If making a reliable long-term electrical connection between neurons and circuitry continues to be as hard as it has been so far, then this technique could offer a superior way of coupling the brain to cybernetics. Neurons would only need to be near the input device, not need to be touching it. The brain would figure out what the signals meant just as easily.
To avoid floating-point problems and to allow continuous loading, the world was split up into nodes with specified transformations between them. This resulted in a world that often cannot be mapped, as it would pass through itself. There were also many tricks that were used to fit the huge number of objects in memory. Many things self-destruct, or disappear if out of sight for more that a few minutes.
Because functional programming makes it extremely difficult to do things that OOP and procedural can do very simply. Stateless isn't a benefit, its a defect. Real life has state. Most workflows you use a computer for require state. Even a simple event like posting this answer requires state- state to store my session info (on both ends). There's a reason that functional languages are used only in the realm of mathematics- its not suitable anywhere else. You can write imperative code just fine in Haskell, with the occasional requirement to be more explicit about something than in an ordinary imperative language (e.g. distinguishing passing around a variable from passing around the value it had at a particular time). One should not be forced to do imperative programming without first-class variables, first-class imperative actions, and first-class program state. Full STM, channels, and MVars are great for parallelism. Those things are what you get in return for your slight extra explicitness about what you want, and many of the repetative bits have already been wrapped up in monad combinators.
I have a spelling checker, It came with my PC; It plainly marks four my revue Mistakes I cannot sea. I've run this poem threw it, I'm sure you're please too no, It's letter perfect in it's weight, My checker tolled me sew.
-Author Unknown- Actually, Author Known. It was written (slightly differently) by John Brophy as a humour piece in the June 1996 edition of the Farm Journalist, newsletter of the Canadian Farm Writers' Federation. The edition used to be online at http://www.cfwf.ca/farmj/fjjun96/#spell, and is still present in the Web Archive:
1. Write up some crap chat log that plays on the stereotypes of a certain subculture. 2. Get it posted onto slashdot. 3. Put Google ads on your site. 4. Profit!!!!
I had this problem for a while too. If the computer was sitting there, the box would never pop up, but randomly, while I was gaming, it would pop up and disappear immediately. The frequency of appearence went up over time, until it started to appear sometime while not gaming. By the point at which it was appearing several times a minute, I found that I could get it to not disappear if the mouse stopped moving at the exact time that it appeared. It turned out to be a notice telling me to replace my wireless mouse batteries. Presumably a bug was causing it to disappear whenever more data was received from the mouse, so it never stayed on screen. (I was addicted to C&C Generals at the time, ICYW.)
An expressive, succinct, high-level language is still the better bet than a verbose language for producing quality code.
Strange that you should link to LISP here, since in Scheme one can pull of almost exactly the same trick, again by forgetting a pair of parentheses.
(if (eqv? foo 0)...)
versus
(if (eqv? (foo) 0)...)
So, Betty tries to copy a borrowed blu-ray disc which triggers a player device to phones home and a day later police knocks on her door.
Ah, no, you don't understand this bill, clearly. Arresting everyone who breaks these laws would be too expensive. Most of the time, you just record it and don't do anything. Then, when everyone is a criminal, you have arbitrary powers of arrest, which are the best thing to stop Terrorists. The best bit is that it is totally legal, because they're criminals.
Actually, Robert Rankin proposed something rather similar in his (bizzare and humorus) book East of Ealing. It was written and is set before the days of RFID tags, and features barcodes instead. Like in many of his stories, the End of the World is prevented by the heros.
Froogle link
It probably did melt, but the important part was that it was also crushed by the immense magnetic field created. This is a bit like the effect created at http://205.243.100.155/frames/shrinkergallery.html. Of course, the actual heating cannot be worked out as they do not specify the duration of the current.
"What inspired the British Broadcasting Corporation to suddenly leap into the software programming foray?"
You do know that this is the same BBC that released the BBC Microcomputer, right? Anyway:
the Apache Modules are "related to the way pages are built on bbc.co.uk",
Dirac is video codec,
TV-Anywhere is "an open standard for metadata describing TV and radio programmes",
Media Dispatch is for transferring huge MPEGs,
MXF File Test Engine can perform scripted tests on MXF files (a type of media file), and
Video Shot Change Detector is exactly what it says on the tin.
(The rest of the stuff is simple large-corparation-network-type tools.) The BBC are exactly the sort of people to do this. Anyway, as a publicly-funded broadcaster, they should be developing (and open-sourcing) most of this sort of thing, for broadcasting over the net and suchlike.
Yeah, we must mostly be criminals if go on these "IRC chat rooms". TFA says:
One day late last year, Mr. Abad was on the Internet Relay Channel, or IRC, a global online chat system that is best known as the lair of various digital bad guys.
(emphasis mine). If TFA makes mistakes like these, I would be a little suspicious about the rest of the facts.
We have initiated discussions with Mitsui and they will be sending us 100 grams of carbon nanotubes to examine. (We have purchased CNTs for $700/gm. Mitsui will be sending us the 100 grams for free. Their expected sale price is $100/kg!)
So that's $10 worth of carbon nanotubes for free -- very generous! >:-< They repeat the price and amout of the next page, so they must be right.
What do those "IT heavyweights" know about "agility"? They're giant, ancient monolithic dinosaurs, threatened by the vastly more agile little mammal Linux.
What it does do is take complete snapshots every (for example) 100 steps. In order to move "backwards" a step, it returns to the previous breakpoint (a known state) and goes forward 99 steps.
Then it returns to the same breakpoint and goes forward 98 steps. And so on. So from your perspective, you see the 99th step, 98th, 97th, and on down. It only LOOKS like it's running backwards.
This would even work for the game of life.
This *has* been done for Life, in Life32 (great program, and I am not affiliated). It works very well. It was in fact the first thing I thought of when I read this.
For example, imagine a set of virtual "rooms" each one is dedicated to a specific task.
It was called MicrosoftBob. It was a spectacular flop, and its only major legacy is the MS Office Assistants (The Dot is unchanged, and the tradition of the most irritating personality being the default started there.).
The difference being that the corewars programs were supposed to be designed by humans. I only know of one case where they were evolved. Anyway, it was not necessary for them to reproduce, and indeed many didn't.
So you sail to Mars in a month, you solve the landing issue.... then how the #(*%^# do you get BACK?
You don't. Hopefully most of the heavy kit (air miners, robotic bulldozers, etc) will be non-perishable and will have have been transported there by slower routes. This also gives you more time to construct the much more complex and expensive human (and livestock?) habitation that will go by solar sail. (I've been reading (Red|Green|Blue) Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson.)
It seems that spheres are going to be a very common shape in this movie, With Planets, The Hart of Gold that looks like a big sphere, and Marvins head which is a huge sphere on a little body. I don't know about everyone else all those sphears seem more of a nineties thing. The 2000 seem to prefer more edges in the style.
...enough to give front-line soldiers bandwidth equal to downloading three feature-length movies a second.
Secondly, an individual soldier needs no where near that much information. It's even doubtful that, say, a battalion-level command post would need that much information exchange.
I think they were talking about the total requirements, not the requirements per soldier.
I have (at home) the *best* fire-starting lens: a square plastic "flat" (with concentric circular ridges) lens about 45cm == 18in across, from an overhead projector, but found (with ~10% broken off) in a junkyard. When used the right way round, it is so powerful that viewing the spot leaves temporary dots on your eyes *even through a welding glass*. I have perfected the "shadow maximising" technique of burning things not on a flat surface but in mid-air. You can even burn rocks or concrete with it.
I always store it between books, in a huge brown-paper envelope that my copy of Knuth came in, just for safety.
Slashdot Mirror
As a younger geek, I loved reading Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! It would be a good intro to his other more-scientific works too.
If making a reliable long-term electrical connection between neurons and circuitry continues to be as hard as it has been so far, then this technique could offer a superior way of coupling the brain to cybernetics. Neurons would only need to be near the input device, not need to be touching it. The brain would figure out what the signals meant just as easily.
Actually the forums are still quite active, with several comics posted in the Guest Strips forum every day.
If you want the technical details, read The Continuous World of Dungeon Siege (a fascinating read).
To avoid floating-point problems and to allow continuous loading, the world was split up into nodes with specified transformations between them. This resulted in a world that often cannot be mapped, as it would pass through itself. There were also many tricks that were used to fit the huge number of objects in memory. Many things self-destruct, or disappear if out of sight for more that a few minutes.
It came with my PC;
It plainly marks four my revue
Mistakes I cannot sea.
I've run this poem threw it,
I'm sure you're please too no,
It's letter perfect in it's weight,
My checker tolled me sew.
-Author Unknown- Actually, Author Known. It was written (slightly differently) by John Brophy as a humour piece in the June 1996 edition of the Farm Journalist, newsletter of the Canadian Farm Writers' Federation. The edition used to be online at http://www.cfwf.ca/farmj/fjjun96/#spell, and is still present in the Web Archive:
http://web.archive.org/web/20050116015142/http://
(Finally, after keeping that information for several years, it has become useful, and my struggle has not been in vain!!!)
The version I heard ends with: ... Then he tried another: "288".
The listeners looked shocked.
"288?" one said, "That one's just too gross."
ITYM:
1. Write up some crap chat log that plays on the stereotypes of a certain subculture.
2. Get it posted onto slashdot.
3. Put Google ads on your site.
4. Profit!!!!
I had this problem for a while too. If the computer was sitting there, the box would never pop up, but randomly, while I was gaming, it would pop up and disappear immediately. The frequency of appearence went up over time, until it started to appear sometime while not gaming. By the point at which it was appearing several times a minute, I found that I could get it to not disappear if the mouse stopped moving at the exact time that it appeared.
It turned out to be a notice telling me to replace my wireless mouse batteries. Presumably a bug was causing it to disappear whenever more data was received from the mouse, so it never stayed on screen. (I was addicted to C&C Generals at the time, ICYW.)
Erm, actually, you can view the area, just not at high zooms. I have worked out that the road in the centre of the photo is Steelhead Way
This post brought to you by my paranoia.
Actually, Robert Rankin proposed something rather similar in his (bizzare and humorus) book East of Ealing. It was written and is set before the days of RFID tags, and features barcodes instead. Like in many of his stories, the End of the World is prevented by the heros. Froogle link
It probably did melt, but the important part was that it was also crushed by the immense magnetic field created. This is a bit like the effect created at http://205.243.100.155/frames/shrinkergallery.html . Of course, the actual heating cannot be worked out as they do not specify the duration of the current.
- the Apache Modules are "related to the way pages are built on bbc.co.uk",
- Dirac is video codec,
- TV-Anywhere is "an open standard for metadata describing TV and radio programmes",
- Media Dispatch is for transferring huge MPEGs,
- MXF File Test Engine can perform scripted tests on MXF files (a type of media file), and
- Video Shot Change Detector is exactly what it says on the tin.
(The rest of the stuff is simple large-corparation-network-type tools.) The BBC are exactly the sort of people to do this. Anyway, as a publicly-funded broadcaster, they should be developing (and open-sourcing) most of this sort of thing, for broadcasting over the net and suchlike.(emphasis mine). If TFA makes mistakes like these, I would be a little suspicious about the rest of the facts.
So that's $10 worth of carbon nanotubes for free -- very generous! >:-< They repeat the price and amout of the next page, so they must be right.
This *has* been done for Life, in Life32 (great program, and I am not affiliated). It works very well. It was in fact the first thing I thought of when I read this.
For example, imagine a set of virtual "rooms" each one is dedicated to a specific task.
It was called Microsoft Bob.
It was a spectacular flop, and its only major legacy is the MS Office Assistants (The Dot is unchanged, and the tradition of the most irritating personality being the default started there.).
The difference being that the corewars programs were supposed to be designed by humans. I only know of one case where they were evolved. Anyway, it was not necessary for them to reproduce, and indeed many didn't.
Secondly, an individual soldier needs no where near that much information. It's even doubtful that, say, a battalion-level command post would need that much information exchange.
I think they were talking about the total requirements, not the requirements per soldier.
I always store it between books, in a huge brown-paper envelope that my copy of Knuth came in, just for safety.