>you would find that time does not pass for a photon
Thank you, I've been wondering about this for a while. If time slows down as you approach the speed of light (a well-accepted phenomena) then time should stop at the speed of light, and photons would be part of the fabric of the universe. A photon's world is instantaneous, their effects are the basis for measuring time.
>you may see them going faster than the speed of light relative to each other
Really? I thought the whole point of relativity was that you never see photons going faster than C regardless of circumstance.
I don't think it's a 1:1 comparison. Killing mosquitoes is analagous to killing terrorists...you don't stop them from breeding. A proper mosquito-control regimen involves maintaining healthy (warm summer) climate so dragonflies are healthy and eat the mosquito larvae the moment they pop out of the pond.
You should see a pond with dragonflies hovering...it looks like the Congratulations screen from a videogame. Each dragonfly takes a 10' radius, so a group of them has the whole pond on lockdown.
Hahaha...good point. Well I guess I was defining RTS upwards. Strategy games are missing a lot of strategy when it comes to memorizing tech-trees. Currently I am working on learning Tech Wars 1.9d (war3) which is a small fraction of the overall war3 melee experience, and I'm well aware that once I learn it, the map will be useless (as I will be able to own anyone regardless of circumstance).
For example, air fleets in Tech Wars harass tanks, which absorb damage but ultimately fail. What stops air fleets? Nothing. Air hits fast and it hits hard. It's all memorization, not so much different from Super Mario Bros so long ago.
The real strength of RTS is simulating the interactions of different components, and I think this has been ignored. Most of the improvements of RTS "pathing" involve the behavior of single-unit movement, not communication.
By your own admission there is a lot more than 'mindless clicking' occuring in a modern RTS and I would argue these are the functions that make the game competitive, if you want ai to do all this for you play civilization, as that is essentially what that would do to a rts.
Yep, War3 has a lot more than mindless clicking but it mostly falls under the category of memorization...which can be interesting as long as you care...Civ is turn-based, I have a hard time with turn based games these days.
If battles did not become entirely deterministic from this change then you would simply see a push for more units and the management would become meta-management
Meta-management is what I'm looking for yes. I thought hard and decided AI would not make games deterministic, otherwise AI would be, by definition, perfect and I don't see this happening soon.
Morale is a trivial thing to implement but it would tend to favor outcomes which are already likely (i.e. overwhelming force -> you're pwned) and hence doesn't add anything to the game.
Exactly, AI would rule out the most obvious outcomes and make subtle play more interesting.
Unit pathing could always use improvement and it has improved, just look at w2->sc->w3
Granted, War3 has a number of improvements that make it compelling, but I tend to prefer the custom maps.
Androids are made by Christians (specifically, protestants) to subvert God, for whom they have a special loathing.
Take Bladerunner for example, USA all the way. Battlestar Galactica....well they did outlaw abortion a couple weeks ago, although so far the Cylons talk about "God's Will" more than anyone else.
For one thing, if a virulent tumor was planted in a normal mouse's back, and the transplanted white blood cells were injected into the mouse's abdomen, the cells still found the cancer without harming normal cells. The kind of cancer didn't seem to matter.
This article should be titled, "Reasearchers Introduced to Normal Immune Function." How do they think non-super t-cells find tumors, by hiring a tour guide?
The implication is that until this super mouse came along, nobody had any cancer resistance at all. And yet I'd venture to say, cancer and viruses are the two things immune systems handle best.
This system forms a first line of host defense against pathogens, such as bacteria.
why can't there be games where we receive phone calls or e-mails from assassins in real life? I know this sounds ridiculous, but make me afraid of my foe outside the game. Get in my head.
You mean like, "Case...this is Wintermute. We need to talk."
Or have you seen the movie eXistenZ by any chance?
I think when the AI throws himself on your fortified positions, his units will send a high-casualty message, resulting in a switch to a long-term strategy.
I want RTS units that have morale, so they know when to stick, know when to run, know how to pick high-value targets, or switch targets (say if marines get rushed by firebats). It could be learnable, programmable, or hardwired, anything to make RTS less of a clickfest.
I want macro orders like "storm base," "harass," "defend," instead of the simple back-and-forth patrol that results in eventual slaughter. All units place too much priority on completing their movement, and right-clicking the soil is the worst mistake you can make in heavy combat.
Two games later, the units are exactly as dumb as they always were, just with more spells and a deeper techtree. But I wanted - expected - all this to happen in 1996 before Starcraft even came out!
Most people's personal tax allowance is roughly 5000 pounds...After that, the first £2,150 you earn is taxed at 10%, between 2,150 and 33,300 is at 22% and any taxable income over 33,300 is charged at 40%.
That's a complicated way of saying you get to keep $50,000 of the first $60,000 you earn. On $100k income you keep $74,000, not bad. On $300k income (which is possible for a power-earner couple) you keep $194k. An American would keep $214k, not a huge difference imho, and some of that difference would be spent on private health insurance.
Now on a $700k income (highly unusual)...Brit keeps $434k and American keeps $475k. Not too different!
Meanwhile, 8-11% on National Insurance sounds analagous to Social Security.
The big difference is the VAT, 17.5% sales tax whereas in the US, you can have anywhere from zero to 9% (usually state/local policy) and the latter sometimes drives people up the wall.
That's a nice idea, I wonder how the study did their math. Their top-end subsidies add up to $1.6 trillion. US domestic oil consumption is 20m/day, at 42gal/barrel that's 306 billion gallons. Divide and you get their low end of $5. If you account for 36 gallons fuel in a barrel, that's still just $6.
Besides, $1.4 trillion of the subsidies are classified as environmental or "other," including travel delays, accidents, and subsidized parking. I suppose this is the point, but it's a huge grey area.
Still, if you're willing to grant all these things, EU gas prices ($4 tax?) make sense. The study doesn't show any way to get to $15 though.
A common critique of Marx points out that the increasing class antagonisms he predicted never actually developed in the Western world following industrialization. This problem with classical Marxist theory was known from the beginning of the 20th century, and much of the work of Vladimir Lenin was dedicated to answering it. In essence, Lenin argued...through imperialism the bourgeoisie of wealthy countries is using "superprofits" from the imperial colonies to effectively bribe the working class back home in order to appease it.
It really didn't make sense to me, since HFCS is a sweeter syrup than cane-sugar-based sucrose.
I don't think anyone's ever argued that fructose syrup is sweeter than sucrose. However, according to some posters, fructose is further down the metabolic pathway. "Sweeter" to your stomach maybe, not your mouth.
These are oft-cited figures, but as damaging as they are, they are the same figures cited by the industry to hide profits.
A better way to look at this is to remember that gas recently cost $1.25 gallon. Subtract 63 cents in NY taxes and you have $0.62. Subtract dealer profit and you have ~$0.50. Therein lies the cost AND profit of making gasoline. Granted, you left room for the refinery to make 84 cents but I think it could easily be over two dollars. Venezuelan gasoline only costs $0.17 at the pump because Venezuela is an oil-producing nation. How much oil does Venezuela produce? Not as much as Exxon.
ExxonMobil pumps 2.6m barrels of crude oil per day (42 gallons per barrel) and has its own refineries. With a 2005 gross income of $371 billion, that works out to $9/gallon.
Consider, with crude oil prices topping $75/barrel, Exxon would have to make at least 75/42 = $1.78 to even bother refining it at all. At most ($3/gallon), they could collect about $120 billion. What accounts for the difference?
I'm struggling to understand how Exxon can make $371 billion, or $1200 for every man, woman and child in America.
Well I'm glad to hear that ethanol is not so toxic to engine health, but a 2-4% drop in horsepower is a lot. Consider 87 fuel is a 6.5% drop in octane over 93 premium. Add it together and you have ~10% difference.
In system optimization, that's a killer. Imagine a system where you have 10 parts in series, each operating at a 10% loss.....no it's not zero, but it's about a 65% drop.
The point is, I think I notice the difference. A 3% difference for ethanol represents how many tranny-unfriendly downshifts over the life of the car?
OPEC is not the short-term problem because OPEC charges a maximum of $30 per barrel of oil. And, OPEC is frequently undercut by their own members.
In fact, invading Iraq is the leading reason why prices have hit $75/barrel. With Iraqi production offline, OPEC doesn't have the price-regulating surplus they always had in the past. In fact, OPEC is currently powerless (unless they really want to screw us, but they're already making two to three times what they normally do).
Disappointingly, the pricing is set to be about the same as the DVD, even though the download...can only play on one machine.
Of course, this is how product upgrades are launched.
* Manufacturing/distribution costs are less. * Quality is less (now you have to burn it yourself) * Product gutted (no case/artwork/ability to play anywhere) * Price is the same
If you take a look at food/homecare products, you'll see this has been going on for quite some time. Of course, the one thing I don't see is the compelling reason to switch. Ususally with a product upgrade, there is a perceived improvement in convenience (for example, smaller bottles of soda) but in this case, downloading off BitTorrent takes just as long as going to the store.
The US hasn't had a new refinery built in 30 years. That's why our gas is expensive, because supplies are artificially limited. Who controls refinery construction? The vertically-integrated domestic oil companies.
I can't believe the cable companies would be so stupid as to compare themselves to oil. This is exactly where the situation leads when you have a monopoly. The market becomes saturated so the only avenue for growth is increasing prices.
I would venture to guess that the cable modem market is pretty saturated right about now. In theory, I'm not entirely opposed to price changes based on changing circumstances, but the real problem is this cable/oil monopoly took only 5 years to create (oil was at its cheapest in 1999, cable modems were just starting)...meaning that competing technologies (hybrid cards, household fiber) are locked out. Now everyone's spending extra money to stay afloat rather than saving and investing in the next technology.
Well how do you prove it? The biggest red flag is the site never launched. But you have to look at the VC contract and see what Sprockets was mandated to do. It could have been a very open-ended contract.
The other thing is Sprockets management may have been in collusion with some elements of the VC team. Otherwise the VC could just come to the office, look at the mess, and appoint their own CEO to take control. I was only there for a month, so I don't know if they got in any trouble, but the claim letter seemed to indicate a successful end to the enterprise.
Specifically the letter said I could "file a claim" for company property, and my sense was that all claims would be handled with utmost care. I didn't file one, it scared me a little bit to be getting on the inside of the scam.
Slashdot Mirror
>you would find that time does not pass for a photon
Thank you, I've been wondering about this for a while. If time slows down as you approach the speed of light (a well-accepted phenomena) then time should stop at the speed of light, and photons would be part of the fabric of the universe. A photon's world is instantaneous, their effects are the basis for measuring time.
>you may see them going faster than the speed of light relative to each other
Really? I thought the whole point of relativity was that you never see photons going faster than C regardless of circumstance.
> DDT or Malaria -- Which is Worse?
I don't think it's a 1:1 comparison. Killing mosquitoes is analagous to killing terrorists...you don't stop them from breeding. A proper mosquito-control regimen involves maintaining healthy (warm summer) climate so dragonflies are healthy and eat the mosquito larvae the moment they pop out of the pond.
You should see a pond with dragonflies hovering...it looks like the Congratulations screen from a videogame. Each dragonfly takes a 10' radius, so a group of them has the whole pond on lockdown.
You also don't lose 35% of your power in a car, by burning 3% less powerful fuel. You only burn the fuel once.
It was a theoretical argument about optimizing a system in series, which should be useful in cars or not. Why post AC?
Hahaha...good point. Well I guess I was defining RTS upwards. Strategy games are missing a lot of strategy when it comes to memorizing tech-trees. Currently I am working on learning Tech Wars 1.9d (war3) which is a small fraction of the overall war3 melee experience, and I'm well aware that once I learn it, the map will be useless (as I will be able to own anyone regardless of circumstance).
For example, air fleets in Tech Wars harass tanks, which absorb damage but ultimately fail. What stops air fleets? Nothing. Air hits fast and it hits hard. It's all memorization, not so much different from Super Mario Bros so long ago.
The real strength of RTS is simulating the interactions of different components, and I think this has been ignored. Most of the improvements of RTS "pathing" involve the behavior of single-unit movement, not communication.
By your own admission there is a lot more than 'mindless clicking' occuring in a modern RTS and I would argue these are the functions that make the game competitive, if you want ai to do all this for you play civilization, as that is essentially what that would do to a rts.
Yep, War3 has a lot more than mindless clicking but it mostly falls under the category of memorization...which can be interesting as long as you care...Civ is turn-based, I have a hard time with turn based games these days.
If battles did not become entirely deterministic from this change then you would simply see a push for more units and the management would become meta-management
Meta-management is what I'm looking for yes. I thought hard and decided AI would not make games deterministic, otherwise AI would be, by definition, perfect and I don't see this happening soon.
Morale is a trivial thing to implement but it would tend to favor outcomes which are already likely (i.e. overwhelming force -> you're pwned) and hence doesn't add anything to the game.
Exactly, AI would rule out the most obvious outcomes and make subtle play more interesting.
Unit pathing could always use improvement and it has improved, just look at w2->sc->w3
Granted, War3 has a number of improvements that make it compelling, but I tend to prefer the custom maps.
Androids are made by Christians (specifically, protestants) to subvert God, for whom they have a special loathing.
Take Bladerunner for example, USA all the way. Battlestar Galactica....well they did outlaw abortion a couple weeks ago, although so far the Cylons talk about "God's Will" more than anyone else.
From the article:
For one thing, if a virulent tumor was planted in a normal mouse's back, and the transplanted white blood cells were injected into the mouse's abdomen, the cells still found the cancer without harming normal cells. The kind of cancer didn't seem to matter.
This article should be titled, "Reasearchers Introduced to Normal Immune Function." How do they think non-super t-cells find tumors, by hiring a tour guide?
The implication is that until this super mouse came along, nobody had any cancer resistance at all. And yet I'd venture to say, cancer and viruses are the two things immune systems handle best.
This system forms a first line of host defense against pathogens, such as bacteria.
Bacteria, lol. As if.
why can't there be games where we receive phone calls or e-mails from assassins in real life? I know this sounds ridiculous, but make me afraid of my foe outside the game. Get in my head.
You mean like, "Case...this is Wintermute. We need to talk."
Or have you seen the movie eXistenZ by any chance?
FPS and RTS games don't need highly sophisticated AI
Clueless...the "S" in RTS stands for "simulation."
How many trolls in this thread so far, a hundred?
I think when the AI throws himself on your fortified positions, his units will send a high-casualty message, resulting in a switch to a long-term strategy.
I want RTS units that have morale, so they know when to stick, know when to run, know how to pick high-value targets, or switch targets (say if marines get rushed by firebats). It could be learnable, programmable, or hardwired, anything to make RTS less of a clickfest.
I want macro orders like "storm base," "harass," "defend," instead of the simple back-and-forth patrol that results in eventual slaughter. All units place too much priority on completing their movement, and right-clicking the soil is the worst mistake you can make in heavy combat.
Two games later, the units are exactly as dumb as they always were, just with more spells and a deeper techtree. But I wanted - expected - all this to happen in 1996 before Starcraft even came out!
Last week's Slashdot article on Theo de Raadt was about how he's not using binary drivers.
Most people's personal tax allowance is roughly 5000 pounds...After that, the first £2,150 you earn is taxed at 10%, between 2,150 and 33,300 is at 22% and any taxable income over 33,300 is charged at 40%.
That's a complicated way of saying you get to keep $50,000 of the first $60,000 you earn. On $100k income you keep $74,000, not bad. On $300k income (which is possible for a power-earner couple) you keep $194k. An American would keep $214k, not a huge difference imho, and some of that difference would be spent on private health insurance.
Now on a $700k income (highly unusual)...Brit keeps $434k and American keeps $475k. Not too different!
Meanwhile, 8-11% on National Insurance sounds analagous to Social Security.
The big difference is the VAT, 17.5% sales tax whereas in the US, you can have anywhere from zero to 9% (usually state/local policy) and the latter sometimes drives people up the wall.
Here's the American tax chart I used.
That's a nice idea, I wonder how the study did their math. Their top-end subsidies add up to $1.6 trillion. US domestic oil consumption is 20m/day, at 42gal/barrel that's 306 billion gallons. Divide and you get their low end of $5. If you account for 36 gallons fuel in a barrel, that's still just $6.
Besides, $1.4 trillion of the subsidies are classified as environmental or "other," including travel delays, accidents, and subsidized parking. I suppose this is the point, but it's a huge grey area.
Still, if you're willing to grant all these things, EU gas prices ($4 tax?) make sense. The study doesn't show any way to get to $15 though.
Pyramid schemes work when you're at the top.
It really didn't make sense to me, since HFCS is a sweeter syrup than cane-sugar-based sucrose.
I don't think anyone's ever argued that fructose syrup is sweeter than sucrose. However, according to some posters, fructose is further down the metabolic pathway. "Sweeter" to your stomach maybe, not your mouth.
Refined sugar is sucrose, which consists of a molecule of glucose covalently bonded to a molecule of fructose.
Well that would make sense. By short-circuiting the breakdown of sucrose, you've just pointed out that fructose corn syrup is a drug.
19% taxes
4% dist & marketing
22% refining & profit
55% crude oil
These are oft-cited figures, but as damaging as they are, they are the same figures cited by the industry to hide profits.
A better way to look at this is to remember that gas recently cost $1.25 gallon. Subtract 63 cents in NY taxes and you have $0.62. Subtract dealer profit and you have ~$0.50. Therein lies the cost AND profit of making gasoline. Granted, you left room for the refinery to make 84 cents but I think it could easily be over two dollars. Venezuelan gasoline only costs $0.17 at the pump because Venezuela is an oil-producing nation. How much oil does Venezuela produce? Not as much as Exxon.
ExxonMobil pumps 2.6m barrels of crude oil per day (42 gallons per barrel) and has its own refineries. With a 2005 gross income of $371 billion, that works out to $9/gallon.
Consider, with crude oil prices topping $75/barrel, Exxon would have to make at least 75/42 = $1.78 to even bother refining it at all. At most ($3/gallon), they could collect about $120 billion. What accounts for the difference?
I'm struggling to understand how Exxon can make $371 billion, or $1200 for every man, woman and child in America.
Well I'm glad to hear that ethanol is not so toxic to engine health, but a 2-4% drop in horsepower is a lot. Consider 87 fuel is a 6.5% drop in octane over 93 premium. Add it together and you have ~10% difference.
In system optimization, that's a killer. Imagine a system where you have 10 parts in series, each operating at a 10% loss.....no it's not zero, but it's about a 65% drop.
The point is, I think I notice the difference. A 3% difference for ethanol represents how many tranny-unfriendly downshifts over the life of the car?
OPEC is not the short-term problem because OPEC charges a maximum of $30 per barrel of oil. And, OPEC is frequently undercut by their own members.
In fact, invading Iraq is the leading reason why prices have hit $75/barrel. With Iraqi production offline, OPEC doesn't have the price-regulating surplus they always had in the past. In fact, OPEC is currently powerless (unless they really want to screw us, but they're already making two to three times what they normally do).
Disappointingly, the pricing is set to be about the same as the DVD, even though the download...can only play on one machine.
Of course, this is how product upgrades are launched.
* Manufacturing/distribution costs are less.
* Quality is less (now you have to burn it yourself)
* Product gutted (no case/artwork/ability to play anywhere)
* Price is the same
If you take a look at food/homecare products, you'll see this has been going on for quite some time. Of course, the one thing I don't see is the compelling reason to switch. Ususally with a product upgrade, there is a perceived improvement in convenience (for example, smaller bottles of soda) but in this case, downloading off BitTorrent takes just as long as going to the store.
The US hasn't had a new refinery built in 30 years. That's why our gas is expensive, because supplies are artificially limited. Who controls refinery construction? The vertically-integrated domestic oil companies.
I can't believe the cable companies would be so stupid as to compare themselves to oil. This is exactly where the situation leads when you have a monopoly. The market becomes saturated so the only avenue for growth is increasing prices.
I would venture to guess that the cable modem market is pretty saturated right about now. In theory, I'm not entirely opposed to price changes based on changing circumstances, but the real problem is this cable/oil monopoly took only 5 years to create (oil was at its cheapest in 1999, cable modems were just starting)...meaning that competing technologies (hybrid cards, household fiber) are locked out. Now everyone's spending extra money to stay afloat rather than saving and investing in the next technology.
Well how do you prove it? The biggest red flag is the site never launched. But you have to look at the VC contract and see what Sprockets was mandated to do. It could have been a very open-ended contract.
The other thing is Sprockets management may have been in collusion with some elements of the VC team. Otherwise the VC could just come to the office, look at the mess, and appoint their own CEO to take control. I was only there for a month, so I don't know if they got in any trouble, but the claim letter seemed to indicate a successful end to the enterprise.
Sorry it was June 2000.
Specifically the letter said I could "file a claim" for company property, and my sense was that all claims would be handled with utmost care. I didn't file one, it scared me a little bit to be getting on the inside of the scam.