This vaccine would probably work much better in combination with something to refocus one's cigarette obsession. There's a nicotine inhaler that looks vaguely like a cigarette (it's cylindrical, roughly), and the reason it is shaped that way is to permit you to "smoke" it like you would a normal cigarette.
If you can refocus your attention onto something else - say, a lollipop, or a toothpick - then you accomplish the bulk of what this is trying to do, namely, get people off of cigarettes.
I'd love to see this concept applied to harder drugs than nicotine, though. Imagine actually being able to cure a cocaine addict. What a way to win the war on drugs:)
Re:make menuconfig
on
USB Menorah
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· Score: 2, Funny
You should probably build that one as a module. I mean, you never know when you might want to convert.
It's not really fair to compare pen and paper RPGs with computer MMORPGs anyway, and here's why:
A small RPG house (like, say, Chaosium) can stay afloat with a very few products with low circulation numbers, because the development and maintenance costs for a pen-and-paper RPG are scalable (that is, if you plan on having a small audience, you don't have to hire 50 people to work on the thing - in fact, in this day and age, half a dozen could conceivably produce a nice-looking pen-and-paper RPG).
On the other hand, developing a computer game requires the creation of content as well as the program itself, and for MMOGs, content (being King, as Brad McQuaid has said) has to be extensive to keep individual people playing (regardless of the size of the audience).
While MUDs - being smaller - have managed to stay afloat throughout the MMOG revolution, they require a fraction of the people needed to create content (art, world-building, sound, and design, not to mention programming) and to maintain operations.
For MMOGs, however, all those extra people *are* required, and so in order to have a game with compelling content, you have to start with a minimum expected playerbase (to recoup development costs). Investors will want to see the game generate profits, and companies will be unwilling to devote time and resources to a game whose profit margin is less than they could get on another project.
I have no idea whether Elias is right or not. But I can tell you that EQ has made some tremendous improvements in the past year based on the successes of other games, as well as some that they came up with themselves.
Too bad that SOE's marketing department keeps getting in the way of a good product, though. But that's another story altogether.:p
FR is a great world for making computer games in (as has been demonstrated repeatedly by various games, including the old SSI gold box games back in the day). I'm not sure how it'll deal with a MMO audience, though, since it tends to rely a lot on single-player/group mechanics and/or deus ex machina.
Okay, how about this one: An artificial life project involved virtual agents with a set of linked blocks which had actuators at the joints. The fitness function was for the agent to achieve the highest vertical position possible during the time allowed. Due to a bug in the code, or an anomaly in the physics model, agents evolved that would use their appendages to beat themselves over the "head". Doing so would propel the body upwards for some reason.
Here's another, from my lab: An evolvable agent project involved evolving a controller for a model of a robot based on the cricket insect. The model simulated interactions between the tarsus (foot) and the ground, but not between the ground and the rest of the leg (for the sake of speed - the computations are orders of magnitude more heinous with other contact implemented). So, the GA found that it could obtain a better fitness (faster locomotion) by protruding the femur-tibia joints (think "knee") through the ground, with the feet still resting on top of the ground.
Here's a third example, from my Master's research: A model of a simpler cricket robot was used to evolve a controller for that robot. At one point, there was an issue with the method of integration (Runge-Kutta 4th order) having problems with the high stiffnesses in the equations of motion. The GA exploited this fact, and determined that by inverting the legs (protruding the "knees" through the floor), and holding the feet (modeled as points) firmly against the ground, the numerical inaccuracy would accelerate the robot forward without requiring the robot to move the legs otherwise at all.
If you delve into the guts of genetic algorithm projects, you will find zillions of instances of the GA giving you what you "asked for" instead of what you wanted. (Usually, these anomalies don't get published, as the phenomenon is well known by anyone who has fiddled around in the field.)
Nifty - did that happen in SS2 also? (I suppose I could load it up and try if I really wanted, but I'm lazy and it's late.)
Also, this "sanity" concept - though perhaps not the visual representation of it in game - was lifted directly from the "sanity" rules in Chaosium's pen-and-paper RPG, Call of Cthulhu.
For example, if you actually were to see Cthulhu, you would have to make a sanity check by rolling a 1d100 lower than your current sanity points (if memory serves correctly). If you fail, you go temporarily insane and lose 1d100 sanity points (having a few dozen is healthy). If you succeed, I think you don't go insane immediately but you lose 1d100 sanity anyway. The depletion of sanity points eventually makes you go insane permanently.
Of course, if that weren't bad enough, Cthulhu also eats 1d4 people per round.
I definitely get motion sickness watching somebody else play a first-person perspective game of any sort (even Morrowind, where character motion was notoriously slow). Part of it, I think, comes from the unexpected, rapid mouse-controlled turns that people do when playing FPSes.
If I'm in control of the character, I can generally stave off motion sickness for an hour or two, but five minutes of watching somebody else whipping their character around will make me ready to puke.:)
Also, optic flow (the apparent movement of an image through one's field of vision) seems to be related. Games where you move quickly, or where the walls/ceiling/floor are very close to the point-of-view, have a higher rate of optic flow, and those games tend to make me reach for the trash can a lot more quickly.
Speaking of Sierra, they canned (a couple of years ago) Babylon 5: Into the Fire. When the developers got some investment together and tried to buy all the IP from Sierra (which, because WB had by then revoked Sierra's license, Sierra was *never* going to be able to use), Sierra declined.
Now we have countless B5 mods for various games, and a group of (mostly) Russians are working on a freeware B5 space combat sim.
Exactly. Anytime that really annoying AND REALLY FSCKING LOUD Billy Mays guy that advertises any of a dozen products I will never buy comes on, I either change the channel (if I'm watching regular TV) or fast-forward until the break is over (if I'm watching something I recorded). I know that lots of other people do the same thing, and TV programmers should examine these ads and determine what signal-to-noise ratio they provide (and then schedule - or decline to run - accordingly).
As for solving the issue of false referrers, why not just modify where the referrer ends up based on whether the specified referring page actually has a link to you or not. The distributed effects of zillions of bloggers all spamming the spam site with automated HTTP requests should be enough to dissuade the spammers from continuing:)
I have to agree with twistedcubic here - though I did see it after three weeks' worth of people telling me how hardcore it sucked. I dunno, maybe I was set up for a disappointment even worse than reality, so when I finally did see it, it was actually pretty good.
Yeah, they did leave a helluvalotta loose ends, and reality was nowhere near as intricate as my imagination made it after seeing Matrix 1 and 2, but (with the exception of some plot gratuity offered by the Merovingian) I had no real complaints walking out of there.
Okay, I take that back - I would much rather have seen them make the MCP be a giant spinning cylinder.
As for the review here, it wasn't so much a review of the movie as it was an inside look at some of the people who made Jackson's trilogy work (and, to be quite honest, I hope those people are like that IRL). Still, I can't believe that Jackson said he didn't like the Scouring of the Shire in RotK. I always thought it was the most important part of the trilogy.
I am writing regarding the recently-passed bill Ohio Sub H. B. 179. While this bill has provisions unrelated to my concerns, I wish to voice my extreme trepidation with regards to the provisions prohibiting activation of a video recording device inside any facility where a copyrighted movie is being shown.
The bill is incredibly poorly written. It would prohibit, for example, the following innocuous activities:
* Patrons at retail stores like Wal-Mart could be arrested for testing out the assortment of video cameras if any movie was being shown in the store (and stores generally like to show the movies that they're trying to sell).
* News reporters would not be permitted to record video at retail stores or movie theaters if a movie were being shown at the time; an investigative reporter could be arrested for doing a story on health violations at the concession stand if a movie is playing in the theater and the theater owner decides to call the police.
* Retail store owners and theater owners could be arrested for running security cameras in their buildings if they did not obtain the written permission from the copyright holders for every movie they show. This includes stores like Blockbuster, which shows numerous movies on their TVs in an effort to generate more rentals, and runs security cameras to help prevent crime; each store owner would have to obtain permission individually for every copyright holder of the movies they show, and while they wait for a response, they would either have to let their TVs go dark or their security cameras go blind in order to conform to the law.
Obviously, this bill has numerous issues with regards to these provisions - and these issues far outweigh any benefits that could be generated. This is especially true since a much simpler bill stating that "video recording of a publicly-performed motion picture is prohibited without the permission of the copyright holder" would suffice.
Well... except for the part where we already have federal laws that state that.
Please veto this bill, and demand that the State Legislature return to you a bill that includes only the other unrelated provisions of the bill.
This is certainly a much easier target than the zillions of eBay transactions that go on. IANAL, but I was under the impression that you could be civilly liable if you, as a third party, interfere with conformance to the terms of a contract.
[i]I recently had a problem to solve similar to the problem outlined in the article (optimizing results with N variables, where N > 5) and the GA solution beat the pants off the brute-force solution.[/i]
I would indicate that Ladd's article sets up an invalid comparison between brute force and his GA search, because he seeds his search with the flag set for -O1 or -O3.
I'm not saying he should make the GA start from scratch. I'm saying that he should permit brute force to start from -O1 or -O3 and perturb the solutions from there (in essence, run the GA but without selection, and take the best individual found at the end).
What we should be most skeptical about is that Mr. Ladd wanted to study the effects of using a GA on optimization, yet he neglected to run a control sample involving random perturbation of options from the start case (-O1 or -O3), without selection.
If, as I suspect, the search space is disorderly, then random perturbation should, among the same number of test compilations, be able to find a solution comparable to that which his GA finds.
GPL isn't the only license possible for open source software. And permitting free distribution is not the only reason one might want to use open source (though it is the best one).
A developer may want to make the source available so that users know that the developer is being honest in his creation of code that doesn't include backdoors, virus-like behavior, or other bad things. If the license agreement says that you can compile the source once you've paid for it or have agreed to other terms, but you aren't permitted to modify it, then that's it - you aren't allowed to modify it.
OTOH, if the code were GPLed at one point and made available to the public, then this guy is pretty much screwed.
When I read the books, that was one of my favorite scenes. I always felt that it would make for a very dramatic scene on film, showing just how great Gandalf's power had become and just how far Saruman had fallen from the grace of the Valar.
Of course, I also thought the Scouring of the Shire was one of the most important scenes in the books....and I also think the Silmarillion would make a nice TV series. But that's just me.;)
You missed a lot of what the Scouring meant, if that's all you got from it.
It showed the reader just how much the four hobbits had grown since they first left the Shire. They had truly gone from four plain, ordinary hobbits to four larger-than-life heroes, true leaders of their own people.
It also showed the reader that when strife happens, even the smallest of us can band together and vanquish evil, if we all work together and stand up against the darkness.
I think that the numbers show that on average 20% of your audience will pay for the game. This says only one thing to me, that your game is not very good. Instead of looking as to why linux users are approximatly 4% more willing to purchase the sofware; instead look at why 80% of your users wont. Solve that, and you have accomplished something.
I think the entire MMOG market is trying to solve that problem. Currently, the market for MMOGs is tiny compared to that of, say, offline PS2 games, and the single largest contributing reason for that is the recurring charge to play such games.
Assuming there is statistical significance to their numbers, I would suggest that the median age of game-playing Linux users is higher than that of game-playing Windows users, and thus the factors that accompany age (increased wealth, especially) would contribute to continued subscribership.
I don't have proof of this, obviously, but it's a hypothesis that somebody could conceivably test if they really felt like it.
Slashdot Mirror
This vaccine would probably work much better in combination with something to refocus one's cigarette obsession. There's a nicotine inhaler that looks vaguely like a cigarette (it's cylindrical, roughly), and the reason it is shaped that way is to permit you to "smoke" it like you would a normal cigarette.
:)
If you can refocus your attention onto something else - say, a lollipop, or a toothpick - then you accomplish the bulk of what this is trying to do, namely, get people off of cigarettes.
I'd love to see this concept applied to harder drugs than nicotine, though. Imagine actually being able to cure a cocaine addict. What a way to win the war on drugs
You should probably build that one as a module. I mean, you never know when you might want to convert.
SOE's multipass (or whatever it's called) doesn't cover SWG at all, because a large chunk of the revenue from SWG goes to LucasArts.
It's not really fair to compare pen and paper RPGs with computer MMORPGs anyway, and here's why:
:p
A small RPG house (like, say, Chaosium) can stay afloat with a very few products with low circulation numbers, because the development and maintenance costs for a pen-and-paper RPG are scalable (that is, if you plan on having a small audience, you don't have to hire 50 people to work on the thing - in fact, in this day and age, half a dozen could conceivably produce a nice-looking pen-and-paper RPG).
On the other hand, developing a computer game requires the creation of content as well as the program itself, and for MMOGs, content (being King, as Brad McQuaid has said) has to be extensive to keep individual people playing (regardless of the size of the audience).
While MUDs - being smaller - have managed to stay afloat throughout the MMOG revolution, they require a fraction of the people needed to create content (art, world-building, sound, and design, not to mention programming) and to maintain operations.
For MMOGs, however, all those extra people *are* required, and so in order to have a game with compelling content, you have to start with a minimum expected playerbase (to recoup development costs). Investors will want to see the game generate profits, and companies will be unwilling to devote time and resources to a game whose profit margin is less than they could get on another project.
I have no idea whether Elias is right or not. But I can tell you that EQ has made some tremendous improvements in the past year based on the successes of other games, as well as some that they came up with themselves.
Too bad that SOE's marketing department keeps getting in the way of a good product, though. But that's another story altogether.
FR is a great world for making computer games in (as has been demonstrated repeatedly by various games, including the old SSI gold box games back in the day). I'm not sure how it'll deal with a MMO audience, though, since it tends to rely a lot on single-player/group mechanics and/or deus ex machina.
Okay, how about this one: An artificial life project involved virtual agents with a set of linked blocks which had actuators at the joints. The fitness function was for the agent to achieve the highest vertical position possible during the time allowed. Due to a bug in the code, or an anomaly in the physics model, agents evolved that would use their appendages to beat themselves over the "head". Doing so would propel the body upwards for some reason.
Here's another, from my lab: An evolvable agent project involved evolving a controller for a model of a robot based on the cricket insect. The model simulated interactions between the tarsus (foot) and the ground, but not between the ground and the rest of the leg (for the sake of speed - the computations are orders of magnitude more heinous with other contact implemented). So, the GA found that it could obtain a better fitness (faster locomotion) by protruding the femur-tibia joints (think "knee") through the ground, with the feet still resting on top of the ground.
Here's a third example, from my Master's research: A model of a simpler cricket robot was used to evolve a controller for that robot. At one point, there was an issue with the method of integration (Runge-Kutta 4th order) having problems with the high stiffnesses in the equations of motion. The GA exploited this fact, and determined that by inverting the legs (protruding the "knees" through the floor), and holding the feet (modeled as points) firmly against the ground, the numerical inaccuracy would accelerate the robot forward without requiring the robot to move the legs otherwise at all.
If you delve into the guts of genetic algorithm projects, you will find zillions of instances of the GA giving you what you "asked for" instead of what you wanted. (Usually, these anomalies don't get published, as the phenomenon is well known by anyone who has fiddled around in the field.)
Nifty - did that happen in SS2 also? (I suppose I could load it up and try if I really wanted, but I'm lazy and it's late.)
Also, this "sanity" concept - though perhaps not the visual representation of it in game - was lifted directly from the "sanity" rules in Chaosium's pen-and-paper RPG, Call of Cthulhu.
For example, if you actually were to see Cthulhu, you would have to make a sanity check by rolling a 1d100 lower than your current sanity points (if memory serves correctly). If you fail, you go temporarily insane and lose 1d100 sanity points (having a few dozen is healthy). If you succeed, I think you don't go insane immediately but you lose 1d100 sanity anyway. The depletion of sanity points eventually makes you go insane permanently.
Of course, if that weren't bad enough, Cthulhu also eats 1d4 people per round.
I definitely get motion sickness watching somebody else play a first-person perspective game of any sort (even Morrowind, where character motion was notoriously slow). Part of it, I think, comes from the unexpected, rapid mouse-controlled turns that people do when playing FPSes.
:)
If I'm in control of the character, I can generally stave off motion sickness for an hour or two, but five minutes of watching somebody else whipping their character around will make me ready to puke.
Also, optic flow (the apparent movement of an image through one's field of vision) seems to be related. Games where you move quickly, or where the walls/ceiling/floor are very close to the point-of-view, have a higher rate of optic flow, and those games tend to make me reach for the trash can a lot more quickly.
I think Starscape was on one of their previous lists.
Speaking of Sierra, they canned (a couple of years ago) Babylon 5: Into the Fire. When the developers got some investment together and tried to buy all the IP from Sierra (which, because WB had by then revoked Sierra's license, Sierra was *never* going to be able to use), Sierra declined.
Now we have countless B5 mods for various games, and a group of (mostly) Russians are working on a freeware B5 space combat sim.
Exactly. Anytime that really annoying AND REALLY FSCKING LOUD Billy Mays guy that advertises any of a dozen products I will never buy comes on, I either change the channel (if I'm watching regular TV) or fast-forward until the break is over (if I'm watching something I recorded). I know that lots of other people do the same thing, and TV programmers should examine these ads and determine what signal-to-noise ratio they provide (and then schedule - or decline to run - accordingly).
"I'll make a program where every time you click a huge pool of blood explodes and spills everywhere. Is it a fun game? no."
I'd play it. I mean, I wouldn't pay for it, but I'd play it. Shoving a guy down the stairs or running a guy into a wall with a truck is fun, so why wouldn't exploding blood pools be fun?
Fortunately, Google is working on this problem.
:)
As for solving the issue of false referrers, why not just modify where the referrer ends up based on whether the specified referring page actually has a link to you or not. The distributed effects of zillions of bloggers all spamming the spam site with automated HTTP requests should be enough to dissuade the spammers from continuing
They went into this pretty much knowing that would be the case. At least they satisfied their curiosity.
I have to agree with twistedcubic here - though I did see it after three weeks' worth of people telling me how hardcore it sucked. I dunno, maybe I was set up for a disappointment even worse than reality, so when I finally did see it, it was actually pretty good.
Yeah, they did leave a helluvalotta loose ends, and reality was nowhere near as intricate as my imagination made it after seeing Matrix 1 and 2, but (with the exception of some plot gratuity offered by the Merovingian) I had no real complaints walking out of there.
Okay, I take that back - I would much rather have seen them make the MCP be a giant spinning cylinder.
As for the review here, it wasn't so much a review of the movie as it was an inside look at some of the people who made Jackson's trilogy work (and, to be quite honest, I hope those people are like that IRL). Still, I can't believe that Jackson said he didn't like the Scouring of the Shire in RotK. I always thought it was the most important part of the trilogy.
Dear Governor Taft,
I am writing regarding the recently-passed bill Ohio Sub H. B. 179. While this bill has provisions unrelated to my concerns, I wish to voice my extreme trepidation with regards to the provisions prohibiting activation of a video recording device inside any facility where a copyrighted movie is being shown.
The bill is incredibly poorly written. It would prohibit, for example, the following innocuous activities:
* Patrons at retail stores like Wal-Mart could be arrested for testing out the assortment of video cameras if any movie was being shown in the store (and stores generally like to show the movies that they're trying to sell).
* News reporters would not be permitted to record video at retail stores or movie theaters if a movie were being shown at the time; an investigative reporter could be arrested for doing a story on health violations at the concession stand if a movie is playing in the theater and the theater owner decides to call the police.
* Retail store owners and theater owners could be arrested for running security cameras in their buildings if they did not obtain the written permission from the copyright holders for every movie they show. This includes stores like Blockbuster, which shows numerous movies on their TVs in an effort to generate more rentals, and runs security cameras to help prevent crime; each store owner would have to obtain permission individually for every copyright holder of the movies they show, and while they wait for a response, they would either have to let their TVs go dark or their security cameras go blind in order to conform to the law.
Obviously, this bill has numerous issues with regards to these provisions - and these issues far outweigh any benefits that could be generated. This is especially true since a much simpler bill stating that "video recording of a publicly-performed motion picture is prohibited without the permission of the copyright holder" would suffice.
Well... except for the part where we already have federal laws that state that.
Please veto this bill, and demand that the State Legislature return to you a bill that includes only the other unrelated provisions of the bill.
This is certainly a much easier target than the zillions of eBay transactions that go on. IANAL, but I was under the impression that you could be civilly liable if you, as a third party, interfere with conformance to the terms of a contract.
[i]I recently had a problem to solve similar to the problem outlined in the article (optimizing results with N variables, where N > 5) and the GA solution beat the pants off the brute-force solution.[/i]
I would indicate that Ladd's article sets up an invalid comparison between brute force and his GA search, because he seeds his search with the flag set for -O1 or -O3.
I'm not saying he should make the GA start from scratch. I'm saying that he should permit brute force to start from -O1 or -O3 and perturb the solutions from there (in essence, run the GA but without selection, and take the best individual found at the end).
What we should be most skeptical about is that Mr. Ladd wanted to study the effects of using a GA on optimization, yet he neglected to run a control sample involving random perturbation of options from the start case (-O1 or -O3), without selection.
If, as I suspect, the search space is disorderly, then random perturbation should, among the same number of test compilations, be able to find a solution comparable to that which his GA finds.
Not to mention that McCarthy invented garbage collection back in 1958.
All you Java programmers that can't deal with deallocating your own memory - cringe in terror, because you're using Lisp technology!
GPL isn't the only license possible for open source software. And permitting free distribution is not the only reason one might want to use open source (though it is the best one).
A developer may want to make the source available so that users know that the developer is being honest in his creation of code that doesn't include backdoors, virus-like behavior, or other bad things. If the license agreement says that you can compile the source once you've paid for it or have agreed to other terms, but you aren't permitted to modify it, then that's it - you aren't allowed to modify it.
OTOH, if the code were GPLed at one point and made available to the public, then this guy is pretty much screwed.
God DAMN it: there are NO "wierding modules" in any written version of Dune. They are just a David Lynch appeasement for the moronic masses.
You're just jealous that your name isn't a killing word.
When I read the books, that was one of my favorite scenes. I always felt that it would make for a very dramatic scene on film, showing just how great Gandalf's power had become and just how far Saruman had fallen from the grace of the Valar.
...and I also think the Silmarillion would make a nice TV series. But that's just me. ;)
Of course, I also thought the Scouring of the Shire was one of the most important scenes in the books.
You missed a lot of what the Scouring meant, if that's all you got from it.
It showed the reader just how much the four hobbits had grown since they first left the Shire. They had truly gone from four plain, ordinary hobbits to four larger-than-life heroes, true leaders of their own people.
It also showed the reader that when strife happens, even the smallest of us can band together and vanquish evil, if we all work together and stand up against the darkness.
By the way, Tolkien abhorred allegory.
I think that the numbers show that on average 20% of your audience will pay for the game. This says only one thing to me, that your game is not very good. Instead of looking as to why linux users are approximatly 4% more willing to purchase the sofware; instead look at why 80% of your users wont. Solve that, and you have accomplished something.
I think the entire MMOG market is trying to solve that problem. Currently, the market for MMOGs is tiny compared to that of, say, offline PS2 games, and the single largest contributing reason for that is the recurring charge to play such games.
Assuming there is statistical significance to their numbers, I would suggest that the median age of game-playing Linux users is higher than that of game-playing Windows users, and thus the factors that accompany age (increased wealth, especially) would contribute to continued subscribership.
I don't have proof of this, obviously, but it's a hypothesis that somebody could conceivably test if they really felt like it.