if intelligent life is common in the universe, it makes it less likely that humanity is the product of a Divine Plan
Or maybe just that our existence is not the single most important element of said Divine Plan. Perhaps it's this possibility that's the most frightening. Everyone wants to be daddy's favorite child, and it's much easier when you're his only child.
A cursory glance at the many hardcoded rules, behaviours, actions, messages and object types verifies this.
I read through the source a few months ago, and I agree. It was poorly designed if the intent is to be a general game engine, since the object behaviors and interactions are so specificly hardcoded into the code. If the object type is named peasant or peon, let it build a new structure. That's by no means general, and if you wanted to whip up a similar style game where knights can build their own blacksmith, then you wouldn't just be able to edit the character and building data files, you'd have to hack away at the source.
But I have faith in the future potential for FreeCraft, and I invoke the Torvalds Defense, "It works," as proof of its potential. One of the best platforms to develop a project from is a working example. It's much much easier to modify a working WC2 clone into a general game engine than it is to develop a general game engine from scratch.
It's just that now we know that no matter what happens, it isn't vaporware. It's a project with promise and a atable release that needs talented people to work on it.
I'm hopeing someone manages to put together a good game that has more focus on strategy than "Build and swarm"
Yes, and then they could call it "Warcraft II", the game this was modeled after. Granted, it IS possible to build and swarm in WC2, but if you try that strategy in the company of good players, you will be crushed. A really good game will permit the elementary strategies, and they will work, but will be balanced ever so slightly to the strategical side such that a player who chooses a more complicated strategy and executes it correctly will always defeat the elementary strategy.
That was the whole reason I liked and played WC2. The balance was tipped in just such a manner. The learning curve was low, but the potential for complex strategy interaction was high.
2600 has a shady reputation, Wired has an upright-citizen reputation. The way our courts work, you go after the shadiest perpetrator of the crime you can find first, and try to set a precedent (because, sadly, nobody minds finding disreputable characters guilty). Once you have a precedent set, you can scare the others into submission.
wouldn't it be cheaper to pay someone to duplicate technologies in Napster rather than buying the name?
Welcome to postmodernism. Names are worth far far more than technologies. Do you think McDonalds has some magic way to make burgers and fries better than anybody else can?
Let's see. I can't even remember the last time I saw a BSOD on a Windows box. You have to configure it properly, which even a monkey can do. Windows 2000 has much less reboots, and XP even less.
It's a shame I'm not a monkey then. Last night a friend of mine clicked the play button on winamp and his XP box spontaneously rebooted itself. So by "Windows 2000 has much less reboots, and XP even less," are you including the spontaneous reboots?
a computer system could run on a couple of W if you could reclaim all of the heat it generates
Minus light from the monitor and the whirring sounds, a computer would practically be a perpetual motion machine if you could reclaim all of the heat it generates. Unfortunately, the laws of thermodynamics don't permit full recovery like that.
Much more profound though is that they're basically talking about a device that converts heat into light: The ramifications and applications of that are wide ranging and staggering.
Remember a couple years back when we invented fire? Yeah, that funny little orangish/yellowish glow from the air around the wood, that's kind of the same principle.
Religion frequently serves more as a justification for war, rather than a cause of war. Nationalism is the root of war. There are very few wars fought over matters of principle, the principle is either stapled onto the side, or lost in the rush of nationalistic fever.
When the world's people view themselves as the world's people, then there can't be war. Let's look at the U.S. and Canada. It doesn't really matter what happens between the U.S. and Canada, they can't go to war over it because the people of these two countries don't really differentiate between each other.
War begins with this idea that "this is my nation, and therefore I will make sure no other nation is dominant over it." At its heart, this is an ingrained instinct for territorial defense and social grouping. The problem comes when people start viewing their social group as separate from another social group, and then everything seen and heard becomes biased in favor of ones own social group.
It's like sports teams. There are people who just like a sport, but those people are rare. Usually when people say they like a sport, they really mean they like a particular team or two, and they root feverishly for that team even though they have no personal connection to that team. If their team loses, they don't enjoy the fact that a game they really like was played, but instead lament the fact that "their team" lost.
Team mentality is very similar to nationality. People usually like teams that are from where they are from, just because. People feverishly support their own nation just because that's where they were born. And in this rush to feverishly "defend ones own," everyone forgets the macropicture of humanity.
Patriotism is inherently a great concept, it just gets so twisted and mutilated when people start thinking in war mode. As soon as the mental war mode is enabled, the entire world is viewed through a lense of false dichotomies, where everything is either black or white, us or them, dead or alive, free or enslaved. These false dichotomies bring out the most powerful emotions in people and the quest for the blood of the enemy begins.
As soon as emotions come into play, the brain has to find justifications for its hatred, justifications for why the enemy is different, why the enemy is evil, and why ones own nation is good and just and right. The mind will go to great lengths to find and believe these justifications, on both sides of every conflict, and we end up with two groups of people mindlessly rushing head-on to their mutual impending doom.
The only defense the world has against war is the free dissemination of people, culture, ideas, religions, and values. Only when the world achieves a near homogenous mix will it be difficult to find those differences which make it so easy for humanity to justify thoughts of war.
Who is to say that someone won't come along tommorrow and have a far better way of describing them, that allows them to have many other effects.
QED (which describes photons in excruciating detail) is one of the most successful theories we have. It can predict experimental results to horrendously lengthy precision. It is unlikely that a theory will come around that will show effects from photons that are significantly different on a human-scale than what is currently understood, because any such theory would most certainly have to contradict all the experiments to-date which have confirmed QED.
And it makes no difference whatsoever to the fact that your brain relies on the flows of electric currents which will be effected by any radio signals.
The brain is a massively parallel analog electrochemical system. It turns out to be pretty fault tolerant, as most such analog systems are, and it seems a pretty far stretch to say that electrical currents induced by microwave radiation would damage the brain in such a manner.
Throw thousands of bullets at me every minute of every day, however, and it may start to have effect.
Tie a concrete block to your foot and jump in a water puddle. Do this a hundred times a day for 20 years. Now compare that to tying a concrete block to your foot and jumping in the ocean. I guarantee the health effects will be noticeably different.
The reason most scientists accept that microwave radiation is not harmful is because the effects of radiation are dependent on their frequency, not their intensity. The frequency is a measure of how much energy is in each single photon that strikes you. The intensity is a measure of how much total energy strikes you in a certain time period, and thus, is related to the number of those photons that strike per time period.
Radiation frequencies such as ultraviolet and above (which includes X-rays and such) have sufficient energy per photon to have an ionizing effect which can damage DNA. Below ultraviolet radiation is visible light, then infrared light which is emitted by all bodies at room temperature, and then even down further than that is microwave radiation. The only effect microwave radiation can have is a heating effect, there simply isn't enough energy per photon to have the ionizing effect which will do damage. In fact, you're much more likely to have damage done by a flashlight than a cell phone.
For more information on the physics that explains this, look up the photoelectric effect. You all know how to use google.
but you can't look at the result without destroying the entire computer.
It's the computation that is destroyed when an intermediate step is looked at, the computer is never destroyed short of applying a large hammer. Computations are done on a superposition of possible values. If one of the quantum bits (qubits) interacts with the outside world, such as by being observed, then the qubit will lose its superposition of values by collapsing into a single value. At that point, the computation is no longer quantum in nature, because by collapsing it has become like a classical calculation on a single value.
This is actually related to the most "beautiful" aspect of the two-slit experiment, which is the addition of a detector to one of the two slits. If the photon goes through the slit with the detector, then the detector clicks, and if it goes through the other slit, the detector doesn't click. Therefore, by the click or lack of click, we can know which slit the photon has gone through. Because information has escaped the system by our knowing which slit the photon goes through, the system is then no longer in a superposition of going through both slits, and the screen no longer shows the bright spots and dark spots of the interference pattern. If we turn the detector off so that we no longer know which slit it went through, then the interference pattern reappears.
This is perhaps one of the most profound experimental results of the entire last century, simply for the philosophical implications about the central role played by information, or in the Copenhagen interpretation, by the observer.
If he wins, the legal precedent could be : "If the algorythm is simple enough to express as a haiku, it is protected speech and not a computer process."
Brilliant!!! Now all we have to do is express a complete Turing machine in haiku form, and then we can reduce all other algorithms to it!
Obviously, the reason we have piracy is *because* the current prices aren't "more attractive".
I don't rent videotapes and copy them. Heck, I don't even record movies off of TV. Why? A movie on VHS tape can cost me $7 at my local oversized supermart.
In short, Alice and Bob can verify lien integrity as long as they have any (secure or insecure) reliable means of communicating apart from the quantum channel
This is wonderful if you're James Bond. Now use this defense against man-in-the-middle attacks to secure my connection to a website I'm about to make a purchase on.
Slashdot Mirror
Publicly stated corporate policies pledging good behavior toward intellectual property should be as commonplace as privacy policies have become.
Well I for one am very pleased to hear AHEAD of time that the Milky Way is inhospitable. I was thinking of moving there.
And on a related note, do not ever EVER attempt to delete all hidden files with the command:
.*
/root, and you've erased your entire harddrive. I'll leave the reason why as an exercise for the reader.
rm -rf
Login as root and do this in
if intelligent life is common in the universe, it makes it less likely that humanity is the product of a Divine Plan
Or maybe just that our existence is not the single most important element of said Divine Plan. Perhaps it's this possibility that's the most frightening. Everyone wants to be daddy's favorite child, and it's much easier when you're his only child.
Partisan politics above rule of law and furthering the system of Rank hath all priveledges and no responsibility are all that they care about.
We will likely see no change in our party system as long as we have a voting system which specifically rewards it. That must be redesigned first.
A cursory glance at the many hardcoded rules, behaviours, actions, messages and object types verifies this.
I read through the source a few months ago, and I agree. It was poorly designed if the intent is to be a general game engine, since the object behaviors and interactions are so specificly hardcoded into the code. If the object type is named peasant or peon, let it build a new structure. That's by no means general, and if you wanted to whip up a similar style game where knights can build their own blacksmith, then you wouldn't just be able to edit the character and building data files, you'd have to hack away at the source.
But I have faith in the future potential for FreeCraft, and I invoke the Torvalds Defense, "It works," as proof of its potential. One of the best platforms to develop a project from is a working example. It's much much easier to modify a working WC2 clone into a general game engine than it is to develop a general game engine from scratch.
It's just that now we know that no matter what happens, it isn't vaporware. It's a project with promise and a atable release that needs talented people to work on it.
I'm hopeing someone manages to put together a good game that has more focus on strategy than "Build and swarm"
Yes, and then they could call it "Warcraft II", the game this was modeled after. Granted, it IS possible to build and swarm in WC2, but if you try that strategy in the company of good players, you will be crushed. A really good game will permit the elementary strategies, and they will work, but will be balanced ever so slightly to the strategical side such that a player who chooses a more complicated strategy and executes it correctly will always defeat the elementary strategy.
That was the whole reason I liked and played WC2. The balance was tipped in just such a manner. The learning curve was low, but the potential for complex strategy interaction was high.
Wake me up when Ford is the only company that is allowed to provide cars in my area.
I'd prefer if you just let me sleep...
chrisd, Honest question: what exactly are you qualifications that put you in such a high and mighty position to lecture us?
The fact that you read the article.
I was afraid that Slashdot was going to "The Lone Gunmen are Ghosts" the X-Files finale.
If Slashdot keeps on blaring all these spoilers on the front page, I don't think I'll ever be able to enjoy watching the X-Files again.
Trust no one...
Wired even posted the utility
2600 has a shady reputation, Wired has an upright-citizen reputation. The way our courts work, you go after the shadiest perpetrator of the crime you can find first, and try to set a precedent (because, sadly, nobody minds finding disreputable characters guilty). Once you have a precedent set, you can scare the others into submission.
wouldn't it be cheaper to pay someone to duplicate technologies in Napster rather than buying the name?
Welcome to postmodernism. Names are worth far far more than technologies. Do you think McDonalds has some magic way to make burgers and fries better than anybody else can?
Let's see. I can't even remember the last time I saw a BSOD on a Windows box. You have to configure it properly, which even a monkey can do. Windows 2000 has much less reboots, and XP even less.
It's a shame I'm not a monkey then. Last night a friend of mine clicked the play button on winamp and his XP box spontaneously rebooted itself. So by "Windows 2000 has much less reboots, and XP even less," are you including the spontaneous reboots?
a computer system could run on a couple of W if you could reclaim all of the heat it generates
Minus light from the monitor and the whirring sounds, a computer would practically be a perpetual motion machine if you could reclaim all of the heat it generates. Unfortunately, the laws of thermodynamics don't permit full recovery like that.
Much more profound though is that they're basically talking about a device that converts heat into light: The ramifications and applications of that are wide ranging and staggering.
Remember a couple years back when we invented fire? Yeah, that funny little orangish/yellowish glow from the air around the wood, that's kind of the same principle.
Religion frequently serves more as a justification for war, rather than a cause of war. Nationalism is the root of war. There are very few wars fought over matters of principle, the principle is either stapled onto the side, or lost in the rush of nationalistic fever.
When the world's people view themselves as the world's people, then there can't be war. Let's look at the U.S. and Canada. It doesn't really matter what happens between the U.S. and Canada, they can't go to war over it because the people of these two countries don't really differentiate between each other.
War begins with this idea that "this is my nation, and therefore I will make sure no other nation is dominant over it." At its heart, this is an ingrained instinct for territorial defense and social grouping. The problem comes when people start viewing their social group as separate from another social group, and then everything seen and heard becomes biased in favor of ones own social group.
It's like sports teams. There are people who just like a sport, but those people are rare. Usually when people say they like a sport, they really mean they like a particular team or two, and they root feverishly for that team even though they have no personal connection to that team. If their team loses, they don't enjoy the fact that a game they really like was played, but instead lament the fact that "their team" lost.
Team mentality is very similar to nationality. People usually like teams that are from where they are from, just because. People feverishly support their own nation just because that's where they were born. And in this rush to feverishly "defend ones own," everyone forgets the macropicture of humanity.
Patriotism is inherently a great concept, it just gets so twisted and mutilated when people start thinking in war mode. As soon as the mental war mode is enabled, the entire world is viewed through a lense of false dichotomies, where everything is either black or white, us or them, dead or alive, free or enslaved. These false dichotomies bring out the most powerful emotions in people and the quest for the blood of the enemy begins.
As soon as emotions come into play, the brain has to find justifications for its hatred, justifications for why the enemy is different, why the enemy is evil, and why ones own nation is good and just and right. The mind will go to great lengths to find and believe these justifications, on both sides of every conflict, and we end up with two groups of people mindlessly rushing head-on to their mutual impending doom.
The only defense the world has against war is the free dissemination of people, culture, ideas, religions, and values. Only when the world achieves a near homogenous mix will it be difficult to find those differences which make it so easy for humanity to justify thoughts of war.
Who is to say that someone won't come along tommorrow and have a far better way of describing them, that allows them to have many other effects.
QED (which describes photons in excruciating detail) is one of the most successful theories we have. It can predict experimental results to horrendously lengthy precision. It is unlikely that a theory will come around that will show effects from photons that are significantly different on a human-scale than what is currently understood, because any such theory would most certainly have to contradict all the experiments to-date which have confirmed QED.
And it makes no difference whatsoever to the fact that your brain relies on the flows of electric currents which will be effected by any radio signals.
The brain is a massively parallel analog electrochemical system. It turns out to be pretty fault tolerant, as most such analog systems are, and it seems a pretty far stretch to say that electrical currents induced by microwave radiation would damage the brain in such a manner.
Throw thousands of bullets at me every minute of every day, however, and it may start to have effect.
Tie a concrete block to your foot and jump in a water puddle. Do this a hundred times a day for 20 years. Now compare that to tying a concrete block to your foot and jumping in the ocean. I guarantee the health effects will be noticeably different.
The reason most scientists accept that microwave radiation is not harmful is because the effects of radiation are dependent on their frequency, not their intensity. The frequency is a measure of how much energy is in each single photon that strikes you. The intensity is a measure of how much total energy strikes you in a certain time period, and thus, is related to the number of those photons that strike per time period.
Radiation frequencies such as ultraviolet and above (which includes X-rays and such) have sufficient energy per photon to have an ionizing effect which can damage DNA. Below ultraviolet radiation is visible light, then infrared light which is emitted by all bodies at room temperature, and then even down further than that is microwave radiation. The only effect microwave radiation can have is a heating effect, there simply isn't enough energy per photon to have the ionizing effect which will do damage. In fact, you're much more likely to have damage done by a flashlight than a cell phone.
For more information on the physics that explains this, look up the photoelectric effect. You all know how to use google.
but you can't look at the result without destroying the entire computer.
It's the computation that is destroyed when an intermediate step is looked at, the computer is never destroyed short of applying a large hammer. Computations are done on a superposition of possible values. If one of the quantum bits (qubits) interacts with the outside world, such as by being observed, then the qubit will lose its superposition of values by collapsing into a single value. At that point, the computation is no longer quantum in nature, because by collapsing it has become like a classical calculation on a single value.
This is actually related to the most "beautiful" aspect of the two-slit experiment, which is the addition of a detector to one of the two slits. If the photon goes through the slit with the detector, then the detector clicks, and if it goes through the other slit, the detector doesn't click. Therefore, by the click or lack of click, we can know which slit the photon has gone through. Because information has escaped the system by our knowing which slit the photon goes through, the system is then no longer in a superposition of going through both slits, and the screen no longer shows the bright spots and dark spots of the interference pattern. If we turn the detector off so that we no longer know which slit it went through, then the interference pattern reappears.
This is perhaps one of the most profound experimental results of the entire last century, simply for the philosophical implications about the central role played by information, or in the Copenhagen interpretation, by the observer.
So what does that make bugs in open source software, "documented features" since the source is open?
:)
I would say they are "obfuscated features", since yeah, it's there, but if anybody could read the source they would see the bug.
If he wins, the legal precedent could be : "If the algorythm is simple enough to express as a haiku, it is protected speech and not a computer process."
Brilliant!!! Now all we have to do is express a complete Turing machine in haiku form, and then we can reduce all other algorithms to it!
Obviously, the reason we have piracy is *because* the current prices aren't "more attractive".
I don't rent videotapes and copy them. Heck, I don't even record movies off of TV. Why? A movie on VHS tape can cost me $7 at my local oversized supermart.
Commercial software isn't quite there.
In short, Alice and Bob can verify lien integrity as long as they have any (secure or insecure) reliable means of communicating apart from the quantum channel
This is wonderful if you're James Bond. Now use this defense against man-in-the-middle attacks to secure my connection to a website I'm about to make a purchase on.
And all this time I was under the impression that Linux was an operating system kernel!
No no no, you must be thinking of Windows.