Yes! Inner Space, where you fly a cute little spaceship around, fighting to reclaim your hard drive from viruses, and capturing Icons from the actual programs therein. (Or blowing them up, if you really hate their applications). Man, that game was fun. I found it (or a trial copy of it) on a used 486 years ago; it was great fun, even if you couldn't save, or be more than one ship, or buy most of the fun weapons (though there were tricks to switch to another ship on your team, and you can have your enemy's arms as the spoils of war.... if the police weren't around to take you in for it... or if you don't mind going after the police...) Anyway. The game was pretty slick.
Prey is not only laughably implausible in reality... it's only incidentally related. Prey featured nano-robots forming a sort of distributed-group-consciousness-thingy. No one is making nano-robots. People are making nano-tubes, which have about as much relationship to nano robots as a three-foot section of copper phone wire has to a regular-sized robot... and you need more than just that for Prey, you need wireless-mesh-communication self-aware mind-controlling evil nanorobots who can fly through the air like nanoblackhelicpoters.
Next to all that, the way he butchers computing isn't even worth mentioning.
But you can't try to go through the process because the zomg cabal is there to keep you down!1!
Seriously. Administrative abuse is a problem at Wikipedia like it is at any site that has volunteer administrators (and many online and real-world institutions that have paid and unpaid administrators). It's the insinuations that there's some sort of evil cabal that are ridiculous. As a formerly-active Wikipedia administrator typically more interested in keeping the place clean than in Politics, I can say that it's pretty much a daily occurrence for some nut or another to try and edit some page in some ridiculous fashion (you know, Bush is the devil, XYZ group is corrupt and here's a bunch of blogs saying why, look at my free energy device, et cetera et cetera), get blocked, then cry zomgfoul! the cabal is keeping me down!!! Quite frankly, if you can't differentiate yourself from the Time Cube guy when you're crying foul, your complaint (valid or otherwise) will be lost in a noise of stupidity. (Tips for standing out: Be rational and collected, try to be calm, and drop the zomgopressed!!! angle.)
On the contrary. I contend that it is possible that, given adequate dexterity, one could construct a robot that would take a preselected song and render the music in a way which evokes the same emotional qualities from the performance that a skilled human could accomplish. In fact, there's an easy way you can do it without the robot: record a skilled human's performance into an MP3 file and play it back.:P Now, physical reproductions are a lot harder, but entirely plausible.
I further suspect that with adequate research into psychology and music, it would indeed be possible to construct a robot to render most arbitrary scores in a manner emotionally appropriate to that song. Aesthetics are measurable, techniques observable. It would be nontrivial, certainly, to achieve this, but it is not too hard to imagine it being done as early as in, oh, the next fifty years or so. After all, it's not that hard to figure out "minor keys, slow tempo, hey, this might be a sad song", and while there are certainly exceptions and outliers, a little data mining on musical scores could go a signifcant way. (Ooh, now there's an idea for an application of approximate nonnegative matrix factorization! mwuahahhaha.)
Composing great works is the hard problem, because most of those can tie into some rather creative Ideas, and it's harder to come up with those than it is to encode music and gestures and such.
"You need puzzles and monsters" eh? Explain Second Life then.
Easy. Second Life sucks.
Or, how's this? It's a puzzle how to build anything moderately interesting!
And it's filled with monsters who are just there to indulge their deviant fantasies!
This is, indeed, good news! This, plus wind-power, some recent excellent solar-power breakthroughs and throw in hydro, will no doubt drastically reduce the dependency on foreign oil. However, I am a bit hesitant to do the truffle-shuffle just yet because of the oil cartel and hits powerful hold on certain Washington big-wigs and other powerful old farts. Correct me if I'm wrong (which is most of the time), but weren't a few of the alternative power studies debunked by 'independent research' funded by big oil companies? I can't seem to recall off the top of my head... Any oil company worth its salt is looking for a way to get in on the alternative-energy game the minute it becomes profitable (and maybe before if they can stake out the territory). And, honestly, I'd imagine that there are nontrivial expertise overlaps between drilling for oil and drilling for geothermal power that would put the oil industry at an advantage over other-random-people for getting in on the action. And if geothermal energy is meaningfully profitable, geothermal dollars are as good as petroleum ones.
Go look at BP. They really want in on the action...
Yeah. The Evil Government (tm) doesn't need to connect bots to log channels; they could always just stuff a sniffer on the fiber going to a major IRC hub server, and go from there.
P.S. This isn't data mining. This is logging channels and putting the results in a search engine. Data mining is when you take a mass of data and try to determine some nontrivial nonobvious characteristics of the relationships of the data therein. Think of Google: Search engines are not data mining. The advertising engine that they use to determine which ads to show to which users of which sites and how to charge for them to maximize their profit and assorted Fun Stuff Like That.... that's data mining.
Going into channels is cheap. I can leave a client open on my desktop for hours on end and it doesn't really interfere with anything. I can leave a client open on my server (irssi, and connect to it with PuTTY) for months at a time.
Since it's so darned easy, if there's any slight benefit to me being in the channel (maybe I might look at an interesting or informative conversation hours later, maybe someone can page me and get my attention, maybe...) then I might as well leave the connection open. At the very least it saves me some time when I next connect.
TFA is light on details, but it seems the proposal that was withdrawn was something about requiring cable companies to play material from minority-owned small businesses on the "excess channels" they don't use. So, it's affirmative action.
No, no, if the mass is already existing and you want to do something to it, you're affecting mass, but if you want to actually create this mass, to cause it, to make it happen.... then you are actually effecting mass.
Think of it this way, if you're so inclined:
Effecting a reduction in carbon emissions is likely to affect global warming.
No. Grey goo is a stupid fear, when you get down to it. The energy budget isn't there. You can't just walk over and dissolve rocks and glass and concrete and steel by trying to eat them. There isn't a net energy gain to be had.
Smart scientists are worried about nanoparticles getting stuck places they shouldn't and doing bad things there. Like causing cancer. Or killing fish. Or accumulating in fish and killing people who eat fish. Or getting into peoples' brains and causing... brain problem stuff.
It's like saying that if you don't like the subscriptions and lock-ins that the cell companies require in the US, that you just don't use a cell phone. The price of ignoring it is huge. The difference here is that you can at least use a regular phone. and there are prepaid phones. And they all interoperate! Not so with Facebook! If you don't have an account on your university's network, you can't see more than names of people (and tiny pictures).
Re:Perhaps it is because it is a Jew mecca?
on
RIAA Afraid of Harvard
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· Score: 2, Funny
Perhaps because it is a Jew mecca? Silly troll! Muslims go to Mecca; jews go to Jerusalem.
No wonder your species has a reputation for being stupid.
"but I suspect this wild success is the exception, rather than the rule."
why, whats your logic behind that, because you give very good examples of WHY such technology races benifit us then proceed to try trash it based on nothing. everytime man has been invovled in competition of this nature, he has produced better tech, and there's no reason to think we won't this time.
Couple of things. First, we've already done a Space Race. The problems of Space have been attacked, and been solved (to within the appropriate mission parameters as applicable). There are diminishing returns on research in the area. Sending a crew to the Moon, sending a crew to Mars.... it's a quantitative difference, sure, but it's not the same deal as sending people up there to begin with. Secondly, on that note, I don't think the Next Big Thing is going to be spectacularly space-related. Biotech/genetics, possibly, or maybe some nanomateriwhatever stuff, but not so much Spacey. I mean, even practical fusion power (which would be an awesome next-big-thing and which could be construed as Spacey) isn't something that you could reasonably expect to walk away from a new major space program with.
Past performance does not necessarily indicate future results... it'd be naive to assume that throwing money at space will keep coming back with awesomely wonderful things, and there are so many things that we could be spending money on, research and otherwise.
Russia having two space ports (similar to how the US has the Kennedy and Johnson space centers) is going to be one of the best things they can do. The more efficient the process of launching stuff into Earth orbit, not to mention out of orbit for interplanetary missions, the closer everyone comes to space based living. See, why the heck "everyone" would want space-based living is beyond me. There's some darned nice stuff in Terrestrial living, like flowers and trees and grass and an atmosphere. What's the huge advantage of recreating all that stuff in space? Don't tell me it's "more room" or any garbage like that; it's fairly well-established there is plenty of space on the ground for people, it's the resources to support said people that impose limits on population capacity... and shooting things up into space doesn't do much to create more of such resources, either.
A multinational space race (or even better, cooperative missions) benefits everyone, even if its the side effects of materials developed for aerospace programs being used for everyday life. Yes, but: does it benefit everyone more than the tax money spent on such matters was just left in peoples' paychecks, to do whatever money normally does from that point on? This is not immediately obvious. Sure, previous space / weapons research money hit the jackpot by leading to cheap transistors and Computers, but I suspect this wild success is the exception, rather than the rule.
My guess is that they'd point the ATC system facing Up, for planes waay above the towers, instead of aiming it down at homes near all that pesky Terrain.
And besides, it's not as if they have dozens of regular ATC towers over your mountains right now, is it?
Not me - I specifically wrote in "not to be spent on hookers" on my last check to the IRS.
Money is fungible. So they'll just take the $N allocated to hookers from your check and spend it on Pork instead, then take $N from the Pork fund and use that instead.
If it weren't for debt, you wouldn't need 30 years worth of money to buy a home. Right. A rich developer would have bought up the land, built a house or some apartments, and started charging rent for it. Since he's the one with the capital.
I'd like you to meet my close personal friend, Osama Bin Laden, a leading terrorist. He thinks we're all infidels, that this country is full of fornication, homosexuality, intoxicants, gambling, and usury. He'd like it if we installed Sharia law. He'd be thrilled if this little country called Israel (an ally of the US) were utterly destroyed.
He'd also like the US out of the middle East, true. And he has some good reasons to hate the US for its meddling around there, but to say that they just want to be left alone is poppycock.
Because it makes so much sense to save up for a house for 30 years before moving into it!
(Maybe more than 30 years. If you're not living in your own house you're paying rent somewhere.)
Some of us live in places where a small home can be had from $4,000 or so. Like in rural West Virginia. The rest of us should be glad for at least this aspect of a debt-based society.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes! Inner Space, where you fly a cute little spaceship around, fighting to reclaim your hard drive from viruses, and capturing Icons from the actual programs therein. (Or blowing them up, if you really hate their applications). Man, that game was fun. I found it (or a trial copy of it) on a used 486 years ago; it was great fun, even if you couldn't save, or be more than one ship, or buy most of the fun weapons (though there were tricks to switch to another ship on your team, and you can have your enemy's arms as the spoils of war.... if the police weren't around to take you in for it... or if you don't mind going after the police...) Anyway. The game was pretty slick.
Next to all that, the way he butchers computing isn't even worth mentioning.
Seriously. Administrative abuse is a problem at Wikipedia like it is at any site that has volunteer administrators (and many online and real-world institutions that have paid and unpaid administrators). It's the insinuations that there's some sort of evil cabal that are ridiculous. As a formerly-active Wikipedia administrator typically more interested in keeping the place clean than in Politics, I can say that it's pretty much a daily occurrence for some nut or another to try and edit some page in some ridiculous fashion (you know, Bush is the devil, XYZ group is corrupt and here's a bunch of blogs saying why, look at my free energy device, et cetera et cetera), get blocked, then cry zomgfoul! the cabal is keeping me down!!! Quite frankly, if you can't differentiate yourself from the Time Cube guy when you're crying foul, your complaint (valid or otherwise) will be lost in a noise of stupidity. (Tips for standing out: Be rational and collected, try to be calm, and drop the zomgopressed!!! angle.)
I further suspect that with adequate research into psychology and music, it would indeed be possible to construct a robot to render most arbitrary scores in a manner emotionally appropriate to that song. Aesthetics are measurable, techniques observable. It would be nontrivial, certainly, to achieve this, but it is not too hard to imagine it being done as early as in, oh, the next fifty years or so. After all, it's not that hard to figure out "minor keys, slow tempo, hey, this might be a sad song", and while there are certainly exceptions and outliers, a little data mining on musical scores could go a signifcant way. (Ooh, now there's an idea for an application of approximate nonnegative matrix factorization! mwuahahhaha.)
Composing great works is the hard problem, because most of those can tie into some rather creative Ideas, and it's harder to come up with those than it is to encode music and gestures and such.
Agreed. Grandparent lends credence to the stereotype that RAR is a warez format.
"You need puzzles and monsters" eh? Explain Second Life then.
Easy. Second Life sucks.Or, how's this? It's a puzzle how to build anything moderately interesting! And it's filled with monsters who are just there to indulge their deviant fantasies!
Or, another simple one. "Hype hype hype."
I could go on for hours^Wminutes!
They have portable scales you can drive trucks onto. You can also invoke the magic words "gross vehicle weight".
Go look at BP. They really want in on the action...
P.S. This isn't data mining. This is logging channels and putting the results in a search engine. Data mining is when you take a mass of data and try to determine some nontrivial nonobvious characteristics of the relationships of the data therein. Think of Google: Search engines are not data mining. The advertising engine that they use to determine which ads to show to which users of which sites and how to charge for them to maximize their profit and assorted Fun Stuff Like That.... that's data mining.
Since it's so darned easy, if there's any slight benefit to me being in the channel (maybe I might look at an interesting or informative conversation hours later, maybe someone can page me and get my attention, maybe...) then I might as well leave the connection open. At the very least it saves me some time when I next connect.
Think of it this way, if you're so inclined: Effecting a reduction in carbon emissions is likely to affect global warming.
Smart scientists are worried about nanoparticles getting stuck places they shouldn't and doing bad things there. Like causing cancer. Or killing fish. Or accumulating in fish and killing people who eat fish. Or getting into peoples' brains and causing... brain problem stuff.
:)
why, whats your logic behind that, because you give very good examples of WHY such technology races benifit us then proceed to try trash it based on nothing. everytime man has been invovled in competition of this nature, he has produced better tech, and there's no reason to think we won't this time.
Couple of things. First, we've already done a Space Race. The problems of Space have been attacked, and been solved (to within the appropriate mission parameters as applicable). There are diminishing returns on research in the area. Sending a crew to the Moon, sending a crew to Mars.... it's a quantitative difference, sure, but it's not the same deal as sending people up there to begin with. Secondly, on that note, I don't think the Next Big Thing is going to be spectacularly space-related. Biotech/genetics, possibly, or maybe some nanomateriwhatever stuff, but not so much Spacey. I mean, even practical fusion power (which would be an awesome next-big-thing and which could be construed as Spacey) isn't something that you could reasonably expect to walk away from a new major space program with.Past performance does not necessarily indicate future results... it'd be naive to assume that throwing money at space will keep coming back with awesomely wonderful things, and there are so many things that we could be spending money on, research and otherwise.
See, why the heck "everyone" would want space-based living is beyond me. There's some darned nice stuff in Terrestrial living, like flowers and trees and grass and an atmosphere. What's the huge advantage of recreating all that stuff in space? Don't tell me it's "more room" or any garbage like that; it's fairly well-established there is plenty of space on the ground for people, it's the resources to support said people that impose limits on population capacity... and shooting things up into space doesn't do much to create more of such resources, either. A multinational space race (or even better, cooperative missions) benefits everyone, even if its the side effects of materials developed for aerospace programs being used for everyday life. Yes, but: does it benefit everyone more than the tax money spent on such matters was just left in peoples' paychecks, to do whatever money normally does from that point on? This is not immediately obvious. Sure, previous space / weapons research money hit the jackpot by leading to cheap transistors and Computers, but I suspect this wild success is the exception, rather than the rule.
And besides, it's not as if they have dozens of regular ATC towers over your mountains right now, is it?
Money is fungible. So they'll just take the $N allocated to hookers from your check and spend it on Pork instead, then take $N from the Pork fund and use that instead.
- you can't get criminal charges for copyright infringement unless you're doing it commercially for the $$$
- you won't get civil charges for copyright infringement from some company in Japan if you're way over here in America, it's not worth it
- therefore, if they've not licensed it to some American interest (who could sue you), you're probably in the clear
and by "in the clear" I mean "in the big foggy misty unmapped legal gray zone over there".Right. A rich developer would have bought up the land, built a house or some apartments, and started charging rent for it. Since he's the one with the capital.
He'd also like the US out of the middle East, true. And he has some good reasons to hate the US for its meddling around there, but to say that they just want to be left alone is poppycock.
Yay for our debt-based society!
Because it makes so much sense to save up for a house for 30 years before moving into it!(Maybe more than 30 years. If you're not living in your own house you're paying rent somewhere.)
Some of us live in places where a small home can be had from $4,000 or so. Like in rural West Virginia. The rest of us should be glad for at least this aspect of a debt-based society.