Just a hint, in the country at the south of yours we use 1 billion = 1 million of millions. And I am sure in almost all the counties at the south of mine.
That's odd, I always thought that the proper term was billón, not billion. After all, billion is an English word which is defined as 1,000,000,000. Billón is a Spanish word defined as 1,000,000,000,000. Despite the similarities between billion and billón, there are actually different words.
It is always pretty funny to see a case of classical northamerican ignorance:-)
It is equally funny to see a case of classical latinamerican mixing of languages:-)
The GPS satellites are in a very high orbit, far above the region where comsats and space stations live; I doubt the Earth's magnetic field gives them any significant protection at that altitude.
The GPS satellites are in a low-earth-orbit. The communication satellites that are in geosynchronous orbit are much further out. The inner Van Allen belts fall inside the geosyncronous orbit, but they actually don't provide much protection from radiation. In fact, when they become amplified, they have been known to damage satellites.
A conventional road has the same cross-section as the planet it's built on... so a hypothetical flat road encircling the globe is as near as damnit circular. Now what shape are wheels?
You are correct that a conventional road is circular (or at least much closer to being circular than the straight line that we perceive it to be). However, the constraints of the problem (from the article) included "keeping the axle moving in a straight line and at a constant velocity". Clearly a conventional road fails to meet this constraint since objects moving along a circular path are not traveling at a constant velocity.
If you read all of the bible, you will see that god actually has a change of heart and personality at one point. While the earlier god is quick to start the smiting and the fire and brimstone, by the end god has really mellowed out and isn't such a angry god. It seems like there were some anger management classes sometime after the flood.
Re:What I would like to see...
on
Review: Dragonshard
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
As you can see, a lot of people have already responded that NWN is the solution to what you need. I tend to disagree with this though. I think it is because I used to play PnP D&D (or is that P&P DnD) and miss the ultimate flexibility and ease of development that it provided.
NWN has a fantastic scripting system and a decent UI for creating modules. It basically provides a simulation engine where all creatures (and even objects) respond to various events (seeing something, getting attacked, etc.). The flexibility it provides is wonderful and there have been many great modules and features created by the community.
Where NWN falls short is in its ability to be an aid to a DM wishing to run a traditional PnP-like game. I don't fault the developers for this, it wasn't what they were trying to build. However, I wish someone would build this. The problem with NWN is that it is really set up to build totally pre-designed modules. It is very difficult to build flexibility into the module. Sure, someone using the DM client can come in and take over control of an NPC or monster, create new monsters, etc., but to be really effective, the entire module (including all NPCs) has to be built before you ever start playing. While this is possible, it tends to lead to the type of module where the players are just following a story rather than creating the story as they go along.
What I think would be a better tool to aid a DM would be something that provided features such as keeping track of the characters, quickly creating maps of areas, quickly throwing together a combat situation, provide die-rolling and calculation abilities, etc.. It would not try to build an automated world, it would merely provide tools for keeping track of what was going on in the world and automate some of the more tedious parts of PnP D&D.
I guess I am just showing my age, but I can't see any good way of playing D&D without the players and DM talking, describing events and actions, and at times resorting to the game mechanics to deal with various situations that arise (combat, skill checks, etc.). D&D was always a game of story telling, not one of rolling dice to see if a character hit and killed a monster. The combat and game mechanics are secondary to the story telling (and story creating), or at least they should be in a good game of D&D.
Even though he didn't quote it, I believe he was referring to this part of the posting:
He took his shot, saw it was a definate hit and then "booked" outta there.. it took him hours and hours to crawl out of there on his belly.
Older posts had questioned the robot's effectiveness and how whether or not a sniper moved after a shot would alter the robot's effectiveness. The idea was that if a sniper moves away quickly, knowing where they used to be was not that useful. (not my opinion... just what was said before... that still gives you more info than you had otherwise).
I think that the confusion was about whether or not the poster who talked about snipers moving, but moving slowly, after a shot was trying to make any comment on the effectiveness of the robot or not.
Actually, it is even really the first floating nuclear power plant to sit on a grid:
After one of the particularly bad typhoons of the 90s (I can't recal if it was Paka or another one), Guam had lost 1/3 of it's power production. The US Navy connected a nuclear submarine to the power grid to provide supplemental power until the power plant came back online.
It's "Pirates OF Silicon Valley." If the editors (Zonk) had bothered to follw the link that those word make he would have easily caught this. What's/. coming to?
That's the name of the made for TV movie, the name of the original work is "Fire in the Valley". What are the/. nitpickers coming to?
It just provides the info for what you should do, doesn't actually take the action for you. But with some simple automation, you can make a bot out of it. (Look for the right messages, send the right messages to press buttons in the other program). This can get you started along those lines:
One problem though... Even though Hold'Em Analyzer advertises for places such as Party Poker and Empire Poker, it is on their list of disallowed software. If they determine you are running it, they can confiscate your bankroll. I've seen that happen.
Interestingly they don't seem to automatically check (at least not very often), but do look for it. I had a friend who had been running a poker-bot for a few months before he got an email from them telling him to quit it, followed shortly by another one telling him they were confiscating his bankroll.
My guess is that it doesn't check very often in order to limit how much you can learn very much about how it checks. Common technique used on the better-designed dongles.
It is highly unlikely that any online poker operation would risk cheating.
If you look at how many active tables they have going at any given time along with the average rake per pot and the number of hands/hour dealt... Well, personally, I find it doubtful that any of them would run the risk of being shutdown (either through legal action or bad press) by fixing the game.
The people that run gambling houses just don't go around making bad bets.
And that is why ABMs are a losing proposition. Sure, you can protect yourself from incoming missiles, but now you have turned your arms race into an economic war where you are always at the disadvantage.
If we have N ABMs, the enemy just has to build N+1 BMs to defeat the system. And that's assuming that the ABM is 100% accurate. And it is cheaper for the enemy to do that than it is for us to build the ABM in the first place!
This "launch at high altitude" is a better way of getting into orbit is ridiculous. The problem with getting to orbit is speed, not altitude. You could take a spacecraft up 200 miles and you would still need a ton of thrust and fuel to get it to go into orbit.
Sure, you could carry it on a 747, travelling at around 600mph. Now try to get it up to 17,500mph.
Piggybacking works well for getting into space (like SSO/White Kight showed) but it doesn't do much for getting into orbit.
When the US first signed this particularly treaty, a clause was placed there to allow either side to withdraw from it so long as they gave six months notice.
So, to begin with, the notion that the treaty was broken is false. There was an exit clause placed in the treaty and that clause was properly executed.
Of course, that doesn't change the fact that we decided to pull out of the treaty. However, in regards to your question of "So why did the US sign them in the first place?" and whether or not such treaties are in our self interest... it appears obvious that the leaders that first signed them thought that it would be likely that either side might in the future decide that the treaty should no longer apply. They put that clause in there after all.
I'm not trying to debate the point of whether or not it is a good treaty with respect to our self interest. Frankly, I really don't know. Personally I feel that ABMs are only likely to increase the desire of potential enemies to build up the number of weapons they have capable of reaching us. And it is a particularly bad solution when the cost of an ABM weapon is greater than the cost of the BM it is designed to counter. However, this all comes from my rather limited viewpoint.
But as to the notion of the U.S. breaking the treaty, or whether or not the leaders who signed it thought it was in our best interest to be permanently constrained by such a treaty... it is pretty clear that it was not broken, and the leaders who signed it provided an exit clause.
"can't be bothered to check the exact number right now" how about 113 times before? eg: STS-114
Unfortunately, the numbering scheme NASA uses for the shuttle flights is a bit more complicated than that. The last shuttle launch was STS-107. That one just happened to be out of order somewhat, but if you look at the history of shuttle missions, you will see the numbering scheme is very odd. I believe the 10th shuttle flight was STS-41B or something similar. Challenger's last flight was STS-51L, even though it was the 25th shuttle launch.
I remember a similar program on my C64 that would play Reveille on the 1541 drive.
I got it off a BBS with no idea what it was supposed to do. I believe the instructions on the screen were "Remove disk from drive. Close the drive door. Press Return."
If we proceed ahead by excusing the actions of one group based on the evils and crimes committed by another group, then we are certainly doomed.
Why do you insist that if one group is in the wrong, then anything done by the other group must be right and justified? Is it not possible that both groups committed unjustified actions?
What about the group of blacks that pulled Reginald Denny from his truck and savagely beat him, smashing his head against the ground with a cinder block? Are they justified in beating him because a white jury freed a group of racist police?
What about the targeting of Korean storeowners during the riots? How does that fit into the picture? Perhaps that was justified due to the light sentence Soon Ja Du (a Korean shopowner) received after shooting and killing Latasha Harlins during a minor robbery attempt.
This is not about blacks vs. whites, or "whitey" vs. minorities.
This is about evil people (who come in every race and color) and how much control and force they can exert over others when they are allowed to do so.
To say that the L.A. Riots are a response to a black man being beaten by white cops is greatly misleading. Like many things this is not a clear cut black and white issue.
After all, if that is all there was to it, how would you explain the hispanic cop that was involved in the beating? How would you explain the group of black residents that witnessed the beating of Reginald Denny live on the news and rushed out of their houses to save him?
There are good people, there are evil people, there are people who are a mixture of the two. The ones who want you to believe that these incidents are merely related to race want you to have an uncontrollable visceral reaction to such thoughts. They fear people's ability to use intelligence and reasoning. They don't want you to understand the true causes behind anything. And that is how they will attempt to control you.
Japan didn't surrender even after a bomb was dropped on a populated area. What makes you think that they would have surrendered if a bomb was dropped on an unpopulated area?
In fact, Japan didn't surrender after two bombs were dropped on populated areas, or even after the subsequent bombing raids. Japan only surrendered when Russia started to invade.
One of the problems at the time was that the Japanese intelligence was sure that the USA did not have more than one atomic bomb (until Nagasaki, then they claimed that the USA didn't have more than two). Thus a demonstration on an unpopulated area would likely have had no influence on Japan's decision.
Slashdot Mirror
Not to get further off topic... well, actually, yes... to get further off topic... What is the fueling peculiarity? I'm just curious.
That's odd, I always thought that the proper term was billón, not billion. After all, billion is an English word which is defined as 1,000,000,000. Billón is a Spanish word defined as 1,000,000,000,000. Despite the similarities between billion and billón, there are actually different words.
It is always pretty funny to see a case of classical northamerican ignorance :-)
It is equally funny to see a case of classical latinamerican mixing of languages :-)
The GPS satellites are in a very high orbit, far above the region where comsats and space stations live; I doubt the Earth's magnetic field gives them any significant protection at that altitude.
The GPS satellites are in a low-earth-orbit. The communication satellites that are in geosynchronous orbit are much further out. The inner Van Allen belts fall inside the geosyncronous orbit, but they actually don't provide much protection from radiation. In fact, when they become amplified, they have been known to damage satellites.
You are correct that a conventional road is circular (or at least much closer to being circular than the straight line that we perceive it to be). However, the constraints of the problem (from the article) included "keeping the axle moving in a straight line and at a constant velocity". Clearly a conventional road fails to meet this constraint since objects moving along a circular path are not traveling at a constant velocity.
Next thing they should work on slowing is the speed at which jokes fly over your head.
My favorite line from this group is:
"We know we'll never see the day there are no human beings on the planet."
At least they figured this much out.
If you read all of the bible, you will see that god actually has a change of heart and personality at one point. While the earlier god is quick to start the smiting and the fire and brimstone, by the end god has really mellowed out and isn't such a angry god. It seems like there were some anger management classes sometime after the flood.
As you can see, a lot of people have already responded that NWN is the solution to what you need. I tend to disagree with this though. I think it is because I used to play PnP D&D (or is that P&P DnD) and miss the ultimate flexibility and ease of development that it provided.
NWN has a fantastic scripting system and a decent UI for creating modules. It basically provides a simulation engine where all creatures (and even objects) respond to various events (seeing something, getting attacked, etc.). The flexibility it provides is wonderful and there have been many great modules and features created by the community.
Where NWN falls short is in its ability to be an aid to a DM wishing to run a traditional PnP-like game. I don't fault the developers for this, it wasn't what they were trying to build. However, I wish someone would build this. The problem with NWN is that it is really set up to build totally pre-designed modules. It is very difficult to build flexibility into the module. Sure, someone using the DM client can come in and take over control of an NPC or monster, create new monsters, etc., but to be really effective, the entire module (including all NPCs) has to be built before you ever start playing. While this is possible, it tends to lead to the type of module where the players are just following a story rather than creating the story as they go along.
What I think would be a better tool to aid a DM would be something that provided features such as keeping track of the characters, quickly creating maps of areas, quickly throwing together a combat situation, provide die-rolling and calculation abilities, etc.. It would not try to build an automated world, it would merely provide tools for keeping track of what was going on in the world and automate some of the more tedious parts of PnP D&D.
I guess I am just showing my age, but I can't see any good way of playing D&D without the players and DM talking, describing events and actions, and at times resorting to the game mechanics to deal with various situations that arise (combat, skill checks, etc.). D&D was always a game of story telling, not one of rolling dice to see if a character hit and killed a monster. The combat and game mechanics are secondary to the story telling (and story creating), or at least they should be in a good game of D&D.
He took his shot, saw it was a definate hit and then "booked" outta there.. it took him hours and hours to crawl out of there on his belly.
Older posts had questioned the robot's effectiveness and how whether or not a sniper moved after a shot would alter the robot's effectiveness. The idea was that if a sniper moves away quickly, knowing where they used to be was not that useful. (not my opinion... just what was said before... that still gives you more info than you had otherwise).
I think that the confusion was about whether or not the poster who talked about snipers moving, but moving slowly, after a shot was trying to make any comment on the effectiveness of the robot or not.
Actually, it is even really the first floating nuclear power plant to sit on a grid:
After one of the particularly bad typhoons of the 90s (I can't recal if it was Paka or another one), Guam had lost 1/3 of it's power production. The US Navy connected a nuclear submarine to the power grid to provide supplemental power until the power plant came back online.
That's the name of the made for TV movie, the name of the original work is "Fire in the Valley". What are the /. nitpickers coming to?
Well put!
Sometimes it takes some efficient Germanic words to form the proper response to such obnoxious statements.
One of the more popular ones is Hold'Em Analyzer:
http://www.poker-soft.com/
It just provides the info for what you should do, doesn't actually take the action for you. But with some simple automation, you can make a bot out of it. (Look for the right messages, send the right messages to press buttons in the other program). This can get you started along those lines:
http://www.pokerbot-pro.com/
One problem though... Even though Hold'Em Analyzer advertises for places such as Party Poker and Empire Poker, it is on their list of disallowed software. If they determine you are running it, they can confiscate your bankroll. I've seen that happen.
Interestingly they don't seem to automatically check (at least not very often), but do look for it. I had a friend who had been running a poker-bot for a few months before he got an email from them telling him to quit it, followed shortly by another one telling him they were confiscating his bankroll.
My guess is that it doesn't check very often in order to limit how much you can learn very much about how it checks. Common technique used on the better-designed dongles.
It is highly unlikely that any online poker operation would risk cheating.
If you look at how many active tables they have going at any given time along with the average rake per pot and the number of hands/hour dealt... Well, personally, I find it doubtful that any of them would run the risk of being shutdown (either through legal action or bad press) by fixing the game.
The people that run gambling houses just don't go around making bad bets.
Exactly
And that is why ABMs are a losing proposition. Sure, you can protect yourself from incoming missiles, but now you have turned your arms race into an economic war where you are always at the disadvantage.
If we have N ABMs, the enemy just has to build N+1 BMs to defeat the system. And that's assuming that the ABM is 100% accurate. And it is cheaper for the enemy to do that than it is for us to build the ABM in the first place!
This "launch at high altitude" is a better way of getting into orbit is ridiculous. The problem with getting to orbit is speed, not altitude. You could take a spacecraft up 200 miles and you would still need a ton of thrust and fuel to get it to go into orbit.
Sure, you could carry it on a 747, travelling at around 600mph. Now try to get it up to 17,500mph.
Piggybacking works well for getting into space (like SSO/White Kight showed) but it doesn't do much for getting into orbit.
When the US first signed this particularly treaty, a clause was placed there to allow either side to withdraw from it so long as they gave six months notice.
So, to begin with, the notion that the treaty was broken is false. There was an exit clause placed in the treaty and that clause was properly executed.
Of course, that doesn't change the fact that we decided to pull out of the treaty. However, in regards to your question of "So why did the US sign them in the first place?" and whether or not such treaties are in our self interest... it appears obvious that the leaders that first signed them thought that it would be likely that either side might in the future decide that the treaty should no longer apply. They put that clause in there after all.
I'm not trying to debate the point of whether or not it is a good treaty with respect to our self interest. Frankly, I really don't know. Personally I feel that ABMs are only likely to increase the desire of potential enemies to build up the number of weapons they have capable of reaching us. And it is a particularly bad solution when the cost of an ABM weapon is greater than the cost of the BM it is designed to counter. However, this all comes from my rather limited viewpoint.
But as to the notion of the U.S. breaking the treaty, or whether or not the leaders who signed it thought it was in our best interest to be permanently constrained by such a treaty... it is pretty clear that it was not broken, and the leaders who signed it provided an exit clause.
I thought they always measured rocket motor efficiencies in rods/hogshead.
Plays Mary-Kate and Ashley videos games? No wonder she is violent and bad tempered. I would be as well.
quite easily, actually
Unfortunately, the numbering scheme NASA uses for the shuttle flights is a bit more complicated than that. The last shuttle launch was STS-107. That one just happened to be out of order somewhat, but if you look at the history of shuttle missions, you will see the numbering scheme is very odd. I believe the 10th shuttle flight was STS-41B or something similar. Challenger's last flight was STS-51L, even though it was the 25th shuttle launch.
That's just damn funny.
I remember a similar program on my C64 that would play Reveille on the 1541 drive.
I got it off a BBS with no idea what it was supposed to do. I believe the instructions on the screen were "Remove disk from drive. Close the drive door. Press Return."
I was rather surprised to say the least.
If we proceed ahead by excusing the actions of one group based on the evils and crimes committed by another group, then we are certainly doomed.
Why do you insist that if one group is in the wrong, then anything done by the other group must be right and justified? Is it not possible that both groups committed unjustified actions?
What about the group of blacks that pulled Reginald Denny from his truck and savagely beat him, smashing his head against the ground with a cinder block? Are they justified in beating him because a white jury freed a group of racist police?
What about the targeting of Korean storeowners during the riots? How does that fit into the picture? Perhaps that was justified due to the light sentence Soon Ja Du (a Korean shopowner) received after shooting and killing Latasha Harlins during a minor robbery attempt.
This is not about blacks vs. whites, or "whitey" vs. minorities.
This is about evil people (who come in every race and color) and how much control and force they can exert over others when they are allowed to do so.
To say that the L.A. Riots are a response to a black man being beaten by white cops is greatly misleading. Like many things this is not a clear cut black and white issue.
After all, if that is all there was to it, how would you explain the hispanic cop that was involved in the beating? How would you explain the group of black residents that witnessed the beating of Reginald Denny live on the news and rushed out of their houses to save him?
There are good people, there are evil people, there are people who are a mixture of the two. The ones who want you to believe that these incidents are merely related to race want you to have an uncontrollable visceral reaction to such thoughts. They fear people's ability to use intelligence and reasoning. They don't want you to understand the true causes behind anything. And that is how they will attempt to control you.
Japan didn't surrender even after a bomb was dropped on a populated area. What makes you think that they would have surrendered if a bomb was dropped on an unpopulated area?
In fact, Japan didn't surrender after two bombs were dropped on populated areas, or even after the subsequent bombing raids. Japan only surrendered when Russia started to invade.
One of the problems at the time was that the Japanese intelligence was sure that the USA did not have more than one atomic bomb (until Nagasaki, then they claimed that the USA didn't have more than two). Thus a demonstration on an unpopulated area would likely have had no influence on Japan's decision.