Did you read the Pacman Dossier linked from TFA? They specifically say how the best player in the world doesn't play by memorising a pattern, because that's too inflexible. If you make a mistake while executing the pattern, memorisers are at loss to how to recover from that mistake. On the other hand, learning ghost behaviour allows you to adapt much better and removes that inflexibility, and this is how the best player in the world racked up a perfect score.

I actually offered just that while going through airport security recently. I got selected on both directions of my trip. I opted out twice. I offered both times to strip instead of being probed. The first pat down actually wasn't that bad, no touching of my genitals. The second one touched them very briefly.

I wore a long skirt with nothing underneath, but they didn't seem to take any note of that.

I also wasn't brave enough to make too much of a fuss, because as a foreign national, I thought I couldn't afford dealing with the problems if they had happened (e.g. being stranded in a foreign airport in a foreign country). I did tell them I was opting out due to 4th amendment issues, because they asked me why I was opting out, and were writing it down.

Yeah, in case anyone else thought the name was familiar...

Fuck. :-(

It was a pleasure to burn...

The point of a patent is to encourage people to invent.

People have this huge idea that patents are there in order to give people an incentive to create. That's mostly what copyright is supposed to do, not patents. The point with patents is to get rid of guild secrets. The essential point of a patent is that you carefully describe how your invention works in exchange of the state granting you a temporary monopoly on your invention. The alternative to patents is that you have to use a trade secret in order to exploit your invention without the state-granted monopoly.

Patents right now are completely broken because they are not actually disclosing any secrets, just expressing obvious facts. That is the real reason they're broken. Not because they're stifling innovation. Innovation is happening of its own accord. Patents don't affect innovation. They affect patent warfare, but were supposed to kill or discourage trade secrets.

Y'know what, I was thinking the same, because it's a widely acknowledged fact that change sucks, but this guy has convinced me otherwise.

You're a webdev? I know you said you don't want to keep doing that, but what else are you happy doing?

Right now, GNU Octave is looking to rebrand itself and is starting a website to rival Matlab Central. The The Octave-Forge pages also need help, and a hot new designer star just recently came along who is helping us with logo and brand image design. His name is Fotios Kasolis.

You could do a lot of good if you got involved with us. Plus, Octave itself is interesting if you're into mathematics and numerical analysis.

In the US, for example, (get this) corporations are now considered to be people and to have the same rights of free speech!

Old news is old... like, 19th century old... Corporations have been considered to be people since the 14th ammendment passed... Which is really perverse, when you realise that the amendment was intended for the protection of newly freed slaves, and instead it was overwhelmingly used to grant corporations property rights.

I'm not making this up.

ZOMBO

If it's anecdotes you want, I can provide a counteranecdote.

My mom runs Debian. She learned how to use a mouse about a year and a half ago. She was getting pretty fed up with Windows, antivirus popup this, ad over here, Sony Vaio crapware all over the place.

With Debian, her experience has been much more pleasant, in her own words "a lot less bullshit", and she doesn't miss the ads I adblocked for her in Iceweasel.

Sure, she didn't install or configure Debian... I did that for her, but someone else took the chore of installing and configuring OS X for the hardware it's running on. If you were to install a half-assed version of OS X on some unfamiliar hardware, your user would have the same experience. I chose what the default apps would be, I chose default formats that would be the least hassle for her, I was her one-time sysadmin, and have forgotten about it since. She now uses her Debian laptop mostly for Facebook, email, and opening MSFT Office attachments her friends send her. All works without a hitch. If you or someone else had taken the time to config Ubuntu for your friend, I think your anecdote would be different.

You could argue that it should just work "out of the box" for all possible hardware, but given the scope of Linux and free software in general, this is an impossible task. There are too many boxes out there.

I find it profoundly unsatisfying that you have to ask this question.

It's not your fault; it's the structure of the educational system. You are clearly not interested in mathematics, since you just want to cram and pass some test. You don't specify exactly for what you need mathematics, but I'm guessing it's for some other thing, possibly something computer related.

It's a big lie that you'll ever use calculus for anything except for specialised degrees (and if you were to use it for anything you personally would want to do in your future, you would already be interested in it). It's also profoundly strange that calculus seems to be pinnacle of mathematical education if you're not going to go on to study something like mathematics itself or physics.

To put my frustration another way, why doesn't anybody ever ask similar questions for sculpture, or Schaum's Outlines on Basket Weaving or all the other myriad useless things we humans do for our edification? Why is western society obsessed with mathematics, deluded into thinking it's useful in general, and why are people so stressed over learning this useless and dryly-presented subject? Why aren't you required to achieve a certain level of chess expertise before you can complete a computer science degree? A lot of early computer science was concerned with chess playing, let us not forget!

It's pointless. It's pointless to cram for exams about subjects you don't care about in order to satisfy requirements you don't genuinely need.

My recommendation is, are you really interested in learning this stuff? If so, just spend hours and hours in your local university library in the math section browsing books you're interested in. If you're not really interested, go grab some Schaum's Outlines or the Complete Idiot's guide or whatever, and use that to pass whatever bureaucratic and pointless requirement your educational institute imposes before you're allowed to study what you really want to study.

I want to hear you had to go to the hospital for an emergency maxilofacial reconstruction.