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Nobody's stupid enough to do that except the Bush administration, and a press badge doesn't grant you access to black sites. If anything, the Iraq War was a perfect example of how well the American military can keep a secret when they need to, when it was only online document leaks that confirmed the existence of groups like Task Force 373. There were some small leaks by the press, like the stuff on Guantanamo Bay prisoners and Abu Graihb, but in the overall scheme of things they were largely too small to have a significant effect on the public consciousness, and they took too long to mature.
As for whether free press should be suspended, I think moderation should probably be used. A lot of the people who took photos in Vietnam of supposed brutality of American soldiers or allies, like the guy who took the Nguyễn Ngọc Loan execution photo and Jane Fonda after the Hanoi Jane incident frequently came out and said they wished that they never took the photos or had them published. Ironically in most cases it wasn't some morality which guided journalism in Vietnam but rather capitalism itself, since such pictures sold millions of copies of papers and magazines. At any rate, I think the mistakes from Vietnam have been learned, both by the government and by media corporations.
It's not conventional journalism that policymakers need to concern themselves with anymore anyways, since Twitter and Reddit have given birth to an entirely new form of journalism that can be anonymous and instantaneous. If anything, the saturation and ability for online sources to give such wide ranges of information and opinion would dilute the effect on the public consciousness as a whole in wartime so much so that an oversaturation of a particular opinion in a muddy case, like in the Vietnam War, would be exponentially harder to attain.
As for whether free press should be suspended, I think moderation should probably be used. A lot of the people who took photos in Vietnam of supposed brutality of American soldiers or allies, like the guy who took the Nguyễn Ngọc Loan execution photo and Jane Fonda after the Hanoi Jane incident frequently came out and said they wished that they never took the photos or had them published. Ironically in most cases it wasn't some morality which guided journalism in Vietnam but rather capitalism itself, since such pictures sold millions of copies of papers and magazines. At any rate, I think the mistakes from Vietnam have been learned, both by the government and by media corporations.
It's not conventional journalism that policymakers need to concern themselves with anymore anyways, since Twitter and Reddit have given birth to an entirely new form of journalism that can be anonymous and instantaneous. If anything, the saturation and ability for online sources to give such wide ranges of information and opinion would dilute the effect on the public consciousness as a whole in wartime so much so that an oversaturation of a particular opinion in a muddy case, like in the Vietnam War, would be exponentially harder to attain.
Say I'm designing a piece of software (I'm not) which has no access to the time, the internet, or a table of preset numbers to cycle through. let's also say that it purges everything between loads, so loading it up is exactly the same every single time.
How would I go about making a Random Number Generator under these circumstances? It's been bothering me for days because by the very nature of maths, the results are going to be the same every time without external input.
How would I go about making a Random Number Generator under these circumstances? It's been bothering me for days because by the very nature of maths, the results are going to be the same every time without external input.
Can you scan the environment and rely on that? Just generate a number based on the variables from the readings.
No external inputs. My dad's convinced it's not impossible.
Can you use the processing speed of a part of the computer?
I guess so. I think I (and my Dad) was expecting there to be some mathematical solution involving 200 brackets of sin or something. RNGs seem a lot more complicated and externally-driven than I assumed they were.
Sir Saladin
Count
Vermillion_Hawk said:
I think you are mistaken.
About the only difference is that it was fairly popular to treat the drafted soldiers who served in Viet Nam like **** but now the soldiers in our new never ending wars don't get spat upon so much.
It's partially because RNG's can be separated into two parts: the chaotic function and the seed. The seed is the input for the chaotic function, which we'll come back to later. The chaotic function gives extremely different outputs for inputs with relatively small differences. Many RNGs use the output from said function as the next seed or to modify the given seed, in hopes that an even larger difference will make the next outputs appear more random (there are other ways of getting a new seed though). However, since the chaotic function is not truly random, we try to pick a seed that is either hopefully truly random, or is in essence random for the intended purpose. With no access to external inputs and a consistent starting state, you cut off most, if not all, chances of a random seed. In a real computer, you could abuse the fact that your state will always be "mutated" by the surroundings, clock timing, general physics, etc, but in an ideal machine, I can't think of anything that would suffice.jacobhinds said:
why is Taleworld's Forum that poular?
6,589,942 posts. not bad I guess 
It's not really that big in comparison to the game's popularity. Places like TWC and simtropolis are way bigger, even considering how much more popular those games are (there's also only one forum for the mount & blade series)
It doesn't help that TWC has visible post counts, badges, more badges, a dual-tiered ranking system, big banners for modders, and a kagrillion smileys. also badges.
I wouldn't take post count as a marker of popularity, since
I wouldn't take post count as a marker of popularity, since
good point. but just counting the online time is not good either imo. I think a mix between posts and online time would be the best solution
Stupid me forgot to finish my post. I meant to say post count isn't a very good indicator of popularity because some sites, like simtropolis, sort of encourage huge numbers of posts by making it into more of a social network. Typical bare-bones phpBB sites like this can end up scaring off people who aren't used to the forum setuo
Whenever I go to TWC now to look for mods I always see tons of banned people. That always reminds me of why I stopped using that forum in the first place.
The moderators are incredibly prickly, and who has time for playing at law in that pretentious subforum they have just for making appeals.
The moderators are incredibly prickly, and who has time for playing at law in that pretentious subforum they have just for making appeals.
I find the forum's setup very easy, but that could only be mejacobhinds said:
