Because the chemical in this case is something we have all the necessary things to produce.
I can't make energy (ie. food) from no input, but with some energy expenditure, my body could carry out the set of reactions to convert glucose (which is readily available in the diet) to Vitamin C.
It is made internally by almost all organisms although notable mammalian group exceptions are most or all of the order chiroptera (bats), guinea pigs, capybaras, and one of the two major primate suborders, the Anthropoidea (Haplorrhini) (tarsiers, monkeys and apes, including human beings).
Because a mutation turned off our precursor's ability to do so, and (due to the abundance of vitamin C in their diet), wasn't immediately deleterous but instead managed to spread throughout the entire population.
Probably not a tradeoff. Scurvy is devastating and Wikipedia says an animal like a 70 kg goat makes ~13 grams of Vitamin C a day (which isn't very much of anything).
Sure. I was responding to the tradeoff question. It just doesn't seem very likely that some animal survived because it wasn't making Vitamin C (the other case is some animal surviving even though it didn't properly make it).
What kind of cellular machinery would be required? Where would this cellular machinery exist? Would we have a vitamin-C creating gland? How susceptible would this gland be to outright failure a la diabetes? The body could do a lot of things, but without a working alternative model simply saying the existing model is faulty suggests a deep understanding we clearly lack.
You'll find that jurors with higher education are often eliminated (prosecutors hate educated jurors, they tend to be harder to convince), jurors with law experience (even if it's as simple as a law class in high school) also tend to be eliminated, because they know at least a little something about standards of proof and nullification, etc.
The list of things that you can be eliminated for by either the judge or one of the attorneys (who get a limited number [3, I think] of eliminations) is staggering.
I disagree with the author when he says that "RPG, in the context of video games basically means quest based game with turn based combat." IMO, this is extremely narrow-minded, and entirely sidesteps the most important part of the RPG acronym: the R and P, standing for role-playing.
That said, just role-playing is not enough to make an RPG (otherwise, all games would be RPG's!). To say Zelda is anything other than an RPG is narrow-mindedness at best, and intentionally misleading at worst.
"RPG" is an empirical cluster. It's a mistake to seriously attempt to infer the properties of the cluster from the term used to describe it. It does seem safe to say that the above description is overly narrow, but that doesn't mean most video games referred to as RPGs have much to do with role-playing.
At least back in the old days of Nintendo Power, they called games like that "adventure" games, or sometimes action/adventure and RPG was another (then sorely neglected) category where you would always get to read about these games, only to find that they would never leave Japan.
The article addresses this part clearly: the "RP" in "RPG" doesn't really define the category, since most (all?) character-based games are "role-playing": in a racing game, you're role-playing a race car driver, in a military FPS you're role-playing a soldier, etc. But I wouldn't call those RPGs by any stretch of the imagination.
RPG has pretty much come to mean a very specific thing: quest-type game with turn-based combat. I would never think of Zelda as an RPG.
(As an aside, remember Super Mario RPG? They mashed standard Mario with the kind of RPG format I describe above... funny that they explicitly acknowledge the format in the title of the game.)
I disagree with the "turn-based". There are loads of RPGs which aren't strictly turn-based or even feature action-oriented battles. Games such as Final Fantasy and Xenosaga would fall into the former category (which really is blurring the line a bit because it depends on what you define as turn-based) while games such as World of Warcraft or the "Tales of" Series, which feature real time combat, either more tactical (WoW) or even in the style of Beat-em-Ups (which was essentially pioneered by Tales of Phantasia and became a selling point of the series as a whole).
I would personally define RPG as a game that features most the following:
- a story that isn't just background for the gameplay (like in many FPS, where the story is just an excuse for you to shoot stuff). This will most likely includes character development and other sorts of progression in the game world. (Zelda? Check.)
- some sort of combat system, whether turn-based, action-oriented or with strategic elements doesn't matter (Zelda? Check.)
- generally non-linear gameplay including sidequests. There's usually a red thread along which the main game progresses, but you can "pause" at almost any time and just do what the fuck you want - go explore, do sidequests, grind levels or equipment etc. (Zelda? Check.)
- character progression, through acquiring new items, abilities, levels, skills etc. (Zelda? Check.)
I kept this intentionally fuzzy because there are many fringe cases, such as Monster Hunter, which basically lacks the story (it's really just an excuse to tell you "go hunt monsters"), but is otherwise considered an RPG too.
Zelda definitely IS an RPG. I think it's partially due to being so special that many people don't like to classify it as such - they might feel like it takes away from the magic a bit.
a story that isn't just background for the gameplay... (Zelda? Check.)
Is there some hidden story mode for Zelda? Last I checked a princess got kidnapped and you go rescue her. That is the total extent of the plot. It is as paper thin as you can get. There is no character development. Outside of Link's ability to use a sword he has zero character. Gannon is an equally shallow evil wizard dude.
I agree to a point, but there's a reason I included "world progression" into that point.
I do have to admit I'm a bit biased on this since I've read a lot of supplementary materials which flesh out the games a lot (there are mangas for Ocarina of Time, Majora's Mask and quite a few other Zeldas), and especially the newer Zeldas (arguably starting with Majora's Mask[1]) do have a decent plot and story, even though it isn't as "epic" as the likes of Final Fantasy.
[1] Majora's Mask deserves a special mention because it's - perhaps infamously - a very non-standard Zelda. Most of its charme lies in the incredible amount of (mostly optional) character driven side-quests which range from funny and interesting to soul-crushingly depressing. I consider it my favorite game in the franchise for this reason.
I think "Action RPG" is a better term for a game like Skyrim, but RPG works too. I think the main point is that characters should have complex, D&D-style stats that should be more important than player ability -- i.e. if an expert with a level 10 paladin can consistently beat a newbie with a level 30 warrior, then you aren't playing a "real" RPG.
To me, an RPG video game requires you assume the persona of someone else, someone who has their own collection of stats and backstory and motivations. One particularly important point is combat must depend on the character your playing as much as (or more so) than your own ability. Generally this means you get to decide the tactics, but the character you play as decides how well they perform.
I agree with all of your points, though the only one I can address is the LINQ for source code quip and amend it somewhat to an already possible "LINQ for codebases." It should, in theory, be just a few weekends worth of work to use Mono.Cecil (https://github.com/jbevain/cecil) to provide a nice queryable API to inspect an (already compiled) codebase. I'm sure some nice static evaluation tools could be written based on this that nobody's thought of yet.
That said, being able to inspect the source-code pre-compilation is a whole other level above and beyond—as a fan of the compile-time safety that statically-typed languages provide, any opportunity to eliminate bugs and complexity before the code makes it to a customer is a welcome one, and if Roslyn is good, it could be huge.
Roslyn will be good. It has to be because from what I understand, the MS team themselves will use Roslyn in Visual Studio and other products. Roslyn isn't just a public API for others to analyze code. It will be the foundation on which .NET framework languages will depend upon.
See Eric Lippert (Member of the Roslyn team, C# Principal) notes here:
Well, MFC was actually a library. And I know it was a poor library. But this is a different ball game.
With Roslyn, they are going to write C# compiler in C# itself (and VB compiler in VB). And if they expose this as an API, it's guaranteed that I will be able to parse every valid C# file.
as someone who's tried to use Mono.Cecil, it kind of sucks if you're not already developing on the Mono toolchain (among other things, there's no interoperability between System.Reflection types and Mono.Cecil types, and even if you're on Mono, I don't think you can "vivisect" running Assemblies.) Microsoft has a product called FxCop (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb429476(VS.80).aspx) which does style analysis and linting -- however, the code analysis is all embedded in the FxCop binary and undocumented.
suffice to say, I'm psyched about Roslyn -- more about code transformations than correctness aids.
If by "unaffected" you mean "correct", then yes, as long as it is set up correctly for cross-compilation (I mean the compiler and assembler, which are unused on the target box in non-LTO mode).
But with GCC LTO, distcc will only distribute the parsing of the source code while the optimization and code generation will be done on the target box, so the speedup gain with distcc will be much smaller (LTO makes the ratio of work that parallelizable to work that is non-parallelizable much lower).
GCC LTO partitions the work, if it can interact with distcc it can distribute optimization too, at the cost of some missed optimizations. I don't know if that does the right thing in GCC 4.6.0
I suspect that they wouldn't be that stupid. That would alienate sizable parts of the Skype userbase. Microsoft is stupid, but not that stupid. This seems like pure paranoia to me.
Not paranoia. I don't care. If anything, I want it to happen, as I have a few VOIP ideas that can't compete with a free Skype everywhere.
The reason to buy skype is for it's name, not for it's tech, as everybody agrees it's tech is not worth $8B. The name is only important if it gets you something. It will get you phone sales if you're the only one offering it on a phone.
Possibly with something like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser_cooling, where you're not actually striking it with matter, but only with photons, though I don't know if photons react with antimatter (I presume not, but I am not a particle physicist).
Of course they interact with photons. Photons are how electric and magnetic fields are propagated. So if they can be contained by an electromagnetic trap, they interact with photons.
I think I should've been more specific—I know that the two interact, but I wasn't sure if they /react/. That is, would collision between photons and antimatter produce the same sort of decay as matter-antimatter collision. Some research suggests that it indeed would.
Antimatter is just matter moving backwards in time, so it interacts with photons (which by the way, is its own antiparticle). This is one line of reasoning which strongly suggests antimatter should fall down not up in a gravitionational field.
although iirc Dark matter is something does not interact with light.
I think people may be overselling this a bit. It is true that antimatter bears certain resemblances to matter traveling "backwards in time" when the math is examined, but the mental images conjured up by a plain-English reading of that phrase are almost entirely wrong. It's not like you tap the antimatter and the motion goes backward in time. I hate using metaphors, but it's somewhat more like you have a guy walking forward on the road, but if you hit him violently enough he'll end up turned around, walking back-first but in the same direction. Yeah, he's walking backwards through time! ime! ime! ime! but it's not like you can actually send messages backwards or anything; give him a message and he's still walking in the positive-time direction. There's a lot of cancellation of the negative term that goes on and he's still dancing to the tune of the same arrow-of-time as the rest of us.
I'm pretty pessimistic that antimatter will be repulsed by gravity, because you would suddenly have a term that would have to appear for the potential energy of the now-flipped gravity field. It makes much more sense for it to be affected normally. It's an interesting question that we might as well look at, on the off chance that the science will be wrong (which is when it advances, after all), but I wouldn't hold your breath.
I don't fully understand your analogy. How exactly is that situation "backwards in time" if it still is moving forwards? Where could I find more info on this?
Actually, it sounds like you got it perfectly. There is legitimately a way in which he's going "backwards", it's just not the way you would naturally think of if I just told you he's going "backwards". The backwards-through-time thing is one way of reading the math, but it doesn't mean what you think if you just read what the English says. Antimatter is way less interesting than "backwards in time" can make it sound. It's interesting, but not "kill your grandfather before your father is born" sort of interesting, just "fun particle physics" interesting.
- I think all photons fall down in a gravitational field.
- you claim photons are their own antiparticle.
Hence, antiphotons fall down in a gravitational field. How then would antimatter fall upwards ~because~ it is the antiparticle of matter? Am I wrong in 'knowing' that all light bends the same under gravity?
Best as I can tell I don't think we disagree. You are saying that antimatter should react the same way with respect to gravity as matter does right? Then I agree. I do not think antimatter will be found to fall up or be repelled.
> Antimatter is just matter moving backwards in time
That could finally put an end to the chicken-egg problem. There was an anti-matter chicken in the first egg and it had moved back in time to lay its own egg after it hatched!
I invariably find myself doing this in C projects because not doing it is a serious violation of DRY--writing possibly hundreds of lines of free (foo->bar); free (foo->baz); free (foo->quux->fnord); ... ; free (foo) is not only hugely error prone, but a waste of everyone's time.
I can't make energy (ie. food) from no input, but with some energy expenditure, my body could carry out the set of reactions to convert glucose (which is readily available in the diet) to Vitamin C.