You can't send any information "along" a quantum entanglement. How do you propose to send a timing signal along a channel that can carry no information? How do you propose to define "instantaneous" when you can't even provide a timing signal that matches your definition? I was under the impression that you could alter different properties of an entangled pair and the same alteration would show up on its twin, thus passing information. After doing a bit of reading, I see that I was incorrect. Maybe it was some sci-fi story I read (or daydreamed) where they performed instant communication between remote colonies by distributing pairs of entangled particles and channeling their transmissions via that. Well damn, that sucks.:)
Certainly nobody will buy this castle for making a profit. Do the math: 40 million pounds have to be spent. People pay 2.40 per entry. Thus you need 16.7 million entries to cover the acquisition costs (assuming the 450,000 visitors a year are all adults, a bit optimistic). Using this figure, it takes 37 years to pay off the initial investment - ignoring costs for running the castle, such as ongoing repairs, staff, etc.
Still, it would be cool to have that castle and enjoy eternal night life... Speaking of eternal night life, here's an even better idea. Every night throw a wild and massive party. Cover charge is 100 Euro per person. 500 Euro gets you your own room to host your own mini-party in true bacchanalian fashion. Or 2500 Euro gets you the dungeon for the evening. On Friday and Saturday, tasteful in-period costumes are mandatory (vampires okay, clowns not okay... rent 'em at the door if you forgot yours). It's like Disney Land but for mature audiences only. Have live DJ competitions where the audience votes and the top prize for the winning DJ is 10% of the take from cover charges or something like that.
It'd be a hell of a blast until it gets shut down for some please-think-of-the-children reason.
Ironically, it would probably be more lucrative to buy property in something like Second Life than a castle like this. The castle is cool as hell, but the location is not very convenient. Nor is your suggestion. I mean, it's not like my name is Thomas Anderson or something.
You get PAID (real money) to do THAT (virtual world stuff).
Talk about the new economy - make real money from unreal worlds. It's been that way since people were making money writing fiction. Ask J.K. Rowling how her unreal fantasy world pays the bills.
I realize it's their choice but I think it's the wrong one and yes, am waiting till they 'fix' it or something else comes along. It may also be a design decision on their part. If they haven't implemented support for sparse databases, then each unit of space in the virtual world may actually translate directly into allocated memory on the server. It would certainly be the simplest way to implement, if not the most efficient in terms of storage. If that's the case, then it would be unlikely they could decouple this dependency (as you hint in your other post).
I am working on something sort of like Lambda Moo but in Ruby. Where the scripting isn't just in the game, but *is* the game, and it's a coding platform first and only game/social as an aspect of working on a shared project. Sounds interesting... I hope you write a journal entry about it when there's something ready to try out.
You've stumbled onto my point in your hope to prove me wrong. Linden makes it appear as if Land is limited - they'd claim to sell you light-years of space to make you think that they were selling something limited. But virtual space isn't like that, they could sell an infinite amount of space right next to Earth, despite you thinking you got it all... Similarly, if you bought "all of the land in Second Life" they'd simply print more, the planet would get bigger and the "value of your investment" would change as Linden manipulated the market. Like domain names. You buy some nice.com name, but then they bring out.biz,.info, etc. They simply "print up" more domain names and the only limitation is the permutation of letters you want. By artificially limiting the number of TLDs, they manipulate the market.
Is it hard for you to understand that while the internet takes servers to run, that these servers serve data to users. Empty space doesn't need dedicated server, but the way the game is billed allocates servers by land space, not by load. So you get a ton of land with low processing requirements and mere virtual feet away, across a line, the CPU load is horrible simply because you step into overused land. Right, I get it... I run servers myself. But it's their ballgame and their rules. They determine the pricing just as any business does. Just because they've decided to use the analogy of land space and sell servers based on that because it works with their particular world model doesn't make it wrong... it just means that they're doing it differently than you would choose to.
Listen, this is a technical discussion, I don't know any Linden by name, I merely see them doing what's one step about the junk-stock spam that comes into my mailbox daily and failing to run technical stuff correctly because it fits an early, though imho, ill conceived notion of pricing. I want SL to work, but it won't the way it is. Anshe will probably sue them out of existence when they reveal her land isn't worth the paper it's backed up on. Yeah, apologies -- it was late and I wasn't the happiest camper. However, my original point remains the same. Linden Labs has chosen to model their server pricing in terms of acres per server or whatever units they measure dimensions in. I'm guessing Anshe understands that anybody can come along and buy up their own servers as well, so she's taking a risk and if she fails to monetize that risk, it's her dime. But anybody can download the Crystal Space open source engine (or one of numerous others), develop their own game, run their own servers, and charge based on CPU time/bandwidth or something. Who knows... such a model might be successful with the exception that the heavy users who are often crucial for the game to gain traction likely won't be too pleased paying the bulk of the costs so that casual players pay only pennies.
He hasn't noticed that players teleport across SecondLife now instead of walking... Actually, I don't play SL. Last I heard you used some kind of physical transportation. Anyways, I'll reply to your other post.
By Linden's prims/acre/$ pricing they force you into a scale where there numbers are profitable. [...] Why do they do this? Because it seems to fit their economic model... I think you answered your own question. It's their game using their business model, they designed it to work that way. And they did so in order for it to be profitable. If you think it's a rip off, fine... don't pay it. But let me know when you open up your own game with pricing as you specified. Because when you do, I'll buy several lightyears of space around the perimeter of the current world dimensions so that when someone wants to have any space allocated to them, people will have to travel several lightyears through my territory to get there. Won't that be fun? Because it's only a few KB in your database, it'll cost me pennies a month in terms of storage, CPU, and bandwidth but all your users will be pissed off and leave since it's impossible to cross several lightyears of space given that there's no faster-than-light travel.
Instead, for their own blatantly selfish reasons and the good of people who want LL to do better and SL to not suck... So you think you're entitled to tell Linden Labs how to run their business? Your mock concern over someone else's game doesn't seem very sincere... what's your real agenda here?
A new age variation on the old water-bag trick. One guy owned two service stations. One station was the last stop before heading out of LA, into the desert, heading for Palm Springs. The other was the last service station before heading out of Palm Springs, out across the desert, heading for LA. Sounds rather apocryphal. However, taken in the same way as Aesop's Fables, it's a good story nonetheless.
Yeah that sounds like it to me. The crystals were making words in the sand, but hte miners ignored it so the crystals ended up killing one of them. Then the crystal started multiplying inside the science hall, and disrupting the power. Classic episode. Iirc its late season 1. Yes, there it is. Season 1, Episode 17: Home Soil.
the one i'm thinking of was from TNG...the thing was superintelligent, and as a result, superbored. it sort of swallowed up riker, iirc, and wanted the rest of the crew to entertain it... Skin of Evil? That's the one where Yar died by the creature who was composed of everything bad discarded from a particular race. I think the TNG episode closest to this is the terraforming project where they had the crystalline life forms (they called humans "bags of mostly water") which existed in the water layer just below the surface.
So, if you blurred it, you must have edited the photo. So in no way does a photoshopped photo prove you won a million dollars. Nor does coming over to your house to show you the actual million dollar check prove that I won it either. For all you know, I might have printed that one myself on my new color laser printer. Of course, I could deposit it and show you my online bank balance. But maybe I've setup some kind of strange proxy which does a man-in-the-middle with the bank and replaces a deposit for $100.00 with one for $1000000.00 instead. Or I could take you with me to the bank and deposit it with the teller. But maybe the teller is a friend of mine and is colluding with me just to pull a prank on you.
Maybe it doesn't work as proof. But putting an image online, ideally in conjunction with some kind of third-party information, functions as decent evidence.
With no air flow in that section of ducting, the paper has no way of getting hot enough to ignite. I doubt it would ignite anyway, but what do I know. All true enough, but I'm sure there are countless other materials that can be had for next to nothing which are more fire regulation friendly than shredded paper.
The company is going into the ground like a lawn dart. I'm glad I moved my office manager to OpenOffice last year. Don't worry... OpenOffice.org will clone this interface within 6 months.
The server room had a heating vent leading into it, and no A/C. They solved it by clogging the vent with a bag full of shredded paper... Uh... shredded paper in a heating vent? Anyone else see anything wrong with that idea?
Re:Isn't it time for a CLEAR code contest?
on
IOCCC 2006 is now open
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Yeesh... sounds too much like work. I get paid to write clear code. When I don't get paid, I want to have fun with it.
Re:A good one for a good programmer...
on
IOCCC 2006 is now open
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· Score: 2, Interesting
That's probably a good way to lose since creativity is one of the key factors, not just plain illegibility. Take, for example, this program (one of my all-time favorites) which prints out the value of pi:
Or this one which, when compiled and run, prints out another character as program source. You compile the output to that, run it and it outputs another character as program source. You compile that, and you get back the original program's source:
So you're suggesting that people use something that they are not comfortable with, instead of something that they are and which is getting better at an acceptable pace? -- As a boy I jumped through Windows, as a man I play with Penguins. Your advice appears to be at odds with your sig.
I can argue about MySQL's faults over and over, but at the end of the day it's easy to use and it's good enough for most people. So MySQL is like the Windows of databases?
Or you could use a service that people actually use, like MSN Messenger. Which (optionally) gets archived to your hard drive in an XML format. I'm sure MS has some tools for corporations to auto-archive company IM accounts as well... I think Live Communications Server is their thing.
Re:Vista already doing some of this
on
DieHard, the Software
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· Score: 4, Informative
Seems like OpenBSD's implementation does what DieHard claims, or at least some of it. See this interview from August 2005 for information:
I don't know a lot about the movie, but the Wikipedia page [wikipedia.org] indicates it's based specifically on the website. That said, it seems natural to obtain licensing. Yeah, it just seems rather odd that since the website is based upon publicly available news articles that a movie studio would go out of its way and pay to license content which is basically public info. And the phrase Darwin Award was in use long before that site came into existence. Anyway, more power to the site owner for cashing in on it.
Slashdot Mirror
So if I fart and you're 100 meters away, will you say that I haven't yet farted because it's outside of your smell cone?
No Next Gen? What will I do without being able to watch Picard and crew?!?
Still, it would be cool to have that castle and enjoy eternal night life... Speaking of eternal night life, here's an even better idea. Every night throw a wild and massive party. Cover charge is 100 Euro per person. 500 Euro gets you your own room to host your own mini-party in true bacchanalian fashion. Or 2500 Euro gets you the dungeon for the evening. On Friday and Saturday, tasteful in-period costumes are mandatory (vampires okay, clowns not okay... rent 'em at the door if you forgot yours). It's like Disney Land but for mature audiences only. Have live DJ competitions where the audience votes and the top prize for the winning DJ is 10% of the take from cover charges or something like that.
It'd be a hell of a blast until it gets shut down for some please-think-of-the-children reason.
Talk about the new economy - make real money from unreal worlds. It's been that way since people were making money writing fiction. Ask J.K. Rowling how her unreal fantasy world pays the bills.
Maybe it doesn't work as proof. But putting an image online, ideally in conjunction with some kind of third-party information, functions as decent evidence.
Yeesh... sounds too much like work. I get paid to write clear code. When I don't get paid, I want to have fun with it.
That's probably a good way to lose since creativity is one of the key factors, not just plain illegibility. Take, for example, this program (one of my all-time favorites) which prints out the value of pi:
http://www0.us.ioccc.org/1988/westley.c
Or this one which, when compiled and run, prints out another character as program source. You compile the output to that, run it and it outputs another character as program source. You compile that, and you get back the original program's source:
http://www0.us.ioccc.org/2000/dhyang.c
And given the space constraints, your program should be quite clever and compact itself even before you try and obfuscate it.
--
As a boy I jumped through Windows, as a man I play with Penguins. Your advice appears to be at odds with your sig.
Seems like OpenBSD's implementation does what DieHard claims, or at least some of it. See this interview from August 2005 for information:
http://kerneltrap.org/node/5584
Any thoughts?