Castle Wolfenstein was a really excellent game, it was the first game I played on a home computer. It had a lot of really neat features that were innovative in the year it was produced (1983) but it was not a 3D shooter- it had an overhead view, like Robotron 2084. The plot was good- you could fool some guards with a uniform but not the dreaded SS, you had limited ammo, and there were grenades... Oh, and it was published on a 5 1/4" floppy. (holding all of 143K per side, I think.) And yes, we passed them around bypassing the copy protection and played them when our parents weren't home then too, though we had a legit copy of that particular game(and, in 1984, the sequel Beyond Castle Wolfenstein.)
It predated "all Keen episodes, Cosmo, Dune, Monkey Island (great games!), Duke Nukem 1 and 2, etc.". There were first-person games then, too, like Wizardry and Akalabeth. They just weren't as nice looking and weren't shooters.
You're thinking of Wolfenstein 3D, the third Wolfenstein game.
I rented skis at a resort in Canada, and when asked (for purposes adjustment of bindings) I gave my height and weight in metric units.
The employee looked very confused look and started to look around for his manager until I gave him the imperial equivalents. As I was visiting from the US, I had thought giving metric units was being considerate...
In 1790, 5 years before the French adopted their metric system and while Louis XVI was still nominally King of France, Thomas Jefferson proposed to the US a metric system using feet, bushels, and pounds as basic units which no one, including the US, ended up actually adopting.
Since you're keeping score on how long the US has considered yet failed to adopt a metric system, you should know that this has been true for a longer time than the metric system has been used in France. The idea of metric measurements was not totally new in 1790 either, having been proposed by a French friar over a century before.
On the other hand, a decimal monetary system was also proposed in the above document. The US was the first to nation to formally adopt decimal currency. (US currency wasn't produced until 1793, though Jefferson had proposed and there was some agreement on a decimal system of US currency as early as 1785) - an innovation which now has nearly worldwide acceptance. Even the British finally emulated the US and adopted a decimal monetary system almost 200 years later, in 1971.
If someone shows up at a hospital ER in the midst of a heart attack,(or most anything which is acute, treatable and immediately life-threatening) US hospitals will (and legally must) treat that person for the immediate problem even if that person has no insurance or ability to pay.
This is very, very common, and is in essence a very inefficient de facto form of state health care. Along with tort costs this is one of the primary reasons hospital care is so expensive in the US. (Unfunded mandates from the state are not actually free... someone must pay.)
That being said, everyone dies eventually, and when they do it's generally expensive. Is there evidence that this particular behavior costs more to society in total? They may die earlier or more suddenly (e.g. from heart attacks) and actually end up costing society less. If you're going to coldly calculate the cost to society of all the illnesses caused, you must also coldly calculate the costs which would have eventually occured had that person lived healthier longer but still eventually got terminally, expensively ill.
Re: I've used genetic algorithms
on
Digital Darwin
·
· Score: 1
Now about evolution. By the stict definition of evolution, no one can logically deiny that evolution is happening right now. HOWEVER, speciation, that is another thing entirely. I am not sure that we have ever witnessed specieation, but i could be wrong about this. Please let me know if i am.
We've seen speciation lots and lots of times. See the relevant portion of the talk.origins FAQ.
Another set of interesting examples are "ring species"- species where population A can breed with B, B can breed with A or C, and C can breed with B... but A can't breed with C (or produces only infertile offspring.) This can happen when the three populations are semi-isolated but with occasional travel between A and B, and between B and C. By most species definitions A, B and C are one species, as each type can (at least indirectly) share genetic information with the others. The key development which can occur in this situation- if all the B die, there are now two different species A and C. This would be instant speciation.
if you have i would like to know about the following:
-linux support
- can i control the volume though the spdif device - and then attach the DAC directly to a power amp
-best
-greg
I'm not sure about the first three, but Greg lives in Nijmegen, The Netherlands, and works at the Max Planck Institute in Nijmegen as a software developer. He lives with his girlfriend who is a psycholinguist at the Max Planck Institute.
There are two different technologies here which are being discussed as if they are inherently identical. Both are mostly theoretical and they would work well together, but they're not really the same thing, and either could be implemented without the other.
It's theoretically possible, and in fact probably much easier, to design self-replicating robots (physical von Neumann machines) which are not nanoscale; one proposed application of this is to mine the asteroid belt. A lot of the dangerous possible consequences referred to as applying to 'nanotechnology'- machine reproduction out of control, nanomachines targetting inappropriate objects for conversion to more machines- would apply to von Neumann machines at any scale.
It's also certainly possible(and much, much easier) to make nanotechnology that cannot self-replicate. The problem is that it would seem to be so hard to make them that making substantial amounts of them is easy only if they're made by other nanomachines.
If this were made in the real world, they probably wouldn't make true von Neumann machines, as if reproduction were uncontrolled you'll get potentially dangerous exponential growth, and more importantly the corporation selling it can't make a profit. A better way is to have a nanomachine that makes nanomachines different from itself.
The consumer of tomorrow would buy a small amount of nanomachine B which, when fed raw materials and activated makes large numbers of 'sterile' nanomachine C which is what actually does the job. The company/scientists/government/illuminati/whoever keeps nanomachine A, which is what makes nanomachine B, in some secure location. A need not be self-replicating if it's sufficiently reliable (self- or other A- repairing, perhaps?) If B can't make more B, a lot of the problems go away and you can still make enough useful C to do whatever job you need done. Perhaps B will only make a billion C or so before the user has to go buy more B, or perhaps B works for only a specified time, thus ensuring a revenue stream for the owners of A from people buying more B.
Also, next year they can develop A', which makes B', which the public gets to use to make C', which is very slightly better than C.
Even if A gets released and goes amok it can only make B, which results in a geometric rather than an exponential growth problem which goes away as soon as you eliminate or capture the non-self-reproducing A.
Nanotech doesn't (directly) imply free energy; even with all the raw materials and 'perfect' nanotechnology there would need to be energy input into such a system. There's still no such thing as an energetically free lunch.
Of course, physical von Neumann machines (whether nanoscale or not) have potential to make power cheap by making asteroids into solar panels and beaming energy down, etc...
The article somewhat misquotes Clarke's First Law, written in 1962, which actually said:
When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.
He continued:
Perhaps the adjective "elderly" requires definition. In physics, mathematics, and astronautics it means over thirty; in the other disciplines, senile decay is sometimes postponed to the forties. There are, of course, glorious exceptions; but as every researcher just out of college knows, scientists of over fifty are good for nothing but board meetings, and should at all costs be kept out of the laboratory!
One should keep in mind Asimov's Corrolary to Clarke's Law: (from 1977)
When, however, the lay public rallies round an idea that is denounced by distinguished but elderly scientists and supports that idea with great fervor and emotion -- the distinguished but elderly scientists are then, after all, probably right.
Nanotech has some danger of falling under Asimov's corrolary.
Clarke's Third Law is actually better known than his first, and may apply here too:
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
Close, but this clearly should be in scientific notation, for those of us who don't want to use and remember all those prefixes.
"Researchers at Holloman AFB have broken their own 6.49 x 10^8 seconds old land speed record for rail vehicles. The rocket powered sled covered the 4.8 x 10^3 meter track in roughly 6 seconds. Preliminary numbers put the sled's speed at Mach 8.6 or about 2.86 x 10^3 meters per second - it covered the last 2.9 x 10^3 meters in just 1.3 seconds. The previous record of 2.74 x 10^3 meters per second was set at 1982-10-05. Other accounts are at the Alamogordo 8.64 x 10^4 secondly News, the Denver Post, and CNN."
How are the 'rabidly support' and 'rabidly oppose' options distinguished from 'okay with' and 'mildly dislike' in a voting booth?
Keep in mind that voters with only a mild preference can exaggerate that preference- and if the rules state that a 'rabid' vote counts more toward deciding the outcome of the election they will be motivated to do so.
The most marbles for which the outlier in weight (if it is unknown whether the unique marble is heavier or lighter) can be determined in n weighings is (3^n - 3)/2. (for n>1)
For 12 marbles, as the parent says n=3 is sufficient, and there are many weighing schemes which work, including:
Label the marbles A, C, D, E, F, I, K, L, N, M, O, and T
weigh MA DO versus LIKE
weigh ME TO versus FIND
weigh FAKE versus COIN
If the unique coin is known to be heavier or lighter, you can distinguish the full 3^N. For the three weighings case, weigh 9 versus another 9- if you know the unique is heavier or lighter this tells you which of the three sets of nine contains the unique marble. Then weigh 3 against 3, then 1 against 1.
The grandparent poster incorrectly answered the question,and then blamed his mistake on the interviewer for not asking a simpler question which would have been trivial to solve... not a good sign in a potential employee.
I'm guessing a response like, "There are 24 possibilities to distinguish between, as one of the twelve is either heavy or light. There are 3 possible outcomes to each weighing, so I can theoretically see 27 possible outcomes from three weighings. Therefore, there should exist a solution in three weighings." would be acceptable- I doubt the interviewer would require you to actually figure one of the solutions out on the spot as this is not trivial, though the ability to do so rapidly would be either exceptional or because you'd seen it before.
Check out this presentation. It describes the methods currently used to accurately determine the rate of the earth's rotation, and how they've been able to use historical accounts to get earth rotation data points- if they have a record, for example, that there was a total eclipse in a certain city in Babylon at local noon on January 1, 1000 BC, they can use the orbits of the earth and moon (which are well-modeled over that time frame) to figure out when in UTC that eclipse must have happened, and compare the two.
It looks like the day is getting an average of 2ms longer per century, but it fluctuates 4-5ms away from that on a decade timescale plus some shorter-term noise.
In college we had the tradition of the 'Negative time Tommy's run'. Tommy's was a hamburger joint open all night. We'd leave at, say, 2:30 AM, go eat supfast (or whatever a meal eaten at that time is called) and return to campus before we left, at 2:20 AM.
Might as well make an event out of our nonsensical system of labelling the current time.
Re:Espionage and the Eisenhower Era
on
Secret Empire
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· Score: 1
Some interesting things of note in the Eis era:
...-The USA went to war against the little known country (at the time), Korea in 1950. This was the first appliction of containment.
In addition to the problems others have mentioned with the rest of this statement(that it was a UN action, the definition of 'Korea'), it is also true that Eisenhower was not president until 1953. The conflict had been going on for three years when he came into office, and an armistace was signed six months into his presidency.
Participation in ending a three year war is exciting, but for different reasons than starting one...
It's people like these who are doing the important work in making Klingon into such a successful modern language! Of course, they should also learn other, equally important languages.
IANAL, but when a police officer pulls you over, you are under arrest. That's what being 'under arrest' means: it is illegal for you to leave your location(or police custody as applicable)- which is true during a traffic stop. (The fact that it's not in an actual police building isn't the important aspect.)
There are rules for this; it's not legal for a policeman to forbid you to leave a location unless certain conditions for placing you under arrest are met. Police can ask you to stay in situations where you're allowed to leave, so it can be useful to bluntly ask if you're permitted to leave to determine if you're actually under arrest, and to establish that you were placed under arrest and not just voluntarily staying if the answer is no.
It may not be a good idea to do this unless it's truly necessary, however- making a cop unhappy is rarely a good idea even if you've done nothing wrong...
Assuming from context that you are referring to the US, you are mistaken about the laws for the country as a whole. There are a few states (and D.C.) which restrict possession and sale of lockpicks per se, but in most places law enforcement has to prove intent to use them for an illegal purpose for them to be illegal. For more information, see the alt.locksmithing FAQ.
Also cars are subject to extreme safety regulations which guns are not. There are all kinds of regulations about who can drive, there are tests, age limits, physical health (eyesight etc) requirements etc. Most cars also have child safety features which guns don't have. All cars require keys so that only the owner (or somebody he/she gives the key to) can operate the car, something that is sorely needed in the gun world.
No. It is completely legal for a 10-year old child in poor health who has taken no tests to drive an unlicenced car on a private track(so long as it is done under circumstances where child endangerment is avoided.) Such a circumstance would be illegal on public roads but it is completely legal on private property.
Non-stock racing cars often do not use car keys, and often lack many of the safety features and emission standards applied to cars licenced to drive on public roads. This is why some race and concept cars are referred to as 'not street legal'. It is nonetheless legal to operate such cars on private property.
I'm unsure whether or not car keys or the equivalent are legally required to be included in cars licenced to operate on public roads; it may simply be a matter of consumer demand for that feature and not a legal requirement. I believe very old vintage cars may be street legal without locks in some states but that may be a specific grandfather clause, like that for not requiring seat belts.
The laws to which you refer are specific to the operation of cars on public roads, but do not restrict possession and use of cars on private property. Guns are already illegal to operate on public roads, and their possession and use on private property is already subject to many regulations.
"If I could have gotten 51 votes in the Senate of the United States for an out right ban, picking up every one of them... "Mr. and Mrs. America, turn 'em all in," I would have done it. I could not do that. The votes weren't here."
--
U.S. Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), CBS-TV's "60 Minutes," 2/5/95
Only the most radical fringe of firearm rights advocates would want to deregulate firearm ownership down to the level at which we regulate driving. Current US law is far, far more restrictive of firearms than automobiles.
You can buy and operate a car with no licence or background check and you do not need to register it, and you may transport it wherever you like, including across state lines. It is not nearly so easy to do such things with a gun.
If you want to operate a car on public roads you are required to have a license and registration... but no licence or registration exists to allow you to operate firearms on public roads, and the penalty for doing so is far more severe than the penalty for operating a car without a licence and registration.
Yes, but most will not ignore signed treaties simply because they're inconvenient.
Softwood Lumber?
It's true that Canada continues to ignore its treaties with its Indiginous Peoples regarding softwood lumber, notably by allowing Canadian lumber companies to clearcut forests in violation of treaties.
His business practices are still profoundly anticompetitive- he still inspires fervent loyalty from many long-term individual and institutional customers and ruthlessly uses this loyalty, with supplimental FUD campaigns, to discourage alternative products from succeeding in the metaphysical marketplace. In spite of attempts by some of his competitors, such as Buddism, to be compatable with his product, his middle managers and customer support personnel often act to discourage such compatability.
Several versions of the source code for his product are available, but all of these are early beta test versions unimplementable as written. There is heated argument as to which of these distributions is the best one to use. Local implementation of this code nearly always modifies the code so heavily that it is unrecognizable as the original, but users rarely share details of what modifications they've made.
Slashdot Mirror
It predated "all Keen episodes, Cosmo, Dune, Monkey Island (great games!), Duke Nukem 1 and 2, etc.". There were first-person games then, too, like Wizardry and Akalabeth. They just weren't as nice looking and weren't shooters.
You're thinking of Wolfenstein 3D, the third Wolfenstein game.
The employee looked very confused look and started to look around for his manager until I gave him the imperial equivalents. As I was visiting from the US, I had thought giving metric units was being considerate...
Since you're keeping score on how long the US has considered yet failed to adopt a metric system, you should know that this has been true for a longer time than the metric system has been used in France. The idea of metric measurements was not totally new in 1790 either, having been proposed by a French friar over a century before.
On the other hand, a decimal monetary system was also proposed in the above document. The US was the first to nation to formally adopt decimal currency. (US currency wasn't produced until 1793, though Jefferson had proposed and there was some agreement on a decimal system of US currency as early as 1785) - an innovation which now has nearly worldwide acceptance. Even the British finally emulated the US and adopted a decimal monetary system almost 200 years later, in 1971.
{insert erroneous "Most Brits don't know obvious fact X" claim here}
This is very, very common, and is in essence a very inefficient de facto form of state health care. Along with tort costs this is one of the primary reasons hospital care is so expensive in the US. (Unfunded mandates from the state are not actually free... someone must pay.)
That being said, everyone dies eventually, and when they do it's generally expensive. Is there evidence that this particular behavior costs more to society in total? They may die earlier or more suddenly (e.g. from heart attacks) and actually end up costing society less. If you're going to coldly calculate the cost to society of all the illnesses caused, you must also coldly calculate the costs which would have eventually occured had that person lived healthier longer but still eventually got terminally, expensively ill.
Another set of interesting examples are "ring species"- species where population A can breed with B, B can breed with A or C, and C can breed with B... but A can't breed with C (or produces only infertile offspring.) This can happen when the three populations are semi-isolated but with occasional travel between A and B, and between B and C. By most species definitions A, B and C are one species, as each type can (at least indirectly) share genetic information with the others. The key development which can occur in this situation- if all the B die, there are now two different species A and C. This would be instant speciation.
Hope this helps!
It's theoretically possible, and in fact probably much easier, to design self-replicating robots (physical von Neumann machines) which are not nanoscale; one proposed application of this is to mine the asteroid belt. A lot of the dangerous possible consequences referred to as applying to 'nanotechnology'- machine reproduction out of control, nanomachines targetting inappropriate objects for conversion to more machines- would apply to von Neumann machines at any scale.
It's also certainly possible(and much, much easier) to make nanotechnology that cannot self-replicate. The problem is that it would seem to be so hard to make them that making substantial amounts of them is easy only if they're made by other nanomachines.
If this were made in the real world, they probably wouldn't make true von Neumann machines, as if reproduction were uncontrolled you'll get potentially dangerous exponential growth, and more importantly the corporation selling it can't make a profit. A better way is to have a nanomachine that makes nanomachines different from itself.
The consumer of tomorrow would buy a small amount of nanomachine B which, when fed raw materials and activated makes large numbers of 'sterile' nanomachine C which is what actually does the job. The company/scientists/government/illuminati/whoever keeps nanomachine A, which is what makes nanomachine B, in some secure location. A need not be self-replicating if it's sufficiently reliable (self- or other A- repairing, perhaps?) If B can't make more B, a lot of the problems go away and you can still make enough useful C to do whatever job you need done. Perhaps B will only make a billion C or so before the user has to go buy more B, or perhaps B works for only a specified time, thus ensuring a revenue stream for the owners of A from people buying more B.
Also, next year they can develop A', which makes B', which the public gets to use to make C', which is very slightly better than C.
Even if A gets released and goes amok it can only make B, which results in a geometric rather than an exponential growth problem which goes away as soon as you eliminate or capture the non-self-reproducing A.
Nanotech doesn't (directly) imply free energy; even with all the raw materials and 'perfect' nanotechnology there would need to be energy input into such a system. There's still no such thing as an energetically free lunch. Of course, physical von Neumann machines (whether nanoscale or not) have potential to make power cheap by making asteroids into solar panels and beaming energy down, etc...
"Researchers at Holloman AFB have broken their own 6.49 x 10^8 seconds old land speed record for rail vehicles. The rocket powered sled covered the 4.8 x 10^3 meter track in roughly 6 seconds. Preliminary numbers put the sled's speed at Mach 8.6 or about 2.86 x 10^3 meters per second - it covered the last 2.9 x 10^3 meters in just 1.3 seconds. The previous record of 2.74 x 10^3 meters per second was set at 1982-10-05 . Other accounts are at the Alamogordo 8.64 x 10^4 secondly News, the Denver Post, and CNN."
There, that's much better, right?
Keep in mind that voters with only a mild preference can exaggerate that preference- and if the rules state that a 'rabid' vote counts more toward deciding the outcome of the election they will be motivated to do so.
For 12 marbles, as the parent says n=3 is sufficient, and there are many weighing schemes which work, including:
Label the marbles A, C, D, E, F, I, K, L, N, M, O, and T
If the unique coin is known to be heavier or lighter, you can distinguish the full 3^N.For the three weighings case, weigh 9 versus another 9- if you know the unique is heavier or lighter this tells you which of the three sets of nine contains the unique marble. Then weigh 3 against 3, then 1 against 1.
The grandparent poster incorrectly answered the question,and then blamed his mistake on the interviewer for not asking a simpler question which would have been trivial to solve ... not a good sign in a potential employee.
I'm guessing a response like, "There are 24 possibilities to distinguish between, as one of the twelve is either heavy or light. There are 3 possible outcomes to each weighing, so I can theoretically see 27 possible outcomes from three weighings. Therefore, there should exist a solution in three weighings." would be acceptable- I doubt the interviewer would require you to actually figure one of the solutions out on the spot as this is not trivial, though the ability to do so rapidly would be either exceptional or because you'd seen it before.
It looks like the day is getting an average of 2ms longer per century, but it fluctuates 4-5ms away from that on a decade timescale plus some shorter-term noise.
Might as well make an event out of our nonsensical system of labelling the current time.
Participation in ending a three year war is exciting, but for different reasons than starting one...
2. BOOM
3. Profit! er, I mean Publish!
It's people like these who are doing the important work in making Klingon into such a successful modern language! Of course, they should also learn other, equally important languages.
There are rules for this; it's not legal for a policeman to forbid you to leave a location unless certain conditions for placing you under arrest are met. Police can ask you to stay in situations where you're allowed to leave, so it can be useful to bluntly ask if you're permitted to leave to determine if you're actually under arrest, and to establish that you were placed under arrest and not just voluntarily staying if the answer is no.
It may not be a good idea to do this unless it's truly necessary, however- making a cop unhappy is rarely a good idea even if you've done nothing wrong...
Assuming from context that you are referring to the US, you are mistaken about the laws for the country as a whole. There are a few states (and D.C.) which restrict possession and sale of lockpicks per se, but in most places law enforcement has to prove intent to use them for an illegal purpose for them to be illegal. For more information, see the alt.locksmithing FAQ.
HA, like they actually play music on VH-1.
Non-stock racing cars often do not use car keys, and often lack many of the safety features and emission standards applied to cars licenced to drive on public roads. This is why some race and concept cars are referred to as 'not street legal'. It is nonetheless legal to operate such cars on private property.
I'm unsure whether or not car keys or the equivalent are legally required to be included in cars licenced to operate on public roads; it may simply be a matter of consumer demand for that feature and not a legal requirement. I believe very old vintage cars may be street legal without locks in some states but that may be a specific grandfather clause, like that for not requiring seat belts.
The laws to which you refer are specific to the operation of cars on public roads, but do not restrict possession and use of cars on private property. Guns are already illegal to operate on public roads, and their possession and use on private property is already subject to many regulations.
You can buy and operate a car with no licence or background check and you do not need to register it, and you may transport it wherever you like, including across state lines. It is not nearly so easy to do such things with a gun.
If you want to operate a car on public roads you are required to have a license and registration... but no licence or registration exists to allow you to operate firearms on public roads, and the penalty for doing so is far more severe than the penalty for operating a car without a licence and registration.
The US-Canada Softwood Lumber Agreement expired in April 2001 as stated in the original document and has not yet been renegotiated.
Were you aware that a NAFTA tribunal recently rebuked and fined the Canadian Government because it "improperly threatened, abused and deliberately misled Pope & Talbot" (A US lumber company?)
Why is Canada's breaking of its treaties relevant to this discussion?
I'd recommend replacing "God" with "Invisible Pink Unicorn."
His business practices are still profoundly anticompetitive- he still inspires fervent loyalty from many long-term individual and institutional customers and ruthlessly uses this loyalty, with supplimental FUD campaigns, to discourage alternative products from succeeding in the metaphysical marketplace. In spite of attempts by some of his competitors, such as Buddism, to be compatable with his product, his middle managers and customer support personnel often act to discourage such compatability.
Several versions of the source code for his product are available, but all of these are early beta test versions unimplementable as written. There is heated argument as to which of these distributions is the best one to use. Local implementation of this code nearly always modifies the code so heavily that it is unrecognizable as the original, but users rarely share details of what modifications they've made.