I've met some extremely high functioning autistics before. I've also met autistics who do not have violent outbursts.
It is rare however to see a high functioning autistic to write a well structured and empathetic passage like that without editing it for several hours. Given you wrote that passage in under an hour, clearly you were misdiagnosed.
Which is why sovereign states often look at the Internet with very mixed feelings. In the old days, doing business in a country meant dealing souly with their laws, nowadays, you can do business worldwide without a presence anywhere, subject largely to laws of your own choosing.
China has chosen to largely block "web2.0" and just leave the foreign Internet as merely a reference tool. Other countries are either doing the same or wishing they could, to have something so central to the lives of its citizens that a government cannot control is somewhat an alien concept to many. My thoughts are that if the Internet did have stronger consumer protection, this would remove some of the impetus for government interference. Or at the very least remove a potential rationalisation that could be offered to the public.
You can buy a pint of beer in Australia too, despite the country being otherwise completely metric.
You call it a pint because it is seved in a "pint glass", which by law holds 570 mililitres of beer, rather than the beer served one imperial pint of liquid (which, for historical reasons, it also happens to be).
Catholics, who make up more than half of the world's Christians generally believe that suffering is one of the keys to understanding Christ and his suffering. While never going as far as deliberately injuring others for this reason, there are certain groups within the church that encourage its members to reduce their usage of painkillers.
There is some serious masochism in the Catholic faith, be it long term ascetic fasting and mortification of the flesh (self injury) or simply meditating on natural pain that one has received from sickness or injury. I do not however believe that any Christian church really condones enjoying the suffering of others though, which is what is sick and unhealthy.
A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.
The intentions were clearly to arm a militia to protect the state from external threats, not to provide the means to overthrow the state itself, I'm not quite sure where you got that idea from, it sounds nice.
You know, it's damn hard to kill someone with a knife. The areas that cause someone to die instantly are quite small and take a fair bit of force to stab, most people do not have the strength or dexterity to do that. Knife murders usually rely on the victim being alone and bleeding out, all it takes is pressure on a stab wound and it will bleed slowly enough for help to arrive in time. Unless one is some form of stabbing virtuoso that practices every day with a bayonet dummy, the idea that one can lunge at a crowd of people and fatally wound even one of them is somewhat optimistic.
I am still totally perplexed as to why rational thinking people could consider a law giving the right to bear arms, written in the days where arms meant sabres, brown bess muskets and the occasional long rifle (half a century before the invention of the Minié ball or rotating bolt) entitles them to buy AR-15 rifles and automatic handguns.
It's true, although Chinese parents can select any one or two characters to name their child from the thousands of characters in common use and the tens of thousands out of common use, there are a few hundred characters that tend to be used disproportionately often.
As for surnames, the top 100 most common surnames make up more than 85% of the country's population and over 1/5 of Chinese are called either "Wang", "Li" or "Zhang".
People having the same name as a leader is quite common. I know at least two guys who cannot write their own name on Weibo because they are called "Li Peng", using the exact same two characters as the former premier (who's name IS still blocked and will be as long as he is still alive for reasons you can look up yourself).
As for Chaiman Xi, his surname is not particularly common and his given name is not common either, however they are all common words. You cannot ask someone "are you familiar with the nearby plain?" without writing his name for example.
Caterpiller armoured bulldozers are probably the most visible element of IDF retaliatory demolitions. When your product is being used to knock down the homes of civilians to flush out insurgents in the community then you shouldn't be dumbfounded when your PR takes a slide.
Wasn't Quake III considered a pretty successful online game? I remember playing it at more than a couple of LAN parties, which is what kids used to do back then.
It's network code is pretty nice too, based on sending a diff between last acknowledged packet and current state with an elegant set of macros to expose the logic, more robust and efficient than what is used by most MMOs.
I would call Quake's networking system technically brilliant and the client-server architecture is far stronger than you would expect, just the gameplay tends to suck pretty hard in the recent games.
His classes are notoriously hard still. He takes the view that if something is part of the subject, it can be in the exam, whether he has mentioned it or not. He also gives a lot of homework compared to other lecturers. He gets away with it because he's just such a damn good teacher that students mostly just accept it, and those who don't are silenced by his loud and opinionated fan club. Foreign students and the types of student that takes e-commerce tend to just skip his subjects, because they punish your grade point average to say the least.
I'm not anonymous, I had him for Cryptography and Security in '05, best educator I have ever encountered. The atmosphere in his classes is like some evangelical revival, rows upon rows of screaming students wanting to not just learn but live what he's teaching. Would be damn scary if he got political.
While I don't usually go around with a big bag of pity to be given out to corporate executives, it's sad for Meg Whitman that she happens to be a female CEO at HP so soon after that blithering idiot Carly Fiorina made such a conspicuous mess of things.
Game programming involves a lot of seperation of policy and mechanism. Policy is the rules behind the game, things like leveling up, binding items, calculating damage, UI layout, etc. Mechanism is the tech that holds it together, things like 3d rendering, database transactions, network layer, physics simulation, particle simulation, font rendering, etc.
Generally speaking game programmers work on the mechanism side of the spectrum and game designers work on the policy side, but where they meet is determined by the individual team, generally speaking there will be a core engine handled by specialist engine programmers on the very mechanism extremity, some core systems handled by game programmers built on top of that, with policy written in a scripting language that interfaces with those. Mechanism is hard to implement and moves slowly, good game programmers will focus on making the interface for this very clean and flexable to allow policy to change rapidly while leaving the mechanism clean and undamaged. This allows the best play experience to be developed with the minimum expense of programmers (who are the only game developers who regularly get 6 figure salaries, so the fewer the better).
Programmers almost never remove mechanism, since the policies controlling them get turned on and off on an almost daily basis and a seasoned programmer will never fully trust a designer who confidently says "oh, we won't need that anymore". It is the norm to be told "hey, you know that thing we got rid of 6 months ago because testers hated it? We want it again!", so programmers just tend to leave everything in there in the assumption it will come back.
Anyway, games are shipped with maybe 1/3rd of the the functionality turned off by scripts and config as a general rule, unless you have a programmer dominated studio where the attitude is "I wrote it, it's going in". What you're seeing here, as with Hot Coffee and every time you see hidden content/functionality coming back through fan mods is just a product of standard operating practice, there is a lot of vestigial functionality lying around since code and resources in modern games are just too big for any individual to keep track of. You turn something off, make it unable to turn on and it's not there. If some idiots want to mod their consoles and screw with the game, turning stuff on and off like a trained monkey at a switchboard, well, that's pretty much what most game designers do for a living and designers still get their name on the credits, so I don't see why we can't give credit to the Hot Coffee modders for "creating" that feature from nothing.
As for this bug, I'd be more critical because it's implemented wrongly. If a modder could have turned it on, then a game designer could have switched it on, seemingly at random before shipping, since he "is an expert in game theory, emergent narritive and human machine interface, why won't anyone take me seriously as a professional?" The golden rule for programmers is to never throw sharp toys into the playpen.
Not only that, but the guys he wouldn't dare fire, namely Jony Ive (the genius industrial designer behind iEverything who basically saved Apple) must be indulged in doing whatever the hell they want, even though they probably shouldn't, namely control the GUI, otherwise they will come into early conflict with the new boss.
An hater would say that it shows that Jobs had no design talent of his own, an admirer would say it shows he was too professional to waste Jony Ive's time designing his personal possessions. Either way, his legacy as a man of taste would have been greater if the executor of his estate scuttled her before she was complete.
Taking the first step towards pervasive censorship always sounds so benevolent since free speech will always be used in some difficult to endure ways, but I would rather have a website full of racists and trolls than lose that free speech. There are plenty of other websites out there where the powers decide what you can and cannot say, The Escapist is a good example of a heavily policed site where goodthink prevails, but I doubt you'll draw much traction on Slashdot. However I fully support your right to express your belief on this forum.
Folks have been making pomace brandys, like grappa for centuries. This suggestion is just to put it into an engine rather than drinking it, which many people who have tasted it would approve of.
Traditional Chinese is most often used in Taiwan (pop 23 million), where the offical language is Mandarin. Hong Kong people taking notes for themselves often prefer writing English and when writing informally and Mandarin influenced Chinese (with Traditional characters) when writing novels and other great works (see Gu Long, Jin Yong, Liang Yusheng, etc.). The overwealming majority of Cantonese speakers live on the mainland though and only know how to write using Mandarin grammar.
Best to think of Simplified/Traditional as the same set of characters in different shapes, like Roman, Italic, Frikten, Insular, Antiqua, Uncial, etc for the Latin alphabet. Most people can read both if they can read either properly. It does not really bear a relationship with the language
It should be "Chinese Edition" since it refers to the written language. Mandarin is a spoken dialect of Chinese, roughly equivalent to what "Received Pronunciation" is to English. Chinese can generally understand all Mandarin, though few outside of Beijing can speak it perfectly.
Modern written Chinese borrows heavily from Mandarin grammar and vocabulary, while retaining some conventions from Classical Chinese, the older written form that was pretty much impossible to understand when read aloud.
While it is possible to write in Chinese characters using Cantonese, Minnan or Wu grammar, it's quite rare and considered strange or wrong, even in regions where those dialects are spoken.
I might also add that in early digital, stored program computers, relays were still used for multiplexing in the register and memory banks, the reason is that is 1) they would only be activated once per instruction at decoding time, 2) they could be ganged to flip a lot of paralell wires at the same time driven by one coil, saving much space and complexity, 3) they had lower resistance and lower leakage than a valve. Valves were only used for arithimatic in those days, where their speed was needed.
No, the first computational devices were electromechanical punchcard databases, they used relays throughout, as did the automatic switching systems in the phone network. Tubes we only used as amplifiers when my grandfather was a young man, computers like Colossus and Eniac that did in fact use vaccuum tubes for switching were largely either obscure or classified until my grandfather was in his mid 30s and too busy with his legal practice, family and music to much care.
When I studied Comp Sci in the early 00s, we had a compulsary couse on digital circuits, ground up sort of stuff, nand gates, verilog, that sort of thing. If you didn't have a course like that, it is regretable.
My proudest moment is my 80 something year old grandfather, who's own father had built radios for a living and who's brother is a retired electrical engineer saw my textbook and grilled me about solid state switching. He said he did not understand how a signal could be selected based on another signal without the use of electromechanical relays. He knew roughly how a transistor works and I explained how they could be combined into AND, OR and NOT gates. From there, I drew a circuit digram of a multiplexer and to him it was like some great realization that there was no perversion of God's laws going on inside a CPU (joke).
He bought his first PC and Digital Camera within a month.
Slashdot Mirror
I've met some extremely high functioning autistics before. I've also met autistics who do not have violent outbursts.
It is rare however to see a high functioning autistic to write a well structured and empathetic passage like that without editing it for several hours. Given you wrote that passage in under an hour, clearly you were misdiagnosed.
Which is why sovereign states often look at the Internet with very mixed feelings. In the old days, doing business in a country meant dealing souly with their laws, nowadays, you can do business worldwide without a presence anywhere, subject largely to laws of your own choosing.
China has chosen to largely block "web2.0" and just leave the foreign Internet as merely a reference tool. Other countries are either doing the same or wishing they could, to have something so central to the lives of its citizens that a government cannot control is somewhat an alien concept to many. My thoughts are that if the Internet did have stronger consumer protection, this would remove some of the impetus for government interference. Or at the very least remove a potential rationalisation that could be offered to the public.
You can buy a pint of beer in Australia too, despite the country being otherwise completely metric.
You call it a pint because it is seved in a "pint glass", which by law holds 570 mililitres of beer, rather than the beer served one imperial pint of liquid (which, for historical reasons, it also happens to be).
Catholics, who make up more than half of the world's Christians generally believe that suffering is one of the keys to understanding Christ and his suffering. While never going as far as deliberately injuring others for this reason, there are certain groups within the church that encourage its members to reduce their usage of painkillers.
There is some serious masochism in the Catholic faith, be it long term ascetic fasting and mortification of the flesh (self injury) or simply meditating on natural pain that one has received from sickness or injury. I do not however believe that any Christian church really condones enjoying the suffering of others though, which is what is sick and unhealthy.
Video ads = evil
Unintrusive, relavent and optimised ads = a good way to generate revenue and maybe even learn about a useful product from time to time.
A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.
The intentions were clearly to arm a militia to protect the state from external threats, not to provide the means to overthrow the state itself, I'm not quite sure where you got that idea from, it sounds nice.
At the same time a crazy Chinese guy stabbed 23 primary school children at school. None died.
You know, it's damn hard to kill someone with a knife. The areas that cause someone to die instantly are quite small and take a fair bit of force to stab, most people do not have the strength or dexterity to do that. Knife murders usually rely on the victim being alone and bleeding out, all it takes is pressure on a stab wound and it will bleed slowly enough for help to arrive in time. Unless one is some form of stabbing virtuoso that practices every day with a bayonet dummy, the idea that one can lunge at a crowd of people and fatally wound even one of them is somewhat optimistic.
I am still totally perplexed as to why rational thinking people could consider a law giving the right to bear arms, written in the days where arms meant sabres, brown bess muskets and the occasional long rifle (half a century before the invention of the Minié ball or rotating bolt) entitles them to buy AR-15 rifles and automatic handguns.
It's true, although Chinese parents can select any one or two characters to name their child from the thousands of characters in common use and the tens of thousands out of common use, there are a few hundred characters that tend to be used disproportionately often.
As for surnames, the top 100 most common surnames make up more than 85% of the country's population and over 1/5 of Chinese are called either "Wang", "Li" or "Zhang".
People having the same name as a leader is quite common. I know at least two guys who cannot write their own name on Weibo because they are called "Li Peng", using the exact same two characters as the former premier (who's name IS still blocked and will be as long as he is still alive for reasons you can look up yourself).
As for Chaiman Xi, his surname is not particularly common and his given name is not common either, however they are all common words. You cannot ask someone "are you familiar with the nearby plain?" without writing his name for example.
Caterpiller armoured bulldozers are probably the most visible element of IDF retaliatory demolitions. When your product is being used to knock down the homes of civilians to flush out insurgents in the community then you shouldn't be dumbfounded when your PR takes a slide.
Wasn't Quake III considered a pretty successful online game? I remember playing it at more than a couple of LAN parties, which is what kids used to do back then.
It's network code is pretty nice too, based on sending a diff between last acknowledged packet and current state with an elegant set of macros to expose the logic, more robust and efficient than what is used by most MMOs.
I would call Quake's networking system technically brilliant and the client-server architecture is far stronger than you would expect, just the gameplay tends to suck pretty hard in the recent games.
His classes are notoriously hard still. He takes the view that if something is part of the subject, it can be in the exam, whether he has mentioned it or not. He also gives a lot of homework compared to other lecturers. He gets away with it because he's just such a damn good teacher that students mostly just accept it, and those who don't are silenced by his loud and opinionated fan club. Foreign students and the types of student that takes e-commerce tend to just skip his subjects, because they punish your grade point average to say the least.
I'm not anonymous, I had him for Cryptography and Security in '05, best educator I have ever encountered. The atmosphere in his classes is like some evangelical revival, rows upon rows of screaming students wanting to not just learn but live what he's teaching. Would be damn scary if he got political.
While I don't usually go around with a big bag of pity to be given out to corporate executives, it's sad for Meg Whitman that she happens to be a female CEO at HP so soon after that blithering idiot Carly Fiorina made such a conspicuous mess of things.
I've been working in China for 3.5 years, I get to sit for my 16 hour work day, and we get free dinner!
Problem is, I have a Chinese boss who doubts my leadership skills when I point out that working employees to death is not good for the company.
They didn't include it.
Game programming involves a lot of seperation of policy and mechanism. Policy is the rules behind the game, things like leveling up, binding items, calculating damage, UI layout, etc. Mechanism is the tech that holds it together, things like 3d rendering, database transactions, network layer, physics simulation, particle simulation, font rendering, etc.
Generally speaking game programmers work on the mechanism side of the spectrum and game designers work on the policy side, but where they meet is determined by the individual team, generally speaking there will be a core engine handled by specialist engine programmers on the very mechanism extremity, some core systems handled by game programmers built on top of that, with policy written in a scripting language that interfaces with those. Mechanism is hard to implement and moves slowly, good game programmers will focus on making the interface for this very clean and flexable to allow policy to change rapidly while leaving the mechanism clean and undamaged. This allows the best play experience to be developed with the minimum expense of programmers (who are the only game developers who regularly get 6 figure salaries, so the fewer the better).
Programmers almost never remove mechanism, since the policies controlling them get turned on and off on an almost daily basis and a seasoned programmer will never fully trust a designer who confidently says "oh, we won't need that anymore". It is the norm to be told "hey, you know that thing we got rid of 6 months ago because testers hated it? We want it again!", so programmers just tend to leave everything in there in the assumption it will come back.
Anyway, games are shipped with maybe 1/3rd of the the functionality turned off by scripts and config as a general rule, unless you have a programmer dominated studio where the attitude is "I wrote it, it's going in". What you're seeing here, as with Hot Coffee and every time you see hidden content/functionality coming back through fan mods is just a product of standard operating practice, there is a lot of vestigial functionality lying around since code and resources in modern games are just too big for any individual to keep track of. You turn something off, make it unable to turn on and it's not there. If some idiots want to mod their consoles and screw with the game, turning stuff on and off like a trained monkey at a switchboard, well, that's pretty much what most game designers do for a living and designers still get their name on the credits, so I don't see why we can't give credit to the Hot Coffee modders for "creating" that feature from nothing.
As for this bug, I'd be more critical because it's implemented wrongly. If a modder could have turned it on, then a game designer could have switched it on, seemingly at random before shipping, since he "is an expert in game theory, emergent narritive and human machine interface, why won't anyone take me seriously as a professional?" The golden rule for programmers is to never throw sharp toys into the playpen.
Not only that, but the guys he wouldn't dare fire, namely Jony Ive (the genius industrial designer behind iEverything who basically saved Apple) must be indulged in doing whatever the hell they want, even though they probably shouldn't, namely control the GUI, otherwise they will come into early conflict with the new boss.
An hater would say that it shows that Jobs had no design talent of his own, an admirer would say it shows he was too professional to waste Jony Ive's time designing his personal possessions. Either way, his legacy as a man of taste would have been greater if the executor of his estate scuttled her before she was complete.
Taking the first step towards pervasive censorship always sounds so benevolent since free speech will always be used in some difficult to endure ways, but I would rather have a website full of racists and trolls than lose that free speech. There are plenty of other websites out there where the powers decide what you can and cannot say, The Escapist is a good example of a heavily policed site where goodthink prevails, but I doubt you'll draw much traction on Slashdot. However I fully support your right to express your belief on this forum.
Chickens, when hugged, go into a defensive posture, crouching low, head down, wings slightly hunched. They generally will not peck adult humans.
In retrospect, she could have mistaken me for a cockerel trying to mount her and gone into a mating position, which is roughly the same posture.
Folks have been making pomace brandys, like grappa for centuries. This suggestion is just to put it into an engine rather than drinking it, which many people who have tasted it would approve of.
Traditional Chinese is most often used in Taiwan (pop 23 million), where the offical language is Mandarin. Hong Kong people taking notes for themselves often prefer writing English and when writing informally and Mandarin influenced Chinese (with Traditional characters) when writing novels and other great works (see Gu Long, Jin Yong, Liang Yusheng, etc.). The overwealming majority of Cantonese speakers live on the mainland though and only know how to write using Mandarin grammar.
Best to think of Simplified/Traditional as the same set of characters in different shapes, like Roman, Italic, Frikten, Insular, Antiqua, Uncial, etc for the Latin alphabet. Most people can read both if they can read either properly. It does not really bear a relationship with the language
It should be "Chinese Edition" since it refers to the written language. Mandarin is a spoken dialect of Chinese, roughly equivalent to what "Received Pronunciation" is to English. Chinese can generally understand all Mandarin, though few outside of Beijing can speak it perfectly.
Modern written Chinese borrows heavily from Mandarin grammar and vocabulary, while retaining some conventions from Classical Chinese, the older written form that was pretty much impossible to understand when read aloud.
While it is possible to write in Chinese characters using Cantonese, Minnan or Wu grammar, it's quite rare and considered strange or wrong, even in regions where those dialects are spoken.
I might also add that in early digital, stored program computers, relays were still used for multiplexing in the register and memory banks, the reason is that is 1) they would only be activated once per instruction at decoding time, 2) they could be ganged to flip a lot of paralell wires at the same time driven by one coil, saving much space and complexity, 3) they had lower resistance and lower leakage than a valve. Valves were only used for arithimatic in those days, where their speed was needed.
No, the first computational devices were electromechanical punchcard databases, they used relays throughout, as did the automatic switching systems in the phone network. Tubes we only used as amplifiers when my grandfather was a young man, computers like Colossus and Eniac that did in fact use vaccuum tubes for switching were largely either obscure or classified until my grandfather was in his mid 30s and too busy with his legal practice, family and music to much care.
When I studied Comp Sci in the early 00s, we had a compulsary couse on digital circuits, ground up sort of stuff, nand gates, verilog, that sort of thing. If you didn't have a course like that, it is regretable.
My proudest moment is my 80 something year old grandfather, who's own father had built radios for a living and who's brother is a retired electrical engineer saw my textbook and grilled me about solid state switching. He said he did not understand how a signal could be selected based on another signal without the use of electromechanical relays. He knew roughly how a transistor works and I explained how they could be combined into AND, OR and NOT gates. From there, I drew a circuit digram of a multiplexer and to him it was like some great realization that there was no perversion of God's laws going on inside a CPU (joke).
He bought his first PC and Digital Camera within a month.