still seem to share unreasonable delays, too (I haven't had the newer MS-Word crash, yet, but I don't stress it as I did in earlier jobs, either). Having this "advance" spread to browsers is definitely not on my wish list.
> King Kong to me was disapointing.
Screw you and your disappointment, what were the grosses from it? I googled, and it looks like $600 million worldwide. Not the expected $1 billion, but it probably made its nut, and moreso.
Hollywood doesn't care about art (at least in the big pictures) but box office (and sometimes other ancilliary rights, after Lucas became independently Croesus from keeping the Star Wars merchandising rights). After all, they are in the movie *business*, not the movie non-profit organization(s).
Saruman would be one of The Wise who chased The Necromancer out of the Wildwood. Anyone know what Christopher Lee's schedule is like?
> I know it is heresy to say this, but Tolkien was a crappy writer.
1) Are you saying this on the basis of The Hobbit and the Lord Of The Rings, Farmer Giles, The Silmarillion, or the Unfinished Tales?
2) Remember, before him, there was just Lord Dunsany, The Worm Ourouboros (forget the author), and maybe Evangeline Walton's prose version of the Mabinogion. Are you criticizing him because he overused things that he invented, and then were done to death by others? I had a friend who hated Jimmy Hendrix because he was just a warmed over version of Ozzy Osbourne's guitar player (forgot his name, too. Not my best day), utterly ignoring who came first.
3) Crappy writer compared to whom, in the fantasy field (no good comparing him to Hemingway or Spllane, frex)?
Except that human meat is called "long pork" because it is so similar to regular pork.
Pork is "The Other White Meat" (really, if you cannot trust your TV sponsers, who CAN you trust?).
Ergo, Humans are the other, other white meat.
Ipso facto. Quod Est Demonstratum. Now that's a glory for you!
That was Colossal Cave, aka Adventure.
Speaking only for the 1977 version on a DEC-20, it was fixed, just complex. We (well, two other guys in the group) mapped it over the course of two weekends. Of course, the pirate could make mapping hell by moving stuff (items dropped to ID the room) around randomly.
How highly enriched? Weapons grade is supposedly over 90% (IANA Nuclear Weapons Designer, or Physicist, though). I owuld presume that they call it Highly Enriched at 40%, so that could be a lot of leeway.
Bayer, which invented aspirin, was the pharmacutical unit of I.G. Farben, which started from coal tar distallates and grew into a company that made *anything* associated with chemistry. Thus, naturally, I.G Farben also made the poison gas that the Germans used in WWI. Because of things like this (and the perception that it was so successful that no one could compete against it), I.G. Farben was broken up after WWI into a half dozen companies, one of which was Bayer. OTOH, the Bayer Aspirin trademark was seized in the USA as war reparations and assigned to some small manufacturer (which naturally grew to be a major). Bayer still made the Bayer Aspirin used by the rest of the owrld, though. About 10 years ago, Bayer GMBH bought the US company that owned the trademark, so Bayer Aspirin is now made by Bayer, again, ruining a great Believe-It-Or-Not entry.
Very meta, that.
But Asimov only had one robot killing frenzy in his entire Robot series (although one other story LOOKED like it might devolve into one, soon after). You must mean Robert Silverberg.
Or else you are thinking of the movie version of I, Robot (version like The Thing was a version of Who Goes There?). But that would be silly.
They need not be viewed as art, just as something worth reviewing. Car magazines do not view the average car as art, but some can still produce valid reviews.
When the reviewer puts his name on the article, and appears often enough to get a reputation, readers will be safe from paid reviews (providing that they check into the magazines that reviews reviewers :-).
> And you know why they used the liev virus vaccine?
Because it gives better immunization than dead viruses, of course. Who would want to take reshots every ten years, in case of decreasing immunity, when one sugar cube gives lifetime immunity, guaranteed?
The Salk vaccine is not better than the Sabin, until the vacination rate nears unity. Even if he DID do all his work at my alma mater.
Unless I am really mistaken, wasn't Toshiba a Japanese company during WW2? If they hadn't sold components to Japanese interests, who would they sell to? The Americans? That would get them executed.
I suppose that he doesn't take Bayer Aspirin anymore because of their complicity in WWI gas attacks on the Western Front?
> I can go to the store and buy the shiniest new
:-) , whereas Business Software is supposed to be bought by businesses (who make money, unlike teachers and students).
> video game with realistic physics and lighting
> for about 50 bucks, but if I want an office
> suite I have to pay $300?
Supply and Demand, maybe? Who would thinkingly pay $300 for a game (although several $1000's for a games machine and only playing a few games, so as to become an expert in them, passes through the mind filter - some people
> Isn't this the first thing the government should
> be looking out for? I bet Microsoft could charge
> $20 for Office and still make money.
So? It isn't the government's job to set prices (in the USA, while not in a world war), just to maintain a non-coersive situation. So, that Microsoft has a monopoly isn't illegal, or that they charge what you feel is too much, just that they do not use their monopoly position to destroy any competitors, some of which may sell something similar for more and some for less.
And, yes, it looks like the Federal Government fell down on that job, so far. OTOH, computers were small potatoes when the damage started, and it wasn't worth the effort (it was thought). Maybe it required a generation raised on them to tell exactly how MS cheated, versus just giving volume discounts.
> I mean who really cares about Internet Explorer, it's free.
No, its price is just built into Windows. If you use Windows you always pay it even if you never use any browser (you think), let alone IE.
The current tribal nature is from emulating the conquering Arabs, and the devastation left by the Mongols, who destroyed (or let die) much of the desert agriculture, and thus the supporting civilization. In fact, most of the so-called Iraqi Arabs are no more Arab than the French are Germanic Franks, or inhabitants of Turkey really Turkmen.
Umm, backwards. The Russians were the supporters of the North (and became quite unpopular there after it was over, when they started acting like the Ugly American stereotype), not the Chinese (who were supporting the Khmer Rouge, though). A full invasion of the North might have ticked off the Russians, a bit, but it was NOT a central concern of theirs, just as the fall of South Vietnam did not cause us to escalate to WWIII. With a bit of good diplomacy, the Chinese might have accepted a unified Vietnam that didn't plan to go anywere.
Not that we knew that, at the time. We were still thinking in terms of monolithic Communism, rather than the USSR as Imperial Russia ruled by Czar Leonid I, and Imperial China ruled by Emperor Mao, with both stuck with nominally Communist economies.
That was just one small population, not all "native" Americans. IIRC, that group eventually was killed off, as well.
> If you've already been rooted, there's no plugin you can use to improve security...
Except one that hard reformats all your disks.
After all, when you recreate them, they might have better security (if the rootkit didn't get backed up), and they cannot have worse than they had.
> So your ancestors came to earth on the B-Arch then?
Whereas yours didn't (claiming to be on the A or C ark) and all died in the unsanitized telephone plague?
If God did not want them to be sheared, He would not have made them sheep.