Well, (1) the bots are (or can be) made to message you unprompted, thus forcing you to at least filter them (if you know how), or talk to them (if you don't), and (2) by posing as 'real people' and targeting children, the bots are being dishonest and manipulative. The fact that other advertising has also been dishonest and manipulative doesn't excuse anything here.
Jerking off to anime of 13 year old girls fucking = free speech. Sending an advertisement to a 13 year old girl = "disturbing".
That's correct. Distasteful as it may be to some, the production and voluntary consumption of hentai is a victimless non-crime, and if you don't like it, you are free not to watch it. Disguising ad-bots as playmates in order to extract money from children (who haven't necessarily developed the skills to differentiate between a new IM friend and a corporate shill-bot), on the other hand, is bordering on fraud. Quite disturbing.
The idea of spoofing another child in order to sell products to children is certainly distrurbing, but if the example conversation shown in the article is at all representative of the quality of the "AI", then I'm not too worried (yet)--even the youngest and most naive child will recognize that it's a bot on the other end of the line pretty quick. It might even teach them a valuable lesson about not making assumptions about the true nature of their IM buddies...
If they ever get the AI chatting to be higher than "Eliza" level, let me know.
Not really. Keep in mind that hydrogen is a gas, and as such can/will increase its volume when released from its high-pressure container (in this case, the rock). As such, it isn't a contradiction for a cubic metre of rock to contain many litres of hydrogen.
(offtopic) Re:The true question....
on
e-Denounce
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· Score: 2
(pronounced "war-ez" and not "wares" by the true junkies)
One of the sysadmins at my previous job pronounced it that way, and I couldn't figure out why... isn't "warez" a shortened/l33t form of "softwares"? If so, shouldn't it be pronounced the same way? War-ez just sounds like Juarez, the city in Mexico...
I would imagine that there are few people involved in senate or the house who could fight something like this forever, because they would have then shown a consistant record of voting against something...thus causing loss of donations because corporations feel you cannot be swayed.
Wow, that is the most unabashedly cynical thing I have read all year. My hat is off to you, sir.:^)
Yeah right. Unless your grandma can build one of these, I wouldn't count on them replacing TiVos or Replays anytime soon.
Well, she probably can't. But I (or some other bored Slashdotter) could, and then I/he can turn around and sell it to Grandma for a small markup. (barring any swarming lawyer attacks, of course)
Libraries make value decisions all the time about what content to provide. They consciously censor on whatever criteria it is they use.
No, it's different, because the library must pay (in money and shelf space) for each book it buys. Because the library has a finite amount of book-buying funds, such value decisions are necessary. With the Internet, all content is equally available by default, and it costs the library more to make some of it unavailable than it does to just leave it all available.
A more accurate analogy would be if Congress agreed to fund a bulk book-of-the-month club subscription on the library's behalf, but only if the library agreed to hire someone to go through the received books each month and throw away the books that he considered 'offensive'.
Dunno much about the bills, I had always voted for Fienstein before in spite of all the crud she supported that I did not like. Now after this I think I am switching to the Republican party.
Don't bother, the Republicans are just as much in the pocket of corporations as the Democrats are. If you really want someone who represents the peoples' interests, and not those of the campaign contributors, you're going to have to go with a third party. I suggest this one, as they do not accept corporate contributions, and are thus unlikely to be influenced by corporate money.
First of all, it's not a perfect copy! This myth has been allowed to propagate too far, for too long
It won't be long until people have the bandwidth to distribute.WAV files or even.ISO images... and for many people with less-than-perfect ears (myself included) a good mp3 recording doesn't sound noticably different from the original. Not to mention the fact that every copy after the original encoding IS a perfect copy of the original mp3. So I think this argument isn't a very persuasive one.
Unless i find a way of converting 5000+ songs in less than a couple days
Are you in a hurry? Write up a conversion script, run it in the background, leave your computer running, and go about your life for a couple of days.... no sweat.
You're getting something for nothing, no matter what way you look at it
It's not inherently immoral to get something for nothing. Every time you inhale, you're getting air for nothing... and nobody considers breathing to be immoral.
Look at it this way: if computers, the Internet, mp3 players, etc had been invented 5,000 years ago, and were available/affordable to anyone who wanted one... if everyone in the world had had the ability to send and receive digital information to everyone else since time immemorial, would there even be the concept of copyright infringment? Quite the contrary, I think -- instead, the right to copy files would be protected as a 'natural God-given right'.
The idea that Joe may dictate what Sue does, with her own equipment, in the privacy of her own home, is merely an artifact, a historical accident, that will fade away as digital communications become as natural as breathing. Certainly unrestricted digital copying can give content creators the short end of the stick under the current system, but the current system is also an artifact of the now-obsolete physical/industrial model of content distribution. It too will fade away, and (presumably) be replaced with another system, one that better reflects the new realities.
I know the legal difference between copyright infringement and theft, thank you very much. I'm talking about the moral implications of what he was saying
On the other hand, morality does change and evolve over time. What was considered immoral then is considered moral now, or vice versa. I submit that with the advent of personal computers and the Internet, the moral status of not-for-profit copyright infringment needs to be revisited.
Re:a little nonsense, but hey - it's near April Fo
on
Globalism Post 9/11
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· Score: 2
When you come to America know that we like our guns (among other things).
Don't listen to him. I'm an American, and I don't like guns one bit. Neither do most Americans I know.
If your country is so much better, then go back.
If you can't handle constructive criticism, then at least don't try to stop others when they try to help improve our country. The only thing that keeps America great is constant improvement, and if everyone were to just plug their ears and chant "America is great, love it or leave it" the way you do, then America would quickly stagnate and become inferior. Oh wait, that's exactly what is happening...:^P
How to put pressure on politicians so they will do their damn jobs they already get paid for and ignore lobbyists
I'll give you a hint -- the cure for a Republican isn't to replace him with a Democrat, or vice versa. The Democrats and the Republicans are both bought and paid for by the same corporations, and they merely play a game of good-cop/bad-cop to get you to vote for one party or the other -- but no matter which of the two parties wins, the corporations are in control. Hence the SSSCA, DMCA, etc.
If you don't like this situation, I suggest you vote for one of our fine third parties, and/or support a transition to instant runoff voting to help break the Democrat and Republican parties' lock on elections.
Keep in mind that Aqua is the all-singing, all-dancing, vectorized, resolution-independent, Altivec-blasting, next-generation UI engine. As such, it's doing a lot more work that your standard blit-the-pixels window manager. Whether you think it's worth it to do things at a higher level like this, is up to you; in my opinion, it is, or will be in a few months. If you've got a 5GHz G5 sitting in your Mac, you might as well give it some work to do....
Kurt Skauren(sp?), progenitor of AtheOS, cannot be too pleased about this.
If I was Kurt, I would be very pleased about this. Someone reusing your code is about the highest praise they can give it. If you're thinking that Kurt is worried about AtheOS losing mindshare.... well, he has said himself that he doesn't hope that AtheOS will take over the world; it's more of a personal plaything for him. Given that, what's the problem with another GPL'd OS using its code?
Opening up a storefront makes for a much larger radar blip than some random link
Who said anything about opening up a storefront? You can sell unlicensed CDs off of a table on the street corner (which is quite common), or from your home over the Internet. It's not terribly difficult to do.
So people will buy this valueless corporate data from a warez site, but not from a licensed vendor?
Because the warez site can sell it for only slightly more than the cost of reproducing the media (e.g. $1.99 for a movie, $2.99 for Windows XP), whereas the licensed vendor has to pay the content producers, and must therefore pass costs of production on to the buyer (which is why legally sold movies and software cost tens or hundreds of dollars).
It is not possible to copy hard work.
Sure, but neither is it necessary to do so. One need only wait for the results of the hard work, and copy them.
A zero-effort copy is worth exactly zero. It has no value by definition.
You have a very strange definition of value. Under a capitalist system, if I can sell something for $5, then it is worth $5 to me, no more and no less. What an item is worth has nothing to do with how much it cost me to produce it. As a silly example, I buy two lottery tickets. Both cost me exactly $1 to procure, but one is worth millions and the other is worthless.
Products, OTOH, have value because they are not zero-effort.
Absolutely wrong. Value is not determined by cost of production, but solely by the price the buyers are willing to pay. See above.
Businesses have an incentive to perform that effort. Warez d00dz do not.
Again, warez d00dz (at least some of them) have incentive as well, people will pay them money to do so.
Businesses are willing to put the effort into making a polished product for sale (a carton of orange juice), when it is only a matter of a little time and effort to produce unlimited oranges (an orchard or even one orange tree) for the customer. Yet people buy millions of dollars worth of orange juice every week.
Sure, because the time and effort it takes to make your own oranges outweighs the time and effort it takes to just buy a carton of juice. Such is not usually the case with digital data.
To my best knowledge, Sun's JVM never returns free memory to the OS[1]
Are you pointing to a debug/design flaw in Sun's implementation and saying that it is a fundamental flaw in the Java language? If so, please explain why.
w4r3z d00dz have no incentive other than if they happen to feel like it to make copies available.
Cash money isn't an incentive for pirates? People do pay for pirated stuff, you know.
Fortunately, it isn't possible to yet copy hard work.
In the case of digital content, it's extremely easy to copy the results of hard work. That's the issue here. [...]The convenience of not having to tend an orchard is more valuable than $16/month
That's not a good analogy -- copying a CD or DVD is nowhere near as difficult as tending an orchard.
US industry is much cleaner than any developing 3rd world or former Soviet industry, yet it's always the US they want to screw over! Lets see Russia or Japan sign the Kyoto accords, don't hand us the hari kiri knife.
Well, someone has to lead the way. Why not us? If any country has the cash and resources to clean up their energy systems, it's the USA. We put a man on the moon, right? Hell, if we put a real effort into it, we'd probably develop all kinds of new technologies that could then be implemented cheaply in other nations, making them much more likely to follow suit.
This "we won't do anything until someone else does it first" attitude is childish, irresponsible, and does nobody any good.
There's very simple argument in favor of more nuclear power - Coal plants, during their operation , *will* kill many many more people than a nuclear plant.
Given your rational POV, you surely know what a "false dilemna" is?
Personally, I think there ought to be more R&D spent on solar chimneys.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, (1) the bots are (or can be) made to message you unprompted, thus forcing you to at least filter them (if you know how), or talk to them (if you don't), and (2) by posing as 'real people' and targeting children, the bots are being dishonest and manipulative. The fact that other advertising has also been dishonest and manipulative doesn't excuse anything here.
That's correct. Distasteful as it may be to some, the production and voluntary consumption of hentai is a victimless non-crime, and if you don't like it, you are free not to watch it. Disguising ad-bots as playmates in order to extract money from children (who haven't necessarily developed the skills to differentiate between a new IM friend and a corporate shill-bot), on the other hand, is bordering on fraud. Quite disturbing.
If they ever get the AI chatting to be higher than "Eliza" level, let me know.
Not really. Keep in mind that hydrogen is a gas, and as such can/will increase its volume when released from its high-pressure container (in this case, the rock). As such, it isn't a contradiction for a cubic metre of rock to contain many litres of hydrogen.
One of the sysadmins at my previous job pronounced it that way, and I couldn't figure out why... isn't "warez" a shortened/l33t form of "softwares"? If so, shouldn't it be pronounced the same way? War-ez just sounds like Juarez, the city in Mexico...
Wow, that is the most unabashedly cynical thing I have read all year. My hat is off to you, sir.
Well, she probably can't. But I (or some other bored Slashdotter) could, and then I/he can turn around and sell it to Grandma for a small markup. (barring any swarming lawyer attacks, of course)
Libraries make value decisions all the time about what content to provide. They consciously censor on
whatever criteria it is they use.
No, it's different, because the library must pay (in money and shelf space) for each book it buys. Because the library has a finite amount of book-buying funds, such value decisions are necessary. With the Internet, all content is equally available by default, and it costs the library more to make some of it unavailable than it does to just leave it all available.
A more accurate analogy would be if Congress agreed to fund a bulk book-of-the-month club subscription on the library's behalf, but only if the library agreed to hire someone to go through the received books each month and throw away the books that he considered 'offensive'.
Don't bother, the Republicans are just as much in the pocket of corporations as the Democrats are. If you really want someone who represents the peoples' interests, and not those of the campaign contributors, you're going to have to go with a third party. I suggest this one, as they do not accept corporate contributions, and are thus unlikely to be influenced by corporate money.
It won't be long until people have the bandwidth to distribute
Are you in a hurry? Write up a conversion script, run it in the background, leave your computer running, and go about your life for a couple of days.... no sweat.
It's not inherently immoral to get something for nothing. Every time you inhale, you're getting air for nothing... and nobody considers breathing to be immoral.
Look at it this way: if computers, the Internet, mp3 players, etc had been invented 5,000 years ago, and were available/affordable to anyone who wanted one... if everyone in the world had had the ability to send and receive digital information to everyone else since time immemorial, would there even be the concept of copyright infringment? Quite the contrary, I think -- instead, the right to copy files would be protected as a 'natural God-given right'.
The idea that Joe may dictate what Sue does, with her own equipment, in the privacy of her own home, is merely an artifact, a historical accident, that will fade away as digital communications become as natural as breathing. Certainly unrestricted digital copying can give content creators the short end of the stick under the current system, but the current system is also an artifact of the now-obsolete physical/industrial model of content distribution. It too will fade away, and (presumably) be replaced with another system, one that better reflects the new realities.
Obviously, you shouldn't. This device is made for people who don't have the time, skill, or inclination to build their own box.
thank you very much. I'm talking about the moral implications of what he was saying
On the other hand, morality does change and evolve over time. What was considered immoral then is considered moral now, or vice versa. I submit that with the advent of personal computers and the Internet, the moral status of not-for-profit copyright infringment needs to be revisited.
Don't listen to him. I'm an American, and I don't like guns one bit. Neither do most Americans I know.
If your country is so much better, then go back.
If you can't handle constructive criticism, then at least don't try to stop others when they try to help improve our country. The only thing that keeps America great is constant improvement, and if everyone were to just plug their ears and chant "America is great, love it or leave it" the way you do, then America would quickly stagnate and become inferior. Oh wait, that's exactly what is happening...
Try National Public Radio, it works for me.
If you want a daily dose of half-baked inventions, check out The Half-Bakery. It's an excellent site for the inventive/whimsical mind.
I'll give you a hint -- the cure for a Republican isn't to replace him with a Democrat, or vice versa. The Democrats and the Republicans are both bought and paid for by the same corporations, and they merely play a game of good-cop/bad-cop to get you to vote for one party or the other -- but no matter which of the two parties wins, the corporations are in control. Hence the SSSCA, DMCA, etc.
If you don't like this situation, I suggest you vote for one of our fine third parties, and/or support a transition to instant runoff voting to help break the Democrat and Republican parties' lock on elections.
Keep in mind that Aqua is the all-singing, all-dancing, vectorized, resolution-independent, Altivec-blasting, next-generation UI engine. As such, it's doing a lot more work that your standard blit-the-pixels window manager. Whether you think it's worth it to do things at a higher level like this, is up to you; in my opinion, it is, or will be in a few months. If you've got a 5GHz G5 sitting in your Mac, you might as well give it some work to do....
If I was Kurt, I would be very pleased about this. Someone reusing your code is about the highest praise they can give it. If you're thinking that Kurt is worried about AtheOS losing mindshare.... well, he has said himself that he doesn't hope that AtheOS will take over the world; it's more of a personal plaything for him. Given that, what's the problem with another GPL'd OS using its code?
Let a million flowers bloom, I say.
Overruled.
Opening up a storefront makes for a much larger radar blip than some random link
Who said anything about opening up a storefront? You can sell unlicensed CDs off of a table on the street corner (which is quite common), or from your home over the Internet. It's not terribly difficult to do.
So people will buy this valueless corporate data from a warez site, but not from a licensed vendor?
Because the warez site can sell it for only slightly more than the cost of reproducing the media (e.g. $1.99 for a movie, $2.99 for Windows XP), whereas the licensed vendor has to pay the content producers, and must therefore pass costs of production on to the buyer (which is why legally sold movies and software cost tens or hundreds of dollars).
It is not possible to copy hard work.
Sure, but neither is it necessary to do so. One need only wait for the results of the hard work, and copy them.
A zero-effort copy is worth exactly zero. It has no value by definition.
You have a very strange definition of value. Under a capitalist system, if I can sell something for $5, then it is worth $5 to me, no more and no less. What an item is worth has nothing to do with how much it cost me to produce it. As a silly example, I buy two lottery tickets. Both cost me exactly $1 to procure, but one is worth millions and the other is worthless.
Products, OTOH, have value because they are not zero-effort.
Absolutely wrong. Value is not determined by cost of production, but solely by the price the buyers are willing to pay. See above.
Businesses have an incentive to perform that effort. Warez d00dz do
not.
Again, warez d00dz (at least some of them) have incentive as well, people will pay them money to do so.
Businesses are willing to put the effort into making a polished
product for sale (a carton of orange juice), when it is only a matter of a little time and effort to produce unlimited oranges (an orchard or even one orange tree) for the customer. Yet people buy millions of dollars worth of orange juice every week.
Sure, because the time and effort it takes to make your own oranges outweighs the time and effort it takes to just buy a carton of juice. Such is not usually the case with digital data.
Are you pointing to a debug/design flaw in Sun's implementation and saying that it is a fundamental flaw in the Java language? If so, please explain why.
Cash money isn't an incentive for pirates? People do pay for pirated stuff, you know.
Fortunately, it isn't possible to yet copy hard work.
In the case of digital content, it's extremely easy to copy the results of hard work. That's the issue here.
[...]The convenience of not having to tend an orchard is more valuable than $16/month
That's not a good analogy -- copying a CD or DVD is nowhere near as difficult as tending an orchard.
Well, someone has to lead the way. Why not us? If any country has the cash and resources to clean up their energy systems, it's the USA. We put a man on the moon, right? Hell, if we put a real effort into it, we'd probably develop all kinds of new technologies that could then be implemented cheaply in other nations, making them much more likely to follow suit.
This "we won't do anything until someone else does it first" attitude is childish, irresponsible, and does nobody any good.
Given your rational POV, you surely know what a "false dilemna" is?
Personally, I think there ought to be more R&D spent on solar chimneys.