I'm curious about the code base. For the screenshots it seems a lot like MediaWiki, but with other extensions I've not seen before allowing comments on pages and voting on stories and comments. Anyone know what they are using?
Is this really about free speach? Free speach is a precious right, which gaurantees the right to criticise the govenments, corperations and express cotriversal political views. It undermines the concept to class a silly joke like "bong hits 4 jesus" in the same category as the Communist victims of the McArfee withhunts, Ang Sang Soo, Ghandi, and the thousand of russian disidents sent to siberia.
Get a grip and stop crying wolf, a save your breath for when its really needed.
Most curious, knowing nothing about this a had a peek at the wikipedia page, and the user contributions and found that mediation case, which was closed yesterday. To me this looks like your run of the mill wikipedia dispute, which have spiraled out of control, as they often do. And who is the anon poster, the same person who was blocked as an imposter and is taking his beef elsewhere.
I don't know whats what, but its probably best to keep this stuff in the wiki. By all means people can contribute to the page but make sure you understand the various ways of wikipedia before turning this into something bigger than it is.
Indeed its not a hoax, its more an insertion of a little known theory into the encyclopedia. Yes there is a lot of this sort of stuff in wikipedia, something like 1000 articles are deleted daily and they are often of some not notable band, theory, or person. This is probably a bigger problem than vandalism on wikipedia. The exposure of wikipedia now makes it a honey pot for those who wish to push their pet theory. Currently there a big arbitration debate on how to handle psudoscience articles. For the most part these don't have that much effect on mainstream articles, original research is those is often swiftly delete or marked with a tag to warn the reader.
I think a lot depends on whether he converts the money into real life currency. If so hes no longer acting solely in the game would and the laws of the land may apply, he will certainly have a lot of tax to pay.
If he remains in the game world, hes going to be in big trouble, the number of suckers will run out and he will have a lot of angry investors on his tail. It would not surprise me if these investors get some bounty hunters on his tail. In game his name will be dirt, probably punishment enough.
One on the points in the article is that you just can't trust Wikipedia. Is their any source on the internet or elsewhere which is completely trustworthy? Could you trust Microsoft for an independent view of windows? Could you trust slashdot? Could you trust Britannica to give a balanced view on american activities in central America?
Jason is also more very keen on Google in preference to Wikipedia. But again the results of Google are the result of a hive mind: that of the collective set of all links by people who made webpages.
Anyway it must be said this is one of the most informed criticism of Wikipedia I've read.
From the article: We all know the game industry suffers from a lot of personnel turnover.... Apart from the waste of life and talent this represents, it means that game companies have no institutional memory, and that's partly why we keep making design errors.
I'm not sure if agree with this thesis, whilst there is a lot of changes in the grunt work, artists, coders etc. Its a different story for those higher up in the organization who have the a much longer track record and also have the responsibility for overall game design. We don't see Carmac or Shigeru Miyamoto doing much movement or leaving the industry. Yet its these people who are the Game Designers who set the overall feel of the game and the balance of the game.
No, please keep ideas of objectivity off this wiki!
Some of the greatest tensions in wikipedia are its struggle to be objective. Objectivity is something which can be aimed for but never achieved. The Neutral Point of View position in wikipedia is frequently used as a hammer to bash ideas which one person does not like. Often this can result in poor articles locked in an everlasting edit war and full of criticisms and counter criticisms.
So its good to see that Jimbo a one time Objectivist has finally accepted that there is a need for a more subjective space where people can get on with trying to move things forward without wasting all their time defending against the cynics.
One interesting example of mistakes with rounding errors was the Lonenz attractor which was an important part of the development of chaos thery.
Lorenz first ran the simulation with one set of parameter and a few days later ran the simulation again, the original parameter values were printed out after rounding and hence different from the actual ones used. The second time he ran it he input the printed out values and came up with a very different solution. This showed the sensativity of dynamical systems to initial conditions.
I'm really getting sick of the greenie environmentalists.
Actually government scientists.
A few decades ago they were crying about how we'd have no food to feed the overpopulated earth (Malthusians). Six billion and growing at 500,000/year (source UN).
Then they were crying about how the world will freeze from global cooling. See ocean current shutdown.
Then they were concerned that Florida was be flooded by global warming. Maybe not Florida but an island has reciently been evacuated due to rising tides.
Then we would die from mega-viruses created out of medical research. Ever heard of MRSA and the other hospital super bugs?
Now we're dying from genetically modified foods that are feeding millions of starving people (who happen to be starving because of the socialist government they live under, not because of lack of opportunities). I'm not aware of many socalists governments in developing countries, corrupt dictorships might be more acurate. In India one of the most prosprous well fed states is Kerella which has had a long tradition of communist governments. Have a listern to the discussions at the world trade talks to find out the cause of the stravation.
Sounds like you've got some rethinking to do or soon you will be sick of Greenie environmantalists saying "I told you so".
"You only need one event in several million. As soon as it has taken place the new plant has a huge selective advantage. That plant will multiply rapidly.
Unlike the researchers I am not surprised by this. If you apply herbicide to plants which is lethal, eventually a resistant survivor will turn up.
The glufosinate-ammonium herbicide used in this case put "huge selective pressure likely to cause rapid evolution of resistance".
So is Johnson unsuprised that a) once cross polination has occured
it will then spread rapidly, or b) herbicide resistance can develope rapidly without cross polination? The quote is ambiguous although I suspect its the former. Either way its not a good endorsment of the GMO+weedkiller stratergy.
As you are the sole developer a bug tracker might be overkill. You basically need to cordinate with yourself. Most of the need for a bug tracker system is when theres many developers who need to coordinate. Theres many other ways you could record the bugs, an 'open bugs' and a 'closed bugs' folder in your email program would do, 90% of the job.
Broadband is nowhere near fast enough for what I'd like.
Basically I want a communication system which is as close to sitting in the same room as someone else as its possible to get.
So I need 3D, live, instant, film quality, models with full surrond sound. Say about 1,000 by 1,000 by 1,000 resolution with 24 colour bits per voxel at 25 frames per second. So I need 6e11 bits per second before compression thats 600 giga bits per second. Compression should be good say 1:1000 giving 600 megabits per second. So things need to be about 600 times as fast as now before I'm happy!
Another project with similar aims of establishing prior art as a defence against frivolous patenting in the plant domain is
Traditional Ecological Knowledge Prior Art Database or (T.E.K.* P.A.D.).
(disclaimer I've contributed a large dataset to this database).
With the anouncment of google base, google shifted from a service which could help the small website content publisher, to a manopoly aiming to grab everyones content. Small providers could make a small living through hosting content and showing google adds. Now they want your content for free with no financial insentive.
As with the monopoly of Microsoft and it counter the open source movement, we need to start building a new open movement to counter Google. We need to quickly embrace the latest Web 2.0 ideas, particularly semantic features like RSS, atom, distributed folksominies, and licencing ideas like creative commons.
Rather than google becoming a monolithic hoover of content, we need to develop
a network of hobbyists, exchanging their content, under open licences, so that content is free for all.
The example given is a politician dodging the question of whether he threatened somebody or not. The (repeatedly asked) question was "Did you threaten him?" and the (repeated) answer was "I warned him.", without any clarification of the distinction being drawn. Why couldn't the politician say "No, it wasn't a threat, because..."?
I think we've seen quite a rise in aggressive interviewing of late. Often they are asking unanswerable questions, questions intended to trap the interviewee. The interviewee is well aware that it is a trap and responds with a fudge. No one in their right mind would actually answer the question as stated, so we get a deadlock.
These questions tend to be yes/no black and white questions, where the reality of the situation is more a shade of grey in the middle.
Recent BBC coverage of the last election certainly suffered through this type of questioning, which in the end reveals nothing. I'd much rather hear less aggressive more exploratory questioning, which probes deeper into the subject.
My complaint with Ajax is that it makes scripting the web much more difficult.
This illustrates a nice tension in the Web 2.0. On the one hand we have the push towards semantic markup, which should make it easier to make content machine readable. On the other AJAX which can make things harder.
Have you though of directly submitting XmlHttpRequest queries? In theory you could grab the content direct in xml rather than having to parse the resulting html.
Activists want to change not only things that other people own, but also change people against their will, and don't want to accept responsibility if they screw up
I think this is a miss charcterisation of most activists. Yes activists do want to see a change in society. Ultimatly it is the govenment which takes the decision and not the activist. As decision maker is the govenments role to take the large chunk of the responsibility.
Will his approach lead to faster computations? Of course not.
It posibly might. In my mathematical research I've often worked with squared distances in geometric calculations. They can often make things a lot simpler. A particular example is Gaussian curvature and I found a formula for this which eliminated a nasty square root. It quite a common thing to do, see a square root (or even a sin or cosine) in a formula, then square both sides and see if things work out easier.
As for actual numeric calculations, it does have the posibility of making thing exact and in some instances quicker. In modern computer graphics circles are often drawn using the differential equation defining a circle rather than resorting to sines and cosines.
I'm sceptical that this really represents a revolutionary aproach. In one part he talks about the aperence of irrational numbers in the diagonal of a square and how his method avoids these. The precence of irationals has been one of the most productive parts of mathematics giving rise to fields like Galoia theory and in turn the proof Fermats last theoreom.
Take a peek at the GameFAQs.com forums. They are frequented by youth and young adults. Notice the terrible grammar, horrible spelling, and the inability of many posters there to post coherent, sensible content.
Take two ten year old boys talking. Would you expect coherent, sensible content?
No you would probably get the same quality of content, stupid jokes, and numerious
errors. Maybe the quality of GamesFAQ reflects those who use it, if you have kids using a message board expect discussions at a kids level.
From a readers POV GamesFAQ is not much good, from a writers point of view: its a means of expression accessable to kids. Hopefully its also teaching them the rules of internet communication, over the years they may mature to post meaningful content and eventually obtain the pinical of internet forum acheivment: slashdot moderator status!
Instead of throwing billions at a problem that will occur again it might be best to treat the city as we treated people along the Miss.
Move them.
Yes Los Angeles should be moved due to earthquake risk!
Slashdot Mirror
I'm curious about the code base. For the screenshots it seems a lot like MediaWiki, but with other extensions I've not seen before allowing comments on pages and voting on stories and comments. Anyone know what they are using?
Get a grip and stop crying wolf, a save your breath for when its really needed.
I don't know whats what, but its probably best to keep this stuff in the wiki. By all means people can contribute to the page but make sure you understand the various ways of wikipedia before turning this into something bigger than it is.
Indeed its not a hoax, its more an insertion of a little known theory into the encyclopedia. Yes there is a lot of this sort of stuff in wikipedia, something like 1000 articles are deleted daily and they are often of some not notable band, theory, or person. This is probably a bigger problem than vandalism on wikipedia. The exposure of wikipedia now makes it a honey pot for those who wish to push their pet theory. Currently there a big arbitration debate on how to handle psudoscience articles. For the most part these don't have that much effect on mainstream articles, original research is those is often swiftly delete or marked with a tag to warn the reader.
If he remains in the game world, hes going to be in big trouble, the number of suckers will run out and he will have a lot of angry investors on his tail. It would not surprise me if these investors get some bounty hunters on his tail. In game his name will be dirt, probably punishment enough.
Jason is also more very keen on Google in preference to Wikipedia. But again the results of Google are the result of a hive mind: that of the collective set of all links by people who made webpages.
Anyway it must be said this is one of the most informed criticism of Wikipedia I've read.
I'm not sure if agree with this thesis, whilst there is a lot of changes in the grunt work, artists, coders etc. Its a different story for those higher up in the organization who have the a much longer track record and also have the responsibility for overall game design. We don't see Carmac or Shigeru Miyamoto doing much movement or leaving the industry. Yet its these people who are the Game Designers who set the overall feel of the game and the balance of the game.
No, please keep ideas of objectivity off this wiki!
Some of the greatest tensions in wikipedia are its struggle to be objective. Objectivity is something which can be aimed for but never achieved. The Neutral Point of View position in wikipedia is frequently used as a hammer to bash ideas which one person does not like. Often this can result in poor articles locked in an everlasting edit war and full of criticisms and counter criticisms.
So its good to see that Jimbo a one time Objectivist has finally accepted that there is a need for a more subjective space where people can get on with trying to move things forward without wasting all their time defending against the cynics.
One interesting example of mistakes with rounding errors was the Lonenz attractor which was an important part of the development of chaos thery. Lorenz first ran the simulation with one set of parameter and a few days later ran the simulation again, the original parameter values were printed out after rounding and hence different from the actual ones used. The second time he ran it he input the printed out values and came up with a very different solution. This showed the sensativity of dynamical systems to initial conditions.
A few decades ago they were crying about how we'd have no food to feed the overpopulated earth (Malthusians). Six billion and growing at 500,000/year (source UN).
Then they were crying about how the world will freeze from global cooling. See ocean current shutdown.
Then they were concerned that Florida was be flooded by global warming. Maybe not Florida but an island has reciently been evacuated due to rising tides.
Then we would die from mega-viruses created out of medical research. Ever heard of MRSA and the other hospital super bugs?
Now we're dying from genetically modified foods that are feeding millions of starving people (who happen to be starving because of the socialist government they live under, not because of lack of opportunities). I'm not aware of many socalists governments in developing countries, corrupt dictorships might be more acurate. In India one of the most prosprous well fed states is Kerella which has had a long tradition of communist governments. Have a listern to the discussions at the world trade talks to find out the cause of the stravation.
Sounds like you've got some rethinking to do or soon you will be sick of Greenie environmantalists saying "I told you so".
"You only need one event in several million. As soon as it has taken place the new plant has a huge selective advantage. That plant will multiply rapidly. Unlike the researchers I am not surprised by this. If you apply herbicide to plants which is lethal, eventually a resistant survivor will turn up. The glufosinate-ammonium herbicide used in this case put "huge selective pressure likely to cause rapid evolution of resistance".
So is Johnson unsuprised that a) once cross polination has occured it will then spread rapidly, or b) herbicide resistance can develope rapidly without cross polination? The quote is ambiguous although I suspect its the former. Either way its not a good endorsment of the GMO+weedkiller stratergy.
As you are the sole developer a bug tracker might be overkill. You basically need to cordinate with yourself. Most of the need for a bug tracker system is when theres many developers who need to coordinate. Theres many other ways you could record the bugs, an 'open bugs' and a 'closed bugs' folder in your email program would do, 90% of the job.
Dare to Dream.
Welcome to slashdot! don't let the moderators grid you down.
Another project with similar aims of establishing prior art as a defence against frivolous patenting in the plant domain is Traditional Ecological Knowledge Prior Art Database or (T.E.K.* P.A.D.). (disclaimer I've contributed a large dataset to this database).
With the anouncment of google base, google shifted from a service which could help the small website content publisher, to a manopoly aiming to grab everyones content. Small providers could make a small living through hosting content and showing google adds. Now they want your content for free with no financial insentive.
As with the monopoly of Microsoft and it counter the open source movement, we need to start building a new open movement to counter Google. We need to quickly embrace the latest Web 2.0 ideas, particularly semantic features like RSS, atom, distributed folksominies, and licencing ideas like creative commons.
Rather than google becoming a monolithic hoover of content, we need to develop a network of hobbyists, exchanging their content, under open licences, so that content is free for all.
I think we've seen quite a rise in aggressive interviewing of late. Often they are asking unanswerable questions, questions intended to trap the interviewee. The interviewee is well aware that it is a trap and responds with a fudge. No one in their right mind would actually answer the question as stated, so we get a deadlock. These questions tend to be yes/no black and white questions, where the reality of the situation is more a shade of grey in the middle.
Recent BBC coverage of the last election certainly suffered through this type of questioning, which in the end reveals nothing. I'd much rather hear less aggressive more exploratory questioning, which probes deeper into the subject.
This illustrates a nice tension in the Web 2.0. On the one hand we have the push towards semantic markup, which should make it easier to make content machine readable. On the other AJAX which can make things harder.
Have you though of directly submitting XmlHttpRequest queries? In theory you could grab the content direct in xml rather than having to parse the resulting html.
Bit-tech.net has an Article on Half Life-Lost Cost which has screenshots showing effect of HDR and link to a video.
I think this is a miss charcterisation of most activists. Yes activists do want to see a change in society. Ultimatly it is the govenment which takes the decision and not the activist. As decision maker is the govenments role to take the large chunk of the responsibility.
Well I'm one of those who got it first time, the name entirely gave the solution away, which of the dice looked like petals around a rose?
It posibly might. In my mathematical research I've often worked with squared distances in geometric calculations. They can often make things a lot simpler. A particular example is Gaussian curvature and I found a formula for this which eliminated a nasty square root. It quite a common thing to do, see a square root (or even a sin or cosine) in a formula, then square both sides and see if things work out easier.
As for actual numeric calculations, it does have the posibility of making thing exact and in some instances quicker. In modern computer graphics circles are often drawn using the differential equation defining a circle rather than resorting to sines and cosines.
I'm sceptical that this really represents a revolutionary aproach. In one part he talks about the aperence of irrational numbers in the diagonal of a square and how his method avoids these. The precence of irationals has been one of the most productive parts of mathematics giving rise to fields like Galoia theory and in turn the proof Fermats last theoreom.
Take two ten year old boys talking. Would you expect coherent, sensible content? No you would probably get the same quality of content, stupid jokes, and numerious errors. Maybe the quality of GamesFAQ reflects those who use it, if you have kids using a message board expect discussions at a kids level.
From a readers POV GamesFAQ is not much good, from a writers point of view: its a means of expression accessable to kids. Hopefully its also teaching them the rules of internet communication, over the years they may mature to post meaningful content and eventually obtain the pinical of internet forum acheivment: slashdot moderator status!
Instead of throwing billions at a problem that will occur again it might be best to treat the city as we treated people along the Miss. Move them. Yes Los Angeles should be moved due to earthquake risk!
Reminds me of the good samaratan story from the bible.