This is 2006, not 1995, you can't just make stuff up like this anymore. In the middle of the film, Harrison Ford happens to not only be a security expert, but an Apple hardware developer too. Pfft, I went to a press screening preview for Hackers, and believe me, you couldn't get away with that stuff in 1995 either.
I laughed very hard, but not because of any comedy in the movie.
No, just in the context of piracy. If I download a song and upload it somewhere else, it should be copyright infringement. I shouldn't have to listen to it for it to be infringement, especially since it is impossible to tell what songs you've listened to.
It's silly to misapply laws for one domain to another. Using your logic, we should send speeding tickets to airmail since they're going faster than the speed limit.
Maybe because we are different? As food supply and habitat improves, the birth rate of humans decreases, which is the opposite of that of all other animals. We currently have negative birth rates in almost all developed countries now, which are sustaining their population levels only through immigration.
I am somewhat aggravated they'd use the thinkofthechildren line yet again.
Back when I was doing things that weren't illegal exactly, but not the kind of stuff I'd want traceable to me (mainly practical jokes and such, some of which the school administration might not find to be very funny) I'd use public computer labs to do all of my activities, since I realized that at some level, my name could be associated with my dialup connection, my dorm ethernet connection, etc.
I actually considered the idea a good one, and still do to this day, to require ISPs to attach names to IP addresses and retain them for a certain period of time (I considered a year to be a good time frame). Not for any of this thickofthechildren BS, but to track down hackers, vandals, and et cetera. The records would only be given out via search warrant, though due to the often very time critical nature of these things, I think a court should be able to issue signed electronic search warrants that could be sent to a cascade of ISPs to track down a guy using a series of relays to cover his tracks. At the time, and I think it's still true, tracking down someone online involves police bascially banging the phones with the ISP, trying to get permission to get access to their logs. It was cumbersome, and usually took way too long.
Training enough for what? Exactly how much should a seven year old train and still get to be a seven year old?
It just depends what your priorities are.
Some kids do martial arts every day after school, some don't. If your kid wants to do guitar lessons half time and martial arts half time, thats what his priorities are. It's fine. But if his goal is to excel at martial arts (and I'm not saying it is, or that it should be) then two days a week isn't enough. I did martial arts two days a week for years, but it was only when I kicked it up to four to six days a week that I noticed large improvements in flexibility, stamina, coordination, and et cetera.
I think he was saying your kid isn't training enough.
As someone with 10 years or so of martial arts under his belt: Four hours a week of martial arts is recommended if you want to advance your skills. Two hours is just a maintenence regimen.
This was second quarter CS. So not the very first CS class these freshmen took, but close to it. Maybe they learned how to cheat in the first quarter, or maybe the prof there was just clueless.
This was the highest level of cheating we ever caught. It was about 25 out of 200 flagged and brought in for possible disciplinary action (oddly enough, this was 12% just like you found). There was another 10 or 15 "possibles" that we found that the professor decided weren't serious enough or solid enough to be brought in. (In my opinion, they copied one of the functions, but did their own work on the rest of it -- we did send an email out to them though.)
Catching them was actually an involved collaborative effort among the 10 TAs. One wrote the program to catch em, I personally wrote a program tracking their physical locations of their logins, and marked which groups were phyiscally working next to each other at the same time. Fun stuff, actually. I caught about 6 students who the automated program missed, by noting that 3 different pairs of students worked at the same time at a remote lab, and noting that they all turned in the program, with enough shuffling around of functions in the file and other monkey business that the automated parser didn't consider it the same submission. I think one of those guys we found to be fine -- the other two groups got on his machine and emailed their source code out when the one guy was out taking a leak. He learned all about the magic of xlock after that. =)
Having actually worked on several group projects in school and at various times critiquing other people's code, I can honestly say your statement there is pure BS. There are about 10 different ways to put together any given function, 3-4 of which work well, and about 1 being optimal. Even at a beginner level, most programs are made up of countless functions. And since beginning students don't know crap about optimizing code, professors SHOULD see all the code combinations possible.
For further clarity, we weren't even that concerned about the structure of functions, or if people helped each other out. I even caught one guy in the lab right in front of me turning his CRT around and letting the other group copy his code down, and the professor didn't care as long as they rewrote it before they turned it in.
We were talking about literally 0 byte (or 0 byte after removing variable names) differences between almost 25 different turnins. People that idiotic deserve to be booted out of the program.
We're not going to go through 200 turnins and see if similarities exist in structure or whatever, that would just be silly and impractical, as you indeed pointed out, there will always be similarities in introductory programs.
When I TAed a CS class, we caught about a quarter of them turning in the same assignment, some with 0 byte diffs from the others, some with just renamed variables. I think about 8 of em got serious disciplinary actions taken.
I met David Brin once. He tried to sell me some roleplaying games.
Anyhow, why can't his kid code? Probably doesn't have the mindset for it, sorry. Not everyone can sit in front of a computer all day long thinking about "imaginary things" and then typing them in. If your mind doesn't work in the right way, it can be almost impossible to learn to program. I've taught introductory CS classes before; they can learn enough to scrape by in the class, but they'll never be good programmers (and they usually forget it all by the time the next quarter starts).
Don't stress your kid out over it, just find out what he is good at.
If he really loves programming but his mindset isn't right, I guess you could try playing analytical games with him. I dunno, maybe Roborally? Or just crack open an open source quake mod and let him poke around with it, and let him see his results working in action without having to run up the learning curve of writing a whole program from scratch.
The language itself doesn't really matter, truth be told. I learned on C, FutureBASIC, Hypercard and maybe some other stuff relatively at the same time. The mindset is the important thing, not the language.
Under my model, "piracy" (skip the word debates, please) is not the act of downloading something, it's the act of actually viewing/hearing it. If you download something and immediately delete it, it's not piracy.
So under your proposed system, I can courier warez at will? I think the standard should be the potentiality of the human experience. In other words, if I have it on my computer, I can listen to it or not. The law shouldn't change based on if I actually chose to listen to a file. If nothing else, it would be very hard to determine if that person distributing all those mp3s was actually listening to them. I guess RIAA could set up some sort of spy mike system, but that seems to be getting even more ridiculous than what we have now.
Of course, you might address this, but your site is/.-ed.
Hmm, I used the S2IS for a while and actually liked it. The only real complaint I had was that it was just too large, too unwieldy.
I ended up buying the Powershot A620, which is an incredible camera. It offers just the right amount of customization without drowing you. I just got back from a trip to Banff, and took shots out on the glaciers. Took a total of three presses to get it set so that the exposure came out just right.
I'm not a professional photographer, but I've gotten really tired over the years with the "Auto" setting on digital cameras, as they almost universally screw up the exposure on a shot. I need a camera that lets me fiddle with the settings, and adjust how many things I need to fiddle with at one time.
Yet another UCSD post. Last one was the guy who made a saw that wouldn't chop off your fingers, and before that it was the Chez Bob (Prof Savage) in the CSE Grad lounge.
No, I love open ended RPGs. I think games like FF7 should have the "role-playing" label ripped off of them and beaten over the heads of the game designers.
I just like to powergame a little. (Not too much -- it's stupidly easy in Oblivion to make a character with permanent 100% chameleon, essentially rendering him invincible.)
Bugs are forgiveable, but bad game design is not. The mods that somewhat fix the gaping deficiencies in the gameplay are the only things that make the game palatable.
Oblivion, Oblivion. I uninstalled Nero so that I could play Oblivion without it crashing every 30 minutes. And it's a game that needs about 10 mods installed in order to be fun.
I'm still not sure if I love the game or hate it.
On the negative side:
1) Levelling system is one of the worst ever. Your early endurance score matters more than your endurance late in the game, so you have to be careful to crank it up in each of your early levels. Which entails sitting still and letting monsters hit you for half an hour each time you want to level. Ridiculous. Fortunately there's a mod that solves it, by incrementally levelling your stats as you skill up.
2) Combat system is tedious at best. Monsters scale with your level... and since spell damage goes up slower than spell costs, your spells actually do less and less damage as you get higher in level. OOO is a mod that fixes the most major of the scaling problems, and retweaks some things a little bit to make it better.
3) Magic item creation is pretty bad. Most of the options are terrible. Why yes, I'd like to damage myself over time! How thoughtful! Or you can either put a Feather (greater carrying capacity) on an item, or you can put +Strength on an item and get carrying capacity as well as a host of other benefits. And I thoroughly detest charged magic items. I don't care, tone down weapons or whatever, but I really hate the idea of burning through a stack of gold every time I whack a skeleton with my weapon. So I never use magical weapons unless the combat is way over the top. I haven't found a mod yet that makes all magic weapons permanent.
4) Combats are too easy and too similar. Pretty much anything can be beaten by left clicking over and over, mixed up with taps of healing spells on yourself. If you have potions, you essentially have an infinite life bar and infinite mana. How can you lose? The new combat behavior mod helps a little here, though it usually just involves monsters learning to dodge your 5 MPH fireballs...
5) Stealth is ridiculous. You can run a mile away from a monster and hide in a dark cubbyhole but he still can track you down and kill you. I found a mod which lets you re-hide if you break line of sight for 20 seconds, and have been enjoying using that. Also, a mod to do away with the bloody telepathic guards also helps a great deal if you play a rogue type in the game.
6) It's as crashy, if not crashier than any Bethesda game since pre-patch Daggerfall. And I only tip the hat to Daggerfall, since it wouldn't run at all on my Cyrix procesor until about 19 patches out.
On the positive side: 1) It's pretty
2) Okay/decent storyline
3) Has Jean-Luc Picard, the only bright spot in the terrible multiple-personality disaster voice acting for the NPCs (they use MULTIPLE voices on the same NPCs, it sounds like they're crazy).
4) But... best of all... the game is just barely flexible enough that you can do some really cool things with the chaos that ensues. Pickpocket an NPC villan. Stab him. He runs over to a nearby place and picks up a weapon. The owner of the weapons call the guards, who then beat the living daylight out of him. I think my version of the world has a lot more larcenous NPCs than in my girlfriend's... I find dead bodies of NPCs caught stealing all over the place, and from time to time I'll see a thieves guild member run screaming by chased by the guards, but my girlfriend hasn't seen it yet. I saw the guards blow away a guy once for stealing lettuce. Or I delayed completing an escort quest and ended up taking the NPCs I was "escorting" through the Oblivion gates. They come back to life if killed, so they make excellent party members as they fan out and take on the dremoras while I sneak up from behind for the backstab.
I like it... but I'm still looking for more patches to further improve the gameplay. The game design, as a whole, was terribly flawed at release.
I agree. I think having a small hand would drastically improve the game.
As to the rest of you, it's not that there's only one valid move, but usually only one optimal move, with way too much randomness for my taste, never getting the right tiles you need.
Carcassone is a terrible game. There's almost no strategy involved. When you draw a tile, you often only have a single place to put it (either because you're forced to as the only move, or because it's the only option that'll help your people). I felt like I'd have more fun flipping coins and counting winners based on the heads.
If you had more control over tile placement, the game would be a hell of a lot more interesting.
>>The study found counties with e-voting tended to tilt toward Bush, even after controlling for differences between counties including past voting history, income, percentage of Hispanic voters, voter turnout, and county size.
If you're talking about the Florida Counties, I proved their statistical analysis wrong back when the story broke.
Essentially their logic went: 1) We developed a model that can predict voting patterns 2) Real life didn't match the model Conclusion: Fraud happened.
They covered it up by talking about regressions and things like that, but that was it in a nutshell. Their model was also weird in that if, for example, a county voted 80% one way in the previous year, it would expect 120% to vote that way during the next election.
I (Bill Kerney) was a grad student in CS at UCSD until '01 or '02 or so under Scott Baden.
For those who don't know, the Chez Bob computer was the most overengineered ledger in the history of ledgers. Every year some student would hack it to do something new and unusual. When I was there, they: 1) Added passwords (which were not really needed since the fridge door wasn't locked or anything if you wanted to steal something) 2) Added text to speech. 3) Added a saying it could say whenever you logged in. I enjoyed making up random latin phrases, which it would read in its stately mechanical voice. 4) Added a barcode reader. 5) Barcode reader was integrated into text to speech. "BOUGHT. ONE. TIGERS. MILK." Awesome.
And I think it also did stock alerts, sending an email to the Chez Bob Coordinator Alan Su when they were running low on something. Since we had a few people in the department who did Battlebots at the time, there were some people working on building a delivery robot that would pull the item out of the fridge, drive down the corridor and deliver the item. I think the main stumbling block was that they couldn't figure out how to open the doors (which had passcodes, and I think were difficult to open anyway for a robot).
For those who don't know Stefen Savage, check the archives on Slashdot, going back at least to '98 or so when he published his doctoral thesis (IIRC) on tracking DDOS attacks by looking at spurious ACKs coming into an unused block of IP space. He's had a lot of interesting ideas that Slashdot has covered. If my memory hasn't gone fuzzy, he also tought a computer gaming class at UCSD (which I enjoyed helping my friend (Scott O'Neil) with as I'd worked in the gaming industry for a couple years).
According to the engineer who built the things, the radiation levels would be acceptable, and the explosion wouldn't damage (or even set on fire) the town below it.
Very similar to my middle school experience. There were no computer stores in a wide radius around my middle school (it was a poor neighborhood), so I was the only source of floppies the school had. Since the school didn't allow you to save file to the 20MB hard drives they had back then, floppies were the only way of preserving your required CS homework....I never paid for lunch for two years, and probably netted about 70-80$ from floppy sales when all was said and done.
My buddy's uncle worked on the development of nuclear tipped AA missiles.
They weren't as big a deal as you'd think, they certainly weren't designed to blow up the cities they were trying to protect. The key fact is that airplane wings are great at resisting stress going upwards (i.e. in the direction of lift), but very bad at downwards, and so you could explode a large missile above them and rip the wings off incoming bombers without having to be too accurate.
If you pay a contractor twice as much, they don't do twice as good a job. They just say thank you and pocket the diffwerence.
There's actually laws on how to handle the low end of bids. It's not like I could bid on a freeway overpass for 10$ and then build a bridge out of used kleenex.
The only problem is with inspection. If a contractor cuts corners, the inspectors should be all over them like white on rice. Hire twice as many inspectors, and pay for them with the extra fines from the problems you're going to find.
Slashdot Mirror
This is 2006, not 1995, you can't just make stuff up like this anymore. In the middle of the film, Harrison Ford happens to not only be a security expert, but an Apple hardware developer too. Pfft, I went to a press screening preview for Hackers, and believe me, you couldn't get away with that stuff in 1995 either.
I laughed very hard, but not because of any comedy in the movie.
No, just in the context of piracy. If I download a song and upload it somewhere else, it should be copyright infringement. I shouldn't have to listen to it for it to be infringement, especially since it is impossible to tell what songs you've listened to.
It's silly to misapply laws for one domain to another. Using your logic, we should send speeding tickets to airmail since they're going faster than the speed limit.
Maybe because we are different? As food supply and habitat improves, the birth rate of humans decreases, which is the opposite of that of all other animals. We currently have negative birth rates in almost all developed countries now, which are sustaining their population levels only through immigration.
I am somewhat aggravated they'd use the thinkofthechildren line yet again.
Back when I was doing things that weren't illegal exactly, but not the kind of stuff I'd want traceable to me (mainly practical jokes and such, some of which the school administration might not find to be very funny) I'd use public computer labs to do all of my activities, since I realized that at some level, my name could be associated with my dialup connection, my dorm ethernet connection, etc.
I actually considered the idea a good one, and still do to this day, to require ISPs to attach names to IP addresses and retain them for a certain period of time (I considered a year to be a good time frame). Not for any of this thickofthechildren BS, but to track down hackers, vandals, and et cetera. The records would only be given out via search warrant, though due to the often very time critical nature of these things, I think a court should be able to issue signed electronic search warrants that could be sent to a cascade of ISPs to track down a guy using a series of relays to cover his tracks. At the time, and I think it's still true, tracking down someone online involves police bascially banging the phones with the ISP, trying to get permission to get access to their logs. It was cumbersome, and usually took way too long.
Training enough for what? Exactly how much should a seven year old train and still get to be a seven year old?
It just depends what your priorities are.
Some kids do martial arts every day after school, some don't. If your kid wants to do guitar lessons half time and martial arts half time, thats what his priorities are. It's fine. But if his goal is to excel at martial arts (and I'm not saying it is, or that it should be) then two days a week isn't enough. I did martial arts two days a week for years, but it was only when I kicked it up to four to six days a week that I noticed large improvements in flexibility, stamina, coordination, and et cetera.
I think he was saying your kid isn't training enough.
As someone with 10 years or so of martial arts under his belt:
Four hours a week of martial arts is recommended if you want to advance your skills. Two hours is just a maintenence regimen.
The crusades were started by Islamic radicals butchering Christian pilgrims on the way to Jerusalem.
I guess I'd call that unprovoked terrorism.
It's funny how history repeats itself, sometimes.
This was second quarter CS. So not the very first CS class these freshmen took, but close to it. Maybe they learned how to cheat in the first quarter, or maybe the prof there was just clueless.
This was the highest level of cheating we ever caught. It was about 25 out of 200 flagged and brought in for possible disciplinary action (oddly enough, this was 12% just like you found). There was another 10 or 15 "possibles" that we found that the professor decided weren't serious enough or solid enough to be brought in. (In my opinion, they copied one of the functions, but did their own work on the rest of it -- we did send an email out to them though.)
Catching them was actually an involved collaborative effort among the 10 TAs. One wrote the program to catch em, I personally wrote a program tracking their physical locations of their logins, and marked which groups were phyiscally working next to each other at the same time. Fun stuff, actually. I caught about 6 students who the automated program missed, by noting that 3 different pairs of students worked at the same time at a remote lab, and noting that they all turned in the program, with enough shuffling around of functions in the file and other monkey business that the automated parser didn't consider it the same submission. I think one of those guys we found to be fine -- the other two groups got on his machine and emailed their source code out when the one guy was out taking a leak. He learned all about the magic of xlock after that. =)
Having actually worked on several group projects in school and at various times critiquing other people's code, I can honestly say your statement there is pure BS. There are about 10 different ways to put together any given function, 3-4 of which work well, and about 1 being optimal. Even at a beginner level, most programs are made up of countless functions. And since beginning students don't know crap about optimizing code, professors SHOULD see all the code combinations possible.
For further clarity, we weren't even that concerned about the structure of functions, or if people helped each other out. I even caught one guy in the lab right in front of me turning his CRT around and letting the other group copy his code down, and the professor didn't care as long as they rewrote it before they turned it in.
We were talking about literally 0 byte (or 0 byte after removing variable names) differences between almost 25 different turnins. People that idiotic deserve to be booted out of the program.
We're not going to go through 200 turnins and see if similarities exist in structure or whatever, that would just be silly and impractical, as you indeed pointed out, there will always be similarities in introductory programs.
Sounds About Right
When I TAed a CS class, we caught about a quarter of them turning in the same assignment, some with 0 byte diffs from the others, some with just renamed variables. I think about 8 of em got serious disciplinary actions taken.
I met David Brin once. He tried to sell me some roleplaying games.
Anyhow, why can't his kid code? Probably doesn't have the mindset for it, sorry. Not everyone can sit in front of a computer all day long thinking about "imaginary things" and then typing them in. If your mind doesn't work in the right way, it can be almost impossible to learn to program. I've taught introductory CS classes before; they can learn enough to scrape by in the class, but they'll never be good programmers (and they usually forget it all by the time the next quarter starts).
Don't stress your kid out over it, just find out what he is good at.
If he really loves programming but his mindset isn't right, I guess you could try playing analytical games with him. I dunno, maybe Roborally? Or just crack open an open source quake mod and let him poke around with it, and let him see his results working in action without having to run up the learning curve of writing a whole program from scratch.
The language itself doesn't really matter, truth be told. I learned on C, FutureBASIC, Hypercard and maybe some other stuff relatively at the same time. The mindset is the important thing, not the language.
Under my model, "piracy" (skip the word debates, please) is not the act of downloading something, it's the act of actually viewing/hearing it. If you download something and immediately delete it, it's not piracy.
/.-ed.
So under your proposed system, I can courier warez at will? I think the standard should be the potentiality of the human experience. In other words, if I have it on my computer, I can listen to it or not. The law shouldn't change based on if I actually chose to listen to a file. If nothing else, it would be very hard to determine if that person distributing all those mp3s was actually listening to them. I guess RIAA could set up some sort of spy mike system, but that seems to be getting even more ridiculous than what we have now.
Of course, you might address this, but your site is
Hmm, I used the S2IS for a while and actually liked it. The only real complaint I had was that it was just too large, too unwieldy.
I ended up buying the Powershot A620, which is an incredible camera. It offers just the right amount of customization without drowing you. I just got back from a trip to Banff, and took shots out on the glaciers. Took a total of three presses to get it set so that the exposure came out just right.
I'm not a professional photographer, but I've gotten really tired over the years with the "Auto" setting on digital cameras, as they almost universally screw up the exposure on a shot. I need a camera that lets me fiddle with the settings, and adjust how many things I need to fiddle with at one time.
Yet another UCSD post. Last one was the guy who made a saw that wouldn't chop off your fingers, and before that it was the Chez Bob (Prof Savage) in the CSE Grad lounge.
;)
Almost makes me proud to be an alumni.
Give me a week at Bethesda and I could fix the most glaring of problems, and make the game about ten times as fun.
No, I love open ended RPGs. I think games like FF7 should have the "role-playing" label ripped off of them and beaten over the heads of the game designers.
I just like to powergame a little. (Not too much -- it's stupidly easy in Oblivion to make a character with permanent 100% chameleon, essentially rendering him invincible.)
Bugs are forgiveable, but bad game design is not. The mods that somewhat fix the gaping deficiencies in the gameplay are the only things that make the game palatable.
Oblivion, Oblivion. I uninstalled Nero so that I could play Oblivion without it crashing every 30 minutes. And it's a game that needs about 10 mods installed in order to be fun.
I'm still not sure if I love the game or hate it.
On the negative side:
1) Levelling system is one of the worst ever. Your early endurance score matters more than your endurance late in the game, so you have to be careful to crank it up in each of your early levels. Which entails sitting still and letting monsters hit you for half an hour each time you want to level. Ridiculous. Fortunately there's a mod that solves it, by incrementally levelling your stats as you skill up.
2) Combat system is tedious at best. Monsters scale with your level... and since spell damage goes up slower than spell costs, your spells actually do less and less damage as you get higher in level. OOO is a mod that fixes the most major of the scaling problems, and retweaks some things a little bit to make it better.
3) Magic item creation is pretty bad. Most of the options are terrible. Why yes, I'd like to damage myself over time! How thoughtful! Or you can either put a Feather (greater carrying capacity) on an item, or you can put +Strength on an item and get carrying capacity as well as a host of other benefits. And I thoroughly detest charged magic items. I don't care, tone down weapons or whatever, but I really hate the idea of burning through a stack of gold every time I whack a skeleton with my weapon. So I never use magical weapons unless the combat is way over the top. I haven't found a mod yet that makes all magic weapons permanent.
4) Combats are too easy and too similar. Pretty much anything can be beaten by left clicking over and over, mixed up with taps of healing spells on yourself. If you have potions, you essentially have an infinite life bar and infinite mana. How can you lose? The new combat behavior mod helps a little here, though it usually just involves monsters learning to dodge your 5 MPH fireballs...
5) Stealth is ridiculous. You can run a mile away from a monster and hide in a dark cubbyhole but he still can track you down and kill you. I found a mod which lets you re-hide if you break line of sight for 20 seconds, and have been enjoying using that. Also, a mod to do away with the bloody telepathic guards also helps a great deal if you play a rogue type in the game.
6) It's as crashy, if not crashier than any Bethesda game since pre-patch Daggerfall. And I only tip the hat to Daggerfall, since it wouldn't run at all on my Cyrix procesor until about 19 patches out.
On the positive side:
1) It's pretty
2) Okay/decent storyline
3) Has Jean-Luc Picard, the only bright spot in the terrible multiple-personality disaster voice acting for the NPCs (they use MULTIPLE voices on the same NPCs, it sounds like they're crazy).
4) But... best of all... the game is just barely flexible enough that you can do some really cool things with the chaos that ensues. Pickpocket an NPC villan. Stab him. He runs over to a nearby place and picks up a weapon. The owner of the weapons call the guards, who then beat the living daylight out of him. I think my version of the world has a lot more larcenous NPCs than in my girlfriend's... I find dead bodies of NPCs caught stealing all over the place, and from time to time I'll see a thieves guild member run screaming by chased by the guards, but my girlfriend hasn't seen it yet. I saw the guards blow away a guy once for stealing lettuce. Or I delayed completing an escort quest and ended up taking the NPCs I was "escorting" through the Oblivion gates. They come back to life if killed, so they make excellent party members as they fan out and take on the dremoras while I sneak up from behind for the backstab.
I like it... but I'm still looking for more patches to further improve the gameplay. The game design, as a whole, was terribly flawed at release.
I agree. I think having a small hand would drastically improve the game.
As to the rest of you, it's not that there's only one valid move, but usually only one optimal move, with way too much randomness for my taste, never getting the right tiles you need.
Carcassone is a terrible game. There's almost no strategy involved. When you draw a tile, you often only have a single place to put it (either because you're forced to as the only move, or because it's the only option that'll help your people). I felt like I'd have more fun flipping coins and counting winners based on the heads.
If you had more control over tile placement, the game would be a hell of a lot more interesting.
>>The study found counties with e-voting tended to tilt toward Bush, even after controlling for differences between counties including past voting history, income, percentage of Hispanic voters, voter turnout, and county size.
If you're talking about the Florida Counties, I proved their statistical analysis wrong back when the story broke.
Essentially their logic went:
1) We developed a model that can predict voting patterns
2) Real life didn't match the model
Conclusion: Fraud happened.
They covered it up by talking about regressions and things like that, but that was it in a nutshell. Their model was also weird in that if, for example, a county voted 80% one way in the previous year, it would expect 120% to vote that way during the next election.
It was ludicrous it ever made it as a story.
Heya Stefan,
I (Bill Kerney) was a grad student in CS at UCSD until '01 or '02 or so under Scott Baden.
For those who don't know, the Chez Bob computer was the most overengineered ledger in the history of ledgers. Every year some student would hack it to do something new and unusual. When I was there, they:
1) Added passwords (which were not really needed since the fridge door wasn't locked or anything if you wanted to steal something)
2) Added text to speech.
3) Added a saying it could say whenever you logged in. I enjoyed making up random latin phrases, which it would read in its stately mechanical voice.
4) Added a barcode reader.
5) Barcode reader was integrated into text to speech. "BOUGHT. ONE. TIGERS. MILK." Awesome.
And I think it also did stock alerts, sending an email to the Chez Bob Coordinator Alan Su when they were running low on something. Since we had a few people in the department who did Battlebots at the time, there were some people working on building a delivery robot that would pull the item out of the fridge, drive down the corridor and deliver the item. I think the main stumbling block was that they couldn't figure out how to open the doors (which had passcodes, and I think were difficult to open anyway for a robot).
For those who don't know Stefen Savage, check the archives on Slashdot, going back at least to '98 or so when he published his doctoral thesis (IIRC) on tracking DDOS attacks by looking at spurious ACKs coming into an unused block of IP space. He's had a lot of interesting ideas that Slashdot has covered. If my memory hasn't gone fuzzy, he also tought a computer gaming class at UCSD (which I enjoyed helping my friend (Scott O'Neil) with as I'd worked in the gaming industry for a couple years).
According to the engineer who built the things, the radiation levels would be acceptable, and the explosion wouldn't damage (or even set on fire) the town below it.
Very similar to my middle school experience. There were no computer stores in a wide radius around my middle school (it was a poor neighborhood), so I was the only source of floppies the school had. Since the school didn't allow you to save file to the 20MB hard drives they had back then, floppies were the only way of preserving your required CS homework. ...I never paid for lunch for two years, and probably netted about 70-80$ from floppy sales when all was said and done.
My buddy's uncle worked on the development of nuclear tipped AA missiles.
They weren't as big a deal as you'd think, they certainly weren't designed to blow up the cities they were trying to protect. The key fact is that airplane wings are great at resisting stress going upwards (i.e. in the direction of lift), but very bad at downwards, and so you could explode a large missile above them and rip the wings off incoming bombers without having to be too accurate.
If you pay a contractor twice as much, they don't do twice as good a job. They just say thank you and pocket the diffwerence.
There's actually laws on how to handle the low end of bids. It's not like I could bid on a freeway overpass for 10$ and then build a bridge out of used kleenex.
The only problem is with inspection. If a contractor cuts corners, the inspectors should be all over them like white on rice. Hire twice as many inspectors, and pay for them with the extra fines from the problems you're going to find.