>> Marvin Minsky says that HAL stands for
>> Heuristically programmed ALgorithmic computer
>Heuristic-Algorithm computer makes a lot more sense.
Actually A.C. Clarke says in the book in question that HAL stands for Heuristic ALgorithm. Furthermore, HAL=IBM-1 thing is also in the book. No one sasying anything about these things is being insightful at all in any way.
Thank you.
The best games have always run on Windows... Not counting some console games, sure, but the worst games run on windows as well. At least 90% of all games suck ass.
...no self-respecting Slashdotter would be caught dead being unable to dual-boot into deathmatch heaven.
Actually I have a lot of self respect and I can't stand first person shooters at all. Nothing against anyone who does. I just think they're totally lame.
For my real time strategy needs I dual boot into MacOS thanks very much for playing.
I had a funny experience. I went to the website and downloaded and ran the patch but it gave me a message saying I did not need to install this update and exited. Anyone else have this happen?
I didn't have this happen, but I did read the page before blindly downloading a patch (from MS of all places), so I can say that you do need a patch, but you did download the wrong one.
I prefered fastbond, 4 stone rain, 4 ice storm 4 each of the other land destruction cards, strip mines, stormseekers howling mines, black vises, timetwister, wheel of fortune and a legend enchantment I forget what was called that made you have to pay 3 extra mana for any spell.
People freaking hated that deck.
Best first turn:sol ring 2 black vises done. your turn 6 damage before you can even play a card.
One guy spent the 3 mana he actually managed to get on the board to bring out his black lotus and then I crumbled it giving him mana equal to the BL's casting cost: 0
he had ball lightning berzerk and a fork in his hand.
I played from beta until ice age came out bought a few of those packs, but the appeal was gone. All the cool cards were gone. ---CONFLICT!!---
someone explain how this is a troll, I'm confused.....
I'm not sure that I would have marked it as troll, maybe flamebait. The reason though is pretty clear. In case you didn't notice, the post was made by Wacko Warner who is one of the Warner Brothers. It's pretty obvious that he would have a difficult time offering an objective opinion about a competing studio's work. ---CONFLICT!!---
like if there were 20,000 Pamela Anderson clones walking arround
Well, PA would be a really bad choice for this since she was really pretty bad looking before all the surgery.
Personally I'd say make 20000 Jennifer Love Hewitt clones. ---CONFLICT!!---
it is impossible to generate a truely random number.
Prove it;-)
It is kind of like trying to prove something can't be done.
It is entirely possible to prove that something can't be done at least in mathematics.
For example: It is impossible to trisect an arbitrary angle using just a straight edge and compass.
This was conjectured by the ancient Greeks and not proven until fairly recently with the development of modern algebra, specifically Galois theory. (The proof is beyond the scope of this post).
I tried to find a link, but no luck. ---CONFLICT!!---
I can believe that light travels at a certain speed, but science can't tell me WHY it travels at that speed. All science can say is "just because". Now, religion will say "because god made it so", and while this answer is boring and unexplanative it is still an answer. An answer to a question that science can't answer
Science does not say "just because" it says "I don't know" which is an answer. It is also an absolutely true answer. Religion will say "because god made it so" which is an answer. Barely. It is not true or honest though. It is a statement of what someone believes to be true while knowing full well that they could be wrong. They will never add that caveat though. This is even less helpful than Science's "I don't know" because it forces the extra step of asking where god comes from which will inevitably be answered with the same "I don't know" one iteration later.
Why do religious people using this argument always stop before the argument is done?
The next obvious question is:
Then where did god come from
Religion: some jumbled crap about how we can't question, or we're not worthy or some similar crap that in the end boils down to:
Um, we don't know
Which curiously enough is the same answer that science gave in the predceding step.
The only difference is that the religious answer adds an extra step to try and cover up the fact that they are totally ignorant as to the origin of the universe. Science is more honest in this respect in that it admits its ignorance without being forced into it.
The same conclusions are reached either way.
The religious answer adds nothing. No new knowledge is gained, no questions are answered.
This doesn't say that there is no god, but it does show that there is absolutely no reason to waste time and effort supporting the belief.
Oh yeah, except for that whole, "Do it or I'll fucking spank you"* thing. Real loving guy there.
Wow, you really need to better inform yourself.
One good source would be a book called The Bible As History. I forget the author. The book is an examination of the historical aspects of the bible with respect to modern archaeology. The author is actualy a christian, but it's not a religious book.
So where to start in on you;-)
The bulk of the bible is history, in the old sense -- an uncritical examanation of the past. It is as realiable as the march of Alexander the Great and the reign of Nero.
No, it is not nearly as reliable since history is mutable and a political tool as powerful as a religion is always abused.
You conveniently ignore and misinterpret this point in your response to another poster:
After all, the bible has been changed, translated, and manipulated by how many kings and religious leaders by now? As we know the bible today, it has been a work-in-progress for hundreds of years.
Wrong. The Catholic Bible has been around in its current form since Emperor Constantine called the First Council of Nicea, around AD 400. The Protestant Bible removes several Old Testament books, but adds no new ones.
You don't address translation or manipulation which are central to the issue. As for changes, you say: well they've been the same since they were manipulated into their current state in 400 AD
Did the walls of Jericho miracously fall at the sound of a trumpet? Possibly. Granted this is a possibility. But I'll bet you don't have a clue as to why. Jericho had been abandoned for at least 200 years by the time Joshua(?) blew his little horn. So regardless of whether the walls actually fell down, there was no battle since there were no defenders.
The question mark on Joshua's name is there for 2 reasons though. First, I'm not certain that he is the one referenced in the bible relative to this incident. Assuming I got that right, there is no reason to believe that he was actually the one there since all the battles fought by "Joshua" were actually stretched over several hundred years and many different generals. For convenience and to simplify the telling, these "facts" were changed. The idea, most likely, was that the important issue was that the Hebrews actually did
conquer Palestine. An alternative way of putting it is that they went around and butchered the rightful owners of the land so that they could steal it.
More historical inaccuracy though regardless of the reasons for it.
The only reason that they are the "good guys" in the book is that they wrote it.
There is actually a lot of evidence for the flood.
The fact that it happened before the christian god was even invented and that the story of Noah was actually stolen nearly verbatim from the story of Gilgamesh just proves that the semetic religions were based on stealing others' ideas and using them as their own from the very beginning.
Granted it wasn't the whole world, but a gigantic flood did, in fact, occur
It should, at the moment it strikes your foot, achieve a speed of 32 feet per per second exactly
Wow, it looks like someone needs to take basic physics.
a=acceleration, v=velocity, d=distance, Int()=integration.
(1)a=32f/s^2 (acceleration due to gravity)
(2)v= Int(a)dt = at + v0 (v0=0 since we're starting from rest)
(3)d= Int(v)dt = at^2/2 + d0 (d0=0 convenient choice of coordinate system)
So in one second it will achieve a velocity of 32f/s by equation (2) but only have traveled 16 feet by equation (3), or halfway to his foot.
It's really sad that you try so hard to come across as reasonable and open minded about these issues and then throw in such a slimy dig at Nietzsche.
His "God is Dead" philosophy is in no way destructive of your stated goal of "take the lessons recorded for us by our forebears and Make The World Better." It actually provides a much better method for this than religion does. Nietzsche's whole point in Thus Spoke Zarathustra (Originally in German titled Also Sprach Zarathustra which is the title of the main theme from 2001. Coincidence? I doubt it)
is that since we are no longer held back by all the crap and baggage of religion and god that we as human beings have the ability and the responsibility to ourselves to overcome our condition and move on to something greater.
Please explain exactly how this philosophy is "destructive"?
There's now more to be sought in emergent & material properties and mathematical functions. And that's up till now not a widely researched field.
Could you provide some more information on this or perhaps a link (in English please). I don't understand why simpler would be a setback. ---CONFLICT!!---
I wonder what useful would come of making up your own axioms...
Well, assuming you pick good axioms, quite a few things actually. Euclid's 5th(?) postulate was proved to be independent of the others. This means that it can't be proved from any of the others. So you can either accept it or choose its contverse as an axiom. Accepting the postulate leads to Euclidian geometry accepting its converse leads to non-Euclidian geometry. Depending on how you phrase it you get either hyperbolic or......I forget, but another type of geometry. Both are fascinating from a purely mathematical perspective, and one is essential to the construction of general relativity.
Another example is the so called "Axiom of Choice" usually first encountered in upper division undergraduate math classes. It essentially says that given any collection of sets you can say "Take one element from each set" which is a common step in proofs. For finite sets this is obvious and for countable sets ( the natural numbers 1,2,3..... for example) it is pretty simple too. But notice there is nothing in it about the size of the collections. There are several commonly used equivalents to the axiom of choice as well:
Zorn's Lemma, the Well Ordering Principle and
Tychonov's Product Theorem: any product of compact topological spaces, when equipped with the product topology, is also compact.
I had to look up the statement of Tychonov's theorem since it's been a while. If you care, I found an interesting article regarding the equivalences here.
Anyhow, it was proved (by Gödel I think) that this axiom is independent from the other axioms of set theory meaning you can accept it or accept its converse and still be as consistent as you were before. There was a big debate about this back in the day when it was discovered that using it you could take a sphere, take it apart and reassemble it into 2 spheres the same size as the original. Eventually it was accepted by the mathematics community and rejected by the physics community. One of the consequences of the axiom of choice is that there exist sets which are not "Lebesgue measurable" which has a big affect on the integrability of functions on these sets. Every non-measurable set I've seen is totally pathalogical, so the physics people who actually have to do integrations save themselves the step of seeing if their domain is actually measurable before they start integrating by rejecting the axiom. The converse of the axiom can be stated in this case as "There are no unmeasurable sets".
So, yes it could be useful to make up your own axioms, but it isn't easy to pick the "right" ones. ---CONFLICT!!---
Cop's pulled over my brother in law a year or so back, ripped him out of the car, and beat him senseless.
Which has exactly what to do with racism?
The same thing happened to me in Seattle and I'm white.
This is the point another poster was making. People seeking to avoid taking responsibility for their lives and actions play the race card on everything whether or not it's justified.
(from where I'm from that the equivilent of 1.5 Oregon's). But where they're from that's the equivalent of one apartment building;-)
---CONFLICT!!---
Re:A moment of silence. . .
on
The Challenger
·
· Score: 1
, is it possible to clearly define, at what point a fetus becomes sentient,
Well, the only sane way to define this is when the fetus can exist outside of its host body.
Before this time, apart from being a fetus it meets the definition of parasite. It is as tremendous a violation of the rights of the mother to sentence her to 18 years of raising another human as it would be to force an unwanted child to exist.
people on the street will wash your car's windshield while you're stopped at a red light, then expect you to tip them.
In fact coming across the border from Mexico into San Diego they do this even if you say no, usually leaving your windshield dirtier than when they started.
Slashdot Mirror
>> Marvin Minsky says that HAL stands for
>> Heuristically programmed ALgorithmic computer
>Heuristic-Algorithm computer makes a lot more sense.
Actually A.C. Clarke says in the book in question that HAL stands for Heuristic ALgorithm. Furthermore, HAL=IBM-1 thing is also in the book. No one sasying anything about these things is being insightful at all in any way.
Thank you.
---CONFLICT!!---
The best games have always run on Windows...
...no self-respecting Slashdotter would be caught dead being unable to dual-boot into deathmatch heaven.
Not counting some console games, sure, but the worst games run on windows as well. At least 90% of all games suck ass.
Actually I have a lot of self respect and I can't stand first person shooters at all. Nothing against anyone who does. I just think they're totally lame.
For my real time strategy needs I dual boot into MacOS thanks very much for playing.
---CONFLICT!!---
I had a funny experience. I went to the website and downloaded and ran the patch but it gave me a message saying I did not need to install this update and exited. Anyone else have this happen?
I didn't have this happen, but I did read the page before blindly downloading a patch (from MS of all places), so I can say that you do need a patch, but you did download the wrong one.
---CONFLICT!!---
I prefered fastbond, 4 stone rain, 4 ice storm 4 each of the other land destruction cards, strip mines, stormseekers howling mines, black vises, timetwister, wheel of fortune and a legend enchantment I forget what was called that made you have to pay 3 extra mana for any spell.
People freaking hated that deck.
Best first turn:sol ring 2 black vises done. your turn 6 damage before you can even play a card.
One guy spent the 3 mana he actually managed to get on the board to bring out his black lotus and then I crumbled it giving him mana equal to the BL's casting cost: 0
he had ball lightning berzerk and a fork in his hand.
I played from beta until ice age came out bought a few of those packs, but the appeal was gone. All the cool cards were gone.
---CONFLICT!!---
someone explain how this is a troll, I'm confused.....
I'm not sure that I would have marked it as troll, maybe flamebait. The reason though is pretty clear. In case you didn't notice, the post was made by Wacko Warner who is one of the Warner Brothers. It's pretty obvious that he would have a difficult time offering an objective opinion about a competing studio's work.
---CONFLICT!!---
like if there were 20,000 Pamela Anderson clones walking arround
Well, PA would be a really bad choice for this since she was really pretty bad looking before all the surgery.
Personally I'd say make 20000 Jennifer Love Hewitt clones.
---CONFLICT!!---
it is impossible to generate a truely random number.
;-)
Prove it
It is kind of like trying to prove something can't be done.
It is entirely possible to prove that something can't be done at least in mathematics.
For example: It is impossible to trisect an arbitrary angle using just a straight edge and compass.
This was conjectured by the ancient Greeks and not proven until fairly recently with the development of modern algebra, specifically Galois theory. (The proof is beyond the scope of this post).
I tried to find a link, but no luck.
---CONFLICT!!---
You just don't get it do you?
Science does not require any faith at all ever.
I can believe that light travels at a certain speed, but science can't tell me WHY it travels at that speed. All science can say is "just because". Now, religion will say "because god made it so", and while this answer is boring and unexplanative it is still an answer. An answer to a question that science can't answer
Science does not say "just because" it says "I don't know" which is an answer. It is also an absolutely true answer. Religion will say "because god made it so" which is an answer. Barely. It is not true or honest though. It is a statement of what someone believes to be true while knowing full well that they could be wrong. They will never add that caveat though. This is even less helpful than Science's "I don't know" because it forces the extra step of asking where god comes from which will inevitably be answered with the same "I don't know" one iteration later.
---CONFLICT!!---
Why do religious people using this argument always stop before the argument is done?
The next obvious question is:
Then where did god come from
Religion: some jumbled crap about how we can't question, or we're not worthy or some similar crap that in the end boils down to:
Um, we don't know
Which curiously enough is the same answer that science gave in the predceding step.
The only difference is that the religious answer adds an extra step to try and cover up the fact that they are totally ignorant as to the origin of the universe. Science is more honest in this respect in that it admits its ignorance without being forced into it.
The same conclusions are reached either way.
The religious answer adds nothing. No new knowledge is gained, no questions are answered.
This doesn't say that there is no god, but it does show that there is absolutely no reason to waste time and effort supporting the belief.
Oh yeah, except for that whole, "Do it or I'll fucking spank you"* thing. Real loving guy there.
*Loki from Dogma
---CONFLICT!!---
Wow, you really need to better inform yourself.
;-)
One good source would be a book called The Bible As History. I forget the author. The book is an examination of the historical aspects of the bible with respect to modern archaeology. The author is actualy a christian, but it's not a religious book.
So where to start in on you
The bulk of the bible is history, in the old sense -- an uncritical examanation of the past. It is as realiable as the march of Alexander the Great and the reign of Nero.
No, it is not nearly as reliable since history is mutable and a political tool as powerful as a religion is always abused.
You conveniently ignore and misinterpret this point in your response to another poster:
After all, the bible has been changed, translated, and manipulated by how many kings and religious leaders by now? As we know the bible today, it has been a work-in-progress for hundreds of years.
Wrong. The Catholic Bible has been around in its current form since Emperor Constantine called the First Council of Nicea, around AD 400. The Protestant Bible removes several Old Testament books, but adds no new ones.
You don't address translation or manipulation which are central to the issue. As for changes, you say: well they've been the same since they were manipulated into their current state in 400 AD
Did the walls of Jericho miracously fall at the sound of a trumpet? Possibly.
Granted this is a possibility. But I'll bet you don't have a clue as to why. Jericho had been abandoned for at least 200 years by the time Joshua(?) blew his little horn. So regardless of whether the walls actually fell down, there was no battle since there were no defenders.
The question mark on Joshua's name is there for 2 reasons though. First, I'm not certain that he is the one referenced in the bible relative to this incident. Assuming I got that right, there is no reason to believe that he was actually the one there since all the battles fought by "Joshua" were actually stretched over several hundred years and many different generals. For convenience and to simplify the telling, these "facts" were changed. The idea, most likely, was that the important issue was that the Hebrews actually did
conquer Palestine. An alternative way of putting it is that they went around and butchered the rightful owners of the land so that they could steal it.
More historical inaccuracy though regardless of the reasons for it.
The only reason that they are the "good guys" in the book is that they wrote it.
---CONFLICT!!---
a flood for which there is no evidence
There is actually a lot of evidence for the flood.
The fact that it happened before the christian god was even invented and that the story of Noah was actually stolen nearly verbatim from the story of Gilgamesh just proves that the semetic religions were based on stealing others' ideas and using them as their own from the very beginning.
Granted it wasn't the whole world, but a gigantic flood did, in fact, occur
---CONFLICT!!---
It should, at the moment it strikes your foot, achieve a speed of 32 feet per per second exactly
Wow, it looks like someone needs to take basic physics.
a=acceleration, v=velocity, d=distance, Int()=integration.
(1)a=32f/s^2 (acceleration due to gravity)
(2)v= Int(a)dt = at + v0 (v0=0 since we're starting from rest)
(3)d= Int(v)dt = at^2/2 + d0 (d0=0 convenient choice of coordinate system)
So in one second it will achieve a velocity of 32f/s by equation (2) but only have traveled 16 feet by equation (3), or halfway to his foot.
Granted, he should still eat his hat though.
---CONFLICT!!---
It's really sad that you try so hard to come across as reasonable and open minded about these issues and then throw in such a slimy dig at Nietzsche.
His "God is Dead" philosophy is in no way destructive of your stated goal of "take the lessons recorded for us by our forebears and Make The World Better." It actually provides a much better method for this than religion does. Nietzsche's whole point in Thus Spoke Zarathustra (Originally in German titled Also Sprach Zarathustra which is the title of the main theme from 2001. Coincidence? I doubt it)
is that since we are no longer held back by all the crap and baggage of religion and god that we as human beings have the ability and the responsibility to ourselves to overcome our condition and move on to something greater.
Please explain exactly how this philosophy is "destructive"?
Your statement is a good example of "backbiting".
---CONFLICT!!---
There's now more to be sought in emergent & material properties and mathematical functions. And that's up till now not a widely researched field.
Could you provide some more information on this or perhaps a link (in English please). I don't understand why simpler would be a setback.
---CONFLICT!!---
I wonder what useful would come of making up your own axioms...
Well, assuming you pick good axioms, quite a few things actually. Euclid's 5th(?) postulate was proved to be independent of the others. This means that it can't be proved from any of the others. So you can either accept it or choose its contverse as an axiom. Accepting the postulate leads to Euclidian geometry accepting its converse leads to non-Euclidian geometry. Depending on how you phrase it you get either hyperbolic or......I forget, but another type of geometry. Both are fascinating from a purely mathematical perspective, and one is essential to the construction of general relativity.
Another example is the so called "Axiom of Choice" usually first encountered in upper division undergraduate math classes. It essentially says that given any collection of sets you can say "Take one element from each set" which is a common step in proofs. For finite sets this is obvious and for countable sets ( the natural numbers 1,2,3..... for example) it is pretty simple too. But notice there is nothing in it about the size of the collections. There are several commonly used equivalents to the axiom of choice as well:
Zorn's Lemma, the Well Ordering Principle and
Tychonov's Product Theorem: any product of compact topological spaces, when equipped with the product topology, is also compact.
I had to look up the statement of Tychonov's theorem since it's been a while. If you care, I found an interesting article regarding the equivalences here.
Anyhow, it was proved (by Gödel I think) that this axiom is independent from the other axioms of set theory meaning you can accept it or accept its converse and still be as consistent as you were before. There was a big debate about this back in the day when it was discovered that using it you could take a sphere, take it apart and reassemble it into 2 spheres the same size as the original. Eventually it was accepted by the mathematics community and rejected by the physics community. One of the consequences of the axiom of choice is that there exist sets which are not "Lebesgue measurable" which has a big affect on the integrability of functions on these sets. Every non-measurable set I've seen is totally pathalogical, so the physics people who actually have to do integrations save themselves the step of seeing if their domain is actually measurable before they start integrating by rejecting the axiom. The converse of the axiom can be stated in this case as "There are no unmeasurable sets".
So, yes it could be useful to make up your own axioms, but it isn't easy to pick the "right" ones.
---CONFLICT!!---
Cop's pulled over my brother in law a year or so back, ripped him out of the car, and beat him senseless.
Which has exactly what to do with racism?
The same thing happened to me in Seattle and I'm white.
This is the point another poster was making. People seeking to avoid taking responsibility for their lives and actions play the race card on everything whether or not it's justified.
---CONFLICT!!---
(ping of death was fixed in under 24 hours for example).
Ummmmm... You misspelled "2 years" as "under 24 hours".
Ordinarily I don't bother with spelling corrections,
but this does totally change your post.
---CONFLICT!!---
(from where I'm from that the equivilent of 1.5 Oregon's). ;-)
But where they're from that's the equivalent of one apartment building
---CONFLICT!!---
, is it possible to clearly define, at what point a fetus becomes sentient,
Well, the only sane way to define this is when the fetus can exist outside of its host body.
Before this time, apart from being a fetus it meets the definition of parasite. It is as tremendous a violation of the rights of the mother to sentence her to 18 years of raising another human as it would be to force an unwanted child to exist.
---CONFLICT!!---
same goes for fat people and food (of which i am)
;-)
Ummm.... You're food?
Remind me not to visit your country
---CONFLICT!!---
There's a great sports bar in San Diego with over a hundred screens (Sports City),
Where is this place?
---CONFLICT!!---
baseball is just a painful reminder of how long it is between the Super Bowl and the start of Monday Night Football.
;-)
Right on Lady Fractal. That is the best description of that game I have ever heard
---CONFLICT!!---
people on the street will wash your car's windshield while you're stopped at a red light, then expect you to tip them.
In fact coming across the border from Mexico into San Diego they do this even if you say no, usually leaving your windshield dirtier than when they started.
---CONFLICT!!---
And all this time I just hung up on them.
I can't wait to try this one BWAHAHAHA!
Thanks for the hot tip.
---CONFLICT!!---
Considering they actually hire people who specialize in user interfaces and the psychologies behind them?
By "hire" I think you mean "steal the work by the people Apple hired"
---CONFLICT!!---