Looks like our legislative bodies need to go back to nursery school; too many laws they pass involve trying to bell the cat.
Seriously, why not just pass a law making crime illegal? Then all the police can just go home and we'll live in a wonderous utopia. Oh, you say we live in a world where people who are already criminals are, by definition, aren't obeying the law and it's that simple? Well, start walking the walk; you act like criminals will just bend over, but it's not the criminals who have to BOGU.
On the other hand it is not difficult to show that the last fifteen years have followed the course of the predictions of 15 years ago.... We already know with negligible remaining room for doubt that there is a human-caused warming and we expect larger human-caused changes in the future.
(Note I've reversed the order of the sentences in the original post.)
The problem I have with this logic is that it does not follow. There's only three basic predictions to make on climate issues right now, "It'll get warmer", "It'll get cooler", or "It'll stay the same". Since the smart money is not on the third outcome, you really have a 50-50 chance of being right on this issue by sheer luck.
(If you're claiming that somebody in 1988 predicted which parts of the world would warm up by how much with reasonable accuracy, please let me know... and show me the predictions.)
Now, I can say, "I have ten fingers, therefore the world will get warmer", but it doesn't mean that if the world get warmer, I can conclude that my reasoning was correct and my ten fingers made the world warmer. Remember that substitute nearly every argument made today about "warming" with "cooling" and it was made in the '70s... switching to the winning team without changing the underlying arguments has done nothing to make those arguments true or false.
The globe may be getting warmer, but the modelling and simulations to date still have enough trouble "predicting" the past; there's a distributed computing project you can donate your computer time to (although I don't recall if it's quite available yet) that has your computer run a model of the past 100 years and see which comes out the most accurate in the end. They're running this project because it's a real problem. If you have a really good working model, you can start to assign causes, but even then, it's still too soon for dogmatic statements about what is "causing" global warming.
As I like to say... of course we're impacting climate. It does not follow that we're "causing" warming (the increasing solar output is certainly a candidate for having a vastly greater impact then we could ever hope for!), nor does it follow that it is a disaster. (For every negative scenario of doom and disaster, there's another currently inhospitable part of the world that becomes more pleasent and fertile. Warming has to go a long way to render the entire globe inhosipitable... and the one sure thing is that change will happen. In fact it's happened just in my lifetime. Life has conspicuously failed to come to an end. No, that doesn't prove that disaster won't happen in the future, but vague, one-sided fortellings of disaster don't prove anything either.)
Right now, the evidence just isn't in place for much more then "the world is warming"... we don't even know what the effects of that will be, we have no proof or evidence that the world will continue to warm (my gut feeling based on looking at cycles of temperature, solar output, and some other things is that within ten years, it'll be cooling again and religious environmentalists will simultaneously declare their anti-warming policies a success despite continued lack of evidence in any direction, and resume screeching about the dangers of the next Ice Age if we don't reduce pollution and recycle more in a repeat of the 70's; you heard it here first, but of course this is just a gut feeling based on data, not a rigorous argument.), and I find it rather alarmist that everybody seems so willing to merely assume they will be unredeemably negative. Making claims like "We already know with negligible remaining room for doubt that there is a human-caused warming" is way, way too early. There's a hell of a lot of room for doubt in a field we know almost nothing about.
What do you mean, "single point of fact"? This article is an observation of a trend, a trend we all have the seen the data to.
You may agree or disagree, but we all have the facts from outside of this article. We don't need this article to notice that Microsoft is backing down on all fronts and that "dirty tricks" seems to be all they have left; on the technical front they've all but abadoned innovation, with the possible exception of.NET. (It's a warmed over implementation of a VM, but nowadays damn near everything is a warmed over implementation of something; it has enough interesting things in it to be considered a sort of innovation.)
"Aglomeration of facts [sic]": In other words, the "culture" of the company. Of all the points made in this article I find this the most compelling. The current culture at Microsoft has made it what it is. It was magnificently adapted to the 80's and 90's, but it doesn't seem like it's going to be able to adapt to the Linux threat; all of its coping mechanisms are defunct, and it's too big for anyone to change.
My claim isn't that they will die, but they will become another IBM. (Although, IBM is a lot more diverse then Microsoft on the profit sheet...)
This seems like a fine time to mention Slow Sort, which makes bubble sort look downright efficient and clever. From this paper (PDF).
(The paper is fun if you know computer science, the c2.com link is in "normal English". Try the paper if you think you'd enjoy it; it has a dry wit and pursues its task of sorting as slowly as possible with great gusto.)
I wonder where the "line" between "internal" and "external" stops, eh? Suppose "my internet" was a private organization that you could join and particpate in. I wonder how trademark usage comes to bear in private communications between private individuals or companies.
This is a good question that nobody is addressing.
In that mindset, then, I knew we were "fucked" when, a few years ago, a simple piece of software that allowed users to make shared annotations on web sites (a piece of software that users consented to using by downloading and installing themselves) was held up as some kind of violation of intellectual property by content creators.
Anyways, it's not the same logic that says mix tapes are illegal or personal annotations are illegal, there are real differences, and IMHO, I think it's a bad sign that people still think the two are identical. You're welcome to your opinions on the validity of such software, of course, but your characterizations of my arguments as "the same argument that makes mix tapes illegal" is flatly wrong; I get to say what my arguments are;-)
Re:Internet legislation futility
on
The Year In Tech Law
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Who says I have to use "the" root DNS servers?
Shhhhh. Don't freak out the Senators.
Am I committing a crime in the United States if I put up a private network running TCP/IP, put up some DNS servers that are authoritative for "CartoonNetwork.com" and put up some web servers to host pornography for that domain name?
To the extent that an external, unconnected visitor might see this resolution of "CartoonNetwork.com", it probably would be a crime, but not really one of those new-fangled "internet crimes", it'd just be fraud and/or trademark violations.
If it's purely internal then I can't imagine what the crime would be.
Cooperation on the Internet works on the basis of social pressure, not on legislation. Legislation will only cause the Internet to fragment and "route around" the stupidity.
Only to the extent that the legislation permits. I can imagine laws that can not be "routed around" in any significant way; an extreme, but perfectly viable, option is to ban the Internet altogether, or just whitelist it at the transport level. This is damned hard to just "route around". Unfortunately, this logic promotes just sitting back and do nothing ("they will inevitably lose"), which is a Very Bad Idea, not least of which is that there is still a difference between "not losing" and "winning".
People love learning instinctively; it is something that must be ground out of us with massive institutional schooling, and even then only partially successfully.
However, people don't all want to learn the same things, and where does "how to change a radiator" fit into a science format? It's learning, but many people don't consider it "learning" because they still have the blinders they picked up in school about what "learning" is. If it's not an academic subject, it isn't learning.
That said, have you looked over the courses offered at your local Major University? With the modern profusion of knowledge, and people's divergent interests, how can you possibly cover such a range?
This probably would have worked 80 years ago, when the domain of knowlege was smaller. Now people's interests have justifiably diverged and you can't knit a market out of five hundred.0001% demographic slots with a television. (That's the fundamental problem; television can't do what they are asking it to do here.)
This leads to the illusion that everybody hates to learn, because there is so much knowledge in the world that whatever issue you choose as a touchstone, you can find lots of people who don't know it. "What do you mean you don't know what Bolshevism is?" But talk to those same people, and you'll find the majority of them know lots of stuff you don't. You may even find they consider you ignorant.
The kind of elitism presented in the parent message is not justified on the whole. Your view is skewed because you choose a very personal measure of what "learned" means. You have no choice in that issue since you are human, but you should not apply it universally. I find most people know things and learn things; those who truly refuse to learn anything exist, but they are rare.
(Parenthetical: That doesn't mean everybody does a good job of learning... but they usually try.)
"Untraditional moves?" Are there any even remotely plausible "untraditional moves" left to exploit in a fighting game? We long since left the realm of even faint plausibility, even in the hand-to-hand only sub-genre, and in this era of 20-30 fully realized characters with 100+ moves each in fighting games, what moves could be left?
"Use X, dragon-punch CCW, dragon-punch CW, circle circle square to deliver the dreader flower picking move! Your character will pick flowers and hand them to his opponent, whereupon the flowers will cause the opponent to swoon and loose half of their health."
And I'll lay money that if you substitute "health" for some sort of "love resistance", there's a Japanese game/"dating sim" that has done this. Seriously. (Except maybe the "half" bit.)
To the moderator who modded my previous message as a troll: I envy your lack of exposure to loons who really believe various cosmic events that have happening millions of times signal the end of existance as we know it, but that's what we call a "satirization" of those loons. The first sentence, not to mention the second paragraph, should have been the giveaway. (Not to mention "something-or-other!".)
Please turn in your mod points at the nearest recycling facility.
Essentially, it might be possible, but I doubt it. Hell, these things are considerably shakier and less stable than a full-size helicopter (less weight == more maneuverable), and have considerably less endurance. You'd be far better off sticking a hulking great camera on a full-sized heli and putting a pilot in it. Admittedly though, that would defeat the point of the exercise...
Thanks, that's better.
For the record, I still see planes working better, even in many of the cited examples; even "inspecting a bridge" doesn't generally need hover capability, just snapshot capability, so it's a matter of pointing and clicking at the right time. There are a few places a helicopter can go a little plane can't... but if your space is that tight the helicopter probably can't safely go there anyhow, since a wind gust will send a blade into the bridge and goodbye UAV.
(OK, I don't fly helicopters and I admit I'm assuming helicopters can't afford to even lightly tap objects with their blades, but I feel like it's a pretty safe assumption.)
I honestly think that if they thought they could get away with it, they would have by now. Britain did, after all.
The urgency generated by 9/11 has faded, even though it left a fingerprint on our society that will remain for decades. Witness the increasing Congressional friction over the Patriot act, which expect will only get worse over the next couple of years, barring major terrorists attacks. I don't think Ashcroft has the clout to pass this, not to mention the economic impacts of doing that. (I know I'd stop using the Internet to buy things and recommend to everybody I know that they do as well, rather then my current opinion which is that it's largely safer then physical purchasing at the moment.)
Yes, I know this has happened millions upon millions of times before, but this time it's the END OF THE EARTH FOR SURE! Stock up on your survival gear! Soon the planet will be torn asunder by gravitational resonance and Planet X will eat up the remainder of our planet in a fiesta of electromagnetic quantum something-or-other!
What's different about this opposition? Why, that I'm aware of it of course!
"Existing small helicopters are loud" does not directly imply "all small helicopters must be loud"; that's an unwarrented conclusion. If you dump more money into it I would expect you can nearly eliminate the engine noise. The R/C helicopter ethuisiast is not likely to want to pay what this would cost, though.
Same goes for the other characteristics you cite. Not all small helicopters necessarily must be shakey, nor does shakiness necessarily imply "useless for surveillance" (you can still take fast snapshots with expensive cameras (digital or analog), and with adequate computer assistance you may still get human-usable video; jitter correction technology has been in consumer-grade camcorders for a while).
"Low cost" is a relative term, after all; a surveillance grade helicopter would make your R/C helicopter look like a toy by cost comparision, and the pictures in the article certainly aren't it, but it might still be low cost as compared to human surveillance.
On the other hand, a certain amount of blade noise is unavoidable, but possibly controllable.
I'm not saying you're wrong, maybe it is impossible, I'm saying that the evidence you cited doesn't warrent the conclusions you make.
Well, I was going to trump you and link to that post through the !Sdrawkcab CGI that reverses webpages.
Remember that going around a true Moebius strip once results in an inversion.
Unfortunately, while I can find several links, they all go to "smeg.com" which appears to now belong to some Italian company, who probably acquired it via a trademark dispute.
Pity, it would have been funny. Clicking on my link again would have re-reversed the web pages...
You've been modded "funny" as I write this but really you have an interesting point.
The answer is that to date, all of our wheels have been spikey and sharp, tending to work poorly and often killing, crushing, and destorying things in its path, rather then working as designed.
My pet example of this is "Object Oriented Programming". I think OOP is a significant advance, but it took 20 years to start to get implementations of it that were really useful, in C++, in Python, in a couple of other languages. (I take a broad view here. C# probably qualifies, but I haven't used it. Perl does for wizards only; technically the capabilities exist but they're damned hard to really get right. Java is getting there but still borderline, unless you augment it with other tools. Most other implementations tend to hit complexity walls too early to be useful, such as pre-template C++.) Think "design patterns", and the subsequent work being done based on that.
Finding the best way to do one thing is easy. Finding the best way to do a million things is harder. Iterators or Observers? MVC or something else? Pervasive persistence or request only? (These are of course only sample questions, not meant to be answered or considered as exhaustive.) The only way to answer these questions on a large scale is to try them on a large scale. That takes time, and a lot of what seems like re-invention, as some new combination is tried out with a few subtly different answers from last time.
The sheer staggering multiplicity of answers on so many dimensions is really unprecendented in any other Engineering field, since they all tend to be able to use "physical locality" to isolate the complexities of their system. Consider the almost uniformity of mainstream CPU design, for instance; is it really so inconceivable that a little 'reinvention of the wheel', i.e., a complete re-thinking of PC architecture, isn't called for?
Right now, we really don't know as much as Language X bigots ("Language X is the one true way!") would have you think. There's still a lot of room for experimentation. And the only true way to experiment is by building a slightly different wheel, and seeing if it maims its users slightly less then before in a wide variety of situations.
In this sense, "software engineering" almost approaches a true experimental science, albeit with very engineering-oriented experiments.
Did a search on the titles and it seems nobody has yet pointed to Liquid War (at least not properly naming it in the title of their post). Winner of Most Unique/Original Game in the HappyPuppy 2002 awards. Simple, yet fun. Controls couldn't be any simpler and multiplayer action is reasonably well paced, not "frantic" (usually), yet not slow, either (again, usually).
What crack are you smoking? The weapons inspections did fail, M(r/s). AC! The "inspections" were supposed to be validations that the weapons we all knew existed were destroyed with full Iraqi cooperation, something that only existed in leftie delusions. I guess we were just supposed to pretend that continuous stonewalling qualifies as full cooperation?
The continuous re-writing of history is just infuriating. The "left" is far, far more guilty of that then any of their "opponents". And again, this is why you find your opinions marginalized. You have to make up history to support your views.
Like I said, how dare he enforce the actual words of the resolution? (Why don't you go read them?)
He acted wrongly in not only going against the will of, but actively flipping off the United Nations,
I find it ironic that "actively flipping off the United Nations" consisted of "actually enforcing United Nation resolutions". God damn that unilateralist bastard, didn't he realize those were just for show?
With so many accusations like that transparently false, is it any wonder that you find your viewpoints marginalized?
(I suppose your "quick diplomatic solution" largely consists of Yet Another UN Resolution? Yes, those worked well...)
The most important presentation rule: Tell a story
on
PowerPoint Makes You Dumb
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· Score: 3, Informative
The most important presentation rule of all is that you must tell a story.
Your story does not have to be like a novel or anything, but you do want to co-opt the standard story order: Problem, elaboration, solution, resolution (effects of solution). This time-tested structure drives your presentation forward and makes people more likely to want to listen.
The two other presentation orders I see result in flawed presentations, regardless of the other qualities of the presentation. "Random facts in random order", by far the most common, results in an incoherent presentation that leaves the listener to try to pick out the most important facts themselves; perhaps valid in some ways but for the most part that indicates failure on your part.
"Solution first" may seem more appealing then my formulation, but popping the climax right off the bat leaves the rest of the presentation an anti-climax. It's important to explain the problem, so as to motivate the listener to listen.
By the time you get to the solution, significant chunks of your audience should want to hear the solution.
Of course, this only really applies to presentations more then ten minutes or so; shorter then that and it doesn't much matter. That's also why this message is "solution first"... of course, it's also not a presentation, it's online writing, so newspaper rules are in effect, but it's also because you shouldn't need ten minutes to read this post.
Photons, more or less by definition, are always traveling at the speed of light and experience 0 time. You can't slow a photon below light speed.
The earlier "freezing" of a photon really wasn't, more of an imaging of the photon. The second photon produced in that experiment was identical at the quantum mechanical level so in a real way it was the same photon, but in terms of physical continuity there was a point where the photon ceased to be a photon, was "recorded", and was later "played back". At no time was it ever going slower then the speed of light.
The (most likely) goal of the apology is to quell criticism that might adversely affect the sales of their games, current and future.
If the apology does not accomplish that goal, perhaps they should now retract it. Use the resulting publicity to take a stand for free speech and gain some noteriety.
Just a thought. I haven't done a full analysis, I really can't without intimate knowledge about Rockstar etc., but it's worth thinking about. If the recipients aren't going to be gracious about it, perhaps it's time to stop bending over for them.
If you can call experiencing precisely zero time passage between the time of its creation and the time of its destruction "normal progression", sure. Even if it's never destroyed, it still experience zero time. To the extent that statement even makes sense.
It's true that 'time dilation' does not produce the sci-fi effect of "slowing things down" subjectively for the participants (although there's a great Stargate SG-1 episode on this subject!), when the thing in question gets all the way to "infinite dilation" the rules change a bit.
Slashdot Mirror
Looks like our legislative bodies need to go back to nursery school; too many laws they pass involve trying to bell the cat.
Seriously, why not just pass a law making crime illegal? Then all the police can just go home and we'll live in a wonderous utopia. Oh, you say we live in a world where people who are already criminals are, by definition, aren't obeying the law and it's that simple? Well, start walking the walk; you act like criminals will just bend over, but it's not the criminals who have to BOGU.
On the other hand it is not difficult to show that the last fifteen years have followed the course of the predictions of 15 years ago.... We already know with negligible remaining room for doubt that there is a human-caused warming and we expect larger human-caused changes in the future.
(Note I've reversed the order of the sentences in the original post.)
The problem I have with this logic is that it does not follow. There's only three basic predictions to make on climate issues right now, "It'll get warmer", "It'll get cooler", or "It'll stay the same". Since the smart money is not on the third outcome, you really have a 50-50 chance of being right on this issue by sheer luck.
(If you're claiming that somebody in 1988 predicted which parts of the world would warm up by how much with reasonable accuracy, please let me know... and show me the predictions.)
Now, I can say, "I have ten fingers, therefore the world will get warmer", but it doesn't mean that if the world get warmer, I can conclude that my reasoning was correct and my ten fingers made the world warmer. Remember that substitute nearly every argument made today about "warming" with "cooling" and it was made in the '70s... switching to the winning team without changing the underlying arguments has done nothing to make those arguments true or false.
The globe may be getting warmer, but the modelling and simulations to date still have enough trouble "predicting" the past; there's a distributed computing project you can donate your computer time to (although I don't recall if it's quite available yet) that has your computer run a model of the past 100 years and see which comes out the most accurate in the end. They're running this project because it's a real problem. If you have a really good working model, you can start to assign causes, but even then, it's still too soon for dogmatic statements about what is "causing" global warming.
As I like to say... of course we're impacting climate. It does not follow that we're "causing" warming (the increasing solar output is certainly a candidate for having a vastly greater impact then we could ever hope for!), nor does it follow that it is a disaster. (For every negative scenario of doom and disaster, there's another currently inhospitable part of the world that becomes more pleasent and fertile. Warming has to go a long way to render the entire globe inhosipitable... and the one sure thing is that change will happen. In fact it's happened just in my lifetime. Life has conspicuously failed to come to an end. No, that doesn't prove that disaster won't happen in the future, but vague, one-sided fortellings of disaster don't prove anything either.)
Right now, the evidence just isn't in place for much more then "the world is warming"... we don't even know what the effects of that will be, we have no proof or evidence that the world will continue to warm (my gut feeling based on looking at cycles of temperature, solar output, and some other things is that within ten years, it'll be cooling again and religious environmentalists will simultaneously declare their anti-warming policies a success despite continued lack of evidence in any direction, and resume screeching about the dangers of the next Ice Age if we don't reduce pollution and recycle more in a repeat of the 70's; you heard it here first, but of course this is just a gut feeling based on data, not a rigorous argument.), and I find it rather alarmist that everybody seems so willing to merely assume they will be unredeemably negative. Making claims like "We already know with negligible remaining room for doubt that there is a human-caused warming" is way, way too early. There's a hell of a lot of room for doubt in a field we know almost nothing about.
What do you mean, "single point of fact"? This article is an observation of a trend, a trend we all have the seen the data to.
.NET. (It's a warmed over implementation of a VM, but nowadays damn near everything is a warmed over implementation of something; it has enough interesting things in it to be considered a sort of innovation.)
You may agree or disagree, but we all have the facts from outside of this article. We don't need this article to notice that Microsoft is backing down on all fronts and that "dirty tricks" seems to be all they have left; on the technical front they've all but abadoned innovation, with the possible exception of
"Aglomeration of facts [sic]": In other words, the "culture" of the company. Of all the points made in this article I find this the most compelling. The current culture at Microsoft has made it what it is. It was magnificently adapted to the 80's and 90's, but it doesn't seem like it's going to be able to adapt to the Linux threat; all of its coping mechanisms are defunct, and it's too big for anyone to change.
My claim isn't that they will die, but they will become another IBM. (Although, IBM is a lot more diverse then Microsoft on the profit sheet...)
This seems like a fine time to mention Slow Sort, which makes bubble sort look downright efficient and clever. From this paper (PDF).
(The paper is fun if you know computer science, the c2.com link is in "normal English". Try the paper if you think you'd enjoy it; it has a dry wit and pursues its task of sorting as slowly as possible with great gusto.)
I wonder where the "line" between "internal" and "external" stops, eh? Suppose "my internet" was a private organization that you could join and particpate in. I wonder how trademark usage comes to bear in private communications between private individuals or companies.
;-)
This is a good question that nobody is addressing.
In that mindset, then, I knew we were "fucked" when, a few years ago, a simple piece of software that allowed users to make shared annotations on web sites (a piece of software that users consented to using by downloading and installing themselves) was held up as some kind of violation of intellectual property by content creators.
Serious question, is this a troll or a coincidence?
Anyways, it's not the same logic that says mix tapes are illegal or personal annotations are illegal, there are real differences, and IMHO, I think it's a bad sign that people still think the two are identical. You're welcome to your opinions on the validity of such software, of course, but your characterizations of my arguments as "the same argument that makes mix tapes illegal" is flatly wrong; I get to say what my arguments are
Who says I have to use "the" root DNS servers?
Shhhhh. Don't freak out the Senators.
Am I committing a crime in the United States if I put up a private network running TCP/IP, put up some DNS servers that are authoritative for "CartoonNetwork.com" and put up some web servers to host pornography for that domain name?
To the extent that an external, unconnected visitor might see this resolution of "CartoonNetwork.com", it probably would be a crime, but not really one of those new-fangled "internet crimes", it'd just be fraud and/or trademark violations.
If it's purely internal then I can't imagine what the crime would be.
Cooperation on the Internet works on the basis of social pressure, not on legislation. Legislation will only cause the Internet to fragment and "route around" the stupidity.
Only to the extent that the legislation permits. I can imagine laws that can not be "routed around" in any significant way; an extreme, but perfectly viable, option is to ban the Internet altogether, or just whitelist it at the transport level. This is damned hard to just "route around". Unfortunately, this logic promotes just sitting back and do nothing ("they will inevitably lose"), which is a Very Bad Idea, not least of which is that there is still a difference between "not losing" and "winning".
How about instead of patching the law with new special cases for electronic media, we recognize that the law is fundamentally broken and come up with coherent answers for the general case?
We've passed the point where the law can be patched back into usefulness; it's time to rethink on a more fundamental level.
In a similar vein, I would someday like to become a millionaire... in some currency or other. Just to be able to say, "Yes, I'm a millionaire."
(Might also be useful distraction if you get mugged by an idiot. "Why would you want these twenties when you can have these hundred thousands?")
People love learning instinctively; it is something that must be ground out of us with massive institutional schooling, and even then only partially successfully.
.0001% demographic slots with a television. (That's the fundamental problem; television can't do what they are asking it to do here.)
However, people don't all want to learn the same things, and where does "how to change a radiator" fit into a science format? It's learning, but many people don't consider it "learning" because they still have the blinders they picked up in school about what "learning" is. If it's not an academic subject, it isn't learning.
That said, have you looked over the courses offered at your local Major University? With the modern profusion of knowledge, and people's divergent interests, how can you possibly cover such a range?
This probably would have worked 80 years ago, when the domain of knowlege was smaller. Now people's interests have justifiably diverged and you can't knit a market out of five hundred
This leads to the illusion that everybody hates to learn, because there is so much knowledge in the world that whatever issue you choose as a touchstone, you can find lots of people who don't know it. "What do you mean you don't know what Bolshevism is?" But talk to those same people, and you'll find the majority of them know lots of stuff you don't. You may even find they consider you ignorant.
The kind of elitism presented in the parent message is not justified on the whole. Your view is skewed because you choose a very personal measure of what "learned" means. You have no choice in that issue since you are human, but you should not apply it universally. I find most people know things and learn things; those who truly refuse to learn anything exist, but they are rare.
(Parenthetical: That doesn't mean everybody does a good job of learning... but they usually try.)
"Untraditional moves?" Are there any even remotely plausible "untraditional moves" left to exploit in a fighting game? We long since left the realm of even faint plausibility, even in the hand-to-hand only sub-genre, and in this era of 20-30 fully realized characters with 100+ moves each in fighting games, what moves could be left?
"Use X, dragon-punch CCW, dragon-punch CW, circle circle square to deliver the dreader flower picking move! Your character will pick flowers and hand them to his opponent, whereupon the flowers will cause the opponent to swoon and loose half of their health."
And I'll lay money that if you substitute "health" for some sort of "love resistance", there's a Japanese game/"dating sim" that has done this. Seriously. (Except maybe the "half" bit.)
What's left?
To the moderator who modded my previous message as a troll: I envy your lack of exposure to loons who really believe various cosmic events that have happening millions of times signal the end of existance as we know it, but that's what we call a "satirization" of those loons. The first sentence, not to mention the second paragraph, should have been the giveaway. (Not to mention "something-or-other!".)
Please turn in your mod points at the nearest recycling facility.
Essentially, it might be possible, but I doubt it. Hell, these things are considerably shakier and less stable than a full-size helicopter (less weight == more maneuverable), and have considerably less endurance. You'd be far better off sticking a hulking great camera on a full-sized heli and putting a pilot in it. Admittedly though, that would defeat the point of the exercise...
Thanks, that's better.
For the record, I still see planes working better, even in many of the cited examples; even "inspecting a bridge" doesn't generally need hover capability, just snapshot capability, so it's a matter of pointing and clicking at the right time. There are a few places a helicopter can go a little plane can't... but if your space is that tight the helicopter probably can't safely go there anyhow, since a wind gust will send a blade into the bridge and goodbye UAV.
(OK, I don't fly helicopters and I admit I'm assuming helicopters can't afford to even lightly tap objects with their blades, but I feel like it's a pretty safe assumption.)
I honestly think that if they thought they could get away with it, they would have by now. Britain did, after all.
The urgency generated by 9/11 has faded, even though it left a fingerprint on our society that will remain for decades. Witness the increasing Congressional friction over the Patriot act, which expect will only get worse over the next couple of years, barring major terrorists attacks. I don't think Ashcroft has the clout to pass this, not to mention the economic impacts of doing that. (I know I'd stop using the Internet to buy things and recommend to everybody I know that they do as well, rather then my current opinion which is that it's largely safer then physical purchasing at the moment.)
Yes, I know this has happened millions upon millions of times before, but this time it's the END OF THE EARTH FOR SURE! Stock up on your survival gear! Soon the planet will be torn asunder by gravitational resonance and Planet X will eat up the remainder of our planet in a fiesta of electromagnetic quantum something-or-other!
What's different about this opposition? Why, that I'm aware of it of course!
BEWARE!
"Existing small helicopters are loud" does not directly imply "all small helicopters must be loud"; that's an unwarrented conclusion. If you dump more money into it I would expect you can nearly eliminate the engine noise. The R/C helicopter ethuisiast is not likely to want to pay what this would cost, though.
Same goes for the other characteristics you cite. Not all small helicopters necessarily must be shakey, nor does shakiness necessarily imply "useless for surveillance" (you can still take fast snapshots with expensive cameras (digital or analog), and with adequate computer assistance you may still get human-usable video; jitter correction technology has been in consumer-grade camcorders for a while).
"Low cost" is a relative term, after all; a surveillance grade helicopter would make your R/C helicopter look like a toy by cost comparision, and the pictures in the article certainly aren't it, but it might still be low cost as compared to human surveillance.
On the other hand, a certain amount of blade noise is unavoidable, but possibly controllable.
I'm not saying you're wrong, maybe it is impossible, I'm saying that the evidence you cited doesn't warrent the conclusions you make.
We need to educate them on the benefits of non-violent and non-coercive political debate and discourse, not open source software.
What do you think Open Source software is?
Think about it.
Well, I was going to trump you and link to that post through the !Sdrawkcab CGI that reverses webpages.
Remember that going around a true Moebius strip once results in an inversion.
Unfortunately, while I can find several links, they all go to "smeg.com" which appears to now belong to some Italian company, who probably acquired it via a trademark dispute.
Pity, it would have been funny. Clicking on my link again would have re-reversed the web pages...
You've been modded "funny" as I write this but really you have an interesting point.
The answer is that to date, all of our wheels have been spikey and sharp, tending to work poorly and often killing, crushing, and destorying things in its path, rather then working as designed.
My pet example of this is "Object Oriented Programming". I think OOP is a significant advance, but it took 20 years to start to get implementations of it that were really useful, in C++, in Python, in a couple of other languages. (I take a broad view here. C# probably qualifies, but I haven't used it. Perl does for wizards only; technically the capabilities exist but they're damned hard to really get right. Java is getting there but still borderline, unless you augment it with other tools. Most other implementations tend to hit complexity walls too early to be useful, such as pre-template C++.) Think "design patterns", and the subsequent work being done based on that.
Finding the best way to do one thing is easy. Finding the best way to do a million things is harder. Iterators or Observers? MVC or something else? Pervasive persistence or request only? (These are of course only sample questions, not meant to be answered or considered as exhaustive.) The only way to answer these questions on a large scale is to try them on a large scale. That takes time, and a lot of what seems like re-invention, as some new combination is tried out with a few subtly different answers from last time.
The sheer staggering multiplicity of answers on so many dimensions is really unprecendented in any other Engineering field, since they all tend to be able to use "physical locality" to isolate the complexities of their system. Consider the almost uniformity of mainstream CPU design, for instance; is it really so inconceivable that a little 'reinvention of the wheel', i.e., a complete re-thinking of PC architecture, isn't called for?
Right now, we really don't know as much as Language X bigots ("Language X is the one true way!") would have you think. There's still a lot of room for experimentation. And the only true way to experiment is by building a slightly different wheel, and seeing if it maims its users slightly less then before in a wide variety of situations.
In this sense, "software engineering" almost approaches a true experimental science, albeit with very engineering-oriented experiments.
Did a search on the titles and it seems nobody has yet pointed to Liquid War (at least not properly naming it in the title of their post). Winner of Most Unique/Original Game in the HappyPuppy 2002 awards. Simple, yet fun. Controls couldn't be any simpler and multiplayer action is reasonably well paced, not "frantic" (usually), yet not slow, either (again, usually).
Worth a try.
What crack are you smoking? The weapons inspections did fail, M(r/s). AC! The "inspections" were supposed to be validations that the weapons we all knew existed were destroyed with full Iraqi cooperation, something that only existed in leftie delusions. I guess we were just supposed to pretend that continuous stonewalling qualifies as full cooperation?
The continuous re-writing of history is just infuriating. The "left" is far, far more guilty of that then any of their "opponents". And again, this is why you find your opinions marginalized. You have to make up history to support your views.
Like I said, how dare he enforce the actual words of the resolution? (Why don't you go read them?)
He acted wrongly in not only going against the will of, but actively flipping off the United Nations,
I find it ironic that "actively flipping off the United Nations" consisted of "actually enforcing United Nation resolutions". God damn that unilateralist bastard, didn't he realize those were just for show?
With so many accusations like that transparently false, is it any wonder that you find your viewpoints marginalized?
(I suppose your "quick diplomatic solution" largely consists of Yet Another UN Resolution? Yes, those worked well...)
The most important presentation rule of all is that you must tell a story.
Your story does not have to be like a novel or anything, but you do want to co-opt the standard story order: Problem, elaboration, solution, resolution (effects of solution). This time-tested structure drives your presentation forward and makes people more likely to want to listen.
The two other presentation orders I see result in flawed presentations, regardless of the other qualities of the presentation. "Random facts in random order", by far the most common, results in an incoherent presentation that leaves the listener to try to pick out the most important facts themselves; perhaps valid in some ways but for the most part that indicates failure on your part.
"Solution first" may seem more appealing then my formulation, but popping the climax right off the bat leaves the rest of the presentation an anti-climax. It's important to explain the problem, so as to motivate the listener to listen.
By the time you get to the solution, significant chunks of your audience should want to hear the solution.
Of course, this only really applies to presentations more then ten minutes or so; shorter then that and it doesn't much matter. That's also why this message is "solution first"... of course, it's also not a presentation, it's online writing, so newspaper rules are in effect, but it's also because you shouldn't need ten minutes to read this post.
Photons, more or less by definition, are always traveling at the speed of light and experience 0 time. You can't slow a photon below light speed.
The earlier "freezing" of a photon really wasn't, more of an imaging of the photon. The second photon produced in that experiment was identical at the quantum mechanical level so in a real way it was the same photon, but in terms of physical continuity there was a point where the photon ceased to be a photon, was "recorded", and was later "played back". At no time was it ever going slower then the speed of light.
The (most likely) goal of the apology is to quell criticism that might adversely affect the sales of their games, current and future.
If the apology does not accomplish that goal, perhaps they should now retract it. Use the resulting publicity to take a stand for free speech and gain some noteriety.
Just a thought. I haven't done a full analysis, I really can't without intimate knowledge about Rockstar etc., but it's worth thinking about. If the recipients aren't going to be gracious about it, perhaps it's time to stop bending over for them.
it progresses noramlly for it, subjectively
If you can call experiencing precisely zero time passage between the time of its creation and the time of its destruction "normal progression", sure. Even if it's never destroyed, it still experience zero time. To the extent that statement even makes sense.
It's true that 'time dilation' does not produce the sci-fi effect of "slowing things down" subjectively for the participants (although there's a great Stargate SG-1 episode on this subject!), when the thing in question gets all the way to "infinite dilation" the rules change a bit.