Sad to hear of Roblimo's passing. This site from around 2000 to 2003 taught me a lot and made me feel -- for lack of a better phrase -- like a tech insider.
Though the prose is repetitive and often corny, I was galvanized to become a much more efficacious jerk by reading "The 50th Law" -- advice from the "48 Laws of Power" guy based on the life and career of 50 Cent.
Great music, nice action, but the difficulty was set too high, especially in that any collision with enemies hurt you (even touching the bad guy's hat with your toe).
The guy who programmed this is a frickin' genius. To this day, Alternate Reality is more lifelike in many ways than just about any FRPG out there. And on an Atari 800!
It's great that your kids turned out well, and I don't doubt that the surprises were thrilling. But how can you deny other parents the chance to give their children whatever advantages they can, as they see them?
On the issue of the forces we do not understand, yes, they are out there. We do not understand everything yet. But we understand a great deal more than we did 200 years ago, and it is a fair guess that we'll make a comparable amount of progress in the next 40 or so. Then genetics will not hold great mysteries for us. We will be on to something even more profound, like how matter came to be or why light has a speed limit or how many universes there are...
It's no surprise that after spending a huge amount of time, effort and money on developing the black magnesium 12" cube to house the NeXT -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Next_Computer --, that he would want to try again with a cube design, even if a much cuddlier one. The G4 Cube was a cool design, imo.
Actually, this idea has some merit when taken in the most general way -- that we should be able to have our beliefs and preferences applied automatically to situations that involve us, without necessarily announcing these preferences to every passer-by.
But consider this: someone wants to read a book while sitting in a hotel lobby but finds the lights gradually dimming as several people who prefer low indoor lighting arrive. He then goes into his "settings" to move his slider to show a preference for blindingly bright indoor illumination, clearly a misstatement of his real preference. The sort of false extremism this could produce in a political context -- "I have to make up for the effect of your anti-abortion stance by taking a radically pro-abortion stance" (or vice versa) -- could be absurd and dangerous.
For a few years, my online banking ID was.....isbunk, where.... was the name of the bank. (We had hit a rough patch in our relationship.) No one ever protested this -- or noticed it, more likely -- though the system did stop me from registering a more, er, vivid UID.
This was already ancient news when a nearly identical story came my way nine months ago.
Here is Nokia's statement from 2006 (one of many companies to establish a policy regarding tantalum sourcing as a result of the Congo conflict), sitting in plain sight on their website:
"Nokia is not buying tantalum or other raw materials but processed components and assemblies from suppliers around the world. Suppliers' activities account for a substantial part of the life-cycle environmental impact of Nokia products. Nokia has a comprehensive set of global Nokia Supplier Requirements. These requirements also include environmental requirements. It is an integral part of Nokia's supply chain management to ensure that the suppliers comply with the requirements. To ensure compliance, trained Nokia personnel conduct regular assessments as part of normal supplier assessment.
"Nokia does not use any endangered species for any business purpose and furthermore requests that its suppliers avoid raw material procurement from an origin where there are clear human or animal rights abuse, or the method of procurement or distribution is illegal. In marketing and other company activities, Nokia will depict animals in a dignified manner.
"Nokia has sent a notification of the Congo situation to its suppliers using Tantalum asking them to follow the situation, and to avoid purchasing tantalum from Congo. Nokia is also reducing the use of tantalum in its products."
Here's what I know, and forgive me if any of this seems rudimentary, but I think vibrato (like singing generally) is not well understood by most people:
Vibrato is a cyclic departure from and return to a pitch. When a cellist holds a note and wobbles her left hand without starting a new note, or when B.B. King does the same, that is vibrato. It is heard as a "throb" in the voice, especially in those voices where it coincides with a cycling of intensity as well. This pulsing quality is something that musical instruments can rarely capture.
Some things vibrato is not: -Tremolo: the repetition of a note, usually rapid, despite the misuse of the term in electric guitar circles to mean pitch-bending equipment. -Glissando: a change in pitch moving in one direction, like a slide whistle or a pianist running a finger across the keys. -Trill: the rapid alternation of two distinct notes, though in some voices this can sound a lot like vibrato -Melisma: in vocal music, the inclusion of many notes on one vowel -- think Mariah Carey
In singing, most or all of the excursion of a person's vibrato is below the note being held. The graph of a person's vibrato would rarely look like a perfect sine wave, but usually would have an element of saw wave mixed in. That is, during the 1/6th of a second of an average vibrato cycle, the pitch might drop fairly quickly to the bottom of the range of excursion (let's say 1/3 of a whole tone) and take the rest of that time to climb back to the "correct" pitch, and perhaps go sharp by a few cents briefly.
The rate, shape, dynamics and excursion of a singer's vibrato is something that a well-trained singer can tell with some accuracy after a few seconds of listening. "Eight beats per second, rather smooth, consistent dynamic, and shallow," for example. It is a an objective evaluation, and I'm not surprised a machine can do it too.
But it is terribly difficult to change one's natural vibrato. It takes months of practice and guidance for the typical voice student with a poor vibrato to improve it. Knowing that the end result (the voice) comes from a combination of physiology, psychology, and technique that involves muscles from the face to the feet, I don't see how this type of feedback will help them fix it.
Assuming, of course, that it needs fixing. The ideal of a moderate and inoffensive vibrato, while present in many successful singers' voices and most opera singers' voices, is also conspicuously absent from the voices of many well-loved singers and entertainers.
"Payment settlement entities [...] will be required to report the annual gross amount of reportable transactions to the IRS..."
Although I'm a long-time libertarian, I have to say that if they're collecting ONLY an annual gross dollar figure, and not the details of individual transactions, it probably would help them collect taxes and it would probably be a sensible thing to do in the context of existing laws. Income taxes are stupid in principle, but I can't think of a good reason to apply them only to money that's harder to conceal.
It is a concern that this "gimme a ballpark figure" will eventually become "gimme your customer list" but we can burn that bridge when we come to it...
Any movement or decision in traffic that could be construed as dangerous, rude or presumptuous must be followed by the driver blinking the hazard lights for a few flashes. Otherwise the affected drivers nearby will honk angrily at the "refusal to apologize" implied by not blinking the hazards.
Before anything that is even vaguely reminiscent of a "Singularity" takes shape, we must work towards increasing our emotional intelligence and our moral depth. Whether or not we have strong AI or swarms of omnicompetent nanobots in 2029, our command of information and control over basic biological processes will be far ahead of where they now stand. Within the next two decades, we (or at least some of us) will have access to far more power than many of us could be trusted with.
Huge intellectual and physical resources will be available to people out of proportion to their intellects but in proportion to their access to money or state authority. Really, that's the case now, but in twenty years how much further will we be in surveillance, biological augmentation AND disruption, and so on? The intelligence and the "levers" with which to move the environment will be there for the grasping, but without broader minds and deeper souls (Hofstadter's ideal) to define the goals and guide the work, a utopia could turn rancid literally overnight.
We need to begin fostering the growth of humanist moral guides. Ethics and political philosophy will be hot topics when we can do almost anything. Religion will appear quaint to more and more of us, so it will be harder to look to preachers for specific guidance, but Joe Six-Pack-of-Gene-Therapy-Derived-Abs (and his prospective AI minions) would pose far less danger to himself and to us if he could be convinced of the profound lessons to be found in the reflective, gentle and self-effacing thoughts of the best religious leaders. We will have an embarrassment of intellectual riches, but our test will lie in whether we are smart enough to subjugate those riches to the service of wisdom.
Would I have had the imagination to escape from small-town life so satisfyingly, and what's more important, so socially? And twenty years later, would any of us be able to play FF12 (or just name a game!) in our off-hours?
Glad they caught him for the Code Monkeys episode before he was gone.
Slashdot Mirror
Sad to hear of Roblimo's passing. This site from around 2000 to 2003 taught me a lot and made me feel -- for lack of a better phrase -- like a tech insider.
Though the prose is repetitive and often corny, I was galvanized to become a much more efficacious jerk by reading "The 50th Law" -- advice from the "48 Laws of Power" guy based on the life and career of 50 Cent.
I accidentally sex from a bunch of people at once...is this dangerous?
[Sorry.]
Wasn't BBN.com the second domain name ever to be purchased? (Was reading the article about Symbolics.com earlier.)
I'm probably not the only one who was startled that the Chrome OS would be on Sony laptops. Oh, well.
Great music, nice action, but the difficulty was set too high, especially in that any collision with enemies hurt you (even touching the bad guy's hat with your toe).
The guy who programmed this is a frickin' genius. To this day, Alternate Reality is more lifelike in many ways than just about any FRPG out there. And on an Atari 800!
It's great that your kids turned out well, and I don't doubt that the surprises were thrilling. But how can you deny other parents the chance to give their children whatever advantages they can, as they see them?
On the issue of the forces we do not understand, yes, they are out there. We do not understand everything yet. But we understand a great deal more than we did 200 years ago, and it is a fair guess that we'll make a comparable amount of progress in the next 40 or so. Then genetics will not hold great mysteries for us. We will be on to something even more profound, like how matter came to be or why light has a speed limit or how many universes there are...
It's no surprise that after spending a huge amount of time, effort and money on developing the black magnesium 12" cube to house the NeXT -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Next_Computer --, that he would want to try again with a cube design, even if a much cuddlier one. The G4 Cube was a cool design, imo.
So crazy...it just might work!
Sorry.
Actually, this idea has some merit when taken in the most general way -- that we should be able to have our beliefs and preferences applied automatically to situations that involve us, without necessarily announcing these preferences to every passer-by.
But consider this: someone wants to read a book while sitting in a hotel lobby but finds the lights gradually dimming as several people who prefer low indoor lighting arrive. He then goes into his "settings" to move his slider to show a preference for blindingly bright indoor illumination, clearly a misstatement of his real preference. The sort of false extremism this could produce in a political context -- "I have to make up for the effect of your anti-abortion stance by taking a radically pro-abortion stance" (or vice versa) -- could be absurd and dangerous.
For a few years, my online banking ID was .....isbunk, where .... was the name of the bank. (We had hit a rough patch in our relationship.) No one ever protested this -- or noticed it, more likely -- though the system did stop me from registering a more, er, vivid UID.
To an opera singer who is wading into comp. sci. / AI / brain science (and rapidly getting submerged, I must admit), this is rather inspiring.
Come on, Neil Peart! Don't let the guitarists get all the PhD's!
This was already ancient news when a nearly identical story came my way nine months ago.
Here is Nokia's statement from 2006 (one of many companies to establish a policy regarding tantalum sourcing as a result of the Congo conflict), sitting in plain sight on their website:
http://www.nokia.com/A4230065
"Our position: Tantalum / Coltan
"Nokia is not buying tantalum or other raw materials but processed components and assemblies from suppliers around the world. Suppliers' activities account for a substantial part of the life-cycle environmental impact of Nokia products. Nokia has a comprehensive set of global Nokia Supplier Requirements. These requirements also include environmental requirements. It is an integral part of Nokia's supply chain management to ensure that the suppliers comply with the requirements. To ensure compliance, trained Nokia personnel conduct regular assessments as part of normal supplier assessment.
"Nokia does not use any endangered species for any business purpose and furthermore requests that its suppliers avoid raw material procurement from an origin where there are clear human or animal rights abuse, or the method of procurement or distribution is illegal. In marketing and other company activities, Nokia will depict animals in a dignified manner.
"Nokia has sent a notification of the Congo situation to its suppliers using Tantalum asking them to follow the situation, and to avoid purchasing tantalum from Congo. Nokia is also reducing the use of tantalum in its products."
Barr is over 5% in 19 states, according to Zogby. His numbers are far higher than Nader's this time around: http://blog.bobbarr2008.com/2008/07/09/good-polling-numbers/ And here's a clickable map: http://www.zogby.com/50state/
Here's what I know, and forgive me if any of this seems rudimentary, but I think vibrato (like singing generally) is not well understood by most people:
Vibrato is a cyclic departure from and return to a pitch. When a cellist holds a note and wobbles her left hand without starting a new note, or when B.B. King does the same, that is vibrato. It is heard as a "throb" in the voice, especially in those voices where it coincides with a cycling of intensity as well. This pulsing quality is something that musical instruments can rarely capture.
Some things vibrato is not:
-Tremolo: the repetition of a note, usually rapid, despite the misuse of the term in electric guitar circles to mean pitch-bending equipment.
-Glissando: a change in pitch moving in one direction, like a slide whistle or a pianist running a finger across the keys.
-Trill: the rapid alternation of two distinct notes, though in some voices this can sound a lot like vibrato
-Melisma: in vocal music, the inclusion of many notes on one vowel -- think Mariah Carey
In singing, most or all of the excursion of a person's vibrato is below the note being held. The graph of a person's vibrato would rarely look like a perfect sine wave, but usually would have an element of saw wave mixed in. That is, during the 1/6th of a second of an average vibrato cycle, the pitch might drop fairly quickly to the bottom of the range of excursion (let's say 1/3 of a whole tone) and take the rest of that time to climb back to the "correct" pitch, and perhaps go sharp by a few cents briefly.
The rate, shape, dynamics and excursion of a singer's vibrato is something that a well-trained singer can tell with some accuracy after a few seconds of listening. "Eight beats per second, rather smooth, consistent dynamic, and shallow," for example. It is a an objective evaluation, and I'm not surprised a machine can do it too.
But it is terribly difficult to change one's natural vibrato. It takes months of practice and guidance for the typical voice student with a poor vibrato to improve it. Knowing that the end result (the voice) comes from a combination of physiology, psychology, and technique that involves muscles from the face to the feet, I don't see how this type of feedback will help them fix it.
Assuming, of course, that it needs fixing. The ideal of a moderate and inoffensive vibrato, while present in many successful singers' voices and most opera singers' voices, is also conspicuously absent from the voices of many well-loved singers and entertainers.
From TFA:
"Payment settlement entities [...] will be required to report the annual gross amount of reportable transactions to the IRS..."
Although I'm a long-time libertarian, I have to say that if they're collecting ONLY an annual gross dollar figure, and not the details of individual transactions, it probably would help them collect taxes and it would probably be a sensible thing to do in the context of existing laws. Income taxes are stupid in principle, but I can't think of a good reason to apply them only to money that's harder to conceal.
It is a concern that this "gimme a ballpark figure" will eventually become "gimme your customer list" but we can burn that bridge when we come to it...
Any movement or decision in traffic that could be construed as dangerous, rude or presumptuous must be followed by the driver blinking the hazard lights for a few flashes. Otherwise the affected drivers nearby will honk angrily at the "refusal to apologize" implied by not blinking the hazards.
Before anything that is even vaguely reminiscent of a "Singularity" takes shape, we must work towards increasing our emotional intelligence and our moral depth. Whether or not we have strong AI or swarms of omnicompetent nanobots in 2029, our command of information and control over basic biological processes will be far ahead of where they now stand. Within the next two decades, we (or at least some of us) will have access to far more power than many of us could be trusted with.
Huge intellectual and physical resources will be available to people out of proportion to their intellects but in proportion to their access to money or state authority. Really, that's the case now, but in twenty years how much further will we be in surveillance, biological augmentation AND disruption, and so on? The intelligence and the "levers" with which to move the environment will be there for the grasping, but without broader minds and deeper souls (Hofstadter's ideal) to define the goals and guide the work, a utopia could turn rancid literally overnight.
We need to begin fostering the growth of humanist moral guides. Ethics and political philosophy will be hot topics when we can do almost anything. Religion will appear quaint to more and more of us, so it will be harder to look to preachers for specific guidance, but Joe Six-Pack-of-Gene-Therapy-Derived-Abs (and his prospective AI minions) would pose far less danger to himself and to us if he could be convinced of the profound lessons to be found in the reflective, gentle and self-effacing thoughts of the best religious leaders. We will have an embarrassment of intellectual riches, but our test will lie in whether we are smart enough to subjugate those riches to the service of wisdom.
If not for Gygax...
Would I have had the imagination to escape from small-town life so satisfyingly, and what's more important, so socially? And twenty years later, would any of us be able to play FF12 (or just name a game!) in our off-hours?
Glad they caught him for the Code Monkeys episode before he was gone.