I've always believed that anyone who qualifies their statements with that line deserves to be modded into oblivion, just on principle. If you've got something to say that you believe will be unpopular, just say it -- don't try to impress us with how tough and brave you are putting your karma on the line. Or whatever.
AMEN! I can't stand that kind of preemptive whining. It's obnoxious. Only in extremely rare and egregious cases is complaining about being modded a reasonable thing to do.
I really don't agree. Any respectable geek shouldn't be getting spam in the first place, let alone be stupid enough to click the unsubscribe links.
Personally I haven't had more than 30-50 spams in the last 3 years or so
You give good advice, but this holier than thou stuff is really hard to take. I get tons of spam, simply because I was active on USENET and had a website with an unobfuscated mailto link 12 frickin' years ago, before spam was an issue. I'm ancient by slashdot standards, and remember seeing the birth of spam on USENET (GREEN CARD LOTTERY!) while reading the newsgroup with Timex Sinclair. OK, the Timex Sinclair is an exaggeration. Anyway, I have my own domain, and use email addresses from that domain forwarded to my main address. I get almost no spam to those addresses, but for various reasons I don't want to eliminate my old address, which is a spam trap. So I use a byzantine combination of SpamAssassin and shell scripts to deal with most of it. It does OK.
It takes only one slip these days to get on a list from which you can never escape. Congratulations on your spam-free life, but don't get too cocky about it, please. Especially with us old farts.:-)
Did you know there is a shogi for 41x41? (it might be 43x43, i don't remember precisely. HUGE,anyway).
I did not know that. Interesting.
I wonder what anybody can say about the complexity of shogi, and how that relates to cracking/modeling shogi.
Seems to me the option of dropping a captured piece adds huge amounts of complexity - but I have no idea how much. Shogi's a really interesting game. Do you play Xiangqi, too?:)
Anyway, I don't completely agree with you about go stones not having a board-wide influence. Think ladders (i forgot the japanese term), and especially think some wide area crossing ladders. Also think influence. With relates to ladders, among other things.
Right - that's why I said a given stone doesn't *directly* influence the other side. It's more subtle.
And as to brute-force vs. knowledge, deep blue had an extensive lib of chess data (i.e. knowledge) to make use of. Nevertheless, brute-force seems to outperform knowledge (even human chess knowledge), so I wouldn't look down on it.
A couple of years ago John Watson wrote a pretty high-level book on chess strategy that essentially said all the rules we learned about chess are fine and dandy, but what really matters is straight, conrete, position-specific calculation. For human players. I don't think that approach can work, though, for any but the very best players in the world. It also affirms that I will never be one of those.:)
Anyway, this is getting long too. Sorry
No worries. I don't think we're imposing on anyone but ourselves.:-)
Friend, nobody is bashing chess here. But it *is* a fact that it is harder to model/crack go than it is to model/crack chess.
Fact not disputed. It's not that I feel like chess is being bashed. I guess it's that I have been around here a long time, and I have "Go complexity" fatigue. Just watch, whenever there is a post about chess, you'll see a raft of knee-jerk "Go is better. It's more complex. Play Go instead. I am cool because I'm different" posts. When there's a discussion of Go, it's always in comparison to chess, and I just think that's kind of silly. It's just irritating, like that annoying relative who, when you want to talk about sailing, loudly changes the subject to his new powerboat. It isn't that I would think he was bashing sailing, just that a) he hijacked the discussion to a different subject (which isn't really the case in this thread) and b) making a dumb comparison.
Besides, if you want to be cool and different, play shogi.:-)
And the branching factor, and possible number of moves are important factors contributing to that fact, but not the only ones.
True.
One thing that always amazed me, is that nobody sees fit to mention that it is possible, and even likely, to have two or more simultaneous, independent conflicts in the same go game. I have never seen that in a game of chess (although that doesn't mean much, really;-)) But it hardly simplifies matters on the go side of things.
This is partly due to the size of the go board, combined with the fact that individual pieces don't have a wide scope that can directly affect the other side of the board as chess pieces can. So yes, Go games usually have several smaller battles taking place.
Chess can, too, but not to the extent of Go. Usually when you have this kind of situation it's something like a kingside attack vs. a queenside attack. But you can't take a Go stone and bring it to another part of the board to help out like you can in chess, so it's more "compartmentalized." Which is another reason I think the comparison is flimsy. The games are just so fundamentally different. They're played on boards with black and white pieces taking turns, and that's *it*. If comparisons must be made, the aforementioned shogi is much better for that.
Another thing is that in go you use different KINDS of strategies and evaluation 'procedures', which are much more qualitative than the chess variants (which is *not* to say that the quantitaive has no place in go). Have you ever tried to have a PC practise qualitative reasoning?
Part of the reason Go is considered more qualitative is due to the complexity. It's just a lot harder to be quantitative. (Imagine the complexity of chess if it were played on a 19x19 board!) One of the battles in the computer chess world was between the "brute force school of thought and the "chess knowledge" school. Brute Force won initially, but it's getting to the point of limited returns, and there's more talk of adding "chess knowledge" to make the programs stronger.
I think a contributing factor in the relative weakness of computer Go is that nowhere near as much effort has been expended on making Go programs as there has been in chess.
Yes, Go has much more branching, complexity, etc. But the Go players' hype is a bit misleading. It's like comparing the damage done to someone who jumps off a 30 story building with that to someone jumping off a 110 story building. The latter will hit a lot harder (let's just ignore terminal velocity for this analogy, OK?), but 30 stories is hard enough. Chess is hard, and complex, enough to devote a lifetime to.
I'm not bashing Go (I like them game, and recommend it, but I'm more into chess), but I get tired of all the Go fanatics acting as if Go makes chess look like Slapjack. It does not.
Yeah, it stings, don't it? I was doing it to make a point. Which you, apparently, missed.
Doesn't sting me. Odd way to make a point. You determined that an abstract group of people was nasty and then insulted them to give 'em a taste of their own medicine. Doesn't really make as much sense as you think it does in this context. Your rhetoric lacks focus. You need to let go, and *be the insult*.
It's not "my" side. I ain't no damned conservative - that's another insult in itself. But I can say, that as a libertarian (i.e. neither conservative nor liberal, 'cause you guys are both wrong)
Oh gawd.
Another libertarian who's oh, so above the rest - and also can't understand why they're considered so insufferable.
All right. Sorry. Didn't mean to be nasty. But really, when you call anyone on the left a socialist, and talk about "hive/pack mentality", do you really expect those people not to be insulted?
Actually, I have another question: Why does it seem that lefties are more apt/willing to resort to really nasty, personal insults when characterizing their enemies? I don't see people calling you folks "animals" just because you espouse a hive/pack mentality rather than believing in individualism. Why is the reverse OK?
Ahem...
Here's a little exchange:
ALAN COLMES: Are all the American people that don't support him [President George W. Bush] dumb?
ANN COULTER: No. I think, as I indicated in my last book, they're traitors.
How about this:
MICHAEL SAVAGE: And we have all of the leaders -- we have Obergrupenführer Clinton; we have Grupenführer Carter; we have Brigadeführer Daschle.... There are only a few rotten führers on the bottom of the corporals; they're the ones wearing the little funny green costumes down there. But they're all there. That's how I see them.
MICHAEL SAVAGE: You know you're part of a left-wing fringe that will destroy the Democrat party even further than it's been destroyed. Keep on talking George, because it doesn't play outside MoveOn.org, an organization of rat-bastard Communists.
The point of these few snips is simple: "Lefties" get as much abuse as anyone else. You have every right to complain about being insulted if you wish, but please drop this nonsense about how your side hardly ever stoops so low. It's crap. It only seems like "lefties are more apt/willing" because that's clearly what you want to believe.
I'm sorry, but you have been docked one Karma Unit for using the phrase "seamless integration." I invoke the fair use clause of the Anti-Trite-Marketingbabble Law to protect myself from penalty for having quoted the Illegal Phrase.
It is permissible to use the Approved Word "SEMPRINI" as a placeholder for an Illegal Word or Phrase. Thank you for your attention.
The only thing it lacks is the smart recording functions that TIVO has, but then that function sounds like it would be a lot of work to delete things it records that you do not want.
The amount of work required to delete the stuff you don't want is -- wait for it -- Zero! When TiVO takes it upon itself to record something, it is automatically assigned a low priority status. If it's taking up room you need to record something else, those programs are written over without nary a peep from the TiVO.
TiVO might have some annoying restrictions, but overall, it's really nicely designed and works very well. Of course, I got mine because it befuddled my dad and he gave it to me, so I don't have a lot invested in it...
I have nothing against iRivers. I don't think iPods are the last word in wonderfulness.
However, I am a happy iPod user. I plug my iPod into my iBook, and it launches iTunes and performs a sync over firewire in very short order.
My point being, you say "no syncing required" as if that takes any effort. It's a lot easier than manually copying stuff - just plugging in.
I appreciate that for some, it's more useful to just mount as a HD (iPods will do that, too). But iPod's sync function works very well for most. I don't see how it can be denied that the integration is really well designed.
(AGAIN, I'm not putting any other players down! I am not saying iPods are perfect in every way! I have to make this clear, since expressing satisfaction with an iPod gets one flamed as a rabid Apple fanboi around here.)
We keep one around for when we get kittens. First, they're house broken and taught to use the litter box. Then they're taught to go outside instead. Works like a charm. No litter box to smell/clean/change, and nothing to worry about tripping over in the yard either. One of the better things about cats: they look after themselves.
We used to do that. Now we have 2 kittens, and they'll never go outside. The last cat we owned was loved by all in the neighborhood. He went missing for a couple of days and came back with a respiratory infection that killed him in a few weeks of trying everything we could. We think he got stuck in a garage or something and inhaled something bad. The one previous to that got FIV from another cat and died of an opportunistic toxoplasmosis infection. Neither cat lived past 7.
The life span of indoor cats is in the 15-20 year range. For outdoor cats it's 5 to 7. Please don't interpret this reply as an indignant condemnation of your having an outdoor cat. Like I said, I did it for years, so I have no sense of self-righteousness about this. But the pain of losing those cats was really awful, and I'd just like to put the suggestion out there.
There are alternatives, too. We are in the process of procuring a cat run, which is a covered wire mesh tunnel that lets cats go outside, get some fresh air and sun, chase some bugs, and not be bothered by other animals or hit by cars.
Having to euthanize a terminally ill cat sucks. A lot.
You know, I really don't mind Lucas going in and tinkering with SFX, and when he says he puts stuff in he wanted to get in originally but couldn't because of budget and technology, I'm happy to give him the benefit of the doubt.
Gosh, that sure is nice of you. I'm certain that George Lucas is grateful that you're willing to tolerate his making certain changes to his own creative work.
Han fired first. Period.
What I don't understand is how Lucas could have made such a change without first consulting otis wildflower of Slashdot. Who the hell does he think he is?!?
If being satisfied with a purchase and not seeing any reason to fuck with it just to add features I don't need is your definition of fanboy, I stand so defined.
See, around these parts, it's not possible to simply be someone who likes Apple products. If you dare to praise an iPod, or OS X, or anything Apple, you are a MINDLESS FANBOY. It means your house is festooned with Apple bumper stickers and posters, and you fantasize about fellating Steve Jobs.
On the other hand, if you mindlessly criticize anything Apple, and relentlessly call its defenders fanboiz, you are a clear-headed and objective industry pundit with a license to condescend. You are also a 7337 rebel who understands Apple sucks ass because of its failure to support the ogg vorbis juggernaut.
So please, drop the pretense of being a reasonable person who is also a satisfied Apple customer. You can't fool slashdot. We know you don't exist.
Whoops! Gotta go - it's time for us to face Cupertino and pray.
Depends on what you mean by that. Winning at BJ IS 100% luck. Losing is a certainty (in the long run, without counting cards).
There are hit/stand/double down tables crafted by those who play it. For example (a fake one): if the dealer has XYZ cards and you have 14, always hit.
The fact that there are optimal strategies doesn't make it deterministic. If you play perfect basic strategy, you merely reduce the margin by which you are losing. So you keep your money a little longer, but you'll still lose it.
Only using those "tables" can you closely acheive some kind of winning capacity.
Sorry, but this is wrong. The rules are set up so the players can't win. You can only move from losing by a small margin to winning by a small margin by counting cards, something impossible online (they "shuffle" after each hand) and very hard in casinos nowadays, with the 6+ deck shoes and low penetration.
It's all about odds, they figure that if you hit, or stand, at certain cards your *odds* of winning that hand are higher.
Yes, but they're still losing. For example, if you have a K6 (16) vs. a 10 showing, you have to hit. You're very likely to bust, but by doing this, you lose less often. BJ basic strategy, which is what you're talking about, is all about losing less often.
This is no different than with the Poker bots.
Yes it is. It is fundamentally different, because BJ has no element of deception. The dealer plays according to an unvarying algorithm that makes it possible to calculate odds of winning precisely. The only information you have in Poker is any upcards and the way the player bets, which is varied intentionally for the purpose of deception.
There is no resemblance between poker and BJ except that they're played with cards and chips and such. This superficial resemblance is why some idiot TV execs figured they could cash in on the poker craze by showing the "World Series of Blackjack." I like blackjack, but watching it on TV is horrible. The commentary always boils down to the idiot announcer complaining that someone's taking an extra card screws up the rest of the table. There just isn't any real strategizing necessary to play the game. The correct strategy can be written on a 4x5 card.
As long as you don't take it as gospel and turn into yet another hyper-libertarian free-market-worshipping Rand cultist. "Objectivists," AKA Randroids, are easy to spot with their propensity for congratulating themselves and condescending to others simultaneously. All hail the omnipotent Invisible Hand, which solves all problems!
I know I'm gonna get flamed for this, since randroids are overrepresented here, but there it is. I'll just take it.
Good point. I guess the way I look at it is this: Doing something wacky with hardware is all OK by me, but if I were doing it, I'd expect to take some shit for it.:)
I do think there's value in doing something just for the sake of doing it. I also think it's OK to like what someone does while also giving them a hard time about it. It still seems impractical to me.
The hack is to record the IR pulses as sound files and play them back with an IR LED connected to the iPod's headphone port. It's a really smart and cool idea but I guess you guys wouldn't know one of those if it bit you on your collective ass.
Maybe it was smart, but in the end, the summary is accurate: Take an iPod and an adapter and a Pocket PC and make something pedestrian out of it.
The only way this is "cool" is if it's a way to test an idea that might have some rational use. That might be the case. Otherwise, no matter how cleverly done, they still have just taken 2 very expensive things and combined them to do the job of one very inexpensive thing. That's just begging to be ridiculed.
Slashdot Mirror
I've always believed that anyone who qualifies their statements with that line deserves to be modded into oblivion, just on principle. If you've got something to say that you believe will be unpopular, just say it -- don't try to impress us with how tough and brave you are putting your karma on the line. Or whatever.
AMEN! I can't stand that kind of preemptive whining. It's obnoxious. Only in extremely rare and egregious cases is complaining about being modded a reasonable thing to do.
I really don't agree. Any respectable geek shouldn't be getting spam in the first place, let alone be stupid enough to click the unsubscribe links.
:-)
Personally I haven't had more than 30-50 spams in the last 3 years or so
You give good advice, but this holier than thou stuff is really hard to take. I get tons of spam, simply because I was active on USENET and had a website with an unobfuscated mailto link 12 frickin' years ago, before spam was an issue. I'm ancient by slashdot standards, and remember seeing the birth of spam on USENET (GREEN CARD LOTTERY!) while reading the newsgroup with Timex Sinclair. OK, the Timex Sinclair is an exaggeration. Anyway, I have my own domain, and use email addresses from that domain forwarded to my main address. I get almost no spam to those addresses, but for various reasons I don't want to eliminate my old address, which is a spam trap. So I use a byzantine combination of SpamAssassin and shell scripts to deal with most of it. It does OK.
It takes only one slip these days to get on a list from which you can never escape. Congratulations on your spam-free life, but don't get too cocky about it, please. Especially with us old farts.
(And no, I've never clicked any link in spam.)
As Firesign Theater once said:
News Announcer: "Big light in sky slated to appear in East."
Did you know there is a shogi for 41x41? (it might be 43x43, i don't remember precisely. HUGE,anyway).
:)
:)
:-)
I did not know that. Interesting.
I wonder what anybody can say about the complexity of shogi, and how that relates to cracking/modeling shogi.
Seems to me the option of dropping a captured piece adds huge amounts of complexity - but I have no idea how much. Shogi's a really interesting game. Do you play Xiangqi, too?
Anyway, I don't completely agree with you about go stones not having a board-wide influence. Think ladders (i forgot the japanese term), and especially think some wide area crossing ladders. Also think influence. With relates to ladders, among other things.
Right - that's why I said a given stone doesn't *directly* influence the other side. It's more subtle.
And as to brute-force vs. knowledge, deep blue had an extensive lib of chess data (i.e. knowledge) to make use of. Nevertheless, brute-force seems to outperform knowledge (even human chess knowledge), so I wouldn't look down on it.
A couple of years ago John Watson wrote a pretty high-level book on chess strategy that essentially said all the rules we learned about chess are fine and dandy, but what really matters is straight, conrete, position-specific calculation. For human players. I don't think that approach can work, though, for any but the very best players in the world. It also affirms that I will never be one of those.
Anyway, this is getting long too. Sorry
No worries. I don't think we're imposing on anyone but ourselves.
Friend, nobody is bashing chess here. But it *is* a fact that it is harder to model/crack go than it is to model/crack chess.
:-)
;-)) But it hardly simplifies matters on the go side of things.
:)
Fact not disputed. It's not that I feel like chess is being bashed. I guess it's that I have been around here a long time, and I have "Go complexity" fatigue. Just watch, whenever there is a post about chess, you'll see a raft of knee-jerk "Go is better. It's more complex. Play Go instead. I am cool because I'm different" posts. When there's a discussion of Go, it's always in comparison to chess, and I just think that's kind of silly. It's just irritating, like that annoying relative who, when you want to talk about sailing, loudly changes the subject to his new powerboat. It isn't that I would think he was bashing sailing, just that a) he hijacked the discussion to a different subject (which isn't really the case in this thread) and b) making a dumb comparison.
Besides, if you want to be cool and different, play shogi.
And the branching factor, and possible number of moves are important factors contributing to that fact, but not the only ones.
True.
One thing that always amazed me, is that nobody sees fit to mention that it is possible, and even likely, to have two or more simultaneous, independent conflicts in the same go game. I have never seen that in a game of chess (although that doesn't mean much, really
This is partly due to the size of the go board, combined with the fact that individual pieces don't have a wide scope that can directly affect the other side of the board as chess pieces can. So yes, Go games usually have several smaller battles taking place.
Chess can, too, but not to the extent of Go. Usually when you have this kind of situation it's something like a kingside attack vs. a queenside attack. But you can't take a Go stone and bring it to another part of the board to help out like you can in chess, so it's more "compartmentalized." Which is another reason I think the comparison is flimsy. The games are just so fundamentally different. They're played on boards with black and white pieces taking turns, and that's *it*. If comparisons must be made, the aforementioned shogi is much better for that.
Another thing is that in go you use different KINDS of strategies and evaluation 'procedures', which are much more qualitative than the chess variants (which is *not* to say that the quantitaive has no place in go). Have you ever tried to have a PC practise qualitative reasoning?
Part of the reason Go is considered more qualitative is due to the complexity. It's just a lot harder to be quantitative. (Imagine the complexity of chess if it were played on a 19x19 board!) One of the battles in the computer chess world was between the "brute force school of thought and the "chess knowledge" school. Brute Force won initially, but it's getting to the point of limited returns, and there's more talk of adding "chess knowledge" to make the programs stronger.
I think a contributing factor in the relative weakness of computer Go is that nowhere near as much effort has been expended on making Go programs as there has been in chess.
Sorry for the length. I'm feeling chatty today.
Actually, the number of possible moves in a game of Go far outnumbers those in chess. In fact, they outnumber the number of atoms in the universe!
The possible number of moves in a 40-move chess game also outnumber the number of atoms in the universe.
Yes, Go has much more branching, complexity, etc. But the Go players' hype is a bit misleading. It's like comparing the damage done to someone who jumps off a 30 story building with that to someone jumping off a 110 story building. The latter will hit a lot harder (let's just ignore terminal velocity for this analogy, OK?), but 30 stories is hard enough. Chess is hard, and complex, enough to devote a lifetime to.
I'm not bashing Go (I like them game, and recommend it, but I'm more into chess), but I get tired of all the Go fanatics acting as if Go makes chess look like Slapjack. It does not.
Yeah, it stings, don't it? I was doing it to make a point. Which you, apparently, missed.
Doesn't sting me. Odd way to make a point. You determined that an abstract group of people was nasty and then insulted them to give 'em a taste of their own medicine. Doesn't really make as much sense as you think it does in this context. Your rhetoric lacks focus. You need to let go, and *be the insult*.
A return of quality Portman and grits stamp-jokes! Not the inferior "Soviet Russia" or "overlords". Yay!
I know what you mean. Now, just imagine a beowulf cluster of Natalie Portman and grits jokes...
It's not "my" side. I ain't no damned conservative - that's another insult in itself. But I can say, that as a libertarian (i.e. neither conservative nor liberal, 'cause you guys are both wrong)
Oh gawd.
Another libertarian who's oh, so above the rest - and also can't understand why they're considered so insufferable.
All right. Sorry. Didn't mean to be nasty. But really, when you call anyone on the left a socialist, and talk about "hive/pack mentality", do you really expect those people not to be insulted?
Actually, I have another question: Why does it seem that lefties are more apt/willing to resort to really nasty, personal insults when characterizing their enemies? I don't see people calling you folks "animals" just because you espouse a hive/pack mentality rather than believing in individualism. Why is the reverse OK?
... There are only a few rotten führers on the bottom of the corporals; they're the ones wearing the little funny green costumes down there. But they're all there. That's how I see them.
Ahem...
Here's a little exchange:
ALAN COLMES: Are all the American people that don't support him [President George W. Bush] dumb?
ANN COULTER: No. I think, as I indicated in my last book, they're traitors.
How about this:
MICHAEL SAVAGE: And we have all of the leaders -- we have Obergrupenführer Clinton; we have Grupenführer Carter; we have Brigadeführer Daschle.
MICHAEL SAVAGE: You know you're part of a left-wing fringe that will destroy the Democrat party even further than it's been destroyed. Keep on talking George, because it doesn't play outside MoveOn.org, an organization of rat-bastard Communists.
The point of these few snips is simple: "Lefties" get as much abuse as anyone else. You have every right to complain about being insulted if you wish, but please drop this nonsense about how your side hardly ever stoops so low. It's crap. It only seems like "lefties are more apt/willing" because that's clearly what you want to believe.
Thank you, dancingmad.
So now Apple's given my wife a way to INSTANTLY find all my porn.
I guess I now have to go back to a "download as needed then delete" paradigm.
Sheesh, I wish they'd think these things through.
I'm sorry, but you have been docked one Karma Unit for using the phrase "seamless integration." I invoke the fair use clause of the Anti-Trite-Marketingbabble Law to protect myself from penalty for having quoted the Illegal Phrase.
It is permissible to use the Approved Word "SEMPRINI" as a placeholder for an Illegal Word or Phrase. Thank you for your attention.
... I think that all the arguments that Creationists have are bunk. But that's just me.
No, it's not just you. They ARE bunk.
The only thing it lacks is the smart recording functions that TIVO has, but then that function sounds like it would be a lot of work to delete things it records that you do not want.
The amount of work required to delete the stuff you don't want is -- wait for it -- Zero! When TiVO takes it upon itself to record something, it is automatically assigned a low priority status. If it's taking up room you need to record something else, those programs are written over without nary a peep from the TiVO.
TiVO might have some annoying restrictions, but overall, it's really nicely designed and works very well. Of course, I got mine because it befuddled my dad and he gave it to me, so I don't have a lot invested in it...
I have nothing against iRivers. I don't think iPods are the last word in wonderfulness.
However, I am a happy iPod user. I plug my iPod into my iBook, and it launches iTunes and performs a sync over firewire in very short order.
My point being, you say "no syncing required" as if that takes any effort. It's a lot easier than manually copying stuff - just plugging in.
I appreciate that for some, it's more useful to just mount as a HD (iPods will do that, too). But iPod's sync function works very well for most. I don't see how it can be denied that the integration is really well designed.
(AGAIN, I'm not putting any other players down! I am not saying iPods are perfect in every way! I have to make this clear, since expressing satisfaction with an iPod gets one flamed as a rabid Apple fanboi around here.)
We keep one around for when we get kittens. First, they're house broken and taught to use the litter box. Then they're taught to go outside instead. Works like a charm. No litter box to smell/clean/change, and nothing to worry about tripping over in the yard either. One of the better things about cats: they look after themselves.
We used to do that. Now we have 2 kittens, and they'll never go outside. The last cat we owned was loved by all in the neighborhood. He went missing for a couple of days and came back with a respiratory infection that killed him in a few weeks of trying everything we could. We think he got stuck in a garage or something and inhaled something bad. The one previous to that got FIV from another cat and died of an opportunistic toxoplasmosis infection. Neither cat lived past 7.
The life span of indoor cats is in the 15-20 year range. For outdoor cats it's 5 to 7. Please don't interpret this reply as an indignant condemnation of your having an outdoor cat. Like I said, I did it for years, so I have no sense of self-righteousness about this. But the pain of losing those cats was really awful, and I'd just like to put the suggestion out there.
There are alternatives, too. We are in the process of procuring a cat run, which is a covered wire mesh tunnel that lets cats go outside, get some fresh air and sun, chase some bugs, and not be bothered by other animals or hit by cars.
Having to euthanize a terminally ill cat sucks. A lot.
Hmf. Young 'uns...
It's not "the Fonzi." It's "The Fonz," or "Fonzie."
You are not cool. Aayyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy!
You know, I really don't mind Lucas going in and tinkering with SFX, and when he says he puts stuff in he wanted to get in originally but couldn't because of budget and technology, I'm happy to give him the benefit of the doubt.
Gosh, that sure is nice of you. I'm certain that George Lucas is grateful that you're willing to tolerate his making certain changes to his own creative work.
Han fired first. Period.
What I don't understand is how Lucas could have made such a change without first consulting otis wildflower of Slashdot. Who the hell does he think he is?!?
If being satisfied with a purchase and not seeing any reason to fuck with it just to add features I don't need is your definition of fanboy, I stand so defined.
See, around these parts, it's not possible to simply be someone who likes Apple products. If you dare to praise an iPod, or OS X, or anything Apple, you are a MINDLESS FANBOY. It means your house is festooned with Apple bumper stickers and posters, and you fantasize about fellating Steve Jobs.
On the other hand, if you mindlessly criticize anything Apple, and relentlessly call its defenders fanboiz, you are a clear-headed and objective industry pundit with a license to condescend. You are also a 7337 rebel who understands Apple sucks ass because of its failure to support the ogg vorbis juggernaut.
So please, drop the pretense of being a reasonable person who is also a satisfied Apple customer. You can't fool slashdot. We know you don't exist.
Whoops! Gotta go - it's time for us to face Cupertino and pray.
Blackjack is not 100% luck.
Depends on what you mean by that. Winning at BJ IS 100% luck. Losing is a certainty (in the long run, without counting cards).
There are hit/stand/double down tables crafted by those who play it. For example (a fake one): if the dealer has XYZ cards and you have 14, always hit.
The fact that there are optimal strategies doesn't make it deterministic. If you play perfect basic strategy, you merely reduce the margin by which you are losing. So you keep your money a little longer, but you'll still lose it.
Only using those "tables" can you closely acheive some kind of winning capacity.
Sorry, but this is wrong. The rules are set up so the players can't win. You can only move from losing by a small margin to winning by a small margin by counting cards, something impossible online (they "shuffle" after each hand) and very hard in casinos nowadays, with the 6+ deck shoes and low penetration.
It's all about odds, they figure that if you hit, or stand, at certain cards your *odds* of winning that hand are higher.
Yes, but they're still losing. For example, if you have a K6 (16) vs. a 10 showing, you have to hit. You're very likely to bust, but by doing this, you lose less often. BJ basic strategy, which is what you're talking about, is all about losing less often.
This is no different than with the Poker bots.
Yes it is. It is fundamentally different, because BJ has no element of deception. The dealer plays according to an unvarying algorithm that makes it possible to calculate odds of winning precisely. The only information you have in Poker is any upcards and the way the player bets, which is varied intentionally for the purpose of deception.
There is no resemblance between poker and BJ except that they're played with cards and chips and such. This superficial resemblance is why some idiot TV execs figured they could cash in on the poker craze by showing the "World Series of Blackjack." I like blackjack, but watching it on TV is horrible. The commentary always boils down to the idiot announcer complaining that someone's taking an extra card screws up the rest of the table. There just isn't any real strategizing necessary to play the game. The correct strategy can be written on a 4x5 card.
Time to read Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand.
As long as you don't take it as gospel and turn into yet another hyper-libertarian free-market-worshipping Rand cultist. "Objectivists," AKA Randroids, are easy to spot with their propensity for congratulating themselves and condescending to others simultaneously. All hail the omnipotent Invisible Hand, which solves all problems!
I know I'm gonna get flamed for this, since randroids are overrepresented here, but there it is. I'll just take it.
Actually, I agree with many of Rand's ideas. Unfortunately, many people tend to take it a little too seriously..
Wow - they finally found the right theme music! Nice lyrics:
It's time to play the music
It's time to light the lights
it's time to meet the Muppets on the Farscape Show tonight.
It's time to put on makeup
It's time to dress up right
It's time to raise the curtain on the Farscape Show tonight.
Good point. I guess the way I look at it is this: Doing something wacky with hardware is all OK by me, but if I were doing it, I'd expect to take some shit for it. :)
I do think there's value in doing something just for the sake of doing it. I also think it's OK to like what someone does while also giving them a hard time about it. It still seems impractical to me.
The hack is to record the IR pulses as sound files and play them back with an IR LED connected to the iPod's headphone port. It's a really smart and cool idea but I guess you guys wouldn't know one of those if it bit you on your collective ass.
Maybe it was smart, but in the end, the summary is accurate: Take an iPod and an adapter and a Pocket PC and make something pedestrian out of it.
The only way this is "cool" is if it's a way to test an idea that might have some rational use. That might be the case. Otherwise, no matter how cleverly done, they still have just taken 2 very expensive things and combined them to do the job of one very inexpensive thing. That's just begging to be ridiculed.
Thank you.
Back under your bridge, you!