Since NASA can't land jack shit on Mars these days, this must be a real kick in the groin to all the new-age, computer-assisted, high-salary engineers, seeing as a bunch of probably-dead guys with slide rules and electron lamps are still outdoing them. Ha ha. ----------
Write "I'm going to ass-ass-inate the president" on your ass (it'll take a fairly big ass, so you may have to ask someone else for a favour...) and lay on the roof of your house for a few hours, mooning the sky. You might want to do this at night so that your warm ass provides a nice contrast against the relatively cool roof and so that you offend fewer neighbours. Then see how long before the secret service shows up. If they don't, wait a month, then repeat. ----------
Some of my profs rant about FORTRAN and how glorious the 'good old days' were. I guess that's one way for a computer geek to date himself... ----------
I just looked inside my baby and found that the healthy green glow I've been seeing at night is indeed a giant 'shroom, and not an LED as I suspected. At least it's not as bad as the nasty mutating fungus that was devouring Mir and is probably starting to take a hold on the ISS. BTW, does anyone know if this stuff is actually dangerous to healthy people? ----------
I wonder how they market it... 10 days or it's free? Is there a disclaimer for weather related launch delays? If the rocket explodes after takeoff, will they send you a new pizza? These are all important questions that need to be addressed before orbital pizza becomes a reality... ----------
...if I stuck a lit stick of dynamite up my butt and called myself the space shuttle. I'd probably get hurt less too, as opposed to flying off this monster at the estimated 250mph... ----------
If this stuff's real, then it must be the remnants of NASA's failed attempt to keep up with the 40's and 50's predictions that we'll be living happily in space sometime by the mid 70's.
If, on the other hand, there are little green men on Mars, we'd hear from them by now. After all, they likely have a hefty fine waiting for the guys who keep smashing space probes into their planet.
Although things may not have been so in this instance, it is often the case that school officals don't know what to do or how to behave properly. This may be because they're assholes, or because they're stupid, or simply because they lack the experience. Without knowing exactly what the kid did, judging the harshness of the punishment is not possible. However, in my experience, the delivery of the bad news is often more significant than the punishment. If he was made to feel like a criminal as opposed to a kid that screwed up then I see how the school could be held at least partially responsible. After all, kids are kids; they're inexperienced and impressionable. That is why content is rated all over the world; kids lack the mental capacity and experience to properly judge the things they see and hear. ----------
If the law is copyrighted and it cannot be distributed freely, how the hell are we supposed to know about it?
"Sorry Officer, the part of the criminal code about DUI is copyrighted and, being a poor drunk, I can't afford to get access..."
That's an exaggeration, but the legal precedent this is setting is, well, stupid. ----------
This is one of the most ill-concieved political schemes I know of. It's all too well founded on the three principles of politics:
1) Ignorance: like most decision makers, those behind this solution have no expertise, desire to consult experts, or any intellect of any kind.
2) Speed: although it doesn't work in theory and is incredibly damaging in practice, this solution can be implemented quickly and easily.
3) Lack of responsibility: the solution is such as not to suggest that the established institutions or voting majorities are in any way responsible for anything to do with the problem.
WAVE is a political convenience that follows these rules and not a real soultion. I can't imagine any sociologist or psychologist worth the paper his/her diploma is printed on suggesting something this absurd and the intelligence of the politicians need not be debated. It's as easy to set up as any database and an 800-number, and places the blame for the problem and much of the responsibility for fixing it squarely on the kids themselves, absolving their parents and teachers of responsibility and making them all sleep better at night. It also makes the school a very unhealthy environment for children that's full of distrust. If I had kids and they were affected by this, I'd seriously consider leaving the state, or even the country.
Reading the other posts kind'a makes me want to read the list too...
Sadly, all I'm reading is a really long lsit of...
Internal Servlet Error:
javax.servlet.ServletException: JZ006: Caught IOException: java.io.IOException: Broken pipe
at...
at...
at...
at...
(it goes on for a while)
At least I'm not in space. If I was in space and saw this, I'd probably mess myself.
"Commander, er, the life support system threw an exception and crashed spectacularily. It says here we have a broken pipe..." ----------
Noooo! It's all ready too late! No one will see the damned webpage for the next ten thousand years - it's gone to slashdot hell...
The word of the day is mirror. Early and often. ----------
I remember the good old days when 3dfx was king. Half the 3D games were in both Glide and software, and the other hald were in Glide only. ATI was puffing along on the sidelines (much like it is now), NVIDIA was just starting out and my Diamond Monster 2 was the fastest thing in the world that a reasonable ammount of money could buy. Now it hasn't been even three years and 3dfx is gone. I don't know whether to blame NVIDIA's hardware supermacy or some really bad choices made by someone at 3dfx.
Actually, to be honest, I think 3dfx is as much to blame for its fall as is any competition they had. In my opinion, they made two major mistakes since then that led to where they are now;
1) Voodoo 3 - the bigger mistake of the two, I think, was the release of this video card. It was a faster, "AGP-enhanced" Voodoo 2 with a 2D renderer. While being nice and fast, the image quality hadn't improved much, it was 16bit only and there was nothing new to it what so ever. Meanwhile the TNT2 could do anything the Voodoo 2 could just as fast, but also had 32bit capability, better image quality and a whole bunch of new features. I'm sure the Voodoo 3 sold well since 3dfx was still a well-established company, but it was the begining of the end. Someone's poor market predicions (for what type of video card would be in demand) essentially doomed them.
2) The purchase of STB, which led to 3dfx ceasing to sell their technology to 3rd party manufacturers, served to further screw things up for them. The chip is only half the fun in a video card and having multiple manufacturers using the chip meant that it would appeal to a wider audience (because of the individual tweaks and addons from each manufacturer), and hence sell better. Alas, 3dfx was too good for that, and brand name 3rd party manufacturers had to default to NVIDIA, whether they wanted to or not.
Now the latest offerings from 3dfx come late, way after NVIDIA's geeforce (which is on something like a third or fourth version since initial release), and can barely compete. The only relatively new games that still use Glide are Ultima IX and Unreal Tournament (and its derivatives) and no OEMs that I've heard of put 3dfx cards into their computers. It's over, and 3dfx goes the way of the dinosaurs. It's kind-of sad...
Well, this knocks out NVIDIA's biggest competitor for the hard core gamer's dollar, even though 3dfx isn't what it used to be. That leaves who in the market? ATI, Matrox and S3 (now sonicube or some such thing), it would seem.
Now, ATI makes decent stuff, but I've never been very impressed with their hardware in terms of leading edge polygon spinning power. For Matrox, gaming video cards are a side thing, and they seemed pretty quiet since the G400 came out some time ago to compete with the TNT2. And finally S3, the bastards who bought Diamond and took them out of the video card business after a single, somewhat disappointing release using S3's not-so-hot chip (I really liked Diamond and the things they made; the 3dfx based Monster and the NVIDIA based Viper video cards, for instance) - they have the FireGL but I'm not sure how effective that will be at gaining any market share.
Since none of these seem like a serious threat to NVIDIA, it appears that we have a monopoly brewing. On one hand we might benefit, if this serves to reduce the speed with which they pump out new electronics. It would be nice, I think, if they stopped turning up the chip speed by 20MHz and releasing the new hardware while calling it the [Old Name] Ultra and charging $100 more. Maybe if there's no one to outrun, they'll have time to make some truly new product while the software catches up with the hardware they've already made. Then again, maybe this will kill research and innovation while driving prices through the roof. Who knows... ----------
It would be more fun to put the winner on a Titan rocket for a ride half-way around the globe in low orbit. The winner starts the trip from a secret location somewhere in the continental US and ends by free-falling smack into the middle of Kremlin an hour later. The expressions on the face of the guards alone would be well worth it, and it promotes nuclear disarmament, too.:D ----------
I wonder, just what is the Spanish equivalent of Intel, or the Russian equivalent of Unix? The thing is, a lot of the "polluting" tech words are names that only sound English because an English-speaking person came up with them. Half the other things are acronyms that 90% of the world doesn't know the proper meaning of so it only makes sense to say the letters as they appear in English. Even if you knew the meaning and translated the words back to your language, no one would know what the hell you're talking about. It would certainly be hard to associate it with what it originally represented.
Take GNU, for instance, and put it into French (it's easy enough so that even I can do it without offending the intelligence of every French person on the planet). What do we get? GNEPU? (GNEPU n'est pas Unix?) What the hell is GNEPU and who will figure out the fact that it's the same thing as GNU? If I'm in Germany and have GNU and you're in France and have GNEPU, do we have the same OS?
I say this problem is unaviodable. If people in different nations need to be able to talk to each other about technology (and run this Internet thingy, for instance), the names of things have to be common. Besides, in a hundred years, we'll all have a common languge; Anglomandarindian, and all this silliness will be behind us (except for Quebec, where the use of Anglomandarindian will be illegal and people will live in wooden shacks with no electricity).
However, until the glorious and all-powerful Anglomandarindian is common throughout the globe (Europe will first have to get over their inferior Geranglofrench), just stop bitching. If you invent something cool and name it in Spanish, I'll use the Spanish name and be happy to do so.
But it did affect the whole world. Maybe you should follow your own advice?
from article:
-----[
The cable cut had also affected Internet access in Japan, Indonesia, Hong Kong, UK and the USA, though its biggest impact was in South East Asia.
]-----
Some drunk, old and likely insane freighter captain decides to drop anchor 100 miles out to sea and accidentally kicks half the world in the nuts. I guess even the little people still have some power...:D ----------
-----[
"It would seem to be that certain individuals in Germany do have some problems with certain religions." (...)
Some Scientologists have accused Germany of displaying the religious intolerance of the Nazi regime in taking action against their organization.
]-----
Whoa! Someone here has some serious misconceptions! They make it sound like their on par with all the other worldly religions like Christianity, Islam and so on. Uh, oh, the grand religion of Scientology, its countelss deeply spiritual followers and its $5 million admission fee! Where do I sign up?
Also, while I'm sure that both German Scientologists feel very deprived and discriminated against at this very moment, that's a far cry from a Nazi regime. It's not like they lined them up against the wall and shot them or anything. It's just rich kids whining 'cause someone dared slap them on the wrist.
On a slightly (just slightly) less serious note, the only thing that separates Scientology from any other cult is the fact that they target the rich and [insert your own IQ-defining adjectives here] people. If they weren't so bloody rich, all that would remain of the Scientologists today would be a shot-up wooden shack in the middle of nowhere with "FBI wuz here" carved into the front door.
Answer from either candidate:
Well, being the rational person that I am, I will most certainly not make any tax cuts. It would be bad for the economy at this time and the money would be better spent on ten billion other things anyway, from building anti-asteroid nuclear missiles through imprisoning small-time drug users to protecting national security by holding encryption down and overthrowing Cuba. I will, however, being the good politician that I am, bounce the idea of cutting taxes around a lot 'cause poor folk think it'll help them and rich folk know it will... ----------
...is someone to register something like reallysucks.com and make a hosting service giving people virtual domain names. Then you'd end up with microsoft.reallysucks.com or guinness.reallysucks.com and so on, and the whole thing can't be broken up by WIPO (at least in theory). After all, reallysucks.com is used as a hosting service, potentially to generate money (adds/hosting fees/etc) and not for being malicious (or angry, or whatever upsets the lawmakers). As to the users' choice of handles, well, there are no laws against that yet. It's not perfect, but it's a suitable workaround. Now all we need is a sucker who'll do it... ----------
I doubt that the computer that will drive the car will actually be in the car. A computer powerful enough to do this today would need quite a large chunk of space for both itself and the small army of people that will be needed to do the voodoo dance around it to make it work. It would probably not even be next to the track but instead sitting somewhere dry and cold (Canada?;) and control the car by remote. Even if the computer could be made to fit, they probably wouldn't put it in the car anyway - what do you tell the press when your billion-dollar computer hits the wall on the first turn of its first run at 200mph and becomes one with the soil?
It's not really about beating the human opponent - it's about making a bigger, nastier computer. The human is just a benchmark, and not a very good one at that because we tent to be pretty inconsistent.
The Deep Blue-Kasparov fight was lost to begin with because Deep Blue could see a dozen or so moves ahead for any given board configuration, elimiate the ones that it was programmed to think unlikely and then pick the one that left it in the best situation given a set of rules. People don't do that, at least not on the scale that a computer can, not to mention the mistakes we make, so Kasparov was doomed to loose eventually, if not to Deep Blue then to Really Deep Blue. It was all about how quickly and how well the computer could "solve" the given board configuration.
This race is no different. It will be a lot more challenging because the inputs are infinitely more complex than in chess, and the proper course of action is sometimes not clearly defined, but it will just be a horribly complex formula of some sort that tells the car how fast to go. With other opponents on the track, the level of complexity goes up, but it's still just a formula.
What I'd like to see is Deep Blue explain why the chicken crossed the road or what's the ultimate question to the ultimate answer, or to just drink 4 pints of beer and try to pick up...
Slashdot Mirror
Since NASA can't land jack shit on Mars these days, this must be a real kick in the groin to all the new-age, computer-assisted, high-salary engineers, seeing as a bunch of probably-dead guys with slide rules and electron lamps are still outdoing them. Ha ha.
----------
Having shot the iceman, the archer then proclaimed: I own j00!
----------
Write "I'm going to ass-ass-inate the president" on your ass (it'll take a fairly big ass, so you may have to ask someone else for a favour...) and lay on the roof of your house for a few hours, mooning the sky. You might want to do this at night so that your warm ass provides a nice contrast against the relatively cool roof and so that you offend fewer neighbours. Then see how long before the secret service shows up. If they don't, wait a month, then repeat.
----------
Some of my profs rant about FORTRAN and how glorious the 'good old days' were. I guess that's one way for a computer geek to date himself...
----------
I just looked inside my baby and found that the healthy green glow I've been seeing at night is indeed a giant 'shroom, and not an LED as I suspected. At least it's not as bad as the nasty mutating fungus that was devouring Mir and is probably starting to take a hold on the ISS. BTW, does anyone know if this stuff is actually dangerous to healthy people?
----------
I wonder how they market it... 10 days or it's free? Is there a disclaimer for weather related launch delays? If the rocket explodes after takeoff, will they send you a new pizza? These are all important questions that need to be addressed before orbital pizza becomes a reality...
----------
...if I stuck a lit stick of dynamite up my butt and called myself the space shuttle. I'd probably get hurt less too, as opposed to flying off this monster at the estimated 250mph...
----------
I can smell the smell of progress. Weeee!
----------
If this stuff's real, then it must be the remnants of NASA's failed attempt to keep up with the 40's and 50's predictions that we'll be living happily in space sometime by the mid 70's.
If, on the other hand, there are little green men on Mars, we'd hear from them by now. After all, they likely have a hefty fine waiting for the guys who keep smashing space probes into their planet.
----------
Although things may not have been so in this instance, it is often the case that school officals don't know what to do or how to behave properly. This may be because they're assholes, or because they're stupid, or simply because they lack the experience.
Without knowing exactly what the kid did, judging the harshness of the punishment is not possible. However, in my experience, the delivery of the bad news is often more significant than the punishment. If he was made to feel like a criminal as opposed to a kid that screwed up then I see how the school could be held at least partially responsible. After all, kids are kids; they're inexperienced and impressionable. That is why content is rated all over the world; kids lack the mental capacity and experience to properly judge the things they see and hear.
----------
If the law is copyrighted and it cannot be distributed freely, how the hell are we supposed to know about it? "Sorry Officer, the part of the criminal code about DUI is copyrighted and, being a poor drunk, I can't afford to get access..." That's an exaggeration, but the legal precedent this is setting is, well, stupid.
----------
This is one of the most ill-concieved political schemes I know of. It's all too well founded on the three principles of politics:
1) Ignorance: like most decision makers, those behind this solution have no expertise, desire to consult experts, or any intellect of any kind.
2) Speed: although it doesn't work in theory and is incredibly damaging in practice, this solution can be implemented quickly and easily.
3) Lack of responsibility: the solution is such as not to suggest that the established institutions or voting majorities are in any way responsible for anything to do with the problem.
WAVE is a political convenience that follows these rules and not a real soultion. I can't imagine any sociologist or psychologist worth the paper his/her diploma is printed on suggesting something this absurd and the intelligence of the politicians need not be debated. It's as easy to set up as any database and an 800-number, and places the blame for the problem and much of the responsibility for fixing it squarely on the kids themselves, absolving their parents and teachers of responsibility and making them all sleep better at night. It also makes the school a very unhealthy environment for children that's full of distrust. If I had kids and they were affected by this, I'd seriously consider leaving the state, or even the country.
----------
Reading the other posts kind'a makes me want to read the list too...
Sadly, all I'm reading is a really long lsit of...
Internal Servlet Error:
javax.servlet.ServletException: JZ006: Caught IOException: java.io.IOException: Broken pipe
at...
at...
at...
at...
(it goes on for a while)
At least I'm not in space. If I was in space and saw this, I'd probably mess myself.
"Commander, er, the life support system threw an exception and crashed spectacularily. It says here we have a broken pipe..."
----------
Noooo! It's all ready too late! No one will see the damned webpage for the next ten thousand years - it's gone to slashdot hell...
The word of the day is mirror. Early and often.
----------
I remember the good old days when 3dfx was king. Half the 3D games were in both Glide and software, and the other hald were in Glide only. ATI was puffing along on the sidelines (much like it is now), NVIDIA was just starting out and my Diamond Monster 2 was the fastest thing in the world that a reasonable ammount of money could buy. Now it hasn't been even three years and 3dfx is gone. I don't know whether to blame NVIDIA's hardware supermacy or some really bad choices made by someone at 3dfx.
Actually, to be honest, I think 3dfx is as much to blame for its fall as is any competition they had. In my opinion, they made two major mistakes since then that led to where they are now;
1) Voodoo 3 - the bigger mistake of the two, I think, was the release of this video card. It was a faster, "AGP-enhanced" Voodoo 2 with a 2D renderer. While being nice and fast, the image quality hadn't improved much, it was 16bit only and there was nothing new to it what so ever. Meanwhile the TNT2 could do anything the Voodoo 2 could just as fast, but also had 32bit capability, better image quality and a whole bunch of new features.
I'm sure the Voodoo 3 sold well since 3dfx was still a well-established company, but it was the begining of the end. Someone's poor market predicions (for what type of video card would be in demand) essentially doomed them.
2) The purchase of STB, which led to 3dfx ceasing to sell their technology to 3rd party manufacturers, served to further screw things up for them. The chip is only half the fun in a video card and having multiple manufacturers using the chip meant that it would appeal to a wider audience (because of the individual tweaks and addons from each manufacturer), and hence sell better. Alas, 3dfx was too good for that, and brand name 3rd party manufacturers had to default to NVIDIA, whether they wanted to or not.
Now the latest offerings from 3dfx come late, way after NVIDIA's geeforce (which is on something like a third or fourth version since initial release), and can barely compete. The only relatively new games that still use Glide are Ultima IX and Unreal Tournament (and its derivatives) and no OEMs that I've heard of put 3dfx cards into their computers. It's over, and 3dfx goes the way of the dinosaurs. It's kind-of sad...
----------
Well, this knocks out NVIDIA's biggest competitor for the hard core gamer's dollar, even though 3dfx isn't what it used to be. That leaves who in the market? ATI, Matrox and S3 (now sonicube or some such thing), it would seem.
Now, ATI makes decent stuff, but I've never been very impressed with their hardware in terms of leading edge polygon spinning power. For Matrox, gaming video cards are a side thing, and they seemed pretty quiet since the G400 came out some time ago to compete with the TNT2. And finally S3, the bastards who bought Diamond and took them out of the video card business after a single, somewhat disappointing release using S3's not-so-hot chip (I really liked Diamond and the things they made; the 3dfx based Monster and the NVIDIA based Viper video cards, for instance) - they have the FireGL but I'm not sure how effective that will be at gaining any market share.
Since none of these seem like a serious threat to NVIDIA, it appears that we have a monopoly brewing. On one hand we might benefit, if this serves to reduce the speed with which they pump out new electronics. It would be nice, I think, if they stopped turning up the chip speed by 20MHz and releasing the new hardware while calling it the [Old Name] Ultra and charging $100 more. Maybe if there's no one to outrun, they'll have time to make some truly new product while the software catches up with the hardware they've already made. Then again, maybe this will kill research and innovation while driving prices through the roof. Who knows...
----------
It would be more fun to put the winner on a Titan rocket for a ride half-way around the globe in low orbit. The winner starts the trip from a secret location somewhere in the continental US and ends by free-falling smack into the middle of Kremlin an hour later. The expressions on the face of the guards alone would be well worth it, and it promotes nuclear disarmament, too. :D
----------
I wonder, just what is the Spanish equivalent of Intel, or the Russian equivalent of Unix? The thing is, a lot of the "polluting" tech words are names that only sound English because an English-speaking person came up with them. Half the other things are acronyms that 90% of the world doesn't know the proper meaning of so it only makes sense to say the letters as they appear in English. Even if you knew the meaning and translated the words back to your language, no one would know what the hell you're talking about. It would certainly be hard to associate it with what it originally represented.
Take GNU, for instance, and put it into French (it's easy enough so that even I can do it without offending the intelligence of every French person on the planet). What do we get? GNEPU? (GNEPU n'est pas Unix?) What the hell is GNEPU and who will figure out the fact that it's the same thing as GNU? If I'm in Germany and have GNU and you're in France and have GNEPU, do we have the same OS?
I say this problem is unaviodable. If people in different nations need to be able to talk to each other about technology (and run this Internet thingy, for instance), the names of things have to be common. Besides, in a hundred years, we'll all have a common languge; Anglomandarindian, and all this silliness will be behind us (except for Quebec, where the use of Anglomandarindian will be illegal and people will live in wooden shacks with no electricity).
However, until the glorious and all-powerful Anglomandarindian is common throughout the globe (Europe will first have to get over their inferior Geranglofrench), just stop bitching. If you invent something cool and name it in Spanish, I'll use the Spanish name and be happy to do so.
----------
But it did affect the whole world. Maybe you should follow your own advice?
from article:
-----[
The cable cut had also affected Internet access in Japan, Indonesia, Hong Kong, UK and the USA, though its biggest impact was in South East Asia.
]-----
----------
Some drunk, old and likely insane freighter captain decides to drop anchor 100 miles out to sea and accidentally kicks half the world in the nuts. I guess even the little people still have some power... :D
----------
-----[
"It would seem to be that certain individuals in Germany do have some problems with certain religions."
(...)
Some Scientologists have accused Germany of displaying the religious intolerance of the Nazi regime in taking action against their organization.
]-----
Whoa! Someone here has some serious misconceptions! They make it sound like their on par with all the other worldly religions like Christianity, Islam and so on. Uh, oh, the grand religion of Scientology, its countelss deeply spiritual followers and its $5 million admission fee! Where do I sign up?
Also, while I'm sure that both German Scientologists feel very deprived and discriminated against at this very moment, that's a far cry from a Nazi regime. It's not like they lined them up against the wall and shot them or anything. It's just rich kids whining 'cause someone dared slap them on the wrist.
On a slightly (just slightly) less serious note, the only thing that separates Scientology from any other cult is the fact that they target the rich and [insert your own IQ-defining adjectives here] people. If they weren't so bloody rich, all that would remain of the Scientologists today would be a shot-up wooden shack in the middle of nowhere with "FBI wuz here" carved into the front door.
Have you hugged a Scientologist today?
----------
Answer from either candidate:
Well, being the rational person that I am, I will most certainly not make any tax cuts. It would be bad for the economy at this time and the money would be better spent on ten billion other things anyway, from building anti-asteroid nuclear missiles through imprisoning small-time drug users to protecting national security by holding encryption down and overthrowing Cuba. I will, however, being the good politician that I am, bounce the idea of cutting taxes around a lot 'cause poor folk think it'll help them and rich folk know it will...
----------
...is someone to register something like reallysucks.com and make a hosting service giving people virtual domain names. Then you'd end up with microsoft.reallysucks.com or guinness.reallysucks.com and so on, and the whole thing can't be broken up by WIPO (at least in theory). After all, reallysucks.com is used as a hosting service, potentially to generate money (adds/hosting fees/etc) and not for being malicious (or angry, or whatever upsets the lawmakers). As to the users' choice of handles, well, there are no laws against that yet. It's not perfect, but it's a suitable workaround. Now all we need is a sucker who'll do it...
----------
I doubt that the computer that will drive the car will actually be in the car. A computer powerful enough to do this today would need quite a large chunk of space for both itself and the small army of people that will be needed to do the voodoo dance around it to make it work. It would probably not even be next to the track but instead sitting somewhere dry and cold (Canada? ;) and control the car by remote. Even if the computer could be made to fit, they probably wouldn't put it in the car anyway - what do you tell the press when your billion-dollar computer hits the wall on the first turn of its first run at 200mph and becomes one with the soil?
----------
It's not really about beating the human opponent - it's about making a bigger, nastier computer. The human is just a benchmark, and not a very good one at that because we tent to be pretty inconsistent.
The Deep Blue-Kasparov fight was lost to begin with because Deep Blue could see a dozen or so moves ahead for any given board configuration, elimiate the ones that it was programmed to think unlikely and then pick the one that left it in the best situation given a set of rules. People don't do that, at least not on the scale that a computer can, not to mention the mistakes we make, so Kasparov was doomed to loose eventually, if not to Deep Blue then to Really Deep Blue. It was all about how quickly and how well the computer could "solve" the given board configuration.
This race is no different. It will be a lot more challenging because the inputs are infinitely more complex than in chess, and the proper course of action is sometimes not clearly defined, but it will just be a horribly complex formula of some sort that tells the car how fast to go. With other opponents on the track, the level of complexity goes up, but it's still just a formula.
Me.Speed = NewSpeed ( frTireTemp(), flTireTemp(), rrTireTemp(), rlTireTemp(), frTirePSI(),... )
What I'd like to see is Deep Blue explain why the chicken crossed the road or what's the ultimate question to the ultimate answer, or to just drink 4 pints of beer and try to pick up...
----------