I was given a detention for possessing a rubber band when i was in 6th grade. Crazy, right? Well here's the really unbelievable part: we were allowed to have and USE pencils all the time. Talk about living in a backward society.

unfortunately those people don't "have what it takes" to be a television news anchor by today's standards.

"* I heard Rush Limbaugh spend most of a program once going on and on about the eruption of a volcano, and how it was putting out more CO2 than mankind would emit in like 200 years or something like that, and concluding there's nothing mankind could possibly *do* to change the climate."

Yes, Rush likes to cite fictitious 'evidence' to support his moronic ramblings. Truthfully, volcanic activity pales in comparison to manmade C02 output.

http://www.frankodwyer.com/blog/?p=229

http://www2.sunysuffolk.edu/mandias/global_warming/global_warming_misinformation_volcanoes.html

Plenty of bots learn as they go. Some simpler ones might learn the layout of a level (counterstrike) or a room (roomba) through trial and error. You can imagine it would not be that hard to create a simple database that maps the geometry of such spaces to a reasonable resolution. Similarly, you could create a database of tactics in Starcraft for openings to easily identify the most effective ones all else being equal. Unfortunately, it could be difficult in a Player vs AI situation to gain enough high-quality data. Some AI's make use of AI vs. AI gaming to analyze effectiveness of different strategies, but obviously that will just make the AI's next build neccessarily better at playing against their current version. Obviously that's a big challenge.

Another huge problem is deciding how much an AI should imitate human behavior. In chess, it only matters that an AI wins. However, in video games, AI's are often ridiculed for not behaving like a real person: they use information not available to players, they violate the limits of what is possible for a human player to do, or even alter gameplay such that their units attack faster or are invincible to certain attacks. The programmers write the AI this way because they may have serious flaws or holes in their logic. AI's are almost always really lopsided in their competence at various aspects of play. Programmers often must max out an AI's strengths to compensate or the pathetic maximum of its weaknesses. Using a learning, dynamic AI would not neccessarily solve this problem. A simple example: in a fighting game like Soul Calibur, you could make the AI aggressively rush the human player at the beginning of the match. The second round, if this works, you could try it again. However, it turned out poorly, you could have the AI take a defensive stance next time around. This is a simple form of learning, but would be quickly obvious to the human player, who could then easily take advantage. A dynamic AI may be less predictable, but probably still somewhat predictable. It may not succumb to the same attack everytime, only to succumb too easily to various attacks. Also, you can add in some randomness to decrease predictability, but the AI will then be less productive.

there is no such number as 0.0000...1 You are saying an infinite number of 0's come before the 1. That means that you will NEVER reach the 1. Let's say you have 0.9999... and 0.0000...1 where the first term has n 9's and the second term has n 0's. Also, you could imagine needing not 0.9999... but 0.9999...9 The latter term is nonsense. In short, you cannot add the 1 to a 9 to collapse the sum of both expressions because you would need infinity + 1 terms.

I find it incredibly hard to believe that "common wisdom" says games are trending more expensive. I've owned about a dozen systems staring with the Atari Pong (which had no games to purchase. You could play pong...and pong with multiple paddles...and it was amazing). When I finally got to the age where I was purchasing my own NES games, I remember shelling out $50 a game. Obviously with inflation, that'd be signiicantly more than the $60/game price you see now ($50 for wii). Worse yet, I bought Mega Man a couple years after it first came out and Toys R Us was still charging $50! These days 6months to 1 year after release, you can pick up most games for $20 or so. Even pre-orders are regularly priced $10 or $20 off. And if you consider the used games market (eBay, not gamestop), downloadable games, old game compilations, etc. you can easily build a solid (if antiquated) collection that you'll never have enough time to fully play and enjoy. Finally, going back to Atari and NES games now, it's easy to see how (nostalgia aside) game quality has improved drastically. Comparing Sky Kid to Halo Reach is like comparing apples to a michelin-starred 5-course meal.

As an aside - I have a very fond memory of spending hours and hours looking through my entire collection of Nintendo Power magazines compiling a list of 20 or so games I wanted to buy used. At the time, there were no used game stores where I lived, but my dad knew of one in Colorado where he flew out for business infrequently. So I gave him my list of games and waited an excruciating week for him to come back. He did fairly well, scoring at least half the games on the list (probably the cheaper ones). And I was blown away when he told me he got them for under $200 total. I excitedly jammed them into my NES one after the other - a big mistake at the time. Anyone familiar with the prime days of the NES knows that you play one game at a time until you've squeezed every last bittersweet drop of entertainment out the cartridge. You were supposed to beat the game several times, often requiring playing the first board 800 times due to difficulty and lack of game saves. And before my foray into used games, that's exactly how it worked because games were actually quite expensive. None could boast 100 hours of content, maybe 2 hours of content that took 100 hours to beat without losing a life (contra) or 10 hours of content that you played through 10 times (final fantasy).

I'd like to applaud Best Buy for modeling their business after a car dealership. Enough of this customer-is-always-right BS. The customer is the enemy. The goal of a store is to take as much money from each customer as possible and it's up to the responsible consumer to try to pay as little as possible. That's just textbook capitalism. 6th Ave. electronics. figured this out eons ago. That's why I shop at Amazon...oh wait.

Just to spell out how this approach fails, imagine if disability insurance worked this way. Say I stop paying the $1,000 annual premium for my $50k /yr benefit of disability insurance. Then 5 years later I become disabled. Should I be able to pay $1k, $5k, $10k or even $100k to now collect the $50k/ yr benefit? Obviously not. Insurance companies would no longer exist if this were the case. Just as with insurance, the $75 fee was mandated to cover a very unlikely event (unlikely enough for the homeowner not to feel protection was needed). The firefighters need 100 people to pay $75 to cover the cost of putting out the 1/100 homes that catch fire.

Since when do entertainment and profitabilty make for a deeply flawed movie? Focusing on net neutrality and packet priority would have bored the audience and interfered with the arch of the story. Just because something is ethically (and socio-economically) compelling, does not make it good theater.

Agreed - no accident. They have posted erroneous charges to both my wireless and fios account in the past. On the fios account they removed a charge and then 5 months later re-reversed it! I have auto-bill pay, but I still check it infrequently and noticed after i had paid it. They agreed to re-re-reverse the charge, but said they would have to break it up over 6 months? whatever.

They also seem to train their reps to say anything to make a sale. I asked if they could come install fios earlier than what was available online. After working up the chain of command they agreed...then simply didn't show up. Of course by then I would have had to wait even longer for comcast. Despite all of this, I actually like Verizon better than most of their competition and they push quality products.

I'm sick of people claiming that bills like these are preventing congress from enacting more important legislation, because that's obviously not the case. The reason we have such abyssmal progress in our law making is that the law makers are mostly ignorant, incompetent and/or corrupt.

I don't see why you got modded offtopic. This is the reason we don't have net neutrality, among many, many other laws needed for the public good. Just so we're clear though, the Democrats agenda is the same as the republicans - a grip on power, but yes it looks like they are going to fail at that shortly. At this point I'm completely disillusioned with our whole political process.

10 doesn't have to mean 'perfect.' 10/10 can simply be a must-buy. Obviously a reviewer shouldn't be handing out so many 10's, but I think every point on a scale should be used. I really like a 10 (or 5 point scale) because it's simple and effective. When I had plenty of time to play video games, I would buy every 10 i saw, most 9's and some 8's that looked promising/good genre. Now that I have a kid, I buy most 10's and a few 9's depending on the content of the reviews and my experience with the series/genre.

I think it's real news. it's on Sun, The Register, and Metro UK news websites.

>>Maybe they will build their next brick-and-mortar store out of clue-by-fours.

Hey moron, there's no such thing as clue-by-fours. They're called 2"x4's! What an f'in dumb@$$. Could you be anymore clueless?