Is this another bleeding edge geekjoy toy or something we can turn grandma loose on? The staying power of a 25+ year old windows paradigm should be suggesting something to someone. Personally, I hate it when software I trust, understand and appreciate gets "improved" into something strange and unusable. Life on the trailing edge is actually comfortable, where the OS keeps its stupid, once-was-enough learning curve to itself and lets mission critical apps get on with it -- like Hawkeye's criterion for a good nurse, from the original M*A*S*H.
Anonymous has no reasonable right to remain anonymous because s/he asserts a right to anonymity? Like, you can get out of the Army if you're crazy, but if you want to get out of the Army you can't get out of the Army because you're not crazy. Catch 22.
This is why Madalyn Murray O'Hair would have invented Hell eventually, if she hadn't gone through it first.
I know middle-aged men who'd rather retire, who know networks well, who are paying $12,000 and up to our local community college (or is it a tech school?) just to get the baseline credentials they've already learned on the job. I suppose it makes sense. You don't know jack outside your own cubicle. But if everyone speaks the same language, shares the same vocabulary, marches in the same lockstep, then anyone can do the same h.a. job on demand. No more expensive idiosyncrasy. Every fish gets the exact same bicycle, just in time, and the blonde with the red shorts and the hammer has that much farther to run. Good luck.
Just for the sake of argument, has it ever seemed to anyone else that measuring a stright DIAMETER with a straight stick and a curved CIRCUMFERENCE with the same straight stick was just bound to cause trouble? How are a curved line and a straight line equivalent enough to measure with the same stick? Yes, you can measure both kinds of thing with string, but if you start going around corners with a piece of string, haven't you accidentally discovered the old dee-wye-dee-eks-iness of things?
Evolution is not easily understood, but as you point out, failing to understand how evolution works does not mean evolution doesn't happen. There's a lot of fuzzy thinking around, especially among evolutionists forced to defend their ideas in fundamental, high-relief arenas of metaphor and unreason they themselves abandoned in childhood, and are not even comfortable thinking about.
Perhaps evolutionists, considered as a species of human not well adapted to argument by crucifixion and fire, should collectively adapt by discarding our own comfortable cliches. For example, science and art diverge when the "Great Chain of Being," usually drawn as Fish -> Amphibian -> Reptile -> Mammal -> Monkey -> Ape -> Neanderthal -> You, takes an ironic place as explicator of natural selection.
However we can derive an adaptive strategy from our own Weltanschauung by adopting a Darwinian style of metaphor. To wit, the thing that drives evolution OF SPECIES (not, of course, individuals) is natural selection. In other words, the thing that drives the warm wax of DNA variability into specific niches is EVERYTHING ELSE, not teleology. Even the word "niche" is wrong, since it suggests womblike comfort. The edges of niches are razor sharp, and niches are defined by entire ecologies, not happy thoughts in the service of creature comforts.
Uhh. Lord, that's just too easy. Where are they gonna advertise this stuff, Mars TV or Manswers?
Let's not forget Lt. Yarr's favorite, Disenchanted. Or Data's perennial parfum of cherce, WD 69. Or Whorf's favorite acne creme, Slash Dot.
Yesterday's news ain't worth a plugged nickel. I don't even want a pdf file (x 365) clogging up my laptop. All I really want is TODAY's Doonesbury, plus Pat Oliphant's politicals and Dilbert. Anything more acerbic than that, I can turn on MSNBC's Keith & Rachel show. No commercials, please. Don't make me buy this stuff. Instead, issue a content derivative and trade it on NASDAQ, where nobody gets hurt.
Can't say as I've ever played a multiplayer game, aside from old-fashioned board games like go or parcheesi. If you mean stuff on a computer played by one person at a time, then I'd have to say hack-em-slash-em ADHDrrhea is pretty boring. I don't mind plot spoilers if I seek 'em out; that falls under the general rubric of General Tzu's predilection for knowing one's enemy, the lay of the land, etc. The converse, what makes a game good, is harder to think of, but I'd say in general that genuinely droll or self-aware AIs rank high on the list. Good games come from the bleeding edge occasionally, but consistent high quality comes from well back in the techological pack where the issues are known, the workarounds have been found and the development team is working with artists, musicians and cap-and-bells ludimeisters to fill the corners of existing limits. Great examples abound; Star Ocean 2 and Final Fantasy IX on PS1 come readily to mind. Just giving away a plot point? Depends, doesn't it? Othello kills Desdemona. There, the secret is out.
Yup. However, MFoG makes strong Go accessible to non-geeks, always presuming that Go players are not geeks in the accepted sense of the word. I mean, mogo requires command-line arguments that are a bit idiosyncratic, compared to GNU Go or even SmartGo (Anders Kierulf's excellent PC Go suite). Mogo's performance improves with time and memory, whereas Dave Fotland's takes advantage of dual-core processors on boxen likely to be found at home, Dell Inspirons, e.g. Where MFoG shines is the way Fotland has integrated MCTS into his own knowledge-based player. The result is very playable.
However, MCTS has made everybody's Go program a moving target, and nobody who claims the laurels today is likely to be wearing them tomorrow. Exciting times. As little as two years ago, absolutely nobody expected strong Go from a computer in this decade. By the end of the century, it may be necessary to play against 7-dan computers, and it's not at all clear whether the games will resemble anything in the last thousand years of history.
One of mogo's inhuman idiosyncracies, e.g., is that it never plays for the crushing victory and invariably settles for the minimum win required. That's weird, like playing against a Vulcan.
David Fotland's Many Faces of Go v12 runs under Wine (or at least CrossOver) pretty much out-of-the-box. There is one minor cosmetic issue with shadows under the go stones, but that's it. And, courtesy of the new Monte Carlo algorithms, it can whip your butt on a 9x9 board playing at 3 dan (!) which, until last year, I'd have thought was impossible.
Ok, I get the concept that "burn" in this context has nothing to do with oxidation. TFA is a bit hard to follow when it uses value-added sanitizing sales jargon to describe gnarly policy conundrums as though they were immediately solved and only awaiting President Obama's SOA. But...
Can anyone say precisely what the final products of this so-called "burn" will be, since obviously plutonium oxide is nobody's friend? Is there a stable thorium isotope? Instead of radon, we get what, precisely? Do all these heavy metals and transironic elements play nice with Thumper and Bambi? Do you want them in your tomato soup?
Common law has always held that handwritten notes are above reproach. If your teacher steals notes from your backpack, he or she, her department and your university are offering to pay for the next nine years of your Harvard education, IMHO. Think civil lawsuit.
If you start with ECHELON, then you kinda gotta assume that State of the Art follows the same "sipping from a fire hose" logic, only better.
The new electronic lingua franca for communications of all kinds, where the phone company is just one more client for terabytes of available bandwidth (so to speak), sort of requires you to listen to everyone if you want to listen to anyone. You have to dumb down to one channel of interest somehow.
IMHO, you could make an argument that First Amendment freedom of the press protects the right to listen as well as the right to mouth off, so the NSA gets a pass on that one. They have to listen to the 99.44% of/. that's utter drivel (of course, this ain't that;-)
Guttman's algorithm depended on early HD designs being sloppy. That is, the very "defect" that allowed overlapping bits to be detectable would allow multi-pass sloppy writes to smear out the original data.
Modern drives became smaller and vastly more precise. Hence, the mythology that one pass random write suffices because there is less or no overlap between bits written at different times, a theory which probably works equally well or better on high-precision non-mechanical drives like RW-DVDs or USB flash drives.
The probability that fatique of some sort occurs in the receiving medium, maybe detectable by chemical analysis, is a consideration, as is the likelihood that journaling file systems impose extra layers of unwanted data persistence. Hence, physical destruction.
I knew a Congressman's private secretary who could type 90 wpm, at least triple my ten-fingered speed. Her weapon of choice was an IBM Selectric sporting a snazzy qwerty keyboard. That, and absinthe, IIRC. Something green. Maybe it was Mountain Dew?
Pushing sixty five. I still play Mike Goetz' B03 version of Adventure, mainly just to enjoy how much faster a modern laptop running YAZE can generate the game than my original Kaypro 10. (Yes, pushing the red button does crash the emulation, but not Ubuntu Hardy.) I'd play Zork but revisiting the topiary garden can't be better than the original, now that we've seen (and can't scrub out of our memories) Edward Scissorhands.
Well, if Carl "Just Look Around" Sagan was right, and we're living in a recursive universe inside a black hole, then it follows that "background radiation" is our own event horizon observed from the wrong side and "gravity waves" would simply be time itself. As far as "blurry focus" goes, that's just an ordinary quantum effect, waves being particles.
Coffee and nicotine together, in massive college-student sized doses, make a potent psychoactive witch's brew. I used to smoke 2 to 4 packs of Winstons daily (back when a pack cost 50 cents!), and drink eight or nine cups of Folger's daily. The result is not exactly Fry in coffee nirvana, but it is extraordinary and hardly noticeable until you've quit both for a few years. Then you feel like you've taken stupid pills for the next eight years. You never do mellow out, just get clinically depressed.
What? Turn a bushel over the most gorgeously noctiluminescent species on the planet? Not bloody likely. Bright city lights are where the human species goes when it goes forth to multiply. You can't argue with a bower bird about the importance of bent twigs, and you can't argue with the starry-eyed on their way to a billion private paradisios.
Slashdot Mirror
Is this another bleeding edge geekjoy toy or something we can turn grandma loose on? The staying power of a 25+ year old windows paradigm should be suggesting something to someone. Personally, I hate it when software I trust, understand and appreciate gets "improved" into something strange and unusable. Life on the trailing edge is actually comfortable, where the OS keeps its stupid, once-was-enough learning curve to itself and lets mission critical apps get on with it -- like Hawkeye's criterion for a good nurse, from the original M*A*S*H.
Anonymous has no reasonable right to remain anonymous because s/he asserts a right to anonymity? Like, you can get out of the Army if you're crazy, but if you want to get out of the Army you can't get out of the Army because you're not crazy. Catch 22. This is why Madalyn Murray O'Hair would have invented Hell eventually, if she hadn't gone through it first.
I know middle-aged men who'd rather retire, who know networks well, who are paying $12,000 and up to our local community college (or is it a tech school?) just to get the baseline credentials they've already learned on the job. I suppose it makes sense. You don't know jack outside your own cubicle. But if everyone speaks the same language, shares the same vocabulary, marches in the same lockstep, then anyone can do the same h.a. job on demand. No more expensive idiosyncrasy. Every fish gets the exact same bicycle, just in time, and the blonde with the red shorts and the hammer has that much farther to run. Good luck.
Just for the sake of argument, has it ever seemed to anyone else that measuring a stright DIAMETER with a straight stick and a curved CIRCUMFERENCE with the same straight stick was just bound to cause trouble? How are a curved line and a straight line equivalent enough to measure with the same stick? Yes, you can measure both kinds of thing with string, but if you start going around corners with a piece of string, haven't you accidentally discovered the old dee-wye-dee-eks-iness of things?
...this is why you use keyfiles. Generate them from /dev/urandom, esp. on Macs which use yarrow. Dunno about Ubuntu.
Does it matter, really, how Fox goes down in flames so long as it honors the laws of gravity?
Just brilliant. And they say human beings have "autonoetic consciousness" and are truly capable of planning a visit to the head.
Evolution is not easily understood, but as you point out, failing to understand how evolution works does not mean evolution doesn't happen. There's a lot of fuzzy thinking around, especially among evolutionists forced to defend their ideas in fundamental, high-relief arenas of metaphor and unreason they themselves abandoned in childhood, and are not even comfortable thinking about.
Perhaps evolutionists, considered as a species of human not well adapted to argument by crucifixion and fire, should collectively adapt by discarding our own comfortable cliches. For example, science and art diverge when the "Great Chain of Being," usually drawn as Fish -> Amphibian -> Reptile -> Mammal -> Monkey -> Ape -> Neanderthal -> You, takes an ironic place as explicator of natural selection.
However we can derive an adaptive strategy from our own Weltanschauung by adopting a Darwinian style of metaphor. To wit, the thing that drives evolution OF SPECIES (not, of course, individuals) is natural selection. In other words, the thing that drives the warm wax of DNA variability into specific niches is EVERYTHING ELSE, not teleology. Even the word "niche" is wrong, since it suggests womblike comfort. The edges of niches are razor sharp, and niches are defined by entire ecologies, not happy thoughts in the service of creature comforts.
Uhh. Lord, that's just too easy. Where are they gonna advertise this stuff, Mars TV or Manswers? Let's not forget Lt. Yarr's favorite, Disenchanted. Or Data's perennial parfum of cherce, WD 69. Or Whorf's favorite acne creme, Slash Dot.
Yesterday's news ain't worth a plugged nickel. I don't even want a pdf file (x 365) clogging up my laptop. All I really want is TODAY's Doonesbury, plus Pat Oliphant's politicals and Dilbert. Anything more acerbic than that, I can turn on MSNBC's Keith & Rachel show. No commercials, please. Don't make me buy this stuff. Instead, issue a content derivative and trade it on NASDAQ, where nobody gets hurt.
Can't say as I've ever played a multiplayer game, aside from old-fashioned board games like go or parcheesi. If you mean stuff on a computer played by one person at a time, then I'd have to say hack-em-slash-em ADHDrrhea is pretty boring. I don't mind plot spoilers if I seek 'em out; that falls under the general rubric of General Tzu's predilection for knowing one's enemy, the lay of the land, etc. The converse, what makes a game good, is harder to think of, but I'd say in general that genuinely droll or self-aware AIs rank high on the list. Good games come from the bleeding edge occasionally, but consistent high quality comes from well back in the techological pack where the issues are known, the workarounds have been found and the development team is working with artists, musicians and cap-and-bells ludimeisters to fill the corners of existing limits. Great examples abound; Star Ocean 2 and Final Fantasy IX on PS1 come readily to mind. Just giving away a plot point? Depends, doesn't it? Othello kills Desdemona. There, the secret is out.
Yup. However, MFoG makes strong Go accessible to non-geeks, always presuming that Go players are not geeks in the accepted sense of the word. I mean, mogo requires command-line arguments that are a bit idiosyncratic, compared to GNU Go or even SmartGo (Anders Kierulf's excellent PC Go suite). Mogo's performance improves with time and memory, whereas Dave Fotland's takes advantage of dual-core processors on boxen likely to be found at home, Dell Inspirons, e.g. Where MFoG shines is the way Fotland has integrated MCTS into his own knowledge-based player. The result is very playable.
However, MCTS has made everybody's Go program a moving target, and nobody who claims the laurels today is likely to be wearing them tomorrow. Exciting times. As little as two years ago, absolutely nobody expected strong Go from a computer in this decade. By the end of the century, it may be necessary to play against 7-dan computers, and it's not at all clear whether the games will resemble anything in the last thousand years of history.
One of mogo's inhuman idiosyncracies, e.g., is that it never plays for the crushing victory and invariably settles for the minimum win required. That's weird, like playing against a Vulcan.
David Fotland's Many Faces of Go v12 runs under Wine (or at least CrossOver) pretty much out-of-the-box. There is one minor cosmetic issue with shadows under the go stones, but that's it. And, courtesy of the new Monte Carlo algorithms, it can whip your butt on a 9x9 board playing at 3 dan (!) which, until last year, I'd have thought was impossible.
Ok, I get the concept that "burn" in this context has nothing to do with oxidation. TFA is a bit hard to follow when it uses value-added sanitizing sales jargon to describe gnarly policy conundrums as though they were immediately solved and only awaiting President Obama's SOA. But...
Can anyone say precisely what the final products of this so-called "burn" will be, since obviously plutonium oxide is nobody's friend? Is there a stable thorium isotope? Instead of radon, we get what, precisely? Do all these heavy metals and transironic elements play nice with Thumper and Bambi? Do you want them in your tomato soup?
Thank you, President Obama!
What brave new word was that? Soma? Whatever, I hope they shoot the film in Lego animatronics, like Star Wars.
Common law has always held that handwritten notes are above reproach. If your teacher steals notes from your backpack, he or she, her department and your university are offering to pay for the next nine years of your Harvard education, IMHO. Think civil lawsuit.
If you start with ECHELON, then you kinda gotta assume that State of the Art follows the same "sipping from a fire hose" logic, only better. The new electronic lingua franca for communications of all kinds, where the phone company is just one more client for terabytes of available bandwidth (so to speak), sort of requires you to listen to everyone if you want to listen to anyone. You have to dumb down to one channel of interest somehow. IMHO, you could make an argument that First Amendment freedom of the press protects the right to listen as well as the right to mouth off, so the NSA gets a pass on that one. They have to listen to the 99.44% of /. that's utter drivel (of course, this ain't that ;-)
"significantly more complex DNA repair systems"...?
Is it even possible to outlaw mutation? Viral plasticity trumps genetic engineering.
Guttman's algorithm depended on early HD designs being sloppy. That is, the very "defect" that allowed overlapping bits to be detectable would allow multi-pass sloppy writes to smear out the original data.
Modern drives became smaller and vastly more precise. Hence, the mythology that one pass random write suffices because there is less or no overlap between bits written at different times, a theory which probably works equally well or better on high-precision non-mechanical drives like RW-DVDs or USB flash drives.
The probability that fatique of some sort occurs in the receiving medium, maybe detectable by chemical analysis, is a consideration, as is the likelihood that journaling file systems impose extra layers of unwanted data persistence. Hence, physical destruction.
I knew a Congressman's private secretary who could type 90 wpm, at least triple my ten-fingered speed. Her weapon of choice was an IBM Selectric sporting a snazzy qwerty keyboard. That, and absinthe, IIRC. Something green. Maybe it was Mountain Dew?
Pushing sixty five. I still play Mike Goetz' B03 version of Adventure, mainly just to enjoy how much faster a modern laptop running YAZE can generate the game than my original Kaypro 10. (Yes, pushing the red button does crash the emulation, but not Ubuntu Hardy.) I'd play Zork but revisiting the topiary garden can't be better than the original, now that we've seen (and can't scrub out of our memories) Edward Scissorhands.
Well, if Carl "Just Look Around" Sagan was right, and we're living in a recursive universe inside a black hole, then it follows that "background radiation" is our own event horizon observed from the wrong side and "gravity waves" would simply be time itself. As far as "blurry focus" goes, that's just an ordinary quantum effect, waves being particles.
Coffee and nicotine together, in massive college-student sized doses, make a potent psychoactive witch's brew. I used to smoke 2 to 4 packs of Winstons daily (back when a pack cost 50 cents!), and drink eight or nine cups of Folger's daily. The result is not exactly Fry in coffee nirvana, but it is extraordinary and hardly noticeable until you've quit both for a few years. Then you feel like you've taken stupid pills for the next eight years. You never do mellow out, just get clinically depressed.
What? Turn a bushel over the most gorgeously noctiluminescent species on the planet? Not bloody likely. Bright city lights are where the human species goes when it goes forth to multiply. You can't argue with a bower bird about the importance of bent twigs, and you can't argue with the starry-eyed on their way to a billion private paradisios.