Hint: put the installers for both the mac and windows ipod downloaders of your choice* on the storage space of your iPod. That way when you go to a friend's house, you can easily swap files.
Fighting poverty and fighting the symptoms of poverty are two very different fights. They're both worthy, but bags of food aren't going to start nonexistent economies.
FF1 is a great game. Anyone who likes older console games and hasn't played through it should. It's kinda hard though, harder than later members of the series at least.
Here's a breakdown:
- Run away. The dungeons are hard. (especially the marsh cave - the first real dungeon, the ice cave, the fiend of wind's dungeon(s) and the final castle) There are a small handful of really efficient places to level up. When you aren't actively leveling up, you should run from just about everything. Once you have protection from death effects and reusable healing items, you can be more lax with this, but in general run away. This, by the way, is what the much-maligned Thief is useful for; he's got the best chance of getting away. But in practice, the fighter, red mage, and black belt get away about as often.
- Starting right after you get your first orb lit up, keep 99 heal potions at all time. The game lacks effective healing (except for 3 vital items you find in the late game) so you'll want to have access to the at most 2970 points of healing the potions offer. However, white magic isn't all that great. It's pretty viable to not have any healing except potions.
- Here's where to level up: until level 8 or so, walk around outside towns. After level 8, make sure you have Fire 2 and ideally Harm 2, and go to the tip of a little peninsula east of the second town. There's hard but not too hard monsters that will give you 600-1000 XP per encounter; just be sure to nuke the frost wolves a.s.a.p. Later, there's recurring undead on a square in the waterfall, and once you have ProRings, the Eye at the end of the Ice cave can be fought again and again. Much much later, the vampires on the penultimate floor of the final level are the fastest way to reach levels 30-50.
- Though it lacks flavor, the party of 2 fighters and 2 red mages is so good as to be something of an easy mode. Black and white magic are both kind of underpowered, and having a team that can all take punches makes up for not getting Harm, Heal, and Nuke. Make sure you don't skip Fast, Invs2, Exit, all the Cures, all the Fires (for undead, the other attack spells aren't nearly as important). Life and the aElement defense spells are pretty good. Everything else is either useless or good only in a specific fight (e.g. sleep against the pirates) or is available too late (aRub). Really black magic sucks in the game. It's useful against a handful of obnoxious encounters with massed enemies, but not so much against any of the bosses. Red mages much better than black mages.
- If you do want a black and white mage instead, I'd still put a second fighter in as #2. The first two positions absorb the lion's share of attacks, and having both get to wear full armor is amazingly useful. The upgraded thief gets almost as good of armor as the knight and he can cast Fast, so a thief is a pretty viable option. Black belts only get better than fighters at the very highest levels, and they have the most boring upgrade. Red mages aren't really strong enough to stand in position #2; it'll be hard to keep a second-in-command red wizard alive in the final dungeon.
- Use the floater in the desert southeast of the volcano. If there's a clue to do this that's placed in the game, I've missed it. I think everything else can be figured out by talking to people.
- Use attack magic to kill enemies that have ugly mass attacks or instant death effects. Hit bosses with swords.
- Don't throw away magic items just to keep lousy helmets and shields on non-knight/ninja characters. You want a fire item, a harm item, a lit item, 2 or (much better) 3 heal items, and the white shirt.
- Speaking of items, the swords and armor that are extra strong against certain elements or types of enemies don't actually have any effect. There's a patch out there for the ROM that will enable this feature. It's worth seeking out, as Square *did* intend the Dragon sword to be good against Dragons etc. But if you don't use it, don't hold on to any weapons or armor for specific encounters.
- Once you beat the game, there's a rare challenge enemy on the walk up to the fourth fiend.
Sure, not picking one from the 4 or 5 that are currently popular, but picking one out of anything that might interest an audience.
I guess I'm more thinking of video games circa 1990 than now, but what combination of factors makes a designer say "World War I fighter planes" or "A plumber running around in some fantasy world" or "You're the mayor of a city."
This is the kind of thing that can be trivially and meaninglessly "simulated" by random selection of terms from a few predefined dictionaries, but that's not what's going on. How would you get an artificial intelligence that could look at history, literature, etc. have a rough sketch of a mechanical idea of the game and pick a location and setting that it thinks will work both artistically and commercially?
It's basically a task of difficulty similar to natural language processing. My point is, in response to the claim that creativity will be able to be programmed, is that while "in the box" creativity (write a symphony in the style of 18th century Austrian composers) is probably more easily simulated than we'd like to think. But most creative processes have a lot of little steps that are "out of the box" where you need to connect ideas out in a big universe of possibility with no firm restrictions or easily measurable definitions of "correct" and "incorrect." It's all way fuzzier than computer intelligence does well. I think to be creative, the system would first need the ability to independently develop taste.
Creativity might be programmable in things like music that is purely an exploration of formal structure and style, or abstract graphic design, or perhaps extending the patterns within a well-established style (say contemporary housing architecture).
However, writing a screenplay or a poem, or picking a new video game setting even is a much more complicated task, as it involves an interaction between formal artistic constraints and definions with a full human experience of the world. Getting to that point will mean fully modeling the human interaction with the world and society. Or a non-human intelligence which would be sometime when the systems behavior becomes dominated by emergent behaviors that are complex and organic enough to be completely unrecognizable as the product of the underlying mechanics and design.
That is, we may soon be able to get a program to write a nice symphony. We may even some day get it to write an *innovative* symphony - though meaningful innovation already requires a lot of self-awareness and abstraction beyond the original problem space, but getting it to up and decide to write a symphony on its own accord, out of some self-interested desire? Much further away.
It's a little obscure in the article (and elsewhere) but you have to generate two executables, both of which are manipulated to hit a common target. Basically some hashcodes are easier to hit than others. You can't hit an arbitrary one.
Well obviously sales that work on commission are covering the tipping angle with a different setup.
But 20% for acceptable service or service that had problems that didn't relate to your server. Most negative restaurant experiences don't come from the person writing down your order and handing you your plates. Undertipping because of slow service is venting frustration, not punishing whoever is at fault.... the person at fault may well be the manager who wrote an unreasonable schedule or the other server who is at home stoned leaving your undertipped staffer covering twice the workload.
15% was the polite minimum years ago, 20% in expensive cities. But the cost of living has gone up a lot since the early 90s, and wages at the bottom rung haven't. And since we don't have a society that can run without bottom-tier jobs, it's good civics to update custom.
Not tipping is a gestural communication that says to the world "my parents didn't go to college."
Seriously dude, it's low class. 20% for everything everywhere, things in America tend to cost less than they should anyway (go out to dinner in any other first world country on a local salary). If service was slow, it's the kitchens fault, or someone who isn't serving you didn't show up. If the order was wrong, it's still likely the fault of the kitchen / understaffing. Or maybe your server has only worked their for a week. Punishing new staff is a good way never to get old staff. Whatever the problem is, if they're polite or even cordial, it's still a full tip.
Anyone who has to stand up and pretend to be happy while dealing with the public should get tips. I'd tip at retail if they'd put out a cup. The public is horrible. Customers are like children. Restaurant patrons are worse. Maintaining a positive attitude in that situation requires compensation that is visible and frequent.
Tip dammit. If they have to require it on the bill, then they probably have the unfortunate luck to have an unusually high cheap asshole component in their customer base. And the manager that set the policy won't ever see your lack of tipping. You just made someone's minimum wage hour worse. Way to go.
I doubt they go hiking either. I imagine they know better than most which providers have the most comprehensive coverage in their area.
My point is, these devices need to be pretty strictly regulated. If any business can block anyones incoming calls, this creates a problem. The blocking effect will inevitably have some radius of bleed.
Is there some way these things could be made to not block a special frequency or pagers. Doctors and emergency workers on call need to be able to be reached at dinner and in movie theaters. Everyone else can shut up.
Why live like you've got something to prove when you can own your own dimension of reality and nobody can tell you you're wrong?
Re:Read an article to this effect....
on
Cracking Go
·
· Score: 1
"Exhaustive search" isn't.
Checkers took over a decade to exhaustively search. Chess would be orders of orders of magnitudes harder, Go again so. Not even we nerds and computer scientists really intuit exponential functions. 10^60 board positions means that true exhaustive search, or even a fraction of it is impossible. That much information would take galaxies of matter and energy to store. It's cool to imagine super-clusters of Dyson Spheres dedicated to solving ancient board games, and maybe this is why we haven't met any ETs, they've gone dark using all their energy for science rather than communication, but now we're talking real sci fi.
The article suggests that in 10 years it will be possible, with known algorithms to have a computer brute force Go a little bit deeper than Deep Blue brute forced chess back in 97. Maybe since Go is a game of pattern recognition, masters are better than 12 or so moves ahead, but every so many years the number of moves ahead that brute force algorithms can dig into the game will increase by 1. Every once in a while, someone will come up with a pruning trick or board evaluation optimization and n will bump up by 2 or 3. Go masters are human beings. Their analysis of the game is ultimately going to fail to something that can make error free play into the analytically best position n moves in advance. Human neural network pattern recognition has tricks up its sleeves, but n-deep error free play is a super power. For sufficiently high n, it wins.
Arthur C. Clarke recently said something to the effect that had it not been for Cold War politics (international pissing contest + good public face on ICBM research) science wouldn't have really gotten to much space exploration until the components had become much cheaper and lighter.
It's not so much that we've had a slow go, it's that we had an artificially false start.
Similarly, Europeans landed on North America sometime around 1000, but it was an accident, and Norse sailing craft, which were the best in the western world, weren't really up to the task of regular trans-atlantic voyages, it would be another 500 years before really practical technology caught up to the mere feasibility.
And it might be 400 years again here. Even though technology (in some ways) progresses faster now than 500 years ago, the challenge of space is more difficult than the challenge of long ocean voyage, not just by an order of magnitude, but along many different *dimensions* of difficulty.
The failure of reality to keep up with science fiction isn't the fault of reality (or of science fiction) it was only a strange confluence of events that allowed the two to look, for a moment, similar.
Moot argument, the Stones did all their best work after the Beatles did all their best work (and when they had broken up in all but name). The Beatles win out by writing a simply countless great pop songs and their initial incarnation - four white guys playing faster than the 50s rock and roll but singing like black a black female soul / pop group is one of the weirdest and most amazing inventions in pop history. The Stones meanwhile are among a tiny handful of white people who could play electric blues well (really among a handful of people in general, the blues got pretty soft after the late 50s, a couple of exceptions aside). I mean seriously, I don't think anyone aside from Muddy, Elmore James, and the Stones has covered a Robert Johnson song without looking like a dork. Anyway the Stones did more than anyone else in the 60s to craft the image side of rock and roll as it would play out into the 70s and what good remained of rock and roll in the 80s and 90s: thin, dressing dangerously, agressive hint of bisexuality... you know, punk.
Anyway, they're both pretty great and there are a whole lot of great songs out there whose recipe is basically one part Beatles, one part Stones, shake and mix will.
Canadian currency jokes now end. Of course, where the Euro or Pound is used, BOTH of our currencies are jokes. I was hanging out with some Europeans over the summer here in New York and they were buying up digital cameras, clothing, etc. etc. To them, it was deeply discounted. Sort of felt like living in Mexico.
If you're searching for positives in a huge pool of negatives, even an extremely reliable test will return a majority of false positives.
In the scenario I described, out of a million internet users, the system turns up 50,000 only 19 of whom are terrorists, but all of whom are now under suspicion.
And don't paint suspicion about intelligence techniques in such black and white terms. I don't believe that the government whisks people away to gitmo because of a single computer test, however in many smaller ways that add up to being able to live your life like a free citizen or not, they DO encroach with very little probable cause.
The worst thing is that for a search like this, 95% accuracy is TERRIBLE.
Let's say in 1,000,000 posters there are 20 secret terrorists. This system (assuming the 95% figure isn't just made up, and since it's a reliability figure coming from a government contractor - it is) will label 19 of the real terrorists as terrorists and *50,000* innocent internet users as terrorists. Since we already live in a world where being under government suspicion (but no charges) gets your assets frozen, phones tapped, and puts you on the no-fly list this is a BIG problem.
I go to a fairly international university. I've seen this 1984 B.S. shit on innocent people's jobs and educations first hand. As long as our elected representatives keep granting themselves and their officers these kinds of powers, we do not have the right to call ourselves the "land of the free."
Right now the US has in place a set of laws that would allow for an authoritarian (not-quite totalitarian, though if the press keeps dismantling itself, who knows) government. All it would take is the decision to enforce them to the letter; no consent from the voters would be needed.
> Linux has the reputation of being usable only by teenage computer geeks and this does not help.
When, in 1996?
If your IT department hasn't even *heard* of Ubuntu or read enough to be passingly familiar with their stupid (yes) naming system, then it would probably be a very bad idea for your business to switch.
I think you might be misreading old promises from World of Disney as actual predictions.
Space is a hard engineering problem, and its expensive as well. We're only 50 years into this; we're doing well. How long did it take Greek Triremes to develop into something capable of crossing an ocean?
Uh yeah, because having a "hippy" image (sort of) makes you somehow less capitalistic. They're a publicly traded company with a ferocious marketing department. Apple is as capitalistic as they come. But hey, way to buy the hype in a weird inverted way.
Slashdot Mirror
Hint: put the installers for both the mac and windows ipod downloaders of your choice* on the storage space of your iPod. That way when you go to a friend's house, you can easily swap files.
*gtkPod users of course do not have this problem.
Righto.
Fighting poverty and fighting the symptoms of poverty are two very different fights. They're both worthy, but bags of food aren't going to start nonexistent economies.
FF1 is a great game. Anyone who likes older console games and hasn't played through it should. It's kinda hard though, harder than later members of the series at least.
Here's a breakdown:
- Run away. The dungeons are hard. (especially the marsh cave - the first real dungeon, the ice cave, the fiend of wind's dungeon(s) and the final castle) There are a small handful of really efficient places to level up. When you aren't actively leveling up, you should run from just about everything. Once you have protection from death effects and reusable healing items, you can be more lax with this, but in general run away. This, by the way, is what the much-maligned Thief is useful for; he's got the best chance of getting away. But in practice, the fighter, red mage, and black belt get away about as often.
- Starting right after you get your first orb lit up, keep 99 heal potions at all time. The game lacks effective healing (except for 3 vital items you find in the late game) so you'll want to have access to the at most 2970 points of healing the potions offer. However, white magic isn't all that great. It's pretty viable to not have any healing except potions.
- Here's where to level up: until level 8 or so, walk around outside towns. After level 8, make sure you have Fire 2 and ideally Harm 2, and go to the tip of a little peninsula east of the second town. There's hard but not too hard monsters that will give you 600-1000 XP per encounter; just be sure to nuke the frost wolves a.s.a.p. Later, there's recurring undead on a square in the waterfall, and once you have ProRings, the Eye at the end of the Ice cave can be fought again and again. Much much later, the vampires on the penultimate floor of the final level are the fastest way to reach levels 30-50.
- Though it lacks flavor, the party of 2 fighters and 2 red mages is so good as to be something of an easy mode. Black and white magic are both kind of underpowered, and having a team that can all take punches makes up for not getting Harm, Heal, and Nuke. Make sure you don't skip Fast, Invs2, Exit, all the Cures, all the Fires (for undead, the other attack spells aren't nearly as important). Life and the aElement defense spells are pretty good. Everything else is either useless or good only in a specific fight (e.g. sleep against the pirates) or is available too late (aRub). Really black magic sucks in the game. It's useful against a handful of obnoxious encounters with massed enemies, but not so much against any of the bosses. Red mages much better than black mages.
- If you do want a black and white mage instead, I'd still put a second fighter in as #2. The first two positions absorb the lion's share of attacks, and having both get to wear full armor is amazingly useful. The upgraded thief gets almost as good of armor as the knight and he can cast Fast, so a thief is a pretty viable option. Black belts only get better than fighters at the very highest levels, and they have the most boring upgrade. Red mages aren't really strong enough to stand in position #2; it'll be hard to keep a second-in-command red wizard alive in the final dungeon.
- Use the floater in the desert southeast of the volcano. If there's a clue to do this that's placed in the game, I've missed it. I think everything else can be figured out by talking to people.
- Use attack magic to kill enemies that have ugly mass attacks or instant death effects. Hit bosses with swords.
- Don't throw away magic items just to keep lousy helmets and shields on non-knight/ninja characters. You want a fire item, a harm item, a lit item, 2 or (much better) 3 heal items, and the white shirt.
- Speaking of items, the swords and armor that are extra strong against certain elements or types of enemies don't actually have any effect. There's a patch out there for the ROM that will enable this feature. It's worth seeking out, as Square *did* intend the Dragon sword to be good against Dragons etc. But if you don't use it, don't hold on to any weapons or armor for specific encounters.
- Once you beat the game, there's a rare challenge enemy on the walk up to the fourth fiend.
Ok, that's enough. I love that game.
Sure, not picking one from the 4 or 5 that are currently popular, but picking one out of anything that might interest an audience.
I guess I'm more thinking of video games circa 1990 than now, but what combination of factors makes a designer say "World War I fighter planes" or "A plumber running around in some fantasy world" or "You're the mayor of a city."
This is the kind of thing that can be trivially and meaninglessly "simulated" by random selection of terms from a few predefined dictionaries, but that's not what's going on. How would you get an artificial intelligence that could look at history, literature, etc. have a rough sketch of a mechanical idea of the game and pick a location and setting that it thinks will work both artistically and commercially?
It's basically a task of difficulty similar to natural language processing. My point is, in response to the claim that creativity will be able to be programmed, is that while "in the box" creativity (write a symphony in the style of 18th century Austrian composers) is probably more easily simulated than we'd like to think. But most creative processes have a lot of little steps that are "out of the box" where you need to connect ideas out in a big universe of possibility with no firm restrictions or easily measurable definitions of "correct" and "incorrect." It's all way fuzzier than computer intelligence does well. I think to be creative, the system would first need the ability to independently develop taste.
While the robots are attaining invulnerability one step at a time rather than by breakthrough and revolution, I don't really find this comforting.
Creativity might be programmable in things like music that is purely an exploration of formal structure and style, or abstract graphic design, or perhaps extending the patterns within a well-established style (say contemporary housing architecture).
However, writing a screenplay or a poem, or picking a new video game setting even is a much more complicated task, as it involves an interaction between formal artistic constraints and definions with a full human experience of the world. Getting to that point will mean fully modeling the human interaction with the world and society. Or a non-human intelligence which would be sometime when the systems behavior becomes dominated by emergent behaviors that are complex and organic enough to be completely unrecognizable as the product of the underlying mechanics and design.
That is, we may soon be able to get a program to write a nice symphony. We may even some day get it to write an *innovative* symphony - though meaningful innovation already requires a lot of self-awareness and abstraction beyond the original problem space, but getting it to up and decide to write a symphony on its own accord, out of some self-interested desire? Much further away.
It's a little obscure in the article (and elsewhere) but you have to generate two executables, both of which are manipulated to hit a common target. Basically some hashcodes are easier to hit than others. You can't hit an arbitrary one.
Anyway, use one of the SHA algorithms
Well obviously sales that work on commission are covering the tipping angle with a different setup.
But 20% for acceptable service or service that had problems that didn't relate to your server. Most negative restaurant experiences don't come from the person writing down your order and handing you your plates. Undertipping because of slow service is venting frustration, not punishing whoever is at fault.... the person at fault may well be the manager who wrote an unreasonable schedule or the other server who is at home stoned leaving your undertipped staffer covering twice the workload.
15% was the polite minimum years ago, 20% in expensive cities. But the cost of living has gone up a lot since the early 90s, and wages at the bottom rung haven't. And since we don't have a society that can run without bottom-tier jobs, it's good civics to update custom.
Not tipping is a gestural communication that says to the world "my parents didn't go to college."
Seriously dude, it's low class. 20% for everything everywhere, things in America tend to cost less than they should anyway (go out to dinner in any other first world country on a local salary). If service was slow, it's the kitchens fault, or someone who isn't serving you didn't show up. If the order was wrong, it's still likely the fault of the kitchen / understaffing. Or maybe your server has only worked their for a week. Punishing new staff is a good way never to get old staff. Whatever the problem is, if they're polite or even cordial, it's still a full tip.
Anyone who has to stand up and pretend to be happy while dealing with the public should get tips. I'd tip at retail if they'd put out a cup. The public is horrible. Customers are like children. Restaurant patrons are worse. Maintaining a positive attitude in that situation requires compensation that is visible and frequent.
Tip dammit. If they have to require it on the bill, then they probably have the unfortunate luck to have an unusually high cheap asshole component in their customer base. And the manager that set the policy won't ever see your lack of tipping. You just made someone's minimum wage hour worse. Way to go.
Doctors on call aren't on airplanes.
I doubt they go hiking either. I imagine they know better than most which providers have the most comprehensive coverage in their area.
My point is, these devices need to be pretty strictly regulated. If any business can block anyones incoming calls, this creates a problem. The blocking effect will inevitably have some radius of bleed.
I really don't know much about cell / PCS
Is there some way these things could be made to not block a special frequency or pagers. Doctors and emergency workers on call need to be able to be reached at dinner and in movie theaters. Everyone else can shut up.
Would this make legal downloads Software Privateering?
Insane billionaire is the ultimate lifestyle yes.
Why live like you've got something to prove when you can own your own dimension of reality and nobody can tell you you're wrong?
"Exhaustive search" isn't.
Checkers took over a decade to exhaustively search. Chess would be orders of orders of magnitudes harder, Go again so. Not even we nerds and computer scientists really intuit exponential functions. 10^60 board positions means that true exhaustive search, or even a fraction of it is impossible. That much information would take galaxies of matter and energy to store. It's cool to imagine super-clusters of Dyson Spheres dedicated to solving ancient board games, and maybe this is why we haven't met any ETs, they've gone dark using all their energy for science rather than communication, but now we're talking real sci fi.
The article suggests that in 10 years it will be possible, with known algorithms to have a computer brute force Go a little bit deeper than Deep Blue brute forced chess back in 97. Maybe since Go is a game of pattern recognition, masters are better than 12 or so moves ahead, but every so many years the number of moves ahead that brute force algorithms can dig into the game will increase by 1. Every once in a while, someone will come up with a pruning trick or board evaluation optimization and n will bump up by 2 or 3. Go masters are human beings. Their analysis of the game is ultimately going to fail to something that can make error free play into the analytically best position n moves in advance. Human neural network pattern recognition has tricks up its sleeves, but n-deep error free play is a super power. For sufficiently high n, it wins.
Arthur C. Clarke recently said something to the effect that had it not been for Cold War politics (international pissing contest + good public face on ICBM research) science wouldn't have really gotten to much space exploration until the components had become much cheaper and lighter.
It's not so much that we've had a slow go, it's that we had an artificially false start.
Similarly, Europeans landed on North America sometime around 1000, but it was an accident, and Norse sailing craft, which were the best in the western world, weren't really up to the task of regular trans-atlantic voyages, it would be another 500 years before really practical technology caught up to the mere feasibility.
And it might be 400 years again here. Even though technology (in some ways) progresses faster now than 500 years ago, the challenge of space is more difficult than the challenge of long ocean voyage, not just by an order of magnitude, but along many different *dimensions* of difficulty.
The failure of reality to keep up with science fiction isn't the fault of reality (or of science fiction) it was only a strange confluence of events that allowed the two to look, for a moment, similar.
Moot argument, the Stones did all their best work after the Beatles did all their best work (and when they had broken up in all but name). The Beatles win out by writing a simply countless great pop songs and their initial incarnation - four white guys playing faster than the 50s rock and roll but singing like black a black female soul / pop group is one of the weirdest and most amazing inventions in pop history. The Stones meanwhile are among a tiny handful of white people who could play electric blues well (really among a handful of people in general, the blues got pretty soft after the late 50s, a couple of exceptions aside). I mean seriously, I don't think anyone aside from Muddy, Elmore James, and the Stones has covered a Robert Johnson song without looking like a dork. Anyway the Stones did more than anyone else in the 60s to craft the image side of rock and roll as it would play out into the 70s and what good remained of rock and roll in the 80s and 90s: thin, dressing dangerously, agressive hint of bisexuality... you know, punk.
Anyway, they're both pretty great and there are a whole lot of great songs out there whose recipe is basically one part Beatles, one part Stones, shake and mix will.
such as:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wAtUw6lxcis
John Peel's favorite song of all time. He once played it on the air twice in a row.
Canadian currency jokes now end. Of course, where the Euro or Pound is used, BOTH of our currencies are jokes. I was hanging out with some Europeans over the summer here in New York and they were buying up digital cameras, clothing, etc. etc. To them, it was deeply discounted. Sort of felt like living in Mexico.
The only "intuitive" interface is the nipple. After that it's all learned. - Bruce Ediger
You missed my point.
If you're searching for positives in a huge pool of negatives, even an extremely reliable test will return a majority of false positives.
In the scenario I described, out of a million internet users, the system turns up 50,000 only 19 of whom are terrorists, but all of whom are now under suspicion.
And don't paint suspicion about intelligence techniques in such black and white terms. I don't believe that the government whisks people away to gitmo because of a single computer test, however in many smaller ways that add up to being able to live your life like a free citizen or not, they DO encroach with very little probable cause.
The worst thing is that for a search like this, 95% accuracy is TERRIBLE.
Let's say in 1,000,000 posters there are 20 secret terrorists. This system (assuming the 95% figure isn't just made up, and since it's a reliability figure coming from a government contractor - it is) will label 19 of the real terrorists as terrorists and *50,000* innocent internet users as terrorists. Since we already live in a world where being under government suspicion (but no charges) gets your assets frozen, phones tapped, and puts you on the no-fly list this is a BIG problem.
I go to a fairly international university. I've seen this 1984 B.S. shit on innocent people's jobs and educations first hand. As long as our elected representatives keep granting themselves and their officers these kinds of powers, we do not have the right to call ourselves the "land of the free."
Right now the US has in place a set of laws that would allow for an authoritarian (not-quite totalitarian, though if the press keeps dismantling itself, who knows) government. All it would take is the decision to enforce them to the letter; no consent from the voters would be needed.
Yeah, if these guys are holding G. I. Frikkin' Joe to be "sacred" then I really have to ask how sacred they're holding the idea of sacredness.
> Linux has the reputation of being usable only by teenage computer geeks and this does not help.
When, in 1996?
If your IT department hasn't even *heard* of Ubuntu or read enough to be passingly familiar with their stupid (yes) naming system, then it would probably be a very bad idea for your business to switch.
I think you might be misreading old promises from World of Disney as actual predictions.
Space is a hard engineering problem, and its expensive as well. We're only 50 years into this; we're doing well. How long did it take Greek Triremes to develop into something capable of crossing an ocean?
Uh yeah, because having a "hippy" image (sort of) makes you somehow less capitalistic. They're a publicly traded company with a ferocious marketing department. Apple is as capitalistic as they come. But hey, way to buy the hype in a weird inverted way.
Install mplayer via apt-get.
Get the codec tarball from the mplayer site.
Done, done, done.