Recent content by Tamayo

Outside Quebec, though, I have perceived us Canadians to be a bit more prudish, and that movie is definitely an R to us. I contend it is not misogynistic, though. I came to it having read the novella first. I hadn't realized there even was a film, let alone one with a baby Crockett and a...

The break requested by the FBI changes two things in the operating system of that phone: the time delay between password attempts and the limit of ten attempts before the phone erases itself. It would need to be applied as a custom operating system on the phone, which means it would need...

From the quote in the article: The notion of using only indentation for block structure is not just one of which-editor-do-I-like (GNU Emacs) and whether-I-use-tabs-or-spaces (spaces of course) but indeed how-do-I-parse-a-program. C, which as noted in Mr Young's article, descends from B and...

All Turing-complete languages are equally "powerful"; there is no problem that can be solved by a C program that cannot also be solved by an Intercal program. Unfortunately, it's really hard to write a program in Intercal, and it's absurdly hard to read an Intercal program to figure out what it...

Fourth-edition GURPS has fewer absolutely game-breaking flaws in it than previous editions, but they're still there if you do the munchkin-ing. They're mostly gone. Really. At the price, unfortunately, of reducing the game's elegance and orthogonality. Still, any really clever munchkin...

In fact, that's a multinomial system like the one in GURPS. It just uses different dice, though smaller ones and more of them. GURPS actually implicitly admits that the number of dice being rolled ought to be 6 instead of 3The multinomial distribution of 6dX very closely models a Gaussian...

Your statement seems fairly opaque to me, so I will quote you, then paraphrase you in hopes I am understanding what you are getting at. I don't recognize it and Google didn't help me much. Is this game based on the OGL d20 system? That is, are its mechanics strongly reminiscent of...

Um. Let me state initially that the quest for better (for many ways of measuring "better") PRNGs will never cease, but it has certainly come up with some really excellent ones. Linear congruential PRNGs---such as those that come with the standard Unix C library, or any version of BASIC from...

Literally true; practically absolutely infeasible. Note that in on-line multiplayer games, there isn't ever only one pseudo-random number generator sequence in existence at any given time, and the number picked to represent the result of any given action will depend not only upon who is doing...

Ah, poor guys. Thirty seconds into the movie (or thereabouts---no, I didn't time it carefully; no, I don't really care) an alien spaceship rumbles past the moon and kicks up dust. Three jingoistic hours later (or thereabouts) our heroes bring down said alien spaceship with a Macintosh...

There are cryptosystems that do not rely on integer factoring or the discrete logarithm problem, which are the two most common trapdoor one-way functions in use these days and which are vulnerable to Shor's algorithm; check out lattice-based cryptography for one of them if you are interested...

Actually, a zombie outbreak would almost certainly end in apocalypse. Here's why.

What do you mean by "sexism" here? Let me suggest some possibilities, from en.wiktionary.org/wiki/sexism: So, in the spirit of your question, could we have a society wherein it was not possible to have such a belief? Mmmmaybe---but only by force. Would it be good if such a belief were...

Er, actually, the US Air Force bought PS3s because they were ideal for the task at hand. (And also cheap.) They were intended to be used online so they were easy to fit up into clusters, they had Cell processors for crunching large amounts of spatial data, and they could (at the time) be...

Ah, but it's a "-yo" mora, not an "-o". ;-) It was my great-grandmother's name, and then my UO character's (this is a gaming site, right?) and then my userid for casual discussion fora. My own name is just too boring to mention so I shall not do that. And, on topic, I again applaud your...