From a legal point of view, a Wiki citation is toilet paper,' quipped patent expert Greg Aharonian.
And from any sane person's point of view, 99% of comments from patent experts are toilet paper, which is why we're in such a mess today.
So, it's beautifully symmetric. Patent lawyers and Wikipedia were made for each other.:-)
Although in Wikipedia's defence, it gets it right ***far*** more often.:-)
In any case, Wikipedia can always be corrected, and very easily, that's the power of it. Whereas the only way of correcting a patent lawyer is with a lobotomy.
I know that you're merely trolling and don't actually believe what you say. Nevertheless...
It's worth stating that unless you believe that the human brain contains magic (which 99% of your religious bretheren don't), then it is no more than a very complex arrangement of perfectly ordinary physical components, namely atoms and molecules. And if you don't think that we will in due course be able to arrange atoms and molecules as we wish, then you're very blinkered to the direction in which science and engineering are heading.
That said, the recreation of human brains is merely an interesting challange as far as practical engineers are concerned, and not a practical approach. The vast majority of us have no intention of actually taking that route because protein is such an inferior building material. Your alleged god (aka. blind evolution) only "chose" it because carbon is so damn versatile in conjunction with O and N and H, so a million different reactions occurred in the mess of the primordial soup. And one of them happened to work.
Well we don't rely on blind chance, but coerce the reactions in the direction we want, which gives us the chance to choose our materials more strategically. And we will.
There's not a chance in hell (trying to use your frame of reference here) of us producing "brains" that are *MERELY* as good as nature created in humans, because the equations that underpin ordinary physics and chemistry (and therefore molecular nanotechnology) say otherwise. Instead, you can expect "brains" a billion times our mental capacity and a trillion times our mental speed in due course. We know that it's possible (from theory, and by observing protein nanomachines doing it very poorly), but we lack the infrastructure to do it ourselves at present. It's many decades away, but hey, we're working on it.:-)
You'd have to contradict the maths and physics of materials and biotech that says that MNT is possible before you can validly say that it's not. And with the intellectual depth of your contribution above, my guess is that you won't.:-)
It's not Blizzard's business to tell us how we are permitted to generate keystroke events on our private machines.
If we want to generate them by pressing keyboard buttons, fine, but if instead we want to use our machines' powerful capabilities to generate them for us, that's also fine. They're our computers, not Blizzard's, and their attempt to limit our use of computing resources is extremely blinkered.
If Blizzard want to apply controls, they should do so on their servers. Our machines are not theirs to control. What's more, try telling a disabled person that they can't use input automation to enable them to play the game.
The "cheating" arguments are entirely irrelevant. By that ridiculous logic, anyone who has a faster computer, a clearer monitor or a faster network than others is also "cheating", and the ever-changing evolution and progress of equipment stops dead.
Modern computers are automation engines. Live with it, Blizzard --- you can't sweep back the tide. Input automation is here to stay.
Just as important as having people working together in harmony is having them working together without stagnating creatively --- and that requires acceptance of well-reasoned criticism of the current design, instead of immediately calling it "disruptive" and rejecting it.
It also requires telling your own fanboys and groupies to stop defending the status quo on principle and to start thinking for themselves for a change. While theoretically on your side, fanboys are actually deadly to a project's interests in their total antagonism to any thinking outside of the box.
In other words, you need some disharmony in a project, or in time it will lose its novelty and interest and stagnate. Just seeking absence of heated argument as an important goal is not at all wise --- it's just too easy to throw away the baby with the bathwater.
But the original got VERY tired after the second rehash.
This merely indicates that you approached GW as if it were EQ or WoW or AO. It's not.
GW isn't about grinding over and over again, with just the geography changing to make you think that you're doing something different. That's the old traditional tedium that GW was designed to leave behind, and it succeeded, superbly.
Instead, GW is about exploring the universe of SKILLS and CHARACTER BUILDS, and making yourself more and more competent by being ever more skillful with your builds and your use of those builds. It requires true player skill of the very deepest kind, full understanding of how the thousands of complex skills work, and also ability to use them well through sheer player practice and experimentation. For those who want to press the Attack key and then go to sleep for 10 minutes as in some traditional MMOG raids, this is the wrong game. But if you like to use your brain when playing, then GW is THE game to play -- it should definitely appeal to the computer science types.:-) And it even requires high manual dexterity in the harder zones, and a good sense of tactics.
GW is a joy to play once you're really skillful. Before GW, I completed two traditional multi-year MMOGs, and they were utterly empty of real player involvement and gameplay compared to GW, despite each of them requiring many years of level grinding.
So, your "got very tired" is no reflection on GW... it's merely that you totally failed to understand the game, because every profession is *utterly* different once you understand their skills and begin to master the builds.
GW is extremely easy for casual play, and extremely hard and complex for deep play. You were at the casual end.
You see a situation and then imagine what a "hero" would do in that situation.
You've merely deferred the question, since we conclude what a "hero" would do only by reference to ourselves.
Without self-reference and awareness of self, we simply have no basis for determining what any sentient entity would do, real or imagined, in any situation. And the only process by which self-reference and awareness of self leads to choices is causality and our assessment of the merits of future states.
Bringing one's mother or any other hero into the question provides no additional insight, since clearly we do not possess a mental library of hero responses for all eventualities. The hero is not autonomous: it's just ourselves, temporarily placed into different shoes but still quite unavoidably answering all questions from an entirely personal perspective.
> Chemistry looks like it has more lines than all the hard sciences put together Chemistry is often called the "central science" because it connects other sciences http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chemistry
More precisely, Chemistry involves and is involved in numerous other sciences. This is pretty inevitable, when you consider that almost all other sciences relate to atoms and molecules in some way, and of course atoms and molecules clearly involve most of physics.
The reason why Chemistry doesn't live in a disjoint corner of its own is because it's not *really* a science in the pure sense --- it ought to be called Bulk Molecular Engineering Science, and once it has finally accepted molecular nanotechnology as part of its domain, then just plain Molecular Engineering Science will be the correct term.
It's not really an independent science, but a melting pot where numerous other sciences overlap. If you exclude from Chemistry the contribution from other physical sciences, what you have left possesses far more engineering attributes than pure science ones. Chemistry is very empirical by nature, and all its modelling from first principles relies almost entirely on physics and related sciences.
That said, Chemistry does require its own professional niche and its own educational spectrum, because the area is just so *VAST*. Calling it the "central science" is entirely accurate in respect of its importance, and because of the sheer magnitude of its domain.
Is there an actuall graphics card out there that IS capable of doing the eyecandy stuff, it don't have to do games, that is fully opensource with absolutely no binary bits.
I used to think matrox cards were the way to go but even they have a binary HAL bit that you need if you want the more advanced features needed for xgl and the likes.
You're not right about this, as HAL is entirely optional. I run the Matrox G550 PCIe card *without HAL* (pure source-based Gentoo distro with the standard G550/mga kernel/X11 driver) and have all the fancy OpenGL eye-candy goodness.
But it gets even better than mere 2D eye candy. You can even run full 3D OpenGL games on this card perfectly happily and at decent frame rates, as long as the game is coded efficiently for the standard OpenGL pipeline and doesn't require programmable shaders. As an example, I run the old FPS game Cube on this card in a slowish P4, at a very acceptable 50 FPS, and it's extremely snappy like FPS games need to be.
So don't believe everything you hear. The pure open-source Matrox driver works just great, *without* HAL.
This discussion about whether to preload this distro or that distro misses the crucial point: that the only thing that really matters is that all the hardware should work FULLY under whichever software is supplied, and that full sources be provided. And the reason is the following:
If the above requirement is satisfied, then the "community support" (specifically mentioned by Dell) will very rapidly extend to making sure that all other distros also work on that specific Dell hardware. That's what distros like to do, after all.
So the initial choice of distro really doesn't matter in the grand scheme of things, although it might as well be a popular one. What matters is that Dell should have 100% committment to the principles of FOSS for whichever distro they choose, and not a half-hearted (nor closed source) one.
Supporting multiple distros would be costly, and probably would not be done in depth, so it might even be a bad thing. Choose one (any), and support it well and fully.
Why? To leave politicians and lawyers behind
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>> What's the goal here?
The goal here is the same as the one which made the Pilgrims leave the old world on the Mayflower... there was too much crap imposed on them by the rest of society.
Of course, after a few hundred years, that same crap appeared in the new world. That's life.
And that's precisely why this kind of voyage to pastures new must be repeated again and again.
Until devices and other hardware components have enough built-in intelligence to communicate with each other and with user programs, and until their built-in intelligence is presented to applications through a standardized communications interface, there will always be a role for operating systems.
And the reason is simply that this is the primary role of an O/S: to glue together many rather dumb components (some virtual, some non-local), and to provide a standard abstraction for them, so that applications can be programmed with a degree of sanity. Everything that O/Ss do can be considered in those terms.
Host operating systems will disappear when they are no longer needed. And *that* will happen only when/if their key functions have migrated into the hardware, so it's a defensible argument to say that actually they will never really disappear, but transform.
>> how am I going to implement this new idea I have for cross-application communication based on shared pipes among apps.
Actually, it's even worse than your funny (but accurate) comment suggests:
In the Unix model, applications are often built out of multiple cooperating processes, each of which is isolated into its own address space, with strong barriers between processes enforced by the MMU hardware. This makes each separate part more robust, more comprehensible, and more secure.
In contrast, when Bitfrost throws away the ability of programs to talk to other programs, it is intrinsically encouraging a monolithic approach to program design, which is a huge step backwards both for security and for complexity management.
Bitfrost is right to deny free access by programs to a user's filestore objects as an important part of its new security framework, but if the price for that is to disallow strong application factoring and partitioning into separate but communicating processes then the cure may be worse than the disease.
... and join us on IRC at freenode #OpenMoko. (Don't ask "When can I get it?" on the channel, just type "counter" for the countdown to the various development and release dates.)
In accepting consensus opinion, you are ignoring one small little problem. The scientific method.
1) The extremely widely accepted global warming theory relies entirely on the results computed by the world's many Global Climate Models. These GCMs embody our scientific understanding of climate. There is absolutely no way for the combined and interacting effects of thousands of elements of known physics to be determined analytically --- it can only be done by simulation.
2) Not a single one of our current crop of GCMs can model the 100,000-year cycle of glaciations even remotely closely. The changes in solar irradiation resulting from orbital variations do not account for the 12 or so degs C variation between glaciated and interglacial peaks directly, and the currently simulated oceanic and atmospheric feedbacks do not account for it indirectly.
3) Climatologists acknowlege extremely widely in peer-reviewed papers that oceanic and atmospheric circulations are currently modelled only very simplistically, and that that cloud formation dynamics in particular are work in progress and that our current knowledge in this area cannot reliably predict even the sign of atmospheric feedback under major climate perturbations.
4) Oceanic biota contribute 10 times as much CO2 exchange to/from the atmosphere as the entirety of human activity, yet the collosal changes (90%) in the oceanic biosphere through direct human activity over the last century are not part of the climate modelling in any current GCM.
Put those 4 things together and the "science" of climate change has a problem. The problem is simple: scientifically, we cannot use the scientific method to predict change because our best models are not yet scientifically predictive. That's an absolute problem, and it can't be fudged by wishful thinking.
We know many facts --- most of the measurements are not in doubt. The trouble is, we can't add those facts together because the underlying model isn't working even to first order. You HAVE to be able to model major effects like the glaciation cycle before you can be confident that your model is valid for smaller effects like a 1 or 2 degrees C of additional contributory greenhouse heating.
The fact that the vast majority of climatologists believe that we are witnessing unprecedented global warming and that man's outpouring of CO2 is the key factor in it really has no bearing on the above. Science is not about beliefs. And it's not about witnessing diverse effects in the world around us and mentally putting 2 and 2 together. That's not science.
The only thing that's really certain is that we're witnessing an unprecedented rise in CO2 levels, and that the extra CO2 is undoubtedly a contributing factor for any climate change. And that's it. That's all we know. The rest is supposition, and the results from our GCM simulations cannot be accepted as gospel because they are quite severely limited, and do not match history, and we know it.
I'm not actually a skeptic on global warming at all (personally), but I absolutely refuse to attribute to science a prediction that the scientific method cannot currently deliver. It's a matter of scientific integrity.
Any open-source Milankovitch simulator?
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I tried to raise some interest in providing EdGCM with variant insolation input, but it was deemed not a useful idea because the old Model II collapses for any simulated periods of longer than a couple of thousand years.
Do you know of any open-source simulator covering the various orbital parameters of Milankovitch and/or others? It could be handy for plugging into other simulation frameworks, like ESMF.
The argument that you can't fast charge an ultracapacitor at home only holds if you are trying to charge it directly off the mains. But that would be a silly design approach.
Instead, keep one device at home on permanent trickle charge from the mains, and then connect this home unit to your mobile units when they need fast high-amperage charging.
The fact that the number of Earth-observing missions will drop is interesting. The fact that the submitter sees some wierd link between that and the global warming bandwagon is not.
Instead of using the logic of "10 million lemmings must be right", global warming advocates would do well in looking at the underlying scientific knowledge instead. The measurements are scientific and wholly honest for the most part, but the popular interpretations are not scientific at all, and should be ignored by those who value science above advocacy and social posturing.
There is a very wierd popular meme that the fact that a large number of scientists *THINK* that there is a substantive correlation between CO2 levels and the melting ices indicates that there actually *IS* a causal effect. Well, science doesn't work that way. The number of adherents to an interpretation has absolutely no bearing on science, despite the popular feeling that "it must be right".
The simple fact is that the various intrepretations are all within the same error bounds, and manmade CO2 has been demonized for no good scientific reason at all, mainly because of lack of alternatives it seems. Well that's just not good enough. The real demon is our lack of knowledge about what's going on. Blaming CO2 doesn't absolve us.
Anyone who is still wholly convinced by the CO2 agit prop ought to take a look through Earth's history, back to a time when the CO2 levels were hundreds of times what they are now, and yet the Earth was a solid block of ice.
That's one important piece of evidence to the contrary, but when it comes to science, there is a vastly more important issue to consider, and it has nothing to do with observations.
Science is based on mathematical models that are the basis of our theories, and the use of hypotheses derived from those theories by which the theories can be tested. Well, in climatology, those theories are embodied in computational models, our many Global Climate / Circulation Models (GCMs) --- and not a single one of those GCMs predicts the extreme temperature oscillations between glacial and inter-glacial periods that have been occurring with total regularity every 100,000 years over the recent million years of Earth's history.
When the theory doesn't match observations, then the theory is wrong. Yet, people are basing their predictions about the effect of manmade CO2 on those blatantly non-working models.
Well sorry, but that's scientifically invalid.
I have no personal axe to grind either way, being just an observer with a good scientific background. But I take great exception to science being used to underpin political agendas (in either direction) when it is not yet able to model even the most large-scale parameters of climate. That's not science.
It's a good funding idea in the "afluent" west as well, for all sorts of reasons.
The idea that everyone is rolling in money in USA and Europe is a myth propagated by Hollywood, the media and politicians, because the reality of the situation is neither popular nor a vote winner. If anyone doubts that, just check the stats on homeless people right across the richest nations. 37 million people in the USA alone were living below the poverty line at the last count... that represents a lot of people who not only need food and shelter but also the benefits of modern communications.
I suspect that OLPC's caution in approaching sales in the west is more to do with the impact this might have on how his very worthwhile project is perceived abroad, rather than whether we would benefit from it too. We would, and I don't mean just us techies who want to play with the gadget. It's sad, but many anonymous people whom we pass in the street daily actually *need* this thing.
Prokofy Neva once called me the most dangerous person she had ever encountered in Second Life.
I took that to mean that I was doing something right and talking sense against her views, which she didn't like.
She seems to have bought herself a really heavy duty Reality Distortion Field. The sad thing is, the more mind-bonglingly ridiculous her statements become, the more exposure she gets.
The likelihood that she's actually someone's experiment in social AI is growing stronger, because it's unlikely that a human could keep up such a vitriolic one-sided tirade of utter nonsense for so many months and years. She's like Eliza, but abusive instead of quaint. They're both equally uncomprehending of the other side of a discussion.
>> The problem is that the extra weight needed to carry the wings for the two spacecraft you mention (the shuttle and SS1) will add more weight to the craft, and thus need extra fuel anyway.
Wings add weight only when they're tacked onto a craft as an afterthought.
If the craft *IS* a wing by design, then they add no weight at all.
Internal structural buttressing is required whatever the shape of the craft, even if it's spherical, because weight considerations mandate that walls be thin so you can't rely on the shell materials alone for structural integrity under reentry pressure. Consequently it's fair to say that wings don't even add buttressing weight.
The best approach would probably be a combined one: (i) use wings for shedding reentry velocity through lift, but not for landing because that requires heavy landing gear; and then, (ii) once you've glided off all your velocity, just land vertically using your takeoff rockets. Hence, no additional weight is required, and much less fuel is needed for landing.
... or else you're extremely insightful. (it works either way:-)
Because if an object is entirely under the control of an FSM, then clearly it has no freedom to "interpret" its input subjectively. AND THAT APPLIES REGARDLESS OF ITS COMPLEXITY.
Which means that, if we're actually deterministic automata (but so complex that it appears otherwise), then freedom of will is entirely an illusion.
I'm perfectly happy either way. Since freedom of action is an illusion in practice, discovering that it's not even a possibility under the human FSM is "interesting" but of no practical consequence. I shall continue doing WTF I want and say it's an allowed state in my FSM.:-)
Even if we assume for a minute that this isn't a scam...
They've got their underlying model entirely wrong if they're expecting massive growth and success of their VR network by analogy with the Internet.
The Internet bloomed in popularity because it was decentralized and uncontrolled, growing branches at all points and sprouting leaf nodes everywhere. The explosive growth of content "at the edges" happened because of a total lack of coordination and restriction, ie. because people could do their own thing without asking, and almost without cost. And its millions of contributors were driven by fun and interest, not by earning money from their sites.
In contrast, these Neuronet folks seem to be starting with a centralised and tightly restricted registration scheme, plus costly membership that is clearly creating an elite and a money-driven pyramid right from the start.
Well that won't work, if they expect growth modelled on the growth of the Internet.
And it also won't work because of the lack of community-based VR systems to run on such a VR network. The few existing ones that could qualify (Second Life, all online MMOGs and game worlds, clan-based FPSs, etc etc) are almost all proprietary or centralized or both, and hence don't meet the two key requirements for explosive growth.
Frameworks for making non-proprietary and decentralized VR systems do exist, in fact there are many of them (in the guise of open-source 3D game engines), but that's merely a potential rather than a reality for today.
Was a couple of hours of downtime early in a workday really such a burden?
For some it was, for others it wasn't, but that's not the point.
The point is that downtime at ANY time of the day is inappropriate in a global service in this day and age, since it's always prime time for somebody somewhere. Lots of people play on "foreign" servers, because that's where their friends are.
Many other MMOGs have now eliminated patch-update downtime in favor of continuous background updates, and their maintenance is typically fully transparent: "We're doing scheduled maintenance at hour XX-YY GMT, but you're unlikely to notice anything". Another MMOG I'm currently playing is like that, very slick --- the only time I ever noticed the service being down was when they were moving their huge data center lock stock and barrel to a larger site. And there is never any downtime for new expansions.
Far from "Does it matter?", this is very welcome news from Blizzard indeed. It's about time.
As the author of the article states, "1024x768 resolution could use an upgrade".
What he failed to mention though, was that this resolution was already very poor and uncompetitive in a well-featured tablet PC back in 2004 !!! As a clear fan of his X41t and X60s, I think he's reviewing the new Lenovo through rose-tinted spectacles.
I looked at the X-series along with many others when I was researching for my own tablet PC some 2+ years ago (before that I had a Thinkpad), and the Toshiba Tecra M4 tablet came out miles ahead on so many fronts that it was like something out of the future, yet it was very cheap compared to its rivals: 1069 UK pounds in 2004.
Graphically, there was just no comparison: the Tosh has a terrific 1400x1050 screen (driven by nVidia 6200 Go), and as this is a convertible tablet (the laptop screen swivels around and folds back down flat for tablet use), this lovely screen supports pen-proximity sensing too, as well as the usual touch pad and Thinkpad-like nipple on the keyboard.
The Tosh is tightly packed with other features too (Wifi, Bluetooth, Firewire, SD card, PCMCIA, gigabit Ether, excellent Linux support), but graphics is the killer advantage that decided the choice. Lenovo's 1024x768 was pretty poor even back in 2004, but now it is simply unacceptable on any but the most basic laptops, and in an otherwise-sexy Lenovo tablet it is so completely out of place that I find it just totally incongruous.
I liked my old Thinkpad, but if Lenovo are going to attract people like me "back to the fold", they need to take a very serious look at their specs compared to the competition.
Slashdot Mirror
From a legal point of view, a Wiki citation is toilet paper,' quipped patent expert Greg Aharonian.
:-)
:-)
And from any sane person's point of view, 99% of comments from patent experts are toilet paper, which is why we're in such a mess today.
So, it's beautifully symmetric. Patent lawyers and Wikipedia were made for each other.
Although in Wikipedia's defence, it gets it right ***far*** more often.
In any case, Wikipedia can always be corrected, and very easily, that's the power of it. Whereas the only way of correcting a patent lawyer is with a lobotomy.
I know that you're merely trolling and don't actually believe what you say. Nevertheless ...
:-)
:-)
It's worth stating that unless you believe that the human brain contains magic (which 99% of your religious bretheren don't), then it is no more than a very complex arrangement of perfectly ordinary physical components, namely atoms and molecules. And if you don't think that we will in due course be able to arrange atoms and molecules as we wish, then you're very blinkered to the direction in which science and engineering are heading.
That said, the recreation of human brains is merely an interesting challange as far as practical engineers are concerned, and not a practical approach. The vast majority of us have no intention of actually taking that route because protein is such an inferior building material. Your alleged god (aka. blind evolution) only "chose" it because carbon is so damn versatile in conjunction with O and N and H, so a million different reactions occurred in the mess of the primordial soup. And one of them happened to work.
Well we don't rely on blind chance, but coerce the reactions in the direction we want, which gives us the chance to choose our materials more strategically. And we will.
There's not a chance in hell (trying to use your frame of reference here) of us producing "brains" that are *MERELY* as good as nature created in humans, because the equations that underpin ordinary physics and chemistry (and therefore molecular nanotechnology) say otherwise. Instead, you can expect "brains" a billion times our mental capacity and a trillion times our mental speed in due course. We know that it's possible (from theory, and by observing protein nanomachines doing it very poorly), but we lack the infrastructure to do it ourselves at present. It's many decades away, but hey, we're working on it.
You'd have to contradict the maths and physics of materials and biotech that says that MNT is possible before you can validly say that it's not. And with the intellectual depth of your contribution above, my guess is that you won't.
It's not Blizzard's business to tell us how we are permitted to generate keystroke events on our private machines.
If we want to generate them by pressing keyboard buttons, fine, but if instead we want to use our machines' powerful capabilities to generate them for us, that's also fine. They're our computers, not Blizzard's, and their attempt to limit our use of computing resources is extremely blinkered.
If Blizzard want to apply controls, they should do so on their servers. Our machines are not theirs to control. What's more, try telling a disabled person that they can't use input automation to enable them to play the game.
The "cheating" arguments are entirely irrelevant. By that ridiculous logic, anyone who has a faster computer, a clearer monitor or a faster network than others is also "cheating", and the ever-changing evolution and progress of equipment stops dead.
Modern computers are automation engines. Live with it, Blizzard --- you can't sweep back the tide. Input automation is here to stay.
Just as important as having people working together in harmony is having them working together without stagnating creatively --- and that requires acceptance of well-reasoned criticism of the current design, instead of immediately calling it "disruptive" and rejecting it.
It also requires telling your own fanboys and groupies to stop defending the status quo on principle and to start thinking for themselves for a change. While theoretically on your side, fanboys are actually deadly to a project's interests in their total antagonism to any thinking outside of the box.
In other words, you need some disharmony in a project, or in time it will lose its novelty and interest and stagnate. Just seeking absence of heated argument as an important goal is not at all wise --- it's just too easy to throw away the baby with the bathwater.
But the original got VERY tired after the second rehash.
:-) And it even requires high manual dexterity in the harder zones, and a good sense of tactics.
... it's merely that you totally failed to understand the game, because every profession is *utterly* different once you understand their skills and begin to master the builds.
This merely indicates that you approached GW as if it were EQ or WoW or AO. It's not.
GW isn't about grinding over and over again, with just the geography changing to make you think that you're doing something different. That's the old traditional tedium that GW was designed to leave behind, and it succeeded, superbly.
Instead, GW is about exploring the universe of SKILLS and CHARACTER BUILDS, and making yourself more and more competent by being ever more skillful with your builds and your use of those builds. It requires true player skill of the very deepest kind, full understanding of how the thousands of complex skills work, and also ability to use them well through sheer player practice and experimentation. For those who want to press the Attack key and then go to sleep for 10 minutes as in some traditional MMOG raids, this is the wrong game. But if you like to use your brain when playing, then GW is THE game to play -- it should definitely appeal to the computer science types.
GW is a joy to play once you're really skillful. Before GW, I completed two traditional multi-year MMOGs, and they were utterly empty of real player involvement and gameplay compared to GW, despite each of them requiring many years of level grinding.
So, your "got very tired" is no reflection on GW
GW is extremely easy for casual play, and extremely hard and complex for deep play. You were at the casual end.
You see a situation and then imagine what a "hero" would do in that situation.
You've merely deferred the question, since we conclude what a "hero" would do only by reference to ourselves.
Without self-reference and awareness of self, we simply have no basis for determining what any sentient entity would do, real or imagined, in any situation. And the only process by which self-reference and awareness of self leads to choices is causality and our assessment of the merits of future states.
Bringing one's mother or any other hero into the question provides no additional insight, since clearly we do not possess a mental library of hero responses for all eventualities. The hero is not autonomous: it's just ourselves, temporarily placed into different shoes but still quite unavoidably answering all questions from an entirely personal perspective.
More precisely, Chemistry involves and is involved in numerous other sciences. This is pretty inevitable, when you consider that almost all other sciences relate to atoms and molecules in some way, and of course atoms and molecules clearly involve most of physics.
The reason why Chemistry doesn't live in a disjoint corner of its own is because it's not *really* a science in the pure sense --- it ought to be called Bulk Molecular Engineering Science, and once it has finally accepted molecular nanotechnology as part of its domain, then just plain Molecular Engineering Science will be the correct term.
It's not really an independent science, but a melting pot where numerous other sciences overlap. If you exclude from Chemistry the contribution from other physical sciences, what you have left possesses far more engineering attributes than pure science ones. Chemistry is very empirical by nature, and all its modelling from first principles relies almost entirely on physics and related sciences.
That said, Chemistry does require its own professional niche and its own educational spectrum, because the area is just so *VAST*. Calling it the "central science" is entirely accurate in respect of its importance, and because of the sheer magnitude of its domain.
You're not right about this, as HAL is entirely optional. I run the Matrox G550 PCIe card *without HAL* (pure source-based Gentoo distro with the standard G550/mga kernel/X11 driver) and have all the fancy OpenGL eye-candy goodness.
But it gets even better than mere 2D eye candy. You can even run full 3D OpenGL games on this card perfectly happily and at decent frame rates, as long as the game is coded efficiently for the standard OpenGL pipeline and doesn't require programmable shaders. As an example, I run the old FPS game Cube on this card in a slowish P4, at a very acceptable 50 FPS, and it's extremely snappy like FPS games need to be.
So don't believe everything you hear. The pure open-source Matrox driver works just great, *without* HAL.
This discussion about whether to preload this distro or that distro misses the crucial point: that the only thing that really matters is that all the hardware should work FULLY under whichever software is supplied, and that full sources be provided. And the reason is the following:
If the above requirement is satisfied, then the "community support" (specifically mentioned by Dell) will very rapidly extend to making sure that all other distros also work on that specific Dell hardware. That's what distros like to do, after all.
So the initial choice of distro really doesn't matter in the grand scheme of things, although it might as well be a popular one. What matters is that Dell should have 100% committment to the principles of FOSS for whichever distro they choose, and not a half-hearted (nor closed source) one.
Supporting multiple distros would be costly, and probably would not be done in depth, so it might even be a bad thing. Choose one (any), and support it well and fully.
>> What's the goal here?
... there was too much crap imposed on them by the rest of society.
The goal here is the same as the one which made the Pilgrims leave the old world on the Mayflower
Of course, after a few hundred years, that same crap appeared in the new world. That's life.
And that's precisely why this kind of voyage to pastures new must be repeated again and again.
Until devices and other hardware components have enough built-in intelligence to communicate with each other and with user programs, and until their built-in intelligence is presented to applications through a standardized communications interface, there will always be a role for operating systems.
And the reason is simply that this is the primary role of an O/S: to glue together many rather dumb components (some virtual, some non-local), and to provide a standard abstraction for them, so that applications can be programmed with a degree of sanity. Everything that O/Ss do can be considered in those terms.
Host operating systems will disappear when they are no longer needed. And *that* will happen only when/if their key functions have migrated into the hardware, so it's a defensible argument to say that actually they will never really disappear, but transform.
>> how am I going to implement this new idea I have for cross-application communication based on shared pipes among apps.
Actually, it's even worse than your funny (but accurate) comment suggests:
In the Unix model, applications are often built out of multiple cooperating processes, each of which is isolated into its own address space, with strong barriers between processes enforced by the MMU hardware. This makes each separate part more robust, more comprehensible, and more secure.
In contrast, when Bitfrost throws away the ability of programs to talk to other programs, it is intrinsically encouraging a monolithic approach to program design, which is a huge step backwards both for security and for complexity management.
Bitfrost is right to deny free access by programs to a user's filestore objects as an important part of its new security framework, but if the price for that is to disallow strong application factoring and partitioning into separate but communicating processes then the cure may be worse than the disease.
Expecting commercially-oriented and service-tied phones to do what *we* want is futile.
Take your destiny in your own hands and help us build something that suits our community needs and your personal needs, not those of the carriers.
Official site
Pictures and press info
Blogs and notices
Mailing lists
It's your world, if you want it to be.
Put those 4 things together and the "science" of climate change has a problem. The problem is simple: scientifically, we cannot use the scientific method to predict change because our best models are not yet scientifically predictive. That's an absolute problem, and it can't be fudged by wishful thinking.
We know many facts --- most of the measurements are not in doubt. The trouble is, we can't add those facts together because the underlying model isn't working even to first order. You HAVE to be able to model major effects like the glaciation cycle before you can be confident that your model is valid for smaller effects like a 1 or 2 degrees C of additional contributory greenhouse heating.
The fact that the vast majority of climatologists believe that we are witnessing unprecedented global warming and that man's outpouring of CO2 is the key factor in it really has no bearing on the above. Science is not about beliefs. And it's not about witnessing diverse effects in the world around us and mentally putting 2 and 2 together. That's not science.
The only thing that's really certain is that we're witnessing an unprecedented rise in CO2 levels, and that the extra CO2 is undoubtedly a contributing factor for any climate change. And that's it. That's all we know. The rest is supposition, and the results from our GCM simulations cannot be accepted as gospel because they are quite severely limited, and do not match history, and we know it.
I'm not actually a skeptic on global warming at all (personally), but I absolutely refuse to attribute to science a prediction that the scientific method cannot currently deliver. It's a matter of scientific integrity.
I tried to raise some interest in providing EdGCM with variant insolation input, but it was deemed not a useful idea because the old Model II collapses for any simulated periods of longer than a couple of thousand years.
Do you know of any open-source simulator covering the various orbital parameters of Milankovitch and/or others? It could be handy for plugging into other simulation frameworks, like ESMF.
The argument that you can't fast charge an ultracapacitor at home only holds if you are trying to charge it directly off the mains. But that would be a silly design approach.
Instead, keep one device at home on permanent trickle charge from the mains, and then connect this home unit to your mobile units when they need fast high-amperage charging.
Let me encapsulate the thoughts of millions:
FUCK OFF
The fact that the number of Earth-observing missions will drop is interesting. The fact that the submitter sees some wierd link between that and the global warming bandwagon is not.
Instead of using the logic of "10 million lemmings must be right", global warming advocates would do well in looking at the underlying scientific knowledge instead. The measurements are scientific and wholly honest for the most part, but the popular interpretations are not scientific at all, and should be ignored by those who value science above advocacy and social posturing.
There is a very wierd popular meme that the fact that a large number of scientists *THINK* that there is a substantive correlation between CO2 levels and the melting ices indicates that there actually *IS* a causal effect. Well, science doesn't work that way. The number of adherents to an interpretation has absolutely no bearing on science, despite the popular feeling that "it must be right".
The simple fact is that the various intrepretations are all within the same error bounds, and manmade CO2 has been demonized for no good scientific reason at all, mainly because of lack of alternatives it seems. Well that's just not good enough. The real demon is our lack of knowledge about what's going on. Blaming CO2 doesn't absolve us.
Anyone who is still wholly convinced by the CO2 agit prop ought to take a look through Earth's history, back to a time when the CO2 levels were hundreds of times what they are now, and yet the Earth was a solid block of ice.
That's one important piece of evidence to the contrary, but when it comes to science, there is a vastly more important issue to consider, and it has nothing to do with observations.
Science is based on mathematical models that are the basis of our theories, and the use of hypotheses derived from those theories by which the theories can be tested. Well, in climatology, those theories are embodied in computational models, our many Global Climate / Circulation Models (GCMs) --- and not a single one of those GCMs predicts the extreme temperature oscillations between glacial and inter-glacial periods that have been occurring with total regularity every 100,000 years over the recent million years of Earth's history.
When the theory doesn't match observations, then the theory is wrong. Yet, people are basing their predictions about the effect of manmade CO2 on those blatantly non-working models.
Well sorry, but that's scientifically invalid.
I have no personal axe to grind either way, being just an observer with a good scientific background. But I take great exception to science being used to underpin political agendas (in either direction) when it is not yet able to model even the most large-scale parameters of climate. That's not science.
It's a good funding idea in the "afluent" west as well, for all sorts of reasons.
... that represents a lot of people who not only need food and shelter but also the benefits of modern communications.
The idea that everyone is rolling in money in USA and Europe is a myth propagated by Hollywood, the media and politicians, because the reality of the situation is neither popular nor a vote winner. If anyone doubts that, just check the stats on homeless people right across the richest nations. 37 million people in the USA alone were living below the poverty line at the last count
I suspect that OLPC's caution in approaching sales in the west is more to do with the impact this might have on how his very worthwhile project is perceived abroad, rather than whether we would benefit from it too. We would, and I don't mean just us techies who want to play with the gadget. It's sad, but many anonymous people whom we pass in the street daily actually *need* this thing.
Prokofy Neva once called me the most dangerous person she had ever encountered in Second Life.
I took that to mean that I was doing something right and talking sense against her views, which she didn't like.
She seems to have bought herself a really heavy duty Reality Distortion Field. The sad thing is, the more mind-bonglingly ridiculous her statements become, the more exposure she gets.
The likelihood that she's actually someone's experiment in social AI is growing stronger, because it's unlikely that a human could keep up such a vitriolic one-sided tirade of utter nonsense for so many months and years. She's like Eliza, but abusive instead of quaint. They're both equally uncomprehending of the other side of a discussion.
>> The problem is that the extra weight needed to carry the wings for the two spacecraft you mention (the shuttle and SS1) will add more weight to the craft, and thus need extra fuel anyway.
Wings add weight only when they're tacked onto a craft as an afterthought.
If the craft *IS* a wing by design, then they add no weight at all.
Internal structural buttressing is required whatever the shape of the craft, even if it's spherical, because weight considerations mandate that walls be thin so you can't rely on the shell materials alone for structural integrity under reentry pressure. Consequently it's fair to say that wings don't even add buttressing weight.
The best approach would probably be a combined one: (i) use wings for shedding reentry velocity through lift, but not for landing because that requires heavy landing gear; and then, (ii) once you've glided off all your velocity, just land vertically using your takeoff rockets. Hence, no additional weight is required, and much less fuel is needed for landing.
... or else you're extremely insightful. (it works either way :-)
:-)
Because if an object is entirely under the control of an FSM, then clearly it has no freedom to "interpret" its input subjectively. AND THAT APPLIES REGARDLESS OF ITS COMPLEXITY.
Which means that, if we're actually deterministic automata (but so complex that it appears otherwise), then freedom of will is entirely an illusion.
I'm perfectly happy either way. Since freedom of action is an illusion in practice, discovering that it's not even a possibility under the human FSM is "interesting" but of no practical consequence. I shall continue doing WTF I want and say it's an allowed state in my FSM.
Even if we assume for a minute that this isn't a scam ...
They've got their underlying model entirely wrong if they're expecting massive growth and success of their VR network by analogy with the Internet.
The Internet bloomed in popularity because it was decentralized and uncontrolled, growing branches at all points and sprouting leaf nodes everywhere. The explosive growth of content "at the edges" happened because of a total lack of coordination and restriction, ie. because people could do their own thing without asking, and almost without cost. And its millions of contributors were driven by fun and interest, not by earning money from their sites.
In contrast, these Neuronet folks seem to be starting with a centralised and tightly restricted registration scheme, plus costly membership that is clearly creating an elite and a money-driven pyramid right from the start.
Well that won't work, if they expect growth modelled on the growth of the Internet.
And it also won't work because of the lack of community-based VR systems to run on such a VR network. The few existing ones that could qualify (Second Life, all online MMOGs and game worlds, clan-based FPSs, etc etc) are almost all proprietary or centralized or both, and hence don't meet the two key requirements for explosive growth.
Frameworks for making non-proprietary and decentralized VR systems do exist, in fact there are many of them (in the guise of open-source 3D game engines), but that's merely a potential rather than a reality for today.
For some it was, for others it wasn't, but that's not the point.
The point is that downtime at ANY time of the day is inappropriate in a global service in this day and age, since it's always prime time for somebody somewhere. Lots of people play on "foreign" servers, because that's where their friends are.
Many other MMOGs have now eliminated patch-update downtime in favor of continuous background updates, and their maintenance is typically fully transparent: "We're doing scheduled maintenance at hour XX-YY GMT, but you're unlikely to notice anything". Another MMOG I'm currently playing is like that, very slick --- the only time I ever noticed the service being down was when they were moving their huge data center lock stock and barrel to a larger site. And there is never any downtime for new expansions.
Far from "Does it matter?", this is very welcome news from Blizzard indeed. It's about time.
As the author of the article states, "1024x768 resolution could use an upgrade".
What he failed to mention though, was that this resolution was already very poor and uncompetitive in a well-featured tablet PC back in 2004 !!! As a clear fan of his X41t and X60s, I think he's reviewing the new Lenovo through rose-tinted spectacles.
I looked at the X-series along with many others when I was researching for my own tablet PC some 2+ years ago (before that I had a Thinkpad), and the Toshiba Tecra M4 tablet came out miles ahead on so many fronts that it was like something out of the future, yet it was very cheap compared to its rivals: 1069 UK pounds in 2004.
Graphically, there was just no comparison: the Tosh has a terrific 1400x1050 screen (driven by nVidia 6200 Go), and as this is a convertible tablet (the laptop screen swivels around and folds back down flat for tablet use), this lovely screen supports pen-proximity sensing too, as well as the usual touch pad and Thinkpad-like nipple on the keyboard.
The Tosh is tightly packed with other features too (Wifi, Bluetooth, Firewire, SD card, PCMCIA, gigabit Ether, excellent Linux support), but graphics is the killer advantage that decided the choice. Lenovo's 1024x768 was pretty poor even back in 2004, but now it is simply unacceptable on any but the most basic laptops, and in an otherwise-sexy Lenovo tablet it is so completely out of place that I find it just totally incongruous.
I liked my old Thinkpad, but if Lenovo are going to attract people like me "back to the fold", they need to take a very serious look at their specs compared to the competition.