*shrug* Eh, what's the difference really? They're both recreational activities that have very utilitarian purposes. And they've both been linked to death. I'd say that a substantial percentage of the people who have had sex or owned a gun have died.
Also, I'd wager it's safer from a legal standpoint. Crazy parents try to sue gun manufacturers for school shootings. I've yet to see someone sue Hustler for inciting their child to sire children upon his underage girlfriend.
Odd. My response to the "ASL?" query tends to be "Well, I'm getting better at it, but I keep confusing the signs and my grasp of the grammar is tenuous."
Bah... This just reinforces my belief that these tests are biased against the AI in that people expect the AI to make intelligent conversation with people who make no sense. Quite honestly, Alice's responses seem dead on. Would you bother with scintallating conversation with a smarmy human like that? She obviously realized you thought yourself too clever and gave up on conversing. I know I would.
There was an AI program which consistently was unable to be distinguished from a human in tests. The catch is that the program emulated a paranoid schizophrenic. That program was PARRY and he was written in 1972. The key reason he was able to succeed, as I understand, was that he was free to terminate the conversation at any time or to suddenly switch topics.
To me, this is very interesting because one of the major faults in conversational AI seems to be the AI's intolerance of nonsense sentences. And honestly, wouldn't you close the chat window or change topics if the other person started gibbering incoherently? (Well, either that or you'd just assume they were from AOL...)
One good example of a game that did bring in Historical Accuracy was Europa Universalis. You can play as a large number of nations, each pretty realistically modelled. Admittedly, this means that gameplay is not "balanced." Conquering the world with Spain may be a bit easier than doing the same thing with Latvia. Then again, is balance really something needed in a historical game?
Actually, there's more benefit than you might think for accurate location modeling. I know people who've improved their golf game on well-known courses by playing through the course on computer golf games. And then, of course there's that famous example of making Doom levels of your high school to prepare for the rampage...
Ok, so that last one didn't happen. *shrug* But I still wager that a similar technique could be used to familiarize someone with a building. People learn by experience and sometimes these games can be an appropriately real virtual reality to get one ready for actual reality.
While I realize it's not free, I'm curious as to whether you played Locomotion, the kinda-sequel he wrote around the same time as Rollercoaster Tycoon 2. I received it in a bundle pack along with RCT2 and all expansions for $20 at Walmart. I don't quite get it, but then again, I didn't really understand the first Transport Tycoon.
My spelling and grammer combined with the fact that I have college degree, proves a problem with the educaion system. READ THIS: "plane" "accelerating" "basic literacy" "long jumper"
Give his sig, are you sure it's not his pitiful excuse for a joke?
There's a growing number of places that prohibit cell phones with picture-taking capability. I wouldn't be surprised if some of these places start making a rule against camera phones. Sure, they're not likely to try to catch people, but it gives them one more thing to charge or threaten you with when they like.
With the current outcry against camera phones in locker rooms, government installations, and now possibly malls, how long will it take before the phone manufacturers are required to provide a way to disable phones while in an area? They already came up a way to block calls at movie theaters.
What, like Zip drives and Jazz drives? I remember a few people using those in college and every once in a while, you see a computer with one in it, but they were more expensive than the 1.44 MB floppies and it was highly dependent on the other person having the proprietary drive. USB keys are working much more nicely.
Most users need even more than to know how to handle Spam. They need to know what spam is! As this article indicates, the typical user really doesn't even understand the jargon being used.
And anyone else feel the great frustration of teaching their mother how to do a "double-click" and how long it took for them to pick it up?
For instance, there's the works of Phillip K. Dick with his lands which are over-run with expanding (and eventually reproducing) factories, or his Second Type story with the robotic buzzsaws eventually evolving to human form so as to better fool the opposition and deciding that humanity in general was the problem.
Personally, I think it would take a lot of magic technology to get machines up to the level where they might decide to eliminate humanity in general, or to take over, but then again, it's amazing how prescient some Sci-Fi authors are. Look at Heinlein in The Door to Summer and how his protagonist invents a robot recognizable as the Roomba in the first few chapters. Of course, he had the character do so in 1970...
Also, the regional dialect/accent variation is at times even greater than with English. Which kind of makes sense given that Deaf groups tend to get isolated in their individual cities and ASL isn't exactly a long-distance language. (Although the ASL community accounts for a large number of the Sidekick phones in Columbus due to them allowing easy long-distance communication without use of voices or hearing.
^_^ But then again, I'm a hearing person who's only in his first course, so feel free to discount just about everything I say.
How do you define what a city should and should not provide for its citizens? Things that have been around the longest? Things that aren't technologically based? Police, fire, water, etc use a good deal of technology to perform their services. Is it really wrong for a city to want to provide services for its citizenry? Isn't that the purpose of government in the first place?
Necessity. To me, the government should provide services that are necessary to civilization. Fire departments and utilities like water and electricity are government controlled because they're services that need to be available even when it's not profitable to do so. Ditto with the postal service. As I've said before to people talking about the benefits of privitization, the biggest problem with having private industry handle vital concerns is that the main purpose of private business is to make money. In comparison, the primary purpose of the government is to provide the service even if they have to provide it at a loss. We've seen this repeatedly with privitized services. It made more money for Enron to have rolling blackouts because they could sell their electricity at higher prices, and export it to other states. The cable companies do their level best to only allow one company in any given area so that they can force people to accept their rates because they're the only game in town. In areas where the service is not vital, such as Wi-Fi, the government has the advantage over any private industries in that they can throw as much money into it as they need to. And, essentially, you're forcing a monopoly, as everyone must pay for the services, even if they use an alternate prviate service. Admittedly, many services have carved a niche opposite public services. Private schools are still paid for by families who want the best education for their child. People still use Fed-Ex and UPS to send packages (Although personally, I think the US Postal Service is more private industry than any thing else these days. Heck, the post office in my hometown has actually been privitized since I was a wee bairn two decades ago.) due to greater convenience, more services, occasionally cheaper prices.
Anyhow, back to the subject at hand, to me the WiFi access is not vital. The private companies, while expensive, are probably still costing us less than the government would be charging us in taxes to keep things running. (I work in government, and efficiency is not really the watchword a good bit of the time. As aforementionned, the goal is to make sure the service is always available, not to do it cheaply or efficiently.) As it is, such a technology is probably only going to help out a certain income range who can afford to get the laptop and wireless card, and to pay for the electricity to keep it charged.
Legal Expenses and Those Who Can't Pay Them
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EZTree Shuts Down
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True. However, as other have noted, this was a privately owned torrent site, supported only by donations and ads. I sincerely doubt they had the money to fight this legally. Why should people who don't have any interest in the specific files send takedown notices? Well, (a) They could be sending form letters to everyone who has "*torrent" in their name, figuring something has to be illegal, (b) taking down a torrent site and being able to claim to their stockholders that they've "eliminated a pirate threat to the profitability of the stock" is probably a big PR boost for them, or (c) is the possibility that they're hoping it gets into a legal battle so that they can extract outrageous legal penalties. Sure, the people involved have only their paltry job incomes, but when the legal battle is like shooting fish in a barrel, what's the harm of using buckshot?
I can't remember where I saw the statistic, but I remember reading that the number of accidents involving motor vehicles sharply increases the week after either DST change. Basically, on the day that people "spring forward," drivers and pedestrians are more exhausted and less likely to be reacting quickly enough. *shrug* And honestly, doesn't the "10,000 barrels of oil" sound like an exact rehash, right down to the amount, of the original DST proposal?
Everyone I've ever seen pulled over on the highway in Kentucky was black.
Or bearing Ohio plates. Ohio and Kentucky have a fair amount of emnity. Having Ohio plates in Kentucky or vice versa seems to make you eligible for getting pulled over. As someone who grew up in Kentucky near the Ohio border and now lives in Ohio, but visits family in Kentucky, I've had ample opportunity to learn how valid this truism is.
And for the sake of the racial profiling angle, I'm white enough to blind people without my clothes on, not that a lack of clothes is generally the case while driving...
When typing in an address, there is a default zoom level (3, to give it an arbitrary marker). Trying a few locations in my area, that default level has no satellite data. It would be nice of them to decrease the zoom unti an actual viewable area is displayed. For example, this random location in Newark, OH automatically comes up as "does not have imagery for this zoom level." If they checked to see if there were imagery at that level and eased back on the zoom until there was imagery, it would be an improvement. (Well, technically speaking... Newark is not the prettiest place.)
Hmmm... large electric shocks through the hips, possible going through the testicular region... I think we have our new gamer population control system! Only the 133t (and those bright enough to avoid these devices) will breed.
Well, except that murder is murder. If you kill someone, you're up for murder. AFAIK, libel is only libel if its false, which can be a bit more difficult to prove. Not, of course, that there aren't grey areas in murder as well (But my wife wanted to die. She told me so years ago without witnesses.) but slander and libel generally require more proof that a crime took place in the first place, rather than clarifying whodunnit and whytheydunnit.
There already is a break inherent in dual-parent families onyl taking in one income. Once you factor in daycare, cleaning, increased taxes, and the like, dual incomes don't bring in that much more than the single income. There will always be exceptions to the rule, I suspect, what I wonder how many of these dual income families would find they were making a lot less extra than they expected, when all is said and done. *wry grin* And that's not even getting into the potential costs of the latchkey generation coming to age...
^_^ One occasionally sees "news stories" about people being able to read CDs with the naked eye, but all of them seem to someone modifying the story about this guy.
Slashdot Mirror
Also, I'd wager it's safer from a legal standpoint. Crazy parents try to sue gun manufacturers for school shootings. I've yet to see someone sue Hustler for inciting their child to sire children upon his underage girlfriend.
For the humor-impaired: ASL
Bah... This just reinforces my belief that these tests are biased against the AI in that people expect the AI to make intelligent conversation with people who make no sense. Quite honestly, Alice's responses seem dead on. Would you bother with scintallating conversation with a smarmy human like that? She obviously realized you thought yourself too clever and gave up on conversing. I know I would.
To me, this is very interesting because one of the major faults in conversational AI seems to be the AI's intolerance of nonsense sentences. And honestly, wouldn't you close the chat window or change topics if the other person started gibbering incoherently? (Well, either that or you'd just assume they were from AOL...)
Also consider Memtest86+. Supposedly, it is kept more up to date. I know that Corsair Memory recommends it over Memtest86.
One good example of a game that did bring in Historical Accuracy was Europa Universalis. You can play as a large number of nations, each pretty realistically modelled. Admittedly, this means that gameplay is not "balanced." Conquering the world with Spain may be a bit easier than doing the same thing with Latvia. Then again, is balance really something needed in a historical game?
Ok, so that last one didn't happen. *shrug* But I still wager that a similar technique could be used to familiarize someone with a building. People learn by experience and sometimes these games can be an appropriately real virtual reality to get one ready for actual reality.
While I realize it's not free, I'm curious as to whether you played Locomotion, the kinda-sequel he wrote around the same time as Rollercoaster Tycoon 2. I received it in a bundle pack along with RCT2 and all expansions for $20 at Walmart. I don't quite get it, but then again, I didn't really understand the first Transport Tycoon.
My spelling and grammer combined with the fact that I have college degree, proves a problem with the educaion system.
READ THIS: "plane" "accelerating" "basic literacy" "long jumper"
Give his sig, are you sure it's not his pitiful excuse for a joke?
Vincent Price, is that you?
With the current outcry against camera phones in locker rooms, government installations, and now possibly malls, how long will it take before the phone manufacturers are required to provide a way to disable phones while in an area? They already came up a way to block calls at movie theaters.
What, like Zip drives and Jazz drives? I remember a few people using those in college and every once in a while, you see a computer with one in it, but they were more expensive than the 1.44 MB floppies and it was highly dependent on the other person having the proprietary drive. USB keys are working much more nicely.
I get myself in trouble navigating around the KDE GUI too. I'll double-click icons, forgetting that a single-click invokes them there.
And anyone else feel the great frustration of teaching their mother how to do a "double-click" and how long it took for them to pick it up?
Personally, I think it would take a lot of magic technology to get machines up to the level where they might decide to eliminate humanity in general, or to take over, but then again, it's amazing how prescient some Sci-Fi authors are. Look at Heinlein in The Door to Summer and how his protagonist invents a robot recognizable as the Roomba in the first few chapters. Of course, he had the character do so in 1970...
^_^ But then again, I'm a hearing person who's only in his first course, so feel free to discount just about everything I say.
Necessity. To me, the government should provide services that are necessary to civilization. Fire departments and utilities like water and electricity are government controlled because they're services that need to be available even when it's not profitable to do so. Ditto with the postal service. As I've said before to people talking about the benefits of privitization, the biggest problem with having private industry handle vital concerns is that the main purpose of private business is to make money. In comparison, the primary purpose of the government is to provide the service even if they have to provide it at a loss. We've seen this repeatedly with privitized services. It made more money for Enron to have rolling blackouts because they could sell their electricity at higher prices, and export it to other states. The cable companies do their level best to only allow one company in any given area so that they can force people to accept their rates because they're the only game in town. In areas where the service is not vital, such as Wi-Fi, the government has the advantage over any private industries in that they can throw as much money into it as they need to. And, essentially, you're forcing a monopoly, as everyone must pay for the services, even if they use an alternate prviate service. Admittedly, many services have carved a niche opposite public services. Private schools are still paid for by families who want the best education for their child. People still use Fed-Ex and UPS to send packages (Although personally, I think the US Postal Service is more private industry than any thing else these days. Heck, the post office in my hometown has actually been privitized since I was a wee bairn two decades ago.) due to greater convenience, more services, occasionally cheaper prices.
Anyhow, back to the subject at hand, to me the WiFi access is not vital. The private companies, while expensive, are probably still costing us less than the government would be charging us in taxes to keep things running. (I work in government, and efficiency is not really the watchword a good bit of the time. As aforementionned, the goal is to make sure the service is always available, not to do it cheaply or efficiently.) As it is, such a technology is probably only going to help out a certain income range who can afford to get the laptop and wireless card, and to pay for the electricity to keep it charged.
True. However, as other have noted, this was a privately owned torrent site, supported only by donations and ads. I sincerely doubt they had the money to fight this legally. Why should people who don't have any interest in the specific files send takedown notices? Well, (a) They could be sending form letters to everyone who has "*torrent" in their name, figuring something has to be illegal, (b) taking down a torrent site and being able to claim to their stockholders that they've "eliminated a pirate threat to the profitability of the stock" is probably a big PR boost for them, or (c) is the possibility that they're hoping it gets into a legal battle so that they can extract outrageous legal penalties. Sure, the people involved have only their paltry job incomes, but when the legal battle is like shooting fish in a barrel, what's the harm of using buckshot?
I can't remember where I saw the statistic, but I remember reading that the number of accidents involving motor vehicles sharply increases the week after either DST change. Basically, on the day that people "spring forward," drivers and pedestrians are more exhausted and less likely to be reacting quickly enough. *shrug* And honestly, doesn't the "10,000 barrels of oil" sound like an exact rehash, right down to the amount, of the original DST proposal?
Or bearing Ohio plates. Ohio and Kentucky have a fair amount of emnity. Having Ohio plates in Kentucky or vice versa seems to make you eligible for getting pulled over. As someone who grew up in Kentucky near the Ohio border and now lives in Ohio, but visits family in Kentucky, I've had ample opportunity to learn how valid this truism is.
And for the sake of the racial profiling angle, I'm white enough to blind people without my clothes on, not that a lack of clothes is generally the case while driving...
When typing in an address, there is a default zoom level (3, to give it an arbitrary marker). Trying a few locations in my area, that default level has no satellite data. It would be nice of them to decrease the zoom unti an actual viewable area is displayed. For example, this random location in Newark, OH automatically comes up as "does not have imagery for this zoom level." If they checked to see if there were imagery at that level and eased back on the zoom until there was imagery, it would be an improvement. (Well, technically speaking... Newark is not the prettiest place.)
Hmmm... large electric shocks through the hips, possible going through the testicular region... I think we have our new gamer population control system! Only the 133t (and those bright enough to avoid these devices) will breed.
Well, except that murder is murder. If you kill someone, you're up for murder. AFAIK, libel is only libel if its false, which can be a bit more difficult to prove. Not, of course, that there aren't grey areas in murder as well (But my wife wanted to die. She told me so years ago without witnesses.) but slander and libel generally require more proof that a crime took place in the first place, rather than clarifying whodunnit and whytheydunnit.
There already is a break inherent in dual-parent families onyl taking in one income. Once you factor in daycare, cleaning, increased taxes, and the like, dual incomes don't bring in that much more than the single income. There will always be exceptions to the rule, I suspect, what I wonder how many of these dual income families would find they were making a lot less extra than they expected, when all is said and done. *wry grin* And that's not even getting into the potential costs of the latchkey generation coming to age...
^_^ One occasionally sees "news stories" about people being able to read CDs with the naked eye, but all of them seem to someone modifying the story about this guy.