Even simple mass-recruiting ants have much more complex and labile problem solving skills than we ever thought
Both solutions to the example maze could be solved by simply favouring left turns whenever possible. I'd like to see an example that challenges the ants in different ways.
The other thing is, with a couch co-op or a single player game, I have more control over the difficulty level of the game. I freely admit I'm not the greatest at FPS games, but with a single player game I can set the AI difficulty or with a friend playing at home I can ask them to go easy on me (or vise versa). Getting killed every 10 seconds in a giant online game isn't very fun, especially with increasing respawn delays.
And finally, I can play a local game forever. Online only games can (and have been) killed whenever it's not profitable enough to fund the game servers.
OpenLeaks is looking to provide information to interested parties, e.g., journalists, whereas WikiLeaks is there to disseminate the information to everyone.
I'm not too hopeful of how that will play out. Big media will probably agree amongst themselves what to release and what not to release. How is that different than how things work today?
What they could do is give the media advanced access to the information, but X days later give it to everyone. That makes sure that eventually the information does get out.
One thing I'm not sure of is how to determine what should not be leaked - they probably need some sort of a policy on that. For example, "we will not assist in leaking X, Y, and Z".
Agreed. This comment from an EA Exec once again shows that EA is somewhat out of touch with the gaming world.
Someone should remind them that you can play split-screen on a console but very few games these days take advantage of that. The disadvantage to network-only play is I can't invite a friend over to play a game anymore - we have to play online. It's not the same thing!
I find a lot of games have vastly different gameplay between single and multi player modes (particularly shooters). Some games I prefer single player (modern combat 2), others I prefer online (battlefield 2), and yet others are just as good online or single player (civilization revolution, which has the same gameplay between single and multi player).
Keys that "nobody uses" are great for command sequences for KVMs, virtual machines, desktop environments, etc...
On the CAPS LOCK key, I sometimes use it when entering 'constant' identifiers into source code where the convention is to use all uppercase letters. eg. PI_CONST = 3.1415 Though I've gotten pretty good at entering all uppercase letters with just the SHIFT keys (and I suspect the same will happen to others if the CAPS LOCK is taken away from those who shout in their online posts).
Then there's the "house of mirrors" mod the inventor of the nude scanner proposed, so that nude images would be distorted. Seems like a reasonable tradeoff to me.
People talk about the difficult choice between being seen nude and bring groped.... is it really that difficult a decision? People voluntarily strip nude in front of strangers in public change rooms every day (and some seem to be pretty proud of their wanker flying around for extended periods). How's a nude scan different? And you get to look like an Avatar, not even a bare skin shot. Not awesome, but not the end of the world, really.
Groping, on the other hand, is sexual molestation and can (and I'm sure *does*) leave lasting emotional scars on people who have to endure it. And that story about a guy who was groped to the point of ejaculation. Oh, then being charged with assault, of all things! - what the f--- is that about? On top of that, being detained and fined for refusing such abhorrent treatment! Now that's what gets my blood pressure up. There's no way in hell I would allow my child to be searched in that way.
So I'd suggest they install the house-of-mirrors mod and remove the "choice" of being groped which isn't even a choice at all. Case closed.
From the article:
Every time we convince ourselves that things “aren’t that bad” and thus not in need of change, we are training ourselves to be complacent in the face of injustice, and we are weakening our capacity to challenge those forces most in need of change. It could always be worse, but that doesn’t mean we should surrender the opportunity to make it better.
Yeah, people could do more. But look at the huge demonstrations that occurred during the Bush administration (and maybe the Obama era, haven't kept tabs). Media barely covered it. Nothing changed. I'm sure a huge number of people went to jail and ruined their lives over it, and we'll never know their names. Do you want to join them? If not, then what do you plan to do differently?
The "Free Press" is not actually free to report whatever it feels like. Sorry if that's news to you.
"Very rarely did we communicate through the press anything that we didn't absolutely control," said Dunn.
"One of the reasons we did so many of the David Plouffe videos was not just for our supporters, but also because it was a way for us to get our message out without having to actually talk to reporters," said Dunn, referring to Plouffe, who was Obama's chief campaign manager.
This was also true under the Bush administration. I'm sure you can find other sources that confirm this.
I'm not saying wikileaks should or shouldn't have released what it did... but if you're wanting to wait for mainstream media to release damning evidence of the likes of what we've seen recently, don't hold your breath for it. Wikileaks is filling a void left by media that is controlled by government and corporate entities.
There's something you don't understand: wikileaks worked with media and government for several months prior to the release of those classified documents to discuss what should be redacted.
If he wanted a long, heathy and happy life, he could've remained in obscurity like all of us. I doubt that's his goal.
There's a lot of ways to look at these leaks, and one of them is a wake up call to the people of the world of what goes on and how things are run (it's a lot more "high school" than I ever would have guessed).
Cannibalizing isn't the right word. If it were, Apple would also allow "cannibalizing" of their app sales by allowing publishing of any apps, not just those Apple thinks are worthy and match its brand image.
I love the way an iPad looks but knowing it'll be just as function-limited as my iPod makes me cringe. No, thanks! My eee PC with Ubuntu will have to do for now (but I can't wait until Ubuntu's equivalent of an "app store" is ready).
Speaking of removing the drive train, what about removing it altogether? I remember seeing a show where a bus had 4 electric motors - 1 in each wheel - resulting in much less wasted energy than a conventional drive shaft + differential design.
Except the people shown in the audience are App Store users.
I've owned 4 Apple computers and 3 iPods of various models. With Apple's current trajectory in plain view, I am very doubtful I will buy another Apple product of any kind. I'll let the ones I have die naturally and won't replace them.
Thankfully we still have alternatives. Vote with your wallet, people!
The bright white flash style of screen transition should be used sparingly. The first video makes copious use of it and it's very distracting. Scrubbing through a couple other videos, it looks pieced together by an amateur with no scene seemingly longer than 5 or 10 seconds.
Not in all cases! I had to spend about 2 hours on the phone with Dell, rebooting my server, flashing the bios, running diagnostics, etc... before they would send me a new part.
So the health of the Earth is in a tailspin and we've still got people/corporations that continue to large-scale strip whatever they can get their hands on.
Tar sands of Alberta, Canada will eventually be the size of Florida, USA. Besides the completely destroyed wildlife habitat, millions (yes, really) of birds will die in the toxic tailing ponds and billions of gallons of pristine glacier water will be made toxic. This when thousands of species are endangered and millions of people don't have safe drinking water.
Shark finning for the Chinese market have caused over 90% of the world shark population to disappear.
And am unsure about your claim that driving "personalities" equals emotions. Unless strategy game AI can be considered emotional as they use similar "personalities" when prioritizing options.
A fair point to raise. But how do you resolve the conflicts which arise from competing personalities? In a strategy game the resolution may be waging war or taking a pawn. What about in a self-driving situation?
Would everyone simply opt for the 'aggressive' personality? Why would one ever choose the 'passive' personality? (I'm looking for tradeoffs, as there are always tradeoffs).
I could see an AI one-upmanship resulting from these choices. I wonder if passengers of auto-driven cars would feel road rage when an auto-driven limousine is always given priority over them.
a radar or lidar in the front, and it can detect and respond to objects appearing in the path of travel. There is no need for it to be able to tell the different between a kid, a ball or a animal.
Consider this situation: there is a kid, a ball, and an animal blocking the road. You have no choice but to hit one of them. Which do you choose?
One bit of the article gave me pause: "It drove at the speed limit, which it knew because the limit for every road is included in its database, and left the freeway several exits later."
I wouldn't be too confident of a self-driving vehicle that couldn't even read a speed limit sign. What about road construction, "slippery when wet", temporary detour, etc... signs? It's very important to be able to read a sign.
Also says: "The car can be programmed for different driving personalities — from cautious, in which it is more likely to yield to another car, to aggressive, where it is more likely to go first. "
As soon as you invite emotion into the picture, you're opening the door to traffic accidents. That's why a good portion of accidents happen: emotion (road rage, impatience, etc).
Still, a great and welcome step to self-driving technology!
That's bad, but frankly, most people don't read the TOS anyway (which is another problem--when the TOS are too long and full of legalese, it's annoying, difficult, and unexpected for people to bother reading them.)
I wish we could force lawyers to read through all the source code to an application before allowing them to use it. Change the functionality of buttons randomly (and without notice) so they have to re-read the source code to be sure it still does what they expect. That's sort of what they're expecting of us with EULAs and TOS!
I'm glad to hear that - I really disliked the UI for Civ IV: It felt like work.
Now if Civilization V would come to the console like Civ Rev did I'd definitely be forking some money over! In fact all these weeks I was expecting it to come out on the console so I'm pretty disappointed today.
Look at the relative 'failure' of sub-notebooks with Linux preinstalled. Most people expected to run Windows apps on them and I'll bet a very large number were returned to the store for this reason (otherwise why would they not be offered anymore?). Assume for a moment that most people do want to run Windows for whatever reason (familiarity, MS office, etc...).
Then they start getting into open source software on Windows and seeing all that is out there like games, word processors, ad nauseum. At some point the masses will realize that most open source software is also cross-platform. Hey, so I don't need Windows to run all this stuff? Then the landscape changes.
Slashdot Mirror
Both solutions to the example maze could be solved by simply favouring left turns whenever possible.
I'd like to see an example that challenges the ants in different ways.
You'd also better prevent your users from plugging in devices onto the wired and wireless network.
And disable bluetooth.
The user could also open the case up and plug in a hard drive.
Well, you'll never plug all the holes.
The other thing is, with a couch co-op or a single player game, I have more control over the difficulty level of the game. I freely admit I'm not the greatest at FPS games, but with a single player game I can set the AI difficulty or with a friend playing at home I can ask them to go easy on me (or vise versa). Getting killed every 10 seconds in a giant online game isn't very fun, especially with increasing respawn delays.
And finally, I can play a local game forever. Online only games can (and have been) killed whenever it's not profitable enough to fund the game servers.
I'm not too hopeful of how that will play out. Big media will probably agree amongst themselves what to release and what not to release. How is that different than how things work today?
What they could do is give the media advanced access to the information, but X days later give it to everyone. That makes sure that eventually the information does get out.
One thing I'm not sure of is how to determine what should not be leaked - they probably need some sort of a policy on that. For example, "we will not assist in leaking X, Y, and Z".
Agreed. This comment from an EA Exec once again shows that EA is somewhat out of touch with the gaming world.
Someone should remind them that you can play split-screen on a console but very few games these days take advantage of that. The disadvantage to network-only play is I can't invite a friend over to play a game anymore - we have to play online. It's not the same thing!
I find a lot of games have vastly different gameplay between single and multi player modes (particularly shooters). Some games I prefer single player (modern combat 2), others I prefer online (battlefield 2), and yet others are just as good online or single player (civilization revolution, which has the same gameplay between single and multi player).
My first thought is: how long until we see USDA-leaks. And that might not be a bad thing.
The big yellow one is the sun! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ORTLn-RDnQ4
But seriously, if you look at the sun in the middle of your video, the mass ejection appears to be much larger than the Sun itself. Wow!
Keys that "nobody uses" are great for command sequences for KVMs, virtual machines, desktop environments, etc...
On the CAPS LOCK key, I sometimes use it when entering 'constant' identifiers into source code where the convention is to use all uppercase letters. eg. PI_CONST = 3.1415
Though I've gotten pretty good at entering all uppercase letters with just the SHIFT keys (and I suspect the same will happen to others if the CAPS LOCK is taken away from those who shout in their online posts).
Then there's the "house of mirrors" mod the inventor of the nude scanner proposed, so that nude images would be distorted. Seems like a reasonable tradeoff to me.
People talk about the difficult choice between being seen nude and bring groped.... is it really that difficult a decision? People voluntarily strip nude in front of strangers in public change rooms every day (and some seem to be pretty proud of their wanker flying around for extended periods). How's a nude scan different? And you get to look like an Avatar, not even a bare skin shot. Not awesome, but not the end of the world, really.
Groping, on the other hand, is sexual molestation and can (and I'm sure *does*) leave lasting emotional scars on people who have to endure it. And that story about a guy who was groped to the point of ejaculation. Oh, then being charged with assault, of all things! - what the f--- is that about? On top of that, being detained and fined for refusing such abhorrent treatment! Now that's what gets my blood pressure up. There's no way in hell I would allow my child to be searched in that way.
So I'd suggest they install the house-of-mirrors mod and remove the "choice" of being groped which isn't even a choice at all. Case closed.
From the article:
Yeah, people could do more. But look at the huge demonstrations that occurred during the Bush administration (and maybe the Obama era, haven't kept tabs). Media barely covered it. Nothing changed. I'm sure a huge number of people went to jail and ruined their lives over it, and we'll never know their names. Do you want to join them? If not, then what do you plan to do differently?
The "Free Press" is not actually free to report whatever it feels like. Sorry if that's news to you.
See http://www.wnd.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=113347
This was also true under the Bush administration. I'm sure you can find other sources that confirm this.
I'm not saying wikileaks should or shouldn't have released what it did... but if you're wanting to wait for mainstream media to release damning evidence of the likes of what we've seen recently, don't hold your breath for it. Wikileaks is filling a void left by media that is controlled by government and corporate entities.
There's something you don't understand: wikileaks worked with media and government for several months prior to the release of those classified documents to discuss what should be redacted.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/11/24/wikileaks_cables_pentagon/
In other words, government had months to move people around and out of harm's way prior to the release. That's my understanding.
If he wanted a long, heathy and happy life, he could've remained in obscurity like all of us. I doubt that's his goal.
There's a lot of ways to look at these leaks, and one of them is a wake up call to the people of the world of what goes on and how things are run (it's a lot more "high school" than I ever would have guessed).
Things need to change.
Cannibalizing isn't the right word. If it were, Apple would also allow "cannibalizing" of their app sales by allowing publishing of any apps, not just those Apple thinks are worthy and match its brand image.
I love the way an iPad looks but knowing it'll be just as function-limited as my iPod makes me cringe. No, thanks! My eee PC with Ubuntu will have to do for now (but I can't wait until Ubuntu's equivalent of an "app store" is ready).
Speaking of removing the drive train, what about removing it altogether? I remember seeing a show where a bus had 4 electric motors - 1 in each wheel - resulting in much less wasted energy than a conventional drive shaft + differential design.
http://www.hybridcars.com/components/michelins-reinvents-wheel-with-motors-25308.html
Wow, does Apple's 1984 commercial seem ironic now:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OYecfV3ubP8
Except the people shown in the audience are App Store users.
I've owned 4 Apple computers and 3 iPods of various models. With Apple's current trajectory in plain view, I am very doubtful I will buy another Apple product of any kind. I'll let the ones I have die naturally and won't replace them.
Thankfully we still have alternatives. Vote with your wallet, people!
The bright white flash style of screen transition should be used sparingly. The first video makes copious use of it and it's very distracting.
Scrubbing through a couple other videos, it looks pieced together by an amateur with no scene seemingly longer than 5 or 10 seconds.
Possibly better off as a slideshow.
Not in all cases! I had to spend about 2 hours on the phone with Dell, rebooting my server, flashing the bios, running diagnostics, etc... before they would send me a new part.
So the health of the Earth is in a tailspin and we've still got people/corporations that continue to large-scale strip whatever they can get their hands on.
Tar sands of Alberta, Canada will eventually be the size of Florida, USA. Besides the completely destroyed wildlife habitat, millions (yes, really) of birds will die in the toxic tailing ponds and billions of gallons of pristine glacier water will be made toxic. This when thousands of species are endangered and millions of people don't have safe drinking water.
Shark finning for the Chinese market have caused over 90% of the world shark population to disappear.
What issues are you aware of?
And am unsure about your claim that driving "personalities" equals emotions. Unless strategy game AI can be considered emotional as they use similar "personalities" when prioritizing options.
A fair point to raise. But how do you resolve the conflicts which arise from competing personalities? In a strategy game the resolution may be waging war or taking a pawn. What about in a self-driving situation?
Would everyone simply opt for the 'aggressive' personality? Why would one ever choose the 'passive' personality? (I'm looking for tradeoffs, as there are always tradeoffs).
I could see an AI one-upmanship resulting from these choices. I wonder if passengers of auto-driven cars would feel road rage when an auto-driven limousine is always given priority over them.
a radar or lidar in the front, and it can detect and respond to objects appearing in the path of travel. There is no need for it to be able to tell the different between a kid, a ball or a animal.
Consider this situation: there is a kid, a ball, and an animal blocking the road. You have no choice but to hit one of them. Which do you choose?
One bit of the article gave me pause: "It drove at the speed limit, which it knew because the limit for every road is included in its database, and left the freeway several exits later."
I wouldn't be too confident of a self-driving vehicle that couldn't even read a speed limit sign. What about road construction, "slippery when wet", temporary detour, etc... signs? It's very important to be able to read a sign.
Also says: "The car can be programmed for different driving personalities — from cautious, in which it is more likely to yield to another car, to aggressive, where it is more likely to go first. "
As soon as you invite emotion into the picture, you're opening the door to traffic accidents. That's why a good portion of accidents happen: emotion (road rage, impatience, etc).
Still, a great and welcome step to self-driving technology!
What about GOOG419^WGmail?
That's bad, but frankly, most people don't read the TOS anyway (which is another problem--when the TOS are too long and full of legalese, it's annoying, difficult, and unexpected for people to bother reading them.)
I wish we could force lawyers to read through all the source code to an application before allowing them to use it. Change the functionality of buttons randomly (and without notice) so they have to re-read the source code to be sure it still does what they expect. That's sort of what they're expecting of us with EULAs and TOS!
I've never heard that in daily conversation. Ever hear the expression "bought and paid for"? Or "what did you (pay|buy it for) - wholesale or retail?"
UI is inspired by Civ Rev...
I'm glad to hear that - I really disliked the UI for Civ IV: It felt like work.
Now if Civilization V would come to the console like Civ Rev did I'd definitely be forking some money over! In fact all these weeks I was expecting it to come out on the console so I'm pretty disappointed today.
Look at the relative 'failure' of sub-notebooks with Linux preinstalled. Most people expected to run Windows apps on them and I'll bet a very large number were returned to the store for this reason (otherwise why would they not be offered anymore?).
Assume for a moment that most people do want to run Windows for whatever reason (familiarity, MS office, etc...).
Then they start getting into open source software on Windows and seeing all that is out there like games, word processors, ad nauseum. At some point the masses will realize that most open source software is also cross-platform. Hey, so I don't need Windows to run all this stuff? Then the landscape changes.