"Video games will become lame if they become too popular." -- Video game enthusiasts
Congrats, gamers. You've now joined the fine art snob, the classical music afficionado, and the indie music twit in the ludicrous belief that nothing's any good if someone else has heard of it. And ya know what? Nobody gives a damn what *they* think either.
Popular things are popular because people appreciate them. And since art is purely subjective, the only useful way to define good art is to ask, "do lots of people think it's good?" Anyone who thinks that popularity always leads to a loss of quality or intellectual content has apparently never listened to the Beatles, seen Star Wars, The Matrix or The Godfather, and never watched Lost or the Sopranos.
Popular art can be good. Video games are no exception. Quit whining.
sending clouds scattering in its wake in a perfect circle
clouds being pushed aside
As I see it, the clouds aren't being "blasted away" by any kind of shock wave or gas flowing outward from the volcano. Unlike a firecracker or grenade, the amount gas released by a big eruption is tiny compared to the amount of air heated by it.
As air is heated by the volcano, it rises. But if air is flowing up away from the volcano, air a further away from the volcano must be sinking to compensate.
You may know how clouds form: as moist air rises, it cools adiabatically and water starts to condense, forming droplets. It works both ways: if air is forced to *sink*, it warms adiabatically, and cloud droplets evaporate.
The clear-sky circle isn't a shock blast, it's a simple case of "what goes up must also come down".
More than half of fatalities are of the form car + tree/guardrail/wall/... -- we can't make those things less massive
They're not moving, though, so they don't contribute any energy or momentum to the collision.
If you know some physics and are familiar with the idea of a "symmetry argument", you should be able to convince yourself that when a moving vehicle hits a fixed barrier head-on, the collision details (amount of energy dissipated, momentum lost, etc) are the same as if it struck a moving vehicle identical to itself.
A light car hits a barrier in the same way it would hit another light car head-on; a heavy car hits a barrier the same way it'd hit a heavy car head-on. Which is to say, zero-sum game.
When you have a greater metropolitan area that's home to 12 million plus people that spans a dozen city entities in two counties, mass transit becomes a much bigger problem than can be solved by an idiotic handwave of "just ban cars from city limits".
Yeah, you're right. There's no way a 12-million-person megacity could ever run on mass transit. Especially not in the U.S. Utterly impossible.
True, it took a little more thought than "just ban cars from city limits". You actually have to spend some money. But it can be done, even in this here U. S. of A.
Having played Puzzle Pirates back when it was transitioning from subscription to micropayments, yes, the payments are individually small: 50 cents here, a buck there. But if you're a big pimp pirate, they add up.
I also believe the median is a lot smaller than the average. Many pirates paying a little, a few paying truly ridiculous amounts of cash.
Mod parent up. A standard security mantra is, if you use a bigger hammer than necessary, you increase the chances of smashing your thumb.
The more complex the software tool, the more likely it is to have some sort of security hole in an obscure feature you don't care about and aren't aware of.
To clarify my question, there are tons of ways in which an ATM can be untrustworthy:
* It has additional hardware bolted on to steal card numbers * Its software has been tampered with * The bank running it is corrupt * It's not actually an ATM, just a box that steals card numbers and hands out cash without talking to my bank.
This brings up a serious question. You need some cash in an unfamiliar state or country, and you come across an ATM. How do you know if you can trust it?
The standard security mantra is, "only use trusted hardware to authenticate yourself", but that can't happen here.
Anyone have any ideas for an ATM authentication system that will both prove to the bank that I am who I say I am, and prove to me that the ATM isn't stealing my authentication keys?
The only solution I can think of involves trusted hand-held devices like cell phones or keychain password tokens.
I'm a typical "nerd-sized" caucasian male. Not a total lardbutt, but my fingers are definitely pretty big. I've been happily typing on my iPhone 1.0 since the day they came out.
It does take a little longer than a 30-second "poke at it in the store" trial to get used to the keyboard, but I'm totally happy with it. You've just got to convince yourself to keep your hands off the backspace key, let typos go, and trust the autocorrect to fix them for you.
That's exactly what the iPhone does. You can be really sloppy when typing common letters like "S", but you have to be more precise for nearby uncommon letters like "Z". Not that that's a problem, it'll autocorrect if you miss.
Supposedly the sizes of these sensitive areas can change based on what you're in the process of typing, but I can't tell if it's actually doing that.
Agree. Anyone who thinks this is a cool idea hasn't used an iPhone keypad much.
The inventor's still stuck on the notion that each keypress must map onto a single character somehow, but the iPhone is smarter than that. It resolves ambiguous keypresses based on the letters that came before, and *also* the ones that came after. For instance, typing "THI", it assumes I'm on my way to "this", "thin", or "thick", but if I follow it up with "MAS", it changes the I to an O for "THOMAS".
And if I really did want to type the unusual name "Thimas", I just hit the little cancel-autocorrect x-box on the screen.
Lots of people here are taking a capitalist "let the best media win and the worst media fail" point of view, which I can totally get behind, in terms of national news. Between nytimes.com, fox news, cnn, washington post, la times, and direct feeds from AP and Reuters, there's no shortage of sources for national and international news. If a few of those sources can't figure out how to make a profit off the Web and go bust, hey, who cares?
But my worry is about local news. Many of the papers in question are the *only* source of serious investigative news in their region. If the New York Times and the Boston Globe go bust, who's going to investigate City Hall and State Capitol political shenanigans, state police brutality, or local corporate fraud? The Post and the Herald? Not likely. Random bloggers? They're too diffuse to have the power to be taken seriously by the government. TV channels? The only investigative journalism they have time or money for is "Are Pokemon Killing Our Kids?!"
I'm seriously worried that if these papers go under, nobody will be watching the local authorities. As I see it, scandal and corruption are already a much much bigger problem at the local level than nationally, because at the local level, not many people are paying attention. Get rid of the local paper, and it'll be party central at the city hall.
"Commodity" is not the opposite of "luxury", but nevermind that....
If your point is that news is something everyone needs, but WoW is something people only the wealthy pay for, I disagree. I'm willing to bet you that the median income of New York Times subscribers is higher than the median income of WoW players.
Willingness to pay for media has very little to do with income, and everything to do with the perceived quality of the product.
-----------------
If, on the other hand, you're using "commodity" in its technical sense, as a product for which variation in quality is irrelevant, then you're closer to correct. News *is* perceived as a commodity, in that people don't notice a difference in quality between New York Times brand news and Yahoo brand news. But as the quality of AP and Reuters decline due to lack of support from prime newsgatherers, the difference will become more and more obvious.
Wow. Fishing for nerds is so damned easy, they take the bait even when you put a sign on it saying "WARNING: CONTAINS FISHHOOKS".
For a good nerd time, try working out the probability distribution table for Mod8(D6+D6)+1. I suggested it as a joke, but it's less horrible thank you might think.
80,000 rolls a day is one every 10 seconds. You can't be sure exactly which roll is going to be yours vs another gamer's, but you can use the average of say, the next 50 rolls to give yourself an edge the same way a card-counting Blackjack player would.
No problem. You can generate any die roll you like from D6's, just do a little math.
For a D8, just roll two D6's, add them together, and then take the result modulo 8 and add 1. Poof! A random number between 1 and 8! . . . . (If you're furious with nerd rage right now: I'm kidding. If you're not furious: don't try this at home.)
If you think software RNGs aren't random enough to play board games with, you'd better delete your Webmail accounts and close your online bank account, because Web security absolutely relies on them.
On the other hand, this machine is frickin' awesome. But I do worry about the fact that it makes die rolls in large batches, and stores them for hours before using them. A fine opportunity for cheating if you can get access to any of the dice-roller's controller software.
Slashdot Mirror
"Video games will become lame if they become too popular." -- Video game enthusiasts
Congrats, gamers. You've now joined the fine art snob, the classical music afficionado, and the indie music twit in the ludicrous belief that nothing's any good if someone else has heard of it. And ya know what? Nobody gives a damn what *they* think either.
Popular things are popular because people appreciate them. And since art is purely subjective, the only useful way to define good art is to ask, "do lots of people think it's good?" Anyone who thinks that popularity always leads to a loss of quality or intellectual content has apparently never listened to the Beatles, seen Star Wars, The Matrix or The Godfather, and never watched Lost or the Sopranos.
Popular art can be good. Video games are no exception. Quit whining.
sending clouds scattering in its wake in a perfect circle
clouds being pushed aside
As I see it, the clouds aren't being "blasted away" by any kind of shock wave or gas flowing outward from the volcano. Unlike a firecracker or grenade, the amount gas released by a big eruption is tiny compared to the amount of air heated by it.
As air is heated by the volcano, it rises. But if air is flowing up away from the volcano, air a further away from the volcano must be sinking to compensate.
You may know how clouds form: as moist air rises, it cools adiabatically and water starts to condense, forming droplets. It works both ways: if air is forced to *sink*, it warms adiabatically, and cloud droplets evaporate.
The clear-sky circle isn't a shock blast, it's a simple case of "what goes up must also come down".
More than half of fatalities are of the form car + tree/guardrail/wall/... -- we can't make those things less massive
They're not moving, though, so they don't contribute any energy or momentum to the collision.
If you know some physics and are familiar with the idea of a "symmetry argument", you should be able to convince yourself that when a moving vehicle hits a fixed barrier head-on, the collision details (amount of energy dissipated, momentum lost, etc) are the same as if it struck a moving vehicle identical to itself.
A light car hits a barrier in the same way it would hit another light car head-on; a heavy car hits a barrier the same way it'd hit a heavy car head-on. Which is to say, zero-sum game.
Physics smackdown'd!
When you have a greater metropolitan area that's home to 12 million plus people that spans a dozen city entities in two counties, mass transit becomes a much bigger problem than can be solved by an idiotic handwave of "just ban cars from city limits".
Yeah, you're right. There's no way a 12-million-person megacity could ever run on mass transit. Especially not in the U.S. Utterly impossible.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_City
True, it took a little more thought than "just ban cars from city limits". You actually have to spend some money. But it can be done, even in this here U. S. of A.
Having played Puzzle Pirates back when it was transitioning from subscription to micropayments, yes, the payments are individually small: 50 cents here, a buck there. But if you're a big pimp pirate, they add up.
I also believe the median is a lot smaller than the average. Many pirates paying a little, a few paying truly ridiculous amounts of cash.
Mod parent up. A standard security mantra is, if you use a bigger hammer than necessary, you increase the chances of smashing your thumb.
The more complex the software tool, the more likely it is to have some sort of security hole in an obscure feature you don't care about and aren't aware of.
To clarify my question, there are tons of ways in which an ATM can be untrustworthy:
* It has additional hardware bolted on to steal card numbers
* Its software has been tampered with
* The bank running it is corrupt
* It's not actually an ATM, just a box that steals card numbers and hands out cash without talking to my bank.
This brings up a serious question. You need some cash in an unfamiliar state or country, and you come across an ATM. How do you know if you can trust it?
Given the number of people who've been scammed by everything from bolt-on ATM card skimmers to oldschool fake night deposit boxes, this is worth worrying about.
The standard security mantra is, "only use trusted hardware to authenticate yourself", but that can't happen here.
Anyone have any ideas for an ATM authentication system that will both prove to the bank that I am who I say I am, and prove to me that the ATM isn't stealing my authentication keys?
The only solution I can think of involves trusted hand-held devices like cell phones or keychain password tokens.
I'm a typical "nerd-sized" caucasian male. Not a total lardbutt, but my fingers are definitely pretty big. I've been happily typing on my iPhone 1.0 since the day they came out.
It does take a little longer than a 30-second "poke at it in the store" trial to get used to the keyboard, but I'm totally happy with it. You've just got to convince yourself to keep your hands off the backspace key, let typos go, and trust the autocorrect to fix them for you.
0. The phone figures out where the *center* of your finger is, something a physical keyboard can't do. And any mistakes get autocorrected gracefully.
1. As you type, the letters pop up above your finger so you can see it. And you can slide around to adjust if you're slightly off.
2. Yes. You will more mistakes with a non-tactile keyboard, but they will be autocorrected.
Try an iPhone for a bit. Or watch this video. What the iPhone lacks in tactile response compared to a Blackberry, it more than makes up for in brains.
And watch the foreign-language tricks in the latter part of that video. Can't do *that* with a Blackberry!
Keep swearing! The phone will eventually figure out you're a pottymouth and adapt its autocorrect dictionary.
That's exactly what the iPhone does. You can be really sloppy when typing common letters like "S", but you have to be more precise for nearby uncommon letters like "Z". Not that that's a problem, it'll autocorrect if you miss.
Supposedly the sizes of these sensitive areas can change based on what you're in the process of typing, but I can't tell if it's actually doing that.
Agree. Anyone who thinks this is a cool idea hasn't used an iPhone keypad much.
The inventor's still stuck on the notion that each keypress must map onto a single character somehow, but the iPhone is smarter than that. It resolves ambiguous keypresses based on the letters that came before, and *also* the ones that came after. For instance, typing "THI", it assumes I'm on my way to "this", "thin", or "thick", but if I follow it up with "MAS", it changes the I to an O for "THOMAS".
And if I really did want to type the unusual name "Thimas", I just hit the little cancel-autocorrect x-box on the screen.
bbc.co.uk is unlikely to report on stories like this or this.
If all politics is local, you'd better have some local news sources.
Lots of people here are taking a capitalist "let the best media win and the worst media fail" point of view, which I can totally get behind, in terms of national news. Between nytimes.com, fox news, cnn, washington post, la times, and direct feeds from AP and Reuters, there's no shortage of sources for national and international news. If a few of those sources can't figure out how to make a profit off the Web and go bust, hey, who cares?
But my worry is about local news. Many of the papers in question are the *only* source of serious investigative news in their region. If the New York Times and the Boston Globe go bust, who's going to investigate City Hall and State Capitol political shenanigans, state police brutality, or local corporate fraud? The Post and the Herald? Not likely. Random bloggers? They're too diffuse to have the power to be taken seriously by the government. TV channels? The only investigative journalism they have time or money for is "Are Pokemon Killing Our Kids?!"
I'm seriously worried that if these papers go under, nobody will be watching the local authorities. As I see it, scandal and corruption are already a much much bigger problem at the local level than nationally, because at the local level, not many people are paying attention. Get rid of the local paper, and it'll be party central at the city hall.
"Commodity" is not the opposite of "luxury", but nevermind that....
If your point is that news is something everyone needs, but WoW is something people only the wealthy pay for, I disagree. I'm willing to bet you that the median income of New York Times subscribers is higher than the median income of WoW players.
Willingness to pay for media has very little to do with income, and everything to do with the perceived quality of the product.
-----------------
If, on the other hand, you're using "commodity" in its technical sense, as a product for which variation in quality is irrelevant, then you're closer to correct. News *is* perceived as a commodity, in that people don't notice a difference in quality between New York Times brand news and Yahoo brand news. But as the quality of AP and Reuters decline due to lack of support from prime newsgatherers, the difference will become more and more obvious.
Everyone likes the New York Times, but if it's behind a paywall, everyone will go read Yahoo News instead. Right?
Everyone likes World of Warcraft, but since it's behind a paywall ($15/month!), everyone plays MapleStory instead. Right?
1 million Americans pay for the New York Times, and many more than that read it for free. 2.5 million Americans *pay* for WoW.
There's nothing wrong with paywalls, so long as you can make your product attractive enough to pay for.
The "right" way to do it is something like
floor(8*(36*roll3+6*roll2+roll1 - 43)/215)) + 1
Yes, but you're rolling far more dice than you need to, since you're making a die roll the same as a coin flip.
And your texttobinary thing made me throw up in my mouth a little bit... :)
Wow. Fishing for nerds is so damned easy, they take the bait even when you put a sign on it saying "WARNING: CONTAINS FISHHOOKS".
For a good nerd time, try working out the probability distribution table for Mod8(D6+D6)+1. I suggested it as a joke, but it's less horrible thank you might think.
80,000 rolls a day is one every 10 seconds. You can't be sure exactly which roll is going to be yours vs another gamer's, but you can use the average of say, the next 50 rolls to give yourself an edge the same way a card-counting Blackjack player would.
it can only roll D6s.
No problem. You can generate any die roll you like from D6's, just do a little math.
For a D8, just roll two D6's, add them together, and then take the result modulo 8 and add 1. Poof! A random number between 1 and 8!
.
.
.
.
(If you're furious with nerd rage right now: I'm kidding. If you're not furious: don't try this at home.)
RTFA. The machine was built for a good reason.
If you think software RNGs aren't random enough to play board games with, you'd better delete your Webmail accounts and close your online bank account, because Web security absolutely relies on them.
On the other hand, this machine is frickin' awesome. But I do worry about the fact that it makes die rolls in large batches, and stores them for hours before using them. A fine opportunity for cheating if you can get access to any of the dice-roller's controller software.
Sorry it took me so long to read this article about the total failure of virtual reality. I've been busy, I spent the whole day in Azeroth.