The suicidal are often among the more capable in society, apart from their moment(s) of weakness. The only people who are always happy, are the parasitizing-mentally retarded who are generally well-supported by another member or collective of society. Any system of eugenics should start with consideration of IQ (since it is in general the so-far-strongest hereditary attribute correlated with success and flexibility), and be effected through sterilization. Any other suggestion is just aesthetics or mean-spiritedness.
Let me amend that. The cup doesn't even need to be symmetric, as long as the orientation stays the same across rolls (i.e. you don't spin it). You'll still get a stationary ergodic sequence of rolls.
First, there are PRNGs which can boost a seed of perfect randomness into arbitrarily much cryptographically guaranteed pseudo-randomness. (It'll be as hard to break the pseudo-randomness, as it is to break the crypto.) I'm no expert on this, but read this if you're interested: http://www.wisdom.weizmann.ac.il/~oded/foc-book.html
However, a shaken die isn't even a PRNG in any reasonable sense of the word. A die well-shaken in a symmetric cup, by a chaotic system, is real randomness in the sense that the rolls will be a stationary independent sequence. It'd take some work to convince me that I'm wrong on this, but I'll listen.
Here is a shitty way to use a biased die in such a system for randomness (it just uses the die as a coin, and uses von Neumann's method; if I were smarter I'd do better). Label the faces 1,2,3 as "A". Label the faces 4,5,6 as "B". Roll the die repeatedly and each time "AB" comes up, mark that as "0". Each time "BA" comes up, mark that as "1". (Making sure not to reuse letters. I.e., "ABA" does not count as "01" but "ABBA" does.) Note that the sequence of 0s and 1s you mark down is uniform independent random.
And yes, I'd much rather have an atomic decay RNG. However, "perfect enough for cryptography" randomness isn't magic. People screwed up in the past, just because they weren't paranoid enough. Le chiffre de Vigenère was good enough for centuries.
It would appear that an average Chinese-on-the-street, would put to shame an average storm-trooper or chekist, at least as far as cold-blooded murderous loyalty to the state is concerned.
There's no way you can predict the outcome of well-shaken dice. Even if the dice were imperfect, the random numbers could easily be whitened by any number of methods. Atomic decay isn't uniformly random either, of course - the waiting time for decays is exponentially distributed and not stationary (it is decaying after all), but this is easily corrected for.
Using atomic decay is all about being faster, and less maintenance.
ZZT was a great intro not only to game design and programming, but also hex editing! You could find the byte which disabled level editing, by comparing your levels to the ones that came with the game. (And of course, being teenagers, we then made obscene parodies of every edit-protected level we could find. Ah, memories.)
Also, if Qbasic counts then, taking internet access for granted, there are literally hundreds of superior alternatives (at least for learning) available for free... why bother with the crud microsoft may or may not provide?
Horrible ROMs is where opinion gets interesting. Everyone likes Mario 3 well enough; but only certain people can tolerate Clash at Demonhead. I rate it as one of the best NES games ever, along with Solar Jetman which had huge seamless gamefields and very challenging physics. Too challenging and weird, which is probably why it failed, but there's still nothing like it. It's sort of like a single-player story mode for xpilot.
I eat plenty of vegetables, raw and cooked, in addition to a supplement. I am quite unconcerned.
I guess my point is mostly that depending on juice for nutrition, for all the sugar you end up getting, maybe not the best idea. Better to eat real whole vegetables and drink cola, than to drink juice and eat processed crap.
In my case, I have steamed kale and a boiled potato along with the steak. Fie on the juice-drinkers; I get my nutrition from chewing actual food, and it's fabulous.
Anti-oxidants: yeah, apparently oxidation is a pathway for the benefits of exercise (i.e. exercise weakens by oxidation your muscles, and the repair process is what is beneficial). I laughed when I read it. Yet another ridiculous fad debunked after, I'm sure, several million dollars in sales to the naive.
Clearly (I thought) I was referring to "food industry" orange juice, not real orange juice. Good for you; I used to enjoy that when I had a tree in Florida.
My reactions to orange juice and cola respectively, are completely the opposite of yours.
Minute Maid brand OJ (the most processed) will actually make me vomit; Tropicana just makes me feel sick for half the day; and fresh-squeezed from good oranges is "safe" about half the time, otherwise it's like Tropicana.
Cola doesn't do this. Still, I usually just drink water, and get my nutrition from actual food, which leans toward the healthy side. No point in drinking a few hundred calories.
I just read a novel wherein one of the main characters said to himself while arguing a lost cause: "I am the Lorax. I speak for the trees." It was rather poignant in the context.
If this novel were in the visual medium of animation, it would probably not be possible (or financially reasonable) to make such a reference. That is at least a little bit sad, and part of the "hidden tax" that comes along with so-called intellectual property.
Just like when he forgot to give air to Laurie when he teleported her to Mars, it emphasizes the fact that he is nearly totally disconnected from most aspects of humanity.
He blew his enemies up in showers of gore presumably because it happened to be slightly easier than the alternative, even if it spattered a roomful of traumatized bystanders. He knew enough to stop the "bad guy", but beyond that he just didn't care either way. Now that's chilling.
For that reason I was very glad that they left the gore in, even though in the movie it looks worse than the equivalent scene in the comic.
Most of those vitamins are artificial ones and added back in after pasteurization.
Drinking orange juice for its vitamin content, is literally paying a few thousand-percent markup on vitamin pills. Seriously. Just take a multi-vitamin (which costs practically nothing), and then drink whatever you want to drink.
Hey, I'm not surprised that there was dirty dealings involved. It's part of how the world works.
But it's been decades now. Every other dirty thing Rumsfeld has done, the truth has been uncovered within a year or two and is easily found by anyone who gives even half a shit.
And yet, legions of scientists have found no problem with aspartame. Interesting. Even a stopped, greedy, clock...
Yeah, OK. Or I can take a nearly-free multi-vitamin which is like eating my fill of every fruit and vegetable on the face of the planet, instantly, and with a net zero calories which I can spend later on the tastier cola (or to be frugal, water).
Fair enough. I usually don't bother with the/. article, and even my prestigious institutional affiliation doesn't give me access to the good articles on the subject (randomized trials, &c.) although the abstracts seem quite significant.
How do life science people get anything done but negotiating access to research?
Refined sugar is just as new to our bodies, on the evolutionary time scale, as high fructose corn syrup. Even the volumes associated with the modern concept of fruit juice are new: 12 oz. of orange juice is considered reasonable to drink, even though it's equivalent to eating six oranges in a few minutes. Lots more sugar, and much more frequently, than we had during what I'm sure was a pre-technological paradise. Oh yeah, even "natural" juices often have the vitamins stripped out and added back in after pasteurization. Little difference between orange juice and cola, really. If you like one over the other fine, but it's close to a wash nutritionally.
There's nothing wrong with living your life by various rules of thumb, because it's impossible to get into all of the details in one lifetime. But insisting on the dogmatic conclusions of your heuristics, is sheer insanity.
Slashdot Mirror
Internet tough guy. Lemme guess, 16 or so?
The suicidal are often among the more capable in society, apart from their moment(s) of weakness. The only people who are always happy, are the parasitizing-mentally retarded who are generally well-supported by another member or collective of society. Any system of eugenics should start with consideration of IQ (since it is in general the so-far-strongest hereditary attribute correlated with success and flexibility), and be effected through sterilization. Any other suggestion is just aesthetics or mean-spiritedness.
Let me amend that. The cup doesn't even need to be symmetric, as long as the orientation stays the same across rolls (i.e. you don't spin it). You'll still get a stationary ergodic sequence of rolls.
First, there are PRNGs which can boost a seed of perfect randomness into arbitrarily much cryptographically guaranteed pseudo-randomness. (It'll be as hard to break the pseudo-randomness, as it is to break the crypto.) I'm no expert on this, but read this if you're interested: http://www.wisdom.weizmann.ac.il/~oded/foc-book.html
However, a shaken die isn't even a PRNG in any reasonable sense of the word. A die well-shaken in a symmetric cup, by a chaotic system, is real randomness in the sense that the rolls will be a stationary independent sequence. It'd take some work to convince me that I'm wrong on this, but I'll listen.
Here is a shitty way to use a biased die in such a system for randomness (it just uses the die as a coin, and uses von Neumann's method; if I were smarter I'd do better). Label the faces 1,2,3 as "A". Label the faces 4,5,6 as "B". Roll the die repeatedly and each time "AB" comes up, mark that as "0". Each time "BA" comes up, mark that as "1". (Making sure not to reuse letters. I.e., "ABA" does not count as "01" but "ABBA" does.) Note that the sequence of 0s and 1s you mark down is uniform independent random.
And yes, I'd much rather have an atomic decay RNG. However, "perfect enough for cryptography" randomness isn't magic. People screwed up in the past, just because they weren't paranoid enough. Le chiffre de Vigenère was good enough for centuries.
That was the authorities' doing, not the killer's.
It would appear that an average Chinese-on-the-street, would put to shame an average storm-trooper or chekist, at least as far as cold-blooded murderous loyalty to the state is concerned.
Carry one and only one of these: http://www.amazon.com/Toshiba-SD-M3203B3-32MB-Card-e310/dp/B00006HXGY
There's no way you can predict the outcome of well-shaken dice. Even if the dice were imperfect, the random numbers could easily be whitened by any number of methods. Atomic decay isn't uniformly random either, of course - the waiting time for decays is exponentially distributed and not stationary (it is decaying after all), but this is easily corrected for.
Using atomic decay is all about being faster, and less maintenance.
Stephenson is a pseudo-scientist hack.
ZZT was a great intro not only to game design and programming, but also hex editing! You could find the byte which disabled level editing, by comparing your levels to the ones that came with the game. (And of course, being teenagers, we then made obscene parodies of every edit-protected level we could find. Ah, memories.)
First, that wasn't until DOS 5.0.
Also, if Qbasic counts then, taking internet access for granted, there are literally hundreds of superior alternatives (at least for learning) available for free... why bother with the crud microsoft may or may not provide?
As opposed to the one in DOS?
Horrible ROMs is where opinion gets interesting. Everyone likes Mario 3 well enough; but only certain people can tolerate Clash at Demonhead. I rate it as one of the best NES games ever, along with Solar Jetman which had huge seamless gamefields and very challenging physics. Too challenging and weird, which is probably why it failed, but there's still nothing like it. It's sort of like a single-player story mode for xpilot.
Thanks, I actually laughed at this. Dark humor; well pitched. Kudos.
I eat plenty of vegetables, raw and cooked, in addition to a supplement. I am quite unconcerned.
I guess my point is mostly that depending on juice for nutrition, for all the sugar you end up getting, maybe not the best idea. Better to eat real whole vegetables and drink cola, than to drink juice and eat processed crap.
In my case, I have steamed kale and a boiled potato along with the steak. Fie on the juice-drinkers; I get my nutrition from chewing actual food, and it's fabulous.
Anti-oxidants: yeah, apparently oxidation is a pathway for the benefits of exercise (i.e. exercise weakens by oxidation your muscles, and the repair process is what is beneficial). I laughed when I read it. Yet another ridiculous fad debunked after, I'm sure, several million dollars in sales to the naive.
Clearly (I thought) I was referring to "food industry" orange juice, not real orange juice. Good for you; I used to enjoy that when I had a tree in Florida.
I'm glad you found what works for you.
My reactions to orange juice and cola respectively, are completely the opposite of yours.
Minute Maid brand OJ (the most processed) will actually make me vomit; Tropicana just makes me feel sick for half the day; and fresh-squeezed from good oranges is "safe" about half the time, otherwise it's like Tropicana.
Cola doesn't do this. Still, I usually just drink water, and get my nutrition from actual food, which leans toward the healthy side. No point in drinking a few hundred calories.
I just read a novel wherein one of the main characters said to himself while arguing a lost cause: "I am the Lorax. I speak for the trees." It was rather poignant in the context.
If this novel were in the visual medium of animation, it would probably not be possible (or financially reasonable) to make such a reference. That is at least a little bit sad, and part of the "hidden tax" that comes along with so-called intellectual property.
Just like when he forgot to give air to Laurie when he teleported her to Mars, it emphasizes the fact that he is nearly totally disconnected from most aspects of humanity.
He blew his enemies up in showers of gore presumably because it happened to be slightly easier than the alternative, even if it spattered a roomful of traumatized bystanders. He knew enough to stop the "bad guy", but beyond that he just didn't care either way. Now that's chilling.
For that reason I was very glad that they left the gore in, even though in the movie it looks worse than the equivalent scene in the comic.
There is an "add/remove applications" which has a subset of the total packages and a dumbed-down interface.
That's not the problem.
Most of those vitamins are artificial ones and added back in after pasteurization.
Drinking orange juice for its vitamin content, is literally paying a few thousand-percent markup on vitamin pills. Seriously. Just take a multi-vitamin (which costs practically nothing), and then drink whatever you want to drink.
The "healthfulness" of juice is >99% marketing.
Maybe you're phenylketonuric?
Stevia is OK I guess. It helps my whey powder go down, but I wouldn't use it to sweeten things I want to enjoy eating...
Hey, I'm not surprised that there was dirty dealings involved. It's part of how the world works.
But it's been decades now. Every other dirty thing Rumsfeld has done, the truth has been uncovered within a year or two and is easily found by anyone who gives even half a shit.
And yet, legions of scientists have found no problem with aspartame. Interesting. Even a stopped, greedy, clock...
Yeah, OK. Or I can take a nearly-free multi-vitamin which is like eating my fill of every fruit and vegetable on the face of the planet, instantly, and with a net zero calories which I can spend later on the tastier cola (or to be frugal, water).
Life is grand.
Fair enough. I usually don't bother with the /. article, and even my prestigious institutional affiliation doesn't give me access to the good articles on the subject (randomized trials, &c.) although the abstracts seem quite significant.
How do life science people get anything done but negotiating access to research?
Refined sugar is just as new to our bodies, on the evolutionary time scale, as high fructose corn syrup. Even the volumes associated with the modern concept of fruit juice are new: 12 oz. of orange juice is considered reasonable to drink, even though it's equivalent to eating six oranges in a few minutes. Lots more sugar, and much more frequently, than we had during what I'm sure was a pre-technological paradise. Oh yeah, even "natural" juices often have the vitamins stripped out and added back in after pasteurization. Little difference between orange juice and cola, really. If you like one over the other fine, but it's close to a wash nutritionally.
There's nothing wrong with living your life by various rules of thumb, because it's impossible to get into all of the details in one lifetime. But insisting on the dogmatic conclusions of your heuristics, is sheer insanity.