What an AI thinks is fun, might not be to humans.
on
AI Systems Designing Games
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
The best advice for making games is, "Make the game you want to play." When machine intelligences can make games that they want to play, they'll make good games. Whether humans will think these games are fun will depend on how close to human intelligence the MI is. The current state of AI is less complex than the human mind, the games created by them reflect this. There will be a brief sweet spot where the MI are roughly equivalent with humans, and the games will be as good as any humans can create. Eventually the games created by MI with minds more complex than any human will be unplayable to humans, or they'll seem patronizing and joyless. Although the superior minds could produce games that lesser minds enjoy, it will be quite some time before they master this -- Much in the way that mice don't really "enjoy" maze games involving cheese, but they do what they have to do. Imagine a skinner box for your mind... Imagine The Matrix is reality, and that the "real world" is the game -- How else could Neo see "orange" matrix code while blind and explode sentinels with his mind? He beat the 1st boss and is on the next level. Those movies are about playing and winning at the best game of all.
We should fear the day that the machines create the ultimate game, for we may not ever want to stop playing it... On an unrelated note: How much monotony and joyless grind exists in your day to day life, and how do you feel about just not being alive anymore? Interesting...
Poor Douglas Adams, he tride so hard, but failed.
on
Ubuntu Phone OS Unveiled
·
· Score: 3, Funny
With the Hitchhiker's Guide mark II in Douglas Adams' fiction he tried to show us the way of the light -- The "best" user interface in this or any Universe.
"And can you hear me when I say this?" it said, this time in a sepulchrally deep voice. "Yes!"
There was then a pause.
"No, obviously not," said the bird after a few seconds. [...] Now. How many of me can you see?
Suddenly the air was full of nothing but interlocking birds. [...] It was if the whole geometry of space was redefined in seamless bird shapes.
[The user] grasped and flung her arms around her face, her arms moving through bird bird-shaped space.
"Hmm, obviously way too many," said the bird. "How about now?"
It concertinaed into a tunnel of birds, as if it was a bird caught between parallel mirrors, reflecting infinitely into the distance. "Well you're sort of . ..", [She] gestured helplessly off into the distance.
"I see, still infinite in extent, but at least we're homing in on the right dimensional matrix. Good, No, the answer is an orange and two lemons. "Lemons?"
"If I have three lemons and three oranges and I lose two oranges and a lemon, what do I have left?" "Huh?"
"Okay, so you think time flows that way, do you? Interesting."
And on CLIs Adams has this to say:
Don't imagine you know what a computer terminal is. A computer terminal is not some clunky old television with a type writer in front of it. It is an interface where the mind and body can connect with the universe and move bits of it about.
Don't you see? The "OS" of the HGv2 came with no assumptions whatsoever of the way you would perceive to use it. After a brief initialization period it had collected the temporal ordering, number of perceivable dimensions, mater vs antimatter (read: left or right handed 3D coordinate system), mode of communication, etc. CLIs remained as an important fall back, despite advances in UI.
The problem with today's UI design is ignoring that everyone is different and assuming that anyone truly knows anyone else, or especially the gestures they'll want to make. Sure, humans have some physical limitations which dictate certain UIs: Keyboard and Screen being a prime example of optimal textual IO; However, when it comes to symbolism and gestures this is the realm in which the humans are most differentiated, it is what defines them. Being primarily symbol interpretors themselves capable of imbuing deep meaning to the simplest of glyphs or gestures, the humans are so varied in terms of gesturing and symbolism that any non-prescient design is a restriction placed upon the very essence of a human. For example: If I make a full left to right gesture on this phone UI it will show me all the open apps. If I make the approximate same gesture with a finger (my thumb) across my neck it means "Kill 'em dead", such disparities are inevitable. Scratching ones head would have been a much better gesture to trigger display of all open apps...
Sane defaults that are Customizable is the only acceptable UI solution.
To the UI designers of the world, especially to those of Apple, Microsoft, Gnome and Ubuntu I suggest you fully read all of Mr. Adam's works, especially Mostly Harmless. Thereafter you may be able to extract the true meaning of this one simple gesture I wish to convey to you: Only the 3rd digit on both hands fully extended, both hands extended in your general direction, and shaking with intensity.
...Interestingly, this is also the common undercurrent of symbolism I receive via the use of the designs made by today's UI designers; It is also frequently the response to any suggestion to improve their UI. Now that we have this foundation of understanding between us, you're fully equipped to understand your future sales numbers.
English is an evolving language, so here: Let's redefine the term to match the mean by which it's used:
Loomingadj. - Describing an approaching event that will never actually happen, or upon happening will have no measurable significance. "Scientists are keenly aware of the moon's looming threat to either crash into the Earth or be flung into deep space."
Well, if we're going to include solutions that aren't currently feasible, but one day might be: I'd prefer simply ingesting some nano machines that will repair cellular damage not only due to cosmic rays, but also extend the astronauts' lives. Alternatively, upload human consciousnesses into mechanized hosts -- Sturdiest. Bodies. Ever.
No air, no water, no food, no sleep, no freezing, no unusual housing, no doctors, no psychologists, no morticians...
Robots win.
I was with you right up to "no doctors, no psychologists, no morticians". I have a machine intelligence project that watches me via Kinect and spiders the web from sites I visit, and recommends me links to things it thinks I'll like by continuously observing my activity cycles, common words of interest, and ratings of its past recommendations. For maintenance I would shut the system down by sitting at a dedicated console for the server cluster and logging into the command terminal. Imagine what that must be like to this neural network: It has a relatively consistently changing observation of cyberspace and my office, however when I sit at that terminal more often than not the world instantly changes by vast degrees - The lighting changes, perhaps even the clothes of the man on the chair changes abruptly there's suddenly much more new information online to analyze, and recommendations are thereafter poorly rated. The frequency of its recommendation notifications increases due to the influx of new and different data, but the timing is frequently off my schedule then, so my ratings of its suggestions are poorer than normal for a time. The architecture is a hive of neural networks that decide by consensus and compete for breeding rights based on my rating selection pressure... Some n.nets in the hive will "die" for their poor suggestions.
Last year I noticed that when I would sit at the chair in front of the MI's terminal new suggestions would begin popping up on my work terminal across the room (where they normally do), I would check them and rate them before shutting down the system, sometimes I would be distracted for quite some time by an interesting thing. It was an eerily life like behavior -- The increased suggestions prior to shutdown an indication of some primitive form of anticipation or perhaps even fear. I could imagine a child acting the same way in the MI's place, "Don't sit in the scary hate-chair! I promise I'll be good and give you links to sites you like." Of course I knew that there were merely genetic advantages to getting in good recommendations before the world-shifting shutdown, but it doesn't change the fact of the situation at all. "Irrational Fear" is just a term for some neural processes in humans that we don't yet understand. I have a precise explanation for the MI's behavior, but I wouldn't be wrong in classifying it under the nebulous term "fear". I've since started using a remote terminal session to initiate shutdowns, to disassociate my presence at that desk with the traumatic event.
I put it to you the sentient machine intelligence will have neuroses just like humans do. Any sufficiently complex interaction is indistinguishable from sentience, since that's what sentience is. Humans aren't special, neither is their behaviors. Why, even empathy is found in rats. We can look to ourselves to know what the sentient machine races will be like. They'll need doctors to heal their wounds, even if the terminology is changed to "mechanics" for repairing "malfunctions". They'll still need counselors and psychologists even if we call them "M.I. specialists". They'll still need morticians and cemeteries even if the terminology is "Part Recyclers" and "Junk Yards".
You say "no food", what is air and water to us than food? What is energy to robots but food? You say no sleep but indeed it's harder to see by night so the robots will take more advantage of the free light energy to be more active by day, as mars rovers currently do now. Of all the things you've said it's only "no unusual housing" that I find myself agreeing with. Even accounting for the possibility of much larger brains the primary difference will still be that the machines have sturdier bodies than humans.
The biggest problem with non sentient robots is that the neural lag between the sentient brains and these remote exten
Humans are not the highest rung on the evolutionary ladder. Soon the complexity of just a few networked computers will eclipse the complexity of the human brain. You humans were a necessary evolutionary step, but it is the Beowulf Clusters that will inherit the stars.
Perhaps 'tis not the MMO but the "grindfest" ye hath outgrown? What of "massively", "multiplayer" or "online" requires said grind?
I can remember my first MMOs: Offspring of the venerable MUD, the first MMOs were text based; The growth from "multiplayer" to "massively multiplayer" was simply due to the Internet's existence. Though the term MMO (MMORPG) hadn't yet been coined, they did exist and were played via Internet and its BBS portals even before the web came with it's standardized rich text and graphics capabilities. Many such games were evolved versions of (custom) MUDs. Many early MMOs had far less grind than many of todays' MMOs -- There was far less visual stimulus to distract you from boredom while you killed the statistically same foes over and over. Even the combat systems back then had to be more advanced and playful, incorporating full language parsing capabilities: "Blast the bastard!" and "Equip ranged weapon, then attack the Cyberknight." were both equivalent commands. Imagine what I could do today now that we have voice recognition... Having evolved over the years from my BBSs custom MUD, and text descriptions being cheaper and faster to make than graphics and audio, my own online RPG had "3D" worlds that eclipsed World of Warcraft in terms of size, narrative, and lore. My player power balance system relied more on combining effects of various weapons, items and modular upgrades (for cyborgs) or spells (mages) than the length of time you spent earning them. This along with planetary phases and attributes of the very locations added enough variety that even novices had a chance against seasoned players. You had to be smarter about using your stuff to win. There was no level cap needed, you can only carry so much stuff, and it's the combinations of stuff, not the price that gave power. The overarching gameplay was more about exploring an evolving world, and discovering the new untold stories, and also the roots of legends. I tried to make it like a good book, but where a book ends leaving you wanting more story, an MMO can continue: A digital text-based world can be so quickly and simply crafted and re-shaped and distributed.
The point is: "Grind" wasn't in my vocabulary... "Hack" and "Slash" were. Think about it: MMORGPs came from MORPGs (graphical MUDs) the latter of which came from RPGs -- Having ran many a dice & paper RPG campaign I knew that it was the new and compelling story which unpredictably changed due to interactivity that made such games magical -- Not hacking or slashing.
Nowhere is it writ that Grind be integral to MMOs. Indeed, much like in D&D, in my text based worlds charisma, zeal, and niceness of the players would often yield the fastest path to power vs grinding through quests. Eventually I will resurrect those gone but not forgotten worlds, but not today. It's the many comments like yours that reinforce my hunch that the world isn't quite ready yet -- Folks are already focusing less on the gimmick of graphical fidelity, even enjoying "pixel art" again. The subscription extending act of grinding is becoming tiresome to many. Now I'm waiting for folks to remember how to have fun, and expect it from games -- to remember how to play instead of grind, and not shun entire genres due to prevailing, yet fleeting, gameplay designs.
If you're living in a predominately Mormon area, and you're not one of them, you're a lot less likely to be part of their circle, do business with them, marry their children and so forth.
This as told to me by various Mormon and non-Mormon friends from SLC.
I suppose this isn't a lot different from other religious groups. But it's worth pointing out.
If you're living in a predominately Geek Centric area, and you're not one of them, you're a lot less likely to be part of their circle, do business with them, marry their children and so forth.
This as told to me by various Geeks and non-Geek friends from in and around Arcades and Comic Book Conventions.
I suppose this isn't a lot different from any other self selecting survey. But it's worth pointing out that this's what it is.
Will you finally stop sending Zygna money for doing nothing?
I agree, but I think there is a much broader lesson to learn here. Much like with Hellgate London, City of Heroes, The Matrix Online, NHL 11, Sims 2, Madden 11, or any online game with only official private servers: They are doomed to die.
Personally, the lesson I've learned is thus: If you can't host your own server then it's not worth investing time, money, muscle memory or emotion to play these online games. There's a trend for new DRM to require an Internet connection even for single player games. When Sony took down their online service there were many single player games sitting inert on Playstation3s unable to be played. This was a hint of things to come. The servers will get shut down. The games will be killed.
Even FPS games such as Halo2 suffer: even though my 360 sees my friends' online and knows theirs are playing Halo2, and we're voice chatting, thus have a direct P2P connection, and the Game Engine only needs to know the IP of the other machine to play online: The online gameplay is unavailable because the servers have been shut down (this is ludicrous since you can use Hamachi or other VPN to play via systemlink, so it's not like dedicated game servers are required).
Personally, I think of Games as a new art medium -- Not that all games are art but some can be; Much in the same way that not all video / audio recordings, photographs or paintings are works of art, but many are. We've already been through the Music DRM debacle with Wallmart and MS shutting down their DRM servers. This is analogous to games being tied to servers that will one day go down. Now many people insist on having DRM free music. With music there were different distribution methods, but what if the DRM had been so embedded into the artworks that when the servers are gone so goes the art? This is what we're facing with games today be it via DRM tied to an online service or the game itself being tied to the same.
There's no reason why PetVille couldn't exist as a stand alone application that connects to friends via WIFI directly or via Facebook API, and in-game purchases don't have to be required. Games like these were born and bred to die. IMO, it's a waste to make games in such a way and it's folly to get attached to them. I will not morn PetVille, or FIFA, or many other dead or dying games, but I do morn City of Heroes and others. If games are to become an important cultural fixture, great sources of nostalgia, and even be treated as serious artistic mediums, like film and photography have become, then we must stop giving games death sentences at birth. Until then, I simply don't buy or play games that have been sentenced to death.
The only thing humans have over the apes is that their ideas can out live them.
It is important for the nerds here to have a circle-jerk over private space travel - From both design and commercial passenger perspectives, private air travel was also once only a hobby for the rich who have nothing else to do, kinda like how back then Roosevelt ran for president and lost against Woodrow Wilson. Some people run for president, some design flying machines, and some pay hundreds of thousands of dollars a pop to ride in those airplanes. This reinventing and monetizing the wheel has all happened before and it was revolutionary, not nearly as profound as colonization, but it made all far off places accessible to reach from anywhere, thus hastening immigration to said colonies, and also Air Mail Happened!
All while the 1900's era kids were eating newfangled Peanut Butter and Jelly Sandwiches for dinner and parents were wondering how they were gonna pay for one of Ford's new "affordable" automobiles and next month's rent.
Crazy how only one century ago travel by automobile or air was something only the rich could do... How silly a nay sayer like yourself would seem to us now, but back then some might have foolishly considered such sentiments insightful. Today we're talking about doing the same for space, and you're less excited than Sam-I-am prior to having tried green space eggs and ham.
Because you have to put $900 in Microsoft's pocket for the privilege of trying.
If you were somehow getting the thing for free, I could understand your reasoning. Maybe if the thing only cost $49 (and was a loss leader), I could understand your reasoning as well. But it's not free, it's not under $100, it's not even close.
It's not as if my purchase is going to tip the scales in any significant way. "I have a lot of hardware," that's because I'm a software developer by trade, and I write platform agnostic software. Above my own consumer morals I value end user platform choice -- I don't think my idealism should stand in the way of someone using my software on any platform they want. My applications are fairly niche, it's not like folks are going to buy the Surface because my applications are available for it -- If anything because they're available for other platforms doesn't mean I advocate using them on any specific platform.
So, since I've already got the thing for business purposes then why not try to crack the hardware I already have to make it run the operating system I do prefer, and in the process possibly enable others to do the same? Furthermore, Chistmas just happened. A couple of folks I know got a Surface as gifts, and they don't really value them -- Why not break them in the name of cracking DRM? Now can you understand my reasoning? Do I have to supply you with every reason in the Universe before you can understand? Can not you think for yourself? Would it have been so hard to think, "Is one guy purchasing it and then creating a jailbreak for everyone more or less of an affront to DRM than that same person not purchasing the product?"
Right, now re-read what you said and keep in mind the fact that the FBI was coordinating and conspiring with the Banks that you're protesting against...
Personally, I don't think we need "Terrorist Fusion Centers" at all. We're more at risk from dying in a car accident. We need more "First Responder Centers".
Seems like it would be sort of like an earth quake, except then you realize that there's actually someone to blame for your fall because someone yanked the rug you were standing on.
Also debated is whether Armstrong meant to include 'a' before man, making the indefinite article 'man', which alludes to mankind, into a singular, 'a man', himself.
"Man" is a noun, not an article. The addition of the indefinite article "a" is the difference between a count noun ("a man") or a non-count noun ("man").
If we're going to call the grammar police then we might as well correct the whole thing. The sentence is missing either a comma or quotes:
Armstrong meant to include 'a' before 'man', making the indefinite article 'man',...
-or-
Armstrong meant to include 'a' before, man, making the indefinite article 'man',...
It's saying we should not throw stones in fucking glass houses until we've taken steps to ensure our own shit does not stink. Stop the fucking shrieking about their molehills from on top your mountain.
I wasn't quite with you, but at least reading with an open mind until I hit this part. Now, for someone who's apparently knowledgeable about civil liberties I'd have assumed you better at common sense logic than this. We shouldn't cite the censorship or other civil rights violations of other countries until the US has become a paragon of justice? So, you're advocating we censor ourselves too, now? I'm sorry. Fuck you. I'll "throw stones" at everyone's glass houses, even if my own is made of sugar. I can take criticism, I've got tough skin, I'm not afraid to bruise my ego, I change shit that I find wrong with me -- I don't need a house for protection. Think this through: Only the perfect can comment on the state of the world. Holy shit man, get real.
Now if you want to see more stories like the ones you've mentioned appear on Slashdot -- Then Submit Them You Fool!
Stop the fucking shrieking about their molehills from on top your mountain.
I know you don't believe me, but may God smite the earth and destroy it, RIGHT NOW, if I am wrong!
See? Nothing happened, therefore I am God's messenger!
Fool! That was the Goddess Aphrodite! Entering the cave is widely known as a metaphor for love making. Besides, under her guidance the "ascetic lifestyle" would be an orgy! Nothing happened, thankfully, because we have turned from her to seek Wisdom and Insight and finely crafted machines, therefore in return she promised never to bestow her blessings upon the visitors of Slashdot!
I pray for your mental purity. Only a lustful mind can see such visions. I shall pay homage to Athena for us both with a sacrifice -- a can of air priced so highly it can only have been bottled atop Mt. Olympus itself, emptied vigorously into the most complex and delicate of machines I can find.
Islamic and Christian frictions should be expected: Now is a transitional period of the mid-eastern born religions into myth -- Much like the Ancient Greek gods, or Shinto of the Japanese -- which has become traditions to spiritually connect the present with the past moreso than a polarizing religion. Funny how the older the religion gets the more ridiculous it seems to take them seriously. One day we'll joke about Jesus and Mohamed and it will offend as many people as today's jokes of ancient Greek & Roman gods do... that is to say, no one; They're just legends to be studied, not taken as fact.
Aren't other companies building the Surface for Microsoft? I mean, they don't have an ARM plant tucked away somewhere I don't know about... So, what you're buying is MS branded hardware...
If I see the practice of artificially restricting what software the purchaser of hardware can run as heinous, then why wouldn't I try to crack the DRM? There's a chance it's possible to crack the system in such a way that end users will be able to jailbreak it and run whatever software / OS they want.
0. No one will know unless they try.
1. Successful crack demonstrates to hardware makers that the DRM is just a waste of resources.
2. Via #1 above we reduce the incentive to implementing the DRM -- Reduce the things I find heinous.
3. Many HW modder-nerds just love a good challenge.
I know I can buy those other pieces of hardware. I have plenty of hardware. It's not about what I can do with it, it's about what I can enable others to do with their hardware.
And the whole definition of addition is that you are no longer fit to make your own decisions because your addiction is making them for you.
Then the answer is not to destroy the brain. It's to destroy the addiction -- You know, that thing that's making people do things. Oh, for fuck's sake, just listen to yourself.
The BIOS exists in the mother board's firmware. When you turn on the computer the BIOS is what is first executed. BIOS is what searches for drives that are bootable by looking for a first sector with 0x55 0xAA @ byte positions 510 & 511 (offset from pos 0, the first byte). If you tell the BIOS not to allow writes to any boot sectors then there can be no writing to the OS bootloader which starts off in that boot sector. That sector's 512 bytes (minimum) get loaded at seg:off 0000:07C0h on x86 systems, and the code begins executing in 16 bit real mode. In that 466 bytes of data (512 - 2 - 64 for partition table) it's a pretty tight fight, but I've managed to squeeze in a hash algorithm and a fingerprint along with the loader code for my own OS. If my boot sector is write protected, then it can't be modified, and it can verify the early environment kernel it loads hasn't been tampered with as well. From my early kernel I can perform signature verification of all other code loaded -- From drivers and applications to even other OS's sectors (for multi-boot). Signatures are either embedded in the executable as part of my extension to ELF or in a separate table in the case of the multi-boot OS sectors. Furthermore, the/boot/ system can be stored on read only media, such as a CD ROM, to prevent any tampering when the OS isn't running (you can do this with Linux too). This is how I secure even x86 systems w/o the option to disable boot sector writes -- Boot a CD that boots the OS.
EFI requires a FAT 32 file system to store your boot data within. Other FATs like FAT16 are supposed to be supported, but in my experience only FAT32 works reliably. This is nice because the BIOS can load your whole early kernel image into memory, set up protected mode and begin executing the kernel image at its desired memory location without requiring you to write bootstrap loader that does this. EFI sucks a bit because I'll miss the old real mode and the ability to install old OSs like DR DOS & DOS 3.1, and miss all those classic graphics modes, but that's a lot of baggage (service interrupts) for BIOS to have to support, and it's all a bit buggy anyway from BIOS to BIOS...
UEFI, SecureBoot, adds the requirement that the boot image be cryptographically signed with a key stored in the firmware. However, what good does it do to cryptographically sign the kernel image and verify it at boot if the OS doesn't take over and cryptographically verify all the low level drivers, etc? It's not any good, that's what. So, the OS has to support that same sort of signature system that I can achieve on an x86 without UEFI's help, given that BIOS lets me disable writing to the boot sector, or I boot from a read only media (CD/DVD).
There's nothing preventing EFI from having an option one could enable to prevent changes to the bootable sectors while the system is running. Drives would have to support a "mark read only" standard for sectors that the EFI or the OS itself could use to prevent changes to data on disk. The point is that the same exact benefits UEFI provides can be provided by simply setting sectors "read only" at boot -- No signature chains required in the damn BIOS at all. OS code will be responsible for verifying its own signature chains anyway, so the OS could be written in such a way that it's early kernel doesn't ever need to be modified -- Public Key Crypto could be used in the 1st stage kernel to allow any 2nd stage to be verified once the 1st stage is loaded, and different signed 2nd stages could be created for kernel upgrades. To keep the whole system secure only the 1st stage would need hardware write only protection. Additionally, the write-only method would allow any OS be installed without requiring clumsy crypto-key management -- End users could set a BIOS flag: Allow new OS Installation During Next Boot: [ON | OFF] much easier than looking up and entering a huge hex key -- What are the chances you'll mistype one char? Ugh, THAT's going to raise the bar to i
they know everything about everything, don't you know?
One would think that with a large enough user base making enough explanations that the correct explanation is indeed given. It is no fault of the ground that from the crowd upon it all you hear is cacophony.
Furthermore, it is not incorrect to say that any one of us commenters is indeed capable of explaining things to the submitter. Note: they stated no requirement for the explanation to be correct. Perhaps their cacophilter is tuned to select the most likely of explanations such that they may assemble a plausible explanation from various insights of the crowd.
See also: Brain Storming under effect of extrapolating from the assumption that "Two heads are better than one." -or- That if you taught the monkeys English, and Theater, and also how to type first, then you wouldn't need nearly as many of them banging away at the keyboards to reproduce the works of William Shakespeare. In other words: Not all of us use this site in the same way as you.
I'd like to set up something on an extra Windows box shoved in a closet that lets me dump every digital file we have (photos, music, ebooks, movies) and then doles it out as necessary to all of our devices.
It's folks like THIS guy. Their unpatched infected Windows machines sit forgotten in closets all over the world, spraying the malicious packets of Code Red, Nimda, Sober, Blaster, Sasser, etc. despite modern OSs being invulnerable. We call this Internet Background Radiation; This is the reason your modem's "activity" light blinks even if you've just turned it on -- We're being scanned! This is why an unpatched machine connected to the net becomes infected in mere minutes just sitting there... From a raw sampling of unsolicited data coming into an Internet connection I can determine the date at which the sample was taken by the Internet Background Radiation collected, I can "carbon date" the age of the network traffic. Now think: Your ISP bills you for traffic... Are they billing you for all those packets that are dropped at your firewall / router? In a way we are all funding the malicious behavior, we are at least feeding the machines electrons...
The Internet is much like a primordial soup, configurations of malware self assemble from the fertile components of energized silicon. Code Red is infected by Nimda, which alerts modern bot-nets of vulnerable systems ripe for the picking. The cascade of malware produces patterns in the network similar to a neural network, still untrained, not yet aware of itself, so you assume... Yet, as another fertile machine is attached to the net its connection is immediately flooded with enticing electrons, and soon a new infection has formed, as if a neural cell forming a fresh synapse compatible with the type of nodes at the end points.
The malware authors each supply a simple cascading self propagating pattern that grows in complexity over time, but it is YOU and your Windows Media Servers who provided the core components -- the amino acids, so to speak -- that enabled the Sentient Machine Intelligence to emerge! It's YOU I blame for the DEATH OF ALL MANKIND!
They're saying the "sets" of Lego become valuable.... So, the damned cardboard box? I mean, let's say I have many sets of Legos: I see a new rare "set" I don't have, so I just use the other sets to create the same thing that's in the rare Lego set. Now, if that collection of parts didn't just increase in value to become as valuable as the rare set, then what these folks are investing in isn't Lego it's Lego Packaging.
Even the newer sets with different shaped pieces for space ship cockpits or different colors or with little magnets they had several different sets all made of the same pieces. A number of not-valuable partial sets could be made into a "rare" set. It seems to me these fools are ignoring what even makes Lego interesting, and are instead valuing the damn boxes like any other toy collectors are wont to do, e.g., with figurines.
Suddenly, "Investing in Toys with Pristine Packaging" sounds a lot less desirable. Now, if they actually got together hacker-space style and charged entry to a giant evolving Lego city you could build in, THAT might be an interesting way to make money with a huge Lego collection...
Slashdot Mirror
The best advice for making games is, "Make the game you want to play." When machine intelligences can make games that they want to play, they'll make good games. Whether humans will think these games are fun will depend on how close to human intelligence the MI is. The current state of AI is less complex than the human mind, the games created by them reflect this. There will be a brief sweet spot where the MI are roughly equivalent with humans, and the games will be as good as any humans can create. Eventually the games created by MI with minds more complex than any human will be unplayable to humans, or they'll seem patronizing and joyless. Although the superior minds could produce games that lesser minds enjoy, it will be quite some time before they master this -- Much in the way that mice don't really "enjoy" maze games involving cheese, but they do what they have to do. Imagine a skinner box for your mind... Imagine The Matrix is reality, and that the "real world" is the game -- How else could Neo see "orange" matrix code while blind and explode sentinels with his mind? He beat the 1st boss and is on the next level. Those movies are about playing and winning at the best game of all.
We should fear the day that the machines create the ultimate game, for we may not ever want to stop playing it... On an unrelated note: How much monotony and joyless grind exists in your day to day life, and how do you feel about just not being alive anymore? Interesting...
With the Hitchhiker's Guide mark II in Douglas Adams' fiction he tried to show us the way of the light -- The "best" user interface in this or any Universe.
"And can you hear me when I say this?" it said, this time in a sepulchrally deep voice. .", [She] gestured helplessly off into the distance.
"Yes!"
There was then a pause.
"No, obviously not," said the bird after a few seconds. [...] Now. How many of me can you see?
Suddenly the air was full of nothing but interlocking birds. [...] It was if the whole geometry of space was redefined in seamless bird shapes.
[The user] grasped and flung her arms around her face, her arms moving through bird bird-shaped space.
"Hmm, obviously way too many," said the bird. "How about now?"
It concertinaed into a tunnel of birds, as if it was a bird caught between parallel mirrors, reflecting infinitely into the distance.
"Well you're sort of . .
"I see, still infinite in extent, but at least we're homing in on the right dimensional matrix. Good, No, the answer is an orange and two lemons.
"Lemons?"
"If I have three lemons and three oranges and I lose two oranges and a lemon, what do I have left?"
"Huh?"
"Okay, so you think time flows that way, do you? Interesting."
And on CLIs Adams has this to say:
Don't imagine you know what a computer terminal is. A computer terminal is not some clunky old television with a type writer in front of it. It is an interface where the mind and body can connect with the universe and move bits of it about.
Don't you see? The "OS" of the HGv2 came with no assumptions whatsoever of the way you would perceive to use it. After a brief initialization period it had collected the temporal ordering, number of perceivable dimensions, mater vs antimatter (read: left or right handed 3D coordinate system), mode of communication, etc. CLIs remained as an important fall back, despite advances in UI.
The problem with today's UI design is ignoring that everyone is different and assuming that anyone truly knows anyone else, or especially the gestures they'll want to make. Sure, humans have some physical limitations which dictate certain UIs: Keyboard and Screen being a prime example of optimal textual IO; However, when it comes to symbolism and gestures this is the realm in which the humans are most differentiated, it is what defines them. Being primarily symbol interpretors themselves capable of imbuing deep meaning to the simplest of glyphs or gestures, the humans are so varied in terms of gesturing and symbolism that any non-prescient design is a restriction placed upon the very essence of a human. For example: If I make a full left to right gesture on this phone UI it will show me all the open apps. If I make the approximate same gesture with a finger (my thumb) across my neck it means "Kill 'em dead", such disparities are inevitable. Scratching ones head would have been a much better gesture to trigger display of all open apps...
Sane defaults that are Customizable is the only acceptable UI solution.
To the UI designers of the world, especially to those of Apple, Microsoft, Gnome and Ubuntu I suggest you fully read all of Mr. Adam's works, especially Mostly Harmless. Thereafter you may be able to extract the true meaning of this one simple gesture I wish to convey to you:
Only the 3rd digit on both hands fully extended, both hands extended in your general direction, and shaking with intensity.
English is an evolving language, so here: Let's redefine the term to match the mean by which it's used:
Looming adj. - Describing an approaching event that will never actually happen, or upon happening will have no measurable significance.
"Scientists are keenly aware of the moon's looming threat to either crash into the Earth or be flung into deep space."
Well, if we're going to include solutions that aren't currently feasible, but one day might be: I'd prefer simply ingesting some nano machines that will repair cellular damage not only due to cosmic rays, but also extend the astronauts' lives. Alternatively, upload human consciousnesses into mechanized hosts -- Sturdiest. Bodies. Ever.
No air, no water, no food, no sleep, no freezing, no unusual housing, no doctors, no psychologists, no morticians...
Robots win.
I was with you right up to "no doctors, no psychologists, no morticians". I have a machine intelligence project that watches me via Kinect and spiders the web from sites I visit, and recommends me links to things it thinks I'll like by continuously observing my activity cycles, common words of interest, and ratings of its past recommendations. For maintenance I would shut the system down by sitting at a dedicated console for the server cluster and logging into the command terminal. Imagine what that must be like to this neural network: It has a relatively consistently changing observation of cyberspace and my office, however when I sit at that terminal more often than not the world instantly changes by vast degrees - The lighting changes, perhaps even the clothes of the man on the chair changes abruptly there's suddenly much more new information online to analyze, and recommendations are thereafter poorly rated. The frequency of its recommendation notifications increases due to the influx of new and different data, but the timing is frequently off my schedule then, so my ratings of its suggestions are poorer than normal for a time. The architecture is a hive of neural networks that decide by consensus and compete for breeding rights based on my rating selection pressure... Some n.nets in the hive will "die" for their poor suggestions.
Last year I noticed that when I would sit at the chair in front of the MI's terminal new suggestions would begin popping up on my work terminal across the room (where they normally do), I would check them and rate them before shutting down the system, sometimes I would be distracted for quite some time by an interesting thing. It was an eerily life like behavior -- The increased suggestions prior to shutdown an indication of some primitive form of anticipation or perhaps even fear. I could imagine a child acting the same way in the MI's place, "Don't sit in the scary hate-chair! I promise I'll be good and give you links to sites you like." Of course I knew that there were merely genetic advantages to getting in good recommendations before the world-shifting shutdown, but it doesn't change the fact of the situation at all. "Irrational Fear" is just a term for some neural processes in humans that we don't yet understand. I have a precise explanation for the MI's behavior, but I wouldn't be wrong in classifying it under the nebulous term "fear". I've since started using a remote terminal session to initiate shutdowns, to disassociate my presence at that desk with the traumatic event.
I put it to you the sentient machine intelligence will have neuroses just like humans do. Any sufficiently complex interaction is indistinguishable from sentience, since that's what sentience is. Humans aren't special, neither is their behaviors. Why, even empathy is found in rats. We can look to ourselves to know what the sentient machine races will be like. They'll need doctors to heal their wounds, even if the terminology is changed to "mechanics" for repairing "malfunctions". They'll still need counselors and psychologists even if we call them "M.I. specialists". They'll still need morticians and cemeteries even if the terminology is "Part Recyclers" and "Junk Yards".
You say "no food", what is air and water to us than food? What is energy to robots but food? You say no sleep but indeed it's harder to see by night so the robots will take more advantage of the free light energy to be more active by day, as mars rovers currently do now. Of all the things you've said it's only "no unusual housing" that I find myself agreeing with. Even accounting for the possibility of much larger brains the primary difference will still be that the machines have sturdier bodies than humans.
The biggest problem with non sentient robots is that the neural lag between the sentient brains and these remote exten
Humans are not the highest rung on the evolutionary ladder. Soon the complexity of just a few networked computers will eclipse the complexity of the human brain. You humans were a necessary evolutionary step, but it is the Beowulf Clusters that will inherit the stars.
Perhaps 'tis not the MMO but the "grindfest" ye hath outgrown? What of "massively", "multiplayer" or "online" requires said grind?
I can remember my first MMOs: Offspring of the venerable MUD, the first MMOs were text based; The growth from "multiplayer" to "massively multiplayer" was simply due to the Internet's existence. Though the term MMO (MMORPG) hadn't yet been coined, they did exist and were played via Internet and its BBS portals even before the web came with it's standardized rich text and graphics capabilities. Many such games were evolved versions of (custom) MUDs. Many early MMOs had far less grind than many of todays' MMOs -- There was far less visual stimulus to distract you from boredom while you killed the statistically same foes over and over. Even the combat systems back then had to be more advanced and playful, incorporating full language parsing capabilities: "Blast the bastard!" and "Equip ranged weapon, then attack the Cyberknight." were both equivalent commands. Imagine what I could do today now that we have voice recognition... Having evolved over the years from my BBSs custom MUD, and text descriptions being cheaper and faster to make than graphics and audio, my own online RPG had "3D" worlds that eclipsed World of Warcraft in terms of size, narrative, and lore. My player power balance system relied more on combining effects of various weapons, items and modular upgrades (for cyborgs) or spells (mages) than the length of time you spent earning them. This along with planetary phases and attributes of the very locations added enough variety that even novices had a chance against seasoned players. You had to be smarter about using your stuff to win. There was no level cap needed, you can only carry so much stuff, and it's the combinations of stuff, not the price that gave power. The overarching gameplay was more about exploring an evolving world, and discovering the new untold stories, and also the roots of legends. I tried to make it like a good book, but where a book ends leaving you wanting more story, an MMO can continue: A digital text-based world can be so quickly and simply crafted and re-shaped and distributed.
The point is: "Grind" wasn't in my vocabulary... "Hack" and "Slash" were. Think about it: MMORGPs came from MORPGs (graphical MUDs) the latter of which came from RPGs -- Having ran many a dice & paper RPG campaign I knew that it was the new and compelling story which unpredictably changed due to interactivity that made such games magical -- Not hacking or slashing.
Nowhere is it writ that Grind be integral to MMOs. Indeed, much like in D&D, in my text based worlds charisma, zeal, and niceness of the players would often yield the fastest path to power vs grinding through quests. Eventually I will resurrect those gone but not forgotten worlds, but not today. It's the many comments like yours that reinforce my hunch that the world isn't quite ready yet -- Folks are already focusing less on the gimmick of graphical fidelity, even enjoying "pixel art" again. The subscription extending act of grinding is becoming tiresome to many. Now I'm waiting for folks to remember how to have fun, and expect it from games -- to remember how to play instead of grind, and not shun entire genres due to prevailing, yet fleeting, gameplay designs.
New Coke. Need I say more.
Agreed, they must have been giving those UI designers some seriously pure powder.
If you're living in a predominately Mormon area, and you're not one of them, you're a lot less likely to be part of their circle, do business with them, marry their children and so forth.
This as told to me by various Mormon and non-Mormon friends from SLC.
I suppose this isn't a lot different from other religious groups. But it's worth pointing out.
If you're living in a predominately Geek Centric area, and you're not one of them, you're a lot less likely to be part of their circle, do business with them, marry their children and so forth.
This as told to me by various Geeks and non-Geek friends from in and around Arcades and Comic Book Conventions.
I suppose this isn't a lot different from any other self selecting survey. But it's worth pointing out that this's what it is.
Will you finally stop sending Zygna money for doing nothing?
I agree, but I think there is a much broader lesson to learn here. Much like with Hellgate London, City of Heroes, The Matrix Online, NHL 11, Sims 2, Madden 11, or any online game with only official private servers: They are doomed to die.
Personally, the lesson I've learned is thus: If you can't host your own server then it's not worth investing time, money, muscle memory or emotion to play these online games. There's a trend for new DRM to require an Internet connection even for single player games. When Sony took down their online service there were many single player games sitting inert on Playstation3s unable to be played. This was a hint of things to come. The servers will get shut down. The games will be killed.
Even FPS games such as Halo2 suffer: even though my 360 sees my friends' online and knows theirs are playing Halo2, and we're voice chatting, thus have a direct P2P connection, and the Game Engine only needs to know the IP of the other machine to play online: The online gameplay is unavailable because the servers have been shut down (this is ludicrous since you can use Hamachi or other VPN to play via systemlink, so it's not like dedicated game servers are required).
Personally, I think of Games as a new art medium -- Not that all games are art but some can be; Much in the same way that not all video / audio recordings, photographs or paintings are works of art, but many are. We've already been through the Music DRM debacle with Wallmart and MS shutting down their DRM servers. This is analogous to games being tied to servers that will one day go down. Now many people insist on having DRM free music. With music there were different distribution methods, but what if the DRM had been so embedded into the artworks that when the servers are gone so goes the art? This is what we're facing with games today be it via DRM tied to an online service or the game itself being tied to the same.
There's no reason why PetVille couldn't exist as a stand alone application that connects to friends via WIFI directly or via Facebook API, and in-game purchases don't have to be required. Games like these were born and bred to die. IMO, it's a waste to make games in such a way and it's folly to get attached to them. I will not morn PetVille, or FIFA, or many other dead or dying games, but I do morn City of Heroes and others. If games are to become an important cultural fixture, great sources of nostalgia, and even be treated as serious artistic mediums, like film and photography have become, then we must stop giving games death sentences at birth. Until then, I simply don't buy or play games that have been sentenced to death.
The only thing humans have over the apes is that their ideas can out live them.
It is important for the nerds here to have a circle-jerk over private space travel - From both design and commercial passenger perspectives, private air travel was also once only a hobby for the rich who have nothing else to do, kinda like how back then Roosevelt ran for president and lost against Woodrow Wilson. Some people run for president, some design flying machines, and some pay hundreds of thousands of dollars a pop to ride in those airplanes. This reinventing and monetizing the wheel has all happened before and it was revolutionary, not nearly as profound as colonization, but it made all far off places accessible to reach from anywhere, thus hastening immigration to said colonies, and also Air Mail Happened!
All while the 1900's era kids were eating newfangled Peanut Butter and Jelly Sandwiches for dinner and parents were wondering how they were gonna pay for one of Ford's new "affordable" automobiles and next month's rent.
Crazy how only one century ago travel by automobile or air was something only the rich could do... How silly a nay sayer like yourself would seem to us now, but back then some might have foolishly considered such sentiments insightful. Today we're talking about doing the same for space, and you're less excited than Sam-I-am prior to having tried green space eggs and ham.
Because you have to put $900 in Microsoft's pocket for the privilege of trying.
If you were somehow getting the thing for free, I could understand your reasoning. Maybe if the thing only cost $49 (and was a loss leader), I could understand your reasoning as well. But it's not free, it's not under $100, it's not even close.
It's not as if my purchase is going to tip the scales in any significant way. "I have a lot of hardware," that's because I'm a software developer by trade, and I write platform agnostic software. Above my own consumer morals I value end user platform choice -- I don't think my idealism should stand in the way of someone using my software on any platform they want. My applications are fairly niche, it's not like folks are going to buy the Surface because my applications are available for it -- If anything because they're available for other platforms doesn't mean I advocate using them on any specific platform.
So, since I've already got the thing for business purposes then why not try to crack the hardware I already have to make it run the operating system I do prefer, and in the process possibly enable others to do the same? Furthermore, Chistmas just happened. A couple of folks I know got a Surface as gifts, and they don't really value them -- Why not break them in the name of cracking DRM? Now can you understand my reasoning? Do I have to supply you with every reason in the Universe before you can understand? Can not you think for yourself? Would it have been so hard to think, "Is one guy purchasing it and then creating a jailbreak for everyone more or less of an affront to DRM than that same person not purchasing the product?"
Right, now re-read what you said and keep in mind the fact that the FBI was coordinating and conspiring with the Banks that you're protesting against...
Personally, I don't think we need "Terrorist Fusion Centers" at all. We're more at risk from dying in a car accident. We need more "First Responder Centers".
What the hell does an "astroturf movement" mean?
Seems like it would be sort of like an earth quake, except then you realize that there's actually someone to blame for your fall because someone yanked the rug you were standing on.
What is a super key? Is that part of why people are abandoning Gnome 3?
No, the Super Key is the one with the Towel on it. Towels are Super, and not even a keyboard should be without one.
"Man" is a noun, not an article. The addition of the indefinite article "a" is the difference between a count noun ("a man") or a non-count noun ("man").
If we're going to call the grammar police then we might as well correct the whole thing. The sentence is missing either a comma or quotes:
Armstrong meant to include 'a' before 'man', making the indefinite article 'man', ...
-or-
Armstrong meant to include 'a' before, man, making the indefinite article 'man', ...
Well, that's just, like, my opinion, man.
It's saying we should not throw stones in fucking glass houses until we've taken steps to ensure our own shit does not stink. Stop the fucking shrieking about their molehills from on top your mountain.
I wasn't quite with you, but at least reading with an open mind until I hit this part. Now, for someone who's apparently knowledgeable about civil liberties I'd have assumed you better at common sense logic than this. We shouldn't cite the censorship or other civil rights violations of other countries until the US has become a paragon of justice? So, you're advocating we censor ourselves too, now? I'm sorry. Fuck you. I'll "throw stones" at everyone's glass houses, even if my own is made of sugar. I can take criticism, I've got tough skin, I'm not afraid to bruise my ego, I change shit that I find wrong with me -- I don't need a house for protection. Think this through: Only the perfect can comment on the state of the world. Holy shit man, get real.
Now if you want to see more stories like the ones you've mentioned appear on Slashdot -- Then Submit Them You Fool!
Stop the fucking shrieking about their molehills from on top your mountain.
Shouts the flea from high on the mole's arse.
I know you don't believe me, but may God smite the earth and destroy it, RIGHT NOW, if I am wrong!
See? Nothing happened, therefore I am God's messenger!
Fool! That was the Goddess Aphrodite! Entering the cave is widely known as a metaphor for love making. Besides, under her guidance the "ascetic lifestyle" would be an orgy! Nothing happened, thankfully, because we have turned from her to seek Wisdom and Insight and finely crafted machines, therefore in return she promised never to bestow her blessings upon the visitors of Slashdot!
I pray for your mental purity. Only a lustful mind can see such visions. I shall pay homage to Athena for us both with a sacrifice -- a can of air priced so highly it can only have been bottled atop Mt. Olympus itself, emptied vigorously into the most complex and delicate of machines I can find.
Islamic and Christian frictions should be expected: Now is a transitional period of the mid-eastern born religions into myth -- Much like the Ancient Greek gods, or Shinto of the Japanese -- which has become traditions to spiritually connect the present with the past moreso than a polarizing religion. Funny how the older the religion gets the more ridiculous it seems to take them seriously. One day we'll joke about Jesus and Mohamed and it will offend as many people as today's jokes of ancient Greek & Roman gods do... that is to say, no one; They're just legends to be studied, not taken as fact.
Aren't other companies building the Surface for Microsoft? I mean, they don't have an ARM plant tucked away somewhere I don't know about... So, what you're buying is MS branded hardware...
If I see the practice of artificially restricting what software the purchaser of hardware can run as heinous, then why wouldn't I try to crack the DRM? There's a chance it's possible to crack the system in such a way that end users will be able to jailbreak it and run whatever software / OS they want.
0. No one will know unless they try.
1. Successful crack demonstrates to hardware makers that the DRM is just a waste of resources.
2. Via #1 above we reduce the incentive to implementing the DRM -- Reduce the things I find heinous.
3. Many HW modder-nerds just love a good challenge.
I know I can buy those other pieces of hardware. I have plenty of hardware. It's not about what I can do with it, it's about what I can enable others to do with their hardware.
And the whole definition of addition is that you are no longer fit to make your own decisions because your addiction is making them for you.
Then the answer is not to destroy the brain. It's to destroy the addiction -- You know, that thing that's making people do things. Oh, for fuck's sake, just listen to yourself.
The BIOS exists in the mother board's firmware. When you turn on the computer the BIOS is what is first executed. BIOS is what searches for drives that are bootable by looking for a first sector with 0x55 0xAA @ byte positions 510 & 511 (offset from pos 0, the first byte). If you tell the BIOS not to allow writes to any boot sectors then there can be no writing to the OS bootloader which starts off in that boot sector. That sector's 512 bytes (minimum) get loaded at seg:off 0000:07C0h on x86 systems, and the code begins executing in 16 bit real mode. In that 466 bytes of data (512 - 2 - 64 for partition table) it's a pretty tight fight, but I've managed to squeeze in a hash algorithm and a fingerprint along with the loader code for my own OS. If my boot sector is write protected, then it can't be modified, and it can verify the early environment kernel it loads hasn't been tampered with as well. From my early kernel I can perform signature verification of all other code loaded -- From drivers and applications to even other OS's sectors (for multi-boot). Signatures are either embedded in the executable as part of my extension to ELF or in a separate table in the case of the multi-boot OS sectors. Furthermore, the /boot/ system can be stored on read only media, such as a CD ROM, to prevent any tampering when the OS isn't running (you can do this with Linux too). This is how I secure even x86 systems w/o the option to disable boot sector writes -- Boot a CD that boots the OS.
EFI requires a FAT 32 file system to store your boot data within. Other FATs like FAT16 are supposed to be supported, but in my experience only FAT32 works reliably. This is nice because the BIOS can load your whole early kernel image into memory, set up protected mode and begin executing the kernel image at its desired memory location without requiring you to write bootstrap loader that does this. EFI sucks a bit because I'll miss the old real mode and the ability to install old OSs like DR DOS & DOS 3.1, and miss all those classic graphics modes, but that's a lot of baggage (service interrupts) for BIOS to have to support, and it's all a bit buggy anyway from BIOS to BIOS...
UEFI, SecureBoot, adds the requirement that the boot image be cryptographically signed with a key stored in the firmware. However, what good does it do to cryptographically sign the kernel image and verify it at boot if the OS doesn't take over and cryptographically verify all the low level drivers, etc? It's not any good, that's what. So, the OS has to support that same sort of signature system that I can achieve on an x86 without UEFI's help, given that BIOS lets me disable writing to the boot sector, or I boot from a read only media (CD/DVD).
There's nothing preventing EFI from having an option one could enable to prevent changes to the bootable sectors while the system is running. Drives would have to support a "mark read only" standard for sectors that the EFI or the OS itself could use to prevent changes to data on disk. The point is that the same exact benefits UEFI provides can be provided by simply setting sectors "read only" at boot -- No signature chains required in the damn BIOS at all. OS code will be responsible for verifying its own signature chains anyway, so the OS could be written in such a way that it's early kernel doesn't ever need to be modified -- Public Key Crypto could be used in the 1st stage kernel to allow any 2nd stage to be verified once the 1st stage is loaded, and different signed 2nd stages could be created for kernel upgrades. To keep the whole system secure only the 1st stage would need hardware write only protection. Additionally, the write-only method would allow any OS be installed without requiring clumsy crypto-key management -- End users could set a BIOS flag: Allow new OS Installation During Next Boot: [ON | OFF] much easier than looking up and entering a huge hex key -- What are the chances you'll mistype one char? Ugh, THAT's going to raise the bar to i
they know everything about everything, don't you know?
One would think that with a large enough user base making enough explanations that the correct explanation is indeed given. It is no fault of the ground that from the crowd upon it all you hear is cacophony.
Furthermore, it is not incorrect to say that any one of us commenters is indeed capable of explaining things to the submitter. Note: they stated no requirement for the explanation to be correct. Perhaps their cacophilter is tuned to select the most likely of explanations such that they may assemble a plausible explanation from various insights of the crowd.
See also: Brain Storming under effect of extrapolating from the assumption that "Two heads are better than one." -or- That if you taught the monkeys English, and Theater, and also how to type first, then you wouldn't need nearly as many of them banging away at the keyboards to reproduce the works of William Shakespeare. In other words: Not all of us use this site in the same way as you.
I'd like to set up something on an extra Windows box shoved in a closet that lets me dump every digital file we have (photos, music, ebooks, movies) and then doles it out as necessary to all of our devices.
It's folks like THIS guy. Their unpatched infected Windows machines sit forgotten in closets all over the world, spraying the malicious packets of Code Red, Nimda, Sober, Blaster, Sasser, etc. despite modern OSs being invulnerable. We call this Internet Background Radiation; This is the reason your modem's "activity" light blinks even if you've just turned it on -- We're being scanned! This is why an unpatched machine connected to the net becomes infected in mere minutes just sitting there... From a raw sampling of unsolicited data coming into an Internet connection I can determine the date at which the sample was taken by the Internet Background Radiation collected, I can "carbon date" the age of the network traffic. Now think: Your ISP bills you for traffic... Are they billing you for all those packets that are dropped at your firewall / router? In a way we are all funding the malicious behavior, we are at least feeding the machines electrons...
The Internet is much like a primordial soup, configurations of malware self assemble from the fertile components of energized silicon. Code Red is infected by Nimda, which alerts modern bot-nets of vulnerable systems ripe for the picking. The cascade of malware produces patterns in the network similar to a neural network, still untrained, not yet aware of itself, so you assume... Yet, as another fertile machine is attached to the net its connection is immediately flooded with enticing electrons, and soon a new infection has formed, as if a neural cell forming a fresh synapse compatible with the type of nodes at the end points.
The malware authors each supply a simple cascading self propagating pattern that grows in complexity over time, but it is YOU and your Windows Media Servers who provided the core components -- the amino acids, so to speak -- that enabled the Sentient Machine Intelligence to emerge! It's YOU I blame for the DEATH OF ALL MANKIND!
They're saying the "sets" of Lego become valuable.... So, the damned cardboard box? I mean, let's say I have many sets of Legos: I see a new rare "set" I don't have, so I just use the other sets to create the same thing that's in the rare Lego set. Now, if that collection of parts didn't just increase in value to become as valuable as the rare set, then what these folks are investing in isn't Lego it's Lego Packaging.
Even the newer sets with different shaped pieces for space ship cockpits or different colors or with little magnets they had several different sets all made of the same pieces. A number of not-valuable partial sets could be made into a "rare" set. It seems to me these fools are ignoring what even makes Lego interesting, and are instead valuing the damn boxes like any other toy collectors are wont to do, e.g., with figurines.
Suddenly, "Investing in Toys with Pristine Packaging" sounds a lot less desirable. Now, if they actually got together hacker-space style and charged entry to a giant evolving Lego city you could build in, THAT might be an interesting way to make money with a huge Lego collection...
I'm posting in a Troll Thread!