OK. (1) This isn't the right place to rant about the current situation in the UK. It's a thread about distracting images in image sequences. You're completely offtopic.
(2) I'm replying because I found your post so utterly stupidly misinformed it's ridiculous. Yes, the UK currently has a shoot-to-kill policy. But it only parallels the US shoot-to-kill policy. It depends on the situation. When police in the US have a house surrounded when there is a dangerous person inside, they will shoot to kill if it is obvious that the police will be in serious danger otherwise.
The police in the UK are NOT NOT NOT going round shooting people they think might be terrorists. That's the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard. IF someone is suspected of being a terrorist AND are suspected of carrying out a threat in a public place AND cannot be apprehended normally first *AND* the police decide that taking the person down is in the interest of our national security - just like in the US if the police have a dangerous suspect in a house and that person is behaving in a dangerous way, the US police will protect their own by taking down that suspect - then the police will shoot that person. The problem is, recently, that if someone is carrying explosives and is shot in the torso, the explosives go off.
Would you sacrifice one person to save the lives of two? The numbers add up already. Would you sacrifice one person to save ten? Twenty? Fifty? If you shoot one innocent person and one person who was about to blow up a station, you save eg fifty innocent lives and lose one innocent life. Yes, it's possible that it could have been done without killing the one innocent - but if you've then held back enough that the terrorists achieve their bombing, then you have LOST.
1.2 million people use the tube system in london each day. The two sets of bombings in two weeks - even though the second set didn't cost any lives - lost a huge number of innocents.
Having a shoot-to-kill policy is likely as much of a deterrent to terrorists as it is a policy to save as many lives as possible.
Your 'advice' to the people who live in London is cruel, cruel, cruel. Half the people in the bombings were white. The policy does NOT condense to "shoot people who you think might be terrorists" - it condenses to "if the situation reaches the point where someone has to be shot to prevent the situation from going badly wrong - the risk of shooting a person and having a bomb go off either by bullet impact or manual detonation is too high to risk non-lethal shots."
Abu-ghraib was torture of multiple people, and was intended by the effectors to be torture of multiple people. Terrorist bombings were multiple killings of multiple people, and were intended to be multiple killings of multiple people. The shoot-to-kill policy has caused the loss of one life, and is intended to save the lives of multiple people. Don't you dare, ever, EVER, to say that it's worse than torture and killing.
The people who are responsible for this policy are not dangerous and violent inhumane animals. They are people trying to save more lives than they cost. If the policy told the police to murder anyone who was slightly suspicious, they would be. But get your damn facts straight before assaulting the UK.
Remember that the US went to war over 9/11. Think how many the US military have killed on suspicion of being dangerous. Get your head out of your damn ass and put this in perspective.
The Home of the Underdogs site has a *massive* list of games (810 at time of writing the article) for older systems and Classic. It's an abandonware site - you won't find Escape Velocity, since Ambrosia still parent that (fetch that from the Ambrosia website instead) but you'll find a heck of a lot of other cool stuff. And you'll get some startling revelations such as, for example, a game like Populous 2 - granted not hugely complicated, but there's a heck of a lot of stuff in there - takes a mere 2.6MB of space, which compresses to 1.6MB. Most items are bigger than that these days. The save file is a whopping 238 bytes. Wow.
Anyway, a good list of games that bring back memories. Enjoy!
I've been told, and I'm beginning to see it, that the game starts when you hit level 60.
THIS is the kind of comment that wastes the game.
No, it doesn't start at 60. The game starts when you hit level 1. Bear with me - I'm not being trite.
When you get to level 60, you start being tough enough to participate in the endgame levels. But there's still a heck of a lot of interesting stuff in levels 1-59; it's just finding a team that it's enjoyable with that's the problem.
You're supposed to be able to enjoy 1-59 for what they are, not just as the prelude to a main act.
As an example: I got my first character, a warrior, up to level 47 or 48. I didn't rush, I solod a bit, I explored areas that were dangerous to me, and I had fun doing it. I did all the quests, and enjoyed them. I toiled to collect the 342 mithril it takes to do the mithril order quests, and the 100 or so more it takes to make stuff for yourself at the same time. My guild merged with a 60-raiding guild so that the top-end players could get more out of their game, and suddenly the pressure came on to just whip through 45-60 so I could join in. Hey, where did my game go? I realise that 60 is fun; but I don't think that the rest of the game should be thrown away just so you can get there. Why burn days getting to 60 (2.5 weeks minimum with rushing, according to an earlier post) to have fun, when you can just have fun?
More recently, I've started a whole bunch of characters. I played a druid to 32, then wanted to see what the game was like as a shaman, a hunter, a warlock, a priest. If I ever get to 60, I'll be running various areas through over and over; I can do that at level 20 too, and you get better items a whole lot more quickly. You find good groups, you find bad groups. I've done deadmines several times in a row; it's FUN. It's fun because I ignored the words 'the game starts at 60'. I haven't even got to 50, and I'm having fun. I have tactics; I have good runs, lucky escapes; I have items that replace the ones I have, and I know there's more space later on to get better. At 60, your item gain rate has to drop significantly; you have to spend hours to get the item you want because it's got that bonus. But as soon as it drops, you know what it is already, and you've already worked out that it's better than the one you have; and there's other people who want it too.
I'll stick with doing what I'm paying for - having fun wherever and whatever. I can look forward to participating in WSG again when my chars grow up a little - but I'm not wasting the early content just so I can start slogging on the later content instead.
Quote parent: (I've) had a wonderful time exploring the world and adventuring with (and without) friends, but there's quite a bit that I've not yet seen. And I'm not rushing past ANY of it. It's all there to be enjoyed.
I'm sure various people who are level 60 will scorn me for my opinions; but I'm pretty sure they missed out on a fair bit of fun on the way up. 60 may well be more fun than I expect; but I don't see any reason to let that cloud my enjoyment of the rest of the game. I'll finish off with a last quote from the parent, with which I wholeheartedly agree.
Winning an MMORPG (or any RPG) is only accomplished by enjoying yourself.
Slightly wrong - pH is the negative base10 logarithm of the concentration of Hydrogen. An acid - with huge amounts of free hydrogen - has a low pH. Glacial (pure) acids can have a negative pH. This doesn't mean that the concentration of hydrogen is low - it's absolutely incredibly enormous.
high pH = low concentration of H+ ions or equivalent
low pH = high concentration of H+ ions or equivalent
Doublechecked with google.
Being in a cubicle next to asotv would mean parent is releasing proprietary information while also identifying himself to asotv. And suggesting that Apple is planning to use its major competitor's technology as its subsystem?
Go away, little troll.
Zero evidence, yes. But we're looking to define the difference between a system that is alive (as we define ourselves to be) and one that is merely responsive. If you create a replica that works, at some point you cross the boundary that people define as unlife to life; and as logical and scientific we want to be about it, there will be those who consider it an aberration and will rise against it. The question will come of whether a soul is being made, whether it's founded or unfounded, evidence or not.
I've tried to keep the following part objective. It is not intended as a troll. Please read it objectively, and consider as part of a discussion over brain simulation and its repercussions rather than about religion. I believe what I believe, you believe what you believe.
I consider there to be no evidence - as such - for religion. Christians point to the bible, others to their own spiritual texts, but I'm quite cynical about the whole thing because there's no manifest evidence. But I don't go out and try to convince them that it's untrue, because I also don't have evidence to the contrary, and I'm also not fussed enough to feel an urge to bring people round to my way of thinking on that. However, as seen over and over (crusades, holy wars, jihads... the list goes on) the percieved insults against a religion are, often enough, responded to with force. US currency and (I think) the White House sigil bears the words "In God We Trust", even though the state is nominally unaffiliated with a religion; can you think of what would happen if it was motioned to be changed? Enough of the US population *believes* it enough that there would be outrage.
These same people believe that the creation of life, of soul, is for their God alone, and creation of new life by humans (other than the conventional way;P ) would be blasphemous, arrogant against God, etc etc. This is the kind of thing that gets ranted about in churches. Whether or not there is "evidence" for it, to enough people it matters.
(Note: I've used 'wires' and 'components' arbitrarily, these can be real (hardware simulation) or simulated (software simulation) or whichever way you prefer.)
The question of morality of this replication of a brain (mouse, human, whatever - let's speak hypothetically, it's easier) boils down to the existence of a soul.
If you have a wiring model that responds to stimuli in the same way as the real brain being modelled would be, then there's no way to distinguish between the two.
This is made more complicated by memory - the theory as I understand it says there's something to do with RNA fragments, so it's not just down to the wiring itself. Presumably that can also be replicated in some way; you can have it simply being a solid chunk of computer memory (which would presumably act as Eidetic memory, as with Simon Illyan in Bujold's Vorkosigan series; there might be compatibility issues in that the brain wouldn't access the data in the same way etc etc, but assume for the moment that that's resolved in a satisfactory way.
So now we have a set of wires and components that responds in the same way as the brain it's modelling, with the same recall. We have two issues.
1. Consciousness. If the two brains (real and model) respond in the same way to a question, then we have to state that either the real brain is hard-wired, and what we percieve as consciousness is mere stimulus-response, albeit in a complicated way (remember that the model brain is a replica of the real brain in every physical way). Or, the model brain has acquired consciousness.
2. Soul. This is left as an exercise to the reader, mostly because it's too open a point, also depending on your religion. I'm leaving this one alone, but the question remains.
They're pretty big questions. And we're getting close. A large section of the community will be entirely closed-minded; if it's made of artificial parts, then it's not alive.
I wonder.
Parallelism is all well and good - but if you're simply recreating the brain with hardward, then you're no closer to understanding what's going on. You need that central processing unit to process the information that it may be able to find.
When we're looking at the question of how the brain works, we need these interpretation stages, because when we look at it as is (either by looking at a physical brain or a hardware model of same) there's just too much chaos to pick out the useful order.
Too bad it'd never work - not unless you could find some REALLY weird bacteria, anyway.
For the 'standard' rules of the Game of Life, this is probably true. Remember though that the rules are changeable; with most real bacteria you've just got a higher chance of survival at higher densities, or some form of lifespan - each point lasting longer than a single turn, with the state of each turn also affecting the lifetime left and spread per unit.
David Brin's Glory Season takes the Game of Life a step further - proper competition. You line up your array on your side of the board, and your opponent on theirs; after the Go, no more changes can be made, and the winner is the one who has the most live cells on their side when stability is reached.
With bacteria, this would need a fair amount of adaptation, and might be hindered by the tendency to clump, but I'm sure that various things like a trigger on overdensity that released a short-lived poison onto the board... clusters that had detached from the main would be more likely to survive this, etc etc.
You've also got elements of 3D being introduced... thick bacteria, thin bacteria, air transfer rather than direct contact with the next cell... could be restricted by laying the single sheet between two slides...
It certainly requires a fair bit more innovation than the simple 2D board, but that's only to be expected. It is at least a fun thought experiment; rather than the Game of Life being unlikely, just consider this as simply being a heck of a lot more complicated >:)
With BitTorrent and several similar applications, the application is supposedly justified by legitimate traffic, and this has been a big point against them being closed down in cases from the RIAA and similar corporations.
As the level of privacy is taken up, notch by notch, it's the illicit side of it that seems to be prevailing. I saw a p2p system was used for one of my automatic WoW updates; I don't see any reason why to hide that from the web at large. If I wanted to get distributed file transfers, and those transfers were legal, I'd probably still not mind; who cares?
This ever-increasing secrecy just boosts the idea of the illegality of the majority of the traffic through these systems. Another side of multiple layers of cloaking is that if a worm/virus/etcetc gets distributed, then it's going to be that many times more difficult to track it down and stop the damn people who are doing it.
I'm interested to see why people are so insistent on extra layers of invisibility. I bet a major answer to that is simple privacy, so that people don't see what you do; to that I respond that this is hardly confidential information; no credit card numbers, phone numbers, addresses. Your IP, which everyone with a website sees anyway when you look in.
Why the obsession with needing so much privacy that it's a haven? Noting that havens attract the bad seeds more than the good.
How can a social culture like that not lead to long term success!
If it starves to death.
Seriously, take a look at what you just wrote. You called starving people arrogant and condescending because they prefer to be alive and less free to being dead and more free.
I quote your quote: "what good does it do to have freedom to say waht you want and worship the religion you want when noone guarantees you will have food on the table"
and your response "A LOT"
and from that I draw the point that you'd rather be dead and free than oppressed and alive. Food is life.
I suggest you remember that if you're dead, you're not really free anyway. Your view of the oppressive system - one that prevents people speaking out - is flawed in that if the system fails, people will die. Yes, sometimes sacrifices must be made (some die rather than all die) BUT if the system is able to provide food (read: life) then your "freedom" can also be read "death".
It's too easy to say "freedom for everyone!" but it's an IDEAL. Survival is real. Taking away people's food and telling them they're now free is one of the stupidest things I've ever heard of.
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Then again, you could always get tipped gloves or something similar - it'd make a hell of an awesome noise going at 144 wpm. Machine-gun typing.
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I noticed that one as well... a while ago there was another typing site, typera, which measured in cpm rather than wpm (and then just figured you should divide by 6 if you wanted a standard wpm score). The fastest typer on it was up to 830 cpm; that's around 121wpm. I've noticed on the typingtest site that I top out around there - but only because I've seen the first few words of text fully before typing it, and know the pattern my fingers are about to go into; after that it drops to around 85, because of interesting words like eutrophication; it's a little irksome to see that, because I know that I simply don't use words like that (looking back at the stuff I've typed so far in this box I can also see that the majority of my words are under 6 characters too; that's the difference between standard typing and the stuff that's analysed as "typical material" (newspapers, and presumably things like executive summaries - the kinds of places where flowery words add to the apparent weight of the article, by sounding more informed.)
Anyway; no matter about the blisters, because you're still performing the same number of keypresses!
You miss the point - Microsoft still get the same money, presumably more so over time. The advertisers are investing in place of a share of your payment in the hope that they can get more from you than they're shelling out to get the ads there in the first place.
My ipod went into a river as I was jumping from boat to bank at one point. It was in for maybe 10 seconds, so presumably shorter than the washing machine and without the associated stresses; I popped the back off, poured the water out, detached the battery and tilted the HD away from the motherboard, put it above a radiator for a few days to be sure, then put it back together again and it worked absolutely fine, with no loss of battery life or memory errors.
There may have been something happening with the washing powder in solution or water being forced into various places by the high Gs at high spin; however as I opened up my ipod it was completely inert. Something really strange must have happened to pierce his battery (solid Li skids around and pops a little when placed on top of water); however then you would expect it to have happened inside the washing machine. The implication there is that he pierced the battery with the screwdriver, which is no mean feat since it's around a 180 corner when you're trying to get in. Makes me wonder exactly what he was trying to do at the time.
Microwave is high-energy (high-frequency) radio wave, that's calibrated to make water molecules vibrate. Sure, it'd scatter from the transmitter - but where the radio stations want their data all over the place, directing a beam should be a simple matter of reflecting waves in directions you don't want the beam to head in the directions you do. Like a satellite dish in reverse.
Sheesh. Looks like it's entirely possible to get immersed in explanation, too. Stuff I know, meet textbox. Not sure there was a keyboard involved.
(Yeah, I used to do multiple focus-sports, still do a couple, and continue to do a lot of gaming. Half of the previous post was speaking from experience as well as the stuff I could remember from the article. I find it fairly easy to focus my surroundings out).
When you're thinking 'normally' - un-automatic, processing stuff logically, actually thinking about the stuff you're looking at - your brain patterns are in beta waveform; it's irregular, you're testing out different parts of your brain to see which one helps most at a problem, and you notice other things more easily.
There was a study done a while ago (the results possibly turned up in one of the popular science magazines? Can't remember.) studying alpha patterns. Alpha brainwaves are what give what is termed 'cyborg ability' - this isn't cyborg in the augmented-with-cool-gizmos though. Here, cyborg means augmentation in a different sense. When you walk, you no longer have to think about the complexity of timing your feet, balance, leg muscles, pressure feedback and all the other intricate things that are needed to master walking. It sounds funny, but you can do it because you're used to it.
That's not cyborg, but you're starting to get the idea. When you ride a bicycle for a few years, you no longer have to think about how you move. Even adults have trouble on a bike the first couple of times - it's about learning how to balance, how to steer with balance, and so on. When you cycle without thinking about it, that's cyborg. You get to a particular place on the road by intending to get there rather than left leg, right leg, move the handlebars this way - it just happens.
A more understandable analogy for slashdotters is gaming. When you've played a game for a certain amount of time, got used to the keyset and mouse movements - you *don't think about it any more*. You want to move left, you move left. You want to walk backwards round a corner, you walk backwards around a corner. If you don't think about having to press that button to get this to happen - that's cyborg. That's when your brain is so used to what happens that it no longer requires the feedback of 'finger press button' - to the brain, it's 'walk backwards around the corner', and you've practised it enough that you can just do it.
That's alpha brainwaves.
The study was examining where alpha brainwaves were found; it's where you find 'think' turned into 'do'. And the three major groups were sportspeople (This is what is known as "The Zone" - where it just happens. You're not thinking about anything else; it's all about what happens, not how it happens, or where to step), zen masters (A different way in - actively turning off the thinking, and settling into alpha by default. The transcendental aspect of it comes from not having the sport or base thought to distract yourself either - pure meditation is when your mind shuts down to one or no active activities, only interrupted by external influence e.g. becoming cold or being disturbed)... and, if you can remember where this sentence was going, gamers.
Focused gamers stop seeing the outside world, and stop interacting with the keyboard - the brain interacts with the game, and the finger-key interface becomes just another synapse. It's less so with more complicated games, where you have to shift your hands around to new keysets; it's also affected by in-game chat (because you have to upshift to beta to access speech centres) and lag (because your brain activity stops corresponding directly with what happens).
Another aspect of having the ability to use alpha pattern is that the ability to pick up the other alpha activities is significantly increased, because it's that much easier to get into the zone. With two or three different ways of settling to alpha - gaming and a focus sport, or a focus sport and meditation - it becomes easier to learn other tasks. The brain is becoming more able to adapt to new impulse-response patterns, and so learns faster. Concentration goes up, productivity goes up; it's an incredibly useful ability to have.
What the article writer doesn't know, but still appreciates the feel of, is the first step along the way. Becoming more skillful; becoming less interface and more immerse, is what takes something to the depths of the brain. And once you're there, it's a pretty small step to reach enjoyment. It's a form of enlightenment; it's just.... pure.
I wonder how effective a directional microwave would be. Not too difficult to make - just find an old microwave and rearrange the pieces. I remember the people who stand in front of microwave transmitters to warm up - consider that a toad is probably a 100-200 times lighter than a human, and I bet that if you put a toad in a microwave it'd explode too. Note I'm NOT recommending this, it'd probably make a horrible mess that might well help poison you as well. But I bet it's possible to make a directional beam from a standard microwave unit, and I don't find it difficult to believe that toads might be used as a target for this, especially after the first one sent its guts skyward by 3.2 feet (which, incidentally, is probably an approximation for 1 metre when posting to an imperial-measure country.)
There could certainly be some, but I doubt they would be habitable. visibility can always be called into question too. An asteroid belt is small, sure, but it goes all the way round, and so may be easier to happen to spot. Planets are small AND only at one point in the orbit at any time.
So... considering the extreme of an 80 year sentence ("life"? That close enough?) even though he said it himself (this might be more considered assisted suicide, but we're looking at the maths here).
Per copy downloaded: 80 years divided by one million. Considering there's only around 700000 *hours* in 80 years, we're looking at maybe 40 minutes' time for each of the downloaders by your formula! Well, shucks.
(24*365.25*80 = 701280)
I like the cruise line plans though. Staying in a cruise pool for the time it takes to cross the atlantic is still a significant time to exert yourself for. If he swapped in and out of the inflatable dinghy with his PR, so long as there was at least one of them in the water at a time, that'd be a pretty appreciable match up to his words.
Around 6 or 7 years ago, my older brother had a voice-recognition password on his computer; it was neat and funky, and very futuristic. Then I found out that I could pitch my voice lower and get in after a couple of tries. Granted, the software standard at the time probably wasn't up to what we'd be looking at here, but it's still a consideration.
Having a nice guy image is good for business; if you play it right. It's good for the stock holders, it's nice for the users. If google had been seen as a bad search engine that was powered by overworked child labour, it wouldn't have got to where it was now, because it didn't have the swath of extra features that have come as a product of their profit from being a good place to advertise and be seen.
There are industries where being less nice is more profitable; especially so if you hold a monopoly. However, since their services are provided for free, it's incredibly easy for us all to migrate elsewhere if they start being nasty. Maintaining (and improving) their business, whether or not it's as simple as having a motto of "do no evil", gets them more views, more advertisers, more revenue.
And, of course, more revenue means more services for us. Which is always nice.
Slashdot Mirror
OK. (1) This isn't the right place to rant about the current situation in the UK. It's a thread about distracting images in image sequences. You're completely offtopic.
(2) I'm replying because I found your post so utterly stupidly misinformed it's ridiculous. Yes, the UK currently has a shoot-to-kill policy. But it only parallels the US shoot-to-kill policy. It depends on the situation. When police in the US have a house surrounded when there is a dangerous person inside, they will shoot to kill if it is obvious that the police will be in serious danger otherwise.
The police in the UK are NOT NOT NOT going round shooting people they think might be terrorists. That's the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard. IF someone is suspected of being a terrorist AND are suspected of carrying out a threat in a public place AND cannot be apprehended normally first *AND* the police decide that taking the person down is in the interest of our national security - just like in the US if the police have a dangerous suspect in a house and that person is behaving in a dangerous way, the US police will protect their own by taking down that suspect - then the police will shoot that person. The problem is, recently, that if someone is carrying explosives and is shot in the torso, the explosives go off.
Would you sacrifice one person to save the lives of two? The numbers add up already. Would you sacrifice one person to save ten? Twenty? Fifty? If you shoot one innocent person and one person who was about to blow up a station, you save eg fifty innocent lives and lose one innocent life. Yes, it's possible that it could have been done without killing the one innocent - but if you've then held back enough that the terrorists achieve their bombing, then you have LOST.
1.2 million people use the tube system in london each day.
The two sets of bombings in two weeks - even though the second set didn't cost any lives - lost a huge number of innocents.
Having a shoot-to-kill policy is likely as much of a deterrent to terrorists as it is a policy to save as many lives as possible.
Your 'advice' to the people who live in London is cruel, cruel, cruel. Half the people in the bombings were white. The policy does NOT condense to "shoot people who you think might be terrorists" - it condenses to "if the situation reaches the point where someone has to be shot to prevent the situation from going badly wrong - the risk of shooting a person and having a bomb go off either by bullet impact or manual detonation is too high to risk non-lethal shots."
Abu-ghraib was torture of multiple people, and was intended by the effectors to be torture of multiple people. Terrorist bombings were multiple killings of multiple people, and were intended to be multiple killings of multiple people. The shoot-to-kill policy has caused the loss of one life, and is intended to save the lives of multiple people. Don't you dare, ever, EVER, to say that it's worse than torture and killing.
The people who are responsible for this policy are not dangerous and violent inhumane animals. They are people trying to save more lives than they cost. If the policy told the police to murder anyone who was slightly suspicious, they would be. But get your damn facts straight before assaulting the UK.
Remember that the US went to war over 9/11. Think how many the US military have killed on suspicion of being dangerous. Get your head out of your damn ass and put this in perspective.
The Home of the Underdogs site has a *massive* list of games (810 at time of writing the article) for older systems and Classic. It's an abandonware site - you won't find Escape Velocity, since Ambrosia still parent that (fetch that from the Ambrosia website instead) but you'll find a heck of a lot of other cool stuff. And you'll get some startling revelations such as, for example, a game like Populous 2 - granted not hugely complicated, but there's a heck of a lot of stuff in there - takes a mere 2.6MB of space, which compresses to 1.6MB. Most items are bigger than that these days. The save file is a whopping 238 bytes. Wow.
Anyway, a good list of games that bring back memories. Enjoy!
I've been told, and I'm beginning to see it, that the game starts when you hit level 60.
THIS is the kind of comment that wastes the game.
No, it doesn't start at 60. The game starts when you hit level 1. Bear with me - I'm not being trite.
When you get to level 60, you start being tough enough to participate in the endgame levels. But there's still a heck of a lot of interesting stuff in levels 1-59; it's just finding a team that it's enjoyable with that's the problem.
You're supposed to be able to enjoy 1-59 for what they are, not just as the prelude to a main act.
As an example: I got my first character, a warrior, up to level 47 or 48. I didn't rush, I solod a bit, I explored areas that were dangerous to me, and I had fun doing it. I did all the quests, and enjoyed them. I toiled to collect the 342 mithril it takes to do the mithril order quests, and the 100 or so more it takes to make stuff for yourself at the same time. My guild merged with a 60-raiding guild so that the top-end players could get more out of their game, and suddenly the pressure came on to just whip through 45-60 so I could join in. Hey, where did my game go? I realise that 60 is fun; but I don't think that the rest of the game should be thrown away just so you can get there. Why burn days getting to 60 (2.5 weeks minimum with rushing, according to an earlier post) to have fun, when you can just have fun?
More recently, I've started a whole bunch of characters. I played a druid to 32, then wanted to see what the game was like as a shaman, a hunter, a warlock, a priest. If I ever get to 60, I'll be running various areas through over and over; I can do that at level 20 too, and you get better items a whole lot more quickly. You find good groups, you find bad groups. I've done deadmines several times in a row; it's FUN. It's fun because I ignored the words 'the game starts at 60'. I haven't even got to 50, and I'm having fun. I have tactics; I have good runs, lucky escapes; I have items that replace the ones I have, and I know there's more space later on to get better. At 60, your item gain rate has to drop significantly; you have to spend hours to get the item you want because it's got that bonus. But as soon as it drops, you know what it is already, and you've already worked out that it's better than the one you have; and there's other people who want it too.
I'll stick with doing what I'm paying for - having fun wherever and whatever. I can look forward to participating in WSG again when my chars grow up a little - but I'm not wasting the early content just so I can start slogging on the later content instead.
Quote parent: (I've) had a wonderful time exploring the world and adventuring with (and without) friends, but there's quite a bit that I've not yet seen. And I'm not rushing past ANY of it. It's all there to be enjoyed.
I'm sure various people who are level 60 will scorn me for my opinions; but I'm pretty sure they missed out on a fair bit of fun on the way up. 60 may well be more fun than I expect; but I don't see any reason to let that cloud my enjoyment of the rest of the game. I'll finish off with a last quote from the parent, with which I wholeheartedly agree.
Winning an MMORPG (or any RPG) is only accomplished by enjoying yourself.
Slightly wrong - pH is the negative base10 logarithm of the concentration of Hydrogen. An acid - with huge amounts of free hydrogen - has a low pH. Glacial (pure) acids can have a negative pH. This doesn't mean that the concentration of hydrogen is low - it's absolutely incredibly enormous. high pH = low concentration of H+ ions or equivalent low pH = high concentration of H+ ions or equivalent Doublechecked with google.
Being in a cubicle next to asotv would mean parent is releasing proprietary information while also identifying himself to asotv. And suggesting that Apple is planning to use its major competitor's technology as its subsystem? Go away, little troll.
Zero evidence, yes. But we're looking to define the difference between a system that is alive (as we define ourselves to be) and one that is merely responsive. If you create a replica that works, at some point you cross the boundary that people define as unlife to life; and as logical and scientific we want to be about it, there will be those who consider it an aberration and will rise against it. The question will come of whether a soul is being made, whether it's founded or unfounded, evidence or not.
;P ) would be blasphemous, arrogant against God, etc etc. This is the kind of thing that gets ranted about in churches. Whether or not there is "evidence" for it, to enough people it matters.
I've tried to keep the following part objective. It is not intended as a troll. Please read it objectively, and consider as part of a discussion over brain simulation and its repercussions rather than about religion. I believe what I believe, you believe what you believe.
I consider there to be no evidence - as such - for religion. Christians point to the bible, others to their own spiritual texts, but I'm quite cynical about the whole thing because there's no manifest evidence. But I don't go out and try to convince them that it's untrue, because I also don't have evidence to the contrary, and I'm also not fussed enough to feel an urge to bring people round to my way of thinking on that. However, as seen over and over (crusades, holy wars, jihads... the list goes on) the percieved insults against a religion are, often enough, responded to with force. US currency and (I think) the White House sigil bears the words "In God We Trust", even though the state is nominally unaffiliated with a religion; can you think of what would happen if it was motioned to be changed? Enough of the US population *believes* it enough that there would be outrage.
These same people believe that the creation of life, of soul, is for their God alone, and creation of new life by humans (other than the conventional way
(Note: I've used 'wires' and 'components' arbitrarily, these can be real (hardware simulation) or simulated (software simulation) or whichever way you prefer.)
The question of morality of this replication of a brain (mouse, human, whatever - let's speak hypothetically, it's easier) boils down to the existence of a soul.
If you have a wiring model that responds to stimuli in the same way as the real brain being modelled would be, then there's no way to distinguish between the two.
This is made more complicated by memory - the theory as I understand it says there's something to do with RNA fragments, so it's not just down to the wiring itself. Presumably that can also be replicated in some way; you can have it simply being a solid chunk of computer memory (which would presumably act as Eidetic memory, as with Simon Illyan in Bujold's Vorkosigan series; there might be compatibility issues in that the brain wouldn't access the data in the same way etc etc, but assume for the moment that that's resolved in a satisfactory way.
So now we have a set of wires and components that responds in the same way as the brain it's modelling, with the same recall. We have two issues.
1. Consciousness.
If the two brains (real and model) respond in the same way to a question, then we have to state that either the real brain is hard-wired, and what we percieve as consciousness is mere stimulus-response, albeit in a complicated way (remember that the model brain is a replica of the real brain in every physical way). Or, the model brain has acquired consciousness.
2. Soul.
This is left as an exercise to the reader, mostly because it's too open a point, also depending on your religion. I'm leaving this one alone, but the question remains.
They're pretty big questions. And we're getting close. A large section of the community will be entirely closed-minded; if it's made of artificial parts, then it's not alive.
I wonder.
Parallelism is all well and good - but if you're simply recreating the brain with hardward, then you're no closer to understanding what's going on. You need that central processing unit to process the information that it may be able to find.
When we're looking at the question of how the brain works, we need these interpretation stages, because when we look at it as is (either by looking at a physical brain or a hardware model of same) there's just too much chaos to pick out the useful order.
I thought it straight away too ;)
Too bad it'd never work - not unless you could find some REALLY weird bacteria, anyway.
For the 'standard' rules of the Game of Life, this is probably true. Remember though that the rules are changeable; with most real bacteria you've just got a higher chance of survival at higher densities, or some form of lifespan - each point lasting longer than a single turn, with the state of each turn also affecting the lifetime left and spread per unit.
David Brin's Glory Season takes the Game of Life a step further - proper competition. You line up your array on your side of the board, and your opponent on theirs; after the Go, no more changes can be made, and the winner is the one who has the most live cells on their side when stability is reached.
With bacteria, this would need a fair amount of adaptation, and might be hindered by the tendency to clump, but I'm sure that various things like a trigger on overdensity that released a short-lived poison onto the board... clusters that had detached from the main would be more likely to survive this, etc etc.
You've also got elements of 3D being introduced... thick bacteria, thin bacteria, air transfer rather than direct contact with the next cell... could be restricted by laying the single sheet between two slides...
It certainly requires a fair bit more innovation than the simple 2D board, but that's only to be expected. It is at least a fun thought experiment; rather than the Game of Life being unlikely, just consider this as simply being a heck of a lot more complicated >:)
With BitTorrent and several similar applications, the application is supposedly justified by legitimate traffic, and this has been a big point against them being closed down in cases from the RIAA and similar corporations.
As the level of privacy is taken up, notch by notch, it's the illicit side of it that seems to be prevailing. I saw a p2p system was used for one of my automatic WoW updates; I don't see any reason why to hide that from the web at large. If I wanted to get distributed file transfers, and those transfers were legal, I'd probably still not mind; who cares?
This ever-increasing secrecy just boosts the idea of the illegality of the majority of the traffic through these systems. Another side of multiple layers of cloaking is that if a worm/virus/etcetc gets distributed, then it's going to be that many times more difficult to track it down and stop the damn people who are doing it.
I'm interested to see why people are so insistent on extra layers of invisibility. I bet a major answer to that is simple privacy, so that people don't see what you do; to that I respond that this is hardly confidential information; no credit card numbers, phone numbers, addresses. Your IP, which everyone with a website sees anyway when you look in.
Why the obsession with needing so much privacy that it's a haven? Noting that havens attract the bad seeds more than the good.
How can a social culture like that not lead to long term success!
If it starves to death.
Seriously, take a look at what you just wrote. You called starving people arrogant and condescending because they prefer to be alive and less free to being dead and more free.
I quote your quote: "what good does it do to have freedom to say waht you want and worship the religion you want when noone guarantees you will have food on the table"
and your response "A LOT"
and from that I draw the point that you'd rather be dead and free than oppressed and alive. Food is life.
I suggest you remember that if you're dead, you're not really free anyway. Your view of the oppressive system - one that prevents people speaking out - is flawed in that if the system fails, people will die. Yes, sometimes sacrifices must be made (some die rather than all die) BUT if the system is able to provide food (read: life) then your "freedom" can also be read "death".
It's too easy to say "freedom for everyone!" but it's an IDEAL. Survival is real. Taking away people's food and telling them they're now free is one of the stupidest things I've ever heard of.
News for Nerds. Stuff that matters.
Then again, you could always get tipped gloves or something similar - it'd make a hell of an awesome noise going at 144 wpm. Machine-gun typing.
I noticed that one as well... a while ago there was another typing site, typera, which measured in cpm rather than wpm (and then just figured you should divide by 6 if you wanted a standard wpm score). The fastest typer on it was up to 830 cpm; that's around 121wpm. I've noticed on the typingtest site that I top out around there - but only because I've seen the first few words of text fully before typing it, and know the pattern my fingers are about to go into; after that it drops to around 85, because of interesting words like eutrophication; it's a little irksome to see that, because I know that I simply don't use words like that (looking back at the stuff I've typed so far in this box I can also see that the majority of my words are under 6 characters too; that's the difference between standard typing and the stuff that's analysed as "typical material" (newspapers, and presumably things like executive summaries - the kinds of places where flowery words add to the apparent weight of the article, by sounding more informed.) Anyway; no matter about the blisters, because you're still performing the same number of keypresses!
You miss the point - Microsoft still get the same money, presumably more so over time. The advertisers are investing in place of a share of your payment in the hope that they can get more from you than they're shelling out to get the ads there in the first place.
Someone who realised that said banner ads are there to generate revenue for the people who put them there, so lowering the cost to the end user.
What's that? You mean you want to buy a machine with equal performance for MORE money?
My ipod went into a river as I was jumping from boat to bank at one point. It was in for maybe 10 seconds, so presumably shorter than the washing machine and without the associated stresses; I popped the back off, poured the water out, detached the battery and tilted the HD away from the motherboard, put it above a radiator for a few days to be sure, then put it back together again and it worked absolutely fine, with no loss of battery life or memory errors.
There may have been something happening with the washing powder in solution or water being forced into various places by the high Gs at high spin; however as I opened up my ipod it was completely inert. Something really strange must have happened to pierce his battery (solid Li skids around and pops a little when placed on top of water); however then you would expect it to have happened inside the washing machine. The implication there is that he pierced the battery with the screwdriver, which is no mean feat since it's around a 180 corner when you're trying to get in. Makes me wonder exactly what he was trying to do at the time.
Microwave is high-energy (high-frequency) radio wave, that's calibrated to make water molecules vibrate. Sure, it'd scatter from the transmitter - but where the radio stations want their data all over the place, directing a beam should be a simple matter of reflecting waves in directions you don't want the beam to head in the directions you do. Like a satellite dish in reverse.
Sheesh. Looks like it's entirely possible to get immersed in explanation, too. Stuff I know, meet textbox. Not sure there was a keyboard involved. (Yeah, I used to do multiple focus-sports, still do a couple, and continue to do a lot of gaming. Half of the previous post was speaking from experience as well as the stuff I could remember from the article. I find it fairly easy to focus my surroundings out).
When you're thinking 'normally' - un-automatic, processing stuff logically, actually thinking about the stuff you're looking at - your brain patterns are in beta waveform; it's irregular, you're testing out different parts of your brain to see which one helps most at a problem, and you notice other things more easily.
There was a study done a while ago (the results possibly turned up in one of the popular science magazines? Can't remember.) studying alpha patterns. Alpha brainwaves are what give what is termed 'cyborg ability' - this isn't cyborg in the augmented-with-cool-gizmos though. Here, cyborg means augmentation in a different sense. When you walk, you no longer have to think about the complexity of timing your feet, balance, leg muscles, pressure feedback and all the other intricate things that are needed to master walking. It sounds funny, but you can do it because you're used to it.
That's not cyborg, but you're starting to get the idea.
When you ride a bicycle for a few years, you no longer have to think about how you move. Even adults have trouble on a bike the first couple of times - it's about learning how to balance, how to steer with balance, and so on. When you cycle without thinking about it, that's cyborg. You get to a particular place on the road by intending to get there rather than left leg, right leg, move the handlebars this way - it just happens.
A more understandable analogy for slashdotters is gaming. When you've played a game for a certain amount of time, got used to the keyset and mouse movements - you *don't think about it any more*. You want to move left, you move left. You want to walk backwards round a corner, you walk backwards around a corner. If you don't think about having to press that button to get this to happen - that's cyborg. That's when your brain is so used to what happens that it no longer requires the feedback of 'finger press button' - to the brain, it's 'walk backwards around the corner', and you've practised it enough that you can just do it.
That's alpha brainwaves.
The study was examining where alpha brainwaves were found; it's where you find 'think' turned into 'do'. And the three major groups were sportspeople (This is what is known as "The Zone" - where it just happens. You're not thinking about anything else; it's all about what happens, not how it happens, or where to step), zen masters (A different way in - actively turning off the thinking, and settling into alpha by default. The transcendental aspect of it comes from not having the sport or base thought to distract yourself either - pure meditation is when your mind shuts down to one or no active activities, only interrupted by external influence e.g. becoming cold or being disturbed)... and, if you can remember where this sentence was going, gamers.
Focused gamers stop seeing the outside world, and stop interacting with the keyboard - the brain interacts with the game, and the finger-key interface becomes just another synapse. It's less so with more complicated games, where you have to shift your hands around to new keysets; it's also affected by in-game chat (because you have to upshift to beta to access speech centres) and lag (because your brain activity stops corresponding directly with what happens).
Another aspect of having the ability to use alpha pattern is that the ability to pick up the other alpha activities is significantly increased, because it's that much easier to get into the zone. With two or three different ways of settling to alpha - gaming and a focus sport, or a focus sport and meditation - it becomes easier to learn other tasks. The brain is becoming more able to adapt to new impulse-response patterns, and so learns faster. Concentration goes up, productivity goes up; it's an incredibly useful ability to have.
What the article writer doesn't know, but still appreciates the feel of, is the first step along the way. Becoming more skillful; becoming less interface and more immerse, is what takes something to the depths of the brain. And once you're there, it's a pretty small step to reach enjoyment. It's a form of enlightenment; it's just.... pure.
I wonder how effective a directional microwave would be. Not too difficult to make - just find an old microwave and rearrange the pieces. I remember the people who stand in front of microwave transmitters to warm up - consider that a toad is probably a 100-200 times lighter than a human, and I bet that if you put a toad in a microwave it'd explode too. Note I'm NOT recommending this, it'd probably make a horrible mess that might well help poison you as well. But I bet it's possible to make a directional beam from a standard microwave unit, and I don't find it difficult to believe that toads might be used as a target for this, especially after the first one sent its guts skyward by 3.2 feet (which, incidentally, is probably an approximation for 1 metre when posting to an imperial-measure country.)
There could certainly be some, but I doubt they would be habitable. visibility can always be called into question too. An asteroid belt is small, sure, but it goes all the way round, and so may be easier to happen to spot. Planets are small AND only at one point in the orbit at any time.
So... considering the extreme of an 80 year sentence ("life"? That close enough?) even though he said it himself (this might be more considered assisted suicide, but we're looking at the maths here).
Per copy downloaded: 80 years divided by one million. Considering there's only around 700000 *hours* in 80 years, we're looking at maybe 40 minutes' time for each of the downloaders by your formula! Well, shucks.
(24*365.25*80 = 701280)
I like the cruise line plans though. Staying in a cruise pool for the time it takes to cross the atlantic is still a significant time to exert yourself for. If he swapped in and out of the inflatable dinghy with his PR, so long as there was at least one of them in the water at a time, that'd be a pretty appreciable match up to his words.
Around 6 or 7 years ago, my older brother had a voice-recognition password on his computer; it was neat and funky, and very futuristic. Then I found out that I could pitch my voice lower and get in after a couple of tries. Granted, the software standard at the time probably wasn't up to what we'd be looking at here, but it's still a consideration.
Having a nice guy image is good for business; if you play it right. It's good for the stock holders, it's nice for the users. If google had been seen as a bad search engine that was powered by overworked child labour, it wouldn't have got to where it was now, because it didn't have the swath of extra features that have come as a product of their profit from being a good place to advertise and be seen.
There are industries where being less nice is more profitable; especially so if you hold a monopoly. However, since their services are provided for free, it's incredibly easy for us all to migrate elsewhere if they start being nasty. Maintaining (and improving) their business, whether or not it's as simple as having a motto of "do no evil", gets them more views, more advertisers, more revenue.
And, of course, more revenue means more services for us. Which is always nice.