The only mistake is to refer to it as a "disorder"
on
Addicted to Information?
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· Score: 5, Informative
...because it has been a long-standing tradition in the study of anything, all things, in any field, to give every uniquely discernable (and not necessarily even reproducible) set of circumstances a name and a place in an ever-broadening taxonomical heirarchy of "things we gave names to".
This is simply how we study things. We now know that there are groups of people who react "differently" to certain sets of stimuli, and we have studied the phenomenon enough to have come to a general, but highly contested decision to treat such people with stimulants of various sorts. w00t. What now? Well, while certain researchers delve into the biochemical, genetic, physiological details of this condition, others will subspecialize in particular demographic slices of the group.
That's what grad school is for, isn't it? "Oh, oh, find something that noone else has really put too much time into and go write up a really long paper and come back in a few years so we can yell at you for a few hours".
Even outside of academia, the mentality is pervasive. This is why there's an aisle in stores for "cleaners". There are cleaning products for every imaginable material, for variants of materials. For vinyl, acrylic, plastics, laminates, polished surfaces, glass, concrete, stainless steel, silver, marble, stained wood, unstained wood, painted surfaces, etc... if we really didn't think that way, all we'd have is soap and water.
In any case, I'm glad we do these things. Of course, I am currently being strongly swayed by the prescribed afternoon dose of methylphenidate which is just now (aaah) breaking the blood-brain-barrier. Without people digging frantically into statistical data concerning behavior patterns, I wouldn't have my Ritalin.
In the 9th grade, some many long-n-odd years ago, I started working at a molecular biology laboratory, as a lab-tech. There, I met Parafilm, and fell in love. It was like thick, translucent Saran Wrap, but so much more bad-ass (as far as a geek like myself could perceive bad-ass-ness).
It was stretchy, self-sealing, could form sterility-preserving seals. It was acid/base/alcohol/corrosive-resistant, we used it to wrap bottletops before placing them in the autoclave, and god knows how hot it got in there. Heck, we used it to seal unfinished beers.
I actually took to carrying around a few sheets of it with me everywhere, and I undoubtedly found uses for them. I took a few sheets with me to summer camp, and on the night of the big bonfire, the bigger (and less geeky) children swooped down upon the field and managed to snag all of the long sticks for marshmallow-toasting. After 20 minutes of scavenging, all I could find were a small pile of 6-inch-ish twigs. Parafilm to the rescue! I bound these twigs together into a trifurcated, flame-resistant monstrosity that noone could argue with. Sadly enough, my popularity was not much improved by this feat.
...with good software titles, those folks who are running Linux on their XBoxes will still go out and purchase some of them green-boxed games. I'm serious. When Halo2 is finally released, I'm thinking that most of them XBox hackers will go out and grab a copy anyway. Even if it *could* be pirated.
Not by far. I love the amount of detail that goes into prerendered settings, and I often feel that 3d does not offer many benefits to RPGs. Flexible viewpoints and zooming and scaling don't seem to benefit immersion into a fantasy world as much as lovingly placed pixels do.
Whether or not I can walk up to a bookshelf, zoom in on a book, or pick it up and throw it won't make much of a difference to me if it looks just like every other book on every other identical bookshelf.
It's the intentional omission of certain details for the sake of tailoring a very particular impression that really makes me happy. Baldur's Gate, Icewind Dale, PlanetScape: Torment, and Fallout (despite Fallout's tiling) all had very carefully and very thoroughly fleshed out worlds, with unique dialogues, unique personalities, and more than enough details to make for a real adventure.
It seems to me that most 3d RPGs aren't really RPGs. You're not playing any role any differently than you would in an action game. The pacing may be slower and the numbers behind the rules of the game-world may be revealed to you in the form of stats and skills, but if you're not crafting a role, a person for a place within a world that reacts convincingly to it, I don't think it's really an RPG.
...simply as a matter of star-developer-politics (I don't watch television-soaps, so I have to have some source of drama in my life).
What were their reasons? I also wonder why twenty of the lead developers working on Medal of Honor: Allied Assault left an Electronic Arts funded studio to found Infinity Ward. Is it really the money, or is it something else? I have no knowledge in this field, so if anyone has any inside information or pertinent experience, please post, I'd love to hear it.
As far as the reallocation of talent goes, I had high hopes for Troika's Arcanum, seeing as how Troika consisted of several key members of the fantastic team which produced Fallout, but wound up disappointed at its lack of polish, whereas Inifinity Ward's soon-to-be-released Call of Duty looks by all means to be incredible even in its juvenile state. Maybe high-level-folk like doing things their way, for better or worse, without the interjections of a publisher seeking marketability. Once again, I'm only hypothesizing. Are there any game-developers out there willing to testify?
...I get this strange feeling that this is what the hush-hush Infinium Labs "Phantom" console is going to do.
Although I can't locate them now, I recall mentions of "streaming games" and "trials" and "online rentals" of "over X0,000 existing software titles". While this is said to include PC titles, I keep thinking that old arcade ROMs would be perfect for this kinda thing.
Games you could play on a whim, whose ROMs are typically a few megs at most, often have high production values, are completed and tested... You could download them via the Phantom, and Infinium Labs pays the copyright holders a nickel each time someone presses "start" on Do Don Pachi.
I personally love arcade shooters, especially Cave shooters like ESPrade and Dangun Feveron. There are a ton of arcade games, fantastic ones like Dead Connection, that I've never seen or heard of until they were added to MAME. As much as I'd hope otherwise, it's not likely that anyone would port them to a current system.
These arcade games from five, ten, fifteen years ago, they were designed to get you to pump in your quarters for an hour or so, maybe-just-maybe a few times a week. Unfortunately, I think the trend as of late has been towards the production of games which require a real commitment over a period of time. Levelling up in RPGs, playing out a season in a football game, unlocking cars in Gran Turismo, and getting your Sims rich, these are the things which seem to get people's wallets out of their pockets.
If some of these old arcade games found their way to a home system now, I bet people would complain about their lack of replayability, the simplicity of their nature, and their brevity. Those were their strengths in the arcade, of course, but how much could a developer expect to make porting a title without content changes to the PS2? They'd have to sell them for a very low price. People would probably not pay fifty dollars for a game they could finish in 30 minutes. Heck, people complained about Ikaruga on the Dreamcast being a straight arcade port.
I have no idea what I'm rambling about anymore, but I guess I'm just sad that the only way I can get a 4-player game of Sunset Riders going is by breaking the law.
Re:Curious, I just dreamt that Google was the Devi
on
Does Google = God?
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· Score: 2, Funny
I wonder if they're hiring...
Curious, I just dreamt that Google was the Devil
on
Does Google = God?
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· Score: 3, Funny
I kid you not, this is an entirely true story.
I awoke this morning from a dream where Google was powered by some ancient, evil, seductive force. Just as I often am in real life, in my dream I found myself curious about some random issue, and decided to research it via Google. In this instance, I was curious about what the lives of precious-stone-traders/exchangers were like, how they travelled, and how they moved their goods.
When I opened a browser to http://www.google.com, I suddenly found myself transported to a dark room, one which felt, smelt, and looked as though it was within a long abandoned motel in a rainy, cold, climate. A grimy stone slab of roughly 4:3 dimensions lay on a table before me, glistening with condensation.
A beautiful woman appeared, dressed seductively in red and black, and bade me to enter my query. Somehow, I knew to put my fingertip to the slab, and the moment I made contact, wispy shadows swirled out from within its crevices and surrounded my fingertip. They nipped at it, they pierced the skin, and with my blood, I scrawled out, "precious stone jewel exchange trader carrier lifestyle travel".
The shadows at once covered my bloody query, writhed and congealed and when they finally withdrew, I found that the writing had been rearranged to read, "I'm feeling lucky". I screamed in terror and pounded on the message with my fists, sending dark red droplets flying from the stone.
I looked up to see the woman smiling. When I returned my gaze to the stone slab, I saw the shadows slowly etching out a shape, simple, symmetrical. Trickles of black ran down the face of the stone from its far side, creating soft curves. It... it was a vase, with a notch in its base. It slowly filled with color, a light sort of beige, taking on a photographic quality and it was then that I realized... it wasn't a vase, it was a top-down view of some chick taking it up the ass.
It makes for a nice hobby, and a nice conversation piece, but I personally don't see why this particular computer (PC or Mac, I'm not biased) would get its own Wired gallery, considering that there are many other machines out there with web-presences that are much niftier.
I'm no casemodder, but from an outsider's point of view, I just think I've seen neater things that haven't gotten as much attention from the likes of Wired. Sifting through old bookmarks, here are a few that I personally found to make me all geek-sweaty-tingly-sexy:
Okay, you're the new lucky geek. That really does sound impressive. It's kind of funny to think that we could have quasi-religious experiences in the presence of machines. I bet I would.
I never had the opportunity to be in the presence of anything like that either. The only supercomputers I've ever stood next to have been the discarded husks of a few Crays that devoted geek-acquaintances had scavenged. I always did wonder what it would be like to walk into the space where one of those top 500 machines was kept. What would it sound like? What would it smell like*?...and would the floor be a-thrum with a deep vibration that made my ears tickle?
*I just know someone is going to answer, "Mountain Dew, Chee-tos, and poor personal hygeine". Come on? Say it.:)
It's true, the stresses involved with sudden acceleration and high-speed travel through a non-negligible medium may be immense, but what if we didn't really care about the cargo?
What if we used this thing to fling all of our garbage towards the sun? Not the best idea, but it could be interesting. We could have a way of permanently ridding our planet of old TV-guides, chicken bones, watermelon rinds, E.T. Atari cartridges, Windows 98 CDs, rapists, spammers, and irreparably soiled panties.
Personally, I've felt that a lot of times, struggling through certain projects intentionally has been quite rewarding. There are, of course, times when I realize that for the sake of tight deadlines or my personal appraisal that "there isn't enough to be learned from the reinvention" that I will look up ready-to-eat solutions.
Generally though, it's not even that I think my code is better, but that my code will get better by having learned the pitfalls the hard way, given that I have enough time to do so without sacrificing sleep, personal hygiene and sanity.
Hahahaha! I have no idea. Waow. Who knows, maybe my roommate and I had so much fun playing with him eventually that we never even thought of deleting it.
I tried that, but strangely enough, it didn't work. Well, it's not that I caved in to temptation, and it's not that it didn't work... rather...
When I got into college was when the 486 DX2-66 was the hottest thing out there (okay, so that wasnt *that* long ago, but that still makes me older than some of you, right?). I went in with my old 286, some single-digit-clockspeed clunker without a case cover (it managed to get torn off at some point). I figured I'd use it just for typing things up and email. None of the current games would run on it.
Strangely enough, I did have a copy of Wolfenstein 3d installed it, which I almost never played since it made me rather nauseous. However, a kid on the same floor happened to stop by one of the few times I had it loaded up.
From that moment on, he would come a-knocking at all times of day, all times of night, sometimes even at four in the morning, asking if he could play Wolfenstein.
"Can I play wolfingthing?!?"
"Hey, you using your computer? I wanna do that pow pow yeah hahahaha thing you know, the guys some German thing! hahaha!"
"Ah, you're not sleeping, are you? Hey, I'm gonna hop on your computer and play that Worfespang thing, don't worry, I'll turn the sound low and won't wake you up."
...and he would sit and laugh maniacally and smash on my keyboard for hours at a time. Sure, we tried to tell him we were busy, but he always found a way. Always.
...and that's how I got into computers. I spent so much time writing little executables to replace Wolf3d.exe that would make it seem as if my computer was having the most incredible, fantastic, epileptic conniptions that... hey, actually, it didn't teach me anything useful other than how to make a 286 bleep and freak out.
My Momma always said life is like a box with a cat in it, you never know if it is alive or dead...
I actually had the opportunity to visit Heisenberg during his final days at his home in Munich, 1975. Let me tell you, the place was full of these boxes, taped shut, smelled absolutely awful. Boxes piled up to the ceiling. Hundreds and hundreds of them everywhere! Then there was the ceaseless cacaphony of yowling, and scraping... The entire time, during tea, he just kept muttering to himself about making some kind of a point.
Godel's Theorem came to mind immediately as I read the original post, and then I came across yours and realized you had fleshed out an appropriate response better than I would have been able to, so suffice to say, "*swoon*".
In any case, I'd still like to tack a few things onto that.
Indeed its easier to simulate a trajectory if you dont have to do it exactly. simply compute the approximate result with error bars and then any time the result is closely inspected you return a different sample from the approximate distribution. Thus one does not have to memo-ize everthing the game player has looked at carefully, you can recreate it on the fly each time something is inspected at high resolution simply by drawing an approximate sample from the distribution. The fact that two looks never quite agree is written off as the "hiesenberg uncertainty principle", or to the QM notion that inspecting an object can change its state.
A large portion of our observation of very small things has involved the flinging of other very small things towards them. It follows then that we'd be compounding the imprecision of "drawing an approximate sample from the distribution" of the thing we are inspecting with the imprecision of the approximation of the thing we are flinging.
In a different sense, it's almost amusing to think that QM may be the result of us having reached the limit of precision of ReallyReallyReallyLongDouble in the system in which we exist, or that maybe somewhere out there at very fundamental level exists a Math.floor().
Back to Godel though:
1) For fun and fluff - So there would be "formally undecidable truths" in our simulation/system. What do you think they might be? "God Exists". "Pepsi really does taste better".
2) Now I'm just going to go off on a semiconscious Sunday-morning rambling here, so don't take me seriously (but humor me if you're so inclined). So in order for everything in our system to be justifiable and explicable, we'd need a more powerful system, a higher level of simulation.
Godel's theorem in a nut shell: you cant prove inconsistency in any set of axioms within the context of those axioms.
Similarly, any simulation we might create in the future must be "less powerful", in that its mechanics of operation (and existence!) can be fully explained within the operating rules of our simulation. This could continue on in both directions. I wonder where we'd be in the ladder of complexity? Would we really be losing "resolution" as our simulations created their own simulations? If we look back to our simulators, then do we assume that all inexplicable phenomena of our existence can be fully justified in their context? If they don't exist, then does that mean that these phenomena are really explainable or not?
I realize this isn't exactly, or even close to on-topic, but I'm curious to see what Slashdotters have to say about this. I've always loved Neuromancer, as it was the first sci-fi book I had ever read and I've thanked God on many days that it was never made into a nightmarishly awful movie. But imagining for a moment that it were to be made into a decent flick, who would you cast to play the various characters from Neuromancer?
As for Case, I'm leaning towards Billy-Bob Thornton.
I hope this is not construed by others as "inciteful", but I am Korean, and I agree with what you are saying. It is indeed an aspect of the culture to yield to social pressures to conform and then perpetuate them. Insular memetics for a peninsular people.
I'll readily admit that I've personally borne a few grudges against the way things are done there, and the way certain things have been done in the Korean-way to me, but hey, a surviving and thriving culture exists because it has survived, and some aspects of it have proven to be successful in terms of self-preservation and self-propagation (and not being so offensive as to warrant annihilation by a united front of other cultures).
As to whether or not the baa-baa-sheep-like-ness will prove to be seriously detrimental to Korean society in the future will require many decades of observation, and many hours spent watching the History Channel after those decades have passed. Who knows? Maybe they've got it right.
Toshiba-Japan's site has several cutesy flash animations demonstrating this device's other feature, the ability to be cute while snacking on your filth.
Check out its stunning personality here. It bleeps, bloops, and whines while cleaning, which makes it about fifty times as personable as I am while I'm doing my chores.
This promotional site has been up for quite some time, so I had no idea it would take so long to get the Trilobite to market. Personally, I'd prefer a cuttlefish-like robot that swims around my sink and cleans my dishes while blub-blub-blubbing.
Not so long ago, I went to go to the U. of R, and I was under the impression that they already had the world's largest, most powerful laser. Is that not true?
The other day at work, I tried to defecate on my workstation, but I couldn't figure out how to undo my belt buckle. I wound up with an unpleasant package to tote home. My project manager was so displeased that she threw her feces at me, screamed, and beat at her chest before jumping into a tree and vanishing.
Then the president of our company came, shot us all with tranqulizer darts, and when I awoke, I found that had been neutered.
Oh the pitiful life of a software developer.
Got a whole lot of awful stuff in our minds
on
Brain Privacy
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· Score: 1
Should devices incorporating such technologies become commonplace, I think we'd quickly discover (or rather, find evidence to prove) that 99% of people scanned will possess seriously "undersirable" mental traits. It wouldn't be out-of-the-ordinary to find someone with violent tendencies, and depression would be even more common.
Even if we could detect these characteristics, to select against them would be against our best interests. If mental/emotional screening had been available and used over the past two centuries, we would have lost almost every great modern mathematician, scientist, artist, musician, and writer to paranoiac ignorance. We'd be living in a world full of dull, unimaginative, passionless sops, perpetually perky, and never dissatisfied. No CDs, no computers, no Beatles, no Godel, no microwave ovens, no Slashdot...
Go ahead, make brain scans accepted practice. Pick the minds of potential employees and let's see what you wind up with as a workforce, if you ever do find anyone who is both qualified and mentally "clean".
Me? I'm going to sit in my room and daydream all day long about having rough, stinky intercourse with a donkey while snacking on human brains and plotting to drop a busload of nuns onto a busload of children. Of course, I'd never do such things. I'd probably get kicked by the donkey.
Slashdot Mirror
This is simply how we study things. We now know that there are groups of people who react "differently" to certain sets of stimuli, and we have studied the phenomenon enough to have come to a general, but highly contested decision to treat such people with stimulants of various sorts. w00t. What now? Well, while certain researchers delve into the biochemical, genetic, physiological details of this condition, others will subspecialize in particular demographic slices of the group.
That's what grad school is for, isn't it? "Oh, oh, find something that noone else has really put too much time into and go write up a really long paper and come back in a few years so we can yell at you for a few hours".
Even outside of academia, the mentality is pervasive. This is why there's an aisle in stores for "cleaners". There are cleaning products for every imaginable material, for variants of materials. For vinyl, acrylic, plastics, laminates, polished surfaces, glass, concrete, stainless steel, silver, marble, stained wood, unstained wood, painted surfaces, etc... if we really didn't think that way, all we'd have is soap and water.
In any case, I'm glad we do these things. Of course, I am currently being strongly swayed by the prescribed afternoon dose of methylphenidate which is just now (aaah) breaking the blood-brain-barrier. Without people digging frantically into statistical data concerning behavior patterns, I wouldn't have my Ritalin.
It was stretchy, self-sealing, could form sterility-preserving seals. It was acid/base/alcohol/corrosive-resistant, we used it to wrap bottletops before placing them in the autoclave, and god knows how hot it got in there. Heck, we used it to seal unfinished beers.
I actually took to carrying around a few sheets of it with me everywhere, and I undoubtedly found uses for them. I took a few sheets with me to summer camp, and on the night of the big bonfire, the bigger (and less geeky) children swooped down upon the field and managed to snag all of the long sticks for marshmallow-toasting. After 20 minutes of scavenging, all I could find were a small pile of 6-inch-ish twigs. Parafilm to the rescue! I bound these twigs together into a trifurcated, flame-resistant monstrosity that noone could argue with. Sadly enough, my popularity was not much improved by this feat.
...with good software titles, those folks who are running Linux on their XBoxes will still go out and purchase some of them green-boxed games. I'm serious. When Halo2 is finally released, I'm thinking that most of them XBox hackers will go out and grab a copy anyway. Even if it *could* be pirated.
Whether or not I can walk up to a bookshelf, zoom in on a book, or pick it up and throw it won't make much of a difference to me if it looks just like every other book on every other identical bookshelf.
It's the intentional omission of certain details for the sake of tailoring a very particular impression that really makes me happy. Baldur's Gate, Icewind Dale, PlanetScape: Torment, and Fallout (despite Fallout's tiling) all had very carefully and very thoroughly fleshed out worlds, with unique dialogues, unique personalities, and more than enough details to make for a real adventure.
It seems to me that most 3d RPGs aren't really RPGs. You're not playing any role any differently than you would in an action game. The pacing may be slower and the numbers behind the rules of the game-world may be revealed to you in the form of stats and skills, but if you're not crafting a role, a person for a place within a world that reacts convincingly to it, I don't think it's really an RPG.
What were their reasons? I also wonder why twenty of the lead developers working on Medal of Honor: Allied Assault left an Electronic Arts funded studio to found Infinity Ward. Is it really the money, or is it something else? I have no knowledge in this field, so if anyone has any inside information or pertinent experience, please post, I'd love to hear it.
As far as the reallocation of talent goes, I had high hopes for Troika's Arcanum, seeing as how Troika consisted of several key members of the fantastic team which produced Fallout, but wound up disappointed at its lack of polish, whereas Inifinity Ward's soon-to-be-released Call of Duty looks by all means to be incredible even in its juvenile state. Maybe high-level-folk like doing things their way, for better or worse, without the interjections of a publisher seeking marketability. Once again, I'm only hypothesizing. Are there any game-developers out there willing to testify?
Although I can't locate them now, I recall mentions of "streaming games" and "trials" and "online rentals" of "over X0,000 existing software titles". While this is said to include PC titles, I keep thinking that old arcade ROMs would be perfect for this kinda thing.
Games you could play on a whim, whose ROMs are typically a few megs at most, often have high production values, are completed and tested... You could download them via the Phantom, and Infinium Labs pays the copyright holders a nickel each time someone presses "start" on Do Don Pachi.
These arcade games from five, ten, fifteen years ago, they were designed to get you to pump in your quarters for an hour or so, maybe-just-maybe a few times a week. Unfortunately, I think the trend as of late has been towards the production of games which require a real commitment over a period of time. Levelling up in RPGs, playing out a season in a football game, unlocking cars in Gran Turismo, and getting your Sims rich, these are the things which seem to get people's wallets out of their pockets.
If some of these old arcade games found their way to a home system now, I bet people would complain about their lack of replayability, the simplicity of their nature, and their brevity. Those were their strengths in the arcade, of course, but how much could a developer expect to make porting a title without content changes to the PS2? They'd have to sell them for a very low price. People would probably not pay fifty dollars for a game they could finish in 30 minutes. Heck, people complained about Ikaruga on the Dreamcast being a straight arcade port.
I have no idea what I'm rambling about anymore, but I guess I'm just sad that the only way I can get a 4-player game of Sunset Riders going is by breaking the law.
I wonder if they're hiring...
I awoke this morning from a dream where Google was powered by some ancient, evil, seductive force. Just as I often am in real life, in my dream I found myself curious about some random issue, and decided to research it via Google. In this instance, I was curious about what the lives of precious-stone-traders/exchangers were like, how they travelled, and how they moved their goods.
When I opened a browser to http://www.google.com, I suddenly found myself transported to a dark room, one which felt, smelt, and looked as though it was within a long abandoned motel in a rainy, cold, climate. A grimy stone slab of roughly 4:3 dimensions lay on a table before me, glistening with condensation.
A beautiful woman appeared, dressed seductively in red and black, and bade me to enter my query. Somehow, I knew to put my fingertip to the slab, and the moment I made contact, wispy shadows swirled out from within its crevices and surrounded my fingertip. They nipped at it, they pierced the skin, and with my blood, I scrawled out, "precious stone jewel exchange trader carrier lifestyle travel".
The shadows at once covered my bloody query, writhed and congealed and when they finally withdrew, I found that the writing had been rearranged to read, "I'm feeling lucky". I screamed in terror and pounded on the message with my fists, sending dark red droplets flying from the stone.
I looked up to see the woman smiling. When I returned my gaze to the stone slab, I saw the shadows slowly etching out a shape, simple, symmetrical. Trickles of black ran down the face of the stone from its far side, creating soft curves. It... it was a vase, with a notch in its base. It slowly filled with color, a light sort of beige, taking on a photographic quality and it was then that I realized... it wasn't a vase, it was a top-down view of some chick taking it up the ass.
I'm no casemodder, but from an outsider's point of view, I just think I've seen neater things that haven't gotten as much attention from the likes of Wired. Sifting through old bookmarks, here are a few that I personally found to make me all geek-sweaty-tingly-sexy:
Project Frozen, which appeared on /. a few years ago.
The Invisible Case, a very classy custom acrylic case, constructed before clear cases were readily available.
Anemone... this one seems to be a /. favorite.
Okay, you're the new lucky geek. That really does sound impressive. It's kind of funny to think that we could have quasi-religious experiences in the presence of machines. I bet I would.
*I just know someone is going to answer, "Mountain Dew, Chee-tos, and poor personal hygeine". Come on? Say it. :)
What if we used this thing to fling all of our garbage towards the sun? Not the best idea, but it could be interesting. We could have a way of permanently ridding our planet of old TV-guides, chicken bones, watermelon rinds, E.T. Atari cartridges, Windows 98 CDs, rapists, spammers, and irreparably soiled panties.
Generally though, it's not even that I think my code is better, but that my code will get better by having learned the pitfalls the hard way, given that I have enough time to do so without sacrificing sleep, personal hygiene and sanity.
Hahahaha! I have no idea. Waow. Who knows, maybe my roommate and I had so much fun playing with him eventually that we never even thought of deleting it.
When I got into college was when the 486 DX2-66 was the hottest thing out there (okay, so that wasnt *that* long ago, but that still makes me older than some of you, right?). I went in with my old 286, some single-digit-clockspeed clunker without a case cover (it managed to get torn off at some point). I figured I'd use it just for typing things up and email. None of the current games would run on it.
Strangely enough, I did have a copy of Wolfenstein 3d installed it, which I almost never played since it made me rather nauseous. However, a kid on the same floor happened to stop by one of the few times I had it loaded up.
From that moment on, he would come a-knocking at all times of day, all times of night, sometimes even at four in the morning, asking if he could play Wolfenstein.
"Can I play wolfingthing?!?"
"Hey, you using your computer? I wanna do that pow pow yeah hahahaha thing you know, the guys some German thing! hahaha!"
"Ah, you're not sleeping, are you? Hey, I'm gonna hop on your computer and play that Worfespang thing, don't worry, I'll turn the sound low and won't wake you up."
...and he would sit and laugh maniacally and smash on my keyboard for hours at a time. Sure, we tried to tell him we were busy, but he always found a way. Always.
...and that's how I got into computers. I spent so much time writing little executables to replace Wolf3d.exe that would make it seem as if my computer was having the most incredible, fantastic, epileptic conniptions that... hey, actually, it didn't teach me anything useful other than how to make a 286 bleep and freak out.
Why cite God's name? :-)
In any case, I'd still like to tack a few things onto that.
A large portion of our observation of very small things has involved the flinging of other very small things towards them. It follows then that we'd be compounding the imprecision of "drawing an approximate sample from the distribution" of the thing we are inspecting with the imprecision of the approximation of the thing we are flinging.In a different sense, it's almost amusing to think that QM may be the result of us having reached the limit of precision of ReallyReallyReallyLongDouble in the system in which we exist, or that maybe somewhere out there at very fundamental level exists a Math.floor().
Back to Godel though:
Similarly, any simulation we might create in the future must be "less powerful", in that its mechanics of operation (and existence!) can be fully explained within the operating rules of our simulation. This could continue on in both directions. I wonder where we'd be in the ladder of complexity? Would we really be losing "resolution" as our simulations created their own simulations? If we look back to our simulators, then do we assume that all inexplicable phenomena of our existence can be fully justified in their context? If they don't exist, then does that mean that these phenomena are really explainable or not?1) For fun and fluff - So there would be "formally undecidable truths" in our simulation/system. What do you think they might be? "God Exists". "Pepsi really does taste better".
2) Now I'm just going to go off on a semiconscious Sunday-morning rambling here, so don't take me seriously (but humor me if you're so inclined). So in order for everything in our system to be justifiable and explicable, we'd need a more powerful system, a higher level of simulation.
As for Case, I'm leaning towards Billy-Bob Thornton.
I'll readily admit that I've personally borne a few grudges against the way things are done there, and the way certain things have been done in the Korean-way to me, but hey, a surviving and thriving culture exists because it has survived, and some aspects of it have proven to be successful in terms of self-preservation and self-propagation (and not being so offensive as to warrant annihilation by a united front of other cultures).
As to whether or not the baa-baa-sheep-like-ness will prove to be seriously detrimental to Korean society in the future will require many decades of observation, and many hours spent watching the History Channel after those decades have passed. Who knows? Maybe they've got it right.
Pass the kimchee, please.
Check out its stunning personality here. It bleeps, bloops, and whines while cleaning, which makes it about fifty times as personable as I am while I'm doing my chores.
This promotional site has been up for quite some time, so I had no idea it would take so long to get the Trilobite to market. Personally, I'd prefer a cuttlefish-like robot that swims around my sink and cleans my dishes while blub-blub-blubbing.
Not so long ago, I went to go to the U. of R, and I was under the impression that they already had the world's largest, most powerful laser. Is that not true?
The other day at work, I tried to defecate on my workstation, but I couldn't figure out how to undo my belt buckle. I wound up with an unpleasant package to tote home. My project manager was so displeased that she threw her feces at me, screamed, and beat at her chest before jumping into a tree and vanishing.
Then the president of our company came, shot us all with tranqulizer darts, and when I awoke, I found that had been neutered.
Oh the pitiful life of a software developer.
Even if we could detect these characteristics, to select against them would be against our best interests. If mental/emotional screening had been available and used over the past two centuries, we would have lost almost every great modern mathematician, scientist, artist, musician, and writer to paranoiac ignorance. We'd be living in a world full of dull, unimaginative, passionless sops, perpetually perky, and never dissatisfied. No CDs, no computers, no Beatles, no Godel, no microwave ovens, no Slashdot...
Go ahead, make brain scans accepted practice. Pick the minds of potential employees and let's see what you wind up with as a workforce, if you ever do find anyone who is both qualified and mentally "clean".
Me? I'm going to sit in my room and daydream all day long about having rough, stinky intercourse with a donkey while snacking on human brains and plotting to drop a busload of nuns onto a busload of children. Of course, I'd never do such things. I'd probably get kicked by the donkey.