The average 15 year old doesn't know how his IM works behind the
scenes? Well no fucking shit -- point to me at some point in the
last 100 years where your average person knew to any degree of
certainty how their tech worked.
Aside from that, anyone who is actually surprised that people who grew up
using a given piece of tech will have different attitudes towards
it than the people who've had to adapt to it needs to be locked up
someplace where they won't pose a threat to their own well-being.
It should be obvious to anyone who hasn't spent their entire life in
a coma that this is just how it works.
I'm not trying to post flamebait here, but honestly I can't even
concieve of another reaction to this...
My only question for Civ4 concerns the AI: Have you made it
a crafty enough opponent yet that it can compete at the higher
skill levels of the game without resorting to the "cheating"
that we've seen in previous incarnations of the game?
If so, how?
As a player, I almost always find the key to really taking
control of a game is to react well to the overall shape of things.
Nuances with the terrain, the way cities are arranged in
respect to each other, grabbing some resources at the
expense of others --
this all provides opportunities for the human player that
I wouldn't think an AI could easily pick up on. How can you
get the AI to "consider the map", so to speak, rather than
simply reacting to the stimulus around it and carrying out
a set of predetermined functions (which, at least in my
estimation, is the limitation that prevents it from competing
fairly at high difficulty levels in the previous Civ games).
Or does the AI find its effectiveness in, say, it's ability
to reexamine every city every turn? Or will it, you know,
just continue to cheat to compete at advanced levels?
Thanks!
PS: My wife's traveling on business most weekends over the
next couple of months. If you wanted to, you know, mail me
an advanced copy... Just tossing that out there.
The Wisdom of Alpha Centauri
on
Ask Sid Meier
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
Sid --
I've always been curious: In Alpha Centauri, how did your team come up with as many snazzy future quotes as they did? Several of them seemed downright smart enough that I was suprised to see them credited to in-game characters rather than historical writers.
Thanks for all the great games; I just dusted off Civ 3 for my yearly week of nonstop obsession.
wow, way to pass the blame there. You blame your situation on your parents in one sentence and say you wish you could change things the next. If you want to do something, do it. If not, don't use your parents as an excuse.
I don't consider citing the basic facts to be "passing the blame". In the Real World, things happen for interconnected reasons -- that includes both progress and decay.
You can't just *decide* that it's time for a renaissance. You need to move the things that provide the foundation for progress into position first, and that's not something that can always be done quickly or easily.
My worry is that the energies of my generation will be wasted, have already been wasted by the state of the world we've been handed. At best, I fear we're the set-up generation rather than one which moves mountains. At worst, we might be the ones who live through the decline of our civilization (not out of the question -- war without end and short-sighted economic policies can't go on forever without having an impact).
Read "The Case for Mars" by Roberty Zubrin. It basically demonstrates that the moon isn't actually an easier starting point and that Mars is, in most ways, far more worth the effort.
It seems to me as if the "future" is waiting for another kick, the sort
of boot-in-the-pants that we saw twice in the last century. Right now, it's stuck. There are
a lot of real Buck Rogers-style things that could be going on if only
people seriously thought they were possible, if only there was a spark
that could get us up and moving again. But that's not going to happen on its own, we need to figure out how to move again.
I dunno, maybe part of the problem is that progress just outran the global
society's ability to
adjust at some point -- that definately seems to be the case with a lot
of the more disaffected people both in the US and overseas. IMO, the
crazed religious zealot in Iran and the crazed Kansas schoolboard member
have a lot of root causes in common. Those wackos are extreme examples,
granted, but it seems like they're also symptomatic of larger societal problems.
I'm ready to pick up and keep moving, though, and I think a lot of people
of my generation are. We never saw a moon landing; it happened before we
were born and, frankly, even if we went back it would seem like old hat.
"Yeah, Earthrise. Great, never seen that before". We read about this shit in the *history* books, man. But that's not a bad thing: I suspect a lot of us
wouldn't find the concept of, say, mining asteroids as exotic as the
Boomers would, and maybe that's all we really need. And hey, if that's
possible, if that improves our lot, maybe it'll finally be that human
advance where, once it starts, it just continues on and on.
Of course, speaking of the Boomers, I fear that my generation (I'm 28)
might be one of those unlucky historical examples of one which didn't
get to do jack shit because they were so busy catering to the needs of
their wealthy elders while trying to patch up the disasterous debts they left us.
By the time they start to croak en masse it'll be too late to do anything
all that interesting -- we'll be too old
and too unimaginative, left only with the shadow of the dreams we once
entertained.
Honestly (and sadly), I'm pretty sure that's the direction we're headed in.
Happily, however, I also believe it's not too late to change that. That's
why I support ideas like the Space Elevator; it's the sort of kick
that might get us out of this funk and allow us to overcome the fate of
being a generation the just paid too much for their houses.
a friend and I used to joke that there were people who gave off destructive mental interference waves. Sitting next to these people would result in a decrease in brain function
Maybe things have changed in the last 10 years, but back when I was in high school we called these people "girls".
I've been studying negative information for years. I consider
myself somewhat of an expert on the subject, actually.
Initially, I believed that negative information was an abstract
math concept, but after a significant amount of additional study
I've determined rather conclusively that it exists in our frame
of reference and that the effects are actually easy to detect. The
trick is to *locate* some of this negative information. Fortunately,
I've managed to work that out as well -- I'm not publishing for a few
months yet, but I figure I'm far enough along to spill some of the
beans:
Experiencing negative inforamtion is all about occupying a point in space and
time which intersects with the negative information stream. This was initially
tricky, but through months of tireless research I've worked out the
optimal conditions:
I find that your best chance of encountering it is roughly
around 1 AM when you're at the bar with your friends after
a long night of drinking and one of them says something
along the lines of, "Awright! Time for some shots!"
Bang! Negative information. What happened after that? How did I get home?
All lost in the quantum flow, never to be accurately described by anyone
involved (except, occasionally and for reasons I still haven't managed to
factor into my equations, the bouncer and the police).
I assume the headaches and liver
damage are just a nominal side effect.
I'm getting the impression that Armadillo might never get anywhere further than a few cool but short flight tests.
Not that I'm one to criticize (large liquid-prop rockets built by Skyshadow: 0), but everytime they get an engine together and start encountering difficulties it seems like they scrap it and just go to another design. Assuming that rockets are anything like the mechanical things that I understand (cars), this just isn't how you can go about these things -- you've got to settle on a promising, well thought-out design and then dedicate your efforts towards ironing out the kinks or you'll perpetually be just past "go".
Anyhow, just the impression I get from reading the updates.
"There may soon be so-called stable contents. In this case, we'd freeze the pages whose quality is undisputed..." The question is, however, how do you determine when something is undisputed. A lot of politically driven pages are constantly edited until there forms a 'balance' between opposing views; that, however, takes time and is never 'undisputed'.
While there are a fairly small number of hotly contested pages, the vast bulk of the Wikipedia is comprised of short entries about fairly unremarkible subjects. These also tend to be the best pages to vandalize (especially in nonobvious ways) because they generally don't get looked at all that much.
So while, say, the Robert Novak page is going to see a lot of dispute between now and whenever someone finally drives a stake through his heart, the page on the Byzantine Emperor Basil I (811-886 AD) probably isn't going to see a great number of worthwhile changes anytime soon.
Re:When can I move there?
on
Ice Lake on Mars
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
It seems to be that "could" and "will" are two different things in this situation.
Odds are, we could live on Mars right now -- learning to grow crops could take some work, but everything else is actually fairly straightforward. You can make bricks from the soil, make O2 from the atmosphere, mine water out of the soil, etc.
Now, when *will* we live on Mars is something else. The answer is pretty much either "a couple of years after a major government decides it's worthwhile" or, more likely, "a few years after we find some way to make money by doing so".
Did you hear that Shakeswhatever fellow is remaking the "Tragicall Historye of Romeus and Juliet"? And that was already a remake of "Mariotto and Gianozza", fer chrissake.
I wish these London playhouses would spend enough resources to bring in some truly creative people and get some new ideas rather than just rehashing the same old stories over and over and over again. I mean, really, how many more beatings can this dead horse really take?
Seriously, though, I've been thinking about BSG ever since the conclusion of last season. Why so compulsive, you ask? Because the phrase "All of this has happened before, and all of it will happen again" reminds me waaay too much of my workday...
PS: I think the Cylon meant Apollo.
What I took from the review...
on
The Escapist
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
My take on the book given the review is that the book was a nice attempt that the author didn't manage to pull off. Heck, even the attempts at humor that the author of the review cited sounded pretty darn lame.
So, I agree: Sounds like a big "skip" to me. Which is too bad -- I've been looking for some new SciFi to read ever since I finished reading through the various works of Vernor Vinge earlier this year.
I read the Dan Simmons "Hyperion" series and found it extremely unsatisfying (a strong start followed by weaker and weaker storytelling). Read "Forge of God" by Greg Bear and it was decent, although the sequel was, in my opinion, lousy. I read "Forever War" by Joe Haldeman and found it entertaining enough, although "Forever Peace" was a struggle to even finish. Also read through a couple of other one-hit-wonder authors whose second and third books were rather Wachowski Brothers, if you catch my meaning.
I don't really know where to go from here. Once you polish off the classics and the hits, you're left with a couple of shelfs of books at Barnes and Noble that all have interesting looking covers and rave reviews on the back, but probably aren't all that good...
And *this*, boys and girls, is why it's so important to be careful when you're hiring your wedding contractors. You might end up with someone like this asshole who seriously believes that the wedding is being put on for his benefit rather than, you know, that of you and your guests.
LOL, the last think anyone needs on their wedding day is an employee who thinks they're running the shit. As if you don't have enough to worry about, imagine having your photographer come to you all in a huff and saying "They're taking PICTURES! Of *MY* WEDDING! I'm history."
Seriously, if your shots are getting ruined by other flashes in the 1/200th of a second that the shutter is open, it's because God himself personally hates you.
Well, as you've mentioned, it's a contract. I'm not suggesting that the photographer *shouldn't* be able to retain the copyrights, I'm just saying that you as a client should think carefully before agreeing to do business that way.
Generally, photographers who keep the copyrights are less expensive than those who don't. Why? Because they're making it up in post-wedding sales. It's business.
Photographers have a right to offer their services for terms they negotiate with you, just like a coder has a right to negotiate their contract with their employer. If you don't like the terms, work with someone else -- trying to BS your way out of it by saying "well, they're images of *my* event!" is just a dodge.
I'm not saying it's not a legitimate business model, I'm saying that it's one that I would never consider participating in as a customer.
IMO, it's less of a concern for the people getting married than it is for their guests. Our wedding was practically a family reunion for both sides, so there were a lot of shots that people wanted. I didn't want to see them getting wallet-raped to get them.
I'm in the Bay Area, too. We got married in Livermore and ended up hiring a photographer from Sonoma.
Anyhow, I wouldn't be happy with anything short of owning full rights to all photos, negatives and prints. If you don't get that in writing, you're leaving open the possibility of getting screwed.
Our photographer had to ask *us* for permission to use shots from our wedding in her portfolio.
On the other hand, pro wedding photographers depend mightily on the income
derived from reproducing their work
I always cringe when I read something like this. To anyone who is planning a
wedding out there: Don't be fooled into this!
It's a little off-topic, but I want to point out that this practice - once "just the way
it was" when it came to wedding photography - is becoming less and less common. When
we got married (a year ago next
Sunday), the #1 thing we looked for was a photographer who wouldn't insist
on maintaining the copyrights to the photos.
This turned out not to be a problem; the few photographers we looked at who
still wanted to maintain copyrights were all old-school (in a negative sense)
in other ways, too.
One guy even wanted to tell us that our relatives wouldn't be allowed to take
pictures at our own fucking wedding! I can't imagine how someone would
hire this guy; what kind of asshole is actually going to tell their guests they can't
take pictures?
Anyhow, the photographer we ended up with used film rather than digital. I actually looked
for this; it added a little bit of work on our part on the back end of the wedding, but
as a hobbyist myself I feel there's a real advantage to film
specifically in terms of the quality of black and white photos. She did a great
job, too.
Once the pictures were developed, we got all the negatives.
We scanned the pictures using a kick-ass negative scanner from Nikon
that we bought refurbed (and then sold on eBay for a profit) and stuck the pictures
out on Ofoto so our friends and relatives could order right from there. Compare
this to my Best Man's wedding a year earlier where he went with a "traditional"
photog who kept the copyrights from the photos and wanted to charge us $20 per shot...
Well, let's just say I don't have any of the pro shots from that wedding.
Now, back on topic: If your photos look too good, why hassle with the local Walmart
just to get yourself what's going to be, at best, an 'okay' print? Unless you need the
prints Right Now, go online! When I'm trying to get my own "good" photos printed,
I've had great luck with Adorama's printing service. Plus, they're used to seeing shots
that are far better than what I can produce. Ofoto (or whatever they're calling
themselves these days) generally kicks out satisfactory results as well.
I seem to remember reading someplace that Tove is a karate champion of one variety or another.
So, yeah, Dvorak should definately start stalking Linus. And he should bring along a crew to videotape it -- when that one hit the net, I'd watch it every morning while I ate my Cheerios.
Slashdot Mirror
Aside from that, anyone who is actually surprised that people who grew up using a given piece of tech will have different attitudes towards it than the people who've had to adapt to it needs to be locked up someplace where they won't pose a threat to their own well-being. It should be obvious to anyone who hasn't spent their entire life in a coma that this is just how it works.
I'm not trying to post flamebait here, but honestly I can't even concieve of another reaction to this...
If so, how?
As a player, I almost always find the key to really taking control of a game is to react well to the overall shape of things. Nuances with the terrain, the way cities are arranged in respect to each other, grabbing some resources at the expense of others -- this all provides opportunities for the human player that I wouldn't think an AI could easily pick up on. How can you get the AI to "consider the map", so to speak, rather than simply reacting to the stimulus around it and carrying out a set of predetermined functions (which, at least in my estimation, is the limitation that prevents it from competing fairly at high difficulty levels in the previous Civ games).
Or does the AI find its effectiveness in, say, it's ability to reexamine every city every turn? Or will it, you know, just continue to cheat to compete at advanced levels?
Thanks!
PS: My wife's traveling on business most weekends over the next couple of months. If you wanted to, you know, mail me an advanced copy... Just tossing that out there.
Sid -- I've always been curious: In Alpha Centauri, how did your team come up with as many snazzy future quotes as they did? Several of them seemed downright smart enough that I was suprised to see them credited to in-game characters rather than historical writers. Thanks for all the great games; I just dusted off Civ 3 for my yearly week of nonstop obsession.
Man has killed man from the beginning of time, and each new frontier has brought new ways and new places to die. Why should the future be different?
I don't consider citing the basic facts to be "passing the blame". In the Real World, things happen for interconnected reasons -- that includes both progress and decay. You can't just *decide* that it's time for a renaissance. You need to move the things that provide the foundation for progress into position first, and that's not something that can always be done quickly or easily.
My worry is that the energies of my generation will be wasted, have already been wasted by the state of the world we've been handed. At best, I fear we're the set-up generation rather than one which moves mountains. At worst, we might be the ones who live through the decline of our civilization (not out of the question -- war without end and short-sighted economic policies can't go on forever without having an impact).
Read "The Case for Mars" by Roberty Zubrin. It basically demonstrates that the moon isn't actually an easier starting point and that Mars is, in most ways, far more worth the effort.
I dunno, maybe part of the problem is that progress just outran the global society's ability to adjust at some point -- that definately seems to be the case with a lot of the more disaffected people both in the US and overseas. IMO, the crazed religious zealot in Iran and the crazed Kansas schoolboard member have a lot of root causes in common. Those wackos are extreme examples, granted, but it seems like they're also symptomatic of larger societal problems.
I'm ready to pick up and keep moving, though, and I think a lot of people of my generation are. We never saw a moon landing; it happened before we were born and, frankly, even if we went back it would seem like old hat. "Yeah, Earthrise. Great, never seen that before". We read about this shit in the *history* books, man. But that's not a bad thing: I suspect a lot of us wouldn't find the concept of, say, mining asteroids as exotic as the Boomers would, and maybe that's all we really need. And hey, if that's possible, if that improves our lot, maybe it'll finally be that human advance where, once it starts, it just continues on and on.
Of course, speaking of the Boomers, I fear that my generation (I'm 28) might be one of those unlucky historical examples of one which didn't get to do jack shit because they were so busy catering to the needs of their wealthy elders while trying to patch up the disasterous debts they left us. By the time they start to croak en masse it'll be too late to do anything all that interesting -- we'll be too old and too unimaginative, left only with the shadow of the dreams we once entertained.
Honestly (and sadly), I'm pretty sure that's the direction we're headed in. Happily, however, I also believe it's not too late to change that. That's why I support ideas like the Space Elevator; it's the sort of kick that might get us out of this funk and allow us to overcome the fate of being a generation the just paid too much for their houses.
Maybe things have changed in the last 10 years, but back when I was in high school we called these people "girls".
Initially, I believed that negative information was an abstract math concept, but after a significant amount of additional study I've determined rather conclusively that it exists in our frame of reference and that the effects are actually easy to detect. The trick is to *locate* some of this negative information. Fortunately, I've managed to work that out as well -- I'm not publishing for a few months yet, but I figure I'm far enough along to spill some of the beans:
Experiencing negative inforamtion is all about occupying a point in space and time which intersects with the negative information stream. This was initially tricky, but through months of tireless research I've worked out the optimal conditions: I find that your best chance of encountering it is roughly around 1 AM when you're at the bar with your friends after a long night of drinking and one of them says something along the lines of, "Awright! Time for some shots!"
Bang! Negative information. What happened after that? How did I get home? All lost in the quantum flow, never to be accurately described by anyone involved (except, occasionally and for reasons I still haven't managed to factor into my equations, the bouncer and the police). I assume the headaches and liver damage are just a nominal side effect.
Not that I'm one to criticize (large liquid-prop rockets built by Skyshadow: 0), but everytime they get an engine together and start encountering difficulties it seems like they scrap it and just go to another design. Assuming that rockets are anything like the mechanical things that I understand (cars), this just isn't how you can go about these things -- you've got to settle on a promising, well thought-out design and then dedicate your efforts towards ironing out the kinks or you'll perpetually be just past "go".
Anyhow, just the impression I get from reading the updates.
While there are a fairly small number of hotly contested pages, the vast bulk of the Wikipedia is comprised of short entries about fairly unremarkible subjects. These also tend to be the best pages to vandalize (especially in nonobvious ways) because they generally don't get looked at all that much.
So while, say, the Robert Novak page is going to see a lot of dispute between now and whenever someone finally drives a stake through his heart, the page on the Byzantine Emperor Basil I (811-886 AD) probably isn't going to see a great number of worthwhile changes anytime soon.
Odds are, we could live on Mars right now -- learning to grow crops could take some work, but everything else is actually fairly straightforward. You can make bricks from the soil, make O2 from the atmosphere, mine water out of the soil, etc.
Now, when *will* we live on Mars is something else. The answer is pretty much either "a couple of years after a major government decides it's worthwhile" or, more likely, "a few years after we find some way to make money by doing so".
I wish these London playhouses would spend enough resources to bring in some truly creative people and get some new ideas rather than just rehashing the same old stories over and over and over again. I mean, really, how many more beatings can this dead horse really take?
Seriously, though, I've been thinking about BSG ever since the conclusion of last season. Why so compulsive, you ask? Because the phrase "All of this has happened before, and all of it will happen again" reminds me waaay too much of my workday...
PS: I think the Cylon meant Apollo.
So, I agree: Sounds like a big "skip" to me. Which is too bad -- I've been looking for some new SciFi to read ever since I finished reading through the various works of Vernor Vinge earlier this year.
I read the Dan Simmons "Hyperion" series and found it extremely unsatisfying (a strong start followed by weaker and weaker storytelling). Read "Forge of God" by Greg Bear and it was decent, although the sequel was, in my opinion, lousy. I read "Forever War" by Joe Haldeman and found it entertaining enough, although "Forever Peace" was a struggle to even finish. Also read through a couple of other one-hit-wonder authors whose second and third books were rather Wachowski Brothers, if you catch my meaning.
I don't really know where to go from here. Once you polish off the classics and the hits, you're left with a couple of shelfs of books at Barnes and Noble that all have interesting looking covers and rave reviews on the back, but probably aren't all that good...
LOL, the last think anyone needs on their wedding day is an employee who thinks they're running the shit. As if you don't have enough to worry about, imagine having your photographer come to you all in a huff and saying "They're taking PICTURES! Of *MY* WEDDING! I'm history."
Seriously, if your shots are getting ruined by other flashes in the 1/200th of a second that the shutter is open, it's because God himself personally hates you.
Generally, photographers who keep the copyrights are less expensive than those who don't. Why? Because they're making it up in post-wedding sales. It's business.
Photographers have a right to offer their services for terms they negotiate with you, just like a coder has a right to negotiate their contract with their employer. If you don't like the terms, work with someone else -- trying to BS your way out of it by saying "well, they're images of *my* event!" is just a dodge.
Unclench a little.
IMO, it's less of a concern for the people getting married than it is for their guests. Our wedding was practically a family reunion for both sides, so there were a lot of shots that people wanted. I didn't want to see them getting wallet-raped to get them.
Anyhow, I wouldn't be happy with anything short of owning full rights to all photos, negatives and prints. If you don't get that in writing, you're leaving open the possibility of getting screwed.
Our photographer had to ask *us* for permission to use shots from our wedding in her portfolio.
http://www.imaging-resource.com/PRODS/LS4K/L40A.HT M
I always cringe when I read something like this. To anyone who is planning a wedding out there: Don't be fooled into this!
It's a little off-topic, but I want to point out that this practice - once "just the way it was" when it came to wedding photography - is becoming less and less common. When we got married (a year ago next Sunday), the #1 thing we looked for was a photographer who wouldn't insist on maintaining the copyrights to the photos.
This turned out not to be a problem; the few photographers we looked at who still wanted to maintain copyrights were all old-school (in a negative sense) in other ways, too. One guy even wanted to tell us that our relatives wouldn't be allowed to take pictures at our own fucking wedding! I can't imagine how someone would hire this guy; what kind of asshole is actually going to tell their guests they can't take pictures?
Anyhow, the photographer we ended up with used film rather than digital. I actually looked for this; it added a little bit of work on our part on the back end of the wedding, but as a hobbyist myself I feel there's a real advantage to film specifically in terms of the quality of black and white photos. She did a great job, too.
Once the pictures were developed, we got all the negatives. We scanned the pictures using a kick-ass negative scanner from Nikon that we bought refurbed (and then sold on eBay for a profit) and stuck the pictures out on Ofoto so our friends and relatives could order right from there. Compare this to my Best Man's wedding a year earlier where he went with a "traditional" photog who kept the copyrights from the photos and wanted to charge us $20 per shot... Well, let's just say I don't have any of the pro shots from that wedding.
Now, back on topic: If your photos look too good, why hassle with the local Walmart just to get yourself what's going to be, at best, an 'okay' print? Unless you need the prints Right Now, go online! When I'm trying to get my own "good" photos printed, I've had great luck with Adorama's printing service. Plus, they're used to seeing shots that are far better than what I can produce. Ofoto (or whatever they're calling themselves these days) generally kicks out satisfactory results as well.
Interesting, "unwatchable" was exactly the word I was looking for. Of course, I was thinking about Ep. 1 at the time...
So, yeah, Dvorak should definately start stalking Linus. And he should bring along a crew to videotape it -- when that one hit the net, I'd watch it every morning while I ate my Cheerios.