There is nothing to explain here. There is no uncanny valley. The simple fact that robotics experts don't like to emphasize is that even the best machines available today completely suck at emulating humans. They can't walk like humans, don't have the facial expressions of humans, and in particular don't behave even remotely like humans. They also can't understand what you say in an everyday conversation and can't talk like humans. People find them creepy or amusing in the same way as they find bad animations in video games creepy or amusing. People also find real-looking plastic fruits creepy. Heck, I personally also find Soya "steaks" rather creepy (not to speak of the horrible taste...).
Car analogy: People would also find a car with fake wheels that reminds of an existing Ford model but is made of strange glass-like material, has fake wheels, and hovers slightly above the ground a bit creepy until they get used to it.
I agree and would like to add some more political comment:
Before the commercialization of the Internet services weren't tied to single companies. Anybody could set up an email, web, or ftp server and there are many different IRC networks to choose from. Sites like Facebook or Google+ that essential lock in customers and attempt to keep a monopoly by "software patents" and similar means should be outright prohibited and certainly boycotted. I don't understand why people do not think about this a bit more. These companies try to replace distributivity and diversity by a monolithic big brother server culture, repackage existing technologies and concepts and give them away to you as if they were something new.
Now people might reply to this: Still anybody can start a site like Facebook, make a search engine and so on. But that is simply not true! You can only do this as long as you are not successful. Once a certain threshold is met, companies like Apple, Google, Facebook will sue you without any doubt! And you will have no chance of defending yourself without some equally powerful ally. This is the result of ill-conceived "intellectual property" laws and the natural and provable tendency of any free market economy to build monopolies and cartels.
If the current trends continue programming, especially web programming, will become an illegal activity in the not too distant future unless you're backed up by one of the huge companies of a small cartel. Unfortunately, most people don't seem to care or think about this.
the extremely well-confirmed minimum figure of Iraq Body Count lists 101,906 civilian deaths. (Notice that Iraq Body Count only counts cases with multiple sources of evidence from the international press, though
Only the population of the town I live in? Well that's OK then!
I really wish anti-war idiots like the one you are replying to would get with the program and start protesting the most realistic numbers, as it would shut off this ridiculous line of debate where some faux rationalist like you starts debating precisely how dreadful the event is, and implies--whether you mean to or not--that if the best estimate is "only" 10% of the estimate given by the maximally outraged nitwit that they should only be 10% as outraged.
"Faux rationalist" Have we read Foucault or some other French bullshit philosophy lately?
Personally I find such political debates boring because they tend to be dominated by people like you who apparently can't read (or don't want to) and just invent accusations and insults out of the blue against anyone they suspect might not fully share their world-view. A reasonable discussion of topics like wars should be based on accurate data.
While there is no doubt that "more deaths are worse than fewer", it isn't a cardinal scale. A million is not ten times worse than a hundred thousand, a hundred thousand isn't a million times worse than one.
While this might be a popular statement, it is still very silly and in a straightforward decision-theoretic sense irrational. I suspect (only modest pun intended) that such sentiments are a by-product of the frequent exposure to Hollywood movie scripts and (in academia) of "trolley-case" ethics.
The big shame is that there are no accurate figures and the most accurate ones are hand-collected by a bunch of volunteers.
Just for the record (not that my opinion matters in any way): I was and am decidedly for the First Gulf War and was and am decidedly against the Second Gulf War. So. Now all the world knows it. I do have some beliefs that do not fit neatly into the standard left/right dichotomy.
You may print out my political opinion now, frame it, and hang it over your bed as a token of the power of independent thinking based on real data over mere political opinion, confirmation bias, and wishful thinking.
I call killing one million people in Iraq for oil and dollar supremacy irresponsible.
I'm not sure that a million Iraqis have actually died in the conflict. Too damn many for sure, but I'm not so sure it's a million.
You're probably right. Figures vary a lot but most of them are far below 1 million. Only the "Opinion Research Business Survey" reports more than 1 million deaths. The controversial Lancet survey reported 601,027 deaths while the extremely well-confirmed minimum figure of Iraq Body Count lists 101,906 civilian deaths. (Notice that Iraq Body Count only counts cases with multiple sources of evidence from the international press, though. So the actual number of deaths is very likely significantly higher and could be well in the range of the Lancet survey.)
However, there doesn't seem to be any reliable source about violent deaths of Iraq military combatants. I've seen estimates ranging from ten thousands up to several hundred thousands, but nobody seems to know for sure.
Anyway, considering all the evidence, it seems likely that less than one million people died in Iraq as a result of the US intervention. (not taking into account the first Gulf War)
Fine. But what if somebody in response to "Protect IP" builds a distributed anonymous DNS system on top of, say, Gnunet? Perhaps an implementation with a simple one-click installer? Heck, someone might even write a Firefox extension for it.
Of course, I'm speaking hypothetically here, because the idea of creating a decentralized DNS system with one-click installation is so crazy and absurd that nobody would ever pursue it, right?
Nothing. Apple is just dominated by aggressive, corporate-type lawyers, that's why they patent things like round corners and putting icons in a grid. That's what Apple considers "innovation" nowadays...as boring as their latest products.
Nope, I don't think it's selective memory. Granted, the floppy disk that is awfully slow. But once a program is in memory it feels as snappy as a corresponding app on my i7 machine. Tested with an old version of Word running on Mac OS 6.
However, perhaps surprisingly, the keyboard of my i7 machine is better than the MacPlus keyboard. That's because I'm using a Unicomp Spacesaver.:)
...does not feel much faster than my MacPlus, because operating system and software makers managed to slow everything down again using "advanced software engineering techniques."
No problem, it's the Defense Department. They can just hire another contractor, some fishy little sub-division of Lockheed or Raytheon who in turn hire other people to do the actual work. Their job is to link any incoming attacks to a geo IP database (easy, just steal some GPL'ed one) and automatically launch ICBMs against the threat.
It would be a waste of money to arm them with nukes, though. Cluster bombs or chemical weapons should suffice. Or, hey, how about this gay bomb? Is it still under development? Does it also work against hackers? Or, the CIA could give a helping hand. They could give away their gigantic porn database (stolen form the FBI) for free to the hackers...that will keep 'em occupied for years!
For Christ's sake it's a name! Who cares about the author's stupid prOn tastes?
And here's the flamebait part: If you use a more mature language than Python (and it's users silly names won't occur and as an additional benefit your programs will run faster. So if e.g. you want to process real pantyshots pixel for pixel I'd suggest using C. If you need to process pantyshots in parallel and with high safety and reliability demands (after all, reliable delivery of prOn is essential for internet economy), Haskell or Ada might also be good choices!
What's the point of this when the devices at one end (personal computers, mobile phones, tablets) are completely insecure? As long as you allow uncontrolled and inherently insecure devices/operating systems to access this network the suggestion does not make much sense.
Apart from the search engine and maps, Google has no essential services, so it's possible. However, I tried to get rid of their search engine by using duck and bing, but find myself to often switch back to google search. At least for the mostly academic search terms for papers etc. they still seem to have the best search results. I ended up by switching constantly between scroogle, google, bing, and other search engines. As for maps, I use them very rarely and for the purposes I use them (walking to conference venues) Google map printouts are very bad. I'm sure there are better maps available on the Net.
In a nutshell, abandoning Google is easy only as long as you can life with inferior search results.
While I don't use FB for the reasons you lay out, I think the situation is not yet as bad as you portray it. I've canceled my Fuckbook account years ago and have no troubles logging into any web forums, etc.
I'd be generally more worried about the general tendency to regulate the Internet and turn it into an interactive TV network. The big companies certainly want that, as long as they get their share of the cake, and many governments nowadays seem to be sympathetic to the idea. This "vision" of the future of the Net is mainly enforced by "intellectual property" laws, primarily by software patents. As long as you do not have success with a new idea on the Net you won't have any problem. However, when Fuckbook, Foogle, Bad Apple, Micro$oft, etc. see some potential in your technology, they will likely (if you refuse their "friendly offers") sue you into oblivion for having served structured documents from a remote server or using windows with round edges.
Get rid of software patents and Fuckbook et. al. will only ever be a problem for their users.
They are privately owned companies. They are free to do anything they want to that is not in violation of the law including not processing payments to and from organizations that they do not wish to for ANY reason unless it violates some anti-discrimination or other law.
I think you are wrong. In Europe companies, especially in the banking and payment sector, cannot just refuse doing business for ANY reason or cancel their contracts as they like. Besides, your indemnification clause makes the claim pointless because Visa/Mastercards have almost with 100% certainty violated European laws when refusing to process payments for Wikileaks. This is particularly so, because people in Europe do not generally have the choice of which kind of credit card they get and VISA/Mastercard have a quasi-monopoly in Europe.
In a nutshell, at least in Europe the law is very likely on the side of Wikileaks and they have good chances of succeeding -- and rightly so! This has nothing to do with political opinion: A financial company that decides because of political pressure from a completely foreign country far away to stop doing business with you and cancel your contracts without sufficient prior warning is really not a company anyone wants to do business with. But some people don't have a choice, and so these companies need to be punished.
Geeks and 'geek culture' seem to be a US-only phenomenon. At least no analog to 'geek' exists in Europe. I've always assumed the 'geek' stereotype was primarily a sign of a higher separation of social groups and a widespread social injustice in the US and also caused by the selective social-darwinist US educational system...but perhaps I'm wrong.
...and on the quality of the reviewers. It's pretty hard to get top reviewers that work for free, even if you know them personally. The better the reviewer, the less time he tends to have.
I don't think netbooks are dead yet but at least the development in the past few years has disappointed me a little bit. I was hoping and looking for ultra-cheap ( $200, possibly even below $100), light and slow devices with non-glare screens. Instead "netbooks" basically evolved into small laptops with glare screens (=unusable for anyone who wants to seriously write with them outside). They are still in the lower price categories but have certainly not become the really inexpensive, disposable devices many people were looking for.
It also annoys me that there doesn't seem to be any affordable ultra-small device apart from the (overpriced) Netwalker. When the first Asus were launched I was hoping to see something below $300 USD that is very small, can run common GNU/linux distributions, has very long battery life (ARM based), and can ring an alarm or power up programmatically. I'd go for the Nanonote if it was just a bit more powerful and could run Emacs with org mode. (Phones mostly suck for that purpose -- they don't have enough keys and it's often hard to put Ubuntu or another decent distro on, say, an Android phone.)
That being said, I'm still very happy with my first-generation EEE PC with a replacement battery that gives me 8-9 hours battery life. I use it almost daily for writing outside and it runs the latest version of Ubuntu just fine. So, perhaps to the dismay of Asus, at least for me the netbook isn't quite dead yet.
Sure I'd buy it. Unfortunately, I live in Southern Europe. Whatever nice gadget is announced somewhere else in the world will arrive only 1-2 years later at 2-3 times the cost.:/
Slashdot Mirror
There is nothing to explain here. There is no uncanny valley. The simple fact that robotics experts don't like to emphasize is that even the best machines available today completely suck at emulating humans. They can't walk like humans, don't have the facial expressions of humans, and in particular don't behave even remotely like humans. They also can't understand what you say in an everyday conversation and can't talk like humans. People find them creepy or amusing in the same way as they find bad animations in video games creepy or amusing. People also find real-looking plastic fruits creepy. Heck, I personally also find Soya "steaks" rather creepy (not to speak of the horrible taste...).
Car analogy: People would also find a car with fake wheels that reminds of an existing Ford model but is made of strange glass-like material, has fake wheels, and hovers slightly above the ground a bit creepy until they get used to it.
I agree and would like to add some more political comment:
Before the commercialization of the Internet services weren't tied to single companies. Anybody could set up an email, web, or ftp server and there are many different IRC networks to choose from. Sites like Facebook or Google+ that essential lock in customers and attempt to keep a monopoly by "software patents" and similar means should be outright prohibited and certainly boycotted. I don't understand why people do not think about this a bit more. These companies try to replace distributivity and diversity by a monolithic big brother server culture, repackage existing technologies and concepts and give them away to you as if they were something new.
Now people might reply to this: Still anybody can start a site like Facebook, make a search engine and so on. But that is simply not true! You can only do this as long as you are not successful. Once a certain threshold is met, companies like Apple, Google, Facebook will sue you without any doubt! And you will have no chance of defending yourself without some equally powerful ally. This is the result of ill-conceived "intellectual property" laws and the natural and provable tendency of any free market economy to build monopolies and cartels.
If the current trends continue programming, especially web programming, will become an illegal activity in the not too distant future unless you're backed up by one of the huge companies of a small cartel. Unfortunately, most people don't seem to care or think about this.
the extremely well-confirmed minimum figure of Iraq Body Count lists 101,906 civilian deaths. (Notice that Iraq Body Count only counts cases with multiple sources of evidence from the international press, though
Only the population of the town I live in? Well that's OK then!
I really wish anti-war idiots like the one you are replying to would get with the program and start protesting the most realistic numbers, as it would shut off this ridiculous line of debate where some faux rationalist like you starts debating precisely how dreadful the event is, and implies--whether you mean to or not--that if the best estimate is "only" 10% of the estimate given by the maximally outraged nitwit that they should only be 10% as outraged.
"Faux rationalist" Have we read Foucault or some other French bullshit philosophy lately?
Personally I find such political debates boring because they tend to be dominated by people like you who apparently can't read (or don't want to) and just invent accusations and insults out of the blue against anyone they suspect might not fully share their world-view. A reasonable discussion of topics like wars should be based on accurate data.
While there is no doubt that "more deaths are worse than fewer", it isn't a cardinal scale. A million is not ten times worse than a hundred thousand, a hundred thousand isn't a million times worse than one.
While this might be a popular statement, it is still very silly and in a straightforward decision-theoretic sense irrational. I suspect (only modest pun intended) that such sentiments are a by-product of the frequent exposure to Hollywood movie scripts and (in academia) of "trolley-case" ethics.
The big shame is that there are no accurate figures and the most accurate ones are hand-collected by a bunch of volunteers.
Just for the record (not that my opinion matters in any way): I was and am decidedly for the First Gulf War and was and am decidedly against the Second Gulf War. So. Now all the world knows it. I do have some beliefs that do not fit neatly into the standard left/right dichotomy.
You may print out my political opinion now, frame it, and hang it over your bed as a token of the power of independent thinking based on real data over mere political opinion, confirmation bias, and wishful thinking.
I call killing one million people in Iraq for oil and dollar supremacy irresponsible.
I'm not sure that a million Iraqis have actually died in the conflict. Too damn many for sure, but I'm not so sure it's a million.
You're probably right. Figures vary a lot but most of them are far below 1 million. Only the "Opinion Research Business Survey" reports more than 1 million deaths. The controversial Lancet survey reported 601,027 deaths while the extremely well-confirmed minimum figure of Iraq Body Count lists 101,906 civilian deaths. (Notice that Iraq Body Count only counts cases with multiple sources of evidence from the international press, though. So the actual number of deaths is very likely significantly higher and could be well in the range of the Lancet survey.)
However, there doesn't seem to be any reliable source about violent deaths of Iraq military combatants. I've seen estimates ranging from ten thousands up to several hundred thousands, but nobody seems to know for sure.
Anyway, considering all the evidence, it seems likely that less than one million people died in Iraq as a result of the US intervention. (not taking into account the first Gulf War)
The Linux kernel has received ... from Microsoft.
Clearly this is an attempt to hide patent-encumbered code inside Linux kernel so that Microsoft can sue later!
Either that or Microsoft Office for Linux(tm) is coming soon!*
* MOfL might contain traces of subtile but annoying incompatibilities with Microsoft Office for Windows
Fine. But what if somebody in response to "Protect IP" builds a distributed anonymous DNS system on top of, say, Gnunet? Perhaps an implementation with a simple one-click installer? Heck, someone might even write a Firefox extension for it.
Of course, I'm speaking hypothetically here, because the idea of creating a decentralized DNS system with one-click installation is so crazy and absurd that nobody would ever pursue it, right?
Nothing. Apple is just dominated by aggressive, corporate-type lawyers, that's why they patent things like round corners and putting icons in a grid. That's what Apple considers "innovation" nowadays...as boring as their latest products.
I'm using Ubuntu
Nope, I don't think it's selective memory. Granted, the floppy disk that is awfully slow. But once a program is in memory it feels as snappy as a corresponding app on my i7 machine. Tested with an old version of Word running on Mac OS 6.
However, perhaps surprisingly, the keyboard of my i7 machine is better than the MacPlus keyboard. That's because I'm using a Unicomp Spacesaver. :)
...does not feel much faster than my MacPlus, because operating system and software makers managed to slow everything down again using "advanced software engineering techniques."
No problem, it's the Defense Department. They can just hire another contractor, some fishy little sub-division of Lockheed or Raytheon who in turn hire other people to do the actual work. Their job is to link any incoming attacks to a geo IP database (easy, just steal some GPL'ed one) and automatically launch ICBMs against the threat.
It would be a waste of money to arm them with nukes, though. Cluster bombs or chemical weapons should suffice. Or, hey, how about this gay bomb? Is it still under development? Does it also work against hackers? Or, the CIA could give a helping hand. They could give away their gigantic porn database (stolen form the FBI) for free to the hackers...that will keep 'em occupied for years!
For Christ's sake it's a name! Who cares about the author's stupid prOn tastes?
And here's the flamebait part: If you use a more mature language than Python (and it's users silly names won't occur and as an additional benefit your programs will run faster. So if e.g. you want to process real pantyshots pixel for pixel I'd suggest using C. If you need to process pantyshots in parallel and with high safety and reliability demands (after all, reliable delivery of prOn is essential for internet economy), Haskell or Ada might also be good choices!
Why do US authorities not just torture people to get the information they need? Wouldn't that be more effective and convenient?
Oh wait...they already did in Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo...
What's the point of this when the devices at one end (personal computers, mobile phones, tablets) are completely insecure? As long as you allow uncontrolled and inherently insecure devices/operating systems to access this network the suggestion does not make much sense.
Wishful thinking is the driving force of e-commerce.
'To say that it can't be done underestimates the ability of the "good" guys,' Boscovich said.
There, fixed that for Boscovich.
Apart from the search engine and maps, Google has no essential services, so it's possible. However, I tried to get rid of their search engine by using duck and bing, but find myself to often switch back to google search. At least for the mostly academic search terms for papers etc. they still seem to have the best search results. I ended up by switching constantly between scroogle, google, bing, and other search engines. As for maps, I use them very rarely and for the purposes I use them (walking to conference venues) Google map printouts are very bad. I'm sure there are better maps available on the Net.
In a nutshell, abandoning Google is easy only as long as you can life with inferior search results.
While I don't use FB for the reasons you lay out, I think the situation is not yet as bad as you portray it. I've canceled my Fuckbook account years ago and have no troubles logging into any web forums, etc.
I'd be generally more worried about the general tendency to regulate the Internet and turn it into an interactive TV network. The big companies certainly want that, as long as they get their share of the cake, and many governments nowadays seem to be sympathetic to the idea. This "vision" of the future of the Net is mainly enforced by "intellectual property" laws, primarily by software patents. As long as you do not have success with a new idea on the Net you won't have any problem. However, when Fuckbook, Foogle, Bad Apple, Micro$oft, etc. see some potential in your technology, they will likely (if you refuse their "friendly offers") sue you into oblivion for having served structured documents from a remote server or using windows with round edges.
Get rid of software patents and Fuckbook et. al. will only ever be a problem for their users.
They are privately owned companies. They are free to do anything they want to that is not in violation of the law including not processing payments to and from organizations that they do not wish to for ANY reason unless it violates some anti-discrimination or other law.
I think you are wrong. In Europe companies, especially in the banking and payment sector, cannot just refuse doing business for ANY reason or cancel their contracts as they like. Besides, your indemnification clause makes the claim pointless because Visa/Mastercards have almost with 100% certainty violated European laws when refusing to process payments for Wikileaks. This is particularly so, because people in Europe do not generally have the choice of which kind of credit card they get and VISA/Mastercard have a quasi-monopoly in Europe.
In a nutshell, at least in Europe the law is very likely on the side of Wikileaks and they have good chances of succeeding -- and rightly so! This has nothing to do with political opinion: A financial company that decides because of political pressure from a completely foreign country far away to stop doing business with you and cancel your contracts without sufficient prior warning is really not a company anyone wants to do business with. But some people don't have a choice, and so these companies need to be punished.
Geeks and 'geek culture' seem to be a US-only phenomenon. At least no analog to 'geek' exists in Europe. I've always assumed the 'geek' stereotype was primarily a sign of a higher separation of social groups and a widespread social injustice in the US and also caused by the selective social-darwinist US educational system...but perhaps I'm wrong.
...and on the quality of the reviewers. It's pretty hard to get top reviewers that work for free, even if you know them personally. The better the reviewer, the less time he tends to have.
I'll buy it. Do you send it to Europe?
I don't think netbooks are dead yet but at least the development in the past few years has disappointed me a little bit. I was hoping and looking for ultra-cheap ( $200, possibly even below $100), light and slow devices with non-glare screens. Instead "netbooks" basically evolved into small laptops with glare screens (=unusable for anyone who wants to seriously write with them outside). They are still in the lower price categories but have certainly not become the really inexpensive, disposable devices many people were looking for.
It also annoys me that there doesn't seem to be any affordable ultra-small device apart from the (overpriced) Netwalker. When the first Asus were launched I was hoping to see something below $300 USD that is very small, can run common GNU/linux distributions, has very long battery life (ARM based), and can ring an alarm or power up programmatically. I'd go for the Nanonote if it was just a bit more powerful and could run Emacs with org mode. (Phones mostly suck for that purpose -- they don't have enough keys and it's often hard to put Ubuntu or another decent distro on, say, an Android phone.)
That being said, I'm still very happy with my first-generation EEE PC with a replacement battery that gives me 8-9 hours battery life. I use it almost daily for writing outside and it runs the latest version of Ubuntu just fine. So, perhaps to the dismay of Asus, at least for me the netbook isn't quite dead yet.
Sure I'd buy it. Unfortunately, I live in Southern Europe. Whatever nice gadget is announced somewhere else in the world will arrive only 1-2 years later at 2-3 times the cost. :/
LOL
+1 funny