Anyone thinking of investing the time in WoT, put it into some other long books instead. I know tons of people afraid to touch War and Peace because it's "too long", but who happily read Jordan's endless saga. If you [the submitter of the question] are one of them, do yourself a favour and read Tolstoy instead.
The way the problem is worded, it's impossible to come up with an expected number of days.
To quote, "Each day one prisoner is chosen at random[...]" If the same prisoner happened to be chosen at random EVERY TIME then the prisoners would never be released. Now, the odds of that happening to infinity are 0, but there is a chance that it could happen until the maximum age of the prisoners. It's even more likely that every prisoner gets randomly selected except for one, until they all die.
To make it possible, we have to assume that each prisoner will only be picked again after every other prisoner has. Perhaps we just shuffle the prisoners into a random order, and loop it. But then the prisoner can just wait until selected again, and then he'll know. Unless we assume that they're all selected before looping back, but that the prisoners don't know that.
Is that last condition necessary for solving the problem without making it trivial, or did I make a mistake somewhere?
I DO get a kick seeing all of the drones "needing" their coffee in the morning - people don't realize they are hooked on the caffine. More addictive than crack!
Hah. Some of use are quite aware we're hooked on the caffine. In fact, I imagine that most coffee addicts are also aware of that.
And drones? Just because you don't share a vice, try not to be all high-and-mighty on those who do.
I was testing an old PS/2 machine once to see if it worked, and I was being rather rude to it - yanking out the power cable as it booted, things like that. In any case, after several boots, it just came up with the strangest message.
It had the word "OK" in the "no" symbol (like no smoking signs, the circle with the line through it) followed by "+ 234123 = IBM". That's it. Wouldn't boot past there. Eventually I rebooted it and it booted perfectly - nothing I did would recreate the error. Sadly, I rebooted it before I thought of getting a picture....
Grin. So are you the exception that proves the rule, or are you the counter-example that discredits it?
Why do men want to be Lara Croft? Why do men playing online games play female characters? I dunno. I neither play Tomb Raider or female characters, I couldn't tell you.
I do know a bunch of role-players (d&d, etc) and I've been told a good roleplayer will play the opposite sex for the challenge and fun. Maybe it's linked to that, I have no idea.
Thanks for the reply. I think my comment suffered from being posted at 5am too:)
"caretaking leads to having estrogen." That is rather interesting. It would almost be valid to say that for men, "acting like a woman" actually DOES make them more womanly. Hah, just wait for laws to be passed in Texas agains men raising their children. Jests aside, although indicative of a relation between environment and hormones, I'm not sure that concluding there are no biological differences between men and women follows.
"Estrogen production is an ongoing process, not something determined at birth" I'll accept that you've demonstrated that above. However, during the development of the brain and associated personality traits (formative stage?), are the hormones environmentally induced? That is, in infants and young children is hormone production either the same in box sexes or mostly a product of environment?
"I said I didn't play FPSes, and stated why, as an illustration. I doubt that applies to all women" Well, I won't lie to you. I was aware that it was 'I' rather than 'women' when I made that statement, but in my defence I did so because it seemed that you were using yourself as an example and maybe hinting we should extrapolate from that.
"it is hard to avoid making generalizations; it's hard to make even a positive point about sex or gender without making them" That's the difficulty with this sort of discussion. On one level you're confronting one set of generalizations, unfortunately the end result is more generalizations. The thing is that generalizations aren't necessarily a bad thing. So while it's bad to overgeneralize, an accurate and open generalization has its place.
"I'm not saying differences aren't there; my difference is that I don't attribute them to biology." The question is, how does that apply to the debate about women gamers? For instance, suppose that genetically (or whatever), 90% of women don't find the current set of games attractive. Now imagine that because of the environment (mostly a result of our culture, I imagine) 90% of women don't find the current set of games attractive. In either case, we're left with a dearth of women gamers, and so a lack of women testers too. Thinking about it, supposing you were correct and it is mostly environmental - then in the future things could change. It is a much more optimistic viewpoint in that respect - maybe a couple of generations from now, as men and women act more equal, children will be brought up in a less "boys get blue, girls get pink" sort of way, and the playing field will be leveled.
"More importanly, what I'm saying is that it's dehumanizing to turn individual women into tokens of a type "woman" without regard to their individual interests." That is dehumanizing. On the other hand, it's wrong to take a generalization about a group to imply it's true about that whole group. It's _generally_ true, but not in every individual case. For instance, "women have breasts" is a generalization. That doesn't mean that I expect that 100% of women have breasts (although studying math myself, I suppose it does mean exactly that in a formal interpretation). Whether it's the person making the generalization, or the person interpreting it, it's important to remember that generalizations are only that.
I think you make an good argument, but I have a couple of responses.
You state "Take it from someone who has studied a good deal of evolutionary psych; there is not a whole lot of evidence that there are personality differences between men and women which cannot be accounted for by environment." Whether or not this is the case, it does nothing to invalidate "women don't think like us[...]" You effectively agree with this statement when you blame environment rather than biology. Also, I have some interest in psych and one of my roommates is huge on it. If you could describe or reference any of those studies, I'd be very interested in reading them and showing my roommate.
If you don't believe me, say to yourself, "Women don't like video games because they have vaginas" and realize how ridiculous that sounds. How about, "women don't like video games because they have different ratios of hormones which affect their temperments and development than guys do?"
I don't know where you're looking if you can't find female gamers. Did you see the poll recently that/. did about gender? It shows a 5% female readership of slashdot. I realize that's not necessarily related to gamers, but still, if _the_ geek hangout on the web is 5% female, you have to see that it's probably hard to find girl gamers.
many women gamers have distinguishing taste in games So we've gone from "Please think before you make generalizations about what women like and don't like" to assuming that all women have good taste in games and "don't tend to play many FPSes"?
games that have been well-crafted (hence the Morrowind obsession) to suck you into the experience (so much for the "theory" posited above that women don't like to enter into the world of the game). I'm not sure if this refutes the theory. It could be interpreted as supporting that theory - many people have argued that women enjoy watching the story, I've seen several comments from women who "can't wait to get to the next little bit of plot information or character interaction" [see here]. Is this a case of being _in_ the game, or watching the story unfold?
Hahahaha. Yeah, right. Remember back in the day before there really were ads for games? The market was still _mostly_ guys. There were gals (hell, most of the good mario 3 players I know are female), but typically hardcore gamers were male. It just seems to be the way things are.
Try getting IE to render a 30 meg HTML file. It takes more than 10 minutes on my 433, and over 800 megs of RAM. Now, I never tried it in Moz or Operah, but if they can do it faster...
Hah, and in IE, don't even think about scrolling too fast, or doing anything at all - it has no qualms reloading the whole damn thing.
I think your message was in fact correct. All the engineering students I know are big big drunks. Some of them didn't work so hard, and now are just drunks but not engineers, but a lot work hard and drink hard. Since they work so hard, it is almost like they need the respite, and so they drink:).
Just letting you know you're not coming out of left field with that observation.
Premarital sex was not invented in the 1960s, and has in fact been around ever since just before the first marriage.
Do I even have to say it? Take your pick:
All sex before the first marriage was premarital sex. [This was the obvious one]
Since there was was no marriage, there could be no such thing as premarital sex - there was only sex. Thus, no one had premarital sex before the first marriage.
Geeky aside from (2):
If the first two people to get married had sex before their marriage, then the first premarital sex actually occured at the moment of the first marrage. Since premarital sex didn't exist until the first marriage, they would just have been having sex; however, the moment they wed, that sex would be retroactively defined as premarital sex. So, the first premarital sex occured at the time of the first wedding.
Maybe he's making reference to all the "hackers" that have been thrown in jail without being charged with anything. Same with the all the "terrrorists" that are undergoing the same thing right now. It's funny that it's OK to throw someone in jail for 3 years for logging into a system they're not supposed to, but actually breaking federal law and committing fraud results in nothing. As soon as the criminal has money, due process is suddenly observed. Capitalism buying justice, who would have seen that coming.
Actually, now that I reread my post, you're right, it's not fair use. Luckily enough, that doesn't matter, since this isn't even a question of copyright law. Am I creating illegal copies of copyrighted materials? no. So, it's not fair use, since it's not even a copyright violation to begin with.
And thankfully enough, I'm Canadian, not American. Although we've been booted down to 3rd place on the UN "good places" list, we don't have our DMCA (yet).
Why is that not fair use? What law are you breaking playing an import? Can you imagine congress (or parliment in CA) trying to pass that law?
Making it illegal to play imports. hah. "You bought that book in FRANCE!? Let me see that. Did you get permission from Pendant Publishing in Washington to read that? You just STOLE FROM THEM!" Yeah, right.
You totally do NOT agree to that. My brother just bought a gamecube. He gave the store X dollars, they gave him a system. Pure sale. No license, nothing. It's his. If he wants to convert it into a fancy disco ball, that's his call. If he wants to rewire it so that the cds spin the wrong way, or fast enough to explode, his call.
Who cares what sony says about modifications. If the guy who sells me a car says "Installing new air filters is illegal" I'm going to tell him to suck it long, and suck it hard. Once they've sold you the device, they have no say in what you do with it. Can you imagine the outrage if Ford tried to shut down 'unauthorized' mechanics? "He put a performance clutch on the engine, which is clearly unauthorized mechanics." Bull shit.
Ok, the thing I don't get about this thread, every seems to accept the assumption that the USA actually has 'aved the world' several times, and that no other nation has ever done so.
When did the USA save the world? The -one- time that I can think of is getting the nukes faster than Germany, and I'm not sure I'd consider opening that can of worms 'saving the world.'
Seriously though. How often has the world been at serious risk? The cold war? The US didn't save the world there, they put it at risk. WW1? WW2? <sarcasm>Because US soldiers were the only ones in those wars.</sarcasm>
While I agree with you that I wouldn't recommend ATI to someone looking for a hardcore performance card, well, or a performance card at all, I have to disagree with you on your second point in (2).
I seem to recall reading many an article on how much better ATI's programmable GPUs are. Something to do with the NVidia cards only allowing like 8 operatations in the vertex shaders, whereas ati cardds allow much more freedom.
I can't remember any specific links, but if you really want I'll look into it. If I'm mistaken, let me know, I'm curious as to how the hardware stands these days. Those benchmarks were just painful to look at though, I have an AIW Radeon, and ouch.
I wish there was a "good reference" mod, because if there was, i'd toss it your way. That was quite the ST episode. I remember how they had to report to the disrupter chambers if they were calculated to be casulties. it was weird but quite interesting.
Slashdot Mirror
You beat me to it.
Anyone thinking of investing the time in WoT, put it into some other long books instead. I know tons of people afraid to touch War and Peace because it's "too long", but who happily read Jordan's endless saga. If you [the submitter of the question] are one of them, do yourself a favour and read Tolstoy instead.
Where in Toronto is this theatre? Sounds like I may want to give it a shot some time.
The way the problem is worded, it's impossible to come up with an expected number of days.
To quote, "Each day one prisoner is chosen at random [...]"
If the same prisoner happened to be chosen at random EVERY TIME then the prisoners would never be released. Now, the odds of that happening to infinity are 0, but there is a chance that it could happen until the maximum age of the prisoners. It's even more likely that every prisoner gets randomly selected except for one, until they all die.
To make it possible, we have to assume that each prisoner will only be picked again after every other prisoner has. Perhaps we just shuffle the prisoners into a random order, and loop it. But then the prisoner can just wait until selected again, and then he'll know. Unless we assume that they're all selected before looping back, but that the prisoners don't know that.
Is that last condition necessary for solving the problem without making it trivial, or did I make a mistake somewhere?
Including phone books?
Hah. Some of use are quite aware we're hooked on the caffine. In fact, I imagine that most coffee addicts are also aware of that.
And drones? Just because you don't share a vice, try not to be all high-and-mighty on those who do.
I was testing an old PS/2 machine once to see if it worked, and I was being rather rude to it - yanking out the power cable as it booted, things like that. In any case, after several boots, it just came up with the strangest message.
It had the word "OK" in the "no" symbol (like no smoking signs, the circle with the line through it) followed by "+ 234123 = IBM". That's it. Wouldn't boot past there. Eventually I rebooted it and it booted perfectly - nothing I did would recreate the error. Sadly, I rebooted it before I thought of getting a picture....
Grin. So are you the exception that proves the rule, or are you the counter-example that discredits it?
Why do men want to be Lara Croft?
Why do men playing online games play female characters? I dunno. I neither play Tomb Raider or female characters, I couldn't tell you.
I do know a bunch of role-players (d&d, etc) and I've been told a good roleplayer will play the opposite sex for the challenge and fun. Maybe it's linked to that, I have no idea.
Thanks for the reply. I think my comment suffered from being posted at 5am too :)
:)
"caretaking leads to having estrogen."
That is rather interesting. It would almost be valid to say that for men, "acting like a woman" actually DOES make them more womanly. Hah, just wait for laws to be passed in Texas agains men raising their children. Jests aside, although indicative of a relation between environment and hormones, I'm not sure that concluding there are no biological differences between men and women follows.
"Estrogen production is an ongoing process, not something determined at birth"
I'll accept that you've demonstrated that above. However, during the development of the brain and associated personality traits (formative stage?), are the hormones environmentally induced? That is, in infants and young children is hormone production either the same in box sexes or mostly a product of environment?
"I said I didn't play FPSes, and stated why, as an illustration. I doubt that applies to all women"
Well, I won't lie to you. I was aware that it was 'I' rather than 'women' when I made that statement, but in my defence I did so because it seemed that you were using yourself as an example and maybe hinting we should extrapolate from that.
"it is hard to avoid making generalizations; it's hard to make even a positive point about sex or gender without making them"
That's the difficulty with this sort of discussion. On one level you're confronting one set of generalizations, unfortunately the end result is more generalizations. The thing is that generalizations aren't necessarily a bad thing. So while it's bad to overgeneralize, an accurate and open generalization has its place.
"I'm not saying differences aren't there; my difference is that I don't attribute them to biology."
The question is, how does that apply to the debate about women gamers? For instance, suppose that genetically (or whatever), 90% of women don't find the current set of games attractive. Now imagine that because of the environment (mostly a result of our culture, I imagine) 90% of women don't find the current set of games attractive. In either case, we're left with a dearth of women gamers, and so a lack of women testers too.
Thinking about it, supposing you were correct and it is mostly environmental - then in the future things could change. It is a much more optimistic viewpoint in that respect - maybe a couple of generations from now, as men and women act more equal, children will be brought up in a less "boys get blue, girls get pink" sort of way, and the playing field will be leveled.
"More importanly, what I'm saying is that it's dehumanizing to turn individual women into tokens of a type "woman" without regard to their individual interests."
That is dehumanizing. On the other hand, it's wrong to take a generalization about a group to imply it's true about that whole group. It's _generally_ true, but not in every individual case. For instance, "women have breasts" is a generalization. That doesn't mean that I expect that 100% of women have breasts (although studying math myself, I suppose it does mean exactly that in a formal interpretation). Whether it's the person making the generalization, or the person interpreting it, it's important to remember that generalizations are only that.
Look at this! Real discussion on slashdot
I think you make an good argument, but I have a couple of responses.
/. did about gender? It shows a 5% female readership of slashdot. I realize that's not necessarily related to gamers, but still, if _the_ geek hangout on the web is 5% female, you have to see that it's probably hard to find girl gamers.
You state "Take it from someone who has studied a good deal of evolutionary psych; there is not a whole lot of evidence that there are personality differences between men and women which cannot be accounted for by environment."
Whether or not this is the case, it does nothing to invalidate "women don't think like us[...]" You effectively agree with this statement when you blame environment rather than biology. Also, I have some interest in psych and one of my roommates is huge on it. If you could describe or reference any of those studies, I'd be very interested in reading them and showing my roommate.
If you don't believe me, say to yourself, "Women don't like video games because they have vaginas" and realize how ridiculous that sounds.
How about, "women don't like video games because they have different ratios of hormones which affect their temperments and development than guys do?"
I don't know where you're looking if you can't find female gamers.
Did you see the poll recently that
many women gamers have distinguishing taste in games
So we've gone from "Please think before you make generalizations about what women like and don't like" to assuming that all women have good taste in games and "don't tend to play many FPSes"?
games that have been well-crafted (hence the Morrowind obsession) to suck you into the experience (so much for the "theory" posited above that women don't like to enter into the world of the game).
I'm not sure if this refutes the theory. It could be interpreted as supporting that theory - many people have argued that women enjoy watching the story, I've seen several comments from women who "can't wait to get to the next little bit of plot information or character interaction" [see here]. Is this a case of being _in_ the game, or watching the story unfold?
Hahahaha. Yeah, right.
Remember back in the day before there really were ads for games? The market was still _mostly_ guys. There were gals (hell, most of the good mario 3 players I know are female), but typically hardcore gamers were male. It just seems to be the way things are.
Try getting IE to render a 30 meg HTML file. It takes more than 10 minutes on my 433, and over 800 megs of RAM. Now, I never tried it in Moz or Operah, but if they can do it faster...
Hah, and in IE, don't even think about scrolling too fast, or doing anything at all - it has no qualms reloading the whole damn thing.
I think your message was in fact correct. All the engineering students I know are big big drunks. Some of them didn't work so hard, and now are just drunks but not engineers, but a lot work hard and drink hard. Since they work so hard, it is almost like they need the respite, and so they drink :).
Just letting you know you're not coming out of left field with that observation.
Do I even have to say it? Take your pick:
Geeky aside from (2):
If the first two people to get married had sex before their marriage, then the first premarital sex actually occured at the moment of the first marrage. Since premarital sex didn't exist until the first marriage, they would just have been having sex; however, the moment they wed, that sex would be retroactively defined as premarital sex. So, the first premarital sex occured at the time of the first wedding.
Maybe he's making reference to all the "hackers" that have been thrown in jail without being charged with anything. Same with the all the "terrrorists" that are undergoing the same thing right now. It's funny that it's OK to throw someone in jail for 3 years for logging into a system they're not supposed to, but actually breaking federal law and committing fraud results in nothing.
As soon as the criminal has money, due process is suddenly observed. Capitalism buying justice, who would have seen that coming.
I've heard of this type of thing before. Hrm, what did they call it?... oh yeah, the Internet.
Well, I guess that's not entirely true, but the www is effectively a P2P file-trading network.
Actually, now that I reread my post, you're right, it's not fair use. Luckily enough, that doesn't matter, since this isn't even a question of copyright law. Am I creating illegal copies of copyrighted materials? no. So, it's not fair use, since it's not even a copyright violation to begin with.
And thankfully enough, I'm Canadian, not American. Although we've been booted down to 3rd place on the UN "good places" list, we don't have our DMCA (yet).
I'm under the impression that most stores that sell pirated games fudge their numbers a bit. It's the whole "cash==no tax" thing.
Why is that not fair use? What law are you breaking playing an import? Can you imagine congress (or parliment in CA) trying to pass that law?
Making it illegal to play imports. hah. "You bought that book in FRANCE!? Let me see that. Did you get permission from Pendant Publishing in Washington to read that? You just STOLE FROM THEM!" Yeah, right.
You totally do NOT agree to that. My brother just bought a gamecube. He gave the store X dollars, they gave him a system. Pure sale. No license, nothing. It's his. If he wants to convert it into a fancy disco ball, that's his call. If he wants to rewire it so that the cds spin the wrong way, or fast enough to explode, his call.
As far as I know, Canada's DMCA-style modifications are still in the formation stage, and we have no such thing (yet?).
Hell, Canada is the nation of 'gray' market satalite. Although they _did_ pass laws about that.
Who cares what sony says about modifications. If the guy who sells me a car says "Installing new air filters is illegal" I'm going to tell him to suck it long, and suck it hard. Once they've sold you the device, they have no say in what you do with it. Can you imagine the outrage if Ford tried to shut down 'unauthorized' mechanics? "He put a performance clutch on the engine, which is clearly unauthorized mechanics." Bull shit.
Ok, the thing I don't get about this thread, every seems to accept the assumption that the USA actually has 'aved the world' several times, and that no other nation has ever done so.
When did the USA save the world? The -one- time that I can think of is getting the nukes faster than Germany, and I'm not sure I'd consider opening that can of worms 'saving the world.'
Seriously though. How often has the world been at serious risk? The cold war? The US didn't save the world there, they put it at risk. WW1? WW2? <sarcasm>Because US soldiers were the only ones in those wars.</sarcasm>
Yeash.
stupid slashcode not allowing empty message bodies. oh well.
don't ya hate pants?
While I agree with you that I wouldn't recommend ATI to someone looking for a hardcore performance card, well, or a performance card at all, I have to disagree with you on your second point in (2).
I seem to recall reading many an article on how much better ATI's programmable GPUs are. Something to do with the NVidia cards only allowing like 8 operatations in the vertex shaders, whereas ati cardds allow much more freedom.
I can't remember any specific links, but if you really want I'll look into it. If I'm mistaken, let me know, I'm curious as to how the hardware stands these days. Those benchmarks were just painful to look at though, I have an AIW Radeon, and ouch.
I wish there was a "good reference" mod, because if there was, i'd toss it your way. That was quite the ST episode.
I remember how they had to report to the disrupter chambers if they were calculated to be casulties. it was weird but quite interesting.