rmidthun

In a similar vein, my 10yo daughter used to play a now-defunct MMO called Pixie Hollow. In it, you played a Disney fairy and took care of pets which needed to be fed and played with to remain happy and healthy.

Months after the game was shut down, she woke up in the middle of the night crying. She had a dream where all the pets from the game were sitting in the empty ruins, trying not to starve to death after they were abandoned by the fairies. The pets might not be real, but the attachments definitely are.

My Roland digital piano has several temperaments it can use including meantone, just, pythagorean. It's a low-midrange model HP203, make to look and sound more like a piano.

Once again, Max Headroom proves to be the most prophetic show of the 80s. "Deities" has a church using exactly this sort of technology to offer "immortality".

Ok, how about it? http://www.superliminal.com/cube/cube.htm

There's also a 5 dimensional one and links to all kinds of crazy.

Interestingly, solving higher dimensional cubes isn't more difficult from an algorithm view. Understanding what you're looking at might be a different story!

There used to be a solution online called the "Ultimate solution", the web page I got it from is now sadly defunct. It showed you how to solve the cube with only two moves. The first was a simple commutator, of form FRF'R' and showed how you can use just this one move to get all the edges in place.

If you then place two of these moves together with a similar structure, you get a move that cycles corners. This is of the form (X)U(X')U', where X is an edge commutator like FRF' (example (FRF')D(F'R'F)D'). This one move properly applied will move 3 corners without disrupting edges.

So, the trick to the fourth dimension is to learn a move on the order (C)W(C')W', where C is the inner part (no final move) of the corner commuter above. And so it goes, each dimension only requiring one more move in the same fashion.

Of course, figuring out exactly how to make that move with the interface is the hard part. And the fun.

What about "Answer" by Frederick Brown? http://www.roma1.infn.it/~anzel/answer.html

Perhaps the shortest SF story worth reading...

There's also some other "big scale" SF like Greg Egan's Diaspora or Olaf Stapledon's Star Maker that might qualify. Egan's book ends up with the main character having run through trillions of AI simulations in new universes, including higher dimensional ones.

Stapledon's book is the story of the entire universe combining into one intelligence to attempt to contact God. The book was written long before computers, so it might not qualify as AI.

This is just a guess, but in ruby, you can perform methods directly on any value, such as "3.succ", which returns 4. I don't think that works in Python. Ruby allows you to extend any class with more methods, so you could create your own function and apply it directly to a number. In Python, you would need to pass that number into a function.

E.g. Ruby: (3.7).round opposed to Python round(3.7)

D'oh. Good point.

At least I can point to it as another example of someone not expert in the field making a stupid statement about crypto...

I think the general problem of padding with random values resulting in non-determinism would still matter in some cases, but IANAC.

Obvious? Didn't that word already cause enough trouble?

What are you going to pad it with? Random values? In that case, I'll just make two requests for the same information and clip it where they differ. Some sort of value based on the message? That also has issues, see link below. So far it doesn't seem like there are any obvious crypto ideas that are not also wrong.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Padding_oracle_attack

Actually, in this case "Limit" is perfectly accurate. The only result of checking this is that the application must call advertisingTrackingEnabled before using the identifier.

If enabled is NO, then the developer can use the identifier for "frequency capping, conversion events, estimating the number of unique users, security and fraud detection, and debugging". Notice that compliance with these restrictions is almost impossible to determine.

http://developer.apple.com/library/ios/#documentation/AdSupp...