he embraced new technology and science to give us rational explanations for things occuring around us we didn't understand
Really? It seemed to me that his outline was thus: Scientist finds new discovery and it eats him, proving that the Universe is far worse that we can imagine. New discoveries never lead to new understanding, they in fact reveal that what we thought we knew was all wrong. Where does a new technology help anyone in HPL land?
How can it possibly be a bad thing if somebody makes the worst possible movie about an aasimov story
"Overdrawn at the Memory Bank" by John Varley used to be one of my favorite stories. Now, I get flashbacks of the horrid MST3K-level movie some PBS channel made of it. Millenium survives a little better, although the movie was awful. These movies also make it difficult to evangelize Varley, who is one of my favorite authors. Maybe someday someone will do Steel Beach or The Golden Globe, but with that track record...
Dungeon Keeper is classic Molyneux. At first, you are simply astounded by the novelty of SimDungeon, laugh while slapping your minions, and marvel at the ability to enter a creature and walk around in first person. You play the first few levels and get the usual new stuff each level, and it's all fun.
Somewhere about 10th level you realize that there really isn't any difference between the levels anymore, you make new dungeons, but they're really about the same. The novelty of the Mistresses and sacrificing and what not start to pale. You get sick of combat which consists of grabbing everything and throwing it in one frantic mess. Every creature has special abilities and even a name, but none of that matters, combat is one big clusterf*ck.
You try multi-player, but the "throw everything" bit ruins any real tactics. Worse, you find the multiplayer doesn't work and they promise to fix it soon. They never do. After a few hours you are basically done.
Peter's games are all enthralling for a few hours and then retire to the back shelf to stay. But, boy those first few hours are magnificent.
If the "PATRIOT" law attempted to forbid the media from playing or printing information, that would be a law "abridging the freedom of the press."
Such as...
Sec 501: [The FBI] may make an application for an order requiring the production of any tangible things (including books, records, papers, documents, and other items) for an investigation to protect against international terrorism or clandestine intelligence activities, provided that such investigation of a United States person is not conducted solely upon the basis of activities protected by the first amendment to the Constitution.
and the kicker:
No person shall disclose to any other person (other than those persons necessary to produce the tangible things under this section) that the Federal Bureau of Investigation has sought or obtained tangible things under this section.
-----------
This means that the FBI can ask for anything and everything and no one is allowed to even mention it, much less report it in the media. If this power is being abused, how will anyone ever find out?
Psychics are considered fair game in SF largely because John Campbell believed in them. He created the word "psionics" in order to make it sound more scientific. He had the idea that these powers occured naturally and those who have them would eventually lead us to a new paradise. As such, it was against the "rules" to have bad-guy psychics in that era SF. This is why otherwise hard SF, such as Niven's Known Space or Asimov's Foundation have them. For authors, it allowed the writing of classic fantasy stories in SF drag. Later writers, most notably Dick, explored the darker side of psychic abilities and it has since disappeared from "serious" SF. Except on TV, of course
Maybe Basic... but not BASIC. BASIC interpreters on the AppleII, early Ataris and the C=64 didn't have a GOSUB statement. The first GOSUB I ever saw was in BASIC 7.0 on the C=128.
AppleBASIC might not have had named functions, but it definitely has GOSUB. I remember porting a program from Apple II to TRS80 (CoCo), and had to figure out how to get around the lack of a POP command, which is meaningless without GOSUB. I think the original BASIC Kemeny and Kurtz had the GOSUB command. Also, most BASICs had a crude definable function syntax, something like DEF FNA(X)=X*X. Not pretty, but not as bad as you make it out to be.
Re:Freecell Solitaire...
on
Awari Solved
·
· Score: 2
I've heard that there's a solution for every dealt hand. I was wondering if anyone has tried anything similar to find out if this is actually true?
I remeber a story here on Slashdot not too long ago about someone who apparently was accused of sending spam because he sent a resume. We don't want that to be illegal.
He sent his resume to a bulk-mailing list, that's spam for sure. People will be able to send resumes, just not to everyone in shotgun fashion.
In school I read a book called Magic House of Numbers by Irving Adler. In that book, adding digits was referred to as casting out nines. Sadly, the book is out of print as it is an excellent collection of math factoids and classic puzzles. I reread over every few years in school and always got more out of it.
I see science as a top-down approach and mathematics as a bottom-up approach.
Except sometimes math does top-down as well. Those axioms and definitions are generally selected in order to guarantee that certain results apply. Mathematicians create entire new branches of math in order to explore areas better than existing tools.
As a "scientific" math take set theory. The question was to find a system in which all math could be grounded in so we would know it was consistent and complete. Even though Godel smashed that dream, it is generally conceded that Zermelo-Frankl + Choice can derive all known math. This system was found by a version of the scientific method, Frankl started with basic properties and tried to build a system (hypothesis) which was published (peer review). Russell, among others, found flaws (experiment), specifically with sets that contain themselves. The theory was modified into its current form (refinement), which hasn't shown any flaws I am aware of (acceptance), even though the Axiom of Choice is extremely bizzare.
Here's a less formal, but possibly easier to understand proof. When you shift a digit, what you are doing is making 10^n * a into 10^(n-1)*a, the difference is therefore:
a * 10^n - a * 10^(n-1)
a * (10^n - 10^(n-1))
a * (10^(n-1) * 10 - 10^(n-1))
a * 10^(n-1) * (10 - 1)
a * 10^(n-1) * 9
Since this number is divisible by 3 (not to mention 9) shifting a digit right is equivalent to subtracting out a bunch of 3s, which won't affect the result of the division. This is why adding the digits is also known as casting out nines.
No one stores dates in 'ascii' format anymore. They are usualy stored as integer numbers representing a number of seconds after an offset. And how many bits is that integer number? And what is the base used? 32 bit Unix rolls in 2038.
Rollover will always be a problem somewhere along the line. Hopefully, a 64 bit date field will be good enough until computers themselves are obsolete (over 584 million years at a resolution of 1 ms).
Further, there are ASCII dates hanging around, look at all the perl webpages or the programming language MUMPS which is probably holding your medical record information somewhere.
Game AI at this point is still finite state machines and A* pathfinding for the most part. Pre-canned scripts, such as placing move-to points on the map are also used heavily. Every once in a while, someone writes something fancier like Genetic Algorithms or Neural Nets, but those generally don't do as well. Examples include Black & White and Galapagos.
Check out The Game AI page for lots of good sources of information. The series "Game Programming Gems" have some really good articles, they recently spun off an AI-specific "AI Programming Gems" which I haven't seen yet.
How can they limit public criticism? Isn't that a serious violation of the first amendment?
The big thing to remember about the First Amendment are the words "Congress shall pass no laws", it says absolutely nothing restricting businesses from putting limits in their contracts. The original UCITA allowed companies to squelch negative reviews of their products.
Congress had nothing to do with UCITA, it was created by an NCCUSL committee. UCITA is part of the Uniform Commercial Code, which is designed so that all states have the same rules when deciding questions of interstate commerce. It is a sort of compromise between state's rights and imposing Federal control. Every state gets to decide if it accepts the code, most of the time it is non-controversial. UCITA was poorly conceived and so got a lot of flak.
A few other points: the original lawsuit was only for repaying hospital costs, it was the jury who decided on the multi-million dollar penalty. A big part of the reason why the jury felt this way was probably due to McDonald's defense. One of their claims was that because the woman was really old and would probably be dead in a few years, her body wasn't worth the cost of repairing it. There is a good, relatively balanced account in the Too Much Coffee Man comic book, believe it or not.
Too bad I don't have moderator points, this is the coolest store I've seen in a long time. Growing up with: Tinkeytoys, Lincoln Logs, Girder&Panel, BrixBlox, Lego, and Erector (an antique version made entirely in metal), is probably a reason I like to make and tinker with things to this very day. I'm glad these things still exist and am buying some Zome stuff right now.
The Incredible Machine still comes out with new stuff every once in a while, and is still a great game. Lemmings appears to be dead, perhaps such misfires as Lemmings Paintball have killed it dead.
The LotR did not have to be modified for the cinema
Yes, it would have been much better if Aragorn started every (and I mean every) speech with a command "Look! Behold! Listen!", followed by an impassioned, yet pointless ramble about ancient trivia. It completely ruined the movie for me.
Media criticism turned into celebrity journalism, with a growing focus on media moguls and TV superstars.
This part is pretty funny coming from a guy who used to work at Wired magazine. I don't recall any other magazine that tried to make, for example, the founders of Viacom seem hip.
The funny thing is, I don't know anybody who doesn't complain about this kind of coverage
Yes, everybody bitches about it. You hear everywhere about how people are sick of all the attention given to [Bobbit, Ramsey, OJ, Levy,...] In fact, its hard to avoid people talking about it sometimes.
From a news point of view, this is a good thing. It means that people are thinking about their coverage and thus will be watching the show. Yes, they'll complain but how many people watched the OJ trial all the way through? Why did they do this, if it bothered them so much? I think people (myself included, here) just enjoy complaining.
The Radio Shack CoCo had a similar parser problem. The basic commands "GOTO" and "GOSUB" were combined together into the tokens "GO", "SUB" and "TO". I wrote a simple dungeon program using the variable "GO", which failed to work at all. Changing the "GO" variable to something else fixed it. It was much later that I found out why.
Slashdot Mirror
Really? It seemed to me that his outline was thus: Scientist finds new discovery and it eats him, proving that the Universe is far worse that we can imagine. New discoveries never lead to new understanding, they in fact reveal that what we thought we knew was all wrong. Where does a new technology help anyone in HPL land?
"Overdrawn at the Memory Bank" by John Varley used to be one of my favorite stories. Now, I get flashbacks of the horrid MST3K-level movie some PBS channel made of it. Millenium survives a little better, although the movie was awful. These movies also make it difficult to evangelize Varley, who is one of my favorite authors. Maybe someday someone will do Steel Beach or The Golden Globe, but with that track record...
Somewhere about 10th level you realize that there really isn't any difference between the levels anymore, you make new dungeons, but they're really about the same. The novelty of the Mistresses and sacrificing and what not start to pale. You get sick of combat which consists of grabbing everything and throwing it in one frantic mess. Every creature has special abilities and even a name, but none of that matters, combat is one big clusterf*ck.
You try multi-player, but the "throw everything" bit ruins any real tactics. Worse, you find the multiplayer doesn't work and they promise to fix it soon. They never do. After a few hours you are basically done.
Peter's games are all enthralling for a few hours and then retire to the back shelf to stay. But, boy those first few hours are magnificent.
Such as...
and the kicker:
-----------
This means that the FBI can ask for anything and everything and no one is allowed to even mention it, much less report it in the media. If this power is being abused, how will anyone ever find out?
Psychics are considered fair game in SF largely because John Campbell believed in them. He created the word "psionics" in order to make it sound more scientific. He had the idea that these powers occured naturally and those who have them would eventually lead us to a new paradise. As such, it was against the "rules" to have bad-guy psychics in that era SF. This is why otherwise hard SF, such as Niven's Known Space or Asimov's Foundation have them. For authors, it allowed the writing of classic fantasy stories in SF drag. Later writers, most notably Dick, explored the darker side of psychic abilities and it has since disappeared from "serious" SF. Except on TV, of course
AppleBASIC might not have had named functions, but it definitely has GOSUB. I remember porting a program from Apple II to TRS80 (CoCo), and had to figure out how to get around the lack of a POP command, which is meaningless without GOSUB. I think the original BASIC Kemeny and Kurtz had the GOSUB command. Also, most BASICs had a crude definable function syntax, something like DEF FNA(X)=X*X. Not pretty, but not as bad as you make it out to be.
It is not true. Proof by counter-example.
He sent his resume to a bulk-mailing list, that's spam for sure. People will be able to send resumes, just not to everyone in shotgun fashion.
How about calling it Port Watson? Or maybe a TAZ?
The question remains, who wants to be first? Maybe you can count Sealand, but that's a bit of a stretch.
In school I read a book called Magic House of Numbers by Irving Adler. In that book, adding digits was referred to as casting out nines. Sadly, the book is out of print as it is an excellent collection of math factoids and classic puzzles. I reread over every few years in school and always got more out of it.
Except sometimes math does top-down as well. Those axioms and definitions are generally selected in order to guarantee that certain results apply. Mathematicians create entire new branches of math in order to explore areas better than existing tools.
As a "scientific" math take set theory. The question was to find a system in which all math could be grounded in so we would know it was consistent and complete. Even though Godel smashed that dream, it is generally conceded that Zermelo-Frankl + Choice can derive all known math. This system was found by a version of the scientific method, Frankl started with basic properties and tried to build a system (hypothesis) which was published (peer review). Russell, among others, found flaws (experiment), specifically with sets that contain themselves. The theory was modified into its current form (refinement), which hasn't shown any flaws I am aware of (acceptance), even though the Axiom of Choice is extremely bizzare.
Here's a less formal, but possibly easier to understand proof. When you shift a digit, what you are doing is making 10^n * a into 10^(n-1)*a, the difference is therefore:
a * 10^n - a * 10^(n-1)
a * (10^n - 10^(n-1))
a * (10^(n-1) * 10 - 10^(n-1))
a * 10^(n-1) * (10 - 1)
a * 10^(n-1) * 9
Since this number is divisible by 3 (not to mention 9) shifting a digit right is equivalent to subtracting out a bunch of 3s, which won't affect the result of the division. This is why adding the digits is also known as casting out nines.
And how many bits is that integer number? And what is the base used? 32 bit Unix rolls in 2038.
Rollover will always be a problem somewhere along the line. Hopefully, a 64 bit date field will be good enough until computers themselves are obsolete (over 584 million years at a resolution of 1 ms).
Further, there are ASCII dates hanging around, look at all the perl webpages or the programming language MUMPS which is probably holding your medical record information somewhere.
Check out The Game AI page for lots of good sources of information. The series "Game Programming Gems" have some really good articles, they recently spun off an AI-specific "AI Programming Gems" which I haven't seen yet.
How can they limit public criticism? Isn't that a serious violation of the first amendment?
The big thing to remember about the First Amendment are the words "Congress shall pass no laws", it says absolutely nothing restricting businesses from putting limits in their contracts. The original UCITA allowed companies to squelch negative reviews of their products.
Congress had nothing to do with UCITA, it was created by an NCCUSL committee. UCITA is part of the Uniform Commercial Code, which is designed so that all states have the same rules when deciding questions of interstate commerce. It is a sort of compromise between state's rights and imposing Federal control. Every state gets to decide if it accepts the code, most of the time it is non-controversial. UCITA was poorly conceived and so got a lot of flak.
A few other points: the original lawsuit was only for repaying hospital costs, it was the jury who decided on the multi-million dollar penalty. A big part of the reason why the jury felt this way was probably due to McDonald's defense. One of their claims was that because the woman was really old and would probably be dead in a few years, her body wasn't worth the cost of repairing it. There is a good, relatively balanced account in the Too Much Coffee Man comic book, believe it or not.
Too bad I don't have moderator points, this is the coolest store I've seen in a long time. Growing up with: Tinkeytoys, Lincoln Logs, Girder&Panel, BrixBlox, Lego, and Erector (an antique version made entirely in metal), is probably a reason I like to make and tinker with things to this very day. I'm glad these things still exist and am buying some Zome stuff right now.
But only of you have access to the source code :)
The Incredible Machine still comes out with new stuff every once in a while, and is still a great game. Lemmings appears to be dead, perhaps such misfires as Lemmings Paintball have killed it dead.
Sounds like Capsela to me.
Yes, it would have been much better if Aragorn started every (and I mean every) speech with a command "Look! Behold! Listen!", followed by an impassioned, yet pointless ramble about ancient trivia. It completely ruined the movie for me.
Media criticism turned into celebrity journalism, with a growing focus on media moguls and TV superstars.
This part is pretty funny coming from a guy who used to work at Wired magazine. I don't recall any other magazine that tried to make, for example, the founders of Viacom seem hip.
The funny thing is, I don't know anybody who doesn't complain about this kind of coverage
...] In fact, its hard to avoid people talking about it sometimes.
Yes, everybody bitches about it. You hear everywhere about how people are sick of all the attention given to [Bobbit, Ramsey, OJ, Levy,
From a news point of view, this is a good thing. It means that people are thinking about their coverage and thus will be watching the show. Yes, they'll complain but how many people watched the OJ trial all the way through? Why did they do this, if it bothered them so much? I think people (myself included, here) just enjoy complaining.
The Radio Shack CoCo had a similar parser problem. The basic commands "GOTO" and "GOSUB" were combined together into the tokens "GO", "SUB" and "TO". I wrote a simple dungeon program using the variable "GO", which failed to work at all. Changing the "GO" variable to something else fixed it. It was much later that I found out why.
Ah, the days of two letter variables...