Feb. 10, 1996: Checkmate
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Man squares off against machine at the chessboard, with decidely mixed results. Compiled by Tony Long.
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Also: Color Sudoku game adds twist to computing. See what people are saying on News.com Extra.
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Gabe: The Penny Arcade Battle Academy Will be meeting next Tuesday the 8th at the Comic Stop. We're an official Pokemon TCG league now. Those of you in the Academy who haven't done so already, should register with Go Pokemon.com. Once you have a POP ID you can post it in this thread and Joe will get you added to the roster. As always, new players are welcome. Just grab a starter deck and be at the Comic Stop around 6.PM. There will be plenty of people willing to walk you through the game if it's your first time. For our regulars, if you're looking for a place up north to get cards and boosters I highly recommend the Cardhaus in Lynnwood. He's got some singles in stock but he also has the best price on boosters I've been able to find. Also, Kiko and I picked up some great tips and a few interesting rules that we did not know about while at the tournament. We'll share our "key learnings" with you all on Tuesday. It should be a fun night, hope to see some new faces. -Gabe out
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RISHON LETZION, Israel A pawn, then another. A knight, then another.
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An Australian pleads guilty to fraud after posing as a dispossessed Nigerian to cheat people of their money. Also: eBay penalizes its own con men & hellip;. Microsoft's legal woes not quite over & hellip;. and more.
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Gabe: I just have some random stuff to share here.Pokemon League night is next Tuesday at the Comic Stop. Matches start at six pm, but you can show up a little early if you'd like to trade cards. As always new players are welcome, just bring a starter deck. It's also a good idea to register at Go-Pokemon.com and bring your POP ID. A reader wrote in today to tell me that he was doing the New York Times crossword puzzle for January 30th and noticed this clue for 12 down:  "Tycho's pal in the webcomic 'Penny Arcade' (4 letters)." That's totally awesome. I'm sure the Force Unleashed will be fine. The time period around the original trilogy is just getting so crowded. Now Vader has a secret apprentice? I mean, it makes sense canonically to me. The Emperor had Mara Jade out there doing his dirty work. It's not unreasonable to think Vader had a similar arrangement. Also the very nature of Sith rule makes covering your ass a necessity. The hook for the game is fine and I don't mind the 3rd person action stuff. There are a few games I'd much rather see them make though. The fact that they have not made a sequel to Republic Commando is fucking criminal. That's not a joke either. I mean that someone over there should be put in jail for the rest of their life. RepCom was an incredible squad based shooter, and unlike most games in that genre it was packed with awesome characters. This games deserves a next gen sequel. The other game that needs a next gen installment is Tie Fighter. Seriously that game came out in 1994 and it's one of the best space shooters ever. And for fucks sake stop setting things during the movies. There's nearly sixty years worth of incredible content (minus the dark nest series) extending out past Return of the Jedi. You don't have to keep trying to cram stories into the same 20 year period. They're milking so much content out of that period that eventually we'll be playing a game as Luke where the goal is to repair vaporators on the south ridge. Hurry up you've only got 'till mid day!Rez is available on Xbox Live now. It's one of the best games ever made.   The most popular piece of clothing we've ever made, AKA The Black Mantle is back in stock. It's joined by its polar opposite, the Luminous Vestments. I have a feeling both will be sold out before I finish typing this.   -Gabe out
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Tycho: Sorry about that. Kiko digests the audio files for that, and I forgot that there President's Day was a holiday that people took seriously. Before today, I was not aware just how seriously Kiko took the concept of presidency. Also, I fixed an offensive and aggressively stupid typographical error in the post above. Now, it's only aggressively stupid in the ways I originally intended.(CW)TB
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From the book, these puzzles demonstrate the thinking processes required to solve difficult SQL problems.  See if you can solve them before checking on the answers.
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QUESTION: Thank you, Mr. President. How will you go about bringing people together? Will you seek a consensus candidate for the Supreme Court if there's an opening? Will you bring some Democrats into your Cabinet?
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Tycho:  He came into work yesterday with a prescription for something that will alter his brain chemistry, which I thought was a big step for the man who refuses to take aspirin.  We've long canonized our respective lunacies, believing it is like some artistic sacrament that makes our bizarre endeavor possible.  We have relied upon them.  Or, at any rate, we did.
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Dans une newsletter envoyÃ©e Ã  ses abonnÃ©s, Electronic Arts a rÃ©vÃ©lÃ© une information trÃ¨s intÃ©ressante : un nouveau Command &amp; Conquer est en prÃ©paration.
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Gabe:  I found a couple more really nice videos of the intro to the final round of the Omegathon. In case you missed it here's a couple different looks at it. This was easily the most elaborate thing we've ever tried to pull off at the show.
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By Robert Jones Parry  More and more com
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I spent much of this afternoon in a mandatory (for poll workers) four hour training class on the Hart InterCivic eSlate voting system, soon to be in use in elections in my home county. (Hart InterCivic is a privately held firm out of Houston, specializing in election equipment and in software products for county records offices). Contrary to my previous impression, the machines are not touch screen machines, although they share some similarities.  I went into the class skeptical; I have been a critic of what I percieve as an unseemly rush to adopt insecure electronic voting systems. I emerged guardedly optimistic; the systems appear, from what I can tell, to be reasonably secure against vote manipulation by people who are not part of the election staff, and they appear to provide approximately the same level of security against election office malfeasance that paper ballots do. At the end of the day, if the election staff wants to tamper, they can; but that was true with paper ballots as well. That risk can be mitigated by election office procedures intended to mitigate it; in San Mateo County's case, those procedures have in some important regards not yet been established, as I will discuss below.
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The Onion Picker: Carmen Basilio and Boxing in the 1950s By Gary B. Youmans, Syracuse University Press , 214 pp., $24.95
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As previously mentioned, Nick Halstead will be revealing the top three places in the results from the programming competition he was hosting. Today starts the top three list with third place - an entry from Karol Grecki:   I was really impressed with Karol's entry and if it was not for the fact that it did not 'run out of the box' it would have been a close cut thing to be the winner. The fact is that because it was a pain to get running the two other judges only gave it 1 point each.   The post includes Karol's solution - a method that involved using the Zend Framework as a backdrop. You can see the application in action on Karol's website or just download the code and play along at home.
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Tycho:  I uploaded the comic early, as many of you noticed.  I entered the wrong number in the update field.  You may also have noticed that the spelling in these posts has really gone to hell.  So, that's numbers and letters.  I hope to one day discover a set of pictograms with which I can manage some baseline fucking proficiency.