Does there necessarily have to be one central game server for multiplayer Internet gaming? It seems to me is should be possible to write a very complex, richly detailed RPG game so that it's entirely peer-to-peer among the people currently playing it.
There are... "challenges" to this, of course. You have to deal with communication delays, the fact that any system can and will drop off without warning, and, of course, the guys who will think it amusing to hack a "Everything But Me Dies" gun into the game. But it should be possible to work around these problems.
If the signal travels faster than light, wouldn't it get received before it was sent??
A single signal, not necessarily.
However, if you can send signals faster than light, you can set things up to get a signal before it was sent. This is inherent to the geometry of the Lorentz-Fitzgerald transforms.
Now, if you can find another mathematical transform which gives the same answers as the Lorentz-Fitzgerald in all areas where it has been tested, but avoids the possibility of time travel, you might have something. But this theory has been very thorougly tested to a lot of decimal places over a very wide range. As near as we can tell, if you can send a message (or anything else) somewhere faster than light could get there, you can arrange a causality violation.
Specifically, the antennae on the Iridium are flat and highly polished surfaces. The flashes can get as bright as -8 magnitude for a few seconds.
The web page to check out is www.heavens-above.com. Give them your latitude and longitude, and they can provide you with predictions of where to look and when.
When you actually had to learn HTML in order to create a web page, we didn't have this problem. Now that there are all those "Duh, point and, duh, click" web-page creation tools, it's only to be expected that some of the noxious stuff floating at the shallow end of the gene pool ("Stormfront", et. al.) is going to get onto the web.
I mean, really, race as an "either-or" thing is such a completely mindless concept that anyone who believes it exists has got to be about two tacos short of a combination plate anyway.
Someone should put together a really devastating parody of these cretins. To quote Thomas More, "The devill... the prowde spirite... cannot endure to be mocked."
"Banned from Argo" was written by Leslie Fish, who has given permission for her lyrics to be posted. I'm sure a search would find it....
... Yep. AltaVista, even.
The first dozen hits were to various of the many parodies. (There are so many parodies of this song that someone is putting together a song book called "Bastard Children of Argo". It's going to be... large.)
The only thing that kept me watching was that I was sure it couldn't have been put on the air with George Lucas's Star Wars imprint if it was all this ghastly, it *had* to get better.
Eventually.
This tragic miscalculation caused me to WATCH THE WHOLE THING.
The Horror! Oh, the Horror!
Imagine a frazzled Mrs. Wookie trying to keep up with a TV cooking show hosted by Harvey Corman dressed as Carmen Miranda doing a "Julia Child on PCP" impression. This only begins to hint at the unspeakable ghastlyness of this excretion.
Since VCRs were rare and expensive back in 1979, I had hoped that no copies of this abomination were still in existance to cause lasting psychological damage to new generations. Surely, anyone who had recorded it would have buried the Betamax tape at a crossroads, with a neodymium-iron-boron magnet stake driven through it. Surely no one who had ever suffered this much could have ever risked the possibility of anyone else undergoing such torture.
Lest anyone is unclear on the "Good-bad" thing here, "Plan 9 From Outer Space" was much better than the "Star Wars Christmas Special." "The Creeping Terror" (the movie with no sound track, only dubbed-in narration, about a two-ton pile of rampaging, carnivorous alien carpet remnants) was a masterpiece of cinematography by comparison.
Lucas can't disclaim responsibility for this thing; the Wookie dwellings were very similar to the Ewok village that no one but Lucas could have known about for years afterwards.
Does it worry you that crying "Censorship! Evil!" at every provider of software filters risks desensitising people to warnings of real censorship, like what is being done in Australia?
After all, so-called "censorware" is really "filterware". You don't get it unless you want it, buy it, and install it on your computer. Why is this exercise of personal choice in any way bad, much less a "threat or menace", to quote the wording of the title of this discussion.
This is quite apart from any issues of how good or selective a job some particular piece of filterware might do.
It wasn't Ronald Reagan who signed the legislation in California which resulted in the release of many mentally ill people from the mental hospitals. That legislation was signed by Gov. Edmund G. Brown, Sr., before Reagan was elected. The standard used to be that you could involuntarily commit someone to a mental hospital on the strength of a psychiatrist's diagnosis that they were "insane". Now, the standard is much more stringent. They must be declared to be a danger to themselves or others.
To a great extent, this is a civil rights issue. A case can certainly be made that it is too difficult now to involuntarily commit someone. But it's certainly true that it used to be far too easy to toss someone into an insane asylum for the rest of their lives, with very little oversight or recourse.
There are several notorious cases, where heirs had a rich, harmless eccentric relative committed so as to get their hands on the inheritance. There's also the case of a reporter who decided to do a story on this, and checked into a mental hospital with some vague complaints of "voices". He behaved entirely normally from then on. Not one psychiatrist recognized that he was sane, though most of the other inmates did.
Then when he decided he had enough material for his story, he damn near couldn't get out.
How easy should it be to indefinitely commit someone to a mental hospital aginst their will?
I can't comment on "Jingle all the Way", which I haven't seen, but I thorougly enjoyed "The Last Action Hero." I seem to be in the minority here, since "The Masses" stayed away in droves.
He poked fun at some of the silly conventions of "action movies" in general and other "Ahhnoldt" movies in particular, and had some good things to say about how Real Life != Jollyweird. (Something that I wish "The Masses" had a far better grasp on than they do.)
The "magic ticket" that lets characters pass through the movie screen isn't any sillier a premise than a door that lets you into John Malkovich's brain.
I wandered around Qualcomm's web page for a while, and couldn't find the information I really wanted:
How much does it cost?
When can I get it?
Even though I live in a residential area in the heart of Silicon Valley, there are no (zero) affordable options for high-speed always-on Internet connectivity where I live. xDSL? Forget it, I'm 21K feet from the CO. IDSL? Sorry, the cards aren't in your CO. Cable modem? No, not available. Tacky Cable (now ATT) hasn't expanded beyond the pilot project in Fremont for years.
All I want is at least 128KB for not more than $100/month, a fixed IP address, and no mindless restrictions about my running a telnetd or sendmail on my home computer. I don't think I'm being too unreasonable. I'm willing to settle for a third the speed at twice the price of ADSL.
Sorry to nitpick, but I'm hearing people use "Immaculate Conception" as if it meant "Virgin Birth" more and more lately, and it really grates.
(And I'm not even a Catholic.)
The "Immaculate Conception" was Mary's conception. Catholic doctrine is that she was concieved without "Original Sin", thus the "immaculate" (though otherwise by the usual means) conception.
Most Protestant churches don't teach this. I'm not sure about the Orthodox churches.
The "People Eating Tasty Animals" peta.org web page got moved to http://www.mtd.com/tasty/ when the PETA folks got upset. It's still there, with some stuff about domain name disputes, but it hasn't been updated since 1996 as near as I can tell from a quick look.
The money raised at $.01/100 emails isn't the point. The point is that in order to enforce such a tax, someone has to keep track of what email you are sending. It's an excuse for closer monitoring.
TNT showed this at 2AM back in May, without listing it. I accidentally stumbled across it about 30-45 minutes into the show. (Since DishTV shows the East Coast TNT feed, I saw it at 11.)
It wasn't listed on the DishTV program guide or TV Guide, and I don't know if this was the final edit of the show or not.
It is definitely worth seeing. They seemed to catch the feel of the era, though some details may be wrong. I'm especially interested in catching the first 30 minutes I missed, and seeing it when I am more fully conscious. I think the whole S100 Bus CP/M 4K Basic Homebrew Computer Club part of the history must have been in the first part which I missed.
The picture of one of those early Computer Fairs looked spot-on. (That was a bit of nostalgia -- I really miss the Computer Faires, back when they were hobbyist oriented.)
I have no idea how accurate they were in their depiction of Jobs, which struck me as a thorougly unpleasant people-user. In one scene, Wozniak confronts Jobs about one of Apple's earliest employees not being awarded any stock options. Jobs just brushes him off, and Woz says "Well, I'm giving him some of mine."
Re:This would be GREAT for armor piercing shells.
on
Element 118 detected
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· Score: 1
Tungsten is sometimes used for armor piercing shells, too, and is marginally more dense. 19.3 g/cc vs. 18.95 for Uranium. I think Tungsten's mechanical properties might not be as good for this purpose as uranium's.
The other really dense metals, osmium, iridium, etc., are far too expensive.
In addition to being strong, dense, and having a bunch of it lying around with no better use to put it to*, depleted uranium strikes sparks when it hits metal. Just what you want when passing through an armored vehicle full of explosive shells. I read a book on the Manhatten Project years and years ago, and it described an incident where machinists were filching chips of uranium to use for "flints" in their cigarette lighters. I think I recall that the Misch metal normally used for these was difficult to come by during WWII, and uranium sparks even better.
Of course, it's also toxic in addition to being slightly radioactive.
*(Not counting the possibility of someone deciding that breeder reactors are a good idea after all.)
It's always ticket me off that Leia gave Luke and Han medals at the end of Episode IV, but didn't give one to Chewie. Huh? He sure earned one every bit as much as the others.
Hmm... Are propane tanks and gasoline outlawed in Canada? I didn't think the smothering state had gotten quite that bad up there yet.
Had the perps concentrated on their little BLEVE bomb rather than the guns, their toll would have likely been at least 20 times as high. The situation was horribly bad. I was nowhere near as bad as it could have been, and very nearly was.
My cousin had one... What a hoot! They generally died the death of too many pumps breaking the seals, I think. I'd love to find one of these old things, and see if I could refurbish it to make it work again. (Just did a search on ebay.com, no luck.)
Slashdot Mirror
Does there necessarily have to be one central game server for multiplayer Internet gaming? It seems to me is should be possible to write a very complex, richly detailed RPG game so that it's entirely peer-to-peer among the people currently playing it.
... "challenges" to this, of course. You have to deal with communication delays, the fact that any system can and will drop off without warning, and, of course, the guys who will think it amusing to hack a "Everything But Me Dies" gun into the game. But it should be possible to work around these problems.
There are
If the signal travels faster than light, wouldn't it get received before it was sent??
A single signal, not necessarily.
However, if you can send signals faster than light, you can set things up to get a signal before it was sent. This is inherent to the geometry of the Lorentz-Fitzgerald transforms.
Now, if you can find another mathematical transform which gives the same answers as the Lorentz-Fitzgerald in all areas where it has been tested, but avoids the possibility of time travel, you might have something. But this theory has been very thorougly tested to a lot of decimal places over a very wide range. As near as we can tell, if you can send a message (or anything else) somewhere faster than light could get there, you can arrange a causality violation.
Specifically, the antennae on the Iridium are flat and highly polished surfaces. The flashes can get as bright as -8 magnitude for a few seconds.
The web page to check out is www.heavens-above.com. Give them your latitude and longitude, and they can provide you with predictions of where to look and when.
I mean, really, race as an "either-or" thing is such a completely mindless concept that anyone who believes it exists has got to be about two tacos short of a combination plate anyway.
Someone should put together a really devastating parody of these cretins. To quote Thomas More, "The devill
"Banned from Argo" was written by Leslie Fish, who has given permission for her lyrics to be posted. I'm sure a search would find it....
... large.)
... Yep. AltaVista, even.
The first dozen hits were to various of the many parodies. (There are so many parodies of this song that someone is putting together a song book called "Bastard Children of Argo". It's going to be
However, this one is the original lyrics:
Argo lyrics on Robert Lentz's web page
(Hey, Robert, I posted your URL on Slashdot... INCOMING!!
The only thing that kept me watching was that I was sure it couldn't have been put on the air with George Lucas's Star Wars imprint if it was all this ghastly, it *had* to get better.
Eventually.
This tragic miscalculation caused me to WATCH THE WHOLE THING.
The Horror! Oh, the Horror!
Imagine a frazzled Mrs. Wookie trying to keep up with a TV cooking show hosted by Harvey Corman dressed as Carmen Miranda doing a "Julia Child on PCP" impression. This only begins to hint at the unspeakable ghastlyness of this excretion.
Since VCRs were rare and expensive back in 1979, I had hoped that no copies of this abomination were still in existance to cause lasting psychological damage to new generations. Surely, anyone who had recorded it would have buried the Betamax tape at a crossroads, with a neodymium-iron-boron magnet stake driven through it. Surely no one who had ever suffered this much could have ever risked the possibility of anyone else undergoing such torture.
Lest anyone is unclear on the "Good-bad" thing here, "Plan 9 From Outer Space" was much better than the "Star Wars Christmas Special." "The Creeping Terror" (the movie with no sound track, only dubbed-in narration, about a two-ton pile of rampaging, carnivorous alien carpet remnants) was a masterpiece of cinematography by comparison.
Lucas can't disclaim responsibility for this thing; the Wookie dwellings were very similar to the Ewok village that no one but Lucas could have known about for years afterwards.
No thanks.
(All the "collecting spam addresses issues aside, of course.)
After all, so-called "censorware" is really "filterware". You don't get it unless you want it, buy it, and install it on your computer. Why is this exercise of personal choice in any way bad, much less a "threat or menace", to quote the wording of the title of this discussion.
This is quite apart from any issues of how good or selective a job some particular piece of filterware might do.
To a great extent, this is a civil rights issue. A case can certainly be made that it is too difficult now to involuntarily commit someone. But it's certainly true that it used to be far too easy to toss someone into an insane asylum for the rest of their lives, with very little oversight or recourse.
There are several notorious cases, where heirs had a rich, harmless eccentric relative committed so as to get their hands on the inheritance. There's also the case of a reporter who decided to do a story on this, and checked into a mental hospital with some vague complaints of "voices". He behaved entirely normally from then on. Not one psychiatrist recognized that he was sane, though most of the other inmates did.
Then when he decided he had enough material for his story, he damn near couldn't get out.
How easy should it be to indefinitely commit someone to a mental hospital aginst their will?
He poked fun at some of the silly conventions of "action movies" in general and other "Ahhnoldt" movies in particular, and had some good things to say about how Real Life != Jollyweird. (Something that I wish "The Masses" had a far better grasp on than they do.)
The "magic ticket" that lets characters pass through the movie screen isn't any sillier a premise than a door that lets you into John Malkovich's brain.
I wandered around Qualcomm's web page for a while, and couldn't find the information I really wanted:
How much does it cost?
When can I get it?
Even though I live in a residential area in the heart of Silicon Valley, there are no (zero) affordable options for high-speed always-on Internet connectivity where I live. xDSL? Forget it, I'm 21K feet from the CO. IDSL? Sorry, the cards aren't in your CO. Cable modem? No, not available. Tacky Cable (now ATT) hasn't expanded beyond the pilot project in Fremont for years.
All I want is at least 128KB for not more than $100/month, a fixed IP address, and no mindless restrictions about my running a telnetd or sendmail on my home computer. I don't think I'm being too unreasonable. I'm willing to settle for a third the speed at twice the price of ADSL.
Sorry to nitpick, but I'm hearing people use "Immaculate Conception" as if it meant "Virgin Birth" more and more lately, and it really grates.
(And I'm not even a Catholic.)
The "Immaculate Conception" was Mary's conception. Catholic doctrine is that she was concieved without "Original Sin", thus the "immaculate" (though otherwise by the usual means) conception.
Most Protestant churches don't teach this. I'm not sure about the Orthodox churches.
The Virgin Birth is something else entirely.
The "People Eating Tasty Animals" peta.org web page got moved to http://www.mtd.com/tasty/ when the PETA folks got upset. It's still there, with some stuff about domain name disputes, but it hasn't been updated since 1996 as near as I can tell from a quick look.
The money raised at $.01/100 emails isn't the point. The point is that in order to enforce such a tax, someone has to keep track of what email you are sending. It's an excuse for closer monitoring.
"If Al Gore invented the Internet, I invented the spelling checker." -- Dan Quayle
TNT showed this at 2AM back in May, without listing it. I accidentally stumbled across it about 30-45 minutes into the show. (Since DishTV shows the East Coast TNT feed, I saw it at 11.)
It wasn't listed on the DishTV program guide or TV Guide, and I don't know if this was the final edit of the show or not.
It is definitely worth seeing. They seemed to catch the feel of the era, though some details may be wrong. I'm especially interested in catching the first 30 minutes I missed, and seeing it when I am more fully conscious. I think the whole S100 Bus CP/M 4K Basic Homebrew Computer Club part of the history must have been in the first part which I missed.
The picture of one of those early Computer Fairs looked spot-on. (That was a bit of nostalgia -- I really miss the Computer Faires, back when they were hobbyist oriented.)
I have no idea how accurate they were in their depiction of Jobs, which struck me as a thorougly unpleasant people-user. In one scene, Wozniak confronts Jobs about one of Apple's earliest employees not being awarded any stock options. Jobs just brushes him off, and Woz says "Well, I'm giving him some of mine."
Tungsten is sometimes used for armor piercing shells, too, and is marginally more dense. 19.3 g/cc vs. 18.95 for Uranium. I think Tungsten's mechanical properties might not be as good for this purpose as uranium's.
The other really dense metals, osmium, iridium, etc., are far too expensive.
In addition to being strong, dense, and having a bunch of it lying around with no better use to put it to*, depleted uranium strikes sparks when it hits metal. Just what you want when passing through an armored vehicle full of explosive shells. I read a book on the Manhatten Project years and years ago, and it described an incident where machinists were filching chips of uranium to use for "flints" in their cigarette lighters. I think I recall that the Misch metal normally used for these was difficult to come by during WWII, and uranium sparks even better.
Of course, it's also toxic in addition to being slightly radioactive.
*(Not counting the possibility of someone deciding that breeder reactors are a good idea after all.)
It's always ticket me off that Leia gave Luke and Han medals at the end of Episode IV, but didn't give one to Chewie. Huh? He sure earned one every bit as much as the others.
Hmm... Are propane tanks and gasoline outlawed in Canada? I didn't think the smothering state had gotten quite that bad up there yet.
Had the perps concentrated on their little BLEVE bomb rather than the guns, their toll would have likely been at least 20 times as high. The situation was horribly bad. I was nowhere near as bad as it could have been, and very nearly was.
My cousin had one... What a hoot! They generally died the death of too many pumps breaking the seals, I think. I'd love to find one of these old things, and see if I could refurbish it to make it work again. (Just did a search on ebay.com, no luck.)