Based on having read some of the book and much about the book, here is my summary:
"I am Wolfram, I am smart. I will show you neat pictures you can make with Mathematica. [Buy it.] I am forced to conclude that I am smarter than Einstein or Newton, because... well, look at these pretty pictures I made! Can you believe they are produced by very simple instructions? Not impressed yet? Well, remember that I am very smart, and I think these things are very important, and, I mean, just look! It's very pretty! Now I will prove a theorem about Turing computability of Rule 110. And for the rest of the book, please listen to my totally unsubstantiated conjectures. You see, if you sort of squint, these pictures look like the universe, and so because of this resemblance, I cleverly realized this is how the universe was made. Don't believe me? Excuse me, but did you get the McCarhur Genius award at age 19? Didn't think so. Oh, and for good measure, I will totally ignore lots of work in biology and philosophy, and make some bold, unsubstantiated conjectures about these fields. They will go down easier when you keep in mind the magnitude of my intellect, and remind yourself that any objections you might have come from an inferior mind. Thank you."
There are also apparently some stupid people who think they can't form a reasonable opinion about something by consulting the testimony (reasoned opinions, reviews, etc.) of experts.
It seems to me a totally rational way to make decisions. It's probably much more reliable than skimming the book, don't you think?
Hey, what's up with that link to the paper that requires you to be a subscriber? Is there a/. username/password for reading the content? If ordinary mortals can't read the most important link (everything else is just fluff) why post this article, especially since the same fluff reported by MSNBC was posted earlier?
The way I read the EULA, it's not like Bioware puts any restrictions on your distribution of your creations. You can set up an FTP, etc. What they do say is that if you make something with the toolkit, they have a right to redistribute it.
Compare this to the case where you splice a whole bunch of GPL code modules together (using your immagination/creativity) and the license declares that others have a right to use your code, even to sell it.
Because the toolkit is so high-level, you basically cannot use it to create content without Bioware IP inside. That content "infects" your creation the way GPL code does, and that puts restrictions on what you can do with the code. The only restriction Bioware insists on is that you give them the rights to use what you make. So you can't, as you said, try to sell off your creations for money to Bioware, because they are, by the license, entitled to your code already--so they can get it for free. Again, this would be the same if you put together a software project full of GPL code. You couldn't say "I'll hide the code until you pay me."
Anyway, I think the GPL is a fair license, and so by extension, I think Bioware's conditions are reasonable too. Basically, they want all the code to be "free"--meaning they want it to be available. I'm sure that down the road, they might try to print and sell a "distribution" CD of the best fan modules that were created. If you don't want to buy it from them, I'm sure you can just get in touch with the authors and download their modules for free. Or, I'm sure there will be many web sites online that keep an inventory of freely-released fan modules. Some of them might even try to make their own "distribution" on CD and sell it. I see nothing in the Bioware license that prevents this. In fact, I see the license encourages wide redistribution of the modules, which is cool, and also in Bioware's interest.
So where exactly is the problem with the license? I honestly don't get what you're worried about.
No, I think you're making his point! How many innocent Palestinians died last month "to set an example"? We'll never know, because they carried off the corpses, but it's definitely in the 100's.
OK, I logged in to my "spam-reception" Hotmail account and got this:
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Wow. Really a great ad for Microsoft technology. I can't wait for the day all Passport and.NET transactions will be based on this great system. I feel reassured they "will do their best" to fix this.
Yoda's climactic fight scene...everyone has heard it's coming, but you can't be prepared to see Yoda in a lightsaber duel...the crowd in my theatre was literally cheering the whole time, at how cool it was...
I'm sorry. The people I saw it with thought this scene was completely absurd. The CG-Yoda comes walking in with a cane, and all of the sudden he's bouncing around the screen like some green piece of flubber, while swinging a mineature light saber. Well, that much is forgivable, I guess. I mean we all knew that Lucas would incorporate a big "look what you can do with digital effects" commercial into the movie. Also, you shouldn't expect him to care that Yoda, the only character that managed to exhude a sense of dignity, should go bouncing around the room a green weasel to entertain children.
But seriously, this scence just exhibits the degree to which Lucas is out of ideas. I have no doubt that Yoda could always defend himself, but I expected him to do so in some more interesting way than just fencing. It's about as much of a letdown as watching a movie in which the Dalai Lama starts blowing away people who diss Tibet with a shotgun.
Even sitting here, I could come up with a much more interesting thing for Yoda to do than merely having an acrobatic sabre duel. I mean, we know that you can do a lot more with the force than telekinesis and telepathy, and I figured it would be Yoda, when his back is against the wall, who would show us. I'm talking about mind control, about creating illusions for Dooku, about working him into such a rage that he loses control of the force, you know, the sort of stuff that Yoda always talked about.
But no, instead Yoda takes out the "far far away" equivalent of the machine gun and goes at it. Never mind that he weighs about 20 pounds--he still manages to parry the kinetic energy of a strong man's blow without flying backwads like a batted muppet. This thought alone caused me to giggle when I saw this scene, and by the end, I was laughing. Not with Yoda, but at him.
That scene made the character lose a lot of credibility in my eyes, and I must say, I was always a fan of Yoda. I worry for the Jedi, because you just know that sooner or later, someone in that galaxy is going to discover actual lasers (you know, devices which emit energy that really travels at the speed of light!). I'd like to see Yoda parry that!
This sounds wrong. The first result of the price drop will be a buying spree for people who have lurked on the sidelines, undecided about which game system to buy. I'm quite certain that Xbox sales will be more than 33% faster after this price cut, so the retailers gain from this.
The fact Sony dropped PS2 prices simultaneously is the only thing that stole the fire from this announcement. Still, if Microsoft stayed at $300, Xboxes would certainly be put on the back shelf and considered a has-been that no sane person would buy on impulse, given the huge exhibit in the front of the store featuring $199 PS2s.
I was trying to sum up for my curious friends my overall impression of AOTC and I think I finally said this: Lucas obviously spent a lot of money, but not a lot of thought on this movie. In some scenes I remember my eyes were involuntarily rolling so much that I thought I might really hurt myself.
The plot was actually quite dumb, on par with recent films starring The Rock. Of course, those movies don't have the hubris to try doing romantic dialogue. AOTC tried, and it was absolutely terrible. Actually, let's face it: Lucas sucks at dialogue. The characters get about as much development as is necessary in a tale aimed at 6-year olds. Everybody is a total cliche. But of course, we're used to that from Lucas. I think he would say that everybody is an archetype--which is Jungian mumbo-jumbo for "stereotype."
Many wondered how the fact Darth Vader's rising up against the Emperor and revealing himself as Anakin Skywalker (ep6) suddenly made him a good guy, though he was directly responsible for the death of thousands of innocent people. Those of us who thought "Huh? Isn't a repentant war criminal still a war criminal?" will be saying "Huh?" many more times during this movie.
spoiler--can't resist:
 
One example: It's only after Senator Brunette-Britney, who is supposed to be righteous, finds out that her suitor killed a whole village of innocent children that she decides she really loves him. Maybe if he also killed their dogs, he'd get a blow job. Or something.
Kids have a stronger stomach than that. Watched LOTR1 again at the $2 theater, and that was 10 times more frightning and violent than AOTC. One of the salvations of Lucas' incompetent writing is that nothing he shows ever appears very realistic. For example, the kid was obviously holding his father's helmet. Jackson worked much harder at making the violent sequences look less clean, and I can tell you, many of the children in the theater were honestly freaked out.
I think the biggest danger you incur when you go see AOTC is that your optic nerve might be severed from constant involuntary eye-rolling brought on by the terrible dialogue and battle sequences in AOTC.
(Spoiler for parents: Please tell them that if someone ever confesses to them they slaughtered a village of innocent children, they should react not by hugging them and telling them it's OK, but by calling the police and making sure the perpetrator rots in jail. Yes, I'm looking at you, Ms. Ex-queen!)
Now we can clearly see that the target audience of this movie is sub-12 children, their parents, and those whose intellectual development was arrested at sub-12 levels. You know who you are! You're the same people who liked Episode 1.
As for me, I'll wait for a lobotomy or reincarnation, without which I'm afraid I can't enjoy "attack of the clones."
This is a good point--if the universe really is cyclic, and maybe the laws of nature vary slightly in each cycle, it would explain why all of the cosmological constants seem so well tuned for the existence of life. The idea (anthropic principle) is that this way, there could be many barren cycles that produced no life, and these cycles would have no observers feeling cheated. In cycles that do produce observers, those observers shouldn't feel "lucky" because the laws of nature are tuned so well. Just about every combination of laws comes up eventually, and only winners are ever observed.
Huh? How come the AC wasn't destroyed at the heat death of the universe? And if the answer is that it was in "hyperspace" why didn't the people just go hang out in hyperspace? Sheesh!
I got the same uneasy feeling about wishful thinking. Even the most optimistic physicists began to admit that accelerating expansion data probably means that immortality (having infinitely many thoughts) is impossible. Now they may have a new source of hope! (Actually, I think not.)
I know that this new theory isn't exactly like the "big crunch" which noone believes in anymore. There was a time when Hawking thought the big crunch meant that the second law would run backwards, and that order would emerge out of disorder. However, he gave that up while many people still held out the big crunch as a possibility, because it turns out that the universe can crunch together without violating the second law.
So, if this new speculative theory is true, it might just be that the universe is inflating and deflating in a periodic manner. It does not mean, however, that entropy decreases in the deflation stages. I wish someone who knows more about this could say whether this theory is consistent with the sort of "oscilation heat death" where in each cycle of oscilation, energy gets more evenly spread out until all matter and structure is dissolved?
If I were one of these researchers and I really wanted to show off what this procedure could do, I'd liposuck someone who has had a severe spinal chord injury, liposuck them, and inject the stem cells to the place where the spinal chord is severed, and hopefully watch it grow back together.
BTW, can you get stem cells to divide in the laboratory and remain stem cells? If so, it seems that the quantity extracted shouldn't matter. This really does sound like a convenient source, though.
I see your point but don't agree. You see, some cameos work better than others, and some really are "timeless" (for example: Leonard Nimoy, Paul McCartney, Stephen Hawking). It's true that it's a bad idea to make the humor in the cameo episodes rely on the audience knowing the guest. However, I know nothing about NSych other than that they are a boy band, and I still found the episode with them hilarious.
I also don't agree that the best political episode was "Lisa Goes to Washington." I think it was "Citizen Kang", a part of the seventh halloween special. This one centers around the Clinton/Dole election of '96, but contains some of the fiercest and funniest political satire I've ever seen on TV, and ages remarkably well.
Where I do agree with you is in that it seems all the episodes are now focused around gimmicks rather than developing the characters. Maybe the characters are already developed too well. However, I think there may be another problem: the Simpsons now has the feel of a committee project without any coherent direction. Playing back the last episode (which was actually very good) these are the credits:
Co-Executive Producer: Ian Maxtone-Graham
Co-Executive Producer: Matt Selman
Co-Executive Producer: Dan Greaney
Co-Executive Producer: Josh Lieb
Supervising Producer: Larina Jean Adams
Supervising Producer: Carolyn Omine
Supervising Producer: Tim Long
Supervising Producers: John Frank, Don Payne
Supervising Producer: Dana Gould
Supervising Producer: Kevin Curran
Supervising Producer: Brian Kelley
Producer: George Meyer
Producer: Ron Hauge
Producers: Tom Gammill, Max Pross
Producer: David Mirkin
Producer: Mark Reiss
Producer: John Vitti
Co-Producer: Marc Willmore
Consultant: John Schwartzwelder
Supervising Director: Jim Reardon
Produced by: Richard Raynis
Produced by: Bonita Pietila
Produced by: David Silverman
Produced by: Denise Sirkot
Produced by: Richard Sakai
Written by: John Schwartzwelder
Directed by: Chuck Sheetz
So, these are the people who have their fingers in the content of this particular episode but are neither animators nor voice actors. It's no wonder, then, that the recent episodes seem to have no direction, and come off as nothing more than a series of gags (many of which are terrible). This might just be the inevitable result of eveybody feeling like they're out of ideas. Because the show must go on, maybe they think that 30 people can cobble enough ideas together to make a 22-minute show. Like I said, it's better than nothing, but incoherence really shows.
I wonder how Nevada could be proud of being the official "most worthless place on the continent" as judged by the government which decided that if some place must be irradiated, it might as well be Nevada, because it's not really much of a loss.
To commemorate this on a license plate is very strange.
I think the fact that it's a commercial, boxed product really is significant. I wonder if commentators will have their own versions of Fritz following the game. If they rented 10 of these 8-chip workstations, they could predict Fritz's next move reasonable move available to Kramnik (there are rarely more than 10 "contender" moves for any position). Conceivably, they might even discover Fritz-killing sequences from the given game configuration, and then see if Kramnik will play one.
Of course, that also leaves open the possibility that Kramnik will just play with the software before the tournament, figure out ways to beat it, and memorize the games verbatim. Since the software is the same, it should repeat its defense in the actual tournament. This would be pretty low, but not impossible, unless Fritz is explicitly programmed to insert a random variable.
Unlike "innards" code, where volunteers are likely to defer to the authority of the hardcore expert coders, it seems the authority of a real UI expert doesn't carry much weight at all. Even the above post seems to assume that UI decisions should be based on some sort of a democracy where everyone gets a voice. That, IMHO, is just what lead to the problems the article mentions.
But really, how many people are going to back down when a UI expert pounds his fist?
(Personal note: My profession is Philosophy, and like UI design, everyone seems to feel qualified to make a contribution. I can tell you that the effect can range from quite funny to very frustrating. I'm sure real UI experts must see our feeble UI musings the same way.)
Slashdot Mirror
The truth is, there has never been a scientifically important coffee-table book. And neither Woflram nor Kruzweil will break this pattern.
"I am Wolfram, I am smart. I will show you neat pictures you can make with Mathematica. [Buy it.] I am forced to conclude that I am smarter than Einstein or Newton, because... well, look at these pretty pictures I made! Can you believe they are produced by very simple instructions? Not impressed yet? Well, remember that I am very smart, and I think these things are very important, and, I mean, just look! It's very pretty! Now I will prove a theorem about Turing computability of Rule 110. And for the rest of the book, please listen to my totally unsubstantiated conjectures. You see, if you sort of squint, these pictures look like the universe, and so because of this resemblance, I cleverly realized this is how the universe was made. Don't believe me? Excuse me, but did you get the McCarhur Genius award at age 19? Didn't think so. Oh, and for good measure, I will totally ignore lots of work in biology and philosophy, and make some bold, unsubstantiated conjectures about these fields. They will go down easier when you keep in mind the magnitude of my intellect, and remind yourself that any objections you might have come from an inferior mind. Thank you."
It seems to me a totally rational way to make decisions. It's probably much more reliable than skimming the book, don't you think?
Hey, what's up with that link to the paper that requires you to be a subscriber? Is there a /. username/password for reading the content? If ordinary mortals can't read the most important link (everything else is just fluff) why post this article, especially since the same fluff reported by MSNBC was posted earlier?
Yeah, I'd love to see you create all the textures and animations from scratch. But if you do, you really do deserve to sell whatever you produced.
Compare this to the case where you splice a whole bunch of GPL code modules together (using your immagination/creativity) and the license declares that others have a right to use your code, even to sell it.
Because the toolkit is so high-level, you basically cannot use it to create content without Bioware IP inside. That content "infects" your creation the way GPL code does, and that puts restrictions on what you can do with the code. The only restriction Bioware insists on is that you give them the rights to use what you make. So you can't, as you said, try to sell off your creations for money to Bioware, because they are, by the license, entitled to your code already--so they can get it for free. Again, this would be the same if you put together a software project full of GPL code. You couldn't say "I'll hide the code until you pay me."
Anyway, I think the GPL is a fair license, and so by extension, I think Bioware's conditions are reasonable too. Basically, they want all the code to be "free"--meaning they want it to be available. I'm sure that down the road, they might try to print and sell a "distribution" CD of the best fan modules that were created. If you don't want to buy it from them, I'm sure you can just get in touch with the authors and download their modules for free. Or, I'm sure there will be many web sites online that keep an inventory of freely-released fan modules. Some of them might even try to make their own "distribution" on CD and sell it. I see nothing in the Bioware license that prevents this. In fact, I see the license encourages wide redistribution of the modules, which is cool, and also in Bioware's interest.
So where exactly is the problem with the license? I honestly don't get what you're worried about.
No, I think you're making his point! How many innocent Palestinians died last month "to set an example"? We'll never know, because they carried off the corpses, but it's definitely in the 100's.
If you think the distinction is so clear, define "terrorism". Until you do shut the fuck up.
My point still stands. They will sell twice as $200 Xboxes than $300 ones. That means more revenue for the store.
I'm sorry. The people I saw it with thought this scene was completely absurd. The CG-Yoda comes walking in with a cane, and all of the sudden he's bouncing around the screen like some green piece of flubber, while swinging a mineature light saber. Well, that much is forgivable, I guess. I mean we all knew that Lucas would incorporate a big "look what you can do with digital effects" commercial into the movie. Also, you shouldn't expect him to care that Yoda, the only character that managed to exhude a sense of dignity, should go bouncing around the room a green weasel to entertain children.
But seriously, this scence just exhibits the degree to which Lucas is out of ideas. I have no doubt that Yoda could always defend himself, but I expected him to do so in some more interesting way than just fencing. It's about as much of a letdown as watching a movie in which the Dalai Lama starts blowing away people who diss Tibet with a shotgun.
Even sitting here, I could come up with a much more interesting thing for Yoda to do than merely having an acrobatic sabre duel. I mean, we know that you can do a lot more with the force than telekinesis and telepathy, and I figured it would be Yoda, when his back is against the wall, who would show us. I'm talking about mind control, about creating illusions for Dooku, about working him into such a rage that he loses control of the force, you know, the sort of stuff that Yoda always talked about.
But no, instead Yoda takes out the "far far away" equivalent of the machine gun and goes at it. Never mind that he weighs about 20 pounds--he still manages to parry the kinetic energy of a strong man's blow without flying backwads like a batted muppet. This thought alone caused me to giggle when I saw this scene, and by the end, I was laughing. Not with Yoda, but at him.
That scene made the character lose a lot of credibility in my eyes, and I must say, I was always a fan of Yoda. I worry for the Jedi, because you just know that sooner or later, someone in that galaxy is going to discover actual lasers (you know, devices which emit energy that really travels at the speed of light!). I'd like to see Yoda parry that!
The fact Sony dropped PS2 prices simultaneously is the only thing that stole the fire from this announcement. Still, if Microsoft stayed at $300, Xboxes would certainly be put on the back shelf and considered a has-been that no sane person would buy on impulse, given the huge exhibit in the front of the store featuring $199 PS2s.
The plot was actually quite dumb, on par with recent films starring The Rock. Of course, those movies don't have the hubris to try doing romantic dialogue. AOTC tried, and it was absolutely terrible. Actually, let's face it: Lucas sucks at dialogue. The characters get about as much development as is necessary in a tale aimed at 6-year olds. Everybody is a total cliche. But of course, we're used to that from Lucas. I think he would say that everybody is an archetype--which is Jungian mumbo-jumbo for "stereotype."
Many wondered how the fact Darth Vader's rising up against the Emperor and revealing himself as Anakin Skywalker (ep6) suddenly made him a good guy, though he was directly responsible for the death of thousands of innocent people. Those of us who thought "Huh? Isn't a repentant war criminal still a war criminal?" will be saying "Huh?" many more times during this movie.
spoiler--can't resist:
 
One example: It's only after Senator Brunette-Britney, who is supposed to be righteous, finds out that her suitor killed a whole village of innocent children that she decides she really loves him. Maybe if he also killed their dogs, he'd get a blow job. Or something.
I think the biggest danger you incur when you go see AOTC is that your optic nerve might be severed from constant involuntary eye-rolling brought on by the terrible dialogue and battle sequences in AOTC. (Spoiler for parents: Please tell them that if someone ever confesses to them they slaughtered a village of innocent children, they should react not by hugging them and telling them it's OK, but by calling the police and making sure the perpetrator rots in jail. Yes, I'm looking at you, Ms. Ex-queen!)
As for me, I'll wait for a lobotomy or reincarnation, without which I'm afraid I can't enjoy "attack of the clones."
That's funny--I thought 4x133=532. A good clue the math is wrong is that multiplying with an even number should not generate an odd number.
This is a good point--if the universe really is cyclic, and maybe the laws of nature vary slightly in each cycle, it would explain why all of the cosmological constants seem so well tuned for the existence of life. The idea (anthropic principle) is that this way, there could be many barren cycles that produced no life, and these cycles would have no observers feeling cheated. In cycles that do produce observers, those observers shouldn't feel "lucky" because the laws of nature are tuned so well. Just about every combination of laws comes up eventually, and only winners are ever observed.
Otherwise, a neat story!
I know that this new theory isn't exactly like the "big crunch" which noone believes in anymore. There was a time when Hawking thought the big crunch meant that the second law would run backwards, and that order would emerge out of disorder. However, he gave that up while many people still held out the big crunch as a possibility, because it turns out that the universe can crunch together without violating the second law.
So, if this new speculative theory is true, it might just be that the universe is inflating and deflating in a periodic manner. It does not mean, however, that entropy decreases in the deflation stages. I wish someone who knows more about this could say whether this theory is consistent with the sort of "oscilation heat death" where in each cycle of oscilation, energy gets more evenly spread out until all matter and structure is dissolved?
BTW, can you get stem cells to divide in the laboratory and remain stem cells? If so, it seems that the quantity extracted shouldn't matter. This really does sound like a convenient source, though.
I also don't agree that the best political episode was "Lisa Goes to Washington." I think it was "Citizen Kang", a part of the seventh halloween special. This one centers around the Clinton/Dole election of '96, but contains some of the fiercest and funniest political satire I've ever seen on TV, and ages remarkably well.
Where I do agree with you is in that it seems all the episodes are now focused around gimmicks rather than developing the characters. Maybe the characters are already developed too well. However, I think there may be another problem: the Simpsons now has the feel of a committee project without any coherent direction. Playing back the last episode (which was actually very good) these are the credits:
Co-Executive Producer: Ian Maxtone-Graham
Co-Executive Producer: Matt Selman
Co-Executive Producer: Dan Greaney
Co-Executive Producer: Josh Lieb
Supervising Producer: Larina Jean Adams
Supervising Producer: Carolyn Omine
Supervising Producer: Tim Long
Supervising Producers: John Frank, Don Payne
Supervising Producer: Dana Gould
Supervising Producer: Kevin Curran
Supervising Producer: Brian Kelley
Producer: George Meyer
Producer: Ron Hauge
Producers: Tom Gammill, Max Pross
Producer: David Mirkin
Producer: Mark Reiss
Producer: John Vitti
Co-Producer: Marc Willmore
Consultant: John Schwartzwelder
Supervising Director: Jim Reardon
Produced by: Richard Raynis
Produced by: Bonita Pietila
Produced by: David Silverman
Produced by: Denise Sirkot
Produced by: Richard Sakai
Written by: John Schwartzwelder
Directed by: Chuck Sheetz
So, these are the people who have their fingers in the content of this particular episode but are neither animators nor voice actors. It's no wonder, then, that the recent episodes seem to have no direction, and come off as nothing more than a series of gags (many of which are terrible). This might just be the inevitable result of eveybody feeling like they're out of ideas. Because the show must go on, maybe they think that 30 people can cobble enough ideas together to make a 22-minute show. Like I said, it's better than nothing, but incoherence really shows.
To commemorate this on a license plate is very strange.
Of course, that also leaves open the possibility that Kramnik will just play with the software before the tournament, figure out ways to beat it, and memorize the games verbatim. Since the software is the same, it should repeat its defense in the actual tournament. This would be pretty low, but not impossible, unless Fritz is explicitly programmed to insert a random variable.
Did you really expect stability, performance and compatibility from a Microsoft RPG?
But really, how many people are going to back down when a UI expert pounds his fist?
(Personal note: My profession is Philosophy, and like UI design, everyone seems to feel qualified to make a contribution. I can tell you that the effect can range from quite funny to very frustrating. I'm sure real UI experts must see our feeble UI musings the same way.)