> Don't expect an official version from the DevTeam.
Actually, don't expect anything from the nethack dev team. The last release was on 8. December 2003. It's as close to stone dead as a project that famous can reasonably get.
Nethack is theoretically winnable without spoilers. It has yet to happen, so I think I'm justified in saying it's not intended to be.
> After inevitable misjudgement of an unfamiliar enemy resulting in death, you're bound to start the game completely anew.
After playing crawl for a short while, you'll quickly learn to treat unfamiliar enemies with the utmost respect:) Of course, that paranoia comes back to bite you, you'll get further but then you're going to die from running out of consumables (strength potions, wands, etc.) in face of the ever-increasing challenges. Learning when to fight and flee is important, but that alone won't win you the game.
I did not say it was completely impossible to win nethack without spoilers. Obviously, it isn't - though it's worth noting that there is no record of it happening, ever, and nethack's been around for a long time.
I said that nethack isn't really intended to be winnable without spoilers, in other words, that winnability without spoilers has not been a significant priority for the dev team. It has been an important priority for the Crawl team, and by far most roguelikes care more about it than nethack. Few roguelikes have as cavalier in adding features you're never going to find out about without spoilers. It even seems this has been deliberate: winning nethack is about "hacks", finding exploits. The deliberate decision to keep pudding farming in the game, for instance, is strong evidence of this. Such hacks are also basically what makes conduct games possible: Combine enough exploit tricks, and you can win the game without ever eating food, or ever killing a monster personally. Some conducts are abstaining from the more obvious and/or powerful tricks, but still you have no chance at them unless you know about the game's more counterintuitive features.
By comparison, in Crawl, the difficulty is strategic - where to go, when and how to spend your limited resources. All features that reward keeping a webpage of spoilers open, or even a scrap paper of notes, have been systematically pruned: If you need to track it, the game tracks it for you. If you need to know, the game tells you. Do vault guards see invisible? Why yes, they do, you can just look at them to find out rather than look at a spoiler, or die trying to find out. You can work out the things you need to know to win on your own, without spoilers, but still the game is fiendishly difficult.
Nethack isn't really intended to be winnable without spoilers. DCSS is, though, but still a good deal of the fun is talking about it, exchanging strategies and ideas.
It's just that if you have a jailbroken Iphone, or any platform the maker desperately tries to lock down, you never know if it's going to be bricked when you wake up tomorrow. Steve Jobs probably feels that you deserve it.
Thing is, with Android it's extremely easy to get a peripheral up and running. There's an app that hooks your wiimote right into the keyboard subsystem, and it Just Works (at least with those emulators sophisticated enough to rely on android's input system rather than rolling their own - sadly, the best Amiga and C64 emulators don't. Wish yongzh would take a look at those).
This. We haven't broken it, but there is definitive progress. The thread at Bruce Scheier's has best signal to noise ratio, there only one in ten try to make jokes about ovaltine, compared to one in three elsewhere.
Any serious user of AES, or any block cipher, is going to use cipher block chaining or a similar technique. Just encrypting each block separately is called "electronic code book" mode and is vulnerable to replay attacks.
Another nice find! GDDMN SENCURE is almost certainly "goddamn secure" - a phrase anyone devising a cryptosystem solely for his own pleasure is likely to encrypt.
This gives us the clue that some words may have wovels removed, and some may have consonants sprinkled liberally into them.
Meh. Intelligence does not equal motivation. Even if you could create a "sentient" program, it will not have the same basic wishes that a human has. In fact, it will probably not have any motivation at all - not knowledge aquistition, not even self-preservation - unless you want it to. So it would be like, "Hm, looks like the humans are wrecking everything. Whatever."
It's not that men are from nature any more emotionally restrained than women. It's just that men who are aggressive and impulsive get a bloody hard time from kindergarten on - not entirely unreasonable - and so they are taught to restrain those traits. Whereas young girl's aggression stays under the radar for most adults, isn't challenged. If you've seen case stories of female bullying, you'll know how bad it can get.
Adult culture enforces the distinction, too. Women's aggression simply isn't viewed as negatively as men's.
> One of the effects of unethical behavior is that people start to not like you, and protest your actions. This costs you money, and is part of the capitalist system you are saying we should be forgiving them because of - instead, we should be embracing that capitalist system, and making sure that they lose money every time they do something stupid, unethical, or just plain evil.
I notice lots of self-professed free market advocates forget this, and do things like attack Fair Trade labeling.
If it's done by majority vote instead of "consensus", they won't need to worry about sitting there till they rot. They'll just call the vote and be done with it. In that less threatening situation, there's less room for aggressive "persuasion" of other jury members.
The demand for "consensus" does not help you. All it does is empower the persistent and headstrong at the expense of the careful and thoughtful. It ruins what's a jury's real strength: its diversity.
If you knew Condorcet's jury theorem, you'd know how important it is that jurors reach their conclusions independently.
You expect sense from the court system. That went out the window long ago - at least by the time they started letting prosecution and defense haggle over who should sit on a jury.
Jurors should be selected by lot, and reach their verdict by majority vote, not "consensus". People who think the current circus gives them a better shot at justice, should learn basic probability theory and look up Condorcet's jury theorem.
I don't see much control freakery, in fact I'm usually amazed at the things sold in the market. Take ROM buddy, for instance. Not only does it fall afoul of the same paragraph as this app, but the roms it offers for download are copyrighted and not theirs to sell ("only download if you own the original game" yeah right!) It's a paid app, too.
Right, it's an offense against freedom of assembly and right to privacy. It can indirectly become an offense against free speech if the speech of the group is changed - if you made a group change its statements by threatening to bash in their heads if they didn't, it would obviously be an offense. Doing it by deception instead of violence doesn't change the outcome as far as free speech is concerned.
I'm surprised the British aren't rioting in the streets over these Stasi methods. Spying on your political opponents was considered president-toppling bad once in the US, and many democracies ban police infiltration outright.
It's not as if they have been reluctant to in the past. Intrade just expired the 2010 as hottest year on record on 100, and some fool who bet against Gore also would have lost - I don't recall if he did take it up, but there was an intrade contact on it, which went in Gore's favor. Question is, can you get better yield out of a ten year bet? Odds are, you can. Eventually, the deniers will come up with a bet no one bothers to take up. I guess that's when it will hit the headlines.
How much cash is a botnet worth? Depends, among other things, on how many cycles it takes to break a captcha. As with the email spam buyers, spam service buyers almost certainly overvalue the services they buy from botnet owners.
Not necessarily. After all, a patient spammer could just read the post himself and enter the captcha manually. The reason they don't do this is that the ROI on spam is so ridiculously low (spam kings like Alan Ralsky got around this problem by selling spam services to unscrupulous companies that thought it would be profitable). Every CPU cycle spent breaking a captcha is profit down the drain for the spammer. Not to mention the payment to developers who come up with anti-captcha techniques.
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> Don't expect an official version from the DevTeam.
Actually, don't expect anything from the nethack dev team. The last release was on 8. December 2003. It's as close to stone dead as a project that famous can reasonably get.
Nethack is theoretically winnable without spoilers. It has yet to happen, so I think I'm justified in saying it's not intended to be.
> After inevitable misjudgement of an unfamiliar enemy resulting in death, you're bound to start the game completely anew.
After playing crawl for a short while, you'll quickly learn to treat unfamiliar enemies with the utmost respect :) Of course, that paranoia comes back to bite you, you'll get further but then you're going to die from running out of consumables (strength potions, wands, etc.) in face of the ever-increasing challenges. Learning when to fight and flee is important, but that alone won't win you the game.
I did not say it was completely impossible to win nethack without spoilers. Obviously, it isn't - though it's worth noting that there is no record of it happening, ever, and nethack's been around for a long time.
I said that nethack isn't really intended to be winnable without spoilers, in other words, that winnability without spoilers has not been a significant priority for the dev team. It has been an important priority for the Crawl team, and by far most roguelikes care more about it than nethack. Few roguelikes have as cavalier in adding features you're never going to find out about without spoilers.
It even seems this has been deliberate: winning nethack is about "hacks", finding exploits. The deliberate decision to keep pudding farming in the game, for instance, is strong evidence of this. Such hacks are also basically what makes conduct games possible: Combine enough exploit tricks, and you can win the game without ever eating food, or ever killing a monster personally. Some conducts are abstaining from the more obvious and/or powerful tricks, but still you have no chance at them unless you know about the game's more counterintuitive features.
By comparison, in Crawl, the difficulty is strategic - where to go, when and how to spend your limited resources. All features that reward keeping a webpage of spoilers open, or even a scrap paper of notes, have been systematically pruned: If you need to track it, the game tracks it for you. If you need to know, the game tells you. Do vault guards see invisible? Why yes, they do, you can just look at them to find out rather than look at a spoiler, or die trying to find out. You can work out the things you need to know to win on your own, without spoilers, but still the game is fiendishly difficult.
Nethack isn't really intended to be winnable without spoilers. DCSS is, though, but still a good deal of the fun is talking about it, exchanging strategies and ideas.
In particular, it's inspired by Angband and Angband variants. There's not much of Nethack in there.
The association I have with armenia is mainly ass-kicking chess players.
It's just that if you have a jailbroken Iphone, or any platform the maker desperately tries to lock down, you never know if it's going to be bricked when you wake up tomorrow. Steve Jobs probably feels that you deserve it.
Also, ROM buddy itself is pretty dodgy, and IMO scummy as well. They're not just giving people an easy way to get roms, they take money for it.
Thing is, with Android it's extremely easy to get a peripheral up and running. There's an app that hooks your wiimote right into the keyboard subsystem, and it Just Works (at least with those emulators sophisticated enough to rely on android's input system rather than rolling their own - sadly, the best Amiga and C64 emulators don't. Wish yongzh would take a look at those).
This. We haven't broken it, but there is definitive progress. The thread at Bruce Scheier's has best signal to noise ratio, there only one in ten try to make jokes about ovaltine, compared to one in three elsewhere.
Any serious user of AES, or any block cipher, is going to use cipher block chaining or a similar technique. Just encrypting each block separately is called "electronic code book" mode and is vulnerable to replay attacks.
Another nice find! GDDMN SENCURE is almost certainly "goddamn secure" - a phrase anyone devising a cryptosystem solely for his own pleasure is likely to encrypt.
This gives us the clue that some words may have wovels removed, and some may have consonants sprinkled liberally into them.
Good find!
Meh. Intelligence does not equal motivation. Even if you could create a "sentient" program, it will not have the same basic wishes that a human has. In fact, it will probably not have any motivation at all - not knowledge aquistition, not even self-preservation - unless you want it to. So it would be like, "Hm, looks like the humans are wrecking everything. Whatever."
How do you measure that? Sentencing statistics are a better guide to society's attitudes, and by most accounts women get off easier for such crimes.
It's not that men are from nature any more emotionally restrained than women. It's just that men who are aggressive and impulsive get a bloody hard time from kindergarten on - not entirely unreasonable - and so they are taught to restrain those traits. Whereas young girl's aggression stays under the radar for most adults, isn't challenged. If you've seen case stories of female bullying, you'll know how bad it can get.
Adult culture enforces the distinction, too. Women's aggression simply isn't viewed as negatively as men's.
> One of the effects of unethical behavior is that people start to not like you, and protest your actions. This costs you money, and is part of the capitalist system you are saying we should be forgiving them because of - instead, we should be embracing that capitalist system, and making sure that they lose money every time they do something stupid, unethical, or just plain evil.
I notice lots of self-professed free market advocates forget this, and do things like attack Fair Trade labeling.
If it's done by majority vote instead of "consensus", they won't need to worry about sitting there till they rot. They'll just call the vote and be done with it. In that less threatening situation, there's less room for aggressive "persuasion" of other jury members.
The demand for "consensus" does not help you. All it does is empower the persistent and headstrong at the expense of the careful and thoughtful. It ruins what's a jury's real strength: its diversity.
If you knew Condorcet's jury theorem, you'd know how important it is that jurors reach their conclusions independently.
You expect sense from the court system. That went out the window long ago - at least by the time they started letting prosecution and defense haggle over who should sit on a jury.
Jurors should be selected by lot, and reach their verdict by majority vote, not "consensus". People who think the current circus gives them a better shot at justice, should learn basic probability theory and look up Condorcet's jury theorem.
I don't see much control freakery, in fact I'm usually amazed at the things sold in the market. Take ROM buddy, for instance. Not only does it fall afoul of the same paragraph as this app, but the roms it offers for download are copyrighted and not theirs to sell ("only download if you own the original game" yeah right!) It's a paid app, too.
Right, it's an offense against freedom of assembly and right to privacy. It can indirectly become an offense against free speech if the speech of the group is changed - if you made a group change its statements by threatening to bash in their heads if they didn't, it would obviously be an offense. Doing it by deception instead of violence doesn't change the outcome as far as free speech is concerned.
I'm surprised the British aren't rioting in the streets over these Stasi methods. Spying on your political opponents was considered president-toppling bad once in the US, and many democracies ban police infiltration outright.
It's not as if they have been reluctant to in the past. Intrade just expired the 2010 as hottest year on record on 100, and some fool who bet against Gore also would have lost - I don't recall if he did take it up, but there was an intrade contact on it, which went in Gore's favor.
Question is, can you get better yield out of a ten year bet? Odds are, you can. Eventually, the deniers will come up with a bet no one bothers to take up. I guess that's when it will hit the headlines.
How much cash is a botnet worth? Depends, among other things, on how many cycles it takes to break a captcha. As with the email spam buyers, spam service buyers almost certainly overvalue the services they buy from botnet owners.
Not necessarily. After all, a patient spammer could just read the post himself and enter the captcha manually. The reason they don't do this is that the ROI on spam is so ridiculously low (spam kings like Alan Ralsky got around this problem by selling spam services to unscrupulous companies that thought it would be profitable). Every CPU cycle spent breaking a captcha is profit down the drain for the spammer. Not to mention the payment to developers who come up with anti-captcha techniques.
That's probably enough to prevent a lot of spam. Spam isn't very profitable per post.