Actually, they do. I read a newspaper article saying that it was by far the most popular sequence in my local lottery, with something like 10,000 tickets every lottery.
What's ironic is that all these people picking "1,2,3,4,5,6" think they're so witty, since they know that it has the same probability of coming up as any other sequence. But in fact, it's the worst possible choice: if it did come up, the jackpot would be split among 10,000 people!
unintentional destruction of the planet through scientific experimentation that goes wrong
I presume you're referring to something like an accidental black-hole creation, dimensional warp, etc in a particle accelerator that would destroy the Earth in the blink of an eye. But I don't think this is really a threat. We're not really doing anything in our particle accelerators that doesn't already happen in space. Subatomic particles are smashing into each other at comparable energies in deep space and inside stars all the time. If it was possible for a high-energy collision to do something planet-destroying, we would be seeing many more stars winking out of existence or going supernova for no apparent reason.
Re:Metathis and Metathat
on
What is .NET?
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· Score: 1
What on earth does MS have to do with Enron, dictatorships and Clinton? "Defining a metatheory" "oppresses the people"? What's that supposed to mean? And what does changing programming standards have to do with changing the English language? Programming and natural languages can be compared in an abstract sense, but they have almost nothing in common in the ways they are used (and thus in the power they confer to their definers).
I can sort of see what you're getting at, but I think you're taking a clever idea too far. As far as I can tell, redefining terms gives you no power whatsoever, let alone absolute power. Unless you subscribe to some extreme version of the sapir-whorf hypothesis (I don't). Please clarify your argument, because it doesn't make much sense to me right now.
Nice concept, but I don't think the "mediaglyph" idea will work better than ordinary language. Something a lot like it has already been invented, and failed: ancient Chinese pictograms. Originally, the Chinese writing system was made of detailed pictures. The Chinese pictographic system can be said to have "failed," in that it evolved into the ideograms we have today, which don't look anything like the pictures they originally represented. It's now an ordinary writing system in many ways like our alphabet (except with thousands of characters, instead of only 26).
The "mediaglyph" idea, from what you describe, sounds exactly the same, with the addition of animation. Animation is a dumb idea anyway, since nobody wants to wait 2-3 seconds to read a single word. I think that, like ancient Chinese pictograms, mediaglyphs would be inferior to ordinary words and eventually disappear.
The reason is standardization. If you want to be able to rapidly read the word "eject," it has to look the same everywhere. You'll never learn to recognize it if it's only on your VCR. So the "eject" on your VCR would have to be the same as on your CD player, your disk drive, etc. And it would have to be the same in contexts completely unrelated to devices, such as a description of someone being "ejected" from their post.
So the tape-out-of-VCR picture becomes not only useless but counterproductive. The word is better served by something arbitrary, abstract and easy to write, such as the letters "e-j-e-c-t" or the modern Chinese ideogram representing the concept.
Your arguments seem to rely on the belief that the Bible is largely a historical account of events. But it is certainly plausible that the Bible is fiction, in light of its many internal contradictions and strong family resemblance to earlier myths. You'd have to first make a strong case for the truth of the Bible based on historical sources known to be reliable, otherwise your argument is circular. Unfortunately, since the origins of the Bible are so apocryphal, this is practically impossible to do convincingly. For instance, even if you show that some parts of the Bible are true, how does that prove that the rest of it is also true?
Thus I find that "historical" pro-Bible arguments are unconvincing, especially since the opposing camp has mounds of "historical" evidence in the form of fossils, carbon-dating, geological data, etc. It's hard to beat science when it comes to empirical evidence, since that's what science is all about.
I am an agnostic myself, so I have some respect for the religious standpoint. But in my opinion, the solid arguments supporting your beliefs are all metaphysical in nature.
No it didn't. The only thing they showed was "it was found that the computer game only stimulated activity in the parts of the brain associated with vision and movement."
Whereas doing arithmetic stimulated the parts of the brain involved in math. Gosh, what a surprise! And what does this stunning result show about the effect of games on antisocial behavior? Nothing.
The best part of the article is when he recommends that children play outside instead. Gee, I wonder what part of the brain that will stimulate? Vision and movement, perhaps?
I've never understood why people think "going outside" somehow makes you into a better person (health benefits aside). Playing ball or whatever is far less intellectually stimulating than most video games. I'm open to your point of view, but can you point me to any studies showing that playing outside is better for a child than video games?
I think you underestimate the kind of work that goes on at Microsoft. Do you really think that the people who work there are stupid enough to ignore compiler warnings? That they don't use prototypes? That misuse of printf is a major problem in their graphical applications? Or that they make sophomoric mistakes like using bubble sort?
Maybe those are the kind of bugs you see in small shops where the previous maintainer was incompetent. But I would guess that bugs in a large-scale system like Windows or Office, written by a highly competent programming team, are usually due to obscure, complex conditions caused by the sheer size of the project. E.g. a bug that occurs only when components X, Y, and Z happen to be running together at the same time. Cleaning up that kind of problem is not, I think, as trivial as you make it out to be.
The links he draws with 1984 are surprisingly apt. I had the same fears in the days after Sept. 11. But the bottom line is that it's just empty doomsday rhetoric with no real basis in fact or rational argument. And after seeing a few months of the new war on terrorism, I think we can say that the American government has been admirably reasonable and clear-headed, proving him wrong.
A word makes it into the language when it's in wide use. Whether or not it "makes sense" is irrelevant. Where's the harm in it, anyway? It's not like English is a "pure" language that has to be defended against irregularities.
Information itself is 2d (not talking about the collection/architecture of information but the information itself).
What's that supposed to mean? AFAIK, any discrete information can be stored as a single (huge) integer. Your computer's RAM can be viewed as one long 128mb (or whatever) integer. There's nothing fundamentally special about 2 dimensions.
Re:"Outside activities"
on
Browsing Alone
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· Score: 3, Insightful
it's really only been in the last 200 years that material gain has been valued over various other social activies such as family, music, art, etc
Do you seriously think that the average peasant or artisan from 300 years ago cared about music and art? Besides the fact that he was illiterate and that there were no libraries in his village, he was much too busy struggling against starvation and disease. His life was short, brutal and devoid of all intellectual stimulation.
As for family, I should point out that many, perhaps most of his children died at birth and that the main reason for giving birth to them was to have an extra helping hand at the farm. Marriages were often arranged. The prevailing notion of happiness at that time was simply the absence of death and misery.
As for today, we have much more time for our family and an unprecedented exposure to culture from all over the world. As for our ancient peasant, he rarely strayed further than a few miles from his village. No, this is a golden age, not a dark age, in humanity's history. Although it's not perfect, we shouldn't let ourselves be blinded by nostalgia for an utopia that never was. We are, in every way -- and even in the third world, where life expectancy has increased by 20 years since 1900 -- better off than our ancestors.
Maybe you think it sounds cool, but ask a dozen people on the street and they'll tell you it's the ugliest name ever. It's too bad that the Ogg guys don't understand the importance of good marketing, because whatever its merits, the format's name alone ensures it will never take off. And the odds are stacked against them in any case. I hope they will prove me wrong, but I don't think they will: tech history is littered with the corpses of superior technologies that weren't marketed properly.
The reason no one's discussed it is that the only popular filesystem with slack space is FAT, the one supported by DOS and its pustulant spawn (win9x/ME). AFAIK, on unices and NT-based windowses, there is no such thing.
<rant> FAT is slow, error-prone and wasteful.
When I browsed the linux kernel sources for using FAT filesystems, I found several vitriolic comments about the wisdom of its technical decisions. The earlier it dies, the better. </rant>
although it's medical and power usefuls are quite helpful
If I could bring back the dead at Hiroshima, Nagasaki and Tchernobyl, I would gladly get rid of today's nuclear power plants. They are, in any case, inefficient and dangerous. Even in industrialized countries, most don't even break even without government aid.
And I know of no nuclear-based medical technologies. Are you referring things like X-rays and cancer treatment? Nuclear technology is hardly needed for those applications; all you need is to dig out a radioactive rock from the ground and expose someone to it.
No, it's clear that nuclear technology is a dangerous technology whose invention was a dark day in the history of humanity. That said, I don't have anything against these exoskeleton things. They look helpful for handicapped people and, if we're lucky, may eventually lead to an Angelic Layer-like game:).
Wu-FTPd has had a long history of security holes. It's practically the BIND of FTP servers.
I looked through the source of Wu-FTPd some time ago, when I was interested in adding support for an encrypted form of FTP proposed in a recent RFC (the protocol never caught on). What I found scared me. Most of the server is one humungous 8000-line C source file which appears to do pretty much everything.
Having quite a bit of experience with the FTP protocol, I expected to immediately understand what was going on, but at first glance, this code baffled me. It's full of pointer arithmetic and chains of if-statements performing mysterious, undecipherable operations on fixed-length arrays. It's not divided into clear levels of abstraction and I had difficulty telling what most functions were supposed to do, let alone what they actually did.
Anyway, I immediately gave up any thought of adding any new features to this godawful mess. Considering all the weird cruft that goes on in that code, it's no surprise to me that people are constantly finding new security holes in it. There are other featureful FTP servers out there; it's hard to see why distributions continue to include a bug-ridden program like Wu-FTPd as default in their distributions.
You're ascribing flaws to a technology that doesn't yet exist. Presumably, if or when brain implants become feasible, they will only become widespread if problems like security, crashes, etc, are 99.99% eliminated. Otherwise they will be used only by handicapped people. Kind of like today's laser eye surgery. If it's as problem-riddled as you speculate, it simply won't be used, so there's nothing to worry about.
As for government abuse, I could make the same argument about traditional computers: the government can build huge databases of personal info, spy on us with Carnivore, etc. This is a social problem, not a technological one. Computers can be used to restrict freedom but they can also greatly increase it, as when oppressed people use it to get information from the free world. I imagine the same will be true of a brain implant technology.
I think that in general, development of potentially beneficial technologies shouldn't be stopped because of possible social consequences down the line. After all, then the telephone came out, there were worries that it would turn everyone into loners.
Then, I finally got the game, and stayed up 48 hours straight finishing the game on Nightmare.
You probably mean Ultra-Violence here. I've been playing for years and still can't finish either Doom 1 or 2 at Nightmare, so a beginner surely couldn't.
I consider myself pretty good at Doom, but I'm lucky if I survive the first few levels at Nightmare. Even the Doom Done Quick guys, who are probably among the best single-player Doom players in the world, did their Doom2 demo on Ultra-Violence. Have you ever heard of anybody who actually managed to finish Doom on Nightmare difficulty?
I also have the strange habit of constantly selecting and deselecting paragraphs as I browse
Yeah, I do this too. I think the habit dates back to the days when I didn't have a wheel-thingamabob on my mouse and was too lazy to use the scrollbar, so I scrolled by selecting text and pushing up or down.
Ahem, ahem. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is the most important charity in the world, with 21 billion dollars US. It is making progress towards stamping out tuberculosis in third-world countries. After Bill's death, practically all of his vast fortune will go to charity, leaving only (IIRC) 10 million for his children. Bill isn't doing this to improve his image; he could've done that with a fraction of the money.
So, not only is Bill Gates a philanthropist, he's the greatest philanthropist ever. Microsoft's business practices notwithstanding, accusing him of avarice is misguided.
I almost wish they had. Is it just me or are BSD sockets really ugly? Functions do several unrelated things depending on their arguments (select() does what, 5 things?), much of the system results from implementation details instead of a client-oriented plan, and the function names don't make much sense. Sockets programming is so conceptually simple it should be a piece of cake, but somehow BSD sockets make it hard.
In comparison, Java has a nice, clean sockets interface. It would be sweet if Windows had something similar instead of the current heap of legacy crap. (though MFC may have made some progress in this direction, I don't really know much about it)
If it were easy to smuggle these sorts of things in, presumably we'd have all sorts of things like suitcase nukes and other medium-size arms.
There was an article in The Economist claiming that terrorist nuclear attacks are a serious threat. After Sept.11, this seems worryingly plausible. If this happens, it will make Sept.11 look like "small beer" as the French say.
I also wish developers would invent more genres instead of contenting themselves with evolutionary changes. I think the problem is that producing games is expensive if you want to compete graphics-wise, trying new things is a big risk and nobody wants to invest in ideas that haven't been proven. IIRC, Paul Reiche (co-creator of Star Control 2, a great 1992 hybrid space shooter/RPG/adventure) said in an interview that he had a lot of difficulty convincing people to invest in his genre-breaking ideas. They just couldn't comprehend that a game could involve both fighting and strategy elements.
Since I started learning Japanese, I recently heard about a major genre that currently exists only in Japan, the social/dating sim. The "killer app" of this genre was Tokimeki Memorial in 1995 (a success on the scale of Doom), and since then there have been thousands of clones. Unfortunately, these games revolve around conversations with game characters, so they are unplayable for people who don't understand Japanese. And because of the aforementioned risks, no one has ever dared release one in the West. As a result, the genre is completely unheard of here.
As a jaded gamer, I find playing a completely new genre for the first time in 5 years very refreshing. Dating sim gameplay is fundamentally different from anything I've seen before. I'm hopeful that the genre will eventually break into the Western market. If you are looking for a paradigm shift, this is perhaps where it will come from.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, they do. I read a newspaper article saying that it was by far the most popular sequence in my local lottery, with something like 10,000 tickets every lottery.
What's ironic is that all these people picking "1,2,3,4,5,6" think they're so witty, since they know that it has the same probability of coming up as any other sequence. But in fact, it's the worst possible choice: if it did come up, the jackpot would be split among 10,000 people!
I presume you're referring to something like an accidental black-hole creation, dimensional warp, etc in a particle accelerator that would destroy the Earth in the blink of an eye. But I don't think this is really a threat. We're not really doing anything in our particle accelerators that doesn't already happen in space. Subatomic particles are smashing into each other at comparable energies in deep space and inside stars all the time. If it was possible for a high-energy collision to do something planet-destroying, we would be seeing many more stars winking out of existence or going supernova for no apparent reason.
I can sort of see what you're getting at, but I think you're taking a clever idea too far. As far as I can tell, redefining terms gives you no power whatsoever, let alone absolute power. Unless you subscribe to some extreme version of the sapir-whorf hypothesis (I don't). Please clarify your argument, because it doesn't make much sense to me right now.
The "mediaglyph" idea, from what you describe, sounds exactly the same, with the addition of animation. Animation is a dumb idea anyway, since nobody wants to wait 2-3 seconds to read a single word. I think that, like ancient Chinese pictograms, mediaglyphs would be inferior to ordinary words and eventually disappear.
The reason is standardization. If you want to be able to rapidly read the word "eject," it has to look the same everywhere. You'll never learn to recognize it if it's only on your VCR. So the "eject" on your VCR would have to be the same as on your CD player, your disk drive, etc. And it would have to be the same in contexts completely unrelated to devices, such as a description of someone being "ejected" from their post.
So the tape-out-of-VCR picture becomes not only useless but counterproductive. The word is better served by something arbitrary, abstract and easy to write, such as the letters "e-j-e-c-t" or the modern Chinese ideogram representing the concept.
Thus I find that "historical" pro-Bible arguments are unconvincing, especially since the opposing camp has mounds of "historical" evidence in the form of fossils, carbon-dating, geological data, etc. It's hard to beat science when it comes to empirical evidence, since that's what science is all about.
I am an agnostic myself, so I have some respect for the religious standpoint. But in my opinion, the solid arguments supporting your beliefs are all metaphysical in nature.
Nice, but I wouldn't be surprised if Google did this already. I don't seem to get many pages with billions of porn popups as results for my searches.
Whereas doing arithmetic stimulated the parts of the brain involved in math. Gosh, what a surprise! And what does this stunning result show about the effect of games on antisocial behavior? Nothing.
The best part of the article is when he recommends that children play outside instead. Gee, I wonder what part of the brain that will stimulate? Vision and movement, perhaps?
I've never understood why people think "going outside" somehow makes you into a better person (health benefits aside). Playing ball or whatever is far less intellectually stimulating than most video games. I'm open to your point of view, but can you point me to any studies showing that playing outside is better for a child than video games?
Maybe those are the kind of bugs you see in small shops where the previous maintainer was incompetent. But I would guess that bugs in a large-scale system like Windows or Office, written by a highly competent programming team, are usually due to obscure, complex conditions caused by the sheer size of the project. E.g. a bug that occurs only when components X, Y, and Z happen to be running together at the same time. Cleaning up that kind of problem is not, I think, as trivial as you make it out to be.
The links he draws with 1984 are surprisingly apt. I had the same fears in the days after Sept. 11. But the bottom line is that it's just empty doomsday rhetoric with no real basis in fact or rational argument. And after seeing a few months of the new war on terrorism, I think we can say that the American government has been admirably reasonable and clear-headed, proving him wrong.
A word makes it into the language when it's in wide use. Whether or not it "makes sense" is irrelevant. Where's the harm in it, anyway? It's not like English is a "pure" language that has to be defended against irregularities.
What's that supposed to mean? AFAIK, any discrete information can be stored as a single (huge) integer. Your computer's RAM can be viewed as one long 128mb (or whatever) integer. There's nothing fundamentally special about 2 dimensions.
Do you seriously think that the average peasant or artisan from 300 years ago cared about music and art? Besides the fact that he was illiterate and that there were no libraries in his village, he was much too busy struggling against starvation and disease. His life was short, brutal and devoid of all intellectual stimulation.
As for family, I should point out that many, perhaps most of his children died at birth and that the main reason for giving birth to them was to have an extra helping hand at the farm. Marriages were often arranged. The prevailing notion of happiness at that time was simply the absence of death and misery.
As for today, we have much more time for our family and an unprecedented exposure to culture from all over the world. As for our ancient peasant, he rarely strayed further than a few miles from his village. No, this is a golden age, not a dark age, in humanity's history. Although it's not perfect, we shouldn't let ourselves be blinded by nostalgia for an utopia that never was. We are, in every way -- and even in the third world, where life expectancy has increased by 20 years since 1900 -- better off than our ancestors.
Maybe you think it sounds cool, but ask a dozen people on the street and they'll tell you it's the ugliest name ever. It's too bad that the Ogg guys don't understand the importance of good marketing, because whatever its merits, the format's name alone ensures it will never take off. And the odds are stacked against them in any case. I hope they will prove me wrong, but I don't think they will: tech history is littered with the corpses of superior technologies that weren't marketed properly.
<rant>
FAT is slow, error-prone and wasteful. When I browsed the linux kernel sources for using FAT filesystems, I found several vitriolic comments about the wisdom of its technical decisions. The earlier it dies, the better.
</rant>
If I could bring back the dead at Hiroshima, Nagasaki and Tchernobyl, I would gladly get rid of today's nuclear power plants. They are, in any case, inefficient and dangerous. Even in industrialized countries, most don't even break even without government aid.
And I know of no nuclear-based medical technologies. Are you referring things like X-rays and cancer treatment? Nuclear technology is hardly needed for those applications; all you need is to dig out a radioactive rock from the ground and expose someone to it.
No, it's clear that nuclear technology is a dangerous technology whose invention was a dark day in the history of humanity. That said, I don't have anything against these exoskeleton things. They look helpful for handicapped people and, if we're lucky, may eventually lead to an Angelic Layer-like game :).
*cough* *cough* GPL *cough* *cough*. His pet license forces you to distribute all your source code if you link it with *ny* GNU applications.
I'm not saying the GPL is evil, but it certainly does constitute applying leverage.
I looked through the source of Wu-FTPd some time ago, when I was interested in adding support for an encrypted form of FTP proposed in a recent RFC (the protocol never caught on). What I found scared me. Most of the server is one humungous 8000-line C source file which appears to do pretty much everything.
Having quite a bit of experience with the FTP protocol, I expected to immediately understand what was going on, but at first glance, this code baffled me. It's full of pointer arithmetic and chains of if-statements performing mysterious, undecipherable operations on fixed-length arrays. It's not divided into clear levels of abstraction and I had difficulty telling what most functions were supposed to do, let alone what they actually did.
Anyway, I immediately gave up any thought of adding any new features to this godawful mess. Considering all the weird cruft that goes on in that code, it's no surprise to me that people are constantly finding new security holes in it. There are other featureful FTP servers out there; it's hard to see why distributions continue to include a bug-ridden program like Wu-FTPd as default in their distributions.
As for government abuse, I could make the same argument about traditional computers: the government can build huge databases of personal info, spy on us with Carnivore, etc. This is a social problem, not a technological one. Computers can be used to restrict freedom but they can also greatly increase it, as when oppressed people use it to get information from the free world. I imagine the same will be true of a brain implant technology.
I think that in general, development of potentially beneficial technologies shouldn't be stopped because of possible social consequences down the line. After all, then the telephone came out, there were worries that it would turn everyone into loners.
You probably mean Ultra-Violence here. I've been playing for years and still can't finish either Doom 1 or 2 at Nightmare, so a beginner surely couldn't.
I consider myself pretty good at Doom, but I'm lucky if I survive the first few levels at Nightmare. Even the Doom Done Quick guys, who are probably among the best single-player Doom players in the world, did their Doom2 demo on Ultra-Violence. Have you ever heard of anybody who actually managed to finish Doom on Nightmare difficulty?
Yeah, I do this too. I think the habit dates back to the days when I didn't have a wheel-thingamabob on my mouse and was too lazy to use the scrollbar, so I scrolled by selecting text and pushing up or down.
So, not only is Bill Gates a philanthropist, he's the greatest philanthropist ever. Microsoft's business practices notwithstanding, accusing him of avarice is misguided.
In comparison, Java has a nice, clean sockets interface. It would be sweet if Windows had something similar instead of the current heap of legacy crap. (though MFC may have made some progress in this direction, I don't really know much about it)
There was an article in The Economist claiming that terrorist nuclear attacks are a serious threat. After Sept.11, this seems worryingly plausible. If this happens, it will make Sept.11 look like "small beer" as the French say.
Since I started learning Japanese, I recently heard about a major genre that currently exists only in Japan, the social/dating sim. The "killer app" of this genre was Tokimeki Memorial in 1995 (a success on the scale of Doom), and since then there have been thousands of clones. Unfortunately, these games revolve around conversations with game characters, so they are unplayable for people who don't understand Japanese. And because of the aforementioned risks, no one has ever dared release one in the West. As a result, the genre is completely unheard of here.
As a jaded gamer, I find playing a completely new genre for the first time in 5 years very refreshing. Dating sim gameplay is fundamentally different from anything I've seen before. I'm hopeful that the genre will eventually break into the Western market. If you are looking for a paradigm shift, this is perhaps where it will come from.