[MUD-Dev] Re: (no subject)

[JC Lawrence]

On Sat, 27 Dec 1997 15:52:07 PST8PDT Ola wrote:

Hurm.  Gotta see why SuperCite is breaking on your headers.

> JC Lawrence <claw at under.Eng.Sun.COM> wrote:

>> ... which asserts that those without evil deeds have no
>> secrets.  There's more than a little truth in there, tho I'll
>> acccept questions on its absoluteness.

> Ah, but what is wrong about "evil deeds", if the evilness is imposed
> by society.  

<nod>

> Lesbians have been forced to leave smaller towns by
> social exclusion. Etc.  

Yup.  I actually find such capabilities in the system to be a Good
Thing.  The problem is not that they are discriminated against, but
that the discriminators are in turn not socially discriminated
against.  Coventry is a very powerful social motivator, as any
observer in a pre-school can observe when the tykes get "time-out".

  Aside: I attended a rather unusual private school in England, which
among other characteristics had a strong more against swearing among
the student body.  The really interesting thing was that it was the
student body, not the staff, which instigated the more, and it was the
student body which enforced it.  The result was that a new student
might arrive in the school, perhaps from a swear-happy public school,
would be initially commented on and viewed with dissapproval by the
other kids for their swearing, and would then be gradually ostracised
by the rest of the school as they continued to swear.

  It was wonderful to watch, and very effective.

As a good friend of mine was prone to say, "Man is prone to witch
hunts."  The shame of the matter is that man is not prone to hunting
witch hunters -- which may be Man's critical weakness in the survival
game.

However, we're a long way from topic here.

> Another point, you should be able to break
> away from your past, because if not, then you will have no reason to
> reach for the "good". (Think about Jesus on the cross)

Umm, no.  I disagree violently as it avoids or obviates the question
of responsibility, but this is not the palce to go into that.

>> Consider the absolute case of our real physical universe.
>> Theoretically, given enough analysis of actually a very small
>> (relatively) number of particles (Heisenberg to the side here
>> because we are dealing with macro events) I can determine and
>> follow your every living motion.  It would be ridiculously
>> expensive, and there are far easier (if invasive) ways to get the
>> same data, but it is, theoretically possible.

> I'm not going to argue against this, although I think you are wrong.
> Especially if you count in the resources available to humans.  (I'm
> not sure how theoretical you are).  

__Extremely__ theoretical in this case.  

> It would be possible for someone
> external to the Universe (God) though.  

Actually it is possible internally as well, tho the order of
difficulty is quite a bit larger.

> Someone inside the system
> (Universe) would add noise each time he moved to "pick up" data.  It
> will eventually turn out to be a matter of significance.

Yup.  

>> so far (say a week), with the excuse that quantumn randomity hides
>> the rest of the past from us through random "noise".

> Idea: What about providing some kind of selective world memory.
> That is, space/timeslices that has attracted a lot of attention will
> be available for more than a week.  (a replay of highlights feature)

My current technical implementation makes this impossible as it
requires that the entire world be reconstructable for any time in the
past, for any single object at that time to be reconstructed (ie its
all or nothing --- you must have the whole wolrd back there in that
past, or you can have nothing back there).  This is slated to be
re-examined as I'm not happy with the limitation and I suspect that a
few key changes could open some interesting efficiencies.

--
J C Lawrence                               Internet: claw at null.net
                                           Internet: coder at ibm.net
----------(*)                        Internet: jc.lawrence at sun.com
...Honourary Member of Clan McFud -- Teamer's Avenging Monolith...