eslifka

The tone in that post by Feldman makes my skin crawl. I hadn't heard of him before but I don't think I could ever read anything he's written now. Is he always like that? ICK.

Yes, but what's important is the rate. Power is the measure of calories per hour (or joules per second). Fat (and food in general) is extremely energy dense, but that energy can only be released relatively slowly.

This is the same reason why TNT is used for demolition while gasoline is used for engines. Gasoline delivers 15 times the energy of an equal weight of TNT, but TNT's energy release is much more rapid (it can also do so without air, the other big reason for blowing things up with TNT).

You only get that result in python by importing the decimal library. The standard behavior in python is (.1 + .2 == .3) == False

However, your code example makes the excellent point that python has such a library available, whereas Javascript does not. At least, not as easily as an import.

This reminds me distinctly of this onion article: http://www.theonion.com/content/node/28694

It's great that he doesn't watch television (except that he does, he just gets it through an alternate channel and is more selective of what he watches) but he puts forth no interesting discussion about the merits thereof. He does mention copyright issues, but only to say that he doesn't violate copyright because it's too much work. He again doesn't make any discussion points on the matter.

I agree. I doubt I'll be able to invest the time to truly compete. But I definitely plan on creating something on the simpler end for fun. And if I can get a bot going that doesn't crash, why not submit it? And given a year until the deadline I see no drawbacks in playing with this casually.

The standard starcraft AI was always pretty pathetic, even after Blizzard's attempts to make it more challenging. My guess is that in the subset competitions (1 - 3) the sc AI would get whipped, if it could even be coerced into competing. (I don't think it could even do the micromanaging competition, I think the units would just sit there until they were attacked. And even then it would be the standard unit ai responding instead of the overall ai. It might fair a little better in the tech limited tournament.) I think the limited scope of those tournaments will allow the submitted bots to be highly optimized. It might fare better in the overall competition though, since both sides will be dealing with the full complexity of the game. But I still think that by the tournament the submitted bots will be highly superior to the built in ai.

I think this is a great idea. I haven't read more than the description page yet, so i don't know if it's possible either, but I think that if it is possible then that would be a great way to iteratively test production. I also wonder if it will be possible to play against your bot early on. They mention in the description that they'll have top players playing the bots at the tournaments, but I wonder if it's easy to get that set up at home. I should think so, but you never know. If it is easy it would be rather fun to play your own bot.

Your comments ring very true to me. My father decided he'd rather stay in a relatively low chemical engineering job rather than push up the corporate latter into a black tie management position. As a result my friends all had much nicer toys and bigger houses, but they rarely saw their parents. On top of that my friend's parents never seemed happy, ever. Whereas my father has always been one of the happiest people I know. Throughout my highschool years he'd tell me stories almost nightly of something interesting he'd done that day. Now that I'm older and nearing the end of my own degree I have no doubt I'll keep the same perspective: stick with doing what you love no matter how much you make off of it.

- I should clarify that we didn't live anywhere near poverty. My father wasn't putting us in a bad situation to keep the job he loved. We were just significantly lower than the people around us, and as a result he didn't have many friends among his peers (by that I mean parents in our suburb) because they looked down on him. So that situation may not have any real bearing on this discussion since he didn't seem to be facing a hard decision: give up the respect of a bunch of career pushing suits or hate his life and his job, hmmm.

I don't have any references for you, but my middle school and highschool required graphing calculators. And they very strongly pushed the ti-83+, claiming that students would be horribly lost if they couldn't follow along with the teacher's instructions. In reality the teachers were all incompetent with the calculators and the school wanted everyone to have an 83+ because that was the only platform on which the teachers knew the process for erasing the memory.

From the Freehacker article I surmise that it's Plura Processing (http://www.pluraprocessing.com/)

"[...] in fact was announced on the Digsby blog as an official way they are going to make some money, with Plura Processing as a partner."

As to whether or not you can supply processing power for a fee, I doubt it. Looking through their individuals page briefly it looks like it's very similar to SETI@home or any other distributed computing effort. If you like the projects they're running you help, if not you don't.