>> People laughed at him...but I still like the idea of a businessman running the country, rather than a politician.
>I presume then that you will be voting for George W. Bush, the first president with an MBA (Harvard, 1975).
No, I would be voting for someone who had actually started and run a real business for a significant period of time and made money doing it. Having an MBA is neither necessary nor sufficient for being a businessman.
>> First, fans very often don't know what they want and they contradict each other when they ask for it.
> 50% say "more", 50% say "less" -> leave it like it is. Simple as that.
There's one problem with this. If 50% say more and 50% say less and you leave it like it is, you're still making 0% of your players happy. If you moved it in either direction, at least you'd make 50% happy.
Another poster brought up the fact that the editorial puts forth Dune 2 as the "first RTS", which is obviously wrong.
What was it, though? You might call Warcraft the first "modern RTS", I guess, but reaching back into the dark corners of my youth, I'm coming up with Ancient Art of War as the first RTS. It was, what, 1981 or so on a CGA PC?
Anyone know something before that (or want to argue that AAW was not an RTS)?
I'm pretty sure this rule was "invented" by parents for children.
You know, children. Those small, humanoid-looking things that are incapable of holding ANYTHING in their hands without banging, dropping, or throwing it on the floor at least once a minute.
If a parent threw away every piece of a child's food that touched the floor, the food bill would triple. It ALL goes on the floor at some point.
I honestly believe this rule was made up for one reason. When your kids drop their food on the floor for the umpteenth time, you want to make them eat it anyway. So you say "five-second rule" and shove it in their slobbering little faces.
I too love Scotland Yard, but it isn't a very good choice for this particular argument.
It may actually be German, for all I know, but I bought it as a child around 1980 from a mainstream toy store in the U.S. There was no indication that it was an import or remake.
So it looks like the American market at least *used* to get the right games, one way or another.
You are being positioned, at least in this community, as the "geek candidate". (I'll omit the quotes from now on, and hope you're not offended by the word geek.)
It seems to me that a female geek holds the best hope for getting a technologically-competent politician into an important office, because female geeks escape from many of the negative stereotypes that plague male geeks in the public perception.
How do you think being a female geek vs a male geek affects your chance to win the election? (Better? Worse? Non-issue?) Along the same lines, do you believe being female in general will make the election easier or more difficult for you?
The reason I asked this question is this -- over half of the replies to this interview post have referred to you as "he", "him", or otherwise as a male, when even the short article blurb clearly indicated you were a "she".
>Or consider the result of walking up to folk playing chess in the park and overturning the board.
>In each case, legal action is both warranted and acceptable.
IANAL. This is a genuine question.
Can either criminal charges or a civil suit really be brought against you for overturning someone's chess board in a public location? Sure you're a jerk, but what law did you break?
How would you be charged or for what would you be sued?
I hate to muddy the waters, because I agree with your point. Having said that, I'll do it anyway.
In the States, at least, you probably could "be allowed" to shoot a man who raped your girlfriend, IF you caught him in the act, had a competent lawyer, and pleaded temporary insanity. ("I wasn't thinking clearly, Your Honor. I just knew I had to stop him from hurting my girlfriend.")
This would be a very humorous analogy for the RIAA to make when they got sued. (Though in a civil suit it would almost certainly fail.) "But Your Honor, we just didn't know what else to do when we saw 1337h@x0r violating our poor little Britney's copyright. We reacted emotionally to stop him by any means necessary before that poor girl got hurt any more."
>What should they have called it, though? Well, it's a Linux Alternative for the Consumer, how about LAC? LacOs. I like it.
But what about all the people in the world who are LacOs-intolerant?
Possible solution to patent problems?
on
AOL Patents IM
·
· Score: 1
I'm sure someone will tell me why this can't work, but what about a system like this?
1. Company X wants to file a patent asserting that they own IP rights to Idea/Product Y.
2. At the time the patent application is filed, Company X is legally obligated to place $10 million US (or some other suitably large amount) in an escrow account. Without this escrow deposit, the patent is considered as not having been filed.
3. If the patent application is rejected or if it is granted but later successfully challenged (on prior art, obviousness, etc), that $10 million instantly goes away, as the escrow company gives it to the government.
This system would still allow corporations to have IP for things they truly invented, but would make it financially suicidal to file a patent unless they were CERTAIN they deserved it. It would put the responsibility for discovering prior art on the filing corporation. (Ideally, the PTO should have the responsibility, but the corporations have the money and incentive to be much more thorough.)
What do you think?
Also, how can we solve the obvious problem with this idea, that being: ordinary people couldn't file a patent on a new idea if they had to put up $10 million, so where can we draw some lines between the megacorps and bright individuals?
Yes, but Velikovsky was also run out of the scientific community because he thought Biblical and mythical miracles/catastrophes were caused by Venus being ejected from Jupiter and rampaging around the Solar System before somehow settling into its current orbit. That's still mighty unlikely.
For example, he stated that the "day the sun stood still" at Jericho, so the Israelites could take their vengeance, was caused by Venus making a close pass to the Earth. It passed just perfectly so as to stop the Earth's rotation. It then came back just one day later and perfectly restarted the rotation exactly as before.
Nevermind the fact that people didn't get flung into space when the rotation suddenly stopped... he's saying Venus passed INSIDE the orbit of the moon, twice! Don't you think they would have mentioned that somewhere in the story?:-)
(You decide for yourself whether I was being redundant when I said "Biblical and mythical". Trying not to get too far off topic, here.)
I've been driving for thirty years with no moving violations but have had two accidents: both caused by teenagers. (Rear-ended at a red stop light by a seventeen year old doing 40 and broadsided a sixteen year old who didn't look for oncoming traffic and pulled right out into traffic from a stop sign.)
Yes, but anecdotal evidence works both ways. I've been driving 13 years (with one speeding ticket in a rural speed trap). I have been in three accidents, all ruled the other party's fault.
One was a female senior citizen on her way to a garden club meeting who ran a red light because she couldn't be late for her social function.
One was a middle aged female who had taken her husband's car without permission and "he'll kill me if he finds out" -- rear-ended me at ~30mph while yielding to traffic at an interstate on-ramp.
One was a youngish (30s) female driving an SUV with four kids in the back -- rear-ended me at a red light going about 45 mph because she was looking at the four kids and ignoring the road.
So my experience has been totally contrary to yours. All of my accidents have been caused by mature female drivers not paying attention to the road. No teenagers in sight.
Theft removes a piece of property from another party such that they no longer have what they once had. Software/music/movie piracy makes a copy of a piece of property, leaving the original fully intact with the other party.
News flash: The ??AA are not winning by passing laws, they are winning by changing our vocabulary.
Once you accept that piracy == theft, you accept that "me copying my friend's CD" == "me stealing your TV", which then suggests you should apply the same laws, so why not call copying AutoCAD "Grand Larceny" and use existing laws to put the perp away for 20 years?
Assuming the submitter did his/her math correctly...
I know 0.001% isn't *that* great a probability (1 in 100,000), but it's a little daunting to think that the probability of Earth being smacked by a huge asteroid during my lifetime is about 1000 times better than my chances of winning the lottery.
(And yeah, that's just that one asteroid, so the real chance would be even a bit higher.)
As mentioned by others in this thread, checking every student's submission against every other is a n^2 problem - how did you deal with the computational requirement?
It is an O(n^2) problem, and we didn't particularly have a clever way around that. In the real world, though, O(n^2) algorithms are perfectly workable so long as n remains reasonably small, and if the coefficient (which is usually discarded in theoretical discussions of Work) is small enough, they can be reasonable even for fairly large n. (For example, if it's really an order 0.1(n^2) problem, that's not *so* bad.)
Mostly, though, we were fortunate enough to be able to run it on some really fast Sparc servers (the main time-sharing computer systems for the university, IIRC), so we had an enormous amount of horsepower at our disposal, and of course it was run "nice" at off-peak times.
Perl cleverness kept the actual coding to a relative minimum (since much of it was regexp-oriented), but that didn't reduce the computational complexity or time, of course.
As a former Head TA for one of the classes in question (CS 1502 - Intro to Computing), I'll try to elaborate and answer common questions.
No, I have no current affiliation with Georgia Tech.
Yes, the cheatfinder really, really, honest-to-God exists. We used it every quarter that I was associated with the class and caught _lots_ of people. You'd be stunned how many people thought we were just making it up to scare them into not cheating.
Yes, it actually works. It examines mostly source code, although some versions of it were twiddled to look at "in-between" assembler to help catch those who just change variable names and such. It scans for patterns in the logical constructs of code blocks, even if they've been rearranged or altered in other "cosmetic" ways. It also looks for exact matches in text (like the "commas in same places" mentioned by Kurt in the article), but this is misleading -- it does a whole lot more than that.
Yes, depending on how you run it, it can generate a boatload of false positives, but it contains several tweakable threshold levels that let you control how "suspicious" a pair-match has to be before it gets flagged, and these thresholds are made looser for simple programs where there's really only one way to do it.
No, no action is *ever* taken based on the output of the cheatfinder directly. It merely alerts the TA who's responsible for cheatfinder that quarter and he/she then manually reads the source code to see if it looks like a case of cheating. If so, it gets sent on to the professor for a final verification (and possible discussion with the student if it is a borderline case), before being forwarded to Kurt for examination and possible disciplinary action.
Finally, yes, it's an old and very "evolved" codebase. You wouldn't want to be the one to maintain it, but on the other hand, it has been tweaked to the point where you'd be really surprised at the sort of clever cheating it can detect. (i.e. it works a lot better than diffing the source code;)
Anyway, figured I should throw in my $0.02 on this one, since I used to run that class.
If anybody has any specific questions, please post to this comment and I'll reply. (Questions from current Tech students asking how to "get around" the cheatfinder will be happily ignored, of course.;)
Plenty of comments have addressed the fact that Apple doesn't really need more than 5% of the PC market to be successful, but no one seems to have addressed *why* people get confused about Jobs' approach to Apple marketing and design.
I think the problem is that Jobs presents too many faces to too many people.
When he's in mainstream media, he talks about how Mercedes only has 5% of the market and that's just plenty for them, because they're a high-end, niche automaker. He seems to place Apple in the same category, which makes a lot of sense.
When he's on a financial show (Lou Dobbs, etc), he talks about what a great opportunity Apple has to expand its marketshare, because with only 5% currently, they need only 5% more to double their share! This makes less sense, because it tends to devolve into "the worse we're doing, the more things can improve".
When he's on stage in front of the Faithful, though, he still goes on about beating Microsoft, taking over the computing world, the "revolution" started by Apple, and so forth. This is pretty much just playing to the audience and trying to keep the Mac zealots as zealous as ever.
So, I think Jobs does it to himself. He pitches the company too many different ways to too many different people, which leads to conflicted understandings of just what Apple is trying to achieve.
The best way for Jobs to quiet the constant media braying about his "only 5%" share is to stop talking about competing with MS, beating MS, starting a revolution, etc, and start repeating over and over: "Apple makes PCs for a certain high-end niche, and in that niche, we are incredibly innovative and successful, and I'm going to make sure we stay that way."
I had to buy Applying UML and Patterns [amazon.com] by Craig Larman for a software engineering class last semester, and it's very good. Not only does he follow a case study through the whole book (a POS system), but he hacks down people for spending too much time on diagramming.
Is a case study of a "POS" system really the reference you want to follow??
I feel silly for feeding the trolls, but I will anyway.
Has it occurred to you that some part of the/. community doesn't actually care that much about Linux or, in fact, any of the other software you mentioned?
Sure, I have a Linux box at home, serving as the gateway for my home network and such, but that doesn't mean I care (at all) to know when Random Kernel Update 4.9.0.3.2b is released. The install I have right now works just fine, thanks, and I don't care if somebody wrote a patch to turn my window borders mauve when a request comes into port 80.
I subscribed to "Slashdot. News for Nerds. Stuff that matters." because I'm a nerd and I love having a good source for stories about science, gadgets, and other nerdly things. I *didn't* (and wouldn't) subscribe to "Slashdot. News about Linux. Microsoft sucks." because I already know Microsoft sucks and I just don't need that much Linux news.
Just because/. got bought by a Linux company doesn't mean we can't still have stories by and for the larger community.
I, for one, skip straight past most of the Linux (and related) stories to read about NASA's latest project, quantum teleportation, laser sails, and other fun science. Don't assume that everyone here is like you or shares your specific interests. "Nerd" is a very broad term these days.
Slashdot Mirror
I read the article a few days ago (the first time it was posted), so I don't recall all the terms used, but the two you asked about:
mez = mesmerize (charm/stun/immobilize sort of thing)
DPS = damage per second (measure of how rapidly you can put the hurt on a monster)
If you want anything else translated, just list it out and I'll be glad to.
>> People laughed at him...but I still like the idea of a businessman running the country, rather than a politician.
>I presume then that you will be voting for George W. Bush, the first president with an MBA (Harvard, 1975).
No, I would be voting for someone who had actually started and run a real business for a significant period of time and made money doing it. Having an MBA is neither necessary nor sufficient for being a businessman.
>> First, fans very often don't know what they want and they contradict each other when they ask for it.
> 50% say "more", 50% say "less" -> leave it like it is. Simple as that.
There's one problem with this. If 50% say more and 50% say less and you leave it like it is, you're still making 0% of your players happy. If you moved it in either direction, at least you'd make 50% happy.
Another poster brought up the fact that the editorial puts forth Dune 2 as the "first RTS", which is obviously wrong.
What was it, though? You might call Warcraft the first "modern RTS", I guess, but reaching back into the dark corners of my youth, I'm coming up with Ancient Art of War as the first RTS. It was, what, 1981 or so on a CGA PC?
Anyone know something before that (or want to argue that AAW was not an RTS)?
I'm pretty sure this rule was "invented" by parents for children.
You know, children. Those small, humanoid-looking things that are incapable of holding ANYTHING in their hands without banging, dropping, or throwing it on the floor at least once a minute.
If a parent threw away every piece of a child's food that touched the floor, the food bill would triple. It ALL goes on the floor at some point.
I honestly believe this rule was made up for one reason. When your kids drop their food on the floor for the umpteenth time, you want to make them eat it anyway. So you say "five-second rule" and shove it in their slobbering little faces.
I too love Scotland Yard, but it isn't a very good choice for this particular argument.
It may actually be German, for all I know, but I bought it as a child around 1980 from a mainstream toy store in the U.S. There was no indication that it was an import or remake.
So it looks like the American market at least *used* to get the right games, one way or another.
Ms. Russell,
You are being positioned, at least in this community, as the "geek candidate". (I'll omit the quotes from now on, and hope you're not offended by the word geek.)
It seems to me that a female geek holds the best hope for getting a technologically-competent politician into an important office, because female geeks escape from many of the negative stereotypes that plague male geeks in the public perception.
How do you think being a female geek vs a male geek affects your chance to win the election? (Better? Worse? Non-issue?) Along the same lines, do you believe being female in general will make the election easier or more difficult for you?
The reason I asked this question is this -- over half of the replies to this interview post have referred to you as "he", "him", or otherwise as a male, when even the short article blurb clearly indicated you were a "she".
>Or is it ignoramii?
No, that's the ancient Japanese art of folding paper into things nobody cares about.
>Or consider the result of walking up to folk playing chess in the park and overturning the board.
>In each case, legal action is both warranted and acceptable.
IANAL. This is a genuine question.
Can either criminal charges or a civil suit really be brought against you for overturning someone's chess board in a public location? Sure you're a jerk, but what law did you break?
How would you be charged or for what would you be sued?
> $sth = $dbh-> prepare({SELECT from tblAll WHERE status="immigrant"});
> $sth->execute();
> @val = $sth->fetchrow_array();
> deport(@val);
Why bother deport()ing them after you have already ->execute()d them? Just to make the bodies harder to find?
> I was thinking of starting a porn site myself...
> One of my buddies tried it, and failed due to the stiff competition.
Failed due to the "stiff" competition. Perhaps an appropriate dose of Viagra would have allowed your buddy to compete with the other porn sites, then?
(Contributes his $0.50 to the bad pun collection jar.)
I hate to muddy the waters, because I agree with your point. Having said that, I'll do it anyway.
In the States, at least, you probably could "be allowed" to shoot a man who raped your girlfriend, IF you caught him in the act, had a competent lawyer, and pleaded temporary insanity. ("I wasn't thinking clearly, Your Honor. I just knew I had to stop him from hurting my girlfriend.")
This would be a very humorous analogy for the RIAA to make when they got sued. (Though in a civil suit it would almost certainly fail.) "But Your Honor, we just didn't know what else to do when we saw 1337h@x0r violating our poor little Britney's copyright. We reacted emotionally to stop him by any means necessary before that poor girl got hurt any more."
>What should they have called it, though? Well, it's a Linux Alternative for the Consumer, how about LAC? LacOs. I like it.
But what about all the people in the world who are LacOs-intolerant?
I'm sure someone will tell me why this can't work, but what about a system like this?
1. Company X wants to file a patent asserting that they own IP rights to Idea/Product Y.
2. At the time the patent application is filed, Company X is legally obligated to place $10 million US (or some other suitably large amount) in an escrow account. Without this escrow deposit, the patent is considered as not having been filed.
3. If the patent application is rejected or if it is granted but later successfully challenged (on prior art, obviousness, etc), that $10 million instantly goes away, as the escrow company gives it to the government.
This system would still allow corporations to have IP for things they truly invented, but would make it financially suicidal to file a patent unless they were CERTAIN they deserved it. It would put the responsibility for discovering prior art on the filing corporation. (Ideally, the PTO should have the responsibility, but the corporations have the money and incentive to be much more thorough.)
What do you think?
Also, how can we solve the obvious problem with this idea, that being: ordinary people couldn't file a patent on a new idea if they had to put up $10 million, so where can we draw some lines between the megacorps and bright individuals?
Yes, but Velikovsky was also run out of the scientific community because he thought Biblical and mythical miracles/catastrophes were caused by Venus being ejected from Jupiter and rampaging around the Solar System before somehow settling into its current orbit. That's still mighty unlikely.
:-)
For example, he stated that the "day the sun stood still" at Jericho, so the Israelites could take their vengeance, was caused by Venus making a close pass to the Earth. It passed just perfectly so as to stop the Earth's rotation. It then came back just one day later and perfectly restarted the rotation exactly as before.
Nevermind the fact that people didn't get flung into space when the rotation suddenly stopped... he's saying Venus passed INSIDE the orbit of the moon, twice! Don't you think they would have mentioned that somewhere in the story?
(You decide for yourself whether I was being redundant when I said "Biblical and mythical". Trying not to get too far off topic, here.)
I've been driving for thirty years with no moving violations but have had two accidents: both caused by teenagers. (Rear-ended at a red stop light by a seventeen year old doing 40 and broadsided a sixteen year old who didn't look for oncoming traffic and pulled right out into traffic from a stop sign.)
Yes, but anecdotal evidence works both ways. I've been driving 13 years (with one speeding ticket in a rural speed trap). I have been in three accidents, all ruled the other party's fault.
One was a female senior citizen on her way to a garden club meeting who ran a red light because she couldn't be late for her social function.
One was a middle aged female who had taken her husband's car without permission and "he'll kill me if he finds out" -- rear-ended me at ~30mph while yielding to traffic at an interstate on-ramp.
One was a youngish (30s) female driving an SUV with four kids in the back -- rear-ended me at a red light going about 45 mph because she was looking at the four kids and ignoring the road.
So my experience has been totally contrary to yours. All of my accidents have been caused by mature female drivers not paying attention to the road. No teenagers in sight.
You'll definitely see it in your lifetime, because it is already here.
It's made more or less of paper, so that shouldn't be an issue in disposal... but there's the battery to worry about, of course.
Please repeat after me.
"Piracy is not theft."
Theft removes a piece of property from another party such that they no longer have what they once had. Software/music/movie piracy makes a copy of a piece of property, leaving the original fully intact with the other party.
News flash: The ??AA are not winning by passing laws, they are winning by changing our vocabulary.
Once you accept that piracy == theft, you accept that "me copying my friend's CD" == "me stealing your TV", which then suggests you should apply the same laws, so why not call copying AutoCAD "Grand Larceny" and use existing laws to put the perp away for 20 years?
Assuming the submitter did his/her math correctly...
I know 0.001% isn't *that* great a probability (1 in 100,000), but it's a little daunting to think that the probability of Earth being smacked by a huge asteroid during my lifetime is about 1000 times better than my chances of winning the lottery.
(And yeah, that's just that one asteroid, so the real chance would be even a bit higher.)
Gives new meaning to "live for today", eh?
As mentioned by others in this thread, checking every student's submission against every other is a n^2 problem - how did you deal with the computational requirement?
It is an O(n^2) problem, and we didn't particularly have a clever way around that. In the real world, though, O(n^2) algorithms are perfectly workable so long as n remains reasonably small, and if the coefficient (which is usually discarded in theoretical discussions of Work) is small enough, they can be reasonable even for fairly large n. (For example, if it's really an order 0.1(n^2) problem, that's not *so* bad.)
Mostly, though, we were fortunate enough to be able to run it on some really fast Sparc servers (the main time-sharing computer systems for the university, IIRC), so we had an enormous amount of horsepower at our disposal, and of course it was run "nice" at off-peak times.
Perl cleverness kept the actual coding to a relative minimum (since much of it was regexp-oriented), but that didn't reduce the computational complexity or time, of course.
As a former Head TA for one of the classes in question (CS 1502 - Intro to Computing), I'll try to elaborate and answer common questions.
;)
;)
No, I have no current affiliation with Georgia Tech.
Yes, the cheatfinder really, really, honest-to-God exists. We used it every quarter that I was associated with the class and caught _lots_ of people. You'd be stunned how many people thought we were just making it up to scare them into not cheating.
Yes, it actually works. It examines mostly source code, although some versions of it were twiddled to look at "in-between" assembler to help catch those who just change variable names and such. It scans for patterns in the logical constructs of code blocks, even if they've been rearranged or altered in other "cosmetic" ways. It also looks for exact matches in text (like the "commas in same places" mentioned by Kurt in the article), but this is misleading -- it does a whole lot more than that.
Yes, depending on how you run it, it can generate a boatload of false positives, but it contains several tweakable threshold levels that let you control how "suspicious" a pair-match has to be before it gets flagged, and these thresholds are made looser for simple programs where there's really only one way to do it.
No, no action is *ever* taken based on the output of the cheatfinder directly. It merely alerts the TA who's responsible for cheatfinder that quarter and he/she then manually reads the source code to see if it looks like a case of cheating. If so, it gets sent on to the professor for a final verification (and possible discussion with the student if it is a borderline case), before being forwarded to Kurt for examination and possible disciplinary action.
Finally, yes, it's an old and very "evolved" codebase. You wouldn't want to be the one to maintain it, but on the other hand, it has been tweaked to the point where you'd be really surprised at the sort of clever cheating it can detect. (i.e. it works a lot better than diffing the source code
Anyway, figured I should throw in my $0.02 on this one, since I used to run that class.
If anybody has any specific questions, please post to this comment and I'll reply. (Questions from current Tech students asking how to "get around" the cheatfinder will be happily ignored, of course.
Plenty of comments have addressed the fact that Apple doesn't really need more than 5% of the PC market to be successful, but no one seems to have addressed *why* people get confused about Jobs' approach to Apple marketing and design.
I think the problem is that Jobs presents too many faces to too many people.
When he's in mainstream media, he talks about how Mercedes only has 5% of the market and that's just plenty for them, because they're a high-end, niche automaker. He seems to place Apple in the same category, which makes a lot of sense.
When he's on a financial show (Lou Dobbs, etc), he talks about what a great opportunity Apple has to expand its marketshare, because with only 5% currently, they need only 5% more to double their share! This makes less sense, because it tends to devolve into "the worse we're doing, the more things can improve".
When he's on stage in front of the Faithful, though, he still goes on about beating Microsoft, taking over the computing world, the "revolution" started by Apple, and so forth. This is pretty much just playing to the audience and trying to keep the Mac zealots as zealous as ever.
So, I think Jobs does it to himself. He pitches the company too many different ways to too many different people, which leads to conflicted understandings of just what Apple is trying to achieve.
The best way for Jobs to quiet the constant media braying about his "only 5%" share is to stop talking about competing with MS, beating MS, starting a revolution, etc, and start repeating over and over: "Apple makes PCs for a certain high-end niche, and in that niche, we are incredibly innovative and successful, and I'm going to make sure we stay that way."
Is a case study of a "POS" system really the reference you want to follow??
Oh, wait... point of ... never mind.
I feel silly for feeding the trolls, but I will anyway.
/. community doesn't actually care that much about Linux or, in fact, any of the other software you mentioned?
/. got bought by a Linux company doesn't mean we can't still have stories by and for the larger community.
Has it occurred to you that some part of the
Sure, I have a Linux box at home, serving as the gateway for my home network and such, but that doesn't mean I care (at all) to know when Random Kernel Update 4.9.0.3.2b is released. The install I have right now works just fine, thanks, and I don't care if somebody wrote a patch to turn my window borders mauve when a request comes into port 80.
I subscribed to "Slashdot. News for Nerds. Stuff that matters." because I'm a nerd and I love having a good source for stories about science, gadgets, and other nerdly things. I *didn't* (and wouldn't) subscribe to "Slashdot. News about Linux. Microsoft sucks." because I already know Microsoft sucks and I just don't need that much Linux news.
Just because
I, for one, skip straight past most of the Linux (and related) stories to read about NASA's latest project, quantum teleportation, laser sails, and other fun science. Don't assume that everyone here is like you or shares your specific interests. "Nerd" is a very broad term these days.
</FEED TARGET="Troll">
So, not to be a smart-ass, but...
"a visor that projects a 3d world exactly the same as your physical arena".
If it's exactly the same as your physical arena, what are you gaining? And how do you know when it's broken?