and more to the point, the computer doesn't even know what chess is. It's just adding, subtracting, fetching instructions from memory, etc. It's kind of like how a guy in a box doesn't really understand chinese, or how none of your brain cells actually know what slashdot is.
Careful. You are (as you probably know) repeating Searle's argument. This sounds like an obvious truth, but it is not. Does a computer know what chess is? You would say no, because you look at the program and observe it juggling bits and bytes. And since the juggling of bits and bytes is not understanding, you conclude that a computer does not understand chess. But can we conclude that YOU do not understand chess because to play chess your neurons are firing, and obviously neurons do not understand chess? No, we cannot. "Understanding" happens at another level of consciousness.
Now, the problem with the level of consciousness of a computer such as Deep Blue, is that the ONLY thing that it has any knowledge about, is chess. Thus it cannot talk about chess, because it has no knowledge of language. It cannot assess the cultural value of chess, because it knows nothing about culture. The only thing it knows anything about, is a field of 64 squares, on which 32 pieces move according to predetermined patterns. However, it knows that particular field VERY well, much better than most humans.
So, the question is whether Deep Blue has a kind of "chess consciousness", in which it really "understands" chess. (Trouble here is, of course, that the terms consciousness and understanding are not well-defined, but let's assume that they mean what is commonly taken as their meaning). And it is very hard to argue that it does not.
Arguments for why Deep Blue has no chess consciousness are usually along the lines of "it does not understand chess because it always makes the same move in the same situation." Not true, as the match of Deep Blue and Kasparov showed. Or, "it does not understand chess because it cannot learn new chess behaviour." Not true, learning algorithms are pretty common nowadays. Or, "it does not understand chess because it cannot explain its moves." Not true, usually a chess computer is perfectly capable of explaining its moves, albeit in a special-purpose language. Or, "it does not understand chess because it uses brute force calculations exclusively." Not true, if that would be the case Deep Blue would need about 10,000 years to make one move. Or, "it does not understand chess because it does not care about the game." Well, that is probably true, but we are now talking of assigning Deep Blue a consciousness of a higher level than just "chess," and I would never argue that it possesses that.
Personally, I believe that Deep Blue has a chess consciousness. True, that consciousness finds its basis in programming (and probably has been automatically configured by Deep Blue itself), but that does not invalidate its quality.
Actually, if they take the trouble to call, then it is probably important. If not, then I feel vindicated that I have ignored their email. In my current Inbox there are 283 unopened messages (no spam, my filter catches it all). A quick scan shows me that I will respond to the five topmost of them. The rest is trash, and will get no response.
Great movies (Brazil is actually one of my favorite movies of all time), but hardly Science Fiction in the movie sense. In the movies, science fiction equals space opera, or at least big special futuristic effects. In literature, it encompasses a wild variety of genres of which space opera is only a very small part.
Then again - maybe it is the voting process itself. Ask the average movie goer to name his favorites and you may end up with a list of reasonably good movies, but certainly not with the best (or most contraversial) movies. Still, that does not explain 2001 on the list.
From experience:
I had to make changes to a fairly complex program. The problem was: both the source code and the documentation were lost. The changes weren't that big, but man was I glad that I knew some assembly...
It is in the top-50 world-wide, but, yeah, I too think the math department was crap. At least as far as teaching math was concerned. They might have written some awesome papers, though.
How about: "Star Trek: The Crusher Adventures", in which Wesley Crusher (Wil Wheaton, of course, who is about the right age now) uses his Traveller powers to explore far reaches of the Universe. During the first six or seven episode, Wesley roams the known part of the Galaxy to round up a crew of ultra-geniuses whom he can also teach the Traveller gifts. No Vulcans, since they are too "logical" for such advanced knowledge, and no Klingons because they are too stupid. Several humans, of course, such as Mature-Guy, Black-Guy, and Hot-Babe, and several aliens, such a Plaster-Face, Funny-Hair, and a CGI-generated energy-based lifeform. Perhaps even Orion-Slave-Girl. While originally being able to travel without any visible means of transportation, Captain Wesley decides in season 2 that it would be a good idea to have a cool ship, as a place to call home and to transport aliens and goods. As an hommage to his mentor, he calls it the USS Traveller.
I am joking, of course, but I would not be surprised to find that this has already been the subject of several novels and a whole lot of fanfic.
I am afraid that a DS9 movie WOULD suck. The reason that DS9 was so good, was that the characters had real developments and had to deal with problems that were not easily solved with technobabble. With 40-minute episodes, you can afford a "bad" ending, in which a major character suffers a great loss, or fucks up big time, or discovers that he or she did exactly what the enemy wanted. This happened frequently in DS9. With a movie, it has to end well in order not to alienate the general public (or so Hollywood thinks).
I can relate to that. I studied math at a famous university for a couple of years before I dropped out. Here are some of the things I remember:
We started with over 100 students in the first year. By the third year, the number had dropped to less than 10 students. Half of those dropped out later. The professors were proud of this fact.
Each lecture took three hours, with one fifteen minute break. You were only allowed to ask questions in the last 15 minutes of the lecture.
Professors only took the trouble to learn students' names when they entered third-year courses.
I once wrote a research paper for one of the professors for a first-year course. In the very last paragraph of the paper I wrote a little joke. The paper was marked "A", then the "A" was crossed out, "C-" written below it, with an arrow pointing to the joke.
Math students had access to the faculty mainframe (this was in the early 1980s), but did not get instruction on how to use it, as opposed to physics students. The reasoning was that math students either should not need computers for their work, or should be smart enough to figure it all out by studying the manuals.
Professors often supplied example excercises. Students were encouraged to make these excercises and supply their answers to the professor. However, these answers were NEVER corrected, so that after a while students simply did not bother anymore.
Professors were notorious for not preparing lectures, and working out examples as they were going along, often failing to prove what they wanted to prove. One particularly telling incident was when a professor was working out a complex proof, starting at the top left of one of the two four-piece blackboards in the hall, and chalking down, very fast, formula after formula. I was trying to follow his proof, but, of course, was always several lines behind. But I thought I did understand it, and was approaching to where he was. When he was at the bottom-right of the second blackboard, he paused, and kept staring at the last line he had written, muttering to himself. While I was approaching this last line (making lots of notes, because OF COURSE these proofs weren't in the textbooks or anything), he started scanning back. After doing this for about five minutes, he suddenly walked over to the first board again, changed a plus into a minus in one of the first lines, then made lots of changes in the rest of what he had written, and finally wrote "Q.E.D." at the bottom-right. Then he closed the blackboards and sent us on our way.
Through this experience I thought I simply was not good enough at math. But when I switched to computer science, where math courses were taught by computer scientists, I passed with flying colours, usually as the best of the class. Not because the courses were easier, but because they were taught better.
No, they did not. They specified the price for one DVD, and for another DVD, and then told the customer that they would get the second one for free if they bought the first one for the specified price. However, when charging they DVDs were listed for $0.00 in total. Clearly, that was a mistake in charging, not in price specification. And basically, every customer with his eyes open would see that they can get away with paying a whole lot less than what Amazon told them it would cost, than what they thought they would have to pay, and than what they SHOULD pay.
It's like a cashier's error, where you receive $10 too much in change. What do you do when you notice this? I point out the error and pay what the bill is. If I would not do that, that would be my gain but someone else's loss: either of the owner of the joint, or of the cashier. Frankly, for me that would be the same as stealing.
You forgot: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, The Director's Cut.
This one differs significantly from the regular editions in that Harry actually DOES die at the end. It is also 135 pages longer, with some additional material in Chapters 3, 7, 8, 16, 18, and 26, besides the completely rewritten version of Chapters 27 and 28.
When I was a kid, I read everything I could get my hands on. I even read my mother's old pockte books. The ones about girls at boarding school. For kids, you know, not what the average adult male thinks books about girls at boarding school are. I am virtually certain Mrs. Rowling read these books too. And I can tell you now: Harry Potter is the modern variant of the girls-at-boarding-school books, with some cliche fantasy thrown in for good measure. It is almost nostalghia when I read them.
From deriving x = 2x, without having set a specific value for x in the first place, we can conclude that x = 2x is satisfied for ANY value for x, not only for zero. So we may conclude that every number is equal to its double, and thus 1 equals 2. QED.
Maybe you should have a look at the list of publications they have put out since 2000.
Actually, it lists publications since the early 90's. The query function does not seem to work as far as dates are concerned. And even then, this list counts less than 3000 publications. Is that really all that 21% of all US computer science PhD students and their supervisors have produced in this period of time? And yes they do list publications in conference proceedings too. 3000 publications is staggeringly close to nothing.
didn't see my first computer until I was 11, didn't own a Pc until I was 13, and didn't own a PC with a GUI until I was 18. Yet here I am, a member of the "techno elite". It's not going to hurt these kids to get a good grounding in the basics and get the computers a little later in their education.
I did not see a computer until I was 18 and went to college. However, I was so interested in computers before that time that I had bought programming books and wrote programs without even the possibility of compiling them. I took computer science as a minor, and I was humiliated. I had huge troubles writing even simple programs, because I did not really understand what computers were about and how they worked. At the same time, other students were producing programs that worked at incredible speeds. Later on I found out that these other students had had computers at home at least since they were 15, 16 years of age. However, by that time I had given up hope that I could ever mean something in the world of computing. That changed after I bought a C64 and started playing around with it. I got work as a commercial programmer, went back to college, and got a master's and later a PhD in computer science.
The point is that having had access to a computer in my teens would have shaved YEARS of my education.
Also, when I look back at how I used to write papers and do research, compared to how I do it now, I see that having access to something like the Internet speeds up research and education enormously. Sure, there's a lot of trash out there, but if you have never been without modern-day online facilities, you have no idea how much they really mean.
The OLPC is not for raising new programmers. It is for giving people access to a hoard of information and to facilities that allow them to collaborate with others in work and education. It is not the only requirement to get ahead in life, but it is incredibly helpful.
I agree that both were superb levels, but they ended kind-of weak. But that was the whole problem with Psychonauts anyway: a superb game that ended kind-of weak. Actually, the Meat-Circus level of Psychonauts turned it from one of my top-10 games to one I would not really recommend to anybody.
Actually, people are mistaken thinking that this is a short story that is published as such.
This is part of a story by Fredric Brown. The story is called "Knock", is eight or nine pages long, and it starts like this:
"There is a sweet little horror story that is only two sentences long: The last man on Earth sat alone in a room. There was a knock at the door... Two sentences and an ellipsis of three dots. The horror, of course, isn't in the story at all; it's in the ellipsis, the implication: what knocked at the door. Faced with the unknown, the human mind supplies something vaguely horrible. But it wasn't horrible, really."
However, I think Fredric Brown (who is something of a specialist in writing ultra-short stories) actually is the writer of the shortest SF story, which is called "The End". It is nine lines long, or rather, four-and-a-half lines long, repeated twice.
The shortest horror story is probably by Roland Topor. It is called "Historical mysteries", and it is only one line, which I do not have the original for, but I can provide my own translation: "Fifteen minutes before he passed away, mr. de la Palice was already dead."
Re:The real fun is reading the reviews.
on
The 20 Worst Games Ever
·
· Score: 2, Informative
and not since Syberia in 2002 has there been a rating over 9.
And, having played Syberia, I can honestly say that as an adventure game it sucks donkeyballs. All puzzles are incredibly easy, except for one which is completely undoable. In itself this is not enough to invalidate the game, but the puzzles are virtually all ridiculously illogical. I mean, at one point in the game the main character cannot climb a certain ladder because there are birds sitting in front of it, and "she is afraid of birds". Now, instead of just stomping right through the birds, or throwing something at them, or making a loud noise, or just waiting until they fly away (which are all impossible), you have to go on a long, boring quest which goes all over the map, to get some birdseed or something so you can lure them away. The game is also dead slow, and the main character is unsympathetic and presented as being quite stupid. The only good thing about the game is that it looks absolutely stunning. Which is probably why Gamespot gave it such a high ranking. Visuals, you know.
Actually, it is much simpler. Several recent studies have indicated that lesser-educated people eat more junk food than higher-educated people - even though they usually have less money to spare and fast food is more expensive than healthy food. So, indeed, chicken and egg are reversed in the study, but it is simply a matter of eating habits.
In the past 7 years I have bought about 1500 DVDs. And I exclusively watch them on my computer, since my TV sucks but my monitor is fabugorgeous.
I know, I can circumvent a copy-protection scheme, just like I circumvent region-encoding. But is it really worth the hassle? If I have to go through hoops to watch the stuff I buy, I rather buy the same stuff where I don't need to go through hoops. I.e., pirated DVDs. Easy to get, easy to play, exactly what I want, and a helluva lot cheaper. To be honest, in this case I would prefer pirated DVDs even if they were the same price as the legal DVDs, or slightly more expensive...
Re:Why software sucks in one sentance
on
Why Software Sucks
·
· Score: 1
"Because you're not willing to pay for what it would cost not to suck"
Spot on.
As a case in point: I once developed software for the government, which they needed to make some regulations accessible to their users. They were going to spread that software around for free. They had a limited budget to develop the stuff, and lots of requests for features. So they asked us to put a price tag on each requested feature, so that they could pick and choose what they wanted.
One of the features they wanted to have was an extensive test of the product in a usability lab. Obviously, when they found out that that would cost as much as the development of ALL the software features they wanted, that was the first thing to go. And that was my advice too. Because I reasoned: (a) there were no complaints on the usability of the prototype, (b) every user of the prototype was able to use it as intended without any training, and (c) if its free, usable in practice, and there is NO budget to implement any of the features that might be suggested by subjects in a usability lab, why do the usability tests at all?
It must be said, I was quite surprised to find out that testing the usability of the software would be so expensive. But all the items on the calculation were reasonable. Interesting lesson to learn.
Slashdot Mirror
and more to the point, the computer doesn't even know what chess is. It's just adding, subtracting, fetching instructions from memory, etc. It's kind of like how a guy in a box doesn't really understand chinese, or how none of your brain cells actually know what slashdot is.
Careful. You are (as you probably know) repeating Searle's argument. This sounds like an obvious truth, but it is not. Does a computer know what chess is? You would say no, because you look at the program and observe it juggling bits and bytes. And since the juggling of bits and bytes is not understanding, you conclude that a computer does not understand chess. But can we conclude that YOU do not understand chess because to play chess your neurons are firing, and obviously neurons do not understand chess? No, we cannot. "Understanding" happens at another level of consciousness.
Now, the problem with the level of consciousness of a computer such as Deep Blue, is that the ONLY thing that it has any knowledge about, is chess. Thus it cannot talk about chess, because it has no knowledge of language. It cannot assess the cultural value of chess, because it knows nothing about culture. The only thing it knows anything about, is a field of 64 squares, on which 32 pieces move according to predetermined patterns. However, it knows that particular field VERY well, much better than most humans.
So, the question is whether Deep Blue has a kind of "chess consciousness", in which it really "understands" chess. (Trouble here is, of course, that the terms consciousness and understanding are not well-defined, but let's assume that they mean what is commonly taken as their meaning). And it is very hard to argue that it does not.
Arguments for why Deep Blue has no chess consciousness are usually along the lines of "it does not understand chess because it always makes the same move in the same situation." Not true, as the match of Deep Blue and Kasparov showed. Or, "it does not understand chess because it cannot learn new chess behaviour." Not true, learning algorithms are pretty common nowadays. Or, "it does not understand chess because it cannot explain its moves." Not true, usually a chess computer is perfectly capable of explaining its moves, albeit in a special-purpose language. Or, "it does not understand chess because it uses brute force calculations exclusively." Not true, if that would be the case Deep Blue would need about 10,000 years to make one move. Or, "it does not understand chess because it does not care about the game." Well, that is probably true, but we are now talking of assigning Deep Blue a consciousness of a higher level than just "chess," and I would never argue that it possesses that.
Personally, I believe that Deep Blue has a chess consciousness. True, that consciousness finds its basis in programming (and probably has been automatically configured by Deep Blue itself), but that does not invalidate its quality.
Actually, if they take the trouble to call, then it is probably important. If not, then I feel vindicated that I have ignored their email. In my current Inbox there are 283 unopened messages (no spam, my filter catches it all). A quick scan shows me that I will respond to the five topmost of them. The rest is trash, and will get no response.
Where is "Brazil"? Where is "12 Monkeys"?
Great movies (Brazil is actually one of my favorite movies of all time), but hardly Science Fiction in the movie sense. In the movies, science fiction equals space opera, or at least big special futuristic effects. In literature, it encompasses a wild variety of genres of which space opera is only a very small part.
Would Brazil and 12 Monkeys be included, I guess we would also see The Truman Show, Stalker, A Clockwork Orange, Dr. Strangelove, and Jakob's Ladder on the list. All SF and great movies, but hardly recognised as such by the average movie goer.
Then again - maybe it is the voting process itself. Ask the average movie goer to name his favorites and you may end up with a list of reasonably good movies, but certainly not with the best (or most contraversial) movies. Still, that does not explain 2001 on the list.
From experience: I had to make changes to a fairly complex program. The problem was: both the source code and the documentation were lost. The changes weren't that big, but man was I glad that I knew some assembly...
Is that a Star Trek movie? I think not.
It is in the top-50 world-wide, but, yeah, I too think the math department was crap. At least as far as teaching math was concerned. They might have written some awesome papers, though.
How about: "Star Trek: The Crusher Adventures", in which Wesley Crusher (Wil Wheaton, of course, who is about the right age now) uses his Traveller powers to explore far reaches of the Universe. During the first six or seven episode, Wesley roams the known part of the Galaxy to round up a crew of ultra-geniuses whom he can also teach the Traveller gifts. No Vulcans, since they are too "logical" for such advanced knowledge, and no Klingons because they are too stupid. Several humans, of course, such as Mature-Guy, Black-Guy, and Hot-Babe, and several aliens, such a Plaster-Face, Funny-Hair, and a CGI-generated energy-based lifeform. Perhaps even Orion-Slave-Girl. While originally being able to travel without any visible means of transportation, Captain Wesley decides in season 2 that it would be a good idea to have a cool ship, as a place to call home and to transport aliens and goods. As an hommage to his mentor, he calls it the USS Traveller.
I am joking, of course, but I would not be surprised to find that this has already been the subject of several novels and a whole lot of fanfic.
I am afraid that a DS9 movie WOULD suck. The reason that DS9 was so good, was that the characters had real developments and had to deal with problems that were not easily solved with technobabble. With 40-minute episodes, you can afford a "bad" ending, in which a major character suffers a great loss, or fucks up big time, or discovers that he or she did exactly what the enemy wanted. This happened frequently in DS9. With a movie, it has to end well in order not to alienate the general public (or so Hollywood thinks).
I can relate to that. I studied math at a famous university for a couple of years before I dropped out. Here are some of the things I remember:
We started with over 100 students in the first year. By the third year, the number had dropped to less than 10 students. Half of those dropped out later. The professors were proud of this fact.
Each lecture took three hours, with one fifteen minute break. You were only allowed to ask questions in the last 15 minutes of the lecture.
Professors only took the trouble to learn students' names when they entered third-year courses.
I once wrote a research paper for one of the professors for a first-year course. In the very last paragraph of the paper I wrote a little joke. The paper was marked "A", then the "A" was crossed out, "C-" written below it, with an arrow pointing to the joke.
Math students had access to the faculty mainframe (this was in the early 1980s), but did not get instruction on how to use it, as opposed to physics students. The reasoning was that math students either should not need computers for their work, or should be smart enough to figure it all out by studying the manuals.
Professors often supplied example excercises. Students were encouraged to make these excercises and supply their answers to the professor. However, these answers were NEVER corrected, so that after a while students simply did not bother anymore.
Professors were notorious for not preparing lectures, and working out examples as they were going along, often failing to prove what they wanted to prove. One particularly telling incident was when a professor was working out a complex proof, starting at the top left of one of the two four-piece blackboards in the hall, and chalking down, very fast, formula after formula. I was trying to follow his proof, but, of course, was always several lines behind. But I thought I did understand it, and was approaching to where he was. When he was at the bottom-right of the second blackboard, he paused, and kept staring at the last line he had written, muttering to himself. While I was approaching this last line (making lots of notes, because OF COURSE these proofs weren't in the textbooks or anything), he started scanning back. After doing this for about five minutes, he suddenly walked over to the first board again, changed a plus into a minus in one of the first lines, then made lots of changes in the rest of what he had written, and finally wrote "Q.E.D." at the bottom-right. Then he closed the blackboards and sent us on our way.
Through this experience I thought I simply was not good enough at math. But when I switched to computer science, where math courses were taught by computer scientists, I passed with flying colours, usually as the best of the class. Not because the courses were easier, but because they were taught better.
they sold it for the price they specified
No, they did not. They specified the price for one DVD, and for another DVD, and then told the customer that they would get the second one for free if they bought the first one for the specified price. However, when charging they DVDs were listed for $0.00 in total. Clearly, that was a mistake in charging, not in price specification. And basically, every customer with his eyes open would see that they can get away with paying a whole lot less than what Amazon told them it would cost, than what they thought they would have to pay, and than what they SHOULD pay.
It's like a cashier's error, where you receive $10 too much in change. What do you do when you notice this? I point out the error and pay what the bill is. If I would not do that, that would be my gain but someone else's loss: either of the owner of the joint, or of the cashier. Frankly, for me that would be the same as stealing.
Seriously, did anyone check that this anonymous guy actually worked where he claimed to?
You must be new here.
You forgot: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, The Director's Cut. This one differs significantly from the regular editions in that Harry actually DOES die at the end. It is also 135 pages longer, with some additional material in Chapters 3, 7, 8, 16, 18, and 26, besides the completely rewritten version of Chapters 27 and 28.
When I was a kid, I read everything I could get my hands on. I even read my mother's old pockte books. The ones about girls at boarding school. For kids, you know, not what the average adult male thinks books about girls at boarding school are. I am virtually certain Mrs. Rowling read these books too. And I can tell you now: Harry Potter is the modern variant of the girls-at-boarding-school books, with some cliche fantasy thrown in for good measure. It is almost nostalghia when I read them.
An alternative? For software patents? There is and has been since the first software was written. It is called "copyrights".
No. Libre as in bière.
From deriving x = 2x, without having set a specific value for x in the first place, we can conclude that x = 2x is satisfied for ANY value for x, not only for zero. So we may conclude that every number is equal to its double, and thus 1 equals 2. QED.
You understood it is a joke, right?
Maybe you should have a look at the list of publications they have put out since 2000.
Actually, it lists publications since the early 90's. The query function does not seem to work as far as dates are concerned. And even then, this list counts less than 3000 publications. Is that really all that 21% of all US computer science PhD students and their supervisors have produced in this period of time? And yes they do list publications in conference proceedings too. 3000 publications is staggeringly close to nothing.
We did it as follows:
x^2 - x^2 = x^2 - x^2 =>
x(x-x) = (x+x)(x-x)
Now divide by (x-x) on both sides of the equation, and we get
x = 2x =>
1 = 2
didn't see my first computer until I was 11, didn't own a Pc until I was 13, and didn't own a PC with a GUI until I was 18. Yet here I am, a member of the "techno elite". It's not going to hurt these kids to get a good grounding in the basics and get the computers a little later in their education.
I did not see a computer until I was 18 and went to college. However, I was so interested in computers before that time that I had bought programming books and wrote programs without even the possibility of compiling them. I took computer science as a minor, and I was humiliated. I had huge troubles writing even simple programs, because I did not really understand what computers were about and how they worked. At the same time, other students were producing programs that worked at incredible speeds. Later on I found out that these other students had had computers at home at least since they were 15, 16 years of age. However, by that time I had given up hope that I could ever mean something in the world of computing. That changed after I bought a C64 and started playing around with it. I got work as a commercial programmer, went back to college, and got a master's and later a PhD in computer science.
The point is that having had access to a computer in my teens would have shaved YEARS of my education.
Also, when I look back at how I used to write papers and do research, compared to how I do it now, I see that having access to something like the Internet speeds up research and education enormously. Sure, there's a lot of trash out there, but if you have never been without modern-day online facilities, you have no idea how much they really mean.
The OLPC is not for raising new programmers. It is for giving people access to a hoard of information and to facilities that allow them to collaborate with others in work and education. It is not the only requirement to get ahead in life, but it is incredibly helpful.
I agree that both were superb levels, but they ended kind-of weak. But that was the whole problem with Psychonauts anyway: a superb game that ended kind-of weak. Actually, the Meat-Circus level of Psychonauts turned it from one of my top-10 games to one I would not really recommend to anybody.
Actually, people are mistaken thinking that this is a short story that is published as such.
This is part of a story by Fredric Brown. The story is called "Knock", is eight or nine pages long, and it starts like this:
"There is a sweet little horror story that is only two sentences long: The last man on Earth sat alone in a room. There was a knock at the door... Two sentences and an ellipsis of three dots. The horror, of course, isn't in the story at all; it's in the ellipsis, the implication: what knocked at the door. Faced with the unknown, the human mind supplies something vaguely horrible. But it wasn't horrible, really."
However, I think Fredric Brown (who is something of a specialist in writing ultra-short stories) actually is the writer of the shortest SF story, which is called "The End". It is nine lines long, or rather, four-and-a-half lines long, repeated twice.
The shortest horror story is probably by Roland Topor. It is called "Historical mysteries", and it is only one line, which I do not have the original for, but I can provide my own translation: "Fifteen minutes before he passed away, mr. de la Palice was already dead."
and not since Syberia in 2002 has there been a rating over 9.
And, having played Syberia, I can honestly say that as an adventure game it sucks donkeyballs. All puzzles are incredibly easy, except for one which is completely undoable. In itself this is not enough to invalidate the game, but the puzzles are virtually all ridiculously illogical. I mean, at one point in the game the main character cannot climb a certain ladder because there are birds sitting in front of it, and "she is afraid of birds". Now, instead of just stomping right through the birds, or throwing something at them, or making a loud noise, or just waiting until they fly away (which are all impossible), you have to go on a long, boring quest which goes all over the map, to get some birdseed or something so you can lure them away. The game is also dead slow, and the main character is unsympathetic and presented as being quite stupid. The only good thing about the game is that it looks absolutely stunning. Which is probably why Gamespot gave it such a high ranking. Visuals, you know.
Actually, it is much simpler. Several recent studies have indicated that lesser-educated people eat more junk food than higher-educated people - even though they usually have less money to spare and fast food is more expensive than healthy food. So, indeed, chicken and egg are reversed in the study, but it is simply a matter of eating habits.
In the past 7 years I have bought about 1500 DVDs. And I exclusively watch them on my computer, since my TV sucks but my monitor is fabugorgeous.
I know, I can circumvent a copy-protection scheme, just like I circumvent region-encoding. But is it really worth the hassle? If I have to go through hoops to watch the stuff I buy, I rather buy the same stuff where I don't need to go through hoops. I.e., pirated DVDs. Easy to get, easy to play, exactly what I want, and a helluva lot cheaper. To be honest, in this case I would prefer pirated DVDs even if they were the same price as the legal DVDs, or slightly more expensive...
"Because you're not willing to pay for what it would cost not to suck"
Spot on.
As a case in point: I once developed software for the government, which they needed to make some regulations accessible to their users. They were going to spread that software around for free. They had a limited budget to develop the stuff, and lots of requests for features. So they asked us to put a price tag on each requested feature, so that they could pick and choose what they wanted.
One of the features they wanted to have was an extensive test of the product in a usability lab. Obviously, when they found out that that would cost as much as the development of ALL the software features they wanted, that was the first thing to go. And that was my advice too. Because I reasoned: (a) there were no complaints on the usability of the prototype, (b) every user of the prototype was able to use it as intended without any training, and (c) if its free, usable in practice, and there is NO budget to implement any of the features that might be suggested by subjects in a usability lab, why do the usability tests at all?
It must be said, I was quite surprised to find out that testing the usability of the software would be so expensive. But all the items on the calculation were reasonable. Interesting lesson to learn.