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Re:Why no mention?
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BioShock Review
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· Score: 4, Informative
The install limitations will be removed in a few months. They're just temporary to protect early sales. Again, so long as you uninstall the game, you get an install slot back. As for why they need this limit, they need it to stop you from distributing your copy of the game to thousands of people.
It seems every government has some type of information it would rather people would not be able to exchange. The US wants to stop online gambling. China wants to stop talk of Democracy. Russia wants to stop people from supporting Chechen independence. Of course, the US also wants to stop child pornography. Lots of people want to stop whatever it is they consider to be hate speech. Germany wants to prevent you from denying the Holocaust. Islamic countries want to prohibit depictions of the prophet or "insults" to their religion.
Certainly some of these things are bad. And some of them also cover activities that should be prohibited. (Hiring someone to kill your wife can be done just by exchanging information over the Internet.)
Someone needs to take the principled stand that people can exchange whatever information they want so long as they're not offering compensation in exchange for a violent crime. Otherwise, we'll wind up with a world where all of these countries get together and make it a crime in your country to help someone in another country violate that country's crazy Internet laws.
This may mean that you lose the right to stop whatever information exchange you personally find distasteful. But in exchange, you will be fighting for lots of real freedoms for lots of really oppressed people.
"No, no, no, no, no. No one ever said the server has to micromanage each client. Transmitting coordinates and letting the client map it out will not allow him to suddenly interfere with another player's ability to shoot him. My point was, GPL will not make a game a cheater's paradise. Good design can prevent that."
I'm sorry, there are only two possibilities:
1) The server trusts the client software not to reveal information to the player that he should not have.
2) The server does not reveal to the client software any information that the player does not have.
If you transmit coordinates of other players to the client software, then if it is modified, it can reveal those locations to the player. You can't escape these two choices.
For simple games, 2 is plausible. Card games work really well with option 2. On a LAN, option 1 is plausible for many games. However, games like first person shooters over the Internet would just not work with option 2, option 1 is basically mandatory.
This is what makes cheating possible and anti-cheating measures essentially mandatory.
"I think it is poor design if a person could cheat just through changing his client. Pertinent information to the game's state (such as stats or whatever) should be stored on the server."
This doesn't work for two major reasons:
1) Who says there's a server? Are you just going to reject peer-to-peer gaming? Who says the server is trusted? What if the server is also untrusted and there are trusted "master servers"? (As, for example, Battlefield 2142 uses.) You can't expect the master servers to run all the games, that's what the servers are for.
2) For poker, you can make the client just the user's agent, but for almost any other game, it's impractical to design a client this way. For one thing, it means the client always has to go to the server before it can present the user with any information that becomes available to the user as a result of a decision the user makes. This increases latency dramatically and would make most first-person shooters unplayable across the Internet.
Imagine if you're turning (or even walking forward) in an FPS -- every frame contains new information you are not supposed to have until that frame is rendered. Are you suggesting a 60 frame per second game should be receiving 60 packets per second with the new data in each frame?
He should be able to move his magnetic domains about once per nanosecond. If you put 128 bits on a ring, that would mean a single ring could clock out 128 bits in as many nanoseconds. There's a bit of write overhead involved in bringing the correct domain underneath the write head, kind of like seek time. Again, for 128 bits per ring, assuming random access, average seek delay would in the neighborhood of 64 nanoseconds.
You would likely rig things so that writes are buffered and sequential addresses take sequential magnetic domains. So write speed would be quite high unless you had out-of-order writes to the same domain, in which case you'd stall an average of 64nS.
You can imagine a pathological write pattern, kind of like trying to alternately write to disk sectors on complete opposite sides of the disk. Even with such a pathological write pattern, you could still do one write every 200nS or so.
Guesstimated throughput would be, assuming 128-bit operations, 1nS rotation time, 128 bits per racetrack, and reasonable buffering and multiplexing:
Random read: 250MB/s Sequential read: 5GB/s Random write: 500MB/s Sequential write: 5GB/s
If you think that just because the content provider makes the content available without charging you, you have no obligation to access it any particular way, think about just what you can justify with this argument. I mean, many providers make email servers available without charging anyone. Is spamming okay?
From where does the obligation not to use mail servers that way come from? Why is it okay for you to use someone else's web server any way you want (even against their wishes and even when it imposes real costs on other people) when it's not okay to do the same thing to a mail server?
If you want to use other people's free services, you have an obligation to use them the way the providers intended. The same applies in the physical world. Many newspapers are available for free outside my local supermarket. Can I go by every day and throw them all in the nearby (free) garbage can?
(However, I do agree that if content providers abuse the agreement by providing broken, irrelevant, malicious, or criminal ads, you have every right to abuse the agreement right back. You don't have to "take it or leave it".)
They have a list of people that *received* money, not a list of people that bought money. How do you think they can tell who bought money? You think the gilsellers care who pays them or who they give the money to? They just do what they're told. You think there aren't Joe Jobs?
It doesn't say they are "better thinkers". It just says that are more *accurate*. The task requires a trade off between speed and accuracy, and Liberals made that trade off differently from Conservatives. (If you have enough details of the study to establish otherwise, please point me to them.)
You have it backwards. SRAM uses transistors to store the data, DRAM uses a capacitor. Basically, SRAM has one switch that's closed if the data is a one and one that's closed if it's a zero. Each switch being on keeps the other one off. On power up, the transistors race and whether you get a zero or one depends largely on variation in gain and leakage in the transistors themselves.
See this. Basically M1/M2 races M3/M4, each one turning on turns the other off. The only stable states are M2/M3 on or M1/M4 on. Theoretically, there is no particular reason the circuit should prefer one state over the other.
Linux has an entropy pool that allows you to turn low-quality randomness into high-quality random numbers. If you were to use this with Linux, you would likely use it as an input into that entropy pool. But it doesn't seem that this is practical or useful on typical PCs.
New sources of entropy are always at least academically interesting.
Not only is the group complained about not what it appears to be, but the complainers are not what they appear to be either. They don't just want this group removed but "all similar disrespectful groups of religion". In other words, their objection is not to the profanity, but the lack of respect, which more than likely means the presence of criticism.
I'm pretty sure there are only three reasons you are still asked to turn off phones on a plane (other than during take-off and landing, which is for real safety reasons):
1) A rogue device that is broken or unusual (for example, a high-power transmitter) might actually cause problems for guidance or communications equipment.
2) Operating cellphones from a plane can cause capacity problems for operators. The signals are line-of-sight and you might tie up a channel on hundreds of sites because all the sites can receive your signals.
3) There is no incentive to work to lift the ban as the airlines would rather charge you for their phone service.
What puzzles me is why we don't do this. I can think of several good reasons why we would. One is the quid pro quo. Another is that if we leave French secret satellites off the list, then if someone spots a satellite not on the list, they won't know whether it's U.S. or French. The same is true ephemerides are made public by amateur spotters. If people don't know whose satellites it is, they'll have to hide from all the satellites, increasing the chances they'll miss hiding from U.S. satellites. (In the case of spy satellites.)
"Surely the wise course of action would be to deny the existence of all secret US satellites plus a smattering of somebody elses's satellites, too. Just to stir up the entropy pool a bit."
We don't actively deny anything. We simply say, "Here's a list of all satellites known to us. If it's not on the list, as far as we know, it doesn't exist." I presume we leave off that list both our own secret satellites and at least some other country's secret satellites. I'm just puzzled why we don't extend the French the same courtesy. Last I heard, they were our allies.
I see a lot of posts on various forums from people who don't have copies of their own web sites, databases, email contacts lists, and so on. I feel bad for these people, but they really are victims of their own stupidity.
I have this conversation regularly:
Me: Sorry, the only solution to that is to restore from your latest backup.
You don't need to be connected to the Internet. A local machine or your router/gateway will work just as well.
The randomness you get comes from the phase noise between the crystal oscillator on your network card and the crystal oscillator that produces your CPU's internal clock. This noise is in turn due to unpredictable microscopic zone temperature variations in the two quartz crystals.
You need to use your highest-precision timer (the TSC in a typical PC) to measure the arrival times. This is one of the best ways to mine thermal noise for true randomness on a conventional PC.
Umm, no. When we talk about "true randomness" we literally mean that it is impossible to predict. When something is impractical to predict, we call it "pseudo randomness". A coin toss may actually be truly random, depending upon quantum interactions between the coin and the air (how precisely molecules bump into the coin while it's in the air), it might also be pseudo-random, I don't think the answer is known and may depend upon precisely how the coin is flipped.
There are many things that we have good reason to think are truly random. Radioactive decay is a good example. Which slit an electron will pass through in a double-slit experiment is another.
If you add a daily quest, you don't add gil-sinks, you remove gil sources. Gil-sinks are one solution to a problem, and the problem is excessive currency creation. The only thing that can cause inflation is the creation of too much currency or too many valuable items. The source end of the equation needs to be fixed.
Unfortunately, Einstein didn't quite live long enough to respond to Bell's Inequality. I wonder whether he would have accepted that, yes, it seems God does play dice with the universe. He could also have chosen to reject locality, which leads to the kind of strange conclusion that everything is predictable, but could depend on something that happened on Alpha Centauri a millisecond ago.
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The install limitations will be removed in a few months. They're just temporary to protect early sales. Again, so long as you uninstall the game, you get an install slot back. As for why they need this limit, they need it to stop you from distributing your copy of the game to thousands of people.
It seems every government has some type of information it would rather people would not be able to exchange. The US wants to stop online gambling. China wants to stop talk of Democracy. Russia wants to stop people from supporting Chechen independence. Of course, the US also wants to stop child pornography. Lots of people want to stop whatever it is they consider to be hate speech. Germany wants to prevent you from denying the Holocaust. Islamic countries want to prohibit depictions of the prophet or "insults" to their religion.
Certainly some of these things are bad. And some of them also cover activities that should be prohibited. (Hiring someone to kill your wife can be done just by exchanging information over the Internet.)
Someone needs to take the principled stand that people can exchange whatever information they want so long as they're not offering compensation in exchange for a violent crime. Otherwise, we'll wind up with a world where all of these countries get together and make it a crime in your country to help someone in another country violate that country's crazy Internet laws.
This may mean that you lose the right to stop whatever information exchange you personally find distasteful. But in exchange, you will be fighting for lots of real freedoms for lots of really oppressed people.
"No, no, no, no, no. No one ever said the server has to micromanage each client. Transmitting coordinates and letting the client map it out will not allow him to suddenly interfere with another player's ability to shoot him. My point was, GPL will not make a game a cheater's paradise. Good design can prevent that."
I'm sorry, there are only two possibilities:
1) The server trusts the client software not to reveal information to the player that he should not have.
2) The server does not reveal to the client software any information that the player does not have.
If you transmit coordinates of other players to the client software, then if it is modified, it can reveal those locations to the player. You can't escape these two choices.
For simple games, 2 is plausible. Card games work really well with option 2. On a LAN, option 1 is plausible for many games. However, games like first person shooters over the Internet would just not work with option 2, option 1 is basically mandatory.
This is what makes cheating possible and anti-cheating measures essentially mandatory.
"I think it is poor design if a person could cheat just through changing his client. Pertinent information to the game's state (such as stats or whatever) should be stored on the server."
This doesn't work for two major reasons:
1) Who says there's a server? Are you just going to reject peer-to-peer gaming? Who says the server is trusted? What if the server is also untrusted and there are trusted "master servers"? (As, for example, Battlefield 2142 uses.) You can't expect the master servers to run all the games, that's what the servers are for.
2) For poker, you can make the client just the user's agent, but for almost any other game, it's impractical to design a client this way. For one thing, it means the client always has to go to the server before it can present the user with any information that becomes available to the user as a result of a decision the user makes. This increases latency dramatically and would make most first-person shooters unplayable across the Internet.
Imagine if you're turning (or even walking forward) in an FPS -- every frame contains new information you are not supposed to have until that frame is rendered. Are you suggesting a 60 frame per second game should be receiving 60 packets per second with the new data in each frame?
He should be able to move his magnetic domains about once per nanosecond. If you put 128 bits on a ring, that would mean a single ring could clock out 128 bits in as many nanoseconds. There's a bit of write overhead involved in bringing the correct domain underneath the write head, kind of like seek time. Again, for 128 bits per ring, assuming random access, average seek delay would in the neighborhood of 64 nanoseconds.
You would likely rig things so that writes are buffered and sequential addresses take sequential magnetic domains. So write speed would be quite high unless you had out-of-order writes to the same domain, in which case you'd stall an average of 64nS.
You can imagine a pathological write pattern, kind of like trying to alternately write to disk sectors on complete opposite sides of the disk. Even with such a pathological write pattern, you could still do one write every 200nS or so.
Guesstimated throughput would be, assuming 128-bit operations, 1nS rotation time, 128 bits per racetrack, and reasonable buffering and multiplexing:
Random read: 250MB/s
Sequential read: 5GB/s
Random write: 500MB/s
Sequential write: 5GB/s
If you think that just because the content provider makes the content available without charging you, you have no obligation to access it any particular way, think about just what you can justify with this argument. I mean, many providers make email servers available without charging anyone. Is spamming okay?
From where does the obligation not to use mail servers that way come from? Why is it okay for you to use someone else's web server any way you want (even against their wishes and even when it imposes real costs on other people) when it's not okay to do the same thing to a mail server?
If you want to use other people's free services, you have an obligation to use them the way the providers intended. The same applies in the physical world. Many newspapers are available for free outside my local supermarket. Can I go by every day and throw them all in the nearby (free) garbage can?
(However, I do agree that if content providers abuse the agreement by providing broken, irrelevant, malicious, or criminal ads, you have every right to abuse the agreement right back. You don't have to "take it or leave it".)
And two Wrights make ...
They have a list of people that *received* money, not a list of people that bought money. How do you think they can tell who bought money? You think the gilsellers care who pays them or who they give the money to? They just do what they're told. You think there aren't Joe Jobs?
"No, according to TFA, liberals are faster and more reliable at differentiating between the letter M and the letter W in a timed experiment."
I guess you didn't read the same FA the rest of us did. Where did you see that Liberals were faster or that the experiment was timed?
It doesn't say they are "better thinkers". It just says that are more *accurate*. The task requires a trade off between speed and accuracy, and Liberals made that trade off differently from Conservatives. (If you have enough details of the study to establish otherwise, please point me to them.)
How much do you want to bet that if Conservatives had scored higher for accuracy, the story would be about how Liberals process information faster.
You have it backwards. SRAM uses transistors to store the data, DRAM uses a capacitor. Basically, SRAM has one switch that's closed if the data is a one and one that's closed if it's a zero. Each switch being on keeps the other one off. On power up, the transistors race and whether you get a zero or one depends largely on variation in gain and leakage in the transistors themselves.
See this. Basically M1/M2 races M3/M4, each one turning on turns the other off. The only stable states are M2/M3 on or M1/M4 on. Theoretically, there is no particular reason the circuit should prefer one state over the other.
DS
Linux has an entropy pool that allows you to turn low-quality randomness into high-quality random numbers. If you were to use this with Linux, you would likely use it as an input into that entropy pool. But it doesn't seem that this is practical or useful on typical PCs.
New sources of entropy are always at least academically interesting.
Not only is the group complained about not what it appears to be, but the complainers are not what they appear to be either. They don't just want this group removed but "all similar disrespectful groups of religion". In other words, their objection is not to the profanity, but the lack of respect, which more than likely means the presence of criticism.
I'm pretty sure there are only three reasons you are still asked to turn off phones on a plane (other than during take-off and landing, which is for real safety reasons):
1) A rogue device that is broken or unusual (for example, a high-power transmitter) might actually cause problems for guidance or communications equipment.
2) Operating cellphones from a plane can cause capacity problems for operators. The signals are line-of-sight and you might tie up a channel on hundreds of sites because all the sites can receive your signals.
3) There is no incentive to work to lift the ban as the airlines would rather charge you for their phone service.
DS
What puzzles me is why we don't do this. I can think of several good reasons why we would. One is the quid pro quo. Another is that if we leave French secret satellites off the list, then if someone spots a satellite not on the list, they won't know whether it's U.S. or French. The same is true ephemerides are made public by amateur spotters. If people don't know whose satellites it is, they'll have to hide from all the satellites, increasing the chances they'll miss hiding from U.S. satellites. (In the case of spy satellites.)
"Surely the wise course of action would be to deny the existence of all secret US satellites plus a smattering of somebody elses's satellites, too. Just to stir up the entropy pool a bit."
We don't actively deny anything. We simply say, "Here's a list of all satellites known to us. If it's not on the list, as far as we know, it doesn't exist." I presume we leave off that list both our own secret satellites and at least some other country's secret satellites. I'm just puzzled why we don't extend the French the same courtesy. Last I heard, they were our allies.
Yes. So is thermal and shot noise. I believe all known sources of true randomness ultimately reduce to quantum uncertainty.
I see a lot of posts on various forums from people who don't have copies of their own web sites, databases, email contacts lists, and so on. I feel bad for these people, but they really are victims of their own stupidity.
I have this conversation regularly:
Me: Sorry, the only solution to that is to restore from your latest backup.
Someone: My latest what?
You don't need to be connected to the Internet. A local machine or your router/gateway will work just as well.
The randomness you get comes from the phase noise between the crystal oscillator on your network card and the crystal oscillator that produces your CPU's internal clock. This noise is in turn due to unpredictable microscopic zone temperature variations in the two quartz crystals.
You need to use your highest-precision timer (the TSC in a typical PC) to measure the arrival times. This is one of the best ways to mine thermal noise for true randomness on a conventional PC.
Umm, no. When we talk about "true randomness" we literally mean that it is impossible to predict. When something is impractical to predict, we call it "pseudo randomness". A coin toss may actually be truly random, depending upon quantum interactions between the coin and the air (how precisely molecules bump into the coin while it's in the air), it might also be pseudo-random, I don't think the answer is known and may depend upon precisely how the coin is flipped.
There are many things that we have good reason to think are truly random. Radioactive decay is a good example. Which slit an electron will pass through in a double-slit experiment is another.
If you add a daily quest, you don't add gil-sinks, you remove gil sources. Gil-sinks are one solution to a problem, and the problem is excessive currency creation. The only thing that can cause inflation is the creation of too much currency or too many valuable items. The source end of the equation needs to be fixed.
Unfortunately, Einstein didn't quite live long enough to respond to Bell's Inequality. I wonder whether he would have accepted that, yes, it seems God does play dice with the universe. He could also have chosen to reject locality, which leads to the kind of strange conclusion that everything is predictable, but could depend on something that happened on Alpha Centauri a millisecond ago.
So what's next? If I go to a restaurant and order a "Coke", are they allowed to say "We have Pepsi, would you like that?"