The insurgency tactics being used in Iraq require access to things like plastic explosives and knowledge of bomb making. Those aren't available under your 2nd amendment rights, and if you tried to get them Homeland Security would come a-knocking. If the Iraqi insurgents were using the sort of guns available to American citizens they'd have lost a long time ago. Your government isn't daft - they give you just enough to make you think you have some power.
The Iraqi insurgency acquired access to plastic explosives largely by raiding army supply depots (some completely unguarded, but not all). If there are any guards at the depot, you're going to need guns to convince them to let you have those explosives.
Small arms are not sufficient to sustain and win an insurgency. They are sufficient to start one.
As deplorable as their 2000 political intrusion was, Gore handed the case to them on a silver platter by only demanding a recount in the precincts where he was behind due to Florida stupidity. If he had thought about it for a few seconds, he would have realized he was opening himself up for an equal protection lawsuit.
Indeed, and to add irony to injury, when an independent recount of all ballots in Florida was conducted, it was found that under Gore's proposed recount plan, he would have lost, while under the full-state recount that would have had a chance of passing Constitutional muster, he would have won. Google up the NORC
"But why would I want to point my gun down range at the target, when my foot is so much easier to hit?!"
Of course the fact that we were denied a full-state recount, despite the compelling argument that anything else would violate equal protection, is somewhat offensive. Oh well, history is history.
Well, let's keep in mind, that rebels/insurgents can make an infernal nusciance of themselves, but there's basically never been a case of rebels taking over and ousting the government forces since artillery was invented.
How can you even say that, given the country I assume you live in?
History has shown time and time again that a large army is incredibly susceptible to being stalled out or ground away by guerilla warefare.
Indeed, and history has also shown that the only effective military counter to an entrenched insurgency is genocide.
The Romans did it to their conquered territories that rebelled, wiping out villages and cities entirely. The British did it to the Boers, putting the women and children into concentration camps (first usage of that term) where they starved to death, until the rebels gave up.
So the question you have to ask yourself is: Would the U.S. military be willing to do it to their own people? Simply to save the government that would give such orders?
So let me get this straight: Individual citizens armed with handguns and rifles and shotguns are going to go up against government forces, who have artillery, cruise missiles, and attack helicopters?
Hell yes! What, do you mean "go up against" as in the Rebels send their list of grievances to the government, and the two parties agree to meet on opposite ends of a field, and once the Sun reaches its zenith they open fire? Well that would be stupid, but fortunately there are other ways of doing things. Ways that have, over the course of the last sixty years, proven that they can be extremely effective. Not always, but asymmetrical warfare can in many situations actually give the advantage to the guerrilla force.
All that artillery, missiles, and helicopters don't mean much when your enemy is blended into the civilian populace of a large city. Look how much good that does us in Iraq!
Oh sure, we have the fire power to just level Baghdad, but we aren't doing that, because wiping out the population isn't the goal, and in fact is counter-productive because every survivor would just hate us even more and the whole country would be our enemy. It would be the same here, only more so! Sure you would think this tyrannical government that we're rebelling against wouldn't have qualms against killing civilians -- but "qualms" don't enter into it. Every civilian death would just turn more of the people against the government, until everyone is against them and they have no power left regardless of how many bombs they have.
Also another lesson from Iraq, about what being told to attack your own people does to the soldiers. When the Army was told to invade the slums and fight the Madhi Army, not only did many of them refuse to fight, many of them joined with the militia and handed them their Army-issued weapons! Weapons that, strictly and demonstratively speaking, the militia didn't need to fight the Iraqi Army to a standstill, but still grant the militia even more power. Now, in Rebellious America, what do you think is going to happen when they ask the Air Force to bomb the people of Topeka into submission?
So unless 2nd amendment advocates are going to actually advocate private ownership of stinger missiles and anti-tank weapons and what-not, it makes no sense at all.
No, this notion that you can't overthrow a government unless you have arms that match theirs is what makes no sense. The world has changed, indeed, but one of the biggest changes is that it's not as much about hardware any more.
Small arms are sufficient for protecting ourselves from minor threats, and they are sufficient to serve as the beginning of an effective armed rebellion. Rifles would be more than enough to mount the raid on the National Guard Depot to get the Stingers and explosives that would proceed to prove -- again -- that a tank is nothing but a big target when you park it in a city.
I don't care how geeky I look, if I lose my eyesight I'll wear whatever is required to see again.
On a serious note, I completely agree, yet at the same time would be very leery of doing so. The main reason? Upgrade paths. They've got a 60-pixel retina they're trying now. Much better than being blind, but much worse than the next gen which will have 4,000 pixels, then there'll be a 64k pixel one, and then the multi-megapixel eyes after that. And then they'll come out with one that not only approximates full human vision, but gives you Geordi LaForge-like super-vision as well. But alas, I can't get that one, because the upgrade to the 64k pixel eye required splicing directly into my optic nerve and now they don't have enough to work with.
So basically I wouldn't be completely comfortable with it until it reached the nearly-normal stage (and I'll just live without the super-vision upgrade), but realistically, it very well may not be at that point when I actually need it. This would make an otherwise no-brainer (see vs not see) a lot tougher.
And as we see now, after a few years there's some verdict. Does anyone who bought the game even care anymore? Anyone who cares about the sex scene (provided they didn't actually want it and buy the game partly because of it) didn't buy the game in the first place anyway! Now subtract all the people who can't find their receipt anymore and... well, you gotta be surprised that it's even 3000 people.
Actually, if I still had my receipt, I'd consider applying for the $5 rebate simply to signal my disapproval of Take Two for not making the sex scene accessible in the unmodded game! I have the PS2 version, but no Gameshark, so I was denied the content that I (unknowingly at the time) payed for!
Even MIT's newer wearable computer enthusiasts are more attractive.
Why on earth would anyone want to wear a computer enthusiast? Is this some extreme form of on-demand tech support? Also, I'm highly skeptical of the claim that computer enthusiasts coming out of MIT, no matter how new, are attractive.
the kids who downloaded the hack could have just as easily have gotten real porn
Yeah, that's exactly why this whole issue has always cracked me up. Oh noes! If a kid goes unsupervised onto the internet, he may download a mod for a game that would show him low-poly-count boobs. We need to stop this, prevent minors from buying GTA, make Take Two release new discs without the content on it, and then, at long last, kids won't be able to find boobs on the internet!
Does it matter? Does the fact that pirates don't intend to buy the game somehow give them the right to procure it for free?
Yes it matters if their method doesn't turn pirates into legitimate customers, then it has no effect on their bottom line, and does nothing but prevent a freeloader from getting something for free, at a negative cost to the legitimate customers.
Is your desire to deny the pirates their fallacious right to free stuff so important that you will inconvenience your paying customers? At no benefit to sales but at a cost to customer satisfaction? And if your chest was a cannon, would you fire your heart at the pirates, Captain Ahab?
Hyperbole aside, I doubt this will end up having much effect on LGPs sales. Whatever tiny amount of pirates turn into paying customers will be balanced by those who don't want to buy a game with DRM of any kind, ending up more or less a wash. What, then, is the point?
If this was what LGP had done, you would have had some right to be upset. But that isn't what they have implemented - if your network drops out, you can still play. You can play the game for a certain length of time without network access (I'm assuming that's weeks or months) before you have to re-authenticate. You can even re-authenticate via another machine's web browser if your game machine never has network access (surely a rare event these days). That looks as equitable a system as could be envisaged.
Look - read their press release. It actually contains Real Information (TM).
So if the last time I played the game was greater than "a certain length of time" assumed to be weeks or months, not long at all for the usage model I'm talking about, and I don't have a net connection that day, I can, at least theoretically, drive to the local library and use their net connection to authenticate my copy at home?
Yeah, that's a tiny, tiny bit better than what I said, and as far as I'm concerned is still not a guarantee that I'll be able to play the game. And eff you, I have every right to be upset at their implementing unnecessary and inconvenient systems that by design can and will lock me out of my game. The very second I have to think something like "Is it worth driving to the nearest net cafe just to be able to play this game?" I have the right to be upset. Like I said, it's not the worst copy protection ever, it's not SecuRom, but it nevertheless reduces the value proposition that buying one of these B-list games used to represent.
If that's the most equitable system you can envision, you simply lack vision. Here's a better one: You authenticate ONCE, EVER, and then you get to play your game without being an assumed pirate. They get their cash, I get my game, transaction over.
He's worked himself up (or got born into) the top of the food chain and that's his privilege: he can fire you, you can't fire him. He can demand ridiculous salaries, you can not. He can sink your company but still get the golden parachute, you can't.
And who can fire the CEO of a public company? Who decides what their salary is, and what kind of "golden parachute" they get?
The Board of Directors.
And what is the most common other career for a member of the Board?
CEO (or other executive position) for another public company.
I mean, the CEO of my company is on the Board of Directors for two other companies, and hell he's even the Chairman of the Board for his own company. And this is utterly common.
You think he, or any other Board member, is going to start a trend of reducing CEO's compensation? No, in fact the exact opposite! It's in their interest to drive up executive compensation, because then at their own company where they are CEO, they can ask to have their salaries raised "in accordance with industry norms" to sell it to the shareholders and employees. And of course the Board is going to say yes, thinking about their own CEO gigs.
It's a racket. It's a huge incestuous web of people colluding for their own mutual benefit. The alleged "risk" of the position that is supposed to justify the compensation doesn't exist, because they've done everything they can to eliminate the risk. Forget even the ludicrous "golden parachute". What about the most simple of "risks" -- that if you screw up your job too badly, you won't be able to get a job in the same field again? Once again, that rarely happens, about the only way to 'ruin' your career in upper management is basically to get indicted. Otherwise, it's never in the interest of the Board to hold their CEOs to too high of standards, because they don't want they themselves to ever have to worry about finding a job.
I don't actually know anything about the total computing power Google employs, but I do know that they will purchase on the order of 1,000-10,000 processors merely to evaluate them prior to making a real purchase.
It's totally doable (people have made far bigger things out of Legos), but probably insecure if you can just cut through the Legos with a Sawz-All.
Would it be considered cheating to make the vault legos out of steel, or any other non-plastic material? I personally think that'd be fine. And yes, it would be worth a lot of bonus points.:)
Pretty much every commercial game I've bought for Linux has some sort of activation system, key lookup or similar. Most of them have some system for authenticating once online and then going offline thereafter. DropTeam even offered a way to generate an authorization on one machine and use it on a non-networked machine.
No commercial Linux game I've bought has required online verification for installation and off-line play. The only time online activation has been required has been when connecting to a game server, and that's really just getting permission to connect to the server, not play the game.
Is this the worst thing in the world? Well, no, I think we've all seen worse forms of copy protection. Yet, the thought of wanting to throw one of these games on my system on the day my ISP is hosed and being denied my right to play my legally purchased game because of this pointless rigmarole irks me. They aren't the greatest games on earth to begin with (a wise business decision, but still true), they're exactly the kind of game that I play for a while, then delete to make room, then install again on some rainy day. Now I'm wondering if I'd be able to. So this is going to make it somewhat less likely that I will purchase LGP games with this mis-feature, and that's the last thing LGP needs.
That's too bad because an anti-Turing revolution is precisely what is going to happen to computer science. The time is ripe for a revolution.
Science welcomes such things, if in fact they pan out. And yes, they can suffer from opposition at first, but in the end results are what count, and starting a revolution is a good way to get your name in the history books. That's why we know the name Einstein, because overturned what you would call "orthodoxy", but I'd call a result that had survived any practical experimentation for centuries.
Turing is basically the same as Newton in this situation. If you can disprove his theorems, or build a machine that operates under less restrictive assumptions, then get to it and make a name for yourself. The closest we've come even in theory is the quantum computer, which differs from Turing's machine in only some ways, not all. Practically there's been tremendous progress but it's still in it's infancy. This could be the very revolution you're saying is needed but not happening, even though it is happening as fast as the people working on it can do it, because it means their names may be remembered just like Turing's is.
Saying science is like a religion, where nobody dares challenge the "orthodoxy", and there's a disincentive to upturning conventional thought, is freaking ludicrous claim in light of the facts.
Most smart minds would rather work in academia where they get more freedoms, less restrictions, and are more easily able to surround themselves with likeminded individuals.
Or hell, why not have the best of both worlds? Professors' research groups are where a lot of DARPA funds end up. My advisor at school had DARPA funding for some research into networking for soldiers in the field (as I'm sure many profs had in the late 90s and early aughts). I don't know any details, since I wasn't involved in that, I was working on his other purely academic projects. Which, like I said, is a hell of a deal. Get a decent salary and a large amount of freedom to do what you want from a research professor position, while getting funding from the government too.
2) The increasing view of government agencies as mismanaged and incapable (and the fact that we somewhat consistently elect candidates that loudly proclaim this outcome as immutable and inevitable), and public sector/military work as a refuge for the bureaucratic and dull.
Heh. Yeah. Paraphrasing from some other source: "Democrats claim the government can be effective and work for the people, and once elected prove themselves wrong. Republicans claim the government can't be effective and will never be able to solve the people's problems, and once elected prove themselves right."
And they say "No, you take this laptop as-is and use it" with the same unthinking and unresponsive attitude with which they fired him, and then where is he?
Of course that is probably a better circumstance under which to be looking for a new job than the one he's in now...
Actually, the wiimote is somewhat limiting in it's tracking capabilities (but fortunately in a way that isn't usually apparent). The wiimote can't tell whether or not it's looking at the sensor bar from the side or not, when you move the wiimote left or right, the two lights appear to get closer together in the same way as if you'd moved it further away from the television.
Since the wiimote is usually used from roughly in front of the TV as a pointing device, this isn't usually a problem.
Well, it would only be a problem if you started off in front of the TV, and then moved over to one side. If you start playing from an angle, then there's no problem (as I know due to the setup of my living room). It's always a relative measurement.
I think the only way around this problem would be to have two cameras, and then Z could be accurately determined at all times by the difference between the two cameras.
Slashdot Mirror
The insurgency tactics being used in Iraq require access to things like plastic explosives and knowledge of bomb making. Those aren't available under your 2nd amendment rights, and if you tried to get them Homeland Security would come a-knocking. If the Iraqi insurgents were using the sort of guns available to American citizens they'd have lost a long time ago. Your government isn't daft - they give you just enough to make you think you have some power.
The Iraqi insurgency acquired access to plastic explosives largely by raiding army supply depots (some completely unguarded, but not all). If there are any guards at the depot, you're going to need guns to convince them to let you have those explosives.
Small arms are not sufficient to sustain and win an insurgency. They are sufficient to start one.
Find out in the next episode of Desperate Planets!
Feh, if I'm going to watch something like that, I'm going to wait for the racier Swingsystem.
As deplorable as their 2000 political intrusion was, Gore handed the case to them on a silver platter by only demanding a recount in the precincts where he was behind due to Florida stupidity. If he had thought about it for a few seconds, he would have realized he was opening himself up for an equal protection lawsuit.
Indeed, and to add irony to injury, when an independent recount of all ballots in Florida was conducted, it was found that under Gore's proposed recount plan, he would have lost, while under the full-state recount that would have had a chance of passing Constitutional muster, he would have won. Google up the NORC
"But why would I want to point my gun down range at the target, when my foot is so much easier to hit?!"
Of course the fact that we were denied a full-state recount, despite the compelling argument that anything else would violate equal protection, is somewhat offensive. Oh well, history is history.
Well, let's keep in mind, that rebels/insurgents can make an infernal nusciance of themselves, but there's basically never been a case of rebels taking over and ousting the government forces since artillery was invented.
How can you even say that, given the country I assume you live in?
*boggle*
History has shown time and time again that a large army is incredibly susceptible to being stalled out or ground away by guerilla warefare.
Indeed, and history has also shown that the only effective military counter to an entrenched insurgency is genocide.
The Romans did it to their conquered territories that rebelled, wiping out villages and cities entirely. The British did it to the Boers, putting the women and children into concentration camps (first usage of that term) where they starved to death, until the rebels gave up.
So the question you have to ask yourself is: Would the U.S. military be willing to do it to their own people? Simply to save the government that would give such orders?
So let me get this straight: Individual citizens armed with handguns and rifles and shotguns are going to go up against government forces, who have artillery, cruise missiles, and attack helicopters?
Hell yes! What, do you mean "go up against" as in the Rebels send their list of grievances to the government, and the two parties agree to meet on opposite ends of a field, and once the Sun reaches its zenith they open fire? Well that would be stupid, but fortunately there are other ways of doing things. Ways that have, over the course of the last sixty years, proven that they can be extremely effective. Not always, but asymmetrical warfare can in many situations actually give the advantage to the guerrilla force.
All that artillery, missiles, and helicopters don't mean much when your enemy is blended into the civilian populace of a large city. Look how much good that does us in Iraq!
Oh sure, we have the fire power to just level Baghdad, but we aren't doing that, because wiping out the population isn't the goal, and in fact is counter-productive because every survivor would just hate us even more and the whole country would be our enemy. It would be the same here, only more so! Sure you would think this tyrannical government that we're rebelling against wouldn't have qualms against killing civilians -- but "qualms" don't enter into it. Every civilian death would just turn more of the people against the government, until everyone is against them and they have no power left regardless of how many bombs they have.
Also another lesson from Iraq, about what being told to attack your own people does to the soldiers. When the Army was told to invade the slums and fight the Madhi Army, not only did many of them refuse to fight, many of them joined with the militia and handed them their Army-issued weapons! Weapons that, strictly and demonstratively speaking, the militia didn't need to fight the Iraqi Army to a standstill, but still grant the militia even more power. Now, in Rebellious America, what do you think is going to happen when they ask the Air Force to bomb the people of Topeka into submission?
So unless 2nd amendment advocates are going to actually advocate private ownership of stinger missiles and anti-tank weapons and what-not, it makes no sense at all.
No, this notion that you can't overthrow a government unless you have arms that match theirs is what makes no sense. The world has changed, indeed, but one of the biggest changes is that it's not as much about hardware any more.
Small arms are sufficient for protecting ourselves from minor threats, and they are sufficient to serve as the beginning of an effective armed rebellion. Rifles would be more than enough to mount the raid on the National Guard Depot to get the Stingers and explosives that would proceed to prove -- again -- that a tank is nothing but a big target when you park it in a city.
I don't care how geeky I look, if I lose my eyesight I'll wear whatever is required to see again.
On a serious note, I completely agree, yet at the same time would be very leery of doing so. The main reason? Upgrade paths. They've got a 60-pixel retina they're trying now. Much better than being blind, but much worse than the next gen which will have 4,000 pixels, then there'll be a 64k pixel one, and then the multi-megapixel eyes after that. And then they'll come out with one that not only approximates full human vision, but gives you Geordi LaForge-like super-vision as well. But alas, I can't get that one, because the upgrade to the 64k pixel eye required splicing directly into my optic nerve and now they don't have enough to work with.
So basically I wouldn't be completely comfortable with it until it reached the nearly-normal stage (and I'll just live without the super-vision upgrade), but realistically, it very well may not be at that point when I actually need it. This would make an otherwise no-brainer (see vs not see) a lot tougher.
Not that I'm complaining. This is fantastic news.
And as we see now, after a few years there's some verdict. Does anyone who bought the game even care anymore? Anyone who cares about the sex scene (provided they didn't actually want it and buy the game partly because of it) didn't buy the game in the first place anyway! Now subtract all the people who can't find their receipt anymore and ... well, you gotta be surprised that it's even 3000 people.
Actually, if I still had my receipt, I'd consider applying for the $5 rebate simply to signal my disapproval of Take Two for not making the sex scene accessible in the unmodded game! I have the PS2 version, but no Gameshark, so I was denied the content that I (unknowingly at the time) payed for!
Even MIT's newer wearable computer enthusiasts are more attractive.
Why on earth would anyone want to wear a computer enthusiast? Is this some extreme form of on-demand tech support? Also, I'm highly skeptical of the claim that computer enthusiasts coming out of MIT, no matter how new, are attractive.
the kids who downloaded the hack could have just as easily have gotten real porn
Yeah, that's exactly why this whole issue has always cracked me up. Oh noes! If a kid goes unsupervised onto the internet, he may download a mod for a game that would show him low-poly-count boobs. We need to stop this, prevent minors from buying GTA, make Take Two release new discs without the content on it, and then, at long last, kids won't be able to find boobs on the internet!
Really, it's just too funny.
Does it matter? Does the fact that pirates don't intend to buy the game somehow give them the right to procure it for free?
Yes it matters if their method doesn't turn pirates into legitimate customers, then it has no effect on their bottom line, and does nothing but prevent a freeloader from getting something for free, at a negative cost to the legitimate customers.
Is your desire to deny the pirates their fallacious right to free stuff so important that you will inconvenience your paying customers? At no benefit to sales but at a cost to customer satisfaction? And if your chest was a cannon, would you fire your heart at the pirates, Captain Ahab?
Hyperbole aside, I doubt this will end up having much effect on LGPs sales. Whatever tiny amount of pirates turn into paying customers will be balanced by those who don't want to buy a game with DRM of any kind, ending up more or less a wash. What, then, is the point?
If this was what LGP had done, you would have had some right to be upset. But that isn't what they have implemented - if your network drops out, you can still play. You can play the game for a certain length of time without network access (I'm assuming that's weeks or months) before you have to re-authenticate. You can even re-authenticate via another machine's web browser if your game machine never has network access (surely a rare event these days). That looks as equitable a system as could be envisaged.
Look - read their press release. It actually contains Real Information (TM).
So if the last time I played the game was greater than "a certain length of time" assumed to be weeks or months, not long at all for the usage model I'm talking about, and I don't have a net connection that day, I can, at least theoretically, drive to the local library and use their net connection to authenticate my copy at home?
Yeah, that's a tiny, tiny bit better than what I said, and as far as I'm concerned is still not a guarantee that I'll be able to play the game. And eff you, I have every right to be upset at their implementing unnecessary and inconvenient systems that by design can and will lock me out of my game. The very second I have to think something like "Is it worth driving to the nearest net cafe just to be able to play this game?" I have the right to be upset. Like I said, it's not the worst copy protection ever, it's not SecuRom, but it nevertheless reduces the value proposition that buying one of these B-list games used to represent.
If that's the most equitable system you can envision, you simply lack vision. Here's a better one: You authenticate ONCE, EVER, and then you get to play your game without being an assumed pirate. They get their cash, I get my game, transaction over.
He's worked himself up (or got born into) the top of the food chain and that's his privilege: he can fire you, you can't fire him.
He can demand ridiculous salaries, you can not. He can sink your company but still get the golden parachute, you can't.
And who can fire the CEO of a public company? Who decides what their salary is, and what kind of "golden parachute" they get?
The Board of Directors.
And what is the most common other career for a member of the Board?
CEO (or other executive position) for another public company.
I mean, the CEO of my company is on the Board of Directors for two other companies, and hell he's even the Chairman of the Board for his own company. And this is utterly common.
You think he, or any other Board member, is going to start a trend of reducing CEO's compensation? No, in fact the exact opposite! It's in their interest to drive up executive compensation, because then at their own company where they are CEO, they can ask to have their salaries raised "in accordance with industry norms" to sell it to the shareholders and employees. And of course the Board is going to say yes, thinking about their own CEO gigs.
It's a racket. It's a huge incestuous web of people colluding for their own mutual benefit. The alleged "risk" of the position that is supposed to justify the compensation doesn't exist, because they've done everything they can to eliminate the risk. Forget even the ludicrous "golden parachute". What about the most simple of "risks" -- that if you screw up your job too badly, you won't be able to get a job in the same field again? Once again, that rarely happens, about the only way to 'ruin' your career in upper management is basically to get indicted. Otherwise, it's never in the interest of the Board to hold their CEOs to too high of standards, because they don't want they themselves to ever have to worry about finding a job.
I don't actually know anything about the total computing power Google employs, but I do know that they will purchase on the order of 1,000-10,000 processors merely to evaluate them prior to making a real purchase.
It's totally doable (people have made far bigger things out of Legos), but probably insecure if you can just cut through the Legos with a Sawz-All.
Would it be considered cheating to make the vault legos out of steel, or any other non-plastic material? I personally think that'd be fine. And yes, it would be worth a lot of bonus points. :)
Pretty much every commercial game I've bought for Linux has some sort of activation system, key lookup or similar. Most of them have some system for authenticating once online and then going offline thereafter. DropTeam even offered a way to generate an authorization on one machine and use it on a non-networked machine.
No commercial Linux game I've bought has required online verification for installation and off-line play. The only time online activation has been required has been when connecting to a game server, and that's really just getting permission to connect to the server, not play the game.
Is this the worst thing in the world? Well, no, I think we've all seen worse forms of copy protection. Yet, the thought of wanting to throw one of these games on my system on the day my ISP is hosed and being denied my right to play my legally purchased game because of this pointless rigmarole irks me. They aren't the greatest games on earth to begin with (a wise business decision, but still true), they're exactly the kind of game that I play for a while, then delete to make room, then install again on some rainy day. Now I'm wondering if I'd be able to. So this is going to make it somewhat less likely that I will purchase LGP games with this mis-feature, and that's the last thing LGP needs.
That's too bad because an anti-Turing revolution is precisely what is going to happen to computer science. The time is ripe for a revolution.
Science welcomes such things, if in fact they pan out. And yes, they can suffer from opposition at first, but in the end results are what count, and starting a revolution is a good way to get your name in the history books. That's why we know the name Einstein, because overturned what you would call "orthodoxy", but I'd call a result that had survived any practical experimentation for centuries.
Turing is basically the same as Newton in this situation. If you can disprove his theorems, or build a machine that operates under less restrictive assumptions, then get to it and make a name for yourself. The closest we've come even in theory is the quantum computer, which differs from Turing's machine in only some ways, not all. Practically there's been tremendous progress but it's still in it's infancy. This could be the very revolution you're saying is needed but not happening, even though it is happening as fast as the people working on it can do it, because it means their names may be remembered just like Turing's is.
Saying science is like a religion, where nobody dares challenge the "orthodoxy", and there's a disincentive to upturning conventional thought, is freaking ludicrous claim in light of the facts.
Most smart minds would rather work in academia where they get more freedoms, less restrictions, and are more easily able to surround themselves with likeminded individuals.
Or hell, why not have the best of both worlds? Professors' research groups are where a lot of DARPA funds end up. My advisor at school had DARPA funding for some research into networking for soldiers in the field (as I'm sure many profs had in the late 90s and early aughts). I don't know any details, since I wasn't involved in that, I was working on his other purely academic projects. Which, like I said, is a hell of a deal. Get a decent salary and a large amount of freedom to do what you want from a research professor position, while getting funding from the government too.
2) The increasing view of government agencies as mismanaged and incapable (and the fact that we somewhat consistently elect candidates that loudly proclaim this outcome as immutable and inevitable), and public sector/military work as a refuge for the bureaucratic and dull.
Heh. Yeah. Paraphrasing from some other source: "Democrats claim the government can be effective and work for the people, and once elected prove themselves wrong. Republicans claim the government can't be effective and will never be able to solve the people's problems, and once elected prove themselves right."
And they say "No, you take this laptop as-is and use it" with the same unthinking and unresponsive attitude with which they fired him, and then where is he?
Of course that is probably a better circumstance under which to be looking for a new job than the one he's in now...
No fuckin way I'm clicking on that.
Say what you will, but that's a lot harder to ignore than a beeper.
Yeah, but it's not as hard to ignore as the Chewbacca Server Monitor, who comes in and rips your arms off if you don't fix the problem.
[hindsight=20/20]shoulda clicked preview, i say for the hundreth time...[/hindsight]
[quote][quote]Trio of Super-Earths Discovered[/quote]
So we found more oil?[/quote]
Not just oil, but Super Oil!
Actually, the wiimote is somewhat limiting in it's tracking capabilities (but fortunately in a way that isn't usually apparent). The wiimote can't tell whether or not it's looking at the sensor bar from the side or not, when you move the wiimote left or right, the two lights appear to get closer together in the same way as if you'd moved it further away from the television.
Since the wiimote is usually used from roughly in front of the TV as a pointing device, this isn't usually a problem.
Well, it would only be a problem if you started off in front of the TV, and then moved over to one side. If you start playing from an angle, then there's no problem (as I know due to the setup of my living room). It's always a relative measurement.
I think the only way around this problem would be to have two cameras, and then Z could be accurately determined at all times by the difference between the two cameras.