Bak

"The earth's magnetic field is in constant flux and undergoes a complete reversal in polarity at irregular intervals every several hundred thousand years or so. " - Scientific American ( http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?articleID...CFA83414B7F0000 ) It's VERY randomish though. How do they know this? Well they know the rate at which the continents are moving (can be measured using GPS or radioactive dating in multiple places on the ocean floor) and look at the alignment of metallic rocks formed in rifts on the ocean floor, which form a definitive stripe pattern ( hard to find a real picture of this, here's an outline: http://www.calstatela.edu/faculty/acolvil/...n_magnetism.jpg ). According to the article the flip is slow and takes 2,000-10,000 years from when it starts to finish the 180 flip in magnetic polarity. Fear not people of Earth.

That seems reasonable. Although I don't see how you can say that "God, once devoid of all anthro-religious symbolism has no evidence for his existence one way or the other," and is therefore 50/50, whereas there is also no evidence that you are or are not hallucinating (let me know if there is), and yet that's not 50/50?

Hmm I see. This sounds a lot like the autotile tool in CLT ( http://continuumlt.sourceforge.net/manual/#autotilewindow ). I think DCME has a similar functionality. Discretion does accept different formats of maps, although the current format accepted is only the traditional .lvl format because that's the only thing I coded. A module for another format could be made, however.

It would seem like you can't say no with any confidence. But in a similar way, how can you know any external truths? All of our experience comes from our fallible senses (people can and do hallucinate at times). How do you know the sky is blue? Because you see it? Perhaps you were hallucinating. How can you claim, with confidence, that you were not hallucinating, or that your entire life is a hallucination (or in the matrix, if you prefer)? Any test of this is subject to our possibly hallucinating senses and is impossible to carry out. I'm ready to admit that I don't believe I'm experiencing a hallucination in the same way I'm ready to admit I don't believe anything supernatural exists.

Hmm sounds interesting. So is your end goal to generate a bunch of tiles on a map that look decent or create a level editor along the lines of DCME, SSME, or CLT, or a level-compression mechanism based on symmetry or ?

if you have a large rigid stick going from earth to mars, and you push it an inch on earths end, does it take 8 minutes for it to move on mars' end? also what the !@#$%^&*?

what sort of evidence would make you definitively become an atheist?

aha! you caught us between builds. Goldeye recently reorganized the source tree to be more friendly for linux users and to get rid of redundency. The vs_net projects are broken until I fix them. Seeing as you want to help out I'll get it fixed asap (so within a few days).

nononono you misunderstood! So agnostics typical take on the issue (tell me if I'm wrong) is that there's no evidence for or against God, so they don't know if He exists. But this argument can be applied to unicorns or any fictional character. I was hoping to compare the absurdity of being agnostic towards unicorns (because there's no evidence for or against their existence) to the absurdity of being agnostic towards God (because there's no evidence for or against His existence). Of course religious people don't believe in unicorns. Why not? There's no evidence they exist. Can we apply the same argument to God? Why not? Is there any evidence God exists?

are you agnostic about the existence unicorns too? grow some balls

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Utpam0IGYac

found this one from work a few years ago http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v622/bak2007/p.jpg

how do i make it go back to normal. I can't see messages one after another, instead I just get a single message and a tree outline of the topic below it. This happened once before and it's stupid.

when you're 90 you'll be remembering your experiences, not how much money you saved.

ehh, who's gonna do the checksum? the client. So, again, man-in-the-middle attack works.

yeah, if you ever played football in hz every time the qb changes the phase, that's a settings change. although I was thinking of using prizes and deprizes

anyway I just want to tall that dude that all of that stuff is possible with ASSS and regions, some of it requiring no custom code at all (the warp to blocks, for instance).

even if your packets are perfectly encrypted, how do you know the networking security module is not passing along the valid decrypted data to say, a physics module that lets the player go through walls?

i'm currently netbanned for testing a self-made continuum .40 maphack in tw. However, the fun bans I've had come from HS. Back in the day right when they switched to ASSS they used to allowed VIE clients in. Naturally I brought in a mervbot to do various things for me like tell me where the flags are, throw the powerball right on top of me for quick goals (you used to get points for scoring goals), and dying 100 times a second to give me all the exp and money I wanted (at night when no one was on, of course). After I got bored of that I'd come up with creative ways to make it look like others are cheating. Basically I made the bot come in under a random name (I think it picked two random words from the dictionary so it wouldn't be instantly identified as a bot). Then I waited until there were two teams battling for the remaining flags, each with their own base. With continuum you can pick up flags from anywhere on the map and drop them anywhere, so I put the bot into a safe zone, and had it pickup flags from one team's flag room, and drop them right next to a player on the other team... lots of good laughs seeing everyone accuse the other player of cheating, hacking ect. Once the mods caught on (I think they started alias checking everyone that came in they didn't recognize), I got a 2 week ban and they stopped allowing VIE clients in.

yes, that's a very good point. I think about this sometimes and what worries me is man-in-the-middle attacks, where there's a hacked discretion client, acting as a server talking to a real discretion client. the fake one connects to a server and passes the info to the real client, which generates the real response and sends it to the fake client, which then passes it on the server... then the fake client takes over and the server thinks everything's ok. hmm, I think the security module would have to act as the module manager so it can be certain that it's doing checksums of the right code. also, the server could encode it's ip address into the encrypted packet and the security module could send data directly to that ip address (that could probably be worked around, although it would be a lot harder than a simple man-in-the-middle, I'm pretty sure that's how continuum's billing server works since if you ever try to do a man-in-the-middle server in continuum to an ssc zone you still get a "not connected to the central player database" warning when connecting). I mean, it's definitely a possibility.

i'm not so sure about that png thing (hey that rhymes!). pngs are good when there's large areas of contiguous color, so this would correspond to a large area of the same tile. save for the blank tile, this isn't usually the case... worth a shot tho. Then again you could just zlib compress the .lvl file when you send it and get about the same compression as png...

if there's more than 333,334 tiles, then about 1 in 3 spots on the map is a tile, which is ridiculous (hmm shouldn't it be 1 in 4 since 8 is 1/4 of 32?). The only only maps I can thing of that would benefit are the ones that have a tile background, but since lvz takes care of that in a much nicer way it wouldn't have much application (scan your zones folder for .lvl files bigger than 1 mb in the tile section [skip the tileset and elvl data]). Even more savings would be to have a "current tile" and just give the tile numbers of the locations, rather than pairs. Using this, the trade off would occur much sooner. Currently you use 32 bytes per tile. With the mine you would use (!@#$%^&*ume tile id <255> means change tile)254 * 16 bytes for changing tiles (if you use all 254 tile types, as an upper bound) + 24 bytes per tile. 32*x = 254*16 + 24*x x = 508 So if a map has 508 tiles you'd be saving space (instead of 333,334 tiles). This means you save space for lvl sizes bigger than (not counting the tileset) 15.9 kb. You could take it a step further and have vector-like drawing instructions where rather than only being able to place points on the map, you can place entire lines and rectangles. So for example, to place a line of the same tile type you could do: <254> it would again, use the current tile type. This would mean encoding a line would take 48 + 8 bytes, so that if the line is 3 or more tiles long, it would save space to encode it this way. Rectangles would be similar. However this is interesting because now the size of the map is dependent on the program that's saving it as well as the format, since this is very similar to like vector graphics. The thing is, all this is nice and all, but it's a bit overkill. Think of when you were making DCME. If you couldn't load a map very easily right at the beginning, you would have probably been swayed away from the project.

it should be an option for the zones... some people are banned from SSC

I don't like how in order to authenticate into a biller you send them your password. Any zone owner can then take your password and use it as they please. A much better system would be to only have the password be sent to the biller when it's !@#$%^&*igned or changed (maybe directly or through some sort of web interface; not through the server). Then, to authenticate a player, the biller sends(through the server) some random bytes, which get appended to the player's name which gets appended to the player's password, and then a one-way hash is taken of that and the hash is what gets sent back to the biller (through the server). Now the server can't figure out your password, since it's a one-way hash, and they can't reuse the hash since the next time you log in the biller will send a different set of random bytes. Something to think about anyway... maybe for Discretion