Wii Play was "best-selling" because it included a controller. Given the choice between buying a controller or buying Wii Play for nearly the same price, Wii Play was a brain-dead choice. That doesn't mean that old people are dominating gaming. I'd be much more interested to see how other Wii games stacked up.
That exemption is only available for non-commercial distribution.
Wow, that is ridiculously wrong. At least if we're talking about GPLv2, there's no difference between commercial and non-commercial distribution.
The fact of the matter is that if you're distributing GPL'd code in a manner that would violate copyright if no license were given (e.g. copying it), then you must distribute the source code (either directly or via a written offer).
Of course, if you're not distributing GPL'd code in a manner that would otherwise violate copyright (e.g. you don't make copies of it yourself, you buy devices with the GPL'd code already in place), then you don't have to do anything. TFA doesn't make it clear whether this is in fact the case with Verizon.
It does play mp3s. And you can copy things via USB to avoid the fee. You can even have Amazon convert them to its special format for free, email the doc back to you instead of transferring it wirelessly, and avoid the fee.
If a minor walks into a smoke shop smoking a cigarette, then they're already a smoker, so what's the rationale from preventing them from buying a cigarette, compared to an adult who's already a smoker?
The argument is that if you prevent them from buying a cigarette, they are less likely to start smoking to begin with. If you could somehow magically tell which minors were already addicted to smoking and only sell them cigarettes, that might make sense--but you'd probably end up increasing the number of other youth smokers that way (the minor gives them to his friends, or the perceived "coolness" factor of smoking increases due to increased availability, etc).
Or flip it around: if you could (hypothetically) prove that a given adult and a given minor haven't smoked before, what's the rationale for preventing only the minor from smoking?
This one's much easier. The formula is X - Y, where X is the health benefit to the person and others around him from not smoking, and Y is the cost of the loss of freedom to that person. For children, we've decided that X is greater than Y, hence the ban. For adults, we've decided that X is less than Y, hence no ban. (There are other substances, e.g. morphine, for which we've decided that X is greater in both adult and youth cases.)
I'd argue that it does, for any reasonable definition of "rationality". Rationality generally means that you choose the option that results in the greatest cost/benefit tradeoff, results in maximum utility, or however you want to call it. If the costs and "benefits" of smoking are roughly the same for adults and minors, then for either of them to choose to smoke, is making an equally irrational decision with regards to smoking. Unless there's a reason why their costs and benefits would not be the same.
There may also be significant differences to the perceived benefits and costs. For example, a youth who decides to start smoking may be rationalizing away the long-term costs (I know lots of adults who smoke who haven't died!), and rationalizing that the short-term benefits (I'm going to look so cool!!!) are greater than they actually are. An adult may see the same long-term costs and short-term benefits in a more rational light due to his age and experience. But the adult may also have different real long-term costs and short-term benefits, as you point out (e.g. different advertising targetting, different peer image of smoking, different health issues at an older age, etc). So even if we had an adult and a child of equal rationality deciding whether or not to smoke, their choices may differ due to their environment. Hence the child's irrationality could, theoretically, move the percentages of smokers in both groups to be equal. (I don't believe this is true, I'm just trying to defend the idea that equal percentages doesn't imply equal rationality.)
No, I'm saying that it's a fallacy to say that the adult smokers' judgment is better with regards to smoking.
A couple of points here.
1) Most adult smokers started smoking when they were minors. You can't say that both child and adult judgment with regards to smoking is the same, because fewer people make the decision to start smoking as an adult. No circular reasoning here.
2) Rationality isn't determined by percentages. Even if, say, 20% of all children smoke and 20% of all adults smoke, this doesn't imply that both children and adults have the same rational judgment capabilities, even just with regards to smoking. Given the fact that in general, children have poorer judgment than adults, I'd say the burden of proof would be on the person claiming that children are equally capable of making a rational decision as adults, even if the numbers were exactly equal. (And, as I note in #1, they're not.)
(A totally different discussion is whether society should value freedom for adults higher than freedom for minors, but it clearly does).
And I don't think the answer to this question needs to be circular or "because it's always been that way". The reason why we value freedom for adults more than freedom for minors is because children's judgment is poorer than the judgment of adults. There is all sorts of scientific evidence for this claim.
The debatable part is (a) how different is that judgment, and (b) the particular age (12, 14, 18, 21, more?) that the lowered freedom value (because of poorer judgment) hits a point at which banning makes sense. (And, I suppose, whether poorer judgment means their freedom to choose should be valued less.)
Here's the response I wrote before reading the rest of Slashdot's responses:
(I disagree with statement #4.) Although the negative health effect for children may be the same negative health effect for adults, we have decided as a society that it is okay to forbid minors from making choices that significantly affect their health in a negative way. However, we have decided that it is not okay to forbid "consenting adults" from making choices that significantly affect their health in a negative way.
If this sort of argument is the the one you're describing as "we've always done it that way," then you may in fact have seen a consensus in your Turk responses but missed the point.
The hole in your rebuttal is here: "Why do we assume adult smokers should have more rights than teen smokers? Because their judgment is better. But if they're smoking too, then what's the basis for saying their judgment is better?"
The basis for saying their judgment is better is that it has been empirically proven, time and time again, in many different contexts and many different situations, that children have poorer judgment than adults. A circular argument isn't necessary to prove this idea. References to smoking aren't necessary to prove this idea. "Children have poorer judgment than adults" is certainly debatable, but not circular.
A more interesting quibble with the "children have poorer judgment than adults" line would be, "What is the age at which children become adults?" If you were favoring lowering the smoking age to 14, say, arguing that the difference in judgment regarding smoking is no different at 14 than it is at 18, then you would have a much more interesting discussion, in my opinion. But I don't think you'll get many people agreeing with you that there is no correlation between age and good judgment at all.
This linkage is is given in the spirit of the charity auction, any obvious abuse or innapropriate links will immediately invalidate the deal. Slashdot.org and SourceForge Inc reserve the right to suspend or withdraw this offer at any time with no refund if user participates in "abusive behavior" as determined by Slashdot.org employees. This abusive behavior can include (but is not limited to) inappropriate or pornagraphic links, malicious code, injection attacks, phishing, etc.
What?! Somebody linking to an "innapropriate" site from Slashdot!?! Never...
I wonder what exactly they had in mind when they wrote up that disclaimer.
Who the f*** decided that sentences on the Internet shall no longer be formatted with two spaces after a period?!
Totally off-topic, but...
Desktop publishers, designers, and professional typesetters have always used one space after a period for proportionally-spaced fonts. (Check any book you want, even from decades ago.) The "two-space" rule has only ever applied for monospaced fonts (like typewriting). See, for example: http://desktoppub.about.com/cs/typespacing/a/onetwospaces.htm
Why can't I buy internet service from some provider that blocks at least 99.9% if not 100% of porn? Why hasnt the 'free market' given me that choice? There is something wrong here.
The 'free market' has given you that choice in places where there's actually a demand for it--for example, in Utah. You might want to move there if you're overly concerned about this sort of thing.
I think there are still some (at least one--me) who agree with Stallman's original "four freedoms", but believe the GPLv2 is sufficient for protecting those freedoms, and the GPLv3 adds too much complexity to be worth it. I personally contribute to GPLv2 projects (and write my own), but I will not contribute to GPLv3 projects. I don't know if I'm the only one in the world--certainly on Slashdot I appear to be the minority--but I do think there are others.
Well, for analogy, consider that I contract with someone to distribute bootleg copies of a CD for me, in return for coupons. I then claim to the judge that I owe nothing to the record label
This is absolutely correct. The record label has no reason to sue you for copyright violation, as you weren't the one (a) duplicating their CDs, or (b) distributing them. This seems pretty straightforward to me.
You could always pick up Go. Computers are going to suck at that for a lot longer than they sucked at chess
I'm not so sure this is true; Go-playing computers could be pretty darn good in 10-15 years.
But regardless, one comment I hear often from people who started playing Go after playing chess is that they were tired of the memorized openings in chess. Go has very little in the way of memorized openings. There are some sequences that are considered "standard", but they typically only go a few moves deep, you can easily reach Master level without ever memorizing them, they change every few decades, and they aren't applicable in all situations anyway (blindly following them without understanding them is actually detrimental).
Personally I love chess and I was never annoyed at openings or the like (although I never memorized more than a few), but if you hate memorizing openings then Go may be the right abstract strategy game for you.
I'm a girl. I build and rip apart computers all the time. And every time I do, MY girlfriend is always bugging me to let her get in there with the screwdriver! Maybe I should write up a story and take some pictures: "The lesbian geek couple mess with computer innards!" Oooohhh.
I guarantee you would make the front page with this easily. Seriously. I would bet money on it.
It seems very intuitive. For each bluffing algorithm (hand->bet correspondence), it seems there would be one that beats it, and then you'd have a sort of rock-paper-scissors cycle.
I have actually played Go. And of course gotten beaten by virtually all but dumbest computer programs, or amateur players.
And these games led you to the conclusion that Go's complexity is mostly due to the board size? Or that conclusion was reached in another way?
Your discussion of AI would be reasonable if we weren't discussing solving the game, not just writing a good AI. The tree size would simply be larger, it seems to me, for Chess. Measurements of material advantage are fine if you are trying to write an AI that does not have the entire tree stored in it.
At any particular point in Chess, the number of possible moves that a player can make is considerably limited, especially at the beginning and end of the game. In Go, the number of possible moves is the number of empty points on the board. This fact alone makes the search tree for Go very large. Such heuristics like material advantage make more sense when talking about creating a strong player than when talking about solving the game, to be sure, but I still think the tree size for Go is much larger.
I think the fact that Go has *ALREADY* been solved for far larger board sizes than Chess has proves that it has far simpler trees to describe.
I disagree, for several reasons. First of all, I believe way more emphasis has been placed on solving very-small-board Go than small-board-chess. This I think happens because of two things, (1) Go is pretty much the same game on any size of board, so improvements in AI on one size can translate pretty directly to improvements on a different size, whereas chess is a much more different game even on 7x7, and (2) because there is no good evaluation function for search tree leafs in Go, creating a strong AI player is pretty much equivalent to solving the game. There's just no drive like that for chess, even 8x8 chess. So it may in fact be the case that 6x6 Go is harder to solve than (one particular layout of) 6x6 chess, but nobody's put the resources into solving that particular brand of 6x6 chess that they have to 6x6 Go.[1]
Finally, even if 6x6 Go is easier to solve than 6x6 chess, it may not follow that 9x9 Go is easier to solve than 9x9 chess. Because of the difference in rules (such as the number of legal moves at any point), increasing Go's board size makes the search tree exponentially larger, much more so than for chess. (I happen to also believe that this doesn't make a big difference to humans, because we play Go mostly via pattern recognition, not by searching the move tree, but it makes a large difference to computers.) But I think this is less of a factor compared to people simply not throwing as many resources towards solving the game.
But apart from that. Little to add. I've tried Go, I didn't like it. I'm sure you've tried Chess and didn't like it.
Actually, I played chess for years and I still enjoy it greatly. I'm sure I suck at it now as I haven't played seriously in some years, but I would still greatly enjoy a game. If you can find a place that allows large-size games, I'd love to play a match or two with you!
In Go, well, the trees terminate very predictably. The number of pieces on the board steadily increases. Chess, even when excluding loops (which are very painful for a computer to identify in tree description) has almost unimaginable permutations.
Because stones can be captured in Go, you get loops just like you can in chess. The number of pieces on the board doesn't steadily increase, it can decrease at any time due to captures, theoretically infinitely. In this sense, there is no difference. (In fact, to detect loops, chess programmers and Go programmers use the same sorts of tricks, e.g. Zobrist hashing.)
And from looking on the Go web page, I find it interesting that it is proven that black wins with perfect play on a 15x15
Slashdot Mirror
http://www.virtusphere.com/
http://youtube.com/watch?v=qTnnJR-hS7k
Wii Play was "best-selling" because it included a controller. Given the choice between buying a controller or buying Wii Play for nearly the same price, Wii Play was a brain-dead choice. That doesn't mean that old people are dominating gaming. I'd be much more interested to see how other Wii games stacked up.
You can buy Opera for the DS for wi-fi surfing, see for example:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QR2yfhBSvR0
The fact of the matter is that if you're distributing GPL'd code in a manner that would violate copyright if no license were given (e.g. copying it), then you must distribute the source code (either directly or via a written offer).
Of course, if you're not distributing GPL'd code in a manner that would otherwise violate copyright (e.g. you don't make copies of it yourself, you buy devices with the GPL'd code already in place), then you don't have to do anything. TFA doesn't make it clear whether this is in fact the case with Verizon.
— =>
(notice blank nothingness)
in Slashdot comments.
It does play mp3s. And you can copy things via USB to avoid the fee. You can even have Amazon convert them to its special format for free, email the doc back to you instead of transferring it wirelessly, and avoid the fee.
Actually, American English spells the word "aluminum", without the second "i".
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=define%3A+aluminum
1) Most adult smokers started smoking when they were minors. You can't say that both child and adult judgment with regards to smoking is the same, because fewer people make the decision to start smoking as an adult. No circular reasoning here.
2) Rationality isn't determined by percentages. Even if, say, 20% of all children smoke and 20% of all adults smoke, this doesn't imply that both children and adults have the same rational judgment capabilities, even just with regards to smoking. Given the fact that in general, children have poorer judgment than adults, I'd say the burden of proof would be on the person claiming that children are equally capable of making a rational decision as adults, even if the numbers were exactly equal. (And, as I note in #1, they're not.)
The debatable part is (a) how different is that judgment, and (b) the particular age (12, 14, 18, 21, more?) that the lowered freedom value (because of poorer judgment) hits a point at which banning makes sense. (And, I suppose, whether poorer judgment means their freedom to choose should be valued less.)
The hole in your rebuttal is here: "Why do we assume adult smokers should have more rights than teen smokers? Because their judgment is better. But if they're smoking too, then what's the basis for saying their judgment is better?"
The basis for saying their judgment is better is that it has been empirically proven, time and time again, in many different contexts and many different situations, that children have poorer judgment than adults. A circular argument isn't necessary to prove this idea. References to smoking aren't necessary to prove this idea. "Children have poorer judgment than adults" is certainly debatable, but not circular.
A more interesting quibble with the "children have poorer judgment than adults" line would be, "What is the age at which children become adults?" If you were favoring lowering the smoking age to 14, say, arguing that the difference in judgment regarding smoking is no different at 14 than it is at 18, then you would have a much more interesting discussion, in my opinion. But I don't think you'll get many people agreeing with you that there is no correlation between age and good judgment at all.
They're not unreasonable, I mean, no one wants to eat our eyes.
What?! Somebody linking to an "innapropriate" site from Slashdot!?! Never
I wonder what exactly they had in mind when they wrote up that disclaimer.
Desktop publishers, designers, and professional typesetters have always used one space after a period for proportionally-spaced fonts. (Check any book you want, even from decades ago.) The "two-space" rule has only ever applied for monospaced fonts (like typewriting). See, for example:
http://desktoppub.about.com/cs/typespacing/a/onetwospaces.htm
Hope that helps!
I think there are still some (at least one--me) who agree with Stallman's original "four freedoms", but believe the GPLv2 is sufficient for protecting those freedoms, and the GPLv3 adds too much complexity to be worth it. I personally contribute to GPLv2 projects (and write my own), but I will not contribute to GPLv3 projects. I don't know if I'm the only one in the world--certainly on Slashdot I appear to be the minority--but I do think there are others.
But regardless, one comment I hear often from people who started playing Go after playing chess is that they were tired of the memorized openings in chess. Go has very little in the way of memorized openings. There are some sequences that are considered "standard", but they typically only go a few moves deep, you can easily reach Master level without ever memorizing them, they change every few decades, and they aren't applicable in all situations anyway (blindly following them without understanding them is actually detrimental).
Personally I love chess and I was never annoyed at openings or the like (although I never memorized more than a few), but if you hate memorizing openings then Go may be the right abstract strategy game for you.
Slashdot. Sad but true.
http://chappie.stanford.edu/cgi-bin/roshambot
And these games led you to the conclusion that Go's complexity is mostly due to the board size? Or that conclusion was reached in another way?
At any particular point in Chess, the number of possible moves that a player can make is considerably limited, especially at the beginning and end of the game. In Go, the number of possible moves is the number of empty points on the board. This fact alone makes the search tree for Go very large. Such heuristics like material advantage make more sense when talking about creating a strong player than when talking about solving the game, to be sure, but I still think the tree size for Go is much larger.
I disagree, for several reasons. First of all, I believe way more emphasis has been placed on solving very-small-board Go than small-board-chess. This I think happens because of two things, (1) Go is pretty much the same game on any size of board, so improvements in AI on one size can translate pretty directly to improvements on a different size, whereas chess is a much more different game even on 7x7, and (2) because there is no good evaluation function for search tree leafs in Go, creating a strong AI player is pretty much equivalent to solving the game. There's just no drive like that for chess, even 8x8 chess. So it may in fact be the case that 6x6 Go is harder to solve than (one particular layout of) 6x6 chess, but nobody's put the resources into solving that particular brand of 6x6 chess that they have to 6x6 Go.[1]
Finally, even if 6x6 Go is easier to solve than 6x6 chess, it may not follow that 9x9 Go is easier to solve than 9x9 chess. Because of the difference in rules (such as the number of legal moves at any point), increasing Go's board size makes the search tree exponentially larger, much more so than for chess. (I happen to also believe that this doesn't make a big difference to humans, because we play Go mostly via pattern recognition, not by searching the move tree, but it makes a large difference to computers.) But I think this is less of a factor compared to people simply not throwing as many resources towards solving the game.
Actually, I played chess for years and I still enjoy it greatly. I'm sure I suck at it now as I haven't played seriously in some years, but I would still greatly enjoy a game. If you can find a place that allows large-size games, I'd love to play a match or two with you!
Because stones can be captured in Go, you get loops just like you can in chess. The number of pieces on the board doesn't steadily increase, it can decrease at any time due to captures, theoretically infinitely. In this sense, there is no difference. (In fact, to detect loops, chess programmers and Go programmers use the same sorts of tricks, e.g. Zobrist hashing.)
Where do you get this from? I don't see it on t