...Clinton had Saddam's ousting on his schedule as well.
But not by invasion. Saddam was a problem because he could jerk around the price of oil by posturing, he was trying to be a rallying point and inspiration for Muslim anti-Western sentiments, and he was funding terrorism against one of our allies (Israel). Even if he hadn't been bluffing about WMD (I think he assumed that sowing doubt about whether he had them or not would make an invasion look too costly), he wasn't a military threat to the U.S., or even any of his neighbors.
Game it out. He was doing pretty well where he was (though Iraq's general populace of course was not); if he'd attacked a neighbor, it would have been Gulf War II with a real coalition and his neighbors footing the bill for most of it. If he'd attacked Israel in earnest, I think they might well have nuked him. Attack the U.S. directly? It is to laugh.
What about supplying terrorists with WMD? First, of course, he didn't have them, but let's assume for the sake of discussion that the top Bushies really thought he did. Game that out from Saddam's perspective. Let's say he hands over some kind of Anthrax or poison gas to a terrorist group, and they actually use it on the U.S.
What if it's traced back to him? No matter how careful he is, there's a significant chance of this. At that point, the U.S. goes in, guns blazing, with actual international support, or at least not active opposition.
Saddam's best course of action was to maintain the status quo as an irritant. And he might be a ruthless, evil SOB, but he's not stupid. He knew that.
I think Bush (or at least some of the people in Bush's cabinet) understood this. But they wanted to invade anyway (they have for a long time), and they jumped on the 9/11 thing as a good excuse. Now we have an actual war (not just a rhetorical 'war' on terror) on two fronts (remember Afghanistan? Bush forgot...) , international scorn, and we're bleeding billions into maintaining this effort while the economy is, at best, stagnant.
It just stuns me that anyone is actually going to vote for this schmuck...
Whether or not you liked the book, or agreed with its (ostensible) politics, it's clear the movie totally screwed it up.
Best example: In one scene, a trooper asks why they are training with knives when the military has nukes.
In the book, the instructor explains that the "Mobile Infantry" is designed to apply force in a controlled manner, to 'spank' an opponent when feasible rather than 'cut their heads off'. (Whether or not the invasion of Iraq was a good idea, it would have been an even worse idea to nuke Bagdhad.)
In the movie, the instructor throws a knife and pins the questioner's hand to a wall, and says, "Hard to push a nuke button now, eh?"
There are some craters in permanent darkness near the poles of the Moon. It has been theorized that there might still be some frozen water there. If
that is the case, then the cost of a Moonbase drops drastically.
They're also near so called peaks of eternal light where solar power would be extremely effective. Let's send a probe there on the cheap, and find out if there really is water there or not. That could make the decision really easy.
In your 3D system, I have to turn to the wall with the parent door and walk to it. Then I have to turn around and step back from the door I just came through so I can see all the other doors for user home directories. I locate the user in question and again have to walk to that door. Then, in their room, I have to locate the file somehow, again walk up to it, and perform some operation to select/open it. That'd be 2 seconds in 2D but more like 30 in 3D. Where is the advantage?
You make good points, but there are ways to speed this up. Again, your 'teleport' terminology helps - what if clicking on the door teleports you to its location (or right clicking, or ctrl-clicking, or whatever). You turn to the 'parent' wall, and click on the 'door' to the parent directory. Bang, you're in the parent dir without walking (and no, I wasn't planning on hallways anyway). Locate user dir, click on it, bang you're in that directory. Unless your 2D window is sorting by file type instead of name, you have the same 'search' problem in both.
(Or, if you were recently using it, you just 'pop' into the 'links' area I mentioned and look in the cached section.)
No, our brains can extract import information quickly. You are instead presenting an environment full of a lot of unimportant information.
But they are presented in orthogonal ways. Each type (shape, size, color, texture) conveys different information, and has separate hardware acceleration in the brain. 2D filemanagers have similar problems, and solve them by using variant views and sorting orders - there's no reason this couldn't be extended to a 3D space. F1 sorts by name, F2 sorts by size, F3 sorts by type, etc.
If everything is a triangle, it is just as useless as showing everything as a generic document icon. You have done nothing to show you're not completely wasting that extra dimension.
I don't see it as worse that forcing all icons into a fixed n-by-n pixel shape. Basically all the icons today are just 2D textures anyway, why's it so automatically worse to apply them to a 3D shape? I'm not married to triangular columns per se, but a column helps represent the size in a fairly intuitive way.
Of course, you can rearrange things - have the height vary by frequency-of-access, or whatever. The point of using (at least) four (orthogonal) variables - shape, size, color, and texture - to simultaneously represent different attributes of the same object is, I think, quite useful.
There are no rooms with doors and columns in the computer.
No, but there are directories that contain files and other directories. I see it as less strained than the 'folder' metaphor.
I'm terribly sorry that my idea seems to offend you. I certainly didn't mean posting it as any kind of personal attack. You assume I plan on "forcing all the 3D hassles of the real world" on the user, when in fact I don't; you've read a lot into what I wrote that just wasn't there.
Already a mistake, because you turn moving between directories into to moving between rooms. A directory is a virtual room such that you can "teleport" between them with a simple click.
Okay, I'd figured the north wall would have the "door" back to the parent directory (possibly more than one if you followed a symlink to get there). The east wall is textured with a 2D map of the filesystem (zoomed in a bit, most likely) showing "you are here".
The south wall has "doors" to the subdirectories. The west wall has a toggle; if activated (and yes, there would be a shortcut to do this), it drops and you see any hidden files/subdirectories.
Now, users mostly work in a subset of directories. In a subdir of their home directory, there'd be a "links" directory which held links to their preferred locations and files, as well as a "cache" of recently-used ones. A shortcut to teleport there would help a lot, obviating the need for a lot of directory changes.
Many games have a "map" feature; some key combo or menu item brings up a 2D map, that you can click to teleport, or for bulk file transfer, just like any 2D filemanager. Plus, for advanced users, a command-line (like the ~ console in, e.g., Quake).
Part of the reason I like to look at game meataphors is they have to have a user interface that is fairly easy to pick up quickly and get at least somewhat productive in. If the interface is too complex, they loose potential market. It's worth looking at the solutions they've come up with to this life-or-death (for them) problem.
99% of the time users don't care about [file size, char/block/fifo, etc.]
Yes, frequently this isn't important, but given 3D it's easy to represent. And, as I said, we have hardware in our brains to extract information like this quickly. (You can estimate the mass, durability, and age of most objects you see instantly.) In a 2D filemanager, when this information is necessary, you have to shift modes to get at it, or scroll between multiple columns of information. This "metaphor" bundles all this data up in one virtual "object".
2D icons were not "necessary", but were a substantial leap in usability becuase they allowed human pattern-recognition hardware to work on files. (You didn't just read the extension, you can recognize, say, an envelope.)
That's not to say you couldn't have different "views" of the data (like, say, the "vision modes" in Alien Vs. Predator) where you can set color to indicate recent access, or whatever.
they're pretty much going to have rooms full of triangles.
Minimum number of polygons. Helps keep the speed up.
The metaphors you have in mind are essentially useless given the resources it takes to render them.
This wouldn't necessarily be a "power user" interface, anyway. I prefer the command line for most things myself. But this would give newbies a more intuitive feel for how things are acutally laid out on the computer. Some people just can't seem to memorize directory paths; this metaphor allows them to "find their way" to the file with the orientation hardware they have in their own brains.
make no mistake that it is the metaphors, not the hardware, that need to be improved before a 3D desktop makes any sense.
I'd be interested to hear what kind of information you'd want packed into the metaphor, or perhaps some suggestions yourself.
My own preference would be a simple rooms metaphor, but files are represented as columns. The shape of the column base indicates file type (triangle for regular file, square/rectangle for char/block device, hexagonal for pipe/socket), the height indicates file size (log2), the color indicates permissions, and the texture indicates detailed file type (text, image, binary, etc.). Symlinks are partially transparent.
The color of the room indicates permissions on the directory, the texture indicates filesystem type (ext2, vfat, smb, ftp, etc.).
You could tell a lot about a file in a single glance. Humans have hardware optimized for that sort of thing.
BFM has the log-2 file height thing right, but it'll still needs work. I'm learning OpenGL, maybe in a year I'll actually have time to work on it. Also, I'm pretty sure Java is the wrong language to do this in for performance reasons. You need a fast machine for it to be at all responsive.
...so I got to go to Italy to try to diagnose malfunctioning robots. There was this roofing-tile plant that was using robots to palletize the tiles coming out of the oven. Tracking a moving conveyor belt. Except every so often one of the robots would flip out and shoot off at high speed in a random direction. Not good, these things were strong enough to kill someone.
Now, I wasn't that familiar with the motion code, but I had worked in that area a year or two before, and the other guy didn't have a valid passport. I'd just gotten married and my wife spoke Italian, so I talked them in to sending us both Coach instead of just me in Business class.
Get there with the special diagnostic software. Turns out it's French subcontractors we have to deal with, and I never got much out of my high-school French classes. ("Il y a un poisson dans votre bibliotheque.") Send my wife off tho the hotel. Try to load up the software, and the floppy I'd used to put it on the laptop was bad, and corrupted it silently. Now it's Friday night in rural Italy in 1995. ('Internet? What's that?') The branch office for our company is on the other side of the country, and closed until Monday anyway.
Can't convince my modem to generate the right tones for the Italian phone system. Did I mention that no one could figure out how to turn the lights on in the plant at night so we're using our laptops as flashlights? But the mosquitos can get in, and they're some Italian mutant variety that raise welts the size of marbles. Oh, and when I finally do get a chance to call the lead motion developer, he chews me out for having to spend the day at home waiting for my phone call.
Then, about four a.m. I get to the hotel, where my wife has dressed up in some sexy lingerie. But she's pissed as hell that I'm so late and didn't call that she chews me out, too.
The next day I try some fun but useless diagnostics, and those damn Europeans (:-> ) will take a two-hour lunch but won't knock off until three in the morning so I'm getting several days in the red on sleep. Plus all the hotels are booked so every night I'm in a different hotel room, seeing my new bride (who apologized after I explained the situation to her) maybe half an hour a night before I collapse.
We find a computer store on Sunday that'll let me use their email account to get the right software, and finally load it on the robots. But then it takes another day and a half before the problem case gets logged and it proves our fix works.
How about kudzu, or grass, or dandelions, or whatever? How about plants that have proven to grow just fine without us tinkering with them for a few thousand years, but are also susceptible to some degree to weed-killers?
How about we engineer into such plants a dependency on a particular substance that isn't common in the environment? Humans have lost the ability to make folic acid, bacteria haven't. Knock out a production pathway in the plants (destruction is easier than creation, no?) and you've created a dependency on a new 'vitamin'.
Then if the GM stock spreads, it won't compete well against the natural variety.
Or, make the new strains more susceptible to a given herbicide. They already make Roundup-resistant canola, make plants with a "glass jaw" for Roundup instead.
Is there something I'm missing besides, "Oh, that might cut into our porift margin?"
A. I hack my client/image files to make all the enemies in the game bright red...
That lets you see an enemy better when they are in your field of view, but if there's no way under the game rules for you to see them, you're not informed of their actual position.
You can also design the game to minimize such an advantage. Everyone has a variety of vision modes available that give different capabilities, so the draw for cheating is lower. You can just learn how to play the game.
I hack the client so that I have auto aim capabilites...
That's harder to deal with, but at least it can't "pre-aim"; if someone's sneaking up behind you, you don't know they're there to aim at (at least, in some implementations).
I'm not convinced there aren't ways to deal with these problems, too. The paper eliminates certain kinds of cheating, but I agree, not all.
For newbies, it could be a very useful conceptual model of how the computer is laid out. I have a heck of a time explaining directories to my mid-60's parents, and being able to show them how the filesystem is laid out would be nice.
My own preference would be a simple rooms metaphor, but files are represented as columns. The shape of the column base indicates file type (triangle for regular file, square/rectangle for char/block device, hexagonal for pipe/socket), the height indicates file size (log2), the color indicates permissions, and the texture indicates detailed file type (text, image, binary, etc.). Symlinks are partially transparent.
The color of the room indicates permissions on the directory, the texture indicates filesystem type (ext2, vfat, smb, ftp, etc.).
You could tell a lot about a file in a single glance. Humans have hardware optimized for that sort of thing.
Yes, you'd want to mix metaphors a bit, have a regular file explorer option, even a command line, but those coudl be more advanced add-ons that some non-power-users wouldn't ever need.
I went to block images from their site (not because they were particularly offensive, just juvenile - and animated, which is unforgivable), but they had put in a 'disable right click' Javascriptlet.
I had to go all the way up to the "Tools" menu to select "Block Images from this Site". But I suppose they were more worried about some 13-year-old clicking the "Save Image As" button...
I got a PC case with a closing front cover to protect the power switch and such. Thought I was really clever.
First, our 1.5-year-old found the UPS switch. Duct tape and plastic for that one. Then he found the rocker switch on the power supply at the back of the PC. More duct tape. Thought I was safe. But no...
I was skimming a book in Borders that touched on this - the people who did NOLF discussed the AI tricks they used. One good one was that areas were divided into regions, and when an NPC wanted to find a path to the player, they'd pick a direct course, then mark the 'cost' of the region *just before the player's region* to a high but not infinite value.
This encouraged other NPC's to find alternate routes to the player, if available, without having to put in a bunch of hints and such. They'd just "naturally" try to flank the player if they could.
Sorry, can't remember the name of the book. "AI Game Programming" was in the title, though.
I personally don't like the idea of getting over an emotional trauma by 'desensitizing' myself to it, as the article seems to suggest.
Well, this article
seems to indicate that fears like PTSD don't ever get totally "unlearned"; one has to learn how to suppress or overide the fear:
Such relapses are among the evidence indicating that even though extinction training suppresses the original fear conditioning, the fear memory remains within an animal's brain...
Quirk's group and other researchers have made the case that a brain area called the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) provides a home for the fear-inhibiting memories created by extinction training. It has the right connections to shut off the fear response... Several brain-imaging studies have suggested that people with posttraumatic stress disorder have an abnormally small or inactive mPFC.
"[F]or a long time I bought into a common schema for the Bush
administration: dim-bulb president surrounded and propped up
by bright, ruthless neocons... I'm chagrined to admit now that
I have, at least in part, bought into a lie... The neocons
surrounding Bush are not all that bright." - Jon Carroll
What happens physically is that different or modified physical laws take over before the singularity is reached, and the result is that there is no longer a singularity.
We assume that's the case, yes. But no one has a real clue what new model would apply in such a region. It would have to involve elements of both General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics, but those two models make radically different predictions for such a situation.
At least one and probably both are wrong, but we don't yet have any idea what might supersede them.
...what "exists" within the event horizon (the radius at which the gravitational force equals the speed of light) of the object we call a black hole is unobservable, and cannot be described by standard models.
It's true that it can't be described by standard models, but if the black hole is charged or rotating (or both) then the event horizon is distored to the point where the 'singularity' (the place where all current models break down) is reachable.
One potential consequence is time travel, to give an idea of how odd the math gets.
The only way I would feel confident about not accumulating cruft due to upgrading big packages from source (gnome, kde, X) is if they are installed 100% into a single folder (like/opt/kde/3.2/(bin|lib|conf|man|...). Then I can safely uninstall by deleting that top version folder.
That's the way most packages should be installed anyway, even with rpm and deb and such. Then create symlinks from places like/usr/bin into that/opt directory. Removal is a simple 'find' operation to get the symlinks, then remove the directory under/opt. Like Encap.
System-level packages don't work so well with this format, of course, and if you need to make some partitions read-only you can run into some issues. Hey, nothing's perfect. But for non-system stuff...
Testing industrial robots' collision detection
on
Dream Jobs of 2004
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
That was my job for about 6 months in 1998. Taking 12-foot-tall industrial robots that can lift 500lbs and smashing them into things. Almost no one has bigger toys than that, and they don't usually get to test them to destruction.
It was kind of secret. Everyone walking by must have thought I was the worst robot programmer on Earth. But I still had that big grin on my face...
Slashdot Mirror
But not by invasion. Saddam was a problem because he could jerk around the price of oil by posturing, he was trying to be a rallying point and inspiration for Muslim anti-Western sentiments, and he was funding terrorism against one of our allies (Israel). Even if he hadn't been bluffing about WMD (I think he assumed that sowing doubt about whether he had them or not would make an invasion look too costly), he wasn't a military threat to the U.S., or even any of his neighbors.
Game it out. He was doing pretty well where he was (though Iraq's general populace of course was not); if he'd attacked a neighbor, it would have been Gulf War II with a real coalition and his neighbors footing the bill for most of it. If he'd attacked Israel in earnest, I think they might well have nuked him. Attack the U.S. directly? It is to laugh.
What about supplying terrorists with WMD? First, of course, he didn't have them, but let's assume for the sake of discussion that the top Bushies really thought he did. Game that out from Saddam's perspective. Let's say he hands over some kind of Anthrax or poison gas to a terrorist group, and they actually use it on the U.S.
What if it's traced back to him? No matter how careful he is, there's a significant chance of this. At that point, the U.S. goes in, guns blazing, with actual international support, or at least not active opposition.
Saddam's best course of action was to maintain the status quo as an irritant. And he might be a ruthless, evil SOB, but he's not stupid. He knew that.
I think Bush (or at least some of the people in Bush's cabinet) understood this. But they wanted to invade anyway (they have for a long time), and they jumped on the 9/11 thing as a good excuse. Now we have an actual war (not just a rhetorical 'war' on terror) on two fronts (remember Afghanistan? Bush forgot...) , international scorn, and we're bleeding billions into maintaining this effort while the economy is, at best, stagnant.
It just stuns me that anyone is actually going to vote for this schmuck...
No kidding? Really? I would never have guessed.
Satire's one thing. The problem is, the movie was incompetent satire, not "brilliant". Others have done it much better.
Best example: In one scene, a trooper asks why they are training with knives when the military has nukes.
Please, spare us a sequel to that!
They're also near so called peaks of eternal light where solar power would be extremely effective. Let's send a probe there on the cheap, and find out if there really is water there or not. That could make the decision really easy.
You make good points, but there are ways to speed this up. Again, your 'teleport' terminology helps - what if clicking on the door teleports you to its location (or right clicking, or ctrl-clicking, or whatever). You turn to the 'parent' wall, and click on the 'door' to the parent directory. Bang, you're in the parent dir without walking (and no, I wasn't planning on hallways anyway). Locate user dir, click on it, bang you're in that directory. Unless your 2D window is sorting by file type instead of name, you have the same 'search' problem in both.
(Or, if you were recently using it, you just 'pop' into the 'links' area I mentioned and look in the cached section.)
No, our brains can extract import information quickly. You are instead presenting an environment full of a lot of unimportant information.
But they are presented in orthogonal ways. Each type (shape, size, color, texture) conveys different information, and has separate hardware acceleration in the brain. 2D filemanagers have similar problems, and solve them by using variant views and sorting orders - there's no reason this couldn't be extended to a 3D space. F1 sorts by name, F2 sorts by size, F3 sorts by type, etc.
If everything is a triangle, it is just as useless as showing everything as a generic document icon. You have done nothing to show you're not completely wasting that extra dimension.
I don't see it as worse that forcing all icons into a fixed n-by-n pixel shape. Basically all the icons today are just 2D textures anyway, why's it so automatically worse to apply them to a 3D shape? I'm not married to triangular columns per se, but a column helps represent the size in a fairly intuitive way.
Of course, you can rearrange things - have the height vary by frequency-of-access, or whatever. The point of using (at least) four (orthogonal) variables - shape, size, color, and texture - to simultaneously represent different attributes of the same object is, I think, quite useful.
There are no rooms with doors and columns in the computer.
No, but there are directories that contain files and other directories. I see it as less strained than the 'folder' metaphor.
I'm terribly sorry that my idea seems to offend you. I certainly didn't mean posting it as any kind of personal attack. You assume I plan on "forcing all the 3D hassles of the real world" on the user, when in fact I don't; you've read a lot into what I wrote that just wasn't there.
Okay, I'd figured the north wall would have the "door" back to the parent directory (possibly more than one if you followed a symlink to get there). The east wall is textured with a 2D map of the filesystem (zoomed in a bit, most likely) showing "you are here". The south wall has "doors" to the subdirectories. The west wall has a toggle; if activated (and yes, there would be a shortcut to do this), it drops and you see any hidden files/subdirectories.
Now, users mostly work in a subset of directories. In a subdir of their home directory, there'd be a "links" directory which held links to their preferred locations and files, as well as a "cache" of recently-used ones. A shortcut to teleport there would help a lot, obviating the need for a lot of directory changes.
Many games have a "map" feature; some key combo or menu item brings up a 2D map, that you can click to teleport, or for bulk file transfer, just like any 2D filemanager. Plus, for advanced users, a command-line (like the ~ console in, e.g., Quake).
Part of the reason I like to look at game meataphors is they have to have a user interface that is fairly easy to pick up quickly and get at least somewhat productive in. If the interface is too complex, they loose potential market. It's worth looking at the solutions they've come up with to this life-or-death (for them) problem.
99% of the time users don't care about [file size, char/block/fifo, etc.]
Yes, frequently this isn't important, but given 3D it's easy to represent. And, as I said, we have hardware in our brains to extract information like this quickly. (You can estimate the mass, durability, and age of most objects you see instantly.) In a 2D filemanager, when this information is necessary, you have to shift modes to get at it, or scroll between multiple columns of information. This "metaphor" bundles all this data up in one virtual "object".
2D icons were not "necessary", but were a substantial leap in usability becuase they allowed human pattern-recognition hardware to work on files. (You didn't just read the extension, you can recognize, say, an envelope.)
That's not to say you couldn't have different "views" of the data (like, say, the "vision modes" in Alien Vs. Predator) where you can set color to indicate recent access, or whatever.
they're pretty much going to have rooms full of triangles.
Minimum number of polygons. Helps keep the speed up.
The metaphors you have in mind are essentially useless given the resources it takes to render them.
This wouldn't necessarily be a "power user" interface, anyway. I prefer the command line for most things myself. But this would give newbies a more intuitive feel for how things are acutally laid out on the computer. Some people just can't seem to memorize directory paths; this metaphor allows them to "find their way" to the file with the orientation hardware they have in their own brains.
make no mistake that it is the metaphors, not the hardware, that need to be improved before a 3D desktop makes any sense.
I'd be interested to hear what kind of information you'd want packed into the metaphor, or perhaps some suggestions yourself.
My own preference would be a simple rooms metaphor, but files are represented as columns. The shape of the column base indicates file type (triangle for regular file, square/rectangle for char/block device, hexagonal for pipe/socket), the height indicates file size (log2), the color indicates permissions, and the texture indicates detailed file type (text, image, binary, etc.). Symlinks are partially transparent.
The color of the room indicates permissions on the directory, the texture indicates filesystem type (ext2, vfat, smb, ftp, etc.).
You could tell a lot about a file in a single glance. Humans have hardware optimized for that sort of thing.
BFM has the log-2 file height thing right, but it'll still needs work. I'm learning OpenGL, maybe in a year I'll actually have time to work on it. Also, I'm pretty sure Java is the wrong language to do this in for performance reasons. You need a fast machine for it to be at all responsive.
Now, I wasn't that familiar with the motion code, but I had worked in that area a year or two before, and the other guy didn't have a valid passport. I'd just gotten married and my wife spoke Italian, so I talked them in to sending us both Coach instead of just me in Business class.
Get there with the special diagnostic software. Turns out it's French subcontractors we have to deal with, and I never got much out of my high-school French classes. ("Il y a un poisson dans votre bibliotheque.") Send my wife off tho the hotel. Try to load up the software, and the floppy I'd used to put it on the laptop was bad, and corrupted it silently. Now it's Friday night in rural Italy in 1995. ('Internet? What's that?') The branch office for our company is on the other side of the country, and closed until Monday anyway.
Can't convince my modem to generate the right tones for the Italian phone system. Did I mention that no one could figure out how to turn the lights on in the plant at night so we're using our laptops as flashlights? But the mosquitos can get in, and they're some Italian mutant variety that raise welts the size of marbles. Oh, and when I finally do get a chance to call the lead motion developer, he chews me out for having to spend the day at home waiting for my phone call.
Then, about four a.m. I get to the hotel, where my wife has dressed up in some sexy lingerie. But she's pissed as hell that I'm so late and didn't call that she chews me out, too.
The next day I try some fun but useless diagnostics, and those damn Europeans ( :-> ) will take a two-hour lunch but won't knock off until three in the morning so I'm getting several days in the red on sleep. Plus all the hotels are booked so every night I'm in a different hotel room, seeing my new bride (who apologized after I explained the situation to her) maybe half an hour a night before I collapse.
We find a computer store on Sunday that'll let me use their email account to get the right software, and finally load it on the robots. But then it takes another day and a half before the problem case gets logged and it proves our fix works.
Slept pretty well on the flight home, though.
I keep getting fragged on the third level.
How about we engineer into such plants a dependency on a particular substance that isn't common in the environment? Humans have lost the ability to make folic acid, bacteria haven't. Knock out a production pathway in the plants (destruction is easier than creation, no?) and you've created a dependency on a new 'vitamin'. Then if the GM stock spreads, it won't compete well against the natural variety.
Or, make the new strains more susceptible to a given herbicide. They already make Roundup-resistant canola, make plants with a "glass jaw" for Roundup instead.
Is there something I'm missing besides, "Oh, that might cut into our porift margin?"
They did make their own 3D API. We might have been lamenting QuickDraw 3D instead of OpenGL games...
That lets you see an enemy better when they are in your field of view, but if there's no way under the game rules for you to see them, you're not informed of their actual position.
You can also design the game to minimize such an advantage. Everyone has a variety of vision modes available that give different capabilities, so the draw for cheating is lower. You can just learn how to play the game.
I hack the client so that I have auto aim capabilites...
That's harder to deal with, but at least it can't "pre-aim"; if someone's sneaking up behind you, you don't know they're there to aim at (at least, in some implementations).
I'm not convinced there aren't ways to deal with these problems, too. The paper eliminates certain kinds of cheating, but I agree, not all.
There are better ways. (PDF, sorry.) It's also interesting to see other papers and such that reference this paper.
It's also one of the only Monty Python films that manages to tell a complete story (with many asides, of course).
My own preference would be a simple rooms metaphor, but files are represented as columns. The shape of the column base indicates file type (triangle for regular file, square/rectangle for char/block device, hexagonal for pipe/socket), the height indicates file size (log2), the color indicates permissions, and the texture indicates detailed file type (text, image, binary, etc.). Symlinks are partially transparent.
The color of the room indicates permissions on the directory, the texture indicates filesystem type (ext2, vfat, smb, ftp, etc.).
You could tell a lot about a file in a single glance. Humans have hardware optimized for that sort of thing.
Yes, you'd want to mix metaphors a bit, have a regular file explorer option, even a command line, but those coudl be more advanced add-ons that some non-power-users wouldn't ever need.
I had to go all the way up to the "Tools" menu to select "Block Images from this Site". But I suppose they were more worried about some 13-year-old clicking the "Save Image As" button...
First, our 1.5-year-old found the UPS switch. Duct tape and plastic for that one. Then he found the rocker switch on the power supply at the back of the PC. More duct tape. Thought I was safe. But no...
This encouraged other NPC's to find alternate routes to the player, if available, without having to put in a bunch of hints and such. They'd just "naturally" try to flank the player if they could.
Sorry, can't remember the name of the book. "AI Game Programming" was in the title, though.
Fortunately, there are a lot of mods for it, with new levels and situations. Many of them are way harder than the original game...
Well, this article seems to indicate that fears like PTSD don't ever get totally "unlearned"; one has to learn how to suppress or overide the fear:
"[F]or a long time I bought into a common schema for the Bush administration: dim-bulb president surrounded and propped up by bright, ruthless neocons... I'm chagrined to admit now that I have, at least in part, bought into a lie... The neocons surrounding Bush are not all that bright." - Jon Carroll
We assume that's the case, yes. But no one has a real clue what new model would apply in such a region. It would have to involve elements of both General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics, but those two models make radically different predictions for such a situation.
At least one and probably both are wrong, but we don't yet have any idea what might supersede them.
It's true that it can't be described by standard models, but if the black hole is charged or rotating (or both) then the event horizon is distored to the point where the 'singularity' (the place where all current models break down) is reachable.
One potential consequence is time travel, to give an idea of how odd the math gets.
That's the way most packages should be installed anyway, even with rpm and deb and such. Then create symlinks from places like /usr/bin into that /opt directory. Removal is a simple 'find' operation to get the symlinks, then remove the directory under /opt. Like Encap.
System-level packages don't work so well with this format, of course, and if you need to make some partitions read-only you can run into some issues. Hey, nothing's perfect. But for non-system stuff...
It was kind of secret. Everyone walking by must have thought I was the worst robot programmer on Earth. But I still had that big grin on my face...