No, it is not. I've dabbled in two dozen programming languages, and Applescript is the one I've hated the most. It tries to be normal English but because of its strong typing you have to write the sentences exactly correct, which is annoying and hard to figure out once you get past the simplistic 'hello world' stage.
The way you need to string the words together is not obvious, and is sometimes not even proper English. I really wish Apple would wise up and drop it in favour for something more intuitive on the advanced level, like javascript or python./me waits for Mac zealots to moderate this as a troll...
Although you worked on it, you never owned the copyright. What makes you think you'd own it now, or that there isn't somebody out there with a legitimate claim to it? Use it at your own risk.
That varies from country to country. While the general concepts of copyright are agreed upon in international conventions and agreements, the national implementations have significant differences. Always consult a lawyer from the country in question.
The Matrix does not try to make philosophy 'easy to understand' - it makes interesting philosophical points. That's why philosophers love it. It is a fresh variety on the old and worn 'brain in a vat' thought experiment.
In fact, it is the thinking up of strange thought experiments and using them as arguments is part of what makes philosophy what it is, and so fun.
I can assure you that a lot of my fellow students here at the Department of Philosophy really enjoy what they are doing. Philosophy does not have to be boring at all.
Read some of the articles refered to from the Matrix web site (it is referred to from the NYT article which you probably didn't read). They are quite good. David Chalmer's article is a blast.
Warning: Loops and samples you find through a quick google/kazaa search or on one of those "we assume everything uploaded to us is public domain" archives, are more likely than not rip-offs from copyrighted works or have not-for-profit licenses that people often forget to copy along with the sample.
If you want to get samples that you can actually use without any fear of being sued, you have a much harder time. I have yet to find a single free sample archive on the web that takes copyright seriously.
The only proper solution is to design the game for multiplayer with the inevitability of cheating in mind.
Always assume that information sent to the client can be made use of by players.
Never assume that responses from a client are generated by a human being (as opposed to a bot).
Always make challenges that can be solved better by humans than by computer AIs.
With these limitations, there are certain games you simply can't make. FPS games where the challenge is simply aiming correctly with a mouse, is one of those.
I remember this was a cool demo in Oberon, the very neat operating system written by the guy who invented Pascal, Nicolas Wirth. You could collaborately write complex text inside a normal text window that you opened. That was about 15 years ago...
Oberon actually still exists, and can be run on top of Linux these days. Not that anyone care. It was a nice experiment, though.
First off, it isn't the Phillipines that is coming up with this "new and unique way to find money", it is, as usual, the IMF. And if you actually read the article, you'd see that they expect a lot more than $51 million a year in tax income from this.
Who will suffer? The poor, of course. The IMF always asks governments to crack down on the poor, while sheltering the rich.
Unlike in Europe, where SMS is a cash cow for greedy telcoms, SMS in the Phillipines is free (or at least was until recently, I am not following very closely).
Here is a summary of the changes, pluss a request:
NEW FEATURES - You can now automate workers and specialists in cities - We have sound support and ship a new, improved insometric tileset - A new and much improved city dialog in the GTK client - Windows and GTK 2.0 versions of the client - Lots of other changes, see the NEWS file for more
RULE CHANGES - Leftover research bulbs will carry over to next advance - Trade routes are more effective - You can build city walls even though you have Great Wall wonder - Unit food cost under Communism has been reduced to 1 - If you lose your palace, you get a new for free in random city - Units attacking ships in cities double their firepower, while defenders get only 1 firepower. - Helicopters defending against air units get 50% penalty, and have their firepower reduced to 1 against fighter units. - Stealth fighters and bombers are partially invisible like subs, and stealth bombers have increased attack strength from 14 to 18
A REQUEST We are in great need of more sound effects and better graphics. If you have some talent in either direction, please considering giving us a hand.
"It WOULD be appropriate and utterly defensible to use nukes against a country that hit us with chemical or biologicals. Any such country foreits it right to exist."
The US used chemical weapons against Vietnam, nuclear weapons against Japan. Has the US forfeited its right to exist?
You cannot simply multiply them. The chances of a lot of those parameters are linked to each other. Besides, what is being described is the chance of HUMAN life evolving, which isn't exactly the question. There could be other forms of life, too, you know...
Besides, many of those numbers are pure guesses as well..
There is nothing new in the article as far as I can see. It is an old suggestion, and there are lots and lots of people and companies working on this (myself included). However, there are several practical problems that this article ignores.
The first is a practical method of prepayment. You just cannot afford to send a bill per transaction. The safest and easiest solutions to emerge the last year are proxy payment through SMS or phone. Much easier and hassle free than credit cards. Also makes anonymous payment possible (good for, you know, those sites).
The second is the practical problem of knowing who is accessing the site. You need a single logon for all sites for a payment system to work. Logging in to each and every site is too much hassle. MS Passport desires to do this. Please don't let it. It is way too much power for one company to hold.
Lastly, you need a practical method of metering payment. I prefer a pseudosubscription model myself. A system where you buy time limited access to a site rather than pay per page. Pay per page encourages partitioning up the content artificially to get more hits. Also, in a subscription model you can use various prices, not just a penny. To make this simpler you can use a kind of opt-in mechanism to automatically accept a given price for a given site every time you need to renew. Significantly, a subscription model needs fewer extra transactions to make the system work.
Fixing the amount to a penny may not be a good idea. It will mean that all sites will aspire to reach as wide an audience as possible, lowering the content to a least common denomintor, instead of encouraging niche markets/special interest sites that could set a higher price to compensate for fewer visitors.
In this war that is being waged with such religous fervour by both sides, nothing seems to be holy anymore. Such bitter irony. And Bush still talks about fighting for freedom... yeah, right...
There is a more in depth Associated Press article on the subject here.
Also, in related news, the ancient and extremely dangerous sedition laws are being expanded and rehabilitated. These are the laws that were used to jail anarchists and communists for their opinions during the McCarthy era.
I've always been thinking that releases for Debian is kind of useless for those of us with permanent connection to the internet. I'm running Debian testing and I'm almost entirely happy with the stability of that.
If Debian made yet another version that is a bit more conservative (say, a month testing instead of just days for "testing"), I'd recommend that to my friends instead of RedHat. There is no way I'll recommend them that outdated potato version.
We who go to these demonstrations and the organisations which organise them, like Attac, are not against trade. Where did you get that silly notion? We are against corporate power at the expense of democracy and against the neoliberal "free trade" paradigm being imposed on countries, but that's not the same thing.
Try read up a bit more on the movement before opening your mouth. Let me suggest starting with the homepage of Attac.
Opposition to the DMCA is a part of the fight against the global corporate power-grab at expense of national democracies and civil liberties, which is a major reason why people like me go to these demonstrations.
You mean, the fight between Gandalf and the Balrog. The little 'fight' between Gandalf and Saruman happens real-time in the book as well, but not the fight with the Balrog.
I really look forward to seeing how they render the Balrog...
>By your logic, the United Nations should start >killing Iraqi men, women, and children until >Sadam Hussein steps down
Haven't you noticed - this is exactly what is happening now. The US is still bombing Iraq occasionally, almost a decade after the war supposedly was over, and the blockade has killed hundreds of thousands of innocent people who cannot get food, clean water or medicines in a country where the infrastructure has been completely devastated by bombing.
Why are only closed-source, binary-only, commercial applications listed in the application index? Even when better free alternatives exist, they are not listed. That kind of shows some bias, eh?
Slashdot Mirror
"debugging is not exactly trivial in AppleScript"
/me waits for Mac zealots to moderate this as a troll...
No, it is not. I've dabbled in two dozen programming languages, and Applescript is the one I've hated the most. It tries to be normal English but because of its strong typing you have to write the sentences exactly correct, which is annoying and hard to figure out once you get past the simplistic 'hello world' stage.
The way you need to string the words together is not obvious, and is sometimes not even proper English. I really wish Apple would wise up and drop it in favour for something more intuitive on the advanced level, like javascript or python.
The Matrix does not try to make philosophy 'easy to understand' - it makes interesting philosophical points. That's why philosophers love it. It is a fresh variety on the old and worn 'brain in a vat' thought experiment.
In fact, it is the thinking up of strange thought experiments and using them as arguments is part of what makes philosophy what it is, and so fun.
I can assure you that a lot of my fellow students here at the Department of Philosophy really enjoy what they are doing. Philosophy does not have to be boring at all.
Read some of the articles refered to from the Matrix web site (it is referred to from the NYT article which you probably didn't read). They are quite good. David Chalmer's article is a blast.
Warning: Loops and samples you find through a quick google/kazaa search or on one of those "we assume everything uploaded to us is public domain" archives, are more likely than not rip-offs from copyrighted works or have not-for-profit licenses that people often forget to copy along with the sample.
If you want to get samples that you can actually use without any fear of being sued, you have a much harder time. I have yet to find a single free sample archive on the web that takes copyright seriously.
The only proper solution is to design the game for multiplayer with the inevitability of cheating in mind.
Always assume that information sent to the client can be made use of by players.
Never assume that responses from a client are generated by a human being (as opposed to a bot).
Always make challenges that can be solved better by humans than by computer AIs.
With these limitations, there are certain games you simply can't make. FPS games where the challenge is simply aiming correctly with a mouse, is one of those.
I remember this was a cool demo in Oberon, the very neat operating system written by the guy who invented Pascal, Nicolas Wirth. You could collaborately write complex text inside a normal text window that you opened. That was about 15 years ago...
Oberon actually still exists, and can be run on top of Linux these days. Not that anyone care. It was a nice experiment, though.
First off, it isn't the Phillipines that is coming up with this "new and unique way to find money", it is, as usual, the IMF. And if you actually read the article, you'd see that they expect a lot more than $51 million a year in tax income from this.
Who will suffer? The poor, of course. The IMF always asks governments to crack down on the poor, while sheltering the rich.
Unlike in Europe, where SMS is a cash cow for greedy telcoms, SMS in the Phillipines is free (or at least was until recently, I am not following very closely).
Here is a summary of the changes, pluss a request:
NEW FEATURES
- You can now automate workers and specialists in cities
- We have sound support and ship a new, improved insometric tileset
- A new and much improved city dialog in the GTK client
- Windows and GTK 2.0 versions of the client
- Lots of other changes, see the NEWS file for more
RULE CHANGES
- Leftover research bulbs will carry over to next advance
- Trade routes are more effective
- You can build city walls even though you have Great Wall wonder
- Unit food cost under Communism has been reduced to 1
- If you lose your palace, you get a new for free in random city
- Units attacking ships in cities double their firepower, while defenders get only 1 firepower.
- Helicopters defending against air units get 50% penalty, and have their firepower reduced to 1 against fighter units.
- Stealth fighters and bombers are partially invisible like subs, and stealth bombers have increased attack strength from 14 to 18
A REQUEST
We are in great need of more sound effects and better graphics. If you have some talent in either direction, please considering giving us a hand.
"It WOULD be appropriate and utterly defensible to use nukes against a country that hit us with chemical or biologicals. Any such country foreits it right to exist."
The US used chemical weapons against Vietnam, nuclear weapons against Japan. Has the US forfeited its right to exist?
In the eyes of the chinese govt, this cannot be but another reason not to trust closed source operating systems made in the US.
You cannot simply multiply them. The chances of a lot of those parameters are linked to each other. Besides, what is being described is the chance of HUMAN life evolving, which isn't exactly the question. There could be other forms of life, too, you know...
Besides, many of those numbers are pure guesses as well..
There is nothing new in the article as far as I can see. It is an old suggestion, and there are lots and lots of people and companies working on this (myself included). However, there are several practical problems that this article ignores.
The first is a practical method of prepayment. You just cannot afford to send a bill per transaction. The safest and easiest solutions to emerge the last year are proxy payment through SMS or phone. Much easier and hassle free than credit cards. Also makes anonymous payment possible (good for, you know, those sites).
The second is the practical problem of knowing who is accessing the site. You need a single logon for all sites for a payment system to work. Logging in to each and every site is too much hassle. MS Passport desires to do this. Please don't let it. It is way too much power for one company to hold.
Lastly, you need a practical method of metering payment. I prefer a pseudosubscription model myself. A system where you buy time limited access to a site rather than pay per page. Pay per page encourages partitioning up the content artificially to get more hits. Also, in a subscription model you can use various prices, not just a penny. To make this simpler you can use a kind of opt-in mechanism to automatically accept a given price for a given site every time you need to renew. Significantly, a subscription model needs fewer extra transactions to make the system work.
Fixing the amount to a penny may not be a good idea. It will mean that all sites will aspire to reach as wide an audience as possible, lowering the content to a least common denomintor, instead of encouraging niche markets/special interest sites that could set a higher price to compensate for fewer visitors.
In this war that is being waged with such religous fervour by both sides, nothing seems to be holy anymore. Such bitter irony. And Bush still talks about fighting for freedom... yeah, right...
There is a more in depth Associated Press article on the subject here.
Also, in related news, the ancient and extremely dangerous sedition laws are being expanded and rehabilitated. These are the laws that were used to jail anarchists and communists for their opinions during the McCarthy era.
I've always been thinking that releases for Debian is kind of useless for those of us with permanent connection to the internet. I'm running Debian testing and I'm almost entirely happy with the stability of that.
If Debian made yet another version that is a bit more conservative (say, a month testing instead of just days for "testing"), I'd recommend that to my friends instead of RedHat. There is no way I'll recommend them that outdated potato version.
Releases deserve to die.
Give someone a hammer, and he will see nails everywhere. Give politicians emergency powers, and they will see terrorists everywhere.
We who go to these demonstrations and the organisations which organise them, like Attac, are not against trade. Where did you get that silly notion? We are against corporate power at the expense of democracy and against the neoliberal "free trade" paradigm being imposed on countries, but that's not the same thing.
Try read up a bit more on the movement before opening your mouth. Let me suggest starting with the homepage of Attac.
Opposition to the DMCA is a part of the fight against the global corporate power-grab at expense of national democracies and civil liberties, which is a major reason why people like me go to these demonstrations.
You mean, the fight between Gandalf and the Balrog. The little 'fight' between Gandalf and Saruman happens real-time in the book as well, but not the fight with the Balrog.
I really look forward to seeing how they render the Balrog...
>By your logic, the United Nations should start >killing Iraqi men, women, and children until >Sadam Hussein steps down
Haven't you noticed - this is exactly what is happening now. The US is still bombing Iraq occasionally, almost a decade after the war supposedly was over, and the blockade has killed hundreds of thousands of innocent people who cannot get food, clean water or medicines in a country where the infrastructure has been completely devastated by bombing.
Wake up!
Why are only closed-source, binary-only, commercial applications listed in the application index? Even when better free alternatives exist, they are not listed. That kind of shows some bias, eh?