I never finished it. Partly that's because I was playing in Linux, where the performance of this 2D game was awful on a system where Valve's 3D Portal ran smoothly at moderate-to-high quality settings. It's kind of sad that the Wine programmers can use Linux APIs to implement Windows APIs so much more efficiently than the Adobe programmers can use Linux APIs to implement their own Flash player.
Anyone want to spoil the ending for me? Was there 2D cake, and was it delicious and moist?
Don't be such a dick. It's attitudes like this that get the Linux community such a bad name. "We are clueless"? "Linux-unfriendly nature of the BBC's site"? How old are you?
So in response to his one possibly personal attack (which I took as a joke) and his one statement that you've misinterpreted as a personal attack, you're making two even-more-personal attacks? Is this really the best way to get the mote out of his eye? I'm not sure whether calling someone clueless in a random Slashdot comment makes the Linux community look bad, but calling someone a childish dick while getting +5, Insightful for criticizing his "attitude" certainly makes the Slashdot moderators look bad.
As for the content of your post, it's even clearer that "whoever57" got it right and you did not. The proper followup to "Sorry that our methodology-less numbers were obviously off by orders of magnitude" is not "Here's some different methodology-less numbers that look to be in the right ballpark". If you can't be bothered to make sure that what you're saying is accurate and/or give your audience the means to double-check you, why not save bandwidth and just remain silent?
I agree with nearly everything you said, but you spoke too soon here:
Changing this would speed up the process of research, but who's volunteering to die for the cause?
Probably lots of people, if you gave them the chance. Offer terminally ill people an untested drug, along with a contract stipulating f(t) paid to their next of kin if they die t years after the treatment. If your researchers' confidence in their drug (as expressed by your willingness to offer large, slowly decaying functions f(t) that you don't expect to have to pay out too often or too soon) exceeds your prospective patients' confidence in their chances without your drug (as expressed by their demand for large, slowly decaying f(t)), then you've got a deal.
Unfortunately, as a practical matter the overhead of such a transaction makes this kind of high-stakes capitalism impossible. Most medical companies wouldn't be able to afford to pay both 5% to actuaries for calculating f(t) and 5000% to lawyers for being within a hundred mile radius.
This is just speaking for myself, but that ending was one of the very few times I've truly felt fear and suspense in an action movie. The standard trope goes something like: "Every one of Our Heroes is in mortal peril, and maybe the show plays it up by killing a Red Shirt, but you know that nobody you care about is going to bite it because they've got to be here for the next episode." Serenity was: "One fantastic character was actually killed, now another one's killed... dear God, this 'everybody might die' scene might actually end with everybody dying!"
If there had been a serious chance at bringing Firefly back to TV then I wouldn't think losing Book and Wash was worth the loss of Book and Wash, but for the movie's sake it was the right artistic choice to make.
This campaign was a serious threat to the status quo -- not earth shattering stuff, but it would have made people look stupid
And we couldn't have that: the only people allowed to make Democrats look stupid are themselves!
Aborted or not, Colbert's run has been a nice eye opener. Access to a state's Republican ballot costs 14 times more than the Democrats' registration fee? Access to that state's Democratic ballot can be thwarted by less than a dozen people? Colbert has probably done more than anyone to make it clear that the venerated days where all us normal people cast votes are just a small part of the whole election process.
I still don't see that it's something which needs to be addressed in the document format specification, though. The idea is to make it clear that the original document interpretation was broken (and in what way it was broken), right? But if you put a special "I'm broken" tag into the format, that's just one more very irregular feature you have to build into every reader implementation. Is every office suite supposed to know that it should highlight broken spreadsheet cells in flashing red or something? It seems like it would be easier for the document converter to save two copies of each output document, the first with the formulae etc. intact and ready to be reinterpreted correctly, the second with the formulae replaced by raw output that matches what the broken office suite would have rendered. Properly deciding how to handle a broken document like that is always going to require someone to be able to look at both versions, isn't it? I'd think that figuring out a clever way to keep both versions in the same file (even if you use an existing mechanism for change tracking) would just obfuscate that requirement, not make it easier to meet.
the information that the math is broken in the source in a particular way is not representable in ODF.
Isn't this true with *every* format, both the already existing ones and all humanly conceivable ones? If the application is broken, it doesn't matter that it can't write an "I'm broken" tag to its output file, because it *won't* write such a tag. Only in a hopelessly irreparable program would programmers see a bug and think "let's make this part of the file format standard" instead of "lets fix this".
An application or program might have requested and been given access through the firewall, or
So, this firewall, it just blocks remote access to applications who don't open TCP or UDP ports for listening? Awesome! I've been running a firewall for years and I didn't even know it!
I do recall that something like 65% of an audio CD is error correction, and I always found it odd that this effect is true.
I think it's closer to 35%, but yeah. With no error correction every little scratch would be just as bad as a scratch in vinyl; with ECC (and interleaving) a CD can lose whole kilobits of physical bits (or kilobytes, if the drive is smart enough to recognize bad reads on a physical level and treat them as erasures) without losing any of the underlying data.
Incidentally, that interleaving is why CDs aren't exactly "streaming media", and why I'm suspicious of claims of jitter problems. A CD player doesn't read two bytes, play them, read two more, etc. - it has to read thousands of bytes ahead to handle the interleaving and it's supposed to do some funky Galois field arithmetic on the result to make use of the error correction coding. By the time a hypothetically "jittered" bit actually influenced what's being played, it should have been processed for at least a good fraction of a second, and any reasonable CD player design would time the playback from an internal clock that drives the disc's rotation, not the other way around.
But bear in mind, this programming language was invented by people who are so insecure that they're willing to shred the Fourth Amendment to try and assuage their fear of terrorists. I think C=> might be more accurate.
Don't forget we're talking about streaming media. There's no clock. Maybe the difference is down to the fact that the read head having to work harder means that the *timing* of a bit is altered, not the value of the bit itelf; effectively getting jitter reading from the CD.
I've heard that jitter was a real problem with older CD players, but even if that's true it shouldn't need to be a problem with anything made this century. A few kilobytes of flash memory would be enough to buffer away any timing problems.
It's good to see that you're at least admitting that the values of bits are the same on every read. I take it you've now read about what error correction codecs are?
When my CD-ROM reads audio data from two CDs produced from the same master, it reads the exact same audio data each time (thank you, Reed and Solomon).
If your CD player doesn't do the same, it's broken and you should get a new one.
Laws limiting what people can do with their own lives and property are not in the same class as laws limiting what people can do with others' lives and property against the others' will. You may reasonably think both kinds of laws are necessary, but if you want to convince others of that view, then pretending a distinction doesn't exist is disingenuous.
Not only are many EULA's supposedly unenforcable (I am neither a lawyer, nor caring enough to research properly, so this is just repeating slashdot hearsay),
They should be unenforceable. An unsigned "contract" that you supposedly had to agree to in order to legally use a product you already purchased before even getting to read the terms? In what universe does that make sense? However, court cases have gone both ways, and when the user rather than the software company has to bring the lawsuit (as would be the case with remotely disabled software) I wouldn't bet on the user. Do you really think these Orange Box customers are going to be able to legally force the products they paid for to be reenabled?
they would have to PHYSICALLY COME TO MY HOUSE AND REMOVE THE PROGRAM.
That's an awful lot of Caps Lock for what is really only a statement of faith on your part, faith which has in the past been contradicted by reality. The Interbase back door, for example, wasn't discovered until it had been open sourced for six months, prior to which the closed source Interbase database server had been remotely accessible for six years.
copyright is a silly idea and a peculiar recent Western European innovation that most of the world rightly rejects
There's lots of people even in the West who reject respecting copyrights themselves, because the result of "someone else will pay for it" gets them lots of free stuff, and free stuff is awesome. There are fewer people anywhere who reject the idea of requiring others to respect copyrights, because the result of "nobody will pay for it" might cause the supply of free new stuff to dry up.
On the other hand, I've got to say I'm on the anti-copyright side in this particular case; the supply of free century-old stuff is in much more danger from abandonment by copyright-holding publishers than from a shortage of remuneration for artists' great grandchildren.
But seriously, for those who haven't played Portal yet, consider The Ending Song to be one big spoiler; it won't be nearly as amusing if you haven't played through the game, and conversely the game will probably seem kind of anticlimactic if you play it for the first time after already having heard the ending in beautiful lyric form.
On the Atari, way back when. Even on the Atari 2600 it wasn't the best game available by a long shot.
Here's what I've played that has been both newer and better:
Deus Ex (even 2) Baldurs Gate Civilization Half Life Star Control (even 3) Starcraft Quake multiplayer
You know, I'll stop here, because the complete list would include nearly every video game I've ever played, whereas the single sentence "Calling Pong the height of gaming is insane" would convey my point just as well. I'd also say nasty things about Nolan Bushnell right now, but it might be more fair to assume he was misquoted, because even someone as biased as the inventor of Pong couldn't possibly say something that stupid.
"Dude, you can't take something off the Internet.. that's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool." - Joe, NewsRadio
That's right, folks: you're being protected from the terrorists by people whose understanding of the modern world has yet to surpass that of 1990s sitcom writers.
You either trust your government or you dont. If you dont trust the current admin, elect a new one.
You say "if" as if it was an open question, so tell us: did you trust the current administration when Bush said "any time you hear the United States government talking about wiretap, it requires -- a wiretap requires a court order"? If so, have you learned your lesson yet? If not, do you think they've become more trustworthy since?
Of course, the question itself is built on false dilemmas.
What if you trust your government with some power but not with this level of unchecked power?
What if you trust some parts of your government more than others?
If all we have to do when the government does something wrong is "elect a new one" then what was the point of that Constitution and Bill of Rights anyway?
How do we elect a new government when we often only get to vote between people who will violate the Constitution proudly and people who will whimper about it but enable the violations anyway?
Even if we find a government willing to promise not to abuse it's power, what do we do if those promises are violated? Enforce the rule of law, or wait another 2-4 years and try again?
Do you believe in any limitations on investigative power? Do you understand why many of many of the rest of us do want some limitations, and why we are proud that many such limitations are spelled out in the founding documents of this country?
You point out World War II as an example of espionage being used to reduce a military threat; you also point out that since then it has become easier for spies to gather information, and I would add that the United States now faces vastly reduced military threats. Given those two facts, do you think the tradeoffs between the risk of internal corruption and the risk of external threats dictate increased or decreased restrictions on wiretapping?
When Republicans try to frame this debate as "They won't let us spy on Al Qaeda", are they successfully fooling you?
No, they can't get something to the president alone. You need 60 people to call for cloture in the senate before a vote can be taken.
True (although I'd like to see the Republicans forced to do some real filibustering, not just threatening to filibuster and laughing when the Democrats back down). But in this case that doesn't apply - the telecom companies have already broken the law; the Democrats (at least the ones who care about civil liberties) don't need to pass any new ones. All they need to do is not cooperate with the criminals who are trying to get off the hook.
"Why honey, of course you can play *these* games; they're educational!"
"Well... I don't know what this 'Quake' is, but I guess maybe it'll give you more experience with computers or something... just stop bugging me about it."
"You want a video game console? Fine, whatever, just don't burn the house down. Mommy needs a nap."
they're only running for the Senate, our house of review. So they won't be proposing any bills
Your Senate never writes any new laws? That's fantastic! If only our Senate worked that way. Also our House of Representatives.
We'd still let them vote to repeal old laws, though. And if they're good, then once the US Code fits into a single bound volume again we might let them vote to replace old laws with new ones.
If I took a stack of bill and burned them, or buried them never to be seen again, that would be wasting them.
That would be "wasting money" literally, but it wouldn't be wasting wealth, except insofar as paper money could be used as a scratchy substitute for toilet paper. Imagine if you destroyed 90% of the dollars in the world. Would it be a travesty? Of course not - the remaining 10% of dollars would just be worth 10 times as much.
If they spent $100mill on a telescope array, where did the money go?
It paid people who were capable of building telescope arrays to spend their time and resources building telescope arrays instead of something else productive. If the telescope array is less valuable then what they would have done instead (which I don't think is the case in this instance, but which can happen in general) then yes, you've wasted wealth.
So they tell you that the reason for drafting a dozen shlubs off the street is simply to decide questions of fact that are somehow too confusing for that guy in the robe with the gavel and the decades of legal experience? They could also tell you in the standard briefing that attempts at Jury Nullification will be punished by magic leprechauns, but it wouldn't make it so.
Slashdot Mirror
I never finished it. Partly that's because I was playing in Linux, where the performance of this 2D game was awful on a system where Valve's 3D Portal ran smoothly at moderate-to-high quality settings. It's kind of sad that the Wine programmers can use Linux APIs to implement Windows APIs so much more efficiently than the Adobe programmers can use Linux APIs to implement their own Flash player.
Anyone want to spoil the ending for me? Was there 2D cake, and was it delicious and moist?
Don't be such a dick. It's attitudes like this that get the Linux community such a bad name. "We are clueless"? "Linux-unfriendly nature of the BBC's site"? How old are you?
So in response to his one possibly personal attack (which I took as a joke) and his one statement that you've misinterpreted as a personal attack, you're making two even-more-personal attacks? Is this really the best way to get the mote out of his eye? I'm not sure whether calling someone clueless in a random Slashdot comment makes the Linux community look bad, but calling someone a childish dick while getting +5, Insightful for criticizing his "attitude" certainly makes the Slashdot moderators look bad.
As for the content of your post, it's even clearer that "whoever57" got it right and you did not. The proper followup to "Sorry that our methodology-less numbers were obviously off by orders of magnitude" is not "Here's some different methodology-less numbers that look to be in the right ballpark". If you can't be bothered to make sure that what you're saying is accurate and/or give your audience the means to double-check you, why not save bandwidth and just remain silent?
I agree with nearly everything you said, but you spoke too soon here:
Changing this would speed up the process of research, but who's volunteering to die for the cause?
Probably lots of people, if you gave them the chance. Offer terminally ill people an untested drug, along with a contract stipulating f(t) paid to their next of kin if they die t years after the treatment. If your researchers' confidence in their drug (as expressed by your willingness to offer large, slowly decaying functions f(t) that you don't expect to have to pay out too often or too soon) exceeds your prospective patients' confidence in their chances without your drug (as expressed by their demand for large, slowly decaying f(t)), then you've got a deal.
Unfortunately, as a practical matter the overhead of such a transaction makes this kind of high-stakes capitalism impossible. Most medical companies wouldn't be able to afford to pay both 5% to actuaries for calculating f(t) and 5000% to lawyers for being within a hundred mile radius.
This is just speaking for myself, but that ending was one of the very few times I've truly felt fear and suspense in an action movie. The standard trope goes something like: "Every one of Our Heroes is in mortal peril, and maybe the show plays it up by killing a Red Shirt, but you know that nobody you care about is going to bite it because they've got to be here for the next episode." Serenity was: "One fantastic character was actually killed, now another one's killed... dear God, this 'everybody might die' scene might actually end with everybody dying!"
If there had been a serious chance at bringing Firefly back to TV then I wouldn't think losing Book and Wash was worth the loss of Book and Wash, but for the movie's sake it was the right artistic choice to make.
This campaign was a serious threat to the status quo -- not earth shattering stuff, but it would have made people look stupid
And we couldn't have that: the only people allowed to make Democrats look stupid are themselves!
Aborted or not, Colbert's run has been a nice eye opener. Access to a state's Republican ballot costs 14 times more than the Democrats' registration fee? Access to that state's Democratic ballot can be thwarted by less than a dozen people? Colbert has probably done more than anyone to make it clear that the venerated days where all us normal people cast votes are just a small part of the whole election process.
I still don't see that it's something which needs to be addressed in the document format specification, though. The idea is to make it clear that the original document interpretation was broken (and in what way it was broken), right? But if you put a special "I'm broken" tag into the format, that's just one more very irregular feature you have to build into every reader implementation. Is every office suite supposed to know that it should highlight broken spreadsheet cells in flashing red or something? It seems like it would be easier for the document converter to save two copies of each output document, the first with the formulae etc. intact and ready to be reinterpreted correctly, the second with the formulae replaced by raw output that matches what the broken office suite would have rendered. Properly deciding how to handle a broken document like that is always going to require someone to be able to look at both versions, isn't it? I'd think that figuring out a clever way to keep both versions in the same file (even if you use an existing mechanism for change tracking) would just obfuscate that requirement, not make it easier to meet.
the information that the math is broken in the source in a particular way is not representable in ODF.
Isn't this true with *every* format, both the already existing ones and all humanly conceivable ones? If the application is broken, it doesn't matter that it can't write an "I'm broken" tag to its output file, because it *won't* write such a tag. Only in a hopelessly irreparable program would programmers see a bug and think "let's make this part of the file format standard" instead of "lets fix this".
An application or program might have requested and been given access through the firewall, or
So, this firewall, it just blocks remote access to applications who don't open TCP or UDP ports for listening? Awesome! I've been running a firewall for years and I didn't even know it!
I do recall that something like 65% of an audio CD is error correction, and I always found it odd that this effect is true.
I think it's closer to 35%, but yeah. With no error correction every little scratch would be just as bad as a scratch in vinyl; with ECC (and interleaving) a CD can lose whole kilobits of physical bits (or kilobytes, if the drive is smart enough to recognize bad reads on a physical level and treat them as erasures) without losing any of the underlying data.
Incidentally, that interleaving is why CDs aren't exactly "streaming media", and why I'm suspicious of claims of jitter problems. A CD player doesn't read two bytes, play them, read two more, etc. - it has to read thousands of bytes ahead to handle the interleaving and it's supposed to do some funky Galois field arithmetic on the result to make use of the error correction coding. By the time a hypothetically "jittered" bit actually influenced what's being played, it should have been processed for at least a good fraction of a second, and any reasonable CD player design would time the playback from an internal clock that drives the disc's rotation, not the other way around.
But bear in mind, this programming language was invented by people who are so insecure that they're willing to shred the Fourth Amendment to try and assuage their fear of terrorists. I think C=> might be more accurate.
Don't forget we're talking about streaming media. There's no clock. Maybe the difference is down to the fact that the read head having to work harder means that the *timing* of a bit is altered, not the value of the bit itelf; effectively getting jitter reading from the CD.
I've heard that jitter was a real problem with older CD players, but even if that's true it shouldn't need to be a problem with anything made this century. A few kilobytes of flash memory would be enough to buffer away any timing problems.
It's good to see that you're at least admitting that the values of bits are the same on every read. I take it you've now read about what error correction codecs are?
When my CD-ROM reads audio data from two CDs produced from the same master, it reads the exact same audio data each time (thank you, Reed and Solomon).
If your CD player doesn't do the same, it's broken and you should get a new one.
Laws limiting what people can do with their own lives and property are not in the same class as laws limiting what people can do with others' lives and property against the others' will. You may reasonably think both kinds of laws are necessary, but if you want to convince others of that view, then pretending a distinction doesn't exist is disingenuous.
Not only are many EULA's supposedly unenforcable (I am neither a lawyer, nor caring enough to research properly, so this is just repeating slashdot hearsay),
They should be unenforceable. An unsigned "contract" that you supposedly had to agree to in order to legally use a product you already purchased before even getting to read the terms? In what universe does that make sense? However, court cases have gone both ways, and when the user rather than the software company has to bring the lawsuit (as would be the case with remotely disabled software) I wouldn't bet on the user. Do you really think these Orange Box customers are going to be able to legally force the products they paid for to be reenabled?
they would have to PHYSICALLY COME TO MY HOUSE AND REMOVE THE PROGRAM.
That's an awful lot of Caps Lock for what is really only a statement of faith on your part, faith which has in the past been contradicted by reality. The Interbase back door, for example, wasn't discovered until it had been open sourced for six months, prior to which the closed source Interbase database server had been remotely accessible for six years.
copyright is a silly idea and a peculiar recent Western European innovation that most of the world rightly rejects
There's lots of people even in the West who reject respecting copyrights themselves, because the result of "someone else will pay for it" gets them lots of free stuff, and free stuff is awesome. There are fewer people anywhere who reject the idea of requiring others to respect copyrights, because the result of "nobody will pay for it" might cause the supply of free new stuff to dry up.
On the other hand, I've got to say I'm on the anti-copyright side in this particular case; the supply of free century-old stuff is in much more danger from abandonment by copyright-holding publishers than from a shortage of remuneration for artists' great grandchildren.
It's hard to overstate my satisfaction!
But seriously, for those who haven't played Portal yet, consider The Ending Song to be one big spoiler; it won't be nearly as amusing if you haven't played through the game, and conversely the game will probably seem kind of anticlimactic if you play it for the first time after already having heard the ending in beautiful lyric form.
On the Atari, way back when. Even on the Atari 2600 it wasn't the best game available by a long shot.
Here's what I've played that has been both newer and better:
Deus Ex (even 2)
Baldurs Gate
Civilization
Half Life
Star Control (even 3)
Starcraft
Quake multiplayer
You know, I'll stop here, because the complete list would include nearly every video game I've ever played, whereas the single sentence "Calling Pong the height of gaming is insane" would convey my point just as well. I'd also say nasty things about Nolan Bushnell right now, but it might be more fair to assume he was misquoted, because even someone as biased as the inventor of Pong couldn't possibly say something that stupid.
"Dude, you can't take something off the Internet.. that's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool." - Joe, NewsRadio
That's right, folks: you're being protected from the terrorists by people whose understanding of the modern world has yet to surpass that of 1990s sitcom writers.
You either trust your government or you dont. If you dont trust the current admin, elect a new one.
You say "if" as if it was an open question, so tell us: did you trust the current administration when Bush said "any time you hear the United States government talking about wiretap, it requires -- a wiretap requires a court order"? If so, have you learned your lesson yet? If not, do you think they've become more trustworthy since?
Of course, the question itself is built on false dilemmas.
What if you trust your government with some power but not with this level of unchecked power?
What if you trust some parts of your government more than others?
If all we have to do when the government does something wrong is "elect a new one" then what was the point of that Constitution and Bill of Rights anyway?
How do we elect a new government when we often only get to vote between people who will violate the Constitution proudly and people who will whimper about it but enable the violations anyway?
Even if we find a government willing to promise not to abuse it's power, what do we do if those promises are violated? Enforce the rule of law, or wait another 2-4 years and try again?
Do you believe in any limitations on investigative power? Do you understand why many of many of the rest of us do want some limitations, and why we are proud that many such limitations are spelled out in the founding documents of this country?
You point out World War II as an example of espionage being used to reduce a military threat; you also point out that since then it has become easier for spies to gather information, and I would add that the United States now faces vastly reduced military threats. Given those two facts, do you think the tradeoffs between the risk of internal corruption and the risk of external threats dictate increased or decreased restrictions on wiretapping?
When Republicans try to frame this debate as "They won't let us spy on Al Qaeda", are they successfully fooling you?
No, they can't get something to the president alone. You need 60 people to call for cloture in the senate before a vote can be taken.
True (although I'd like to see the Republicans forced to do some real filibustering, not just threatening to filibuster and laughing when the Democrats back down). But in this case that doesn't apply - the telecom companies have already broken the law; the Democrats (at least the ones who care about civil liberties) don't need to pass any new ones. All they need to do is not cooperate with the criminals who are trying to get off the hook.
"Why honey, of course you can play *these* games; they're educational!"
"Well... I don't know what this 'Quake' is, but I guess maybe it'll give you more experience with computers or something... just stop bugging me about it."
"You want a video game console? Fine, whatever, just don't burn the house down. Mommy needs a nap."
2. This is followed by the singing of the "Microsoft Sucks" song.
You know, I'm all in favor of more organizations for anti-Microsoft geeks, but I've got to warn you that asking us to sing can only end in tragedy.
they're only running for the Senate, our house of review. So they won't be proposing any bills
Your Senate never writes any new laws? That's fantastic! If only our Senate worked that way. Also our House of Representatives.
We'd still let them vote to repeal old laws, though. And if they're good, then once the US Code fits into a single bound volume again we might let them vote to replace old laws with new ones.
If I took a stack of bill and burned them, or buried them never to be seen again, that would be wasting them.
That would be "wasting money" literally, but it wouldn't be wasting wealth, except insofar as paper money could be used as a scratchy substitute for toilet paper. Imagine if you destroyed 90% of the dollars in the world. Would it be a travesty? Of course not - the remaining 10% of dollars would just be worth 10 times as much.
If they spent $100mill on a telescope array, where did the money go?
It paid people who were capable of building telescope arrays to spend their time and resources building telescope arrays instead of something else productive. If the telescope array is less valuable then what they would have done instead (which I don't think is the case in this instance, but which can happen in general) then yes, you've wasted wealth.
So they tell you that the reason for drafting a dozen shlubs off the street is simply to decide questions of fact that are somehow too confusing for that guy in the robe with the gavel and the decades of legal experience? They could also tell you in the standard briefing that attempts at Jury Nullification will be punished by magic leprechauns, but it wouldn't make it so.