Everything else on that planet had extra arms and unusual breathing apparatus and so forth. But the humanoids used the human bodyplan down to the toenails, just stretched out. Convergent evolution is one thing... but aliens should actually be, y'know, alien.
It's possible to make sympathetic characters that don't look at all like a human. See, e.g., District 9. But apparently they didn't feel like it here.
I enjoyed the movie well enough. But scientifically, it was just bonkers.
I'd just like to second that - for a simple setup, Motion's just right. I've got one watching my office, too. Easy setup and does precisely what's needed. It wouldn't scale to a very large setup, but that's not its goal.
...and I wanna use OpenGL. I know there's OpenGL ES, and there's full-fledged OpenGL. Is there a practical common subset? Are there techniques that scale?
They also didnt tell you that upscaling on a ps3 is not as good as many regular upscaling dvd players let alone standalone blu-ray players because the system doesnt do that much postprocessing. Why would that be?
I have a Toshiba upscaling DVD player and a PS3. I have seen no indication whatsoever that the PS3 has any limitations or problems with upscaling DVDs. They look very nice on my 52" 1080p TV. I only bother with Blu-Ray for F/X blockbusters; for chick flicks with the wife I don't need to be able to read the notes on the refrigerator behind the characters.
Where, exactly, are you getting the information that the PS3's upscaling is gimped? At one point, early on, it didn't do upscaling. But that was fixed back in May 2007 (firmware 1.80), and there's been a couple improvements since then...
How do you think the average user would do with WINE?
If you'll note carefully, we're not talking about the average user. We're talking about a techie guy setting up a computer for someone else. As it turns out, my elderly parents do just fine with Wine - I set them up with a desktop shortcut that launches Peggle for them.
Other than view half the video sources on the Internet, do their income tax, and run any games or other purchased software, no there's nothing Ubuntu can't do -- assuming that their hardware is adequately supported in Linux which may or may not be the case.
Name three video sources on the Internet Linux can't view. I haven't run into any.
Web-based income tax, assuming you use software for it. We pay a guy.
I play several older games on Wine without trouble, and use qemu for a few others. The newer ones I play on my PS3.
With Ubuntu, there's a dramatically smaller need to use "purchased software".
It's getting hard to find hardware that isn't supported under Linux. USB stuff has standards, which any OS can implement - it's been a long time since I ran into some random gewgaw that wouldn't work with Linux. Video cards have been an issue, but less and less so. Intel and Nvidia seem to be solved problems, and ATI seems to be getting there. What hardware are you worried about, anyway?
This, of course, ignores the point that if you're going to be doing tech support for your family, which class of problem do you want to be solving - the ones above, or endless battles with malware? I know which ones I picked for my parents, and when I visit I spend a *lot* less time fixing Ubuntu problems for them.
Free will ain't no argument against time travel!
on
The Big Questions
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· Score: 3, Interesting
Basically you have a situation where there is a physics question (are CTCs possible, and if so, how would they work?), where one of the strongest arguments available is based on the assumption of free will (the feeling that older-me can *choose* freely to warn younger-me away from the CTC).
A lot of people don't like this model because it would seem to eliminate any possibility of free will. Personally, I don't particularly worry about whether I have free will or not. If I do have free will, then I don't have to worry about it. If I don't, then there's no point in worrying about it. Either way...
But this model doesn't necessarily pose problems for free will. Consider normal ideas about time and free will. Your parents freely chose to have you, right? At the very least, their free choices led them to the point where they did have you, though hopefully they were happy about it.
Now, assuming no time travel, those choices cannot now be changed, right? They cannot now decide not to have had you. The moment of choice was back then, somewhere in the past. Once that choice was made, it was fixed. Assuming free will, it was not totally determined by what led up to it in some physical deterministic sense, but once made it could not be changed. This is not a constraint on free will.
Now, just by adding in time travel we needn't change anything about this. Choices are freely made at the moment they are decided. It's just that now it's possible to know what those free choices "were" at a point in time "before" the choice "will be" made. (English again forces us to use strange tenses to speak about this. Oh, well.) Remember, in this model, there is no privileged point we can pick out and call 'the present'. Every moment is past to some instants, future to others. Every moment is a "present".
(Note that some people use this idea to reconcile the idea of God knowing what we will do with the notion of free will. God, existing outside of time, doesn't ordain what people do, It just sees them doing it. I only bring it up to point out that lots of people have no problem in principle with the idea that they both have free will and yet someone knows with certainty what they will do. I don't see why it's any different if someone besides a God has that knowledge...)
If you see a movie of yourself from the future doing certain things tomorrow, from a certain perspective it doesn't mean that you are "fated" to do those things. It just means that you know, when that time comes around, that doing those things will seem to you to be the best available choice.
Perhaps the future choice seems silly, or even terrible. Well, can't you think of a moment where you've made a choice, and then later (perhaps only a second later) thought, "What was I thinking?" The fact that it seems unlikely to you that you will make that choice doesn't mean that you won't make it. People do things they never expected to do, even said they wouldn't do, all the time.
Yup... and all of those plans are for "Mobile Broadband Plans for USB Modems, PC Cards, ExpressCards, MiFi(TM) 2200, Notebooks or Netbooks", or else for "Mobile Broadband Connect", to connect such devices to phones.
However, the list of great features planned for this release is amazing!
I'm looking forward to officially-supported VDPAU. Even with a moderately beefy Athlon X2, playback's a little jerky for 720p AVCHD movies from my camcorder. With some hacking and PPAs, I can get VDPAU working with 9.04, and it's much better - CPU usage massively reduced, yet smooth playback.
Recode the DNA or RNA to use the slowest, most "pessimal" coding for the same proteins. The virus is externally the same but reproduces orders of magnitude slower, slow enough for the immune system to kill it before it can cause any harm. And the extent of the recoding is such that it's effectively impossible for the virus to revert to pathogenic form.
Quite intelligent. Not at all random, if I may say so myself.
Actually, fractals generate arbitrarily complex structures with very simple rules (e.g. the Mandelbrot Set - take a complex number, square it, add the original number, repeat.) That's pretty much exactly the kind of structure you'd expect an evolutionary process to come up with. If I may say so myself.
He found a practical application for the effect in "Rotating Cylinders and the Possibility of Global Causality Violation" (named in honor of Frank Tipler's paper). The universe hates time machines... so one side of a war works to convince the other side to try to make one.
What if the game taught you to be a better player? For example, it could slant the gameplay to teach you one strategy, then once you'd mastered that, move on to teach you a different one. If you do well enough, it starts to require combined strategies, etc.
The PS3 - especially the new "slim" model - doesn't have overheating problems. The very first PS3 model had a 90nm CPU and a 90nm GPU - it could run noisy, but not hot. The one I have (originally a 40GB model, I've since bumped up the hard drive) has a 65nm CPU and a 90nm GPU, is pretty quiet, and hasn't given me any hardware problems. The new "slim" model has 45nm parts (producing less heat) and a honking big fan. The big fan means it both moves a lot of air and is quiet.
I've seen no evidence that there's a big problem with PS3 reliability, and the story about updates 'bricking' are still unsubstantiated. It'll be interesting to see if this guy can actually produce some evidence...
Holy Grail is great and all, but I think "Life Of Brian" is the best Monty Python movie. It's the only one where they maintained a coherent plot thread through the whole proceedings, and still had drop-dead-funny stuff.
Crossfading in 2D, when everything's in one focal plane, is no problem. In 3D, different objects are in different focal planes, and everything's a confused mess until the fade's over. Your eye has no idea how far away to focus.
A lot of transitions will be jump-cuts, I suspect, with important objects in the old and new scenes at approximately the same focal depth to keep the eyes from straining from the transition.
(Say... what would the 3D equivalent of a star-wipe be?)
I once had a problem where a license manager would fail without giving a reason. During development I had, in my code, a printf which said, "No licence, no frickin' error" - which I forgot to remove before shipping. It was about a year before we'd patched all the customers. At least it wasn't a stronger expletive - but I always keep my editorial comments in the comments now.
I heard of some coder being told to implement some braindead feature... and he called the conditional variable controlling the behavior, "CustomerIsAnIdiot". But they didn't strip debugging symbols, and while the customer may have been an idiot, they knew how to use the "strings" command...
The 'fat' PS3's price is being cut to $299 and it retains the "OtherOS" feature. The press releases says "users will not be able to install other Operating Systems to the new PS3 system" [emphasis added]. (It's also not clear yet how hard it'll be to upgrade the HD in the 'slim' model, if it's possible at all.)
I've got Linux on mine, but I haven't had a chance to use it much. The annoying thing is that there's no real equivalent to a bootloader. If you set it to boot Linux, it will always boot to Linux until you boot the PS3 "Game OS", at which point it will always boot Game OS until you explicitly change it again. Makes it annoying to experiment with when the kids use it, too.
Um... it didn't. "Building blocks for life" does not equal "life". But once the 'building blocks' formed, life could get started... almost certainly on Earth. See, e.g., here.
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It's possible to make sympathetic characters that don't look at all like a human. See, e.g., District 9. But apparently they didn't feel like it here.
I enjoyed the movie well enough. But scientifically, it was just bonkers.
I'd just like to second that - for a simple setup, Motion's just right. I've got one watching my office, too. Easy setup and does precisely what's needed. It wouldn't scale to a very large setup, but that's not its goal.
There are also... power issues.
...and I wanna use OpenGL. I know there's OpenGL ES, and there's full-fledged OpenGL. Is there a practical common subset? Are there techniques that scale?
I have a Toshiba upscaling DVD player and a PS3. I have seen no indication whatsoever that the PS3 has any limitations or problems with upscaling DVDs. They look very nice on my 52" 1080p TV. I only bother with Blu-Ray for F/X blockbusters; for chick flicks with the wife I don't need to be able to read the notes on the refrigerator behind the characters.
Where, exactly, are you getting the information that the PS3's upscaling is gimped? At one point, early on, it didn't do upscaling. But that was fixed back in May 2007 (firmware 1.80), and there's been a couple improvements since then...
If you'll note carefully, we're not talking about the average user. We're talking about a techie guy setting up a computer for someone else. As it turns out, my elderly parents do just fine with Wine - I set them up with a desktop shortcut that launches Peggle for them.
This, of course, ignores the point that if you're going to be doing tech support for your family, which class of problem do you want to be solving - the ones above, or endless battles with malware? I know which ones I picked for my parents, and when I visit I spend a *lot* less time fixing Ubuntu problems for them.
From my own far-too-long-and-obsessive meditation on time travel:
A lot of people don't like this model because it would seem to eliminate any possibility of free will. Personally, I don't particularly worry about whether I have free will or not. If I do have free will, then I don't have to worry about it. If I don't, then there's no point in worrying about it. Either way...
But this model doesn't necessarily pose problems for free will. Consider normal ideas about time and free will. Your parents freely chose to have you, right? At the very least, their free choices led them to the point where they did have you, though hopefully they were happy about it.
Now, assuming no time travel, those choices cannot now be changed, right? They cannot now decide not to have had you. The moment of choice was back then, somewhere in the past. Once that choice was made, it was fixed. Assuming free will, it was not totally determined by what led up to it in some physical deterministic sense, but once made it could not be changed. This is not a constraint on free will.
Now, just by adding in time travel we needn't change anything about this. Choices are freely made at the moment they are decided. It's just that now it's possible to know what those free choices "were" at a point in time "before" the choice "will be" made. (English again forces us to use strange tenses to speak about this. Oh, well.) Remember, in this model, there is no privileged point we can pick out and call 'the present'. Every moment is past to some instants, future to others. Every moment is a "present".
(Note that some people use this idea to reconcile the idea of God knowing what we will do with the notion of free will. God, existing outside of time, doesn't ordain what people do, It just sees them doing it. I only bring it up to point out that lots of people have no problem in principle with the idea that they both have free will and yet someone knows with certainty what they will do. I don't see why it's any different if someone besides a God has that knowledge...)
If you see a movie of yourself from the future doing certain things tomorrow, from a certain perspective it doesn't mean that you are "fated" to do those things. It just means that you know, when that time comes around, that doing those things will seem to you to be the best available choice.
Perhaps the future choice seems silly, or even terrible. Well, can't you think of a moment where you've made a choice, and then later (perhaps only a second later) thought, "What was I thinking?" The fact that it seems unlikely to you that you will make that choice doesn't mean that you won't make it. People do things they never expected to do, even said they wouldn't do, all the time.
Yup... and all of those plans are for "Mobile Broadband Plans for USB Modems, PC Cards, ExpressCards, MiFi(TM) 2200, Notebooks or Netbooks", or else for "Mobile Broadband Connect", to connect such devices to phones.
You mean his PPA? :->
I'm looking forward to officially-supported VDPAU. Even with a moderately beefy Athlon X2, playback's a little jerky for 720p AVCHD movies from my camcorder. With some hacking and PPAs, I can get VDPAU working with 9.04, and it's much better - CPU usage massively reduced, yet smooth playback.
Recode the DNA or RNA to use the slowest, most "pessimal" coding for the same proteins. The virus is externally the same but reproduces orders of magnitude slower, slow enough for the immune system to kill it before it can cause any harm. And the extent of the recoding is such that it's effectively impossible for the virus to revert to pathogenic form.
Here, play with it yourself, like I did. I think you'd be interested in the results I got. Including parasitism and symbiosis.
Actually, fractals generate arbitrarily complex structures with very simple rules (e.g. the Mandelbrot Set - take a complex number, square it, add the original number, repeat.) That's pretty much exactly the kind of structure you'd expect an evolutionary process to come up with. If I may say so myself.
He found a practical application for the effect in "Rotating Cylinders and the Possibility of Global Causality Violation" (named in honor of Frank Tipler's paper). The universe hates time machines... so one side of a war works to convince the other side to try to make one.
What if the game taught you to be a better player? For example, it could slant the gameplay to teach you one strategy, then once you'd mastered that, move on to teach you a different one. If you do well enough, it starts to require combined strategies, etc.
I've seen no evidence that there's a big problem with PS3 reliability, and the story about updates 'bricking' are still unsubstantiated. It'll be interesting to see if this guy can actually produce some evidence...
"It says 'Romans Go Home'." "No it doesn't!"
"He has a wife, you know..."
Oh, heck, just see here.
...which can be found here.
Crossfading in 2D, when everything's in one focal plane, is no problem. In 3D, different objects are in different focal planes, and everything's a confused mess until the fade's over. Your eye has no idea how far away to focus. A lot of transitions will be jump-cuts, I suspect, with important objects in the old and new scenes at approximately the same focal depth to keep the eyes from straining from the transition. (Say... what would the 3D equivalent of a star-wipe be?)
I heard of some coder being told to implement some braindead feature... and he called the conditional variable controlling the behavior, "CustomerIsAnIdiot". But they didn't strip debugging symbols, and while the customer may have been an idiot, they knew how to use the "strings" command...
Yup, when I replied the whole story was just a few hours old. Thanks for the update.
I've got Linux on mine, but I haven't had a chance to use it much. The annoying thing is that there's no real equivalent to a bootloader. If you set it to boot Linux, it will always boot to Linux until you boot the PS3 "Game OS", at which point it will always boot Game OS until you explicitly change it again. Makes it annoying to experiment with when the kids use it, too.
Um... it didn't. "Building blocks for life" does not equal "life". But once the 'building blocks' formed, life could get started... almost certainly on Earth. See, e.g., here.
(Okay, yeah, tropical zones, waves of reinfection, etc. But there's a reason zombie movies always take place in the summer.)