Yes, you can buy points to buy premium content (pay2play zones or power ups or items), or you can pay the monthly fee like the good old days and get all the zones (and some bonus points per month).
That's not the point. The option should not involve scammery or even the appearance of scammery.
I still don't want WeatherBug anywhere near my computers even though it's been legit, apparently, for years.
It was my main game for over 3 years (a spot recently taken over by City of Heroes as I've gone back for my 4th major run at it) and in all that time, I went into Veshan (red dragon raid) one time, and Plane of Fear (god of fear raid) one time, with my level 50 necro. And that was towards the end of my run. Went back later after cap was raised to 60, and then skipped town permanently around level 52-ish.
I often said on their own boards, before they closed them due to too much bitching, that they succeeded in spite of themselves, largely for lack of technologically equivalent competition. They were the first to produce the dancing bear, so to speak.
Consider some of their stupid decisions that would make it dead on arrival today: Spellcasters have to "meditate" to gain back mana faster. So far, so good. But that put a book in your face, blocking any of the novel, lovely 3D world for the nominal gameplay aspect that something could sneak up on you and whack you for full damage because you couldn't see.
They got rid of it -- after 2 years, when pops started dropping. Consider having to retrieve your body or lose everything (which, BTW, was on a timer.) Legion were the teens with parents swearing at them because they died just before going out for dinner on Friday. Or working people who died in the late evening and knew they had to be up to 3 and thus exhausted the next day.
And arguably worse, magicians had magic bags you could put things in that made them weightless (if you carried too much, you slowed down in movement.) So far, so good, except they were conjured items, and disappeared when you logged out. Or disconnected accidentally because the network, or their servers, coughed.
People quickly learned to only put yard trash semi-valuable (at one time) loot into it, like tarnished or bronze weapons and so on. But not your real weapons, which, of course, was the bulk of your weight. Could have been trivially solved by, say, giving you a 10 minute window when logging back in to empty it before it disappears.
> Besides; you don't know what his Iron Man contract has him obligated into.
Didn't the LotR people sign up for all 3 movies? Same for Matrix 2 & 3, or Empire and RotJ, IIRC.
More difficult would be DC's Justice League, with Batman and Superman as big, independent stars. Ok, the Superman guy would probably sign on in a heartbeat, let's be honest.
For this, more difficult than Iron Man would be producing a Thor that wasn't completely idiotic. He'd have to be a real person, and even some 7' football lineman won't measure up much to the CGI Hulk. And that's the greatly reduced Hulk from Hulk 2.
> "Each vehicle will be equipped with five laser scanners, seven cameras, GPS, inertial measurement > unit, three Linux PCs, and an x-by-wire driving system. The mission will start on July 10 in Milan, > Italy and will reach Shanghai, China on October 10 (10/10/10) on a 13,000 km route though Italy, > Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia, Romania, Ukraine, Russia, Kazakhstan, and finally > China."
"And it has a robot arm that can hand out a driver's license, car registration, and cash in-between them, with a wonderful cowl blocking sight from everybody but the police officer."
Francis Crick & Koch blew off "the position that the mind is more than a mere product of physical phenomena has been far more convincing to most people throughout human history" by simply suggesting the time to start the analysis is now. The time for philosophizing is over.
Once the NCCs are fully mapped, insofar as they can be, then people can start looking for additions to physics, as need be, and if necessary
IIRC, a quantum device is not, in fact, more powerful than a Turing Machine. It's just a hell of a lot faster due to the incredibly massive parallelism ALA "the particle takes every possible path". I could be wrong, but I used to think this, too, until someone corrected me.
While at the deepest level, the universe, because of QM, may have true randomness, that does not mean it percolates upward to have a direct effect on dice rolls, which are classical ignorance.
It would be a pretty rare event where the degeneration of one nucleus or proton or neutron shifted or removed an atom that made a difference in a roll, though of course that would be theoretically possible.
So, too, there's no evidence that the conscious experience necessarily has anything to do with QM. I see no reason to suppose that based on its capacity. Such suggestions largely revolve around the inability, for now, to explain consciousness based on known physics. It's a romantic mysticism of sort. Two hard-to-comprehend things -- they must be related!
Your mind exists, and therefore is caused by something, somehow. And that something seems to be real-world physics, even if the details escape us at the moment.
Secondly, there are two issues:
1. What can the human mind, with consciousness involved or not, calculate?
2. How does the conscious experience arise, presumably from real-world physics? If you wish to introduce a dualist or spiritual world for parts or all of it, I'm not going to argue it -- the same principle applies to that world, too. Conscious somehow arises from it. Spirit atoms, if you will.
Do not get confused between the two issues.
As for the former, Penrose suggested there were certain things (a particular tiling problem) that a human mind could solve but that a Turing machine could not. This implies, from the Church-Turing Thesis, that either the human mind is a more powerful, but finite computation device, or has some hint of the infinite in it.
Please note that said computation by the human mind does not necessarily have to involve consciousness per se (which is another error people make.)
More importantly, his examples are not generally accepted as valid, in that a properly programmed Turing machine (or computer) could not also do such a computation.
As for the second, the conscious experience itself, which may or may not have anything whatsoever to do with the mind as a computational device (or at least anything vital w.r.t. this Turing-equivalency issue) is, as Searle suggests, a real phenomenon, and thus arises, somehow, from real stuff "out there". In other words, it is not a purely informational thing that arises from symbol-pushing itself.
Hence a computer simulation of physics would not yield a conscious entity per se, were a brain to be created in it, though it may be able to create a human-level intelligence (and this is where the vitalness of the conscious phenomenon itself comes in. Recent research suggests it may just be an afterburner interpreting ideas and decisions already made, for the purpose of storing those back into the brain device, rather than being actively involved in immediate decision making.)
And, of course, if one figured out how conscious as a phenomenon arose from real-world physics, you could simulate that physics and get a simulated, functioning fake consciousness in a computer, the way a big simulation of chemistry and physics could simulate a flame or a tire rolling or an electric circuit, for that matter. But the simulated consciousness would not actually be conscious, though it would (as a computational device) pump out the exact same kind of data and for exactly the same reasons.
Actually, poking a random square is NP-easy, so to speak. It's just not guaranteed a solution.
Remember that NP-Hard means essentially there is no way to solve a problem short of basically trying all possibilities. And that's exactly what a human mind is doing in Minesweeper.
> Here's what ex-presidential adviser Richard Clarke...and others are > saying needs to be done to keep cyberwars from escalating into full-scale combat
How about threats of full-scale combat to keep cyberwars themselves from escalating?
> Where I live (Argentina) virtually no one drives automatic transmission cars. We get the > same models you do, but with manual transmission.
Many places, especially with mountains, have manual rather than automatic. You can downshift to help slow the car downhill.
In the '90s, Renault sold cars in the US with automatic transmissions, but the transmissions aped the behavior of manuals with respect to coasting. You took your foot off the gas, and instead of coasting freely (as per US automatics), the car dogged and slowed down dragging on the engine, just like a manual.
Slashdot Mirror
Or, more accurately, if Google started serving up ad links to similar scam sites, people would start fleeing Google, too.
Yes, you can buy points to buy premium content (pay2play zones or power ups or items), or you can pay the monthly fee like the good old days and get all the zones (and some bonus points per month).
That's not the point. The option should not involve scammery or even the appearance of scammery.
I still don't want WeatherBug anywhere near my computers even though it's been legit, apparently, for years.
> Hey, back in simpler times OS/2 was super badass. Both of the guys
> who ran it were hard core.
I remember some nuns in Italy in a commercial talking about how super badass OS/2 "Varp" was. Is that who you're thinking of?
> anybody who cries about the limit on PvP is just upset that they can't randomly kill any other player
That's pretty accurate. Some games, and EQ is one of them, have (or had) specific PvP servers. Heck, they even had several varieties:
Balls-out Everybody vs. Everybody PvP
Realm vs. Realm of Good vs. Evil
Race vs. Race of Hummies vs. Elves vs. Fatties vs. Shorties
Pick your poison, it was all there.
It was my main game for over 3 years (a spot recently taken over by City of Heroes as I've gone back for my 4th major run at it) and in all that time, I went into Veshan (red dragon raid) one time, and Plane of Fear (god of fear raid) one time, with my level 50 necro. And that was towards the end of my run. Went back later after cap was raised to 60, and then skipped town permanently around level 52-ish.
I often said on their own boards, before they closed them due to too much bitching, that they succeeded in spite of themselves, largely for lack of technologically equivalent competition. They were the first to produce the dancing bear, so to speak.
Consider some of their stupid decisions that would make it dead on arrival today: Spellcasters have to "meditate" to gain back mana faster. So far, so good. But that put a book in your face, blocking any of the novel, lovely 3D world for the nominal gameplay aspect that something could sneak up on you and whack you for full damage because you couldn't see.
They got rid of it -- after 2 years, when pops started dropping. Consider having to retrieve your body or lose everything (which, BTW, was on a timer.) Legion were the teens with parents swearing at them because they died just before going out for dinner on Friday. Or working people who died in the late evening and knew they had to be up to 3 and thus exhausted the next day.
And arguably worse, magicians had magic bags you could put things in that made them weightless (if you carried too much, you slowed down in movement.) So far, so good, except they were conjured items, and disappeared when you logged out. Or disconnected accidentally because the network, or their servers, coughed.
People quickly learned to only put yard trash semi-valuable (at one time) loot into it, like tarnished or bronze weapons and so on. But not your real weapons, which, of course, was the bulk of your weight. Could have been trivially solved by, say, giving you a 10 minute window when logging back in to empty it before it disappears.
Umm, Cap's leader of the Avengers, in spite of the recent aberration. And we know he'll be in it thanks to the shield cameo in ice in Hulk.
And I wouldn't cry for Downey being "stuck". "You sign up for X Iron Man movies and Y Avengers/group movies for Z dollars, Z >>>> X or Y."
It's interesting that Emma Peel Avengers would have been in perfect alignment with Whedon-style, much moreso than Marvel Avengers.
> Besides; you don't know what his Iron Man contract has him obligated into.
Didn't the LotR people sign up for all 3 movies? Same for Matrix 2 & 3, or Empire and RotJ, IIRC.
More difficult would be DC's Justice League, with Batman and Superman as big, independent stars. Ok, the Superman guy would probably sign on in a heartbeat, let's be honest.
For this, more difficult than Iron Man would be producing a Thor that wasn't completely idiotic. He'd have to be a real person, and even some 7' football lineman won't measure up much to the CGI Hulk. And that's the greatly reduced Hulk from Hulk 2.
I prefer to think of Buffy as the love child of Emma Peel and Charisma Carpenter. Over and over again I think of this.
Actually, a skeptical class that did an honest, thorough investigation would be good.
Something like this, but for UFOs.
> "It's the latest way for Hollywood to combat falling DVD sales due to piracy."
Fixed: "It's the latest way for Hollywood to combat falling DVD sales due slapping nerds in the face by changing Star Trek into a pure action film."
"Blizzard quickly nerfed the shirt to merely reduce bullet damage by 0.23%"
> "Each vehicle will be equipped with five laser scanners, seven cameras, GPS, inertial measurement
> unit, three Linux PCs, and an x-by-wire driving system. The mission will start on July 10 in Milan,
> Italy and will reach Shanghai, China on October 10 (10/10/10) on a 13,000 km route though Italy,
> Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia, Romania, Ukraine, Russia, Kazakhstan, and finally
> China."
"And it has a robot arm that can hand out a driver's license, car registration, and cash in-between them, with a wonderful cowl blocking sight from everybody but the police officer."
From TFA: "If Amazon forwards the bill to Sony, how will Sony respond?"
Depends on the law. Does it just affect the end retailer, or can Amazon hold Sony responsible for the exact same, inaccurate description?
Francis Crick & Koch blew off "the position that the mind is more than a mere product of physical phenomena has been far more convincing to most people throughout human history" by simply suggesting the time to start the analysis is now. The time for philosophizing is over.
Once the NCCs are fully mapped, insofar as they can be, then people can start looking for additions to physics, as need be, and if necessary
IIRC, a quantum device is not, in fact, more powerful than a Turing Machine. It's just a hell of a lot faster due to the incredibly massive parallelism ALA "the particle takes every possible path". I could be wrong, but I used to think this, too, until someone corrected me.
Does anyone know for sure?
While at the deepest level, the universe, because of QM, may have true randomness, that does not mean it percolates upward to have a direct effect on dice rolls, which are classical ignorance.
It would be a pretty rare event where the degeneration of one nucleus or proton or neutron shifted or removed an atom that made a difference in a roll, though of course that would be theoretically possible.
So, too, there's no evidence that the conscious experience necessarily has anything to do with QM. I see no reason to suppose that based on its capacity. Such suggestions largely revolve around the inability, for now, to explain consciousness based on known physics. It's a romantic mysticism of sort. Two hard-to-comprehend things -- they must be related!
Your mind exists, and therefore is caused by something, somehow. And that something seems to be real-world physics, even if the details escape us at the moment.
Secondly, there are two issues:
1. What can the human mind, with consciousness involved or not, calculate?
2. How does the conscious experience arise, presumably from real-world physics? If you wish to introduce a dualist or spiritual world for parts or all of it, I'm not going to argue it -- the same principle applies to that world, too. Conscious somehow arises from it. Spirit atoms, if you will.
Do not get confused between the two issues.
As for the former, Penrose suggested there were certain things (a particular tiling problem) that a human mind could solve but that a Turing machine could not. This implies, from the Church-Turing Thesis, that either the human mind is a more powerful, but finite computation device, or has some hint of the infinite in it.
Please note that said computation by the human mind does not necessarily have to involve consciousness per se (which is another error people make.)
More importantly, his examples are not generally accepted as valid, in that a properly programmed Turing machine (or computer) could not also do such a computation.
As for the second, the conscious experience itself, which may or may not have anything whatsoever to do with the mind as a computational device (or at least anything vital w.r.t. this Turing-equivalency issue) is, as Searle suggests, a real phenomenon, and thus arises, somehow, from real stuff "out there". In other words, it is not a purely informational thing that arises from symbol-pushing itself.
Hence a computer simulation of physics would not yield a conscious entity per se, were a brain to be created in it, though it may be able to create a human-level intelligence (and this is where the vitalness of the conscious phenomenon itself comes in. Recent research suggests it may just be an afterburner interpreting ideas and decisions already made, for the purpose of storing those back into the brain device, rather than being actively involved in immediate decision making.)
And, of course, if one figured out how conscious as a phenomenon arose from real-world physics, you could simulate that physics and get a simulated, functioning fake consciousness in a computer, the way a big simulation of chemistry and physics could simulate a flame or a tire rolling or an electric circuit, for that matter. But the simulated consciousness would not actually be conscious, though it would (as a computational device) pump out the exact same kind of data and for exactly the same reasons.
And I take that back, even. Guessing is a guaranteed solution -- it's just not a guaranteed win.
Actually, poking a random square is NP-easy, so to speak. It's just not guaranteed a solution.
Remember that NP-Hard means essentially there is no way to solve a problem short of basically trying all possibilities. And that's exactly what a human mind is doing in Minesweeper.
Congress: Spaces shuttle is expensive. Replace it with something else.
NASA: Ok. And we're shutting down the shuttle.
Congress: Psyche! We are cancelling the new thing, too!
NASA: Why?
Congress: We'll lose more votes cutting an entitlement 0.01% than we will deleting NASA.
NASA: Uhh, ok. Well, I guess we can get by hiring the Rooskies for launches.
Congress: That's the spirit!
Rooskies: Eh hehehehe. Psyche!
"zeppo", duh!
> Here's what ex-presidential adviser Richard Clarke...and others are
> saying needs to be done to keep cyberwars from escalating into full-scale combat
How about threats of full-scale combat to keep cyberwars themselves from escalating?
Started a little early-80s Omni hatchback off in 4th (of 5) once. The smell of scorched electrics or something filled my nostrils.
I was a stupid teen.
> Where I live (Argentina) virtually no one drives automatic transmission cars. We get the
> same models you do, but with manual transmission.
Many places, especially with mountains, have manual rather than automatic. You can downshift to help slow the car downhill.
In the '90s, Renault sold cars in the US with automatic transmissions, but the transmissions aped the behavior of manuals with respect to coasting. You took your foot off the gas, and instead of coasting freely (as per US automatics), the car dogged and slowed down dragging on the engine, just like a manual.