Ah, remember when the release of a Netscape mattered?
Actually, this one matters quite a bit. For example:
the IE rendering mode could hurt Firefox in the long-run, because it gives sites an excuse to stick with their old IE-only designs."
This release isn't a good thing. It's a blow to the progress that Firefox and Mozilla have made, and more to the point, it's a significant FU to the developers, as it reduces all of their hard work to a painfully ugly IE add on.
So, would these be the same "experts" who predicted we'd have flying cars, robotic maids, commercial space flight and a moon colony by 2000?
Based on the past track record of technology related predictions, I'd say predictions are worth the paper they're printed on.
Besides, just because the hardware complexity reaches the necessary stage doesn't mean the software will. Being able to build a digital brain that equals or exceeds the human brain in complexity and power doesn't mean the software engineers can write code to run it. There are a lot of advances in psychology that need to be made before we can start wiring up our digital successors.
I've read the article, and it sounds like the door is being opened to start treating links to a site as a financial contribution to a campaign. While this could be used to fight astroturf campaigns, the actual implications are staggering. This all boils down to how much a link can raise for a candidate, and assigning a dollar value to links. The secretary sending letters example is a good one, and outlines the kind of muddy waters this is marching into.
I don't see how this can work effectively. Marketing Driods have been trying to assign dollar values to links and impressions for ages to no avail.. I see this becoming a muddy mess of conflicting and inconsistent enforcement. The Internet just isn't in a state where this can be monitored and enforced effectively.
Look at how links impact search engine rankings. For example, the Google Bomb of linking "Miserable Failure" to The Shurb's biography. Would these links be considered a campaign contribution to Kerry in the last election? If so, what would their value be? Of the links on Slashdot, who would be responsible, the web site itself or the people who made the posts?
What if a BLOG gets flooded with BLOG SPAM linking to a political site, using terms like "How to Save Social Seurity" for the links? IS the BLOG admin responsible under these laws? The hosting provider? The person who made the posts or the person whose BLOG it is? None of this is addressed. All the discussion in the article seemed focused on the notion that the person whose web site has the link was the person who created the link and is authorized to create the link.
I think Bicentennial Man is more an idea about the evolution of such devices to the point where they become, for all intents and purposes, human. It's a story that, were it to play out, would take another hundred years to even begin,and that's with highly optimistic assumptions about the advancement of AI and robotics technology.
I'm more interested in the next generation, the near term consequences as society evolves. Assume devices like "Teddy" get past the prototype stage and reach the consumer market at an affordable price. Make some realistic assumptions about the development of technology in the next 2 to 20 years and write a story about the human consequences.
Bicentennial Man is a great stroy, but it focuses far too much on the machine for this contest.
This isn't about sentient or semi sentient machines, but about how a device like the "Teddy" would impact human societies.
I propose a contest. Write a story involving "Teddy". Make it positive, negative, hopeful or pessimistic. Encase the hardware in different shells if you like (A clown or a Jack in the box spring to mind). Is it a gift from parent to child? Is a workaholic parent using it to "Spend time with the kids" while at the office? Is an obsessive individual or a stalker using it to monitor their prey? Is it being used as nothing more than a cuddly baby monitor, sort of a remote control Teddy Ruxpin?
And yes, I did just pick a round about way to say "I'm talking out my a**."
Or perhaps it's a picture of the future, as corporate rule of the nation and laws continues to grow, and the vestiges of Democracy and Human Rights are slowly but surely stripped away.
Oh, he was executed for "Crimes Against Copyright".
The dirty little secret of the RIAA and MPAA lawsuits is that the people who refuse to settle and pay "damages" are being charged with the same crime. Fortunately for the file traders, most of these cases are being settled in one manner or another, but they aren't going to arbitration or a courtroom. Some DHS agents just walk in, arrest the "file trader" and charge them. While the 12 year old girl and the 80+ grandma who got served reached the media, there's already about a dozen 20 something file traders that have been put to death by the federal government.
One poor slob was running Freenet as well as eDonkey, and was promptly charged with distributing child pornography. Most people don't know that the courts have taken running freenet as "proof" that the user is distributing kiddie porn. Remember folks, if you can't police the content, police the utility.
I've had a couple of bosses who were very ignorant of the technological aspects of the work the company did. They were CIO's and were hired primarily because the company owner thought that a good manager should be able to manage anything.
One had some promise. He understood that he was, to be kind, completely devoid of any real understanding of the technology. He relied heavily on the knowledge of the staff and focused on the client facing and staff management aspects of the job. All was well, until it turned out he was a paranoid nut who started playing a variety of political games instead of doing the job, but until then, he was able to do well. He'd demonstrated that a good manger really can manage something of which they have limited understanding.
Another manager was the flip side. He had no understanding of the technology, and was, to be kind, a hand wringing, spineless jellyfish. The thought of pushing for the cash for a major hardware upgrade was beyond his capabilities, and all of our insistence that the system was dying fell on deaf ears because "Well, it's working now, isn't it?"
And when I say "hand wringing" I mean it literally. He would walk around wringing his hands like he was washing them, and whenever we discussed budgets or the need for new servers, he would get a terrified "Deer in the headlights" look in his eyes.
While he accomplished literally nothing and was, through his inaction, responsible for several major system crashes, he lasted a VERY long time, because he always told the owner what he wanted to hear, and blamed the IT staff when something went wrong, something the owner was apt to accept at face value.
I find it quite interesting that you know some of the content of the Bible but lack all of the context and meaning.
I notice something we both have in common. We each fall prey to a common intellectual failing. We both automatically assume that anyone who has a different interpretation of something must be wrong, and therefore must not understand the context as well as we do. The issue isn't which of us understands more of the Biblical context, but what cultural context we personally have form our respective pasts.
Ultimately, you missed a point of humor I was trying to make. I wasn't expressing my own views, but trying to mock the crowd who've been claiming that gay marriage is against God's will and using verses from Leviticus to prop up their claim., despite the debates between Peter an Paul about the need for Christians to follow "Jewish" laws. While the specific debate, if memory serves, was about circumcision and dietary laws, it's often applied to most Jewish purity laws.
Most of the marital equality you speak of is from New Testament writing, and another thing I was trying to mock with my earlier post was the fact that many "Christians" ignore New Testament Grace and ideals, replacing it with Old Testament rules and patriarchy.
Remember, while the interpretation you described of Marital Equality can be defended Biblically, there were and are many people who argue women shouldn't work, vote or even cut their hair, and all of them can quote passages that support that idea. There are also entire denominations who argue that women should always be subservient to their husbands, with some groups going so far as to assume women aren't even entitled to offer their own opinions. All of them have Biblical justifications for this, and can twist and weave the context to support their arguments.
For every person who ignores the passages about women being subservient to their husbands (Like you and I from the sound of it) there are people who consider the phrase "One Flesh" to be entirely about maintaining sexual fidelity, completely ignoring any possible "Equality" connotations. One explanation I've often heard is that God made Eve out of Adam's rib so he would know to keep her under his arm and protect her. Many argue that it's the husband's responsibility to "protect" his wife and for all intents and purposes treat her like a child with slightly more responsibility than the other kids. I think such an idea is total and complete bunk, but then I'm not a member of the Promise Keepers either.
I never said anything about the morality of gay marriages. All I did was question the accuracy of the claim that gay relationships don't last as long as hetero relationships. I've seen no real evidence either way, and the claim sounds like a load of propaganda from some individual or group whose against gay marriages.
I know such statistics do not yet exist, and was asking for them in part because I honestly believe gay relationships are, at the human level, no different than hetero relationships, and I have no fear of such statistics being brought to light.
I was also asking for them in order to try and define, at least for the thread, what constituted a fair comparison. It's frightening the kinds of comparisons many anti-gay marriage activists will engage in to push their ideas across.
In which case, comparing it to heterosexual Marriages is an Apples to Oranges scenario.
I'd like to know what the statistics are on "lifelong committed" monogamous relationships in Hetero couples versus Gay couples. I'd also like to see early death due to AIDS taken into account.
Just from what we've discussed, we could be looking at gay relationships ending sooner than hetero couples because of AIDS.
We could also be looking at someone comparing gay relationships in general to heterosexual marriages. If you leave out all the heterosexual couples who have what they call a "lifelong committed" monogamous relationship at one point, yet break up before getting married, you're tossing the usability of the statistic out the window.
I don't think we can have a really useful statistic in this regard for another generation at least. Gay relationships are under a lot of social pressure and stress that heterosexual relationships are not. A certain amount of the gay breakups are going to be related to that.
... the average length of a gay/lesbian marriage is much shorter than your typical hetero marriage.
I'm not quite sure where that statistic could come from, given the fact that gay marriages haven't even been legal for very long. Even then, they're not legal in many places. The sample is very small at this point
Slashdot Mirror
Ah, remember when the release of a Netscape mattered?
Actually, this one matters quite a bit. For example:
the IE rendering mode could hurt Firefox in the long-run, because it gives sites an excuse to stick with their old IE-only designs."
This release isn't a good thing. It's a blow to the progress that Firefox and Mozilla have made, and more to the point, it's a significant FU to the developers, as it reduces all of their hard work to a painfully ugly IE add on.
So, would these be the same "experts" who predicted we'd have flying cars, robotic maids, commercial space flight and a moon colony by 2000?
Based on the past track record of technology related predictions, I'd say predictions are worth the paper they're printed on.
Besides, just because the hardware complexity reaches the necessary stage doesn't mean the software will. Being able to build a digital brain that equals or exceeds the human brain in complexity and power doesn't mean the software engineers can write code to run it. There are a lot of advances in psychology that need to be made before we can start wiring up our digital successors.
Chobits
Chobits
Very strange, but well outside the paramaters of the contest, as they're not likely to exist within the next 20 years, even in research labs.
So now I find myself wondering, does he lead a revolution, or end up dead?
As that's the only entry so far, I guess it's in the lead to be the winner...
In which case I'm glad I didn't offer a priz
Ah, but people will still follow the link!
What's more, how will the government know all of the search engines respect such an attribute?
And how will you exlain what rel=nofollow is and what it means to the average member of Congress?????
Never heard of it. What's it about?
Is caricature the only way to sustain your beliefs
Nope, it's just a fun way to express them.
Hold on a second. Let me channel a Republican for a moment:
Iran?
Why, that's a county of heathens!
In America, this is all in the cause of Good Christian Democracy!
It's OK here, because God is on Bush's side!
Yech. I always feel icky after doing that.
I've read the article, and it sounds like the door is being opened to start treating links to a site as a financial contribution to a campaign. While this could be used to fight astroturf campaigns, the actual implications are staggering. This all boils down to how much a link can raise for a candidate, and assigning a dollar value to links. The secretary sending letters example is a good one, and outlines the kind of muddy waters this is marching into.
I don't see how this can work effectively. Marketing Driods have been trying to assign dollar values to links and impressions for ages to no avail.. I see this becoming a muddy mess of conflicting and inconsistent enforcement. The Internet just isn't in a state where this can be monitored and enforced effectively.
Look at how links impact search engine rankings. For example, the Google Bomb of linking "Miserable Failure" to The Shurb's biography. Would these links be considered a campaign contribution to Kerry in the last election? If so, what would their value be? Of the links on Slashdot, who would be responsible, the web site itself or the people who made the posts?
What if a BLOG gets flooded with BLOG SPAM linking to a political site, using terms like "How to Save Social Seurity" for the links? IS the BLOG admin responsible under these laws? The hosting provider? The person who made the posts or the person whose BLOG it is? None of this is addressed. All the discussion in the article seemed focused on the notion that the person whose web site has the link was the person who created the link and is authorized to create the link.
I think Bicentennial Man is more an idea about the evolution of such devices to the point where they become, for all intents and purposes, human. It's a story that, were it to play out, would take another hundred years to even begin,and that's with highly optimistic assumptions about the advancement of AI and robotics technology.
I'm more interested in the next generation, the near term consequences as society evolves. Assume devices like "Teddy" get past the prototype stage and reach the consumer market at an affordable price. Make some realistic assumptions about the development of technology in the next 2 to 20 years and write a story about the human consequences.
Bicentennial Man is a great stroy, but it focuses far too much on the machine for this contest.
This isn't about sentient or semi sentient machines, but about how a device like the "Teddy" would impact human societies.
"Teddy" Story Contest
I propose a contest. Write a story involving "Teddy". Make it positive, negative, hopeful or pessimistic. Encase the hardware in different shells if you like (A clown or a Jack in the box spring to mind). Is it a gift from parent to child? Is a workaholic parent using it to "Spend time with the kids" while at the office? Is an obsessive individual or a stalker using it to monitor their prey? Is it being used as nothing more than a cuddly baby monitor, sort of a remote control Teddy Ruxpin?
Imagine the goatse.cx picture.
Now imagine it's talking.
And yes, I did just pick a round about way to say "I'm talking out my a**."
Or perhaps it's a picture of the future, as corporate rule of the nation and laws continues to grow, and the vestiges of Democracy and Human Rights are slowly but surely stripped away.
Oh, he was executed for "Crimes Against Copyright".
The dirty little secret of the RIAA and MPAA lawsuits is that the people who refuse to settle and pay "damages" are being charged with the same crime. Fortunately for the file traders, most of these cases are being settled in one manner or another, but they aren't going to arbitration or a courtroom. Some DHS agents just walk in, arrest the "file trader" and charge them. While the 12 year old girl and the 80+ grandma who got served reached the media, there's already about a dozen 20 something file traders that have been put to death by the federal government.
One poor slob was running Freenet as well as eDonkey, and was promptly charged with distributing child pornography. Most people don't know that the courts have taken running freenet as "proof" that the user is distributing kiddie porn. Remember folks, if you can't police the content, police the utility.
I've had a couple of bosses who were very ignorant of the technological aspects of the work the company did. They were CIO's and were hired primarily because the company owner thought that a good manager should be able to manage anything.
One had some promise. He understood that he was, to be kind, completely devoid of any real understanding of the technology. He relied heavily on the knowledge of the staff and focused on the client facing and staff management aspects of the job. All was well, until it turned out he was a paranoid nut who started playing a variety of political games instead of doing the job, but until then, he was able to do well. He'd demonstrated that a good manger really can manage something of which they have limited understanding.
Another manager was the flip side. He had no understanding of the technology, and was, to be kind, a hand wringing, spineless jellyfish. The thought of pushing for the cash for a major hardware upgrade was beyond his capabilities, and all of our insistence that the system was dying fell on deaf ears because "Well, it's working now, isn't it?"
And when I say "hand wringing" I mean it literally. He would walk around wringing his hands like he was washing them, and whenever we discussed budgets or the need for new servers, he would get a terrified "Deer in the headlights" look in his eyes.
While he accomplished literally nothing and was, through his inaction, responsible for several major system crashes, he lasted a VERY long time, because he always told the owner what he wanted to hear, and blamed the IT staff when something went wrong, something the owner was apt to accept at face value.
I find it quite interesting that you know some of the content of the Bible but lack all of the context and meaning.
I notice something we both have in common. We each fall prey to a common intellectual failing. We both automatically assume that anyone who has a different interpretation of something must be wrong, and therefore must not understand the context as well as we do. The issue isn't which of us understands more of the Biblical context, but what cultural context we personally have form our respective pasts.
Ultimately, you missed a point of humor I was trying to make. I wasn't expressing my own views, but trying to mock the crowd who've been claiming that gay marriage is against God's will and using verses from Leviticus to prop up their claim., despite the debates between Peter an Paul about the need for Christians to follow "Jewish" laws. While the specific debate, if memory serves, was about circumcision and dietary laws, it's often applied to most Jewish purity laws.
Most of the marital equality you speak of is from New Testament writing, and another thing I was trying to mock with my earlier post was the fact that many "Christians" ignore New Testament Grace and ideals, replacing it with Old Testament rules and patriarchy.
Remember, while the interpretation you described of Marital Equality can be defended Biblically, there were and are many people who argue women shouldn't work, vote or even cut their hair, and all of them can quote passages that support that idea. There are also entire denominations who argue that women should always be subservient to their husbands, with some groups going so far as to assume women aren't even entitled to offer their own opinions. All of them have Biblical justifications for this, and can twist and weave the context to support their arguments.
For every person who ignores the passages about women being subservient to their husbands (Like you and I from the sound of it) there are people who consider the phrase "One Flesh" to be entirely about maintaining sexual fidelity, completely ignoring any possible "Equality" connotations. One explanation I've often heard is that God made Eve out of Adam's rib so he would know to keep her under his arm and protect her. Many argue that it's the husband's responsibility to "protect" his wife and for all intents and purposes treat her like a child with slightly more responsibility than the other kids. I think such an idea is total and complete bunk, but then I'm not a member of the Promise Keepers either.
I've nothing against most ads.
Google text ads are the only ones I click on to buy something though.
If I follow a banner or popup, it's ONLY to complain to the site about the marketing ploy.
Given the profanity I'm most likely to use when I encounter these things, calling them a "Floater" works nicely.
My general comment is "Well, if they're going to throw this s*** at me I'm not visiting this s***ty site again"
Don't go putting words in my mouth.
I never said anything about the morality of gay marriages. All I did was question the accuracy of the claim that gay relationships don't last as long as hetero relationships. I've seen no real evidence either way, and the claim sounds like a load of propaganda from some individual or group whose against gay marriages.
I know such statistics do not yet exist, and was asking for them in part because I honestly believe gay relationships are, at the human level, no different than hetero relationships, and I have no fear of such statistics being brought to light.
I was also asking for them in order to try and define, at least for the thread, what constituted a fair comparison. It's frightening the kinds of comparisons many anti-gay marriage activists will engage in to push their ideas across.
Ah, but you see, the article paints this as a "Bad" thing, so the games MUST be good, therefore the company going down must be a BAD thing.
/. logic.
So anyone who says the games were bad MUST be a troll!
Simple
The Temple of Elemental Evil and games based on Vampire: The Masquerade
Oh, that's OK then.
Nothing wrong with a company that made bad games going under.
In which case, comparing it to heterosexual Marriages is an Apples to Oranges scenario.
I'd like to know what the statistics are on "lifelong committed" monogamous relationships in Hetero couples versus Gay couples. I'd also like to see early death due to AIDS taken into account.
Just from what we've discussed, we could be looking at gay relationships ending sooner than hetero couples because of AIDS.
We could also be looking at someone comparing gay relationships in general to heterosexual marriages. If you leave out all the heterosexual couples who have what they call a "lifelong committed" monogamous relationship at one point, yet break up before getting married, you're tossing the usability of the statistic out the window.
I don't think we can have a really useful statistic in this regard for another generation at least. Gay relationships are under a lot of social pressure and stress that heterosexual relationships are not. A certain amount of the gay breakups are going to be related to that.
So, which link is the documentary?????
I can't seem to find a link on the front page that looks like it could be the one...
Three years?
Compared to the US that's DAMN fast.
Man, I feel better already!
... the average length of a gay/lesbian marriage is much shorter than your typical hetero marriage.
I'm not quite sure where that statistic could come from, given the fact that gay marriages haven't even been legal for very long. Even then, they're not legal in many places. The sample is very small at this point
Do you have any references for that stat?