I want to watch the New Dr. Who. I even want to give the BBC money as I think it's a fine thing they are doing.
You could buy the DVDs. I believe they're all out now, and there's a boxset due in November. As a geek I assume you have a multiregion DVD player or at the very least the ability to install mplayer. The exchange rate will be nasty, though, with the dollar being as low as it has been lately.
Where do you find a material with the compressive strength of bone and low density? How do you replace the tensional strength and flexiblity of muscle?
Ahahahahaha! Well, what you do is you clone off some really gigantic humanoid things and you coat them in metallic armour to (a) keep their full power restrained and under control and (b) give everyone the impression that they're actually just robots. Then you wire into their nervous systems, set up some kind of neural interface, synchronise a suitably messed-up teenager and away you go!
If I had any of that $h17 I could build some HELLACIOUS ROBOTS and conquer...ummm, spread democracy throughout the world.
Hope you like Sunny Delight. You'll end up with a whole lot of the stuff.
Re:Commentary on w3's captcha-inaccessibility page
on
Defeating Captcha
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· Score: 1
For example, I've seen sites that say "If you cannot read this, call this phone number for access." Too bad for you if you don't have a phone.
Hmm. How many people have an internet connection but no telephone? Stop me if I'm wrong here, but most people still get their connection from a phone line, though ADSL has largely superseded dialup these days...
So, that captcha cuts out those people who have an internet connection AND have no phone AND are blind. Pretty small segment there.
I've been playing role-playing games since I was 11 (D&D, AD&D, Runequest, MERP, Traveller, etc..). I can't say I've ever tried to translate those fantasies into reality.
Well, there's me feeling a fool. Just the other day I saw someone I didn't like the look of and tried to cast Magic Missile at them...
I feel rather dense here, but what do fps over say 60 buy you?
Futureproofing, as you've already had mentioned, but also it gets you a bit of extra insurance... With my distinctly crappy card (bottom-of-the-line budget GeForce somethingorother, but fanless which I suppose is a plus) I get a perfectly playable Neverwinter Nights experience most of the time - except when the crap starts flying. When I'm launching meteor swarms and fireballs at all in sight and when there are dozens of drow guards and duergar invaders and three gigantic golems all on screen at once - THAT'S when you want the better card. 100fps in normal play buys you 60fps when things get frantic, and those are the times you really need a responsive system.
I just hope Denton doesn't spend all his time in the movie hacking bank terminals.
He'd have to, given that UNATCO are so tight that he has to buy most of his own ammo.
But nah - it'd make a much better movie if he spent all his time sneaking around vent shafts and occasionally hacking into security systems, then gloating at the distant sounds of gun turrets and the screams of guards...
So I don't think 35 years is really enough time. I'd say more like 300 years.
That wouldn't concentrate anyone's mind. Doomed in 35 years, unless we do something about it? Right, let's dig up those Orion blueprints and go do something about it damn quick! Doomed in 300 years, unless we do something about it? Oh, well, the jury's still out on it, we're not even sure if it would make any difference, we certainly don't want to do anything that would jeopardise the American economy in the meantime, it's all a greenie leftie liberal myth anyway, let's wait and see for a while.
Considering things really havent been truly tested, one bad judgement could cost billions..
Actually, this is a really positive sign. Lloyds of London know all about risk. They've watched the SCO circus go around and have concluded that
- SCO don't have a leg to stand on
- However, they've made some people think there's a risk
- Sell insurance
- Profit!
This is not quite as much a case of free money as the insurance policies you can buy against abduction by aliens, but it's pretty close...
Re:how did we miss that before?
on
Ice Lake on Mars
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· Score: 1
They are Germans, (from a different country, in case you have never heard of it), and Germany was deeply opposed to joining in a pointless agressive war aimed at ensuring the re-election of one of the most dangerous politicians on this planet.
I was tremendously amused, in the runup to George and Tony's Mesopotamian fireworks display, by hearing commentary from Americans who complained about the Germans being pacifists.
Historical ignorance is one thing, but that was just comical. You guys want the old Germany back?
Sure, this was a just war and it was all legal and OK and necessary because otherwise Saddam might have launched those WMDs, but it's like offering a recovered alcoholic just a half-pint... Sorry, but the Germans aren't allowed even a little wafer-thin war. You know what they get like after a few invasions.
The solar system does not contain "the Sun and
9 planets" as so many of us incorrectly learned. Rather, it contains 6 families: a star, the rocky planets, the asteroid belt, the gas giant planets, the Kuiper belt, and the Oort cloud.
Can't remember who it was first said it, but the best classification I ever read was:
"The Solar System contains the Sun, Jupiter, and assorted debris."
There was one CD I purchased which wouldn't copy using the standard Linux apps (its cover mentioned anti-piracy tech.)
Interesting. Which was it?
I've had a few discs (which I try not to call CDs because they are not CDs, they just happen to have the same form factor and play in some CD players) which claimed to be copy-protected, but I ripped them with no trouble. They threw up a lot of errors, which I suppose they intended to cause all kinds of pops and jumps in the output of a ripper, but it seems cdparanoia was equal to the task;-)
If they've finally come out with one that beats cdparanoia, then I'm intrigued...
There is no racism in finding yourself sexually attracted to certain racial characteristics such as skin colour.
There isn't?
Terrific! Now I can stop having to hide all that Japanese porn... Although while I'm no longer worried about being thought racist, perhaps the tentacle thing might cause people to worry?
Well, thanks for the link. You just entirely destroyed my Sunday afternoon. What the hell, it was raining anyway... You've made me fish out NWN from the depths of the filesystem where it had been lurking for aeons, unearth my cute little halfling sorceror and get her out on the road again.
Love the weapons. Some real nasty flavour text here. A lot more imaginative than the original modules, except maybe some of the stranger stuff from HotU.
Oh, and damn you for that room of strange oddities. 'Further experimentation with this is forbidden' it says. Surely these monks know how people's minds work?
Once I've finished this I'll get my nasty character out, too. Neutral evil katana-specialist, who will take a hellish delight in corrupting our friend the wannabe paladin;-)
Yep. Six of 'em, but they've been dying off. This is part of the reason why it's being retired. If it loses any more, they can't control its attitude, and then it could wind up on a potentially dangerous uncontrolled reentry.
It's the boss' job to allow for that, not yours. Or, if it's yours, it's also your job to explain to him that you are allowing for things like that. If you lie to your boss about how long it will take you to do something, then all that happens is you both allow for unforeseen problems, and the schedule gets out of whack.
It all evens out in the end. It's how nature protects weak products.
First, the engineer pads his schedule.
PHB: Six Months?
DILBERT: At least.
DILBERT (thinking): One month to build the product and five months to play "DOOM" on my computer.
Then the manager pads the schedule as clever negotiating ploy.
PHB: One year...unless you add people to my tiny empire.
Then the vice president pads the schedule to avoid looking bad to the president.
VP: Eighteen months.
Meanwhile, the sales people are making up numbers because nobody tells them anything.
SALES (to customer): Two months...and it solves every problem you have!
This cause the customers to develop irrational desire for the product.
CUSTOMER: Give me the "beta" test version in one month.
I've never been convinced by the Chinese Room. Pile of books doesn't speak Chinese, fair enough. Man following rules in books doesn't speak Chinese, also fair enough. Room as a whole doesn't speak Chinese? That does not necessarily follow.
The counterargument, from the linked page, is
In response, Searle claims that if we simply imagine the person in the Chinese room to memorize the look-up table, we have produced a counter example to this reply.
Not really. Bearing in mind that the Chinese Room is assumed to be a Turing machine, this is no different from moving the lookup tables from the hard disk into RAM. It just contracts the system geographically.
Reading your link, it seems that Searle's actual argument has been that although the Chinese Room reasoning doesn't prove that it's impossible to write such a list of instructions and such a pile of dictionaries, it does prove that the Chinese Room would not actually be conscious. Perhaps, but does that matter? How would we know? What exactly is the difference between a Turing machine running ChineseRoom 1.0, capable of convincing a Chinaman it's conscious and speaks Chinese, and a Chinaman's brain in a vat inside a similar room?
Certainly, the Chinese Room Turing machine would say it was conscious, in perfect Chinese; it would compose poetry, it would discuss philosophy, it might discuss whether or not Turing machines can be conscious, it might even agree that they can't (has anyone told it what it is?) If it didn't show all the signs of the same inner being and spirit that humans do, it wouldn't convince our jury of Chinese that it's conscious and intelligent.
Conclusion: maybe it IS impossible to write a Chinese-room program, and maybe it wouldn't be conscious, but Searle hasn't proved it to be so, not by a long shot.
It's probably obvious by now that I side with Turing over Searle. If something acts like it's conscious, we may as well assume that it is conscious. Otherwise we wind up arguing solipsism: how do I even know you're conscious? You might be a zombie!
You put so much effort into deducing what the Bible means from what it actually says, and yet you don't give the grandparent post the same courtesy?
To quote:
Hell, even if you believe the earth is flat and was created by the Almighty 6000 years ago like it says in the Bible, it would be gone already with a half life that short.
Now, what you did there was proceed to argue that the Bible says nothing of the sort. This, of course, is Silly. The Earth is not flat, the Earth was not created by the Almighty 6000 years ago, but some people believe these things and they additionally believe that the Bible supports them in these curious notions. Hence the grandparent post. Your regurgitation of masses of Biblical scholarship is just as irrelevant in that context as I would be if I posted a huge amount of trigonometry, astronomy and isotope ratio computations proving that the Earth is roughly spherical and around four and a half billion years old. It would be missing the point entirely.
Why? Because no one sells AO games. Block Buster, Circuit City, Best Buy, Walmart, Target, GameStop, etc don't sell AO games (as far as I know).
This actually strikes me as cowardice on Rockstar's part.
This is not just any game. This is San Andreas. It's the gaming event of the year. It's the third in a series that has consistently blown away every expectation.
It doesn't matter if they rate it R or AO, or if Hillary Clinton says it's awful, or if the Pope issues an edict forbidding it. This thing's going to be huge, so huge that those squeamish stores that ordinarily won't stock AO games will have to either give in or miss out on massive business.
But no... for fear of the American nipplephobia, Rockstar compromise their principles. This from the company whose game marketing generally involves deliberately inciting a moral panic in the tabloids... It's just sad.
Probably Dr. I. Q. Hi, Secretary of the Stratosphere, who commissioned space hero D. Dodgers to claim the Planet X for Earth, and secure the supply of illudium phosdex (the shaving cream molecule), some time in the 24 1/2th Century.
Slashdot Mirror
Never met Simon Travaglia, then?
You could buy the DVDs. I believe they're all out now, and there's a boxset due in November. As a geek I assume you have a multiregion DVD player or at the very least the ability to install mplayer. The exchange rate will be nasty, though, with the dollar being as low as it has been lately.
Ahahahahaha! Well, what you do is you clone off some really gigantic humanoid things and you coat them in metallic armour to (a) keep their full power restrained and under control and (b) give everyone the impression that they're actually just robots. Then you wire into their nervous systems, set up some kind of neural interface, synchronise a suitably messed-up teenager and away you go! If I had any of that $h17 I could build some HELLACIOUS ROBOTS and conquer...ummm, spread democracy throughout the world.
Hope you like Sunny Delight. You'll end up with a whole lot of the stuff.
Hmm. How many people have an internet connection but no telephone? Stop me if I'm wrong here, but most people still get their connection from a phone line, though ADSL has largely superseded dialup these days...
So, that captcha cuts out those people who have an internet connection AND have no phone AND are blind. Pretty small segment there.
Well, there's me feeling a fool. Just the other day I saw someone I didn't like the look of and tried to cast Magic Missile at them...
Futureproofing, as you've already had mentioned, but also it gets you a bit of extra insurance... With my distinctly crappy card (bottom-of-the-line budget GeForce somethingorother, but fanless which I suppose is a plus) I get a perfectly playable Neverwinter Nights experience most of the time - except when the crap starts flying. When I'm launching meteor swarms and fireballs at all in sight and when there are dozens of drow guards and duergar invaders and three gigantic golems all on screen at once - THAT'S when you want the better card. 100fps in normal play buys you 60fps when things get frantic, and those are the times you really need a responsive system.
How long does it take to say 'terrorists'?
That, plus about thirty seconds.
Good for you. For any panicking Windows users - move to UNIX and never worry about rootkits ever again!
Really, go ahead. You can trust me ;-)
He'd have to, given that UNATCO are so tight that he has to buy most of his own ammo.
But nah - it'd make a much better movie if he spent all his time sneaking around vent shafts and occasionally hacking into security systems, then gloating at the distant sounds of gun turrets and the screams of guards...
That wouldn't concentrate anyone's mind. Doomed in 35 years, unless we do something about it? Right, let's dig up those Orion blueprints and go do something about it damn quick! Doomed in 300 years, unless we do something about it? Oh, well, the jury's still out on it, we're not even sure if it would make any difference, we certainly don't want to do anything that would jeopardise the American economy in the meantime, it's all a greenie leftie liberal myth anyway, let's wait and see for a while.
Actually, this is a really positive sign. Lloyds of London know all about risk. They've watched the SCO circus go around and have concluded that
- SCO don't have a leg to stand on
- However, they've made some people think there's a risk
- Sell insurance
- Profit!
This is not quite as much a case of free money as the insurance policies you can buy against abduction by aliens, but it's pretty close...
I was tremendously amused, in the runup to George and Tony's Mesopotamian fireworks display, by hearing commentary from Americans who complained about the Germans being pacifists.
Historical ignorance is one thing, but that was just comical. You guys want the old Germany back?
Sure, this was a just war and it was all legal and OK and necessary because otherwise Saddam might have launched those WMDs, but it's like offering a recovered alcoholic just a half-pint... Sorry, but the Germans aren't allowed even a little wafer-thin war. You know what they get like after a few invasions.
Can't remember who it was first said it, but the best classification I ever read was:
"The Solar System contains the Sun, Jupiter, and assorted debris."
Interesting. Which was it?
I've had a few discs (which I try not to call CDs because they are not CDs, they just happen to have the same form factor and play in some CD players) which claimed to be copy-protected, but I ripped them with no trouble. They threw up a lot of errors, which I suppose they intended to cause all kinds of pops and jumps in the output of a ripper, but it seems cdparanoia was equal to the task ;-)
If they've finally come out with one that beats cdparanoia, then I'm intrigued...
You misspelled 'Ame...' - naah, too easy.
There isn't?
Terrific! Now I can stop having to hide all that Japanese porn... Although while I'm no longer worried about being thought racist, perhaps the tentacle thing might cause people to worry?
Love the weapons. Some real nasty flavour text here. A lot more imaginative than the original modules, except maybe some of the stranger stuff from HotU.
Oh, and damn you for that room of strange oddities. 'Further experimentation with this is forbidden' it says. Surely these monks know how people's minds work?
Once I've finished this I'll get my nasty character out, too. Neutral evil katana-specialist, who will take a hellish delight in corrupting our friend the wannabe paladin ;-)
Yep. Six of 'em, but they've been dying off. This is part of the reason why it's being retired. If it loses any more, they can't control its attitude, and then it could wind up on a potentially dangerous uncontrolled reentry.
OK, now I've seen it all. Someone on Slashdot actually asking for the, er, goat pic?
Well, if you really want it, check out the Christmas Island TLD, and may Satan have mercy upon your soul...
It all evens out in the end. It's how nature protects weak products.
First, the engineer pads his schedule.
PHB: Six Months?
DILBERT: At least.
DILBERT (thinking): One month to build the product and five months to play "DOOM" on my computer.
Then the manager pads the schedule as clever negotiating ploy.
PHB: One year...unless you add people to my tiny empire.
Then the vice president pads the schedule to avoid looking bad to the president.
VP: Eighteen months.
Meanwhile, the sales people are making up numbers because nobody tells them anything.
SALES (to customer): Two months...and it solves every problem you have!
This cause the customers to develop irrational desire for the product.
CUSTOMER: Give me the "beta" test version in one month.
Thus nature disguises weak products as "beta".
CUSTOMER: Cardboard? That's stupid.
DILBERT: Oh...then it's beta.
The counterargument, from the linked page, is
In response, Searle claims that if we simply imagine the person in the Chinese room to memorize the look-up table, we have produced a counter example to this reply.
Not really. Bearing in mind that the Chinese Room is assumed to be a Turing machine, this is no different from moving the lookup tables from the hard disk into RAM. It just contracts the system geographically.
Reading your link, it seems that Searle's actual argument has been that although the Chinese Room reasoning doesn't prove that it's impossible to write such a list of instructions and such a pile of dictionaries, it does prove that the Chinese Room would not actually be conscious. Perhaps, but does that matter? How would we know? What exactly is the difference between a Turing machine running ChineseRoom 1.0, capable of convincing a Chinaman it's conscious and speaks Chinese, and a Chinaman's brain in a vat inside a similar room?
Certainly, the Chinese Room Turing machine would say it was conscious, in perfect Chinese; it would compose poetry, it would discuss philosophy, it might discuss whether or not Turing machines can be conscious, it might even agree that they can't (has anyone told it what it is?) If it didn't show all the signs of the same inner being and spirit that humans do, it wouldn't convince our jury of Chinese that it's conscious and intelligent.
Conclusion: maybe it IS impossible to write a Chinese-room program, and maybe it wouldn't be conscious, but Searle hasn't proved it to be so, not by a long shot.
It's probably obvious by now that I side with Turing over Searle. If something acts like it's conscious, we may as well assume that it is conscious. Otherwise we wind up arguing solipsism: how do I even know you're conscious? You might be a zombie!
You put so much effort into deducing what the Bible means from what it actually says, and yet you don't give the grandparent post the same courtesy?
To quote:
Hell, even if you believe the earth is flat and was created by the Almighty 6000 years ago like it says in the Bible, it would be gone already with a half life that short.
Now, what you did there was proceed to argue that the Bible says nothing of the sort. This, of course, is Silly. The Earth is not flat, the Earth was not created by the Almighty 6000 years ago, but some people believe these things and they additionally believe that the Bible supports them in these curious notions. Hence the grandparent post. Your regurgitation of masses of Biblical scholarship is just as irrelevant in that context as I would be if I posted a huge amount of trigonometry, astronomy and isotope ratio computations proving that the Earth is roughly spherical and around four and a half billion years old. It would be missing the point entirely.
More so than any of the Trek characters, methinks. How many of us here were first inspired into tech geekdom by Chief Enginner Scott?
This actually strikes me as cowardice on Rockstar's part.
This is not just any game. This is San Andreas. It's the gaming event of the year. It's the third in a series that has consistently blown away every expectation.
It doesn't matter if they rate it R or AO, or if Hillary Clinton says it's awful, or if the Pope issues an edict forbidding it. This thing's going to be huge, so huge that those squeamish stores that ordinarily won't stock AO games will have to either give in or miss out on massive business.
But no... for fear of the American nipplephobia, Rockstar compromise their principles. This from the company whose game marketing generally involves deliberately inciting a moral panic in the tabloids... It's just sad.
Probably Dr. I. Q. Hi, Secretary of the Stratosphere, who commissioned space hero D. Dodgers to claim the Planet X for Earth, and secure the supply of illudium phosdex (the shaving cream molecule), some time in the 24 1/2th Century.