I see two problems with your analogy. Crashing a car is far more expensive than producing CP, so much so that it would be hard to justify ever doing it intentionally. In addition, people don't make money off car crash photos; they do make money from CP.
It depends on your perspective. You're right in that competitive Scrabble isn't about knowing meanings of words, and this does bother some people. You can view Scrabble as not being about words so much as about combinations of letters. The game is then about a mix of anagramming and strategy (it was this strategy that I was talking about when I referred to depth; while living room Scrabble games usually feature little strategy, competitive players take into account many factors when choosing a play).
Scrabble isn't a game about words, it's just a game that uses them. It's about anagramming and about strategic decisions. It's no coincidence that Scrabble players tend to be on the more math-y side. If you shift your view of the point of the game, you might lose some of your disgust.
Assuming that "and" was supposed to be "any" (this is why proper spelling is important, folks), this is entirely false. Any sequence of turns solves one and only one position of the cube. If you don't believe it, work on your spatial reasoning imagine taking a solved cube and performing the inverse of the sequence (the sequence in reverse order, with all clockwise turns becoming counterclockwise and vise versa). You will get one position (obviously a starting position plus a sequence of turns uniquely determines an ending position). This is the position that that sequence will solve. No other.
Blindfold solving is done by memorizing the starting configuration of the cube and then performing algorithms that only affect a small number of pieces in a specific way (e.g. rotating three corners clockwise, flipping the orientation of two edges). These algorithms can be combined to, for example, cycle edge A -> edge B -> edge C -> edge D -> edge E -> edge A. Because this is inefficient from a number of turns standpoint, it wouldn't be suitable for a robot.
I'm a competitive cuber/scrabble player, you insensitive clod!
(No, seriously, I am. Scrabble has a lot of depth to it when played on a higher level that you are completely ignoring. Don't be so quick to dismiss something just because you don't know much about it.)
Single deck with favorable rules (S17, DAS, Surrender) can give a small player edge with perfect strategy, I believe. However, once basic strategy came around casinos changed their games to remove the player edge (more decks, H17 and no DAS, etc).
I believe the person I replied to was talking about the U.S. Presidential elections. In that case, having more than a couple parties doesn't work too well.
The reason that there are two parties is because this maximizes the number of votes each party receives without removing *all* competition. If there's one big left wing party and twenty small right wing parties, you can be sure that the left wing party will win every time. Reasonable right-wingers would combine their parties so that the candidate in office might have positions that coincide more closely with their own.
The US electoral system inherently favours a two-party system. Don't like it? Push for electoral reform.
No, you mean that scientists can't always predict the weather accurately for the upcoming weekend. Big difference. Weather is short term, climate is long term. That seems to be the gist of your very well thought out argument.
I'm guessing you're running Linux? Flash isn't a problem at all on Windows; I haven't had a single flash-related crash in Firefox in the past couple of years. Flash in Firefox on Fedora (whee alliteration) has caused me countless issues, though. Flash + Windows = Good, Flash + Linux = Very Bad.
Erm, what? The U.S. has signed the Kyoto Protocol, but we haven't ratified it. Ratification is up to the Senate. Big distinction here that you're completely ignoring.
Never mind that your diluting the meaning of the word "torture" beyond measure. This is not torture at all, a much more accurate description would be "not respecting privacy of a criminal suspect". Causing direct and extreme physical or psychological pain in order to extract information is torture
Had you read the posts above you, you would know that he's talking about waterboarding. And I'm pretty sure that that qualifies as torture...
Before I'm attacked for being "conservative", know that I'm very liberal on just about everything. You're just being silly, though.
I'm not the one who sneered at those "infatuated with self-expression" -- those are McCain's words. The point of his extended joke was that young people have little valuable to say, and blogs are similarly worthless.
That's the conservative point of view: your elders are smarter than you, so just listen to them and shut your mouth until you're 50.
(The progressive point of view might be to thank the bigoted, ignorant, hidebound bastards who brought us up for the few good things they accomplished. Say, winning World War Two and inventing the transistor -- it's a short list. Then show them to a seat so they can watch in dismay while those of us who got a political education from someone other than Augustine, Hobbes, and Leviticus try to fix up the mess they stuck us with.)
This is so soaked with irony that it makes me want to laugh. McCain said that when he was young he was arrogant and thought he knew everything. Here you are, young, arrogant, and thinking you know everything.
Half the blogosphere was yelling its head off in 2002-2003 that the Iraq war was a horrible idea, sold to us with phony reasons. But our political system is run by white-hairs who sneer that blogging hippies are too young and foolish to listen to.
Half the blogosphere complained? People complain about everything, especially young people. Big deal. This is not to say that they were perhaps not justified, but this isn't always the case, and just the fact the blogosphere complained is meaningless.
Yes, the link you give is ThinkProgress's primary source, so thank you for pointing out that TP and I do not rely on biased information. (That source is actually a story by Declan McCullagh, a libertarian whose politics I mostly strongly oppose except on matters of censorship.)
Umm, no. Declan would be relying on unbiased information and adding his own bias to it. You would be relying on biased information. The second half of that is completely irrelevant to your argument.
McCain's bill would have chilled free expression on the internet to the point where very few blogs could have afforded to enable comments. Maybe McCain didn't realize the implications of his own bill for bloggers who want to engage their audience. Or, as his mockery at Liberty would suggest, maybe he just doesn't value open discussion on the internet.
That is one FUD-filled conclusion. You need a *real* source to back up your claims here. That last sentence is especially filled with FUD. You're drawing your own conclusions based on a bill he proposed, and then trying to spin them as his point of view. Nice try, but no.
Actually, it's Wikipedia's policy to block open proxies for precisely this reason. Nothing's preventing a vandal from using them once his/her IP gets banned otherwise (and nothing's preventing someone from creating tons of socks undetected by the Checkuser editors, either).
2. bio-fuels could start taking up the slack, this is really only feasible if large scale bio-fuel from algae is started, and so far at least one texas energy company is starting a major bio-fuel from algae product cycle. How that company does, might drastically change the face of bio-fuel as an alternative to fossil fuels, if they're successful and profitable. Erm, not really. If we're talking about other energy sources, natural gas, hyrdogen (fuel cell cars), and wind power are where it's at. Biofuels are overrated. Before you say that running on any of these isn't going to happen, in Iceland you can already find filling stations for a fuel car (and, of course, fuel cell cars themselves).
Open source is killing them. Get your head out of the clouds. OSS is in no way "killing them". What's Linux's market share on the desktop again? Something like 0.01%? Firefox is just about the only open source application that a random person off the street might use. OSS is doing fairly well on things like servers, but at present it is not killing Microsoft. It has a dominant market share of desktop operating systems, and let's not forget that Microsoft does more than that as well. Microsoft's gaming division doesn't look like it's going to be put out of business by open source any time soon.
As much as I'd like open source to be "killing" Microsoft, it's simply not happening at present.
See http://blogs.zdnet.com/microsoft/?p=615
This has been going on for a while. My Sony laptop from December '07 came with this. It should be noted that the ad-funded version is available only to OEMs.
Hardly - you may find that the Person Who Pays The Bills is running IE 6...;-) No, I'm quite sure that my mother is running Firefox. Now excuse me, my daily ten minutes of sun are up, back to the basement now.
Slashdot Mirror
f(x) = -1/2 +/- sqrt(5)/2
Am I missing something here? This looks like a sixth grade algebra problem.
I see two problems with your analogy. Crashing a car is far more expensive than producing CP, so much so that it would be hard to justify ever doing it intentionally. In addition, people don't make money off car crash photos; they do make money from CP.
It depends on your perspective. You're right in that competitive Scrabble isn't about knowing meanings of words, and this does bother some people. You can view Scrabble as not being about words so much as about combinations of letters. The game is then about a mix of anagramming and strategy (it was this strategy that I was talking about when I referred to depth; while living room Scrabble games usually feature little strategy, competitive players take into account many factors when choosing a play).
Scrabble isn't a game about words, it's just a game that uses them. It's about anagramming and about strategic decisions. It's no coincidence that Scrabble players tend to be on the more math-y side. If you shift your view of the point of the game, you might lose some of your disgust.
Just as a quick note, the page you linked is unofficial world records and hasn't been updated in a while. The official fastest times are here
Before someone claims dishonesty, all these solves were performed in competition with judges observing,
Assuming that "and" was supposed to be "any" (this is why proper spelling is important, folks), this is entirely false. Any sequence of turns solves one and only one position of the cube. If you don't believe it, work on your spatial reasoning imagine taking a solved cube and performing the inverse of the sequence (the sequence in reverse order, with all clockwise turns becoming counterclockwise and vise versa). You will get one position (obviously a starting position plus a sequence of turns uniquely determines an ending position). This is the position that that sequence will solve. No other.
Blindfold solving is done by memorizing the starting configuration of the cube and then performing algorithms that only affect a small number of pieces in a specific way (e.g. rotating three corners clockwise, flipping the orientation of two edges). These algorithms can be combined to, for example, cycle edge A -> edge B -> edge C -> edge D -> edge E -> edge A. Because this is inefficient from a number of turns standpoint, it wouldn't be suitable for a robot.
I'm a competitive cuber/scrabble player, you insensitive clod!
(No, seriously, I am. Scrabble has a lot of depth to it when played on a higher level that you are completely ignoring. Don't be so quick to dismiss something just because you don't know much about it.)
So THAT'S where the restaurant at the end of the universe is...
Single deck with favorable rules (S17, DAS, Surrender) can give a small player edge with perfect strategy, I believe. However, once basic strategy came around casinos changed their games to remove the player edge (more decks, H17 and no DAS, etc).
At last, we'll finally be able to find Russell's teapot!
I was under the impression that it was Bogosort.
I believe the person I replied to was talking about the U.S. Presidential elections. In that case, having more than a couple parties doesn't work too well.
The reason that there are two parties is because this maximizes the number of votes each party receives without removing *all* competition. If there's one big left wing party and twenty small right wing parties, you can be sure that the left wing party will win every time. Reasonable right-wingers would combine their parties so that the candidate in office might have positions that coincide more closely with their own.
The US electoral system inherently favours a two-party system. Don't like it? Push for electoral reform.
No, you mean that scientists can't always predict the weather accurately for the upcoming weekend. Big difference. Weather is short term, climate is long term. That seems to be the gist of your very well thought out argument.
I'm guessing you're running Linux? Flash isn't a problem at all on Windows; I haven't had a single flash-related crash in Firefox in the past couple of years. Flash in Firefox on Fedora (whee alliteration) has caused me countless issues, though. Flash + Windows = Good, Flash + Linux = Very Bad.
Erm, what? The U.S. has signed the Kyoto Protocol, but we haven't ratified it. Ratification is up to the Senate. Big distinction here that you're completely ignoring.
Never mind that your diluting the meaning of the word "torture" beyond measure. This is not torture at all, a much more accurate description would be "not respecting privacy of a criminal suspect". Causing direct and extreme physical or psychological pain in order to extract information is torture
Had you read the posts above you, you would know that he's talking about waterboarding. And I'm pretty sure that that qualifies as torture...
I'm not the one who sneered at those "infatuated with self-expression" -- those are McCain's words. The point of his extended joke was that young people have little valuable to say, and blogs are similarly worthless. That's the conservative point of view: your elders are smarter than you, so just listen to them and shut your mouth until you're 50. (The progressive point of view might be to thank the bigoted, ignorant, hidebound bastards who brought us up for the few good things they accomplished. Say, winning World War Two and inventing the transistor -- it's a short list. Then show them to a seat so they can watch in dismay while those of us who got a political education from someone other than Augustine, Hobbes, and Leviticus try to fix up the mess they stuck us with.)
This is so soaked with irony that it makes me want to laugh. McCain said that when he was young he was arrogant and thought he knew everything. Here you are, young, arrogant, and thinking you know everything.
Half the blogosphere was yelling its head off in 2002-2003 that the Iraq war was a horrible idea, sold to us with phony reasons. But our political system is run by white-hairs who sneer that blogging hippies are too young and foolish to listen to.
Half the blogosphere complained? People complain about everything, especially young people. Big deal. This is not to say that they were perhaps not justified, but this isn't always the case, and just the fact the blogosphere complained is meaningless.
Yes, the link you give is ThinkProgress's primary source, so thank you for pointing out that TP and I do not rely on biased information. (That source is actually a story by Declan McCullagh, a libertarian whose politics I mostly strongly oppose except on matters of censorship.)
Umm, no. Declan would be relying on unbiased information and adding his own bias to it. You would be relying on biased information. The second half of that is completely irrelevant to your argument.
McCain's bill would have chilled free expression on the internet to the point where very few blogs could have afforded to enable comments. Maybe McCain didn't realize the implications of his own bill for bloggers who want to engage their audience. Or, as his mockery at Liberty would suggest, maybe he just doesn't value open discussion on the internet.
That is one FUD-filled conclusion. You need a *real* source to back up your claims here. That last sentence is especially filled with FUD. You're drawing your own conclusions based on a bill he proposed, and then trying to spin them as his point of view. Nice try, but no.
Actually, it's Wikipedia's policy to block open proxies for precisely this reason. Nothing's preventing a vandal from using them once his/her IP gets banned otherwise (and nothing's preventing someone from creating tons of socks undetected by the Checkuser editors, either).
You're behind the times. They already offer internet. I use it in my home; let's me browse /. while I'm on the toilet.
//If client is using Netscape Navigator 3.0 or higher, set the popup window as the focus.
From their site. It's not that surprising that they're still using tables for layouts, they probably fired their dev team about ten years ago.
As much as I'd like open source to be "killing" Microsoft, it's simply not happening at present.
The ads are in fact in things like sidebars, clogging up your interface but not your actual document.
See http://blogs.zdnet.com/microsoft/?p=615
This has been going on for a while. My Sony laptop from December '07 came with this. It should be noted that the ad-funded version is available only to OEMs.