You consider I-0 "erotic?" Are you crazy? (Minor spoiler follows)
>x jack Face like a slab of processed meat by-products left out in the sun too long, haphazard hair plugs that look like he rubbed a glob of rubber cement on his scalp and head-butted a cat, teeth so stained and discolored he must brush them with molasses... you really picked yourself a winner this time, Trace.
Jack turns his head and looks you up and down. "So, darlin', how old are you?" he asks. [Enter a number or type "refuse"]> refuse
"Not gonna answer, huh?" Jack says. "Well, I suppose it don't make no difference. Y'look old enough to me!" He chuckles and puts his hand on your knee.
>z Time passes.
Jack slides his hand up your thigh.
>z Time passes.
Jack slides his hand... er... all the way up. "I reckon it's time we pulled off somewhere," he says huskily. "How 'bout it?"
>no Jack sneers at you. "Let's cut the bullshit, okay?" he spits. "You knew whut you were gettin' into when you got in the car." He veers off the road -- the barbed- wire fences are gone, and it occurs to you for the first time to wonder how far you traveled while you were asleep -- and drives through the trackless desert until the road is out of sight. He turns off the ignition, sets the parking brake, and with no further ado, throws himself on you.
In Jack's car, in the middle of the desert You were never crazy about Jack's car to begin with, but it's now officially #1 on your list of the most loathsome places you've ever been.
Jack has you pinned to the seat, rendering you unable to keep him from groping your breasts, which is intolerable enough, and licking your face, which raises the distinct possibility that you'll never feel clean again.
I just played through most of Half-Life 2. Now, sure, sometimes it's fun to shoot things (or throw radiators at them), but the actual story components of HL2 are *nothing* compared to Blue Chairs, Gamlet, etc.
The issue isn't that HL2 is an FPS; if someone made a graphical game with anywhere near the literary depth of the stuff that's coming into IF annually, it'd be pretty impressive. Instead we keep getting Neuromancer rehashes and space operas.
It's called AIF (Adult Interactive Fiction), and if you're really interested you can pick up some stuff from the AIF comps. Be forewarned that a lot this stuff is generally really poorly written. Like any sort of "erotica," I suppose.
Yeah. I think what somebody was trying to repeat thirdhand is that most *known* large primes are Mersenne primes; this is because we have effective, distributable algorithms to factor Mersenne numbers, while there are no such algorithms to determine whether an arbitrary number of comparable size is prime.
IF you still have the casettes, you might try recording them to wave files and looking for/writing a program that can decode them. I think I remember that the stella interpreter for Atari 2600 could read its casette recordings.
Google turns up a whole bunch of emulators for various Sinclair machines; I can't reccomend one in particular since I haven't used them, but you can probably find a good one for your machine.
One of your primary assertions seems to be that many people oppose Bush's policies because they dislike him personally. But this could not be farther from the truth; Dubya is one of the most personable, likeable people around. The people who hate him feel so *because* of his policies.
The assertion that Iraq has been "freed" is at best a shaky one. Any government which is perceived as having been installed by America rather than freely elected (that is, any goverment at all) will face harsh opposition by violent rebel forces. Think of the Irish Republican Army, times about eight hundred, with the belief that they are committing divinely-mandated acts of Jihad.
This could go on all day. But rejecting the obvious explanations for every action of the Bush administration (they want to be reelected, they want to make money for their supporters, they want to kill off social services to lower taxes) and claiming that it's all some benevolent conspiracy to do some heavy-duty nation building in the Middle East is rather uningenuous.
I'm using Caltech's dorm internet service as I type and it's the fastest connection I've ever had. But it is true that our brand new web enrollment system really sucks, but so did talking directly to the registrar. In either case you'd end up enrolled in 15 copies of the same class. When I was at the University of Oklahoma they had a very nice web enrollment system which worked perfectly.
I hear wireless coverage is pretty spotty; though I don't have a laptop myself I know that the ITS wireless doesn't cover much of the campus and a bunch of the coverage is people running access points out of their rooms with their own equipment.
Someone mentioned an ethics code; Caltech is maybe one of the 3 to 5 places in the world that could really be described as having an ethics code (meaning that people actually obey it and most of them don't cheat on their take-home finals). So it sounds like this survey is just bullshit.
So, it depends on how good it sounds; I mean, if it just has to hit the correct drum at the right time, that's not too hard; but musicianship can't be conveyed very well with MIDI. The same applies to any instrument-playing robot. That being said, making a really basic robot to play the correct notes on a trumpet would be much harder than building a robot to play the correct drums on a trap set. Unfortunately, when Yamaha claimed to make a trumpet-playing robot, they didn't post any actual sound clips as the music it played was under copyright.
I come from a wild west family -- my great (x n) uncles were murdered by Doc Hollidy and Wyatt Erp's clan, at which point their brother, my great (x n) grandfather, a lawyer, realized that there was no justice in the west and ordered contracts on the lives of all involved, suceeding on several. (You can see the history of the gunfight at the OK Corral, as presented in the modern historic town of Tombstone, AZ, here.
Now perhaps it is true that the only connection I have to these days is blood and tradition, and perhaps it is further true that I'm studying to be a mathematician, well on the way to some distant ivory tower, but if Mr. McBride would care for a pistol duel at sundown for the honor of the old west (and to put a stop to his extortion campaign), I think I might have a hard time refusing.
First, why on earth would anyone ever want to enter a page of figures into a spreadsheet? The fact that the page of figures exists means that it was either handwritten or printed; in either case, you're re-entering data, which means that there is something fundamentally wrong with the way you've got things set up.
Second, why on earth would you want "to perform ctrl, alt, or Fn keystrokes in the midst of a stream of text typing" ? I can't bring to mind any program where this would be done commonly.
Pardon me, but I don't understand what touch-typing and grammar have to do with each other. The fact that I know where the keys are under my fingers and can type around 90 wpm or so and the fact that I understand where to put periods, commas, and apostrophes and how to spell correctly are, as far as I can tell, completely unrelated.
He's famous at least in Pasadena (where he taught at Caltech for several years); there are photographs of him all over the place and even a Feynman collage on the wall of a clothing store.
My parents both work as computer contractors, my father mainly for a couple government agencies and my mother in the IT department of a major hard drive manufacturer. They'd both been in these jobs for quite a while when I was born. (I'm currently in college, so that was in the 1980's). They still hold the same jobs. Over all this time, they've always been there for me.
Being a contractor means that you're home more often and/or at different times than your spouse, which is really nice. On the other hand, my mother told me that when she was younger she put in the long hours all the time, but often she'd end up on the loosing side when that happened. She doesn't stay so late any more, and she's been one of the few people who survived the massive layoffs after the dot-com busts.
Of course, I'm not my parents, and I don't know what sort of toll these things have taken on them, but I do know that they were wonderful parents to me, even at times when we were having to deal with all sorts of external problems at once -- elderly relatives, cancer, managing all sorts of things which we were forced into managing, etc.
The game "war," as I have seen it, is completely random -- you simply apply an algorithm to a given shuffling to a deck, so the game is decided before it is begun. The game is effectively equivalent to a coin toss.
By the way, I'm a rather good thumbwrestler (if I do say so myself), and I do enjoy playing the game. It's great for roadtrips or anything else that involves a lot of waiting.
If you have an OS X machine, you can do this, although it's a little convoluted if you actually want to install music in there, but basically you just have to update the internal tables. It's really easy to take mp3's off of the iPod and onto a desktop, though.
I know that a lot of people at school here play poker on the internet and make something like $1000 a night (real money), so it seems like Everquest is not exactly the big money here.
Mathematics is non-trademarkable and non-patentable, and most (if not all) mathematicians want to keep it that way. There is very clearly no legal grounds for any of this, as the niece herself admits.
By "Kasner's work" I believe she is referring to his work popularizing mathematics. Kasner was one of the first high-profile mathematicians, the equivalent of Richard Feynman or Stephen Hawking in his day. He was a brilliant topologist, but as well a brilliant teacher, and the words Googol and Googolplex were heavily popularized by him -- certainly everyone I knew growing up had heard of the numbers.
If I were in google's shoes, I'd probably use some of the money to establish a foundation in memory of Kasner or something. I certainly would not send money to a niece who barely ever knew him and was clearly trying to moralize her overt money grab. And I would be fully cognizant of the fact I was under no legal or ethical obligation to do *anything*. Mathematics stands out as one of the areas in which knowledge is the most free, and any attempt to force it into the death-march of the music, movie, and software industries is morally repulsive.
I'm currently studying to become a mathematician; one of the reasons is that the mathematical community has avoided the intellectual-property nonsense that other fields have embraced. Mathematical research is published in public journals and the only sort of "royalty" is attribution; concepts in mathematical papers are not patented and nobody is ever charged for using them. This was probably the deciding factor in my choice between mathematics and computer science -- the sort of behavior that Microsoft and other large companies display is immature, inethical, and all in all inexcusable.
If I recall correctly, I've read an article elsewhere which insinuated that Mr. Kasner's niece is a professional intellectual property litigator of the shadiest manner -- the sort that tries to slip through patents with established prior art and then sue the original inventors. I could be wrong, of course; I've been reading a lot of stuff about the horrendously broken United States IP system and I may be confused.
Supposing that you do somehow end up with $2100 (from someone who does not have any clue how to locate you, no less) you can simply use it to purchase an actual Powerbook and send it to him.
If you RTF PDF, you'd see that he did in fact inform eBay of the fraud, only to be blown off by them. Beyond that, a scammer is not going to go out of his way to take one specific person down; even if he did succeed against all odds in winning the case, he'd have basically publicized the fact that he could not be trusted.
Re:The un-PC point of view in re: Google IPO
on
Google IPO Swami
·
· Score: 1
From the article:
"More sinister, it is now becoming clear that virus and spam producers are working in cahoots with at least some of the spam filter makers, so that consumers are forced into a Mafia-style protection racket in which you have to buy the filters in order to have even reasonably satisfactory use of the Internet."
I haven't heard *anything* about this. Since it's in the article I'd assume that it's to some extent true -- i.e. some obscure company was founded by spammers to block their particular manner of spam, but it that if this were really a serious issue I'd be hearing a lot more about it. Further, the plausibility of this is almost zero; it assumes the following:
(1) All spam providers are unified into one large, mafia-type body.
(2) They've either designed their spam in a manner that an algorithm can detect, or they publish some secret list of domains or addresses that send out only spam.
Causing me to take the article with a large chunk of salt is that the column is written by the author of a book entitled "The Great Conservatives" which makes the following statement:
"Conservatism, the philosophy of the great Tory governments of 1783-1830, was the driving force behind the rise [of Britain], it was the governing political idea during the triumph, and its abandonment was the principal cause of the decay."
This simply confirms my perception that this author is a professional inflammatory writer, who puts more emphasis on making outlandish statements than on maintaining any connection with reality. This well correlates with his assertion that the internet is "slower and harder to use" since 1997 and that it will eventually fall by the wayside, to be replaced with proprietary information sources licensed by large companies for their employees. Why people would listen to this man is beyond me.
Unfortunately, companies don't need any revenue to make their directors very, very rich; observe the Enron scandal. And to an extent, many companies have become a vehicle for the enrichment of the higher-ups at the expense of more ordinary people.
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You consider I-0 "erotic?" Are you crazy? (Minor spoiler follows)
>x jack
Face like a slab of processed meat by-products left out in the sun too long,
haphazard hair plugs that look like he rubbed a glob of rubber cement on his
scalp and head-butted a cat, teeth so stained and discolored he must brush them
with molasses... you really picked yourself a winner this time, Trace.
Jack turns his head and looks you up and down. "So, darlin', how old are you?"
he asks.
[Enter a number or type "refuse"]> refuse
"Not gonna answer, huh?" Jack says. "Well, I suppose it don't make no
difference. Y'look old enough to me!" He chuckles and puts his hand on your
knee.
>z
Time passes.
Jack slides his hand up your thigh.
>z
Time passes.
Jack slides his hand... er... all the way up. "I reckon it's time we pulled off
somewhere," he says huskily. "How 'bout it?"
>no
Jack sneers at you. "Let's cut the bullshit, okay?" he spits. "You knew whut you
were gettin' into when you got in the car." He veers off the road -- the barbed-
wire fences are gone, and it occurs to you for the first time to wonder how far
you traveled while you were asleep -- and drives through the trackless desert
until the road is out of sight. He turns off the ignition, sets the parking
brake, and with no further ado, throws himself on you.
In Jack's car, in the middle of the desert
You were never crazy about Jack's car to begin with, but it's now officially #1
on your list of the most loathsome places you've ever been.
Jack has you pinned to the seat, rendering you unable to keep him from groping
your breasts, which is intolerable enough, and licking your face, which raises
the distinct possibility that you'll never feel clean again.
I just played through most of Half-Life 2. Now, sure, sometimes it's fun to shoot things (or throw radiators at them), but the actual story components of HL2 are *nothing* compared to Blue Chairs, Gamlet, etc.
The issue isn't that HL2 is an FPS; if someone made a graphical game with anywhere near the literary depth of the stuff that's coming into IF annually, it'd be pretty impressive. Instead we keep getting Neuromancer rehashes and space operas.
It's called AIF (Adult Interactive Fiction), and if you're really interested you can pick up some stuff from the AIF comps. Be forewarned that a lot this stuff is generally really poorly written. Like any sort of "erotica," I suppose.
As a a matter of fact, the BBC has commissioned a flash version of that game with graphics for each scene to promote their new HHGTG stuff.
Yeah. I think what somebody was trying to repeat thirdhand is that most *known* large primes are Mersenne primes; this is because we have effective, distributable algorithms to factor Mersenne numbers, while there are no such algorithms to determine whether an arbitrary number of comparable size is prime.
IF you still have the casettes, you might try recording them to wave files and looking for/writing a program that can decode them. I think I remember that the stella interpreter for Atari 2600 could read its casette recordings.
Google turns up a whole bunch of emulators for various Sinclair machines; I can't reccomend one in particular since I haven't used them, but you can probably find a good one for your machine.
One of your primary assertions seems to be that many people oppose Bush's policies because they dislike him personally. But this could not be farther from the truth; Dubya is one of the most personable, likeable people around. The people who hate him feel so *because* of his policies.
The assertion that Iraq has been "freed" is at best a shaky one. Any government which is perceived as having been installed by America rather than freely elected (that is, any goverment at all) will face harsh opposition by violent rebel forces. Think of the Irish Republican Army, times about eight hundred, with the belief that they are committing divinely-mandated acts of Jihad.
This could go on all day. But rejecting the obvious explanations for every action of the Bush administration (they want to be reelected, they want to make money for their supporters, they want to kill off social services to lower taxes) and claiming that it's all some benevolent conspiracy to do some heavy-duty nation building in the Middle East is rather uningenuous.
I'm using Caltech's dorm internet service as I type and it's the fastest connection I've ever had. But it is true that our brand new web enrollment system really sucks, but so did talking directly to the registrar. In either case you'd end up enrolled in 15 copies of the same class. When I was at the University of Oklahoma they had a very nice web enrollment system which worked perfectly.
I hear wireless coverage is pretty spotty; though I don't have a laptop myself I know that the ITS wireless doesn't cover much of the campus and a bunch of the coverage is people running access points out of their rooms with their own equipment.
Someone mentioned an ethics code; Caltech is maybe one of the 3 to 5 places in the world that could really be described as having an ethics code (meaning that people actually obey it and most of them don't cheat on their take-home finals). So it sounds like this survey is just bullshit.
So, it depends on how good it sounds; I mean, if it just has to hit the correct drum at the right time, that's not too hard; but musicianship can't be conveyed very well with MIDI. The same applies to any instrument-playing robot. That being said, making a really basic robot to play the correct notes on a trumpet would be much harder than building a robot to play the correct drums on a trap set. Unfortunately, when Yamaha claimed to make a trumpet-playing robot, they didn't post any actual sound clips as the music it played was under copyright.
Can't understand why; Haydn is better anyway.
I come from a wild west family -- my great (x n) uncles were murdered by Doc Hollidy and Wyatt Erp's clan, at which point their brother, my great (x n) grandfather, a lawyer, realized that there was no justice in the west and ordered contracts on the lives of all involved, suceeding on several. (You can see the history of the gunfight at the OK Corral, as presented in the modern historic town of Tombstone, AZ, here.
Now perhaps it is true that the only connection I have to these days is blood and tradition, and perhaps it is further true that I'm studying to be a mathematician, well on the way to some distant ivory tower, but if Mr. McBride would care for a pistol duel at sundown for the honor of the old west (and to put a stop to his extortion campaign), I think I might have a hard time refusing.
First, why on earth would anyone ever want to enter a page of figures into a spreadsheet? The fact that the page of figures exists means that it was either handwritten or printed; in either case, you're re-entering data, which means that there is something fundamentally wrong with the way you've got things set up.
Second, why on earth would you want "to perform ctrl, alt, or Fn keystrokes in the midst of a stream of text typing" ? I can't bring to mind any program where this would be done commonly.
Pardon me, but I don't understand what touch-typing and grammar have to do with each other. The fact that I know where the keys are under my fingers and can type around 90 wpm or so and the fact that I understand where to put periods, commas, and apostrophes and how to spell correctly are, as far as I can tell, completely unrelated.
He's famous at least in Pasadena (where he taught at Caltech for several years); there are photographs of him all over the place and even a Feynman collage on the wall of a clothing store.
My parents both work as computer contractors, my father mainly for a couple government agencies and my mother in the IT department of a major hard drive manufacturer. They'd both been in these jobs for quite a while when I was born. (I'm currently in college, so that was in the 1980's). They still hold the same jobs. Over all this time, they've always been there for me.
Being a contractor means that you're home more often and/or at different times than your spouse, which is really nice. On the other hand, my mother told me that when she was younger she put in the long hours all the time, but often she'd end up on the loosing side when that happened. She doesn't stay so late any more, and she's been one of the few people who survived the massive layoffs after the dot-com busts.
Of course, I'm not my parents, and I don't know what sort of toll these things have taken on them, but I do know that they were wonderful parents to me, even at times when we were having to deal with all sorts of external problems at once -- elderly relatives, cancer, managing all sorts of things which we were forced into managing, etc.
The game "war," as I have seen it, is completely random -- you simply apply an algorithm to a given shuffling to a deck, so the game is decided before it is begun. The game is effectively equivalent to a coin toss.
By the way, I'm a rather good thumbwrestler (if I do say so myself), and I do enjoy playing the game. It's great for roadtrips or anything else that involves a lot of waiting.
If you have an OS X machine, you can do this, although it's a little convoluted if you actually want to install music in there, but basically you just have to update the internal tables. It's really easy to take mp3's off of the iPod and onto a desktop, though.
I know that a lot of people at school here play poker on the internet and make something like $1000 a night (real money), so it seems like Everquest is not exactly the big money here.
Mathematics is non-trademarkable and non-patentable, and most (if not all) mathematicians want to keep it that way. There is very clearly no legal grounds for any of this, as the niece herself admits.
Not exactly. A googol squared would be 10^200; a googolplex, however, is 10^(googol), which is several orders of magnitude larger.
By "Kasner's work" I believe she is referring to his work popularizing mathematics. Kasner was one of the first high-profile mathematicians, the equivalent of Richard Feynman or Stephen Hawking in his day. He was a brilliant topologist, but as well a brilliant teacher, and the words Googol and Googolplex were heavily popularized by him -- certainly everyone I knew growing up had heard of the numbers.
If I were in google's shoes, I'd probably use some of the money to establish a foundation in memory of Kasner or something. I certainly would not send money to a niece who barely ever knew him and was clearly trying to moralize her overt money grab. And I would be fully cognizant of the fact I was under no legal or ethical obligation to do *anything*. Mathematics stands out as one of the areas in which knowledge is the most free, and any attempt to force it into the death-march of the music, movie, and software industries is morally repulsive.
I'm currently studying to become a mathematician; one of the reasons is that the mathematical community has avoided the intellectual-property nonsense that other fields have embraced. Mathematical research is published in public journals and the only sort of "royalty" is attribution; concepts in mathematical papers are not patented and nobody is ever charged for using them. This was probably the deciding factor in my choice between mathematics and computer science -- the sort of behavior that Microsoft and other large companies display is immature, inethical, and all in all inexcusable.
If I recall correctly, I've read an article elsewhere which insinuated that Mr. Kasner's niece is a professional intellectual property litigator of the shadiest manner -- the sort that tries to slip through patents with established prior art and then sue the original inventors. I could be wrong, of course; I've been reading a lot of stuff about the horrendously broken United States IP system and I may be confused.
Supposing that you do somehow end up with $2100 (from someone who does not have any clue how to locate you, no less) you can simply use it to purchase an actual Powerbook and send it to him.
If you RTF PDF, you'd see that he did in fact inform eBay of the fraud, only to be blown off by them. Beyond that, a scammer is not going to go out of his way to take one specific person down; even if he did succeed against all odds in winning the case, he'd have basically publicized the fact that he could not be trusted.
From the article:
"More sinister, it is now becoming clear that virus and spam producers are working in cahoots with at least some of the spam filter makers, so that consumers are forced into a Mafia-style protection racket in which you have to buy the filters in order to have even reasonably satisfactory use of the Internet."
I haven't heard *anything* about this. Since it's in the article I'd assume that it's to some extent true -- i.e. some obscure company was founded by spammers to block their particular manner of spam, but it that if this were really a serious issue I'd be hearing a lot more about it. Further, the plausibility of this is almost zero; it assumes the following:
(1) All spam providers are unified into one large, mafia-type body.
(2) They've either designed their spam in a manner that an algorithm can detect, or they publish some secret list of domains or addresses that send out only spam.
Causing me to take the article with a large chunk of salt is that the column is written by the author of a book entitled "The Great Conservatives" which makes the following statement:
"Conservatism, the philosophy of the great Tory governments of 1783-1830, was the driving force behind the rise [of Britain], it was the governing political idea during the triumph, and its abandonment was the principal cause of the decay."
This simply confirms my perception that this author is a professional inflammatory writer, who puts more emphasis on making outlandish statements than on maintaining any connection with reality. This well correlates with his assertion that the internet is "slower and harder to use" since 1997 and that it will eventually fall by the wayside, to be replaced with proprietary information sources licensed by large companies for their employees. Why people would listen to this man is beyond me.
Unfortunately, companies don't need any revenue to make their directors very, very rich; observe the Enron scandal. And to an extent, many companies have become a vehicle for the enrichment of the higher-ups at the expense of more ordinary people.