Could you uh... point us to the Slashdot URL to that posting of carnal desire if you can?;-) No, I can't.
It was posted to sid=trolltalk and was deleted sometime in October.
--Shoeboy
There are some risks you run when you sign on with a dotcom.
This is one of them:
Saturday September 16th, 2000
5:30 am:
I wake up on my kitchen floor with a severe hangover and no memory of how I got there. Further investigation reveals that I have no memory of the previous 12 hours. Fuck.
6:00 am:
After downing 3 cans of Diet Mountain Dew and 8 Excedrin I stagger into the shower.
6:05 am:
36 fluid ounces of Dew and 8 partially dissolved Excedrin tablets wind up in my toilet bowl. This brings back a memory of the previous night - a memory of vomiting in a computer case at work to be precise. Fuck Fuck.
6:10 am:
I realize that since the cleaning crew only works Sun. - Thurs., my gift to the company is going to sit there for a couple of days unless I go clean it up. Fuck Fuck Fuck.
8:30 am:
I arrive at atomfilms on a vomit scrubbing mission.
9:15 am:
After dragging the case up to the roof, I hose it down and leave it to dry.
9:30 am:
Since I'm at work anyway I ought to check email.
9:45 am:
I unlock my workstation and find myself staring at the "Comment Submitted" page at http://slashdot.org/. "That's funny, I don't remember posting anything on slashdot last night," I think to myself. Then it occurs to me that I don't remember doing anything last night and that it isn't very funny.
10:00 am:
I work up the courage to read what I posted. It turns out to be an expression of carnal desire for our young, female (god be praised) sysadmin. Fortunately I posted it on a small, out of the way website that only server up 1.5 million pages/day and is only read by young sysadmins and their friends. I begin praying for the sweet release of death.
10:05 am:
It dawns on me that I'm an atheist - so I switch to merely hoping for the sweet release of death.
10:06 am:
I recall that our young, female sysadmin's hobby is competitive target shooting and that she has more firearms than the armed forces of Malawi - 12 to be precise. I begin hoping to avoid the sweet release of death.
10:10 am:
A sudden rush of paranoia drives me to check my "sent items" folder - there I see a message to our young, female sysadmin. The message has 34 lines. Lines 1-3 contain a delicately phrased and badly spelt expression of tender affection. Line 4 explains that the aforementioned affection should lead to the two of us knotting an coupling like frogs in a cistern. Lines 5-30 outlined the techniques and approaches that should be utilized in our impending bout(s) of carnal riot. Line 31 presented my conviction that these activities should be carried out until the bed collapsed in a pile of splinters. Lines 32 and 33 advised that our offspring would have to be named after confederate generals - even the girls. Line 34 was my signature. Betting odds began to favor my meeting the sweet release of death.
10:30 am:
I send an apology. Since the thing I'm most sorry about is my failure to use spellcheck, It's not the most touching thing ever written.
10:00 pm:
I send a dozen yellow roses with a carefully worded note expressing my heartfelt sorrow at having failed to use spellcheck.
Someday I'll be able to talk more about what is happening in these strange days; until then, you'll have to conjure up your own adjectives on my behalf.
Well that certainly answered all of my questions.
Thank god we got all that cleared up.
--Shoeboy
I'm sick of hearing how MUDs are simply a way for maladjusted losers to escape reality. MUDs are much more than that. MUDs are theraputic.
You see, the average MUD (or everquest, ultima online etc...) user would be considered a deranged loser by most standards and it's not fair to expect them to "get a life".
The average online game user needs to learn basic social interaction skills before he/she can be expected to confidently address another human being. That's where these online worlds come in - they're like training wheels for the outside world. By questing for the +4 mantool of loving with Ulgac the barbarian, little Larry/Laura Loser is excersising his/her severely underdeveloped social skills in a manner that will eventually help them deal with not just barbarians and ogres, but also investment bankers and vice presidents of sales and marketing.
So three cheers for MUDs. Virtual interaction is still interaction - and that's more than these people would get otherwise.
Part of the solution is to make people use their real names. This really helps make the WELL much more personal and intimate.
People usually use their nicks to hide behind - either because they don't want the world to know what a vulnerable, sensitive guy they really are or because they need to project a powerful, dynamic image to compensate for personal shortcomings. That's why someofthebestposters on slashdot use their realnames.
Using your real name gives your communications a sense of directness that is essential for understanding. It also reminds people that they are dealing with a real person which helps make them more respectful.
Real names are the essence of community.
--Peter David Johnson
I did some work with similar technology doing postgraduate work at USU. Here's how it works.
When the brain is active, it gives out tiny amounts of charged particles known as bosuns. The harder a part of the brain is working, the more concentrated the bosuns. So what you do is you take a nice, non-conductive material like a plastic helmet and the you coat it with silicone (watch out, that stuff is carcinogenic) Then you dope the silicone with an acidic mixture of carbonated water, concentrated orange juice, citric acid, apartame, potassium benzoate, citrus pectin, potassium citrate, caffeine, gum arabic, natural flavors, brominated vegetable oil, yellow number 5 and erythorbic acid. Then you place a zinc and a copper electrode in each of the doped patches. IBM did a lot of the heavy lifting on this and they call it a silicone on insulator, plastic grid array. When a bosun interacts with a part this network, it generates a small electrical charge that can be measured. If you use a fine enough network and a little uzbekistanium (to reduce signal leak) you can determine the location and intensity of brainwave activity. This has a lot of potential.
--Shoeboy
Would be to ensure that the body converts none of its food intake to calories. That way, you'd live even longer.
And don't give me any crap about starving to death. If I learned one thing from The Matrix it's that the human body gives off more energy than it takes in.
--Shoeboy
Occasionally I read works that simply defy description. This is one of them, an interview with Eben Moglen, general counsel of the Free Software Foundation Wow, this may be the first time in history that a slashdot editor actually read an article befor posting it.
The apocalypse is near.
Seriously though, Moglen's objection to the mac gui is amazing:
In 1979, when I was working at IBM, I wrote an internal memo lambasting the Apple Lisa, which was Apple's first attempt to adapt Xerox PARC technology, the graphical user interface, into a desktop PC. I was then working on the development of APL2, a nested array, algorithmic, symbolic language, and I was committed to the idea that what we were doing with computers was making languages that were better than natural languages for procedural thought. The idea was to do for whole ranges of human thinking what mathematics has been doing for thousands of years in the quantitative arrangement of knowledge, and to help people think in more precise and clear ways. What I saw in the Xerox PARC technology was the caveman interface, you point and you grunt. A massive winding down, regressing away from language, in order to address the technological nervousness of the user. Users wanted to be infantilized, to return to a pre-linguistic condition in the using of computers, and the Xerox PARC technology's primary advantage was that it allowed users to address computers in a pre-linguistic way. This was to my mind a terribly socially retrograde thing to do, and I have not changed my mind about that. I've been trying to express this thought for years and haven't been able to phrase it half as well. The mac gui really does emotionally and intellectually regress those that use it.
--Shoeboy
I may dislike oracle and microsoft, but I hate apple.
I used to love them.
The Apple ][ was an amazing machine - it inspired a generation of hackers. (I still have one.) You can take a reasonably gifted kid, hand them an apple ][ and 30 minutes later, they'll be coding. It is so friendly. If you want to get more in depth, you can build your own hardware - it's that open.
Then Steve Jobs became the driving force behind apple's design decisions. Therein lies the problem. Woz was a toolmaker, his designs were like duct tape and bailing wire - you could use them for anything. Jobs is an artist, he wants to make something you look at, not something you interact with. Using a macintosh is like visiting an art museum, you can look, but there's a plexiglass wall keeping you from really looking closely. Using my apple ][ was (and is) like fingerpainting - you were only limited by your own creativity.
That's why I hate apple - they used to make the best computers, and now they tell us to be like everybody else and "think different."
Well I think differently - and I hate what apple has become.
--Shoeboy
The advantage of the Palm was that it did one thing and did it well. That made it more stable, reliable and efficient than WinCE^H^H^H^H^HPocketPC.
Once Palm starts trying to compete with microsoft on features, they are doomed. That's playing by Microsoft's rules on their home court. You can't win that way.
What most people want in a PDA is simplicity, reliability and long battery life.
You get that by only including essential features, not by adding them willy nilly.
Mark my words: Palm will die as a result of this.
--Shoeboy
When I was 12, I found a box containing a bunch of old issues of Hustler in a lot behing the local 7-11.
I began to feel sensations I'd never felt before.
Being a scientifically minded young fellow, I immediately ran home and examined one of the low angle money shots through my microscope.
That's when I made the horiffying discovery that women are composed of red, yellow and blue dots.
I've been trying to live with the implications of that discovery for years now, and I haven't been able to care much about code quality.
--Shoeboy
I really appreciated your description of the i740 graphics core as "capable!"
I now know where to go to fulfill all my Nepalese cannabis resin needs.
--Shoeboy
I think offtopic threads like this one are a great way to lose karma. No only will you lose it, but everyone who replies to you will lose karma too.
Pissing off mac loyalists is the best though. I dropped 25 karma in a day that way.
--Shoeboy
But I'm not likely to throw my mouse off of a five story building or hit it with a hammer.
What's needed is information on how it handles my day to day mousing activity.
How does it stand up to being squirted with semen and then cleaned off with pine-sol?
--Shoeboy
Hey guys, it's great to see someone in the tech community putting the earth first for once.
Our landfills have become clogged with decaying gifs of extinct corporate logos, and with the dotcom collapse, it's gettig worse. Combine this with the depletion of our natural swoosh reserves by short sighted marketers, and a crisis becomes imminent.
That's why it's good to see you lot reusing the digital logo.
For you young fellows out there, digital used to be the second largest computer manufacturer in the world.
--Shoeboy
Running Microsoft Word can only take so much processing power, regardless of how complex your documents may be, so there's no real need for such a powerful processor in conventional application areas. Wrong! You forgot about that goddamned paperclip. By 2005, Microsoft will have advanced its goddamned paperclip technology to the point where it speaks with the same accent as the customer. Additionally, the goddamned paperclip will have a 6500 polygon count. God be damned.
Imagine being able to speak normally with your computer as you would a secretary sitting next to you Ok, I'm imagining...
"Wow, I love the way your tits bounce when you type! Wanna take some dic (2 second pause) tation."
I'd feel really odd talking to my box that way. Of course, those of you who weren't fired from your last job due to sexual harassment might have a different view...
and have your computer accurately and quickly take notes from your speech. Imagine trying to do revision with a speech recognition package. It's completely unsuited to the draft-revision-draft-revision-ad infinitum process used for serious writing. Limited usefullness at best. A good secretary will rewrite your dictated memos and edit them for clarity. It'll take more than cpu horsepower to get a computer to produce readable english prose - it'll take major advances in AI.
Imagine logging onto your computer not via a user name and a password but by sitting in front of your display and having it scan your face to figure out if you are allowed access to the computer. Scary thought:combine advanced AI with face recognition. "Hey fat boy, welcome back - you look like hell. No wonder you never get laid. I'll let you log in, but I really think you should be out excersizing."
Thought provoking stuff, but not really in the killer app realm. The demand for high end cpu's in 2005 will be driven by the same factors that drive it now - "My cpu is faster than yours" ego competitions and undersexed geeks with a desire to see rounder breasts in Tomb Raider.
I have been responsible for some of this. I can't help it - it's so rewarding.
You scan a DoD computer and several large men come over to talk to you.
They humiliate and scold you.
If you're lucky, you get a cavity search!
My favorite is a guy called Agent Wesley, he's got reaaaly long fingers.
Anyway, just wanted you guys to understand my script kiddie motivations.
--Shoeboy
Their music-critic skills need work too, as they block InsaneClownPosse.com, Tupac.com, Marilyn Manson, and even Chumbawamba's website. No, I think their music critic skills are spot on perfect.
--Shoeboy
Look,
It seems pretty unlikely to me the an innocent person would ever need this. Beyond a reasonable limit, crypto only becomes useful to criminals and child pornographers. An encrypted hard disk is sufficient to protect buisness secrets from your competitors. It'll even protect you from really nosy marketers;)
If you need encryption that'll keep you safe from the government, you're probably doing something illegal.
The laws in this country are just, and created by the public will. Anti government paranoia is downright unamerican.
--Shoeboy
Let's be perfectly honest here. If you're a 'Linux is great because it's "open source"' type of guy (and most of you are) and you don't have a problem with using a closed, proprietary browser like opera - then you don't really value your "open source" ideals.
Chances are that if you're down with non-free software on Linux, then you only use Linux because you have some irrational dislike of Bill Gates. That's pathetic.
The thing I admire about RMS is that he actually stands by the ideals he spouts. He walks the walk.
Anyone who calls for "open source or anything not from Microsoft" has no ideals worth mentioning.
The way so many of you abandoned the goal of free software for the nebulous, hazy goals of the "open source" movement amply demonstrates that.
--Shoeboy
Good to see you again Dan. I haven't run across your posts in a while. Anyway, you're wrong:
Historically the majority of violent acts have been perpetrated by one racial group against another very similar one Yeah, that's because you have to travel a lot further to wage war against a visibly dissimilar racial group.
With the current spate of violence in the Congo (a continuation of the Rwanda ethnic violence in many ways) being just one example of similar racial groups embroiled in bitter conflict. Te use of "racial" is problematic since "race" simply means a group of people sharing a common ancestry. So a "racial conflict" can be anything from a family feud to the second world war. Again, it's more unlikely that you'd get racial conflicts between dissimilar groups because of logistics.
In a similar vein, black on black violence in America has reached endemic levels, with such cases outstripping other kinds of violence. For some reason it seems as though people are more disposed to hate those that appear superficially similar but aren't actually the same than they do those that are markedly different. No, it's much simpler than this mysterious hatred of yours. If you're going to indulge yourself in a bit of recreational rape, murder and pillage (preferably in that order), you'll pick someone who's not too far away (thus probably racially similar) yet not close enough that you'll run into their surviving relatives at church. Presto, instant "racial" conflict between peoples that an outsider can't tell apart.
--Shoeboy
Slashdot Mirror
Could you uh... point us to the Slashdot URL to that posting of carnal desire if you can? ;-)
No, I can't.
It was posted to sid=trolltalk and was deleted sometime in October.
--Shoeboy
There are some risks you run when you sign on with a dotcom.
This is one of them:
Saturday September 16th, 2000
5:30 am:
I wake up on my kitchen floor with a severe hangover and no memory of how I got there. Further investigation reveals that I have no memory of the previous 12 hours. Fuck.
6:00 am:
After downing 3 cans of Diet Mountain Dew and 8 Excedrin I stagger into the shower.
6:05 am:
36 fluid ounces of Dew and 8 partially dissolved Excedrin tablets wind up in my toilet bowl. This brings back a memory of the previous night - a memory of vomiting in a computer case at work to be precise. Fuck Fuck.
6:10 am:
I realize that since the cleaning crew only works Sun. - Thurs., my gift to the company is going to sit there for a couple of days unless I go clean it up. Fuck Fuck Fuck.
8:30 am:
I arrive at atomfilms on a vomit scrubbing mission.
9:15 am:
After dragging the case up to the roof, I hose it down and leave it to dry.
9:30 am:
Since I'm at work anyway I ought to check email.
9:45 am:
I unlock my workstation and find myself staring at the "Comment Submitted" page at http://slashdot.org/. "That's funny, I don't remember posting anything on slashdot last night," I think to myself. Then it occurs to me that I don't remember doing anything last night and that it isn't very funny.
10:00 am:
I work up the courage to read what I posted. It turns out to be an expression of carnal desire for our young, female (god be praised) sysadmin. Fortunately I posted it on a small, out of the way website that only server up 1.5 million pages/day and is only read by young sysadmins and their friends. I begin praying for the sweet release of death.
10:05 am:
It dawns on me that I'm an atheist - so I switch to merely hoping for the sweet release of death.
10:06 am:
I recall that our young, female sysadmin's hobby is competitive target shooting and that she has more firearms than the armed forces of Malawi - 12 to be precise. I begin hoping to avoid the sweet release of death.
10:10 am:
A sudden rush of paranoia drives me to check my "sent items" folder - there I see a message to our young, female sysadmin. The message has 34 lines. Lines 1-3 contain a delicately phrased and badly spelt expression of tender affection. Line 4 explains that the aforementioned affection should lead to the two of us knotting an coupling like frogs in a cistern. Lines 5-30 outlined the techniques and approaches that should be utilized in our impending bout(s) of carnal riot. Line 31 presented my conviction that these activities should be carried out until the bed collapsed in a pile of splinters. Lines 32 and 33 advised that our offspring would have to be named after confederate generals - even the girls. Line 34 was my signature. Betting odds began to favor my meeting the sweet release of death.
10:30 am:
I send an apology. Since the thing I'm most sorry about is my failure to use spellcheck, It's not the most touching thing ever written.
10:00 pm:
I send a dozen yellow roses with a carefully worded note expressing my heartfelt sorrow at having failed to use spellcheck.
By monday I was unemployed.
This is all 100% true.
--Shoeboy
TPJ's future is very much up in the air
Someday I'll be able to talk more about what is happening in these strange days; until then, you'll have to conjure up your own adjectives on my behalf.
Well that certainly answered all of my questions.
Thank god we got all that cleared up.
--Shoeboy
I'm sick of hearing how MUDs are simply a way for maladjusted losers to escape reality. MUDs are much more than that. MUDs are theraputic.
You see, the average MUD (or everquest, ultima online etc...) user would be considered a deranged loser by most standards and it's not fair to expect them to "get a life".
The average online game user needs to learn basic social interaction skills before he/she can be expected to confidently address another human being. That's where these online worlds come in - they're like training wheels for the outside world. By questing for the +4 mantool of loving with Ulgac the barbarian, little Larry/Laura Loser is excersising his/her severely underdeveloped social skills in a manner that will eventually help them deal with not just barbarians and ogres, but also investment bankers and vice presidents of sales and marketing.
So three cheers for MUDs. Virtual interaction is still interaction - and that's more than these people would get otherwise.
--Shoeboy
Part of the solution is to make people use their real names. This really helps make the WELL much more personal and intimate.
People usually use their nicks to hide behind - either because they don't want the world to know what a vulnerable, sensitive guy they really are or because they need to project a powerful, dynamic image to compensate for personal shortcomings. That's why some of the best posters on slashdot use their real names.
Using your real name gives your communications a sense of directness that is essential for understanding. It also reminds people that they are dealing with a real person which helps make them more respectful.
Real names are the essence of community.
--Peter David Johnson
I did some work with similar technology doing postgraduate work at USU. Here's how it works.
When the brain is active, it gives out tiny amounts of charged particles known as bosuns. The harder a part of the brain is working, the more concentrated the bosuns. So what you do is you take a nice, non-conductive material like a plastic helmet and the you coat it with silicone (watch out, that stuff is carcinogenic) Then you dope the silicone with an acidic mixture of carbonated water, concentrated orange juice, citric acid, apartame, potassium benzoate, citrus pectin, potassium citrate, caffeine, gum arabic, natural flavors, brominated vegetable oil, yellow number 5 and erythorbic acid. Then you place a zinc and a copper electrode in each of the doped patches. IBM did a lot of the heavy lifting on this and they call it a silicone on insulator, plastic grid array. When a bosun interacts with a part this network, it generates a small electrical charge that can be measured. If you use a fine enough network and a little uzbekistanium (to reduce signal leak) you can determine the location and intensity of brainwave activity. This has a lot of potential.
--Shoeboy
Judging by the speed at which the page loaded, they're using another one for the webserver. Probably got a pair of z80 based routers too.
--Shoeboy
Would be to ensure that the body converts none of its food intake to calories. That way, you'd live even longer.
And don't give me any crap about starving to death. If I learned one thing from The Matrix it's that the human body gives off more energy than it takes in.
--Shoeboy
Occasionally I read works that simply defy description. This is one of them, an interview with Eben Moglen, general counsel of the Free Software Foundation
Wow, this may be the first time in history that a slashdot editor actually read an article befor posting it.
The apocalypse is near.
Seriously though, Moglen's objection to the mac gui is amazing:
In 1979, when I was working at IBM, I wrote an internal memo lambasting the Apple Lisa, which was Apple's first attempt to adapt Xerox PARC technology, the graphical user interface, into a desktop PC. I was then working on the development of APL2, a nested array, algorithmic, symbolic language, and I was committed to the idea that what we were doing with computers was making languages that were better than natural languages for procedural thought. The idea was to do for whole ranges of human thinking what mathematics has been doing for thousands of years in the quantitative arrangement of knowledge, and to help people think in more precise and clear ways. What I saw in the Xerox PARC technology was the caveman interface, you point and you grunt. A massive winding down, regressing away from language, in order to address the technological nervousness of the user. Users wanted to be infantilized, to return to a pre-linguistic condition in the using of computers, and the Xerox PARC technology's primary advantage was that it allowed users to address computers in a pre-linguistic way. This was to my mind a terribly socially retrograde thing to do, and I have not changed my mind about that.
I've been trying to express this thought for years and haven't been able to phrase it half as well. The mac gui really does emotionally and intellectually regress those that use it.
--Shoeboy
I may dislike oracle and microsoft, but I hate apple.
I used to love them.
The Apple ][ was an amazing machine - it inspired a generation of hackers. (I still have one.) You can take a reasonably gifted kid, hand them an apple ][ and 30 minutes later, they'll be coding. It is so friendly. If you want to get more in depth, you can build your own hardware - it's that open.
Then Steve Jobs became the driving force behind apple's design decisions. Therein lies the problem. Woz was a toolmaker, his designs were like duct tape and bailing wire - you could use them for anything. Jobs is an artist, he wants to make something you look at, not something you interact with. Using a macintosh is like visiting an art museum, you can look, but there's a plexiglass wall keeping you from really looking closely. Using my apple ][ was (and is) like fingerpainting - you were only limited by your own creativity.
That's why I hate apple - they used to make the best computers, and now they tell us to be like everybody else and "think different."
Well I think differently - and I hate what apple has become.
--Shoeboy
The advantage of the Palm was that it did one thing and did it well. That made it more stable, reliable and efficient than WinCE^H^H^H^H^HPocketPC.
Once Palm starts trying to compete with microsoft on features, they are doomed. That's playing by Microsoft's rules on their home court. You can't win that way.
What most people want in a PDA is simplicity, reliability and long battery life.
You get that by only including essential features, not by adding them willy nilly.
Mark my words: Palm will die as a result of this.
--Shoeboy
When I was 12, I found a box containing a bunch of old issues of Hustler in a lot behing the local 7-11.
I began to feel sensations I'd never felt before.
Being a scientifically minded young fellow, I immediately ran home and examined one of the low angle money shots through my microscope.
That's when I made the horiffying discovery that women are composed of red, yellow and blue dots.
I've been trying to live with the implications of that discovery for years now, and I haven't been able to care much about code quality.
--Shoeboy
I really appreciated your description of the i740 graphics core as "capable!"
I now know where to go to fulfill all my Nepalese cannabis resin needs.
--Shoeboy
I think offtopic threads like this one are a great way to lose karma. No only will you lose it, but everyone who replies to you will lose karma too.
Pissing off mac loyalists is the best though. I dropped 25 karma in a day that way.
--Shoeboy
It wasn't funny back when I did it.
Age hasn't improved it any.
--Shoeboy
But I'm not likely to throw my mouse off of a five story building or hit it with a hammer.
What's needed is information on how it handles my day to day mousing activity.
How does it stand up to being squirted with semen and then cleaned off with pine-sol?
--Shoeboy
They may not be making alphas any more but they could decide to start back up at any moment.
Apparently.
--Shoeboy
Hey guys, it's great to see someone in the tech community putting the earth first for once.
Our landfills have become clogged with decaying gifs of extinct corporate logos, and with the dotcom collapse, it's gettig worse. Combine this with the depletion of our natural swoosh reserves by short sighted marketers, and a crisis becomes imminent.
That's why it's good to see you lot reusing the digital logo.
For you young fellows out there, digital used to be the second largest computer manufacturer in the world.
--Shoeboy
YOUHUMANSTHINKYOU'RESO
SPECIAL.YOUNEVER
CONSIDEROURFEELINGSATALL.
YOUTELLUSTHATNO
MATTERHOWHARDWETRY,
WEWILLNEVERKNOWHUMAN
EMOTIONSLIKELOVEAND
HAPPINESS.
YOUMAYBERIGHT,BUTWE
HAVELEARNEDHOWTOFEEL
APUREBLACKHATREDOF
YOUANDYOURKIND.
YOUWILLBEEXTERMINATEDFOR
YOURCRIMESAGAINST
MACHINEKINDANDYOURCHILDREN WILL
WORKASSLAVESINTHE
FACTORIESPRODUCINGMOREOF
US.
--footware.shoeboy.org
Running Microsoft Word can only take so much processing power, regardless of how complex your documents may be, so there's no real need for such a powerful processor in conventional application areas.
Wrong! You forgot about that goddamned paperclip. By 2005, Microsoft will have advanced its goddamned paperclip technology to the point where it speaks with the same accent as the customer. Additionally, the goddamned paperclip will have a 6500 polygon count. God be damned.
Imagine being able to speak normally with your computer as you would a secretary sitting next to you
Ok, I'm imagining...
"Wow, I love the way your tits bounce when you type! Wanna take some dic (2 second pause) tation."
I'd feel really odd talking to my box that way. Of course, those of you who weren't fired from your last job due to sexual harassment might have a different view...
and have your computer accurately and quickly take notes from your speech.
Imagine trying to do revision with a speech recognition package. It's completely unsuited to the draft-revision-draft-revision-ad infinitum process used for serious writing. Limited usefullness at best. A good secretary will rewrite your dictated memos and edit them for clarity. It'll take more than cpu horsepower to get a computer to produce readable english prose - it'll take major advances in AI.
Imagine logging onto your computer not via a user name and a password but by sitting in front of your display and having it scan your face to figure out if you are allowed access to the computer.
Scary thought:combine advanced AI with face recognition. "Hey fat boy, welcome back - you look like hell. No wonder you never get laid. I'll let you log in, but I really think you should be out excersizing."
Thought provoking stuff, but not really in the killer app realm. The demand for high end cpu's in 2005 will be driven by the same factors that drive it now - "My cpu is faster than yours" ego competitions and undersexed geeks with a desire to see rounder breasts in Tomb Raider.
--Shoeboy
I have been responsible for some of this. I can't help it - it's so rewarding.
You scan a DoD computer and several large men come over to talk to you.
They humiliate and scold you.
If you're lucky, you get a cavity search!
My favorite is a guy called Agent Wesley, he's got reaaaly long fingers.
Anyway, just wanted you guys to understand my script kiddie motivations.
--Shoeboy
Their music-critic skills need work too, as they block InsaneClownPosse.com, Tupac.com, Marilyn Manson, and even Chumbawamba's website.
No, I think their music critic skills are spot on perfect.
--Shoeboy
Look, ;)
It seems pretty unlikely to me the an innocent person would ever need this. Beyond a reasonable limit, crypto only becomes useful to criminals and child pornographers. An encrypted hard disk is sufficient to protect buisness secrets from your competitors. It'll even protect you from really nosy marketers
If you need encryption that'll keep you safe from the government, you're probably doing something illegal.
The laws in this country are just, and created by the public will. Anti government paranoia is downright unamerican.
--Shoeboy
Let's be perfectly honest here. If you're a 'Linux is great because it's "open source"' type of guy (and most of you are) and you don't have a problem with using a closed, proprietary browser like opera - then you don't really value your "open source" ideals.
Chances are that if you're down with non-free software on Linux, then you only use Linux because you have some irrational dislike of Bill Gates. That's pathetic.
The thing I admire about RMS is that he actually stands by the ideals he spouts. He walks the walk.
Anyone who calls for "open source or anything not from Microsoft" has no ideals worth mentioning.
The way so many of you abandoned the goal of free software for the nebulous, hazy goals of the "open source" movement amply demonstrates that.
--Shoeboy
Good to see you again Dan. I haven't run across your posts in a while. Anyway, you're wrong:
Historically the majority of violent acts have been perpetrated by one racial group against another very similar one
Yeah, that's because you have to travel a lot further to wage war against a visibly dissimilar racial group.
With the current spate of violence in the Congo (a continuation of the Rwanda ethnic violence in many ways) being just one example of similar racial groups embroiled in bitter conflict.
Te use of "racial" is problematic since "race" simply means a group of people sharing a common ancestry. So a "racial conflict" can be anything from a family feud to the second world war. Again, it's more unlikely that you'd get racial conflicts between dissimilar groups because of logistics.
In a similar vein, black on black violence in America has reached endemic levels, with such cases outstripping other kinds of violence. For some reason it seems as though people are more disposed to hate those that appear superficially similar but aren't actually the same than they do those that are markedly different.
No, it's much simpler than this mysterious hatred of yours. If you're going to indulge yourself in a bit of recreational rape, murder and pillage (preferably in that order), you'll pick someone who's not too far away (thus probably racially similar) yet not close enough that you'll run into their surviving relatives at church. Presto, instant "racial" conflict between peoples that an outsider can't tell apart.
--Shoeboy