I have a Sony KP61PS2 - it's a 61" (yes, sixty-one inch) rear projection CRT set.It's not a HD set because there is no HD programming here in the UK, but since I mainly use it to watch DVD's anyway, that's hardly a problem. Instead it has Sony's "Digital Reality Control" (DRC) which doubles the apparent resolution (it's necessary at this size).
The screen technology they use throws the vast majority of the light directly forward in a fairly narrow cone, concentrating it powerfully, so the brightness and contrast has to be seen to be believed. Even when viewing in daylight.
This set absolutely rocks for viewing movies.
Surprisingly despite its size, the set is no deeper than a conventional TV and will fit against the wall without sticking out too far. In fact it sticks out just far enough that if you are using external speakers, the front of the set will be just about flush with them. Perfect.
As for price, this TV cost me quite a bit less than a low-end 42" plasma screen. With none of the picture quality deficiencies inherent in plasma screen displays.
The only thing that would beat my TV is a good quality ceiling mounted CRT projector. And you know how expensive those are.
BTW I coupled this with a JVC DVHS machine, and the picture quality of my digital off-air recordings is indistinguishable from the original, even on this monster screen. I doubt most DVR recorders are that good.
I agree that international intervention is needed, particularly with regard to separating the two countries and creating an independent Palestine, but I don't think your suggestions regarding a bloody progrom against Palestinian freedom fighters has much merit.
Every people is entitled to fight for its own survival and if that means some of their enemies die, even civilians, then those enemies obviously shouldn't have threatened that survival in the first place.
Don't forget that many Americans used the very same argument to justify the civilian deaths that resulted from America's warlike response to 9/11. The difference is, of course, that guerilla tactics and "terror" are the only tools available to the Palestinians. The US, on the other hand, whose survival was never seriously threatened, had plenty of options but preferred all the same to roll out the full war machine and kill some civilians anyway.
Hell, I've even seen Americans claiming on slashdot that the American people are entitled to prosecute foreign wars not only for their survival, but even just to protect their military and economic hegemony and support their resource-squandering lifestyles.
So if you're thinking there is some moral justification for singling out the PLO and their more militant cohorts for extraordinary punishment as war criminals, just consider this: what goes around comes around.
You're assuming that the wealth generated by all these robots will be used to provide universal welfare at a comfortable standard for everybody. That isn't how it has worked in the past, with the order-of-magnitude increases in efficiency brought by Taylorization etc.
Instead, the wealthiest 10% will reap the rewards, living in unimaginable luxury in secure compounds tended and protected by robots, and the other 90% of humanity will be left to fend for themselves in an economy with no employment opportunities for humans.
Don't listen to this AC. I've been to Tokyo and it's a great place to be especially if you're fairly young and like going out a lot. Yes of course there are one or two assholes - but that's true everywhere you go. I found most people were friendly and helpful to gaijin like myself. Youngsters were particularly welcoming. Everything Western is cool to them.
Also I've seen documentaries on British TV which portrayed the Japanese education systems is one of the best in the world.* How could it be otherwise when they lead the world in so many fields of industry?
So I'd definitely take the parent post with a large grain of salt. Informative, my ass.
*sucks to be a schoolkid though if you're not too bright, it's common practice to make kids do evening classes and summer school if they are having problems keeping up.
If you're going to renounce your native citizenship, it's a good idea to obtain citizenship somewhere else first. From what I hear, that's no easier to do in Japan than it is in the US.
I don't know, maybe this research proposal is the best thing that could happen.
You see, I believe that *without* this Japanese govt. funding, technology will very likely deliver AI with similar capabilities much sooner than that anyway.
With guaranteed funding in place, laboratories will have no incentive to rush - when you're on a gravy train, you tend to want to stay there - and it will undoubtedly take the full 30 years to get there.
At least that would give us some breathing room so we can figure out what our children can do for a living once the robots arrive.
I think you also have to take care not to become too sensationalist, because then you lose credibility.
Nobody said this was easy!
I think we need both approaches - an attention- grabbing headline and a series of easy-to-digest bullet points with some extreme worst-case examples to provoke people's interest, with links to more specific and reasonable texts.
It's mainly a presentation issue. Look, when someone hits the link or types in the URL for a particualr web site, and they see this, they're going to go: "What the...where's the web site...what's this? Oh, blah blah...zzzzzz. Fuck it, I'll just go to www.thing.com instead."
The top of the page needs to be more pithy, sensational and attention-grabbing. You need to use more psychology to incentivize people to actually READ the very valid political points you have written up. Otherwise most of them will just turn off.
Bear in mind that most people - even most professional IT people, believe it or not, neither know nor care what a software patent is, and they don't see why they should want to know or care, either.
Yes that looks a lot better. But again, it seems to be preaching mainly to the choir. We need pithy points that will reach the minds of the currently uniformed, not just people who are already versed in our vocabulary.
Too blunt for most people and it doesn't say one thing about why people should want to prevent this. They'll probably just get annoyed about the disruption and move on somewhere else.
That page is too full of rambling text. We need something more compelling that will either jam itself into the average reader's brain in minimum time, or else make them *want* to find out more right away. Like a professionally composed advertisement.
Yeah well it IS slower these days (BTW my ID is lower than either of yours. Neener neener.)
Though this is probably mostly due to application bloat, putting strain on the VM.
For instance, I frequently get problems with mozilla crashing after it's been up for a few hours of heavy use. There seems to be some memory leak which eventually causes serious swapping. Soon after it runs out of memory altogether and mozilla just crashes completely.
This usually happens right when I'm in the middle of composing a long comment to some thread on Slashd
Get a PhD and go to work for a big merchant bank. Recruitment is very much controlled by HR in these places and they just love paper qualifications (I suppose because it means they can raise the average quality of candidates without actually having to understand anything about the skills thus represented).
Alternatively you could use a PhD to get a position as a trainee BA with one of the big consultancy firms. I can't vouch for how they are right now, but Accenture - formerly Andersen Consulting - certainly used to only consider candidates with very good academic qualifications.
You need to realize that a PhD isn't going to mean you can autmatically leapfrog into a senior role and 100K starting salary. What it *will* do is enable you to compete for entry into "fast track" career paths with the very best firms. Once in, opportunities abound. If, say, you joined a top merchant bank, and if you are ambitious and talented and applied to move over to the business side in the Front Office, you could be earning 250K + 500K bonus before you reach 30. If you stayed on the IT side you'd make slightly less money but you would still be assured of access to the most challenging projects using the most up to date technologies.
Looks like everybody's missing the point here. What is the major roadblock for government when they want to trample on somebody? Their legal rights. Do they like this? No.
So, what they do is start by eroding the rights of a group nobody cares about.
(We all know by now surely that the so-called logical fallacy of the "thin end of the wedge" isn't a fallacy at all, it's just a description of a well-worn strategy that always works when your enemy is sufficiently complacent.)
Already, if this becomes law, the homeless will have virtually no right to privacy. And if the state wants to track you, and they think it will be difficult to get permission, all they will have to do is make you homeless. Easily done.
Eventually, when the homeless have altogether become "non-persons" in the eyes of the law, the next small step will be to extend this category of non-persons to include the unemployed. And it's even easier to make somebody unemployed.
I believe it has already been the consensus for many years that primates and rodents had a common rodent-like ancestor. So all this really does is confirm what we already knew, in the face of some minor wacko fringe theory about cat ancestors that nobody paid any attention to anyway.
How much time and effort could you see your local paper putting into prosecuting fraudulent advertising in their classified ads?
Not much maybe, but then again the local paper isn't a multi-billion dollar business, and the local paper doesn't collect a proportion of the cash value of each sale, and the local paper doesn't ram their own payment system down your throat where they cream off another few percent...etc. etc.
But that would cost them money and eat into their multi-billion dollar profits. It could cost them, ooh, thousands.
The main problem with eBay is the enormous and insatiable greed of tyhe people running it. They know the law will eventually clip their wings. They just want to make as much money as they can before that happens. They're no better than the scammers, in other words.
Ha, nobody said this was simple. But don't forget, ice ages do last quite a while. Presumably something else happens to break the planet out of the cycle. Some theories have it that solar weather - long cyclic variations in solar output - has a large role to play here. Anyway, geological evidence says the Earth does break out of ice ages. But we don't have any evidence that the Earth can recover from the opposite temperature extreme.
The "strong" nuclear force is largely responsible for holding the atomic nucleus together. If I remember correctly it is the same force that holds the quarks together inside each proton and neutron. This used to be referred to as "color force" and the particles that mediate it are known as gluons. If the theory has changed or if I have got this plain mixed up, I'm sure some nuclear physicist will happen by and correct me.
Also, somebody earlier implied that neutrons hold the nucleus together. Not strictly true - the strong force is attractive between all the nucleons, but the positive electrical charge on the protons has a stronger repulsive effect at close range. The neutrons space out the protons, "diluting" the positive charge, allowing the attractive strong force to predominate.
Slashdot Mirror
I have a Sony KP61PS2 - it's a 61" (yes, sixty-one inch) rear projection CRT set.It's not a HD set because there is no HD programming here in the UK, but since I mainly use it to watch DVD's anyway, that's hardly a problem. Instead it has Sony's "Digital Reality Control" (DRC) which doubles the apparent resolution (it's necessary at this size).
The screen technology they use throws the vast majority of the light directly forward in a fairly narrow cone, concentrating it powerfully, so the brightness and contrast has to be seen to be believed. Even when viewing in daylight.
This set absolutely rocks for viewing movies.
Surprisingly despite its size, the set is no deeper than a conventional TV and will fit against the wall without sticking out too far. In fact it sticks out just far enough that if you are using external speakers, the front of the set will be just about flush with them. Perfect.
As for price, this TV cost me quite a bit less than a low-end 42" plasma screen. With none of the picture quality deficiencies inherent in plasma screen displays.
The only thing that would beat my TV is a good quality ceiling mounted CRT projector. And you know how expensive those are.
BTW I coupled this with a JVC DVHS machine, and the picture quality of my digital off-air recordings is indistinguishable from the original, even on this monster screen. I doubt most DVR recorders are that good.
I agree that international intervention is needed, particularly with regard to separating the two countries and creating an independent Palestine, but I don't think your suggestions regarding a bloody progrom against Palestinian freedom fighters has much merit.
Every people is entitled to fight for its own survival and if that means some of their enemies die, even civilians, then those enemies obviously shouldn't have threatened that survival in the first place.
Don't forget that many Americans used the very same argument to justify the civilian deaths that resulted from America's warlike response to 9/11. The difference is, of course, that guerilla tactics and "terror" are the only tools available to the Palestinians. The US, on the other hand, whose survival was never seriously threatened, had plenty of options but preferred all the same to roll out the full war machine and kill some civilians anyway.
Hell, I've even seen Americans claiming on slashdot that the American people are entitled to prosecute foreign wars not only for their survival, but even just to protect their military and economic hegemony and support their resource-squandering lifestyles.
So if you're thinking there is some moral justification for singling out the PLO and their more militant cohorts for extraordinary punishment as war criminals, just consider this: what goes around comes around.
Yes, yes, yes. Moderators please lend their plus points.
That's more like it!
Redundant? Do AC trolls moderate now, too?
You're assuming that the wealth generated by all these robots will be used to provide universal welfare at a comfortable standard for everybody. That isn't how it has worked in the past, with the order-of-magnitude increases in efficiency brought by Taylorization etc.
Instead, the wealthiest 10% will reap the rewards, living in unimaginable luxury in secure compounds tended and protected by robots, and the other 90% of humanity will be left to fend for themselves in an economy with no employment opportunities for humans.
I think I'd go a little further than that. On the basis of Bruce's analysis it seems pretty clear to me that SCO are. . . well, toast basically.
Don't listen to this AC. I've been to Tokyo and it's a great place to be especially if you're fairly young and like going out a lot. Yes of course there are one or two assholes - but that's true everywhere you go. I found most people were friendly and helpful to gaijin like myself. Youngsters were particularly welcoming. Everything Western is cool to them.
Also I've seen documentaries on British TV which portrayed the Japanese education systems is one of the best in the world.* How could it be otherwise when they lead the world in so many fields of industry?
So I'd definitely take the parent post with a large grain of salt. Informative, my ass.
*sucks to be a schoolkid though if you're not too bright, it's common practice to make kids do evening classes and summer school if they are having problems keeping up.
If you're going to renounce your native citizenship, it's a good idea to obtain citizenship somewhere else first. From what I hear, that's no easier to do in Japan than it is in the US.
I don't know, maybe this research proposal is the best thing that could happen.
You see, I believe that *without* this Japanese govt. funding, technology will very likely deliver AI with similar capabilities much sooner than that anyway.
With guaranteed funding in place, laboratories will have no incentive to rush - when you're on a gravy train, you tend to want to stay there - and it will undoubtedly take the full 30 years to get there.
At least that would give us some breathing room so we can figure out what our children can do for a living once the robots arrive.
Nobody said this was easy!
I think we need both approaches - an attention- grabbing headline and a series of easy-to-digest bullet points with some extreme worst-case examples to provoke people's interest, with links to more specific and reasonable texts.
It's mainly a presentation issue. Look, when someone hits the link or types in the URL for a particualr web site, and they see this, they're going to go: "What the...where's the web site...what's this? Oh, blah blah...zzzzzz. Fuck it, I'll just go to www.thing.com instead."
The top of the page needs to be more pithy, sensational and attention-grabbing. You need to use more psychology to incentivize people to actually READ the very valid political points you have written up. Otherwise most of them will just turn off.
Bear in mind that most people - even most professional IT people, believe it or not, neither know nor care what a software patent is, and they don't see why they should want to know or care, either.
In my humble opinion, of course.
Yes that looks a lot better. But again, it seems to be preaching mainly to the choir. We need pithy points that will reach the minds of the currently uniformed, not just people who are already versed in our vocabulary.
Too blunt for most people and it doesn't say one thing about why people should want to prevent this. They'll probably just get annoyed about the disruption and move on somewhere else.
That page is too full of rambling text. We need something more compelling that will either jam itself into the average reader's brain in minimum time, or else make them *want* to find out more right away. Like a professionally composed advertisement.
Who's got the time to write this up and modify their web site? Better if somebody makes up a standard page we can all copy.
Yeah well it IS slower these days (BTW my ID is lower than either of yours. Neener neener.)
Though this is probably mostly due to application bloat, putting strain on the VM.
For instance, I frequently get problems with mozilla crashing after it's been up for a few hours of heavy use. There seems to be some memory leak which eventually causes serious swapping. Soon after it runs out of memory altogether and mozilla just crashes completely.
This usually happens right when I'm in the middle of composing a long comment to some thread on Slashd
Get a PhD and go to work for a big merchant bank. Recruitment is very much controlled by HR in these places and they just love paper qualifications (I suppose because it means they can raise the average quality of candidates without actually having to understand anything about the skills thus represented).
Alternatively you could use a PhD to get a position as a trainee BA with one of the big consultancy firms. I can't vouch for how they are right now, but Accenture - formerly Andersen Consulting - certainly used to only consider candidates with very good academic qualifications.
You need to realize that a PhD isn't going to mean you can autmatically leapfrog into a senior role and 100K starting salary. What it *will* do is enable you to compete for entry into "fast track" career paths with the very best firms. Once in, opportunities abound. If, say, you joined a top merchant bank, and if you are ambitious and talented and applied to move over to the business side in the Front Office, you could be earning 250K + 500K bonus before you reach 30. If you stayed on the IT side you'd make slightly less money but you would still be assured of access to the most challenging projects using the most up to date technologies.
Looks like everybody's missing the point here. What is the major roadblock for government when they want to trample on somebody? Their legal rights. Do they like this? No.
So, what they do is start by eroding the rights of a group nobody cares about.
(We all know by now surely that the so-called logical fallacy of the "thin end of the wedge" isn't a fallacy at all, it's just a description of a well-worn strategy that always works when your enemy is sufficiently complacent.)
Already, if this becomes law, the homeless will have virtually no right to privacy. And if the state wants to track you, and they think it will be difficult to get permission, all they will have to do is make you homeless. Easily done.
Eventually, when the homeless have altogether become "non-persons" in the eyes of the law, the next small step will be to extend this category of non-persons to include the unemployed. And it's even easier to make somebody unemployed.
It's anybody's guess where it will go from there.
I believe it has already been the consensus for many years that primates and rodents had a common rodent-like ancestor. So all this really does is confirm what we already knew, in the face of some minor wacko fringe theory about cat ancestors that nobody paid any attention to anyway.
Not much maybe, but then again the local paper isn't a multi-billion dollar business, and the local paper doesn't collect a proportion of the cash value of each sale, and the local paper doesn't ram their own payment system down your throat where they cream off another few percent...etc. etc.
But that would cost them money and eat into their multi-billion dollar profits. It could cost them, ooh, thousands.
The main problem with eBay is the enormous and insatiable greed of tyhe people running it. They know the law will eventually clip their wings. They just want to make as much money as they can before that happens. They're no better than the scammers, in other words.
Ha, nobody said this was simple. But don't forget, ice ages do last quite a while. Presumably something else happens to break the planet out of the cycle. Some theories have it that solar weather - long cyclic variations in solar output - has a large role to play here. Anyway, geological evidence says the Earth does break out of ice ages. But we don't have any evidence that the Earth can recover from the opposite temperature extreme.
The "strong" nuclear force is largely responsible for holding the atomic nucleus together. If I remember correctly it is the same force that holds the quarks together inside each proton and neutron. This used to be referred to as "color force" and the particles that mediate it are known as gluons. If the theory has changed or if I have got this plain mixed up, I'm sure some nuclear physicist will happen by and correct me.
Also, somebody earlier implied that neutrons hold the nucleus together. Not strictly true - the strong force is attractive between all the nucleons, but the positive electrical charge on the protons has a stronger repulsive effect at close range. The neutrons space out the protons, "diluting" the positive charge, allowing the attractive strong force to predominate.
It's "Grammar Nazis", not "Grammer Nazi's".