When I went to Bluffton College for undergrad, our Humanities I teacher let us play Civilization III for assignment credit. The game was on reserve at the campus library for students to check out! I for one welcome our new video game homework overlords.:-)
Are you saying that the American Heart Association sells research/aid to its donors? How about your favorite charity, are they selling you something? They have money, but this clearly isn't a transaction in the commercial sense. You are giving money freely for whatever "higher good" you believe in. Your immediate benefit may be incidental or non-existant. If you want to make the concept of commercial exchange equivalent to charitable donation, you may do so, but you must expand that definition to charities you like too or it's just prejudice.
Church does qualify as non-commercial under U.S. tax law. But for the sake of argument here are some key differences:
A) Commercial world
- goods and services are exchanged for monetary funds
- the price is set but may fluctuate over time or with the features of the product
- refunds not uncommon
- purpose of business is to earn profit
- advertisement helps people know about products or services
B) Church
- services are given freely, donations are given freely
- the amount of money given is more dependent on the person's desire and means
- who gets a refund on a donation?
- purpose of Church is to worship God and change hearts
- advertisement helps people engage minds or open discussion on spiritual topics
If he isn't selling anything or competing with them, do they have legal grounds to make him cease and desist? I thought imitation was the highest form of flattery. Do we now outlaw spoof, satire, and creative imitation?
It's actually gotten slightly more user friendly in the latest versions with the Tavern and Item Shop restructuring. A feeble attempt but a welcome one.
You're right, DotA is complex. But then you have to ask yourself, would you keep playing it over and over again if it weren't so full of variety and depth? Being newbie-friendly is great, but there's often a trade-off with complexity. I for one welcome our new IceFrog overlords.
Back to the parent thread: valve can make the game more player-friendly (if not newbie) by adding reconnection features, custom match-making, and their own dedicated servers. Ask any DotA player, it's the rage quitting/dropping in DotA that truly ruins the game, and if the DotA "switch" option has helped a little, a robust stand-alone DotA from Valve could help a lot.
Completely true. However, IceFrog has been developing DoTA since 2005. Eul created his version in 2003 (or 2002?). Which means Guinsoo probably developed DoTA for around 2 years. While not the original developer, IceFrog has developed the game for around 5 years and his contributions have made DotA very balanced and interesting to play.
I have read that paleoanthropologists sometimes use the word "human" for a variety genera including Australopithecus, Paranthropus, Homo, et cetera.. While these are all hominids, what the average person would call "human" are referred to as "anatomically modern humans" or Homo sapiens sapiens by paleoanthropologists. I hope this nomenclature helps clear up any confusion.
I'm always confused if these discoveries are supposed to show that we'll someday have sentient robots that will rule the world a la every sci-fi for the past decade or if they are trying to model biological evolution in a meaningful way. Personally, I hope the sentient robot thing is NP-complete.:P
For modeling biological evolution, any in silico organism model needs to incorporate the fact that most mutations are "nearly neutral" (some might say slightly deleterious) with respect to the scoring algorithm (selection) while the next largest group is deleterious, and only a small fraction are beneficial. Not every "bit" (base) in a genome has the same value, and certainly that value is related to its context. In the genome mutation can strike anywhere although some places may be lethal so it will never be expressed in a breeding organism. In AI there may be restrictions on the parameters that can change, but in the genome mutations can produce some pretty nasty defects. It's actually the relative badness of those defects which gives selection the power to weed out unfit individuals before the defect can become fixed. However, in biological evolution, defects can and do become fixed, either being linked with good traits or because there isn't sufficient selection power to get rid of them. Thus, after many many generations of "optimizing" the robots should also manifest situations where they do "stupid" things routinely because the "good" things they do are "linked" to the bad things they do on the coding level.
The problem: iPhone users suck up too much bandwidth for the ATT network.
The solution: decrease use or increase network capacity.
For ATT, the decreased use can happen using updated pricing, and increased capacity will happen as a matter of course from year to year, but I think the real and likely solution ATT will just not like: when the contract is over and the iPhone is made available on other networks the ATT network will experience less use (lost customers) and iPhone users will experience greater capacity (they are spread out on multiple networks).
It seems ironic to me that by posting this article on slashdot about so-called trolling, the story submission itself became flamebait. Of course, maybe intentionally so, the story is tagged as such.
First, we need the spontaneous formation of a membrane that can selectively remove calcium. Calcium at higher concentrations is cytotoxic and will aggregate proteins/nucleic acids. Calcium regulation is therefore tight and ubiquitous in living things. See article.
Given such a membrane and some short DNA polymers, we also need to translate this random "information" into something meaningful. The current mechanism is: DNA -> RNA -> PROTEIN. This requires RNA polymerase or, at least, some ribosome-like enzyme to make a protein product. These enzymes are usually proteinaceous themselves--catch 22. We also need a DNA polymerase for replication if we wish to propagate our newly acquired "information".
I am more interested in how this spontaneous aggregation of DNA crystals could play a role in living cells.
"In turn, the company has employed black hat hackers for what is called a penetration, or pen, test team."
I think "black hat" would not be quite the term to describe this sort of activity.
The term "white hat" is usually used for hired hacks: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Hat.
Perhaps this was actually a well-crafted move. Just think about it:
Publicity for having your artist honored by Google: very good.
Publicity for having your artist honored by Google and THEN getting publicity for complaining about it: priceless.
Somehow though, I doubt they're so clever and insidious.
- Sam
Except that what people want out of a console is not an expensive computer that can surf the web, but a highly specialized and highly fun gaming machine. Microsoft should follow Nintendo's lead and focus more on good gaming than good features. What works in the OS world does not work in the console world, I'm sorry...
Slashdot Mirror
When I went to Bluffton College for undergrad, our Humanities I teacher let us play Civilization III for assignment credit. The game was on reserve at the campus library for students to check out! I for one welcome our new video game homework overlords. :-)
Are you saying that the American Heart Association sells research/aid to its donors? How about your favorite charity, are they selling you something? They have money, but this clearly isn't a transaction in the commercial sense. You are giving money freely for whatever "higher good" you believe in. Your immediate benefit may be incidental or non-existant. If you want to make the concept of commercial exchange equivalent to charitable donation, you may do so, but you must expand that definition to charities you like too or it's just prejudice.
Church does qualify as non-commercial under U.S. tax law. But for the sake of argument here are some key differences:
A) Commercial world
- goods and services are exchanged for monetary funds
- the price is set but may fluctuate over time or with the features of the product
- refunds not uncommon
- purpose of business is to earn profit
- advertisement helps people know about products or services
B) Church
- services are given freely, donations are given freely
- the amount of money given is more dependent on the person's desire and means
- who gets a refund on a donation?
- purpose of Church is to worship God and change hearts
- advertisement helps people engage minds or open discussion on spiritual topics
If he isn't selling anything or competing with them, do they have legal grounds to make him cease and desist? I thought imitation was the highest form of flattery. Do we now outlaw spoof, satire, and creative imitation?
It's actually gotten slightly more user friendly in the latest versions with the Tavern and Item Shop restructuring. A feeble attempt but a welcome one.
You're right, DotA is complex. But then you have to ask yourself, would you keep playing it over and over again if it weren't so full of variety and depth? Being newbie-friendly is great, but there's often a trade-off with complexity. I for one welcome our new IceFrog overlords.
Back to the parent thread: valve can make the game more player-friendly (if not newbie) by adding reconnection features, custom match-making, and their own dedicated servers. Ask any DotA player, it's the rage quitting/dropping in DotA that truly ruins the game, and if the DotA "switch" option has helped a little, a robust stand-alone DotA from Valve could help a lot.
Completely true. However, IceFrog has been developing DoTA since 2005. Eul created his version in 2003 (or 2002?). Which means Guinsoo probably developed DoTA for around 2 years. While not the original developer, IceFrog has developed the game for around 5 years and his contributions have made DotA very balanced and interesting to play.
I have read that paleoanthropologists sometimes use the word "human" for a variety genera including Australopithecus, Paranthropus, Homo, et cetera.. While these are all hominids, what the average person would call "human" are referred to as "anatomically modern humans" or Homo sapiens sapiens by paleoanthropologists. I hope this nomenclature helps clear up any confusion.
I'm always confused if these discoveries are supposed to show that we'll someday have sentient robots that will rule the world a la every sci-fi for the past decade or if they are trying to model biological evolution in a meaningful way. Personally, I hope the sentient robot thing is NP-complete. :P
For modeling biological evolution, any in silico organism model needs to incorporate the fact that most mutations are "nearly neutral" (some might say slightly deleterious) with respect to the scoring algorithm (selection) while the next largest group is deleterious, and only a small fraction are beneficial. Not every "bit" (base) in a genome has the same value, and certainly that value is related to its context. In the genome mutation can strike anywhere although some places may be lethal so it will never be expressed in a breeding organism. In AI there may be restrictions on the parameters that can change, but in the genome mutations can produce some pretty nasty defects. It's actually the relative badness of those defects which gives selection the power to weed out unfit individuals before the defect can become fixed. However, in biological evolution, defects can and do become fixed, either being linked with good traits or because there isn't sufficient selection power to get rid of them. Thus, after many many generations of "optimizing" the robots should also manifest situations where they do "stupid" things routinely because the "good" things they do are "linked" to the bad things they do on the coding level.
Int != Wis
"The rats have gotten smarter...even problem solving intelligence...you know when that one looks at you, she's figuring things out..."
"Scientists were so concerned with whether or not they could make the perfect rat, they never stopped to ask if they should!"
- (Paraphrases a la J.P.)
Yes, apparently, Apple will not charge.
The problem: iPhone users suck up too much bandwidth for the ATT network. The solution: decrease use or increase network capacity.
For ATT, the decreased use can happen using updated pricing, and increased capacity will happen as a matter of course from year to year, but I think the real and likely solution ATT will just not like: when the contract is over and the iPhone is made available on other networks the ATT network will experience less use (lost customers) and iPhone users will experience greater capacity (they are spread out on multiple networks).
It seems ironic to me that by posting this article on slashdot about so-called trolling, the story submission itself became flamebait. Of course, maybe intentionally so, the story is tagged as such.
To a scientist, most women look hot... I mean, think about it, looking at women all day instead of mice has to be much more pleasant for them. :P
Thus, this comic seems terribly appropriate (PhD Comics ftw): http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=1174
First, we need the spontaneous formation of a membrane that can selectively remove calcium. Calcium at higher concentrations is cytotoxic and will aggregate proteins/nucleic acids. Calcium regulation is therefore tight and ubiquitous in living things. See article.
Given such a membrane and some short DNA polymers, we also need to translate this random "information" into something meaningful. The current mechanism is: DNA -> RNA -> PROTEIN. This requires RNA polymerase or, at least, some ribosome-like enzyme to make a protein product. These enzymes are usually proteinaceous themselves--catch 22. We also need a DNA polymerase for replication if we wish to propagate our newly acquired "information".
I am more interested in how this spontaneous aggregation of DNA crystals could play a role in living cells.
Perhaps this was actually a well-crafted move. Just think about it: Publicity for having your artist honored by Google: very good. Publicity for having your artist honored by Google and THEN getting publicity for complaining about it: priceless. Somehow though, I doubt they're so clever and insidious. - Sam
Except that what people want out of a console is not an expensive computer that can surf the web, but a highly specialized and highly fun gaming machine. Microsoft should follow Nintendo's lead and focus more on good gaming than good features. What works in the OS world does not work in the console world, I'm sorry...