I wasn't saying it was anything super-symbolic (male prostitution or drug dealing), but the delivery guys are clearly just a framing element for a commentary on the writers' perception of MTV's perversion of music and the direction that it was moving. A bunch of over-hyped crap from no-talent schmucks being sold to the public at ridiculous rates while the public laps it up. I interpret it as a fairly critical view on MTV's influence on music evolution. Maybe it's just me.
(Karma bonus foregone (again) because I think we're completely off-topic from TFA.)
Re:Mentioned as "Greatest Adventure Games"
on
Vintage Games
·
· Score: 1
There are a couple of games analogous to Marble Madness for the Wii that combine its (previously) unique and innovative gameplay with Nintendo's novel controller. And I'd put them more-or-less on a par (I spent quite a few hours playing Marble Madness). Agree on SI, but it not only made their list - It made their cover. It certainly meets the definition of 'Vintage', but I'm not sure about how much it shook up the world - It had far fewer 'clones' than some others despite being wildly popular. Spy Hunter's an excellent example - There may have been games like it before, but it set the stage for many developers trying to do the same thing better. Heck, even the early GTAs qualify.
Centipede was neat because it re-thought the control (even though Bowling came first, Centipede was more popular/iconic), but it was strictly arcade rather than home-console AFAIK. Break-through and Warlock, though, were really early steps toward outside-the-stick thinking for console games and were reasonably popular (Break-through at least).
Perhaps I'm straying away from 'vintage' and leaning toward 'game-changing'.
If you think that song's about working in a department store, you need to listen to it again. It still cracks me up that MTV used it in its promos.
Still, nothing to do with TFA, just a catchy title. I like the iwantmymkv tag.
Re:Mentioned as "Greatest Adventure Games"
on
Vintage Games
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
There was a lot of overlap - Even as popularity went. I played Super Mario Brothers (total Pitfall Harry ripoff!) mainly at home, but years after dumping a bunch of quarters into the arcade box. I only ever played Asteroids on my Atari, but I'm aware that it had an arcade presence.
Tron and Centipede, however, were pretty strictly arcade boxes for me. Break-through and Warlock I'm not sure I saw anywhere except for Atari.
Re:Mentioned as "Greatest Adventure Games"
on
Vintage Games
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Haven't read the book yet (just requested from library - too cheap for Amazon), but it's interesting that some of the iconic arcade classics missed out. Sure, we have Space Invaders, but what about Tron, Asteroids, Centipede, Dig-Dug, Paperboy? I donated a heckuva lotta quarters to my local Chuck E. Cheese as a kid just for the privilege. As far as the Atari games go, I might toss in Break-through and Warlock too just for helping open the door to more innovative controller ideas (like Centipede did for the stand-up arcade boxes). Somebody should be tossed to a lurking Grue.
You used to be free? Where are you from? I'd like to move there. I appreciate what I have here in the US, but I define a free country as being one that simply provides basic services to its citizens and implements laws to the extent that people are protected from one another. If that exists on Earth, I've yet to find it.
Back on-topic, it sounds like these folks are being prepped for return to somewhere in the West (TFA states English and Spanish language training). I usually like seeing states being allowed for themselves what they'd like to do, but we've made such a mess of this that I don't care if Virginia's legislators are objecting to these guys moving there - Force them to take them regardless if we can't find a friendlier place. It'll be tough on these guys, but probably a big step up from Gitmo. And with the integration training they're getting and support from the local Uighur population, maybe they can avoid some of the Gitmo stigma.
There must be a tacky "What's shipped to Cuba, stays in Cuba," joke here.
...if you buy Chinese goods, you support oppression.
Yeah, but where do you think we get the $$ to buy that Chinese crap? Take a look at our national debt and the debt-holders. We're buying Chinese crap using $$ borrowed from the Chinese. It's a very dysfunctional, but symbiotic, relationship. Look up codependency. And our financial overlords (with whom I do not necessarily agree) seem to think that we need to keep buying this crap to sustain our culture.
The only solution I see is a huge culture change (but that's terribly difficult to effect - If you can figure it out, please do.)
Back on-topic, this sucks. I've got a lot of respect for the Chinese people, but their government is miserable. And they seem to be too big and disconnected to really shake things up. Events like Tiananmen Square make big news and show the world that they're trying, but don't really seems to affect the way things run day-to-day. I'd love to drop some pamphlets instructing citizens on methods for proxying out through the great Chinese firewall...
The "understood" security risks are that using IE 6 to surf the web is probably the most efficient way to funnel malware into the Norton AntiVirus malware collection system.
You're only half-way there. "Understood risks" can be explained up the chain. Other risks can not. If you have no funding to document risks in new software, you can't pass them up for approval. In the corporate world, that's fine - You only need to get it past your CIO.
In the government world, it means you need to pony up for your IT staff to write up new security docs or live in an insecure (but approved) IT world. Ugly, but true.
We're forced to use IE6 at work - Mainly because IT understands the security risks (significant, but understood) and their web-apps are written to support it. Upgrading is too expensive expensive right now - Especially when the suits realize that we'll have to do it again later. Think of the brake-recall equation from Fight Club - The result is tragic, but real-world rather than ideal. So, IE6 endures...
I thought the same thing - Even after alteration these things aren't as efficient (in a Lumens/Watt context) as CFLs or LEDs. But TFA does point out that the advantage is the more "natural" light. I use both CFLs and incandescents at home - The light from the "normal" bulbs is just nicer IMO. The entry price for LEDs is too high for me to look too seriously and (despite possibly being environmentally friendlier), they're not as energy efficient as the CFLs.
Here too. The brothel is a small non-descript building that makes no indication that it's anything but a residential dwelling.
The library has a huge neon sign screaming B-O-O-K-S BOOKS BOOKS. Also there's a nice skate-park out front to attract youngsters. (The brothel relies mostly on word of mouth and good lip-service).
I assume that your brothel/library look about the same? I can't wait for my new brothel-identifying iPhone! As long as we put 'not to be used by law-enforcement' in the EULA.
Sometimes, the idea of licensing doesn't seem so bad. PROVE that you are competent to run a machine, and meet minimum standards before you can connect your machine to the internet.
That gave me chills. I'm kind of an anarchist at heart, but licensing for HAM radio operators seems to have gone mostly OK... And abuse is punishable... What's the big difference between the RF spectrum and the Internet? Rampage traffic affects legitimate users... I'm torn.
"Openly malicious" is really tricky - I'll grant you that. But before going for the borderline cases, I'd start at the ones that are more "open".
E.g. * E-mail with 1000s of recipients that are readily identifiable by postini-style filters as spam. * Packets containing known exploit strings that are currently "popular" for compromising PCs
Now, ideally I'd like a system that didn't require these kind of measures. Short of that, I'd like a system where I could at least have a warning from my ISP so that I could respond and say, "That traffic was only directed at systems that I own or at systems from which I had consent from the owner" so that they had deniability and I could pen-test my computers or hack my phones without risking consequences. But I acknowledge that it's messy... I'd love a cleaner solution.
I think you misunderstood - It didn't find it surprising or cool that the WSJ was bashing Obama's plan for the future. That's pretty standard practice. But the fact that the WSJ was referencing the Underpants Gnomes from South Park was both novel and pretty cool.
Wasn't trying to go on an Obama rant, just saying that Underpants Gnomes in the WSJ was kinda neat. Also, I messed up - it wasn't his financial plan, it was his plan for closing Gitmo. Although dangerously off-topic here, have a link for those curious: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124329131991652291.html
The solution is obvious (albeit ugly). Punish the user. We are a long way from having a "secure" OS - I use Windows at work and both Windows & Linux at home and have used them for years. They both used to be swiss-cheese concerning security and both have improved dramatically, but neither are secure nor will they be any time soon.
1) Any ISP relaying openly malicious traffic needs to face consequences for it - Force them to self-monitor. 2) ISPs will start threatening users responsible for malicious traffic with disconnection. 3) Users with compromised connections will either have to start caring about security or give up Internet service.
I can feel the flames rising around me - They're welcome. As long as when you shout me down for this ugly step "forward", please present an alternative solution more insightful than "OS designers need to fix their security", 'cuz nobody's hit end-game yet. (Or "4 - ???" "5 - Profit", please... It's tired... But it did appear very recently in the WSJ as an analogy for Obama's stimulus plan - How cool is that!)
Without speculating on the specifics of tweaking the AI, my guess is that IBM has tried to think through these things. Having put together a few AI bots myself (purely recreationally - you know, just for kicks), I know that I let them play in the real world for quite a while to work out the kinks before unveiling them to nerdy friends and family to show them off and demonstrate just how much time and sleep I'd wasted. My poker-bot played thousands of games in free online rooms before I told anyone that I was even working on him.
IBM has probably been feeding Watson DVR'd episodes for a while now so that they could identify (if not fix) the kind of gotchas that you're thinking about.
Some people are willing to accept insanely high overhead to avoid censorship - Ever try Freenet?
But I agree - You could conceivably configure a router to just shut this down (I assume - I'm not really an IT guy). If you notice that two IPs are trying to communicate with large amounts of traffic at a 0.1% success rate, you may just block that traffic to save your network.
I never said anything about knowing that it was a good RNG. I said people would trust it as a good RNG. Open source (for most people) is about knowing that it can be reviewed by peers. For a small minority, it's about going through the code and deciding, "well it looks good to me - and surely if there are problems, an expert in the field will catch them." And, for a very small minority, it's about reviewing expert-level details and critiquing them.
I never said that open-source was better (although it quite often is). I said it was more trusted.
Wow. Your post seriously just lead me to tie the simultaneous life/death states of SchrÃdinger's cat to a warm fuzzy world as opposed to a cold mechanical one where, given enough input and a simulator better than we've yet invented, we'd know whether or not the cat was dead.
Simultaneously living/dead cat awaiting certain doom = Warm fuzzy Live cat/Dead cat = Cold mechanical
Except that with the pips on different faces being different colors, I don't think that missing pips or phantom pips are really a high risk. It almost seems more likely that you'd miss an entire die than miscount the colored pips.
This isn't facial recognition - It's really basic optical recognition.
Still not random. Quantum events can be practically unpredictable and appear sufficiently random as to be indistinguishable from something truly random. But they're still not random. From the article you link to:
These theories suggest that even though macroscopic phenomena are deterministic in theory under Newtonian mechanics, real-world systems evolve in ways that cannot be predicted in practice because one would need to know the micro-details of initial conditions and subsequent manipulation or change.
There are a lot of examples of things that are 'random enough' (nuclear decay, thermal noise, atmospheric noise, etc) for anything you could need. But I submit that nothing in the world is really random, just unpredictable and close enough to being random for any practical use.
That's true RNGs are not truly random. But, then again, neither is anything else. Just sufficiently random to be indistinguishable from an actual random event.
Slashdot Mirror
I wasn't saying it was anything super-symbolic (male prostitution or drug dealing), but the delivery guys are clearly just a framing element for a commentary on the writers' perception of MTV's perversion of music and the direction that it was moving. A bunch of over-hyped crap from no-talent schmucks being sold to the public at ridiculous rates while the public laps it up. I interpret it as a fairly critical view on MTV's influence on music evolution. Maybe it's just me.
(Karma bonus foregone (again) because I think we're completely off-topic from TFA.)
There are a couple of games analogous to Marble Madness for the Wii that combine its (previously) unique and innovative gameplay with Nintendo's novel controller. And I'd put them more-or-less on a par (I spent quite a few hours playing Marble Madness). Agree on SI, but it not only made their list - It made their cover. It certainly meets the definition of 'Vintage', but I'm not sure about how much it shook up the world - It had far fewer 'clones' than some others despite being wildly popular. Spy Hunter's an excellent example - There may have been games like it before, but it set the stage for many developers trying to do the same thing better. Heck, even the early GTAs qualify.
Centipede was neat because it re-thought the control (even though Bowling came first, Centipede was more popular/iconic), but it was strictly arcade rather than home-console AFAIK. Break-through and Warlock, though, were really early steps toward outside-the-stick thinking for console games and were reasonably popular (Break-through at least).
Perhaps I'm straying away from 'vintage' and leaning toward 'game-changing'.
If you think that song's about working in a department store, you need to listen to it again. It still cracks me up that MTV used it in its promos.
Still, nothing to do with TFA, just a catchy title. I like the iwantmymkv tag.
There was a lot of overlap - Even as popularity went. I played Super Mario Brothers (total Pitfall Harry ripoff!) mainly at home, but years after dumping a bunch of quarters into the arcade box. I only ever played Asteroids on my Atari, but I'm aware that it had an arcade presence.
Tron and Centipede, however, were pretty strictly arcade boxes for me. Break-through and Warlock I'm not sure I saw anywhere except for Atari.
Haven't read the book yet (just requested from library - too cheap for Amazon), but it's interesting that some of the iconic arcade classics missed out. Sure, we have Space Invaders, but what about Tron, Asteroids, Centipede, Dig-Dug, Paperboy? I donated a heckuva lotta quarters to my local Chuck E. Cheese as a kid just for the privilege. As far as the Atari games go, I might toss in Break-through and Warlock too just for helping open the door to more innovative controller ideas (like Centipede did for the stand-up arcade boxes). Somebody should be tossed to a lurking Grue.
Mine goes pretty well as far as you need it to.
The problem is that it only moves forward in time... And only at 1x...
I miss freedom, QQ.
You used to be free? Where are you from? I'd like to move there. I appreciate what I have here in the US, but I define a free country as being one that simply provides basic services to its citizens and implements laws to the extent that people are protected from one another. If that exists on Earth, I've yet to find it.
Back on-topic, it sounds like these folks are being prepped for return to somewhere in the West (TFA states English and Spanish language training). I usually like seeing states being allowed for themselves what they'd like to do, but we've made such a mess of this that I don't care if Virginia's legislators are objecting to these guys moving there - Force them to take them regardless if we can't find a friendlier place. It'll be tough on these guys, but probably a big step up from Gitmo. And with the integration training they're getting and support from the local Uighur population, maybe they can avoid some of the Gitmo stigma.
There must be a tacky "What's shipped to Cuba, stays in Cuba," joke here.
...if you buy Chinese goods, you support oppression.
Yeah, but where do you think we get the $$ to buy that Chinese crap? Take a look at our national debt and the debt-holders. We're buying Chinese crap using $$ borrowed from the Chinese. It's a very dysfunctional, but symbiotic, relationship. Look up codependency. And our financial overlords (with whom I do not necessarily agree) seem to think that we need to keep buying this crap to sustain our culture.
The only solution I see is a huge culture change (but that's terribly difficult to effect - If you can figure it out, please do.)
Back on-topic, this sucks. I've got a lot of respect for the Chinese people, but their government is miserable. And they seem to be too big and disconnected to really shake things up. Events like Tiananmen Square make big news and show the world that they're trying, but don't really seems to affect the way things run day-to-day. I'd love to drop some pamphlets instructing citizens on methods for proxying out through the great Chinese firewall...
I don't know about blocking Twitter, but my faith in humanity would take a big step up if it went under because everyone decided to ignore it.
In fact, I'm so frustrated over the matter that I'm going to go blog about it on my MySpace and Facebook profiles!
The "understood" security risks are that using IE 6 to surf the web is probably the most efficient way to funnel malware into the Norton AntiVirus malware collection system.
You're only half-way there. "Understood risks" can be explained up the chain. Other risks can not. If you have no funding to document risks in new software, you can't pass them up for approval. In the corporate world, that's fine - You only need to get it past your CIO.
In the government world, it means you need to pony up for your IT staff to write up new security docs or live in an insecure (but approved) IT world. Ugly, but true.
It's not quite that easy.
We're forced to use IE6 at work - Mainly because IT understands the security risks (significant, but understood) and their web-apps are written to support it. Upgrading is too expensive expensive right now - Especially when the suits realize that we'll have to do it again later. Think of the brake-recall equation from Fight Club - The result is tragic, but real-world rather than ideal. So, IE6 endures...
I thought the same thing - Even after alteration these things aren't as efficient (in a Lumens/Watt context) as CFLs or LEDs. But TFA does point out that the advantage is the more "natural" light. I use both CFLs and incandescents at home - The light from the "normal" bulbs is just nicer IMO. The entry price for LEDs is too high for me to look too seriously and (despite possibly being environmentally friendlier), they're not as energy efficient as the CFLs.
I think you just redefined "learning". But, it is in line with a lot of the "facts" I've picked up on /.
Here too. The brothel is a small non-descript building that makes no indication that it's anything but a residential dwelling.
The library has a huge neon sign screaming B-O-O-K-S BOOKS BOOKS. Also there's a nice skate-park out front to attract youngsters. (The brothel relies mostly on word of mouth and good lip-service).
I assume that your brothel/library look about the same? I can't wait for my new brothel-identifying iPhone! As long as we put 'not to be used by law-enforcement' in the EULA.
Sometimes, the idea of licensing doesn't seem so bad. PROVE that you are competent to run a machine, and meet minimum standards before you can connect your machine to the internet.
That gave me chills. I'm kind of an anarchist at heart, but licensing for HAM radio operators seems to have gone mostly OK... And abuse is punishable... What's the big difference between the RF spectrum and the Internet? Rampage traffic affects legitimate users... I'm torn.
"Openly malicious" is really tricky - I'll grant you that. But before going for the borderline cases, I'd start at the ones that are more "open".
E.g.
* E-mail with 1000s of recipients that are readily identifiable by postini-style filters as spam.
* Packets containing known exploit strings that are currently "popular" for compromising PCs
Now, ideally I'd like a system that didn't require these kind of measures. Short of that, I'd like a system where I could at least have a warning from my ISP so that I could respond and say, "That traffic was only directed at systems that I own or at systems from which I had consent from the owner" so that they had deniability and I could pen-test my computers or hack my phones without risking consequences. But I acknowledge that it's messy... I'd love a cleaner solution.
I think you misunderstood - It didn't find it surprising or cool that the WSJ was bashing Obama's plan for the future. That's pretty standard practice. But the fact that the WSJ was referencing the Underpants Gnomes from South Park was both novel and pretty cool.
Wasn't trying to go on an Obama rant, just saying that Underpants Gnomes in the WSJ was kinda neat. Also, I messed up - it wasn't his financial plan, it was his plan for closing Gitmo. Although dangerously off-topic here, have a link for those curious:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124329131991652291.html
The solution is obvious (albeit ugly). Punish the user. We are a long way from having a "secure" OS - I use Windows at work and both Windows & Linux at home and have used them for years. They both used to be swiss-cheese concerning security and both have improved dramatically, but neither are secure nor will they be any time soon.
1) Any ISP relaying openly malicious traffic needs to face consequences for it - Force them to self-monitor.
2) ISPs will start threatening users responsible for malicious traffic with disconnection.
3) Users with compromised connections will either have to start caring about security or give up Internet service.
I can feel the flames rising around me - They're welcome. As long as when you shout me down for this ugly step "forward", please present an alternative solution more insightful than "OS designers need to fix their security", 'cuz nobody's hit end-game yet. (Or "4 - ???" "5 - Profit", please... It's tired... But it did appear very recently in the WSJ as an analogy for Obama's stimulus plan - How cool is that!)
Without speculating on the specifics of tweaking the AI, my guess is that IBM has tried to think through these things. Having put together a few AI bots myself (purely recreationally - you know, just for kicks), I know that I let them play in the real world for quite a while to work out the kinks before unveiling them to nerdy friends and family to show them off and demonstrate just how much time and sleep I'd wasted. My poker-bot played thousands of games in free online rooms before I told anyone that I was even working on him.
IBM has probably been feeding Watson DVR'd episodes for a while now so that they could identify (if not fix) the kind of gotchas that you're thinking about.
Some people are willing to accept insanely high overhead to avoid censorship - Ever try Freenet?
But I agree - You could conceivably configure a router to just shut this down (I assume - I'm not really an IT guy). If you notice that two IPs are trying to communicate with large amounts of traffic at a 0.1% success rate, you may just block that traffic to save your network.
I never said anything about knowing that it was a good RNG. I said people would trust it as a good RNG. Open source (for most people) is about knowing that it can be reviewed by peers. For a small minority, it's about going through the code and deciding, "well it looks good to me - and surely if there are problems, an expert in the field will catch them." And, for a very small minority, it's about reviewing expert-level details and critiquing them.
I never said that open-source was better (although it quite often is). I said it was more trusted.
Wow. Your post seriously just lead me to tie the simultaneous life/death states of SchrÃdinger's cat to a warm fuzzy world as opposed to a cold mechanical one where, given enough input and a simulator better than we've yet invented, we'd know whether or not the cat was dead.
Simultaneously living/dead cat awaiting certain doom = Warm fuzzy
Live cat/Dead cat = Cold mechanical
Weird.
Except that with the pips on different faces being different colors, I don't think that missing pips or phantom pips are really a high risk. It almost seems more likely that you'd miss an entire die than miscount the colored pips.
This isn't facial recognition - It's really basic optical recognition.
Still not random. Quantum events can be practically unpredictable and appear sufficiently random as to be indistinguishable from something truly random. But they're still not random. From the article you link to:
These theories suggest that even though macroscopic phenomena are deterministic in theory under Newtonian mechanics, real-world systems evolve in ways that cannot be predicted in practice because one would need to know the micro-details of initial conditions and subsequent manipulation or change.
There are a lot of examples of things that are 'random enough' (nuclear decay, thermal noise, atmospheric noise, etc) for anything you could need. But I submit that nothing in the world is really random, just unpredictable and close enough to being random for any practical use.
That's true RNGs are not truly random. But, then again, neither is anything else. Just sufficiently random to be indistinguishable from an actual random event.