The same reasoning can be used to support just about any bad idea you can think of that involves a claim of repression, most notably 9/11 Truthers. You try and try and try to be reasonable and accomodating (because questioning authority is a very good thing, in principle), but at the end of the day you simply have to tell them to shut up and ban them and use whatever other hamfisted tools you have at your disposal to make them shut up because they will not stop the crapflooding.
Some strains of self-proclaimed "feminism" are the same way. If you want to talk about the very real anti-woman discrimination that exists (yes, even in western societies) and contrast that to anti-man discrimination (also very real, though very much neglected) and discuss ways of improving a specific form of discrimination or ways of trying to help society as a whole evolve to be more egalitarian, that's awesome.
But the very, very vocal minority of "feminists" are engaged in a very different sort of struggle based on self-pitying identity politics. A real egalitarian will insist that it does not matter what is between your legs, full stop. (It's a shame that the reviewer failed this test as well.)
Yeah, I'm sure that works fine when you're living in a freaking desert. Try doing that stuff in Florida, where the temperature stays in the 80s at night (real degrees, not that uselessly imprecise Celsius crap) and humidity stays in the 90%s.
The fact that union dues are easily itemized and visible does not render them any more of a net loss than the CEO using the money (value) created by the workers to buy a new corporate jet instead of raising salaries. People who argue otherwise are perfectly willing to accept the absurd legal fiction of corporate personhood that favors the rich but are utterly unable to understand or accept that a similar entity might exist to serve the non-C level employees.
If you're going the Lisp route, pick a dialect of Scheme.
Bah. Pick Scheme if you don't care about performance, if you want to write your own compiler, or if you enjoy using gratuitous recursive calls for no good reason.
Otherwise, pick Common Lisp. Damn fast, macros that are both more intuitive and more powerful (if a little more dangerous), and one of the greatest object oriented frameworks ever designed (CLOS.)
Have you noticed how Germany is third world nation teetering on the edge of becoming a failed state, so great and horrible is the weight of their collective shame? No? Well, maybe you should considering just fucking admitting. it already. No one cares (except a few Armenians, one assumes.)
I don't know if you've noticed, but you have a few other things on your plate right now what with the Kurds and ISIS and the religious conservative blowhards (you know, the ones who make Texas look like a bunch of simpering progressives) who have all but torpedoed your EU aspirations. This Armenian thing is a softball. Try not to fuck it up.
Instead of parroting the decades-old conservative meme about children having too much self-esteem, maybe you should direct the ire where it really belongs: at the anachronistic university system and the government that props it up. A four year degree is now required for jobs that didn't even require a high school diploma when my father was my age. Students are not only saddled with debt for decades, but they are wasting four years of their life on material that largely will not be used in their job. And the universities themselves *of course* no longer give a crap about whether the students are learning anything--they aren't in the business of creating scholars. They are rent seekers in the business of subsidizing their own unnecessary degrees in addition to the now almost entirely superfluous physical campus infrastructure.
I don't blame the students at all for not taking their class seriously. They were not taking a course on partial differential equations. They were taking a course on "Strategic Management", and they apparently perceived (correctly) that this was obviously a joke being had at their own expense.
Telling someone that they are imagining there is a problem is highly offensive, really, and tends to make people not want to be around you.
That cuts both ways, though; ascribing a specific sexist motivation to something that is not can be rather offensive as well. You're not just saying that there is a generic problem--you are ascribing specific motivations to specific actions done by specific people.
I've no doubt you've encountered sexism, but the men's room bit seems like a stretch (if they actually intended to keep those conversations a secret, why and how did you find out about them?) and it is extremely hard to take anyone seriously who views cubical artwork as being a conscious attempt to create a hostile work environment. Artwork can be "offensive" in the general sense of the word, of course, but that's not what you said. Putting aside company policies on the material in question, it is extremely antisocial to interpret other people's personal property as hostile commentary on your existence, full stop.
Heck, I once heard a co-worker complain that he would have gotten his promotion if he's been a woman, with an obvious implication since I had gotten mine - ignoring that I've worked here three years longer, am considered more helpful and, oh yeah, _trained him_ when he got here. Nope, obviously, it's because I'm a woman.
Are you sure his obviously self-serving whining to be a personal attack on your qualifications? His comment, as you've presented it, is neutral on your qualifications. It is just complaining, rightly or wrongly, about his perception of an affirmative action / quota type system. It sounds self-absorbed, not passive-aggressive. It is possible he was so overtly hostile as to tell you to your face that you didn't deserve the promotion, but it sounds more like simple egotism.
"You're joking, there aren't any women on the internet!"
This is an old joke that is observing how easy it is to pretend to be someone else on the internet and the many times people have been deceived. To the extent it is making fun of a gender, it is mocking males for being gullible enough to fall for another male's prank. A similar joke says that everyone claiming to be children in a chatroom are actually FBI agents. Would you claim this is some kind of subtle slander against children?
Yes yes, lovely fancy pedantic answers, but I still think Kilimanjaro deserves mentioning as the mountain that involves the longest vertical distance traveled for a mountain climber (assuming we discount all of these pesky underwater mountain climbers and center of the earth mountain climbers.)
Clearly, this is intuitively what people imagine when they hear of a "tallest" or "highest" mountain. Go up to the peaks of these mountains, look down at the ground level where you started--the one that is the farthest from that ground level, the one that involves traversing a longer vertical distance, the one that gives you the farthest clear view to the horizon--that is the tallest mountain. And the name of that mountain is, from my understanding, Kilimanjaro.
How does your "personal belief" explain the millionaire Osama bin Laden, the computer programmer "Jihadi John", the hijackers with Ph.D.s who flew jets into the World Trade Center, the millions upon millions of dollars funneled into building rockets and tunnels in Gaza, etc. ?
Let's assume for the sake of argument that the large majority of terrorists are impoverished. It is clear that they are not the ones we really need to worry about. The rich are doing the most damage, and they don't even have to use the poor as pawns in the process--they are quite willing to walk away from their westernized lives of luxury and either blow themselves up or go live in a cave.
So, because the most vocal and visible fundamentalist jackasses these days are Protestant, the Catholic church therefore was right all along? Do you realize that this "good idea" you speak of (not letting the common man form his own opinion) involved killing people if they were caught possessing a Bible written in English?
So, um, were the Inquisition and the Crusades glorious examples of Catholic non-fundamentalism keeping home-grown Puritanism at bay? And there is also the tiny matter of those millions of highly influential Catholic fascists in the early to mid 20th century...
It's should be blindingly obvious that the only reason the Catholic church has become more tolerant was because they have been long losing power in the face of both expanding Protestantism and the Enlightenment. It should also be obvious that as disturbing as today's Protestant fundamentalists are, they are not 1/10 as terrifying as the Catholic church was a few hundred years ago.
So that annoying pedants like me have an excuse to point out that Everest is not the tallest mountain in the world (merely the highest) and that the thousands of people who insist on climbing it are overpaid, pretentious dicks who would rather brag about nearly dying of cerebral edema or hypothermia than do something like climb Kilimanjaro (the tallest above-sea mountain in the world), which is a longer and much more scenic climb.
I don't particularly relish quoting Sam Harris all day long, but as it happens he has refuted this fairly convincingly:
1. Why is this level of intensity of religious/political violence mostly confined to parts of the Muslim world? Plenty of places on Earth on war-torn, but petty tribalism and profit-seeking warlords are not quite the same thing as people willing to sacrifice their lives for a transnational, transracial, translingual, transcultural set of beliefs.
1a. Where are the Tibetan suicide bombers? They have suffered worse than the Palestinians and other Middle Eastern Arabs. Possibly their different reaction has something to do with their religion being relatively more peace-oriented?
2. Take a look at the biographies of the 9/11 hijackers and many other Islamic terrorists some time. Poverty is obviously not the cause here. Why is the middle and upper middle class so strongly committed to this cause?
I'm not sure what's up with the trend of people proudly proclaiming they can't notice the difference between different resolutions. Um, good for you? Me, I could see individual pixels in my old 15 inch 1024x768 monitor from 2.5 feet away. I'm not a freak of nature. I have slightly worse than 20/20 vision. But going from 480i to 1080i (CRT in both cases) with the same 34" screen size and the same 6 foot (more or less) viewing distance was a earthshaking difference noticeable not just to me, but to almost everyone who saw it.
Hell, I remember when the argument was that HD sucks (particularly for porn, but also in general) because you could easily see skin imperfections, the cheap props used in Star Trek, etc. Too much detail was supposedly ruining things... but now the argument is the exact opposite? And some people have even started pulling pseudo-scientific charts out of their asses showing the supposed screen sizes and viewing distances at which different resolutions become indistinguishable (the first thing you notice is the proscribed viewing distances are completely insane, like 11+ feet for a modest screen size.)
My current theory about all of this is that the compression used in online streaming video has you all extremely confused. Or possibly it's because most LCD screens still tend to look weird and indescribably shitty compared to 1080i CRT or 1080p plasma. Or perhaps the upscaling algorithms have become too good--to claim that 4k or HD is a waste, you have to compare 480p native to 1080p native, not 1080p (480p upscaled) to 1080p native.
High bitrate 1080p at 34" should be appear as an instant and impressive improvement over high bitrate, non-upscaled 480p even at 10 feet.
Sitting six feet away from a 37" 1080p TV set to 720p in Windows (otherwise I can't even read the small text), I can watch a 480p video without feeling like I'm losing anything.
Please find an ophthalmologist before it's too late. That goes for everyone who modded this up, too.
Duress passwords are fine for stuff that the adversary doesn't know about. If three letter agents bust in on you and they have network logs or other surveillance showing what you've been up to then no, the duress password is not going to get you anywhere.
On the other hand, if you had a laptop with some Tienanmen square videos on it that you wanted to bring to China, I think it's perfectly viable approach to simply load up the dummy container with videos of yourself doing a little soft S&M or something, just in case. Really, I would like to hear your explain why you think showing some slightly annoyed (but not suspicious of anything in particular) Chinese officers videos of tanks rolling around in Tienanmen would be safer and preferable to showing them your wife tying you to a bedpost. I would say that the latter approach is at least worth a shot.
Of course, it's usually better to go the extra mile and use headerless solutions in such a way that it would take someone with a fair bit of expertise to notice even the possibility of encrypted material, with no way to conclusively prove whether it's there or not. I mean, if the phrase "please enter your password" appears at any point, you have already done something extremely stupid and lazy. The criminal or cop who has just busted in and is holding the gun to your head almost certainly does not have the knowledge or tools necessary to realize that the device might not be fully decrypted.
If you're worried about getting "killed or worse" by an adversary who is going to first detain you for days while the device is subject to extensive forensic analysis then you're a terrorist and/or you plan on visiting some rather unpleasant countries and doing some fantastically stupid things.
I mean, I've no love for SJW-type whining identity politics (which is sadly what much of progressive politics has turned into), but what exactly are the stakes in the Gamergate debacle? Are gamers particularly worried that the industry is going to stop including sexy women and cliched plots to sell games? Because that's fucking stupid. The gaming industry will do that maybe 20 years after Hollywood stops.
So, I mean, are there any stakes at all here for the anti-SJW camp? Are there laws being debated in Congress? Are gamers being discriminated against? It's annoying to hear journalists pontificate about shit they don't understand, but that includes damn near anything they talk about. It's perhaps even worse to have to listen to a manufactured controversy, but still....
Why should we care? Let them troll away and then it all goes away once the journalists get bored with it. There are plenty of pro-egalitarian (i.e. anti-SJW) battles to be fought that have actual consequences, but this doesn't seem to be one of them.
Or am I really so old that I'm failing to realize that being a gamer really is a cultural identity and they really are being discriminated against?
This kinda-sorta happened already with HDTV early adopters. I picked up a 1080i HD CRT from Goodwill a couple years ago for $20 that had only component in, no HDMI. Whoever paid full price for the thing must have been pretty pissed after HDMI and bluray came out and the only HD content they could show was a couple of over the air DTV channels.
For me, they jumped the shark / violated their unofficial motto the day they declared war on the microSD card in their hardware. I could never get too riled about the morality of doing business in China or submitting to the will of three letter agencies here at home because unlike many people I was never under the illusion that they were some kind of activist organization. "Evil" was therefore obviously a reference to not fucking up their own products in an attempt to manipulate their customers into, say, using their cloud storage solution.
Also, I seem to be the only one who finds it extremely alarming that Google has devoted a lot of energy to replacing GPL pieces in Android with BSD-style licensed equivalents. This isn't a simple precautionary exercise or worries about "viral licenses". This certainly isn't about freedom. The moment AOSP projects threaten them (or become an inconvenience) they will simply change licenses and break backwards compatibility. Geeks will struggle mightily to make non-geeks care about this, but there will be no viable alternative in the marketplace, millions will be locked into Google's content ecosystem, and the OEMs (with the possible exception of Amazon) will obediently follow Google.
That is quite interesting, but I think my point may stand. Remember, standard chess matches last for hours. How long can the phone maintain maximum power before having to throttle to keep itself from burning up? And even if heat isn't an issue and we assume it's plugged in, can it pull enough juice through a USB charger to maintain that power? (My Nexus 7 loses power faster than it charges while I'm playing a graphics intensive game.)
Also, I'm not sure why Deep Blue was rated in terms of FLOPs. I don't see how floating point operations are relevant to discrete problems like chess position analysis.
A decent smartphone will romp over grandmaster chess players.
Is this actually true? I'm aware of the recent grandmaster-in-the-bathroom-with-an-iPhone scandal but I had assumed the phone was tied to a desktop at home doing the analysis. My reasoning was thus: ARM processors aren't as powerful (hz for hz) as x86, the existing ARM-optimized chess codebase is presumably much smaller, and most importantly the processing power of smart phones is limited by both heat dissipation and battery life.
I would be surprised if a high-end smartphone in the world could out-compute a reasonably spec'ed desktop from the early 2000s (which was point at which computers began to rather consistently beat grandmasters.) The lack of CPU fan is the biggest limiting factor of all.
While difficult to test I suspect that if we restricted chess players to the same age
and tenure profile of Arimaa players a machine would romp over the novice chess
players (max experience 13 years, average perhaps 7).
You're a decade too late. Even a modestly budgeted machine will (if not intentionally underpowered) romp over master chess players.
I get what you're saying and I'm sure an arimaa grandmaster, if one existed, could beat that particular program. However, you're ignoring the other side of the coin. There have been orders of magnitude more effort expended on writing chess-playing software vs. arimaa-playing software.
Now should I bother to learn the game at all?
Go is much simpler and deeper (although computers are getting pretty good there, too.)
Arimaa isn't a bad game, but despite the claims of its creator I'm not convinced it's simpler than chess. Chess has a few idiosyncratic and tournament-specific rules (three move repetition, castling, double pawn move and the rare en passant capture, having to "checkmate" the king instead of simply capturing him, etc.), but if you ignore those for a moment... chess has straightforward capture, a static setup, and a single method of winning the game. The only thing you have to actually memorize are the 6 different piece movements, the unique rule about knight movement, the unique rule about pawn movement, and the promotion of pawns bit. That's pretty much it. All of the other rules in chess are there for historical reasons or to improve the pace of gameplay among experts--they don't drastically affect the flavor, tactics or depth of the game. If armiaa became a worldwide pastime played by millions, they would surely develop their own array of minor rule tweaks.
So, compare chess's fundamentals (ignoring the ) these are arimaa's fundamentals:
1. Moving one piece one square (plus pushing/pulling--see below) counts as one move. You make four moves per turn. Not bad. It's only slightly more complicated than "move one piece per turn", yet being able to split up a single turn among multiple pieces or pool it all into a single piece is a great way to add depth. (It's not unlike action points in Fallout.) And other than rabbits the pieces all move the same way--obviously, this is simpler than chess.
2. Piece interaction and capture is, um, involved. First, you have a nested hierarchy of pieces that must be memorized (yes, it's "easy" because it's easy to remember that an elephant is bigger than a horse but I don't think that makes it simpler than chess's "any piece can capture any other piece".) Second, there are four different ways to influence an enemy piece: you can pin, pull, push or blockade (blockades only exist in chess in the special case of pawns.) This influence can be used to maneuver an enemy piece over a special trap square, which is which kills the piece... unless there's a friendly piece nearby to save it.
There's a sort of intuitive, real world justification for what is going on ("you see, the horse is grabbing onto the cat's tail, and these four squares here with stickers on them are actually deep holes..."), but I'm not sure how you can call the actual game mechanics simple as compared to chess.
3. The victory condition is getting a rabbit to the other side of the board or killing all of the opponent's rabbits. Like pawns, they can't move backwards. Let's just consider for a moment a game of chess wherein the goal of "kill the king" (again, we're ignoring all of this checkmate nonsense that grew over the centuries) was changed to "kill all of the opponent's pawns". That this would make the game deeper, I don't doubt... but simpler?
If you are talking, it is rather easy to notice a serious helium leak. If I were working in an area where helium asphyxiation was a risk, I would make it a point to sing out loud while I was doing it.
This technique doesn't work so well with argon or nitrogen. That was the only point I was trying to make there.
Slashdot Mirror
The same reasoning can be used to support just about any bad idea you can think of that involves a claim of repression, most notably 9/11 Truthers. You try and try and try to be reasonable and accomodating (because questioning authority is a very good thing, in principle), but at the end of the day you simply have to tell them to shut up and ban them and use whatever other hamfisted tools you have at your disposal to make them shut up because they will not stop the crapflooding.
Some strains of self-proclaimed "feminism" are the same way. If you want to talk about the very real anti-woman discrimination that exists (yes, even in western societies) and contrast that to anti-man discrimination (also very real, though very much neglected) and discuss ways of improving a specific form of discrimination or ways of trying to help society as a whole evolve to be more egalitarian, that's awesome.
But the very, very vocal minority of "feminists" are engaged in a very different sort of struggle based on self-pitying identity politics. A real egalitarian will insist that it does not matter what is between your legs, full stop. (It's a shame that the reviewer failed this test as well.)
Yeah, I'm sure that works fine when you're living in a freaking desert. Try doing that stuff in Florida, where the temperature stays in the 80s at night (real degrees, not that uselessly imprecise Celsius crap) and humidity stays in the 90%s.
The fact that union dues are easily itemized and visible does not render them any more of a net loss than the CEO using the money (value) created by the workers to buy a new corporate jet instead of raising salaries. People who argue otherwise are perfectly willing to accept the absurd legal fiction of corporate personhood that favors the rich but are utterly unable to understand or accept that a similar entity might exist to serve the non-C level employees.
If you're going the Lisp route, pick a dialect of Scheme.
Bah. Pick Scheme if you don't care about performance, if you want to write your own compiler, or if you enjoy using gratuitous recursive calls for no good reason.
Otherwise, pick Common Lisp. Damn fast, macros that are both more intuitive and more powerful (if a little more dangerous), and one of the greatest object oriented frameworks ever designed (CLOS.)
Have you noticed how Germany is third world nation teetering on the edge of becoming a failed state, so great and horrible is the weight of their collective shame? No? Well, maybe you should considering just fucking admitting. it already. No one cares (except a few Armenians, one assumes.)
I don't know if you've noticed, but you have a few other things on your plate right now what with the Kurds and ISIS and the religious conservative blowhards (you know, the ones who make Texas look like a bunch of simpering progressives) who have all but torpedoed your EU aspirations. This Armenian thing is a softball. Try not to fuck it up.
I seriously, seriously doubt it.
Instead of parroting the decades-old conservative meme about children having too much self-esteem, maybe you should direct the ire where it really belongs: at the anachronistic university system and the government that props it up. A four year degree is now required for jobs that didn't even require a high school diploma when my father was my age. Students are not only saddled with debt for decades, but they are wasting four years of their life on material that largely will not be used in their job. And the universities themselves *of course* no longer give a crap about whether the students are learning anything--they aren't in the business of creating scholars. They are rent seekers in the business of subsidizing their own unnecessary degrees in addition to the now almost entirely superfluous physical campus infrastructure.
I don't blame the students at all for not taking their class seriously. They were not taking a course on partial differential equations. They were taking a course on "Strategic Management", and they apparently perceived (correctly) that this was obviously a joke being had at their own expense.
Telling someone that they are imagining there is a problem is highly offensive, really, and tends to make people not want to be around you.
That cuts both ways, though; ascribing a specific sexist motivation to something that is not can be rather offensive as well. You're not just saying that there is a generic problem--you are ascribing specific motivations to specific actions done by specific people.
I've no doubt you've encountered sexism, but the men's room bit seems like a stretch (if they actually intended to keep those conversations a secret, why and how did you find out about them?) and it is extremely hard to take anyone seriously who views cubical artwork as being a conscious attempt to create a hostile work environment. Artwork can be "offensive" in the general sense of the word, of course, but that's not what you said. Putting aside company policies on the material in question, it is extremely antisocial to interpret other people's personal property as hostile commentary on your existence, full stop.
Heck, I once heard a co-worker complain that he would have gotten his promotion if he's been a woman, with an obvious implication since I had gotten mine - ignoring that I've worked here three years longer, am considered more helpful and, oh yeah, _trained him_ when he got here. Nope, obviously, it's because I'm a woman.
Are you sure his obviously self-serving whining to be a personal attack on your qualifications? His comment, as you've presented it, is neutral on your qualifications. It is just complaining, rightly or wrongly, about his perception of an affirmative action / quota type system. It sounds self-absorbed, not passive-aggressive. It is possible he was so overtly hostile as to tell you to your face that you didn't deserve the promotion, but it sounds more like simple egotism.
"You're joking, there aren't any women on the internet!"
This is an old joke that is observing how easy it is to pretend to be someone else on the internet and the many times people have been deceived. To the extent it is making fun of a gender, it is mocking males for being gullible enough to fall for another male's prank. A similar joke says that everyone claiming to be children in a chatroom are actually FBI agents. Would you claim this is some kind of subtle slander against children?
Yes yes, lovely fancy pedantic answers, but I still think Kilimanjaro deserves mentioning as the mountain that involves the longest vertical distance traveled for a mountain climber (assuming we discount all of these pesky underwater mountain climbers and center of the earth mountain climbers.)
Clearly, this is intuitively what people imagine when they hear of a "tallest" or "highest" mountain. Go up to the peaks of these mountains, look down at the ground level where you started--the one that is the farthest from that ground level, the one that involves traversing a longer vertical distance, the one that gives you the farthest clear view to the horizon--that is the tallest mountain. And the name of that mountain is, from my understanding, Kilimanjaro.
How does your "personal belief" explain the millionaire Osama bin Laden, the computer programmer "Jihadi John", the hijackers with Ph.D.s who flew jets into the World Trade Center, the millions upon millions of dollars funneled into building rockets and tunnels in Gaza, etc. ?
Let's assume for the sake of argument that the large majority of terrorists are impoverished. It is clear that they are not the ones we really need to worry about. The rich are doing the most damage, and they don't even have to use the poor as pawns in the process--they are quite willing to walk away from their westernized lives of luxury and either blow themselves up or go live in a cave.
So, because the most vocal and visible fundamentalist jackasses these days are Protestant, the Catholic church therefore was right all along? Do you realize that this "good idea" you speak of (not letting the common man form his own opinion) involved killing people if they were caught possessing a Bible written in English?
So, um, were the Inquisition and the Crusades glorious examples of Catholic non-fundamentalism keeping home-grown Puritanism at bay? And there is also the tiny matter of those millions of highly influential Catholic fascists in the early to mid 20th century...
It's should be blindingly obvious that the only reason the Catholic church has become more tolerant was because they have been long losing power in the face of both expanding Protestantism and the Enlightenment. It should also be obvious that as disturbing as today's Protestant fundamentalists are, they are not 1/10 as terrifying as the Catholic church was a few hundred years ago.
So that annoying pedants like me have an excuse to point out that Everest is not the tallest mountain in the world (merely the highest) and that the thousands of people who insist on climbing it are overpaid, pretentious dicks who would rather brag about nearly dying of cerebral edema or hypothermia than do something like climb Kilimanjaro (the tallest above-sea mountain in the world), which is a longer and much more scenic climb.
I don't particularly relish quoting Sam Harris all day long, but as it happens he has refuted this fairly convincingly:
1. Why is this level of intensity of religious/political violence mostly confined to parts of the Muslim world? Plenty of places on Earth on war-torn, but petty tribalism and profit-seeking warlords are not quite the same thing as people willing to sacrifice their lives for a transnational, transracial, translingual, transcultural set of beliefs.
1a. Where are the Tibetan suicide bombers? They have suffered worse than the Palestinians and other Middle Eastern Arabs. Possibly their different reaction has something to do with their religion being relatively more peace-oriented?
2. Take a look at the biographies of the 9/11 hijackers and many other Islamic terrorists some time. Poverty is obviously not the cause here. Why is the middle and upper middle class so strongly committed to this cause?
http://tiffzhang.com/startup/i...
They may be onto something there.
I think the crosshairs graphic makes this one work:
http://tiffzhang.com/startup/i...
This is so fucking stupid, but I can't stop:
http://tiffzhang.com/startup/i...
http://tiffzhang.com/startup/i...
http://tiffzhang.com/startup/i...
Good hook, but it kinda goes off of the rails after that.
http://tiffzhang.com/startup/i...
Hell, I remember when the argument was that HD sucks (particularly for porn, but also in general) because you could easily see skin imperfections, the cheap props used in Star Trek, etc. Too much detail was supposedly ruining things... but now the argument is the exact opposite? And some people have even started pulling pseudo-scientific charts out of their asses showing the supposed screen sizes and viewing distances at which different resolutions become indistinguishable (the first thing you notice is the proscribed viewing distances are completely insane, like 11+ feet for a modest screen size.)
My current theory about all of this is that the compression used in online streaming video has you all extremely confused. Or possibly it's because most LCD screens still tend to look weird and indescribably shitty compared to 1080i CRT or 1080p plasma. Or perhaps the upscaling algorithms have become too good--to claim that 4k or HD is a waste, you have to compare 480p native to 1080p native, not 1080p (480p upscaled) to 1080p native.
High bitrate 1080p at 34" should be appear as an instant and impressive improvement over high bitrate, non-upscaled 480p even at 10 feet.
Sitting six feet away from a 37" 1080p TV set to 720p in Windows (otherwise I can't even read the small text), I can watch a 480p video without feeling like I'm losing anything.
Please find an ophthalmologist before it's too late. That goes for everyone who modded this up, too.
Duress passwords are fine for stuff that the adversary doesn't know about. If three letter agents bust in on you and they have network logs or other surveillance showing what you've been up to then no, the duress password is not going to get you anywhere.
On the other hand, if you had a laptop with some Tienanmen square videos on it that you wanted to bring to China, I think it's perfectly viable approach to simply load up the dummy container with videos of yourself doing a little soft S&M or something, just in case. Really, I would like to hear your explain why you think showing some slightly annoyed (but not suspicious of anything in particular) Chinese officers videos of tanks rolling around in Tienanmen would be safer and preferable to showing them your wife tying you to a bedpost. I would say that the latter approach is at least worth a shot.
Of course, it's usually better to go the extra mile and use headerless solutions in such a way that it would take someone with a fair bit of expertise to notice even the possibility of encrypted material, with no way to conclusively prove whether it's there or not. I mean, if the phrase "please enter your password" appears at any point, you have already done something extremely stupid and lazy. The criminal or cop who has just busted in and is holding the gun to your head almost certainly does not have the knowledge or tools necessary to realize that the device might not be fully decrypted.
If you're worried about getting "killed or worse" by an adversary who is going to first detain you for days while the device is subject to extensive forensic analysis then you're a terrorist and/or you plan on visiting some rather unpleasant countries and doing some fantastically stupid things.
I mean, I've no love for SJW-type whining identity politics (which is sadly what much of progressive politics has turned into), but what exactly are the stakes in the Gamergate debacle? Are gamers particularly worried that the industry is going to stop including sexy women and cliched plots to sell games? Because that's fucking stupid. The gaming industry will do that maybe 20 years after Hollywood stops.
So, I mean, are there any stakes at all here for the anti-SJW camp? Are there laws being debated in Congress? Are gamers being discriminated against? It's annoying to hear journalists pontificate about shit they don't understand, but that includes damn near anything they talk about. It's perhaps even worse to have to listen to a manufactured controversy, but still....
Why should we care? Let them troll away and then it all goes away once the journalists get bored with it. There are plenty of pro-egalitarian (i.e. anti-SJW) battles to be fought that have actual consequences, but this doesn't seem to be one of them.
Or am I really so old that I'm failing to realize that being a gamer really is a cultural identity and they really are being discriminated against?
This kinda-sorta happened already with HDTV early adopters. I picked up a 1080i HD CRT from Goodwill a couple years ago for $20 that had only component in, no HDMI. Whoever paid full price for the thing must have been pretty pissed after HDMI and bluray came out and the only HD content they could show was a couple of over the air DTV channels.
For me, they jumped the shark / violated their unofficial motto the day they declared war on the microSD card in their hardware. I could never get too riled about the morality of doing business in China or submitting to the will of three letter agencies here at home because unlike many people I was never under the illusion that they were some kind of activist organization. "Evil" was therefore obviously a reference to not fucking up their own products in an attempt to manipulate their customers into, say, using their cloud storage solution.
Also, I seem to be the only one who finds it extremely alarming that Google has devoted a lot of energy to replacing GPL pieces in Android with BSD-style licensed equivalents. This isn't a simple precautionary exercise or worries about "viral licenses". This certainly isn't about freedom. The moment AOSP projects threaten them (or become an inconvenience) they will simply change licenses and break backwards compatibility. Geeks will struggle mightily to make non-geeks care about this, but there will be no viable alternative in the marketplace, millions will be locked into Google's content ecosystem, and the OEMs (with the possible exception of Amazon) will obediently follow Google.
Ah I see you already noted the FLOP thing. My reading comprehension sucks today
That is quite interesting, but I think my point may stand. Remember, standard chess matches last for hours. How long can the phone maintain maximum power before having to throttle to keep itself from burning up? And even if heat isn't an issue and we assume it's plugged in, can it pull enough juice through a USB charger to maintain that power? (My Nexus 7 loses power faster than it charges while I'm playing a graphics intensive game.)
Also, I'm not sure why Deep Blue was rated in terms of FLOPs. I don't see how floating point operations are relevant to discrete problems like chess position analysis.
A decent smartphone will romp over grandmaster chess players.
Is this actually true? I'm aware of the recent grandmaster-in-the-bathroom-with-an-iPhone scandal but I had assumed the phone was tied to a desktop at home doing the analysis. My reasoning was thus: ARM processors aren't as powerful (hz for hz) as x86, the existing ARM-optimized chess codebase is presumably much smaller, and most importantly the processing power of smart phones is limited by both heat dissipation and battery life.
I would be surprised if a high-end smartphone in the world could out-compute a reasonably spec'ed desktop from the early 2000s (which was point at which computers began to rather consistently beat grandmasters.) The lack of CPU fan is the biggest limiting factor of all.
While difficult to test I suspect that if we restricted chess players to the same age and tenure profile of Arimaa players a machine would romp over the novice chess players (max experience 13 years, average perhaps 7).
You're a decade too late. Even a modestly budgeted machine will (if not intentionally underpowered) romp over master chess players.
I get what you're saying and I'm sure an arimaa grandmaster, if one existed, could beat that particular program. However, you're ignoring the other side of the coin. There have been orders of magnitude more effort expended on writing chess-playing software vs. arimaa-playing software.
Now should I bother to learn the game at all?
Go is much simpler and deeper (although computers are getting pretty good there, too.)
Arimaa isn't a bad game, but despite the claims of its creator I'm not convinced it's simpler than chess. Chess has a few idiosyncratic and tournament-specific rules (three move repetition, castling, double pawn move and the rare en passant capture, having to "checkmate" the king instead of simply capturing him, etc.), but if you ignore those for a moment... chess has straightforward capture, a static setup, and a single method of winning the game. The only thing you have to actually memorize are the 6 different piece movements, the unique rule about knight movement, the unique rule about pawn movement, and the promotion of pawns bit. That's pretty much it. All of the other rules in chess are there for historical reasons or to improve the pace of gameplay among experts--they don't drastically affect the flavor, tactics or depth of the game. If armiaa became a worldwide pastime played by millions, they would surely develop their own array of minor rule tweaks.
So, compare chess's fundamentals (ignoring the ) these are arimaa's fundamentals:
1. Moving one piece one square (plus pushing/pulling--see below) counts as one move. You make four moves per turn. Not bad. It's only slightly more complicated than "move one piece per turn", yet being able to split up a single turn among multiple pieces or pool it all into a single piece is a great way to add depth. (It's not unlike action points in Fallout.) And other than rabbits the pieces all move the same way--obviously, this is simpler than chess.
2. Piece interaction and capture is, um, involved. First, you have a nested hierarchy of pieces that must be memorized (yes, it's "easy" because it's easy to remember that an elephant is bigger than a horse but I don't think that makes it simpler than chess's "any piece can capture any other piece".) Second, there are four different ways to influence an enemy piece: you can pin, pull, push or blockade (blockades only exist in chess in the special case of pawns.) This influence can be used to maneuver an enemy piece over a special trap square, which is which kills the piece... unless there's a friendly piece nearby to save it.
There's a sort of intuitive, real world justification for what is going on ("you see, the horse is grabbing onto the cat's tail, and these four squares here with stickers on them are actually deep holes..."), but I'm not sure how you can call the actual game mechanics simple as compared to chess.
3. The victory condition is getting a rabbit to the other side of the board or killing all of the opponent's rabbits. Like pawns, they can't move backwards. Let's just consider for a moment a game of chess wherein the goal of "kill the king" (again, we're ignoring all of this checkmate nonsense that grew over the centuries) was changed to "kill all of the opponent's pawns". That this would make the game deeper, I don't doubt... but simpler?
If you are talking, it is rather easy to notice a serious helium leak. If I were working in an area where helium asphyxiation was a risk, I would make it a point to sing out loud while I was doing it.
This technique doesn't work so well with argon or nitrogen. That was the only point I was trying to make there.