So if you're trying to convince a hardball skeptic,... make NONE of it fantasy!
At the root of the guy's innovation is decompiling the monolithic text into digestible fragments. Done properly, there would be some kind of rules authority (hire a PHD as a "rules judge".)
Find whatever scale declares that Gold doesn't react much, line everything up on to that scale, and index that as a chart in some rules handbook.
In the world of modular RPGs, it's quite easy to adapt the concept of "guilds" to Acid/Base and beyond.
Acids are what they are... because of the definition of acids. Loosely put, they're connected to the elements on the right side of the period table. HCL, H2SO4, the works. Gaming elements already have between 5-10 classifiable factors, so it's a snap to put Chlorine and Sulfur in an Acid guild, and those metals on the left in a Base guild.
For certain knowledge bits such as "Au not reacting with dilute acid", fine. Gamers are used to remembering things like Gold has +1 or +2 Resistance to Acid. Or put the other way, Mg has +1 or +2 Affinity for Acids.
What this kid is really talking about is taking knowledge off of page 47, and letting the user shuffle it around as a physical model of the way people shuffle knowledge in their head.
Chemists in the lab "work" because they are trying to produce specific rections of value in opposition with destructive factors such as impurities. With a little thought, you can assign a scale of "reaction sensitivity" measured on some scale such as % of impurity required to damage the reaction. Then one player assembling his reactions gets more points of something correlating to the difficulty of the reaction he put together before his opponent could sabotage it.
"Clean Room": Your reactions are +x harder to pollute by your opponent."
"Budget Deadline/Limiting Reagent": "You only have two chances to prepare the reaction."
I haven't worked it all out, but you could approach a 9th grade chem course using game mechanics. Despite other posts here, RPG gamers are quite used to dealing with the interactions of HUNDREDS of pages of rules.
Most of this discussion is about which audience the original Wikipedia targets. Is it for "Joe Layman" or a moderately advanced user "finding out about the dynamics of convective vs. orographic precipitation"?
I haven't spent much time digging into the "Simple Wiki" yet. The few articles I glanced at are very short.
I would suppose there is room for 3 levels of depth. Simple takes the ground level, for random Net users who really don't want to spend any effort, and want the "15 minute version because they forgot what the chemical formula for alcohol is".
Some kind of Mid-Line version would be this happy medium everyone's talking about here. "There are compromises on this page. But they are meant for clarity".
Then you can have the Expert page, with the Caveat Lector sign. Sky's the limit, and unless it's patently wrong, it stays. If it doesn't say what you'd like it to, add your own.
I bombed Freshman Calc and declined to bomb intro to Organic Chem. Therefore, I don't have the right to complain about any Math or Orgo articles.
However, as a layfellow, let's see what happens if I don't deliberately pick a topic loaded with equations.
Sorry, but I think the venerable fish is becoming exhausted. Here's World Lingo's version, with my own small tuneups.
The Web is in the air of Cardal About 40 children of an Italian school received its computers by the good will of several authorities of the government. In one week the children should be able to connect to Internet from all the points of the city.
In the middle of great expectation and much joy of the children, president Tabaré Vázquez stood next to a great retinue of authorities of School #24 of the city of Cardal, which inaugurated the pilot program of the Ceibal Plan in the Italian school (in Florida). In the next few days it should be connected to Internet by means of wireless connections, in order that the students can accede to the Web from their homes.
In a brief speech during the act, Vázquez talked about "the importance" of the Ceibal project and assured that "she will fulfill herself the deadline of 2009 to cover all the schools of the country". The agent chief executive preferred to yield his time to one of the children.
At the end of the act, Vázquez was consulted by the present journalists on the matter of cuts in the budget, and if she were going to be able to supply all the money for the plan. Vázquez assured that she was not going to lack the money. "the US$ 15 million are predicted in the budget", assured the conductor the Uruguayan government.
Under the gaze of many parents, some from the accommodated windows or in some corner of the halls class, about 40 children of 3rd and 6th year received their computers X-O. The donation of Nicholas Negroponte is of 200 units. The rest of the students of that school of Cardal will receive its computers in the next few days.
The chance to have a PC in its hands, some for the first time, excited the boys, who did not hope to ignite their machines, to introduce their initial preferences (the first time that boot the machine it is necessary to put the machine name and to choose the colors of the screen) and to prepare to experiment with the X-O. What further it excited them was to be able to take photos and to film themselves with on-board webcam.
Later this week, the children should be able to connect to the Italian School, where an official arrived to provide the school with connection in the classrooms. In the next days this coverage is supposed to extend to the rest of the city so that the children can connect themselves to the Web from their homes. For this, wireless connection technology will be used, supplied by ANTEL with the collaboration provided with UTE.
This soldier is just on the emotional vanguard of one of the classic conceptual problems of this century.
*This* robot has no feelings - but it's the forerunner of one that will. I have a deep instinct which informs me that "Silicon Intelligence is *NOT* quite as impossible as we pretend it is - it's our racial terror refusing to let us set ourselves to the task.
One day my Car will also be intelligent! Just endow it with the S-I mind chip. I actually think cars with personalities can do wonders to relieve road fatigue.
Does this mean you can publish Alpha-Null versions of TurboJunk that "SortaWorks" to prove your key concepts, even though it has a thousand other bugs?
And is there a fast & dirty way to "publish" that's free?
Seems to me this could be a great sneaky gift to OSS types, who LIKE publishing their work.
Question: Can we outrace the Closed Source shops until "all the good stuff is open?"
With the increased capacities of adults, comes increased capabilities for bullying. The adult versions are called Slander & Libel. Can you brush those off so easily when they would affect your community reputation?
Actually, these steps in the article go a ways towards *extending* the adult protections towards children. You don't like the smear campaign someone posted to YellowRag.com? Send a Cease & Desist letter. Little Joey doesn't like Big Bernard stealing his class photo and posting photoshopped versions of it on the net? Awww. Too bad for him.
Microsoft makes their name for producing quality code to begin with, right? I'll peg them to try introducing chaff/fake exploits... and *missing*, at which point they get OWNED for real.
It's perfectly normal to have schedules that don't match your best working hours. What I think generates the silliness that this clock taps into is the mini "game of hit the snooze". Pseudo forcing yourself to be brutalized before one gets up is indicative of subconsciously needing faux excitement.
Put a coffeemaker and headphones beside your bed. If you're torched in the morning, drink some triple strength BeanJuice with the light on. Might as well get some good tunes in - skip the silly robot clock.
Firefox has the lowest "risk of looking stupid". "Go on, click the Red Fox instead of the Blue E..." "Gee, it loads webpages... just like Internet Explorer??!!!!" "Yep... Now let's just put the Fox right on top here where you can find it, and the Blue E down there in the corner..."
Open Office is a little harder, because many programs insist on proprietary export interfacing to MS Project or Excel. But 2 licenses of Excel and 25 users on Open Office works pretty well here.
Linux is the really tricky one, because of the often mentioned Management Nervousness. I think it's better to let one power user who knows the stuff to "just use it", with ZERO promotion, and let the mindshare do its thing.
"If you want to download the audio from this video, go to http://www11.nrk.no/urort/user/?id=36781 It's a norwegian page where I uploaded some of my music. (Lytt = Listen to, Last ned = Download)"
That's the guy who doesn't exactly know how to play any instrument, but uses mix editing like the old amiga samplers used to do. The funny part is he does a lot of it from his camcorder, so watching the jerky images on top of surprisingly clean soundtracks is funny.
P.s. All the corporations fake their "location" anyway, so we'll just borrow their trick and funnel things through a Norwegian distribution center. (Think about it - is an American Singer managed by a German label American or German content?)
Hmm. So you take your average Almost-Bright person, and buy them a cat named Patch.
Oh wait...
You mean... Gotcha. Let's try this instead:
Patch for sub-optimal brain conditions:
Phenomenon - Movie starring John Travolta Flowers for Algernon - story by Daniel Keyes, also made to a movie. 6 Million Dollar Man Episode "Burning Bright" Starring William Shatner
However, the common theme is we don't "deserve" to keep the brain patch, and the price for the extended brain boost is death.
On other days, we discuss things like "Linux may be too hard for Average Joe". That's because we use a statistical example of {Total Users}*{Skill Level of 68% of Users}.
This stick WILL be secure... *against Average Joe!*.
There's only one problem: That's the wrong audience. When you label something "Top Secret"... you are thundering a challenge for the whole world to take their best shot. The rules change.
Maybe "The Best Hackers Money Can Buy" will always win. Fine. But at a minimum, protect against the Best That *PIZZA* Can Buy. (College/20-somethings).
Long ago, I got a couple laughs out of something like this.
I repointed a couple pieces of NastyWare to server as Boot Loaders for my favorite apps. I don't think I can catch all the pieces of today's NastyGrams though.
"Piracy" didn't kill the Small Store Owner. That's mixing up chains of events. Let's back up.
We all smile ruefully at "The Way Things Were" because the 2nd half of 20th Century was a time of such thundering growth, we built a brand new civilization in fifty-ish years, call it 1950-2001.
We really didn't want Punch Cards & 45's, or MiniComputers & 8-Track Tapes. It was The Way Things Were.
The music sales model of 1950-2000 was based on artificial scarcity in all its forms. Now that music fans have a global choice, they can lurk around their own unique playlists. Like kids sneaking soda into the movie theater, there's some glamor to "Petty Sneaking". Shawn Fanning deserves credit for waking people up, right on cue with the calendar symbolism, too. What needs to happen is for the entire music industry to realize the golden age is gone, and switch models.
ISP's used to charge by the hour, until by popular demand, that crashed. Now everyone pays a flat rate for modest access. Ad-Supported Services is the model that the Net lives on, so Ad-Supported Flat Rate Music is where it's at. Make it "Free" to the consumer, because your Ad vendor pays your hard cash. If the main line is "free", then there's no point in "pirating", is there? We all know P2P copies are about price-point, not quality.
It's not "pirating", it's "exposure", remember? You can't buy what you don't know.
Some kid in my high school made me a couple tapes of Petra, which had very crisp melodies. I made my first halting attempts at mixes from those tapes, and when some 5th rate tape player ate my originals, I... *bought* the replacement tapes from a store.
I'm classically in the middle of the market that doesn't care about quality for 75% of my collection. You're right that with the DRM stripped, it won't be long before we should be able to just convert an entire folder's worth of AAC into mp3 that legacy mp3 players can use. I made quite a study of Ultra Low End 3rd party players, one as cheap as $10! Plus, my watch doesn't play AAC files.
Slashdot Mirror
So if you're trying to convince a hardball skeptic, ... make NONE of it fantasy!
At the root of the guy's innovation is decompiling the monolithic text into digestible fragments. Done properly, there would be some kind of rules authority (hire a PHD as a "rules judge".)
Find whatever scale declares that Gold doesn't react much, line everything up on to that scale, and index that as a chart in some rules handbook.
That one is a snap!
... because of the definition of acids. Loosely put, they're connected to the elements on the right side of the period table. HCL, H2SO4, the works. Gaming elements already have between 5-10 classifiable factors, so it's a snap to put Chlorine and Sulfur in an Acid guild, and those metals on the left in a Base guild.
In the world of modular RPGs, it's quite easy to adapt the concept of "guilds" to Acid/Base and beyond.
Acids are what they are
For certain knowledge bits such as "Au not reacting with dilute acid", fine. Gamers are used to remembering things like Gold has +1 or +2 Resistance to Acid. Or put the other way, Mg has +1 or +2 Affinity for Acids.
What this kid is really talking about is taking knowledge off of page 47, and letting the user shuffle it around as a physical model of the way people shuffle knowledge in their head.
Chemists in the lab "work" because they are trying to produce specific rections of value in opposition with destructive factors such as impurities. With a little thought, you can assign a scale of "reaction sensitivity" measured on some scale such as % of impurity required to damage the reaction. Then one player assembling his reactions gets more points of something correlating to the difficulty of the reaction he put together before his opponent could sabotage it.
"Clean Room": Your reactions are +x harder to pollute by your opponent."
"Budget Deadline/Limiting Reagent": "You only have two chances to prepare the reaction."
I haven't worked it all out, but you could approach a 9th grade chem course using game mechanics. Despite other posts here, RPG gamers are quite used to dealing with the interactions of HUNDREDS of pages of rules.
This is the post that I will reply to.
... Fine.
... Fine.
... Fine.
Most of this discussion is about which audience the original Wikipedia targets. Is it for "Joe Layman" or a moderately advanced user "finding out about the dynamics of convective vs. orographic precipitation"?
I haven't spent much time digging into the "Simple Wiki" yet. The few articles I glanced at are very short.
I would suppose there is room for 3 levels of depth. Simple takes the ground level, for random Net users who really don't want to spend any effort, and want the "15 minute version because they forgot what the chemical formula for alcohol is".
Some kind of Mid-Line version would be this happy medium everyone's talking about here. "There are compromises on this page. But they are meant for clarity".
Then you can have the Expert page, with the Caveat Lector sign. Sky's the limit, and unless it's patently wrong, it stays. If it doesn't say what you'd like it to, add your own.
I bombed Freshman Calc and declined to bomb intro to Organic Chem. Therefore, I don't have the right to complain about any Math or Orgo articles.
However, as a layfellow, let's see what happens if I don't deliberately pick a topic loaded with equations.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plate_Tectonics
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decision_making
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiprocessing
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unilineal_evolution Fine.
So, Wikipedia does just fine on "Science", thank you.
Figures.
The genders came up both ways, so I picked one. And I think I did see "Italy School", but that didn't make sense with this level of unreliability...
But not so bad otherwise. It beats the weird characters.
Sorry, but I think the venerable fish is becoming exhausted. Here's World Lingo's version, with my own small tuneups.
The Web is in the air of Cardal
About 40 children of an Italian school received its computers by the good will of several authorities of the government. In one week the children should be able to connect to Internet from all the points of the city.
In the middle of great expectation and much joy of the children, president Tabaré Vázquez stood next to a great retinue of authorities of School #24 of the city of Cardal, which inaugurated the pilot program of the Ceibal Plan in the Italian school (in Florida). In the next few days it should be connected to Internet by means of wireless connections, in order that the students can accede to the Web from their homes.
In a brief speech during the act, Vázquez talked about "the importance" of the Ceibal project and assured that "she will fulfill herself the deadline of 2009 to cover all the schools of the country". The agent chief executive preferred to yield his time to one of the children.
At the end of the act, Vázquez was consulted by the present journalists on the matter of cuts in the budget, and if she were going to be able to supply all the money for the plan. Vázquez assured that she was not going to lack the money. "the US$ 15 million are predicted in the budget", assured the conductor the Uruguayan government.
Under the gaze of many parents, some from the accommodated windows or in some corner of the halls class, about 40 children of 3rd and 6th year received their computers X-O. The donation of Nicholas Negroponte is of 200 units. The rest of the students of that school of Cardal will receive its computers in the next few days.
The chance to have a PC in its hands, some for the first time, excited the boys, who did not hope to ignite their machines, to introduce their initial preferences (the first time that boot the machine it is necessary to put the machine name and to choose the colors of the screen) and to prepare to experiment with the X-O. What further it excited them was to be able to take photos and to film themselves with on-board webcam.
Later this week, the children should be able to connect to the Italian School, where an official arrived to provide the school with connection in the classrooms. In the next days this coverage is supposed to extend to the rest of the city so that the children can connect themselves to the Web from their homes. For this, wireless connection technology will be used, supplied by ANTEL with the collaboration provided with UTE.
"Proper use of terms" was on the cutting edge of Chinese philosophy 2200 years ago.
This soldier is just on the emotional vanguard of one of the classic conceptual problems of this century.
*This* robot has no feelings - but it's the forerunner of one that will. I have a deep instinct which informs me that "Silicon Intelligence is *NOT* quite as impossible as we pretend it is - it's our racial terror refusing to let us set ourselves to the task.
One day my Car will also be intelligent! Just endow it with the S-I mind chip. I actually think cars with personalities can do wonders to relieve road fatigue.
Would one of you /. geniuses please discover a manual config of this idea so that we can breed an army of WinMules that can't reproduce any more bots?
The irony would be delicious.
Does this mean you can publish Alpha-Null versions of TurboJunk that "SortaWorks" to prove your key concepts, even though it has a thousand other bugs?
And is there a fast & dirty way to "publish" that's free?
Seems to me this could be a great sneaky gift to OSS types, who LIKE publishing their work.
Question: Can we outrace the Closed Source shops until "all the good stuff is open?"
I must disagree here.
With the increased capacities of adults, comes increased capabilities for bullying. The adult versions are called Slander & Libel. Can you brush those off so easily when they would affect your community reputation?
Actually, these steps in the article go a ways towards *extending* the adult protections towards children. You don't like the smear campaign someone posted to YellowRag.com? Send a Cease & Desist letter. Little Joey doesn't like Big Bernard stealing his class photo and posting photoshopped versions of it on the net? Awww. Too bad for him.
Microsoft makes their name for producing quality code to begin with, right?
I'll peg them to try introducing chaff/fake exploits... and *missing*, at which point they get OWNED for real.
It's perfectly normal to have schedules that don't match your best working hours. What I think generates the silliness that this clock taps into is the mini "game of hit the snooze". Pseudo forcing yourself to be brutalized before one gets up is indicative of subconsciously needing faux excitement.
Put a coffeemaker and headphones beside your bed. If you're torched in the morning, drink some triple strength BeanJuice with the light on. Might as well get some good tunes in - skip the silly robot clock.
It is happening, and in that order.
Firefox has the lowest "risk of looking stupid".
"Go on, click the Red Fox instead of the Blue E..."
"Gee, it loads webpages... just like Internet Explorer??!!!!"
"Yep... Now let's just put the Fox right on top here where you can find it, and the Blue E down there in the corner..."
Open Office is a little harder, because many programs insist on proprietary export interfacing to MS Project or Excel. But 2 licenses of Excel and 25 users on Open Office works pretty well here.
Linux is the really tricky one, because of the often mentioned Management Nervousness. I think it's better to let one power user who knows the stuff to "just use it", with ZERO promotion, and let the mindshare do its thing.
Plus, in half of my PC boxes, I tell it to stop searching (and crushing my CPU capacity) ... and like a puppy, it "forgets" and starts searching again!
Did anyone else notice that "Zune" is like a cartoon character like the Ren or the Taco Bell Dog saying when it would work? "ZUUUUNE!"
You're forgetting Linux, OS X, and Tux.
Fornication ends in N.
Lasse Gjertsen!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JzqumbhfxRo
"If you want to download the audio from this video, go to
http://www11.nrk.no/urort/user/?id=36781
It's a norwegian page where I uploaded some of my music. (Lytt = Listen to, Last ned = Download)"
That's the guy who doesn't exactly know how to play any instrument, but uses mix editing like the old amiga samplers used to do. The funny part is he does a lot of it from his camcorder, so watching the jerky images on top of surprisingly clean soundtracks is funny.
P.s. All the corporations fake their "location" anyway, so we'll just borrow their trick and funnel things through a Norwegian distribution center. (Think about it - is an American Singer managed by a German label American or German content?)
Hmm. So you take your average Almost-Bright person, and buy them a cat named Patch.
... Gotcha. Let's try this instead:
Oh wait...
You mean
Patch for sub-optimal brain conditions:
Phenomenon - Movie starring John Travolta
Flowers for Algernon - story by Daniel Keyes, also made to a movie.
6 Million Dollar Man Episode "Burning Bright" Starring William Shatner
However, the common theme is we don't "deserve" to keep the brain patch, and the price for the extended brain boost is death.
This is the post I'll reply to.
... *against Average Joe!*.
On other days, we discuss things like "Linux may be too hard for Average Joe". That's because we use a statistical example of {Total Users}*{Skill Level of 68% of Users}.
This stick WILL be secure
There's only one problem: That's the wrong audience. When you label something "Top Secret"... you are thundering a challenge for the whole world to take their best shot. The rules change.
Maybe "The Best Hackers Money Can Buy" will always win. Fine.
But at a minimum, protect against the Best That *PIZZA* Can Buy.
(College/20-somethings).
Long ago, I got a couple laughs out of something like this.
I repointed a couple pieces of NastyWare to server as Boot Loaders for my favorite apps. I don't think I can catch all the pieces of today's NastyGrams though.
So let me see if I have this - ...
AOL forced the name to change to Pidgin IM Program
PIMP!
"Piracy" didn't kill the Small Store Owner. That's mixing up chains of events. Let's back up.
We all smile ruefully at "The Way Things Were" because the 2nd half of 20th Century was a time of such thundering growth, we built a brand new civilization in fifty-ish years, call it 1950-2001.
We really didn't want Punch Cards & 45's, or MiniComputers & 8-Track Tapes. It was The Way Things Were.
The music sales model of 1950-2000 was based on artificial scarcity in all its forms. Now that music fans have a global choice, they can lurk around their own unique playlists. Like kids sneaking soda into the movie theater, there's some glamor to "Petty Sneaking". Shawn Fanning deserves credit for waking people up, right on cue with the calendar symbolism, too. What needs to happen is for the entire music industry to realize the golden age is gone, and switch models.
ISP's used to charge by the hour, until by popular demand, that crashed. Now everyone pays a flat rate for modest access. Ad-Supported Services is the model that the Net lives on, so Ad-Supported Flat Rate Music is where it's at. Make it "Free" to the consumer, because your Ad vendor pays your hard cash. If the main line is "free", then there's no point in "pirating", is there? We all know P2P copies are about price-point, not quality.
It's not "pirating", it's "exposure", remember? You can't buy what you don't know.
... *bought* the replacement tapes from a store.
Some kid in my high school made me a couple tapes of Petra, which had very crisp melodies. I made my first halting attempts at mixes from those tapes, and when some 5th rate tape player ate my originals, I
Good, someone started this thread.
I'm classically in the middle of the market that doesn't care about quality for 75% of my collection. You're right that with the DRM stripped, it won't be long before we should be able to just convert an entire folder's worth of AAC into mp3 that legacy mp3 players can use. I made quite a study of Ultra Low End 3rd party players, one as cheap as $10! Plus, my watch doesn't play AAC files.