Slashback: Games, Goats, Galileo

Slashback tonight brings you word on a games contest, an update to the famous spider-goat hybrid which grossed you out months ago, bad news for Galileo's last days, passable news for anyone following the David McOwen story and more. Read on for the updates :)

Make sure you slip this into the fine print of your consulting contracts. Adn writes "Newsbytes is reporting in a story that David McOwen, who was facing some pretty serious charges will be let go with a fine as against a much harsher fate. If utilizing so called "unused cycles" for the greater good is a crime (I know he was not charged for that per se... but bear with me here) then makes you consider uninstalling all those SETI@Home Screensavers doesnt it? Also a larger question...If the law (in these kinds of cases) operates on the 'intent' of the accused, what is the justification for even considering it a crime?"

Playing games builds your mind and your hand-eye coordination. Bill Kendrick writes: "The results are in for the SDL Game Contest held by No Starch Press, Linux Journal and Loki Games.

First place was awarded to LBreakout by Michael Speck. Second place went to Tower Toppler by Andreas Roever. My own game, Vectoroids just barely made third place over another asteroids-style game, Rock Dodgers by Paul Holt.

Congratulations! The full list of games is listed on No Starch's results page."

Guaranteed not to be your average Slashdot book review! Alex Chiu writes "Hello. This is alex chiu. I have written an online book at http://superiching.com Teaching people how to communicate with God using I-Ching. This online book is free for everyone to read. It's at least 5 times bigger than alexchiu.com. If interested, please release this news."

You may remember Alex from the interview we did with him a little while ago -- truly a unique individual.

Flying blind and a long way from home. Vertigo01 writes: "According to this article on CNN.com, galileo has encountered some technical problems on its flyby of Io and "for unknown reasons, went into safe mode" ... (sounds like my last Win98 install) ... flight engineers hope to restore normal operation for the duration of Galileo's life, but it looks like we won't get any more pictures of Io out of her."

Victoria's Secret probably won't put this on the box. FortKnox writes "Spider Silk is long known to be one of the strongest biological structure made (5 times stronger than steel by weight). Biologists have already genetically engineered goats to produce spider silk in their milk. Now, they have successfully extracted the protein and "spun" the silk. The next, and final step, is to mass produce the silk to be available commercially. Move over kevlar, here comes something better! I want to have the first biologically built house! I wonder how insulated spider silk is...."

Tower Toppler

[Renraku]

Tower Toppler was an Atari game from way back in the day. Dunno if the gameplay in the one mentioned is the same as the sourceforge one, but it wouldn't surprise me. I begged my parents for this game for years, forgetting about shitty pac-man or the Indiana Jones game that had no point at all.

Re:The Law

[quincy_MD]

Not quite... The law makes a distinction between 2 different classes of crime: malum prohibitum and malum in se. Malum prohibitum crimes are crimes that are (literally) "Evil because it's prohibited". There is no need to have intent to break malum prohibitum laws. Speeding on the interstate, for example, is malum prohibitum. Even if you didn't intend to speed, you still broke the law. Malum in se crimes are crimes that are (literally) "Evil in and of themselves". These are crimes like murder... To murder someone requires an intent to murder. To be guilty of the crime requires that the prosecution prove you intended to commit the crime. And I'm sure the "stealing computer time" thing is malum prohibitum.

Re:Funniest quote ever.

[Wyatt Earp]

There was another funny quote about them from a couple years back.

"If you put a bunch of spiders in togeather, in a few days you are left with one big, fat, happy spider."

IIRC this was when the genetic alterations was being done to the goats, nice to see there's been progress. This has been a Army funded project for years, I remeber reading it in the WSJ back in the mid 80s.

Re:Tower Toppler

[SuzanneA]

Actually, its a rewrite of Nebulus by Hewson. It was released on the C64, Spectrum, ST, Amiga, and probably others. I'm not sure which came first, probably either the Spectrum or C64 version (given that Hewson was a UK company).

SDL game contest downloads

[OverCode@work]

The game download page is not ready yet, but you can find many of these games on the authors' home pages. I highly recommend downloading them -- there were some really good submissions. And by all means don't just download the top three. Almost all of the entries are worth a look.

Although some were disappointed that their games didn't win, everyone has been very polite and understanding. That says a lot about the open source/free software development community. It really was a pleasure to deal with everyone involved in the contest.

-John (one of four SDL game contest judges)

Re:Why Goats?

[Wise Dragon]

I have years of experience milking and caring for goats and cows.

Goats

Are less likely to die than cows, and less expensive when they DO die

Reproduce faster than cows.

Can eat a wider variety of foods than cows

Are easier to milk than cows

Are easier to drag around than cows

Goats make less of a mess when they defecate.

The main problem with goats is that the milk tastes terrible. Some breeds are tastier than others, but I gag on most of it. Note that this is not a problem when it comes to spider silk.

Re:Super I-Ching

[_ph1ux_]

I-ching is performed by throwing three coins.
The I-ching is the reading of the meanings of tri-grams. Tri-grams are made up of three lines - either solid or broken.

Each coin represents one line. Heads=solid Tails=broken.

So if you throw three coins it will be something like: heads, heads, tail (usually you predetermine that you are going to read the coins leftmost first - or something.)

so H,H,T would look like:

---
---
- -

and you would look up this trigram symbol for its meaning....

sometimes you would throw 3 times and look up all three symbols to get a more in depth reading.

Re:Why Goats?

[coyul]

Forgot the link:
http://www.forbes.com/global/2001/0219/061.html [forbes.com]

Re:Spider Silk

[RapaNui]

IIRC Vectran is a 'Liquid Crystal Polymer' fibre, quite frequently mentioned during the last two(?) or so America's Cup events.
Seems to mainly be used in competition sails.

Uh.. found a link:

Vectran fibres [vectran.net]