Dintiradan

Originally Posted By: Dintiradan You're all forgetting that it's freaking cold outside. Originally Posted By: ANGREH MARINE Pansy. So tonight it's likely to get to forty below (that's forty below to you Fahrenheit users). Not to worry though — according to the long range forecast it'll be above freezing on Thursday.

You're all forgetting that it's freaking cold outside.

My Stuff -> Preferences -> Do you want to be notified via email when you receive a private message? This solves one of the problems; I don't know if Aran's RSS feeds still work.

Quote: Also, fur fur. FYT.

Originally Posted By: Excalibur Originally Posted By: Dintiradan Are you talking about sites like Face-Bok which encourage segregated cliques? I think sites like that are the exception. There are segregated cliques on Facebook? I'm not sure if I've seen any myself, but I haven't had one for very long. Gah, sorry. When I say 'cliques', I mean in the graph theory sense. I don't know if segregated is an actual term; what I meant to say is that Facebook isn't strongly connected. I didn't mean to imply racial segregation, or high school cliques, or anything like that. My apologies for speaking Mathese; I'll try not to let it happen again.

Well, would you prefer Crackbook?

If I understand correctly, you're talking about big fish and little ponds. Meh. Size is overrated. If you really must care about something, care about growth. It's pretty tough to become a bigger fish when you're in a small pond. </bad-analogy> I don't quite get what you're saying about the Internet undoing itself. Are you talking about sites like Face-Bok which encourage segregated cliques? I think sites like that are the exception.

Reminds me of a conversation I had a while back. A relative just had her first kid, and gave her a difficult to spell name. My mother, whose name is also difficult to spell, couldn't understand why parents would subjugate their children with 'fashionable' names that they would be spelling out for the rest of their lives. I offered a solution. Instead of naming your children, just number them. Once they reach a certain age (say, entering school, or once they learn to read), they will be allowed to choose their own name. This way, the children will be able to choose names not taken by their peers, while still being easy to spell. The downside is that some kids might pick names like Spiderman, but as long as parent are able to veto names, I think it's a good system. EDIT: On the other hand, biblical names are usually alright, since their spellings are pretty much standardized. If I ever have a son, his middle name is totally going to be Mahershalalhashbaz.

Originally Posted By: Hypnotic The worst one I say would be: 14. Name your dog "Dog." I have a friend who did that. I feel so sorry for that Dog. Is this really that odd? We have a cat, and while it has a 'real' name, almost all the time I refer to it as 'Cat' or 'the Cat'. I'm not being speciest either — fifty percent of my conversations begin with 'Hey man', and the other fifty would begin with 'Hey woman' if it weren't considered sexist.

Originally Posted By: Ephesos It will happen, don't worry. I'm still setting up the world. Now that I think of it, I need to start consolidating the pantheon... I've let that slide for too long now. Recycle LoD? ;-)

Originally Posted By: Excalibur George W. Bush shall now be known as Biff Lane III. You denizens of the States should really do something like that - it was hilarious when we did.

This is a public service announcement.* Code: Severe Creation Mild Creation Merciful Creation--------------- ------------- -----------------Arancaytar (INT) Ephesos (AGI) Celtic Minstrel (WIL)NoIntro (CHA) Ackrovan (WIL) Nioca (AGI)Severe Preservation Mild Preservation Merciful Preservation------------------- ----------------- ---------------------Excalibur (TAL) Dantius (INT)Severe Destruction Mild Destruction Merciful Destruction------------------ ---------------- --------------------Nikki (STR) Nalyd (INT) Dakkanor (AGI/TAL)BloodMoon (INT)STR---Nikki (Severe Destruction)AGI---Ephesos (Mild Creation)Nioca (Merciful Creation)Dakkanor? (Merciful Destruction)INT---Arancaytar (Severe Creation)Dantius (Mild Preservation)BloodMoon (Severe Destruction)Nalyd (Mild Destruction)WIL---Ackrovan (Mild Creation)Celtic Minstrel (Merciful Creation)CHA---NoIntro (Severe Creation)TAL---Excalibur (Severe Preservation)Dakkanor? (Merciful Destruction) * Without guitars. :-(

Every time Student of Trinity brings up the Masters/Doctorate distinction, I'm taken aback. All I can say is that Masters programs for Computing Science in Canada are alive and well. It wasn't until a discussion on these boards not too long ago that I realized you could apply for a Doctorate program without first doing a Masters. Here, the option simply isn't there - you must do a Masters first. Oh, there's a little line in the handbook that says gifted students can be fast-tracked through a Masters, or skip one entirely. But a professor will quickly tell you, without rancour, the option is only there for true geniuses. A Comp. Sci. professor would be hard-pressed to think of five students who went straight from an undergraduate to work on their Ph.D. At my Comp. Sci. department, there are two options for pursuing a Masters - course-based and thesis-based. The course-based approach is strongly, strongly discouraged. The thesis-based route still has courses. Some of them are joint undergrad-Masters courses. One I sat in for a couple of days was on machine learning - students had to investigate a recent advancement in the field and prepare a short lecture on it for the rest of the class. I dropped because it would have been a horrendous time sink and I was already at full course load. From what I hear, some Masters courses have the students study an open problem and attempt to solve it. I was talking with a professor in Toronto a few months ago, and he confirmed what the rest of you are saying about the decline of Masters programs. He said that a Masters degree from the U.K. carried a stigma - it's a mark of someone who tried to get a Ph.D., but failed. He also said that a Canadian Masters degree carried a lot more respect than one from the States. He may have just been talking about Comp. Sci. Masters, but it seemed he was talking in general. It's not uncommon for someone to take a Masters, write a thesis on software engineering or user interface design, and then join the workforce. Some places like Google virtually require their applicants to have a Masters degree. -- RE: Undergraduate theses: That would be cool, but I don't know where some programs would find the time. My program has a number of courses which are de facto capstone courses. I like them; they're just ridiculous sinks that steal your time away from 'normal' (busywork) courses. I'm not sure how capstones or internships would apply to the 'normal' sciences, though.

Originally Posted By: Salmon (I've not dismissed his skepticism, just the value of this data he is using to either add bouyancy to his skepticism, and its applicability to the same. Remember, 61Mb of data out of how many Tb have been leaked?) 61 MB is quite a lot, actually. Image files are big, audio files are big, video files are huge, but plaintext e-mails use next to no space. A plaintext copy of War and Peace is a little over 3 MB. If the 61 MBs are nothing but e-mails, that's a lot of correspondence. (Haven't read that much of TFA, so I could be misreading it. If it was 61 MBs of sampling data, it would be small, but still potentially sizable depending on how often data was sampled (10 stations? 1000 stations? Hourly? Daily? Monthly?) and how it was formatted.)

Remember, genes are NOT blueprints. This means you can't, for example, insert "the genes for an elephant's trunk" into a giraffe and get a giraffe with a trunk. There are no genes for trunks. (Everything I wanted to know about genetics, I learnt from Alpha Centauri. Meh, I suppose there are worse alternatives.)

Originally Posted By: Student of Trinity Judge 1 votes Yes, Yes, and Yes. Judge 2 votes Yes, No, and No. Judge 4 votes No, Yes, and No. Judge 3 voted No, No, Yes. That guy's a jerk though, so no one counted his vote.

It can always get worse. For instance, what about players who don't want to spend time levelling up their relationship? There's a potential for enterprising people to offer character levelling services.

Rolling pins.

I stopped reading after the first three lines.

Originally Posted By: Ephesos Um, of course. If all goes according to plan, my idea is to have two parties running at once. Separate sessions, naturally. Congratulations! You've found the Head of Vecna! That sounds like a lot of work. Very cool, but a lot of work. I'd love to play too, but I doubt I'd have the time... :-(

Originally Posted By: Thuryl the title of this topic becomes more appropriate with every post I love it when Thuryl goes meta.

Don't worry, it's a lot of people. And don't mind me, I'm just one of those who can't see the forest for the decision trees.

Arghhhhhhhhh. (Delurks.) @Thuryl: No. You can't actually do that. You can't walk into a topic full of misunderstandings about artificial sentience, machine learning, and deterministic machines, and then make a Comp. Sci. Theatre about floating point representation.

Hubris much? Now don't get me wrong - I can think of a number of cases where peacekeeping intervention from the States has improved matters, and other cases where support from them was sorely needed. But there are also cases where intervention from the States has made things worse. Regardless of any of that, no one has voted the States to be the world police. EDIT: @Synergy (and others): That's all well and good, but I (and other people I know) don't think Obama has deserved the award... yet. Yes, he's an eloquent speaker, but talk is cheap. Heck, if you don't mind, we'll pick you for an example. You're one of the more eloquent writers here on Spiderweb. Say years from now you run for President (The horror! The horror!). On the campaign trail you make a number of moving speeches. You get elected... and then spend a year mostly dealing with domestic issues. At the end of the year you get a Nobel Prize. Would you think you deserved it? Of course I'm not saying you wouldn't deliver on your promises, just like I'm not saying Obama won't. But I'd rather the Prize be awarded based on specific actions. Y'know, like the other ones are? If the members of the committee just wanted to endorse him, they should have done so by other means. They're intelligent men and women, I'm sure their words (as individuals) would have carried a lot of weight. It's not just the Nobel Prize; I dislike it when any award is given for reasons other than specific merit in a narrowly defined area (don't get me started on the Order of Canada).

Remind me to tell you about the time we had a party member who was cursed with, among other things, being unable to die. We cast Remove Curse on him once we were able to... forgetting that his body wasn't attached to his head at the moment. DM had a great time describing that one.