As usual, being Slashdot, the louder you are, the more insightful you are modded.
Bullshit. The only thing Gödel's incompleteness theorems prove is that no knowledge, not even human knowledge or even a deity's knowledge, can be both consistent and complete. Human beings are so ridiculously inconsistent that completeness doesn't even enter into the picture and Gödel doesn't apply.
WTF does this mean? Which of Godel's incompleteness theorems tells me about deity's knowledge? Godel's theorems have quite precise mathematical content. Your psycho-babble is embarrassing and wrong. But since it's clearly not meant to be understood and you clearly don't know what you are talking about, I'll just point out one specific obvious error: not all formal systems are either incomplete or inconsistent -- they have to be complex enough to contain the natural numbers, an infinite set. I don't know how "souls" and "knowledge" and you grandma relate to Godel but I have a strong suspicion that they don't.
Maybe "nothing is holy", but surely there is such thing as taste. To me, the Mohammed cartoons are mostly tasteless and I can see why they would offend muslims.
Maybe, let's see... a cartoon showing queen Margarethe giving a blowjob to prime minister Anders Fogh. I wonder how many Danish newspapers would print that? I think none, and the reason is that people have a basic sense of what is tasteful humour and satire and what is tasteless drivel designed to provoke people already severely disadvantaged in Danish society.
I blame it on the Greatest American of all time, Ronny Reagan, who funded radical islam in Afghanistan (to bleed the Russians) and instructed CIA to train them in combat and explosives. One of the great beneficiaries of the US back then was a young guy called bin Laden.
Unfortunately, we (Europeans) reap what you (Americans) sow.
I've heard that the judges in the Corby case have never found someone not guilty. Never.
I have heard this as well, but qualified with *drug* cases, not *all* cases. Also, I'm not sure exactly how many cases this refers to. In any case, I would conjecture that also in other countries drug related cases would have a higher rate of convictions than other cases (compared to, say, theft).
I can't fucking wait until someone does that to one of those cunting judges. See how the system feels from the other side, you arrogant shits. And yes, that also applies to every judge in the US or Australia or Europe that has given someone an insanely over-the-top sentence just because a drug was found in their bag.
They may sound over the top to you, but these judges are just following the law. It is not their job to set sentence guidelines, it is a job for the lawmakers.
Interesting to note that you exclude even the possibility of a third option.
I just don't buy the defence. If there was someone else involved, we would've heard about it by now. What with the 1,000,000 dollar reward and the high media profile of the case. If it was a gang of baggage handlers, as popular opinion seems to point to, then one of the more small-fry members would be queing up for their 15 minutes of fame.
Mate, you are so full of shit. As an expat aussie, I just can't understand the Australian media frenzy about this Corby woman. Maybe the sun is really starting to get to everyone.
First of all, I think that it's extremely arrogant to expect that since you are Australian, you should be subject to Australian law everywhere you go. If you travel overseas, you should accept that you answer to local laws.
What we are seeing here is a government that has chosen to make its drug policy as harsh and intolerant as possible, for whatever reasons they have chosen to do that (to impress the US?) Zero tolerance in this situation, basically requires the summary execution of anyone who, "guilty" or not, makes contact with the world of illegal drugs that the government wishes to eliminate wholesale.
Either Corby was too stupid to know that Indonesia is tough on drugs, or she took the risks willingly. By the way, Australia is not particularily easy on drugs either, last time I looked. And please, in the league of sucking up to the US, Autralia easily takes first place in the world. There would have been no Bali bombing if Howard wasn't so keen to play the role of Dubya's local lieutenant.
The fact that the court did not admit hearsay about some fairytales involving baggage handlers and attention seeking Aussie criminals speaks common sense instead of "corruption". In any case, what do the Indonesian judges gain by putting Corby in jail? This stupid throwing around of accusations like "corruption" without any proof or even evidence is just a smokescreen for racism and arrogant assumptions of cultural superiority.
The fact that she had the drugs in her bag puts the burden on her to prove that they are not hers -- this is the way it would have worked in Australia, also. In my opinion, and the opinion of the Indonesian judges, her defence team did not provide reasonable doubt.
Try making a sci-fi, fantasy, or 19th-century The Sims and not only will interest be limited, but developers' knowledge of the interactions would be limited to, for the 19th-century example, history books and novels by the likes of the Brontes, Thackeray, and Jane Austen.
Some great ideas for games there. Just wait a few years, these sort of games are just waiting to be made. Apparently, in terms of sales, the game industry is now bigger than Hollywood; Holywood isn't perfect and it turns out a lot of crap, but then again, there are real masterpieces that appear every now and again -- surely it's only a matter of time before the game industry grows up and starts producing masterpieces. By the way, check out Crawford's book if you come across it; he had an obsession about "human interaction" games back in the eighties and was really way ahead of his time in his designs.
I'm finding this conversation enjoyable, by the way. I'm usually not pressed to detail and support my views to this extent, and I'm enjoying the opportunity and practice.
It's always fun to find a good sub-thread in Slashdot in which to have an intelligent discussion. Actually, it's one of the only good things about Slashdot I can think of;)
Games whose challenges are essentially nonviolent are extremely hard to pull off and in my estimation tend to take the form of puzzle (Tetris, Myst...) or sports (in which I'll include various racing titles) games.
Of course there are also strategy games like Civilisation. And "human interaction" games like "The Sims". In fact, I think that the Sims is considered to be a phenomenon in terms of sales.
But the industry doesn't seem to take note; I don't see too many of "The Sims" clones around -- it is certainly not the explosion of clones which followed Wolfenstein/Doom. Actually, the only one I am aware of is "Playboy: the mansion" which brings sleaze to the concept.
"Sleazy" games are not the only games on the market, they are not the only ones advertised, and gaming is not the only industry to aggrandize sleaze. The point where the author completely loses credibility in my eyes is the mention of BMX XXX. I saw not a single instance of "anticipation" for the game. Since its initial announcement, all I saw regarding it was derisive comments on its very baseness and obvious sleaze quotient.
You are right about BMX XXX. But he wasn't claiming that *all* games are sleaze; the rant was about sleazy/violent games, many of which came after Wolfenstein (actually, he talks about the famous "Custer's revenge" before, but that is more of a curiosity than a trendsetter).
And this ignores the fact that the games with more base themes often sell better than some less violent ones with arguably better gameplay, regardless of advertising.
I know that this is the accepted view, but do you have some data to back that up? And anyway, my point was the following: do we buy violent games because we like violent games, or do we buy them because we've been conditioned by the games industry and bombarded by advertising for so long. After all, as you said, it is the gameplay, characters etc. that make the game.
I used to agree with the Slashdot zeitgeist: "It's not the game designer's fault, they are only giving us what we want". I've recently been reading Chris Crawford's excellent "On Game Design" book; the extract below really made me reconsider. Is it that we, the players, want all the sleaze and gore, or is it that we've become accustomed to it, continuously being fed this sort of material by a sick industry?
I think that as with all things, the truth is grey, and the sleaze merchant has some responsibility for the effects of profiting on sleaze and the glorification of violence.
"The first-person shooters broke the dam. The very first, Castle Wolfenstein, copped a nasty attitude with its deliberately glorified killing. Victims cried out "Meine Liebe!" as they died; blood spattered as they fell. The lead designer, John Romero, continued to develop this vicious style with the enormously successful Doom and its many sequels. Each game showed more gore more realistically. One hit game of the early 90s, Mortal Kombat, seemed to take special pleasure in gore, concluding each victory with the yanking out of the loser's spine. The material accompanying the games reeked of an ugly nihilistic attitude toward killing. All this was, of course, billed as satire or pure fantasy, but the bloody-minded style took hold of the industry. I recall an ad for a game in the mid-90s featuring a man holding a gun lying in a bathtub full of blood. Smelling the scent, the industry advanced the cause with more blood-soaked shooters like Half-Life and Grand Theft Auto. The third installment in the latter series boasted an especially vicious style, offering players the opportunity to hire and then murder a prostitute. As I write this, the newest sleaze game, BMX XXX, is generating plenty of consternation among industry outsiders, intense jealousy among competitors, and even greater anticipation among players.
Compounding the problem is the approbation that the industry bestows upon such products. A prudent industry would treat sleazy products with harsh disdain, but the games industry cannot conceal its delight in sleaze. Grand Theft Auto III won industry awards despite the damage it did to the industry image.
Industry insiders protest that they are merely offering the players what they want; they are not imposing values on players but responding to values already inculcated in youths by a sick society. This is self-serving circumlocution. The games industry is not passively responding to values imposed upon it by a ruthless marketplace; it has selected its own audience, driving away most who do not revel in blood-soaked killing. By offering such games, the industry has attracted the kind of audience that demands them--thereby reinforcing the cycle.
The result of this profound strategic marketing blunder is an industry that is steadily descending into ever-deeper sleaze. The only solution is to take a deep breath, devote a large amount of money to breaking out of this self-imposed pit, and pay the price of developing a healthier marketplace."
I see your point, but at some stage there is a bit of cheating.
There is nothing about "connect more tape" in the definition of TM's; although I concede that if you put that in, you would have something with the same power.
But in the same way, I could change the defininion of FSA to "connect more states" and get something equivalent. The point I'm trying to make is that using compuatibility theory for distinguishing between computing power for *real* devices is a little bit artificial, since they are all really FSA's.
The theory behind FSA's, pushdown automata, TM's etc was not really meant to be applied to distinguish between the computing power of my old Spectrum 48k and my shiny new 1.5Gh Powerbook; it is meant as a classification system for *problems*; to make precise the statement that one problem is harder than other. (One can take it further and get into complexity theory.) The main function of TM's in theory is of coarse to demonstrate problems that cannot be solved by any standard computing machine.
That is why the original story poster was a troll, or at least didn't know what he was talking about.
>So there's more than enough infinity in the universe to permit unbounded automata.
This may be true, but let me assure you that if you take all of the worlds hard disks and put them together, you'll have a lot of storage, but it will still be finite. Meaning that {0^n1^n} is beyond the computer's capability.
Hmm, but that wasn't exactly what the poster said now, was it?
I think that it is useful to be precise when you are talking about things like TM's. And as you probably know, any TM with a finite tape is equivalent to a finite state machine.
In fact, maybe you could explain to me exactly what the poster means when he says that the railroad model is "just a FSM" and not a TM. Presumably, I could hook up more rails to expand the system?
Hmm, how about distinguishing between a *theoretical* model, which is what a Turing Machine is (with infinite tape and all), and a *real* model (like a model railroad or a computer).
I'd like to see you try to construct an infinite tape.;)
Yep, this is a truly embarassing story. Just goes to show that if you use enough technical jargon, you can fool a Slashdot editor into accepting a troll.
I wouldn't worry too much. American right-wing presidents are cowards; they learned their lesson the hard way on Vietnam. They may like to appear as cowboys, but the actual countries they invade are always defenceless; the main thing is to dupe the population into taking money away from social programs and pump them into the pockets of their buddies at Halliburton and co.
Bush knew well that Iraq had no WMDs, otherwise he would've never invaded. The people in his cabinet (Rumsfeld/Negroponte) are the same people that were around when Reagan had to save the United States from evil Libya and evil Nicaragua who were both *huge threats* to the US. Poor Reagan even had Libyan hitmen after him. And poor Bush senior had that evil Saddam trying to kill him.
The most unbelievable thing is that the media and the American public swallows all this and actually believes it; noone in the mainstream ever dares to ask questions.
Actually, I've seen this before. This is the typical defence of American Imperialism, and it's been used a lot to excuse the war in Vietnam. "Yes, I know that we blew up thousands of Cambodians and that we supported a murderous non-democratic regime in South Vietnam, but our intentions were right... we just fucked up".
Unfortunately, "good intentions" are in the eye of the beholder. Hitler also wanted to spread good Christian german civilisation to the "barbaric hordes" of the east.
Ok, I grant you that left shifting is not slower than multiplying by 2;) I actually had two examples in mind, but I only wrote one. The other one was navigating arrays by pointer arithmetic versus the "simple" way of using []. In some cases, pointer arithmetic is actually slower, for example, consider the following two listings:
In general, pointers confuse the compilers and the second listing is slower (with optimisation) than the first. Try it yourself. And here is a benchmark, if you trust me.
Sure, but complexity theory is to a large extent architecture independent. Usually, all that is assumed is a random access model which pretty much covers all the computers I know of.
So don't get me wrong, I'm all for studying algorithms and compexity -- but I don't see why I should dig out assembler manuals.
Well, I believe that the world has changed fundamentally enough since the industrial revolution that it is difficult to take meaningful lessons from before that -- especially when it comes to terrorism which is simly a completely different game when one has access to airplanes, bombs, guns etc.
As far as your first comment, this may be so, but you can't blame me for getting confused about the meaning of "armed surrender" -- it doesn't exactly have the best PR-sounding name;)
I'm not sure that knowing assembly helps you to write good code -- at least that's what my friends who are reasearchers in compiler optimisation tell me.
Compilers these days are pretty smart. In fact, it seems like they do a better job on optimising code than people think. For example, I remember that the profs at uni used to teach us that binary shifting by one to the left was **way** more efficient than simply multiplying by 2. Indeed, this was true in 1997 (when I was an undergrad). However, with the current compilers, this 1337 trick actually produces slower code. I'm sure that the situation is similar for other such simpleminded tricks.
Another problem is that hardware tricks are inherently targeted to a single machine -- making the code less portable. If one writes trick-free code then the compilers can optimise it as suitable for each architecture.
Slashdot Mirror
As usual, being Slashdot, the louder you are, the more insightful you are modded.
Bullshit. The only thing Gödel's incompleteness theorems prove is that no knowledge, not even human knowledge or even a deity's knowledge, can be both consistent and complete. Human beings are so ridiculously inconsistent that completeness doesn't even enter into the picture and Gödel doesn't apply.
WTF does this mean? Which of Godel's incompleteness theorems tells me about deity's knowledge? Godel's theorems have quite precise mathematical content. Your psycho-babble is embarrassing and wrong. But since it's clearly not meant to be understood and you clearly don't know what you are talking about, I'll just point out one specific obvious error: not all formal systems are either incomplete or inconsistent -- they have to be complex enough to contain the natural numbers, an infinite set. I don't know how "souls" and "knowledge" and you grandma relate to Godel but I have a strong suspicion that they don't.
A new kind of geopolitics?
Maybe "nothing is holy", but surely there is such thing as taste. To me, the Mohammed cartoons are mostly tasteless and I can see why they would offend muslims.
Maybe, let's see... a cartoon showing queen Margarethe giving a blowjob to prime minister Anders Fogh. I wonder how many Danish newspapers would print that? I think none, and the reason is that people have a basic sense of what is tasteful humour and satire and what is tasteless drivel designed to provoke people already severely disadvantaged in Danish society.
Anal, I know, but you know that it's Edsger, not Edger, right?
I blame it on the Greatest American of all time, Ronny Reagan, who funded radical islam in Afghanistan (to bleed the Russians) and instructed CIA to train them in combat and explosives. One of the great beneficiaries of the US back then was a young guy called bin Laden.
Unfortunately, we (Europeans) reap what you (Americans) sow.
I have heard this as well, but qualified with *drug* cases, not *all* cases. Also, I'm not sure exactly how many cases this refers to. In any case, I would conjecture that also in other countries drug related cases would have a higher rate of convictions than other cases (compared to, say, theft).
They may sound over the top to you, but these judges are just following the law. It is not their job to set sentence guidelines, it is a job for the lawmakers.
I just don't buy the defence. If there was someone else involved, we would've heard about it by now. What with the 1,000,000 dollar reward and the high media profile of the case. If it was a gang of baggage handlers, as popular opinion seems to point to, then one of the more small-fry members would be queing up for their 15 minutes of fame.
First of all, I think that it's extremely arrogant to expect that since you are Australian, you should be subject to Australian law everywhere you go. If you travel overseas, you should accept that you answer to local laws.
Either Corby was too stupid to know that Indonesia is tough on drugs, or she took the risks willingly. By the way, Australia is not particularily easy on drugs either, last time I looked. And please, in the league of sucking up to the US, Autralia easily takes first place in the world. There would have been no Bali bombing if Howard wasn't so keen to play the role of Dubya's local lieutenant.
The fact that the court did not admit hearsay about some fairytales involving baggage handlers and attention seeking Aussie criminals speaks common sense instead of "corruption". In any case, what do the Indonesian judges gain by putting Corby in jail? This stupid throwing around of accusations like "corruption" without any proof or even evidence is just a smokescreen for racism and arrogant assumptions of cultural superiority.
The fact that she had the drugs in her bag puts the burden on her to prove that they are not hers -- this is the way it would have worked in Australia, also. In my opinion, and the opinion of the Indonesian judges, her defence team did not provide reasonable doubt.
And if you want a motive, have a look at this.
Some great ideas for games there. Just wait a few years, these sort of games are just waiting to be made. Apparently, in terms of sales, the game industry is now bigger than Hollywood; Holywood isn't perfect and it turns out a lot of crap, but then again, there are real masterpieces that appear every now and again -- surely it's only a matter of time before the game industry grows up and starts producing masterpieces. By the way, check out Crawford's book if you come across it; he had an obsession about "human interaction" games back in the eighties and was really way ahead of his time in his designs.
It's always fun to find a good sub-thread in Slashdot in which to have an intelligent discussion. Actually, it's one of the only good things about Slashdot I can think of
Of course there are also strategy games like Civilisation. And "human interaction" games like "The Sims". In fact, I think that the Sims is considered to be a phenomenon in terms of sales.
But the industry doesn't seem to take note; I don't see too many of "The Sims" clones around -- it is certainly not the explosion of clones which followed Wolfenstein/Doom. Actually, the only one I am aware of is "Playboy: the mansion" which brings sleaze to the concept.
You are right about BMX XXX. But he wasn't claiming that *all* games are sleaze; the rant was about sleazy/violent games, many of which came after Wolfenstein (actually, he talks about the famous "Custer's revenge" before, but that is more of a curiosity than a trendsetter).
I know that this is the accepted view, but do you have some data to back that up? And anyway, my point was the following: do we buy violent games because we like violent games, or do we buy them because we've been conditioned by the games industry and bombarded by advertising for so long. After all, as you said, it is the gameplay, characters etc. that make the game.
I think that as with all things, the truth is grey, and the sleaze merchant has some responsibility for the effects of profiting on sleaze and the glorification of violence.
I see your point, but at some stage there is a bit of cheating.
There is nothing about "connect more tape" in the definition of TM's; although I concede that if you put that in, you would have something with the same power.
But in the same way, I could change the defininion of FSA to "connect more states" and get something equivalent. The point I'm trying to make is that using compuatibility theory for distinguishing between computing power for *real* devices is a little bit artificial, since they are all really FSA's.
The theory behind FSA's, pushdown automata, TM's etc was not really meant to be applied to distinguish between the computing power of my old Spectrum 48k and my shiny new 1.5Gh Powerbook; it is meant as a classification system for *problems*; to make precise the statement that one problem is harder than other. (One can take it further and get into complexity theory.) The main function of TM's in theory is of coarse to demonstrate problems that cannot be solved by any standard computing machine.
That is why the original story poster was a troll, or at least didn't know what he was talking about.
>So there's more than enough infinity in the universe to permit unbounded automata.
This may be true, but let me assure you that if you take all of the worlds hard disks and put them together, you'll have a lot of storage, but it will still be finite. Meaning that {0^n1^n} is beyond the computer's capability.
Ok, can you give me a particular problem that an automaton can't solve and a modern computer can?
Hmm, but that wasn't exactly what the poster said now, was it?
I think that it is useful to be precise when you are talking about things like TM's. And as you probably know, any TM with a finite tape is equivalent to a finite state machine.
In fact, maybe you could explain to me exactly what the poster means when he says that the railroad model is "just a FSM" and not a TM. Presumably, I could hook up more rails to expand the system?
Please explain. What does substantially more powerful mean?
Hmm, how about distinguishing between a *theoretical* model, which is what a Turing Machine is (with infinite tape and all), and a *real* model (like a model railroad or a computer).
;)
I'd like to see you try to construct an infinite tape.
Yep, this is a truly embarassing story. Just goes to show that if you use enough technical jargon, you can fool a Slashdot editor into accepting a troll.
I wouldn't worry too much. American right-wing presidents are cowards; they learned their lesson the hard way on Vietnam. They may like to appear as cowboys, but the actual countries they invade are always defenceless; the main thing is to dupe the population into taking money away from social programs and pump them into the pockets of their buddies at Halliburton and co.
Bush knew well that Iraq had no WMDs, otherwise he would've never invaded. The people in his cabinet (Rumsfeld/Negroponte) are the same people that were around when Reagan had to save the United States from evil Libya and evil Nicaragua who were both *huge threats* to the US. Poor Reagan even had Libyan hitmen after him. And poor Bush senior had that evil Saddam trying to kill him.
The most unbelievable thing is that the media and the American public swallows all this and actually believes it; noone in the mainstream ever dares to ask questions.
Can you explain why that is ironic? I don't get it; but hey, I'm not American so maybe I don't understand the American definition of irony.
Actually, I've seen this before. This is the typical defence of American Imperialism, and it's been used a lot to excuse the war in Vietnam. "Yes, I know that we blew up thousands of Cambodians and that we supported a murderous non-democratic regime in South Vietnam, but our intentions were right... we just fucked up".
Unfortunately, "good intentions" are in the eye of the beholder. Hitler also wanted to spread good Christian german civilisation to the "barbaric hordes" of the east.
And here is a benchmark, if you trust me.
Sure, but complexity theory is to a large extent architecture independent. Usually, all that is assumed is a random access model which pretty much covers all the computers I know of.
So don't get me wrong, I'm all for studying algorithms and compexity -- but I don't see why I should dig out assembler manuals.
Well, I believe that the world has changed fundamentally enough since the industrial revolution that it is difficult to take meaningful lessons from before that -- especially when it comes to terrorism which is simly a completely different game when one has access to airplanes, bombs, guns etc.
;)
As far as your first comment, this may be so, but you can't blame me for getting confused about the meaning of "armed surrender" -- it doesn't exactly have the best PR-sounding name
I'm not sure that knowing assembly helps you to write good code -- at least that's what my friends who are reasearchers in compiler optimisation tell me.
Compilers these days are pretty smart. In fact, it seems like they do a better job on optimising code than people think. For example, I remember that the profs at uni used to teach us that binary shifting by one to the left was **way** more efficient than simply multiplying by 2. Indeed, this was true in 1997 (when I was an undergrad). However, with the current compilers, this 1337 trick actually produces slower code. I'm sure that the situation is similar for other such simpleminded tricks.
Another problem is that hardware tricks are inherently targeted to a single machine -- making the code less portable. If one writes trick-free code then the compilers can optimise it as suitable for each architecture.