That was just a wee jab by the submitter. His official title is "Minister for Broadband, Communications, and the Digital Economy". I'm in favour of the new title catching on, though.
These Greek and Roman inventions are the same. You can't really use that steam engine to do any work, and it is impractical to build those kind of structures with your hands or with animal power.
That's true with respect to some of the more abstract tricks they discovered and couldn't find a use for -- the steam engine, as you mentioned, or parabolic mirrors -- but there are an awful lot of areas where the ancient Greeks and Romans did indeed make full practical use of technologies that were lost for more than a millennium afterwards. The GPP mentioned architecture and building technology, which is a biggie. There's also road layout, sewerage, military tactics, field medicine, firefighting technology, and a whole lot more. So it is reasonable to regard the Middle Ages as a reversal in many ways.
However, the rot set in earlier than most people think. A lot of it gets blamed on the rise of religious sects and the destruction of the library at Alexandria, but I see those as symptoms more than causes. A few centuries earlier there were lots of important libraries. If that had still been the case when the Alexandrian library was finally destroyed -- whenever that was -- its destruction wouldn't have mattered nearly as much.
Re:Spycraft: The Great Game
on
Torture in Games
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· Score: 2, Informative
(Un)fortunately, the torture isn't remotely realistic and consists of beating someone who never bleeds, with hands that never get sore. The NPC commits suicide afterwards too, but even that's a bit of a non-event.
"Give me your password. No, the one for the hidden volume."
"There isn't a hidden volume."
"Well we think there may be. So until you give us the password, we're putting you in preventive detention. Oh, and because this is preventive detention rather than a punitive sentence, you don't get to take this to court. Ever."
Yes, the UK police do use that kind of thinking. They don't need to prove, or even have evidence, that there's a hidden volume. Suspicion alone is enough. Against that kind of thinking I suspect TrueCrypt may be more a liability than a protection.
Re:Creative use of language for propaganda
on
Botnets As "eWMDs"
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· Score: 1
Sadly, I'm always stumped by how far a language can be warped so that things are labeled in a desirable way by the authorities.
This has been happening since the ancient times and we haven't grown out of it. The athenian hegemony was named the athenian alliance, the enslavement of foreign countries by the Romans was called Pax Romana,
If it's any comfort, the terms used to refer to the Athenian alliance (the usual term is actually the "Delian League") are expressions invented by modern writers. No conventional name for it is attested by ancient sources. Almost the same story with pax Romana -- the only ancient writer to use the phrase in its modern meaning was a satirist, Martial.
Under this same logical framework, we should be able to resell legally purchased MP3s, if you certify that you are not retaining a copy for yourself. I'm not holding my breath on it though.
Your remark is oddly (perhaps not coincidentally) timely. There is now -- for the time being -- an online second-hand MP3 shop, hosted in the US. News item here. As far as I'm aware it's very new. It's still online at the time of writing.
How is that a misperception? What can "1+1=2 is not true in this universe" even mean other than "1+1=2" does not map to any aspect of this universe. The only reason we can even say that "1+1=2" in this universe is that it maps to (a wide variety of) our observations. Certainly, you can dredge up an axiom set that's internally consistent but doesn't correspond to anything, but that's wasn't the question, was it?
Your complaint about my suggestions may well be valid; I can't tell. I guess we'd agree that physical observation can't substitute for axioms when it comes to defining mathematics. But if you look at the kinds of axioms that have been suggested as the basis for all of mathematics, their relationship to the physical world is far from obvious. So I think that is precisely the question. But I'm not knowledgeable enough to delve into this any further.
I'm no mathematician -- a couple of years at university, hardly enough to qualify me as a number theorist -- but a few possibilities occur to me.
A universe where natural numbers do not represent absolute values, but some more complicated entity that can't be added simply. I'm imagining a universe where there would be no such thing as cardinality as we understand it.
A universe where equation is more like an implication, i.e. not a reversible operation (in our universe, if A implies B, that does not mean that B implies A). So for example if 2=1+1, that would not necessarily imply that 1+1=2.
A universe where 1+1=2 is not a theorem, but an axiom or maybe an undecidable. (It may be that this is in fact our own universe. IIRC some varieties of number theory construct mathematics on the basis of defining each and every natural number by its own axiom, e.g. "2 is defined as 1 greater than 1": if "1+1=2" has the status of an axiom rather than a result, then you can always construct an alternative number system that doesn't depend on it.)
I've no way of knowing if any of these possibilities is even coherent, but even without a degree in maths I can at least imagine some possibilities. If I were properly qualified, no doubt I could imagine more.
The failure of imagination in some avuncular posts to this one is, I think, due to a misperception of "1+1=2" purely as a description of the physical world, when it doesn't have to be perceived that way.
It does look very promising and I'm looking forward to it more eagerly than any commercial game (with the possible exception of World of Goo, which I haven't had time to get yet). I particularly like the attention to detail: the care taken over the G-man's expression, the cockroach at the end offering a taste of the bugs they're building in, the wonderful lighting in the tram ride, and so on.
At first I thought it looked like the tentacle creature had some minor clipping issues with the railing -- but then it broke the railing... oh me of little faith. I feel quite giddy just thinking about this.
I've been a big fan of adaptive game music ever since I realised it existed. The big leap, for me, was Monkey Island 2, where the background music in the starting town would gradually change mood and instrumentation depending on which house you walked into. In 1991, the effect was stunning. The tune was simple and unchallenging -- there's an mp3 arrangement here: the track is "04 Woodtick" -- but it was the adaptation that was the amazing thing. It was particularly important then because the music was pretty much the only audio component in the game: very little in the way of sound effects. (And, quite gratuitously, here's my favourite musical sequence from the game.)
However, a little thought reminds me that adaptive music goes back at least as far as Ballblazer in 1984-85 (game footage begins ca. 1:10; the first minute is what was displayed on screen while loading from floppy; note that the video and music appear to be captured from an Atari emulator that's going about 10% too fast). Not strictly music, I suppose: more like a semi-improvised percussion riff, that varied depending on whether the ball was loose or in one or the other player's possession -- but still.
Coincidence, that both games were Lucasfilm games? I wonder.
You just keep looking until you find them. For example, in my town, I had some difficulty until I found this place, most of whose bundles still come with an XP option, same price as the Vista option. (Prices are in NZ dollars, before you start gasping in horror.)
And if all else fails and you're really desperate, there's Dell.
It would be interesting to see if this has happened to university exams - Oxford and Cambridge must have records going back hundreds of years...
I don't know about Oxford, but I believe the earliest written exams at Cambridge only date to the late 18th or early 19th century, and they were pretty limited in scope and purpose until the mid-late 1800s.
Not sure what they mean by "Instead, they are doing the completely different, and more rigorous, International GCSEs, which are still in demand in Commonwealth countries."
Living in NZ, I wasn't even aware that GCSEs were available here. I very much doubt they are. As far as I'm aware, schools that offer any other assessment model than the home-grown NCEA system (which is incomprehensible to students and largely devoid of standards) offer the Cambridge exams. Here's one state school's advice on the differences between the two models.
Every country has its own problems, but my experience teaching in NZ suggests that the main problem here is that school students' education is too generalised. They take about a dozen subjects simultaneously and as a result of course there's no chance of gaining in-depth training in any one of them. As a result, when they come to university they know more about advertising, business administration, and tourism than I will ever know, but have no idea what an adjective is or how to solve a quadratic equation.
I have taught in UK universities as well, but I wasn't able to determine what, if anything, school students are trained in there.
Well, from a moral standpoint, if a product isn't being made anymore but somebody has it in stock, I think it would be wrong to consider the product abandonware. Stores keep things in stock for a reason.
In the case of books, I would say that a product that is in stock in the primary market is ipso facto "being made", in the sense of being made available. I recently got a publisher to offer a book for one of my courses at a very substantial discount because they printed too many copies and they desperately need to shift them. In spite of the fact that the publisher painted themselves into a corner in terms of pricing, they're still offering the product "new". It's not abandonware.
But if it's only available in the secondary market -- i.e. second-hand -- then, contrary to your opinion, I would say that it is indeed abandonware.
I think that's inaccurate enough that it's not nit-picking to correct it. Russia wasn't defending itself, it was defending a friendly sovereign state from invasion, and taking reprisals for attacks on the civilian population.
So things have changed: Russia has improved a lot since 1941. I can't see Stalin behaving this way.
The Greens are the most liberal party in NZ in many respects, but no party's nose is clean. Remember the Greens were part of the coalition that took away freedom of speech about advocating political parties. Independently of that, they also want to start adding legal controls over what kind of entertainment can enter people's homes.
On the other wing, I was at a pre-election town hall meeting where the ACT candidate told the voters to their faces -- explicitly and openly -- that ACT wants to do away with their personal privacy altogether. (Two minutes later he had the gall to claim that ACT is a "liberal" party.)
There are no serious political parties that actually stand for personal liberty. Well, there's Alliance, and the Legalise Cannabis party; like I said, no serious parties.
Well, apart from the process of getting off a bus.
And not mentioning the fact that, contrary to how they were initially advertised, there is no prospect of being able to use them with more than one bus company, or on any other form of public transport (e.g. suburban trains, cable cars).
In spite of that, I don't really have anything much against them, except that I would very much like to have the choice of whether to use them or some other form of money-saving advance purchase (such as those that used to be available).
Slashdot Mirror
That was just a wee jab by the submitter. His official title is "Minister for Broadband, Communications, and the Digital Economy". I'm in favour of the new title catching on, though.
Kythera was the name of the island it was found near, thus anti-kythera means it was found off the coast of the island.
Actually, no. Antikythira is an island between Kythira and Kriti.
These Greek and Roman inventions are the same. You can't really use that steam engine to do any work, and it is impractical to build those kind of structures with your hands or with animal power.
That's true with respect to some of the more abstract tricks they discovered and couldn't find a use for -- the steam engine, as you mentioned, or parabolic mirrors -- but there are an awful lot of areas where the ancient Greeks and Romans did indeed make full practical use of technologies that were lost for more than a millennium afterwards. The GPP mentioned architecture and building technology, which is a biggie. There's also road layout, sewerage, military tactics, field medicine, firefighting technology, and a whole lot more. So it is reasonable to regard the Middle Ages as a reversal in many ways.
However, the rot set in earlier than most people think. A lot of it gets blamed on the rise of religious sects and the destruction of the library at Alexandria, but I see those as symptoms more than causes. A few centuries earlier there were lots of important libraries. If that had still been the case when the Alexandrian library was finally destroyed -- whenever that was -- its destruction wouldn't have mattered nearly as much.
A relatively non-controversial company, Bethesda, has in fact released a game -- Oblivion -- that featured the player torturing an NPC for information.
(Un)fortunately, the torture isn't remotely realistic and consists of beating someone who never bleeds, with hands that never get sore. The NPC commits suicide afterwards too, but even that's a bit of a non-event.
Why wouldn't the government allow them to compete?
Revenge.
They cannot prove that a hidden volume even exists, that is the whole point.
They don't need to prove it. In the UK at least.
"There isn't a hidden volume."
"Well we think there may be. So until you give us the password, we're putting you in preventive detention. Oh, and because this is preventive detention rather than a punitive sentence, you don't get to take this to court. Ever."
Yes, the UK police do use that kind of thinking. They don't need to prove, or even have evidence, that there's a hidden volume. Suspicion alone is enough. Against that kind of thinking I suspect TrueCrypt may be more a liability than a protection.
Sadly, I'm always stumped by how far a language can be warped so that things are labeled in a desirable way by the authorities. This has been happening since the ancient times and we haven't grown out of it. The athenian hegemony was named the athenian alliance, the enslavement of foreign countries by the Romans was called Pax Romana,
If it's any comfort, the terms used to refer to the Athenian alliance (the usual term is actually the "Delian League") are expressions invented by modern writers. No conventional name for it is attested by ancient sources. Almost the same story with pax Romana -- the only ancient writer to use the phrase in its modern meaning was a satirist, Martial.
Small comfort, I know.
Under this same logical framework, we should be able to resell legally purchased MP3s, if you certify that you are not retaining a copy for yourself. I'm not holding my breath on it though.
Your remark is oddly (perhaps not coincidentally) timely. There is now -- for the time being -- an online second-hand MP3 shop, hosted in the US. News item here. As far as I'm aware it's very new. It's still online at the time of writing.
The Australian constitution only has provisions for free speech in regard to political matters.
I'm envious. Here in NZ we have freedom of speech in every matter except politics.
How is that a misperception? What can "1+1=2 is not true in this universe" even mean other than "1+1=2" does not map to any aspect of this universe. The only reason we can even say that "1+1=2" in this universe is that it maps to (a wide variety of) our observations. Certainly, you can dredge up an axiom set that's internally consistent but doesn't correspond to anything, but that's wasn't the question, was it?
Your complaint about my suggestions may well be valid; I can't tell. I guess we'd agree that physical observation can't substitute for axioms when it comes to defining mathematics. But if you look at the kinds of axioms that have been suggested as the basis for all of mathematics, their relationship to the physical world is far from obvious. So I think that is precisely the question. But I'm not knowledgeable enough to delve into this any further.
I'm no mathematician -- a couple of years at university, hardly enough to qualify me as a number theorist -- but a few possibilities occur to me.
I've no way of knowing if any of these possibilities is even coherent, but even without a degree in maths I can at least imagine some possibilities. If I were properly qualified, no doubt I could imagine more.
The failure of imagination in some avuncular posts to this one is, I think, due to a misperception of "1+1=2" purely as a description of the physical world, when it doesn't have to be perceived that way.
It does look very promising and I'm looking forward to it more eagerly than any commercial game (with the possible exception of World of Goo, which I haven't had time to get yet). I particularly like the attention to detail: the care taken over the G-man's expression, the cockroach at the end offering a taste of the bugs they're building in, the wonderful lighting in the tram ride, and so on.
At first I thought it looked like the tentacle creature had some minor clipping issues with the railing -- but then it broke the railing ... oh me of little faith. I feel quite giddy just thinking about this.
I've been a big fan of adaptive game music ever since I realised it existed. The big leap, for me, was Monkey Island 2, where the background music in the starting town would gradually change mood and instrumentation depending on which house you walked into. In 1991, the effect was stunning. The tune was simple and unchallenging -- there's an mp3 arrangement here: the track is "04 Woodtick" -- but it was the adaptation that was the amazing thing. It was particularly important then because the music was pretty much the only audio component in the game: very little in the way of sound effects. (And, quite gratuitously, here's my favourite musical sequence from the game.)
However, a little thought reminds me that adaptive music goes back at least as far as Ballblazer in 1984-85 (game footage begins ca. 1:10; the first minute is what was displayed on screen while loading from floppy; note that the video and music appear to be captured from an Atari emulator that's going about 10% too fast). Not strictly music, I suppose: more like a semi-improvised percussion riff, that varied depending on whether the ball was loose or in one or the other player's possession -- but still.
Coincidence, that both games were Lucasfilm games? I wonder.
You just keep looking until you find them. For example, in my town, I had some difficulty until I found this place, most of whose bundles still come with an XP option, same price as the Vista option. (Prices are in NZ dollars, before you start gasping in horror.)
And if all else fails and you're really desperate, there's Dell.
It would be interesting to see if this has happened to university exams - Oxford and Cambridge must have records going back hundreds of years...
I don't know about Oxford, but I believe the earliest written exams at Cambridge only date to the late 18th or early 19th century, and they were pretty limited in scope and purpose until the mid-late 1800s.
Not sure what they mean by "Instead, they are doing the completely different, and more rigorous, International GCSEs, which are still in demand in Commonwealth countries."
Living in NZ, I wasn't even aware that GCSEs were available here. I very much doubt they are. As far as I'm aware, schools that offer any other assessment model than the home-grown NCEA system (which is incomprehensible to students and largely devoid of standards) offer the Cambridge exams. Here's one state school's advice on the differences between the two models.
Every country has its own problems, but my experience teaching in NZ suggests that the main problem here is that school students' education is too generalised. They take about a dozen subjects simultaneously and as a result of course there's no chance of gaining in-depth training in any one of them. As a result, when they come to university they know more about advertising, business administration, and tourism than I will ever know, but have no idea what an adjective is or how to solve a quadratic equation.
I have taught in UK universities as well, but I wasn't able to determine what, if anything, school students are trained in there.
Well, from a moral standpoint, if a product isn't being made anymore but somebody has it in stock, I think it would be wrong to consider the product abandonware. Stores keep things in stock for a reason.
In the case of books, I would say that a product that is in stock in the primary market is ipso facto "being made", in the sense of being made available. I recently got a publisher to offer a book for one of my courses at a very substantial discount because they printed too many copies and they desperately need to shift them. In spite of the fact that the publisher painted themselves into a corner in terms of pricing, they're still offering the product "new". It's not abandonware.
But if it's only available in the secondary market -- i.e. second-hand -- then, contrary to your opinion, I would say that it is indeed abandonware.
Fair enough :-)
I think that's inaccurate enough that it's not nit-picking to correct it. Russia wasn't defending itself, it was defending a friendly sovereign state from invasion, and taking reprisals for attacks on the civilian population.
So things have changed: Russia has improved a lot since 1941. I can't see Stalin behaving this way.
The Greens are the most liberal party in NZ in many respects, but no party's nose is clean. Remember the Greens were part of the coalition that took away freedom of speech about advocating political parties. Independently of that, they also want to start adding legal controls over what kind of entertainment can enter people's homes.
On the other wing, I was at a pre-election town hall meeting where the ACT candidate told the voters to their faces -- explicitly and openly -- that ACT wants to do away with their personal privacy altogether. (Two minutes later he had the gall to claim that ACT is a "liberal" party.)
There are no serious political parties that actually stand for personal liberty. Well, there's Alliance, and the Legalise Cannabis party; like I said, no serious parties.
Change the space to a +, i.e. http://www.google.com/search?q=%s+-site:experts-exchange.com.
I'd like to see this technique applied to the supposed bones of JS Bach, of whom the surviving pictures are unreliable and unconvincing.
Done. The Haussmann portrait is basically corroborated.
it hasn't slowed anything down either.
Well, apart from the process of getting off a bus.
And not mentioning the fact that, contrary to how they were initially advertised, there is no prospect of being able to use them with more than one bus company, or on any other form of public transport (e.g. suburban trains, cable cars).
In spite of that, I don't really have anything much against them, except that I would very much like to have the choice of whether to use them or some other form of money-saving advance purchase (such as those that used to be available).
Please forgive my brain-fart. I was thinking of salvere as being "greet" rather than "be greeted". You were right, I was wrong. D'oh!