The first thing this reminded me of was Childhood's End, by Arthur C. Clarke. A suggestion made by the alien power:
"Suppose, for example, that one of your nations, led by some fanatical ruler, tried to revolt against me. The highly inefficient answer to such a threat would involve some billions of horsepower in the shape of atomic bombs. If I used enough bombs, the solution would be complete and final. It would also, as I remarked, be inefficient--even if it possessed no other defects."
"And the efficient solution?"
"That requires about as much power as a smaller radio transmitter--and rather similar skills to operate it. For it's the application of the power, not its amount, that matters. How long do you think Hitler's career as dictator of Germany would have lasted, if wherever he went a voice was talking quietly in his ear? Or if a steady musical note, loud enough to drown out all other sounds and to prevent sleep, filled his brain night and day? Nothing brutal, you appreciate. Yet, in the final analysis, just as irresistible as a tritium bomb."
fwiw, Rockbox plays (unencrypted) AAC and WMA. Not to mention a whole lot of more obscure formats (Vorbis, FLAC, Wavpack, speex, adx, aiff, alac, ape/mac, gbs, mod, mpc, nsf, shorten, sid, spc, wav). And MP3, of course. And also can be used for video on, say, an iPod Photo with no dedicated video hardware or video support in the default firmware.
Heh, this reminds me of how they wouldn't accept the NES emulator FCEU into Debian until there was a free game in there to use it with (which they eventually got when I put the BSD license on Escape From Pong).
To be fair, the iPod Video has dedicated video decoding hardware, whcih allows it to handle higher bitrates than the iPod Color can on its 80 MHz dual core ARM CPU. Devices like the Toshiba Gigabeat F series, though, with their 300 MHz CPUs, have no excuse for not supporting video in the manufacturer's firmware.
Apparently many are using their programming language's own parsing libraries, but not bothering to change the default user-agent header. ftfa:
Many of the automated requests we receive have generic user-agent headers such as Java/1.6.0 or Python-urllib/2.1 which provide no information on the actual software responsible for making the requests.
First game I remember was Windows Minesweeper. I remember seeing it at a friend's house and playing it for a while.
Eventually my family got a PC as well, the only games that I remember were on an Apogee shareware diskette (Wolfenstein 3D, Math Rescue, Monster Bash).
Other friends had NESes and SNESes, but there was never a video game console in our house until I was 12 and got an N64. For months we only had Pilotwings 64, which was fine, but I remember how awesome it was to get Super Mario 64. Then Zelda 64 for a Christmas soon thereafter, I've loved that franchise ever since. I don't know what it was like for Zelda fans used to 2D worlds to be thrown into 3D, but it was a glorious introduction to adventure gaming for me.
anyone who has taken a basic networking class and who knows how the network is setup will have no worries at all
Is it any surprise then that we're worried when they won't reveal how the network is set up? Though presumably the FAA both has networking experts and full access to the specifications yet is still worried...
You can do experiments within virtual worlds to determine the rules under which it operates, just like you can in the real world. For example, in second life, if you don't RTFM, you can still do scientific tests with your avatars to learn the internal physics of that virtual world.
Except that we, the experimenters, exist outside of the Second Life virtual world.
It should be noted that we've been able to run the actual music programs from NES, SNES, C64, and other games on iPods for a while now. The NSF (for NES), SPC (for SNES), and SID (for C64) files for these games are only a few tens of kilobytes each. A few GB is all that's needed to store essentially all the music from every game for all these systems!
Of course, Apple's firmware doesn't support these, but alternative firmwares like iPod Linux and Rockbox do.
suspect the validity of this concept when applied to educated individuals running free-will simulations
And this would please Hari Seldon, as an important aspect of Psychohistory is that the individuals involved must believe in their own free will.
Knowledge of the rules controlling the swarms by the swarms themselves make the problem much more difficult (as if it wasn't hard enough already...)
A professor of mine is working on using swarms of cell phones as a distributed self organizing sensor and computing network. Part of the project involved a new programming language to specifically deal with the spatial distribution of the phones. Here's his page on the project: http://www.research.rutgers.edu/~uli/Sarana/ (summary PDF at the bottom)
...or the short story "Paycheck", by (as with the Minority Report references further up) Phillip K. Dick. I thought the movie was one of the better story to film translations of Dick's work, though, so not too much in the way of complains about how they're completely different.
which make Wikipedia look like a search result by Google rather than a real encyclopedia
I've long considered Wikipedia to be a sort of Internet distillate, a one stop shop to see what the people of the web think/know. When there is a single most center of mass for "collect information on my obsession", those interested in advertising their fandom are attracted to it, rather than this information being scattered about on personal pages.
The massive AI in Metal Gear Solid, intended to (among other things) remove all references to the names of The Patriots. Of course, to do this, it had to have that list embedded in it...
Apparently some idiot forwarded all his corporate mail to Gmail, and used an easy password.
Not only that, the story that I've gathered is that he had created an account with one of the trackers MediaDefender was foiling (or was it a related forum?), using the same password, from an IP known to belong to MediaDefender.
BSD is less restrictive, sure, by the simple fact that is has fewer restrictions. Stallman only would argue that GPL is "More free", and by his definition of "free" he is correct (although that is a somewhat meaningless statement...)
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe the competent try it earlier?
remote torture anybody?
The first thing this reminded me of was Childhood's End, by Arthur C. Clarke. A suggestion made by the alien power:
fwiw, Rockbox plays (unencrypted) AAC and WMA. Not to mention a whole lot of more obscure formats (Vorbis, FLAC, Wavpack, speex, adx, aiff, alac, ape/mac, gbs, mod, mpc, nsf, shorten, sid, spc, wav). And MP3, of course. And also can be used for video on, say, an iPod Photo with no dedicated video hardware or video support in the default firmware.
I am appalled to hear about these attacks on the purity of our precious bodily fluids!
Heh, this reminds me of how they wouldn't accept the NES emulator FCEU into Debian until there was a free game in there to use it with (which they eventually got when I put the BSD license on Escape From Pong).
To be fair, the iPod Video has dedicated video decoding hardware, whcih allows it to handle higher bitrates than the iPod Color can on its 80 MHz dual core ARM CPU.
Devices like the Toshiba Gigabeat F series, though, with their 300 MHz CPUs, have no excuse for not supporting video in the manufacturer's firmware.
Loop a train in a circle, you say?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jiAk5vqvn3A
First game I remember was Windows Minesweeper. I remember seeing it at a friend's house and playing it for a while.
Eventually my family got a PC as well, the only games that I remember were on an Apogee shareware diskette (Wolfenstein 3D, Math Rescue, Monster Bash).
Other friends had NESes and SNESes, but there was never a video game console in our house until I was 12 and got an N64. For months we only had Pilotwings 64, which was fine, but I remember how awesome it was to get Super Mario 64. Then Zelda 64 for a Christmas soon thereafter, I've loved that franchise ever since. I don't know what it was like for Zelda fans used to 2D worlds to be thrown into 3D, but it was a glorious introduction to adventure gaming for me.
It should be noted that we've been able to run the actual music programs from NES, SNES, C64, and other games on iPods for a while now. The NSF (for NES), SPC (for SNES), and SID (for C64) files for these games are only a few tens of kilobytes each. A few GB is all that's needed to store essentially all the music from every game for all these systems!
Of course, Apple's firmware doesn't support these, but alternative firmwares like iPod Linux and Rockbox do.
Knowledge of the rules controlling the swarms by the swarms themselves make the problem much more difficult (as if it wasn't hard enough already...)
A professor of mine is working on using swarms of cell phones as a distributed self organizing sensor and computing network. Part of the project involved a new programming language to specifically deal with the spatial distribution of the phones.
Here's his page on the project: http://www.research.rutgers.edu/~uli/Sarana/ (summary PDF at the bottom)
...was it super great?
...or the short story "Paycheck", by (as with the Minority Report references further up) Phillip K. Dick. I thought the movie was one of the better story to film translations of Dick's work, though, so not too much in the way of complains about how they're completely different.
The massive AI in Metal Gear Solid, intended to (among other things) remove all references to the names of The Patriots. Of course, to do this, it had to have that list embedded in it...
So are you suggesting that it is more of a duct tape approach?
Yes! I recalled that book too, specifically the mention of dragonfly-shaped robots brought it to mind. Didn't realize it was as old as that, though.
BSD is less restrictive, sure, by the simple fact that is has fewer restrictions. Stallman only would argue that GPL is "More free", and by his definition of "free" he is correct (although that is a somewhat meaningless statement...)