In XtremeG (or some name like that) there was an interesting challenge with the physics: in order to do cool loops in the track, the direction "down" had to be relative. Every objet would have its own gravity (or perhaps just the motorcycle has its own), but it was interesting to hear about.
Perhaps a game would be really successful if it had totally screwed up physics, but screwed up in cool ways, like paths that can twist around so you're upside-down but still gravity pulls you toward the path. Add flashy surreal graphics, and you've got something I'd like to play.
Speaking of GNU stuff, there is a more full-featured bunch of programs called GNU Enterprise. It is more heavyweight than GNUCash and has a good design. The only drawback I can see is that it is still in a pretty early stage of development. They have some stuff already, but they still have a long way to go.
Speaking of instant messaging, have you ever heard of the unix talk program? It could very well have been one of the first chat programs created, and it's part of unix. RMS wants to make a unix-workalike. Use your head.
By the way, you don't have to be an extrovert to know that most people would like to be more connected to each other so they can talk about more insignificant stuff.
People have been studying Einstein's brain, and they've found it to be different from most. If I remember correctly, it had enlarged areas where visual thought usually takes place.
Perhaps this guy should consider a new idea: taking people's gifts and not giving them what they want! It may harm his credibility in the eyes of many people, but it might be okay if he came out and proclaimed to the world this policy. "I'll take gifts, but I won't do what you want!"
Do you mean the reference to Planet of the Apes? Yes, it was a good one. But that involved (if I remember correctly, and the new movie is basically the same as the old one) human intervention to speed along intelligence without more development in areas where monkeys and humans differ. That would not likely happen with natural evolution.
I can imagine that in the worst case, the geeks will evolve to look something like chimpanzees, the jocks will become more like gorillas, and the politicians will begin to resemble orangutans.
I can't picture chimpanzee-like creatures writing, say, the Linux kernel. Perhaps a more relaistic idea is geeks like people today, but with less of the survival stuff and more brain. The jocks can magine looking like athletic gorillas, at least until the geeks take over, and as for politicians... only time will tell.
Have you ever played an evolution simulation like Primordial Life (sorry, Windows only. Wine?)? You can play aroung with the mutation rate, and try to find somethig optimal. Too low, and your creatures will never get past simple things, too high and you will create ill-adapted dodos. Perhaps this radiation is raising the mutation rate in the world. Have fun....
Imagine a lot of tiny nanorobots with AI and the ability to reproduce via a reproduction machine on the wall or something.. Then imagine them evolving in a large room. Try to picture what would happen.
So, you wouldn't let people start up a web server, or run sshd on their machines to allow secure remote logins? Or let the network initialization happen after the login prompt comes up?
If you want to run a web server, then server software is strictly needed. You could enable it. Ditto for all those other services. There goes your argument...
Now, should I make a comment about how the (stereo)typical American that knows nothing about the rest of the world, or point out that Australia is generally considered as part of the west, at least in a political sense?
I believe you are describing the typical American. The kind that thinks we're better than the rest of the world just because we have more nukes, or something. (I'm American).
Do you really think that international tourism hasn't dropped already? This little thing happened, something to do with planes. About 3 months ago. You may have heard about it on the TV.
This is practically a psychosis. There are a lot of people who think you'd have to be crazy to get on a plane. Now, how many planes were there that weren't hijacked? Besides, Australia doesn't have *that* many terrorists....
Yes, videogame censorship sucks. But this won't stick anyway. It hasn't before, and it won't now. The censoring of TV, movies, and games is getting overhauled now. GTA will probably get a harsh rating under the new system. Whatever. I'd prefer to have to download a copy of some game off the internet to having a government body like the FBI installing spyware and destroying my privacy.
Yes, spyware sucks. But how did this censorship get in place in the first place if it's sure to go away eventually?
BTW, It's far more fun to pretend that you're the Crocodile Hunter than to actually watch the show. This view is popular even in America!
NASA is much smarter than that. Their software for the space shuttle, for instance, was developed by a bunch of NASA programmers who went over their work exhaustively, where any error could be fatal. They were so cautious that they used four redundant processors in case three failed. They would NEVER entrust a giant moon laser to Microsoft.
Believe me, with NASA's funding problems, they do NOT want a software bug to screw up their chance at glory rivalling the Apollo program. Sorry MS...
SMTP doesn't have to verify the hash, at least not the way you are thinking.
Here's the idea. You are X, sending an email to Y. First, X takes some string from Y, perhaps the email address, and hashes it 2^L (L can be adjusted for faster processors) times (I'm using the scheme proposed by some of the previous responses to my post), then the email is sent via normal SMTP. It looks like this:
The user Y's computer goes through the emails and deletes any that don't have the correct hash of the week (precalculated by Y every week or so). This weeds out spam, and Y can enjoy legitimate emails.
You wouldn't have to rehash the hash for every email. You could just change the hashed thing every week and check, just an ordinary comparison.
Damn, there goes my Nobel, really thought I had a made a breakthrough with that algorithm.
So did I, once.:-)
Then I found out about how compression works, after pkzipping a zip file and discovering that it became bigger. Big disappointment. I guess you just have to get it through your head that computers aren't magic.
An alternative to taking spammers to court is to make them calculate an n-bit partial hash collision on some text, and delete email that doesn't do so. This means that sending email will be processor intensive enough to render bulk emailing impractical but not intensive enough to noticably slow down ordinary email such as I could send to a few people with suggestions like this. The full specification can be found here.
A modification I would add is the ability to give trusted people, like SourceForge mailing lists, passwords they could send and bypass the hash system, so they could operate the mailing lists.
If you think that crossover between coding and art demeans both, take a look at The International Obfuscated C Code Contest. There are some quite artistic pieces of code there, for example the one that looks like an ASCII ball and calculates pi.
MS doesn't have a patent on DRM, it has a patent on a DRM OS. Other platforms could--sigh--support DRM. There just wouldn't be OS-level support for it.
Knowing Microsoft, I probably wouldn't worry too much about this. They'll probably leave some big security holes.
Vel-cro
* Microwaves
* All those cool sattelites
* Lots of great research which has led to a lot of applied stuff.
Downloadable ROMS?
on
SNES Portable
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
An ability that would be really nice is being able to store ROMS on a memory stick or something. That way you could download obscure games and play them on this thing. It works great for computers with SNES9X and ZSNES; why can't it work for this?
A society that thinks that you can teach sex education and birth control in schools without legitimizing adolescent sex but at the same time thinks that teaching basic gun safety in schools would lead to more Columbines is too fekked up to ever think it should teach the difference.
I'm in favor of teaching both. In the case of sex ed., people typically want to get laid, so the best thing to do in that case is to teach them sanity in doing it.
Teaching gun safety won't lead to more shootings; Insanity and stupidity will. Gun safety does just that: make guns safer for the people weilding them.
And a culture that thinks that
30 second ads can change the way you behave, yet
watching 24 minutes of smart ass kids demeaning each other and every adult in the area won't change behavior is really in denial, and is totally unable to rationally address any of the issues we raised here.
The commercials and playground/hallway/school scene you described can both change the bahavior of gullable people and people who want to "fit in" in a stupid place. I'm immune to both; the only effect they have on me is to annoy me.
If you get to people early enough you can steer them away from such idiocy.
Slashdot Mirror
Perhaps a game would be really successful if it had totally screwed up physics, but screwed up in cool ways, like paths that can twist around so you're upside-down but still gravity pulls you toward the path. Add flashy surreal graphics, and you've got something I'd like to play.
Speaking of GNU stuff, there is a more full-featured bunch of programs called GNU Enterprise. It is more heavyweight than GNUCash and has a good design. The only drawback I can see is that it is still in a pretty early stage of development. They have some stuff already, but they still have a long way to go.
By the way, you don't have to be an extrovert to know that most people would like to be more connected to each other so they can talk about more insignificant stuff.
Just another troll. Sigh.
People have been studying Einstein's brain, and they've found it to be different from most. If I remember correctly, it had enlarged areas where visual thought usually takes place.
Perhaps this guy should consider a new idea: taking people's gifts and not giving them what they want! It may harm his credibility in the eyes of many people, but it might be okay if he came out and proclaimed to the world this policy. "I'll take gifts, but I won't do what you want!"
Do you mean the reference to Planet of the Apes? Yes, it was a good one. But that involved (if I remember correctly, and the new movie is basically the same as the old one) human intervention to speed along intelligence without more development in areas where monkeys and humans differ. That would not likely happen with natural evolution.
I can't picture chimpanzee-like creatures writing, say, the Linux kernel. Perhaps a more relaistic idea is geeks like people today, but with less of the survival stuff and more brain. The jocks can magine looking like athletic gorillas, at least until the geeks take over, and as for politicians... only time will tell.
Have you ever played an evolution simulation like Primordial Life (sorry, Windows only. Wine?)? You can play aroung with the mutation rate, and try to find somethig optimal. Too low, and your creatures will never get past simple things, too high and you will create ill-adapted dodos. Perhaps this radiation is raising the mutation rate in the world. Have fun....
Code of the Lifemaker (by James Hogan) anyone?
If you want to run a web server, then server software is strictly needed. You could enable it. Ditto for all those other services. There goes your argument...
First, does one hair make a beard? (no). Do two hairs? Three?
Eventually you will get to a number like 3000 that will be a beard. Oh? Why isn't 2999 hairs a beard?
No beards exist.
You can kill shopkeepers, kill succubi for their money after you finish with them, eat little kittens, and do all sorts of Unaustralian things.
They can't censor life. So they will fail.
I believe you are describing the typical American. The kind that thinks we're better than the rest of the world just because we have more nukes, or something. (I'm American).
Do you really think that international tourism hasn't dropped already? This little thing happened, something to do with planes. About 3 months ago. You may have heard about it on the TV.
This is practically a psychosis. There are a lot of people who think you'd have to be crazy to get on a plane. Now, how many planes were there that weren't hijacked? Besides, Australia doesn't have *that* many terrorists....
Yes, videogame censorship sucks. But this won't stick anyway. It hasn't before, and it won't now. The censoring of TV, movies, and games is getting overhauled now. GTA will probably get a harsh rating under the new system. Whatever. I'd prefer to have to download a copy of some game off the internet to having a government body like the FBI installing spyware and destroying my privacy.
Yes, spyware sucks. But how did this censorship get in place in the first place if it's sure to go away eventually?
BTW, It's far more fun to pretend that you're the Crocodile Hunter than to actually watch the show. This view is popular even in America!
I think that the people who don't seperate the game from reality are already screwed up. Think of what the world would be like otherwise:
As it is, we just have a few lunatics like this.
Believe me, with NASA's funding problems, they do NOT want a software bug to screw up their chance at glory rivalling the Apollo program. Sorry MS...
Here's the idea. You are X, sending an email to Y. First, X takes some string from Y, perhaps the email address, and hashes it 2^L (L can be adjusted for faster processors) times (I'm using the scheme proposed by some of the previous responses to my post), then the email is sent via normal SMTP. It looks like this:
header stuff
hash: nugreynv847nq843nvhrq9q (or somethng)
Dear foo, merry christmas. Etc.
The user Y's computer goes through the emails and deletes any that don't have the correct hash of the week (precalculated by Y every week or so). This weeds out spam, and Y can enjoy legitimate emails.
You wouldn't have to rehash the hash for every email. You could just change the hashed thing every week and check, just an ordinary comparison.
So did I, once. :-)
Then I found out about how compression works, after pkzipping a zip file and discovering that it became bigger. Big disappointment. I guess you just have to get it through your head that computers aren't magic.
A modification I would add is the ability to give trusted people, like SourceForge mailing lists, passwords they could send and bypass the hash system, so they could operate the mailing lists.
Not everyone who codes in perl is a c0D1r; most aren't. Perl is what you make of it. In my experience it is good for small programs.
If you want a language where everything is made for bad code, try INTERCAL or Malbolge.
If you think that crossover between coding and art demeans both, take a look at The International Obfuscated C Code Contest. There are some quite artistic pieces of code there, for example the one that looks like an ASCII ball and calculates pi.
Knowing Microsoft, I probably wouldn't worry too much about this. They'll probably leave some big security holes.
Vel-cro
* Microwaves
* All those cool sattelites
* Lots of great research which has led to a lot of applied stuff.
An ability that would be really nice is being able to store ROMS on a memory stick or something. That way you could download obscure games and play them on this thing. It works great for computers with SNES9X and ZSNES; why can't it work for this?
I'm in favor of teaching both. In the case of sex ed., people typically want to get laid, so the best thing to do in that case is to teach them sanity in doing it.
Teaching gun safety won't lead to more shootings; Insanity and stupidity will. Gun safety does just that: make guns safer for the people weilding them.
The commercials and playground/hallway/school scene you described can both change the bahavior of gullable people and people who want to "fit in" in a stupid place. I'm immune to both; the only effect they have on me is to annoy me.
If you get to people early enough you can steer them away from such idiocy.