While you could try to boil down the soldier's logic to an algorithm, the key difference you can't resolve is that the soldier has free will, while the robot has no real choice of its own.
Free will is an illusion emerging from our observation of the behaviour of very complex systems, namely our brains. The soldier lacks free will just as much as the robot does - it's just that the robot is far less sophisticated in interpreting and taking action on the kind of input we're speaking of. The human soldier has the advantage of an evolutionarily developed brain structure and lots upon lots of prototypical guidelines for responding to many kinds of situations, not just ones a developer thought would be handy on a battlefield. There's a qualitative difference alright, but it's not due to any arbitrary conception of "free will".
Why am I forced to select something before doing most operations? If nothing is selected, surely it's logical I want to do it on the whole image.
You don't need a selection, but you do need an active layer to operate on. Just click on one in the layers tab. Perhaps it's only me being grown with Photoshop, but this seems coherent with the way layers are supposed to work.
What is Photoshop's equivalent to "Alpha to Selection", which I use all the time? (I'm sure it has one but damned if I can find it)
Ctrl+click on a layer.
I'm obviously not trying to refute any of your statements; just trying to be helpful.
You're right, let's just shoot anyone with an IQ below 120.
You haven't quite thought this through. As median cognitive ability goes up as a result of all this shooting, more and more people will drop under the 120 IQ line until we finally end up killing everybody.
You haven't quite thought this through. Obviously we would have sufficient time intervals between purgings to let the population restabilize. Survival of the most intelligent, you say? In a few generations, we'd all be like Stephen Hawking! It would be just like natural selection, only better!
AJAX is the first ubiquitous true push technology on the web
Since when was AJAX "true push"? AJAX can be used to efficiently emulate push-like behaviour, but that doesn't make it push technology. AJAX is just as much pull as the ordinary http interaction.
A similar push-architecture, where a connection between the server and client is persisted for the server to be able to send data to the client at will, has lately been dubbed Comet much in the fashion of AJAX. I'd say it's still quite a different animal and deserving of the distinction.
There's another similar project by the name of XAMPP. XAMPP comes with quite a lot of other handy auxiliaries as well, such as eAccelerator, and it's available for Linux, Windows, Solaris and most recently OSX. The interesting thing is it supports both PHP 4 and 5, allowing easy testing of an application on both versions - and at least the Windows version comes with an automagical version switcher. I'd recommend giving both packages a look.
Do note this, however (and I think it goes for WAMP too):
The default configuration is not good from a security point of view and it's not secure enough for a production environment - please don't use XAMPP in such an environment.
That's an interesting explanation. What troubles me is that Netflix seems to be using having to ship from another state as a means to explain the decline in service quality, which to me would imply increased shipping costs. Is it really that economical?
$23.45? Ars Technica is saying the price will be from $23 to $39 for consumers, with newer releases tagged with the latter one. They'd better offer something major for me to be interested in paying that much.
Steve Pavlina, apparently a man with a huge amount of people following his blog about various ways of self-improvement, has rather nice coverage on his experiment with polyphasic sleep. Long story short, he's been doing it for over 90 days now and claims to have improved his quality of life tremendously. It's a nice read, go check it out. Here's an excerpt from his entry on day 90:
Mentally I feel very different. My brain actually feels different than when I slept monophasically. -- Its really hard to describe this sensation, but it sort of feels like my brain is soaking in a warm jacuzzi. I feel very mentally relaxed and unstressed most of the time, at least when I keep to my naps roughly on schedule. Maybe its because I always just recently woke up.
Personally, I do think polyphasic sleep can have a positive effect. It just takes a lot of character and a suitable life situation to make it work. Not for everybody, but not bogus either.
Who says streams will always be broadcast in RSS format? We already have Atom, and others will undoubtedly follow. A graphical icon is both timeless and more international.
Damn straight. It's still the only BT client I'm aware of to have a proper implementation of partial downloading - which, by the way, is the exact reason I use it for my torrenting needs. Here's how it goes:
Open.torrent file
Alter path to save to, if necessary (there's a text field for the path, click [Browse] for a tree menu)
Uncheck files you don't want to download from the list
Click OK
As opposed to, say, Azureus:
Open.torrent file
Alter path to save to, if necessary (the dialog only sports a graphical tree menu. If the download is a folder, you don't get to choose the name.)
Click OK. Azureus will start downloading all the files and reserve the appropriate amount of disk space.
Right click the torrent task, click show details
Go to the "Files" tab
Select files you don't wish to download
Right click (careful not to unselect), Set priority -> Delete. Azureus will truncate the unwanted files to zero length.
In other words, it takes four steps to do something BitComet manages in one.
Why on earth make it so hard? I'm looking at you, the majority of BT clients. A proper implementation was promised for uTorrent (an otherwise fine client), but got dropped off the list for some reason. Would someone care to offer me an explanation as to why such a trend exists? Does no-one else believe like me that this is an important aspect in a client?
I was recently forced to download a number of files using Azureus instead of BitComet, resulting in acute frustration because of the user interface. The prospect of having to do the same with all my future downloads because of tracker owners deciding BitComet to be bad for them is not delightful, to say the least.
Sampsa and Ville already broke their own record by overclocking the same setup to over 1GHz for both the GPU and memory. See pictures over at Muropaketti.
Which planet do you live on? I really wish it was that simple. According to the CSS spec, height: 100% is the exact same thing as no height property at all, except when the block is absolutely positioned - in which case it will fill the viewport, but nothing more. I gave it a test run yesterday, and browsers (IE6/FF1.0/O8b1) acted very inconsistently.
In short, having an element with 100% height (other than body or html), like in the good old days of table layout, is an impossibility with CSS. I find it hard to understand the reasoning behind this.
The goal that CSS has is admirable and while it is plagued by things like flaky browser support *cough*IE*cough* and some stupidities like the aforementioned, it's a great tool when used right. But still... it doesn't give me absolute control over the looks of my site as I would like it.
I believe, that under all the uncertainty that seems to reign in the quantum realm, beyond what we are limited to seeing, there lies a deterministic universe.
Not that it really matters, if we really can't see it.
Slashdot Mirror
Free will is an illusion emerging from our observation of the behaviour of very complex systems, namely our brains. The soldier lacks free will just as much as the robot does - it's just that the robot is far less sophisticated in interpreting and taking action on the kind of input we're speaking of. The human soldier has the advantage of an evolutionarily developed brain structure and lots upon lots of prototypical guidelines for responding to many kinds of situations, not just ones a developer thought would be handy on a battlefield. There's a qualitative difference alright, but it's not due to any arbitrary conception of "free will".
On your first gripe I agree.
You don't need a selection, but you do need an active layer to operate on. Just click on one in the layers tab. Perhaps it's only me being grown with Photoshop, but this seems coherent with the way layers are supposed to work.
Ctrl+click on a layer.
I'm obviously not trying to refute any of your statements; just trying to be helpful.
That would be Googleplex.
You haven't quite thought this through. Obviously we would have sufficient time intervals between purgings to let the population restabilize. Survival of the most intelligent, you say? In a few generations, we'd all be like Stephen Hawking! It would be just like natural selection, only better!
Haha. Oh, wow.
Come again? :)
Since when was AJAX "true push"? AJAX can be used to efficiently emulate push-like behaviour, but that doesn't make it push technology. AJAX is just as much pull as the ordinary http interaction.
A similar push-architecture, where a connection between the server and client is persisted for the server to be able to send data to the client at will, has lately been dubbed Comet much in the fashion of AJAX. I'd say it's still quite a different animal and deserving of the distinction.
There's another similar project by the name of XAMPP. XAMPP comes with quite a lot of other handy auxiliaries as well, such as eAccelerator, and it's available for Linux, Windows, Solaris and most recently OSX. The interesting thing is it supports both PHP 4 and 5, allowing easy testing of an application on both versions - and at least the Windows version comes with an automagical version switcher. I'd recommend giving both packages a look.
Do note this, however (and I think it goes for WAMP too):
No, that's Web 2.0 you're thinking of.
I knew those hats would be of use to us some day!
That's an interesting explanation. What troubles me is that Netflix seems to be using having to ship from another state as a means to explain the decline in service quality, which to me would imply increased shipping costs. Is it really that economical?
Now that we've managed to establish our business, we will proceed as follows:
$23.45? Ars Technica is saying the price will be from $23 to $39 for consumers, with newer releases tagged with the latter one. They'd better offer something major for me to be interested in paying that much.
Yes, TFA is indeed quite ambiguous on its numbers.
Could I get that in Libraries of Congress per fortnight?
Steve Pavlina, apparently a man with a huge amount of people following his blog about various ways of self-improvement, has rather nice coverage on his experiment with polyphasic sleep. Long story short, he's been doing it for over 90 days now and claims to have improved his quality of life tremendously. It's a nice read, go check it out. Here's an excerpt from his entry on day 90:
Personally, I do think polyphasic sleep can have a positive effect. It just takes a lot of character and a suitable life situation to make it work. Not for everybody, but not bogus either.
I'm afraid we're temporarily out of stock for pigs, sir. As inexplicable as it is, it would seem that they all grew wings overnight and escaped.
...for cut, copy and paste. In that order.
Who says streams will always be broadcast in RSS format? We already have Atom, and others will undoubtedly follow. A graphical icon is both timeless and more international.
Damn straight. It's still the only BT client I'm aware of to have a proper implementation of partial downloading - which, by the way, is the exact reason I use it for my torrenting needs. Here's how it goes:
As opposed to, say, Azureus:
In other words, it takes four steps to do something BitComet manages in one.
Why on earth make it so hard? I'm looking at you, the majority of BT clients. A proper implementation was promised for uTorrent (an otherwise fine client), but got dropped off the list for some reason. Would someone care to offer me an explanation as to why such a trend exists? Does no-one else believe like me that this is an important aspect in a client?
I was recently forced to download a number of files using Azureus instead of BitComet, resulting in acute frustration because of the user interface. The prospect of having to do the same with all my future downloads because of tracker owners deciding BitComet to be bad for them is not delightful, to say the least.
Alright, so how exactly does slower light translate into faster computing?
Sampsa and Ville already broke their own record by overclocking the same setup to over 1GHz for both the GPU and memory. See pictures over at Muropaketti.
AFAIK, some of those are purposeful and some could be mishaps in the CSS validator. Check out Acid2: the guided tour to find out about it.
Full height-sidebars? "height: 100%;"
Which planet do you live on? I really wish it was that simple. According to the CSS spec, height: 100% is the exact same thing as no height property at all, except when the block is absolutely positioned - in which case it will fill the viewport, but nothing more. I gave it a test run yesterday, and browsers (IE6/FF1.0/O8b1) acted very inconsistently.
In short, having an element with 100% height (other than body or html), like in the good old days of table layout, is an impossibility with CSS. I find it hard to understand the reasoning behind this.
The goal that CSS has is admirable and while it is plagued by things like flaky browser support *cough*IE*cough* and some stupidities like the aforementioned, it's a great tool when used right. But still... it doesn't give me absolute control over the looks of my site as I would like it.
I believe, that under all the uncertainty that seems to reign in the quantum realm, beyond what we are limited to seeing, there lies a deterministic universe. Not that it really matters, if we really can't see it.