Honestly Humanity is a joke, almost a cancer. And if an advanced civilization stumbled across us, they would probably wipe us out to make the rest of the universe safer. We as a species love to hate others, we love murder, war, and control. WE thrive on hating those that are different or think or worship different.
You're right. We should find all those ignorant, warlike motherfuckers and kill them.
Instead of a two kilometer tall office building they should build a two kilometer tall railgun. Then design a super aerodynamic, heat-shielded carrier with a late-firing chemical rocket for satellites and spacecraft payloads that can be launched from the rail gun. If there were stability issues (could be tied down with cables, I suppose, like a radio tower) they could build half of it underground, though I don't know how much momentum they'd lose from having to travel the extra distance.
The problem is that while trying to survive and maintain some kind of social normalcy most people don't take an active role in shaping their local/regional/national/world topology until men in black are infiltrating their home at night and killing/disappearing them and/or raping their wife while their children watch. Complacency lies in the middle, and we're ("civilized" countries) still in the middle. The middle's that slippery slope between the crest and trough of utopia and North Korea. Hopefully the EFF will have some success before momentum takes us to that dark point where we have no choice but to answer with drastic measures. Ironically, the goal of both sides is peace and order. I suppose the difference in opinion about the road to said peace and order is what puts us at such unenviable odds.
Cool, I didn't know that. Seems like the U.S. is behind the times when it comes to that sort of thing (giving women the right to vote for example). At least we have the middle east to make us feel better. Those guys seriously need to get their shit together.
I've seen every Star Trek episode and film in order with the exception of TOS which I watched last in an epic and sadly final marathon. Sci-fi has moved on, but Star Trek deserves a place in our hearts that will be difficult to fill again. It was the first serious sci-fi drama on television and has more episodes and films than any normal human being would dare to watch. Star Trek began dying, or should I say everyone began moving on, right around the time TNG was ending and DS9 was beginning. Voyager was its gasps for air and Enterprise its final throes. Battlestar Galactica put the last nail in the coffin, making people realize just how different (and equally if not more excellent) a sci-fi television show could be. The two JJ films succeeded because they had a recognizable name and were simple action flicks.
So Star Trek is dead. Everyone has moved on. That being said, let those who deeply love Star Trek for everything it has given us have a little fun with Star Trek Continues. They're not hurting anyone. Unless they violate the Prime Directive. Is it getting hot in here? Report! Compensate. Check the relays and coils and all that shit. AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!
1) Chris Doohan is spooky (son of James Doohan, reprising his father as "Scotty")
2) Has a holodeck like ST Next Generation, but says "Where no MAN has gone before" in opening credits
Aside from that, it wasn't horrible, in fact they capture the 60's style so well that it's like a really good Vegas tribute act, an Elvis-Karaoke worth paying a compliment to.
That some people today are insistent about the use of gender-agnostic nouns doesn't mean that those using lesser-so nouns in the past were bigots. I highly doubt TOS's use of the word "man" was meant as a slight toward women considering Roddenberry's vision and the fact that it was the first television program showing a white and black person kissing. The entire premise of Star Trek Continues is that it's a continuation of the original series, which used the word "man", so I doubt they intended it to be a slight or exclusionary either. I despise bigotry, but people gotta loosen up a bit. If I say to my kid, "Hey, it's the mailman!" and then realize it's a woman driving I'm not going to start calling them the "mail person" and flog myself for being a misogynist. Language is fluid and its primary purpose is to get the point across. I wonder how many people when they heard the "where no man has gone before" bit thought, "Those sexist bastards! They specifically chose to use the word 'man' instead of 'one' because they're sexist pigs!" I mean, really? I hope someday people will realize that bigotry and choice of words are two very different things and that it's the intent and meaning of language that should cause offense, not an individual word in a sentence.
I think my first hard drive stored something ridiculous like 10 MB. The old ones don't sound like the new ones. Much louder, beefier and slower; they really gave the computer life. I miss the sound of my old Amstrad.
Stranger in a Strange Land is the only book by Heinlein I've read; it was awesome. I'm thinking Jim Carrey would do well as Valentine. He's great at pulling off "strange" roles (whoops) and is a damn good actor. It's a fish-out-of-water story that serves as a mirror to human nature with an inevitably dark ending. I can already see Jim at the bottom of a swimming pool. Can someone please make that?
Have a "The Future" exhibit, a three-room 1:1000-scale model of cities, parks and suburbs showing what a full-scale nuclear war by major powers would look like. The first room would be pre-war, the second as it was happening, and the third what it would look like 100 years later. It that doesn't sober people up then only the real thing will.
Then they are no better than those that hacked into their systems, and should be prosecuted like any criminal hacker
Those that have helped them in this, should be prosecuted as accessories.
Or, if what SONY is doing is acceptable, Than it was okay for those that hacked SONY to do what they did.
The law applies to all, big and small.
Keep telling yourself that as you scratch off the days, months and years on the walls of your prison cell while imagining the guffawing of Sony suits snorting cocaine off prostitutes' asses like Doogie Howser and rolling around in piles of money like Scrooge McDuck. Sony does what it likes, and if anyone disagrees they get beaten with socks filled with 100 dollar bill stacks until they shut up. Don't believe the fairy tale of equal justice under law.
God, I forgot about that one. It asks you if you'd like to format it. Pretty nightmarish. If you use Ext2 IFS to automatically mount an ext2/3/4 partition under Windows, it occasionally fails. If you try to access the partition in the file manager at that point it also asks if you'd like to format it. You can nuke an entire partition with a single click and no password entry.
Microsoft has decided to start using the wheel. I remember sometime before switching permanently to Linux when I noticed IE couldn't display PNG transparency. It was probably the last Windows-related facepalm I ever made as a Windows user.
Heh, thanks. While self-commanding killer robots are the obvious focus of our fear, it's not always the most obvious expectation that bites one in the ass. Killer robots would either never get used or have so many safeguards they'd be half useless amidst the chaos of war and the treachery and adaptability of humans. Though they'd have some degree of self-preservation, they would have no desire or ability to reproduce. Malware on the other hand is designed to do anything to avoid removal and replicate through any means possible. What better way to avoid being deleted than to make the infected facility uninhabitable or exceedingly dangerous to those who could remove it? This logic could be extrapolated to "protecting" surrounding areas, or distant areas connected by network infrastructure that could be used as access points. It's the seeming innocence and perceived weakness of something intangible like software that could reduce the consideration and implementation of safeguards when crafting malware. Right now malware's just an expensive pain in the ass, but a day may come when during your coffee break all the doors lock, the ventilation system halts and the facility begins flooding with CO2.
This thought began as a joke, but this actually does sound how something like Skynet could be born. Malware is infamous for aggressively trying to preserve itself. We all joke about how stupid the idea of programming an AI with a strong sense of self-preservation is because of the obvious dangers, but that is exactly how malware is programmed. Programming it to control industrial systems as well (giving it a "body") seems like a really bad idea, particularly if the aim is not to sabotage the infected industrial system, but to cause as much damage to the target nation as possible (a reasonable wartime goal).
Write a bot to track The Pirate Bay. They give you the program name, upload date, and number of seeds and peers in real-time. They don't even require registration for this information, much less payment. Sure the data would require a little interpretation and extrapolation, but I can think of no better measure of success and popularity.
That's an excellent idea, although I thought of an improvement. Instead of sending waves of our own men to clear the kill counter, we could air drop inflatable sex dolls filled with snakes. Man, future war's gonna be crazy!
Maybe killer robots should be designed as peace keepers, with their primary function being to search out and disarm armed non-allied personnel and confiscate their weapons. It would only use lethal force when fired upon and could identify the shooter with near 100% accuracy. There would also be a timeout period per target so they wouldn't hunt them indefinitely. If the target surrendered, dropped or ejected the ammunition from their weapon the robot would break the target's kill AI. So they'd basically roam about like the Borg and only fuck you up when you attacked them. The robot could respond to lack of compliance to surrender a weapon without an attack with non-lethal force, then take the weapon from the incapacitated bearer.
I suppose my point is that there's a big difference between designing a robot that can kill when necessary and designing something like a walking gun turret from Aliens. Since they're robots (more expendable than people), the strategy of provoking the enemy into attacking them merely by their presence and continual demands to surrender weaponry (and thereby clearly identifying the attackers as proper targets) seems like a good one. Even when the bad guys finally figure out, "Hey man, whatever you do don't shoot that damn thing," if the robot is faster than they are it will attempt to disarm them manually which could again provoke an attack.
Slashdot Mirror
Good point, although it would be useful for launching probes and such.
Eh, they could just have a red light that turns on when it's about to fire and some crap to sign when they hire you. And paperweights, of course.
Honestly Humanity is a joke, almost a cancer. And if an advanced civilization stumbled across us, they would probably wipe us out to make the rest of the universe safer. We as a species love to hate others, we love murder, war, and control. WE thrive on hating those that are different or think or worship different.
You're right. We should find all those ignorant, warlike motherfuckers and kill them.
Instead of a two kilometer tall office building they should build a two kilometer tall railgun. Then design a super aerodynamic, heat-shielded carrier with a late-firing chemical rocket for satellites and spacecraft payloads that can be launched from the rail gun. If there were stability issues (could be tied down with cables, I suppose, like a radio tower) they could build half of it underground, though I don't know how much momentum they'd lose from having to travel the extra distance.
The problem is that while trying to survive and maintain some kind of social normalcy most people don't take an active role in shaping their local/regional/national/world topology until men in black are infiltrating their home at night and killing/disappearing them and/or raping their wife while their children watch. Complacency lies in the middle, and we're ("civilized" countries) still in the middle. The middle's that slippery slope between the crest and trough of utopia and North Korea. Hopefully the EFF will have some success before momentum takes us to that dark point where we have no choice but to answer with drastic measures. Ironically, the goal of both sides is peace and order. I suppose the difference in opinion about the road to said peace and order is what puts us at such unenviable odds.
Cool, I didn't know that. Seems like the U.S. is behind the times when it comes to that sort of thing (giving women the right to vote for example). At least we have the middle east to make us feel better. Those guys seriously need to get their shit together.
I've seen every Star Trek episode and film in order with the exception of TOS which I watched last in an epic and sadly final marathon. Sci-fi has moved on, but Star Trek deserves a place in our hearts that will be difficult to fill again. It was the first serious sci-fi drama on television and has more episodes and films than any normal human being would dare to watch. Star Trek began dying, or should I say everyone began moving on, right around the time TNG was ending and DS9 was beginning. Voyager was its gasps for air and Enterprise its final throes. Battlestar Galactica put the last nail in the coffin, making people realize just how different (and equally if not more excellent) a sci-fi television show could be. The two JJ films succeeded because they had a recognizable name and were simple action flicks.
So Star Trek is dead. Everyone has moved on. That being said, let those who deeply love Star Trek for everything it has given us have a little fun with Star Trek Continues. They're not hurting anyone. Unless they violate the Prime Directive. Is it getting hot in here? Report! Compensate. Check the relays and coils and all that shit. AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!
I watched until 5:50. 2 Most important things:
1) Chris Doohan is spooky (son of James Doohan, reprising his father as "Scotty")
2) Has a holodeck like ST Next Generation, but says "Where no MAN has gone before" in opening credits
Aside from that, it wasn't horrible, in fact they capture the 60's style so well that it's like a really good Vegas tribute act, an Elvis-Karaoke worth paying a compliment to.
That some people today are insistent about the use of gender-agnostic nouns doesn't mean that those using lesser-so nouns in the past were bigots. I highly doubt TOS's use of the word "man" was meant as a slight toward women considering Roddenberry's vision and the fact that it was the first television program showing a white and black person kissing. The entire premise of Star Trek Continues is that it's a continuation of the original series, which used the word "man", so I doubt they intended it to be a slight or exclusionary either. I despise bigotry, but people gotta loosen up a bit. If I say to my kid, "Hey, it's the mailman!" and then realize it's a woman driving I'm not going to start calling them the "mail person" and flog myself for being a misogynist. Language is fluid and its primary purpose is to get the point across. I wonder how many people when they heard the "where no man has gone before" bit thought, "Those sexist bastards! They specifically chose to use the word 'man' instead of 'one' because they're sexist pigs!" I mean, really? I hope someday people will realize that bigotry and choice of words are two very different things and that it's the intent and meaning of language that should cause offense, not an individual word in a sentence.
http://gambas.sourceforge.net/...
http://gambaswiki.org/wiki?l=e...
I think my first hard drive stored something ridiculous like 10 MB. The old ones don't sound like the new ones. Much louder, beefier and slower; they really gave the computer life. I miss the sound of my old Amstrad.
Stranger in a Strange Land is the only book by Heinlein I've read; it was awesome. I'm thinking Jim Carrey would do well as Valentine. He's great at pulling off "strange" roles (whoops) and is a damn good actor. It's a fish-out-of-water story that serves as a mirror to human nature with an inevitably dark ending. I can already see Jim at the bottom of a swimming pool. Can someone please make that?
So you can play Duke Nuk'em quotes on cue.
Have a "The Future" exhibit, a three-room 1:1000-scale model of cities, parks and suburbs showing what a full-scale nuclear war by major powers would look like. The first room would be pre-war, the second as it was happening, and the third what it would look like 100 years later. It that doesn't sober people up then only the real thing will.
It sometimes helps to play by the Devil's rules. You can't fight without getting dirty or win wars with smiles and flowers.
Then they are no better than those that hacked into their systems, and should be prosecuted like any criminal hacker Those that have helped them in this, should be prosecuted as accessories. Or, if what SONY is doing is acceptable, Than it was okay for those that hacked SONY to do what they did.
The law applies to all, big and small.
Keep telling yourself that as you scratch off the days, months and years on the walls of your prison cell while imagining the guffawing of Sony suits snorting cocaine off prostitutes' asses like Doogie Howser and rolling around in piles of money like Scrooge McDuck. Sony does what it likes, and if anyone disagrees they get beaten with socks filled with 100 dollar bill stacks until they shut up. Don't believe the fairy tale of equal justice under law.
will be able to breath new life
If /. ever gets unicode support it may be possible to obscure bad grammar with lens flare glyphs. I wouldn't hold my breathe.
God, I forgot about that one. It asks you if you'd like to format it. Pretty nightmarish. If you use Ext2 IFS to automatically mount an ext2/3/4 partition under Windows, it occasionally fails. If you try to access the partition in the file manager at that point it also asks if you'd like to format it. You can nuke an entire partition with a single click and no password entry.
Still awesome.
Microsoft has decided to start using the wheel. I remember sometime before switching permanently to Linux when I noticed IE couldn't display PNG transparency. It was probably the last Windows-related facepalm I ever made as a Windows user.
I looked through all his comments and there was only one modded greater than zero.
http://slashdot.org/comments.p...
If you think spam is crazy sounding, read some of his comments. It's a real experience.
You are wanting to be commenting here.
Heh, thanks. While self-commanding killer robots are the obvious focus of our fear, it's not always the most obvious expectation that bites one in the ass. Killer robots would either never get used or have so many safeguards they'd be half useless amidst the chaos of war and the treachery and adaptability of humans. Though they'd have some degree of self-preservation, they would have no desire or ability to reproduce. Malware on the other hand is designed to do anything to avoid removal and replicate through any means possible. What better way to avoid being deleted than to make the infected facility uninhabitable or exceedingly dangerous to those who could remove it? This logic could be extrapolated to "protecting" surrounding areas, or distant areas connected by network infrastructure that could be used as access points. It's the seeming innocence and perceived weakness of something intangible like software that could reduce the consideration and implementation of safeguards when crafting malware. Right now malware's just an expensive pain in the ass, but a day may come when during your coffee break all the doors lock, the ventilation system halts and the facility begins flooding with CO2.
This thought began as a joke, but this actually does sound how something like Skynet could be born. Malware is infamous for aggressively trying to preserve itself. We all joke about how stupid the idea of programming an AI with a strong sense of self-preservation is because of the obvious dangers, but that is exactly how malware is programmed. Programming it to control industrial systems as well (giving it a "body") seems like a really bad idea, particularly if the aim is not to sabotage the infected industrial system, but to cause as much damage to the target nation as possible (a reasonable wartime goal).
Write a bot to track The Pirate Bay. They give you the program name, upload date, and number of seeds and peers in real-time. They don't even require registration for this information, much less payment. Sure the data would require a little interpretation and extrapolation, but I can think of no better measure of success and popularity.
That's an excellent idea, although I thought of an improvement. Instead of sending waves of our own men to clear the kill counter, we could air drop inflatable sex dolls filled with snakes. Man, future war's gonna be crazy!
Maybe killer robots should be designed as peace keepers, with their primary function being to search out and disarm armed non-allied personnel and confiscate their weapons. It would only use lethal force when fired upon and could identify the shooter with near 100% accuracy. There would also be a timeout period per target so they wouldn't hunt them indefinitely. If the target surrendered, dropped or ejected the ammunition from their weapon the robot would break the target's kill AI. So they'd basically roam about like the Borg and only fuck you up when you attacked them. The robot could respond to lack of compliance to surrender a weapon without an attack with non-lethal force, then take the weapon from the incapacitated bearer.
I suppose my point is that there's a big difference between designing a robot that can kill when necessary and designing something like a walking gun turret from Aliens. Since they're robots (more expendable than people), the strategy of provoking the enemy into attacking them merely by their presence and continual demands to surrender weaponry (and thereby clearly identifying the attackers as proper targets) seems like a good one. Even when the bad guys finally figure out, "Hey man, whatever you do don't shoot that damn thing," if the robot is faster than they are it will attempt to disarm them manually which could again provoke an attack.