You must have been a real pain in the ass to your friends when you were playing games as a kid.
Yup, I was the one who always probed the details. Sometimes it was just annoying but sometimes it was the key to the solution. What can I say, I grew up a stickler.
Here's a good example of a riddle where the details of the telling are essential to solving it...I used to love these as a kid. I think someone else posted this somewhere in this thread too.
Obviously to everyone, or there would be no point in mentioning it.
You must be baiting me, or just exaggerating to make a point. Many word problems revolve around information that is known to one party in the "story" but not another. The devil is in the details.
I believe he has also had to clarify multiple times that the king was asking if they had been all in the room since they were origionally locked in their cells, even though that was explicitly stated in the origional problem.
Those are cases of poor reading--as you say the problem text is explicit about when the game starts. I challenge you to quote the text where the OP states explicitly that k is known to all parties in the story prior to the start of the game. Sure, yes, it's easily assumed and the answer is only valid if you do. But my point is that if you're going to offer up a math/logic problem, you should at least be able to state your starting conditions clearly.
The vast majority of people who posted got it. If it was so confusing, how were they able to do that?
They did it by either asking about k or by stipulating in their own post that k must be known to the prisoners.
Unless you sell it for more than you paid for it. Otherwise you are taking a loss on the transaction, and losses aren't taxed.
Consider selling your car. If you bought the car for $15,000 and then sell it for $10,000 you are losing $5,000 of value, even though the other $10,000 has been converted to cash. The conversion to cash is a red herring--taken as a whole, the transaction loses money so you don't pay income tax.
The taxman looks at your total monetary value before and after each transaction...income taxes are only assessed on positive differences.
Think of your salary, where you start each pay period with x asset value, and you end each pay period with asset value of (x + paycheck)--you're taxed on the difference (paycheck). Or investments, where your investments start each quarter with n. If you have (n + appreciation) at the end of the quarter you pay taxes on the appreciation. If you have (n - depreciation) you get to deduct the depreciation from your total income.
Because iTunes just has to have its own look and feel on Windows, it seems like it discards the OS window draw services and consumes considerable resources just redrawing itself 60 times per second. On my machine at least, it is noticably less responsive than even big apps like Photoshop--because even Photoshop makes use of the OS-provided window draw, slider bar, resize, etc services. iTunes seems to recreate all that at the application layer, which consumes resources. Perhaps someone who's looked inside can fill in more details.
Read carefully. The mod could be perfect but he won't donate a penny until he hears from Paul Eibeler. Paul, hopefully, is smart enough not to send Jack anything he can use, as in this type of PR war anything written and sent is fair game as ammunition.
It's a technicality. Lawyers are great at that stuff.
Write to your members of Congress, inform them that you vote and you actively follow the issues that are important to you, and then tell them that if they associate with Jack Thompson, you will vote against them when they are next up for re-election. It might be helpful to include links to Jack's initial offer, and the open letter ending his association with NIMF.
Be polite, be civil, and be sure to include your full, real name, and your full, real address. Ask for a reply. You'll probably get one.
Believe it or not, members of Congress pay close attention to these things. They spend hundreds of thousands of dollars per year on staff and supplies for constituent relations. I know it's cool to think that only big corporations get things done in Washington, but it's not true. When enough people speak up, they can move the government.
You can be sure that those who agree with Jack are writing letters once a week. Only by matching or beating that can we fight back.
Here's a good site to get started, for free. Find your representative and senators and write today!
The issue is not what I know, it is what the prisoners themselves know. The problem is stated with variables and can be solved in the abstract with variables. But the solution is only valid from the prisoner perspective if the integer values of those variables are known by the prisoners prior to the development of their group strategy.
The prisoners will of course know how many their total number is (n), since it's clearly stated that they are given a chance to all meet and strategize prior to the game beginning. What is NOT stated is that the king will share the value of k with them.
Any solution depends on counting by the prisoners. This implies that they must have numerical value that they are counting toward. But if they do not know the value of k, they will never know when they have counted to the limit of their strategy, such as ((n-1)*(2k+1) - k) to quote one proposed solution. If k is unknown to the prisoners, that equation will never produce an integer value for the prisoners and thus they will never know when to stop counting and answer yes.
The king is allowed to manipulate the cup himself, k times, out of the view of any of the prisoners. That means the king may turn an upright cup upside down or vice versa up to k times, as he chooses, without the prisoners knowing about it. This does not mean the king must manipulate the cup any number of times at all, only that he may.
Assume that both the king and the prisoners have a complete understanding of the game as I have just explained it to you...
As this reads, the prisoners have a complete understanding of the game as you have explained it to me--i.e. they know of the existence of k but not the value. As written, you do not specify the value of k nor do you state that the value of k is specified to the prisoners. Since a logical solution depends on the prisoners knowing the value of k, and you do not state that they have that knowledge, there can be no logical solution.
From your reaction here is seems we were supposed to know that k is specified to the prisoners. Since that is nowhere in your original write-up, I can logically conclude that you suck at writing up riddles.
As the riddle is written, the value k is not known to the prisoners. The rules are (i.e. the existence of k), but the riddle is silent as to whether the actual value of k is communicated to the prisoners. This may be just be a case of shitty writing, but if we're going to play riddles, we should at least pay attention to their details as presented. After all a huge part of the fun of riddles is in their (carefully crafted) details.
It only works if the prisoners know k ahead of time. Unfortunately as written, the riddle does not say whether they do. It's clear that they are given the *rules*--that the king has k opportunities to flip the chalice. But it's NOT stated (read it carefully) that they are given the value of k ahead of time. If they know the king is limited, but they don't know that limit, your solution does not work, because the value of k+2 is unknown to the prisoners. They will follow their stategy for infinity without ever Alice ever knowing when she hits her limit.
I really don't feel that religion has anything to do with this.
You are wrong, as are the people you cite who are "not anti-science." Even if they dispute natural selection and genetics, they of course are pro-science when they are taking an ibuprofen or getting their children vaccinated or getting their yearly flu shot. And no one with a job or an investment portfolio wants to see America lose its technological edge.
But you, like these people, are not drawing the connections between their actions and the results. Science is not just a collection of facts. You cannot just choose to support the knowledge that benefits you (flu vaccines) and fight against the knowledge that disagrees with your beliefs (carbon dated fossils, genetic evolution). Science is first and foremost a PROCESS (not a collection of "facts"), and if you attack the process you are attacking the development of the knowledge that benefits you as well as the knowledge you don't like.
Developing an effective flu vaccine every year is absolutely impossible without basis in the theories of genetic inheritance and natural selection. These theories were not just proposed and voted on by scientists--they have resulted from and withstood investigation from the process of science, conducted by millions of independent scientists over decades.
Attacking the theories in the way that many conservative religious groups have, is to attack the validity of the scientific process itself. It's pretty hard to do a good job educating and encouraging future scientists when the very concept of science is being subverted for religious or political ends.
Of course there's always a contradictory study, because there's always someone who disagrees with the main study--and it's not hard to design a curriculum that will return an opposite result. That does not imply that the results are therefore equal.
There's a huge difference between the study you cite and the one cited in the GP. The U.Md. study was based on a rigorous survey of the public's perceptions of independently verifiable facts. The study you cite relies on citation frequency as a correlative for ideological agreement.
Frankly any study that uses the phrase "liberal bias" in their conclusion is highly, highly suspect, since the word "liberal," like conservative, is mostly subjectively defined.
Whereas the U.Md. study measures the truthfulness, or accuracy, of the ideas conveyed to the public. At a minimum it shows a correlation between those who are misinformed, and a tendency to watch Fox News. Perhaps one could argue that these people are watching Fox News because it is the MOST accurate outlet, and they wish to most efficiently correct their perceptions. But that seems unlikely to me.
The U.Md. (rightly) does not delve into ideological bias, as that is a political morass not a subject for objective study. It simply shows which viewship has a more accurate perception of certain realities.
It's simply a place to put things you need. If you need an application, you can put it there. If you need a document, you can put it there. If you need a folder, you can put it there. If you need a window, you can put it there.
Computer geeks freak about the Dock because it's not well-defined. "Is is for applications? Is it for documents? Is it for windows? It's so confusing!" No, it's not. It is for things (anything) that you need. It is so useful precisely because it is not limited--you can put anything there if you need it, and take anything out if you don't.
Minimizing windows into the Dock makes sense because if you minimize a window, obviously it's something you need. If you didn't need it you would just close it.
Who cares if all the windows look the same down there. If you mouse over anything in the Dock you get its title in nice big drop-shadowed (easy to read) text.
Democracy doesn't end when you cast your vote, it begins. Voting for a candidate only puts a person in power who is likely to agree with your views...you still have to interact with them and convince them to actually enact laws and regulations to codify and protect your views. That process is what lobbyists are professionals at.
If I got arrested I would get a lawyer--a reactive approach to professional legal respresentation. Lobbying is a proactive approach to professional legal representation--to help make sure the law is advantageous to me from its inception.
I've got lobbyists representing my views on the environment and public resources right now--that's what my membership in the Sierra Club and American Whitewater buys me. And that's why I write and send in letters and/or send them extra money when an issue I care about reaches a critical point. Sure if they succeed it will be at the expense of someone else--companies who want to drill for oil or dump pollutants wherever they want. I'm ok with that.
Some folks seem to think that all lobbying and lobbyists are evil. Not true--lobbying is an essential part of our system of government. Even representatives are in office for 2 years between elections...do you think everyone should just sit on their hands for those 2 years and wait to see what they do?
Is a dual-prong approach. Prong one--a free lightweight, downloadable Java office suite that saves to and opens from your Google account. Prong two--a browser-based AJAX front-end to work on your docs from other machines if you need to.
It's roughly equivalent to the architecture of Outlook--a desktop app that manipulates data stored on a central server, with a browser-based back-up. In fact the real Microsoft killer would be a hosted viable alternative to Exchange/Outlook, as this is the MS product that open source has yet to effectively compete with.
Perhaps you didn't understand the parent. He understands that that is the state of the Internet NOW. He is saying that as the repercussions of problems become more serious, it will no longer be acceptable.
Pick any one of the number of infrastructures upon which this nation depends--your little rant was true for each of them at some point in history. But every infrastructure has to grow up sometime. If it doesn't do it itself, the government is only too happy to appease the nation by creating a "helping hand." (regulatory agency)
Slashdot Mirror
This is the PJ industry standard right now for organizing and culling high-volume takes.
http://www.camerabits.com/pages/PM4.html
And it's a lot less expensive than Aperture, especially if you take the ridiculous system requirements for Aperture into account.
iPhoto is terrible for this sort of work compared to software like Photo Mechanic, Extensis Portfolio, iView Media Pro, etc.
http://www.camerabits.com/pages/PM4.html
It's way, way faster than PS for sorting and organizing RAW files.
It's not an editor--it's just for importing and organizing the take. But at that it is best I've used. I understand it's very popular with PJs.
You must have been a real pain in the ass to your friends when you were playing games as a kid.
l e.htm
Yup, I was the one who always probed the details. Sometimes it was just annoying but sometimes it was the key to the solution. What can I say, I grew up a stickler.
Here's a good example of a riddle where the details of the telling are essential to solving it...I used to love these as a kid. I think someone else posted this somewhere in this thread too.
http://www.greece.k12.ny.us/taylor/topics/grypuzz
Obviously to everyone, or there would be no point in mentioning it.
d =13802205d =13804515d =13805037d =13804553d =13801559d =13801707d =13801933d =13805810d =13801427d =13804138d =13802845
d =13806048
d =13805847
You must be baiting me, or just exaggerating to make a point. Many word problems revolve around information that is known to one party in the "story" but not another. The devil is in the details.
I believe he has also had to clarify multiple times that the king was asking if they had been all in the room since they were origionally locked in their cells, even though that was explicitly stated in the origional problem.
Those are cases of poor reading--as you say the problem text is explicit about when the game starts. I challenge you to quote the text where the OP states explicitly that k is known to all parties in the story prior to the start of the game. Sure, yes, it's easily assumed and the answer is only valid if you do. But my point is that if you're going to offer up a math/logic problem, you should at least be able to state your starting conditions clearly.
The vast majority of people who posted got it. If it was so confusing, how were they able to do that?
They did it by either asking about k or by stipulating in their own post that k must be known to the prisoners.
http://ask.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=165444&ci
http://ask.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=165444&ci
http://ask.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=165444&ci
http://ask.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=165444&ci
http://ask.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=165444&ci
http://ask.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=165444&ci
http://ask.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=165444&ci
http://ask.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=165444&ci
http://ask.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=165444&ci
http://ask.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=165444&ci
http://ask.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=165444&ci
Look I'm not saying that it's an insolvable problem, I'm just saying it's lazily and inexactly written. I'm not alone.
Consider this comment:
http://ask.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=165444&ci
Or this one:
http://ask.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=165444&ci
k is obviously a known constant, the question is known to whom.
As you noted the original poster has had to clarify this several times throughout the thread. If it was so obvious, why all the clarifications?
Unless you sell it for more than you paid for it. Otherwise you are taking a loss on the transaction, and losses aren't taxed.
Consider selling your car. If you bought the car for $15,000 and then sell it for $10,000 you are losing $5,000 of value, even though the other $10,000 has been converted to cash. The conversion to cash is a red herring--taken as a whole, the transaction loses money so you don't pay income tax.
The taxman looks at your total monetary value before and after each transaction...income taxes are only assessed on positive differences.
Think of your salary, where you start each pay period with x asset value, and you end each pay period with asset value of (x + paycheck)--you're taxed on the difference (paycheck). Or investments, where your investments start each quarter with n. If you have (n + appreciation) at the end of the quarter you pay taxes on the appreciation. If you have (n - depreciation) you get to deduct the depreciation from your total income.
Because iTunes just has to have its own look and feel on Windows, it seems like it discards the OS window draw services and consumes considerable resources just redrawing itself 60 times per second. On my machine at least, it is noticably less responsive than even big apps like Photoshop--because even Photoshop makes use of the OS-provided window draw, slider bar, resize, etc services. iTunes seems to recreate all that at the application layer, which consumes resources. Perhaps someone who's looked inside can fill in more details.
Read carefully. The mod could be perfect but he won't donate a penny until he hears from Paul Eibeler. Paul, hopefully, is smart enough not to send Jack anything he can use, as in this type of PR war anything written and sent is fair game as ammunition.
It's a technicality. Lawyers are great at that stuff.
Geez, I wonder why the U.S. is moving so slowly on the conversion to IPv6?
Write to your members of Congress, inform them that you vote and you actively follow the issues that are important to you, and then tell them that if they associate with Jack Thompson, you will vote against them when they are next up for re-election. It might be helpful to include links to Jack's initial offer, and the open letter ending his association with NIMF.
= 12259
Initial offer and game description:
http://gc.advancedmn.com/article.php?artid=5883
NIMF letter:
http://www.gamesindustry.biz/content_page.php?aid
Be polite, be civil, and be sure to include your full, real name, and your full, real address. Ask for a reply. You'll probably get one.
Believe it or not, members of Congress pay close attention to these things. They spend hundreds of thousands of dollars per year on staff and supplies for constituent relations. I know it's cool to think that only big corporations get things done in Washington, but it's not true. When enough people speak up, they can move the government.
You can be sure that those who agree with Jack are writing letters once a week. Only by matching or beating that can we fight back.
Here's a good site to get started, for free. Find your representative and senators and write today!
http://www3.capwiz.com/y/dbq/officials/
The issue is not what I know, it is what the prisoners themselves know. The problem is stated with variables and can be solved in the abstract with variables. But the solution is only valid from the prisoner perspective if the integer values of those variables are known by the prisoners prior to the development of their group strategy.
The prisoners will of course know how many their total number is (n), since it's clearly stated that they are given a chance to all meet and strategize prior to the game beginning. What is NOT stated is that the king will share the value of k with them.
Any solution depends on counting by the prisoners. This implies that they must have numerical value that they are counting toward. But if they do not know the value of k, they will never know when they have counted to the limit of their strategy, such as ((n-1)*(2k+1) - k) to quote one proposed solution. If k is unknown to the prisoners, that equation will never produce an integer value for the prisoners and thus they will never know when to stop counting and answer yes.
Your original write up only states that the prisoners know of the existence of k, not the value.
The king is allowed to manipulate the cup himself, k times, out of the view of any of the prisoners. That means the king may turn an upright cup upside down or vice versa up to k times, as he chooses, without the prisoners knowing about it. This does not mean the king must manipulate the cup any number of times at all, only that he may.
Assume that both the king and the prisoners have a complete understanding of the game as I have just explained it to you...
As this reads, the prisoners have a complete understanding of the game as you have explained it to me--i.e. they know of the existence of k but not the value. As written, you do not specify the value of k nor do you state that the value of k is specified to the prisoners. Since a logical solution depends on the prisoners knowing the value of k, and you do not state that they have that knowledge, there can be no logical solution.
From your reaction here is seems we were supposed to know that k is specified to the prisoners. Since that is nowhere in your original write-up, I can logically conclude that you suck at writing up riddles.
As the riddle is written, the value k is not known to the prisoners. The rules are (i.e. the existence of k), but the riddle is silent as to whether the actual value of k is communicated to the prisoners. This may be just be a case of shitty writing, but if we're going to play riddles, we should at least pay attention to their details as presented. After all a huge part of the fun of riddles is in their (carefully crafted) details.
It only works if the prisoners know k ahead of time. Unfortunately as written, the riddle does not say whether they do. It's clear that they are given the *rules*--that the king has k opportunities to flip the chalice. But it's NOT stated (read it carefully) that they are given the value of k ahead of time. If they know the king is limited, but they don't know that limit, your solution does not work, because the value of k+2 is unknown to the prisoners. They will follow their stategy for infinity without ever Alice ever knowing when she hits her limit.
Copies of most "classic" books are available for free in U.S. communities from libraries. Yet, you can find them on the shelves of most bookstores.
People just like to own things they enjoy.
I really don't feel that religion has anything to do with this.
You are wrong, as are the people you cite who are "not anti-science." Even if they dispute natural selection and genetics, they of course are pro-science when they are taking an ibuprofen or getting their children vaccinated or getting their yearly flu shot. And no one with a job or an investment portfolio wants to see America lose its technological edge.
But you, like these people, are not drawing the connections between their actions and the results. Science is not just a collection of facts. You cannot just choose to support the knowledge that benefits you (flu vaccines) and fight against the knowledge that disagrees with your beliefs (carbon dated fossils, genetic evolution). Science is first and foremost a PROCESS (not a collection of "facts"), and if you attack the process you are attacking the development of the knowledge that benefits you as well as the knowledge you don't like.
Developing an effective flu vaccine every year is absolutely impossible without basis in the theories of genetic inheritance and natural selection. These theories were not just proposed and voted on by scientists--they have resulted from and withstood investigation from the process of science, conducted by millions of independent scientists over decades.
Attacking the theories in the way that many conservative religious groups have, is to attack the validity of the scientific process itself. It's pretty hard to do a good job educating and encouraging future scientists when the very concept of science is being subverted for religious or political ends.
Of course there's always a contradictory study, because there's always someone who disagrees with the main study--and it's not hard to design a curriculum that will return an opposite result. That does not imply that the results are therefore equal.
There's a huge difference between the study you cite and the one cited in the GP. The U.Md. study was based on a rigorous survey of the public's perceptions of independently verifiable facts. The study you cite relies on citation frequency as a correlative for ideological agreement.
Frankly any study that uses the phrase "liberal bias" in their conclusion is highly, highly suspect, since the word "liberal," like conservative, is mostly subjectively defined.
Whereas the U.Md. study measures the truthfulness, or accuracy, of the ideas conveyed to the public. At a minimum it shows a correlation between those who are misinformed, and a tendency to watch Fox News. Perhaps one could argue that these people are watching Fox News because it is the MOST accurate outlet, and they wish to most efficiently correct their perceptions. But that seems unlikely to me.
The U.Md. (rightly) does not delve into ideological bias, as that is a political morass not a subject for objective study. It simply shows which viewship has a more accurate perception of certain realities.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0107362/quotes
It's simply a place to put things you need. If you need an application, you can put it there. If you need a document, you can put it there. If you need a folder, you can put it there. If you need a window, you can put it there.
Computer geeks freak about the Dock because it's not well-defined. "Is is for applications? Is it for documents? Is it for windows? It's so confusing!" No, it's not. It is for things (anything) that you need. It is so useful precisely because it is not limited--you can put anything there if you need it, and take anything out if you don't.
Minimizing windows into the Dock makes sense because if you minimize a window, obviously it's something you need. If you didn't need it you would just close it.
Who cares if all the windows look the same down there. If you mouse over anything in the Dock you get its title in nice big drop-shadowed (easy to read) text.
Democracy doesn't end when you cast your vote, it begins. Voting for a candidate only puts a person in power who is likely to agree with your views...you still have to interact with them and convince them to actually enact laws and regulations to codify and protect your views. That process is what lobbyists are professionals at.
If I got arrested I would get a lawyer--a reactive approach to professional legal respresentation. Lobbying is a proactive approach to professional legal representation--to help make sure the law is advantageous to me from its inception.
I've got lobbyists representing my views on the environment and public resources right now--that's what my membership in the Sierra Club and American Whitewater buys me. And that's why I write and send in letters and/or send them extra money when an issue I care about reaches a critical point. Sure if they succeed it will be at the expense of someone else--companies who want to drill for oil or dump pollutants wherever they want. I'm ok with that.
Some folks seem to think that all lobbying and lobbyists are evil. Not true--lobbying is an essential part of our system of government. Even representatives are in office for 2 years between elections...do you think everyone should just sit on their hands for those 2 years and wait to see what they do?
Is a dual-prong approach. Prong one--a free lightweight, downloadable Java office suite that saves to and opens from your Google account. Prong two--a browser-based AJAX front-end to work on your docs from other machines if you need to.
It's roughly equivalent to the architecture of Outlook--a desktop app that manipulates data stored on a central server, with a browser-based back-up. In fact the real Microsoft killer would be a hosted viable alternative to Exchange/Outlook, as this is the MS product that open source has yet to effectively compete with.
To crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentations of their women.
Perhaps you didn't understand the parent. He understands that that is the state of the Internet NOW. He is saying that as the repercussions of problems become more serious, it will no longer be acceptable.
Pick any one of the number of infrastructures upon which this nation depends--your little rant was true for each of them at some point in history. But every infrastructure has to grow up sometime. If it doesn't do it itself, the government is only too happy to appease the nation by creating a "helping hand." (regulatory agency)
will it still be stuck with iTunes??