Lecturers tend to go over things in too much of an 'overview' format (at least in the science/tech classes) and avoid doing actual example problems that might help us LEARN.
Then again, my calculus teacher doesn't check homework but works problems in the class, and she has an annoying tendency to write "x" in place of "y", miss negative signs, etc. and people get confused. Of course you could say she's not a good lecturer, but she is - she just isn't good at accurately writing on the board. She explains things well and understands things herself, so there's not an issue with her lectures really.
I can see either point standing on its own as a potentially interesting topic
Don't suggest it! They'll dupe it twice!
Actually, and in all seriousness, why do the editors post related stories together or not even split stories? Won't multiple articles give them more traffic?
oo, fancier comment box...but it's too big. you can't see the checkboxes. And the <URL:http://example.com/> text isn't readable. Anyway...
As far as I can tell from testing, the bug is completely fixed.
Are you referring to the bug where the home page turns white (à la about:blank) when you click back to return to it? That just happened to me, and view source (before I left the home page) showed just [html][body][/body][/html], which is Mozilla's way of saying "empty page". It's not repeating, though: if I click back now, both the page and the source display.
"Falun Gong has got it going on, It's all I want and I've waited for so long, Communism, can't you see you're not the religion for me, I know it might be wrong but I'm not listening to the Chinese government..."
(Reposting because, in an attempt to type < instead of <, I clicked "Extrans" and turned my HTML into plaintext.)
I'm going to post a more complete description, in a way that's hopefully easier for someone who's learned classical trig, like myself.
From the summary chapter:
quadrance between two points = distance^2
spread between two lines = sine^2 (regardless of acute or obtuse, incidentally) = opposite quadrance / adjacent quadrance
The first chapter gives the mathematical definitions:
quadrance between points (x1,y1) and (x2,y2): (x2-x1)^2 + (y2-y1)^2
spread between lines a1x+b1y=c1 and a2x+b2y=c2: (a1b2-b1a2)^2 / (a1^2+b1^2)(a2^2+b2^2)
One nice feature of these definitions is that, being squares, they aren't signed. Another interesting point with the last definition is that it can be interpreted in terms of vectors. Knowing that <a, b> is 90 degrees from ax+by=c, and therefore doesn't bother our angles, we can let the first line have a normal vector U, the second have V, and rewrite the second definition as (UxV)^2 / (U.U)(V.V), which by the geometric definitions of the dot and cross products simplifies to sin^2 theta - the "classical" definition of spread. The advantage of the mathematical description is that it works on all fields, not just 2-space.
One more thing to note is that the second set of definitions is on any field, not just on the real numbers. He has some explanation about why he does that, but it's mainly for mathematical elegance.
The cross is defined as one minus the spread, or in classical terms cosine^2. I believe the alliteration is intentional - especially considering he abbreviates them as s and c.
He lists five rules in chapter 1:
Pythagorean theorem in terms of quadrances: Q1+Q2=Q3 iff those points form a right triangle.
"Spread law": the law of sines, squared, so it uses quadrances/spreads.
Triple quadrance formula: Iff the square of the sum of the quads equals twice the sum of the squares of the quads (OMG the fourth power of the distances), then the the points are collinear.
Cross law: (Q1+Q2-Q3)^2=4Q1Q2c3. Canceling squares, we get Q1+Q2-Q3=+-2d1d2 cos(theta), which is the law of cosines. After you fix the sign. Grr. I'm starting to think he's right about avoiding square roots.
Triple spread formula: (s1+s2+s3)^2 = 2(s1^2+s2^2+s3^2)+4s1s2s3, which is interesting in that it uses angles only. I suspect that it's some weird spread-based variant of the usual sum of the angles = pi formula.
Would someone like to expand the triple quad and spread formulae, see where they come from, and see what use they have in rational trig? I would, but I have some relevant math I need to work on....
To make a long story short, he's still using sines and cosines and lengths. He's just gotten rid of angles in a very elegant way by avoiding square roots until the final step, so that people can calculate in a more rational way (if you'll pardon the pun).
Once you know this, then integration and derivation of all sin/cos and derived functions boils down to algebra and derivation and integration of e, which is trivial.
Really? How would that have helped him integrate 1/(1+x^2)?
And how would you even take the derivative of the arctangent? I can see how you can get a giant and annoying formula for the tangent, but how would you invert that? And is taking the derivative of that any easier?
The e-formula is great, but it's not the answer to everything. If you have trouble with big functions, turn them into sines, cosines, and easier integrals. Exponentials probably won't help more than these three would.
I'm going to post a more complete description, in a way that's hopefully easier for someone who's learned classical trig, like myself.
From the summary chapter:<ul> <li>quadrance between two points = distance^2 <li>spread between two lines = sine^2 (regardless of acute or obtuse, incidentally) </ul>
The first chapter gives the mathematical definitions:<ul> <li>quadrance between points (x1,y1) and (x2,y2): (x2-x1)^2 + (y2-y1)^2 <li>spread between lines a1x+b1y=c1 and a2x+b2y=c2: (a1b2-b1a2)^2 / (a1^2+b1^2)(a2^2+b2^2) </ul>
One nice feature of these definitions is that, being squares, they aren't signed. Another interesting point with the last definition is that it can be interpreted in terms of vectors. Knowing that <a, b> is 90 degrees from ax+by=c, and therefore doesn't bother our angles, we can let the first line have a normal vector U, the second have V, and rewrite the second definition as (UxV)^2 / (U.U)(V.V), which by the geometric definitions of the dot and cross products simplifies to sin^2 theta - the "classical" definition of spread.
One more thing to note is that the second set of definitions is on any field, not just on the real numbers. He has some explanation about why he does that, but it's mainly for mathematical elegance.
The cross is defined as one minus the spread, or in classical terms cosine^2. I believe the alliteration is intentional - especially considering he abbreviates them as <i>s</i> and <i>c</i>.
He lists five rules in chapter 1:<ul> <li>Pythagorean theorem in terms of quadrances: Q1+Q2=Q3 iff those points form a right triangle. <li>"Spread law": the law of sines, squared, so it uses quadrances/spreads. <li>Triple quadrance formula: Iff the square of the sum of the quads equals twice the sum of the squares of the quads (OMG the fourth power of the distances), then the the points are collinear. <li>Cross law: (Q1+Q2-Q3)^2=4Q1Q2c3. Canceling squares, we get Q1+Q2-Q3=+-2d1d2 cos(theta), which is the law of cosines. After you fix the sign. Grr. I'm starting to think he's right about avoiding square roots. <li>Triple spread formula: (s1+s2+s3)^2 = 2(s1^2+s2^2+s3^2)+4s1s2s3, which is interesting in that it uses angles only. I suspect that it's some weird spread-based variant of the usual sum of the angles = pi formula. </ul>
Would someone like to expand the triple quad and spread formulae, see where they come from, and see what use they have in rational trig? I would, but I have some <a href="http://www.ahsimc.com/">relevant math</a> I need to work on....
To make a long story short, he's still using sines and cosines and lengths. He's just gotten rid of <i>angles</i> in a very elegant way by avoiding square roots until the final step, so that people can calculate in a more rational way (if you'll pardon the pun).
Euler's identity (e^i pi+1=0) isn't quite as amazing as the original formula which you, which equates all exponential functions and all trigonometric functions.
In fact, there's an easy way to redefine trig with this formula, by using e^(ix) and e^(-ix) to cancel the terms and yield just sine and cosine, whence you can derive the trig formulas by using exponentials.
Haha, the Larson book? I used the 4th edition of that last year and that definitely had the two power series in it (both in the text and on the back cover), and from that the e^ix = cis x formula is trivial to determine.
Oh wait. You got some version of the Larson book without power series? You got ripped off.
The RIAA, MPAA and malware folks everywhere thank you for your stance.
Malware I might accept, but why the comment about the RIAA or the MPAA? I have no problem with them. They have no need to snoop my computer, and I have no need to be interested in their products.
And besides - Isn't poor secuirity at least a little better than no security?
No security and no need for it is better than depending on poor security. I don't know about him, but one reason I avoid P2P is because it's too risky.
"Recently, we had several former staff members revolt against the entire P2P community as a whole. They tried to sabatoge Methlabs and attempted to wipe the Methlabs server of all its data."
"To update everyone on the current situation, there has been some news going around the Internet of a revolt which happened in Methlabs. This is hearsay."
Say what? Was there a revolt or wasn't there? The other side's story isn't self-contradictory.
"We assure you that Methlabs development will continue, and ALL OFFICIAL PROGRAMS MUST be downloaded directly from Methlabs.org . Assume that all other sites contain spyware or malicious code which may not be directly trusted."
This looks suspicious to me. Isn't it possible to do a DNS spoof or a simple web server attack and get access to methlabs.org? Shouldn't any site worth anything have reliable, trusted backups?
And shouldn't the site post hashes of several recent releases instead of simply saying "download from here only, honest!"?
Actually, go straight to the Methlabs forums and change your password to something completely random. And if you used your old Methlabs password somewhere else, get rid of it. Assume for your password's sake that Methlabs.org and Methlabs-Team-in-Exile are both able to compromise your password.
But still, it's good to recognize this position. We don't know what happened, and the fate of a site this crucial to security is not something to jump to conclusions about.
Dark matter? (Score:3, Interesting) by bradbury (33372)
You might have a low ID, but I'm guessing you're not Ray Bradbury. (Not that argumentum to eminentum authoritum or argumentum againstum hominem are worth anything, though, but it's still funny.)
And the reference to some dude at the Bogatonic SETI conference over thirty years ago has a disturbing resemblance to the infamous "Proof by reference to inaccessible literature" found on the classic joke proof list (including such items as "Proof by vigorous hand-waving"): "The author cites a simple corollary of a theorem to be found in a privately circulated memoir of the Slovenian Philological Society, 1883."
I'm not saying you're wrong (I think you're on to something, but this particular one isn't quite it), it's just that your argument sounds characteristic of traditional weakly-proven quack articles.
Try this: go to SafeSearch and search for naked chicks.
Google gives you two barely noticeable error messages:
The word "naked" has been filtered from the search because Google SafeSearch is active.
The word "chicks" has been filtered from the search because Google SafeSearch is active.
And then it goes on to perform the search and find stuff like Britannica, Web Standards Project, Sun emplyoment, and the Yahoo team. WTF does it get these from? It's searching for nothing at all and it found this!
You get exactly the same list when searching for something like "porno porn". Meanwhile, SafeSearching "nude porn" gives: "Suggestions: - Try different keywords." Strange behavior.
(Incidentally, is this a back door to find the highest PageRanked sites?)
OTOH, I see this controller as a DIRECT snub to third-party developers, abandoning multiplatform releases almost entirely. Of course, the GameCube was already mostly there anyway.
Why? Let's see...D-pad? check. Analog stick? check. Some number of buttons (which were never consistent before)? check. Need a second analog stick (in addition to the D-pad) for camera angle? Just use the rotation sensor.
I can easily see Halo playable on this - use it as a gun, and keep the buttons the same. I can see Katamari Damacy playable on this - tilt the controller the way you want the ball of stuff to go. Super Mario Brothers, Pacman, and other arcade games; card or board games; Final Fantasy, KOTOR, and other RPGs; and other menu-based instead of real-time input-based games are all of course portable to this if someone wants - just ignore the tilt feature, turn it sideways, and pretend it's a Famicom controller. SimCity and other mouse-based games can pretend that the controller is a mouse - they don't necessarily need the other dimensions, but they can use them. Second Life, if it wishes to port to a console, would use the motion sensor in place of the 3D motion keys, the analog stick as the mouse, and the buttons as regular buttons or as shift keys (for moving objects). Golf games could just detect the downswing and upswing of the controller and use the analog stick for e.g. aim, instead of reprogramming a golf game designed for the controller. Even Dance Dance Revolution can be played with this instead of a extra mat - just stick one controller in each shoe.
In short, most existing game inputs can be folded into this controller. It doesn't eliminate anything that was doable on any previous input system, except perhaps a keyboard.
I've found the loophole in democracy. It's stupid people. Vast masses of stupid people.
That's not a loophole, that's by design. (It's a feature, not a bug...:-P)
The masses aren't necessarily stupid. The rulers placate them and give them more or less what they want, and they haven't offended them to the point where the masses would vote for a third party or revolt.
I know that most people interested in political theory, myself included, have a strong belief in what should be - good personal freedom, wise rulers, fair courts, etc. But people are free enough, the rulers are smart enough, and the courts are fair enough that it doesn't injure more than a very small minority, and the other minority worried about it (us) really consider it more a theoretical thing than a true action point. So isn't democracy succeeding?
With my actual gun the claim is more like I can put 90% or more of my shots somewhere on a man-sized paper target provided both it and I am stationary and it's not too far away from me, with both hands on the gun, in a stabalised stance.
I find it's very easy to make precision movements with a mouse, I find it's very hard to have precision control of a firearm held out in front of me.
Is this because a gun is actually a more difficult input device to move, or just because it has recoil, weight, etc.? The question is not how good of a shot you are with a mouse and with a gun, it's how much worse you get when you have to aim at a moving target with a mouse, compared to how much worse you get with a gun. If you're a bad gunner but can hit a stationary target as well (or not) as a moving one, which is reasonable since our entire life has programmed our body to compensate for moving selves and objects, then that means that the gun itself is an okay device. You're just bad with the gun. And if you can hit perfect shots with the mouse on a stationary target but can't hit moving targets, then it's the mouse that prevents you from moving it accurately.
I have this problem with a particular older and slightly grimy mouse I have. I'm pretty good with, say, game controllers, and of course I have no problem with the mouse on stationary targets, like dialog box buttons - even those which flagrantly violate Fitt's Law. But I can't get past the first level of America's Army because my mouse doesn't respond fast enough to line up a shot accurately - either its granularity is too high and I literally can't aim at the target pixel, or its sensitivity is too low and I have to pick up the mouse and slide it twice across the mouse pad in order to reach the next target.
Set a date, any date, as long as it's two or more presidencies away and you basically don't have to come through with your promises, even better, someone else will take the blame.
Then you'd have to criticize Kennedy, who asked in 1961 that we put men on the moon at some point that decade. (If you know the date that we landed Apollo 11, you'll realize the humor in that.) Kennedy died in 1963, but we still followed up on the promise.
(While I'm on the subject of Kennedy...how come we need a 15-year timeframe when it's almost half a century later than when we had a 10-year one? Don't we have better technology now? Couldn't we make the next Apollo flight in a year or two?)
That's not the question. The question is, why isn't there a program or library capable of parsing (almost) all well-formed English (or any other natural language) constructs?
The reason is that it helps natural-language systems and AI, which can help you develop programs from more accurate voice and handwriting recognition systems (e.g., it can detect where to put commas and other punctuation in spoken text) to better versions of SHRDLU.
(SHRDLU was an AI that could perform simple instructions expressed in English, and parse things like compound-complex sentences. The grammar parser here would be the front end - able to parse all sentences - and SHRDLU itself, or the thing that actually acted upon the parsed sentence, would be the back end.)
Slashdot Mirror
Lecturers tend to go over things in too much of an 'overview' format (at least in the science/tech classes) and avoid doing actual example problems that might help us LEARN.
Then again, my calculus teacher doesn't check homework but works problems in the class, and she has an annoying tendency to write "x" in place of "y", miss negative signs, etc. and people get confused. Of course you could say she's not a good lecturer, but she is - she just isn't good at accurately writing on the board. She explains things well and understands things herself, so there's not an issue with her lectures really.
I can see either point standing on its own as a potentially interesting topic
Don't suggest it! They'll dupe it twice!
Actually, and in all seriousness, why do the editors post related stories together or not even split stories? Won't multiple articles give them more traffic?
oo, fancier comment box. ..but it's too big. you can't see the checkboxes. And the <URL:http://example.com/> text isn't readable. Anyway...
As far as I can tell from testing, the bug is completely fixed.
Are you referring to the bug where the home page turns white (à la about:blank) when you click back to return to it? That just happened to me, and view source (before I left the home page) showed just [html][body][/body][/html], which is Mozilla's way of saying "empty page". It's not repeating, though: if I click back now, both the page and the source display.
"Falun Gong, get it on"
"Falun Gong has got it going on,
It's all I want and I've waited for so long,
Communism, can't you see you're not the religion for me,
I know it might be wrong but I'm not listening to the Chinese government..."
If you get Services for UNIX (a free download now)
Yeah, you get it here: http://www.cygwin.com/setup.exe
I'm going to post a more complete description, in a way that's hopefully easier for someone who's learned classical trig, like myself.
From the summary chapter:
The first chapter gives the mathematical definitions:
One nice feature of these definitions is that, being squares, they aren't signed. Another interesting point with the last definition is that it can be interpreted in terms of vectors. Knowing that <a, b> is 90 degrees from ax+by=c, and therefore doesn't bother our angles, we can let the first line have a normal vector U, the second have V, and rewrite the second definition as (UxV)^2 / (U.U)(V.V), which by the geometric definitions of the dot and cross products simplifies to sin^2 theta - the "classical" definition of spread. The advantage of the mathematical description is that it works on all fields, not just 2-space.
One more thing to note is that the second set of definitions is on any field, not just on the real numbers. He has some explanation about why he does that, but it's mainly for mathematical elegance.
The cross is defined as one minus the spread, or in classical terms cosine^2. I believe the alliteration is intentional - especially considering he abbreviates them as s and c.
He lists five rules in chapter 1:
Would someone like to expand the triple quad and spread formulae, see where they come from, and see what use they have in rational trig? I would, but I have some relevant math I need to work on....
To make a long story short, he's still using sines and cosines and lengths. He's just gotten rid of angles in a very elegant way by avoiding square roots until the final step, so that people can calculate in a more rational way (if you'll pardon the pun).
Once you know this, then integration and derivation of all sin/cos and derived functions boils down to algebra and derivation and integration of e, which is trivial.
Really? How would that have helped him integrate 1/(1+x^2)?
And how would you even take the derivative of the arctangent? I can see how you can get a giant and annoying formula for the tangent, but how would you invert that? And is taking the derivative of that any easier?
The e-formula is great, but it's not the answer to everything. If you have trouble with big functions, turn them into sines, cosines, and easier integrals. Exponentials probably won't help more than these three would.
I'm going to post a more complete description, in a way that's hopefully easier for someone who's learned classical trig, like myself.
From the summary chapter:<ul>
<li>quadrance between two points = distance^2
<li>spread between two lines = sine^2 (regardless of acute or obtuse, incidentally)
</ul>
The first chapter gives the mathematical definitions:<ul>
<li>quadrance between points (x1,y1) and (x2,y2): (x2-x1)^2 + (y2-y1)^2
<li>spread between lines a1x+b1y=c1 and a2x+b2y=c2: (a1b2-b1a2)^2 / (a1^2+b1^2)(a2^2+b2^2)
</ul>
One nice feature of these definitions is that, being squares, they aren't signed. Another interesting point with the last definition is that it can be interpreted in terms of vectors. Knowing that <a, b> is 90 degrees from ax+by=c, and therefore doesn't bother our angles, we can let the first line have a normal vector U, the second have V, and rewrite the second definition as (UxV)^2 / (U.U)(V.V), which by the geometric definitions of the dot and cross products simplifies to sin^2 theta - the "classical" definition of spread.
One more thing to note is that the second set of definitions is on any field, not just on the real numbers. He has some explanation about why he does that, but it's mainly for mathematical elegance.
The cross is defined as one minus the spread, or in classical terms cosine^2. I believe the alliteration is intentional - especially considering he abbreviates them as <i>s</i> and <i>c</i>.
He lists five rules in chapter 1:<ul>
<li>Pythagorean theorem in terms of quadrances: Q1+Q2=Q3 iff those points form a right triangle.
<li>"Spread law": the law of sines, squared, so it uses quadrances/spreads.
<li>Triple quadrance formula: Iff the square of the sum of the quads equals twice the sum of the squares of the quads (OMG the fourth power of the distances), then the the points are collinear.
<li>Cross law: (Q1+Q2-Q3)^2=4Q1Q2c3. Canceling squares, we get Q1+Q2-Q3=+-2d1d2 cos(theta), which is the law of cosines. After you fix the sign. Grr. I'm starting to think he's right about avoiding square roots.
<li>Triple spread formula: (s1+s2+s3)^2 = 2(s1^2+s2^2+s3^2)+4s1s2s3, which is interesting in that it uses angles only. I suspect that it's some weird spread-based variant of the usual sum of the angles = pi formula.
</ul>
Would someone like to expand the triple quad and spread formulae, see where they come from, and see what use they have in rational trig? I would, but I have some <a href="http://www.ahsimc.com/">relevant math</a> I need to work on....
To make a long story short, he's still using sines and cosines and lengths. He's just gotten rid of <i>angles</i> in a very elegant way by avoiding square roots until the final step, so that people can calculate in a more rational way (if you'll pardon the pun).
Euler's identity (e^i pi+1=0) isn't quite as amazing as the original formula which you, which equates all exponential functions and all trigonometric functions.
In fact, there's an easy way to redefine trig with this formula, by using e^(ix) and e^(-ix) to cancel the terms and yield just sine and cosine, whence you can derive the trig formulas by using exponentials.
Haha, the Larson book? I used the 4th edition of that last year and that definitely had the two power series in it (both in the text and on the back cover), and from that the e^ix = cis x formula is trivial to determine.
Oh wait. You got some version of the Larson book without power series? You got ripped off.
I'm sorry HAL, I can't let you tell me that you're sorry but you're afraid you can't do what I'm asking.
Stupid computer. Get in the kitchen and make me a sandwich.
The RIAA, MPAA and malware folks everywhere thank you for your stance.
Malware I might accept, but why the comment about the RIAA or the MPAA? I have no problem with them. They have no need to snoop my computer, and I have no need to be interested in their products.
And besides - Isn't poor secuirity at least a little better than no security?
No security and no need for it is better than depending on poor security. I don't know about him, but one reason I avoid P2P is because it's too risky.
"Recently, we had several former staff members revolt against the entire P2P community as a whole. They tried to sabatoge Methlabs and attempted to wipe the Methlabs server of all its data."
"To update everyone on the current situation, there has been some news going around the Internet of a revolt which happened in Methlabs. This is hearsay."
Say what? Was there a revolt or wasn't there? The other side's story isn't self-contradictory.
"We assure you that Methlabs development will continue, and ALL OFFICIAL PROGRAMS MUST be downloaded directly from Methlabs.org . Assume that all other sites contain spyware or malicious code which may not be directly trusted."
This looks suspicious to me. Isn't it possible to do a DNS spoof or a simple web server attack and get access to methlabs.org? Shouldn't any site worth anything have reliable, trusted backups?
And shouldn't the site post hashes of several recent releases instead of simply saying "download from here only, honest!"?
"We would like to you login to the Methlabs forums (http://methlabs.org/forums/) and change your password."
Actually, go straight to the Methlabs forums and change your password to something completely random. And if you used your old Methlabs password somewhere else, get rid of it. Assume for your password's sake that Methlabs.org and Methlabs-Team-in-Exile are both able to compromise your password.
But still, it's good to recognize this position. We don't know what happened, and the fate of a site this crucial to security is not something to jump to conclusions about.
Remember the reality distortion field?
Maybe it finally caved in on itself and the RDF's own reality is now distorted, and Steve Jobs is a very sensible, reasonable person?
I certainly hope not.
Dark matter? (Score:3, Interesting)
by bradbury (33372)
You might have a low ID, but I'm guessing you're not Ray Bradbury. (Not that argumentum to eminentum authoritum or argumentum againstum hominem are worth anything, though, but it's still funny.)
And the reference to some dude at the Bogatonic SETI conference over thirty years ago has a disturbing resemblance to the infamous "Proof by reference to inaccessible literature" found on the classic joke proof list (including such items as "Proof by vigorous hand-waving"): "The author cites a simple corollary of a theorem to be found in a privately circulated memoir of the Slovenian Philological Society, 1883."
I'm not saying you're wrong (I think you're on to something, but this particular one isn't quite it), it's just that your argument sounds characteristic of traditional weakly-proven quack articles.
Try this: go to SafeSearch and search for naked chicks .
Google gives you two barely noticeable error messages:
The word "naked" has been filtered from the search because Google SafeSearch is active.
The word "chicks" has been filtered from the search because Google SafeSearch is active.
And then it goes on to perform the search and find stuff like Britannica, Web Standards Project, Sun emplyoment, and the Yahoo team. WTF does it get these from? It's searching for nothing at all and it found this!
You get exactly the same list when searching for something like "porno porn". Meanwhile, SafeSearching "nude porn" gives: "Suggestions: - Try different keywords." Strange behavior.
(Incidentally, is this a back door to find the highest PageRanked sites?)
OTOH, I see this controller as a DIRECT snub to third-party developers, abandoning multiplatform releases almost entirely. Of course, the GameCube was already mostly there anyway.
Why? Let's see...D-pad? check. Analog stick? check. Some number of buttons (which were never consistent before)? check. Need a second analog stick (in addition to the D-pad) for camera angle? Just use the rotation sensor.
I can easily see Halo playable on this - use it as a gun, and keep the buttons the same. I can see Katamari Damacy playable on this - tilt the controller the way you want the ball of stuff to go. Super Mario Brothers, Pacman, and other arcade games; card or board games; Final Fantasy, KOTOR, and other RPGs; and other menu-based instead of real-time input-based games are all of course portable to this if someone wants - just ignore the tilt feature, turn it sideways, and pretend it's a Famicom controller. SimCity and other mouse-based games can pretend that the controller is a mouse - they don't necessarily need the other dimensions, but they can use them. Second Life, if it wishes to port to a console, would use the motion sensor in place of the 3D motion keys, the analog stick as the mouse, and the buttons as regular buttons or as shift keys (for moving objects). Golf games could just detect the downswing and upswing of the controller and use the analog stick for e.g. aim, instead of reprogramming a golf game designed for the controller. Even Dance Dance Revolution can be played with this instead of a extra mat - just stick one controller in each shoe.
In short, most existing game inputs can be folded into this controller. It doesn't eliminate anything that was doable on any previous input system, except perhaps a keyboard.
I've found the loophole in democracy.
:-P)
It's stupid people.
Vast masses of stupid people.
That's not a loophole, that's by design. (It's a feature, not a bug...
The masses aren't necessarily stupid. The rulers placate them and give them more or less what they want, and they haven't offended them to the point where the masses would vote for a third party or revolt.
I know that most people interested in political theory, myself included, have a strong belief in what should be - good personal freedom, wise rulers, fair courts, etc. But people are free enough, the rulers are smart enough, and the courts are fair enough that it doesn't injure more than a very small minority, and the other minority worried about it (us) really consider it more a theoretical thing than a true action point. So isn't democracy succeeding?
With my actual gun the claim is more like I can put 90% or more of my shots somewhere on a man-sized paper target provided both it and I am stationary and it's not too far away from me, with both hands on the gun, in a stabalised stance.
I find it's very easy to make precision movements with a mouse, I find it's very hard to have precision control of a firearm held out in front of me.
Is this because a gun is actually a more difficult input device to move, or just because it has recoil, weight, etc.? The question is not how good of a shot you are with a mouse and with a gun, it's how much worse you get when you have to aim at a moving target with a mouse, compared to how much worse you get with a gun. If you're a bad gunner but can hit a stationary target as well (or not) as a moving one, which is reasonable since our entire life has programmed our body to compensate for moving selves and objects, then that means that the gun itself is an okay device. You're just bad with the gun. And if you can hit perfect shots with the mouse on a stationary target but can't hit moving targets, then it's the mouse that prevents you from moving it accurately.
I have this problem with a particular older and slightly grimy mouse I have. I'm pretty good with, say, game controllers, and of course I have no problem with the mouse on stationary targets, like dialog box buttons - even those which flagrantly violate Fitt's Law. But I can't get past the first level of America's Army because my mouse doesn't respond fast enough to line up a shot accurately - either its granularity is too high and I literally can't aim at the target pixel, or its sensitivity is too low and I have to pick up the mouse and slide it twice across the mouse pad in order to reach the next target.
He then resold the laptop on eBay for $1,159 - just $18,805 short of his bail after police arrested him.
What kind of judge sets a bail at $19,964? Is this the Walmart Court? *pictures what the Walmart Court would be*
"Always Low Bails." "We're Rolling Back (tm) your execution date!"
I know why Donald Knuth is so rich - it's because he fixed all those bugs in the prerelease versions of TeX!
Oh wait...
You just earned yourself a high paying security job with the United States government.
By high-paying security job, you do mean that he's testing the security that's enforced by the high-paid guards, right?
Set a date, any date, as long as it's two or more presidencies away and you basically don't have to come through with your promises, even better, someone else will take the blame.
Then you'd have to criticize Kennedy, who asked in 1961 that we put men on the moon at some point that decade. (If you know the date that we landed Apollo 11, you'll realize the humor in that.) Kennedy died in 1963, but we still followed up on the promise.
(While I'm on the subject of Kennedy...how come we need a 15-year timeframe when it's almost half a century later than when we had a 10-year one? Don't we have better technology now? Couldn't we make the next Apollo flight in a year or two?)
That's not the question. The question is, why isn't there a program or library capable of parsing (almost) all well-formed English (or any other natural language) constructs?
The reason is that it helps natural-language systems and AI, which can help you develop programs from more accurate voice and handwriting recognition systems (e.g., it can detect where to put commas and other punctuation in spoken text) to better versions of SHRDLU.
(SHRDLU was an AI that could perform simple instructions expressed in English, and parse things like compound-complex sentences. The grammar parser here would be the front end - able to parse all sentences - and SHRDLU itself, or the thing that actually acted upon the parsed sentence, would be the back end.)