I read this in 2003. It was either a quite short book, or perhaps a short story, although it was published in a paperback.  The main character was male, and I believe in his early teens. The characters were mostly human, although there were alien races represented as well.  The central focus was the idea that it had been decided to fight all wars virtually. Armies would be laid out on the battlefield, each person roughly a few inches tall, and commanders would physically nudge them around the field using their hands. The results of these battles would determine how resources were distributed.  The main character at one point spends hours, possibly days, leading these virtual soldiers to their deaths in battle. Afterwards, he is greeted with enthusiastic congratulations, but is emotionally scarred by the events, and describes the soldiers as "real people dying." He also describes the painful blisters he experienced while commanding.  I can't remember much more, other than I found the book in a middle-school book fair in the US. Also I believe the friend who congratulated the protagonist after the battle was some sort of strange monster, possibly a giant floating eyeball, or something along those lines.  edit: My persistent googling has yielded zero results, but I really wanna find this book. I've been wracking my brain for more details, but the only thing I can remember is that while the battles are taking place, the commanders (the teen boy) are in some sort of space station. I remember it being described quite like a cliche horse-race betting parlor (gotta be a better way to phrase that), with excited people waving tickets around and betting on the results of the battles. I think one of the friends of the main character had bet big on his victory, and the trivialization of what he experienced as a traumatic event was a source of contention.
Some sort of battle school (no, not Ender's Game), where teens are being trained as military commanders.   The control system for their army hinges around some sort of system that requires extremely fine motor control -- being able to "push" around digital representations of military units using a special interface that interprets minute finger movements.  The boy protagonist eventually meets a girl in the battle school, and is astonished to learn that most people do not live as well as he does -- for instance, he gets a fresh jumpsuit outfit every day and disposes of the old one; this is a luxury.  One scene I recall is them kissing for a moment in some sort of underground passageway; the boy protagonist notes the exact length of the kiss, as he has been trained to have heightened time perception.  I don't recall much about other commander characters; I think they have different special abilities, and one other major character might have physical deformities, possibly because of postwar-radiation-related birth defects.  They have been training for an upcoming, prearranged final battle between all the existing national governments; the military units are very possibly robotic or entirely digital in nature, so as to avoid wasting materiel / human life.    They ultimately win the battle, just barely; I think the girl protagonist gives them an edge in the competition by hacking the timing / control system in favor of their team, causing a discrepancy which only the boy protagonist notices due to his heightened perceptions.  It was agreed that the winning government gets dominion over one of the few islands of land left that was not irradiated in some previous war; the protagonists get to live there as a reward for their victory.  I believe the boy protagonist later realizes he's gradually losing his ability to exactly quantify the passage of time.  Published no later than 2004, likely somewhere between 1980-2000, probably sometime in the '90s.
Partial instead of full markers are shown in PGFplots When using  \documentclass{article} \usepackage{pgfplots} \begin{document} \begin{tikzpicture}         \begin{axis}                     \addplot             [                 red,                 solid,                 mark=x,                 domain=-3e-3:3e-3,                 samples=50             ]              {exp(-x^2/(2e-3^2))/(1e-3*sqrt(2*pi))};         \end{axis}     \end{tikzpicture}    \end{document}   the markers look fine, see    , but when I replace solid with, for instance, loosely dashed, so  \documentclass{article} \usepackage{pgfplots} \begin{document} \begin{tikzpicture}         \begin{axis}                     \addplot             [                 red,                 loosely dashed,                 mark=x,                 domain=-3e-3:3e-3,                 samples=50             ]              {exp(-x^2/(2e-3^2))/(1e-3*sqrt(2*pi))};         \end{axis}     \end{tikzpicture}    \end{document}   the markers only show partially instead of fully, see    . How can I use loosely dashed with full markers showing? Sophix tablet will not work without an SD card My Sophix tablet was working without the SD card, but now the camera will not work. I get the following error message:     Insert a SD card before using. Is the Nintendo 3DS region-locked? I am thinking of buying a 3DS when the price drop comes into place in America, however I live in Australia. Will Australian 3DS games work on a North American 3DS? Edit Mode buttons for selecting vertices and edges vanished When I am in Edit Mode for my project, the Mesh Select Mode buttons have disappeared!  I loaded the default project and the buttons are where they are supposed to be; the issue is only in my project. Marketing Cloud Landing Page: pass values to a data extension Automatically generate thumbnails for all subfolders of a directory in Windows 7? Light Presets .exr I would like to install light presets for Blender to automate my lightning in my scenes. 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At this point, I'm confused, because I can't get to the universal property $\forall c \in \mathcal{C}. \exists! f: c \to T$ anymore, because I'm missing T. (EDIT: I get that this is how it is supposed to be)  But continuing with the category of constant diagrams, even if I have a constant diagram mapping everything to one object / morphism, there is nothing to map, so the functors image is still empty. So now I'm missing both $T$, and any kind of $c$.  EDIT: It seems to me, have I chosen 1, instead of 0, I would have come up with that is considered the definition of the terminal category. What am I missing? Stop Excel from automatically converting certain text values to dates Does anyone happen to know if there is a token I can add to my csv for a certain field so Excel doesn't try to convert it to a date?  I'm trying to write a .csv file from my application and one of the values happens to look enough like a date that Excel is automatically converting it from text to a date.  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