While I'm way too biased in favor of libertarians to be objective about this, I don't think it's a stretch to suggest another Republican was behind this. It's no secret that a lot of Republicans are livid about his candidacy and don't like being associated with him, and therefore would be glad to tarnish him, even if he has no chance of winning.
Don't mistakenly identify "desire for depth and complexity" with "nitpicky and tedious". You may find complex game elements nitpicky - because that doesn't suit your preferred style of gameplay - but a lot of players want at least the illusion of depth to their game. They like the complexity because - I am supposing - it gives the feeling of accomplishment to master all that complexity
Bingo. I think that's a very concise explanation of something I've always felt. To give my example, I'd refer to the Tony Hawk Pro-Skater series. It was really fun, but what bothered me about it (I've played 1 and 4) is that with a few simple button presses, I was doing tricks that are nigh impossible in the real world. (Fittingly, one simple move in the game is *called* "the impossible" because players long deemed it impossible in real life!) What I would have liked a lot more is if the game design adhered to the rule that:
"Difficulty of player performing the trick in-game should equal difficulty of pro-skater peforming the trick in real life"
That would give me a greater appreciation of the nuances you have to master to get an ollie to work, let alone a vertical spinning move.
I don't know how good Verizon is at online bank security. I mean... how safe can you be when you look at your bank account and can't distinguish.02 dollars and.02 cents?
Yeah, but they counterbalanced it by involving Microsoft. Because in a program implemented to avoid a single-point-of-failure, you do NOT want Ubuntu, known for saying "It's HIGHLY recommended that you install grub [without having the tools you'd need to prevent it from locking you out of all operating systems]".
You have my permission to mod me down. Believe me, it's worth it.
(Note: either Ubuntu has a) corrected that, vindicating me against all those who flamed me for my criticisms of its design, or b) not corrected that, in which case it has obviously poor design for newbies and its designers have effectively conceded they don't want them.)
Level Designer: "Let's see, after going through this hall, they'll probably be beat up pretty good, gonna need some health." Writer of companion novel: "Hm, okay, I can work in a dead-marine-carrying-health-packs-in-that-room into chapter 3..."
The problem in crafting a MMORPG is that it takes a long long time.
True, but that's mainly because of one time-consuming thing you didn't list: building up the user base and getting them to stay there, so that the network effects take off. (The feeling that they're being toyed with isn't good for that.)
I was rather unsatisfied with the claims in the summary: A MMORPG needs puzzles and monsters? What about Second Life and Club Penguin? And why is it so hard to add them? $250,000 is quite a lot if you think in terms of "how much you'd have to pay five geeks to set up a vitrual world in a month".
Convincing people to come can pose other problems for the economic analysis as well. The fact that people can quit any given game but not real life, can influence results.
I understand that, but the point is that (based on the descriptions), the patent is so broad as to cover *any* method of doing X, thus being effectively equal to patent on the idea of doing X.
I don't know what scares me more: the thought of a Wikipedia article about the "Wikipedia secret mailing list scandal", or the thought of an edit war on that article.
Once bidders file they become subject to strict 'anticollusion' rules that in effect prohibit participants from discussing any aspect of their bidding until the auction is over.
It's very hard to prove that you did not collude with someone. If AT&T wins, and a year later it turns out they had a secret deal with Verizon, what happens? Will the license be revoked? Or will AT&T successfully argue about the need to "put the past behind us"?
Could someone explain why this guy hasn't been modded down yet? And why his anus lacks splinters that were rubbed off during his forced sodomization with a wooden rod?
[tinfoil hat] Could that be where spam profits actually come from, then? Not from the sale of the advertised products, but from selling anti-spam proprietary software that's specifically programmed to ID your spams (through e.g. a checksum)?
Because if the revenue model involves getting people to buy stuff in spam links, you would *think* the credit card companies would find the spammers within about a day or so...
Someone replied and mentioned the free spam filters, suggesting that the "spam and sell spam filters" model won't work because of the free alternatives. However, this is like saying that no one would buy windows if WINE were perfect. Free software has a harder time finding advertising funds.
1) I think he was being ironic/facetious/whatever.
2) Carlos Slim *is* "just some billionaire". Slim got rich by getting the government to hand him a telecom monopoly that allowed him to hold Mexicans by the balls and thereby extract monopoly rents. Bill Gates, on the other hand, legitimately gained market dominance by offering a superior product and THEN locked people in and extraced monopoly rents.
I probably should have given a little background: I have a bachelor's in mechanical engineering and did some work toward a masters before dropping out. I remember the academic papers being very hard to follow even after all that schooling in in the subject area. (I was studying controls and the problem of closed-loop system identification, which seems to have a lot of overlap with what the robot in the video has to do: model a system while trying to manipulate it.)
"When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail." And likewise I'm tempted to do see where my M/E knowledge applies, but what I'm more interested in is not the mechanics of the robot itself, but understanding how it learns, which would make the "physics" of its world irrelevant until I want to make a practical demo.
So far, I've been reading books aimed at broader audiences: Godel, Escher, Bach and The Emporer's New Mind, and well, everything by Eliezer Yukdowsky.
Just for kicks, I sat down a week ago and tried to model how an intelligent being acts, and settled on a model: it compares sensory data (a sense-vector) to previous actions (action vector) to guess how the world works (the terms in a "world matrix" that it tries to imitate in its "internal model matrix"), and then chooses actions to optimize an unknown utility function.
Looking at the site linked in the video's description, that's basically what the team did, except that they had a much more complicated model. (Mine had a 2x2 binary world matrix.) It seems they also helped it a lot by giving it good approximations of its environment. I'm unclear though how they made it "want" to walk.
Again, thanks for taking the time to answer my quesiton.
[begin economist-minded idea] Wouldn't a better solution be to:
1) Allow employers to discriminate all they want on the basis of genes, and 2) Use tax money to make a transfer payment* to all people based on how bad their genes are. (e.g., You're genetically predisposed to suck at basic math --> $50,000 at age 18.)
That way, you get all the economic efficiency gains of lower search costs, better information, better employees, better employee training decisions, etc., and at the same time give to all people MORE income than if we had to work with imperfect knowledge, since "better gene" people would be funneled to more-productive uses, and "worse gene" people would would get a cut of the gain.
Unlike other entitlement programs, you can't fake your eligibility, and it allows employers to do openly and evenly, what they would inevitably try to do covertly and haphazardly.
What's wrong with this idea? (other than getting people to vote for it)
*For those of you with IQ under 90 or born before 1960: Read this statement as "Use tax dollars to cut a check to all people..."
I know I sound paranoid when I say this, but: if geothermal ever actually did become feasible for providing the world's energy needs at current levels, environmentalists would rationalize a reason why it's not eco-friendly.
Comcast management apparently assigned that question to someone who is so ignorant that he thinks BitTorrent is only a web site,
Oh no, he understands the issues; he was just affirming Comcast's longstanding support of your right as a Comcast customer to visit the BitTorrent website!
This reminded me of this video that I favorited on youtube, in which a robot is "brought to life" and then "feels around" to model the world and itself, and then "figures out" how to walk.
This seems really interesting and something I'd want to work on. Anyone know what I would need to learn and do in order to get involved on a theoretical or practical level?
Slashdot Mirror
While I'm way too biased in favor of libertarians to be objective about this, I don't think it's a stretch to suggest another Republican was behind this. It's no secret that a lot of Republicans are livid about his candidacy and don't like being associated with him, and therefore would be glad to tarnish him, even if he has no chance of winning.
Hm, you're intelligent and articulate, you largely agree with me ... why did you foe me? It's about Ubuntu, isn't it?
Whenever someone pushes me, I always push back. It's the law. (Newton's third, to be precise.)
Don't mistakenly identify "desire for depth and complexity" with "nitpicky and tedious". You may find complex game elements nitpicky - because that doesn't suit your preferred style of gameplay - but a lot of players want at least the illusion of depth to their game. They like the complexity because - I am supposing - it gives the feeling of accomplishment to master all that complexity
Bingo. I think that's a very concise explanation of something I've always felt. To give my example, I'd refer to the Tony Hawk Pro-Skater series. It was really fun, but what bothered me about it (I've played 1 and 4) is that with a few simple button presses, I was doing tricks that are nigh impossible in the real world. (Fittingly, one simple move in the game is *called* "the impossible" because players long deemed it impossible in real life!) What I would have liked a lot more is if the game design adhered to the rule that:
"Difficulty of player performing the trick in-game should equal difficulty of pro-skater peforming the trick in real life"
That would give me a greater appreciation of the nuances you have to master to get an ollie to work, let alone a vertical spinning move.
Agreed, They have been evolving their design for some time now
Um, don't you mean they were intelligently designing it?
***
Hey, if it costs the USPS more, maybe they could pay for it from the ill-gotten profits they derive from selling spamming services!
I don't know how good Verizon is at online bank security. I mean ... how safe can you be when you look at your bank account and can't distinguish .02 dollars and .02 cents?
*ducks*
When one of two things happens:
/. somebody making the exact same criticisms that I did of Ubuntu, in another context.
a) I get a gold-plated public apology from a prominent Ubuntu programmer or Ubuntu forum member, AND this design flaw is removed.
b) One year passes after the last time I see on
(I'd prefer a to b, obviously, but at least in b I would be seeing more consistency and would feel less like abysmal design mainly happens to me.)
Yeah, but they counterbalanced it by involving Microsoft. Because in a program implemented to avoid a single-point-of-failure, you do NOT want Ubuntu, known for saying "It's HIGHLY recommended that you install grub [without having the tools you'd need to prevent it from locking you out of all operating systems]".
You have my permission to mod me down. Believe me, it's worth it.
(Note: either Ubuntu has a) corrected that, vindicating me against all those who flamed me for my criticisms of its design, or b) not corrected that, in which case it has obviously poor design for newbies and its designers have effectively conceded they don't want them.)
Something similar happened for Halo.
Level Designer: "Let's see, after going through this hall, they'll probably be beat up pretty good, gonna need some health."
Writer of companion novel: "Hm, okay, I can work in a dead-marine-carrying-health-packs-in-that-room into chapter 3..."
The problem in crafting a MMORPG is that it takes a long long time.
True, but that's mainly because of one time-consuming thing you didn't list: building up the user base and getting them to stay there, so that the network effects take off. (The feeling that they're being toyed with isn't good for that.)
I was rather unsatisfied with the claims in the summary: A MMORPG needs puzzles and monsters? What about Second Life and Club Penguin? And why is it so hard to add them? $250,000 is quite a lot if you think in terms of "how much you'd have to pay five geeks to set up a vitrual world in a month".
Convincing people to come can pose other problems for the economic analysis as well. The fact that people can quit any given game but not real life, can influence results.
I understand that, but the point is that (based on the descriptions), the patent is so broad as to cover *any* method of doing X, thus being effectively equal to patent on the idea of doing X.
But it was done -- see: every spy movie since 1950. [Screen pops up: "007, here is your mission."]
I know, it's a movie, but shouldn't the fact that the idea was entirely contained in a fictional work be proof that someone thought of it before?
I don't know what scares me more: the thought of a Wikipedia article about the "Wikipedia secret mailing list scandal", or the thought of an edit war on that article.
No, I'm not going to look for it.
Once bidders file they become subject to strict 'anticollusion' rules that in effect prohibit participants from discussing any aspect of their bidding until the auction is over.
It's very hard to prove that you did not collude with someone. If AT&T wins, and a year later it turns out they had a secret deal with Verizon, what happens? Will the license be revoked? Or will AT&T successfully argue about the need to "put the past behind us"?
I took the liberty of converting your post into an ascii semantic web.
You --- does ---> spam <--- is-a --- opt-out mailing list
^
|
|
would-be-better-off-without
|
|
World
Could someone explain why this guy hasn't been modded down yet? And why his anus lacks splinters that were rubbed off during his forced sodomization with a wooden rod?
[tinfoil hat] Could that be where spam profits actually come from, then? Not from the sale of the advertised products, but from selling anti-spam proprietary software that's specifically programmed to ID your spams (through e.g. a checksum)?
Because if the revenue model involves getting people to buy stuff in spam links, you would *think* the credit card companies would find the spammers within about a day or so...
Someone replied and mentioned the free spam filters, suggesting that the "spam and sell spam filters" model won't work because of the free alternatives. However, this is like saying that no one would buy windows if WINE were perfect. Free software has a harder time finding advertising funds.
1) I think he was being ironic/facetious/whatever.
2) Carlos Slim *is* "just some billionaire". Slim got rich by getting the government to hand him a telecom monopoly that allowed him to hold Mexicans by the balls and thereby extract monopoly rents. Bill Gates, on the other hand, legitimately gained market dominance by offering a superior product and THEN locked people in and extraced monopoly rents.
Thanks a lot for the links!
I probably should have given a little background: I have a bachelor's in mechanical engineering and did some work toward a masters before dropping out. I remember the academic papers being very hard to follow even after all that schooling in in the subject area. (I was studying controls and the problem of closed-loop system identification, which seems to have a lot of overlap with what the robot in the video has to do: model a system while trying to manipulate it.)
"When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail." And likewise I'm tempted to do see where my M/E knowledge applies, but what I'm more interested in is not the mechanics of the robot itself, but understanding how it learns, which would make the "physics" of its world irrelevant until I want to make a practical demo.
So far, I've been reading books aimed at broader audiences: Godel, Escher, Bach and The Emporer's New Mind, and well, everything by Eliezer Yukdowsky.
Just for kicks, I sat down a week ago and tried to model how an intelligent being acts, and settled on a model: it compares sensory data (a sense-vector) to previous actions (action vector) to guess how the world works (the terms in a "world matrix" that it tries to imitate in its "internal model matrix"), and then chooses actions to optimize an unknown utility function.
Looking at the site linked in the video's description, that's basically what the team did, except that they had a much more complicated model. (Mine had a 2x2 binary world matrix.) It seems they also helped it a lot by giving it good approximations of its environment. I'm unclear though how they made it "want" to walk.
Again, thanks for taking the time to answer my quesiton.
[begin economist-minded idea] Wouldn't a better solution be to:
1) Allow employers to discriminate all they want on the basis of genes, and
2) Use tax money to make a transfer payment* to all people based on how bad their genes are. (e.g., You're genetically predisposed to suck at basic math --> $50,000 at age 18.)
That way, you get all the economic efficiency gains of lower search costs, better information, better employees, better employee training decisions, etc., and at the same time give to all people MORE income than if we had to work with imperfect knowledge, since "better gene" people would be funneled to more-productive uses, and "worse gene" people would would get a cut of the gain.
Unlike other entitlement programs, you can't fake your eligibility, and it allows employers to do openly and evenly, what they would inevitably try to do covertly and haphazardly.
What's wrong with this idea? (other than getting people to vote for it)
*For those of you with IQ under 90 or born before 1960: Read this statement as "Use tax dollars to cut a check to all people..."
I know I sound paranoid when I say this, but: if geothermal ever actually did become feasible for providing the world's energy needs at current levels, environmentalists would rationalize a reason why it's not eco-friendly.
And keepin the cliches in play! Peace out brotha ... or something.
Comcast management apparently assigned that question to someone who is so ignorant that he thinks BitTorrent is only a web site,
Oh no, he understands the issues; he was just affirming Comcast's longstanding support of your right as a Comcast customer to visit the BitTorrent website!
punchline: "Hah! You thought that was a robotic hand!"
This reminded me of this video that I favorited on youtube, in which a robot is "brought to life" and then "feels around" to model the world and itself, and then "figures out" how to walk.
This seems really interesting and something I'd want to work on. Anyone know what I would need to learn and do in order to get involved on a theoretical or practical level?