... disregarding the obvious problems I have with the BSA which other are sure to point out (and that I have ranted about before) legality, authority and such. It seems very odd to me that anyone should have to PROVE they bought something. CompUSA pulls the same shit when your walking out of the store, I get pretty irate and being stopped and having my purchases searched at the door, especially when I took only TEN STEPS from the register. But that's a little more understandable than the BSA's tactics, after all if I'm in the store with no receipt it's more likely that I didn't just lose it (though it is possible). When you buy site licenses I can imagine you have to show that you have a valid license, as far as proving you didn't buy it after the letter was sent, they can fuck off. If your legal now there's nothing they can do. But what about off the shelf purchases? What about backup copies (allowed by law) that were kept in a firesafe when the originals were destroyed. Like someone commented earlier, you are innocent until proven guilty, the burden of proof is on the prosecution. Hell I'd demand a jury of my peers.
You still need to take time into account. When in the Zion archives did this information exist? This viewing of this material could take place 100, 10, or 2 years after the movie, when the information has been discovered and catalogued. You also need to take into account how much information that the Zion "elders" (I believe they use that term at some point) have released to the human populace at large. It's easily explainable.
It's because the message is not that technology is inherently bad. In fact the technology aspects of it weren't strictly necessary. The movie could have easily been done with a race of aliens enslaving humans, or a group of wizards. The way it was presented, however, was a suitably plausible way of telling the story. The underlying messages, of which there are many I'm amazed at the tremendous amount of thought that went into the first movie (and also afraid that the new ones will be nothing more than action movies), focus more on metaphysical questions.
Additionally, the concept of the universe (similar to the Terminator universe) is that there was a conflict between humans and artificial life. The first movie was told from the viewpoint of a human, of course a human would view the robots as evil, they're the enemy. A story told from the viewpoint of one of the robots wouldn't portray technology as bad at all. Watch the first Animatrix, there is definitely a pro-machine slant to it.
Just because "they" as in the characters in the first movie didn't know much of the history doesn't mean that there can't be other stories which do illuminate the history in the setting. Also the humans you meet in the Matrix are initially from humans that had been grown/put to sleep. The seeting of the movie is after the machines enslaved mankind.
You cannot say that guns are bad because they have been used to kill people
Err you can't? Let's see: Guns are bad because they have been used to kill people. There I said it and it's 100% true. As far as Windows goes, I could sort of care less. Windows has it's place, I'm a Linux zealot, but I still use windows for some things, not even just games;)
Re:Translation: AI is Nowheresville
on
Infinite Games?
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
but that was before people had run out of ideas pertaining to AI. Today the only problems AI can solve are uninteresting ones.
Not even remotely true. AI faded from the public eye maybe, but there are literally hundreds of interesting projects that are being researched. The field never went away, it just doesn't make it into the mass media.
Ohhh my aching sides. Who passed that law, that's classic. You see because you implied that... a definition... has to have... a law... to be... a valid... definition.
That's what science fiction is. Move beyond that and it's fantasy, regardless of whether or not there are dragon's and wizards.
Not true, if it's indistinguishable from magic it becomes science fastasy. There are certain liberties that can be taken, especially when the setting is the far far future, but that does not absolve a science fiction author of all responsibility for keeping the science aspect plausible. The science itself IS NOT just the dressing for science fiction, it is the vector by which the complex issues are brought about. Don't confuse science fantasy/space opera with science fiction.
Not having read the book I can't comment on the possibility of what he describes. Aboe in the comments however are several posts claiming that it's just fiction and it doesn't matter if it's possible. That's only a half truth. It is marketed as "science fiction" which requires plausibility, though if what you describe is correct, the potential for it to still qualify as science fiction is still there. I'm not a fan of Crichton, some of his stuff is ok, but you dropped the magic words for me, "emergent behavior" I may have to pick this one up now.
The point is that in Science Fiction, if you are straying from current scientific "truths" (regardless of the fact that truth is a function of time), that you have to provide an explanation why. Else it's not science fiction.
You've got to be kidding me. By what logic is it ok to pass half the class just because the material is too hard? If people can't do the work THEY DON'T BELONG IN THE CLASS. All men are NOT created equal. Some people are poor in certain areas. Some are just plain STUPID.
Why change the requirement for entry? High School grades mean nothing, less so than college. The idiots are weeded out BECAUSE THEY CAN'T DO THE WORK. As far as I'm concerned the system is working.
I was just out of collage once. And a good think too, the Elmer's glue was starting to get on my nerves. Though I did have to walk aroung with bits of magazine stuck to my sides for a week or so.;)
Err 1 and 2 are kinda mutually exclusive. Additionally, as far as I'm concerned and backed by experience, people who do 2 tend to be the better programmers. People who dabble in CompSci because they love it, and write code for the sake of writing it, are not only more experienced, they're also more willing to try new things, and have a better understanding of the field.
Both this and my previous posts are kidding around though, I'm not a x86 vs. Apple nazi, I like almost all machines... though what I REALLY want is a Lisp machine.
Number one, I've been coding for over 15 years. I have plenty of experience. There is still no such thing as code that wasn't designed to be unit testing. Once YOU gain a little more experience, you'll realize that unit testing is about testing each subroutine as you write it. Yes there can be some difficulties with certain types of code, it can be nerve wracking adding unit testing after the fact, but it CAN be done.
I've written plenty of code dealing with I/O, GUI's, and multi threading. And I'm smart enough to devise unit tests for all of those applications. Do I always use unit testing, no, is it possible to add unit testing to ANY code. Yeah it is. Talk to me when you've had a few more years under your belt.
Don't know why it didn't occur to me at the time but you could just do screen caps and write your recognition software based on that. Question is can you screen cap and make decisions fast enough.
To be honest that's a pretty interesting project. I probably wouldn't go the whole camera route, more likely write code that controlled the mouse, though I wouldn't know how to "see" the game. I imagine there's some way to get a dump of the current dispay. Not being a Windows guy I wouldn't know. Anyone have any ideas?
No, I'm under no obligation to do that. Red Hat (as an example) is basing their business model on GPL software, it is a consequence of that model that the HAVE to provide the source to their distributions. They chose that path knowing what had to occur. If RedHat didn't exist, I'd pull from somewhere else. If no distro companies existed, I'd roll my own, it's that simple.
Slashdot Mirror
That's what I was thinking, though it works better with the bitters on there than without, not sure how to explain that.
My personal cure, while in a bar? Put bitters on an orange slice and suck on it, hasn't failed yet. Thanks to my bartender friend for that solution.
... disregarding the obvious problems I have with the BSA which other are sure to point out (and that I have ranted about before) legality, authority and such. It seems very odd to me that anyone should have to PROVE they bought something. CompUSA pulls the same shit when your walking out of the store, I get pretty irate and being stopped and having my purchases searched at the door, especially when I took only TEN STEPS from the register. But that's a little more understandable than the BSA's tactics, after all if I'm in the store with no receipt it's more likely that I didn't just lose it (though it is possible). When you buy site licenses I can imagine you have to show that you have a valid license, as far as proving you didn't buy it after the letter was sent, they can fuck off. If your legal now there's nothing they can do. But what about off the shelf purchases? What about backup copies (allowed by law) that were kept in a firesafe when the originals were destroyed. Like someone commented earlier, you are innocent until proven guilty, the burden of proof is on the prosecution. Hell I'd demand a jury of my peers.
It's destructive to the environment
No more so than all of the electric power we use to run the computers on this planet.
You still need to take time into account. When in the Zion archives did this information exist? This viewing of this material could take place 100, 10, or 2 years after the movie, when the information has been discovered and catalogued. You also need to take into account how much information that the Zion "elders" (I believe they use that term at some point) have released to the human populace at large. It's easily explainable.
Additionally, the concept of the universe (similar to the Terminator universe) is that there was a conflict between humans and artificial life. The first movie was told from the viewpoint of a human, of course a human would view the robots as evil, they're the enemy. A story told from the viewpoint of one of the robots wouldn't portray technology as bad at all. Watch the first Animatrix, there is definitely a pro-machine slant to it.
Just because "they" as in the characters in the first movie didn't know much of the history doesn't mean that there can't be other stories which do illuminate the history in the setting. Also the humans you meet in the Matrix are initially from humans that had been grown/put to sleep. The seeting of the movie is after the machines enslaved mankind.
You cannot say that guns are bad because they have been used to kill people
Err you can't? Let's see: Guns are bad because they have been used to kill people. There I said it and it's 100% true. As far as Windows goes, I could sort of care less. Windows has it's place, I'm a Linux zealot, but I still use windows for some things, not even just games
but that was before people had run out of ideas pertaining to AI. Today the only problems AI can solve are uninteresting ones.
Not even remotely true. AI faded from the public eye maybe, but there are literally hundreds of interesting projects that are being researched. The field never went away, it just doesn't make it into the mass media.
Only in response to those posting the same thign over and over. I can take a troll hit if necessary, no biggie.
That's what science fiction is. Move beyond that and it's fantasy, regardless of whether or not there are dragon's and wizards.
Not true, if it's indistinguishable from magic it becomes science fastasy. There are certain liberties that can be taken, especially when the setting is the far far future, but that does not absolve a science fiction author of all responsibility for keeping the science aspect plausible. The science itself IS NOT just the dressing for science fiction, it is the vector by which the complex issues are brought about. Don't confuse science fantasy/space opera with science fiction.
Not having read the book I can't comment on the possibility of what he describes. Aboe in the comments however are several posts claiming that it's just fiction and it doesn't matter if it's possible. That's only a half truth. It is marketed as "science fiction" which requires plausibility, though if what you describe is correct, the potential for it to still qualify as science fiction is still there. I'm not a fan of Crichton, some of his stuff is ok, but you dropped the magic words for me, "emergent behavior" I may have to pick this one up now.
The point is that in Science Fiction, if you are straying from current scientific "truths" (regardless of the fact that truth is a function of time), that you have to provide an explanation why. Else it's not science fiction.
It's claiming to be SCIENCE fiction, in which case the science must be correct. Or able to be reasonably extrapolated from what we currently know.
Why change the requirement for entry? High School grades mean nothing, less so than college. The idiots are weeded out BECAUSE THEY CAN'T DO THE WORK. As far as I'm concerned the system is working.
Fair enough, I mis-understood your comment. Certainly, you shouldn't use a new project as your testing ground for new ideas (well sort of).
I was just out of collage once. And a good think too, the Elmer's glue was starting to get on my nerves. Though I did have to walk aroung with bits of magazine stuck to my sides for a week or so. ;)
Err 1 and 2 are kinda mutually exclusive. Additionally, as far as I'm concerned and backed by experience, people who do 2 tend to be the better programmers. People who dabble in CompSci because they love it, and write code for the sake of writing it, are not only more experienced, they're also more willing to try new things, and have a better understanding of the field.
Both this and my previous posts are kidding around though, I'm not a x86 vs. Apple nazi, I like almost all machines... though what I REALLY want is a Lisp machine.
I've written plenty of code dealing with I/O, GUI's, and multi threading. And I'm smart enough to devise unit tests for all of those applications. Do I always use unit testing, no, is it possible to add unit testing to ANY code. Yeah it is. Talk to me when you've had a few more years under your belt.
Don't know why it didn't occur to me at the time but you could just do screen caps and write your recognition software based on that. Question is can you screen cap and make decisions fast enough.
To be honest that's a pretty interesting project. I probably wouldn't go the whole camera route, more likely write code that controlled the mouse, though I wouldn't know how to "see" the game. I imagine there's some way to get a dump of the current dispay. Not being a Windows guy I wouldn't know. Anyone have any ideas?
SCSI was a definite advantage over Wintel machines
Errr, yeah, cuz you can't get SCSI on x86 boxes. Right.
No, I'm under no obligation to do that. Red Hat (as an example) is basing their business model on GPL software, it is a consequence of that model that the HAVE to provide the source to their distributions. They chose that path knowing what had to occur. If RedHat didn't exist, I'd pull from somewhere else. If no distro companies existed, I'd roll my own, it's that simple.