For those with a large monitor, the GP was doing us all a favor. It gets difficult for the human brain to read text with overly long lines: the optimal width is about 65 characters. Longer than that and the eye gets lost when traveling back to the left for the next line. Basic usability/readability knowledge.
If you use a genetic algorithm to generate the AI decision trees for both "groups" (towns; merchant guilds; monster camps) and individuals, this sort of solves your problem. Because not only is it evolving smarter pathfinding/survival AI (not necessarily combat AI) for the monsters, it's also evolving smarter AI for the rabbits and foxes and towns too. If you add in random small mutations to creature stats, too, you'll really be cooking with fire.
It is really difficult though! I remember when UO first came out, they tried simulating a basic ecology. Within hours everyone had killed all the animals to get their weapon skills up, and the monsters were hungry... so they invaded the towns. It wasn't a problem with the ecology, it was a problem with there not being any monsters to kill as a noob! (they were all way too hard)
The third possible solution is to use emergent behavior AI to build a gameworld that practically runs itself. Goblins are getting hungry, so they start raiding the nearby town. Nearby town gets defensive, and starts adding quests to kill goblins. Goblins eventually either die out or move on. NPC wizard walking through his enchanted wood randomly finds an artifact that drives him mad, and he starts raising skeletal minions and so forth to protect his tower. The abomination needs to be wiped out, so the Nature Protector Treehugging Express faction gives out quests to kill his minions, and an epic quest to take down the crazed archmage.
And so forth. Using simple rules for behavior combined with human interaction will create a constantly changing gameworld that will actually stay interesting.
Simple. Because it's insanely hard to create enough actual content to keep up with players' demands.
Which is why emergent behavior and AI needs to take a huge leap forward to make MMOs really fun. I'm actually working on building a virtual ecology using genetic algorithms to generate AI decision trees at the moment. First it's just getting mobs to find food and eat it. Then it's adding in an aggressive mob that will eat the first set of mobs if it can find them. After that, it's simply adding in a mating procedure so that mobs have to find each other in order to mate (and produce the next generation). The tough part will be fitness and how to separate out mobs that are different enough to actually become a separate "species."
Thanks for clearing it up. The anecdote was told to me while I was quite plastered at a new years part last year. Combined with lessened cerebral functions and time... Well, you can understand how it was misconstrued!
There are many terrorist organizations which are not religious.
In fact, one could argue that a majority of the religious terrorism in the middle east is actually nationalist terrorism disguised as religious extremism. If you look at the causes which drive people to the al-qaida bootcamps: oppression (by US forces or otherwise - AQ was not active in Iraq before we had a military presence there), lower standards of living, and so forth. People turn to religion when times get tough. Other people use that to twist the religion. They convince people at the end of their rope that the only thing that will make things better for them, their family, and their country is to go blow up the people fucking them over.
The fact your PC idiots refuse to wake up from your delusional world is why we are in for a world of hurt over the next 4-8 years.
The fact that you ignorant asshats refuse to wake up from your delusional world of hate and bigotry, and perhaps read why people hate the US instead of believing the line "because we're not muslim" is why we've had muslim terrorist attacks on this country and its consulates. Look up the term blowback.
Flying from JFK to Ontario, California the other week: Waiting in the ticket line for three hours to check in. I thought getting there four hours ahead of time would be OK. I was waiting for another 30 minutes in the security line.
By the time I got to the x-ray machine, I was notably distressed. I was afraid I was going to miss my flight. I was fidgeting, and looking around, and looking at my watch a lot. The TSA subcontractors stared at me. After I went through the metal detector, the subcontractor waiting for me asked me why I was so nervous. He asked me the same question several times over to make sure I wasn't making something up.
In short, it's not just being irate or arguing now: simply being worried you'll miss the flight due to the ineptitude of the airline checkin process (they had two automatic kiosks up and four agents behind the desk. At JFK. Two days before Christmas. Both of the kiosks had issues. Of all the checkin counters there, theirs had the longest line. It snaked out of the ropes, around the lobby and back. It was nearly out the door of the airport) is enough to get you suspicious looks.
A friend was on tour with Godspeed! You Black Emperor. They were eating at an IHOP, somewhere in the midwest. Now, Godspeed is kind of an odd band. I don't know if they still do, but they used to squat in an abandoned warehouse up in Quebec. They're peacefully anti-establishment. They dress kind of odd (compared to your typical small-town midwestern family).
Twenty minutes or so after they sat down to their pancakes and eggs, four county sheriffs show up at the restaurant. They sit down and begin questioning the band about terrorism, if they were terrorists, what they were planning on blowing up / shooting up, et cetera.
In other words, some small-town hick decided to call the police on a potential terror threat because this band looked a little different than they did.
Also:
ANY "family of nine" is going to seem damn peculiar on an airline flight. It doesn't matter if it's the Brady Bunch.
Even if they're hardline Catholic? Even if they're hard-line southern baptist? There were several families in the PCA (presbyterian church of america) church I group up in who not only believed makeup and jewelry was evil, but also contraceptives. Each family in that (admittedly, small) portion of the congregation had about six or seven kids. Are these families going to raise a few eyebrows? Sure. Should these families be suspected of being terrorists? Hell no. Sure they're weird, sure they're not the norm.
But neither was the (rather large) family of Hasidic Jews that were aboard my flight from Atlanta to NYC the other day. They dressed different. They had a large family. If their kids were asking which section of the plane was safest, and if they were safe sitting next to the engine, would that have aroused suspicion? I'm guessing not.
It seemed crazy to me that in the New Orleans situation, it was expected of everyone to get out under their own steam by private car or regular transport.
Wait, the US has public transportation?
Sorry to burst your bubble, but there are about 400,000 people living in nawleans. The average capacity for a bus is about 60 folks (guestimate based on experience with greyhound). 5000 buses. I couldn't find accurate figures for average train capacity. I'm making a wild estimate at 400, being 40 passengers per car on a 10 car train. And that's if there are trains available. Simply being able to get that many trains into new orleans, and out at a reasonable time is kind of unthinkable. I don't know much about NO, but I can bet that their train station(s) are not as large nor as organized as, say, Pennsylvania Station in Manhattan. Being able to bus/train the entire population out of New Orleans, given the state of our public/mass transportation (horrible) is kind of ludicrous. They MIGHT be able to load one train every half hour. And that's if amtrak could get that many trains there within a reasonable amount of time. School buses could be used for evac. There are tons of things that could have been done.
But basing evacuation quality on the quality of our bus/train service, adding in the hysteria, adding in the scams (never underestimate the kind of things people will pull on each other when times are desperate), adding in the crime rate in new orleans, so on and so forth... I'm actually surprised it was handled as well (as bad as it may have been) as it was. It could have been a whole lot worse. There could have been more mistakes made. Given the quality of our governance, the quality of our infrastructure, it could have been a hell of a lot worse.
*gruff voice* Ahhhh, here's yer problem here. Ya need to have yer polarity shifted on the rear axle, an' ya need to re-balance the valancies on yer break lights. Winter's comin' so if ya wanna be safe, ya better recharge the van duh wall forces in yer tires jus to be safe!
Very, very few of any skins for any program are aesthetically pleasing. Look through the firefox skins - you get paint shop pro wood grain texture crap, screencaps from an anime stretched with buttons overlayed, and other ugliness. There are *maybe* five skins for firefox that are decent. I haven't looked into opera's, because I don't like its UI. It's simply not elegant. Not the way chrome is (Chrome: everyday at-home browsing; Firefox: at-work developing). Hell, even most gnome/kde themes are utter crap.
In my experience, skins tend to come in a couple different styles:
* Operating system integration (Look, Opera on my windows box looks like safari now! lolz -- or KDE/Gnome theme integration) * "Look Ma I Just Pirated Photoshop And Followed A Tutorial On Making Shadowed Round and/or Glowy Glass Buttons!" * "I feel like making things more playful. Unfortunately, my icons for buttons suck" * "High contrast makes everything better. Always." (I understand that this is necessary for some people as an accessibility need, but why do they have to be so damn ugly?) * "I don't know what anti-alias means." * "I want to stare at this hot cartoon I idolize all day, and maybe some other people will like to, too"
Rarely are community skins any good. I've found a few gems to spruce up my gnome desktop, but it took quite a bit of digging.
One of the reasons MS wanted IE (and the internet with it) to languish:
JavaScript was developed as a pie-in-the-sky idea that would bring desktop-like applications to the web browser. It blundered, partially because functional programming (even with prototypal inheritance) is difficult for most people to wrap their heads around - and partially because its syntax for typical object-oriented duties is downright strange.
So, I blame the stagnation of the internet on three things: IE taking over marketshare (to prevent a competitor from showing up delivering apps via the browser), dot-bust, and the high learning curve of effective javascript.
Disclaimer: I'm a full-time JS developer, and love the language. Even its little quirks. I don't know if that makes me insane, masochistic, or both.
I can choose one from 3,000 of ass-ugly user-created skins! I can't decide whether I want unreadable shit-brown on black, or neon green on pink! OH how about this one? it has racecars!
Most industrial waste cannot be incinerated safely.
C2C is Cradle to Cradle - a biomimicry effort spearheaded by William McDonough. It's also the name of his book: an explanation of the movement, and case studies where he has been brought on to design new factories and processes. One case was the river rouge ford plant; another case was a carpet manufacturer. The River Rouge plant now features things like a green roof (vegetation) where prairie birds nest. It also reclaims and cleans rainwater and runoff from the parking lots. As a result of his efforts, the water coming out of the plant is cleaner than the water coming into the plant.
If they utilized a C2C approach, they wouldn't have to even follow a lot of the regulations out there (because they would either re-use the waste products or sell them to someone else who would use them, instead of sequestering/disposing of them). Biomimicry for the win.
The poster's point was that we should be moving towards a "Cradle to Cradle" type manufacturing climate. Companies that clean up their wastes, or change their processes so the waste can be sold as raw material in either their process or someone elses', end up paying a lot less in regulatory fees.
The point is, our urine, feces, and flatulance/exhalations are used in a cycle. The nitrogen cycle, the water cycle, the carbon dioxide cycle. Waste from manufacturing isn't used in any cycle - it's typically collected and stored (even scrubbers need to be replaced; sequestering waste products isn't the same as reusing them).
Every time you eat food, you're eating your ancestor's waste matter. It's just transformed.
Every time we make something new, we should be figuring out how to incorporate waste matter into it.
Recycling as we have it today isn't true recycling. It's just delaying the junkyard (carpet made from soda bottles is unlikely to be used to make new carpet or new soda bottles - it goes directly to the dump; mainly due to the backing).
Any useful process creates waste, and the process of "cleaning up" that waste is both unlikely to make that waste actually consumable, and generates waste of its own.
The process of life creates waste, and the process of cleaning up that waste creates more life. We need to use biomimicry and smart manufacturing techniques if we're going to survive past the next 2-3 hundred years. Otherwise we're just making the world a little more poisonous every year...
Well, without the moon we wouldn't have eclipses. And without eclipses, we wouldn't have superpowered superhumans fighting to save the world. By saving a cheerleader.
True- this is just an avenue for people to ask questions of the government on policies that aren't necessarily straightforward. It is not an avenue for vetting or voting for laws. It is not an avenue even for steering the direction of the government. It's simply an outlet for people to ask questions that might be answered in obama's weekly youtube appearance.
In all seriousness, when I found out that the games that came with QBASIC were editable, I immediately asked my father how to cheat at them. He handed me the Learn QBASIC book. I was probably 7 at the time.
Went through Logo in middle school (in a LEGO robotics class), and then Pascal and C++ in high school; C++ again and PHP as well in college (not university.. I'm a drop out...)
Slashdot Mirror
For those with a large monitor, the GP was doing us all a favor. It gets difficult for the human brain to read text with overly long lines: the optimal width is about 65 characters. Longer than that and the eye gets lost when traveling back to the left for the next line. Basic usability/readability knowledge.
So complex a spreadsheet can do it!
Eve was specifically designed to weed out people who don't like playing Excel with a pretty space background.
Port Authority owns NY penn station. Not Amtrak.
If you use a genetic algorithm to generate the AI decision trees for both "groups" (towns; merchant guilds; monster camps) and individuals, this sort of solves your problem. Because not only is it evolving smarter pathfinding/survival AI (not necessarily combat AI) for the monsters, it's also evolving smarter AI for the rabbits and foxes and towns too. If you add in random small mutations to creature stats, too, you'll really be cooking with fire.
It is really difficult though! I remember when UO first came out, they tried simulating a basic ecology. Within hours everyone had killed all the animals to get their weapon skills up, and the monsters were hungry... so they invaded the towns. It wasn't a problem with the ecology, it was a problem with there not being any monsters to kill as a noob! (they were all way too hard)
The third possible solution is to use emergent behavior AI to build a gameworld that practically runs itself. Goblins are getting hungry, so they start raiding the nearby town. Nearby town gets defensive, and starts adding quests to kill goblins. Goblins eventually either die out or move on. NPC wizard walking through his enchanted wood randomly finds an artifact that drives him mad, and he starts raising skeletal minions and so forth to protect his tower. The abomination needs to be wiped out, so the Nature Protector Treehugging Express faction gives out quests to kill his minions, and an epic quest to take down the crazed archmage.
And so forth. Using simple rules for behavior combined with human interaction will create a constantly changing gameworld that will actually stay interesting.
Which is why emergent behavior and AI needs to take a huge leap forward to make MMOs really fun. I'm actually working on building a virtual ecology using genetic algorithms to generate AI decision trees at the moment. First it's just getting mobs to find food and eat it. Then it's adding in an aggressive mob that will eat the first set of mobs if it can find them. After that, it's simply adding in a mating procedure so that mobs have to find each other in order to mate (and produce the next generation). The tough part will be fitness and how to separate out mobs that are different enough to actually become a separate "species."
Thanks for clearing it up. The anecdote was told to me while I was quite plastered at a new years part last year. Combined with lessened cerebral functions and time... Well, you can understand how it was misconstrued!
Our intervention in the middle east over the past 200 years has bread suicide bombers who want us the fuck out of their lives. Not the religion.
Got a reference, bub?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communist_terrorism
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eco-terrorism
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nationalist_terrorism
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethnic_violence
There are many terrorist organizations which are not religious.
In fact, one could argue that a majority of the religious terrorism in the middle east is actually nationalist terrorism disguised as religious extremism. If you look at the causes which drive people to the al-qaida bootcamps: oppression (by US forces or otherwise - AQ was not active in Iraq before we had a military presence there), lower standards of living, and so forth. People turn to religion when times get tough. Other people use that to twist the religion. They convince people at the end of their rope that the only thing that will make things better for them, their family, and their country is to go blow up the people fucking them over.
The fact that you ignorant asshats refuse to wake up from your delusional world of hate and bigotry, and perhaps read why people hate the US instead of believing the line "because we're not muslim" is why we've had muslim terrorist attacks on this country and its consulates. Look up the term blowback.
Flying from JFK to Ontario, California the other week: Waiting in the ticket line for three hours to check in. I thought getting there four hours ahead of time would be OK. I was waiting for another 30 minutes in the security line.
By the time I got to the x-ray machine, I was notably distressed. I was afraid I was going to miss my flight. I was fidgeting, and looking around, and looking at my watch a lot. The TSA subcontractors stared at me. After I went through the metal detector, the subcontractor waiting for me asked me why I was so nervous. He asked me the same question several times over to make sure I wasn't making something up.
In short, it's not just being irate or arguing now: simply being worried you'll miss the flight due to the ineptitude of the airline checkin process (they had two automatic kiosks up and four agents behind the desk. At JFK. Two days before Christmas. Both of the kiosks had issues. Of all the checkin counters there, theirs had the longest line. It snaked out of the ropes, around the lobby and back. It was nearly out the door of the airport) is enough to get you suspicious looks.
Anecdote, arising from said "kick me" signs:
A friend was on tour with Godspeed! You Black Emperor. They were eating at an IHOP, somewhere in the midwest. Now, Godspeed is kind of an odd band. I don't know if they still do, but they used to squat in an abandoned warehouse up in Quebec. They're peacefully anti-establishment. They dress kind of odd (compared to your typical small-town midwestern family).
Twenty minutes or so after they sat down to their pancakes and eggs, four county sheriffs show up at the restaurant. They sit down and begin questioning the band about terrorism, if they were terrorists, what they were planning on blowing up / shooting up, et cetera.
In other words, some small-town hick decided to call the police on a potential terror threat because this band looked a little different than they did.
Also:
Even if they're hardline Catholic? Even if they're hard-line southern baptist? There were several families in the PCA (presbyterian church of america) church I group up in who not only believed makeup and jewelry was evil, but also contraceptives. Each family in that (admittedly, small) portion of the congregation had about six or seven kids. Are these families going to raise a few eyebrows? Sure. Should these families be suspected of being terrorists? Hell no. Sure they're weird, sure they're not the norm.
But neither was the (rather large) family of Hasidic Jews that were aboard my flight from Atlanta to NYC the other day. They dressed different. They had a large family. If their kids were asking which section of the plane was safest, and if they were safe sitting next to the engine, would that have aroused suspicion? I'm guessing not.
College campuses also have a (comparatively) large population of people *cough* enthusiastic about hydroponic systems and grow lights.
Wait, the US has public transportation?
Sorry to burst your bubble, but there are about 400,000 people living in nawleans. The average capacity for a bus is about 60 folks (guestimate based on experience with greyhound). 5000 buses. I couldn't find accurate figures for average train capacity. I'm making a wild estimate at 400, being 40 passengers per car on a 10 car train. And that's if there are trains available. Simply being able to get that many trains into new orleans, and out at a reasonable time is kind of unthinkable. I don't know much about NO, but I can bet that their train station(s) are not as large nor as organized as, say, Pennsylvania Station in Manhattan. Being able to bus/train the entire population out of New Orleans, given the state of our public/mass transportation (horrible) is kind of ludicrous. They MIGHT be able to load one train every half hour. And that's if amtrak could get that many trains there within a reasonable amount of time. School buses could be used for evac. There are tons of things that could have been done.
But basing evacuation quality on the quality of our bus/train service, adding in the hysteria, adding in the scams (never underestimate the kind of things people will pull on each other when times are desperate), adding in the crime rate in new orleans, so on and so forth... I'm actually surprised it was handled as well (as bad as it may have been) as it was. It could have been a whole lot worse. There could have been more mistakes made. Given the quality of our governance, the quality of our infrastructure, it could have been a hell of a lot worse.
*gruff voice*
Ahhhh, here's yer problem here. Ya need to have yer polarity shifted on the rear axle, an' ya need to re-balance the valancies on yer break lights. Winter's comin' so if ya wanna be safe, ya better recharge the van duh wall forces in yer tires jus to be safe!
That'll be $65,535!
Very, very few of any skins for any program are aesthetically pleasing. Look through the firefox skins - you get paint shop pro wood grain texture crap, screencaps from an anime stretched with buttons overlayed, and other ugliness. There are *maybe* five skins for firefox that are decent. I haven't looked into opera's, because I don't like its UI. It's simply not elegant. Not the way chrome is (Chrome: everyday at-home browsing; Firefox: at-work developing). Hell, even most gnome/kde themes are utter crap.
In my experience, skins tend to come in a couple different styles:
* Operating system integration (Look, Opera on my windows box looks like safari now! lolz -- or KDE/Gnome theme integration)
* "Look Ma I Just Pirated Photoshop And Followed A Tutorial On Making Shadowed Round and/or Glowy Glass Buttons!"
* "I feel like making things more playful. Unfortunately, my icons for buttons suck"
* "High contrast makes everything better. Always." (I understand that this is necessary for some people as an accessibility need, but why do they have to be so damn ugly?)
* "I don't know what anti-alias means."
* "I want to stare at this hot cartoon I idolize all day, and maybe some other people will like to, too"
Rarely are community skins any good. I've found a few gems to spruce up my gnome desktop, but it took quite a bit of digging.
One of the reasons MS wanted IE (and the internet with it) to languish:
JavaScript was developed as a pie-in-the-sky idea that would bring desktop-like applications to the web browser. It blundered, partially because functional programming (even with prototypal inheritance) is difficult for most people to wrap their heads around - and partially because its syntax for typical object-oriented duties is downright strange.
So, I blame the stagnation of the internet on three things: IE taking over marketshare (to prevent a competitor from showing up delivering apps via the browser), dot-bust, and the high learning curve of effective javascript.
Disclaimer: I'm a full-time JS developer, and love the language. Even its little quirks. I don't know if that makes me insane, masochistic, or both.
Whoa! Completely skinnable!
I can choose one from 3,000 of ass-ugly user-created skins! I can't decide whether I want unreadable shit-brown on black, or neon green on pink! OH how about this one? it has racecars!
And because it is a capacitor, charging it is extremely fast. Maybe, even, faster than it takes for you to fuel your car.
I thought that was overturned?
Most industrial waste cannot be incinerated safely.
C2C is Cradle to Cradle - a biomimicry effort spearheaded by William McDonough. It's also the name of his book: an explanation of the movement, and case studies where he has been brought on to design new factories and processes. One case was the river rouge ford plant; another case was a carpet manufacturer. The River Rouge plant now features things like a green roof (vegetation) where prairie birds nest. It also reclaims and cleans rainwater and runoff from the parking lots. As a result of his efforts, the water coming out of the plant is cleaner than the water coming into the plant.
Ted Talks has a great talk by him: http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/william_mcdonough_on_cradle_to_cradle_design.html
If they utilized a C2C approach, they wouldn't have to even follow a lot of the regulations out there (because they would either re-use the waste products or sell them to someone else who would use them, instead of sequestering/disposing of them). Biomimicry for the win.
The poster's point was that we should be moving towards a "Cradle to Cradle" type manufacturing climate. Companies that clean up their wastes, or change their processes so the waste can be sold as raw material in either their process or someone elses', end up paying a lot less in regulatory fees.
The point is, our urine, feces, and flatulance/exhalations are used in a cycle. The nitrogen cycle, the water cycle, the carbon dioxide cycle. Waste from manufacturing isn't used in any cycle - it's typically collected and stored (even scrubbers need to be replaced; sequestering waste products isn't the same as reusing them).
Every time you eat food, you're eating your ancestor's waste matter. It's just transformed.
Every time we make something new, we should be figuring out how to incorporate waste matter into it.
Recycling as we have it today isn't true recycling. It's just delaying the junkyard (carpet made from soda bottles is unlikely to be used to make new carpet or new soda bottles - it goes directly to the dump; mainly due to the backing).
The process of life creates waste, and the process of cleaning up that waste creates more life. We need to use biomimicry and smart manufacturing techniques if we're going to survive past the next 2-3 hundred years. Otherwise we're just making the world a little more poisonous every year...
Well, without the moon we wouldn't have eclipses. And without eclipses, we wouldn't have superpowered superhumans fighting to save the world. By saving a cheerleader.
True- this is just an avenue for people to ask questions of the government on policies that aren't necessarily straightforward. It is not an avenue for vetting or voting for laws. It is not an avenue even for steering the direction of the government. It's simply an outlet for people to ask questions that might be answered in obama's weekly youtube appearance.
Well, that explains your spelling ;)
In all seriousness, when I found out that the games that came with QBASIC were editable, I immediately asked my father how to cheat at them. He handed me the Learn QBASIC book. I was probably 7 at the time.
Went through Logo in middle school (in a LEGO robotics class), and then Pascal and C++ in high school; C++ again and PHP as well in college (not university.. I'm a drop out...)