Slashdot Mirror
The Year In Ideas
matthewg writes: "This week's New York Times Magazine (free registration required) consists primarily of a special feature, The Year In Ideas. Subtitled 'An encyclopedia of innovations, conceptual leaps, harebrained schemes, cultural tremors, & hindsight reckonings that made a difference in 2001,' the feature describes 80 different "notions, inventions, conceptual swerves and philosophical leaps that mattered this year and may well continue to matter in years to come" in between a couple of paragraphs and half a page. Complete with illustrations which range from informative to whimsical, it covers a lot of interesting ideas, many of which will probably be new to you. The article's subjects include such Slashdot-fodder as software as speech, steganography Goes Digital, and collaborative composition, as well as a plethora of intriguing new ideas, such as new ideas in basic rights and global warming lawsuits. And, of course, the solution to every Slashdotter's woes."
hmm, that stuff with speed dating, imagine sth else getting done in 7 minutes? ;-B
;-P
wonder,how many women/men, would crave/hate it happen?
Now, Make Your WISE Move...
I think a better term would be "Eating Dinner in Hall". People walk into Hall, sit down randomly, spend five minutes talking to the person opposite while waiting for the food to arrive, and then leave immediately after they finish eating. (Believe me, the food isn't worth lingering over.)
Tarsnap: Online backups for the truly paranoid
is here: http://www.nytimes.com/library/magazine/home/
> refuse to register for something they're offering free
Like, for example, Slashdot?
"What did you do tonight?"
"Oh, I just had 375 dates in one evening, nothing special."
Wow...
So a speed date is the answer to all my woes, is it? Pah. Shows what you think of your readers. We're not all socially inept nerds, you know.
The real solution to all my woes is a linux-powered tricorder that scans for single women who like Lego.
This was my favorite. You can read about it here . Apparently in France you now have a right not to exist and can sue for damages. What are those crazy Europeans going to make up next?
It doesn't work anymore
It's called telling the truth.
One of the novel concepts of the last year, the truth was recently proposed as a way of more accurately conveying information.
Some naysayers point out that telling the truth necessarily means not being able to tell lies, as has been the custom, but defenders of the truth counter that the lies were never all that attractive in the first place.
Moreover, lies make inefficient use of bandwidth, leading some to suggest that the truth is perhaps the most effective form of data compression available.
Cryptographers have also expressed interest in this new concept, suggesting that since so many people are unaccustomed to hearing the truth they wouldn't be able to understand a message if it were true.
However, leaders on Capitol Hill expressed alarm that the people should have access to such technology. The fear is that were the truth to be used by hostile forces we would be put in a position where we might be forced to respond with the truth. The ramifications of such a exchange are simply too horrible to contemplate.
Is this truly the only Earth I can live on?
who cares anymore? So the NYT know I'm a mid-40s Afghan woman earning $500,000/yr. big deal.
That may be true, but this website does not try to focus on daily world events. It doesn't report on every single Taliban stronghold to be acquired by the N.A./U.S., it doesn't report on the casualty numbers. If you're looking for that kind of information, there's always MSNBC.com, CNN.com, etc. etc.
Slashdot doesn't want to dwell on all the bad things going on in our world, and obviously the NY Times didn't either.
void women (int money, time_t time);
I thought it was was pr0n! This notion of speaking to the opposite sex is outrageous.
Reliable, Great Value Hosting: $7.95/mo 2.4G/120G
Ah, the idea that every person, regardless of creed, color, nation, toaster and porpoise can make total fools of themselves on DDR machines. That one makes my list!
Yeah you just change www. into archive and it works fine. I just tried it.
Since you have a right not to exist, I guess Dr. Kevorkian will have a field day in France.
Oh, Stanley? Oh, HAL? Aren't we supposed to be in the year of 2001: A Space Odyssey? The newspaper of record may not be savvy to the undercurrents of Technological Singularity, but futurists and prophets know that Kubrickian Artificial Intelligence has arrived right on time to meet the dawn of the age of intelligent machines.
In only a short while, Ray, we will see artificial intelligence for robots go through the JavaScript Tutorial Implementation and beyond the Visual Basic Mind.VB and Mind.JAVA manifestation into a pre-Cambrian explosion of artificially intelligent life forms.
SlashDot is a far better barometer of revolutionary new ideas than an adverttisement-driven media mag -- even the grand Old Lady of New York.
Does anyone have any personal favorite website that deals with digital steganography or image watermarking in any greater depth than the Times article did? I'm interested in finding out some more of the mathematics behind it.
ceci n'est pas une sig.
Pardon me while I ramble.
One E-Mail Message Can Change the World struck me as a particular interesting case-in-point (which I hadn't yet heard about because I don't watch opera and live in the cultural backwater that is Manhattan.) Obviously, the code is speech one is more near and dear to all of our slashdotting hearts, but the NYT doesn't have much to say (other than, yes, we've made our case to that reporter's satisfaction) that we haven't heard yet. The one about the afghani guys e-mail raises what really are the interesting questions - since it seems that "commerce" isn't going to choke our medium of culture and communication to shallow and materialistic braindeath - what sorts of things can all our internetworked computers accomplish, and how do they really change things, from the standpoint of culture and communication.
Incidentally, The Lie Detector That Scans Your Brain is utter hogwash. Pseudoscience quackery phrenology revisited crap crap crap. I don't even know where to start. Okay, we're tuning this thing, and we have this guy (under no particular stress) alternately tell the truth and lie. Then, we have this guy, and if he's caught lying his life is destroyed - he spends 15 years in the can - and we compare the activity in the entire brains of these two subjects when they talk, to try and figure out when the really stressed guy is lying. Okay, I'm a bio grad student, but is the problem not obvious? The intense stress alters neurology in the entirety of the brain. The airport security mounted brainscanners are an endearingly dystopic proposition, but are unfortunately totally impractical. You're going to pull people into security based on brain scans taken from them without a background? You're going to train special techs, and then pay them, to stand there and look at the brainscan of every person who enters the airport? You're going to trust a computer to do it? Please.
The reporter who wrote transcending equations obviously has no background in math. I think he read some of the other new york times articles on the proposals of solid state physicists and got confused. Ah well.
The good and new comes from no quarter where it is looked for, and is always something different from what is expected.
Does this mean that there will be no more new ideas this year? I guess i'll just take a vacation then.
does this arrogant mindless imaginative half-a page constitute relations with anything of an open source nature? naah, hardly, except the woe of churning out virus-like freemindedness ;)
Now, Make Your WISE Move...
Log in as "cypherpunks3" with password "cypherpunks".
With slashdot you don't have to register, you can read and post anonymously.
now that is a bothersome image. - Socializing with all the romance of a job fair.
But if nothing else is working for your, then why not?
I can see this sort of working out if the atmosphere is right. Otherwise it would be a prime target for satire on SNL.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
If you're in that big a hurry, why bother? And who wants to self-select for sober realists, pragmatists, etc. I'd prefer the "giddy happenstance" option and whatever leads from there. The timeframe could extend very happily to the rest of your life under the right circumstances.
I'm surprised the "Hygiene is a Hazard" article didn't get higher billing...
(C'mon. You know you laughed...)
When I think of the last year and ideas that are "conceptual swerves ... that mattered this year and may well continue to matter in years to come", I think of the idea of taking passenger jets, and viewing them as big bombs. They have navigation systems, a destructive payload (mass and jet fuel), and very few places in the world have defences against them.
It sure changed the perspectives of millions of people, lot the least of which includes the thousands in the direct application of the idea.
We shouldn't limit the list of ideas to humanitarian advances.
-benJ
While the last thing American arcades need is yet another Street Fighter clone, this combination of concepts would almost certainly be different enough to draw in the most jaded fighter fan.
And who wants to self-select for sober realists, pragmatists, etc
:)
Well, sober realists and pragmatists, of course
But seriously, dating as currently defined is geared toward romantics. While wonderful for romantics, there are some (or many, in some groups) who don't feel the need for that extra baggage.
For those non-romantics, the whole process becomes an obligation, a burden even. Love should be about doing things for the other because you want to, not following the script given by someone else's definition of romance. Of course, if you ARE a romantic, keep doing what you're doing. You're right, speed dating will do nothing for you.
The timeframe could extend very happily to the rest of your life under the right circumstances.
Absolutely. Even if you only meet them for 7 minutes initially. Giddy happenstance is fine, but why not look for compatible people in the meantime?
AI in VB? *Chuckle*
My Karma: ran over your Dogma
StrawberryFrog
Ah, the idea that every person, regardless of creed, color, nation, toaster and porpoise can make total fools of themselves on DDR machines
Will I retire or break 10K?
I'm a little surprised that none of the arcade game manufacturers have taken the "use your hands and feet" concept and created a fighting game using the same technology.
This was tried on the Sega Genesis, and it failed.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Unfortunately I don't remember the name of this device...
"Biped! Good cranial development. Evidently considerable human ancestry."
Wanna see some REALLY COOL KIT? Prototypes, mostly.
Go to http://www.acorncreative.tv/imac2.html
Comments? I personally like #3, but all three have me drooling...
Where do I go to sign up?
[o]_O
This year, researchers at Columbia University announced their rather startling finding that women in a fertility clinic were almost twice as likely to get pregnant when, unknown to them, total strangers were praying for their success.
Has anybody heard about this study? I find this one rather hard to believe.
Exactly! You don't have the right to create a life whenever you wish. You must consider what you are doing and what good will be the life to the newly created being. It is irresponsible to be a parent, if you have bad genetic inheritance, bad physical conditions, bad habits, no parental skills, no resources to raise a child.
And so:
When you conceive a child, you must think what life will it have.
When you create a clone, you must think what life will it have.
When you program an AI, you must think what life will it have.
Noone has the right to mess with the life, with the spirit and with the intellegence. The creator must be reponsible for his actions.
Future Wiki -- If you don't think about the future, you cannot have one.
bad moderation!
if we don't stop spraying some of this anitbacterial crap around, we're going to end up with real teenage mutant ninja turtles
http://www.michaelparenti.org/MonopolyMedia.html
http://www.projectcensored.org/