If you ever look at a map of Ann Arbor, you realize that it's surprisingly regularly arranged. A couple exceptions here and there. Packard, Huron/Washtenaw, and Main (outside of downtown) being the primary exceptions slashing diagonally in the core of the city. Up near kerry town there's another pinch point that I've circled around a bit. I guess when driving it's the one-way streets that send people in cycles the most.
I played with a bunch of different chatbot scripts about 4 years back. However it was an extremely frustrating experience. There were two I tried that were crazy complicated research projects, that I couldn't get reasonable results out of (I may not have had enough source material for them, or something) and due to their complexity, I couldn't adapt them. They were using theoretical models of language and grammatical structure, and supposedly could work in multiple languages without modification simply by feeding the right source material. The others were ridiculously boring simple chat bots, eliza style or otherwise that in spite of being more than 100 lines, were of much lower quality than what you describe. Having a job I enjoy but that demands my time (right now) means I can't really sit down and start the project again, but I do have time enough to read other good solutions to things simply as a mind excercise/out of curiousity.
In addition, the responses are just rot13 in the html source overlayed with a blur jpg. Someone should make a firefox extension or greasemonkey script that decrypts it. Btw isn't it against the rules to feed the googlebot something other than what a user finds?
Am not the gp, but I think the point is it's not the physical machine (the guns themselves or the helicopters, etc) but the war machine that has been inefficient. Putting ethics aside for the moment to make an example, if you were to consider a fictional warmachine where the only tactic was to grab a single enemy, and torture them publicly to the point where they managed to depress the entire enemy force to the point of surrender, wouldn't that be the most efficient warmachine ever? The problem with that solution (still ignoring ethics) is that it is highly unlikely that that would succeed, supposing we tried a different tactic: we have nuclear bombs to wipe most of the world off the map, with one we could easily make our entire problem dissappear. Again, highly efficient, comparatively cheap, except for the backlash from the rest of the world which would make that a bad move to say the least. Ethics is where the world gets complicated. We can only justify deaths ethically in a self-defense point of view. The rest of the world gets outraged when serious attempts aren't made to subdue even the clearly dangerous with something short of lethal force, collateral damage adds to the enemies to our country from even among our allies (and ourselves), not to mention neutral parties. Thus we have to train our soldiers ever more perfectly, we have to provide ever more accurate weapons. Having to decide friend or foe among a crowd of apparently civilians is much more difficult than simply pointing across trenches and saying "they are the enemy" thus we become less efficient at catching the enemy without adding to our enemies, and our warmachine more costly, while our tools become themselves more accurate and efficient. Overall our killing machines are more efficient, and our warmachine less effective.
With respect to what was stated, my brain was off, however, as you pointed out, there was still something fishy with the numbers, but what I realized is that the wrongdiagnosis page is just a huge collection of cited quotations grouped together. There doesn't seem to be any effort to try to explain the differences between statistics sourced from different locations, and since pretty much every bullet point comes from somewhere else, I'm not surprised they're still incoherent if you take away my confusion. What I think this points to more is the amount of smoking propaganda out there. Both sides of the issue having paid for a great number of *definitive* studies, the resulting range of results and conclusions leaving us in the dark as to where the real results lie.
Hahahaha... wow. My brain was off. I am a moron. I think I parsed Death Rate as the rate of death for an individual which really is nonsensical (and even then I didn't do that right either). Please ignore the grandparent post!
What I like from your link is the following quote:
Death statistics for Smoking: The following are statistics from various sources about deaths and Smoking:
* Death rate is 2-3 times higher than non-smokers What the heck does that even mean? People who smoke die 2-3 times more often? Is this like one of your replies a dying more than once type deal? What the heck?
I don't know, but I think he's poking at the fact that on a Universal Scale, our best understanding is that it's a zero-sum game... ("How do you reverse entropy?... 'let there be light.'") However we don't have proof for the all the physics of that (what about traveling between parallel universes?), and further, we can approximate our lives to a non-zero-sum game, because the 4.5 billion years we can expect to have from our sun still, the unknown many billion years our universe has left (could be infinite) and the 156 billion light-year diameter of the universe as is (we believe it's expanding) are constraints that we may not easily be able to exhaust in human comprehensible timeframes. Solid civilizations have only existed for 4000 years? We have a while to go before we run out of processable material and time in the Universe. We may be constrained in that there is no technology (or we won't find it) and not enough energy to reach out from beyond our own solar system. And so that may be when things become zero-sum. We could waste too much energy and find ourselves incapable of leaving our own planet, and even then it won't exactly be zero-sum until our sun dies, and we truly have no more entropy available to exploit.
Not if he doesn't think of them as hundreds of microneedles. If he just thinks of it as a patch, then there's no visual reminder that there are many little needles. It depends how it's marketed, and how he can view the product at the crucial time.
Wrist flick is all that is neccessary to activate moves in many games, and then Super Mario Galaxy that just came out is an amazing game great single player, easy to pickup and put down. Plus there are all the virtual console games, and that was nearly enough to justify the console all by itself for me.
That older one looks like it was scanned in from a negative or a blown up film print. I don't know how you might accurately examine the real resolution comparitively.
Don't worry about the bad mods. Better mods usually come along and fix things. You're at +3 interesting now for the original comment, and I would expect it to stay there. Do you moderate?
The point I was making was that *people* might want to verify in a public manner, in order to get their 50$ party loyalty compensation for example. Or continued employement with a specific employer could lead to the employers coercing their employees to show their vote in exchange for a raise or pink slip. The laws surrounding privacy of your vote are there to specifically prevent that, because unscrupulous political parties could convince enough people to put pressure on their employees to vote the *right* way, or could offer incentives for people to run vote buying operations. Street gangs beating people up in the street, and offering protection in exchange for proof of vote, which they can then exchange for money or drugs or guns with the appropriate people.
Say you have people who don't care about either candidate, and would normally not vote. Would a cupcake be enough to convince them to make their way to the poll booth? How's about a pair of free movie tickets? Now what if you would offer more interesting prizes if people could verify their vote with you (assuming the voted for the right party)? A free massage in a massage parlor? Free domestic plane tickets to somewhere as long as you fly on off dates at weird times? How much would it cost to buy a Senate seat in your state?
Secrecy of the vote is important to try to separate the voting process as much as possible from invalid influence. We want it to be an informed, intellectual, ideological, political decision. The apathetic, indifferent or otherwise unvoting 50% of the population plus those of the voting public who might be unfairly pressured shouldn't determine who gets put into office, because that could lead to an even messier and unfortunate future.
The secrecy of a person's vote is important to prevent vote-buying and other similar schemes (bullying people into voting and providing the slips as proof of company loyalty... etc).
This is actually the most sane and easy to implement solution I've heard of. The voting machines can be as nifty or (nearly) as insecure as you like, all they do is help speed up the filling out of an optically analyzable ballot. This ballot can be extremely clear, the machine then prints out the ballot which the person can double check before they submit it to the standard lockbox. From there you have a verifiable paper trail, with theoretically optimally filled out (most-easily machine readable) ballots, these can be fed in large batches into the scanners, which can be statistically sampled for verification purposes. Should the scan counters be buggy, or corrupted, you can always go back to the paper record, which incidentally, won't have the problem of hanging chads, no ambiguity would exist.
This development has gotten so much press in the tech world, that people who would otherwise never bring their business to Walmart (or at the very least would never review products for it) found the need to make an exception for something they considered temporarily more important: to support a big 3rd party making a big step in the right direction: moving away MS's monopoly, and making it possible for the average person to do so too. If this was not such a big deal, and this laptop was a normal product then you'd probably see more reviews from reviewers with longer, more respected review histories. Also, many retailers filter there reviews to some degree, moderating away the excessively vulgar, inappropriate reviews... those usually rate the product badly, so of all the reviews made, more poor reviews end up being deleted.
The reviews on Walmart could be subject to that sort of deletion process, or they could just be completely benign, the stores having been flooded by Linux afficionados absorbing all their supply, leaving few to no laptops for any random regular Joe Lusers to try.
Slashdot Mirror
If you ever look at a map of Ann Arbor, you realize that it's surprisingly regularly arranged. A couple exceptions here and there. Packard, Huron/Washtenaw, and Main (outside of downtown) being the primary exceptions slashing diagonally in the core of the city. Up near kerry town there's another pinch point that I've circled around a bit. I guess when driving it's the one-way streets that send people in cycles the most.
*/ phew! You forgot your comment end tag, and it was posed to nullify the rest of the conversation. Careful next time. Those are dangerous.
I played with a bunch of different chatbot scripts about 4 years back. However it was an extremely frustrating experience. There were two I tried that were crazy complicated research projects, that I couldn't get reasonable results out of (I may not have had enough source material for them, or something) and due to their complexity, I couldn't adapt them. They were using theoretical models of language and grammatical structure, and supposedly could work in multiple languages without modification simply by feeding the right source material. The others were ridiculously boring simple chat bots, eliza style or otherwise that in spite of being more than 100 lines, were of much lower quality than what you describe. Having a job I enjoy but that demands my time (right now) means I can't really sit down and start the project again, but I do have time enough to read other good solutions to things simply as a mind excercise/out of curiousity.
Interested in releasing the source?
Blackjack! With Hookers. And Booze... Actually skip the blackjack.
Yeah! Plagiarism is stealing!
Yes.
In the end my initial linguistic challenge was the following:
If: Everyone dies exactly once.
Then: "smokers die twice as often" is confusing.
The comment:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=373659&cid=21512367
neatly explained however, that, Death Rate "refers to the number of people per given amount that die in a set time period. "
And once you state things that way, death rate is much less confusing.
In addition, the responses are just rot13 in the html source overlayed with a blur jpg. Someone should make a firefox extension or greasemonkey script that decrypts it. Btw isn't it against the rules to feed the googlebot something other than what a user finds?
Am not the gp, but I think the point is it's not the physical machine (the guns themselves or the helicopters, etc) but the war machine that has been inefficient. Putting ethics aside for the moment to make an example, if you were to consider a fictional warmachine where the only tactic was to grab a single enemy, and torture them publicly to the point where they managed to depress the entire enemy force to the point of surrender, wouldn't that be the most efficient warmachine ever? The problem with that solution (still ignoring ethics) is that it is highly unlikely that that would succeed, supposing we tried a different tactic: we have nuclear bombs to wipe most of the world off the map, with one we could easily make our entire problem dissappear. Again, highly efficient, comparatively cheap, except for the backlash from the rest of the world which would make that a bad move to say the least. Ethics is where the world gets complicated. We can only justify deaths ethically in a self-defense point of view. The rest of the world gets outraged when serious attempts aren't made to subdue even the clearly dangerous with something short of lethal force, collateral damage adds to the enemies to our country from even among our allies (and ourselves), not to mention neutral parties. Thus we have to train our soldiers ever more perfectly, we have to provide ever more accurate weapons. Having to decide friend or foe among a crowd of apparently civilians is much more difficult than simply pointing across trenches and saying "they are the enemy" thus we become less efficient at catching the enemy without adding to our enemies, and our warmachine more costly, while our tools become themselves more accurate and efficient. Overall our killing machines are more efficient, and our warmachine less effective.
With respect to what was stated, my brain was off, however, as you pointed out, there was still something fishy with the numbers, but what I realized is that the wrongdiagnosis page is just a huge collection of cited quotations grouped together. There doesn't seem to be any effort to try to explain the differences between statistics sourced from different locations, and since pretty much every bullet point comes from somewhere else, I'm not surprised they're still incoherent if you take away my confusion. What I think this points to more is the amount of smoking propaganda out there. Both sides of the issue having paid for a great number of *definitive* studies, the resulting range of results and conclusions leaving us in the dark as to where the real results lie.
Hahahaha... wow. My brain was off. I am a moron. I think I parsed Death Rate as the rate of death for an individual which really is nonsensical (and even then I didn't do that right either). Please ignore the grandparent post!
For the uninitiated, teh funny parent referenced: http://www.bash.org/?104383
* Death rate is 2-3 times higher than non-smokers What the heck does that even mean? People who smoke die 2-3 times more often? Is this like one of your replies a dying more than once type deal? What the heck?
I don't know, but I think he's poking at the fact that on a Universal Scale, our best understanding is that it's a zero-sum game... ("How do you reverse entropy? ... 'let there be light.'") However we don't have proof for the all the physics of that (what about traveling between parallel universes?), and further, we can approximate our lives to a non-zero-sum game, because the 4.5 billion years we can expect to have from our sun still, the unknown many billion years our universe has left (could be infinite) and the 156 billion light-year diameter of the universe as is (we believe it's expanding) are constraints that we may not easily be able to exhaust in human comprehensible timeframes. Solid civilizations have only existed for 4000 years? We have a while to go before we run out of processable material and time in the Universe. We may be constrained in that there is no technology (or we won't find it) and not enough energy to reach out from beyond our own solar system. And so that may be when things become zero-sum. We could waste too much energy and find ourselves incapable of leaving our own planet, and even then it won't exactly be zero-sum until our sun dies, and we truly have no more entropy available to exploit.
Not if he doesn't think of them as hundreds of microneedles. If he just thinks of it as a patch, then there's no visual reminder that there are many little needles. It depends how it's marketed, and how he can view the product at the crucial time.
Wrist flick is all that is neccessary to activate moves in many games, and then Super Mario Galaxy that just came out is an amazing game great single player, easy to pickup and put down. Plus there are all the virtual console games, and that was nearly enough to justify the console all by itself for me.
That older one looks like it was scanned in from a negative or a blown up film print. I don't know how you might accurately examine the real resolution comparitively.
Here ya go then:
http://www.fentek-ind.com/kbtbwrusb.htm
Can't it just have been edited/scanned/reformatted via MS Word 2007
Don't worry about the bad mods. Better mods usually come along and fix things. You're at +3 interesting now for the original comment, and I would expect it to stay there. Do you moderate?
The point I was making was that *people* might want to verify in a public manner, in order to get their 50$ party loyalty compensation for example. Or continued employement with a specific employer could lead to the employers coercing their employees to show their vote in exchange for a raise or pink slip. The laws surrounding privacy of your vote are there to specifically prevent that, because unscrupulous political parties could convince enough people to put pressure on their employees to vote the *right* way, or could offer incentives for people to run vote buying operations. Street gangs beating people up in the street, and offering protection in exchange for proof of vote, which they can then exchange for money or drugs or guns with the appropriate people.
Say you have people who don't care about either candidate, and would normally not vote. Would a cupcake be enough to convince them to make their way to the poll booth? How's about a pair of free movie tickets? Now what if you would offer more interesting prizes if people could verify their vote with you (assuming the voted for the right party)? A free massage in a massage parlor? Free domestic plane tickets to somewhere as long as you fly on off dates at weird times? How much would it cost to buy a Senate seat in your state?
Secrecy of the vote is important to try to separate the voting process as much as possible from invalid influence. We want it to be an informed, intellectual, ideological, political decision. The apathetic, indifferent or otherwise unvoting 50% of the population plus those of the voting public who might be unfairly pressured shouldn't determine who gets put into office, because that could lead to an even messier and unfortunate future.
The secrecy of a person's vote is important to prevent vote-buying and other similar schemes (bullying people into voting and providing the slips as proof of company loyalty... etc).
This is actually the most sane and easy to implement solution I've heard of. The voting machines can be as nifty or (nearly) as insecure as you like, all they do is help speed up the filling out of an optically analyzable ballot. This ballot can be extremely clear, the machine then prints out the ballot which the person can double check before they submit it to the standard lockbox. From there you have a verifiable paper trail, with theoretically optimally filled out (most-easily machine readable) ballots, these can be fed in large batches into the scanners, which can be statistically sampled for verification purposes. Should the scan counters be buggy, or corrupted, you can always go back to the paper record, which incidentally, won't have the problem of hanging chads, no ambiguity would exist.
This development has gotten so much press in the tech world, that people who would otherwise never bring their business to Walmart (or at the very least would never review products for it) found the need to make an exception for something they considered temporarily more important: to support a big 3rd party making a big step in the right direction: moving away MS's monopoly, and making it possible for the average person to do so too. If this was not such a big deal, and this laptop was a normal product then you'd probably see more reviews from reviewers with longer, more respected review histories. Also, many retailers filter there reviews to some degree, moderating away the excessively vulgar, inappropriate reviews... those usually rate the product badly, so of all the reviews made, more poor reviews end up being deleted.
The reviews on Walmart could be subject to that sort of deletion process, or they could just be completely benign, the stores having been flooded by Linux afficionados absorbing all their supply, leaving few to no laptops for any random regular Joe Lusers to try.