Role-playing and caffeine seem like a natural marriage, though.

They didn't prove anything except that by increasing the complexity of 'Life', they can force some kind of complex behaviour that would have been impossible for the simpler version we're all more familiar with. They changed the rules from 'alive or dead' tiles to '00 01 10 or 11' tiles. There are two different rhomboids in the Penrose tile universe they're playing in, so it seems to make sense that you will find some sufficiently complex means of navigating it if you observe two bits at once.

I think it should have been couched differently: Penrose universe NOT non-repeating, given a sufficiently complex, self-changing pattern to look for.

That description is clearly from the Gamecube Zelda game "Twilight Princess".

Now, I'm not going to read the article, because the poster decided to make a reference to a fictional character. Patrick Batman isn't a real person, and has no bearing on any kind of studies of any relevance to any subject that might be of any use to actual criminal studies except in some oblique, culturally related way. Could watching too many movies make you do stupid things, even kill people? Yeah, I'm 88% certain of it. Does knowing that make me a criminal psychologist? No, no it doesn't.

Thanks a lot, there, SHERLOCK HOLMES!

I love how authors at Slashdot will resort to using phrases like "Pretty much!!" to more or less gloss over facts like how the Higgs Boson is still nowhere near being anything more material than a theoretical particle resting on pure conjecture made up by actual existing humans who are merely uncomfortable with how dark the universe is. Religious believe in God, too, and are "Pretty much!!" sure there's no doubt God ever existed, though there's no concrete evidence that God does or ever did. I believe Stephen Hawking had something to say about Religion, along the lines that it's a fairy tale for people who are afraid of the dark. I'm surprised he didn't state something similar in dismissal of the Higgs Boson and the rest of the Dark Matter bandwagon.

My-my, what a perfect opportunity to analyze the differences between bulls and bears in the 21st century.

There are definitely those who will say this means the beginning of the end and who will sell, and those who will say this means nothing except a company has reached the maturity to be expected of any stock and that this is the beginning of the beginning and will hold. There are those who this is the first time they ever heard of Microsoft and they will buy because they figure, hell, the price is low, good time to buy.

As the Owl said in the Tootsie-Pop commercial, "Let's -- a'find out!"

uh oh libble timmy
it looks like you bebber get oubba here

I mean, what's to stop a programmer, who isn't necessarily a heady cryptanalyst, from simply reverse-engineering the Mac application and figuring out exactly how it's done without looking at the poem itself (or the encrypted version) at all?

So, this isn't a cryptanalysis contest. It's a reverse-engineering contest. A cryptanalyst isn't given the actual encrypting mechanism, the original, and the cipher all out front and asked for an explanation. They just get the cipher and some reasonable expectation of what the original might possibly contain (the words "fuhrer" or "atom" for example).

So it's kind of boring for me -- a hobbyist with an ardent interest in cryptography -- to bother tackling the problem, when somebody with some familiarity with Macintosh machine language is going to have a severe advantage.

The contest caters to the wrong crowd and packages itself all wrong.

... I think I catch the gist of it.

The Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence begins to draw to a close? I don't think many people are all that interested, today.

The Entertainment industries draw far more budget these days than almost anything. I'm thinking SETI probably only saw the history of funding they did, simply because people WERE spending it on entertainment.

A fairly brainy, highly interactive, open-ended form of entertainment, but entertainment nonetheless. How many times can you watch your favorite film? Eventually you get bored of it being the same thing from beginning to end. Well, nobody found any aliens, yet, so for a kind of passively-entertained (we could say movie-goers) crowd, the thrill has worn out, already. It's like having watched the same movie for each year SETI has been active. "What nothing this year, either? // Honey, that's how it ends. That's how it ALWAYS. Ends. Let me get you your pills."

Some of the crowd have been attracted to dedicated processor time to more active pursuits, like the folding protein thing where you actually interact with it to get little jobs done, like a game. So the gamers / computerized-forms-of-entertainment crowd is off to some other park, as well.

The Sci-Fi geeks probably never donated a single dollar, ever. They're the ones suffering the most in this because to them, entertainment is free because you just go to the library and check out an ever-older series of "Best Of" or other anthologies and voila, endless, free entertainment. But if Seti charged them a late-fee for failing to find E.T. each year, that wouldn't really be fair, would it? So they're bumming.

Hard-core science nerds and are probably still paying almost as much as ever, but you have to admit the decision between a $10 bottle of scotch and $10 on something that drives most women away screaming is a hard decision during these hard times. Meanwhile the philosophers and philanthropists are shit-out the window because being right all the time or seeing your monies do good in the world has little to do with the sort of "nope, nothing happened again, care to insert another quarter?" that adherence to SETI demands. The philosophers already know "nothing happens" and for all we know philanthropists might consider this sort of thing to be wasteful almost to the point of buying snake-oil. Again, hard times. It's not like it really IS the most important thing in the world, after all, you wouldn't beg for $10 from a starving Sudanese or an angry Muslim, would you?

So of course there are numerous reasons why people would flee SETI support. Maybe they should work on their marketing, or something. You never hear about SETI any stores you go to. No "A dime of every purchase goes to the search for extraterrestrial intelligence". There's no SETI-endorsed event cross-sponsored by NASA, no SETI seal of approval on video games, no SETI really anything except the actual, scientific endeavour. Meanwhile the average person is inundated with brand imagery across the spectrum, most of it foul, rotten, grammatically and ethically incorrect mind-toxin.

That's what makes the money, these days, destroying peoples' minds.

If the institution isn't accredited and the degree doesn't carry any weight, why *even* waste "only" $100 ?

*yawn* glad I'm smart enough, passionate enough, and imaginative enough to pursue a Ph.D. in Computer Engineering.

Uh, gee, there, don't forget about gold. Because you're trying to turn children into gold, right?

Just that I hope you're not dissing Alan Alda!

God, dude. Alan Alda has made significant contributions to the public understanding of science through hosting a show about it. He never plays the smart-ass, he's always unassuming and humble, and through that honesty (and by way of interviewing authorities on various subjects) he brings the most complex scientific concepts down to a common level that most people can understand. It's why his show is so popular. So, it may have been quite awhile since M*A*S*H* but that doesn't mean he hasn't stayed relevant. In fact, if Alan Alda wanted to interview a famous scientist -- better yet, YOUR favorite famous scientist, take your pick (I'll pick Stephen Hawking for you in your absence) -- he would get that interview at nearly a moment's notice! There's no scientist who wouldn't want to be interviewed by him and seen on his show. So, Big-Mouth, how many famous scientists can you speak with whenever you feel like it?

Well, now! Funny ALL that!

Because when you take away the car and the outstanding debt, and maybe I'm guessing $50-200 a month in things that are direct affronts to the man's physical health, I am guessing the video games and shit don't really amount to much of a P.I.T.A. after all.