Like the last left-leaning government that did more damage to the nation's healthcare, social security, employee protection, financial market regulation and other sectors than the previous conservative government could've ever dreamed during its 16 years of majority?

1978, aged 8, our school had a commodore pet 3032. i typed in a simple program in BASIC, 10 for i = 1 to 40, 20 print tab(i), i 30 next i, 40 goto 10 and watched the numbers 1 to 40 scroll across the screen. i figured "huh that was obvious, i can do that" and 25 years later i was reverse-engineering NT 4.0 Domains network traffic (often literally one bit at a time) by the same kind of logical inference of observing results and deducing knowledge.

by 2006 i learned that there is something called "Advaita Vedanta" which is crudely known in the west as "espistemology". Advaita Vedanta basically classifies knowledge (there are several types: inference is just one of them), and knowing *that* allows you to have the confidence in your abilities. up until i heard about Advaita Vedanta i was "hacking blind and instinctively", basically. now i know that reverse-engineering is basically an extreme form of knowledge inference. which is kinda cool.

yeah, me! were you around in 1995-1996 by any chance? in CB1 Cafe in cambridge UK i was the person who discovered that you could put zombies into the underground phase-tunnel vehicles, then sneak behind enemy lines (the underground vehicle could see "up" into one square at a time). i would go looking for artillery because artillery by default had a reaaally nasty habit of auto-firing at close-range enemies on a huuge delay. so, what would happen was: first zombie went up, artillery would turn and begin loading, zombie would go to nearest artillery craft and suicide, blowing up several. all artillery would fire, blowing up even more. second zombie up, artillery lock-and-load, zombie makes a beeline for.... you get the idea.

anyway the idea was good enough that it ended up on the hints-and-tips page. turns out that the people who we played were some of the people who worked at activision :)

huh. this sounds very similar to the theoretical virus designs i came up with many years ago. yes, you heard right: turn it round. instead of the programs on the computer being randomised so that they are resistant to malware attacks, randomise the *malware* so that it is resistant to *anti-virus* detection. the model is basically the flu or common cold virus.

here's where it gets interesting: comparing the use of randomisation in malware vs randomisation in defense against malware, it's probably going to start being used in malware before it gets used in defending against malware. why? because malware attackers have nothing to lose. unfortunately, they are likely to keep their compilers secret. even *more* unfortunately, successful creation of anti-malware randomising compilers means that the malware attackers can use them as well.

but, that is just a risk that has to be taken, and make sure a decent job is done of it.

Even with languages that share a common ancestry, these programs still have trouble when it comes to context, as shown in the following screenshot on the same topic.
http://www.androidcentral.com/...

In this case the software tried to translate "move", which the original text uses in the context of "cancel the lease on your apartment and move to a different address" (German word would be "umziehen") and instead picks the German word "verschieben", which is the translation in the context of "grab and item and push it until it's no longer in spot A but in spot B".
Unless the software can actually factor in the context (as Google's search algorithm often tries to do), Murphy's Law will still have a field day with words that can translate into several different and distinct ones in the other language.

who persistently find in favour of the woman, ignoring the benefits that a father can bring to children: if mother does not want her ex-partner around the courts do little to help dad remain in the kids lives. She can break court orders with little penalty while dad is faced with huge legal bills and delays. The courts pretend to act in the best interests of the children - but really they are prejudiced in favour of mothers.

ah, i wrote a diesel truck simulator in 1993 for Pi Technology: there is actually much more to it than that. with a bigger engine with higher torque it is possible to have the vehicle drive more often in its peak torque range where it has either better acceleration or better fuel economy or both.

with a smaller engine the effect you mention - that people put their foot to the floor - means that the engine has to rev its nuts off and thus operates waaay outside of its efficiency band.

you need to watch that program. have you watched the program yet? what did the program get across to you, and can you put it better than i can?

before making *any* judgement you *need* to watch the program on 5th gear which covers exactly this question in some detail. basically the test was designed originally for people driving sensibly, and it was designed i think well over 20 possibly even 30 years ago. so it has a very *very* gentle acceleration and deceleration curve. gentle acceleration because that is not only fuel-efficient but also the cars of that time simply could not accelerate that much, and gentle braking because again that is more fuel-efficient but also because if you had drum brakes they would overheat.

people no longer drive sensibly: they are more aggressive with other drivers (not keeping a safe distance), they put their foot down hard on the accelerator and they put their foot down hard on the brake. also as the cars are more reliable they tend to not maintain them properly: until i watched another program on 5th gear about how badly old oil affects fuel economy and the lifetime of the engine i had absolutely no intention of changing oil regularly in the decade-year-old cars i buy.

so, in effect, people should stop complaining and start driving in more fuel-efficient ways... *regardless* of how aggressive the person behind them gets when they set off from the lights at the same acceleration rate as a 40 tonne cargo lorry. that's the other person's problem.

i love descent, and i love that it's now software libre. i hope the guy who maintains d2x has stopped being an idiot by including patched versions of standard libraries such as libsdl without providing an option to replace them and forcing the patched versions to overwrite pre-installed software, but yes - awesome.

the thing about descent was that it was the first game with 6 degrees of freedom. i actually bought a special joystick that was capable of dealing with it (one designed for flight simulators) and after 2 to 3 weeks of practicing i was competent at side-motion circular slides firing at a target at the centre. the first 2 weeks were spent mostly getting motion sickness and having the nose of the craft bashed against a corner :)

it was also fun to watch spectators swaying from watching the screen! but, again, after a couple of weeks you got used to it, both as a player and as a spectator.

yeah - to those people who set up LAN parties: i hear ya :) i did the same. i think the lowest spec i got away with was a 486 SX 25 with 12mb of RAM, setting the screen to 320x240 and it was just about tolerable. i had to use 10-Base-T with terminators for goodness sake - what the heck i was doing with 5 networked computers in my house back in 1996 with just a 28kbaud modem i _really_ don't know!

so yes, absolutely: descent (the software libre version *or* a commercial version) gets my vote... *as long as* it has a community portal similar to that of Dark Reign, with a chat room so that people can meet other players, set up a match and play. that is bizarrely what's missing from bzflag: although bzflag has an in-game chat it doesn't hatve out-game community chat, very odd.

also, it would be awesome to see planetary-surface action as well, not just in mines (no matter how large). i always felt a little claustrophobic and the attack vectors would be very different in free space... interesting to think about the possibilities here, hmmm :)

The NSA probably wanted more time to exploit it.

we need an extra poll option: there needs to be a man walking in front of the vehicle holding a red flag:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L...

14 billion? That's less than it costs to supply that little adventure in the Iraqi desert with toilet paper!!!

that I can sue the NSA for trying to crack my machines and that the USA will extradite the NSA employees to the UK so that they can be tried in our courts ? Do the people at the USA DOJ understand the meaning of the word ''irony'' ?

This is more outlandish than even something that most political satire writers would have dreamed up.