Slashdot Mirror

I used quantum entanglement in a SF story I posted in my journal (a better copy without /.'s patented smart quote mangler is here). I called them "jump radio" in the story.

I'd hazard a guess you won't find mcgrew.info or holy-bible.us there, either.

• holy-bible.us In archive, 2006-2008.
• mcgrew.info blocked by current "robots.txt" file. The Archive treats "robots.txt" files as retroactive; if the current "robots.txt" won't allow archiving, then the Archive won't display old archived copies. The data is still in the Archive, but not publicly visible.

I'm a formar art student. One of my professors was fond of saying "I don't know what I like, but I know what art is".

Just because you don't understand calculus doen't mean that calculus isn't math.

It's been said "be silent and be though a fool, or speak and remove all doubt".

This is art, in the way that photography is art.

Photography IS art. Your photography is NOT art.

useit.com is about useability, not looks. His choice of colors in the main page could definitely be improved. Webpagesthatsuck.com admits that it does indeed suck itself and violates its own guidelines. But its premise is that you can learn how to make a good page by studying bad ones.

Useit's main page is ghastly, but its subpages are minimalistically elegant. And I say that as a former fine art major (the linked page is ten years old).

A few weeks ago while I was eating lunch at Top Cat's on Stevenson, I saw something that unnerved me a little bit.
Four middle aged men wearing suits were sitting at a nearby table. One of them wore a pistol in a holster, as if he were a character in a TV western, only without the hat.

Nobody seemed to notice or mind. Of course, I noticed and I minded, but there would have been no way for anybody to notice that I noticed, either. My assumption was that these were cops; they looked like cops.

But I had a nagging worry. What if they weren't cops? What if they were here to rob and kill the restaraunt's workers and patrons?

What if they were cops and another Secret Policeman from another jurisdiction (say, the county or state) mistook them for thugs and bullets started flying?

I didn't even finish my beer that day. As soon as my lunch was done I was out of there. I'm uncomfortable around firearms, having been taught firearm safety and hunting at a young age. I mean, shit happens, you know?

The Secret Police are more commonly referred to in the mainstream media as "undercover agents" or "undercover police," and their sole function is to enforce laws that should never been passed, such as alcohol prohibition in the 1920s or anti-prostitution laws today. Laws that nobody is going to call the police for because nobody is victimized by those crimes that should not be criminal.

"The prostitute is the pimp's victim," the authoritarian anti-freedom busybodies whine. If so, why does this victim wind up in jail? These laws make little sense to me.

Besides, if prostitution were legal I could get laid. But that is beside this post's point. And trying to stick to the point I'm not going to mince words and use euphamisms like "undercover" but call them what they really are: the Secret Police, not at all unlike Soviet Russia's Secret Police or Hitler's Facist Secret Police, or the Secret Police in Communist China.

They're not "undercover agents" dammit, they're Secret Police. 1984 may have been a little late, but Orwell was wrong about one thing- when the city council voted to put the spy cameras on 5th street last week (sorry, I can't find a link) they neglected to vote for any money for the "Big Brother is watching!" posters.

Cameras everywhere and Secret Police. Our freedom has been gone for quite some time now. The 9-11 terrorists only speeded up a process that was already underway.

But back to the Secret Police.

Today I heard on the news that what I feared at Top Cat's happened at the Citrus Bowl yesterday. At the inevitable tailgate party, the Secret Police were (of course) sneakily wandering through the crowd pretending to be football fans when a drunken brawl broke out.

A Secret Policeman intervened, and while trying to break up the fight, drew his weapon and fired into the air. Another cop saw this, assumed logically and rationally that this was an armed drunken brawler and shot him dead, in the back.

He died slowly, coughing up blood. The news reports I saw didn't say whether the cop killer was a uniformed police officer or another Secret Policeman.

Here are a few links to mainstream news about it: The Orlando Sentinal, the Tampa Bay C

Yeah? Well, my site has a page with that nice picture of a soldier and a coffee cup with the caption "Have a nice cup of shut the fuck up". It also has a cartoon of Bush in diapers somewhere.

It has lots of swearing, and guess what? Slashdot has lots of fucking badass words, too. You want your kids to see this fucking filth?

If I want to put goatse on my site are you going to stop me? If I want to post pictures of me and some crack whores who's going to stop me? Not my government; its central document, the one piece of paper that all its other laws are based on, say I can say anything I damned well please.

If I want to post porn I'll post porn. If you don't want your kids seeing goatse or hearing the word "fuck" or seeing a picture of someone getting their brains blown out then keep your kids off the goddamn internet.

Sorry about the language but it was needed to make the point.

Yeah? Well, my site has a page with that nice picture of a soldier and a coffee cup with the caption "Have a nice cup of shut the fuck up". It also has a cartoon of Bush in diapers somewhere.

It has lots of swearing, and guess what? Slashdot has lots of fucking badass words, too. You want your kids to see this fucking filth?

If I want to put goatse on my site are you going to stop me? If I want to post pictures of me and some crack whores who's going to stop me? Not my government; its central document, the one piece of paper that all its other laws are based on, say I can say anything I damned well please.

If I want to post porn I'll post porn. If you don't want your kids seeing goatse or hearing the word "fuck" or seeing a picture of someone getting their brains blown out then keep your kids off the goddamn internet.

Sorry about the language but it was needed to make the point.

Dude, Sony is a sore spot with me. I'd give up pot and hookers if it would make Sony go away.

I did find this clue on his webpage:

http://mcgrew.info/ArtificialInsanity.htm

I thought at first when I saw the summary "at last, I've been vindicated." I've been saying for twenty years that programming is an art form. In fact I had a rather good naturedly heated discussion with Charles Broussard about this very subject on the Planet Crap website five or ten years ago, back when I was heavily into computer gaming.

His position was that programming wasn't art. Mine was that it is. Oddly (or not) his training is programming, while art was my major in college (You've probably seen "Steve's School of Fine Art", a humorous (hey, I try, tough room) look at art that's been on the internet as long as slashdot has).

But this is a bit disappointing, as it seems my position isn't vindicated at all. Art has been made with computers for years, these demos are just a continuation. I maintain that the code itself is art.

I also maintain that the programmer's tools (C++, etc) are akin to the artist's tools ten thousand years ago; i.e. mud and a stick. Your grandchildren will have wonderful tools.

-mcgrew
Spam, eggs, sausage and spam. On a stick.)

This is lame. It's neither insightful nor funny.

Then it worked; it IS art. Oh, what? Oops, sorry. You're as unlearned in the art world as as Van Gogh was unlearned in string theory, relativity, or black holes.

Just go to Steve's School of Fine Art! You'll be hopelessly stupid in no time. Or if you're looking for a little something that's not quite so last century (that articls is as old as slashtot) you might peruse my slashdot journal, but it's offtopic, having to do with a crazy woman, an absent alien, marijuana, and my hot roomie and not a word about art.

I was hit by the Sony Trojan when my daughter played a BMG title she'd bought from the music store she worked at at the time (she manages a Gamestop now).

I'll never EVER buy a Sony ANYTHING again, and the only way I'll get a Sony-BMG CD is used. And the only way I'll download any BMG artist is from P2P "piracy". That God damned rootkit was a damned stupid move. Someone should have gone to prison for it. If I rooted their computers I'd be with Linda; well, actually not since Dwight is a maximum security women's prison, but I'd be behind bars.

And all she did was have some dope on her, she didn't hurt anyone, threaten anyone, or cost anyone any money.

If you own Sony stock, please do me a favor and sell it. Sony is EVIL in all capital letters.

-mcgrew

I didn't RTFA (I must not be new here and besides, it's a PDF) but the summary is pretty confusing.

'Every time you do a whois search with any service, you run a risk of losing your domain,'

So if I do a whois search on mcgrew.info I risk losing my domain? That hardly seems likely! But if I hadn't registered it it wouldn't be mine, now would it? You cannot steal imaginary property, and if it's only in your head it's by definition imaginary.

And why would one do a whois search to look up a domain one wanted? I'd go to my registrar and try to register the damned thing! If it was already registered it wouldn't cost me anything. This seems a silly non-issue and I'd like someone to enlighten me.

Here is how domain name research theft crimes can occur

So there is a law against "stealing" someone's idea? What law? In what country? And how could such a law actually solve anything? It isn't a crime if it's not against the law, now is it?

Please don't od this insightful because the summary has me feeling so damned ignorant I just may (gasp) RTFM.

And don't get me wrong and start flaming. IMO this is a shady shoddy practice but no law could fix it, since the internet is global and laws are country-specific. It sems ICAAN is the only one who could do something, and they seem lately to be just another arm of the corporate cartel that runs the world's governments. Since it's most likely the corporates doing this sleaze, I don't see anybody's government or ICAAN doing jack about it.

You're happy? YOU'RE happy? I read the Hobbit in 1970, do you know how fucking long I've been waiting to see this movie?

Do you know how damned disappointed I was with I, Robot? Global warming is caused by the friction heat of Asimov spinning in his grave.

I was less disappointed in The HitchHiker's Guide to the Galaxy but still disappointed that the scene where the police cruiser commited suicide after talking to Marvin wasn't there; in fact the cops never showed up at all.

Do androids dream of electric sheep? If an android has a wet dream, does he short out?

-mcgrew
(the latest journal is not funny at all)

reveals that even the most charitable interpretation of Sony BMG's internal strategizing demonstrates a failure to adequately value security and privacy

Greed indeed. They value security and privacy, they just don't valiue yours. If I rooted their compters with a trojan like they did to me when my daughter ran the software on a music CD she PURCHASED, ironically from th estore she worked at, my old ass would be sitting in a cell right now.

Nobody has ever adequately explained to me how Sony execs stayed out of prison and weren't even charged with a crime. Until they do I'll be forced to believe that it's because of one of "mcgrew's lasw": No rich and powerful man ever goes to prison unless a richer more powerful man wants him there.

Of course this pertains to the USSA only, YMMV.

-mcgrew

In 1979, the US Copyright Office granted a world wide copyright to the late Mr. Adams, who thought he still had plenty of time left. The copyright will not expire until you, too, are long late. The copyright was on a wholly remarkable book based on that radio play.

I never heard of the book. Indeed, nobody outside Islington (at least, nobody important) heard of it, either.

Also unheard of by anybody that matters is another book, called "Whackapedia". In many of the nerdier civilizations in the outer eastern rim of the internet, Whackapedia has already displaced the great Encyclopedia Britannica as the standard repository of all knowlege and wisdom, for though it has many ommissions and contains much that is apocryphal, or at least wildly inaccurate, it scores over the older, more pedestrian work in two important respects.

First, it's free, and second, it has the words "FOO BAR" in large, friendly letters on its cover.

I never said the Iraq war was about terrorism, I said more Americans died in it than died from terrorism.

The Iraq war was to enrich the oil barons in the White House. A quote from the linked blagh: "George Bush's "election" in 2000 was Osama Bin Laden's wet dream come true"

-mcgrew

Lesson 1: The Critique
        The ultimate in masochism. Your grade depends on the critique. In the critique, everyone in class exhibits their work, and comments on all of it. How good yours looks depends on how bad theirs looks. Each work is scrutinized and ruthlessly shredded by your competitors, whose grades depend on how good their work looks compared to yours. These people are mostly talentless losers, not unlike yourself, who desperately want their work placed somewhere where someone might see it, just like you and Vincent.

      To survive this ordeal, keep your work covered until nearly everyone has their work displayed. Place yours prominently next to the worst piece of crap in the room. While everyone is ripping each other to shreds with pompous, empty, multisyllable phrases, translate what they say into plain english, which will demonstrate to the instructor that you, unlike they, actually understand this gobbledygook. Praise everyone's work with backhanded compliments in such a way that the teacher knows that you know it's crap, while the other students think you're complimenting their work.

      Beat everyone to the punch by being merciless about your own work, especially if you've outdone yourself and have actually produced something that doesn't suck. The teacher knows what you've done right; show him/her/it that you know what you've done wrong.

      Smile smugly when you're ripped. Let your face say "HA! It worked! They HATE it!" (See Insulting an Art Student and Art History, below)

      Lastly, be an attractive woman with large breasts. The heterosexual men and the lesbians will all be trying to get in your pants and won't be hard on your work, the homosexual men will be afraid of being thought of as mysogonistic, and the heterosexual women will dismiss you completely as a total, talentless airhead. This is the only place they won't think of you as a threat.

All browsers' default homepage should read: Don't Panic...

Wow, someone suggested that all browsers' default home pages should lead to an old blog posting of mine from two years ago! Cool!

It almost seems like an impossible dream (unless your website design is dead simple).

There's this thing called the "KISS" principle: KISS stands for "Keep It Simple, Stupid". From my vantage point as a former art student and former intranet developer for my employer, it seems that the absolute shittiest sites are the ones produced by the "professional" web developers. Wherever you guys went to school, you should demand your tuition back!

As someone who has to live with your garbage, let me just say that almost all of you suck at your jobs. When I go to your overly busy sites I'me reminded of one of my instructors' favorite sayings that he would utter whenever he would see an overly ambitious piece: "There's less here than meets the eye".

Your flashy sites are NOT impressing anyone. They're annoying us folks who have to put up with them. You can pretend that your site is well designed all you want - it isn't. Lets take Computerworld, for instance.

It's no worse than any of the other computer-oriented sites. Newspapers like the New York Times, Chicago Tribune, or St. Louis Post Dispatch are no better. Now, one might think that a computer-oriented site would have an engineer's perspective and go for elegance. Nope. Lets take a closer look at computerworld, where this story leads. Bad bad bad! (swats computerworld on nose with rolled up magazine).

First you have a splash screen with an ad. Does this garner you any repeat readers? No, it just annoys anyone foolish enough to visit the first time, and makes them want to never go back. As I'm sitting here correcting my typos I don't even know what the fucking ad was for. That's a good thing for the advertiser, because if I remembered who he was I would make a concerted effort to NOT buy his product. I try not to patronize people who annoy me. Fools.

At the top of the page is not the site's masthead, but an ad. Is this Computerworld? No, I take it it's a site called "Sharpen your English". Ah, here's the reason the site's so bad - the Sharpen Your English site's motto is "White Smoke is your tool!" Obviously the kids are calling crack "whitesmoke" these days, and this site's designers are just as obviously smoking the hell out of the stuff. And they can't even hit the biggest key on the keyboard, as there's no space between "white" and "smoke". Or "compurer" and "world". I hate to break it to you, but leaving out spaces wasn't any more original ten fucking years ago than it is now. And these days everybody knows you can't put spaces in URLs, ok dumbasses?

Wait, it does say "Computerworld" right between "100 best places to work" and "IDG". Obvioulsy it's an ad for Computerworld Magazine. Right underneath is an incredibly annoying IBM ad that keeps scrolling and scrolling and scrolling. Yahoo news does that as a so-called "feature". If you design for Yahoo, YOU SUCK. Readers just LOVE to try to hit a link, only to have the goddamned thing move out of the cursor's way just as you click.

That "computerworld" ad is a sickening yellow color, at least on my monitor. I'm reminded of the movie "The Rookie", where Clint Eastwood tells his new partner "You know what a REAL criminal is? I real criminal is someone who would paint a car like that a color like that."

So what do we have down the left side?

Home, News, email newsletters. So far so good, except ya know, I just got to this site and they're asking me if I want them to spam me with their newsletter. WTF???

But what's this - Tech dispenser, shark bait? What in god's holy fuck is this shit? Look, son, once you reach puberty only girls are allowed to be "cute". You're not impressing anyone. Is it too much to ask that a link has some sort of clue as to where it leads? Because even Forrest Gump is smart enough to not follow a link that he doesn't know where it goatses.

And that's the whole problem, number six - you're trying to impress number one, who is your boss. But in order to impre

Having been modded as redundant I feel need to elaborate

That was priceless! Thanks, you made my day! As to your point, I agree completely. What's wrong with pencils and rulers? The newest software will be out of date by the time these kids get out of college.

All a REAL artist needs is mud and a stick, and he can do without either in a pinch. You have to learn to see before you can learn to render.

-mcgrew

I'm certainly OK with the end if both formats fail.

As am I; I don't own an HDTV and as I just shelled out a thousand bucks for a 42 inch flatscreen analog three years ago, I doubt it will matter much to me for quite some time.

My stake in this is that I hate Sony for installing a rootkit on my computer, and I don't like Microsoft very much, either (because I have to use their shitty buggy poorly designed software).

-mcgrew

Legend has it that one night this ape-decended life form was stoned out of his mind from smoking the dried buds of a strange type of plant and drinking Irish Car Bombs and noticed a book in his rucksack called The Hitchhiker's Guide to Europe. In his discombobulated state of mind he thought it was hilarious, and wrote a radio play parodying this book and indeed, science fiction in general.

I never got to hear the play, despite the fact that it was broadcast on the BBC, who has (not "have" you stupid Limeys) claimed that they were displaying all their works on the internet. This was obviouusly some strange useage of the words "all" and "display" that I have not been aware of, as I haven't seen any BBC works on their website at "all".

Perhaps the plays are on display in a locked cabinet in a dark, disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying "beware of the ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal" in a basement with broken stairs.

Just because you have a box full of tools doesn't mean you have to use each and every one of them. You can use the backhoe or the garden spade, it's up to you. Use the right tool for the right job. Just because I only need a hammer today doesn't mean I should throw the screwdriver away.

fast and slow; but it's the same article! Yes, the K5 one has comments, but I think the example gets the point across anyway.

-mcgrew

PS- yes, I know there's a typo in the "back" link. I'm too lazy to fix it.

As far as Sony goes, I will never trust them enough to purchase an audio disc from them again.

I'll never trust them enough to buy ANYTHING form them again. One of the "features" of their trojan was degradation of other software; software I used for legal purposes. I ranted about it is quite some detail a couple of years back when my daughter, who worked in a record store at the time, played a Sony-BMG title in the computer.

If they would do that to a music CD, what would they do to a Sony laptop or a Sony TV set? How would you find hard malware?

When will their crawlers automatically disqualify ALL sites that contain malware though? That would be nifty.

I don't think it would be possible. I linked to a turing test program I wrote called "art.exe" from my Artificial Insanity page that I hosted on another site I owned (which I since have let lapse). The only way a crawler would know that this program was benign was because it isn't listed in any of the antivirus lists of viral signatures.

What would be nice is if Google would have its crawlers automatically check pages as they crawled. If there were any known malwars the page would be blacklsted. But there's no way I can think of to flag malware that hasn't been identified as such by humans.

-mcgrew

PS:)downside would be that you couldn't find microsoft.com (Foghorn Leghorn says...)
PPS: I've been mulling over rewriting the Artificial Insanity program in javascript. But I'm having a hard time finding the time.

You apparently read the article. We don't "read" around here

You should have told him "ewe muss bee knew hear"

Way too much effort; your time would have been better spent trying to one-up the wild assertion that is the story headline.

You must not be new here.

Anyone Slashdot user with half a brain

My head hurts...

-mcgrew

Here's some more free music from some friends of mine (I think the links are still good, the band broke up iinm). here are some more, they're still togather and I doubt you've heard anything like them. Their first CD, All That Lies Between is IMO their best.

-mcgrew

Google has failed me this morning. I remember reading in New Scientist (whose anti-drug propaganda I ranted about a couple of years ago) that they did a study of baby boomers; the generation that started smoking ganja in their youth and are now geezers. They were trying to prove, as all these government studies from all the world's governments do, that pot is bad for you. The object of the study was to look at cancer rates in potheads vs non-potheads. They were certain that reefer causes cancer because there are carcinogens in it.

What they found instead was that (IIRC) potsmokers who did not smoke tobacco had a 10% lower incidence of all cancers than nonsmokers. More striking, however, was the difference between cigarette smokers who also smoked hemp and buttheads who only smoked butts. The cancer incidence of those who smoked both marijuana and tobacco was half the number of those who only smoked cigarettes.

So your study is done, the results are that cannibis prevents cancer.

As I said, a google search for "marijuana boomer study" yielded only one hit (he he he said), to a site I'd never heard of. So I searched New Scientist and found some other interesting tidbits:
Cannabis compound reduces skin allergies in mice
Cannabis compound slows lung cancer in mice
Cannabis extract shrinks brain tumours
Cannabis can help MS sufferers
Cannabis can protect the brain from damage from stroke

So we have a substance that is non-addictive (habit forming but not addictive), non-lethal, fights cancer, helps MS sufferers, is the best anti-nausea agent known, stimulates appetite, yet it is illegal. So why is it illegal?

Because it makes you lazy and forgetful, and what's worse for our corporate overlords, makes you think. You can forget about any substance that makes you think ever being legalized; thinking is the VERY last thing your government (wherever you may live) wants you to to do.

Yes, I'm a geezer. No, I wasn't in the study. Yes, I've smoked dope.

-mcgrew

Not since the Vietnam War ended anyway...

-mcgrew

To be fair, the implication is that it's paying 20-40$ to go to a show, and 30$ for a T-Shirt, that's supporting them

I never saw Kiss live, but when they and I were young, I saw the Doors for five dollars, ten rows from the stage. I never saw The Rolling Stones either, but their concert prices were the same as everybody else's - $3 for the cheap seats, $5 for the good seats. Now the asshats are charging a hundred bucks and up. And you can't even smoke dope at the concerts any more!

Greed knows no bounds. I stopped going to top name concerts years ago, now I go listen to live bands with just as much or more talent at local bars for a two dollar cover and I can drink beer while watching!

Stupid geezers...

-mcgrew

This sorry piece of crap is proof positive of American stupidity. The cassette - the (now obsolete) four track, two-spindle, 1/8th inch, 1 /78 IPS shirt pocket sized tape cassette was produced before the 8-track. The four track cassette was originally made as a dictation device, but advances in tape manufacture and head design soon gave them a frequency response that came close to human hearing's limit, signal to noise ratio low enough that you had to turn it up very loud to hear the hiss, and inaudible harmonic distortion which made them ideal for music.

Nevertheless, the 8-track was born anyway. With its transport speed at twice the 4-track cassette's speed, it should have been audibly superior. However, the "powers that be" decided that 8-tracks were going to be for automobiles, which at the time were not as well insulated from outside sounds and wind as today's cars, and with the auto's horrible acoustics, it was OK for a car's music to sound like effluent.

But the deliberately bad sound wasn't bad enough. The eight track tape had a single spindle, a very clever design where the tape fed from the center of the spindle, around a capstain roller inside the housing and back to the outside of the roll of tape. This made for an expensive setup, and one that was prone to wow and flutter, as well as having the tape get "eaten" by the tape player. And unlike a cassette, if your 8-track got ate, you might as well throw it in the trash.

But wait, there's more! This thing was deemed to be for the car, while cassettes were going to be (by about 1970 or so) for the home.

This made no sense whatever, since the "portable" eight track took up as much space as four cassettes, without being able to play any longer than a cassette. In fact, you could buy a longer playing cassette than 8-track.

But the one thing more than anything else that made 8-tracks suck like a Hoover was the fact that it had to change tracks four times during an album. This usually necessitated at least one song and usually more being interrupted in the middle!

Folks finally, after about ten years, started figuring this stuff out for themselves and replaced their 8-track cartriges with 4 track cassettes. Me? I never had an 8-track, although all my friends did. I, the geek, used the far more logical cassettes since about 1966 or 7. Hah! The geek gets the last laugh again!

And this is why Gene Simmons ceased being relevant sometime in the mid 70's.

Gene Simmons was never relevant, and neither are Radiohead and Reznor. They're just songwriters and musicians. None of them ever changed the world, and I doubt many peoples' lives would have been any different if these guys had never been born.

John Lennon was relevant. Beethooven was relevant. In a hundred years nobody will have ever heard of Resnor, Radiohead, or Kiss.

-mcgrew

PS- Kiss made good music. So does Resnor. If it rocks it rocks. "Oh, we'll paint our faces to cover up the fact our music sucks" is an incredibly stupid statment. Had they no talent, no amount of makeup would have covered it up. The fact is that there are always thousands of very talented musicians making very good music who will die in obscurity because there are so many of them. The makeup was a gimmick that made them stand out.

If you're not a Conservative by the time you're 40, you have no money.

A liberal wants you to give your money to the government so the government can give it to the poor.

A conservative wants you to give your money to the government so the governmnet can give it to him. He says he's against taxes, but he's only against himself paying taxes. If you don't pay yours he's up in arms.

The guy you see risking his life and spending his sweat to build that road isn't getting the government money. His employer sits back in his air-conditioned office and pays hime a pittance from the vast fortunes government gave him to build the road.

Wealth isn't created in the board room or on wall street. Wealth is created in the factory, behind the fry cook's stove, in the programmer's cube, on the construction site. The wealthy don't create wealth, they aggregate it.

America is strange in that its "conservative" party the Republicans would have you believe that they are Christians, when Christianity is decidedly anti-capital.

-mcgrew

Hey, I'm great at prediction. Just listen to what I say, and the exact opposite will happen.

I've noticed that most prognosticators are about on a par with me, or even worse. What's that meme, er, something about nothing and moving along?

-mcgrew

FYI, XP doesn't stand for "eXPerience". It's just an emoticon. -- SharpFang (651121)

I thought your sig was part of the comment until I hit "reply" it's so on-topic. IINM XP stands for "eXtra Pain". Every generation of Windows is a worse experience for the user. I've had XP installed for a couple of years and still can't find where they moved half the shit I knew where was in 98.

From the summary: "While the specs are useless for Vista, it works blazingly fast on Ubuntu". That is exactly what is wrong with Vista (besides the "moving stuff around thing"). How is making my computer slower considered an "upgrade"?

-mcgrew

Boy, am I in deep deep deep REALLY DEEP deep trouble!!! No wonder this happened!

-mcgrew

Boy, am I in deep deep deep REALLY DEEP deep trouble!!! No wonder this happened!

-mcgrew

Boy, am I in deep deep deep REALLY DEEP deep trouble!!! No wonder this happened!

-mcgrew

Boy, am I in deep deep deep REALLY DEEP deep trouble!!! No wonder this happened!

-mcgrew

Boy, am I in deep deep deep REALLY DEEP deep trouble!!! No wonder this happened!

-mcgrew

Boy, am I in deep deep deep REALLY DEEP deep trouble!!! No wonder this happened!

-mcgrew

Boy, am I in deep deep deep REALLY DEEP deep trouble!!! No wonder this happened!

-mcgrew

Boy, am I in deep deep deep REALLY DEEP deep trouble!!! No wonder this happened!

-mcgrew

If I was an artist of some kind today I'd be really worried about all the people making copies of my work and "sharing" them with their friends over the net.

I'm not going to buy your stupid CD if I've never heard any of the songs. Someone once said (I wish I could find the exact quote) that far more authors have starved from obscurity than from copyright infringement. Actually the number that have starved from copyright infringement may in fact be zero, can you name one?

-mcgrew

Because I've said it before and I'll say it again: we have the best governmnet money can buy.

-mcgrew

The description sounds like only a notch above children's toys today.

I wish someone would define "intelligent" here, because this thing doesn't fit the dictionary definition... oh wait, here it is: "4. Computers. pertaining to the ability to do data processing locally; smart: An intelligent terminal can edit input before transmission to a host computer."

I always heard them referred to "smart" terminals and "dumb" terminals, but whatever. Fram TFA (which differred remarkably from the slashdot summary) this thing can't even take, let alone pass, a turing test. One of these days I'll have to get Artificial Insanity back online; that program was good enough at passing the Turing Test it caused eqiopment failure in a friend's computer once - its attitude pissed him off so much he broke his keyboard. And that program was written in 1983 and originally ran on a 20k 1mz Timex.

Let's see your turing machine do that!

But indeed, this stupid toy is "intelligent" only in the sense that it isn't a dumb terminal. Can't say the same about the slashdot summary.

-mcgrew

PS- the download link is bad; I had Art stored at rusies.us, a site I registered for my ska-loving daughter, bt let it lapse. But the text is still there, an argument against "artificial intelligence". It is as offtopic as the fucking summary...

Hear hear! Douglas Adams parodied this in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy with Marvin, the terminally depressed robot ("terminhally depressed", Adams was a fucking genius) with the pain down all the diodes in his left leg, and the doors (who have been shamelessly copied by voice mail programmers), and Eddie the shipboard computer ("Where's a pencil? I'll work it out myself").

News for who? Stuff that does what? IHBT?

-mcgrew

(I'm having a hard time taking this story seriously, and am wondering why I'm even trying to take it seriously. It's total bullshit.)

Hear hear! Douglas Adams parodied this in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy with Marvin, the terminally depressed robot ("terminhally depressed", Adams was a fucking genius) with the pain down all the diodes in his left leg, and the doors (who have been shamelessly copied by voice mail programmers), and Eddie the shipboard computer ("Where's a pencil? I'll work it out myself").

News for who? Stuff that does what? IHBT?

-mcgrew

(I'm having a hard time taking this story seriously, and am wondering why I'm even trying to take it seriously. It's total bullshit.)