just invent transparent aluminium, kit out an old alien spacecraft with a big water tank, and transport it...

We tried that. Random whales kept clogging the lines.

Better yet, build a telecom that isn't a dick. If it works right, I won't care about my brown lawn, I'd probably never even see it. I'll put up damned cacti to get away from AT & Comcast Warner, who are already prickly.

I'm sick and tired of forced bundling from telecoms in general. I can't just buy what I want and only what I want; I have to buy crap I don't want and don't use to get it, and there is not enough competition to find one that doesn't ALSO force bundling.

They should be split up, not merged, dammit! Merging just makes them more bundly.

And don't even get me started about reliability and stealth billing "fees". ARRRRGGG.

Bah. It needs to be called Thürst or nobody will take it seriously.

Like bugs in features that people actually want to use - http://ark42.com/chrome/

Right, and for an encore they can figure out how to get the water from that desalination plant to flow uphill.

People don't realize how much water distribution networks rely on gravity; yes you can pump water to create more head but it raises the operational cost of the system astronomically. It's only practical to supply coastal cities, and then only if there is no water that can feasibly be piped from elsewhere. In California's case that doesn't really solve the problem, which is that their agricultural economy is going to collapse.

There is never too much water, and frankly this is what you get when you build in a desert.

It won’t be much longer before mountains have no snow, then there will be no rivers, no fish, nothing.

When the Last Tree Is Cut Down, the Last Fish Eaten, and the Last Stream Poisoned, You Will Realize That You Cannot Eat Money
-Cree Indian

All it takes is the motivation, a group of likeminded individuals and the willpower to deliver a dist that does not use systemd. I expect most packages in the debian universe have no deps on systemd and therefore no work required to support those packages. So we're talking system packages, some daemons and maybe a few shims for edge cases.

As for why there are only 2 dists left not to have gone to systemd, perhaps that should serve as a clue in itself.

You've just done what the programmers do. Introduce higher-level heuristics into the rules by pushing everything into blocks of actions.

No different to "find enemy", "target enemy", "shoot enemy". The problem is not breaking down a problem given the goal (in your example, every path taken to get from "I want to build a farm" to "I have built a farm here" is equal-cost to the computer) - a simple optimisation removes them from the tree, yes.

But then you either get them, say, building on tiles that are the most at risk from attack because "it doesn't matter which tile". You know that because you infer it from other information, the computer doesn't. Either it has to specifically check EVERY time (game tree), or pick a random / northernmost grassland to upgrade first (programmed heuristic).

Although the exact tree is prunable, the above is the way to get yourself into the same order of magnitude. And computers can, and do, and will struggle with trees of that magnitude for even simple actions unless they are following heuristics.

But, the biggest part you've skipped over - knowing that you need a farm to do X to do Y to do Z in N moves time is the real struggle, the real key. Optimising a tree for the low-hanging fruit (pardon the pseudo-pun) is trivial and can be done automatically and save you a handful of necessary steps.

But what if the system is attacked halfway through the process? Do we abandon? Start again? Fight on valiantly until we get where we want no matter the cost? How do we decide we need a farm? That's where the VAST majority of the game tree decisions are made and that's where the decision matters and THAT'S the difficult question to answer such that a computer can't do it in real-time given the possibilities and the impact of those. Or you'll see it build farms while you quietly strip away its land, units, etc. and it won't "notice".

Think of pathfinding, because that's what you're doing (just through a "directed graph"). There is no difference, to the computer, between A* pathfinding through a terrain and working out the best way through a game tree.

Some routes are muddy and slow you down, some routes lead to loops where you come back to where you are, some routes take more "steps" but get you there quicker, some routes are only a single step but take forever to walk through, some steps are more risky, some steps are safer.

Evaluating those for a computer means enumerating them, and their children, and their grandchildren - and virtually all of them until there's a point that you know it's definitely worse than some other route. How deep you go down the tree increases the complexity, but also increases the chance you have a strategy that works in the long-run. Not traversing to a certain depth means you're only thinking in the short-term.

And every time you enumerate some risk, factor or cost, you are required to formulate it into a single calculation ("edge cost" in graph theory terms). That means giving it a weighting (heuristics!) or determining a weighting dynamically, performing calculations, maybe looking at the surrounding areas (this path is quicker but is nearer the enemy etc.).

I studied graph theory for several years at uni. This stuff sounds really basic, boring, easy and predictable. We all know how mini-max algorithms work on simple games like draughts/checkers. But as soon as you try to scale to anything even vaguely complex you see factors, costs and weighting that are required and which greatly affect the performance of the search (and, hence, the AI).

If there are only 10-20 options like explore and they each take, say, 10 turns to complete, then the computer is only making a decision every 10 turns in effect. Which means it can't react. Sure, you could program an interrupt on certain events. But then it might ignore your attack for 5 turns so being "dumb" and giving you an advantage. Or if you interrupt it every turn with SOMETHING, it's basically back to having to evaluate every single move.

Computer AI is just a series of programmed heuristics and shortcuts to make the real game-tree-traversal possible and practical precisely because they get too large otherwise. The programmed heuristics are basically programmed orders, programmed weaknesses, programmed ignorance. That's where the AI falls down. Someone has told it that "a knight is worth three pawns" in effect, and while that's a general rule that children are introduced to, even they know that it's not a written-in-stone rule to be obeyed every exchange. It's much more complex than that. Someone, somewhere has told the AI in Civilisation, etc. that losing X unit is half as costly as losing Y unit, or building tile Z.

Without those rules, the game tree is too huge to traverse in time. With those rules, the AI is crippled by hard-coded, predictable actions. And there's also the problem that NOBODY wants to play against an unbeatable AI and the only point we can put in a limit is the game-tree depth, or use of heuristics.

And, proper, true, real AI (and human intelligence) is about forming those rules on their own just by playing enough, and knowing when to break those rules as the situation has differed too much. We do it by inference, which you can't program. AI can't yet do it except by things like neural nets etc. which - while useful - have major limitations.

Otherwise, literally, all the Age of Empires modding community could have made a quick, unbeatable AI in the 15-years since it's release and the modding community being able to program their own AI. I used to tweak the QuakeC code for Quake bots back in the day. Things like OpenTTD (and TTDPatch, which is decades old) have allowed huge communities of clever people to create bots to play against on a game which those people are ABSOLUTELY expert at. Yet, still, the bots don't challenge a seasoned player unless they cheat.

Game-tree depth is the killer. And as soon as you prune a branch, you've introduced a heuristic which is a predictable weakness in the AI's operation.

I'm anti-Assange.

He skipped UK bail. Up until then, I thought he was just an idiot, now he's a criminal idiot.

However, if anything, technically protecting Assange could be seen as protecting a suspected rapist, no?

Sorry, but he's no hero. The stuff from Wikileaks is a bunch of useless junk that didn't change anything. Snowden did a hundred times more at a hundred times the risk. The quicker he gives up, is arrested, spends time in a UK jail and then gets passed away to another country (legally) and stops me paying my part of MILLIONS OF POUNDS OF TAX to capture him legally, the better.

I have zero sympathy for him. He was going through the courts, doing things legally, and spouting his mouth off. When he exhausted every possible appeal that way and STILL we found it legal to extradite him, he fled UK bail. My sympathy wasn't all that great for him all that time, anyway, but ended at that moment. The UK did its best to find a way out for him, but legally we are OBLIGED to hand him over, and we didn't just fabricate that law at the last moment for this case. That's the end of the matter.

And when he's released, he'll stand his charge of skipping bail, be extradited anyway, and then NOTHING will happen if what he says is true.

A fugitive is the antithesis of the organisation, conference and attendees. It's a conference for and about the legal profession. As far as I'm aware, Assange has zero legal qualifications whatsoever.

That's like saying you should invite a convicted paedophile to your school safety talk, or a rapist to your rape counselling group. Maybe it SOUNDS good and fair and balanced, but the practicality is insanely stupid.

Criminals (and Assange is one, legally speaking, in the UK for skipping UK court bail) DO NOT get a say in how their justice system handles them, or invited to conferences about the legal profession. Reasonable outsiders make sure the law is fair and balanced for all, but the criminals themselves? No.

"On the other hand Julian is not a fugitive from the British police"

Yes, he is.

He skipped bail imposed by a UK court.

Again, the issue is NOT what other countries want.

While in the UK, under an English court's bail, he breached his bail conditions.

Everything else is a side-issue to whether he's actually a fugitive in the UK or not. Any country with an interest can register it and we'll send him on as and when the law requires. But, at the moment, he's committed a UK crime on UK soil, and stupidly against a UK court.

If he gets out of the embassy, he'll be arrested FOR THAT INSTANTLY PROVABLE CHARGE first. Then we'll worry about everything else but - pretty much - we'd agreed (and it was legally correct for us to agree without changes to existing laws to accommodate that) to extradite him to Sweden. We made them go back several times to dot their i's and cross their t's in that regard and refused to release him to them until it was done. That's sorted.

So he'll come out. Be arrested. Stand charge for skipping bail (evidence is overwhelming including by his own admission - because him being in the embassy is a breach of bail conditions in and of itself - and it's quite obvious it was a wilful violation). Then we'll hand him over to Sweden as we're legally required to (now that they've sorted out the paperwork, but as a member of the EU policing laws we would always have been eventually subject to doing so anyway - the US is a different matter entirely that would need a court's approval, and that court would be the one in Sweden, not the UK). Then whatever happens to him is Sweden's problem. If they extradite him to the US, they better do it REALLY carefully or else Sweden will be in breach of the same EU policing laws that it's using to get hold of him in the first place (they would have to reasonably ensure his life was not endangered by doing so, for instance).

But, first and foremost, he's a wanted CRIMINAL in the UK for skipping bail (we don't really use the word fugitive). It's like getting Al Capone on tax evasion, but cross-territory. And all the UK care about is the bail. Everything else is someone else's problem because we're not dealing direct with any US transfer where the only real scrutiny of human rights, etc. need take place (it's laid down in law that we can assume other EU member provide adequate human rights to comply with UK law, for example).

Aluminum Cans The guy actually opens some vintage pull-tab cans... for SCIENCE!

The Hackaday article that video was linked from