Once you know you're on the last level of Gehennom, yes you basically have to walk over almost every square until you find the vibrating square. Gehennom is boring, I agree.
Use scrolls of gold detection, while confused. The portals on the planes will be detected, and stay detected. And it only moves on the plane of Water.
I don't think fire traps occur on lvl 1. But yes, you can die like that, maybe magic traps do exist there, or you may have few hp and there's a falling rock trap. There's some luck involved in the very early game. But that doesn't matter much, not a huge time investment.
The Oracle has this to say about the invocation: It is said that thou mayst gain entry to Moloch's sanctuary, if thou darest, from a place where the ground vibrateth in the deepest depths of Gehennom. Thou needs must have the aid of three magical items. The pure sound of a silver bell shall announce thee. The terrible runes, read from Moloch's book, shall cause the earth to tremble mightily. The light of an enchanted candelabrum shall show thee the way. Seems pretty explicit to me (apart from the apparent error "thou needs must have...").
I do agree that I started enjoying the game a lot more after reading spoilers. And I saw much more of it too. The first four years I saw the Castle exactly once. In the six years after I found spoilers, I ascended 17 or so times.
Polymorph into an acid blob or so and ooze under the door
Polymorph into a Xorn and walk through the door
Dig around the door
Go up a level, dig down, jump through the hole, hope you end up behind the door
Teleport to the other side
Unlock the door with the spell of Knock, then open it
Have the door hit by a disintegration ray (from a black dragon that misses you, or by polymorphing into one)
And this is just a start. There are options like this with anything you can do in the game. If I want to impress people with Nethack I try to tell them of all the strange situations that can happen with cockatrices... Say a monster has gloves on, picks up a cockatrice corpse and wields it... You put on your ring of conflict, the nymph next to him steals his gloves, he turns to stone:-).
Inside a EU country, you're also not allowed to ask different prices in different regions. For instance, telcos can't ask less for a telephone connection in a city (where mass coverage is cheaper) than they do in rural areas. They're forced to spread out their costs evenly.
And since the EU is a single market, this concept is also applied to the EU as a whole.
Leaving two knights hanging to immediate capture threats, that doesn't suggest any lookahead to me.
But of course, it's neat that it works. People have made utilities for playing through chess games before, like PalView (a simple demo here).
Adapting that to take user input and a very simple lookahead is work, but not stunning in my opinion. Unless there's some reason why this is very hard in JS, I don't really do that language...
Free will might as well not be real, since it can be simulated.
From Eliezer Yudkowsky's
FAQ about the Meaning of Life which is much too Singularity-optimistic and generally raving about AI, but still a good thing to read:
4.5 Do I have free will?
"Free will" is a cognitive element representing the basic game-theoretical unit of moral responsibility. It has nothing whatsoever to do with determinism or quantum randomness. Free will doesn't actually exist in reality, but only in the sense that flowers don't actually exist in reality.
Is a computer ever going to invent mathematics without previous knowledge of it just because it find it to be a useful utility for solving problems?
No, we'll tell it about math. Note that I didn't think of math by myself, nor did you. It took humanity thousands of years to invent and perfect it , with millions of people using the state of the art of their time because that's what they were taught to do.
It's conceivable that an AI could figure out some things like this from scratch, but in practice we won't do that (since we can teach it math, or hard code it). It's enough if it can sometimes think of some new method to solve a problem to be considered as intelligent as us, in my opinion.
Your comment is like "how can a computer ever print a text? Is it going to invent writing, and an alphabet by itself?":-). We're "allowed" to teach it the same things we teach our kids, and hardwire stuff that needs to be hardwired (like a lot of things are hardwired in our brain, vision, language structure, etc).
And as for language translation, in my personal opinion, you need general AI before you can have human-language understanding, and you need that for translation.
Built with the idea that code in attachments should be executable, often automatically. Also full of exploitable bugs, to get even more stuff running automatically, regardless of who who sent it. Responsible for a huge amount of damage by all sorts of worms, trojans, etc.
Someone, somewhere got the idea that email would look better with html; and if it got html, it should get scripting too, that's consistent with web pages! And it's cool if attachments (like pictures) can be opened in their appropriate program automatically - let's run any executables then, that's consistent!
This is oversimplified, but I really feel that this is a case of stupid consistency that caused multi-billion dollar damage. Email should never be executed by the mail client.
Now what reasonable person would expect this to be called a worm?
It's a perfectly normal worm. It installs some shady software on your computer and mails itself around. Other worms use exploits in, say, Outlook to be able to do this; this worm uses an exploitable weakness in the user - they don't read EULAs.
The title "Critical Weakness Found In Users" would have sounded cooler, but wouldn't be news, of course.
People have big double standards. Consider copyright.
Kazaa etc aren't themselves copyright infringers, but they can be used for this purpose very easily, and are actually used for this on a massive scale. However, when government/producers try to do something about this, either by technology (DRM) or by legislation, we cry bloody murder.
Now consider our attitude when some company is in a slightly grey zone over article x.y of the GPL. Off with their heads!
If Microsoft were to release a bit of software that by itself isn't infringing, but makes it trivial to hide GPL code in your binaries, so that companies could steal GPL code without anyone finding out, and if this software was immediately used on a massive scale for exactly this - I think some people here would suggest that MS should be sued, to say the least:)
Regardless, all these posts about drug use really don't have to do with the original point of my offtopic post, which was simply that the majority of kids don't do illegal things because they're illegal.
Yes, sorry for dragging the thread further off-topic, and good point about the 15-16 yos.
Anyway, I think it's actually more likely that those kids listen to what their parents tell them is bad, instead of what's illegal. Kids know that copying music and games is illegal, but all of them do that, basically... Otoh, cannabis may be "legal", but most parents still aren't very happy to see their kids use it.
Uhm, yes. The topic. Nah, Google delisting stuff on a few national sites just isn't so interesting:-)
Yes, drugs being illegal makes them more attractive to "some" but I wager it makes it that it also makes it that much less attractive for the majority.
I live in the Netherlands. Cannabis is basically legal here (well, have to be 18+ to buy it, and the "coffee shops" have to buy it in secret, but it's practically legal). The theory is that cannabis isn't very harmful by itself (less than alcohol or even tobacco), and making cannabis legal prevents users from coming into contact with dealers of heavier drugs. Plus of course, if you can't beat it, tax it - aka Dutch pragmatism:-)
According to a recent study by the EU anti-drug organization, see also this newspaper report, cannabis use in the Netherlands is average, with 20% of adults having tried it at least once (the UK and Denmark, which stricter laws, are at 30%).
Also, Britian, Luxembourg, Italy and Portugal have the most problem users, with 6 to 8 cases per 1000. Austria, Germany and the Netherlands, which all have more liberal laws, have 3 per 1000 problem cases.
So it does seem that legal cannabis does not lead to more use, but might prevent problem use (of more potent drugs, usually).
I believe you can not bring a case directly to the europeans court.
I thought of that later, I think you're right.
But still, they could have sued the other channels (broadcasting from London) ever since they've been doing this, just sue them in the UK.
I see no special reason to sue this station now that it choses to do it as well, if this is based on EU law.
So I still think they think the Swedish court is more likely to grant them the protection than, say, UK courts.
Other channels that target Sweden broadcast from London, thus they aren't affected by Swedish law.
Author's rights are protected strongly in European Law.
If the protection the authors claim is grounded in European law, why are the London-based stations safe from it? Why aren't they bringing the case before the EU courts at once?
Apparently they think the EU courts wouldn't outlaw commercial breaks during movies, which are pretty normal. One Dutch station (SBS6) actually goes so far as to have an entire 30-minute program in between the first and second halves of a film... I *hate* that.
So it seems that Swedish courts are being stricter on interpretation of EU law than the rest of the EU. I doubt that's a good thing.
So if you copyright some book, and then you cryogenically freeze yourself, you get the copyright for as long as you are alive, right?
Earth to mothership: freezing yourself kills you. 'Cryogenically frozen' people are dead. Write 100 times on the blackboard: science fiction is still fiction.
In my opinion Deep Fritz will never beat Kramnik in a Berlin Defence. [...] IMHO the team should try either switching to 1.d4 [...]
That's what Fritz has been playing in his last two White games, with rather better results than his first two Whites. Your comment would have made better sense a week ago:)
The Week In Chess (TWIC) is the news center for chess players, as far as I'm concerned. They have good reports about the match as well, including an interview with Kramnik from a week before the match, here.
My karma is maxed, I'm not just whoring, I just hate people linking to an article on CNN or Yahoo or so when it's about chess. Though this submission was clearly a lot better than the previous ones.
And about the match - it's interesting that after Kramnik exploited the computer's weaknesses (endgame, strategy, etc), the computer followed up by exploiting the human's weaknesses - emotion in game 5 (Kramnik realized he was facing a long hard defence, didn't like this, maybe he was a bit nervy), and vanity in game 6 (Kramnik went for the flashy tactics, he wanted "the best game in his life". Admittedly he didn't see the refutation so it seemed a good move, but it certainly wasn't good anti-computer strategy.)
And now it's 3.5-3.5 with one game to go. Kramnik has to choose between playing for a win (which may involve risk), or take no risks (leading to a probable draw). This may lead to doubts in his mind. Something Fritz doesn't have to deal with, although his operators may have the same problem choosing an opening repertoire.
Let's hope they don't let Fritz go down because of their humans flaws.
This is publishing information about THEIR OWN PRODUCT.
No it isn't. The patch was written by independent developers. Red Hat employees in the US aren't allowed to read the explanation either. And they're not allowed to put it on their site because the license on the explanation doesn't allow this.
Err, I don't think you can release a patch for GPL software (ie, Linux) under a non-GPL license.
The patch itself is perfectly legal, and GPL licensed, and downloadable by anyone, etc.
The documentation accompanying the patch, that explains what security holes were closed, is licensed so as to be undistributable to people in the US jurisdiction. This is because the act of distributing this info is illegal under the DCMA.
You don't understand [...] DMCA is a bad law [...] But it doesn't apply in this case.
Says you. Even if you're right, a law suit would bankrupt me immediately. Why take the risk? Distributing to everyone but the US still reaches 95% of the world...
I think they'd keep getting Americans downloading it just as much. Most people using Kazaa wouldn't have trouble lying on a web form. But it removes their legal liability in the US, as far as I can see.
Slashdot Mirror
SPOILERS
Once you know you're on the last level of Gehennom, yes you basically have to walk over almost every square until you find the vibrating square. Gehennom is boring, I agree.
Use scrolls of gold detection, while confused. The portals on the planes will be detected, and stay detected. And it only moves on the plane of Water.
I don't think fire traps occur on lvl 1. But yes, you can die like that, maybe magic traps do exist there, or you may have few hp and there's a falling rock trap. There's some luck involved in the very early game. But that doesn't matter much, not a huge time investment.
The Oracle has this to say about the invocation: It is said that thou mayst gain entry to Moloch's sanctuary, if thou darest, from a place where the ground vibrateth in the deepest depths of Gehennom. Thou needs must have the aid of three magical items. The pure sound of a silver bell shall announce thee. The terrible runes, read from Moloch's book, shall cause the earth to tremble mightily. The light of an enchanted candelabrum shall show thee the way. Seems pretty explicit to me (apart from the apparent error "thou needs must have...").
I do agree that I started enjoying the game a lot more after reading spoilers. And I saw much more of it too. The first four years I saw the Castle exactly once. In the six years after I found spoilers, I ascended 17 or so times.
In Nethack, you can kick the door down.
Or you can, say:
And this is just a start. There are options like this with anything you can do in the game. If I want to impress people with Nethack I try to tell them of all the strange situations that can happen with cockatrices... Say a monster has gloves on, picks up a cockatrice corpse and wields it... You put on your ring of conflict, the nymph next to him steals his gloves, he turns to stone :-).
And that's why Nethack is unique!
If you don't know what Schrodinger's cat is,
I know! You can find them in boxes in Nethack sometimes! (but half the time they seem to be dead for some reason)
;-)
Inside a EU country, you're also not allowed to ask different prices in different regions. For instance, telcos can't ask less for a telephone connection in a city (where mass coverage is cheaper) than they do in rural areas. They're forced to spread out their costs evenly.
And since the EU is a single market, this concept is also applied to the EU as a whole.
The site says it looks 2 moves deep, but I don't see how it can play like this then:
1.e4 Nc6 2.d4 Nf6 3.e5 Ne4 4.Bd3 Nxd4?? 5.Bxe4 Nxc2?? 6.Qxc2
Leaving two knights hanging to immediate capture threats, that doesn't suggest any lookahead to me.
But of course, it's neat that it works. People have made utilities for playing through chess games before, like PalView (a simple demo here).
Adapting that to take user input and a very simple lookahead is work, but not stunning in my opinion. Unless there's some reason why this is very hard in JS, I don't really do that language...
Oh... btw - artist of course get the regular royalties from people getting their CDs at the library...
So it's not actually free copying, it's just that you don't pay directly for it. They still charge for the mp3s you make, but they charge the library.
Free will might as well not be real, since it can be simulated.
From Eliezer Yudkowsky's FAQ about the Meaning of Life which is much too Singularity-optimistic and generally raving about AI, but still a good thing to read:
4.5 Do I have free will?
"Free will" is a cognitive element representing the basic game-theoretical unit of moral responsibility. It has nothing whatsoever to do with determinism or quantum randomness. Free will doesn't actually exist in reality, but only in the sense that flowers don't actually exist in reality.
I'll go with your point B) :-)
Is a computer ever going to invent mathematics without previous knowledge of it just because it find it to be a useful utility for solving problems?
No, we'll tell it about math. Note that I didn't think of math by myself, nor did you. It took humanity thousands of years to invent and perfect it , with millions of people using the state of the art of their time because that's what they were taught to do.
It's conceivable that an AI could figure out some things like this from scratch, but in practice we won't do that (since we can teach it math, or hard code it). It's enough if it can sometimes think of some new method to solve a problem to be considered as intelligent as us, in my opinion.
Your comment is like "how can a computer ever print a text? Is it going to invent writing, and an alphabet by itself?" :-). We're "allowed" to teach it the same things we teach our kids, and hardwire stuff that needs to be hardwired (like a lot of things are hardwired in our brain, vision, language structure, etc).
And as for language translation, in my personal opinion, you need general AI before you can have human-language understanding, and you need that for translation.
Outlook!
Built with the idea that code in attachments should be executable, often automatically. Also full of exploitable bugs, to get even more stuff running automatically, regardless of who who sent it. Responsible for a huge amount of damage by all sorts of worms, trojans, etc.
Someone, somewhere got the idea that email would look better with html; and if it got html, it should get scripting too, that's consistent with web pages! And it's cool if attachments (like pictures) can be opened in their appropriate program automatically - let's run any executables then, that's consistent!
This is oversimplified, but I really feel that this is a case of stupid consistency that caused multi-billion dollar damage. Email should never be executed by the mail client.
Now what reasonable person would expect this to be called a worm?
It's a perfectly normal worm. It installs some shady software on your computer and mails itself around. Other worms use exploits in, say, Outlook to be able to do this; this worm uses an exploitable weakness in the user - they don't read EULAs.
The title "Critical Weakness Found In Users" would have sounded cooler, but wouldn't be news, of course.
People have big double standards. Consider copyright.
Kazaa etc aren't themselves copyright infringers, but they can be used for this purpose very easily, and are actually used for this on a massive scale. However, when government/producers try to do something about this, either by technology (DRM) or by legislation, we cry bloody murder.
Now consider our attitude when some company is in a slightly grey zone over article x.y of the GPL. Off with their heads!
If Microsoft were to release a bit of software that by itself isn't infringing, but makes it trivial to hide GPL code in your binaries, so that companies could steal GPL code without anyone finding out, and if this software was immediately used on a massive scale for exactly this - I think some people here would suggest that MS should be sued, to say the least :)
Regardless, all these posts about drug use really don't have to do with the original point of my offtopic post, which was simply that the majority of kids don't do illegal things because they're illegal.
Yes, sorry for dragging the thread further off-topic, and good point about the 15-16 yos.
Anyway, I think it's actually more likely that those kids listen to what their parents tell them is bad, instead of what's illegal. Kids know that copying music and games is illegal, but all of them do that, basically... Otoh, cannabis may be "legal", but most parents still aren't very happy to see their kids use it.
Uhm, yes. The topic. Nah, Google delisting stuff on a few national sites just isn't so interesting :-)
Yes, drugs being illegal makes them more attractive to "some" but I wager it makes it that it also makes it that much less attractive for the majority.
I live in the Netherlands. Cannabis is basically legal here (well, have to be 18+ to buy it, and the "coffee shops" have to buy it in secret, but it's practically legal). The theory is that cannabis isn't very harmful by itself (less than alcohol or even tobacco), and making cannabis legal prevents users from coming into contact with dealers of heavier drugs. Plus of course, if you can't beat it, tax it - aka Dutch pragmatism :-)
According to a recent study by the EU anti-drug organization, see also this newspaper report, cannabis use in the Netherlands is average, with 20% of adults having tried it at least once (the UK and Denmark, which stricter laws, are at 30%).
Also, Britian, Luxembourg, Italy and Portugal have the most problem users, with 6 to 8 cases per 1000. Austria, Germany and the Netherlands, which all have more liberal laws, have 3 per 1000 problem cases.
So it does seem that legal cannabis does not lead to more use, but might prevent problem use (of more potent drugs, usually).
"That's no moon" [It's the death star]
Actually, the Death Star is in orbit around Uranus.
I believe you can not bring a case directly to the europeans court.
I thought of that later, I think you're right.
But still, they could have sued the other channels (broadcasting from London) ever since they've been doing this, just sue them in the UK. I see no special reason to sue this station now that it choses to do it as well, if this is based on EU law.
So I still think they think the Swedish court is more likely to grant them the protection than, say, UK courts.
The article states:
If the protection the authors claim is grounded in European law, why are the London-based stations safe from it? Why aren't they bringing the case before the EU courts at once?
Apparently they think the EU courts wouldn't outlaw commercial breaks during movies, which are pretty normal. One Dutch station (SBS6) actually goes so far as to have an entire 30-minute program in between the first and second halves of a film... I *hate* that.
So it seems that Swedish courts are being stricter on interpretation of EU law than the rest of the EU. I doubt that's a good thing.
OOK! Ook ook ook, ook ook. Ook ook. Ook ook ook ook ook. Ook? Ook.
So if you copyright some book, and then you cryogenically freeze yourself, you get the copyright for as long as you are alive, right?
Earth to mothership: freezing yourself kills you. 'Cryogenically frozen' people are dead. Write 100 times on the blackboard: science fiction is still fiction.
In my opinion Deep Fritz will never beat Kramnik in a Berlin Defence. [...] IMHO the team should try either switching to 1.d4 [...]
That's what Fritz has been playing in his last two White games, with rather better results than his first two Whites. Your comment would have made better sense a week ago :)
The Week In Chess (TWIC) is the news center for chess players, as far as I'm concerned. They have good reports about the match as well, including an interview with Kramnik from a week before the match, here.
My karma is maxed, I'm not just whoring, I just hate people linking to an article on CNN or Yahoo or so when it's about chess. Though this submission was clearly a lot better than the previous ones.
And about the match - it's interesting that after Kramnik exploited the computer's weaknesses (endgame, strategy, etc), the computer followed up by exploiting the human's weaknesses - emotion in game 5 (Kramnik realized he was facing a long hard defence, didn't like this, maybe he was a bit nervy), and vanity in game 6 (Kramnik went for the flashy tactics, he wanted "the best game in his life". Admittedly he didn't see the refutation so it seemed a good move, but it certainly wasn't good anti-computer strategy.)
And now it's 3.5-3.5 with one game to go. Kramnik has to choose between playing for a win (which may involve risk), or take no risks (leading to a probable draw). This may lead to doubts in his mind. Something Fritz doesn't have to deal with, although his operators may have the same problem choosing an opening repertoire.
Let's hope they don't let Fritz go down because of their humans flaws.
This is publishing information about THEIR OWN PRODUCT.
No it isn't. The patch was written by independent developers. Red Hat employees in the US aren't allowed to read the explanation either. And they're not allowed to put it on their site because the license on the explanation doesn't allow this.
If that's the case, then it would be legal to distribute the DeCSS code as long as you don't tell anyone what it does.
No, since DeCSS is a circumvention device (another part of the DMCA).
Err, I don't think you can release a patch for GPL software (ie, Linux) under a non-GPL license.
The patch itself is perfectly legal, and GPL licensed, and downloadable by anyone, etc.
The documentation accompanying the patch, that explains what security holes were closed, is licensed so as to be undistributable to people in the US jurisdiction. This is because the act of distributing this info is illegal under the DCMA.
You don't understand [...] DMCA is a bad law [...] But it doesn't apply in this case.
Says you. Even if you're right, a law suit would bankrupt me immediately. Why take the risk? Distributing to everyone but the US still reaches 95% of the world...
And lose the majority of their ad targets?
I think they'd keep getting Americans downloading it just as much. Most people using Kazaa wouldn't have trouble lying on a web form. But it removes their legal liability in the US, as far as I can see.