and thinking, " You know, someday this will be in color, and text will be WYSIWYG and the screen will look like *paper*, with black text."
I was a visionary in my 30's. And I was right. We got it, and it was good, in fact it was awsome.
I was also a naive twit in my 30's. Nowadays I've "devolved" into reading mail in text mode using mutt. Dark background, white 80 column text you can read from halfway across a thirty foot room, and it's good. In fact, it's awsome.
A CRT isn't paper. Different rules apply. Your eyes, and the eyes of your readers, will thank you for realizing this.
Ah well, at least it's better than those websites that print black text on a textured navy blue background.
a clear distinction between the reality and the *model.* A clock may be analog or digital. A clock, or a time zone, is just a model of time. In fact, analog *means* model. *Time* is neither analog nor digital. It's reality. Time existed long before clocks. Plants can tell time. There is no such thing as a time "zone." x,y,z,t is literally true. Take one step to the left in space and you also "travel" in time.
For that matter, clocks don't even really measure what time it *is,* they really just measure the passage of time as a dynamic entity.
If you *really* want to know what "time" it *is* the best you can do is look up.
It's because of a little thing called physics, with a hint of cosmology thrown in for good measure.
Time zones are just a logical construct with no real basis in reality whose only function is to give the illusion that trains run on time.
If they DID there might even be a point to them. Why on earth do they print train schedules with times like "1:37" on them when we all know it's really "Half past one to two somthing or other, depending on the phase of the moon and whether the crick rose any during the night"?
I'm afraid the government has been lying to you again my child, and you've bought it, hook, line and sinker. Well, it'll make you a happy little timeclock puncher so I guess I should just leave you alone.
x,y,z,t. Not just a good idea. It's the law.
KFG
But not as amusing as. . .
on
Tai Chi Robots
·
· Score: 1
your post, little one. Feel free to come back and play again, my son, but maybe you should wait until you've advanced to a stage somewhat beyond zygote.
on the whole, are a species that received their judgeships from Craker Jack boxes. Such seems to be the nature of the beast. That is why, in part, we are blessed with courts of appeal. I won't even get into what I think of the typical city councilman who passes some of these "laws".
I'd note that I specifically said "on duty." Of course an officer not on duty is just an ordinary citizen. While on duty, as a state actor, an officer is given powers that would be extraordinary for a citizen, but this is balanced, to a certain extent, by a removal of certain rights they retain as citizens. The officer *as state actor* has fewer rights, just as, say, a soldier does ( who has damned few rights as the citizen understands them).
A police officer cannot arbitrarily switch back and forth from being a state actor and a citizen. If he collects my trash *while in uniform* he does so as a state actor. As such that trash is now evidence ( although possibly inadmissable) and the *property of the state,* not the officer, and it must be handled with the same protocols as all other evidence.
Including whatever restrictions on freedom of speach apply to evidence.
Of course, if he goes through my trash off duty and posts the contents to a web site he may well be surprised to find he only retains the *protections* of an ordinary citizen. Libel is actionable.
KFG
Karl Marx was actually prescient . . .
on
Tai Chi Robots
·
· Score: 2
in several regards. He fully foresaw the time when the "problem of production" was fully solved. He actually forsaw the problem this would present for a capitalist industrial economy and pretty much asked all the right questions. Unfortunately he came up with pretty much all the wrong answers. Went a bit loopy at the end too.
The point of the matter is though that it's been quite a while since virtually all rote labor has been able to be performed by robots better than humans. It's been the humans that have been insisting on continuing to do this mindless, and pointless, labor in order that they may have "a job."
This last is just one of the symptoms of a social atmosphere based on humans as machines and their output as "the economy." Me, if a machine can do the job, I *don't want it.* Really, just kill me now if you have to. I'd just curl up in a ball and die of ennui anyway if forced to perform such laborious, yet mindless, tasks.
So what the hell do we do when the machines are doing all such tasks, as I believe they *should*?
How about what humans do better than machines? Think.
Maybe then we'll start to realize that the value and the purpose of a human being isn't to be a robot.
There's going to be a shitload of "shakeout" before that comes to pass though. Batten down the hatches.
KFG
Ok, I know you're going for the joke, but. . .
on
Tai Chi Robots
·
· Score: 2
if it's so easy to lift one foot, raise one arm, reeeeaaaaaaal slow, why does it seem so hard for me to get a human student to do it without falling right over?
This is a *major* advancment in humanoid robotics if they've actually pulled this off.
KFG
I'd only point out that. . .
on
Tai Chi Robots
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
Tai Chi is not "shadow boxing" as the basically uninformative blurb the story links to states. It's a legitimate martial art perfectly useful for beating the crap out of people.
Yes, it has it's solo forms, typically practiced in slow motion, just as other martial arts have *their* practice kata, and just as these other martial arts have kata with partners so does Tai Chi, as well as full out sparing.
Don't be fooled by the new age types teaching it badly to Granny in the park, and don't take lessons in it from any instructor not competent to teach it *as* a martial art. They don't know what they're doing.
That said, any robot that can go through a Yang Long Form with me is a *major* step forward in humanoid robotics. Hell, it takes a great deal of practice and training for a *human* to do it vaguely properly and I want to see this puppy in action.
I wonder how it would do in "pushing hands"? That would be the ultimate test.
A policeman, on duty, is an arm of the government, not a citizen. The policeman has sworn an oath to uphold the law *as* an instrument of the government. Actual ordinary citizens have to trust the police to do so or their entire function, indeed, the entire function of *law* falls into disrepute.The Constitution puts certain limits on the actions of police officers *because* the second they put on the that shield they are the government, not a citizen. Police have *fewer* rights than citizens.This is why the police have adopted the dodge of hiring ordinary citizens to go places and do things that they cannot.
A policeman who does not follow due process is the greatest threat to lawfulness there is.
Contrarywise, a journalist going through the trash of a public official to find out the truth has long been held to be one of the *greatest* preservers of democratic law that there is. See the Pentagon Papers.Protections for such behaviours were specifically written into the Constitution.
The entire function of the Constitution is to *restrict* the actions of government and law enforcement and *empower* citizens.
Indeed, some of the restrictions on law enforcment ( such as it taking a week to get a warrant) were overtly written to make it impossible to effectively prosecute certain unjust laws. That's the frikkin' *point.*
I don't wonder why some polititians might object to this.
I suppose it "benefits" them by continuing to allow them to rest peacefully in their graves.
If you are about the average age for a Slashdot reader I may well be older than your parents. Much of the material used had already passed into the public domain before *my* parents were born.
The film is *old.* There are no copyright holders.
Most technology really only requires a bit of drive and a few smart people to develop. Hell, that's where it came from in the first place.
Most of America's restrictions on exporting tech overtly rely on the concept that America is just better and smarter than anyone else.
Bull puckies.
If America wants to maintain any sort of commercial lead in technology it has to distribute it in such a way that it's just plain easier and cheaper to *buy* it than develop it yourself.
As Goethe noted, everything has been thought of, the trick is to think of it again. The historical evidence is clear that anything America can think of so can China, Russia, England, Germany, etc.
Oh. Wait, as often as not these countries think of things *first* and America has to play catch-up.
The idea that you can 'restrict' technology is just plain doofey. If you can figure something out so can hundreds of thousands of others.
So go for it India. Think of stuff, build stuff, develop 'home grown' free software, put the screws to American 'tech' companies and make its government sweat bullets.
Maybe it'll get the country off its ass again, like Russia did when it launched a satellite years before anyone thought it would be possible.
Anything but this damned brand name pushing, marketroid driven 'economy' we've got now.
I don't mean technically either, I mean in basic concept.
I don't know about you, but I'm simply not going to participate. If I feel the need of an eBook I'll go to Project Gutenberg. I havn't yet read all of Dumas or Dickens, the worst of which is better than any of the crap being shilled by Oprah. Twain, O Henry, GBS, Thoreau, Kipling, Swift, Sir Richard Burton, Melville, Hume, London, Conrad. . . Jesus, the list goes on for miles, all free for the taking, distributing, printing, even selling if you want.
I think it's somewhat ironic that one of the best uses of public domain eTexts is the ease with which specialty and art binders may now get source material.
So be radical. Screw MS and Adobe. Download the entire PG opus and freely *pass it on to your friends.* Print the son of a bitch and hand it out on the street corners.
Otherwise, if these people have their way, we'll have to start memorizing them and whispering them to our children quietly, in the dark, waiting for the "story police" to come and bust us.
that fits on top of my tower and I'll be set. The dinosaurs aren't dead, they've just taken a while to "evolve" to a smaller package.
PC's are birds. I guess Linus realized that when he chose the penguin as a mascot.
I mean really, think about it. You can get a card with a vacuum tube on it, visual state displays, tape backup and water cooling, all the things that micros "obsoleted."
In the case of the Christian doctrine it is *The* Book. In it's original usage a generic meaning to apply to the *particular* book was probably intentional. Early Christians could talk about "the book" in public without an outsider knowing what they were specifically talking about.
You'll find the word used genercially even today in such words as bibliography and variations of the word are still the generic for book and library in many Latinate languages.
Let me repeat. Bible is not a religious word, any more than, say, genesis is.
You're right about the apple of course. There is no Biblical source for assuming this.
Me, I rather guess that the actual fruit was a banana.
So it's been out nearly 7 years now. Time flies when you're having fun I guess.
This book is perhaps Cliffie's greatest social contribution, but it really raised the neck hairs of many "technology advocates." It's absolutely bang on though and a "must read."
*Nobody* can accuse Cliffie of being anti technology. Being a professional technologist doesn't mean you can't recognize where its use appropriate and where it isn't.
Learing isn't simply a matter of filling out the right little box on the anwer sheet of a standardized tests. It's as much a social event as anything else, indeed this is the very argument of those that object to home learning ( a bogus complaint because there's plenty of society outside the classroom. In fact, that's where *most* of society is).
Some people who oppose home learning on this basis then advocate taking these children and placing them in cubes facing a glass titty.
I don't get it.
Hire good teachers, and then, for God's sake, *let them teach.* Although this thought scares some people. After all, little Buffy might just come home after finding that her parents, and government, have been lying to her.
We sure don't want *that,* do we? It's "unamerican."
I can find prior art for this as near as my neighbor's back yard. He's got one of those Madonna in a bathtub thingies. The Madonna and bathtub are both white. He has different colored spotlights he can shine on it to change its color depending on his mood.
He's been doing this for 40 years * that I know of.* I don't know how long before I moved in next door he'd been doing it.
You'll find the same technique used in any theatrical performance, rock show, movie or other such staged performance.
This technique is so old it isn't even medieval. It predates that period by a considerable margin.
And since when is chrome "tech?"
"Yeah, I advance the technology of my house by putting up some new wallpaper and adding a few colored lights."
transliteration. Or for that matter merely "translating" into a readable grammer. This is what untalented hacks do. A proper translation will go as far as it can to preserve everything, including idiom.
Poetry is the hardest to translate, but it can be done, particularly in the older metrical non rhyming "saga" type poems.
If any modern author has an inate sense of the importance of, and a fine ability to produce, proper cadanced epic poems, for God's sake man, it's certainly J.R.R.
Slashdot Mirror
and thinking, " You know, someday this will be in color, and text will be WYSIWYG and the screen will look like *paper*, with black text."
I was a visionary in my 30's. And I was right. We got it, and it was good, in fact it was awsome.
I was also a naive twit in my 30's. Nowadays I've "devolved" into reading mail in text mode using mutt. Dark background, white 80 column text you can read from halfway across a thirty foot room, and it's good. In fact, it's awsome.
A CRT isn't paper. Different rules apply. Your eyes, and the eyes of your readers, will thank you for realizing this.
Ah well, at least it's better than those websites that print black text on a textured navy blue background.
KFG
a clear distinction between the reality and the *model.* A clock may be analog or digital. A clock, or a time zone, is just a model of time. In fact, analog *means* model. *Time* is neither analog nor digital. It's reality. Time existed long before clocks. Plants can tell time. There is no such thing as a time "zone." x,y,z,t is literally true. Take one step to the left in space and you also "travel" in time.
For that matter, clocks don't even really measure what time it *is,* they really just measure the passage of time as a dynamic entity.
If you *really* want to know what "time" it *is* the best you can do is look up.
KFG
Actually. Just hit submit. . . and there you go.
KFG
It turned 5763 nearly four months ago. Is this some sort of new thing that someone forgot to tell me about?
Sheesh, I just can't keep up with the rate of social change these days.
KFG
It's because of a little thing called physics, with a hint of cosmology thrown in for good measure.
Time zones are just a logical construct with no real basis in reality whose only function is to give the illusion that trains run on time.
If they DID there might even be a point to them. Why on earth do they print train schedules with times like "1:37" on them when we all know it's really "Half past one to two somthing or other, depending on the phase of the moon and whether the crick rose any during the night"?
KFG
which show that having just *one* drink actually improves the driving of most people.
I doubt you've seen that trumpeted about the newspapers today though.
Go figure.
KFG
I'm afraid the government has been lying to you again my child, and you've bought it, hook, line and sinker. Well, it'll make you a happy little timeclock puncher so I guess I should just leave you alone.
x,y,z,t. Not just a good idea. It's the law.
KFG
your post, little one. Feel free to come back and play again, my son, but maybe you should wait until you've advanced to a stage somewhat beyond zygote.
At least learn to read first.
KFG
on the whole, are a species that received their judgeships from Craker Jack boxes. Such seems to be the nature of the beast. That is why, in part, we are blessed with courts of appeal. I won't even get into what I think of the typical city councilman who passes some of these "laws".
I'd note that I specifically said "on duty." Of course an officer not on duty is just an ordinary citizen. While on duty, as a state actor, an officer is given powers that would be extraordinary for a citizen, but this is balanced, to a certain extent, by a removal of certain rights they retain as citizens. The officer *as state actor* has fewer rights, just as, say, a soldier does ( who has damned few rights as the citizen understands them).
A police officer cannot arbitrarily switch back and forth from being a state actor and a citizen. If he collects my trash *while in uniform* he does so as a state actor. As such that trash is now evidence ( although possibly inadmissable) and the *property of the state,* not the officer, and it must be handled with the same protocols as all other evidence.
Including whatever restrictions on freedom of speach apply to evidence.
Of course, if he goes through my trash off duty and posts the contents to a web site he may well be surprised to find he only retains the *protections* of an ordinary citizen. Libel is actionable.
KFG
in several regards. He fully foresaw the time when the "problem of production" was fully solved. He actually forsaw the problem this would present for a capitalist industrial economy and pretty much asked all the right questions. Unfortunately he came up with pretty much all the wrong answers. Went a bit loopy at the end too.
The point of the matter is though that it's been quite a while since virtually all rote labor has been able to be performed by robots better than humans. It's been the humans that have been insisting on continuing to do this mindless, and pointless, labor in order that they may have "a job."
This last is just one of the symptoms of a social atmosphere based on humans as machines and their output as "the economy." Me, if a machine can do the job, I *don't want it.* Really, just kill me now if you have to. I'd just curl up in a ball and die of ennui anyway if forced to perform such laborious, yet mindless, tasks.
So what the hell do we do when the machines are doing all such tasks, as I believe they *should*?
How about what humans do better than machines? Think.
Maybe then we'll start to realize that the value and the purpose of a human being isn't to be a robot.
There's going to be a shitload of "shakeout" before that comes to pass though. Batten down the hatches.
KFG
if it's so easy to lift one foot, raise one arm, reeeeaaaaaaal slow, why does it seem so hard for me to get a human student to do it without falling right over?
This is a *major* advancment in humanoid robotics if they've actually pulled this off.
KFG
Tai Chi is not "shadow boxing" as the basically uninformative blurb the story links to states. It's a legitimate martial art perfectly useful for beating the crap out of people.
Yes, it has it's solo forms, typically practiced in slow motion, just as other martial arts have *their* practice kata, and just as these other martial arts have kata with partners so does Tai Chi, as well as full out sparing.
Don't be fooled by the new age types teaching it badly to Granny in the park, and don't take lessons in it from any instructor not competent to teach it *as* a martial art. They don't know what they're doing.
That said, any robot that can go through a Yang Long Form with me is a *major* step forward in humanoid robotics. Hell, it takes a great deal of practice and training for a *human* to do it vaguely properly and I want to see this puppy in action.
I wonder how it would do in "pushing hands"? That would be the ultimate test.
KFG
I am also aware that the film used for this piece is older than that. My parents were born a long time ago. My point stands.
KFG
A policeman, on duty, is an arm of the government, not a citizen. The policeman has sworn an oath to uphold the law *as* an instrument of the government. Actual ordinary citizens have to trust the police to do so or their entire function, indeed, the entire function of *law* falls into disrepute.The Constitution puts certain limits on the actions of police officers *because* the second they put on the that shield they are the government, not a citizen. Police have *fewer* rights than citizens.This is why the police have adopted the dodge of hiring ordinary citizens to go places and do things that they cannot.
A policeman who does not follow due process is the greatest threat to lawfulness there is.
Contrarywise, a journalist going through the trash of a public official to find out the truth has long been held to be one of the *greatest* preservers of democratic law that there is. See the Pentagon Papers.Protections for such behaviours were specifically written into the Constitution.
The entire function of the Constitution is to *restrict* the actions of government and law enforcement and *empower* citizens.
Indeed, some of the restrictions on law enforcment ( such as it taking a week to get a warrant) were overtly written to make it impossible to effectively prosecute certain unjust laws. That's the frikkin' *point.*
I don't wonder why some polititians might object to this.
KFG
I suppose it "benefits" them by continuing to allow them to rest peacefully in their graves.
If you are about the average age for a Slashdot reader I may well be older than your parents. Much of the material used had already passed into the public domain before *my* parents were born.
The film is *old.* There are no copyright holders.
KFG
abnormally shaped media is a novelty, and is soon rejected.
KFG
Most technology really only requires a bit of drive and a few smart people to develop. Hell, that's where it came from in the first place.
Most of America's restrictions on exporting tech overtly rely on the concept that America is just better and smarter than anyone else.
Bull puckies.
If America wants to maintain any sort of commercial lead in technology it has to distribute it in such a way that it's just plain easier and cheaper to *buy* it than develop it yourself.
As Goethe noted, everything has been thought of, the trick is to think of it again. The historical evidence is clear that anything America can think of so can China, Russia, England, Germany, etc.
Oh. Wait, as often as not these countries think of things *first* and America has to play catch-up.
The idea that you can 'restrict' technology is just plain doofey. If you can figure something out so can hundreds of thousands of others.
So go for it India. Think of stuff, build stuff, develop 'home grown' free software, put the screws to American 'tech' companies and make its government sweat bullets.
Maybe it'll get the country off its ass again, like Russia did when it launched a satellite years before anyone thought it would be possible.
Anything but this damned brand name pushing, marketroid driven 'economy' we've got now.
KFG
exactly what eBook protection is, a stupid joke?
I don't mean technically either, I mean in basic concept.
I don't know about you, but I'm simply not going to participate. If I feel the need of an eBook I'll go to Project Gutenberg. I havn't yet read all of Dumas or Dickens, the worst of which is better than any of the crap being shilled by Oprah. Twain, O Henry, GBS, Thoreau, Kipling, Swift, Sir Richard Burton, Melville, Hume, London, Conrad. . . Jesus, the list goes on for miles, all free for the taking, distributing, printing, even selling if you want.
I think it's somewhat ironic that one of the best uses of public domain eTexts is the ease with which specialty and art binders may now get source material.
So be radical. Screw MS and Adobe. Download the entire PG opus and freely *pass it on to your friends.* Print the son of a bitch and hand it out on the street corners.
Otherwise, if these people have their way, we'll have to start memorizing them and whispering them to our children quietly, in the dark, waiting for the "story police" to come and bust us.
KFG
coming from the same root.
[Middle English, from Old French, from Late Latin biblia, from Greek, pl. of biblion, book diminutive of biblos, papyrus, book, from Bublos Byblos.]
KFG
that fits on top of my tower and I'll be set. The dinosaurs aren't dead, they've just taken a while to "evolve" to a smaller package.
.
PC's are birds. I guess Linus realized that when he chose the penguin as a mascot.
I mean really, think about it. You can get a card with a vacuum tube on it, visual state displays, tape backup and water cooling, all the things that micros "obsoleted."
The more things change. .
KFG
stuck it in her *throat*?
KFG
In the case of the Christian doctrine it is *The* Book. In it's original usage a generic meaning to apply to the *particular* book was probably intentional. Early Christians could talk about "the book" in public without an outsider knowing what they were specifically talking about.
You'll find the word used genercially even today in such words as bibliography and variations of the word are still the generic for book and library in many Latinate languages.
Let me repeat. Bible is not a religious word, any more than, say, genesis is.
You're right about the apple of course. There is no Biblical source for assuming this.
Me, I rather guess that the actual fruit was a banana.
KFG
So it's been out nearly 7 years now. Time flies when you're having fun I guess.
This book is perhaps Cliffie's greatest social contribution, but it really raised the neck hairs of many "technology advocates." It's absolutely bang on though and a "must read."
*Nobody* can accuse Cliffie of being anti technology. Being a professional technologist doesn't mean you can't recognize where its use appropriate and where it isn't.
Learing isn't simply a matter of filling out the right little box on the anwer sheet of a standardized tests. It's as much a social event as anything else, indeed this is the very argument of those that object to home learning ( a bogus complaint because there's plenty of society outside the classroom. In fact, that's where *most* of society is).
Some people who oppose home learning on this basis then advocate taking these children and placing them in cubes facing a glass titty.
I don't get it.
Hire good teachers, and then, for God's sake, *let them teach.* Although this thought scares some people. After all, little Buffy might just come home after finding that her parents, and government, have been lying to her.
We sure don't want *that,* do we? It's "unamerican."
KFG
I can find prior art for this as near as my neighbor's back yard. He's got one of those Madonna in a bathtub thingies. The Madonna and bathtub are both white. He has different colored spotlights he can shine on it to change its color depending on his mood.
He's been doing this for 40 years * that I know of.* I don't know how long before I moved in next door he'd been doing it.
You'll find the same technique used in any theatrical performance, rock show, movie or other such staged performance.
This technique is so old it isn't even medieval. It predates that period by a considerable margin.
And since when is chrome "tech?"
"Yeah, I advance the technology of my house by putting up some new wallpaper and adding a few colored lights."
Right Bob, bite me.
KFG
transliteration. Or for that matter merely "translating" into a readable grammer. This is what untalented hacks do. A proper translation will go as far as it can to preserve everything, including idiom.
Poetry is the hardest to translate, but it can be done, particularly in the older metrical non rhyming "saga" type poems.
If any modern author has an inate sense of the importance of, and a fine ability to produce, proper cadanced epic poems, for God's sake man, it's certainly J.R.R.
KFG