a) Most people in education barely know linux exists.
Anecdote:
In the required "intro to computers" class in college, I was bored with "this is how you double click; this is how you create a directory; this is how you create a text file" stuff. So I downloaded putty and worked on my website over ssh. I was in the middle of updating a few packages when the instructor glanced at my screen and exclaimed, "I didn't know you knew DOS!"
Oh, definitely. Most people don't take nearly enough to get to an anesthetic dosage.
And I wouldn't necessarily call it a trip. It has some weird effects on how you move, talk, and perceive sound.. but they're not necessarily hallucinations. You get sensory deprivation, and that can lead to hallucinations.. but the drug itself doesn't cause you to hallucinate like, say, LSD or 2C-I.
For the record, drinking cough syrup is pretty serious. The active ingredient as a cough suppressant is a dissociative anesthetic (it doesn't work on your lungs, it works on your brain). Drinking enough of it WILL get you fucked up. Drinking enough of it with not enough time left between said imbibing WILL kill your brain cells. However, because of how it works (it heats up specific brain cells which cause them to shut down; if you take cough medicine too often these cells get used to the higher temperature and do not shut down - and so they die), it's relatively safe for widespread human consumption - thus, cough syrup.
It's a scarier high than marijuana. It's also a more dangerous high than marijuana. It's a lot like ketamine. It's not something to fuck or denigrate cause it's something "stupid teenagers do"... because there are a lot of people out there who are pretty serious about it, even going so far as to extract the DXM from the syrup and mix concentrated batches of the stuff. And to do that, you need to know a little more about chemistry than you learned in high school.
Huh, wouldn't that make all the drug laws unconstitutional then, since it's not a power expressly permitted to the federal government (and is thus reserved for the states or the people)?
The same situation wouldn't happen with marijuana. For one, when you drive stoned you drive about 15mph, because anything faster is like WHOA DUDE I'M SPEEDING. If anything, you overcompensate for your reduced motor skills by slowing way down, taking turns extremely slow, and watching the road like a hawk. The amount of MJ-only related auto accidents is relatively (to alcohol) nil.
There's a huge difference between a substance abuser and a substance user. It's usually qualified by how the use of said substance affects their day-to-day functioning in society. Once it begins to negatively effect it and they do nothing to stop it, that can be said to be abuse. If they use it and nobody except the ones who are close enough to him/her actually knows about it, one could probably say they're not abusing it.
MISUSE OF COMMON COLD MEDICINE CAN LEAD TO CARDIAC ARREST, COMA, AND DEATH.
Seriously. Look it up. Dextromethorphan Hydrobromide, the active ingredient in most cough syrups and pills, is a dissociative anesthetic, similar to ketamine (animal tranquilizers). In high enough doses it can put you into an anesthetic sleep, similar to when you go under for surgery. Except typically, you're still conscious during this - you just can't see, feel, smell, taste, or hear anything. It's an extremely high dose. And the anesthetic dosage for DXM is much closer to the lethal dose of DXM, whereas the anesthetic dose of ketamine has much more play in it. Granted, you would have to down about 2000mg of the stuff (most OTC stuff is 15mg per dose, so that's a shitton of pills or nasty tasting syrup. Unless you're a basement chemist and you've extracted it and concentrated it).
As long as we have sexual organs, there are going to be people who resort to making money off of it. It's just that now, some people who resort to it do so out of their addiction's demands.
It's not a question of how they render. It's more a question of two things:
Google pagerank, and semantics.
From what I understand, part of what helps your pagerank is the ratio of content (words) to markup. CSS in an external file doesn't count towards this, afaik. So, when three divs will do the job with some CSS, instead of 80 characters of table tags, go with the divs.
Semantic-wise, tables can give screenreaders problems. They give no semantic structure to the page - and neither do divs, which is why they should be left for pure layout purposes, and other elements such as the paragraph, strong, emphasis, headings, list items (I've seen several sites in my day they used a table to emulate an unordered list. ugh) and so forth should be used in lieu of styled spans and divs.
Tables also DO render slower. There is a performance hit, especially if you're doing a lot of DHTML where the canvas needs to be redrawn a lot.
And contrary to popular belief, CSS hacks aren't really necessary anymore. The few bugs you have to work around can be put in a separate css file and included with an IE conditional comment. No bughacking needed.
It could if the AI decision tree were a genetic algorithm.... each entity gets its own decision tree, and the ones that survive mate.:P
Of course, that only really makes sense in an MMO 'verse.
You could do some AI juggling, so that after every map (or every time the AI loses), it runs its algorithms against all previous scenarios until it wins (or at least, gets better at not losing).
But then you end up with an AI that wins all the time, and a huge amount of CPU cycles.
So very true. A huge improvement to the AI would be visibility determining. IE, the AI might be able to tell the shot came from the southwest, but it can't see you exactly because of all the foliage - to root out the threat, it sends a squad to comb the area.
Unfortunately, the squad pulls out a giant comb and starts running it through the foliage..
Since you used an example from a role playing game , I'll respond with similar. Disclaimer: I'm totally hot for genetic algorithms, ever since I saw this article on pathfinding.
Oftentimes, a player character's "best" moves are limited by other factors rather than just needing to push the button - does he have enough combo points? does he have enough mana? is he in range? and so forth, before it's even a valid choice. Using a more complicated getInformation set than is outlined in the pathfinding program linked above, let's lay out what the mob can find out:
How many hostile enemies are there? What kind of targets are the hostile enemies (ranged, melee, soft [rogue,mage,etc], hard [warrior,paladin])? How hurt is each target? How much damage has each available target done to me? How much healing has each available target done to other hostiles? How devastating have the non-damage abilities of available targets been to friendlies? Which abilities are available to me? Which status ailments do the available targets have currently? Add up levels of opponents and levels of allies. Who is larger? Which ability did I use last?.. And so on - I'm sure there are more checks you could give the AI access to - probably even depending on its intelligence.
Then there are the actions the MOB can take:
Choose target (can target self) Attack target (melee) Attack target (ranged) Use ability on target (repeat for however many abilities are available to the MOB - limited by mana, and so forth) Run away Close distance Run to ranged distance
It would take quite a bit of training (you could probably automatically cull the first several generations, but later on you might actually have to interact with it yourself), but this kind of technique could end up with some very "smart" AIs that are fun and challenging to play against. You don't get God AIs, because they have limited information. You don't get God AIs, because their abilities are limited - and not by simple randomness. You might actually get an AI that stuns you and runs if it realizes it's outmatched, instead of stupidly sitting there and whaling at you with its rusty sword of crumbling.
Granted, genetic algorithms have some HUGE drawbacks:
The decision tree can be quite large, and it can take quite a few cycles to evaluate. Of course, as your fitness check you could check how long it took to execute.
It can take quite a bit of training (hundreds of generations, with thousands of entities each) before you get something that resembles an intelligent algorithm.
Meanwhile, it might generate something that checks for contingencies you never thought to bake into the AI script.
The terrorists/freedomfighters/whateveryouwanttocallthem "have" won on some of their wishes, and lost on others. They wanted:
- economic downfall (accomplished) - reduction of the standard of living in the US (accomplished) - reduction in US/western interference in the ME (not accomplished) - more members to their radical agenda (accomplished, fueled by our evisceration of the Iraqi government)
Ambient music is often dull or lacks individuality
Really? I find Brian Eno's "Music for Airports" essential beauty. Its layered harmonies, simple progression, and pure tones exude a perfection of aesthetics. It is calming, shockingly beautiful, and all-together unique.
Well, I'm a website owner myself [...] And speaking as a website owner, I can say that a host's personal politics come heavily into play when choosing colos. [for example,] three months ago I was offered a deal from McColo. A beautiful colo with tons of bandwidth. It was a simple website I needed to put up, but I was told that if it was finished within a day, my price would be doubled. Then I realized whose colo it was. A bunch of spammers. The money was right, but the risk was too big. I knew who the colo did business with, and based on that, I passed the job on to a friend of mine. And last week, these security experts let McColo's upstream providers know what was going on. My friend's website was taken offline when McColo's internet contracts were terminated. He wasn't even finished implementing. My business is alive because I knew there were risks involved locating my boxen at that colo. My friend wasn't so lucky.
If I know something is going to be on a particular site - let's take looking for a walkthrough for example - I just search for: "gamefaqs saga frontier." If I'm looking for something particular on wowwiki or thottbot, I just enter, "thottbot death's sting" or "wowwiki aldor."
I guess I could set up a quick search keyword, but I'm lazy.
Once a decent electric car with gasoline for long (200+m) range is produced at the entry-point level...
Cost of Iraq War + bank bail out: ~ $3700000000000 Cost to supply said car to all 18+y/o americans (75.4% of the pop), and effectively end our reliance on foreign oil: ~ $3667200000000
Slashdot Mirror
Anecdote:
In the required "intro to computers" class in college, I was bored with "this is how you double click; this is how you create a directory; this is how you create a text file" stuff. So I downloaded putty and worked on my website over ssh. I was in the middle of updating a few packages when the instructor glanced at my screen and exclaimed, "I didn't know you knew DOS!"
Oh, definitely. Most people don't take nearly enough to get to an anesthetic dosage.
And I wouldn't necessarily call it a trip. It has some weird effects on how you move, talk, and perceive sound.. but they're not necessarily hallucinations. You get sensory deprivation, and that can lead to hallucinations.. but the drug itself doesn't cause you to hallucinate like, say, LSD or 2C-I.
By hacks, I meant abusing bugs in a browser's parsing of CSS to hide rules from some browsers while allowing other browsers to see them.
You know, things that aren't in the standards and cause things like quirks mode to activate.
For the record, drinking cough syrup is pretty serious. The active ingredient as a cough suppressant is a dissociative anesthetic (it doesn't work on your lungs, it works on your brain). Drinking enough of it WILL get you fucked up. Drinking enough of it with not enough time left between said imbibing WILL kill your brain cells. However, because of how it works (it heats up specific brain cells which cause them to shut down; if you take cough medicine too often these cells get used to the higher temperature and do not shut down - and so they die), it's relatively safe for widespread human consumption - thus, cough syrup.
It's a scarier high than marijuana. It's also a more dangerous high than marijuana. It's a lot like ketamine. It's not something to fuck or denigrate cause it's something "stupid teenagers do" ... because there are a lot of people out there who are pretty serious about it, even going so far as to extract the DXM from the syrup and mix concentrated batches of the stuff. And to do that, you need to know a little more about chemistry than you learned in high school.
Huh, wouldn't that make all the drug laws unconstitutional then, since it's not a power expressly permitted to the federal government (and is thus reserved for the states or the people)?
The same situation wouldn't happen with marijuana. For one, when you drive stoned you drive about 15mph, because anything faster is like WHOA DUDE I'M SPEEDING. If anything, you overcompensate for your reduced motor skills by slowing way down, taking turns extremely slow, and watching the road like a hawk. The amount of MJ-only related auto accidents is relatively (to alcohol) nil.
Black & Milds are not cigars. They are shredded pipe tobacco rolled in a tobacco leaf. Cigars are rolled tobacco leaves.
If you're going to be a recovering smoker, at least know a little about what you're smoking :) /friendly ribbing
There's a huge difference between a substance abuser and a substance user. It's usually qualified by how the use of said substance affects their day-to-day functioning in society. Once it begins to negatively effect it and they do nothing to stop it, that can be said to be abuse. If they use it and nobody except the ones who are close enough to him/her actually knows about it, one could probably say they're not abusing it.
MISUSE OF COMMON COLD MEDICINE CAN LEAD TO CARDIAC ARREST, COMA, AND DEATH.
Seriously. Look it up. Dextromethorphan Hydrobromide, the active ingredient in most cough syrups and pills, is a dissociative anesthetic, similar to ketamine (animal tranquilizers). In high enough doses it can put you into an anesthetic sleep, similar to when you go under for surgery. Except typically, you're still conscious during this - you just can't see, feel, smell, taste, or hear anything. It's an extremely high dose. And the anesthetic dosage for DXM is much closer to the lethal dose of DXM, whereas the anesthetic dose of ketamine has much more play in it. Granted, you would have to down about 2000mg of the stuff (most OTC stuff is 15mg per dose, so that's a shitton of pills or nasty tasting syrup. Unless you're a basement chemist and you've extracted it and concentrated it).
ALL drugs are dangerous when misused.
Everything parent posted is backed up by personal anecdotal evidence. As weak as anecdotal evidence is.
Wait, prostitution is drug related?
I thought it was sex related?
As long as we have sexual organs, there are going to be people who resort to making money off of it. It's just that now, some people who resort to it do so out of their addiction's demands.
It's not a question of how they render. It's more a question of two things:
Google pagerank, and semantics.
From what I understand, part of what helps your pagerank is the ratio of content (words) to markup. CSS in an external file doesn't count towards this, afaik. So, when three divs will do the job with some CSS, instead of 80 characters of table tags, go with the divs.
Semantic-wise, tables can give screenreaders problems. They give no semantic structure to the page - and neither do divs, which is why they should be left for pure layout purposes, and other elements such as the paragraph, strong, emphasis, headings, list items (I've seen several sites in my day they used a table to emulate an unordered list. ugh) and so forth should be used in lieu of styled spans and divs.
Tables also DO render slower. There is a performance hit, especially if you're doing a lot of DHTML where the canvas needs to be redrawn a lot.
And contrary to popular belief, CSS hacks aren't really necessary anymore. The few bugs you have to work around can be put in a separate css file and included with an IE conditional comment. No bughacking needed.
It could if the AI decision tree were a genetic algorithm.... each entity gets its own decision tree, and the ones that survive mate. :P
Of course, that only really makes sense in an MMO 'verse.
You could do some AI juggling, so that after every map (or every time the AI loses), it runs its algorithms against all previous scenarios until it wins (or at least, gets better at not losing).
But then you end up with an AI that wins all the time, and a huge amount of CPU cycles.
So very true. A huge improvement to the AI would be visibility determining. IE, the AI might be able to tell the shot came from the southwest, but it can't see you exactly because of all the foliage - to root out the threat, it sends a squad to comb the area.
Unfortunately, the squad pulls out a giant comb and starts running it through the foliage..
Since you used an example from a role playing game , I'll respond with similar. Disclaimer: I'm totally hot for genetic algorithms, ever since I saw this article on pathfinding.
Oftentimes, a player character's "best" moves are limited by other factors rather than just needing to push the button - does he have enough combo points? does he have enough mana? is he in range? and so forth, before it's even a valid choice. Using a more complicated getInformation set than is outlined in the pathfinding program linked above, let's lay out what the mob can find out:
How many hostile enemies are there? .. And so on - I'm sure there are more checks you could give the AI access to - probably even depending on its intelligence.
What kind of targets are the hostile enemies (ranged, melee, soft [rogue,mage,etc], hard [warrior,paladin])?
How hurt is each target?
How much damage has each available target done to me?
How much healing has each available target done to other hostiles?
How devastating have the non-damage abilities of available targets been to friendlies?
Which abilities are available to me?
Which status ailments do the available targets have currently?
Add up levels of opponents and levels of allies. Who is larger?
Which ability did I use last?
Then there are the actions the MOB can take:
Choose target (can target self)
Attack target (melee)
Attack target (ranged)
Use ability on target (repeat for however many abilities are available to the MOB - limited by mana, and so forth)
Run away
Close distance
Run to ranged distance
It would take quite a bit of training (you could probably automatically cull the first several generations, but later on you might actually have to interact with it yourself), but this kind of technique could end up with some very "smart" AIs that are fun and challenging to play against. You don't get God AIs, because they have limited information. You don't get God AIs, because their abilities are limited - and not by simple randomness. You might actually get an AI that stuns you and runs if it realizes it's outmatched, instead of stupidly sitting there and whaling at you with its rusty sword of crumbling.
Granted, genetic algorithms have some HUGE drawbacks:
The decision tree can be quite large, and it can take quite a few cycles to evaluate. Of course, as your fitness check you could check how long it took to execute.
It can take quite a bit of training (hundreds of generations, with thousands of entities each) before you get something that resembles an intelligent algorithm.
Meanwhile, it might generate something that checks for contingencies you never thought to bake into the AI script.
The terrorists/freedomfighters/whateveryouwanttocallthem "have" won on some of their wishes, and lost on others. They wanted:
- economic downfall (accomplished)
- reduction of the standard of living in the US (accomplished)
- reduction in US/western interference in the ME (not accomplished)
- more members to their radical agenda (accomplished, fueled by our evisceration of the Iraqi government)
Really? I find Brian Eno's "Music for Airports" essential beauty. Its layered harmonies, simple progression, and pure tones exude a perfection of aesthetics. It is calming, shockingly beautiful, and all-together unique.
Eh, he said isotopes. A bismuth compound isn't really an isotope... There's probably bismuth isotopes used in contrast tests, though. IANAD.
Isn't bismuth also used in pepto bismol?
Most of their inventions are algorithmic in nature.
Except the revenue which comes from business leasing blackbox solutions for email, docs, and internal search.
If I know something is going to be on a particular site - let's take looking for a walkthrough for example - I just search for: "gamefaqs saga frontier." If I'm looking for something particular on wowwiki or thottbot, I just enter, "thottbot death's sting" or "wowwiki aldor."
I guess I could set up a quick search keyword, but I'm lazy.
Once a decent electric car with gasoline for long (200+m) range is produced at the entry-point level...
Cost of Iraq War + bank bail out:
~ $3700000000000
Cost to supply said car to all 18+y/o americans (75.4% of the pop), and effectively end our reliance on foreign oil:
~ $3667200000000
Imagine if we'd pumped all that Iraq money into subsidies for efficient cars and getting off of Oil! We might actually be a successful country now!