I have always enjoyed the game of Monopoly, playing as the bank, without a piece on the board. It's really fun, it's got role-play elements that open up when you do that. You get to take the whole "auctioneer" thing as far as you want, and since you don't have a shoe in the race, or whatever, you can take a really bank-centric perspective on the game. I also find the game speeds along better, when the banker player isn't in the game. Likewise when you actually play by the rules of the game, it's not an hours-long endurance test. Biggest cause of extended Monopoly games? Putting tax money on the board to be collected by "Free Parking". Stop doing that, and allow and encourage trading of properties according to the intended game mechanics, and the game is much more fun with faster pacing. Try it sometime. Offer to be the banker and auctioneer, without playing on the map, and moderate the rules from there.
"You're gonna plug your pocket into a monitor? That might look funny."
In one of the offices I travel to, I've got an LCD panel and a keyboard, I use my laptop like a workstation, out of the way. It doesn't look funny, because it doesn't look like anything at all.
"If you open the box on said piece of software, break the seal on the disc, read the EULA and don't agree with the terms, what do you do?"
You walk away with the understanding that you have just donated a certain amount of money to a corporation, more or less. That's pretty much what the outcome will be at the end of the day, no matter who or how much you complain. As a consumer you made a poor purchasing decision.
I don't know but I'm reading it on a laptop that I installed Ubuntu on this afternoon, got the wireless network, sound, and xfree config working, and then changed the deb sources to "testing", did apt-get update, apt-get upgrade, and everything is a-ok. The only snag in any of this was knowing that xorg.conf has to exist before the config script will write it.
I'm tired of people still claiming that linux is hard to install. I just did it on a whim. Granted I'm pretty experienced, but I think that just makes me more qualified to judge.
What does it cost in Canada to attend hearings, state your case when asked to, etc.?
The cost of a lawsuit tends to increase with the amount of responsibility one is trying to deny. Generally, in the cases you hear cost fortunes and take forever, the defendant is to some degree responsible for the damage being claimed.
It's much easier when you're clearly in the right and your story is 100% consistent to the mind of reasonable people. If you're anything other than completely innocent, defense tends to be more complicated and expensive.
If the woman in the story wrote things that were demonstrably untrue, and if reasonable people can be persuaded that she wrote these things to intentionally harm the plaintiff's reputation, then she may well be in for a great deal of trouble and expense, and still might lose.
It sounds like she has an arm of the government in her court, "Ministries of Environment and Labour", so it hardly sounds like such a "David and Goliath" scenario.
Libel cases are rarely decided in favor of the plaintiff. They won't get $2 million (canadian?) They probably can have the material taken offline, and the woman would be most wise to take it down already. It's not exactly a DeCSS.
If the people in that great liberal paradise up north, that I hear so much about, don't care to rally around this woman, why should I care? It seems like quite the local issue, some small town in Ontario.
"Why should Sony expect us to respect their EULAs when they disrespect consumers by secretly installing root kits on [unknowing] user's computers!"
They've just had their ass handed to them on that one -- it got the kind of press coverage that even laypeople see and understand. It may be a small thing in the big picture, but Sony has taken a credibility hit on this, and a lot of people noticed.
Re:Sensationalist Journalism?
on
A Flu Pandemic?
·
· Score: 0, Flamebait
"That's probably what you would have said about an article on the same magazine four years ago that predicted the demise of New Orleans by floods."
Did I miss something? Scientific American predicted this?
Re:So why is Tamiflu withdrawn from customers?
on
A Flu Pandemic?
·
· Score: 1
"I should be able to buy it, and do not rely on ANY government to supply it when the poo hits the fan..."
It's patented, right?
That means the manufacturing process is open. Ok, so everybody doesn't have the resources to make such things, but then there are a lot of private labs out there.
Re:The 1957 influenza epidemic
on
A Flu Pandemic?
·
· Score: 1
I'm not sure what the "advances in medicine" are supposed to do against a virus that kills in 24 hours. Even people with full insurance coverage who live next door to a doctor will wait longer than this with what seems like "a bad cold". By then it was too late with the 1918 flu. Maybe the standard vaccine will have some effect, but who knows.
> Sorry, dude, but there are no good or great Midi only songs out there.
Do you realize this is exactly like saying that sheet music is no good? A Mozart symphony as committed to paper can be represented in MIDI and then losslessly converted back to sheet music form. The idea that someone would take one of these forms and feed it to an automaton for rendering is an entirely separate issue, but MIDI itself is not the problem here.
The real advantage of MIDI is that it allows a composer or arranger to work in the domain of music theory, and have late binding to the acoustical domain. In unskilled hands, this leads to unplayable figures and problems that are only discovered when the score is realized on real instruments in a real room, but that's been a problem since the first compositions were made on staff paper.
Nothing is new under the sun, and MIDI is nothing but a lossless compression format for musical scores, with the distinction that they can be fed directly to an automaton for rendering. It's that aspect that seems to throw the layperson straight off the understanding of what the format actually is.
A bookcase of piano music isn't the same kind of object as a piano, or the same kind of object as the sound that comes out of the piano. Nobody is tempted to put these things in the same category, but we see MIDI compared to "WAV, MP3" etc. all the time.
"This may be a little off topic but certainly related:) I'm looking for a way to use custom samples with my keyboard, and I basically have two options. I either need a software sampler, or a way to make Akai S-1000/S-3000 programs, on Linux. Has anyone here faced a similar situation? Any help would be greatly appreciated:)"
What you want, I haven't found yet for Linux. There are precious few options for Windows, even. That said, I really love sampletank.
I understand where you're coming from, fully. But I consider MIDI to be a form of lossless compression for sheet music. Looking at it like that, MIDI can be *more* expressive than sheet music.
Do you believe musical information is lost by committing the notation to the score?
Also, I hate to break it to you, but there are many situations where synth orchestrations are already being used, with the listeners being none the wiser. Nobody is trying to fill Avery Fisher Hall for a concert performance by a synthesizer.
But many students and beyond, are having a much easier life due to the availability of things like EWQL, Philharmonik, GPO. In the very recent past, the composer would never actually hear his voicings until he got an orchestra to play it -- a prospect that was anything but guaranteed. The best you could hope for in most cases is a piano reduction we played ourselves, or maybe, reduced arrangements if you happened to have friends who played orchestral instruments.
Today, and the change has been overnight, you can get a *very* good rendition of orchestral works without these hurdles. This is a big deal. And no, it's not good enough to eliminate the need for the orchestra for performance, although it's been good enough for tv and film scores and the like.
I'm trying to write an AI player for Risk. For placing armies and reinforcing borders, I've started with a heuristic approach that weighs the least number of fronts, the least continental fronts, the continent value, and maybe a continental affinity in the event of a tie. Depending on how you weigh the continent value against the number of continental borders, this always picks Japan or Argentina first, assuming the theatre is the original map.
I'm thinking there must be a "one true" next correct territory to put a unit, regardless of how many ready units there are, what the current state of the map is, etc. Likewise for attacking. Right now my AIPlayer attacks anywhere he has 3 or mor troop strength regardless of the opposition (very stupid, I know:-)
Trying to figure out this troop placement thing made me realize I don't actually have a working strategy as a human player. I've always basically just tried to get a connected map wherever my opponents weren't, or else just placed units randomly. But the more I look at it, the more I think the best early strategy is to take and hold South America. Trying to generalize the reasons for that strategy into something that would work for any map.
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I have always enjoyed the game of Monopoly, playing as the bank, without a piece on the board. It's really fun, it's got role-play elements that open up when you do that. You get to take the whole "auctioneer" thing as far as you want, and since you don't have a shoe in the race, or whatever, you can take a really bank-centric perspective on the game. I also find the game speeds along better, when the banker player isn't in the game. Likewise when you actually play by the rules of the game, it's not an hours-long endurance test. Biggest cause of extended Monopoly games? Putting tax money on the board to be collected by "Free Parking". Stop doing that, and allow and encourage trading of properties according to the intended game mechanics, and the game is much more fun with faster pacing. Try it sometime. Offer to be the banker and auctioneer, without playing on the map, and moderate the rules from there.
"You're gonna plug your pocket into a monitor? That might look funny."
In one of the offices I travel to, I've got an LCD panel and a keyboard, I use my laptop like a workstation, out of the way. It doesn't look funny, because it doesn't look like anything at all.
In that situation I rarely need anything but putty. I have a cygwin tree on my keychain, which has been very useful as well from time to time.
"If you open the box on said piece of software, break the seal on the disc, read the EULA and don't agree with the terms, what do you do?"
You walk away with the understanding that you have just donated a certain amount of money to a corporation, more or less. That's pretty much what the outcome will be at the end of the day, no matter who or how much you complain. As a consumer you made a poor purchasing decision.
>This may be a form of treason
Oh? Levying war against the United States? Adhering to their enemies? Giving them aid and comfort? All of the above?
Good luck with that.
"After all, a stamp costs 34 cents."
Do certified mail. Costs a little more. You get a receipt, and a much better idea that the addressee actually opened it.
"Yeah, wtf, is this really /.?"
I don't know but I'm reading it on a laptop that I installed Ubuntu on this afternoon, got the wireless network, sound, and xfree config working, and then changed the deb sources to "testing", did apt-get update, apt-get upgrade, and everything is a-ok. The only snag in any of this was knowing that xorg.conf has to exist before the config script will write it.
I'm tired of people still claiming that linux is hard to install. I just did it on a whim. Granted I'm pretty experienced, but I think that just makes me more qualified to judge.
What does it cost in Canada to attend hearings, state your case when asked to, etc.?
The cost of a lawsuit tends to increase with the amount of responsibility one is trying to deny. Generally, in the cases you hear cost fortunes and take forever, the defendant is to some degree responsible for the damage being claimed.
It's much easier when you're clearly in the right and your story is 100% consistent to the mind of reasonable people. If you're anything other than completely innocent, defense tends to be more complicated and expensive.
If the woman in the story wrote things that were demonstrably untrue, and if reasonable people can be persuaded that she wrote these things to intentionally harm the plaintiff's reputation, then she may well be in for a great deal of trouble and expense, and still might lose.
It sounds like she has an arm of the government in her court, "Ministries of Environment and Labour", so it hardly sounds like such a "David and Goliath" scenario.
Libel cases are rarely decided in favor of the plaintiff. They won't get $2 million (canadian?) They probably can have the material taken offline, and the woman would be most wise to take it down already. It's not exactly a DeCSS.
If the people in that great liberal paradise up north, that I hear so much about, don't care to rally around this woman, why should I care? It seems like quite the local issue, some small town in Ontario.
"Why should Sony expect us to respect their EULAs when they disrespect consumers by secretly installing root kits on [unknowing] user's computers!"
They've just had their ass handed to them on that one -- it got the kind of press coverage that even laypeople see and understand. It may be a small thing in the big picture, but Sony has taken a credibility hit on this, and a lot of people noticed.
"That's probably what you would have said about an article on the same magazine four years ago that predicted the demise of New Orleans by floods."
Did I miss something? Scientific American predicted this?
"I should be able to buy it, and do not rely on ANY government to supply it when the poo hits the fan ..."
It's patented, right?
That means the manufacturing process is open. Ok, so everybody doesn't have the resources to make such things, but then there are a lot of private labs out there.
I'm not sure what the "advances in medicine" are supposed to do against a virus that kills in 24 hours. Even people with full insurance coverage who live next door to a doctor will wait longer than this with what seems like "a bad cold". By then it was too late with the 1918 flu. Maybe the standard vaccine will have some effect, but who knows.
If you can go to jail for violating their copyright, they can go to jail for violating yours.
Who will be the first to go to jail for a GPL violation?
Anything you do to copyright law, sharpens or dulls a sword that cuts both ways.
> Sorry, dude, but there are no good or great Midi only songs out there.
Do you realize this is exactly like saying that sheet music is no good?
A Mozart symphony as committed to paper can be represented in MIDI and then
losslessly converted back to sheet music form. The idea that someone would take one of these forms and feed it to an automaton for rendering is an entirely separate issue, but MIDI itself is not the problem here.
The real advantage of MIDI is that it allows a composer or arranger to work in the domain of music theory, and have late binding to the acoustical domain. In unskilled hands, this leads to unplayable figures and problems that are only discovered when the score is realized on real instruments in a real room, but that's been a problem since the first compositions were made on staff paper.
Nothing is new under the sun, and MIDI is nothing but a lossless compression format for musical scores, with the distinction that they can be fed directly to an automaton for rendering. It's that aspect that seems to throw the layperson straight off the understanding of what the format actually is.
A bookcase of piano music isn't the same kind of object as a piano, or the same kind of object as the sound that comes out of the piano. Nobody is tempted to put these things in the same category, but we see MIDI compared to "WAV, MP3" etc. all the time.
"This may be a little off topic but certainly related
What you want, I haven't found yet for Linux. There are precious few options for Windows, even. That said, I really love sampletank.
>A multitrack audio editor isn't supposed to export MIDI files.
Will it not play my hardware synths? Or my midi-fied real piano?
What use is a sequencer that won't play my instruments?
I understand where you're coming from, fully. But I consider MIDI to be a form of lossless compression for sheet music. Looking at it like that, MIDI can be *more* expressive than sheet music.
Do you believe musical information is lost by committing the notation to the score?
Also, I hate to break it to you, but there are many situations where synth orchestrations are already being used, with the listeners being none the wiser.
Nobody is trying to fill Avery Fisher Hall for a concert performance by a synthesizer.
But many students and beyond, are having a much easier life due to the availability of things like EWQL, Philharmonik, GPO. In the very recent past, the composer would never actually hear his voicings until he got an orchestra to play it -- a prospect that was anything but guaranteed. The best you could hope for in most cases is a piano reduction we played ourselves, or maybe, reduced arrangements if you happened to have friends who played orchestral instruments.
Today, and the change has been overnight, you can get a *very* good rendition of orchestral works without these hurdles. This is a big deal. And no, it's not good enough to eliminate the need for the orchestra for performance, although it's been good enough for tv and film scores and the like.
> Seems all tech has to be aimed at the military these days.
By "these days" you mean, the current era that began with "civilization", right?
>That sums it up... How is that for programming an AI Player ?
It helps a great deal. Thank you.
"However, nothing beats the satisfaction of the good old cardboard + plastic style world domination."
The good old set had counters made of *wood*, youngster.
>is it news? Im waiting for the day someone makes axis and allies using google maps
no, no, Squad Leader down to the individual unit and vehicle, using Google Earth.
I'm trying to write an AI player for Risk. For placing armies and reinforcing borders, I've started with a heuristic approach that weighs the least number of fronts, the least continental fronts, the continent value, and maybe a continental affinity in the event of a tie. Depending on how you weigh the continent value against the number of continental borders, this always picks Japan or Argentina first, assuming the theatre is the original map.
:-)
I'm thinking there must be a "one true" next correct territory to put a unit, regardless of how many ready units there are, what the current state of the map is, etc. Likewise for attacking. Right now my AIPlayer attacks anywhere he has 3 or mor troop strength regardless of the opposition (very stupid, I know
Trying to figure out this troop placement thing made me realize I don't actually have a working strategy as a human player. I've always basically just tried to get a connected map wherever my opponents weren't, or else just placed units randomly. But the more I look at it, the more I think the best early strategy is to take and hold South America. Trying to generalize the reasons for that strategy into something that would work for any map.
>Of course, it would take a few YEARS to make people learn the rules.
I can't even find people who will play Monopoly according to the rules that come with the game...