"he bottom line is, the game mechanics define the rules of the game, and if an action is allowed it is a legitimate part of the game."
WRONG. That is the battle cry of all griefers, and it makes no sense. Do you kill someone in real life and say "Well, the rules of the universe allow me to kill you, it must be intended." Why is it that when a game designer gives you freedom to do as you like, you suddenly think it's reasonable to exploit these freedoms in any way you like?
When organizations started attacking GTA:Vice City because you can "run over and kill prostitutes" I thought that was dumb. You can run over and kill prostitutes in real life. Ban real life! Vice city is an open ended game and you can do bad things if you want, but that doesn't mean you're encouraged to.
The same with PVP in MMORPG's. Just because the game designers give you more freedom, doesn't mean it's intended for you to kill-on-site everybody you can regardless of reason.
Open ended game != excuse to do whatever the hell you want.
Please back up your statement that "If mecha were such a great idea, we'd have used them in WWII. We certainly had the technology to build them back then." Any links on bipedal robots?
I think you are mistaken that we've had the technology for automated bipedal motion / balance since world war 2. I think it is a very challenging robotics problem. I know for a fact that active research is being done in this area. Projects like Honda Asimo and Sony QRIO and there are several other lower profile projects.
I agree with you that wheeled locomotion is clearly superior to legged locomotion with current technology. But I don't see how you can write off legged locomotion in the future. You gain a great deal of flexibility by walking on two legs.
It took a lot of self control not to mod you as troll, but I'll stick to my policy of replying instead of moderating down.
Do you really think it's unreasonable for an avid gamer to be running windows? Really?
Should he be playing all of the latest and greatest games on Linux?
Why attack him because of his very reasonable choice of operating system. Comments like this make Slashdot look like an extremist faction instead of a place for reasonable discussion.
Aaron Hertzmann's work is great, yeah. Aaron's work can be used as an example based system. My work, on the other hand, is model based. I tried really hard to model the painterly process. Not as elegant a solution as Aaron's, but it works better for lots of styles. I don't have any source code to play with. Maybe I will in the next year.
What exactly do you mean by "Markov chain an image with that data"? Treating an image as a Markov Random Field means that you assume each pixel is conditioned only on some neighborhood. It's simply an assumption of locality. With that assumption you can do all kinds of things, so it's not clear what approach you're suggesting.
Also it will be a while before the mall booth has filters accurately reproducing the great artists. To solve the painterly rendering problem you first need to solve the vision problem. So good luck with that. A real painterly renderer (for instance, an artist) paints according to a higher level understanding of an image. Faces and hands are rendered differently than background. Edges are highlighted. Etc, etc... The more iconic your art style, the more image understanding you need to pull it off. The more that an art style can be defined as a dependency on local pixels, the easier it is for a computer to do.
I'm an active COH player and an ex-everquest player. I must first give you kudos for making a really polished, fun game. It's really a great take on the MMORPG.
The game has a bus-load of fun ideas. The badge system is great. The costume system and character creation are amazing. Technically, the game is top notch- great mapmaking, great animation, etc...
One of the best ideas is simplicity. Starting players don't have to worry about complicated inventory systems. They just go out there and start kicking butt. Kicking butt is not to difficult, because the player is quite a bit stronger versus the environment compared to previous MMORPGs.
But that simplicity becomes a drag in the later game. I've got 3 characters approaching the high end (mid 30s) and I'm starting to dislike the slow experience grind, with nothing to look forward to but a new ability every 3 levels.
Missions are fun, but they get a bit formulaic. With one huge exception, they offer uninteresting rewards and have cookie cutter goals. (The exception being the wonderful respec mission)
I'm sure it was a conscious design decision to have no inventory system, no armor, no weapons. And I think that's a great idea, at first. But by the time you're level 30 and you've played the game for a couple of months, you really start to want MORE. The enhancement system doesn't cut it. That's just a trip to the store every 5 levels. I'd like to get a cool piece of (origin specific) armor when I complete a task force.
Even baby steps in this direction would great. A way to distinguish myself (other than aesthetically) from other players would be nice. This could also give origins a chance to actually matter.
So the question in all of this is- why the aversion to traditional RPG elements, even at high levels? Is this going to change?
I'm an avid City of Heroes player. I thought about this issue myself, but then realized they might have intentionally left out any voice acting. Look how people talk- with comic book style voice bubbles. They're trying to give it a comic book feel, so having no voices is makes sense.
I had an encounter with something similar to number 1 (bait and switch). I was looking for a camera to give as a wedding gift, and I found on best buy's web site that their price was within 10 dollars of the online prices from pricegrabber, so I figured I'd go to best buy and pick one up since I was in a hurry.
When I got to the store the camera was 30 dollars more expensive. I asked the salesman if there were any other offers not shown with the current price, and he said no. I went to one of their computers and pulled up their product catalog (through what looked like their web page) and it also listed the price as 30 dollars more.
So I went back home and looked it up online and found it at the cheaper price. I bought it and selected "pick up at store", then went back, but then they tried to give me what was obviously a returned and mangled box, then they tried to sell me all sorts of other stuff with it, and then they told me they couldn't give me a gift receipt since it was purchased online.
Anyway, it worked out fine, but it seems borderline illegal to have different prices online and in store. I'm sure I missed some fine print somewhere.
Dictionary attacks become exponentially harder as your user name becomes longer, assuming that is constructed of random characters.
The likelihood of a dictionary attack hitting a n character random string of characters and numbers is miniscule for n larger than 15 or so, even if the dictionary attacker is trying 1 million combinations a second, because there are (at least) 36^n user names in that space.
my rough calculations say that it would take 7 billion years to dictionary attack the space of 15 character random numbers of and letters, even if you could do so at a rate of one million a second.
So if your 15 character random user name gets spammed immediately after creation without ever being used, it's an inside job.
But I wouldn't be surprised if it was buried in the Hotmail terms of service that they can sell your addresses.
yes, you're right of course, which is why all of this research is so unimpressive and it's a bit frustrating that it's getting so much press.
I think it should be theoretically possible to do, though. You'd need a pretty fancy material that could produce an arbitrary wavefront at arbitrary viewing angles (something holographic and dynamic).
"I had to turn the Webmail system off until I can add a turing test for each sent message and implement a limit for the number of recipients - an unrealistic step for IM"
Limiting number of recipients is not unreasonable- 1. And instead of a turing test each message, you have a system where the message recipient can cry foul if the system was spam. With an authenticated system, this keeps the spammer from sending any more messages after 10 people have cried foul. Don't let people create more than one account per hour from a single IP address. I don't think this is unreasonable.
Exactly. It's authenticated. Combined with a turing test every time you register an account and the ability for users to "vote" other users off the network temporarily, it limits spam.
Which is why all of those spam doomsday forecasters seem so ridiculous.
You should not make an analogy between ISPs and traditional utilities like the electric company. Electricity is one way. Internet is two way. No matter what you do with your electricity, it won't destroy the rest of the grid. (barring extreme things for which you WILL receive a visit from the electric company). On the other hand, it's easy for one internet costumer to ruin the experience for many others (by sending thousands of spam a day, for instance).
A better analogy might be a phone company. They sure as heck don't give you freedom to use your phone however you want.
But anyway, I agree that ISPs should be unhindered connections to the internet, but only in one direction- to the client.
I cannot believe they are doing this. It is undoubtedly a deep AI problem to properly grade an essay. You have to be able to understand if statements connect logically to form an argument, you have to understand analogy, you have to understand sarcasm, etc... this is so far beyond our current capability.
As implemented, I'm sure there are easy ways to scam this system by writing gibberish. Who sold them this idea? I want to know the person responsible for this abuse of computing.
yes yes yes yes! Pay attention in your linear algebra classes. I know your boring instructor might make Eigen vectors sound like the most tedious thing in the universe, but it is a staple of computer science if you want to do lots of interesting things with data.
You're being overly hard on the grandparent. He makes some good points. And naive image vectorization IS a problem. Eigenfaces only works with extremely careful registration of images, because the images are vectorized naively. Basically this means throwing out any notion of spatial coherence. (You could vectorize the image in random order, scanline order, whatever.. as long as you did it consistantly across the data set you'd get the same bases out. Shouldn't a system understand that an image shifted one pixel to the right is not arbitrarily far from its original version?).
See http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~jebara/papers/iccv03.p df for a good argument about this
And responding to another point of yours, classification algorithms that look only at intensity are at best brittle. In the real world things have to be better. You have to be able to recognize an object under different lighting, etc. The fact that you can design and calibrate a system well enough to work on pixel intensity alone in a few specific cases doesn't convince me that it's robust.
That's not to say that you can't do some vision tasks with relatively simple metrics like intensity histograms or naively vectorized images, but really data representation is a major bottleneck for a lot of vision work. But you look like you're qualified to know that so I don't know why you're jumping down the grandparent's throat.
Q "What do you run for anti-virus?" A "Nothing. Linux isn't as succeptible to viruses"
Keep telling yourself that. It will be all the more spectacular when a linux destroying worm makes the rounds. Especially when tech-support know-it-alls tell everyone that linux has some kind of magical virus immunity.
Wow, that's a very thorough complaint. What worries me, though, is all of the focus on conspiracy theories. A lot of the material in the complaint is slam-dunk, send SCO executives to jail material. But a lot of it is tin-foil-hat conjecture. And I hope it doesn't get dismissed because of such.
I disagree, I think it's some of the coolest "music" I've ever heard. It sets a wonderful, creepy, scary atmosphere that I just love. I don't want to hear guitars and drums, I want to hear scary sounds and pulsing heartbeats... I don't want it to be anything resembling mainstream music. I hated the Quake2 soundtrack, for instance.
Slashdot Mirror
"he bottom line is, the game mechanics define the rules of the game, and if an action is allowed it is a legitimate part of the game."
WRONG. That is the battle cry of all griefers, and it makes no sense. Do you kill someone in real life and say "Well, the rules of the universe allow me to kill you, it must be intended." Why is it that when a game designer gives you freedom to do as you like, you suddenly think it's reasonable to exploit these freedoms in any way you like?
When organizations started attacking GTA:Vice City because you can "run over and kill prostitutes" I thought that was dumb. You can run over and kill prostitutes in real life. Ban real life! Vice city is an open ended game and you can do bad things if you want, but that doesn't mean you're encouraged to.
The same with PVP in MMORPG's. Just because the game designers give you more freedom, doesn't mean it's intended for you to kill-on-site everybody you can regardless of reason.
Open ended game != excuse to do whatever the hell you want.
Please back up your statement that "If mecha were such a great idea, we'd have used them in WWII. We certainly had the technology to build them back then." Any links on bipedal robots?
I think you are mistaken that we've had the technology for automated bipedal motion / balance since world war 2. I think it is a very challenging robotics problem. I know for a fact that active research is being done in this area. Projects like Honda Asimo and Sony QRIO and there are several other lower profile projects.
I agree with you that wheeled locomotion is clearly superior to legged locomotion with current technology. But I don't see how you can write off legged locomotion in the future. You gain a great deal of flexibility by walking on two legs.
It took a lot of self control not to mod you as troll, but I'll stick to my policy of replying instead of moderating down.
Do you really think it's unreasonable for an avid gamer to be running windows? Really?
Should he be playing all of the latest and greatest games on Linux?
Why attack him because of his very reasonable choice of operating system. Comments like this make Slashdot look like an extremist faction instead of a place for reasonable discussion.
Aaron Hertzmann's work is great, yeah. Aaron's work can be used as an example based system. My work, on the other hand, is model based. I tried really hard to model the painterly process. Not as elegant a solution as Aaron's, but it works better for lots of styles. I don't have any source code to play with. Maybe I will in the next year.
g /
http://www.cc.gatech.edu/cpl/projects/artstylin
I am a painterly rendering researcher,
What exactly do you mean by "Markov chain an image with that data"? Treating an image as a Markov Random Field means that you assume each pixel is conditioned only on some neighborhood. It's simply an assumption of locality. With that assumption you can do all kinds of things, so it's not clear what approach you're suggesting.
Also it will be a while before the mall booth has filters accurately reproducing the great artists. To solve the painterly rendering problem you first need to solve the vision problem. So good luck with that. A real painterly renderer (for instance, an artist) paints according to a higher level understanding of an image. Faces and hands are rendered differently than background. Edges are highlighted. Etc, etc... The more iconic your art style, the more image understanding you need to pull it off. The more that an art style can be defined as a dependency on local pixels, the easier it is for a computer to do.
I'm an active COH player and an ex-everquest player. I must first give you kudos for making a really polished, fun game. It's really a great take on the MMORPG.
The game has a bus-load of fun ideas. The badge system is great. The costume system and character creation are amazing. Technically, the game is top notch- great mapmaking, great animation, etc...
One of the best ideas is simplicity. Starting players don't have to worry about complicated inventory systems. They just go out there and start kicking butt. Kicking butt is not to difficult, because the player is quite a bit stronger versus the environment compared to previous MMORPGs.
But that simplicity becomes a drag in the later game. I've got 3 characters approaching the high end (mid 30s) and I'm starting to dislike the slow experience grind, with nothing to look forward to but a new ability every 3 levels.
Missions are fun, but they get a bit formulaic. With one huge exception, they offer uninteresting rewards and have cookie cutter goals. (The exception being the wonderful respec mission)
I'm sure it was a conscious design decision to have no inventory system, no armor, no weapons. And I think that's a great idea, at first. But by the time you're level 30 and you've played the game for a couple of months, you really start to want MORE. The enhancement system doesn't cut it. That's just a trip to the store every 5 levels. I'd like to get a cool piece of (origin specific) armor when I complete a task force.
Even baby steps in this direction would great. A way to distinguish myself (other than aesthetically) from other players would be nice. This could also give origins a chance to actually matter.
So the question in all of this is- why the aversion to traditional RPG elements, even at high levels? Is this going to change?
I'm an avid City of Heroes player. I thought about this issue myself, but then realized they might have intentionally left out any voice acting. Look how people talk- with comic book style voice bubbles. They're trying to give it a comic book feel, so having no voices is makes sense.
A reasonable demand, so that we don't have to name every large boulder in Saturn's ring system.
I had an encounter with something similar to number 1 (bait and switch). I was looking for a camera to give as a wedding gift, and I found on best buy's web site that their price was within 10 dollars of the online prices from pricegrabber, so I figured I'd go to best buy and pick one up since I was in a hurry.
When I got to the store the camera was 30 dollars more expensive. I asked the salesman if there were any other offers not shown with the current price, and he said no. I went to one of their computers and pulled up their product catalog (through what looked like their web page) and it also listed the price as 30 dollars more.
So I went back home and looked it up online and found it at the cheaper price. I bought it and selected "pick up at store", then went back, but then they tried to give me what was obviously a returned and mangled box, then they tried to sell me all sorts of other stuff with it, and then they told me they couldn't give me a gift receipt since it was purchased online.
Anyway, it worked out fine, but it seems borderline illegal to have different prices online and in store. I'm sure I missed some fine print somewhere.
Dictionary attacks become exponentially harder as your user name becomes longer, assuming that is constructed of random characters.
The likelihood of a dictionary attack hitting a n character random string of characters and numbers is miniscule for n larger than 15 or so, even if the dictionary attacker is trying 1 million combinations a second, because there are (at least) 36^n user names in that space.
my rough calculations say that it would take 7 billion years to dictionary attack the space of 15 character random numbers of and letters, even if you could do so at a rate of one million a second.
So if your 15 character random user name gets spammed immediately after creation without ever being used, it's an inside job.
But I wouldn't be surprised if it was buried in the Hotmail terms of service that they can sell your addresses.
20 million is about 1/10th the cost of a 747 according to boeing :
http://www.boeing.com/commercial/prices/
just because it doesn't reach orbit doesn't mean there's no value to it.
t ml
There's a whole lot of space science that happens in the altitude range that spaceship one will reach.
http://www.wff.nasa.gov/pages/soundingrockets.h
yes, you're right of course, which is why all of this research is so unimpressive and it's a bit frustrating that it's getting so much press.
I think it should be theoretically possible to do, though. You'd need a pretty fancy material that could produce an arbitrary wavefront at arbitrary viewing angles (something holographic and dynamic).
"I had to turn the Webmail system off until I can add a turing test for each sent message and implement a limit for the number of recipients - an unrealistic step for IM"
Limiting number of recipients is not unreasonable- 1. And instead of a turing test each message, you have a system where the message recipient can cry foul if the system was spam. With an authenticated system, this keeps the spammer from sending any more messages after 10 people have cried foul. Don't let people create more than one account per hour from a single IP address. I don't think this is unreasonable.
Exactly. It's authenticated. Combined with a turing test every time you register an account and the ability for users to "vote" other users off the network temporarily, it limits spam.
Which is why all of those spam doomsday forecasters seem so ridiculous.
You should not make an analogy between ISPs and traditional utilities like the electric company. Electricity is one way. Internet is two way. No matter what you do with your electricity, it won't destroy the rest of the grid. (barring extreme things for which you WILL receive a visit from the electric company). On the other hand, it's easy for one internet costumer to ruin the experience for many others (by sending thousands of spam a day, for instance).
A better analogy might be a phone company. They sure as heck don't give you freedom to use your phone however you want.
But anyway, I agree that ISPs should be unhindered connections to the internet, but only in one direction- to the client.
I cannot believe they are doing this. It is undoubtedly a deep AI problem to properly grade an essay. You have to be able to understand if statements connect logically to form an argument, you have to understand analogy, you have to understand sarcasm, etc... this is so far beyond our current capability.
As implemented, I'm sure there are easy ways to scam this system by writing gibberish. Who sold them this idea? I want to know the person responsible for this abuse of computing.
yes yes yes yes! Pay attention in your linear algebra classes. I know your boring instructor might make Eigen vectors sound like the most tedious thing in the universe, but it is a staple of computer science if you want to do lots of interesting things with data.
You're being overly hard on the grandparent. He makes some good points. And naive image vectorization IS a problem. Eigenfaces only works with extremely careful registration of images, because the images are vectorized naively. Basically this means throwing out any notion of spatial coherence. (You could vectorize the image in random order, scanline order, whatever.. as long as you did it consistantly across the data set you'd get the same bases out. Shouldn't a system understand that an image shifted one pixel to the right is not arbitrarily far from its original version?).
p df for a good argument about this
See http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~jebara/papers/iccv03.
And responding to another point of yours, classification algorithms that look only at intensity are at best brittle. In the real world things have to be better. You have to be able to recognize an object under different lighting, etc. The fact that you can design and calibrate a system well enough to work on pixel intensity alone in a few specific cases doesn't convince me that it's robust.
That's not to say that you can't do some vision tasks with relatively simple metrics like intensity histograms or naively vectorized images, but really data representation is a major bottleneck for a lot of vision work. But you look like you're qualified to know that so I don't know why you're jumping down the grandparent's throat.
Q "What do you run for anti-virus?"
A "Nothing. Linux isn't as succeptible to viruses"
Keep telling yourself that. It will be all the more spectacular when a linux destroying worm makes the rounds. Especially when tech-support know-it-alls tell everyone that linux has some kind of magical virus immunity.
So that works for a straight road... can probably be modified for a curved road.. how about intersections? They'd be unstable at best. (lots of domes)
Everyone would have to use the same size wheels.
I'm not sure steering would work.
(I know it's just a unpractical thought experiment, just carrying it a bit farther)
Doesn't the xprize require 3 people? not just 1 pilot? That's 300ish pounds of dead weight... could make a significant difference.
Wow, that's a very thorough complaint. What worries me, though, is all of the focus on conspiracy theories. A lot of the material in the complaint is slam-dunk, send SCO executives to jail material. But a lot of it is tin-foil-hat conjecture. And I hope it doesn't get dismissed because of such.
I disagree, I think it's some of the coolest "music" I've ever heard. It sets a wonderful, creepy, scary atmosphere that I just love. I don't want to hear guitars and drums, I want to hear scary sounds and pulsing heartbeats... I don't want it to be anything resembling mainstream music. I hated the Quake2 soundtrack, for instance.
I think a reasonably smart SCO employ would have been sending out resumes for the past 6 months.