I don't really disagree. The problem is that they didn't lock him up for having some harmless bacteria, they locked him up for having unknown bacteria, then released him once they learned they were harmless. It's more like locking someone up because circumstantial evidence seems to point to him having weaponized bacteria, then releasing him when he doesn't.
As for your first comment, about my mouth (which I assure you, contains worse than that:P), that's my point. The difference between a harmful and harmless bacteria aren't that big, because even a bacteria that's harmless and already on me can easily become harmful in the right environment. It's not a simple on/off switch that determines whether something's harmful, it's a complex system, and you have to do some advanced testing if you suspect the bacteria has been altered (can't just use the standard pointers to determine what it is).
As per the main story, the difference between 'Harmless' bacteria and deadly ones is pretty darn slim and hard to tell if you're not an expert in the field. This isn't the same as most other situations as it's organic, and organic things are complex, and complex things are hard to examine to see if they're dangerous or not. They shouldn't have been so harsh on him, or so overzealous in the raid, but I don't see any problems with them testing the stuff. He admits that he was recreating germ warfare experiments from the 50s using different bacteria. He says the bacteria isn't harmful, but his rig is similar to one used on extremely harmful ones. So...we should just trust him that the bacteria aren't dangerous? Circumstantial evidence was heavily on the government's side here, anyone preparing to recreate germ warfare experiments should be looked at closely, even if they claim to be using harmless bacteria.
Now again, they should not have handled it the way they did. They should have been a lot nicer and lest gung ho about the whole situation, but they should have, and did, handle the situation, and that's good.
As for the Mail Fraud charge...I wonder what the story behind that is. That I can see in the article he never denies that he committed fraud, nor confirms it, so it seems entirely possible that they happened across this and decided to prosecute him for it, and it's also possible that they're just trying to hit him with something to make it look like they accomplished something. There's not enough info to really tell...
I never said they should design the security, just test it. I don't believe that a convicted burglar should be building locks, I'd feel a lot safer if the company that made locks had one on the payroll who got paid for discovering vulnerabilities in their locks. If things are handled right, and the correct burglar is chosen (don't go for the guy who stole for fun, get the guy who stole because he had to) then there's no reason for them to go back to their old profession.
The Black Hat shouldn't be able to change anything in the code, just do what they'd be doing anyways, trying to find vulnerabilities. This time, however, they're on the payroll and told to report any vulnerabilities. If they choose not to report a weakness and try to exploit it then the companies in the same spot it would be without the guy, except they have a very good subject on their payroll.
Better yet let's be a little more specific. Let's ask victims of lock-picking burglars who were caught (the burglars) if that burglar should be offered a job making sure that other, uncaught, burglars can't pick the locks of that company any more?
I'd feel a lot safer if a burglar who was extremely good at lock picking was unable to pick the locks I was using. Same goes for security, if you have someone who is a professional hacker trying to penetrate your system you're going to find problems a lot faster than if you just have another White Hat, whose more concerned with patching holes than finding them, looking around.
Yeah...cause the chances of having a number evaluate to 65,535 via multiplication is extremely common.
Yes this is a bug. Yeah Microsoft should fix it. No it doesn't really affect anything. The odds of this affecting your calculations are infinitesimal compared to the odds that one of the other 1000 problems you can have will affect your equations. I'm no statistician (perhaps I should use Excel to calculate it?) but I would image you have a better chance of winning the lottery than encountering this problem in a way that actually affects you, much better.
Sadly enough I wouldn't doubt it. One would hope that this isn't just a case of, well, 'that', but having seen some of the lengths lobbyists have gone to it doesn't seem that improbably.
So basically if you're stressed, you do horrible in the game...which makes you more stressed, which makes you do worse in the game...
One would think that stressed people would need to have an easier time in order to unwind, not be forced to unwind to have an easier time. I know that when I play I want the game to be easy when I'm stressed (I love just blowing through a couple of levels really easily, makes me feel 'in control' which helps de-stress me) and hard when I'm not, not the other way around.
AO games don't sell well. That's a pretty solid fact. Retailers don't like to carry games that don't sell well, and especially don't like to carry games that don't sell well AND give them bad PR, which AO games do (even M rated is started to acquire bad publicity now, back when I was a kid an AO game was treated much as M rated is now, it's something that you sell knowing that people will complain that you do sell it).
Now the interesting point here is that AO games sell bad because few retailers will carry them. That sets up a catch-22/loop, lack of retailers -> lack of sales -> lack of retailers ad infinitum.
No stores in the US "actively make the decision to let the customer choose what they want to buy" (with the extremely minor possible exception of collectible game stores that let you order stuff through them, though that doesn't count). Stores carry what they want to carry, usually based on how well they think the item will sell. If you want proof of this just pick an item, a book for instance, one of those complete flops that no one wants to buy. What do you think the odds are that your local bookstore will carry it? Not particularly good, unless you're very lucky. How about organic foods? For a long time grocery stores didn't carry those because they didn't sell well except among a certain crowd who didn't even shop at grocery stores. Was that an issue of censorship? No, it's good market decisions.
Gamestop has a limited space in which to carry games. If you've ever been to one of their stores they can have something like 300 games on display at any time (at their bigger ones, including the tiny game cassettes at the register). They don't carry AO games for the simple reason that those games would take up space and would not sell well, according to studies and something like 10 years of market research. If you believe they would sell well then you're in the vast minority and fighting an uphill battle.
So to recap, Gamestop not carrying AO games is 80% a marketing decision, and 20% a PR decision. Get all upset with the PR roll not having AO games gives them, but don't imagine that they're 'caving' in. They're simply making the intelligent decision to not fight for a game genre that has been shown to not sell well, you're asking them to carry a bunch of games that would sit on their shelves, selling once in a blue moon, and get thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, of people angry at them. That is not a smart decision at all.
Heh...I find that amusing because I myself own a Wii...as my sole console. You're right, there are a lot of people getting into the Wii who didn't used to play games and a lot of non-FPS gamers. However you seem to imply that FPS = Photorealistic graphics, which I think Metroid Prime 3 disproved and is fast using the become one of the hottest games of the year. In fact it may soon become the best selling Wii game if the current trend keeps up.
As I actually said in my post (right after the part you quoted) no. However that's irrelevant, whether or not you feel safer because of giving up some rights is irrelivant to the discussion of whether you've given up enough rights to qualify as living in a police state.
Not quite. Firstly your plan itself would be extremely difficult to implement, easily as difficult as current AIs. How do you teach the AI to prioritize area effect weapons? What if the AI's in a place where he's not supposed to damage the enviroment? Does he still prioritize area effect? How does the AI decide if his dead teammate's weapon is better than his current one? Especially when the two weapons are extremely similar (2 different SMGs), what does the AI do then? Does the AI base it's decision to charge or cover on what the PC is using? If so where's the line, for what weapons will the AI cover and for what weapons will it not? If not then the AI's gonna be pathetic when the PC's taking cover with a shotgun.
The sequence you describe is about the limit of AI programming today.
On top of that your sequence misses out on one of the best parts of modern AIs, in effect it's dumber than some current AIs. When an AI flanks you and you start taking fire from a direction you thought was safe it can be extremely surprising, and being surprised in a game is one of the best parts.
AIs need to advance because the smarter the AI the more options are available for the game. For example, old games tend to have the enemies be a lot stronger that you and outnumber you because they're so dumb they need that to stand a chance (for a modern example think the brutes in Halo 2. Simple AI but they can take and deal a lot of damage). As AI's get smarter and smarter they can get closer and closer to the player's stats, until the AI and the player both are equal in terms of stats and ability. That is when the game would be a lot of fun, when single player is like a game of multiplayer except the enemy has more players and you have surprise. In addition smarter AIs make for awesome boss fights as the tired old strategy of 'the boss has 3x normal health and damage' can be retired and the boss can instead be more intelligent then the other characters but no stronger, which is both more realistic and fun.
For the average person game has come to be equated with First Person Shooter. They are by far the most hyped and talked about types of games, far beyond any other type. For the average non-gamer the word Game is equated with either images of GTA (for the game haters) or an FPS. For the average gamer the main genre is FPS.
So you're right, this should be 'Top 10 issues facing FPS developers'. However, since for a lot of people game = FPS and this article is written for those people*, saying Top 10 game issues is perfectly reasonable.
*9 of the 10 are extremely obvious to people who play lots of games, better AIs? Yeah...that's been a well known problem for a LONG time now. A lot of modern games advertise their AIs because gamers have demanded good AIs for a long time now
Agreed. I read the article a while ago when it came out in print, it's not supposed to be a ranked list. And the AI in games like Rainbow 6 can already surprise you (I got flanked in my last game by a pair of particularly enterprising AIs), good looking water is much, much harder to find.
Geez. People like you are annoying, you know that? Police State? Where do you live? Comparing the current state of America to a Police state is complete and total hyperbole. Last time I checked we did still have free speech, just look at the University of Florida incident (the one that everyone's jumping all over as police brutality, yeah that one). The student was allowed to say what he wanted to say, he was not blocked from speaking up at all. In fact he was allowed to keep saying what he wanted to say long after he had broken the rules of the debate (and a Florida law, but that's less important).
In a true police state he would never have been allowed to speak at all. America is not a police state. America is a country where a small amount of freedom has been removed from the people in order to insure their security. A large number of American's (myself included by the way) believe that that is wrong but calling America a police state just makes you seem like a crazed fanatic, someone completely out of touch with reality. Calm down and think rationally about the freedoms you have right now. Now think about the freedoms allowed to people in a police state. Once you understand the difference between the two then you will stop looking like a fanatic and start looking like a rational individual.
Agreed. Noscript is pretty much an essential part of my browser, more so than Adblock even.
As for this move...if Google's actually not annoying in their ads (punch the monkey) then this might get more clicks. However it's also gonna use more bandwidth (sorry dial-uppers) and be blocked more often. I went through and unblocked Google from my Adblock list (doubleclick remains safely on there thank you very much) because a lot of my favorite sites used those ads to make money and it cost me nothing to let the ads come through as they're just text. With Flash ads there's no way I'm going to see them as I will not disable NoScript to see some ads, that's not happening (and Google remains safely on my untrusted list, stop trying to put cookies on my computer!)
Battlefront 2 with the Heroes and Villains update. Thanks for reminding me, one of my favorite characters to play. It was absolutely hilarious when I first attacked someone during a Heroes vs. Villains fight and realized I was using Light-Chucks:P.
You know we should probably consider nukes...maybe even launch them into orbit them drop them from there...one would imagine that it's the only way to be sure with these sorts of things...
Normally that holds true, but this is the internet we're talking about...the average IQ can decrease relative to itself because people can be just that stupid. Not even mathematics can keep up with the drop in the internet's IQ.
What ends the war is irrelevant when talking about what wins the war. The original comment was that weapons don't win wars, they do. Weapons do not end (civilized) wars (unless you're willing to completely wipe out your enemies barbarian style, then the weapons alone can end the wars). Whether or not they end them, however, they are a direct cause of winning. This can be shown simply, imagine a hypothetical war (I like to use one like WW2 but it's up to you). Imagine that one side wants to win the war without being barbaric. Now imagine that their weapons are inferior to the enemies. Tell me how they can win the war without developing superior weapons.
No army with inferior weaponry (and I count training as weapons fyi) has ever won a war with a country that had even a reasonable sized army.
The Pacific side of WW2 was won because Japan was devistated enough to surrender after having 2 Nuclear Weapons dropped on it. The European side of WW2 was won because the Allied side had more weapons and soldiers then the Axis side and was able to fully occupy their territory.
I could cite other examples but I have to go soon. Here's a simple fact though, 90% of wars are won as a direct result of weapons and the willingness to use them. Rarely do they end with weapons, more often they end with diplomacy, but almost always that diplomacy comes as a direct result of superior weapons being used on a side that thought themselves invincible and was unwilling to enter into diplomatic arrangements until that invincibility was crushed.
As one of my favorite quotes goes, "Violence never solved anything...except slavery, fascism, nazism, communism, baathism, dictatorships and a few other things". Guess what. While war, violence, and weapons may not be able, on their own, to win a war, as that generally requires diplomacy of some sort, they can be the direct cause of that diplomacy and so, since p->q (weapons lead to diplomacy) and q->r (diplomacy leads to 'winning' the war), p->r (can you tell I've been studying for a discrete mathmatics test today?:P).
Slashdot Mirror
I don't really disagree. The problem is that they didn't lock him up for having some harmless bacteria, they locked him up for having unknown bacteria, then released him once they learned they were harmless. It's more like locking someone up because circumstantial evidence seems to point to him having weaponized bacteria, then releasing him when he doesn't.
:P), that's my point. The difference between a harmful and harmless bacteria aren't that big, because even a bacteria that's harmless and already on me can easily become harmful in the right environment. It's not a simple on/off switch that determines whether something's harmful, it's a complex system, and you have to do some advanced testing if you suspect the bacteria has been altered (can't just use the standard pointers to determine what it is).
As for your first comment, about my mouth (which I assure you, contains worse than that
As per the main story, the difference between 'Harmless' bacteria and deadly ones is pretty darn slim and hard to tell if you're not an expert in the field. This isn't the same as most other situations as it's organic, and organic things are complex, and complex things are hard to examine to see if they're dangerous or not. They shouldn't have been so harsh on him, or so overzealous in the raid, but I don't see any problems with them testing the stuff. He admits that he was recreating germ warfare experiments from the 50s using different bacteria. He says the bacteria isn't harmful, but his rig is similar to one used on extremely harmful ones. So...we should just trust him that the bacteria aren't dangerous? Circumstantial evidence was heavily on the government's side here, anyone preparing to recreate germ warfare experiments should be looked at closely, even if they claim to be using harmless bacteria.
Now again, they should not have handled it the way they did. They should have been a lot nicer and lest gung ho about the whole situation, but they should have, and did, handle the situation, and that's good.
As for the Mail Fraud charge...I wonder what the story behind that is. That I can see in the article he never denies that he committed fraud, nor confirms it, so it seems entirely possible that they happened across this and decided to prosecute him for it, and it's also possible that they're just trying to hit him with something to make it look like they accomplished something. There's not enough info to really tell...
Good Legal Advice?
/. !!!!
THIS IS
I never said they should design the security, just test it. I don't believe that a convicted burglar should be building locks, I'd feel a lot safer if the company that made locks had one on the payroll who got paid for discovering vulnerabilities in their locks. If things are handled right, and the correct burglar is chosen (don't go for the guy who stole for fun, get the guy who stole because he had to) then there's no reason for them to go back to their old profession.
The Black Hat shouldn't be able to change anything in the code, just do what they'd be doing anyways, trying to find vulnerabilities. This time, however, they're on the payroll and told to report any vulnerabilities. If they choose not to report a weakness and try to exploit it then the companies in the same spot it would be without the guy, except they have a very good subject on their payroll.
Better yet let's be a little more specific. Let's ask victims of lock-picking burglars who were caught (the burglars) if that burglar should be offered a job making sure that other, uncaught, burglars can't pick the locks of that company any more?
I'd feel a lot safer if a burglar who was extremely good at lock picking was unable to pick the locks I was using. Same goes for security, if you have someone who is a professional hacker trying to penetrate your system you're going to find problems a lot faster than if you just have another White Hat, whose more concerned with patching holes than finding them, looking around.
Yeah...cause the chances of having a number evaluate to 65,535 via multiplication is extremely common.
Yes this is a bug. Yeah Microsoft should fix it. No it doesn't really affect anything. The odds of this affecting your calculations are infinitesimal compared to the odds that one of the other 1000 problems you can have will affect your equations. I'm no statistician (perhaps I should use Excel to calculate it?) but I would image you have a better chance of winning the lottery than encountering this problem in a way that actually affects you, much better.
I find your lack of faith...wait...hang on...the RIAA? Oh, well it's fine then...carry on...
Sadly enough I wouldn't doubt it. One would hope that this isn't just a case of, well, 'that', but having seen some of the lengths lobbyists have gone to it doesn't seem that improbably.
:(
And that is sad
So basically if you're stressed, you do horrible in the game...which makes you more stressed, which makes you do worse in the game...
One would think that stressed people would need to have an easier time in order to unwind, not be forced to unwind to have an easier time. I know that when I play I want the game to be easy when I'm stressed (I love just blowing through a couple of levels really easily, makes me feel 'in control' which helps de-stress me) and hard when I'm not, not the other way around.
AO games don't sell well. That's a pretty solid fact. Retailers don't like to carry games that don't sell well, and especially don't like to carry games that don't sell well AND give them bad PR, which AO games do (even M rated is started to acquire bad publicity now, back when I was a kid an AO game was treated much as M rated is now, it's something that you sell knowing that people will complain that you do sell it).
Now the interesting point here is that AO games sell bad because few retailers will carry them. That sets up a catch-22/loop, lack of retailers -> lack of sales -> lack of retailers ad infinitum.
No stores in the US "actively make the decision to let the customer choose what they want to buy" (with the extremely minor possible exception of collectible game stores that let you order stuff through them, though that doesn't count). Stores carry what they want to carry, usually based on how well they think the item will sell. If you want proof of this just pick an item, a book for instance, one of those complete flops that no one wants to buy. What do you think the odds are that your local bookstore will carry it? Not particularly good, unless you're very lucky. How about organic foods? For a long time grocery stores didn't carry those because they didn't sell well except among a certain crowd who didn't even shop at grocery stores. Was that an issue of censorship? No, it's good market decisions.
Gamestop has a limited space in which to carry games. If you've ever been to one of their stores they can have something like 300 games on display at any time (at their bigger ones, including the tiny game cassettes at the register). They don't carry AO games for the simple reason that those games would take up space and would not sell well, according to studies and something like 10 years of market research. If you believe they would sell well then you're in the vast minority and fighting an uphill battle.
So to recap, Gamestop not carrying AO games is 80% a marketing decision, and 20% a PR decision. Get all upset with the PR roll not having AO games gives them, but don't imagine that they're 'caving' in. They're simply making the intelligent decision to not fight for a game genre that has been shown to not sell well, you're asking them to carry a bunch of games that would sit on their shelves, selling once in a blue moon, and get thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, of people angry at them. That is not a smart decision at all.
Senator Kerry? Is that you?
Heh...I find that amusing because I myself own a Wii...as my sole console. You're right, there are a lot of people getting into the Wii who didn't used to play games and a lot of non-FPS gamers. However you seem to imply that FPS = Photorealistic graphics, which I think Metroid Prime 3 disproved and is fast using the become one of the hottest games of the year. In fact it may soon become the best selling Wii game if the current trend keeps up.
As I actually said in my post (right after the part you quoted) no. However that's irrelevant, whether or not you feel safer because of giving up some rights is irrelivant to the discussion of whether you've given up enough rights to qualify as living in a police state.
Not quite. Firstly your plan itself would be extremely difficult to implement, easily as difficult as current AIs. How do you teach the AI to prioritize area effect weapons? What if the AI's in a place where he's not supposed to damage the enviroment? Does he still prioritize area effect? How does the AI decide if his dead teammate's weapon is better than his current one? Especially when the two weapons are extremely similar (2 different SMGs), what does the AI do then? Does the AI base it's decision to charge or cover on what the PC is using? If so where's the line, for what weapons will the AI cover and for what weapons will it not? If not then the AI's gonna be pathetic when the PC's taking cover with a shotgun.
The sequence you describe is about the limit of AI programming today.
On top of that your sequence misses out on one of the best parts of modern AIs, in effect it's dumber than some current AIs. When an AI flanks you and you start taking fire from a direction you thought was safe it can be extremely surprising, and being surprised in a game is one of the best parts.
AIs need to advance because the smarter the AI the more options are available for the game. For example, old games tend to have the enemies be a lot stronger that you and outnumber you because they're so dumb they need that to stand a chance (for a modern example think the brutes in Halo 2. Simple AI but they can take and deal a lot of damage). As AI's get smarter and smarter they can get closer and closer to the player's stats, until the AI and the player both are equal in terms of stats and ability. That is when the game would be a lot of fun, when single player is like a game of multiplayer except the enemy has more players and you have surprise. In addition smarter AIs make for awesome boss fights as the tired old strategy of 'the boss has 3x normal health and damage' can be retired and the boss can instead be more intelligent then the other characters but no stronger, which is both more realistic and fun.
For the average person game has come to be equated with First Person Shooter. They are by far the most hyped and talked about types of games, far beyond any other type. For the average non-gamer the word Game is equated with either images of GTA (for the game haters) or an FPS. For the average gamer the main genre is FPS.
So you're right, this should be 'Top 10 issues facing FPS developers'. However, since for a lot of people game = FPS and this article is written for those people*, saying Top 10 game issues is perfectly reasonable.
*9 of the 10 are extremely obvious to people who play lots of games, better AIs? Yeah...that's been a well known problem for a LONG time now. A lot of modern games advertise their AIs because gamers have demanded good AIs for a long time now
Agreed. I read the article a while ago when it came out in print, it's not supposed to be a ranked list. And the AI in games like Rainbow 6 can already surprise you (I got flanked in my last game by a pair of particularly enterprising AIs), good looking water is much, much harder to find.
Geez. People like you are annoying, you know that? Police State? Where do you live? Comparing the current state of America to a Police state is complete and total hyperbole. Last time I checked we did still have free speech, just look at the University of Florida incident (the one that everyone's jumping all over as police brutality, yeah that one). The student was allowed to say what he wanted to say, he was not blocked from speaking up at all. In fact he was allowed to keep saying what he wanted to say long after he had broken the rules of the debate (and a Florida law, but that's less important).
In a true police state he would never have been allowed to speak at all. America is not a police state. America is a country where a small amount of freedom has been removed from the people in order to insure their security. A large number of American's (myself included by the way) believe that that is wrong but calling America a police state just makes you seem like a crazed fanatic, someone completely out of touch with reality. Calm down and think rationally about the freedoms you have right now. Now think about the freedoms allowed to people in a police state. Once you understand the difference between the two then you will stop looking like a fanatic and start looking like a rational individual.
Agreed. Noscript is pretty much an essential part of my browser, more so than Adblock even.
As for this move...if Google's actually not annoying in their ads (punch the monkey) then this might get more clicks. However it's also gonna use more bandwidth (sorry dial-uppers) and be blocked more often. I went through and unblocked Google from my Adblock list (doubleclick remains safely on there thank you very much) because a lot of my favorite sites used those ads to make money and it cost me nothing to let the ads come through as they're just text. With Flash ads there's no way I'm going to see them as I will not disable NoScript to see some ads, that's not happening (and Google remains safely on my untrusted list, stop trying to put cookies on my computer!)
Battlefront 2 with the Heroes and Villains update. Thanks for reminding me, one of my favorite characters to play. It was absolutely hilarious when I first attacked someone during a Heroes vs. Villains fight and realized I was using Light-Chucks :P.
Blast...it's not an original idea at all then...
You know we should probably consider nukes...maybe even launch them into orbit them drop them from there...one would imagine that it's the only way to be sure with these sorts of things...
Sweats Nitric Acid you say...
*Goes to put on more Anti-Sweat Deodorant before heading off to the Airport*
LIGHTSABER-CHUCKS! Genius! I was looking for my new awesome weapon idea of the month!
Normally that holds true, but this is the internet we're talking about...the average IQ can decrease relative to itself because people can be just that stupid. Not even mathematics can keep up with the drop in the internet's IQ.
What ends the war is irrelevant when talking about what wins the war. The original comment was that weapons don't win wars, they do. Weapons do not end (civilized) wars (unless you're willing to completely wipe out your enemies barbarian style, then the weapons alone can end the wars). Whether or not they end them, however, they are a direct cause of winning. This can be shown simply, imagine a hypothetical war (I like to use one like WW2 but it's up to you). Imagine that one side wants to win the war without being barbaric. Now imagine that their weapons are inferior to the enemies. Tell me how they can win the war without developing superior weapons.
No army with inferior weaponry (and I count training as weapons fyi) has ever won a war with a country that had even a reasonable sized army.
The Pacific side of WW2 was won because Japan was devistated enough to surrender after having 2 Nuclear Weapons dropped on it.
:P).
The European side of WW2 was won because the Allied side had more weapons and soldiers then the Axis side and was able to fully occupy their territory.
I could cite other examples but I have to go soon. Here's a simple fact though, 90% of wars are won as a direct result of weapons and the willingness to use them. Rarely do they end with weapons, more often they end with diplomacy, but almost always that diplomacy comes as a direct result of superior weapons being used on a side that thought themselves invincible and was unwilling to enter into diplomatic arrangements until that invincibility was crushed.
As one of my favorite quotes goes, "Violence never solved anything...except slavery, fascism, nazism, communism, baathism, dictatorships and a few other things". Guess what. While war, violence, and weapons may not be able, on their own, to win a war, as that generally requires diplomacy of some sort, they can be the direct cause of that diplomacy and so, since p->q (weapons lead to diplomacy) and q->r (diplomacy leads to 'winning' the war), p->r (can you tell I've been studying for a discrete mathmatics test today?