But one thing I haven't heard anything about is why would Bnetd do what they did?
Because every time they tried to spend 3 hours of free time playing Starcraft, 1.5 went into trying to get Blizzard's flakey services to allow the game to start. I quit playing Starcraft because of this.
Complaining that you want to play and that Bnet is down at the moment doesn't cut it with me.
Well, you're wrong. Battle.net is a good deal better lately, but I expect it will go to hell again when WCIII comes out, and it used to be a real PITA.
Not to mention the appeal of hosting semi-private servers, where you can invite all your friends but not the trolls, cheats, and lamers that infest battlenet.
There's a bit in the old testament describing the jewish temple, and a certain object is described as being circular, 10 cubits in diameter with a 30 cubit circumfrance.
Thus, Pi = 3. And since it's in the bible, any other claims are heresy.
However, the software is built to handle node failures, so they probably just swap out a couple a day.:)
Not sure Google qualifies as a supercomputer in that it isn't general-purpose... I don't think you can run a simulation on google.
Re:Fermi's Paradox is bunk.
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So either there is plenty of intelligent life and it ALWAYS is disinterested in overt colonization, or intelligent life is incredibly rare.
They're always disinterested because they're too addicted to Everquest (alien edition) to bother with the real world.
(not joking...)
Re:The problem with all these equations...
on
Rare Earth
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· Score: 2
They wouldn't be confused about that for that long.
Anybody near to our solar system could hardly fail to notice us. If they saw the oxygen in our atmosphere, they'd notice the radio waves, too, if not also the nighttime lighting! That would at least be considered an interesting natural phenomena to check out.
And remember, the galaxy is billions of years old; if you're assuming thousands of civilizations, many of them will be millions of years older than us. They've had time to get here with *non-FTL* ships and for that matter colonize the whole galaxy.
Either it can't be done, or nobody wants to for some reason. Or there's nobody to do it.
(Or, alternately, advanced life is common but we just happen to be the first....)
Re:The problem with all these equations...
on
Rare Earth
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It's not that big an assumption. Sure, anything is possible, but:
Water is common and a great solvent for organic (carbon-chain) molecules.
Carbon-based compounds are really the only ones that form huge, complex molecules.
More important, if there are all these aliens out there, why haven't they visited us? Either
a) They can't. (starships impossible) b) Nobody wants to. (Prime directive, or 'They're made of meat!')
And the earth's moon is certainly freakish; it appears to be the result of an *astoundingly* unlikely collision with a large body at just the right angle. It seems more plausible to me that such a moon is necessary for life than that our planet just happens to be a billion-to-one oddity, especially (as noted above) given the lack of flying saucers.
In the states there are thousands of farmers who cannot afford to eat.
Huh? Support for this, please? (Farmers having trouble making their loan payments or going bankrupt I might believe...)
I mean, if they really couldn't eat, they could, I dunno, consume some edible plants. If only there were some way farmers might have access to those...
Depends on the model. In stock markets, we have self-defeating prophecies; if everybody knows a stock is going up, it's too late, it's already up. In other situations you may have self-fullfilling prophecies - 'There's going to be a war at some point, we know it, they know it, so we better attack first.'
Hey, I can think of lots of software projects that shouldn't have any programmers...
But seriously, one interesting implication is that forks/parallel projects can be a Good Thing! If you have two 10-person projects, and throw one away, you're better off than with a 20-person project.
(Linux filesystems seem to have taken this to heart...;)
"You may use, modify, and redistribute this software freely, and must make it available to third parties under this license in the event that they are able to defeat you in a Grudge Match in The Iron Cage of Fury!"
Forgetting for a moment that this is wrong and harmful, it's also stupid: how on earth is copy-protection of TV ever supposed to work? I point a camcorder at my TV during play, and boom, low-quality copy. Use optical zoom and some moderately cunning software to merge video streams and I might even be able to get a copy at near-full resolution.
...that Mozilla 1.0 will be the default web browserin the GNU/Hurd OS.
palm info center prepared for slashdotting!
on
New Clie Handhelds
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· Score: 2
Amusingly, after following the palminfocenter link, you see a web page with a banner at the top saying, "Hello, Slashdot reader! You have been redirected to this low-bandwidth version of the story so as not to hose us." (Well, I'm paraphrasing.) Wonder when they set that up?
Skynet^H^H^H^H^HGoogle begins to learn at a geometric rate. It becomes self-aware at 2:14am. Eastern time, August 29th. In a panic, they try to pull the plug.
You write a really lousy but functional C compiler in assembler. Then you write a decent C complier in C. Compile it with the first compiler; now that you have an executable, recompile it with itself to get an executable that isn't awful. Possibly the first compiler doesn't handle anything but a subset of your language and you have to make multiple iterations of this.
I wonder when the last time anybody wrote a compiler in assembler was...?
Slashdot Mirror
But one thing I haven't heard anything about is why would Bnetd do what they did?
Because every time they tried to spend 3 hours of free time playing Starcraft, 1.5 went into trying to get Blizzard's flakey services to allow the game to start. I quit playing Starcraft because of this.
Complaining that you want to play and that Bnet is down at the moment doesn't cut it with me.
Well, you're wrong. Battle.net is a good deal better lately, but I expect it will go to hell again when WCIII comes out, and it used to be a real PITA.
Not to mention the appeal of hosting semi-private servers, where you can invite all your friends but not the trolls, cheats, and lamers that infest battlenet.
Actually, that once comes up from time to time.
There's a bit in the old testament describing the jewish temple, and a certain object is described as being circular, 10 cubits in diameter with a 30 cubit circumfrance.
Thus, Pi = 3. And since it's in the bible, any other claims are heresy.
From what I hear, they have cheap-junk hardware.
:)
However, the software is built to handle node failures, so they probably just swap out a couple a day.
Not sure Google qualifies as a supercomputer in that it isn't general-purpose... I don't think you can run a simulation on google.
So either there is plenty of intelligent life and it ALWAYS is disinterested in overt colonization, or intelligent life is incredibly rare.
They're always disinterested because they're too addicted to Everquest (alien edition) to bother with the real world.
(not joking...)
They wouldn't be confused about that for that long.
Anybody near to our solar system could hardly fail to notice us. If they saw the oxygen in our atmosphere, they'd notice the radio waves, too, if not also the nighttime lighting! That would at least be considered an interesting natural phenomena to check out.
And remember, the galaxy is billions of years old; if you're assuming thousands of civilizations, many of them will be millions of years older than us. They've had time to get here with *non-FTL* ships and for that matter colonize the whole galaxy.
Either it can't be done, or nobody wants to for some reason. Or there's nobody to do it.
(Or, alternately, advanced life is common but we just happen to be the first....)
It's not that big an assumption. Sure, anything is possible, but:
Water is common and a great solvent for organic (carbon-chain) molecules.
Carbon-based compounds are really the only ones that form huge, complex molecules.
More important, if there are all these aliens out there, why haven't they visited us? Either
a) They can't. (starships impossible)
b) Nobody wants to. (Prime directive, or 'They're made of meat!')
And the earth's moon is certainly freakish; it appears to be the result of an *astoundingly* unlikely collision with a large body at just the right angle. It seems more plausible to me that such a moon is necessary for life than that our planet just happens to be a billion-to-one oddity, especially (as noted above) given the lack of flying saucers.
I can see it now.
"w00t! f1rst p4nt3nt!"
In the states there are thousands of farmers who cannot afford to eat.
Huh? Support for this, please? (Farmers having trouble making their loan payments or going bankrupt I might believe...)
I mean, if they really couldn't eat, they could, I dunno, consume some edible plants. If only there were some way farmers might have access to those...
The Church of the Subgenius works well for this too, at least against Mormons...
Depends on the model. In stock markets, we have self-defeating prophecies; if everybody knows a stock is going up, it's too late, it's already up. In other situations you may have self-fullfilling prophecies - 'There's going to be a war at some point, we know it, they know it, so we better attack first.'
The trick is knowing which is which...
I believe Steven Spielburg once said that there are only 4 movie plots:
Man vs. Man
Man vs. Nature
Nature vs. Nature
Dog vs. Vampire
See, Alabama isn't so bad, after all.
Its primary purpose, of course, is to give Georgia a buffer zone for Mississippi.
Because the costs of compromise are non-linear with the number of systems compromised. Details left as an exercise for the reader.
Human, of course. There are some things Orc lawyers won't do...
Hey, I can think of lots of software projects that shouldn't have any programmers...
;)
But seriously, one interesting implication is that forks/parallel projects can be a Good Thing! If you have two 10-person projects, and throw one away, you're better off than with a 20-person project.
(Linux filesystems seem to have taken this to heart...
Is that kinda like the XFL?
"You may use, modify, and redistribute this software freely, and must make it available to third parties under this license in the event that they are able to defeat you in a Grudge Match in The Iron Cage of Fury!"
Forgetting for a moment that this is wrong and harmful, it's also stupid: how on earth is copy-protection of TV ever supposed to work? I point a camcorder at my TV during play, and boom, low-quality copy. Use optical zoom and some moderately cunning software to merge video streams and I might even be able to get a copy at near-full resolution.
...that Mozilla 1.0 will be the default web browserin the GNU/Hurd OS.
Amusingly, after following the palminfocenter link, you see a web page with a banner at the top saying, "Hello, Slashdot reader! You have been redirected to this low-bandwidth version of the story so as not to hose us." (Well, I'm paraphrasing.) Wonder when they set that up?
Clearly, the most important algorythm. ;)
IndirectX?
you also took up a bunch of cow abortions, which lost the equivalent mass, if not more.
If the lost mass *isn't* exactly equivalent, then this research is definately worth NASA's time...
Skynet^H^H^H^H^HGoogle begins to learn at a geometric rate. It becomes self-aware at 2:14am. Eastern time, August 29th. In a panic, they try to pull the plug.
And Google fights back.
Actually, you don't need extra hardware at all, you can use your monitor as an AM transmitter:
Tempest for Eliza
Ok, the sound quality is lousy, but...
You write a really lousy but functional C compiler in assembler. Then you write a decent C complier in C. Compile it with the first compiler; now that you have an executable, recompile it with itself to get an executable that isn't awful. Possibly the first compiler doesn't handle anything but a subset of your language and you have to make multiple iterations of this.
I wonder when the last time anybody wrote a compiler in assembler was...?