It wouldn't be difficult to allocate the processing for a given mob to a client's PC. In the background the PC would also be sending commands to the server for the mob as well as for the player.
If the PC disconnects or crashes the missing command would alert the server which would then allocate the mob to another client, or allocate it back to the server itself. This bit would be difficult, since having mobs lag with random clients would be *bad* (though I guess the player who would have been killed in the lag but wasn't because the mobs were also lagged would like it.:)
In current online games that's not worthwhile. You can't trust the client so that stops it fast. If you could trust the client there wouldn't be any benefit until the overhead of allocating mobs and the extra traffic generated outweighed the cost of doingt he processing locally. For current games, it wouldn't of course.
But doing so would allow more complicated AI on fixed server power.
Take a stupid example, of a chess server. Say it has thousands and thousands of players at once, all playing against the computer. The server doesn't have enough grunt for massive searching of the board space. However, Johhny has connected on his PVII which has lots of grunt, especially considering it is only drawing a chess board at the moment. The server could get the client to run the AI - the board state is already at the client after all.
More than that, Freddy could connect using his dumb terminal and start a GrandMastersAreCrap level game. The server doesn't have enough grunt, and Freddy doesn't either. but Johhny is playing on Beginners, his PC is basically idle. The board state of a chess game is *really* small so the server gets Johnny's machine to do the grunt work for Freddy's AI opponent.
As for getting away with not sending info down the wire, the problem of course is that working out the info isn't required might be too difficult, especially if you are using realistic lighting and stuff. You don't always have the CPU to trade off against the bandwidth...
Except that it doesn't matter. Google making a false claim about their algorithm doesn't allow Search King to sue them. It could get them in trouble with some truth in advertising laws I guess, though...
Google can assign Search King a pagerank of -1 if they want. It's their OPINION and due to their location there's some obscure first amendment thing, which allows them to say it.
Even if google assigned Search King a pagerank of -1 because he once cut some high up google person off in traffic, they are allowed to.
Of course I'm stating my opinions as facts, but google's lawyer obviously has the same view, and even managed to find a *really* good precendent, which is so close it could be converted into this case with sed.
I think I understand why your teacher thinks he was saying something meaningful, and why you think he was saying something meaningful; but it was based upon a false evaluation of how "easy" it is to make a fusion bomb, and a wrong-headed sense that the supposed "ease" of inducing fusion with a fission bomb has anything to do with fusion power generation.
It wasn't meant to be meaningful, it was meant to be a joke. Do you have those where you come from?
You know things which intentionally misrepresent something, in order to make people smile.
The whole point is that the ease of fussion power is not the same as the ease inducing fusion with a fission bomb. That's what makes it a joke.
And that goes for the rest of the points you raise. It's meant to be wrong headed, it was a joke. I managed to understand that when the christian fundamentalist "learn evolution from the text books you swines" teacher said it, and I was only a teenager at the time...
Honestly, do people not make jokes where you come from?
I'm not claiming it's actually funny, but it is quite clearly a joke...
I quite liked it I must admit, since it played on a few levels. Making fun of the people who equate fission power with fission bombs, for example.
No it was easy. It was done years ago in the H-bomb that you mention. Of course that doesn't work for a powerplant, but that wasn't the point being made. The point being made was the nuclear fusion was something that people had done before, just not in a controlled fashion.
The fact that coming up with a way to make a fusion bomb wasn't easy and obvious doesn't mean that making one now isn't.
The teacher in question was of course trying to be humourous. He wasn't claiming anything about fusion power being trivial. He was merely saying that nuclear fusion is something people have actually used in the past - as a bomb.
Of course he was a nuclear power nut too, but that's beside the point...
A while ago now I did some hacking on mozilla to make it set the referer on a per site basis. I ran out of time before I got it working properly, but since I'll be finished uni in 10 weeks I'll probably get back to it.
Of course I want everything to be done on a per site basis. Cookies already are, since the spec requires them to be. Blocking images already is. Javascript settings should be (they were on konqueror last time I checked, but they aren't on phoenix - I don't have mozilla ATM), the referer should be, the user agent string should be.
I'm hoping the code that does cookies can be reused to do everything else.
I'll probably try doing it all to phoenix in a few months. Currently I don't have the time to even look at the code.
I don't entirely disagree with your point, but print statements can debug recursive functions. Just print a number of spaces equal to the recursion depth at the start of the line.
How do you know the recursion depth?
Adding a global/static/whatever_the_language_uses variable and the code to increment and decrement it is not just adding print statements after all.
Way back when I did CS2 all of us (other than the wussy Engineers) had to write a recursive descent parser for a pascal like language, to generate MIPS assembler. 99% of the student didn't use a debugger aside from using gdb to get a stack trace from a core file (ie. not running the code in the debugger at all). Most of us managed to get it working using fprintf(stderr,"How the fsck did it get here") statements...
Well, except that in the initial design, at least, they used an intermediate stage to transfer the momentum from the radiation pressure (generated by a conventional fission bomb)...they use the radiation to ablate the outer surface of a cylinder of U-238 (natural uranium) surrounding the deuturium/tritium to use the uranium to compress it, which also trips an initiator placed with some U-235 centered in the center of the deuturium, causing it to fission, which creates two massive pressure waves, an incoming and outgoing, that compresses the deuturium mightily. This ignites fusion in it, which, in turn, releases enough fast neutrons to ignite fission in the normally unfissionable U-238 that surrounds it. The fissioning of U-238 actually produces most of the yield of this device, "Mike", which was about a megaton. Quite an intricate piece of work, really.
My high school physics teacher pointed many years ago when we were looking at nuclear energy, that fusion is 'easy'. It's just that you don't have a power plant left, to turn some turbines after it goes *bang*. And of course the greenies won't like you detonating a fission bomb in the process...
A program that works only when a GPLed library is present is derivative of that library.
Since when did your opinion trump the court's?
A program is a derivative of a library if a court rules it so (and that may change on appeal...). Copyright law determines what a derivative is, and the courts have the job of interpreting that law.
Lots of *strange* things happen, if your statement is followed. A program can change from being a derivative to not being a derivative without modification (by a replacement library being implemented by someone else, for example).
Being able to create a derivative of something that doesn't exist yet also becomes possible (top-down development often results in libraries being written after the program that uses them...)
Creating a derivative of a work you have never seen or possessed (assumming you don't agree with interface copyrights)...
In practice it's pretty obvious then someone is trying to sneak around the GPL by playing dynamic linking games, etc. A reasonable court would see that and rule accordingly. Of course most courts aren't reasonable, and rule in favour of whomever has the most expensive lawyers...
At least here, if you submit to the breathalyzer, that's all the more testing they'll do. Unless you're 110% sure you're going to pass a breathalyzer, you're going to be spending money on this anyway (lawyer fee and/or court fees and fines), so don't balk at the cost of a blood test. It will help you out in the long run and make your legal case stronger if indeed you were under the legal limit. As you said, the blood test trumps, so why would you mess around with anything less accurate?
If the breathalyser is all they'll do and you have had a few, then obviously refusing it to get a blood test is the only intelligent thing to do. So at least in your state that's what you'd do.
Over here though, the breathalyser isn't the last step, but if you pass it you go free, so doing it can only save you time. Plus of course the refusal itself *is* illegal in good old Oz (well the NSW section anyway).
This may be a state-by-state thing, but you can certainly refuse to give a breathalyzer test and still retain your license -- tell the officer to cuff you and take you to the station, where you'll happily give them a blood sample. You're still complying, so they cannot take your license.
Most people would consider a blood test far worse than a breath test, I suspect anyway.
Are police allowed to test for other drugs in your blood as well?
In Australia (well NSW anyway), drink driving is a criminal offence that can result in a jail term (up to two years for a high range BAC), so keeping your license is a relatively minor concern.
Anyway, you should always refuse a breathalyzer test. The things are hardly accurate at all. You should always force their hand by making them take a blood test. Not only will it be more accurate, but you're giving yourself about an hour more time to help lower your BAC.
Over here refusing a breath test is illegal, of course we don't have those pesky civil rights (we also have random breath tests, so you can be pulled over and tested for no reason at all). The penalties for refusing the test are equivalent to the high range penalties, hence refusing is a pretty silly thing to do...
Then again the breath test isn't what matters, the breath test gets you arrested, then you get a more accurate breath test, and you can then be required to (or ask for, though you then get a bill) a blood test. The blood test is trumps.
Maybe because it's the number of items in the array that's the only other member of the TagList, and defining a constant for this would be pretty senseless?
Computers are far better at counting things than people.
It is pure madness to not write the code so that the compiler knows the number of items in the array, and stores them away in a conveniant macro.
Of course if you need access to the length outside the compilation unit with the definition, then make it an extern const int instead of a macro, or if it's C++ make it a const int anyway...
"What he did (in my opinion) is wrong." It isn't proper, or even improper English to associate the IMO with "What he did". If someone said that out loud, 10 out of 10 english speakers would assume that he was talking about the "is wrong". Mainly because "in my opinion" *doesn't* *make* *sense* any other way. Even if the orig. poster was the investigator of the case, and was trying to show presumption of innosense, he would say something along the line of "What he allegedly did", or maybe "What he did (if in fact he did it), was wrong".
Parentheses are used for setting off an aside, to mark additional material that isn't needed by the sentence.
However, in informal writing such as an email or a slashdot post, they are often used to indicate an afterthought. Used in that way they indicate an addition to the previous statement. This is different to speech, I agree. English writing is often different to English speech.
Using 'allegedly' would be far clearer, but this isn't formal writing. Tagging (IMO) to the end of a statement isn't uncommon. Have a look at some IRC logs for example.
All your uses of ()s in the post I'm replying to, are traditional english uses. In that they mark non-essential elements, which can be included in place and make sense. Used in that way parentheses act just like paired dashes, or paired commas. Slang usage of (IMO) also includes the indication of an afterthought, a way of reducing a claim to opinion. (IMO) and (in my opinion) are different in that context since only the IMO version has this slang usage (that I know of).
this statment is from a ann-rand alike libertarian who has got a beef about the gummint.... move along.
I guess your brain is too small to understand that it is possible to see problems caused by things that you do not think are evil incarnate. Some people understand that the world isn't perfect, and that you everything has costs and benefits to be traded off against each other.
Wow, I've never been called an "ann-rand alike libertarian" before.
Especially since my leanings are so obviously socialist. Heck I've voted for both the Labor Party, the Democrats (the Australian ones, not those American ones) and the Communist Party in the past. And currently vote for the Greens.
I don't make a very good libertarian, especially since I support gun control...
Undercut?? Undercutting is when you sell something for below cost so that the competition cannot compete at that price.
I've never come across such a definition of undercut.
The plain old dictionary (ie. the non-economic general definition) gives me:
"To sell at a lower price than or to work for lower wages or fees than (a competitor)."
In economic writing I've only ever heard the term undercut to mean, sell for less than your competitor is selling, nothing to do with cost.
Dumping is the term I've seen for selling below your cost (predatory dumping if you are doing so to remove competition, but usually because government subsidies make it worthwhile for you), and you use that further down.
Let's see, setting a fire and causing millions of dollars/euros in damage is wrong IN YOUR OPINIONWhy on Earth did you need to add the IMO here? Do you think that for some people this is an OK thing to do? Try to get the testicular fortitude to actually say some things are bad or even (God forbid) WRONG!
Surely you can give some benefit of the doubt to the poster and assume that the IMO is in fact associated with the 'what he did' and not with the 'is wrong'.
It seems more likely to me (due to how I parse english, which judging by my english marks in school all those years ago probably isn't correct) that he is saying that in his opinion he did 'it'. And that that 'it' is wrong. In effect saying 'what he allegedly did is wrong' combinged with 'i believe he did it'.
You seem to be from the US. I thought you guys still had the principal of assumption of innonence which leads to the use of terms like 'allegedly' and 'IMO' to clarify statements which would otherwise be in violation of that principal. Or has Ashcroft made a few more changes?
One problem with public corpuses is that they tend to get dated, and generally aren't representative of the messages you want to filter. Filters based on a Bayesian type mechanism will find this sort of an archive entirely useless, and there are clearly better methods for rules-based filters.
The main benefit of a public corpus is academic. It allows different metholodogies to be compared and for experiments to be repeatable.
Slashdot Mirror
It wouldn't be difficult to allocate the processing for a given mob to a client's PC. In the background the PC would also be sending commands to the server for the mob as well as for the player.
:)
If the PC disconnects or crashes the missing command would alert the server which would then allocate the mob to another client, or allocate it back to the server itself. This bit would be difficult, since having mobs lag with random clients would be *bad* (though I guess the player who would have been killed in the lag but wasn't because the mobs were also lagged would like it.
In current online games that's not worthwhile. You can't trust the client so that stops it fast. If you could trust the client there wouldn't be any benefit until the overhead of allocating mobs and the extra traffic generated outweighed the cost of doingt he processing locally. For current games, it wouldn't of course.
But doing so would allow more complicated AI on fixed server power.
Take a stupid example, of a chess server. Say it has thousands and thousands of players at once, all playing against the computer. The server doesn't have enough grunt for massive searching of the board space. However, Johhny has connected on his PVII which has lots of grunt, especially considering it is only drawing a chess board at the moment. The server could get the client to run the AI - the board state is already at the client after all.
More than that, Freddy could connect using his dumb terminal and start a GrandMastersAreCrap level game. The server doesn't have enough grunt, and Freddy doesn't either. but Johhny is playing on Beginners, his PC is basically idle. The board state of a chess game is *really* small so the server gets Johnny's machine to do the grunt work for Freddy's AI opponent.
As for getting away with not sending info down the wire, the problem of course is that working out the info isn't required might be too difficult, especially if you are using realistic lighting and stuff. You don't always have the CPU to trade off against the bandwidth...
Except that it doesn't matter. Google making a false claim about their algorithm doesn't allow Search King to sue them. It could get them in trouble with some truth in advertising laws I guess, though...
Google can assign Search King a pagerank of -1 if they want. It's their OPINION and due to their location there's some obscure first amendment thing, which allows them to say it.
Even if google assigned Search King a pagerank of -1 because he once cut some high up google person off in traffic, they are allowed to.
Of course I'm stating my opinions as facts, but google's lawyer obviously has the same view, and even managed to find a *really* good precendent, which is so close it could be converted into this case with sed.
And that's funny, because the teacher in question was a creationist of no small proportions...
Mmmm... irony as well...
It wasn't meant to be meaningful, it was meant to be a joke. Do you have those where you come from?
You know things which intentionally misrepresent something, in order to make people smile.
The whole point is that the ease of fussion power is not the same as the ease inducing fusion with a fission bomb. That's what makes it a joke.
And that goes for the rest of the points you raise. It's meant to be wrong headed, it was a joke. I managed to understand that when the christian fundamentalist "learn evolution from the text books you swines" teacher said it, and I was only a teenager at the time...
Honestly, do people not make jokes where you come from?
I'm not claiming it's actually funny, but it is quite clearly a joke...
I quite liked it I must admit, since it played on a few levels. Making fun of the people who equate fission power with fission bombs, for example.
Of course you are probably talking about spamd, in which case it's only a far more reasonable 2 years old...
No it was easy. It was done years ago in the H-bomb that you mention. Of course that doesn't work for a powerplant, but that wasn't the point being made. The point being made was the nuclear fusion was something that people had done before, just not in a controlled fashion.
The fact that coming up with a way to make a fusion bomb wasn't easy and obvious doesn't mean that making one now isn't.
The teacher in question was of course trying to be humourous. He wasn't claiming anything about fusion power being trivial. He was merely saying that nuclear fusion is something people have actually used in the past - as a bomb.
Of course he was a nuclear power nut too, but that's beside the point...
A while ago now I did some hacking on mozilla to make it set the referer on a per site basis. I ran out of time before I got it working properly, but since I'll be finished uni in 10 weeks I'll probably get back to it.
Of course I want everything to be done on a per site basis. Cookies already are, since the spec requires them to be. Blocking images already is. Javascript settings should be (they were on konqueror last time I checked, but they aren't on phoenix - I don't have mozilla ATM), the referer should be, the user agent string should be.
I'm hoping the code that does cookies can be reused to do everything else.
I'll probably try doing it all to phoenix in a few months. Currently I don't have the time to even look at the code.
How do you know the recursion depth?
Adding a global/static/whatever_the_language_uses variable and the code to increment and decrement it is not just adding print statements after all.
Way back when I did CS2 all of us (other than the wussy Engineers) had to write a recursive descent parser for a pascal like language, to generate MIPS assembler. 99% of the student didn't use a debugger aside from using gdb to get a stack trace from a core file (ie. not running the code in the debugger at all). Most of us managed to get it working using fprintf(stderr,"How the fsck did it get here") statements...
A program is a derivative of a library if a court rules it so (and that may change on appeal...). Copyright law determines what a derivative is, and the courts have the job of interpreting that law.
Lots of *strange* things happen, if your statement is followed. A program can change from being a derivative to not being a derivative without modification (by a replacement library being implemented by someone else, for example).
Being able to create a derivative of something that doesn't exist yet also becomes possible (top-down development often results in libraries being written after the program that uses them...)
Creating a derivative of a work you have never seen or possessed (assumming you don't agree with interface copyrights)...
In practice it's pretty obvious then someone is trying to sneak around the GPL by playing dynamic linking games, etc. A reasonable court would see that and rule accordingly. Of course most courts aren't reasonable, and rule in favour of whomever has the most expensive lawyers...
Over here though, the breathalyser isn't the last step, but if you pass it you go free, so doing it can only save you time. Plus of course the refusal itself *is* illegal in good old Oz (well the NSW section anyway).
Are police allowed to test for other drugs in your blood as well?
In Australia (well NSW anyway), drink driving is a criminal offence that can result in a jail term (up to two years for a high range BAC), so keeping your license is a relatively minor concern.
Over here refusing a breath test is illegal, of course we don't have those pesky civil rights (we also have random breath tests, so you can be pulled over and tested for no reason at all). The penalties for refusing the test are equivalent to the high range penalties, hence refusing is a pretty silly thing to do...
Then again the breath test isn't what matters, the breath test gets you arrested, then you get a more accurate breath test, and you can then be required to (or ask for, though you then get a bill) a blood test. The blood test is trumps.
I suggest you give The Two Towers a miss too...
And great protection against a fire, or a flood, or a man with an axe.
Oh wait a minute....
It is pure madness to not write the code so that the compiler knows the number of items in the array, and stores them away in a conveniant macro.
After all for a standard array it's as simple as
WhateverType array[] = {INIT_LIST};
#define array_SIZE sizeof(array)/sizeof(*array)
Of course if you need access to the length outside the compilation unit with the definition, then make it an extern const int instead of a macro, or if it's C++ make it a const int anyway...
Parentheses are used for setting off an aside, to mark additional material that isn't needed by the sentence.
However, in informal writing such as an email or a slashdot post, they are often used to indicate an afterthought. Used in that way they indicate an addition to the previous statement. This is different to speech, I agree. English writing is often different to English speech.
Using 'allegedly' would be far clearer, but this isn't formal writing. Tagging (IMO) to the end of a statement isn't uncommon. Have a look at some IRC logs for example.
All your uses of ()s in the post I'm replying to, are traditional english uses. In that they mark non-essential elements, which can be included in place and make sense. Used in that way parentheses act just like paired dashes, or paired commas. Slang usage of (IMO) also includes the indication of an afterthought, a way of reducing a claim to opinion. (IMO) and (in my opinion) are different in that context since only the IMO version has this slang usage (that I know of).
I guess your brain is too small to understand that it is possible to see problems caused by things that you do not think are evil incarnate. Some people understand that the world isn't perfect, and that you everything has costs and benefits to be traded off against each other.
Wow, I've never been called an "ann-rand alike libertarian" before.
Especially since my leanings are so obviously socialist. Heck I've voted for both the Labor Party, the Democrats (the Australian ones, not those American ones) and the Communist Party in the past. And currently vote for the Greens.
I don't make a very good libertarian, especially since I support gun control...
Higher taxes and better health care for all!!!
I've never come across such a definition of undercut.
The plain old dictionary (ie. the non-economic general definition) gives me:
In economic writing I've only ever heard the term undercut to mean, sell for less than your competitor is selling, nothing to do with cost.
Dumping is the term I've seen for selling below your cost (predatory dumping if you are doing so to remove competition, but usually because government subsidies make it worthwhile for you), and you use that further down.
* Must remember to never let your machine die or be replaced. If you do, you'll never be able to reburn the audio.
Surely the first thing you'd do after burning the CD is to rip the CD and store those wav files away somewhere safe...
Surely you can give some benefit of the doubt to the poster and assume that the IMO is in fact associated with the 'what he did' and not with the 'is wrong'.
It seems more likely to me (due to how I parse english, which judging by my english marks in school all those years ago probably isn't correct) that he is saying that in his opinion he did 'it'. And that that 'it' is wrong. In effect saying 'what he allegedly did is wrong' combinged with 'i believe he did it'.
You seem to be from the US. I thought you guys still had the principal of assumption of innonence which leads to the use of terms like 'allegedly' and 'IMO' to clarify statements which would otherwise be in violation of that principal. Or has Ashcroft made a few more changes?
Personally, I'd rather have stupid car destroying environmental regulations which will quickly be reversed when the other guy wins next time.
Over a police state which the other guy who wins next time will only increase.
But I don't vote in American elections (though my wife could, I guess...). I do however live in a state whose premiere said the other day:
If you've got a website with a photo of Osama bin Laden you ought to be subject to surveillance. - Bob Carr, Premiere of NSW, Australia
So I have some experience with this police state business...
You seriously couldn't see that coming?!?