"These guys? Already on the US no fly list. Already known to French authorities for extremist sympathies. At least one already had been in trouble with police for violent crimes."
Yeah, but it looks like they also checked all the flags for troubled kids. You'll find lots and lots of foster home boys(which those were) who are kind of attention-seekers, kind of flirting with various radical political cults, kind of narcissistic, kind of sociopathic/antisocial. What are you going to do?
There are tons, tons of people who fit your 1 and 2. And much as they may be personality-fucked up people who go on to cause a lot of suffering for people they encounter, the vast majority of them are not terrorists. Surveilling them is not free, and is not without consequences in itself.
Just like every business in the world is licensed and regulated right? Except it's not.
Where are you running a business? Yes, every business in the world is regulated, and for businesses where there is high competition and temptation to cut corners, there are regularly domain-specific rules or licensing requirements in place. A highly competitive industry is by default a corrupt industry, because the more bitter the fight, the harder it is to survive without playing dirty. In many countries and many domains, regulation evidently helps with that, but if the industry is sufficiently capital-intensive, regulation itself becomes an arena for dirty fighting.
Taxi drivers are usually poor immigrants. Given sufficient desperation they will play dirty by cheating on their taxes, scamming their customers, or working with criminal organizations (to do e.g. money laundering). They do not, however, have the resources to play regulatory capture dirty game. Uber does.
The problem can solve itself with open information.
Only it didn't when they tried. Taxis are often selected in situations where you can't meaningfully discriminate between them (from a queue, or hailing). They're also heavily used by people ill-equipped to discriminate between them (tourists and drunk people). Throwing more information on them doesn't help.
The major negative impact from TG people is only that which society places on them and thus an unnatural impact.
I've heard a transperson dispute that, saying that even where people are 100% cool with them, they still feel awful about the mind/body mismatch, to the point of depression, self-harming etc. Gender dysphoria can still be a mental illness even if transsexualism per se isn't.
Though of course, not in any sane jurisdiction should that prevent you from driving.
I am licensed to do most of the things a plumber is licensed to do, too. Usually it's the insurance company that minds me doing everything myself, not the government. In fact I had a plumber berate me once, he said installing a toilet was such an easy task we should be able to handle it ourselves next time.
People are licensed to drive. Taxis are licensed to drive people for profit. Profit motives should always be considered potentially dangerous, there are a lot of things people are willing to do, corners they are willing to cut, if it stands between making good money and being destitute.
Taxi deregulation has been tried, many many times. It has many perverse and unexpected results. For instance, you get more taxis on the road with deregulation, but prices become higher. Customers are unable to discriminate between individual drivers based on price (this is also true in Uber's regime, by design). As a result, it's pretty much random who gets a paying customer. If you only win that lottery once every three days, of course you have to crank up prices when it happens - as much as you dare, until you start to worry that they might change their mind/step out of your cab/punch you.
It is false equivalence to say that unregulated taxis have the same consequences as unregulated pharma.
Well, that wasn't the argument. The argument was that if lawmakers think the consequences are bad enough to warrant regulation, then maybe companies (with a huge profit motive clouding their judgements of said matter) shouldn't just be able to disregard it.
MS-DOS games drew their graphics in software to the VGA's frame buffer, while Super NES games were more likely to rely on the S-PPU's built-in scrollable tile planes and sprite capability.
Yeah, which was why it was impressive that Commander Keen had actual scrolling, since that was damn hard to do on the IBM PC those days (although more game-oriented computers from 1983 and even earlier had no trouble with it!)
It was also why texture mapping happened first in PC games - in the beginning there was no hardware support for it anywhere, but the PC had already eschewed specialized graphics chips in favor of raw computing power, so it was easier to do the "impossible" there.
Yeah, I knew I was a little sloppy with the sound cards, just didn't know how:)
I never had many games that asked for mouse.
Civilization did. I think most Microprose games did. I have no idea why, as far as I know for all their games that you might want to play keyboard-only, it made no difference if you left the mouse active.
The kids with the 8-bit nintendos and the A2600s were the "poor" kids.
Indeed, there was a class divide here, but it did not have so much to do with the cost of the systems. The poorer kids lived in apartment housing, which was cheaper, but only apartments had cable TV (private homes would need a satellite dish, which was both expensive and seen as vulgar/ugly). So they got a lot more cultural influence from the US. It wasn't just consoles vs. computers, it also was Transformers vs. Colargol, or Superman vs. Pellefant.
The British royal family. They all live in the same family house together - Indian. All work in the family business - Indian. All have arranged marriages - Indian. They all have sons; daughters no good - Indian. Children live with their parents until they are married - Indian!
They are good at memorizing chess games because chess games make profound sense to them. The more you understand the why's of a chess move, the easier it is to remember it. They aren't good at memorizing arbitrary stuff, and being good at memorizing arbitrary stuff won't help you much getting good at chess.
Playing from randomized positions, computers are vastly better than humans, since they don't rely on "moves making sense" the same way. Go programs (which are a lot weaker than the best humans) trounce humans if they play from a position of, say, 20 random moves - even if the human gets to pick color.
That has been tried with computer Go. It turns out that you can make a computer very, very good at predicting what moves top-level players will make, and still fail abysmally at making a strong program.
Who owns what? According to the hard core of bitcoin fans, it is based on one principle - that the blockchain is the final word on that issue, at least as it concerns bitcoins themselves. If you have the key, the coins are yours.
If you say "those bitcoins aren't yours, they're stolen!" you're implicitly accepting another standard of property - of who owns what - as higher than the blockchain. Then you concede to the messy passions of society to determine who owns what, rather than the mathematical certainties of the block chain.
Bitcoin fans are a bit two-minded on this. On one hand, they demand that money in anonymous accounts belongs to whoever controls the keys, and it's none of your business how they got there. On the other, some do call for blacklisting coins, e.g. the coins FBI seized when Silk Road went under. The technology actually makes that possible, unlike with cash or even conventional digital payments.
I'm all for convicting Karpeles for fraud (and in fact this article is old news to me - despite lots of anonymous accounts trying to pooh-pooh it, investigations of the block chain made a convincing case for fraud in the weeks after MtGox's fall), but I'm also for recognizing the limits of the blockchain, and I'd like BTC fans to realize it can't be a substitute for government, or even government-issued currency.
This is damage control. What the docs show, is that OTR encryption is safe. You can use OTR encryption with Jabber, but Jabber isn't encrypted by default.
What they presumably hope is that people will use Jabber and think they're safe. And Slashdot editors are being the useful idiots as usual.
Neural net-based Go programs have been tried countless times since neural nets were invented, and losing to GNU Go 20 out of 200 games is very very far from state of the art. I don't know which version of Fuego they used, but if it was rated 4-5k it must have been an old and weak one. It's currently rated 2d on KGS.
Worth noting that KGS is stingy on ratings, and especially hard on bots since matches are self-selected. If there's an exploitable weakness in a bot, people will ruthlessly mine it for rating.
The real revolution is the technique that CrazyStone pioneered: Monte carlo tree search. Even basic MCTS programs can beat GNU Go 90% of the time. CrazyStone was on 7d on KGS for a while, although in september it dropped to 6d (presumably because very strong players found a way to exploit its weaknesses - since programs play consistently, rating shouldn't vary too much otherwise).
Monte Carlo is the way forward. I'm convinced that the basic approach of it (randomized search, weighted with a tree towards positions more likely to be fruitful) is going to stay. Improvements are going to be about which moves to weigh the exploration towards in the playouts as opposed to the tree part.
If it was a movie critical of North Korea, that would send a message. But it seems it's just a none-too-deep Hollywood comedy.
What they might do instead, is sponsor a documentary highlighting the dictators' long history of "air nut" behavior and the horrors of their prison state.
In PKDs story, Deckard is human, end of story. A main point of the book is that the androids really are bad: Even though they can be vulnerable and afraid (Pris Stratton) make great art (Luba Luft), or even fall in love with each other (Roy and Irmgard Baty), they ultimately all are true psychopaths, without a hint of compassion or concern for other people except for their own benefit.
In the book, the idea of an android having false memories implanted and believing itself to be human is a ruse: The Rosen Association claims it about Rachael, but actually she knows perfectly well that she's an android. At another point, the androids go to ridiculous lengths to fool Phil Resch, a somewhat cynical bounty hunter, that he is an android. But they fail.
Of course what a Hollywood director does in his film is his own business. But I'd like to see a dramatization that was more faithful, and went into the moral and religious aspects of the story.
Well, then that takes away the main reason to play Nethack - modest as it was in the first place. I held out hope for Nethack for a long time, but it hasn't been developed in over ten years. The indie/roguelike scene has moved on, and improved immensely.
There are better options today, on just about any criteria.
I never said it was the defining feature. I'd say it is the most important, along with randomization.
Have you noticed there are very few games being made nowadays that are three lives, game over, start from the beginning?
Let's call a game that is real time, has permadeath but not random levels "arcade hard". ("Nintendo hard" is a misnomer, Nintendo had far more non-arcade hard games than the competitors, and were among the first to challenge arcade assumptions of what a game should look like)
I propose that if you hate roguelikes, you probably also hate arcade hard games, and vice versa. I guess you have some people fond of twitch reactions and memorized timings who like hard but don't like randomness - in the speedrun crowd, maybe.
DCSS is what replaced Nethack for me. DCSS is every inch as hard, but fairer than Nethack: spoilers will do you little good, boring/cheesy tactics (e.g. grinding) won't help, and you won't die from misclick-type errors as often. Best of all, it has variation in the endgame, since you need three runes to win but there are fifteen in existence. Once you're able to win the game at all, you can start pushing your luck in the extended endgame by getting more runes before doing Zot.
I'm a bit skeptical of the changes made in recent years, though. A lot of the coherence of Linley's design has been eroded along with the improvements.
Slashdot Mirror
"These guys? Already on the US no fly list. Already known to French authorities for extremist sympathies. At least one already had been in trouble with police for violent crimes."
Yeah, but it looks like they also checked all the flags for troubled kids. You'll find lots and lots of foster home boys(which those were) who are kind of attention-seekers, kind of flirting with various radical political cults, kind of narcissistic, kind of sociopathic/antisocial. What are you going to do?
There are tons, tons of people who fit your 1 and 2. And much as they may be personality-fucked up people who go on to cause a lot of suffering for people they encounter, the vast majority of them are not terrorists. Surveilling them is not free, and is not without consequences in itself.
Where are you running a business? Yes, every business in the world is regulated, and for businesses where there is high competition and temptation to cut corners, there are regularly domain-specific rules or licensing requirements in place. A highly competitive industry is by default a corrupt industry, because the more bitter the fight, the harder it is to survive without playing dirty. In many countries and many domains, regulation evidently helps with that, but if the industry is sufficiently capital-intensive, regulation itself becomes an arena for dirty fighting.
Taxi drivers are usually poor immigrants. Given sufficient desperation they will play dirty by cheating on their taxes, scamming their customers, or working with criminal organizations (to do e.g. money laundering). They do not, however, have the resources to play regulatory capture dirty game. Uber does.
Only it didn't when they tried. Taxis are often selected in situations where you can't meaningfully discriminate between them (from a queue, or hailing). They're also heavily used by people ill-equipped to discriminate between them (tourists and drunk people). Throwing more information on them doesn't help.
I've heard a transperson dispute that, saying that even where people are 100% cool with them, they still feel awful about the mind/body mismatch, to the point of depression, self-harming etc. Gender dysphoria can still be a mental illness even if transsexualism per se isn't.
Though of course, not in any sane jurisdiction should that prevent you from driving.
I am licensed to do most of the things a plumber is licensed to do, too. Usually it's the insurance company that minds me doing everything myself, not the government. In fact I had a plumber berate me once, he said installing a toilet was such an easy task we should be able to handle it ourselves next time.
People are licensed to drive. Taxis are licensed to drive people for profit. Profit motives should always be considered potentially dangerous, there are a lot of things people are willing to do, corners they are willing to cut, if it stands between making good money and being destitute.
Taxi deregulation has been tried, many many times. It has many perverse and unexpected results. For instance, you get more taxis on the road with deregulation, but prices become higher. Customers are unable to discriminate between individual drivers based on price (this is also true in Uber's regime, by design). As a result, it's pretty much random who gets a paying customer. If you only win that lottery once every three days, of course you have to crank up prices when it happens - as much as you dare, until you start to worry that they might change their mind/step out of your cab/punch you.
Well, that wasn't the argument. The argument was that if lawmakers think the consequences are bad enough to warrant regulation, then maybe companies (with a huge profit motive clouding their judgements of said matter) shouldn't just be able to disregard it.
Yeah, which was why it was impressive that Commander Keen had actual scrolling, since that was damn hard to do on the IBM PC those days (although more game-oriented computers from 1983 and even earlier had no trouble with it!)
It was also why texture mapping happened first in PC games - in the beginning there was no hardware support for it anywhere, but the PC had already eschewed specialized graphics chips in favor of raw computing power, so it was easier to do the "impossible" there.
Yeah, I knew I was a little sloppy with the sound cards, just didn't know how :)
Civilization did. I think most Microprose games did. I have no idea why, as far as I know for all their games that you might want to play keyboard-only, it made no difference if you left the mouse active.
More like...
Select graphics:
1. CGA
2. EGA
3. VGA
4. Tandy
Select sound:
1. Soundblaster
2. Roland MT32
3. Ensoniq
4. AdLib
5. PC speaker
Select input:
1. Keyboard and mouse
2. Keyboard only
3. Keyboard and joystick (good luck)
(remember to set IRQ/DMA! We will try to autodetect but it's very likely to crash your computer.)
Indeed, there was a class divide here, but it did not have so much to do with the cost of the systems. The poorer kids lived in apartment housing, which was cheaper, but only apartments had cable TV (private homes would need a satellite dish, which was both expensive and seen as vulgar/ugly). So they got a lot more cultural influence from the US. It wasn't just consoles vs. computers, it also was Transformers vs. Colargol, or Superman vs. Pellefant.
The British royal family. They all live in the same family house together - Indian. All work in the family business - Indian. All have arranged marriages - Indian. They all have sons; daughters no good - Indian. Children live with their parents until they are married - Indian!
Except Prince Charles. He's African.
They are good at memorizing chess games because chess games make profound sense to them. The more you understand the why's of a chess move, the easier it is to remember it. They aren't good at memorizing arbitrary stuff, and being good at memorizing arbitrary stuff won't help you much getting good at chess.
Playing from randomized positions, computers are vastly better than humans, since they don't rely on "moves making sense" the same way. Go programs (which are a lot weaker than the best humans) trounce humans if they play from a position of, say, 20 random moves - even if the human gets to pick color.
That has been tried with computer Go. It turns out that you can make a computer very, very good at predicting what moves top-level players will make, and still fail abysmally at making a strong program.
But here's the interesting thing.
Who owns what? According to the hard core of bitcoin fans, it is based on one principle - that the blockchain is the final word on that issue, at least as it concerns bitcoins themselves. If you have the key, the coins are yours.
If you say "those bitcoins aren't yours, they're stolen!" you're implicitly accepting another standard of property - of who owns what - as higher than the blockchain. Then you concede to the messy passions of society to determine who owns what, rather than the mathematical certainties of the block chain.
Bitcoin fans are a bit two-minded on this. On one hand, they demand that money in anonymous accounts belongs to whoever controls the keys, and it's none of your business how they got there. On the other, some do call for blacklisting coins, e.g. the coins FBI seized when Silk Road went under. The technology actually makes that possible, unlike with cash or even conventional digital payments.
I'm all for convicting Karpeles for fraud (and in fact this article is old news to me - despite lots of anonymous accounts trying to pooh-pooh it, investigations of the block chain made a convincing case for fraud in the weeks after MtGox's fall), but I'm also for recognizing the limits of the blockchain, and I'd like BTC fans to realize it can't be a substitute for government, or even government-issued currency.
This is damage control. What the docs show, is that OTR encryption is safe. You can use OTR encryption with Jabber, but Jabber isn't encrypted by default.
What they presumably hope is that people will use Jabber and think they're safe. And Slashdot editors are being the useful idiots as usual.
Neural net-based Go programs have been tried countless times since neural nets were invented, and losing to GNU Go 20 out of 200 games is very very far from state of the art. I don't know which version of Fuego they used, but if it was rated 4-5k it must have been an old and weak one. It's currently rated 2d on KGS.
Worth noting that KGS is stingy on ratings, and especially hard on bots since matches are self-selected. If there's an exploitable weakness in a bot, people will ruthlessly mine it for rating.
The real revolution is the technique that CrazyStone pioneered: Monte carlo tree search. Even basic MCTS programs can beat GNU Go 90% of the time. CrazyStone was on 7d on KGS for a while, although in september it dropped to 6d (presumably because very strong players found a way to exploit its weaknesses - since programs play consistently, rating shouldn't vary too much otherwise).
Monte Carlo is the way forward. I'm convinced that the basic approach of it (randomized search, weighted with a tree towards positions more likely to be fruitful) is going to stay. Improvements are going to be about which moves to weigh the exploration towards in the playouts as opposed to the tree part.
Just shows how crazy it is to rely on Wikipedia these days.
By the way, anyone else missing comments they recall making in this thread?
The person Gamergate started with is an admitted pathological liar.
The rest can be put down to the journalist class' tribalism, and the need to distance oneself from low-status people close to you in social space.
If it was a movie critical of North Korea, that would send a message. But it seems it's just a none-too-deep Hollywood comedy.
What they might do instead, is sponsor a documentary highlighting the dictators' long history of "air nut" behavior and the horrors of their prison state.
The risk associated with driving isn't just for your personally, but also for the life and health of others.
In PKDs story, Deckard is human, end of story. A main point of the book is that the androids really are bad: Even though they can be vulnerable and afraid (Pris Stratton) make great art (Luba Luft), or even fall in love with each other (Roy and Irmgard Baty), they ultimately all are true psychopaths, without a hint of compassion or concern for other people except for their own benefit.
In the book, the idea of an android having false memories implanted and believing itself to be human is a ruse: The Rosen Association claims it about Rachael, but actually she knows perfectly well that she's an android. At another point, the androids go to ridiculous lengths to fool Phil Resch, a somewhat cynical bounty hunter, that he is an android. But they fail.
Of course what a Hollywood director does in his film is his own business. But I'd like to see a dramatization that was more faithful, and went into the moral and religious aspects of the story.
I can't believe it either, but it would impress me much.
Well, then that takes away the main reason to play Nethack - modest as it was in the first place.
I held out hope for Nethack for a long time, but it hasn't been developed in over ten years. The indie/roguelike scene has moved on, and improved immensely.
There are better options today, on just about any criteria.
Oubliette was the inspiration for Liberal Crime Squad, Tarn Adams' (of Dwarf Fortress fame) satirical game about political extremism.
I never said it was the defining feature. I'd say it is the most important, along with randomization.
Have you noticed there are very few games being made nowadays that are three lives, game over, start from the beginning?
Let's call a game that is real time, has permadeath but not random levels "arcade hard". ("Nintendo hard" is a misnomer, Nintendo had far more non-arcade hard games than the competitors, and were among the first to challenge arcade assumptions of what a game should look like)
I propose that if you hate roguelikes, you probably also hate arcade hard games, and vice versa. I guess you have some people fond of twitch reactions and memorized timings who like hard but don't like randomness - in the speedrun crowd, maybe.
DCSS is what replaced Nethack for me. DCSS is every inch as hard, but fairer than Nethack: spoilers will do you little good, boring/cheesy tactics (e.g. grinding) won't help, and you won't die from misclick-type errors as often. Best of all, it has variation in the endgame, since you need three runes to win but there are fifteen in existence. Once you're able to win the game at all, you can start pushing your luck in the extended endgame by getting more runes before doing Zot.
I'm a bit skeptical of the changes made in recent years, though. A lot of the coherence of Linley's design has been eroded along with the improvements.