I've thought that the whole political arena would be a fun game idea. I wouldn't limit it to 2004, but I'd let it be a little more universal. Politics has been around a long time. In order to stay in power (the goal of the game), you would need to balance:
1) The probability that your constituents liked what you were doing
2) The amount of political power you have
3) The size of you election fund
You can increase you funds by pandering to PACs and special interests, but if the voters find out you're dumping toxic waste in the playgrounds, you're out. The worse the transgression, the larger the monetary gain but the bigger the backlash if your caught.
Then you have a random generator of temptations and opponents. Your term consists of a series of votes, for which you can vote for the PACs, you heart, or the people. Say the heart and people match 90% of the time. You get to keep what you don't spend beating the other contenders. The more you spend, the better your chances for re-election. Might I recommend the trophy wife.
I wonder how high the price per pound will be for the whale meat if it's so rare that we've never seen one before?
It sounded like a pretty subtle difference between this whale and other similar species. Was there a suble difference in the taste that made them look at the DNA?
Is this a new fad? Can you really make big bucks making games? Well weâ(TM)re not really sure, but to get anywhere in any industry you need to know your stuff.
So to get anywhere, you need to know your stuff. Do you think you can learn that from people who are not really sure if you can make money in that career path or not? Exactly how much do they know about the industry? Perhaps they should learn their "stuff" before offering courses.
I think that the concept of a business simulator for the movie industry is a good one. I would be curious to know how they will handle the popularity of a movie in their model. Will they have some mechanism for players to vote on each other's titles and movie concepts? Or will the amount of money you spend on actors and writing affect the outcome? I also liked the idea of sliders showing how good a script was to allow the player to adjust the amount the spent on it.
Hopefully 3D and cup holders in seats will be able to co-exist in the 2010 universe.
Poker is the only game in town for a nerd in vegas.
Blackjack is the real game of number savvy nerds. I read an article in Wired that dealt with a group from MIT that played blackjack, counting cards and making great money by playing as a group. It was a fun story that made me wish I could could think of something like that. You can find it online at Hacking Las Vegas
The clouds I understand. They either come from a single, unfiltered exposure or they were illuminated on any given exposure by the sun. The Parthenon superimposed I can see the same way. I think the big problem with this new image is the "wobble."
We go around the sun pretty smoothly, right? Shouldn't the path that the sun traces be a smooth one? On the image with the Parthenon, there is some time issues certainly, but the wiggle off of a "perfect" figure 8 shows that the camera wasn't always replaced exactly the same.
Nice try, nice image, but not as good as the second image pointed to in the article. That's why there are so few of these images around.
I think as soon as we can accurately predict the weather the day after tomorrow I'll be OK with them changing the weather. We don't even understand enough to do that, so how could we possibly think about tampering with the Earth's weather systems?
Until you can accurately predict what the weather should have been, it will be impossible to say that what someone did made things worse. Now suing weathermen for inaccurate forecasts: there's a lawsuit I want a piece of!
Nancy Kress wrote an interesting trilogy about a group of genetically engineered "sleepless" people. The first book was called "Beggars in Spain." She touched on some neat points like just how hard would it be to raise a baby that never fell asleep and how could you compete in school against people who could study all night long, every night.
The existence of such a drug or genetic manipulation could create a major gap between the ones who have and the ones who have not. Not just a military gap, but educational and economic as well. Imagine a country where suddenly the workers can all work a double shift and still get paid minimum wage. You would double the size of your workforce without needing to train anyone. The workers would double their incomes. How could you compete against that?
Is sleep an evolutionary dead end that would get swept away by the rise of a sleepless culture? Like they say, only the fittest survive.
I can hear the good Doctor now, telling me how wise I was to duct tape up my wounds.
"You know, leprosy treatment has proceeded a great deal since the linen rag days. Why now, we just wrap you up in duct tape. Hell, it'll even hold the leaches on better."
When it goes to the dark side of the planet, it would really suck. I imagine if there is life on the planet it gets to enjoy some interesting day patterns.
This isn't necessarily true. Take our own earth's moon. When you see a full moon, it is on the opposite side of the sun from us, and yet it's fully illuminated. I could imagine the same thing happening with this planet's moon. If the planet's rotation were correct, I can't see why you couldn't have a normal day and night, except for the occasional lunar eclipse, which would be massive. It would also be neat to see the lunar eclipse (moon between sun and planet) from the moon's point of view.
You are right though: no matter what, there would be some interesting patterns of day and season with the planet and the other star. It reminds me of the Arthur C. Clarke story 2010 where Jupiter turned into a new star. He mentioned that Earth was very different with the new, much dimmer second sun in the sky at night.
But I think it's sort of pointless to look for earth-ish planets. I know that we're looking for existing life or possible places to live, but isn't it very possible there is some sort of life that lives in a drastically different environment than we do? There could very well be some crazy lifeform that lives on gas giants.
It really isn't all that crazy to look for closer matches to our own first. What if you did find life on one of those other, more far out planets? Can you imagine trying to communicate? There would be massive "frame of reference" problems. We're not just talking about the funky seasons based on which star you happen to be closer to and which side of the planet you are on, or "my, the liquid nitrogen is especially brisk this morning." Think of how different the thought patterns of a species that floated in the atmosphere of a gas giant would be from ours. If we got a message from them, could you even comprehend that it was a message?
I read this article over at USNews.com about Deep Fritz. It said that Deep Fritz did beat the same Deep Blue that beat Kasparov, but a stripped down, castrated version of it. The article claimed:
Press releases touting this week's match boast that Fritz has beaten both Kasparov and Deep Blue. The win over Kasparov came, however, in a super fast kind of chess, where computers have a decided edge. And Fritz didn't really beat Deep Blue-it beat an early version of its software running on slower hardware.
Do I think that there is an added value to better algorithms and pruning methods over pure computational firepower? Sure, but you need to keep in mind that now that Deep Blue has been disassembled, there is no way to get an honest, head to head comparison.
As if it matters, I still get my but kicked by good old GNU Chess.
I found this solution that I thought was great. Even if it didn't have keys per say, the description said:
Knowledge Adventure presents a whole new concept to the Baby Software world with JumpStart Baby with Baby Ball. The ball is big and sits on the desk in front of your child. Rather than clicking a mouse or striking a key on the keyboard baby pushes down on the oversized ball and gets the same effect.
I had this image in my mind of my boss walking into my office, while I'm not just posting to Slashdot, but doing it moving a Teddy bear around by pressing on this big baby ball on my desk with a big, stupid smile on my face. It must be a good thing, after all a happy worker is a productive worker. Just think of my productivity increase as I make the bear run around the screen pecking out C code. Go Teddy go!
This is amazing! 10 years ago, the experts had no proof that planets existed outside of our solar system; today an amateur with an 8" telescope and a CCD camera can help study them. I love to see technology being put to good use like this.
I remember when announced they discovered of the first extrasolar planet in 1995. I felt really jealous that some guy who got to work a massive telescope was the one who found it. I thought it was a shame that astronomy was "out of the hands" of the amateur. I'm glad I was wrong.
Here is a link to a page that has a nice overview of the history and procedures used to find extrasolar planets.
I know that they have optical telescopes that do this now. Keck Observatory come to mind. Here is a link to a page that describes what they are doing and the resolution they are getting. The VLT (Very Large Telescope) is another example of combining the beams of multiple telescopes.
"The resolution achieved by this telescope is the equivalent of sitting in New York and being able to see the dimples on a golf ball in Los Angeles," astronomer Sheperd Doeleman said this week. "
I'm surprised an astronomer would say that. Most of them know that the earth is round. Seeing the L.A. golf ball would be really tough. I don't believe they can see through dirt, and even Tiger Woods couldn't hit it high enough. I felt the bodies of a thousand astronomers flinching in their graves.
There is pottery around from thousands of years ago. Thats how we know about many civilizations: ceramics. Perhaps it's a good thing that we leave something behind:
And in summary, we've found that these primitive people spent their days pecking these plastic keys, surfing the net, and posting to/.
"The donkey has 62 chromosomes (31 pairs), the horse 64 (32 pairs) and the mule and hinny each have 63 chromosomes - of which many pairs are unevenly matched. It is not just the number of chromosomes which is different in donkeys and horses, but their structure: they have developed slightly differently over evolutionary time....The donkey and horse chromosomes are almost completely unable to pair up."
It's amazing that mules turn out as well as they do. If carrying heavy packs all day and being beaten daily by a bowlegged man with whiskey breath is your idea of turning out well.
When a game comes out, modders push the limits of the engines to do anything they want... the clincher is... they do it for free.
I think the best source of game innovation is from players, and that doesn't stop with the modders. Look at all of the MMORPGs out there. Those players aren't creating mods, but by playing characters far better than any AI, they add to the level of game play for everyone. And they not only don't get paid, they pay the game company to play! "You mean you pay to play an elf, so someone else playing the game encounters a more realistic elf during their game?"
The modders are almost yesterday's news compared to the people who pay to improve the game by playing it. Now that's a business model. You get a better "AI equivalent" than anyone could write, and they pay you for the privilege.
So we have an island full of scientists with no engineers
Thank God it isn't an island full of marketing people with no engineers. At least scientists know how the world works. Marketers spend their lives figuring out what people want to buy:
"I just know I could sell people on the idea of a coconut radio to call for help. If I had a computer, I could write you an email with the spec... Wait. Radios are like the internet. Why not make me a computer that's linked to the internet! Out of palm leaves, sea shells, and bamboo. And make it black, black is the hot color for hard drives now. You will be able to match the Pantone number, right?"
I isn't just the ability to "time share" between doctors and having a voice controlled camera that I think makes these things so useful. It's also the precision with which they can work.
According to the article, the size of the incision required is much smaller that you could ever have if you needed to fit your hand in the opening. The smaller the hole, the less traumatic and the shorter the healing time.
Because the system can filter out jitter in hand motion, as well as scaling hand motions down to a smaller scale, the surgeons can also be much more precise than they could if the controlled the tools with their bare hands.
I was surprised to read that the one of the drawbacks to this system was that sometimes the old way, with the larger incision and I am assuming manually done, is better at sparing the nerves in the area of the prostate. Anything that can do this accurately enough to preserve those functions is all right by me. Quite all right. If I had to chose, give me that "Ol' School" if it keeps things working. I would have thought that by changing the gain on the device, it would be even more precise than mere human hands.
The voice controlled camera is neat, the ability to perform surgery a million miles away is cool, but the meat and potatoes of the system is the precision control of the surgical instruments and all of the pain that it can save the patient. Both because of the smaller incision and the greater precision afforded the doctor.
Slashdot Mirror
1) The probability that your constituents liked what you were doing
2) The amount of political power you have
3) The size of you election fund
You can increase you funds by pandering to PACs and special interests, but if the voters find out you're dumping toxic waste in the playgrounds, you're out. The worse the transgression, the larger the monetary gain but the bigger the backlash if your caught.
Then you have a random generator of temptations and opponents. Your term consists of a series of votes, for which you can vote for the PACs, you heart, or the people. Say the heart and people match 90% of the time. You get to keep what you don't spend beating the other contenders. The more you spend, the better your chances for re-election. Might I recommend the trophy wife.
I wonder how high the price per pound will be for the whale meat if it's so rare that we've never seen one before? It sounded like a pretty subtle difference between this whale and other similar species. Was there a suble difference in the taste that made them look at the DNA?
Is this a new fad? Can you really make big bucks making games? Well weâ(TM)re not really sure, but to get anywhere in any industry you need to know your stuff.
So to get anywhere, you need to know your stuff. Do you think you can learn that from people who are not really sure if you can make money in that career path or not? Exactly how much do they know about the industry? Perhaps they should learn their "stuff" before offering courses.
Hopefully 3D and cup holders in seats will be able to co-exist in the 2010 universe.
Blackjack is the real game of number savvy nerds. I read an article in Wired that dealt with a group from MIT that played blackjack, counting cards and making great money by playing as a group. It was a fun story that made me wish I could could think of something like that. You can find it online at Hacking Las Vegas
"Did you do it?"
"Yes. Doe!"
We go around the sun pretty smoothly, right? Shouldn't the path that the sun traces be a smooth one? On the image with the Parthenon, there is some time issues certainly, but the wiggle off of a "perfect" figure 8 shows that the camera wasn't always replaced exactly the same.
Nice try, nice image, but not as good as the second image pointed to in the article. That's why there are so few of these images around.
Until you can accurately predict what the weather should have been, it will be impossible to say that what someone did made things worse. Now suing weathermen for inaccurate forecasts: there's a lawsuit I want a piece of!
Nonsense, I saw it done on Star Trek years ago!
"Jim, where are you going to look in this whole galaxy?
Where are you going to look for Spock's brain?"
In radiology, down the hall and wrapped in sheet of Teflon.
The existence of such a drug or genetic manipulation could create a major gap between the ones who have and the ones who have not. Not just a military gap, but educational and economic as well. Imagine a country where suddenly the workers can all work a double shift and still get paid minimum wage. You would double the size of your workforce without needing to train anyone. The workers would double their incomes. How could you compete against that?
Is sleep an evolutionary dead end that would get swept away by the rise of a sleepless culture? Like they say, only the fittest survive.
"You know, leprosy treatment has proceeded a great deal since the linen rag days. Why now, we just wrap you up in duct tape. Hell, it'll even hold the leaches on better."
This isn't necessarily true. Take our own earth's moon. When you see a full moon, it is on the opposite side of the sun from us, and yet it's fully illuminated. I could imagine the same thing happening with this planet's moon. If the planet's rotation were correct, I can't see why you couldn't have a normal day and night, except for the occasional lunar eclipse, which would be massive. It would also be neat to see the lunar eclipse (moon between sun and planet) from the moon's point of view.
You are right though: no matter what, there would be some interesting patterns of day and season with the planet and the other star. It reminds me of the Arthur C. Clarke story 2010 where Jupiter turned into a new star. He mentioned that Earth was very different with the new, much dimmer second sun in the sky at night.
It really isn't all that crazy to look for closer matches to our own first. What if you did find life on one of those other, more far out planets? Can you imagine trying to communicate? There would be massive "frame of reference" problems. We're not just talking about the funky seasons based on which star you happen to be closer to and which side of the planet you are on, or "my, the liquid nitrogen is especially brisk this morning." Think of how different the thought patterns of a species that floated in the atmosphere of a gas giant would be from ours. If we got a message from them, could you even comprehend that it was a message?
Press releases touting this week's match boast that Fritz has beaten both Kasparov and Deep Blue. The win over Kasparov came, however, in a super fast kind of chess, where computers have a decided edge. And Fritz didn't really beat Deep Blue-it beat an early version of its software running on slower hardware.
Do I think that there is an added value to better algorithms and pruning methods over pure computational firepower? Sure, but you need to keep in mind that now that Deep Blue has been disassembled, there is no way to get an honest, head to head comparison.
As if it matters, I still get my but kicked by good old GNU Chess.
Knowledge Adventure presents a whole new concept to the Baby Software world with JumpStart Baby with Baby Ball. The ball is big and sits on the desk in front of your child. Rather than clicking a mouse or striking a key on the keyboard baby pushes down on the oversized ball and gets the same effect.
I had this image in my mind of my boss walking into my office, while I'm not just posting to Slashdot, but doing it moving a Teddy bear around by pressing on this big baby ball on my desk with a big, stupid smile on my face. It must be a good thing, after all a happy worker is a productive worker. Just think of my productivity increase as I make the bear run around the screen pecking out C code. Go Teddy go!
I remember when announced they discovered of the first extrasolar planet in 1995. I felt really jealous that some guy who got to work a massive telescope was the one who found it. I thought it was a shame that astronomy was "out of the hands" of the amateur. I'm glad I was wrong.
Here is a link to a page that has a nice overview of the history and procedures used to find extrasolar planets.
I know that they have optical telescopes that do this now. Keck Observatory come to mind. Here is a link to a page that describes what they are doing and the resolution they are getting. The VLT (Very Large Telescope) is another example of combining the beams of multiple telescopes.
"The resolution achieved by this telescope is the equivalent of sitting in New York and being able to see the dimples on a golf ball in Los Angeles," astronomer Sheperd Doeleman said this week. "
I'm surprised an astronomer would say that. Most of them know that the earth is round. Seeing the L.A. golf ball would be really tough. I don't believe they can see through dirt, and even Tiger Woods couldn't hit it high enough. I felt the bodies of a thousand astronomers flinching in their graves.
There is pottery around from thousands of years ago. Thats how we know about many civilizations: ceramics. Perhaps it's a good thing that we leave something behind:
And in summary, we've found that these primitive people spent their days pecking these plastic keys, surfing the net, and posting to /.
"The donkey has 62 chromosomes (31 pairs), the horse 64 (32 pairs) and the mule and hinny each have 63 chromosomes - of which many pairs are unevenly matched. It is not just the number of chromosomes which is different in donkeys and horses, but their structure: they have developed slightly differently over evolutionary time....The donkey and horse chromosomes are almost completely unable to pair up."
It's amazing that mules turn out as well as they do. If carrying heavy packs all day and being beaten daily by a bowlegged man with whiskey breath is your idea of turning out well.
I think the best source of game innovation is from players, and that doesn't stop with the modders. Look at all of the MMORPGs out there. Those players aren't creating mods, but by playing characters far better than any AI, they add to the level of game play for everyone. And they not only don't get paid, they pay the game company to play! "You mean you pay to play an elf, so someone else playing the game encounters a more realistic elf during their game?"
The modders are almost yesterday's news compared to the people who pay to improve the game by playing it. Now that's a business model. You get a better "AI equivalent" than anyone could write, and they pay you for the privilege.
Thank God it isn't an island full of marketing people with no engineers. At least scientists know how the world works. Marketers spend their lives figuring out what people want to buy:
"I just know I could sell people on the idea of a coconut radio to call for help. If I had a computer, I could write you an email with the spec... Wait. Radios are like the internet. Why not make me a computer that's linked to the internet! Out of palm leaves, sea shells, and bamboo. And make it black, black is the hot color for hard drives now. You will be able to match the Pantone number, right?"
How about invading Taiwan and taking over the plants? It's not a pleasant, friendly option, but it is an option.
As far as Honk Kong is concerned, honk once for yes, twice for no.
I hope they take the spirit of Linux and share their source (even if the comments are in chinese).
According to the article, the size of the incision required is much smaller that you could ever have if you needed to fit your hand in the opening. The smaller the hole, the less traumatic and the shorter the healing time.
Because the system can filter out jitter in hand motion, as well as scaling hand motions down to a smaller scale, the surgeons can also be much more precise than they could if the controlled the tools with their bare hands.
I was surprised to read that the one of the drawbacks to this system was that sometimes the old way, with the larger incision and I am assuming manually done, is better at sparing the nerves in the area of the prostate. Anything that can do this accurately enough to preserve those functions is all right by me. Quite all right. If I had to chose, give me that "Ol' School" if it keeps things working. I would have thought that by changing the gain on the device, it would be even more precise than mere human hands.
The voice controlled camera is neat, the ability to perform surgery a million miles away is cool, but the meat and potatoes of the system is the precision control of the surgical instruments and all of the pain that it can save the patient. Both because of the smaller incision and the greater precision afforded the doctor.