I remember watching a show on the discovery channel about this at least a year ago. They were testing systems like these in "nielsen homes", as in the people they get the ratings for shows from. Normally they have to punch in when they watch shows and who they are, but with that they were able to just sit down and it would tell who was was watching what when. Of course, it still had some glitches, as in when it thought the family dog was the little girl... but ohwell:D
want to bet that nothing's going to happen but dissapointed that the odds would afford you little reward if you win? Call up the Art Bell show and send him a link to the site... He'll get more doomsdayer's than they could handle. Watch that 300:1 switch around to 1:300.
I can already hear the comments.. "How could he abondon her to a convent when she was 12.." "How could he never see her again" Although I haven't read the book (looks like an interesting read though) it seems like the only practical thing to do. Galileo knew what he was getting into with heresy and all, and truly the best thing you could do for a smart, loved girl at the time was to send her off to a convent, it was the only place where women could learn anything at all.
It's a shame, really that the times didn't allow women to be scientists too. I'm just glad I wasn't born then.
I live less than 15 minutes away from where they plan on launching this thing, so I should be able to see it from my backyard. This morning the Santa Maria Times reported a group of about 45 protesters outside the base. (One decked out as Darth Vader even) They claim that this will start a whole new arms race, and is violating the Anti Ballistic Missile pact of 1972 and the Outer Space Treaty of 1967. Vandenberg originally wanted to launch it on Wednesday morning, but moved it up to Oct 2nd. According to the protesters they were told it was moved up because of the weather, although an official has said they don't scrub launches because of the weather that far into the future. they just moved it back to launch on Wednesday.
And finally, an interesting bit of trivia: They're going to be launching this from SLC-6, which was built to be the launch pad for the Space Shuttle.
Yes, Clarke predicted the use of satellites for communications long before it happened, but he also predicted:
Large space stations orbiting the earth inhabited by everyday citizens, which supposedly would have happened 10 years ago.
colonies on the moon by today.
Travels to Jupiter in less than 2 years from now.
If any of you geeks have seen "Arthur C. Clarke's Mysterious World" you would know better than to use him to "prove" your pet theories. He's gone from a genius author to a old crackpot out there on Sri Lanka, so I would seriously doubt any predictions by him that we'll be having AI buddies in our lifetime, or in our children's lifetime.
As we see from the AI storywriting contest, real AI has hardly progressed in over 30 years. Programs get longer, machines get faster, but there is nothing near that spark of human thought or human creativity. The general consensus was that the AI storywriting machine was just fed a very long set of rules, that it really was hardly writing the story itself at all.
Today we have pacemakers. Tomorrow we will probably have more mechanical replacements for body parts, but there is currently no point in "fixing what ain't broke" in the human body. it's such massive surgery with huge amounts of drugs that have to be taken for the rest of the patient's life that I would prefer staying the way I am, thank you very much.
My final point: They predict AI robots will help us do all the heavy labor that humans normally do. We already have machines, but is there really any reason to make them intelligent? I would feel much more comfortable ordering my hamburger sans pickles with a non-sentient robot than one that actually thinks. Adding AI to those robots used to make cars just opens up a whole new can of worms. Why do that when our current solution works just fine?
As a professional webmaster, I'll say what most of you probably have realized. Yankees.com isn't anything special. The graphics take too long to load, the design is very inconsistent, the navigation needs work, and there's plenty of bugs on the page, like how I can't read a damn word of that font they use on this linux box and how the store opens up not one but two browser windows. No amount of java applets is going to make up for this.
The website also doesn't have anything revolutionary. Cookies to keep track of users? Even slashdot does that. Message forums? You're looking at them! Message forums with a very polite membership? (Where's the fun in that?) Check out C|net's Builder Buzz. I can think of half a dozen sites just on my daily rounds alone that are just as interactive, if not more so than yankees.com. Better designed to boot.
As a webmaster, I also know what the designers were thinking when they built the website, (I know, I think this way too). They weren't thinking "let's do something revolutionary", they were thinking "Look at all these other sites (slashdot) that have message boards, voting booths, and news! We better to do that too!) They relied on the yankees name to draw people there. the truly revolutionary websites don't have that kind of help. They were thinking of how to make money and how to sucker in yankees fans like Katz. It worked for the yankees fans, the rest of us aren't that impressed.
I know I'm going to get hell for this, about how I'm not 'cerebral' or 'imaginative' enough for it. My imagination was going throughout the entire movie, but rather than occupying itself with filling in the holes in the movie it was occupied with imagining how it could have been better and imagining how to improve it. Saying you need 'imagination' to appreciate the BWP is like saying you need 'imagination' to understand (insert name of crappy film here) in order to fill in the gaping holes in the plot.
Back to identifing with the characters. If you identify with half-stoned, moronic, unintelligent, bickering college kids with grating personalities and a vocabulary of about four words then you'd love the movie. I couldn't identify them, and so I couldn't put myself in their shoes and thus I didn't care about their fear and so finally I wasn't scared.
Summary of the movie: "Fuck fuck fuck you lost the map fuck we're lost fuck *scream* *thud*" end of movie.
Yeah, but the problem is there wasn't a bunch of African-American people running around calling themselves niggers, blacks, or colored. We *do* have a bunch of people running around and calling themselves hackers. They're not all script kiddies either, there's plenty of white, grey, and black hat hackers (Think l0pht, cDc, and the people at hackernews.com) who are very talented, intelligent, and respected who *do* break into machines (with or without permission) who call themselves hackers.
If you're just a programmer, you should be ready to explain yourself when you call yourself a hacker, or else get used to people thinking you're breaking into the FBI website for fun, because it's not going to change no matter how much you guys whine about it.
In my 1962 Webster's New Twentieth Century Dictionary it lists a "hacker" as someone who either cuts down trees or works with horse and carriages. To me, programmers trying to change the meaning of the word back to what it was is as silly as the woodcutters and horsemen trying to change the word back to what it was in 1962.
"He was charged with interruption of public communications, theft of computer services and wrongful access to computer systems."
Just FYI, only the first one was related to the actual writing of the virus. He stole an account from AOL (probably with a CC generator, although maybe AOL's just lying and it was one of those "100 free hour" things and they don't want to look stupid "Oh, hey! We're giving away free accounts that anyone can use anonymously to do whatever the hell they want!"
Go to www.e-thepeople.com to write a petition. I would do it myself, except my writing skills aren't the greatest ): . I hope someone goes there and writes one up to prevent anyone in the police from doing that kind of thing.. a petition against predjudice towards internet users for rape victims. If someone does write a petition, I hope it ends up on slashdots front page so we can fill the thing up and send it off to (insert appropriate political office here).
Slashdot Mirror
I remember watching a show on the discovery channel about this at least a year ago. They were testing systems like these in "nielsen homes", as in the people they get the ratings for shows from. Normally they have to punch in when they watch shows and who they are, but with that they were able to just sit down and it would tell who was was watching what when. Of course, it still had some glitches, as in when it thought the family dog was the little girl... but ohwell :D
want to bet that nothing's going to happen but dissapointed that the odds would afford you little reward if you win? Call up the Art Bell show and send him a link to the site... He'll get more doomsdayer's than they could handle. Watch that 300:1 switch around to 1:300.
I can already hear the comments.. "How could he abondon her to a convent when she was 12.." "How could he never see her again" Although I haven't read the book (looks like an interesting read though) it seems like the only practical thing to do. Galileo knew what he was getting into with heresy and all, and truly the best thing you could do for a smart, loved girl at the time was to send her off to a convent, it was the only place where women could learn anything at all.
It's a shame, really that the times didn't allow women to be scientists too. I'm just glad I wasn't born then.
I live less than 15 minutes away from where they plan on launching this thing, so I should be able to see it from my backyard. This morning the Santa Maria Times reported a group of about 45 protesters outside the base. (One decked out as Darth Vader even) They claim that this will start a whole new arms race, and is violating the Anti Ballistic Missile pact of 1972 and the Outer Space Treaty of 1967. Vandenberg originally wanted to launch it on Wednesday morning, but moved it up to Oct 2nd. According to the protesters they were told it was moved up because of the weather, although an official has said they don't scrub launches because of the weather that far into the future. they just moved it back to launch on Wednesday.
And finally, an interesting bit of trivia: They're going to be launching this from SLC-6, which was built to be the launch pad for the Space Shuttle.
Yes, Clarke predicted the use of satellites for communications long before it happened, but he also predicted:
Large space stations orbiting the earth inhabited by everyday citizens, which supposedly would have happened 10 years ago.
colonies on the moon by today.
Travels to Jupiter in less than 2 years from now.
If any of you geeks have seen "Arthur C. Clarke's Mysterious World" you would know better than to use him to "prove" your pet theories. He's gone from a genius author to a old crackpot out there on Sri Lanka, so I would seriously doubt any predictions by him that we'll be having AI buddies in our lifetime, or in our children's lifetime.
As we see from the AI storywriting contest, real AI has hardly progressed in over 30 years. Programs get longer, machines get faster, but there is nothing near that spark of human thought or human creativity. The general consensus was that the AI storywriting machine was just fed a very long set of rules, that it really was hardly writing the story itself at all.
Today we have pacemakers. Tomorrow we will probably have more mechanical replacements for body parts, but there is currently no point in "fixing what ain't broke" in the human body. it's such massive surgery with huge amounts of drugs that have to be taken for the rest of the patient's life that I would prefer staying the way I am, thank you very much.
My final point: They predict AI robots will help us do all the heavy labor that humans normally do. We already have machines, but is there really any reason to make them intelligent? I would feel much more comfortable ordering my hamburger sans pickles with a non-sentient robot than one that actually thinks. Adding AI to those robots used to make cars just opens up a whole new can of worms. Why do that when our current solution works just fine?
As a professional webmaster, I'll say what most of you probably have realized. Yankees.com isn't anything special. The graphics take too long to load, the design is very inconsistent, the navigation needs work, and there's plenty of bugs on the page, like how I can't read a damn word of that font they use on this linux box and how the store opens up not one but two browser windows. No amount of java applets is going to make up for this.
The website also doesn't have anything revolutionary. Cookies to keep track of users? Even slashdot does that. Message forums? You're looking at them! Message forums with a very polite membership? (Where's the fun in that?) Check out C|net's Builder Buzz. I can think of half a dozen sites just on my daily rounds alone that are just as interactive, if not more so than yankees.com. Better designed to boot.
As a webmaster, I also know what the designers were thinking when they built the website, (I know, I think this way too). They weren't thinking "let's do something revolutionary", they were thinking "Look at all these other sites (slashdot) that have message boards, voting booths, and news! We better to do that too!) They relied on the yankees name to draw people there. the truly revolutionary websites don't have that kind of help. They were thinking of how to make money and how to sucker in yankees fans like Katz. It worked for the yankees fans, the rest of us aren't that impressed.
I'm glad I'm not the only geek out here who
doesn't drink.
</offtopic>
And I couldn't identify.
I know I'm going to get hell for this, about how I'm not 'cerebral' or 'imaginative' enough for it. My imagination was going throughout the entire movie, but rather than occupying itself with filling in the holes in the movie it was occupied with imagining how it could have been better and imagining how to improve it. Saying you need 'imagination' to appreciate the BWP is like saying you need 'imagination' to understand (insert name of crappy film here) in order to fill in the gaping holes in the plot.
Back to identifing with the characters. If you identify with half-stoned, moronic, unintelligent, bickering college kids with grating personalities and a vocabulary of about four words then you'd love the movie. I couldn't identify them, and so I couldn't put myself in their shoes and thus I didn't care about their fear and so finally I wasn't scared.
Summary of the movie:
"Fuck fuck fuck you lost the map fuck we're lost fuck *scream* *thud*" end of movie.
Yeah, but the problem is there wasn't a bunch of African-American people running around calling themselves niggers, blacks, or colored. We *do* have a bunch of people running around and calling themselves hackers. They're not all script kiddies either, there's plenty of white, grey, and black hat hackers (Think l0pht, cDc, and the people at hackernews.com) who are very talented, intelligent, and respected who *do* break into machines (with or without permission) who call themselves hackers.
If you're just a programmer, you should be ready to explain yourself when you call yourself a hacker, or else get used to people thinking you're breaking into the FBI website for fun, because it's not going to change no matter how much you guys whine about it.
In my 1962 Webster's New Twentieth Century Dictionary it lists a "hacker" as someone who either cuts down trees or works with horse and carriages. To me, programmers trying to change the meaning of the word back to what it was is as silly as the woodcutters and horsemen trying to change the word back to what it was in 1962.
The meaning has changed. Get over it.
"He was charged with interruption of public communications, theft of computer services and wrongful access to computer systems."
Just FYI, only the first one was related to the actual writing of the virus. He stole an account from AOL (probably with a CC generator, although maybe AOL's just lying and it was one of those "100 free hour" things and they don't want to look stupid "Oh, hey! We're giving away free accounts that anyone can use anonymously to do whatever the hell they want!"
Go to www.e-thepeople.com to write a petition. I would do it myself, except my writing skills aren't the greatest ): . I hope someone goes there and writes one up to prevent anyone in the police from doing that kind of thing.. a petition against predjudice towards internet users for rape victims. If someone does write a petition, I hope it ends up on slashdots front page so we can fill the thing up and send it off to (insert appropriate political office here).