The Tropico series also do this pretty neatly (especially 3 and 4) - you can follow your 'tropicans' from their family home to the job, to the market for food, doctor, church etc. A policeman would follow your orders and run after someone you ordered arrested. Traffic path-finding is not perfect though.
But in Tropico, it is rare to have more than a thousand agents at any one time - whereas I think Sim City '13 has to simulate at least a couple orders of magnitude more agents. Not sure about that - I didn't buy the game.
>The title only suggests something unique about Go to those who didn't read the article.
The thing is, many people use the title to determine whether the article is worth reading. As is, the title suggests that there is something unique about Go that reduces the bandwidth needed by the program, implying that this is something that other common languages fail to achieve. This is obviously impossible (any widely used language is capable of serializing an output byte stream in any way the programmer desires). As a result, the title sets off the alarm for "Language fanboyism", and "mathematically impossible claims", and goes swiftly into the "don't bother" pile together with "universal lossless compression algorithm invented!"[1], "perpetual motion machine" and "My favourite X language is faster that C/C++/Assembler!1!1"
>It feels odd to me that people can be so sure that games have no influence yet images of thin women in magazines has such a strong influence.
There is clearly an invitation to mimic the presented behaviour in both cases, however whether or not people follow up on this is another issue - mainly shaped by social norms. Being thin is socially acceptable and encouraged(whether or not it is a good thing is irrelevant). Killing people - isn't.
Also the action presented has to be related to the context it is presented in. An ad shows thin people in everyday life - so kids try to imitate by starving themselves in everyday life.
Wargames present murder in context of a military conflict - well since we are NOT in the middle of a military conflict, there is no point imitating.
>> With the grasshopper technology the cost of a flight to orbit basically is the cost of rocket fuel...
>Even my car costs significantly more than just the fuel.
yes, but the cost of using your car for a drive from home to work is basically the cost of car fuel. As opposed to the cost of a full car + fuel because you decide to blow your car up once you get to destination, like we now do for rockets.
The thing is, having a comment in a tricky bit of code, and knowing that the comment may be confusing because some jackass (maybe myself six months ago ?) changed the code but missed the comment is IMHO still better than having no information whatsoever.
> In other words, they did the exact opposite of what the SOPA experience told them they should do.
No, from a strategic point of view, they did exactly what the SOPA experience told them they should do. Which is that if a generous contributor wants a possibly controversial bill passed, it has to be done as quickly and as quietly as possible. Or at least quickly enough to leave no time for an opposition movement to gather some serious momentum.
> Why wOuld I feel the need to inspect a book before buying it?
To make sure the pages will not start falling out before you're done reading it ? I had that happen to me several times with cheap paperbacks litterally falling apart before I was even through the first quarter of the book
I was under the impression that this used a similar principle to the one that keeps hard drive heads in place. So some reasonable amount of vibration should not be an issue. On the other hand, assuming a reliability similiar to hard drives, failures will happen. and in worst case, will send a weighty heatsink spinning at 2krpm flying inside your computer case. Given how collision-unfriendly that baby looks, its not something i would want to happen inside my desktop box.
>This is just a way to create a slightly more complex password, if it's stored as a fast hash (like md5) then it's still going to be very easy to crack.
It's not about storage, it is about how to get people to use different passwords. Arguably, the passwords are not very different, but what matters is that they are no longer identic
Its still good advice to people who use the same password on all their accounts. 'just prefix the password with the first three letters of the hostname' will make sure they're slightly better protected in case of a password leak.
"Oh come on, my grandma/dog/goldfish would write better code!!!"
This would be a totally acceptable jab among guys, yet saying this to a female coworker would immediately be misinterpreted as "woman are bad at coding" promptly followed by the full wrath of the HR gender equality team.
I agree that matching the variety of possible assignements by some generic method is very difficult, though in my humble opinion, we already have a lot of the tools required. There is a ton of improvements to do(lots and lots of usability), but the base is there - and a project of such a scale would not be unheard of.
> Its hard to communicate a fraction to a computer
> "Explain whether 4/3 or 3/4 is closer to 1, and how you know."
You just did that. Twice.
Square root ? "(3/4)^(1/2)" or maybe "sqrt(3/4)". There's no complexity in parsing that. I do agree it is not as natural as on paper but maybe tablets will find a way to improve that. Thats what innovation is here for after all.
>"Explain whether 4/3 or 3/4 is closer to 1, and how you know."
I am not familiar with the domain, but dont we have some automatic theorem-proving tools? Validating the answer to such a question would look like a perfect use case to me.[edit : clarified]
> [the description example]
Im not sure about this one. On the one hand i used to have a project in college about reconstructing a picture from an incomplete description - and its hard. On the other hand we are expecting a perfect description. Hence it would be pretty much isomorphic to the code of a program used to draw the picture. Matching the two images is also doable. Pseudocode would actually be the best way to transmit this image .