His facial expressions and gestures are even better than his quotes in Strangelove. Watch the movie and just pay close attention to those. It'll leave you in tears. It's even funnier than any of the three Sellers characters or Slim Pickins' plane ride.
Strangelove's brief apperance was pretty good tho:-)
Fun fact about the movie: The plane captain was going to be a fourth Sellers role, but he was unsure about the Texan accent, so they used Slim Pickins instead. And, when the movie was being filmed, Kubrick didn't tell Pickins that the movie was a comedy. He thought he was the hero.
To be effective, they would have to register practically permutation of such words, otherwise there would still be combinations hate groups could use. Witness the stunning number of domains porn sites have come up with - and that without even any use of certain words.
Seems like we keep coming up with AI "tests" to see if a machine can be considered "intelligent", and then we immediately turn around and try to hack something together that might pass the test, albeit barely. We say that writing a story would need insight into the human condition, which we plainly cannot program into a computer right now. Then, we write a program that can, in a limited sense, tell a story. Then we debate wheter the program, because it can tell a short story, has insight into the human condition. To do that, I think you would need a neural net with a complexity on the order of a human brain, and give it several years of training, just like a human brain.
It's been a while for me too (about 7 years) but dave bowman found the third monolith on a moon orbiting saturn. The black dot was, of course, a huge monolith that took him through some kind of wormhole.
The story was changed for the movie, in which the third monolith was orbiting Jupiter. Probably to include Life on Europa in the next story. The books written after that followed the movie's storyline.
Sounds like something right out or Arthur C Clarke's 2010 and 2061. Basically he wrote about Europa having all the ingredients for life (specifically plenty of water) except for a nearby heat source (which is why the monolith turned Jupiter into a star). He wrote about some life forming at the bottom of this ocean next to sources of geothermal heat.
For no particular reason other than so other/. people can see who hangs out here, here's my answers to their questions:
A brief biography and description of yourself:
I'm probably pretty typical on this one - freshman in college double majoring in CS and EE. I go to the Colorado School of Mines and play a lot of ultimate. I am also a wrestler and a pole vaulter.
The background of how you first became interested in Slashdot.
Hmmmmmm... Kindof a chain of events. I've been programming computers since 4th grade, but it was in the last two years that I found my way here. I decided to get my own computer so I started searching for sites on how to pick out the hardware. I found a good one that went step by step and proved to be a good resource. At the very end, it said "After all that, you're not going to ruin it with windows, ARE YOU?????" and threw in a plug for linux and BeOS, both of which I hadn't heard of. I went to Linux sites and downloaded and installed it from floppy disk images, and of course once I had it installed I started keeping up with linux news - on Linux Mall's front page. They kept linking to Slashdot stories though, so I eventually saw where the action was.
I also approached this corner of the net from another direction. Just out of curiosity one day I did a web search on "how to be a hacker". It took me straight to ESR's essay, entitled "How to be a Hacker." And that run-in with the oss people also took me here.
It was a while before I got an account here though. For months, I just read and didn't even post anything. Then I posted for a while as an AC, and finally decided to get an account. I don't like racking up passwords on the web, so the only ones I have for actual web sites are slashdot.org and netaddress.com
Any interesting anecdotes from your time in Slashdot
Anecdotes? Yeah. I can think of three. One is the Columbine story - the first one right after it happened. I live in Littleton, CO and last year I graduated from a school that was a Columbine rival (in soccer anyway). I was surprised at first to even see it on Slashdot (sometimes when you're really close to something like that, you don't realize how big a deal it really is in the rest of the world) but the comments here gave me a very good perspective on it. I remember that a lot of misinformation was spreading around here so I stuck around counteracting a lot of it. My school is an awful lot like Columbine and yet I was almost completely unaware of the rift between cliques. I was on the wrestling and track teams, and also a bunch of AP classes and computer and chess groups, so I had friends from all groups who probably wouldn't like each other. The whole thing was a big eye-opener.
Another anecdote is the recent evolution story here, where pretty much everyone had to put in their 2 cents. I was no exception, and I wrote a piece filled to overflowing with satire and sarcasm, but not the real grating obvious kind. Basically it took the viewpoint of an ignorant bigot who saw no need for science, or for that matter thinking, in this world. I was trying to provoke thought and make people laugh, and I think I did, but what I should have counted on was that some people just didn't see the sarcasm. Four or five people actually. It just went right by them, and they posted long rebuttals to my comment (which I think made it to level 4 or something). I spent an hour or so rereading them and laughing. I particularly liked another guy's response to one of said posts, which was to simply copy and paste the definition of 'sarcasm' out of a dictionary.
Finally, last year I got out of a social studies class with slashdot. It's true! See, I needed extra social studies credits which didn't fit well in my schedule so I asked about an independant study. They said pick a topic so I wrote "Rights in Cyberspace" (the new section would have been very helpful). So then I spent alot of time reading and posting here, and I used this place as a springboard for my research on my independant study topic, finding other good sources from links people posted here. I covered "decency" laws, intellectual property, and cryptography restrictions, and that was my study. I wrote 3 essays over the semester and finished it off with a big presentation for the principal and some Littleton Public Schools higher-ups about Cryptography. It included a powerpoint presentation explaining public keys, authentication, and hash functions complete with neat little animated diagrams. They loved it, and I got an A+ for the semester!
An explanation of what being in the Slashdot community means to you and friendships that you have formed here.
Absolutely nothing. Nada. Zilch. I haven't made any friends here. How are you supposed to make friends on slashdot for chrissakes? I have friends that I can TALK TO and VISIT and DO STUFF WITH. I don't come HERE for friends. Jeez...
How your life on Slashdot contrasts with your normal life.
I don't think of it as my "life on slashdot". Sure, it's a community, but not a life. I come here because I like the variety and the sometimes intelligent discussions. Mostly I think it's the site design. I mean, this is what you call a well designed web site. It is astheticaly pleasing, responsive, and lets you follow discussions in an organized, easily readable manner. And due to the excellent moderation system, the signal to noise ratio is quite high compared to most places on the net.
Oh, and the slashboxes. Can't forget the slashboxes. A few months ago I didn't think I would ever want to use a portal, but here I am using/. as my portal. Most of the sites I frequent have slashboxes here, and I can see right away if they've been updated or not. This is what the big name companies wish they could do, but here it is done right. This just loads as my home page and it's all right there at my fingertips.
if they tie it too closely, some people will make slashdot into a big game, where the object is to get as many karma points as you can so that you can have the most influence you can, both in your moderation and high initial comment scores. I know some people already think of it this way, but it's not something to be encouraged.
Besides having all the hardware be compatible, a linux notebook needs a keyboard without windows keys. Actually, what would be ideal is if they copied the happy hacking keyboard exactly, and just built it into a notebook. That would rock.
Also, a 3 button mouse for X would be nice, plus a graphics chipset that is accelerated under X.
That was probably a little too prompt
on
KDE 1.1.2 is out
·
· Score: 2
If it's so new that you tell us in the feature about a bunch of servers it's not even AT yet, perhaps it shouldn't be on slashdot yet. What's a few extra hours?
That has got to be THE most technical interview I have ever read. Kindof weird how they bounce back and fourth between talking about issues of interprocess communication and shared memory in a beowulf cluster and "What are your plans for ____?"
I don't even the whole "substitution" method of making ads to begin with. Unless it's REALLY clever, they usually aren't that good.
My favorite ads are the ones that either make you laugh a LOT, or make you say "That is really clever". Substitution generally does neither. Car--Bullet? Mosque--Tennis Ball? So what?
My favorites are usually the super bowl ones, because they aren't so concerned with getting the point across that their product is "classy" or whatever as they are with making it stick in the viewer's mind. Let name recognition do the rest. I don't CARE what morphing effect you can do to make your car synonimous with a first class plane ticket or whatever. It won't make me buy the car. What just might make me buy the car is if the company has some very high name recognition (combined of course with a reputation for quality). Ads, no matter how clever, cannot create a reputation for quality, because they are coming from the company selling the product. But they can generate name recognition.
I think the basic idea behind thin clients should bring back the "good old days" of dumb terminals. By good old days, I mean the days when you could walk up to any terminal in the office, log in, and everything would be exactly the same, because you are in your server account. The days when a sysadmin could install something once, and it took effect everywhere. This should be done again with GUIs. The challenges are that graphics take more processing and bandwidth.
Someone needs to make a thin client that has all the computer parts except any kind of disk drive or other moving parts. It should boot off the network, and to run anything, copy the executable from the server into RAM. Any stored data it operates on should be written to and read from the server. All processing (except big jobs) and graphics rendering should be done on the client. That would both simplify things for the sysadmin and bring back the good old days. It would also operate very fast.
In the submissions section, include a checkbox that says, "This is my personal site. I give Slashdot permission to create a temporary mirror to handle the load should it be linked to in a featured article."
Instead of nitpicking over the details of the current email system, look at the fundamental way computers can move - and authenticate - information.
You can be sure email was delivered and unread if you encrypt it, digitally sign it, and send it, and then get back an encrypted, digitally signed confirmation from the reciever that they got it.
This level of security and authentication could never be claimed by snail mail.
While snail mail will obviouly never go away completely, I think package shipping has pretty much got it made.
Snail mail is typically a delivery of INFORMATION, which can now be better done in other ways. With packages, you are sending a THING, and until some star-trekkish system goes into widespread use, more and more packages will be shipped through FedEx, UPS, etc.
I used to almost never have things shipped to me - I'd go buy them. But since I can now easily do price comparison shopping and find good deals online, I have ordered things shipped to me every week or so.
I hear from others the BeOS is an EXTREMELY nicely designed environment to program in, since they had the advantage of wiping the slate clean and starting over. I hear that code is very reusable, and the applications can communicate through a messaging protocol, and that the toolkit is a very clean design. I hear that application development is very rapid and that usually the end product ends up running like a dream.
Now THAT was an awesome movie, made awesome by a very good actor. You could feel that kid's pain. And that is, of course, what Ender's Game needs.
Interestingly, I have seen both Jake Lloyd and the Sixth Sense kid as guests on the Tonight show. They both came across as pretty sharp people to me. Lloyd was a little cocky, like he's letting Hollywood get to his head. The other kid (I forget his name) seems like a better actor and when he was on Leno it became immediately obvious that he was in the smartest 1% of the people in the room.
Slashdot Mirror
His facial expressions and gestures are even better than his quotes in Strangelove. Watch the movie and just pay close attention to those. It'll leave you in tears. It's even funnier than any of the three Sellers characters or Slim Pickins' plane ride.
:-)
Strangelove's brief apperance was pretty good tho
Fun fact about the movie: The plane captain was going to be a fourth Sellers role, but he was unsure about the Texan accent, so they used Slim Pickins instead. And, when the movie was being filmed, Kubrick didn't tell Pickins that the movie was a comedy. He thought he was the hero.
Yeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeehaaaaaaaaaaaawwwwwwwww.....
--
grappler
To be effective, they would have to register practically permutation of such words, otherwise there would still be combinations hate groups could use. Witness the stunning number of domains porn sites have come up with - and that without even any use of certain words.
--
grappler
Really? Cool! I didn't know that little tidbit. I just assumed he wrote the book AFTER he saw the white oval.
Jeez...
Does anyone know of any plans to support Befs under linux?
--
grappler
Seems like we keep coming up with AI "tests" to see if a machine can be considered "intelligent", and then we immediately turn around and try to hack something together that might pass the test, albeit barely. We say that writing a story would need insight into the human condition, which we plainly cannot program into a computer right now. Then, we write a program that can, in a limited sense, tell a story. Then we debate wheter the program, because it can tell a short story, has insight into the human condition. To do that, I think you would need a neural net with a complexity on the order of a human brain, and give it several years of training, just like a human brain.
--
grappler
Leak stuff to us by posting as an AC and moderating the post to level 5. Nobody can prove it's you.
It's been a while for me too (about 7 years) but dave bowman found the third monolith on a moon orbiting saturn. The black dot was, of course, a huge monolith that took him through some kind of wormhole.
The story was changed for the movie, in which the third monolith was orbiting Jupiter. Probably to include Life on Europa in the next story. The books written after that followed the movie's storyline.
Sounds like something right out or Arthur C Clarke's 2010 and 2061. Basically he wrote about Europa having all the ingredients for life (specifically plenty of water) except for a nearby heat source (which is why the monolith turned Jupiter into a star). He wrote about some life forming at the bottom of this ocean next to sources of geothermal heat.
Cool.
For no particular reason other than so other /. people can see who hangs out here, here's my answers to their questions:
A brief biography and description of yourself:
I'm probably pretty typical on this one - freshman in college double majoring in CS and EE. I go to the Colorado School of Mines and play a lot of ultimate. I am also a wrestler and a pole vaulter.
The background of how you first became interested in Slashdot.
Hmmmmmm... Kindof a chain of events. I've been programming computers since 4th grade, but it was in the last two years that I found my way here. I decided to get my own computer so I started searching for sites on how to pick out the hardware. I found a good one that went step by step and proved to be a good resource. At the very end, it said "After all that, you're not going to ruin it with windows, ARE YOU?????" and threw in a plug for linux and BeOS, both of which I hadn't heard of. I went to Linux sites and downloaded and installed it from floppy disk images, and of course once I had it installed I started keeping up with linux news - on Linux Mall's front page. They kept linking to Slashdot stories though, so I eventually saw where the action was.
I also approached this corner of the net from another direction. Just out of curiosity one day I did a web search on "how to be a hacker". It took me straight to ESR's essay, entitled "How to be a Hacker." And that run-in with the oss people also took me here.
It was a while before I got an account here though. For months, I just read and didn't even post anything. Then I posted for a while as an AC, and finally decided to get an account. I don't like racking up passwords on the web, so the only ones I have for actual web sites are slashdot.org and netaddress.com
Any interesting anecdotes from your time in Slashdot
Anecdotes? Yeah. I can think of three. One is the Columbine story - the first one right after it happened. I live in Littleton, CO and last year I graduated from a school that was a Columbine rival (in soccer anyway). I was surprised at first to even see it on Slashdot (sometimes when you're really close to something like that, you don't realize how big a deal it really is in the rest of the world) but the comments here gave me a very good perspective on it. I remember that a lot of misinformation was spreading around here so I stuck around counteracting a lot of it. My school is an awful lot like Columbine and yet I was almost completely unaware of the rift between cliques. I was on the wrestling and track teams, and also a bunch of AP classes and computer and chess groups, so I had friends from all groups who probably wouldn't like each other. The whole thing was a big eye-opener.
Another anecdote is the recent evolution story here, where pretty much everyone had to put in their 2 cents. I was no exception, and I wrote a piece filled to overflowing with satire and sarcasm, but not the real grating obvious kind. Basically it took the viewpoint of an ignorant bigot who saw no need for science, or for that matter thinking, in this world. I was trying to provoke thought and make people laugh, and I think I did, but what I should have counted on was that some people just didn't see the sarcasm. Four or five people actually. It just went right by them, and they posted long rebuttals to my comment (which I think made it to level 4 or something). I spent an hour or so rereading them and laughing. I particularly liked another guy's response to one of said posts, which was to simply copy and paste the definition of 'sarcasm' out of a dictionary.
Finally, last year I got out of a social studies class with slashdot. It's true! See, I needed extra social studies credits which didn't fit well in my schedule so I asked about an independant study. They said pick a topic so I wrote "Rights in Cyberspace" (the new section would have been very helpful). So then I spent alot of time reading and posting here, and I used this place as a springboard for my research on my independant study topic, finding other good sources from links people posted here. I covered "decency" laws, intellectual property, and cryptography restrictions, and that was my study. I wrote 3 essays over the semester and finished it off with a big presentation for the principal and some Littleton Public Schools higher-ups about Cryptography. It included a powerpoint presentation explaining public keys, authentication, and hash functions complete with neat little animated diagrams. They loved it, and I got an A+ for the semester!
An explanation of what being in the Slashdot community means to you and friendships that you have formed here.
Absolutely nothing. Nada. Zilch. I haven't made any friends here. How are you supposed to make friends on slashdot for chrissakes? I have friends that I can TALK TO and VISIT and DO STUFF WITH. I don't come HERE for friends. Jeez...
How your life on Slashdot contrasts with your normal life.
I don't think of it as my "life on slashdot". Sure, it's a community, but not a life. I come here because I like the variety and the sometimes intelligent discussions. Mostly I think it's the site design. I mean, this is what you call a well designed web site. It is astheticaly pleasing, responsive, and lets you follow discussions in an organized, easily readable manner. And due to the excellent moderation system, the signal to noise ratio is quite high compared to most places on the net.
Oh, and the slashboxes. Can't forget the slashboxes. A few months ago I didn't think I would ever want to use a portal, but here I am using /. as my portal. Most of the sites I frequent have slashboxes here, and I can see right away if they've been updated or not. This is what the big name companies wish they could do, but here it is done right. This just loads as my home page and it's all right there at my fingertips.
if they tie it too closely, some people will make slashdot into a big game, where the object is to get as many karma points as you can so that you can have the most influence you can, both in your moderation and high initial comment scores. I know some people already think of it this way, but it's not something to be encouraged.
Besides having all the hardware be compatible, a linux notebook needs a keyboard without windows keys. Actually, what would be ideal is if they copied the happy hacking keyboard exactly, and just built it into a notebook. That would rock.
Also, a 3 button mouse for X would be nice, plus a graphics chipset that is accelerated under X.
If it's so new that you tell us in the feature about a bunch of servers it's not even AT yet, perhaps it shouldn't be on slashdot yet. What's a few extra hours?
That has got to be THE most technical interview I have ever read. Kindof weird how they bounce back and fourth between talking about issues of interprocess communication and shared memory in a beowulf cluster and "What are your plans for ____?"
I don't even the whole "substitution" method of making ads to begin with. Unless it's REALLY clever, they usually aren't that good.
My favorite ads are the ones that either make you laugh a LOT, or make you say "That is really clever". Substitution generally does neither. Car--Bullet? Mosque--Tennis Ball? So what?
My favorites are usually the super bowl ones, because they aren't so concerned with getting the point across that their product is "classy" or whatever as they are with making it stick in the viewer's mind. Let name recognition do the rest. I don't CARE what morphing effect you can do to make your car synonimous with a first class plane ticket or whatever. It won't make me buy the car. What just might make me buy the car is if the company has some very high name recognition (combined of course with a reputation for quality). Ads, no matter how clever, cannot create a reputation for quality, because they are coming from the company selling the product. But they can generate name recognition.
I think the basic idea behind thin clients should bring back the "good old days" of dumb terminals.
By good old days, I mean the days when you could walk up to any terminal in the office, log in, and everything would be exactly the same, because you are in your server account. The days when a sysadmin could install something once, and it took effect everywhere.
This should be done again with GUIs. The challenges are that graphics take more processing and bandwidth.
Someone needs to make a thin client that has all the computer parts except any kind of disk drive or other moving parts. It should boot off the network, and to run anything, copy the executable from the server into RAM. Any stored data it operates on should be written to and read from the server. All processing (except big jobs) and graphics rendering should be done on the client. That would both simplify things for the sysadmin and bring back the good old days. It would also operate very fast.
Don't make Rob Cry :-)
In the submissions section, include a checkbox that says, "This is my personal site. I give Slashdot permission to create a temporary mirror to handle the load should it be linked to in a featured article."
This is a sad, sad day for Slashdot.
Instead of nitpicking over the details of the current email system, look at the fundamental way computers can move - and authenticate - information.
You can be sure email was delivered and unread if you encrypt it, digitally sign it, and send it, and then get back an encrypted, digitally signed confirmation from the reciever that they got it.
This level of security and authentication could never be claimed by snail mail.
While snail mail will obviouly never go away completely, I think package shipping has pretty much got it made.
Snail mail is typically a delivery of INFORMATION, which can now be better done in other ways. With packages, you are sending a THING, and until some star-trekkish system goes into widespread use, more and more packages will be shipped through FedEx, UPS, etc.
I used to almost never have things shipped to me - I'd go buy them. But since I can now easily do price comparison shopping and find good deals online, I have ordered things shipped to me every week or so.
So THAT service is definately on the increase.
I was talking about Sixth Sense, not Phantom Menace. My WHOLE COMMENT was about how the Sixth Sense kid is a much better choice than Jake Lloyd.
I hear from others the BeOS is an EXTREMELY nicely designed environment to program in, since they had the advantage of wiping the slate clean and starting over. I hear that code is very reusable, and the applications can communicate through a messaging protocol, and that the toolkit is a very clean design. I hear that application development is very rapid and that usually the end product ends up running like a dream.
Can anyone comment on this?
Now THAT was an awesome movie, made awesome by a very good actor. You could feel that kid's pain. And that is, of course, what Ender's Game needs.
Interestingly, I have seen both Jake Lloyd and the Sixth Sense kid as guests on the Tonight show. They both came across as pretty sharp people to me. Lloyd was a little cocky, like he's letting Hollywood get to his head.
The other kid (I forget his name) seems like a better actor and when he was on Leno it became immediately obvious that he was in the smartest 1% of the people in the room.
Ditto on pretty much everything you said. I don't think it's a bad thing though. You probably don't either.
Being that way is how people get smarter and get good, interesting, hopefully well paying jobs.
before the only sites with more than 1000 hits/day will be Slashdot, News sites, Disney, Microsoft, and Porno, Warez, and mp3 sites.
And then of course the search engines to help you find Slashdot, News sites, Disney, Microsoft, and Porno, Warez, and mp3 sites.