Slashdot Mirror

It's not like splicing is anything new - hell we've been making corn that poisons butterflys for a while now - it's not new. Why is this news? What is the nature of the chromosome, is that what makes it so special? What does it do? Anything?

Heh, the first step is, "Have the newest 2.0.x kernel sources..." Is it a little outdated?

Many games work quite easily nowadays with no modifying of the IP Masq setup. I've played Halflife, Tribes, Soldier of Fortune, Unreal Tournament just fine. Some things though need redirecting (it seems game companies slowly are getting smarter about this). Myth 1 and 2 were this way, a little sniffing and "ipmasqadm autofw -A -c tcp 6321 -r tcp 3453 3453 -u". This tells the firewall when someone goes out on port TCP/6321 (Myth's user logon), remember their internal IP and redirect port 3453 to them. For these, you're just left at one user per firewall. The games expect to connect at only port 3453 or whatever. They need reprogramming.

There is a mail list talking about this, nat-peer-games. There isn't much traffic nowadays (21 for the year), but it was frequented by Activision folk in the early days. Somewhere around the archives there is detailed information on programming with UDP and how to properly write games that allow multiple people to use it on one NAT/IP Masq box.

There used to be a web site listing several prorgams and their needed ports for redirecting at http://www.tsmservices.com/masq/, but the web server is down now. It seems many new games (especially FPS) allow multiple people (I know Tribes does, it even allows copies of the same CD to be played on servers), but more frequently the servers do some CD key check. So you'll need to buy multiple copies of games. ;)

Sorry! Onelist site was down when I posted this. This is the correct URL: ArConDev: Artificial Consciousness Development Mailing List

It's nice to see such interest in this field, and some nice book sales... but I just not a member of the 'speculate and wait' theory of artificial consciousness. I want to see a real theory and I wait to see code!

I moderate ArConDev: The Artificial Consciousness Development Mailing List. This is not a philosopher's list, though philosophy is discussed. It's a developer's list; for those people actually trying to code true artificial consciousness.

To give you an idea, my own work of the last five years has centered on the following 'Algorithm for Consciousness':

1) Collect a very large number (1 billion or more) of items of binary consensus fact. Such as: water is wet, bees sting, it is difficult to swim with skipants on, etc.

2) Validate the items (I call them MindPixels) against a large number of people.

3) Train a neural net (SRN's look good) against the items that are most stable across the validating population.

4) When the NN consistently performs better than chance, send an email to the editors of Nature and Science announcing humanity's first 'Minimum Statistical Consciousness' - the first artificial system to have measurable consciousness.

5) When the NN consistently performs statistically indistinguishably from an arbitrary human, email the editors of Nature and Science announce the first true Artificial Consciousness! .

Ok. How's a NN going to generalize consciousness from a bunch of MindPixels? Well, the math is the same as used in tomography, except in many dimensions - hypertomography.

This post is already getting too long... trust me, the theory is solid - and much better explained in my forthcoming book 'Hacking Consciousness'

Yes. We have entered the age of the BioHacker. If you think DOS attacks scare people, wait until the find out about guys like me who moved South America to start a lab and begin hacking life. If you're interested biohacking ground zero is at: BioHacking

The watershed is, how easy (or painful) is it to navigate to a goal by voice... or by mouse... or by keyboard... or by wiggling your fingers, or by thinking at the computer? You tend to use the easiest interface for the current task. Voice moves more items into easy reach -- out of your penalty box, you might say.

It isn't so great for stupid little icons, or Web links, or applications without standard keyboard interfaces. Tom, I saw your critique of KDE, and the same lack of standard keyboard shortcuts that annoy the basic seasoned Unix hacker also makes it hard on the voice users. It's a problem with XWindows managers at the moment (I run an XWindows server on my Windows box, where I use speech recognition -- Dragon NaturallySpeaking, if you're curious). I hate to say it but Microsoft Windows really wins in this regard -- it has genuine keyboard shortcuts standards, which most applications respect. We need a keyboard standards evangelist on Linux...

As for punctuation in programming languages, a surprising amount of it can be automated, because a lot of punctuation is implicit in the constructs. Your standard for-loop comes supplied with "for(){}", and many editors take advantage of the fact already -- electric mode in cperl, for example. Python manages to dispense with a lot of the curly braces and semicolons -- mainly because they're already icing rather than essentials. Of course, the VoiceCoder email list has discussed this issue, and many others, (navigation, variable names) at length. --Patricia

From reading this article, it looks like this company may have discovered an effect of quantum physics that has gone previously unexplored. Big deal, maybe, but hardly a grand unified theory.

• 4/11/99: 10,192 bugs located so far. Fixed one; patch added more. New count is 10,197.
• 4/12/99: 10,197 bugs located so far. Fixed one; patch added more. New count is 10,214.
• 4/13/99: 10,214 bugs located so far. Fixed one; patch added more. New count is 10,222.
• 4/14/99: Treated the gang to a movie to achieve goal of getting through one day without causing further damage.
• 4/15/99: 10,222 bugs located so far. Fixed one; patch added more. New count is 10,378.
• 4/16/99: 10,378 bugs located so far. Fixed one; patch added more. New count is 10,387.
• 4/17/99: 10,387 bugs located so far. Fixed one; patch added more. New count is 10,402.

Listed as one of the year's events is a series of April Fools jokes, including a fake news story where Anti-MS protesters rioted through the streets of Seattle. And eight months later....

Conspiracy theories anyone?????

1. Click on this link to the discussion list on computer security
2. Scroll to the bottom and create a unique log-in
3. Post an article about the REAL etoy story

Please note: they screen each post for relevance, so no Mae Ling Mak Naked Drunk Petrified Spray Painted And Auctioned Off To Disney posts will get through.

I agree completely that Amazon.Com's attempt to enforce this b*s* patent on (essentially) electronic commerce is nonsense. And I agree that we need to take action. I suggest that a boycott might not be the right answer.

Consider this: Amazon.com has yet to turn a profit. In fact, Amazon.com probably loses money on every book they sell. If the goal of a boycott is to harm the business economically in order to adjust their behavior, then the logical course of action would be to buy lots and lots of books from Amazon, all at once, and bankrupt the company. I therefore propose that we set up a "Boycott Amazon" website and set that website up as a partner of Amazon.com.

This reverse-boycott has other benefits to it. For one, we would increase the workload on Amazon's shipping infrastructure, potentially slowing other, less costly orders, from ever shipping. For another, if people buy books from the "Boycott Amazon" website (with the little link to Amazon), then each purchase will only hurt Amazon's pocket more by reducing the revenue of each sale by 5%. These proceeds can then go (for example) to the Free Software Foundation.

Comments?

I'm not sure this is the first time we've had an interspecies birth; I seem to recall a mare giving birth to a live zebra....


The Kulturwehrmacht

...although it might have been smarter for Sun to include more GNU productivity tools with Solaris ... things like GNU compilers and desktops, for example...


The Kulturwehrmacht

I hint a tone of, hmmm... concern? in this comment. I haven't seen anyone address that yet.

How far could this go? Maybe we should be concerned that sending our humor e-mails to a large list of recipients could end us up in court paying AOL heaps of money for tying up their servers, even when the recipients didn't mind receiving it. It doesn't just apply to this case -- one could argue anyone who sends large volumes of e-mail for any reason could be subject to penalties. I guess that's a concern, in a very convoluted way (although the spammers that were clipped here were guilty of much worse crimes...)

One way I've deal with this (my geographically wide-spread family sends each other a dozen or so humor e-mails per day) is by signing up for one of those free listserver/majordomo services. I'm not sure that they (e.g. OneList would defend me, but I do know that by subscribing to my list, I can show that the recipients were not just passive but took active steps to become involved in my list, therefore my weekly humor digest is not "spam". At least, that's my thinking.

I'm not happy with the spector of being abused by big business because I send a lot of e-mail to their subscribers, but on the other hand spam has gotten out of control. If direct-mail marketting companies operated like they do, they would have been locked up years ago. Sure, the "spam" snail-mail can come to you without an address; likewise you can throw it away unopened or even mail it back to them in their own post-paid envelopes. BUT, if direct-mail companies sent out snail-mail with someone else's return address on the envelope, you can bet they'd be clipped quickly. Why spammers think this helps their business case, I have no idea.

In my opinion, another thing that must be stopped are so-called "web bugs", effectively something we've already all talked about here (cookies in GIFs) but attached to HTML e-mails that automatically load on Outlook Express. I guess people who use OE get what they deserve, but this practice should be illegal. Unfortunately, I can't find the Web Bug FAQ link here, but those "1 X 1 GIFs" must go!

Other items which need to be addressed:

• Financial App aka quicken like thing.

I'm working on it :)

If I were them, I'd put some serious cash into the following:

1. First and foremost, web browser development. Put some serious capital behind the Mozilla project, to make up for the lack of support from Netscape/AOL. As Dave Whitinger pointed out, losing the Browser battle could lose us the War. Mozilla has the potential to be a much better browser than Internet Explorer, especially once it becomes XML and SGML compliant. If you can build perl and python interpreters into Mozilla, you have an IE slayer.
2. Linux Laptop development. Linux is a pain in the rear when it comes to laptops; if VA could start selling them commercially, they would have a virtual lock on the market.
3. Start putting some major capital into open source office suites like KOffice or GNOME Office. This is much less necessary than (1) or (2) since there already exist excellent office suites for Linux (including StarOffice), but it may still be a very good idea just-in-case Sun decides to pull the plug on Linux support, in favor of (say) Solaris 8 for Intel.

I'll grant you that free trade helps everyone economically; but not everyone is interested solely in economic help. What about being able to enact your own laws without a faceless organization stepping in and nullifying them? What about representative government? What about the environment? These things aren't covered in most Economics classes, and I have a feeling that they're extremely hard to quantify.
The Kulturwehrmacht

This is post number 643.972571563*2984

Shut the heck up, people, and comment on what's going on, or at least post nude pics of NP here *grins*
Seriously, if you want to babble on like that, get a life, and get a list, they're free at Onelist, you know... that way you're not getting on any /. reader's nerves with posting senseless $h*t!
Do good for once!

There's reports coming out of the Seattle Independent Media Center that police have fired upon a fleeing crowd of protesters. A lot of the story is probably BS, but what this does indicate is that tensions are rising in Seattle. Joy.

There are about 30 "anarchists", dressed in black hooded sweatshirts and hiding behind gasmasks, smashing store windows (such as GAP and Starbacks) and spraypainting police cars and news cameras! They don't seem to have a cause or message; they just wanna have fun. One "anarachist" spoke with a news reporter and rambled about the Bush family being Nazis. Do we get to invoke Godwin's Law on these wanna-be anarchists? :-)

I think at this point the police should start sending SWAT to arrest the anarchists. If they complain, the cops can just tell them "We arrested you because we felt like it." No self-respecting anarchist can complain about that...

It must be a total madhouse in Seattle now. CNN is reporting that the opening ceremonies have been indefinitely postponed due to street protests, but that working sessions of the WTO conference will still be in session.

Police are denying allegations of tear gas or rubber bullets. Meanwhile, some demonstrators are throwing sticks at the police.

However, CNN is saying that the violence is concentrated on one area. Not much word on anything else happening.

Well, Fox News is reporting the cops have been using tear gas in places, and there've been more arrests. As you said, things are getting uglier.

It gets even better. Apparently the police are now also using rubber bullets. To quote the report from ZNet:

Seattle, WA, Tuesday, 11/30/1999 -- Despite CNN's reports that no rubber bullets have been used, the Indy Media Center has several witnesses that saw police firing this morning outside the WTO's meeting place. Despite one protester struck with a rubber bullet, and accounts of at least one more, Seattle police denied using rubber bullets and tear gas on CNN this morning.

Oliver De Marcellus, a 56-year-old activist with People's Global Action, visiting from Geneva, says a rubber bullet shattered the right lens of his glasses. Witnesses report that a rubber bullet also struck a nearby man in the head.

The police have put the entire city on red alert. Volunteer medics are calling for more eyewash for protesters affected by the gas.

Tell that to the McDonald's owner whose store got smashed up. Tell that to the delegates getting attacked. Tell that to the businesses whom these protestors block.

I'll grant you that violent protest is unacceptible .. and that's just what smashing a McDonald's or attacking delegates is, violent. People who conduct themselves in such a manner should be arrested, prosecuted, and sentenced to hard time.

But if you think I'm going to shed tear one for anyone who has been inconvenienced by these protests, you've got to be kidding. In fact, a lot of these businesses are looking foreward to the revenue generated by all these out-of-town protesters. As far as anyone having a longer commute, or having a business slowdown -- speaking as a working stiff myself, why the hell not? Life goes on. Convenience is no more an inalienable right than having a big-screen TV in your living room.

As a service to those who are bad at cutting and pasting:
http://www.zmag.org/Cris esCurEvts/Globalism/GlobalEcon.htm


The Kulturwehrmacht

Speaking frankly, I'd be very frightened to be a protester in Seattle right now. It's only a hunch, but I think things might get a lot uglier in Seattle by week's end...

At the risk of getting off-topic, I'd be very interested if native Seattlers could keep us informed about the situation in Seattle. After alll, what good is the "new media" of Internet if we can't get first-hand, unedited accounts of world events?

After the (apparent) commercial success of the Furby and the AIBO, what do you see as the future of commercial autonomous robotics?

The Kulturwehrmacht

• Liberal: anyone who believes in: the environment, gay rights, women's rights, abortion rights, religious freedom (for more than the Christian Right), and/or an economic safety net.
• Goddamn Stinking Liberal: anyone who can back up these beliefs with evidence, logic, or legal reasoning.
• Radical: a Goddamn Stinking Liberal who acts on these beliefs, in order to affect social change.
• Communist: a Radical without a suit.
• Unballanced dangerous Communist: a Radical or Communist with a concealed carry permit and/or an NRA membership (or equivalent).
• Terrorist: a Radical who ties up traffic for more than two minutes.
• Treasonist: a Radical who disagrees with the government's policies as the government is implementing said policies will full vigor.

If this cyberprotest doesn't manage to shut the website down cold, then whatever OS the site is running on has one hell of an anecdote.....

Maybe if we can get the electrohippies to code a Linux test site for us, we can use this same approach to simulate heavy Web traffic on, say, a Red Hat box with the new 2.4 kernel....

It's working fine now. It was merely slashdotted.
Go nuts.


The Kulturwehrmacht

Apparently, they're anti-freedom protesters, attempting to block the free flow of information and preserve preferential policies that favor a few special interests...

Of course. As opposed to the delegates at the WTO, who are there to meet on strengthening intellecual property rights (that is, blocking the free flow of information) and removing such barriers to free trade as environmental and labor laws, on behalf of major corporations (read as a few special interests).

What's even better is, if you don't like what the WTO is doing, you can't even elect a different WTO. They're beholden to corporations and a few government officials, not to the people.

I tried both Netscape (which gave me same the error message you got) and IE5.0; IE gave me a simple 404 error.

Hopefully the web page went down with Slashdot effect, and not because of police intervention. Then again, with the world becoming the place it is, who knows.........

The Kulturwehrmacht

• Male of average or above average intelligence. This is probably the only field in any doubt, if you read some of my posts...
• Small circle of friends. Yep. I'm pretty selective about who I remain friends with.
• Social outcast. Depends on the social circle. If you're talking freakazoids and weirdos, I'm practically The Man.
• Facinated with cults, weapons, Satanism, and games involving violent death. Let's see. I own several firearms and I used to play Dungeons and Dragons. But I practise Wicca, which is neither a cult nor Satanic. So mark that as 50%.
• History of bullying or drugs. Bullies are such fun to play with though. They turn all red when you make fun of them. No drugs tho.
• Recent decline in marks. I wanted a PhD but settled for a Masters. Does this count?
• Engages in attention-getting schemes. Absolutely! This is why I do stuff like organize Geeks with Guns events, perform in public, and write Open Source Software. Not to mention posting on Slashdot.

The irony here is that George W. is the same guy who allegedly came up with the Willie Horton ad used against his father's opponent in 1988 -- and then released said ad against Dukakis via a political organization not officially affiliated with the Bush/Quayle campaign.

Bush probably has a good legal case for shutting down this site, or having some of its content altered. But given his past history, he doesn't have much of a moral case.

...that Penguin Computing still sells AMD systems; Compaq sells Alphas running Linux; Apple still sells PowerPC systems that are Linux-compatible; and that you can still by SPARC stations from Sun or for cheap from many auction houses and hardware resellers.


The Kulturwehrmacht

I had the chance to play with the Lego Mindstorms system earlier this year...the IR port on the RCX has a maximum range of 1.5 meters. This got me thinking...what about programming a team of, say, six Mindstorms to behave as a team? I'd certainly like to see any research someone has done on this....

The Kulturwehrmacht

...my voices talk to me in Visual Basic. sigh...

The Kulturwehrmacht

Now, how does UCITA figure into this? Each state has to ratify UCITA within its own borders and that's not a given at all. Do now: set up a bookmark to your local legislature and check often to see when UCITA comes up. While waiting, set up a listserv at ListBot or ONElist (or on your own machine if you're running listserv or majordomo) about UCITA and get all the user groups and third parties in your state to sign onto it. When UCITA shows up, hit the panic button and have everyone start writing your legislators every day -- either snail or Email. (Encourage writers to use their own words rather than a form letter.) When you have defeated UCITA in your state, change the name of the list to Internet Issues. Voila! You have just created an inspired and dedicated Internet-aware polity! Those legislators will now *always* be looking over their shoulder for you -- and that's the way we want it...

Whoohoo..we've hit the big time curious :) We could really use some good programmers, game designers, graphics people, beta testers (well, okay, not yet :) ) etcetc on the project. Come on people :) sign up...yes, this is a shameless plug www.onelist.com rark!