Rewording Ed for you: you can think of a "true" regular expression as just a shorthand for describing a state machine. Feed a state machine a string and it can only either accept or reject. Backreferences are an addition to the modern programming implementation of regular expressions, but aren't part of the language theory sense of regular expressions. You can do things with backreferences that *cannot* be done with a deterministic finite state automata.
Interestingly, that wiki link has a quote from Larry Wall also saying that Perl regexes aren't real regular expressions:)
I think we can say we've learned two things from WoW:
Grinding is both a game mechanic AND a personal playstyle. You can damn near completely remove any requirement or advantage of grinding, and a significant percent of the playerbase will *still* grind anyway. And bitch about it. It's tied to the addiction thing, which you've already covered in your post. And it's an addiction that players joining a new game bring with them from the games they've left behind.
The other thing we've learned is that someone will always whine about the time requirement of an MMO, even if the game is easy, and they'll turn that whine in to some sort of claimed justification for buying gold from the gold farmers. I think this shows that it's more due to competitive human nature than actual grinding requirements, since we still see the same argument used even after having removed the grind. "I'm just a casual player! I have to buy gold to keep up with my friends who play more!" As long as MMOs have a wide enough power scale (and a non-trivial time requirement to climb that scale), we're still going to see that argument, even if the game is pure fun all the way up the scale. Unless you only play with people with the exact same schedule as you, you're going to have friends who advance faster than you and friends who advance slower than you.
IMO the gold farming thing only exacerbates these issues - because the people who spend lots of time playing *also* buy gold. There are also the in-game economy issues, where mass farming introduces too much money too fast, driving up prices. And the crowding out issue, where masses of farmers monopolizing a spot starve the rest out for a resource (or XP), and then people feel "forced" to buy those resources on the open market, driving up prices, and so on. Positive feedback loops degrading the gameplay. Clearly we'd all be better off if gold farming was marginalized, but, given all the other points I've brought up, it's pretty much inherent to the existence of MMOs that 1) people will try to farm, and 2) people will try to buy gold.
Ok, your cute example works if China goes back to subsistence agriculture, and if the US wasn't producing anything. In other words, it doesn't work out In Real Life.
In Real Life, China is thriving on persistent 10% economic growth rates. Growth rates fueled by external demand for product and external investors. Within the cute island metaphor, if the American vanishes, the others keep doing all the same stuff, but for themselves. In Real Life, if the US goes into recession, the US doesn't have the money to invest in other countries to to buy as much stuff from other countries, and China does NOT continue having 10% growth rates in manufacturing cheap plastic-and-lead crap for Chinese citizens that don't have the money to buy it with. At the same time, if US businesses start closing due to recession, US products become more expensive, and the US (whose exports have been going up all this time too, just not as fast as its imports from China) exports some pretty important things like food and farming equipment and the parts that keep all those factories running.
This cuts in every direction no matter which big economic group goes into recession first, be it the US or China the EU, because every group is buying and selling in great quantity.
The possible use I see here for heavy freight is that, currently, you need the factories and the warehouses to all be either both by a rail station, both on the same big navigable river, or both on the sea coast... unless you want to have an extra fleet of trucks.
Feasible cheap airships would open up some new possibilities there. The warehouse would still need to be connected to major roads, but not necessarily to rail or river or sea. The factory could be anywhere and not necessarily connected to much of anything. And they need not be in the same geographical region or have an easy land/sea route between them. They can be in different countries or continents and still be connected by a cheap and fast air route. In other words, existing stuff isn't affected much because it's already tied into the old systems, but *expansion* would certainly benefit from the added travel option.
I'm not sure why you think it'd be slower than rail, either. The article lists 222kph. That's way faster than freight trains, and freight lines aren't always the shortest distance either. It's also a lot cheaper and easier to built a landing spot for these than it is to build new rail lines and rail stations. You also get rid of some potential inefficiencies in rail - for rail you have to schedule based on the availability of the physical route, or else cargo sits idle. For airports you only have to schedule based on the endpoints.
It still all depends on cost, of course, but I keep coming up with all these little cumulative advantages that might make the costs work out well.
Sudan and half the other nations of Africa will scream that it's a violation of sovereignty (perhaps with some screaming about "imperialism" or "colonialism" mixed in). The Sudanese military will start shooting at American troops and the Arab militias will scream jihad.
As soon as any number of US troops start dying there - maybe not even then, maybe as soon as troops even begin to get called up to be sent there - the same war-weary general population of the US that has been calling to pull out of Iraq will oppose going to Darfur.
Europe (and the UN in general), which has continually opposed going to Darfur, will continue to oppose going, while additionally decrying US "unilateralism".
An aversion to overly strong government is another pillar of American success, and I think there's more than a little of that in this (and any town meeting) "who do I sue if this goes fubar?" question.
When it's a state plan imposing stuff on a local level - and especially when a large out of state corporation is partnered with the state - those are warning signs that can cause a town to dig in its heels by reflex. Its less of a *desire* to sue, more of a common sense understanding that suing would, in these cases, be so extremely difficult that one wishes one has all the facts ahead of time and retains the power to vote against it if it turns out to be a bad idea.
(in this case, there are multiple angles on the issue that will probably convince New Yorkers to okay it. Like cheaper and more reliable power, and there being nothing that could go catastrophically wrong. No toxic/radioactive materials involved, just some big fans and stringing some more power cables.)
"By the way, why is gas so much more expensive in other countries when we seem to waste it? From time to time I hear about equivalent prices of over $10/gallon."
Taxes.
No, really. When you hear about the global crude oil price going up or down, that's the price *everyone* who imports pays. However, most European countries put a high tax on gasoline. Some use it for road repair and others use it for different social programs, whereas in the US things tend to be paid out of the general state or federal budgets. I've also heard there are a lot of high road tolls in parts of the EU.
(The US federal gas tax is about 18 cents/gallon. State gas taxes can be as high as about 30 cents/gallon; some apply a sales tax to it on top of that, others don't.)
(A little googling shows the UK gas tax in 2000 came out to about $3.40/gallon. Yep. The tax alone was more than twice what the final price was in the US at the time.)
It's worth that for selling its services to other companies, plus the ever-important Branding bonus (from so many people knowing about BitTorrent).
They can be hired for expert support in embedding torrent functionality in other products... like automated patching for MMORPGs, net-enabled game consoles, and, I don't know, lots of other things. Any net-connected device that involves large numbers of machines needing big-ish chunks of data every now and then, which the provider doesn't want to front all the bandwidth for directly.
There's also a niche for just plain hosting files, like shareware and demos, where they might be paid a certain fee per day/week/month/year/whatever to seed files. For smaller companies, it'd be easier to write Cohen a check and add a link to their web page, rather than setting it up themselves. Of course, *other* torrent-based hosting companies could compete for these dollars, but, again, there is the power of Branding.
That won't get them near $9 million for a single deal (unless they score something really huge like doing it for iTunes), but doing lots of smaller deals adds up quick.
> I'm not sure Casablanca would be better in color, I know it wouldn't be any better in 3D
But, assuming equal levels of skill involved, it would have been done differently in 3D, just as it would have been done differently in color, or silent, or as a stage play, or as a book.
They key to 3D will be when they stop treating it as a gimmick and start exploring how extra depth might make a movie *better*, not just doing things exactly as a flat movie that just happens to be 3D. Perhaps as 2D filmmakers discovered and mastered the wide angle shot, there'll be compelling uses for a "deep angle shot".
From conversation with others, I've found that there's a wide, wide variation in school quality from place to place within the US (which does make some sense, since, unlike many other countries, the schools are locally funded and locally controlled).
My own high school in a smallish new england town was one of the ones where there was a strong positive connection between good grades, being in sports, being in the music department, and being popular. If you made four lists ranking my graduating class in those categories, you'd see the same names over and over in the top third of each list.
Outside of my state, there are plenty other schools like that, and plenty that suck. It's something that doesn't really come across well when one boils the entire nation's stats into one average number.
To be honest, I used to agree with that too - a cheap LCD would give me a crushing headache after even something as mundane as reading Slashdot for ten minutes. But desktop LCDs improved, and I bought a good one three years ago, which I regularly game on for long stretches of time with no problems at all.
The only reason left not to game on an LCD is if you've got a super fast machine and want to play at a higher resolution than the LCD can do.
There's always a "Next Big Thing" and for a long, long time WinAmp's been on top of it, promptly keeping up with the times while staying stable and free-as-in-beer.
Pushed aside into maintenance mode, it will not incorporate the next Next Big Thing. New will be mired in windows media player instead, later than we would have wanted it (if ever). Free alternatives will have to essentially rewrite winamp from scratch in order to do the cool new things.
In this case, it won't be the big medical companies pushing it. It'll be insurers, which stand to save tons of money if they can cure diabetics. This overlaps with governments, since most western governments are paying at least some of the medical costs (medicare in the US, much larger programs in Canada and the EU).
And while the big medical corps may resist losing their cash cow, the companies that make generic drugs will gladly pump out the patent-expired medicines used by this cure.
No, that's not how the constitution works. It is not a list of the only rights you have. All rights not restricted by it are explicitly GRANTED. (refer to: 9th amendment)
"While this is a tactical victory, it does mean that it will be harder to completely overturn the DMCA. We (or the EFF...give them money please) will no longer be able to use these sorts of flagrant abuse cases for grounds of rethinking the whole thing."
If we can't overturn the DMCA because the DMCA has already been rendered useless, doesn't that mean we won anyway?
True, there were underqualified people in IT during the boom, because there was such great demand for people...
But we're past the correction now; everyone deemed unneccessary was already cut a year ago. Remember, *everyone* starts out underqualified. In a healthy industry, the underqualified that show promise should be getting hired into the entry level positions, through which they gain experience, moving into higher level positions over time (which become available because the industry is growing)...
Notice that not happening? That's because the industry isn't growing, and there isn't a healthy balance of entry level jobs. I wouldn't blame this entirely on outsourcing - short sighted planning shares much blame too - but outsourcing is inflating the problem. The base of the computer knowledge pyramid is eroding.
I think Presidential influence is asymmetric in respect to positive and negative results. The nation and the economy are seriously complex beasts. A President can foster growth and maybe make slight improvements to the mechanics of the system; he has enough discretion that if he sees the right patterns and makes the right guesses, he can make funding available here and there, putting us on top when a new industry emerges. Likewise, if he sees a flaw, he can move to correct it or at least minimize it. Or... if he is blind and cannot see the ways in which all parts of the system connect, or if he is a fool and ignores these, he can rip parts of system out at his pleasure.
A President can slowly help coax the economy along, or, if the economy was already growing, he can simply leave it alone. But if he meddles, he can do serious short term damage, and if he gets to meddle for two terms unopposed by Congress, he can do serious long term damage.
Additionally, I don't think there's anything that says the whole thing can't be roped to the ground over a giant springy safety mat. It's only required to go up, there's no requirement that it move around while it's up there. This thing might not even have a seat, it might look more like a pogo stick with pedals at the bottom and a big propeller on the top, taking off from a holder on the ground.
Not *practical* I admit, but it sounds like a hell of a lot of fun anyway...
It should greatly slow down some aspects of aging... mainly mechanical parts wearing out and DNA falling apart after too many cell divisions. How much depends on how deep this hybernation goes. Even if it's like sleeping normally for weeks at a time, that's a lot less wear and tear on your body. And in space, it'd be combined without so much annoying gravity pulling you down.
However, you're still getting the same (or higher depending on the spacecraft) dose of radiation over time, right? So there's a chance we'd end up with people who are 150 but only lived for 30 of those years, young and healthy except they're dying of cancer.
This is far closer to theft than filesharing. "Identity theft" is properly named... you lose the clean use of your identity if your identity is stolen. (normal case: trashed credit rating. worst case: criminal record in your name)
Slashdot Mirror
Rewording Ed for you: you can think of a "true" regular expression as just a shorthand for describing a state machine. Feed a state machine a string and it can only either accept or reject. Backreferences are an addition to the modern programming implementation of regular expressions, but aren't part of the language theory sense of regular expressions. You can do things with backreferences that *cannot* be done with a deterministic finite state automata. Interestingly, that wiki link has a quote from Larry Wall also saying that Perl regexes aren't real regular expressions :)
I think we can say we've learned two things from WoW:
Grinding is both a game mechanic AND a personal playstyle. You can damn near completely remove any requirement or advantage of grinding, and a significant percent of the playerbase will *still* grind anyway. And bitch about it. It's tied to the addiction thing, which you've already covered in your post. And it's an addiction that players joining a new game bring with them from the games they've left behind.
The other thing we've learned is that someone will always whine about the time requirement of an MMO, even if the game is easy, and they'll turn that whine in to some sort of claimed justification for buying gold from the gold farmers. I think this shows that it's more due to competitive human nature than actual grinding requirements, since we still see the same argument used even after having removed the grind. "I'm just a casual player! I have to buy gold to keep up with my friends who play more!" As long as MMOs have a wide enough power scale (and a non-trivial time requirement to climb that scale), we're still going to see that argument, even if the game is pure fun all the way up the scale. Unless you only play with people with the exact same schedule as you, you're going to have friends who advance faster than you and friends who advance slower than you.
IMO the gold farming thing only exacerbates these issues - because the people who spend lots of time playing *also* buy gold. There are also the in-game economy issues, where mass farming introduces too much money too fast, driving up prices. And the crowding out issue, where masses of farmers monopolizing a spot starve the rest out for a resource (or XP), and then people feel "forced" to buy those resources on the open market, driving up prices, and so on. Positive feedback loops degrading the gameplay. Clearly we'd all be better off if gold farming was marginalized, but, given all the other points I've brought up, it's pretty much inherent to the existence of MMOs that 1) people will try to farm, and 2) people will try to buy gold.
(I'm not the same anon as above)
Ok, your cute example works if China goes back to subsistence agriculture, and if the US wasn't producing anything. In other words, it doesn't work out In Real Life.
In Real Life, China is thriving on persistent 10% economic growth rates. Growth rates fueled by external demand for product and external investors. Within the cute island metaphor, if the American vanishes, the others keep doing all the same stuff, but for themselves. In Real Life, if the US goes into recession, the US doesn't have the money to invest in other countries to to buy as much stuff from other countries, and China does NOT continue having 10% growth rates in manufacturing cheap plastic-and-lead crap for Chinese citizens that don't have the money to buy it with. At the same time, if US businesses start closing due to recession, US products become more expensive, and the US (whose exports have been going up all this time too, just not as fast as its imports from China) exports some pretty important things like food and farming equipment and the parts that keep all those factories running.
This cuts in every direction no matter which big economic group goes into recession first, be it the US or China the EU, because every group is buying and selling in great quantity.
The possible use I see here for heavy freight is that, currently, you need the factories and the warehouses to all be either both by a rail station, both on the same big navigable river, or both on the sea coast... unless you want to have an extra fleet of trucks.
Feasible cheap airships would open up some new possibilities there. The warehouse would still need to be connected to major roads, but not necessarily to rail or river or sea. The factory could be anywhere and not necessarily connected to much of anything. And they need not be in the same geographical region or have an easy land/sea route between them. They can be in different countries or continents and still be connected by a cheap and fast air route. In other words, existing stuff isn't affected much because it's already tied into the old systems, but *expansion* would certainly benefit from the added travel option.
I'm not sure why you think it'd be slower than rail, either. The article lists 222kph. That's way faster than freight trains, and freight lines aren't always the shortest distance either. It's also a lot cheaper and easier to built a landing spot for these than it is to build new rail lines and rail stations. You also get rid of some potential inefficiencies in rail - for rail you have to schedule based on the availability of the physical route, or else cargo sits idle. For airports you only have to schedule based on the endpoints.
It still all depends on cost, of course, but I keep coming up with all these little cumulative advantages that might make the costs work out well.
A decrease of of 3 decibels about halves the volume, and a decrease of 6 would be about 1/4 the volume.
r t.txt
So 5 dB less than a whisper would mean less than a third the volume of a whisper.
Or for examples, see this hugetastic dB reference chart: http://www.makeitlouder.com/Decibel%20Level%20Cha
Darfur?
Sudan and half the other nations of Africa will scream that it's a violation of sovereignty (perhaps with some screaming about "imperialism" or "colonialism" mixed in). The Sudanese military will start shooting at American troops and the Arab militias will scream jihad.
As soon as any number of US troops start dying there - maybe not even then, maybe as soon as troops even begin to get called up to be sent there - the same war-weary general population of the US that has been calling to pull out of Iraq will oppose going to Darfur.
Europe (and the UN in general), which has continually opposed going to Darfur, will continue to oppose going, while additionally decrying US "unilateralism".
An aversion to overly strong government is another pillar of American success, and I think there's more than a little of that in this (and any town meeting) "who do I sue if this goes fubar?" question.
When it's a state plan imposing stuff on a local level - and especially when a large out of state corporation is partnered with the state - those are warning signs that can cause a town to dig in its heels by reflex. Its less of a *desire* to sue, more of a common sense understanding that suing would, in these cases, be so extremely difficult that one wishes one has all the facts ahead of time and retains the power to vote against it if it turns out to be a bad idea.
(in this case, there are multiple angles on the issue that will probably convince New Yorkers to okay it. Like cheaper and more reliable power, and there being nothing that could go catastrophically wrong. No toxic/radioactive materials involved, just some big fans and stringing some more power cables.)
"By the way, why is gas so much more expensive in other countries when we seem to waste it? From time to time I hear about equivalent prices of over $10/gallon."
Taxes.
No, really. When you hear about the global crude oil price going up or down, that's the price *everyone* who imports pays. However, most European countries put a high tax on gasoline. Some use it for road repair and others use it for different social programs, whereas in the US things tend to be paid out of the general state or federal budgets. I've also heard there are a lot of high road tolls in parts of the EU.
(The US federal gas tax is about 18 cents/gallon. State gas taxes can be as high as about 30 cents/gallon; some apply a sales tax to it on top of that, others don't.)
(A little googling shows the UK gas tax in 2000 came out to about $3.40/gallon. Yep. The tax alone was more than twice what the final price was in the US at the time.)
It's worth that for selling its services to other companies, plus the ever-important Branding bonus (from so many people knowing about BitTorrent).
They can be hired for expert support in embedding torrent functionality in other products... like automated patching for MMORPGs, net-enabled game consoles, and, I don't know, lots of other things. Any net-connected device that involves large numbers of machines needing big-ish chunks of data every now and then, which the provider doesn't want to front all the bandwidth for directly.
There's also a niche for just plain hosting files, like shareware and demos, where they might be paid a certain fee per day/week/month/year/whatever to seed files. For smaller companies, it'd be easier to write Cohen a check and add a link to their web page, rather than setting it up themselves. Of course, *other* torrent-based hosting companies could compete for these dollars, but, again, there is the power of Branding.
That won't get them near $9 million for a single deal (unless they score something really huge like doing it for iTunes), but doing lots of smaller deals adds up quick.
> I'm not sure Casablanca would be better in color, I know it wouldn't be any better in 3D
But, assuming equal levels of skill involved, it would have been done differently in 3D, just as it would have been done differently in color, or silent, or as a stage play, or as a book.
They key to 3D will be when they stop treating it as a gimmick and start exploring how extra depth might make a movie *better*, not just doing things exactly as a flat movie that just happens to be 3D. Perhaps as 2D filmmakers discovered and mastered the wide angle shot, there'll be compelling uses for a "deep angle shot".
"Though if you are communicating to us in Java you want
!ChoicePoint.equals(CheckPoint)"
Nope. That would return True.
From conversation with others, I've found that there's a wide, wide variation in school quality from place to place within the US (which does make some sense, since, unlike many other countries, the schools are locally funded and locally controlled).
My own high school in a smallish new england town was one of the ones where there was a strong positive connection between good grades, being in sports, being in the music department, and being popular. If you made four lists ranking my graduating class in those categories, you'd see the same names over and over in the top third of each list.
Outside of my state, there are plenty other schools like that, and plenty that suck. It's something that doesn't really come across well when one boils the entire nation's stats into one average number.
"unless you plan on playing games on the machine"
To be honest, I used to agree with that too - a cheap LCD would give me a crushing headache after even something as mundane as reading Slashdot for ten minutes. But desktop LCDs improved, and I bought a good one three years ago, which I regularly game on for long stretches of time with no problems at all.
The only reason left not to game on an LCD is if you've got a super fast machine and want to play at a higher resolution than the LCD can do.
There's always a "Next Big Thing" and for a long, long time WinAmp's been on top of it, promptly keeping up with the times while staying stable and free-as-in-beer.
Pushed aside into maintenance mode, it will not incorporate the next Next Big Thing. New will be mired in windows media player instead, later than we would have wanted it (if ever). Free alternatives will have to essentially rewrite winamp from scratch in order to do the cool new things.
Yes, money makes things happen.
In this case, it won't be the big medical companies pushing it. It'll be insurers, which stand to save tons of money if they can cure diabetics. This overlaps with governments, since most western governments are paying at least some of the medical costs (medicare in the US, much larger programs in Canada and the EU).
And while the big medical corps may resist losing their cash cow, the companies that make generic drugs will gladly pump out the patent-expired medicines used by this cure.
No, that's not how the constitution works. It is not a list of the only rights you have. All rights not restricted by it are explicitly GRANTED. (refer to: 9th amendment)
"While this is a tactical victory, it does mean that it will be harder to completely overturn the DMCA. We (or the EFF...give them money please) will no longer be able to use these sorts of flagrant abuse cases for grounds of rethinking the whole thing."
If we can't overturn the DMCA because the DMCA has already been rendered useless, doesn't that mean we won anyway?
"Got to be a first, we actually got a US release *before* the US, rather than 3 months later as is usually the case."
:P
Or, given that the first star wars movie came out in the US in 1977, the UK got this one some 300+ months late...
True, there were underqualified people in IT during the boom, because there was such great demand for people...
But we're past the correction now; everyone deemed unneccessary was already cut a year ago. Remember, *everyone* starts out underqualified. In a healthy industry, the underqualified that show promise should be getting hired into the entry level positions, through which they gain experience, moving into higher level positions over time (which become available because the industry is growing)...
Notice that not happening? That's because the industry isn't growing, and there isn't a healthy balance of entry level jobs. I wouldn't blame this entirely on outsourcing - short sighted planning shares much blame too - but outsourcing is inflating the problem. The base of the computer knowledge pyramid is eroding.
I think Presidential influence is asymmetric in respect to positive and negative results. The nation and the economy are seriously complex beasts. A President can foster growth and maybe make slight improvements to the mechanics of the system; he has enough discretion that if he sees the right patterns and makes the right guesses, he can make funding available here and there, putting us on top when a new industry emerges. Likewise, if he sees a flaw, he can move to correct it or at least minimize it. Or... if he is blind and cannot see the ways in which all parts of the system connect, or if he is a fool and ignores these, he can rip parts of system out at his pleasure.
A President can slowly help coax the economy along, or, if the economy was already growing, he can simply leave it alone. But if he meddles, he can do serious short term damage, and if he gets to meddle for two terms unopposed by Congress, he can do serious long term damage.
Additionally, I don't think there's anything that says the whole thing can't be roped to the ground over a giant springy safety mat. It's only required to go up, there's no requirement that it move around while it's up there. This thing might not even have a seat, it might look more like a pogo stick with pedals at the bottom and a big propeller on the top, taking off from a holder on the ground.
Not *practical* I admit, but it sounds like a hell of a lot of fun anyway...
It should greatly slow down some aspects of aging... mainly mechanical parts wearing out and DNA falling apart after too many cell divisions. How much depends on how deep this hybernation goes. Even if it's like sleeping normally for weeks at a time, that's a lot less wear and tear on your body. And in space, it'd be combined without so much annoying gravity pulling you down.
However, you're still getting the same (or higher depending on the spacecraft) dose of radiation over time, right? So there's a chance we'd end up with people who are 150 but only lived for 30 of those years, young and healthy except they're dying of cancer.
This is far closer to theft than filesharing. "Identity theft" is properly named... you lose the clean use of your identity if your identity is stolen. (normal case: trashed credit rating. worst case: criminal record in your name)
Money. They're already paying so you can call them toll-free. If they have to call you back, that costs them still more money.
You forgot one massively popular series of machines that's been backwards compatible from the start: the Gameboy.