You are a disgusting human being. "People, this is insane. This is 10,000 times worse than the worst thing anybody thinks Michael Jackson ever did to a little boy" To paraphrase, you seem to be saying that you would prefer 10,000 people to molest children rather than one adult play a video game. That's what you mean by "10,000 time worse," isn't it? Or are you saying that, if the team that developed Grand Theft Auto would have, rather than making its video games, gone out and molested 10,000 children, that the world would be a better place?
You say that Grand Theft Auto should be banned, "just like we ban child pornography and entertainment spectacles such as cock fighting and dwarf throwing." Do you see the difference between a video game and the three items listed above? If not, I'll tell you: one of the four things does not actually affect a living being. Just like books and newspaper articles glorifying child molestation. Since living people aren't hurt, it's a protected form of free speech. It may not be mankind's most glorious bit of free speech, but I fear that I have to disagree with you about how it compares to actual crimes.
Brian J. Geiger
P.S. I fear I did not bother to read the rest of your article, as the basic premise seemed so flawed as to make it not entirely worth my while to read the rest. I'm sure there were some very good points about business hiding there within the rhetoric. Good luck with that.
On the other hand, if there's no menu on the left, it'll be easy enough for them to find it on the right hand side. Whereas if you put the menu on the left, then that's always going to pop over your content on a mobile device like a phone. So you should consider whether the menu or the content should hit first on a mobile device for any given application, especially if it's a site that is likely to be visited by mobile devices.
Depression is a trait which, for the long-term survival of the species, is not beneficial. It reduces productivity and so on, so it should be elimintated. Because the adolescent period is one filled with excessive amounts of hormones, it's easier to exaggerate any difficulties that may cause problems with problems in the brain. If the difficulties are too great, the teenager will either kill him/herself explicitly or just end up doing something dumb.
That's why you have the period of high hormones and other difficulties before (by and large) the official breeding stage comes in, so that any of those kinks can be worked out. If you manage to survive into adulthood and gain breeder status, you've obviously managed to do everything not-too-incorrectly.
There's a few other ways to argue that, but that's the first that came to mind.
I would have found it much more interesting if the study had included the impact of exposure to statistically attractive males and females to both male and female subjects.
I see you're neither a Psycholog/Sociology grad student nor a professional researcher in the field. If you were, you would instead think, "A ha! Now I know my thesis/next paper!"
But, yes, the cool thing is that you can take the results from earlier experiments and, preferably after appropriate verification of reproducibility, extend the experiment to include the new factors. I am sure someone will do this, but I doubt it will receive as much press as the original study. Unless it proves that all women are lesbians, in which case it'll probably get much wider coverage.
It may be hardly surprising from an evolutionary standpoint, but it doesn't mean that the study wasn't worth doing. The problem with Evolution as a Behavioural Theory is that it's very difficult to falsify. It's pretty easy to take existing data and fit it into an evolutionary theory, but it's very difficult to find data that proves that the behavior does not come from evolutionary factors. So it's a neat theory, and it's fun for TV shows and parties, but it's not all that useful from a scientific perspective.
Not technically true, although it has been made true by common usage. However, since we are nitpicking anyways, downloading means going from a "greater" machine to a "lesser" on, such as from my XServe to my Powerbook. Uploading is in the opposite direction, such as from my Powerbook to any Windows computer.
Bosses like improvements. Radical change. Go faster, go faster. They tend to like this because that's how they got where they are -- right or wrong they tend to have hard driving personalities. Employees don't like constant change, in my opinion. No one likes coming to work and finding a new policy on their desk about their TPS report cover sheets. Change is useless much of the time.
Perhaps in a standard corporate environment (read: the environment you're in, whatever that may be), but not so much the production environment. I've been very successful in my jobs because, in Production, there are real changes that can be done that will save the various workers many hours each week. Sometimes they're simple, sometimes they're complex.
Yes, I've caused trouble by implementing some changes, but by and large, even the trouble has been a good thing. I've made projects that would have otherwise been impossible not only possible but easy, because I looked at the way we did things the previous time and fixed the things that were wrong. If you do something 150 times every week, and you can do something that saves you about a minute each time, then that's a couple of hours of work saved.
So, perhaps if you're just filing the TPS reports, you may not want to rock the boat. And perhaps if one isn't good at implementing change (which I do not mean to imply about the parent poster, I really do mean in general), then it would be wise do let things improve in the manner you suggest. But in the proper enviroment, I find that the better way to work is to make sure that you eliminate all of the things that keep the employee from being able to do the job that he or she wants to do (art, programming, or what have you) by making the computer do the work, hiring less expensive labor to take care of it, or by taking it over yourself. This promotes happy employees who work to get things done when they need to (again, especially in a Production environment, such as newspapers or certain types of software).
If I were the type of manager who just sat back and let the work happen the way it has, I would not try to get a job in management. Of course, once it is working properly, well, I'll let it go, until I can see a way to improve it that will be worth the effort necessary to make the change.
=Brian
Re:The CIS majors must know something the CS don't
on
In Search of Stupidity
·
· Score: 2, Informative
I owned two Newtons, and my handwriting is atrocious. The 1.1 OS recognized my printing extremely well, however, with a much better success record than Graffiti.
It should also be noted that Graffiti existed on the Newton before there was a Palm. It's just that the Newton's Graffiti window was software, rather than reserving a huge portion of potential screen space for a fixed Graffiti window. I'm not saying that was a bad idea, but it was a difference since the Palm had Graffiti in mind when they made it.
The only real reasons that the Palm succeeded where the Newton failed were the size of the Palm vs. the Newton and because you could program the Palm in C rather than the (custom, but super-cool) Newtonscript. Oh, and the whole Windows compatibility thing, I suppose. I forget if Newton had any Windows software, though I tend to doubt it. Never had a reason to check it out, though.
Now, are you using the current Library of Congress Measurement, or are you using an old one? I mean, new books must be coming in. I presume that's not just the ASCII, but scans of the pictures as a decent resolution.
How will I ever do the proper conversions if you aren't using the up-to-date standards?
Okay, so apparently the "Antelope Hand-Sized" jokes were wearing on the editors, so they chang it to "Hand-Sized Antelope"? Or were they just weary of hearing about Antelope Hands, and wanted to hear about tiny, tiny Antelopes?
Personally, I would have gone with, "Antelope, the Hand-Sized Windows PC, To Debut." Then again, I like to avoid dangling modifiers.
It's true that you can't load the directories, but it's not true that they don't exist. Of course you can't load the directories, because they have directory listing turned off.
However, one of the entries is "Disallow:/infocus/iraq" and the first line in a search of Iraq on whitehouse.gov is/infocus/iraq/websites.html, which is clearly in the directory/infocus/iraq.
or, for any von Neumann computer, the energy required to flip, set or erase a bit)
Which is more or less why I haven't been focusing on von Neumann computers. I admit that, for our current computing model, the problem space is 'impractical' to solve. And by 'impractical', I mean 'impossible'.
And don't forget to prove that the chess space lends itself to a quantum solution; one of the things we've formally proven about quantum computing is that there are many, many problems which cannot be efficiently solved on quantum hardware.
First: no. None of this "an exercise left for the reader" stuff. If I'm going to prove that problems of this complexity are solvable quantumly, I'm going to do it for something slightly better than for the joy of continuing a discussion on slashdot. Thank you for your suggestion, though. Perhaps I would turn the idea into a PhD, or maybe a Huge Sack of Cash.
Instead, let me point out that there are many sources on the web, physicists included, who think that a chess algorithm is potentially suited to Quantum Computing. The classic examples point Grover's algorithm, which initially wouldn't have worked as it only solved for situations where there is only one correct answer for any given node in a search tree (as I understand it), but later modifications of the algorithm apparently work for multiple correct answers, like in chess.
I would link to them, but if you think I should do some mathematical proofs just to refute your quick calculations and conjecture, I think you can look up your own references on Google. I suggest using the words "grover", "chess", and "quantum". You can replace "grover" with "computer" if you'd like.
The quick summary is that there are promising avenues of research, but no conclusion yet. An algorithm has been found for solving the N-Queens problem, but not one of the complexity of chess. Some say yes, some say no, and I believe that's how this argument will go until someone solves the problem or someone else induces the heat-death of the computer by ill-advisedly trying to solve it.
Personally, I wouldn't bother trying to solve chess this way, except that the solution would be worthwhile for a whole host of other, similar problems. And, as you said, you certainly aren't going to solve this chess problem. But saying that we aren't going to figure a way to solve a basic problem like this if we put our minds to it is foolhardy. No, specific implementations may be doomed to failure, but if it's worth it, we'll figure out a way.
In order to save on thermodynamic costs, you're going to do more processing--i.e., statistical analysis to remove redundancy--to reduce the number of bits required per board.
Granted. I'll also say that the first difficulty in your analysis comes in by stating how much energy it takes to flip a bit. That's a real world contraint that will change over time. How much energy did it take to flip a bit in the 1950's? My guess is that it took a lot more than that. I have no reason to think that it won't go down. Will it go down enough? I suspect it will, because I'm that sort of person.
You are making many errors here, the first of which is you don't understand the computational theory behind quantum computation.
Lots of theories, yeah. You know, there aren't really many fully functioning quantum computers, are there? Can you point out some and tell me how they're working right now? Can you guarantee that won't change in the next 10 years. 20? 200?
Computer theory hasn't been around all that long. These many laws that you have may change. But let's examing what we think right now, shall we?
Consider a register composed of three physical bits. Any classical register of that type can store in a given moment of time only one out of eight different numbers i.e the register can be in only one out of eight possible configurations such as 000, 001, 010,... 111. A quantum register composed of three qubits can store in a given moment of time all eight numbers in a quantum superposition. This is quite remarkable that all eight numbers are physically present in the register but it should be no more surprising than a qubit being both in state 0 and 1 at the same time. If we keep adding qubits to the register we increase its storage capacity exponentially i.e. three qubits can store 8 different numbers at once, four qubits can store 16 different numbers at once, and so on; in general L qubits can store 2^L numbers at once.
All right, so you have a huge amount of numbers storable on a relatively small amount of space, from what I'm gathering. You know, as a layman. And it goes on to say that operations can be perfomed simultaneously on all these states.
In fact, isn't that the big benefit of quantum computing? That you can perform parallel computations on the right type of data simulataneously, whereas in our current computing environments you have to perform them linearly (except for various tricks both withing chips and on microprocessors)? Am I to believe that a problem space such as chess wouldn't be the sort of ideal situation to use one of these fancy "quantum processors." Might not some sort of, oh, 256 qubit quantum processor (and you may increase the number of qubits if it makes you feel better) indeed be able to process every chess game, what's the word, simultaneously?
Of course, that's just theorizing about what we know now, which is the point. You say that, no matter what, there can be no possible situation where we could work out the entire tree. In fact, you ridicule the idea and the people who present it. You may consider doing a little reading into a book by Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Your reaction sounds strangely familiar.
I've seen the argument about "more than the number of particles in the universe" stuff before. All over the place. The last time was doing research about WWII cryptography, and how one scheme or another (I believe it was the 4 wheel Enigma) had more possibilities than particles in the universe. And, somehow, we managed to crack it.
The first mistake is in assuming that you have to store board state in its entierty. We've invented this thing called 'compression.' It's really handy for taking situations which are similar and turning them into something that takes up less space but can algorithmically be turned into the original concept.
But of course you know abot compression, you just didn't feel like bringing it up, on account of it being contrary to your argument. Or perhaps it just hadn't occurred to you. Entirely possible, I'll admit.
Now, I would imagine that a clever programmer could probably find lots of patterns in a chess game. Situations in which the same set of moves could be turned into a dictionary entry, for an example of one possible scheme. This would reduce the amount of storage space, and consequently the energy requirements, of the problem.
Then, let's consider advances in technology that aren't merely software. Let's say...Quantum Computing. Ah, those clever Quanta. You could store multiple bits of information on a single atom, hypothetically. No need for messy atoms when you have subatomic particles and potential states and the like doing your dirty work for you.
So, just because you couldn't immediately think of a way to do it, despite your Number Theory background, doesn't mean the engineers can't think of a way to make it happen.
...maybe you should, I dunno, take it in to be fixed. No, really, you've tried diagnosing it, and you couldn't figure it out. So, rather than take it in to be repaired, you decide to post your question on Slashdot? Seriously?
I mean, I guess that works for the editors, since you post made it up, but I don't think that this is such a common problem that it needs to be here for everyone to try to help with.
But since we're here, could anyone tell me why my Check Engine Light keeps coming on in my car? Also, there's a hole in my shoe that I've tried patching with duct tape, but that doesn't seem to work - any advice on that?
Yeah, there's this thing, it's called "Project Management." It's where you figure out how long things are going to take to do, and you make sure they happen in the right amount of time.
I know, sometimes it's tough. Usually it's the most difficult when you have someone telling you that you have to have something done by X time, and you know that time is clearly impossible, but they make you plan for it anyways. That's not the case here, though.
The case here is more likely that they don't know how to plan for QA. I would be willing to bet that they think that Quality Assurance means "Testing the game at the end and fixing the bugs."
Good project managers know that QA is planned for from the beginning, and that you know, from experience and extrapolation, how longs things will take to do. Most importantly, be able to know when you're done. Usually the answer is and ideal, "When we test a couple of times and there are no bugs," though that usually works out to be, "When we test a couple of times and there are no bugs we can't fix by the first or second patch." There are other, better ways to know when you're done testing, if it's part of your complete project plan.
I know it sounds wierd... but people need to realize that advertising is not a right. And the viewers of programs need to be secure in the knowledge that what is presented as fact, opinion, view, or endorsement is correctly attributed to those who actually put it forward.
Actually, the viewers of the programs don't need to be secure. In anything. Economically, factually, emotionally, sexually, whatever. They just don't need it. This is TV. It lies. All the time. There are jokes made about it. I could throw a stone a slashdot and hit at least 12 people with different Simpsons quotes about how TV lies.
The truth is, the people who pay for the program are the people who get to determine what's on it. They can make good decisions or bad decisions, but they're paying for it, so they can do what they want.
As consumers, we pay in two ways. The first is monetarily, if you access it via cable or satellite or paying the government or what have you. The second is in time, by watching the show and/or associated advertisements. Since we've not been paying to watch the commercials as much, the other people who pay with actual money will find another way to make their contribution worthwhile.
We call this system, "capitalism." It guarantees no Truths, only that if people are happy enough with it, they'll keep paying for it. And if it can make it's money in the Marketplace of Cash, it will freely ignore the Marketplace of Ideas.
Why, exactly, do you (appear to) believe the journalists should be punished?
Withholding evidence and hindering a federal investigation, if my TV Court Drama Memory serves me correctly.
By and large, officers of the law, including members of the FBI, want to catch criminals and get as much evidence as possible towards making sure they are prosecuted for their crimes. They have a new tool for use in getting that information, and they are going to use it as frequently as possible for as long as the laws are around.
Think of it this way: people have collected a lot of information that will help determine if this person is truly a criminal and the FBI couldn't otherwise get to it. That would be very annoying. If you want to be more cynical, then you can say that people have collected a lot of information that can be used to prove his guilt, and it annoys them that they can't get to them.
I'm not saying it's right. I'm saying that, as things stand now, it's the law (or a reasonable approximation of the law). Before, Journalists have been, by and large, protected. Now they aren't necessarily as much.
...well. From a technical achievement, that's very good. Impressive, lots of good stuff going on. From an 'improving the GBA' perspective, that's really kinda dumb. If you're going to do all that, just get a PS1 for the same price and not all the work, and you've got just about the same amount of portability.
The idea behind the GBA is the portability. Seriously. Tacking on all that extra stuff does not make the GBA better.
Well, I disregarded the bit about 30 years old, because the sentence made no sense. "The eddies of interest by demographics above age 30 are the exception that proves the rule old people don't play video games." I'm not sure what 'cicular liquid currents by demographics' is even trying to say, so I don't know if he's trying to make us believe that there are still some groups above 30 that play video games, so aside from that nobody plays, or that 30 is the cut off point.
As for the study about the average age, see, that's the thing. He's saying (as is the person with the article linked on that same point) that those studies are wrong or lying. I believe the linked article had some data backing it up, but (though I only skimmed it), I'm pretty sure that data isn't entirely trustworthy.
My problem with this is that, for something that's meant to dispute myths, there's precious little actual data to back it up. Prime example is the one about the old people. He says that, aside from "older women playing bridge", old people really aren't playing video games. My problems:
No data backing it up. Rely's upon, basically, 'I say so.'
No defining of terms. What's an "older lady"? I mean, if it's older than the average gamer, then yes, that kind of implies that they aren't the majority of the gamers. But does that mean age 40 and up? 90? What's the age?
That's about it. It's a stupid thing to debunk myths with no data backing you up.
...only give a replacement copy for defective games. Honestly, it's not that hard. There's plenty of other examples of the retail world of this working just fine. Otherwise, yeah, it's pretty much a free rental place. Don't like it? Rent the games from Gamefly, the Netflix of the gaming world. Doesn't help with PC games, but for any console games, it's really cool. As seen on Penny Arcade.
When you embed a sourceId into the link, it is reasonably ethical to disclose who will be the beneficiary of the referral.
Eh. I mean, sure, okay whatever, but you're paying the same price whether B&N gets the money or Slashdot does. If you don't want Slashdot to get money, you probably shouldn't be on their site. If you have a list of standard boycotts, and you're afraid that the author/submitter of the article is secretly working for one of them, then I'm sure you're clever enough to find the book on your own without the link.
Besides, I'm sure anyone who is worth being boycotted will also have the moral bankruptcy to lie about where the money is going.
Personally, I just don't care that much, although I do tend to mention when I'm making money off something.
Slashdot Mirror
On the other hand, if there's no menu on the left, it'll be easy enough for them to find it on the right hand side. Whereas if you put the menu on the left, then that's always going to pop over your content on a mobile device like a phone. So you should consider whether the menu or the content should hit first on a mobile device for any given application, especially if it's a site that is likely to be visited by mobile devices.
=Brian
Try fitting teen suicide to evolutionary theory
Depression is a trait which, for the long-term survival of the species, is not beneficial. It reduces productivity and so on, so it should be elimintated. Because the adolescent period is one filled with excessive amounts of hormones, it's easier to exaggerate any difficulties that may cause problems with problems in the brain. If the difficulties are too great, the teenager will either kill him/herself explicitly or just end up doing something dumb.
That's why you have the period of high hormones and other difficulties before (by and large) the official breeding stage comes in, so that any of those kinks can be worked out. If you manage to survive into adulthood and gain breeder status, you've obviously managed to do everything not-too-incorrectly.
There's a few other ways to argue that, but that's the first that came to mind.
=Brian
I would have found it much more interesting
if the study had included the impact of exposure
to statistically attractive males and females
to both male and female subjects.
I see you're neither a Psycholog/Sociology grad student nor a professional researcher in the field. If you were, you would instead think, "A ha! Now I know my thesis/next paper!"
But, yes, the cool thing is that you can take the results from earlier experiments and, preferably after appropriate verification of reproducibility, extend the experiment to include the new factors. I am sure someone will do this, but I doubt it will receive as much press as the original study. Unless it proves that all women are lesbians, in which case it'll probably get much wider coverage.
=Brian
It may be hardly surprising from an evolutionary standpoint, but it doesn't mean that the study wasn't worth doing. The problem with Evolution as a Behavioural Theory is that it's very difficult to falsify. It's pretty easy to take existing data and fit it into an evolutionary theory, but it's very difficult to find data that proves that the behavior does not come from evolutionary factors. So it's a neat theory, and it's fun for TV shows and parties, but it's not all that useful from a scientific perspective.
=Brian
Not technically true, although it has been made true by common usage. However, since we are nitpicking anyways, downloading means going from a "greater" machine to a "lesser" on, such as from my XServe to my Powerbook. Uploading is in the opposite direction, such as from my Powerbook to any Windows computer.
=Brian
Bosses like improvements. Radical change. Go faster, go faster. They tend to like this because that's how they got where they are -- right or wrong they tend to have hard driving personalities. Employees don't like constant change, in my opinion. No one likes coming to work and finding a new policy on their desk about their TPS report cover sheets. Change is useless much of the time.
Perhaps in a standard corporate environment (read: the environment you're in, whatever that may be), but not so much the production environment. I've been very successful in my jobs because, in Production, there are real changes that can be done that will save the various workers many hours each week. Sometimes they're simple, sometimes they're complex.
Yes, I've caused trouble by implementing some changes, but by and large, even the trouble has been a good thing. I've made projects that would have otherwise been impossible not only possible but easy, because I looked at the way we did things the previous time and fixed the things that were wrong. If you do something 150 times every week, and you can do something that saves you about a minute each time, then that's a couple of hours of work saved.
So, perhaps if you're just filing the TPS reports, you may not want to rock the boat. And perhaps if one isn't good at implementing change (which I do not mean to imply about the parent poster, I really do mean in general), then it would be wise do let things improve in the manner you suggest. But in the proper enviroment, I find that the better way to work is to make sure that you eliminate all of the things that keep the employee from being able to do the job that he or she wants to do (art, programming, or what have you) by making the computer do the work, hiring less expensive labor to take care of it, or by taking it over yourself. This promotes happy employees who work to get things done when they need to (again, especially in a Production environment, such as newspapers or certain types of software).
If I were the type of manager who just sat back and let the work happen the way it has, I would not try to get a job in management. Of course, once it is working properly, well, I'll let it go, until I can see a way to improve it that will be worth the effort necessary to make the change.
=Brian
I owned two Newtons, and my handwriting is atrocious. The 1.1 OS recognized my printing extremely well, however, with a much better success record than Graffiti.
It should also be noted that Graffiti existed on the Newton before there was a Palm. It's just that the Newton's Graffiti window was software, rather than reserving a huge portion of potential screen space for a fixed Graffiti window. I'm not saying that was a bad idea, but it was a difference since the Palm had Graffiti in mind when they made it.
The only real reasons that the Palm succeeded where the Newton failed were the size of the Palm vs. the Newton and because you could program the Palm in C rather than the (custom, but super-cool) Newtonscript. Oh, and the whole Windows compatibility thing, I suppose. I forget if Newton had any Windows software, though I tend to doubt it. Never had a reason to check it out, though.
=Brian
Now, are you using the current Library of Congress Measurement, or are you using an old one? I mean, new books must be coming in. I presume that's not just the ASCII, but scans of the pictures as a decent resolution.
How will I ever do the proper conversions if you aren't using the up-to-date standards?
=Brian
Okay, so apparently the "Antelope Hand-Sized" jokes were wearing on the editors, so they chang it to "Hand-Sized Antelope"? Or were they just weary of hearing about Antelope Hands, and wanted to hear about tiny, tiny Antelopes?
Personally, I would have gone with, "Antelope, the Hand-Sized Windows PC, To Debut." Then again, I like to avoid dangling modifiers.
=Brian
It's true that you can't load the directories, but it's not true that they don't exist. Of course you can't load the directories, because they have directory listing turned off.
/infocus/iraq" and the first line in a search of Iraq on whitehouse.gov is /infocus/iraq/websites.html, which is clearly in the directory /infocus/iraq.
However, one of the entries is "Disallow:
=Brian
or, for any von Neumann computer, the energy required to flip, set or erase a bit)
Which is more or less why I haven't been focusing on von Neumann computers. I admit that, for our current computing model, the problem space is 'impractical' to solve. And by 'impractical', I mean 'impossible'.
And don't forget to prove that the chess space lends itself to a quantum solution; one of the things we've formally proven about quantum computing is that there are many, many problems which cannot be efficiently solved on quantum hardware.
First: no. None of this "an exercise left for the reader" stuff. If I'm going to prove that problems of this complexity are solvable quantumly, I'm going to do it for something slightly better than for the joy of continuing a discussion on slashdot. Thank you for your suggestion, though. Perhaps I would turn the idea into a PhD, or maybe a Huge Sack of Cash.
Instead, let me point out that there are many sources on the web, physicists included, who think that a chess algorithm is potentially suited to Quantum Computing. The classic examples point Grover's algorithm, which initially wouldn't have worked as it only solved for situations where there is only one correct answer for any given node in a search tree (as I understand it), but later modifications of the algorithm apparently work for multiple correct answers, like in chess.
I would link to them, but if you think I should do some mathematical proofs just to refute your quick calculations and conjecture, I think you can look up your own references on Google. I suggest using the words "grover", "chess", and "quantum". You can replace "grover" with "computer" if you'd like.
The quick summary is that there are promising avenues of research, but no conclusion yet. An algorithm has been found for solving the N-Queens problem, but not one of the complexity of chess. Some say yes, some say no, and I believe that's how this argument will go until someone solves the problem or someone else induces the heat-death of the computer by ill-advisedly trying to solve it.
Personally, I wouldn't bother trying to solve chess this way, except that the solution would be worthwhile for a whole host of other, similar problems. And, as you said, you certainly aren't going to solve this chess problem. But saying that we aren't going to figure a way to solve a basic problem like this if we put our minds to it is foolhardy. No, specific implementations may be doomed to failure, but if it's worth it, we'll figure out a way.
And no, I'm not going to prove it.
=Brian
Granted. I'll also say that the first difficulty in your analysis comes in by stating how much energy it takes to flip a bit. That's a real world contraint that will change over time. How much energy did it take to flip a bit in the 1950's? My guess is that it took a lot more than that. I have no reason to think that it won't go down. Will it go down enough? I suspect it will, because I'm that sort of person.
You are making many errors here, the first of which is you don't understand the computational theory behind quantum computation.
Lots of theories, yeah. You know, there aren't really many fully functioning quantum computers, are there? Can you point out some and tell me how they're working right now? Can you guarantee that won't change in the next 10 years. 20? 200?
Computer theory hasn't been around all that long. These many laws that you have may change. But let's examing what we think right now, shall we?
I'm going to trust a random source from google, the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge Center for Quantum Computing. According to their site...
All right, so you have a huge amount of numbers storable on a relatively small amount of space, from what I'm gathering. You know, as a layman. And it goes on to say that operations can be perfomed simultaneously on all these states.
In fact, isn't that the big benefit of quantum computing? That you can perform parallel computations on the right type of data simulataneously, whereas in our current computing environments you have to perform them linearly (except for various tricks both withing chips and on microprocessors)? Am I to believe that a problem space such as chess wouldn't be the sort of ideal situation to use one of these fancy "quantum processors." Might not some sort of, oh, 256 qubit quantum processor (and you may increase the number of qubits if it makes you feel better) indeed be able to process every chess game, what's the word, simultaneously?
Of course, that's just theorizing about what we know now, which is the point. You say that, no matter what, there can be no possible situation where we could work out the entire tree. In fact, you ridicule the idea and the people who present it. You may consider doing a little reading into a book by Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Your reaction sounds strangely familiar.
=Brian
I've seen the argument about "more than the number of particles in the universe" stuff before. All over the place. The last time was doing research about WWII cryptography, and how one scheme or another (I believe it was the 4 wheel Enigma) had more possibilities than particles in the universe. And, somehow, we managed to crack it.
The first mistake is in assuming that you have to store board state in its entierty. We've invented this thing called 'compression.' It's really handy for taking situations which are similar and turning them into something that takes up less space but can algorithmically be turned into the original concept.
But of course you know abot compression, you just didn't feel like bringing it up, on account of it being contrary to your argument. Or perhaps it just hadn't occurred to you. Entirely possible, I'll admit.
Now, I would imagine that a clever programmer could probably find lots of patterns in a chess game. Situations in which the same set of moves could be turned into a dictionary entry, for an example of one possible scheme. This would reduce the amount of storage space, and consequently the energy requirements, of the problem.
Then, let's consider advances in technology that aren't merely software. Let's say...Quantum Computing. Ah, those clever Quanta. You could store multiple bits of information on a single atom, hypothetically. No need for messy atoms when you have subatomic particles and potential states and the like doing your dirty work for you.
So, just because you couldn't immediately think of a way to do it, despite your Number Theory background, doesn't mean the engineers can't think of a way to make it happen.
=Brian
...maybe you should, I dunno, take it in to be fixed. No, really, you've tried diagnosing it, and you couldn't figure it out. So, rather than take it in to be repaired, you decide to post your question on Slashdot? Seriously?
I mean, I guess that works for the editors, since you post made it up, but I don't think that this is such a common problem that it needs to be here for everyone to try to help with.
But since we're here, could anyone tell me why my Check Engine Light keeps coming on in my car? Also, there's a hole in my shoe that I've tried patching with duct tape, but that doesn't seem to work - any advice on that?
Sigh.
=Brian
While granted, that might help, the poster did kinda say they the PRAM Battery Replacement was the first thing to be done.
Yeah, there's this thing, it's called "Project Management." It's where you figure out how long things are going to take to do, and you make sure they happen in the right amount of time.
I know, sometimes it's tough. Usually it's the most difficult when you have someone telling you that you have to have something done by X time, and you know that time is clearly impossible, but they make you plan for it anyways. That's not the case here, though.
The case here is more likely that they don't know how to plan for QA. I would be willing to bet that they think that Quality Assurance means "Testing the game at the end and fixing the bugs."
Good project managers know that QA is planned for from the beginning, and that you know, from experience and extrapolation, how longs things will take to do. Most importantly, be able to know when you're done. Usually the answer is and ideal, "When we test a couple of times and there are no bugs," though that usually works out to be, "When we test a couple of times and there are no bugs we can't fix by the first or second patch." There are other, better ways to know when you're done testing, if it's part of your complete project plan.
=Brian
I neither give nor receive information through the internet.
=Brian
I know it sounds wierd... but people need to realize that advertising is not a right. And the viewers of programs need to be secure in the knowledge that what is presented as fact, opinion, view, or endorsement is correctly attributed to those who actually put it forward.
Actually, the viewers of the programs don't need to be secure. In anything. Economically, factually, emotionally, sexually, whatever. They just don't need it. This is TV. It lies. All the time. There are jokes made about it. I could throw a stone a slashdot and hit at least 12 people with different Simpsons quotes about how TV lies.
The truth is, the people who pay for the program are the people who get to determine what's on it. They can make good decisions or bad decisions, but they're paying for it, so they can do what they want.
As consumers, we pay in two ways. The first is monetarily, if you access it via cable or satellite or paying the government or what have you. The second is in time, by watching the show and/or associated advertisements. Since we've not been paying to watch the commercials as much, the other people who pay with actual money will find another way to make their contribution worthwhile.
We call this system, "capitalism." It guarantees no Truths, only that if people are happy enough with it, they'll keep paying for it. And if it can make it's money in the Marketplace of Cash, it will freely ignore the Marketplace of Ideas.
=Brian
Why, exactly, do you (appear to) believe the journalists should be punished?
Withholding evidence and hindering a federal investigation, if my TV Court Drama Memory serves me correctly.
By and large, officers of the law, including members of the FBI, want to catch criminals and get as much evidence as possible towards making sure they are prosecuted for their crimes. They have a new tool for use in getting that information, and they are going to use it as frequently as possible for as long as the laws are around.
Think of it this way: people have collected a lot of information that will help determine if this person is truly a criminal and the FBI couldn't otherwise get to it. That would be very annoying. If you want to be more cynical, then you can say that people have collected a lot of information that can be used to prove his guilt, and it annoys them that they can't get to them.
I'm not saying it's right. I'm saying that, as things stand now, it's the law (or a reasonable approximation of the law). Before, Journalists have been, by and large, protected. Now they aren't necessarily as much.
=Brian
...well. From a technical achievement, that's very good. Impressive, lots of good stuff going on. From an 'improving the GBA' perspective, that's really kinda dumb. If you're going to do all that, just get a PS1 for the same price and not all the work, and you've got just about the same amount of portability.
The idea behind the GBA is the portability. Seriously. Tacking on all that extra stuff does not make the GBA better.
=Brian
Well, I disregarded the bit about 30 years old, because the sentence made no sense. "The eddies of interest by demographics above age 30 are the exception that proves the rule old people don't play video games." I'm not sure what 'cicular liquid currents by demographics' is even trying to say, so I don't know if he's trying to make us believe that there are still some groups above 30 that play video games, so aside from that nobody plays, or that 30 is the cut off point.
As for the study about the average age, see, that's the thing. He's saying (as is the person with the article linked on that same point) that those studies are wrong or lying. I believe the linked article had some data backing it up, but (though I only skimmed it), I'm pretty sure that data isn't entirely trustworthy.
=Brian
That's about it. It's a stupid thing to debunk myths with no data backing you up.
=Brian
...only give a replacement copy for defective games. Honestly, it's not that hard. There's plenty of other examples of the retail world of this working just fine. Otherwise, yeah, it's pretty much a free rental place. Don't like it? Rent the games from Gamefly, the Netflix of the gaming world. Doesn't help with PC games, but for any console games, it's really cool. As seen on Penny Arcade.
=Brian
When you embed a sourceId into the link, it is reasonably ethical to disclose who will be the beneficiary of the referral.
Eh. I mean, sure, okay whatever, but you're paying the same price whether B&N gets the money or Slashdot does. If you don't want Slashdot to get money, you probably shouldn't be on their site. If you have a list of standard boycotts, and you're afraid that the author/submitter of the article is secretly working for one of them, then I'm sure you're clever enough to find the book on your own without the link.
Besides, I'm sure anyone who is worth being boycotted will also have the moral bankruptcy to lie about where the money is going.
Personally, I just don't care that much, although I do tend to mention when I'm making money off something.
=Brian