One of the worst written books I've ever read, too (the Knight). I left it at the restaurant this afternoon, and only reluctantly went back to get it.
In all honesty, all breakthroughs almost have to be by definition discoveries of mistakes. Humans are great pattern recognization engines, but you either have to have a mistake (penicillin) or be crazy (Tesla) to break out of the mold, so to speak, and discover/create something radically new.
Nice to see the Rocks Clusters project is still going strong. A buddy of mine F. David Sacerdoti did a lot of work for it back in the day at UC San Diego / the San Diego Supercomputer Center.
A marine officer friend once told me the military was operated and run like a big business, except instead of turning profits, they export bodies of bad guys.
And he was serious, he went into details on the similarities of his training and an MBA program, though I suppose the MBA didn't involve automatic weapons.
There's red tape in any large organization. I've you've developed an allergy to it, go into business for yourself, or a small company with good people.
FFVII is an interactive story. You run on a treadmill for 2 hours and are rewarded with a pellet (another cutscene). Required no thought to solve puzzles, no thought to design characters, no thoughts on where to go next, no thought to defeat enemies. It's just a treadmill that you pay them money to run on.
We've never seen as large a storm as this ever before. Clearly the only possible explanation is human involvement!
(Yes, global warming may be real, but the utterly non-scientific way it is presented in the media just sets my teeth on edge. Sportatic outliers will always happen. You can't EVER point at a single heat wave or hurricane and say that it is evidence of global warming. You have to look at trending, and the big picture. And yet on NPR in April they had three different scientists saying that Katrina was definitely caused by global warming.)
Consider this hypothetical question: scientists want to research a technology that could destroy the world. Should the government fund such research? Why or why not?
The concept that science and religion (hell, call it ethics for a more general rule) should be kept absolutely separate is a terrible one. Ethics must necessarily inform all major facets of life, or, well, you'll end up with science for science's sake, which is great all the way up until you wind back up with the Nazi science establishment. This isn't an example of Godwin's Law, this is absolutely on topic. The Nazis developed real scientific advances into the knowledge of biology and psycology via their use of unethical experiments on unwilling subjects. In some cases, they are the final papers even available on a subject because it would be unethical to repeat or extend them.
And while the above might sound soft, their experiments were anything but. Torture. Exposure to chemical weapons. Amputations. Pouring acid into the eyes of twins to see if they react differently. Psycological abuse. Etc,. etc., etc.
This is science for science's sake, with "rules and politicians" staying out of the way, like the Union of Concerned Scientists want. Even ignoring the questions of torture, there are real questions being presented to us today.
Would you allow yourself to be cloned, to grow spare organs for you if your organs were failing? Why or why not?
Am I the only person who thinks that sometimes, science DOES need oversight?
As much as scientists go on about the line between science and religion, why do they suddenly get uppity when people claim that ethics (which might not derive from the laws of nature!) can and should impose its will upon science? Uranium will decay regardless of political will, or of which political party is in office, but the use and employment of nuclear weapons absolutely is an ethical problem. Belief otherwise is to court disaster. A nuclear weapon in every kitchen!
Science isn't ethics; ethics isn't science. But there are large areas where they necessarily must co-exist, however uncomfortably. Whenever man has tried to substitute science for ethics, you get disasters like the Social Darwinism movement of the early 1900s and the Nazi forced sterilization programs for people with "defective" genes.
Society wouldn't "implode". You're implying a lower birthrate means a society disappears, which is mathematically silly. A lower birthrate means the population shrinks for a few generations, then stablizes with lower numbers, which is a GOOD THING.
Sounds like someone needs to go back to school.
Believe it or not, a lower birthrate DOES mean a society disappears in exponential decay. Some mathematician figured that at the current rate, there'll be like 13 Japanese people by 2500 or 3000 or something.
Negative population growth will be a much bigger issue in the next hundred years than overpopulation.
We've too many people on the planet, eating up too many resources, killing too much life, producing killer pollution.
Sigh.
You know our current problem with food is having too much production, right? The famines ever since the Green Revolution have been caused by political issues, not by actual lack of crops.
The countries with reduced population will be winners, and the cancerously growing populations of doomed countries will self-destruct in the usual Malthusian manner
Ah, yes, there it is. I thought you sounded like a Malthusian. Which is great and all, except Malthus has been proven wrong. Repeatedly. He made some fundamental mistakes in his assumptions, and unfortunately for everyone, fools have been repeating these same mistakes for 200 years.
Having a small population is a recipe for disaster in a country.
Countries with reduced populations have never been winners in history in the long run. Even small countries who have done well, like the Netherlands, have eventually been eclipsed by the bigger countries. It is critical to have at least a small amount of population in the world, for a variety of reasons.
The causes of the horsemen are not political in the truest sense; population pressure is always the root cause.
Like most of Malthusian beliefs, this one is demonstrably false. I'd be curious to see how you'd try to relate something like the Vietnam War to population pressures in America and the USSR.
Nothing, no organism, can grow ceaselessly.
This is the core fallacy that is the root of all the problems with Malthusian beliefs.
Humans are not organisms, beyond the scientific definition. We don't fit into the K or R population models that all creatures, from flies to baboons fall into. Humans are unique. Why? It's simple: humans make their own food. And the birth rate drops as humans get more food (or are more successful over all), which is the opposite of what you see in the animal kingdom.
If you are really concerned about overpopulation, which I guess you might be even though you're not very well informed, the best thing you could do is work to build a strong middle class world-wide.
At some point, it poisons the environment with its own effluent and kills off both room to live and the food supply.
More tripe. Unlike animals, humans build things called Sewer Systems. Have been doing it for a while; you might want to look into it some time.
Humans who maintain a steady state population, intelligently, will have resources to live and to educate, while those who do not will inevitably collapse into warfare, disease, ignorance and (usually religious) totalitarianism through sheer desperation.
No... they'll invade the countries with the smaller populations and take them over. Religious Totalitarianism? I'd say radical communist dictatorships are a bigger issue. Consider the famine in Ethiopia. We had enough food to feed the people -- the communism is why over a million people died.
They will be the danger to to the planet, already warming and drying under the strain of a population doubling every two generations.
More than half the world lives in countries that aren't producing enough babies to replace their population. If the very deep and serious problems in Africa ever get solved (and I think
Yep, and it sounds as if the Slashdot Editors didn't realize this. Normally I'd pass it off on them just clicking approve on an article without reading it (like they normally do), but the editor went and wrote his own little editorial beneath it.
When I was writing applications at the San Diego Supercomputer Center, latency between nodes was the single greatest obstacle to getting your CPUs to running at their full capacity. A CPU waiting to get its data is a useless CPU.
Generally speaking, clusters who want high performance used something like Myrnet instead of ethernet. It's like the difference between consumer, prosumer, and professional products you see in, oh, every industry across the board.
As a side note, how many parallel apps solve the latency issue is by overlapping their communication and computation phases, instead of having them in discrete phases, this can greatly reduce the time a CPU is idle.
I've used all three. I've picked AVG because antivir has an interface out of the Windows 3.1 days and has to be manually rebooted each time it updates.
Avast has the annoying tendency to throw up popups even when I'm in the middle of a full screen app. Getting knocked out of a powerpoint presentation because it needs to helpfully inform you (along with a full page add) that it has successfully completed the twice-daily updating, is aggravating.
AVG isn't great. It noticeably slows down my computer, unlike every other virus scanner I've used, and I have a pretty fast machine. I disable it for +20 fps. It also doesn't disable very well.
Faced with something like this, an insurgency wouldn't get the support of the people they need to be anything but a lunatic fringe. They'd be completely ineffective. For a fraction of what we spent on bombs and guns, we would have ended up not only with fewer deaths but with a trading partner and possible ally in the middle east. And a democratic government that would actually work without propping up by the US army.
The US Military has been building schools and such ever since they toppled the Iraqi government. I'm not sure it shows up under the Reconstruction budget. The insurgents are the ones blowing up the power plants, water mains, etc.
My thought is that the United States isn't doing a good enough job conveying the message that life sucks mainly due to the insurgents.
And life in Iraq is heavily biased by the military. A friend of mine is an officer in the marines. A reporter from CBS came out and wanted to get footage of people being shot in the head, and wanted to see the dangerous areas. He told her that really wasn't a good idea for her safety, and set up a tour instead of some of the good things his unit has done (schools, etc.), and she didn't even bother showing up. He had 20 guys sweltering in the desert waiting for her too.
When was the last time you heard a story like this in the media? Ever?
>>The claims in the video are well-argued but absolutely silly.
I agree with this statement, except the claims are not well-argued.
Their arguments could be picked apart by a three year old.
"In 1997, the CIA released a brochure on terrorism with a picture of the WTC in the crosshairs. The only explanation for this is that the CIA was planning 9/11."
No... the WTC was bombed by terrorists in 1993.
Conclusion: The movie was made by retards.
I love conspiracy theories as much as the next guy, but they don't have a single argument in the whole film that stands on two legs.
I've written my fair share of SWING apps, and they all suffer to some degree or another cross-platform compatibility issues (running on an SGI NT Box turned the whole screen orange), as well as slow refresh speeds and occasional problems not updating the screen at all.
Professional SWING apps seem to mitigate this somehow, but perhaps it requires some deep magic I'm not familiar with. A friend of mine had a SWING app that took 3 minutes to redraw the screen. I could at least help him with that one (he was wastefully putting way too many components on the screen), but nothing I ever experimented with could solve the aforementioned problems.
>>Games like Oblivion or Final Fantasy fall down because simple human interactions are actually quite >>complex, and having characters that may care in heavily pre-scripted ways is a little dry.
Oblivions "role-playing" is just choose-your-own-adventure, and rather horribly done because they use different voice actors for the different dialogue options (which just comes off as creeeepy). But -- their NPC AI is actually pretty damn sweet. I knew I was going to kill a bad guy, so I pick pocketed him and took his weapon off of him, then stabbed him in the back with his own weapon. He got pissed, but instead of punching me, ran over to some nearby corpses (other NPCs that had attacked me) grabbed a weapon off their corpse, and then proceeded to beat the crap out of me.
It's implemented with fairly simple rules, goal-fulfillment and some other stuff, but the interactions that result are actually pretty complex. I watched an NPC get hungry, and eat a head of lettuce. While he might have normally gotten away with it, a wandering guard was nearby and aggroed him. The guy took off at a run for the gates, but the guard chased him down and butchered him not far from his own house. I looted his corpse, took his key, and took everything of value in the house.
There's also several dead NPCs (all thieves guild) lying around in the docks district who at various times had been caught by guards and killed.
Whats funny is that all of those NPCs are alive and well in my girlfriend's game.
>>In the end, my opinion is that the largest deficiency for game AI is that it fails the Turing Test.
Sorry, but people don't actually want that. They *think* they do, but what they actually want is an AI that varies its behavior occasionally.
If I were a GM and could play Onyxia in WOW, you know what I would do? I would walk over to the nice squishy priests, kill them all, then proceed to kill the druids and shamans, then kill the mages and locks, followed by rogues, hunters and finally warriors.
Which is the exact opposite of how it goes, and how it should go.
A boss that could pass the turing test is an unbeatable boss.
On the other hand, I'd like to see boss encounters where the PCs actually have to react and change their tactics, instead of just reading a web page somewhere on how to beat it. Bliz does a couple stupid random things, like varying the breath weapon element in BWL, but that's about it.
So, in conclusion, I think the AI in WOW sucks, but for a totally different reason. =)
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, I get it.
It is just that my tolerance of metafiction isn't very high.
It's a fun trick, and I use it occasionally in my own writings, but an entire book filled with such is nothing but aggravating.
Lol, I'm actually reading Gene Wolfe right now.
One of the worst written books I've ever read, too (the Knight). I left it at the restaurant this afternoon, and only reluctantly went back to get it.
In all honesty, all breakthroughs almost have to be by definition discoveries of mistakes. Humans are great pattern recognization engines, but you either have to have a mistake (penicillin) or be crazy (Tesla) to break out of the mold, so to speak, and discover/create something radically new.
Probably just confused with Marie Curie, who died from exposure to massive amounts of radiation.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marie_Curie
Nice to see the Rocks Clusters project is still going strong. A buddy of mine F. David Sacerdoti did a lot of work for it back in the day at UC San Diego / the San Diego Supercomputer Center.
A marine officer friend once told me the military was operated and run like a big business, except instead of turning profits, they export bodies of bad guys.
And he was serious, he went into details on the similarities of his training and an MBA program, though I suppose the MBA didn't involve automatic weapons.
There's red tape in any large organization. I've you've developed an allergy to it, go into business for yourself, or a small company with good people.
I'd give you mod points if I had any left.
FFVII is an interactive story. You run on a treadmill for 2 hours and are rewarded with a pellet (another cutscene). Required no thought to solve puzzles, no thought to design characters, no thoughts on where to go next, no thought to defeat enemies. It's just a treadmill that you pay them money to run on.
Or the fact that humans have never been there...
The point is statistical anomolies happen all the time, with or without human involvement.
We've never seen as large a storm as this ever before. Clearly the only possible explanation is human involvement!
(Yes, global warming may be real, but the utterly non-scientific way it is presented in the media just sets my teeth on edge. Sportatic outliers will always happen. You can't EVER point at a single heat wave or hurricane and say that it is evidence of global warming. You have to look at trending, and the big picture. And yet on NPR in April they had three different scientists saying that Katrina was definitely caused by global warming.)
Consider this hypothetical question: scientists want to research a technology that could destroy the world. Should the government fund such research? Why or why not?
The concept that science and religion (hell, call it ethics for a more general rule) should be kept absolutely separate is a terrible one. Ethics must necessarily inform all major facets of life, or, well, you'll end up with science for science's sake, which is great all the way up until you wind back up with the Nazi science establishment. This isn't an example of Godwin's Law, this is absolutely on topic. The Nazis developed real scientific advances into the knowledge of biology and psycology via their use of unethical experiments on unwilling subjects. In some cases, they are the final papers even available on a subject because it would be unethical to repeat or extend them.
And while the above might sound soft, their experiments were anything but. Torture. Exposure to chemical weapons. Amputations. Pouring acid into the eyes of twins to see if they react differently. Psycological abuse. Etc,. etc., etc.
This is science for science's sake, with "rules and politicians" staying out of the way, like the Union of Concerned Scientists want. Even ignoring the questions of torture, there are real questions being presented to us today.
Would you allow yourself to be cloned, to grow spare organs for you if your organs were failing? Why or why not?
Am I the only person who thinks that sometimes, science DOES need oversight?
As much as scientists go on about the line between science and religion, why do they suddenly get uppity when people claim that ethics (which might not derive from the laws of nature!) can and should impose its will upon science? Uranium will decay regardless of political will, or of which political party is in office, but the use and employment of nuclear weapons absolutely is an ethical problem. Belief otherwise is to court disaster. A nuclear weapon in every kitchen!
Science isn't ethics; ethics isn't science. But there are large areas where they necessarily must co-exist, however uncomfortably. Whenever man has tried to substitute science for ethics, you get disasters like the Social Darwinism movement of the early 1900s and the Nazi forced sterilization programs for people with "defective" genes.
Correction, 11th lowest birth rate in the world. 181 out of 192 countries.
Society wouldn't "implode". You're implying a lower birthrate means a society disappears, which is mathematically silly. A lower birthrate means the population shrinks for a few generations, then stablizes with lower numbers, which is a GOOD THING.
Sounds like someone needs to go back to school.
Believe it or not, a lower birthrate DOES mean a society disappears in exponential decay. Some mathematician figured that at the current rate, there'll be like 13 Japanese people by 2500 or 3000 or something.
Negative population growth will be a much bigger issue in the next hundred years than overpopulation.
We've too many people on the planet, eating up too many resources, killing too much life, producing killer pollution.
Sigh.
You know our current problem with food is having too much production, right? The famines ever since the Green Revolution have been caused by political issues, not by actual lack of crops.
The countries with reduced population will be winners, and the cancerously growing populations of doomed countries will self-destruct in the usual Malthusian manner
Ah, yes, there it is. I thought you sounded like a Malthusian. Which is great and all, except Malthus has been proven wrong. Repeatedly. He made some fundamental mistakes in his assumptions, and unfortunately for everyone, fools have been repeating these same mistakes for 200 years.
Having a small population is a recipe for disaster in a country.
Countries with reduced populations have never been winners in history in the long run. Even small countries who have done well, like the Netherlands, have eventually been eclipsed by the bigger countries. It is critical to have at least a small amount of population in the world, for a variety of reasons.
The causes of the horsemen are not political in the truest sense; population pressure is always the root cause.
Like most of Malthusian beliefs, this one is demonstrably false. I'd be curious to see how you'd try to relate something like the Vietnam War to population pressures in America and the USSR.
Nothing, no organism, can grow ceaselessly.
This is the core fallacy that is the root of all the problems with Malthusian beliefs.
Humans are not organisms, beyond the scientific definition. We don't fit into the K or R population models that all creatures, from flies to baboons fall into. Humans are unique. Why? It's simple: humans make their own food. And the birth rate drops as humans get more food (or are more successful over all), which is the opposite of what you see in the animal kingdom.
If you are really concerned about overpopulation, which I guess you might be even though you're not very well informed, the best thing you could do is work to build a strong middle class world-wide.
At some point, it poisons the environment with its own effluent and kills off both room to live and the food supply.
More tripe. Unlike animals, humans build things called Sewer Systems. Have been doing it for a while; you might want to look into it some time.
Humans who maintain a steady state population, intelligently, will have resources to live and to educate, while those who do not will inevitably collapse into warfare, disease, ignorance and (usually religious) totalitarianism through sheer desperation.
No... they'll invade the countries with the smaller populations and take them over. Religious Totalitarianism? I'd say radical communist dictatorships are a bigger issue. Consider the famine in Ethiopia. We had enough food to feed the people -- the communism is why over a million people died.
They will be the danger to to the planet, already warming and drying under the strain of a population doubling every two generations.
More than half the world lives in countries that aren't producing enough babies to replace their population. If the very deep and serious problems in Africa ever get solved (and I think
Yep, and it sounds as if the Slashdot Editors didn't realize this. Normally I'd pass it off on them just clicking approve on an article without reading it (like they normally do), but the editor went and wrote his own little editorial beneath it.
Faugh!
/shrug
In practice, cheap is the reality. Just like how consumer goods dominate the market, with much less prosumer and professional equipment sold.
Fast interconnects are way more expensive than ethernet. People that want the extra performance, though, pay for it.
Er, yeah. No kidding.
When I was writing applications at the San Diego Supercomputer Center, latency between nodes was the single greatest obstacle to getting your CPUs to running at their full capacity. A CPU waiting to get its data is a useless CPU.
Generally speaking, clusters who want high performance used something like Myrnet instead of ethernet. It's like the difference between consumer, prosumer, and professional products you see in, oh, every industry across the board.
As a side note, how many parallel apps solve the latency issue is by overlapping their communication and computation phases, instead of having them in discrete phases, this can greatly reduce the time a CPU is idle.
The KeLP kernel does overlapping automatically for you if you want: http://www-cse.ucsd.edu/groups/hpcl/scg/kelp.html
Uh, no. HPV is a major cause of cervical cancer. So much so that a HPV vaccine is being hailed as a cure for cervical cancer.
/ HPV
You can read more about HPV and cancer here:
http://www.cancer.gov/cancertopics/factsheet/Risk
Wait, I thought Ruby on Rails was the trendy new thing that you can't visit a website without seeing?
Damn kids these days.
I've used all three. I've picked AVG because antivir has an interface out of the Windows 3.1 days and has to be manually rebooted each time it updates.
Avast has the annoying tendency to throw up popups even when I'm in the middle of a full screen app. Getting knocked out of a powerpoint presentation because it needs to helpfully inform you (along with a full page add) that it has successfully completed the twice-daily updating, is aggravating.
AVG isn't great. It noticeably slows down my computer, unlike every other virus scanner I've used, and I have a pretty fast machine. I disable it for +20 fps. It also doesn't disable very well.
Except here we're building schools and the insurgents are blowing them up.
Or are you actually claiming we're building schools and then bulldozing them the next day?
Faced with something like this, an insurgency wouldn't get the support of the people they need to be anything but a lunatic fringe. They'd be completely ineffective. For a fraction of what we spent on bombs and guns, we would have ended up not only with fewer deaths but with a trading partner and possible ally in the middle east. And a democratic government that would actually work without propping up by the US army.
The US Military has been building schools and such ever since they toppled the Iraqi government. I'm not sure it shows up under the Reconstruction budget. The insurgents are the ones blowing up the power plants, water mains, etc.
My thought is that the United States isn't doing a good enough job conveying the message that life sucks mainly due to the insurgents.
And life in Iraq is heavily biased by the military. A friend of mine is an officer in the marines. A reporter from CBS came out and wanted to get footage of people being shot in the head, and wanted to see the dangerous areas. He told her that really wasn't a good idea for her safety, and set up a tour instead of some of the good things his unit has done (schools, etc.), and she didn't even bother showing up. He had 20 guys sweltering in the desert waiting for her too.
When was the last time you heard a story like this in the media? Ever?
There were several different versions. IIRC, the $200 one was with Rob, the Zapper, Duck Hunt, and Gyromite.
The core system with Super Mario Bros was $120, though people are saying there was an $80 version, which I don't recall.
>>The claims in the video are well-argued but absolutely silly.
I agree with this statement, except the claims are not well-argued.
Their arguments could be picked apart by a three year old.
"In 1997, the CIA released a brochure on terrorism with a picture of the WTC in the crosshairs. The only explanation for this is that the CIA was planning 9/11."
No... the WTC was bombed by terrorists in 1993.
Conclusion: The movie was made by retards.
I love conspiracy theories as much as the next guy, but they don't have a single argument in the whole film that stands on two legs.
Yep,
I've written my fair share of SWING apps, and they all suffer to some degree or another cross-platform compatibility issues (running on an SGI NT Box turned the whole screen orange), as well as slow refresh speeds and occasional problems not updating the screen at all.
Professional SWING apps seem to mitigate this somehow, but perhaps it requires some deep magic I'm not familiar with. A friend of mine had a SWING app that took 3 minutes to redraw the screen. I could at least help him with that one (he was wastefully putting way too many components on the screen), but nothing I ever experimented with could solve the aforementioned problems.
>>Games like Oblivion or Final Fantasy fall down because simple human interactions are actually quite
>>complex, and having characters that may care in heavily pre-scripted ways is a little dry.
Oblivions "role-playing" is just choose-your-own-adventure, and rather horribly done because they use different voice actors for the different dialogue options (which just comes off as creeeepy). But -- their NPC AI is actually pretty damn sweet. I knew I was going to kill a bad guy, so I pick pocketed him and took his weapon off of him, then stabbed him in the back with his own weapon. He got pissed, but instead of punching me, ran over to some nearby corpses (other NPCs that had attacked me) grabbed a weapon off their corpse, and then proceeded to beat the crap out of me.
It's implemented with fairly simple rules, goal-fulfillment and some other stuff, but the interactions that result are actually pretty complex. I watched an NPC get hungry, and eat a head of lettuce. While he might have normally gotten away with it, a wandering guard was nearby and aggroed him. The guy took off at a run for the gates, but the guard chased him down and butchered him not far from his own house. I looted his corpse, took his key, and took everything of value in the house.
There's also several dead NPCs (all thieves guild) lying around in the docks district who at various times had been caught by guards and killed.
Whats funny is that all of those NPCs are alive and well in my girlfriend's game.
>>In the end, my opinion is that the largest deficiency for game AI is that it fails the Turing Test.
Sorry, but people don't actually want that. They *think* they do, but what they actually want is an AI that varies its behavior occasionally.
If I were a GM and could play Onyxia in WOW, you know what I would do? I would walk over to the nice squishy priests, kill them all, then proceed to kill the druids and shamans, then kill the mages and locks, followed by rogues, hunters and finally warriors.
Which is the exact opposite of how it goes, and how it should go.
A boss that could pass the turing test is an unbeatable boss.
On the other hand, I'd like to see boss encounters where the PCs actually have to react and change their tactics, instead of just reading a web page somewhere on how to beat it. Bliz does a couple stupid random things, like varying the breath weapon element in BWL, but that's about it.
So, in conclusion, I think the AI in WOW sucks, but for a totally different reason. =)