Does anyone know why AVG blocks the Forbes link above? Thanks, Your Faithful zombie overlord.

I'm sorry when I die my shit becomes public domain so there will be no estate. Come on people go out and get a skill and quit mooching off of somebody else's.

Now when I illegaly download the newest DVD screeners, I can do it with a clear conscience knowing that I'm not congesting the network!

Seriously though, this is a good thing. I don't know why the story is tagged "your rights online"

Combos weren't part of the original Street Fighter games until humans figured them out.

And the fact that they were inherent to the system rather than being a preprogrammed set of arbitrary values in a "it's a combo because we say so" list (like every other crappy fighting game, tekken/virtuafighter/etc had done) was what made Capcom's games so strong. You could find new ones by analyzing the system. Some of them worked on some characters but not others because they were bigger or smaller than the "average" sized character, and thus might "fall out" of the combo when their smaller sprite failed to collide with hit detection.

Then they were added to later versions so that the computer could take advantage of them.

No, the AI was simply reprogrammed to know the ones that the developers/playtesters had figured out.

Rocket Jumps? I'm sure the developers coded for it from day 1.

Actually, no. They were a reaction to code written for explosions to move "movable" objects (boxes, powerups, dead bodies, and included in the list, players). The fact that they were coded to "add acceleration", and stacked directly with jump acceleration, was not explicitly coded for.

And different humans have different creative problem solving methods. This is why real AI is hard.

Oddly enough, that was what made Deus Ex so brilliant, and the sequel so piss-poor. In the first, the designers really worked hard to give the players options - different paths for the run-and-gunners, methods for the stealthers/snipers to get around to spots to take guards out, and so on. The sequel, meanwhile, was just linear level after linear level.

You can't code for all contingencies.....and a truly adaptable AI would need to have learning skills to handle those scenarios that were not inherently programmed in.

A truly adaptable AI might (for example of a fighting game) in a writable section of the hard drive, store a list of the combos that the player had successfully used or that the player used most often. Given another 10 years (for processors to get even more powerful), it might analyze that for a weakness.

I'd love to see it. But I'm not going to hold my breath waiting for it, either. I'll take the decision tree + random variance that we get now, throw in a little "Easy = 3, Medium = 5, Hard = 10" Enemy scaling and I'll still play video games. When I want an opponent that is challenging, I'll go online and play against real people.

The one problem with that is that in addition to the fact that real people learn (or at least, some portion of the human population learns from their mistakes, setting aside anyone who's ever shopped at Wal-Mart), real people have Genuine People Personalities, meaning a large percentage of them are Real Assholes.

How chauvinistic! But of course, who but a human would think that a human's mind would be so powerful that the mere observation of a revealing "secret" of the universe would be a threat to it?

Honestly, this is beyond illogical. It may be a fact that the universe thinks and is aware of itself, but to think that it would be protecting itself from humanity learning about it in some way is ludicrous when presented with the infinite number of other ways it could restrict humans from discovering the Higgs boson.

Let's instead consider a more plausible scenario: The LHC is an enormous undertaking that goes beyond any attempt of artifice made before involving particle collision and it is very likely it will have many setbacks.

I can't argue with your statement, in fact I agree.

To be honest, I just think there are bigger problems right now but I know in a few months my inbox will see something like "AMAZING MATH! OBAMA IS SATAN!" in the subject header from a very specific conservative who will take it seriously. In the body will be a very complex formula that if you simplify it, will result in:

- Look at the date Obama won the prize.
- Take the numeral representation for the month of October and Subtract 4
- Subtract 3 from date.
- Take the last digit of the year and also subtract 3.

OMG!!!! 666!!!!!

/facepalm

I'll try to explain but then I'll get something like "I don't have to explain my position" as a response. To which I'll surrender any hope of any meaningful political dialogue, vow to send everything that person sends into the spam folder. Yet I relent and I keep trying like a fool.

Would a nav system on an iPod Touch be of much use? The iPod Touch relies on wifi connectivity to determine your location, so unless you're in a city with full wifi coverage, your position on your trip wouldn't update.

I myself would like to be buried in just the dirt. My body isn't going to do anyone any good when I'm dead. I want to donate my organs, and then be buried. Let the maggots infest my skull, and maybe a bush grow around my loins.

*News Flash*

You pay taxes that build roads you never use.
You pay taxes to pay public servants whose work never impacts you.
You pay taxes to build a weapons that will never see combat.
you pay taxes to fund politicians whose contributions do not (or negatively) affect you.
you pay taxes that fund research into diseases you'll never get.

Why suddenly get upset because you pay taxes to pay teachers for kids you don't have?

(Slightly on topic) As for private schools not getting tax payers money - I can tell you that is absolutely false in Australia (where some private schools receive MORE funding than their public equivalents) and I would be very very surprised if there were many US schools that haven't ever received some sort of "operational assistance" from your local/state/federal governments.

thank *you* for playing

Sounds like sour grapes to me. Google has a technically superior engine, and Mozilla's whining about it. Well boo-hoo guys, how about cutting the crap and getting to work improving your product?

...except that it is fun, but EVE is about politics more than Newtonian physics simulation.

You as the pilot simply set destination and targets and when to fire, but you'd be amazed at the complexity of the game.

You often find yourself engaging and killing enemies at ranges greater than 50km but there are other techniques to have close range combat, but since you don't directly control the flight of the craft that doesn't matter that much either.

Overall, I have a hunch if we were to have space combat in the future, it would be like EVE in which you engage your opponent at vast distances with smart weaponry.

Trust me... Its a blast.

Funny. I did the EVE 14 day trial about a month or so ago, and found it one of the most tedious games I'd ever played. And it's decidedly non-newtonian physics really annoyed me, especially because with the computer controlled movement and combat there's essentially no reason *not* to use newtonian physics.

This is the usual justification of that vast waste of money by attempting to define a different reality to the one we live in. The revelations that have come out over the last few years show that the USSR had a far better intelligence network than anyone suspected so they knew exactly what a pile of steaming crap the money was being wasted on. Also consider that half the worlds press knew that star wars was a pile of steaming crap.
The spending and gloating didn't happen in the USSR, there was far too much chaos with internal leadership struggles and the USSR falling apart for them to take star wars seriously.
Yes I know, Reagan won the cold war by poking a dying bear with a stick yelling "bite me". If the USSR was a serious threat at the time he probably would have started a real war - he was doing the "show the Nips who's boss" trick of the late 1930s.

It's silly to warn against everything, even dangers that aren't out of the ordinary though, because the end-result is just that people learn to ignore warnings, making them useless for the situations where they're actually warranted.

Why do my mobile phone require a "do not microwave" sticker ? Why does the antenna for my wlan have big scary red-yellow DANGER label, complete with triangle and skull saying "risk of DEATH", and when you read more carefully, the actual danger is, the thing consists of conductive metal, if you where to stand on your roof (say when mounting the thing), hold one end and poke the OTHER end at uninsulated mains voltage, you could get an electric shock.

You should warn against things that are more dangerous than they appear, or risks that are elevated. It's not out of the ordinary for a 2-feet piece of metal to be electrically conductive, you don't need to -warn- about that.

The workers at MS who get canned because they become an Indian company will sure come to Olympia with pitchforks and will vote all the incumbants out. A company with lots of employees who are depenent on it to survive are quite powerful and to me this sounds reasonable. Lobbying however is a different ball game and needs to be banned.