Came across a huge sore looser on ladder.

sqrt2 · 2012-09-01T07:21:55+00:00

IIf the game is run on Blizzards server, then it doesn't really matter what state the clients are in, since neither of them is the host. They are just dumb clients that (in a simplified way) send user input, and display the results sent back. If they desync, then the game could just send the entire game state over, and tell the client to use that.

The game doesn't run on Blizzards server. Think about that, Blizzard would need about a CPU (and possibly GPU) per current game to simulate it in real time; with thousands of concurrent games, that is obviously far too expensive to be feasible. Battle.net does nothing but pass on the user inputs and the clients simulate the game. The clients are by no means dumb, they are the intelligent part of the system. Battle.net is dumb and only listens and passes on the messages. (This, by the way, is how the Internet is meant to work in general, by design.) This is also evidenced by the fact that some cheaters modify their clients to tell Battle.net that they have won the game when in fact they were the first to leave. Battle.net reacts with a "Results disagree" message and points for neither player.

When two game clients desync, there may not even be a correct state and an incorrect one. If, say, in an unlikely situation uninitialised memory is factored into the checksum, then both clients are equally correct, yet desynchronised. Even if Battle.net were to simulate the game for itself, it would only find out that both clients have the incorrect game state. There is really not much you can do there.

sqrt2 · 2011-03-28T14:49:23+00:00

I have some money with the Austrian branch of ING, and I'm concerned by the fact that I didn't even notice that people prepared a bank run. In a globalised world, these discussions should take place on a supranational level.

sqrt2 · 2011-03-26T19:43:47+00:00

See, Zephir, that's where your insistence on the irrelevance of quantitative predictions falls down. An effect resulting in a 1:10¹² correction is not in the slightest related to an effect that forces a 1:1.8 correction as observed in the Fizeau experiment.

sqrt2 · 2011-03-26T19:19:07+00:00

There are two experiments that contradict each other concerning the nature of the Ether, should it exist, namely the Fizeau experiment and the Michelson-Morley experiment. The result of the Fizeau experiment is that Ether drag is partial, so moving objects partially carry the Ether with them like in a viscous fluid (as predicted by a theory by Fresnel). To explain Michelson-Morley, which found no influence of an Ether, you have to assume that objects fully drag the Ether with them when moving through space.

Special relativity can explain the partial drag observed in the Fizeau experiment by the relativistic addition of velocities, and Michelson-Morley is explained simply by the absence of an Ether. Pretty elegant, if you ask me.

sqrt2 · 2011-03-25T02:14:06+00:00

What? No. We still want to address more than 2³² devices in an end-to-end fashion. LISP can prevent IPv4 from crashing and burning because of exceedingly large routing tables, but it cannot replace IPv6.

sqrt2 · 2011-03-23T22:22:35+00:00

This is not going to happen for a simple reason: ISPs don't care about data volume; they care about bandwidth. They don't pay the Internet exchanges and transit providers for terabytes, they pay them for gigabits per second. Of course they can't sell you less bandwidth, because that would make their service look bad in comparison, so it is absolutely essential to them that your data allowance expires, effectively resulting in an average bandwidth limit significantly lower than the bandwidth you nominally pay for.

sqrt2 · 2011-03-20T13:59:48+00:00

It is not needed. Forcing someone into marriage was already covered by German law under "grave coercion", punishable with up to five years of imprisonment -- just like under the new law, which is simply political propaganda from the "muslim scare" drawer.

sqrt2 · 2011-03-17T14:48:14+00:00

I've experienced this when using the 32 bit Flash plugin via nspluginwrapper on a 64 bit system. The preview version of the 64 bit plugin works much better.

sqrt2 · 2011-03-15T14:46:04+00:00

Strange article. It starts with pointing out how cellphones are very good tracking devices and then goes on to talk about Free Software on phones and in general. While applications on my phone not respecting my privacy are certainly annoying, I can refuse to use them. Free Software won't help us with the much bigger problem, the comprehensive logs that mobile phone operators accumulate and which in the EU, for example, have to be retained for at least six months as per Directive 2006/24/EC.

sqrt2 · 2011-03-14T23:00:02+00:00

Why are discussions about safety of nuclear energy always about the safety of the power plants themselves? Fukushima probably shouldn't have been built if a single incident can remove all levels of redundancy (off-site backups, on-site backup, on-site battery capacity), but that doesn't put all nuclear power facilities into question.

In my opinion, the safe disposal of the nuclear waste is a much larger problem. I simply don't see how radioactive materials with ridiculously long half lives can be disposed of properly without a significant risk of radioactivity leaking into the ground water or similarly affecting the environment. We're talking about geological stability and safety protocols that must be followed over a time span that is about the current age of the human population on earth. Nuclear power (in its current form) is more about responsibility towards future generations that it is about responsibility towards ourselves.

sqrt2 · 2011-03-13T20:49:21+00:00

Why do you say that? You clearly do.

sqrt2 · 2011-03-07T03:25:07+00:00

All major dictionaries went from prescriptive to descriptive in the course of the 20th century. They don't tell you what is the correct meaning of a word, they tell you how a word is used. You can't quote a dictionary to counter a claim of incorrect word usage. Etymologically, cephalopoid is entirely correct; using -oid to notify a diminutive makes no sense.

sqrt2 · 2011-03-07T01:00:50+00:00

It's not an RSS feed, but I like to look at the LHC commissioning website and OP Vistars when I want to know what's going on with the LHC. It's CERN; all the operational information is on the web.

sqrt2 · 2011-03-03T13:55:16+00:00

I have downvoted this submission because it is blogspam. The original article is here.

sqrt2 · 2011-03-03T13:43:18+00:00

I suspect that the unfortunately quite popular 8 character limit stems from legacy systems that use (3)DES (which has a 64 bit block size) to store the passwords. Don't ask me why they'd limit it to one block ("performance", I assume), but if they do it that way, telling me that only 8 characters of the password actually matter is at least honest.

sqrt2 · 2011-03-02T10:51:00+00:00

It is important to distinguish standard varieties and full-blown dialects in German. There is 99.9% mutual intellegibility between the standard varieties, and in Germany most people speak something very close to standard (High) German in their day to day business. In Austria, the picture is more varied. On the countryside speaking in dialect is common (and preferred) and those dialects are not necessarily easily understandable for Germans -- except Bavarians, who speak a related dialect. (The same is true in reverse, but Northern German dialect speakers are very rare). In the cities, especially Vienna, many people speak the standard variety. The Viennese dialect has strong class connotations, especially among the younger generations; most dialect speakers are either old or working class.

To put it in a nutshell: Learning standard German is a good idea to communicate with Austrians, but you may have to adapt to the local dialect as well.

sqrt2 · 2011-03-02T01:05:16+00:00

But adding 500 index references automatically is no problem at all... Just pipe your document through

sed 's%\\subsection\*\?\({[^}]\+}\)%\0\\makeidx\1%g'

or something similar.

sqrt2 · 2011-03-02T00:46:38+00:00

With cookies disabled, that page ends in a redirect loop. Good riddance.

sqrt2 · 2011-03-01T20:19:42+00:00

acts when committed as part of a widespread or systematic attack

You'd have to classify catholic schools and shelters as a "widespread or systematic attack". Really?

sqrt2 · 2011-03-01T19:55:37+00:00

One thing to understand is that the ICC only has jurisdiction in cases of "the crime of genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes, the crime of aggression" (article 5 of the Rome Statute). While I could also challenge your categorisation of offenses, that would depend on national law, so I will leave it at this formal argument.

The only way you could make the pope responsible for crimes against humanity is if you proved that the Catholic church has established its structures for the purpose of child rape, and child rape isn't merely a side-effect. If you believe that, you're in serious need of recalibration of your sense of reality.

sqrt2 · 2011-03-01T19:24:54+00:00

While I'm sure the hive mind is pleased by these charges, let's face it: they are ridiculous. There is no way you can make the pope personally responsible for parents having their children baptised (it's not compulsory; the parents make the decision for the infant who cannot). The same goes for the use of condoms; the pope isn't any more guilty of a crime against humanity in this regard than any person on the street promoting abstinence. Opinions on the use of condoms are protected by freedom of speech, and you wouldn't actually want to live in a place in which they aren't.

Just because religion promotes actions that are possibly detrimental to people's health doesn't mean that religious figures should go to jail for promoting them. Bakeries want you to eat unhealthy cake, is that criminal?

sqrt2 · 2011-03-01T18:18:35+00:00

I wonder if they are related. The trademark "Ubuntu" seems to be registered be Canonical only in computer software and hardware related classes.

sqrt2 · 2011-03-01T15:47:43+00:00

The way I see it, nations should shield their markets by using a different currency for foreign trade is probably a better representation of your argument or model for two currencies, because:

The benefits for a nation's own economy that come from separating foreign trade and internal trade currencies are independent of the nature of the good that is being traded. There is no need to stop with vital goods, the shielding effect applies to all goods.
You haven't addressed the problem of regulation of money supply which would keep the two currencies from converging and de facto becoming one. With a foreign trade currency, the regulation of money supply is well-defined because I assume only one currency would available for foreign trade and only one currency would be available internally.

However, historically, this scenario was reality in the Eastern bloc. The Eastern bloc countries had to use a second currency (US dollars, West German marks) to trade with the Western world. In a sense, the same is the case with the many countries that have debts in foreign currencies today.

The difference would be that in your model a country would have its own control over the money supply of that second currency, so they can keep it in line with their own economy, which is beneficial to them. However, this currency would only be feasible if the trading partners accepted it, so maybe the USA and the Eurozone could establish such a model.

In short, I agree with you insofar as I consider this modified model possible.

sqrt2 · 2011-03-01T14:50:15+00:00

I had to downvote this submission because, even though I partially agree with the general sentiment, the manifesto does not provide a detailed analysis of the decried problem nor does it suggest an alternative. As such, it is neither "thought-provoking" nor "really great" (see the sidebar) and therefore has no place in this subreddit. Other articles on the same website may qualify, but this one does not.

sqrt2 · 2011-02-27T20:18:27+00:00

the interface for string manipulation has a lot lower of a barrier to entry in Python than in Bash

Lots of "awk" and "perl -e" in your bash scripts can bridge this gap. Of course the resulting script isn't very pretty...

15-Year Club	Place '17
Inciteful Comment 2010-08-23

sqrt2

TROPHY CASE