I am not quite certain that I follow. Depending on tournament type R/P/S is (mostly) a game of chance, chess isn't. The only way I can see R/P/S applying is if they represent the players themselves, not the game. In other words, instead of having individual strength ratings that can be measured in isolation, player R's style of play might be naturally stronger against player S's style than that of player P, in which case we could only express the relative strengths of any pairing. This would allow a scenario where R is stronger than S is stronger than P is stronger than R.
However, given the pairing list of a tournament and the respective pairwise relative strengths, it is still possible to predict the outcome. As a very simple example, let's say that on the first round we have the pairs (rock_a, paper) and (rock_b, scissors). Winners of the first round (paper, rock_b) fight for gold, losers (rock_a, scissors) for bronze. Paper wins, followed by rock_a, rock_b takes bronze and leaves scissors last.
Applied to the problem at hands, one would suspect that there exists an algorithm not far removed from Google's PageRank that can identify all the possible playstyles and their relative strengths, in which case the simplest predictive model would contain the playstyle preference and proficiency of the players combined with style coupling constants (it is likely that a player can play several styles with varying degree of skill, and try to use the one that they believe to give them the best chances against what they know of their opponent). Just my hunch, I'm not really into this stuff.
I am color blind, lacking the ability to see red light. The red-cyan glasses don't work for me because from my point of view the red lens is completely opaque (black) and the cyan lens completely translucent (clear). Thus, you could simulate my experience with the glasses by covering your left eye with your hand and watching the movie with your right eye only. It's not exactly an improvement...
Read the paper - pretty reasonable stuff. The only thing that may raise eyebrows is the origin of the paper. Goes to show that Microsoft has some competent people working for them (did anybody doubt that, it's after all the company policy that is rotten) but also a horde of absolutely brilliant PR weasels which can turn black to white when you're not watching.
Imagine a system where only whitelisted e-mail with a confirmed return address gets through. That would be enough to kill spam. The problem is, how can we allow previously unknown people to get on this whitelist without human intervention and gray/blacklists. Complicated? Not necessarily.
Here's the idea: suppose that we have a certifying service attached to our e-mail address. Say, my e-mail address is me@foo.com and my certifying address is certify.me@foo.com. Now I would want to send e-mail to you@bar.com but you do not know me and you are using a whitelist. No problem. I send you an electronically signed e-mail, and my mailing program, upon deciding that you are not already on my buddy list, cc:s the message (or relevant parts of it) to certify.me@foo.com. When your program receives my message and checks that I am not on your buddy list, it sends a signed query to certify.me@foo.com. The automatic service behind that address verifies that
Yes, this is my signature, and
Yes, I have sent it to you.
Upon receiving the certification your program adds my address to your whitelist and accepts the original message. After all, you now know my e-mail address. Even a spammer who would be willing to reveal his identity would be pummeled to a certain death by millions of certify requests (which would make his ISP very unhappy). And should a spammer once get on your whitelist, just blacklist him.
This would not be a burden for mailing lists, because the certifying procedure is only invoked during the first contact.
This scheme would triple the initial number of e-mail messages, but because it's a one time event, the overhead is small. Considering that 95 some percent of all e-mails seem to be spam, this could actually reduce the traffic significantly after all the spammers have either been auto-spammed back for every single piece of spam that they send, or vanished into oblivion if none of their messages ever reach people.
No, MS should print the EULA directly on the toilet paper so that people could wipe their *sses with it. Difficult to do that with the usual click-through version.
Well, yes and no. In most cases you have to cover extraordinary costs only (like printing full color images, or failing to write a concise paper). You do, however, pay dearly for the reprints, so the basic tenet is true. We scientists pay for the privilege to give away the copyright to our work. I'm content with that as long as it's not my personal money that picks the bill.
Oh, and consider choosing Nature instead of Science. Besides the higher impact factor, at least the last time around I didn't have to pay for the publication of my article there.
You don't seem to know the difference between the Republic of China (ROC, AKA Taiwan) and the People's Republic of China (PRC) (Hint: the Square of the Heavenly Peace is in the latter one).
Nope. Don't have any mod points handy just now, so here's the intelligent reply: Taiwan is a democratic, modern country which quite likely has produced a large part of the system you used to post your message. Taiwan is not PRC. In fact, PRC might happily herd the entire population of Taiwan to the aforementioned square given a chance to do so.
Wealth comes into existence both spontaneously (natural resources like game, crops, timber etc.) and through work. Let's say that I borrow your axe and go to the forest and chop up some firewood. In exchange for you borrowing the axe I give some of it to you when returning the axe. Now both of us are richer than either of us would have been if you declined to borrow the axe. Investment, profit, return, it's the same thing with more abstract tokens of wealth.
If MS windows were not a desirable product why would so many people use it?
'cause it's what they get when they buy a PC
'cause they don't know any better
'cause most people don't give rat's ass about the OS, they just want to use the apps they need
'cause the said apps may be 'borrowed' from workplace or from Joe Neighbor, so it makes sense to have whatever everybody else is having
By your logic, Big Mac must be a paragon of healthy and wholesome meal, since why else would we have a McDonalds in every other corner. All the more so when you consider that those guys actually sell their stuff, instead of making a deal with all grocery stores that each and every customer is given a Big Mac each time they buy something, whether they wanted or not, and the expenses are hidden to the prices of other products.
"dry ice" is marketing term and has NOTHING to do with physics.
Indeed, I tried to stay on the same colloquial level as the previous poster. But I happen to be a space scientist with a Ph.D. in physics, and my field of study is, surprisingly enough, comets. And when planetary scientists discuss these things, they say water ice, methane ice, CO2 ice, et.c., to make it clear what they are talking about, since, as I said, all volatiles in solid form are called ices.
This goes OT but anyway, the Japanese committed a pre-emptive strike at Pearl Harbor. These days the Americans are saying that a pre-emptive strike is ok after all, as long as they are the ones doing that. The Japanese military committed serious war crimes (remember Nanjing) but at the time when Americans nuked Hiroshima and Nagasaki Japan was already beaten and there wasn't any threat to the United States that could have validated the use of nukes as self defence. And the victims were predominantly civilians.
Well, ices can exist in the crystalline or amorphous phase. E.g. the water ice inside cometary nuclei is in amorphous form, and one can argue that it is technically not frozen, because it has originally been built from such tiny particles that there hasn't been a meaningful macrostate (BTW, did you ever create amorphous sulphur in the chemistry class?) to call it such. When amorphous ice is heated, it turns to the 'normal', crystalline phase, which more closely resembles our concept of 'frozen'. I don't know, however, whether the original poster tried to express this distinction.
I see, modern democratic nations don't nuke their neighbors... wait a minute, they do. In fact such a nation is the only one having done that, twice, targeting civilians, and not in self defence. But that's ok, because, uhh, they're the good guys, right? Right?
I wouldn't be too surprised if it was some RIAA-paid instance who's intentionally fingering these CD-R sellers as thieves as a means to suppress their usage of the distribution channel, because if a large part of musicians found out that the scheme works, what would RIAA do (answer: shrivel up).
As a countermeasure, the musicians should create a union of their own and put up one big web auction site for the sole purpose of selling their own music, under their own supervision. This way,
they can cut out the middle men
get guaranteed exposure
get rid of accusations of piracy
and if they do it properly, they can be the ones to lead the society to the era of digital distribution of music
Indeed, according to the latest survey, USA can be seen as a second-class country when it comes to corruption. Yet another good reason to live in Finland:-)
Seriously, though, what are you going to do to change the situation? That is, do you have any plans to overhaul the rotten, corrupted establishment which has tailored the system to the effect that it is next to impossible to get them out of power. Sure, individuals change but the fat, power-hungry parties will go on with their stampede. In a situation where two parties have developed a symbiotic relationship they are as bad as just one.
It is the factorial. See, the first stone has 19x19 = 361 possible places, the second has one less (because of the previous stone occupied that) so two moves has 361*360. Repeat this until the board is full and you get 361! possible plays (this assuming that no pieces are removed and no positions are unplayable). For calculating large factorials just remember that
x! = exp(sum(i=1,x)ln(i))
so the above number is about exp(1768.75) is about 1.438e768 which means that we need a quantum computer with 2552 qubits to represent all the possible states of Go. Now imagine a Beowulf cluster of those...
Uhh... no. For the mathematically challenged, if an average household equals 2 persons, then 67% of the persons have the access, not 134% as you seem to be indicating. Of course, the percentage may change if there is a clear correlation between household size and migration to broadband, but it does not depend on household size as such.
As the article mentioned the potential to use these in airplanes... after the dinner you just pour the rest of the Remy Martin VSOP into the computer instead of downing it yourself. Easy, and good for your health!
This reminds me of some document about penguins I saw a while ago. There was this enormous flock? crowd? (what do you call an ensemble of penguins, a LUG?) standing on the edge of the ice with the intention to go catch some tasty fish from the ocean. However, there could well be sharks or other animals under the surface with a radically different concept of feeding time. So, the penguins just stood there, watching each other, nobody wanting to be the one to find out if that indeed was the case. The situation was finally solved by some sneaky penguins that pushed the ones closest to the edge in the water, and after witnessing the lack of consequences, the entire flock plunged in.
Slashdot Mirror
I am not quite certain that I follow. Depending on tournament type R/P/S is (mostly) a game of chance, chess isn't. The only way I can see R/P/S applying is if they represent the players themselves, not the game. In other words, instead of having individual strength ratings that can be measured in isolation, player R's style of play might be naturally stronger against player S's style than that of player P, in which case we could only express the relative strengths of any pairing. This would allow a scenario where R is stronger than S is stronger than P is stronger than R.
However, given the pairing list of a tournament and the respective pairwise relative strengths, it is still possible to predict the outcome. As a very simple example, let's say that on the first round we have the pairs (rock_a, paper) and (rock_b, scissors). Winners of the first round (paper, rock_b) fight for gold, losers (rock_a, scissors) for bronze. Paper wins, followed by rock_a, rock_b takes bronze and leaves scissors last.
Applied to the problem at hands, one would suspect that there exists an algorithm not far removed from Google's PageRank that can identify all the possible playstyles and their relative strengths, in which case the simplest predictive model would contain the playstyle preference and proficiency of the players combined with style coupling constants (it is likely that a player can play several styles with varying degree of skill, and try to use the one that they believe to give them the best chances against what they know of their opponent). Just my hunch, I'm not really into this stuff.
I am color blind, lacking the ability to see red light. The red-cyan glasses don't work for me because from my point of view the red lens is completely opaque (black) and the cyan lens completely translucent (clear). Thus, you could simulate my experience with the glasses by covering your left eye with your hand and watching the movie with your right eye only. It's not exactly an improvement ...
Read the paper - pretty reasonable stuff. The only thing that may raise eyebrows is the origin of the paper. Goes to show that Microsoft has some competent people working for them (did anybody doubt that, it's after all the company policy that is rotten) but also a horde of absolutely brilliant PR weasels which can turn black to white when you're not watching.
Let's think outside the (mail)box for a second.
Imagine a system where only whitelisted e-mail with a confirmed return address gets through. That would be enough to kill spam. The problem is, how can we allow previously unknown people to get on this whitelist without human intervention and gray/blacklists. Complicated? Not necessarily.
Here's the idea: suppose that we have a certifying service attached to our e-mail address. Say, my e-mail address is me@foo.com and my certifying address is certify.me@foo.com. Now I would want to send e-mail to you@bar.com but you do not know me and you are using a whitelist. No problem. I send you an electronically signed e-mail, and my mailing program, upon deciding that you are not already on my buddy list, cc:s the message (or relevant parts of it) to certify.me@foo.com. When your program receives my message and checks that I am not on your buddy list, it sends a signed query to certify.me@foo.com. The automatic service behind that address verifies that
Upon receiving the certification your program adds my address to your whitelist and accepts the original message. After all, you now know my e-mail address. Even a spammer who would be willing to reveal his identity would be pummeled to a certain death by millions of certify requests (which would make his ISP very unhappy). And should a spammer once get on your whitelist, just blacklist him.
This would not be a burden for mailing lists, because the certifying procedure is only invoked during the first contact.
This scheme would triple the initial number of e-mail messages, but because it's a one time event, the overhead is small. Considering that 95 some percent of all e-mails seem to be spam, this could actually reduce the traffic significantly after all the spammers have either been auto-spammed back for every single piece of spam that they send, or vanished into oblivion if none of their messages ever reach people.
So, anybody willing to implement this?
No, MS should print the EULA directly on the toilet paper so that people could wipe their *sses with it. Difficult to do that with the usual click-through version.
Well, yes and no. In most cases you have to cover extraordinary costs only (like printing full color images, or failing to write a concise paper). You do, however, pay dearly for the reprints, so the basic tenet is true. We scientists pay for the privilege to give away the copyright to our work. I'm content with that as long as it's not my personal money that picks the bill.
Oh, and consider choosing Nature instead of Science. Besides the higher impact factor, at least the last time around I didn't have to pay for the publication of my article there.
You don't seem to know the difference between the Republic of China (ROC, AKA Taiwan) and the People's Republic of China (PRC) (Hint: the Square of the Heavenly Peace is in the latter one).
Wouldn't those be called "Cease & Decease" letters?
Nope. Don't have any mod points handy just now, so here's the intelligent reply: Taiwan is a democratic, modern country which quite likely has produced a large part of the system you used to post your message. Taiwan is not PRC. In fact, PRC might happily herd the entire population of Taiwan to the aforementioned square given a chance to do so.
Wealth comes into existence both spontaneously (natural resources like game, crops, timber etc.) and through work. Let's say that I borrow your axe and go to the forest and chop up some firewood. In exchange for you borrowing the axe I give some of it to you when returning the axe. Now both of us are richer than either of us would have been if you declined to borrow the axe. Investment, profit, return, it's the same thing with more abstract tokens of wealth.
If MS windows were not a desirable product why would so many people use it?
By your logic, Big Mac must be a paragon of healthy and wholesome meal, since why else would we have a McDonalds in every other corner. All the more so when you consider that those guys actually sell their stuff, instead of making a deal with all grocery stores that each and every customer is given a Big Mac each time they buy something, whether they wanted or not, and the expenses are hidden to the prices of other products.
"dry ice" is marketing term and has NOTHING to do with physics.
Indeed, I tried to stay on the same colloquial level as the previous poster. But I happen to be a space scientist with a Ph.D. in physics, and my field of study is, surprisingly enough, comets. And when planetary scientists discuss these things, they say water ice, methane ice, CO2 ice, et.c., to make it clear what they are talking about, since, as I said, all volatiles in solid form are called ices.
This goes OT but anyway, the Japanese committed a pre-emptive strike at Pearl Harbor. These days the Americans are saying that a pre-emptive strike is ok after all, as long as they are the ones doing that. The Japanese military committed serious war crimes (remember Nanjing) but at the time when Americans nuked Hiroshima and Nagasaki Japan was already beaten and there wasn't any threat to the United States that could have validated the use of nukes as self defence. And the victims were predominantly civilians.
Ever tasted dry ice cream? I thought not. Dry ice is carbon dioxide ice. In planetary physics, all volatile compounds in solid form are known as ices.
Well, ices can exist in the crystalline or amorphous phase. E.g. the water ice inside cometary nuclei is in amorphous form, and one can argue that it is technically not frozen, because it has originally been built from such tiny particles that there hasn't been a meaningful macrostate (BTW, did you ever create amorphous sulphur in the chemistry class?) to call it such. When amorphous ice is heated, it turns to the 'normal', crystalline phase, which more closely resembles our concept of 'frozen'. I don't know, however, whether the original poster tried to express this distinction.
I see, modern democratic nations don't nuke their neighbors ... wait a minute, they do. In fact such a nation is the only one having done that, twice, targeting civilians, and not in self defence. But that's ok, because, uhh, they're the good guys, right? Right?
I wouldn't be too surprised if it was some RIAA-paid instance who's intentionally fingering these CD-R sellers as thieves as a means to suppress their usage of the distribution channel, because if a large part of musicians found out that the scheme works, what would RIAA do (answer: shrivel up).
As a countermeasure, the musicians should create a union of their own and put up one big web auction site for the sole purpose of selling their own music, under their own supervision. This way,
Indeed, according to the latest survey, USA can be seen as a second-class country when it comes to corruption. Yet another good reason to live in Finland :-)
Seriously, though, what are you going to do to change the situation? That is, do you have any plans to overhaul the rotten, corrupted establishment which has tailored the system to the effect that it is next to impossible to get them out of power. Sure, individuals change but the fat, power-hungry parties will go on with their stampede. In a situation where two parties have developed a symbiotic relationship they are as bad as just one.
It is the factorial. See, the first stone has 19x19 = 361 possible places, the second has one less (because of the previous stone occupied that) so two moves has 361*360. Repeat this until the board is full and you get 361! possible plays (this assuming that no pieces are removed and no positions are unplayable). For calculating large factorials just remember that
x! = exp(sum(i=1,x)ln(i))
so the above number is about exp(1768.75) is about 1.438e768 which means that we need a quantum computer with 2552 qubits to represent all the possible states of Go. Now imagine a Beowulf cluster of those ...
high bandwidth penetration
Is this some secret korean technique, perhaps vividly depicted in those korean cartoon pr0n magazines you refer to?
and kimchi. Can't do without that.
Uhh ... no. For the mathematically challenged, if an average household equals 2 persons, then 67% of the persons have the access, not 134% as you seem to be indicating. Of course, the percentage may change if there is a clear correlation between household size and migration to broadband, but it does not depend on household size as such.
As the article mentioned the potential to use these in airplanes ... after the dinner you just pour the rest of the Remy Martin VSOP into the computer instead of downing it yourself. Easy, and good for your health!
Self-replicating protein-folding software. The next step on the ladder of artificial evolution?
This reminds me of some document about penguins I saw a while ago. There was this enormous flock? crowd? (what do you call an ensemble of penguins, a LUG?) standing on the edge of the ice with the intention to go catch some tasty fish from the ocean. However, there could well be sharks or other animals under the surface with a radically different concept of feeding time. So, the penguins just stood there, watching each other, nobody wanting to be the one to find out if that indeed was the case. The situation was finally solved by some sneaky penguins that pushed the ones closest to the edge in the water, and after witnessing the lack of consequences, the entire flock plunged in.
I'm not trying to infer anything here ;-)
Comic-not