Hell, just whip up a website that lets users upload a video and get a link back to the improved version of video (use cloud compute for the first few months if needed.)

Get some word of mouth (look at Youtube videos that could benefit - mail the uploaders.) If people actually use it, you can and will get buzz fast on the tech sites.

If you have growing users/day, the VC pitch will be much easier.

Fire and electricity seem to be game mechanics. They happen all the time even if humans aren't around, think about a lightning storm. Game changing, yes, but what the game designer expects you to find and use.

Quantum mechanics, on the other hand, seems more like an artifact of the implementation of reality: everything seems to behave like a classical, Newtonian, clockwork universe, until you look really closely and see we actually have delayed evaluation (or "compute when needed.") That seems like an efficiency hack we weren't supposed to be aware of, and actually makes me think we are probably in a simulation.

I've not sure you understand what the creative people are trying to say. Inspiration is not some Greek God blessing bestowed randomly on creative people because they are walking in the sun. Every good "inspiration" is the result of hundreds of hours of thinking about something from lots of angles and exploring the various ramifications of the ideas you are generating. You can get this from lots of walks outside with your mind free to play with ideas, you don't get it from playing simple games that occupy your brain.

Talk to a musician or scientist: every "inspiration" is the end result of lots of precursor work. As the pieces start falling into place in your mind, you know you are going to get that breakthrough in a week, or a day, or a minute. It becomes so obvious you hardly need to think about it: "it's so beautiful it must be true" is common to music and physics and math.

Agreed, but what do you expect them to sample?

A global statistical model? They claim not to have one.

A Population of actors doing rational things? They didn't seem to implement one.

It's not the DRM (a real screw-up) but the fact that the entire underlying game is borked.

All that cool "model each sim, global structure emerges" rather than "model the global structure, visualize it with animations of sim" seems to be faked. All the fakery means the global structure of the game is just broken: you can't build a large functional city in any reasonable way.

For example, sims leave work, drive home, and pick the first random house they see. They they get wealthy/educated for the next day based on the house they are in. Sure, you get some emergent structure, but it's nothing like a real city or even previous simcity games.

Path-finding seems borked: shortest path is picked over fastest path. All your fire-trucks race to the single closest fire. Left-turns are a recipe for endless traffic jams. Forget using mass transit usefully.

The YouTube videos show all this. It seems beyond fixing, unless they can revert to the old statistical simulation model somehow: one PC doesn't have enough compute to run a large city - they could offload to the cloud (ha, they aren't going that,) or rope the GPU into doing clever sim work (that's a research project.)

Closest I got to Utah was Arizona. Got pulled over for 87mph in Buckeye. Using my English accent, told the cop how much better the roads and scenery and everything was in Arizona and the United States (how can you not speed on such an awesome motorway?) He let me off and gave me a list of Arizona attractions. Win for us both.

Wow, then you are doing something really wrong. Sure, 20% may be idiots with a pre-conceived notion of what the situation is, but 80% are people doing a job and wanting to have a good experience for themselves (and that includes fixing your problem, etc.) If you can get a girl's phone number at a bar, you have enough social skills to get good service from a state or federal employee.

70 over the speed limit, 3 years unfiled minor tax forms, fishing out of season, expired vehicle registration, no car insurance, underaged drunk semi-naked 15 year-old. All resolved with a warning, a high-five, or a $17 payment (for the annoying tax issue, penalties waived.)

And the supreme court judge who granted us smoke breaks during jury sequester (easy negotiation, the court bailiff was impressed though,) and the hot assistant DA (loved the red dress) who returned my lost wallet and said she got satisfaction out of making private citizens happy, and could she do anything more for me?

I love my interactions with government.

Spend energy to convert CO2 to another fuel. Great. That has nothing to do with the article unless "unadulterated CO2" is something important. Unfortunately, "unadulterated CO2" is not exciting: it's cheap and hardly more useful than adulterated CO2.

Thanks for playing.

So it captured 99% of the CO2 in a vessel. Great! Now what does it do with it? Vent it to the atmosphere for zero gain?

Or use some magic zero energy cost process to convert it to chalk or something? Guess the article was missing that.

This is like Sasha Cohen's Hoverboard invention - it's a plank that real scientists can figure out how to levitate. Can I have venture capital?

It's often worse for lawyers, accountants, architects, and consultants at the big firms. You get hired out of school, are expected to work eighty-hour weeks, get ranked and bonused for three to eight years, then just get fired if you haven't advanced to the stay-alive job title (junior partner, director, etc.)

The logic is brutal but compelling: you will work hard, some will make it. Those that don't should be fired before they can form long-term relationships with the firms clients (and become potential competitors.)

Tech isn't quite as tough, but similar logic often applies: the stagnant old timers in any firm become liabilities. They aren't kicking ass, but are creating ever more B-quality code building upon older B-quality code. Eventually, your firm becomes a dinosaur.

It's pretty damning data: it says the reporter lied on significant points. The ball's in his court now: he can declare he told the truth, or he can call out Musk for lying.

If he goes all in, that's when the hard log data comes out.

Broder wants to keep his reputation intact, and is trying hard to avoid saying Musk is lying, because he has to have a bad feeling he will get hit with the raw log data. If Musk is lying, and he calls him on it, he gets a Pullitzer, but he isn't doing that.

It can still be reversed, but typically not by you on a whim :) So, they want you to be really sure you are sending the right amount of money to the right counterparty: it makes their job a lot easier.

Thousands of wire transfers are reversed every day: software problems, miskeyed data, obsolete routing info, various post facto triggers (fraud alerts, money-laundering alerts, terrorist alerts, etc.)

Note the there is a difference between "making funds available to an account," and "actually having money in an account." Checks vs wire transfers have different speeds at which funds become available, but the actual "having the money for sure" can take an open ended amount of time (60 days or more, worse case.) So even if $100K is wired into your account, you can spend it, and next week find you owe the bank $100K because the wire transfer was later rejected.

The "funds on hold" time period for checks is the result of two banks needing to agree money is to be transferred between them (I present check from bank A to bank B, bank B needs to assert bank A will honor the check.) This ensures the amount of bank deposits in the system reflects reality rather than people kiting checks for ever larger amounts to each other.

This is orthogonal to your ability to withdraw money from your account because it has a positive balance. That's a convenience your retail bank affords you. You're on the hook if the funds you relied on don't materialize on time.

Either you misspelled "Music" or you forgot your clever "~" at the end of the password.

Does you parole officer require you to post to slashdot multiple times a day as evidence that you are integrating with society, or do you just do it because Jody Foster still doesn't return your calls?~

Hell, make it 13 characters long (just add '~' at the end to indicate snarky,) that way all the haxxors will be confused because they didn't guess you were being snarky.