Something tells me that there would be more of a market for technology that makes people in real life look more like their avatar, instead.
We can't do that yet. The easiest way for us to develop that tech, would be to have display glasses that would overlay others avatars when you see them. Problem with that is that it only works for those that have the VR glasses. What we'd really like is the genetic engineering/body mods to make any fully grown human adult look like "anything" out of any of the various online games. Things like switching genders, races, species would have to be have to be a trival outpatient process. If you want to spend your 2 weeks vaction as the opposite gender or a different race, it should be quite easy to do. Um, outside of movies and maybe spy agencies we don't have that kinda of tech, yet. The low tech solution would be a costum shop that could custom make customs based on your body scan and on-line avator profile.
Two aircraft were flown for four and a half and six hours respectively, the maximum flight times permitted under range restrictions. The maximum altitude attained was 27,000 feet above sea level. The ultra-light aircraft is designed to fly at altitudes as high as 132,000 feet (25 miles/40km), above normal commercial air-lanes and most weather.
QinetiQ believes that stratospheric platforms will rapidly become commercially viable and revolutionize future communications. High altitude platforms of this sort could provide a cheaper alternative to satellites in remote areas and developing countries. They can also enable observation of natural disasters and humanitarian crises."
I've never thought about it, but how high could a plane fly before the air is just too thin to fly any higher? These things have the potential to kill commerical satellites. These things have the advantages of satellites except have the possibility of being much cheaper just due to launch costs. I could also see sending up replacement craft as being much easier compared to if a satellite had a malfuncion.
Stop with the " global warming is a political agenda driven conclusion" crapola like this. It's totally unacceptable. The mechanism for carbon dioxide IR trapping has been known since 1935 and it's not up for debate.
It's statements like this that drives home how much global warming is a political agenda. It's totally unacceptable for scientists to have locked believes in a theory. They are supposed to constantly question, experiment and update their theories. After 2-3 decades they are only now somewhat certain that the Earth is in a heating tread. There is debate on the causes, and it may take another 2-3 decades to even start answering them. There are alot of folks that just want to say humans caused it now we should fix it. That may or may not be true. The only thing everyone seems to agree on is that we need more study.
All of our clients live in an 8-5 world so I too live in an 8-5 world. I'm rather fond of my 8-5 world including more daylight after I get off of work. That's extra usable daylight which is the real pro DST argument as far as I can tell.
What the heck you don't do any business outside of your timezone? Gosh, if you were in the central time zone and used to atleast talking to customers all over the nation you have to figure people one hour ahead and 2-3 hours behind. That isn't anything compared to if you want to do regular meetings with someone in Europe or Asia. You and I work from 8-5, but it is stupid to think that everyone around you works those hours just because you do. I have coworkers in my office that work 7-3, 9-5, 3-11, and 11-7. Just becuase I work from 8-5 doesn't mean the folks at gas stations, fast food places, or grocery stores work the same hours.
Gosh, this is the same mindset as "Hey I use windows and office so no other OS or office suite exists because I and everyone that I work with already have a MS solution." Just because you are happy with your forced time change doesn't mean all your neighbors actually like it. I'd get rid of DLS in 5 seconds if it were up to me.
Personally, I don't understand why humans are so clock oriented vs sun oriented. It kills me that houses in the US are built in random directions (unless there is a nice view) instead of oriented around the Sun.
Because we aren't supposed to worship the sun any more cause that's something pagans do.;)
Though I wouldn't want to be involved in a project to hide an entire country behind a single public NAT IP. Unless of course it would make me Oprah rich. The biggest problem would accountability as the rest of the world could track it down and say OMG look what someone in China did but without China's help there would be no way to limit the possible suspects beyond that their IP sourced from China.
I didn't know that it could be that easy to actually do. I've heard of the great firewall of China and several other countries that where controlling their part of the internet. Now, I don't care if the US or UK can track down some thing to my big bad country. (Actually, I would be concerned about them, and would actually use US or UK ISPs for foreign intel work, but for domestic uses let's hide my citizens from them!) Yes, that would mean that the US or UK couldn't spy or track down a Chinese IP address without Chinese help. I liked your explanation. I was thinking, we could have 1 US IP, 50 state IPs, and each state would have various county IPs, then each county could just look at the zip codes and say they need that many ip addresses. You could have a town/city level in there as well. No here is where it gets "interesting." I live the US in the State of AR, in Miller county in the city of Texarkana. That's 4 levels of potential privacy law protections that others would have to break through before getting to my local ISP would would add a 5th level of protection. How difficult would it be for the RIAA or MPAA to back track through that? Of course, the flip side is would any P2P program work through that?
People ALWAYS say this and it's crap. That's not how the real world works. Maybe that's how it works at burger king, but in almost every industry I've dealt with there are people whom aren't in their current positions because of merit. I work in government now and people constantly complain that "X person should be fired, that's the way it works in the private sector". News flash, I've worked extensively in both private and public sectors, and the same crap goes on in each. There really isn't a whole lot of difference. People know people and get promoted unfairly. Unions exist and make it hard to fire people. People sleep with their boss. People obtain cushy jobs where there work isn't noticed and do nothing all day. It happens everywhere. I'm not saying it's right, but I am saying that's how the real world works. Not this fantasy land of moving people and salaries and resources like a commodity.
To really encourage and teach our students, we need a teacher job paying $90K that has just 1 class and 1 student and its mainly the teacher and kid playing on the computer. The teacher in that position needs to be a direct relative of either a school board member or school superintendent. The other teachers should make something like $20-25 and have 40-50 students and teach 6-7 classes a day. It should be constantly pointed out to the students that if I was a relative of some one with power in this school that I could have a cushy job with no students to pester me either, but I'm not related to any one so I have to make the attempt to teach students.
The students should all be aware this is vastly unfair. But that's the point. Life, home, school, and work aren't fair. Learn how to make the most of it with the least personal effort.
While I understand that this is probably good for pageviews and thus revenue, do we really have to encourage these people?
Yes, we should. There is a part of me that would love to have the cash to just throw up a DVR security system for 1.5-2K with 4 cameras and record everything that flies over head or also cars passing by my house. I'd want to be able to have pics/videos of what passed, and a date/time stamp, with the GPS cordinates, of my home. To me, every plane flying over my home is a UFO and every car that passes infront of my house is a UDO (UnId'd Driving Object.)
If I had a setup recording that type of data, I'd be willing to exchange it with others to ID all those objects. I'd like to know the ID for every plane, car, or just jogger that passes by my house.
A hide NAT is when many systems using private address space all use the same IP address as their source when they leave their ISP. So, instead of the good ol (not so good) days where ever user needed a public IP address now an ISP can hide thousands of customers behind a single IP address....
Two factors drove this movement. First was the fear of running out of IPV4 addresses... The Internet has become a more efficient secure place and the main driving force behind that was the fear of running out of IP addresses. A fear that was never realized.
The big reason for upgrading to IP6 was politically Asia wasn't "assigned enough" IP address ranges for their use. The US and Europe will never have to leave IP4 just because of lack of address ranges. We've got most of them assigned to us. Reading your post made me think. Why not just hide my whole country behind a NAT? China/US just needs 1 public IP address and anyone within China/US w(c)ould show up as that one IP address to the rest of the world. How many public IP addresses would that need 1 per country? 256, 512, 1024? All the ISPs, companies, and citizens can be firewalled off from the rest of the world.
Should you get fired from your cashiers job just because you got fined for speeding? Better question: Would you let somebody with obvious mental instability babysit your $1.3 billion kid?
Now I want to know how many "rich"/"extremely wealthy" people hire mentally unstable "nannies"/"tutors" for their billionaire heirs.
Minimum sanity standards for officers? Good Lord, man, why not minimum sanity standards for the Commander in Chief? Oh, wait...
Why not maximum sanity standards for leaders? That's obviously what we've always wanted as a species. Come on our "favorite" "leaders" were all loopy. They wouldn't make it in normal sane society, so we make them our leaders. I'm sure there is a good reason that we do this.
I think the only right we have left is the one that says they can't quarter soldiers in your house. Expect that one to be gone by the end of the year, *sigh* . ..
Nah, soliders expect better housing than my place nowadays. I could see us "housing" 1-2 soliders, but we don't have the driveway space for a hummer or jeep. No, this is definitely the only one they'd leave want to alone. I really couldn't see the government being that cheap unless we had a war on our homefront. Heck, we have enough hotels/motels that the government/military could just sieze them. My place? The soliders wouldn't want to cram in there...
Human mates couldn't compete against either the unlimited sex or the emotional attachment level. Of course there could be those that feel that the robot is "too needy," but the robot would recongize the signs and change its behavior so that it acts just as the human would like.
The end result of such a society would be one in which no human can relate to any other human. We would raise basically two types of people; the leaders, and the servile - those who learn by doing, and those who learn by example, respectively.
So you are saying they'd have zero effect on our current society?
I think there are basically two ways you could go on the issue of the social ramifications of sexbots. Presumably they will be a perfect fuck every time, or at least as close as is possible to get - humans are imperfect, therefore nothing can ever be perfect for them. The first way is to say that it will lead to a breakdown of relationships because without sex there will always be a missing element. The counterargument as I see it is that sex is not the most important aspect of our existence and it should probably be made a lot less important in some ways.
Of course, there is the question of whether a robot can actually truly satisfy a human. There is something to be said for interaction between equals.
I tend to think that humans can be satisfied by machines/robots. I don't think sex would be an element of human mating if we got our sex kick from sex bots. Male and female humans could be perfectly happy with their sex maid bot. I could see them not even thinking of a human sex parnter until either the robot or human decides that its time for human reproduction. The name "sex bot" implies only sex. I think of "maid bot" as general house wife, and "wife bot" could raise and teach human offspring in addition to the other abilities. With just "sex bots" physical sex wouldn't be a mating factor. But what about when we get to "wife bots" and those bots have human like emotions and can replicate everything a human mate could except it is designed to complement/adapt to its human mate. Think having "near the perfect" wife/mate from 15 onward for you. Human mates couldn't compete against either the unlimited sex or the emotional attachment level. Of course there could be those that feel that the robot is "too needy," but the robot would recongize the signs and change its behavior so that it acts just as the human would like.
"Key considerations would include ensuring human control over robots, protecting data acquired by robots and preventing illegal use."
"The Ministry of Information and Communication has also predicted that every South Korean household will have a robot by between 2015 and 2020. In part, this is a response to the country's aging society and also an acknowledgement that the pace of development in robotics is accelerating. The new charter is an attempt to set ground rules for this future. "Imagine if some people treat androids as if the machines were their wives," Park Hye-Young of the ministry's robot team told the AFP news agency. "Others may get addicted to interacting with them just as many internet users get hooked to the cyberworld." "
Um, I want more details. I have to agree that I'd want human control over robots even if it meant sentient robots being enslaved. When it comes right down to it, we are human, and they are machines/tools. We shouldn't build some classes of robots just to avoid these problems. I actually kinda of giggled reading this thinking of sex/maid robots. Those would be a selective pressure on humanity. How many or what type of people would marry and reproduce when you could have a robot mate that actually follows your orders, cleans your house, has sex with you as often as you can medically handle, runs your errands and adapts itself to your preferences?
If every 15 year old could easily/cheapily buy their own robot that could do all those things, then the only reason to find a human parnter would be to mate/reproduce. Hmm, we'd need to think about putting in something for "robot mates" to want human offspring after awhile to ensure that their family/mate's geneline survives. These things could be a great form of birth control if nothing else!
I've been thinking that the only home use app lots of HD storage space would be A/V. Now, I guess when 10 PB of HD are $100-1120, then we'll be able to get copies of these 120 TB of hubble data or TBs of other datasets to fill up those future home PB HDs. One day we'll need home exabyte HD to store and play around with public PB datasets.
I can only hope that bandwidth can keep up. How long would it take to transfer a 120 TB bit torrent file over either cable or dsl?
Well, maybe we'll have small TB USB flashdrives that we can just mail those around instead of upgrading our bandwidth.
You mentioned getting email notifications about changes to the repository. You work with the code every day (or nearly every day). You see, these representatives in congress often times vote on bills which they have not even themselves read. They get the executive summary.
That is like the difference between you reading the code for a newly modified parser class and getting one of your underlings to brief you about the changes. You might spend an hour or more reading source code for a whole new class, and only two minutes getting briefed on it. You have to get them actually read the bills first.
Maybe we should require that all bills be read aloud in their entirety in an open session of congress?
Maybe we should just declare that all the bills/laws passed in congress for the year should not exceed 12 pages and that they have to review all previous bills/laws until all congressional bills/laws fit within 12 pages. (Actually, I'd like it to get down to only a page. I don't think that people can follow more than a page of laws/rules so anything that you expect or want people to follow needs to be short and fairly understandable.)
If France doesn't value freedom of speech as much as America, then tell my why the Annual Worldwide Press Freedom Index for 2006 rated America behind France in terms of freedom of the press?
Um, freedom of speech isn't and only about freedom of press. I could careless about most reporters being some what censored. I don't want myself or those that I talk to censored. When I think of freedom of speech it's on the individual level, not the press or web level where you could shout out your message to anyone and be magically protected. Um, I don't believe absolute freedom of speech as a good thing. Think about why absolute freedom of speech is a bad thing. I can accept limits on journalists and governments limiting the things that "the press" publish world wide.
You know what's really funny to me? Slashdot seems to love to blame Bush as being the evil president limiting freedom of speech. He isn't what I tend to worry about. It's the local city mayor/city manager that fires the city accountant when the city accountant publishes the actual city financal budget that I worry about. Bush is really distant; it's the local governmental censors that I'd fear. They are the ones that are actually likely to censor your speech.
Does anyone else think this is a Bad Idea? If there's one thing we've learned from Second Life, it's that left to build their own world from scratch, adults on the internet will make a lot of sex shops. Now, even if the Lego MMO is targeted for kids, it's also going to be pretty popular with people who played with LEGOs as kids, which means it's inevitable that the entire world is filled with nothing but boobs and wieners made out of CGI little plastic blocks.
It's like, "think of the children," only for real this time, because seriously adults are going to fill Legoland with crap.
Actually the "easiest" solution to that potential problem is for the users to be able to declare their section age restricted and/or restricted by a nudity/lang/potential adult content tag and if their parents let them view that material, then no big problem. If the parents are complete spazs about this stuff then it would be right up their for the parents to block it. You'd have to have in your user agreement that the user is expected to properly mod his content correct, but some sort of rule/reviewing process that if there are enough complainers that some one that modded someing G could be bumped up to NC17. Part of me thinks that it would be good if we properly escorted kids through those adult content areas and pretend its all just museum art. We'd hear alot of giggles from the kids, but they'd not care about nudity. Lots of vulgar lang. isn't bad per se; it's just annoying to listen to when every few words are either an insult or sort of like constant compiler warnings. There can be real content underneath vuglar lang., but there is some sort of limit where if most of your content or communication is vuglar just for the sake of being vulgar most people tend to shun it.
There is also the concept of having adult areas or kid only areas and between gray areas. If lego MMPOG became "kid only" is could still succend, but it could also confuse parents that want user accounts to play in the same MMO as their kids that they can't go and monitor their kids in the "kid only" area.
Yes I agree, but remember, these are kids, they also have a childhood to live. Performance and the rage to be the first in everything should be something they gradually come to expect as they age
Um, we have childhood before we go into school and during school breaks. School isn't the time/place for them to do their down time. Actually, there is a part of me that likes "ranking" and "grading" abilities in all sorts of subject areas. There is a part of me that thinks that all grades for each class assignment needs to be published in a chart and the kids see how they rank within the class and how the class ranks within the school and how the school ranks compared to others. Let's use our natural drive to compete to improve education rather than ignoring that it exists.
Of course, this is the high school level I'm talking about, an age group that generally doesn't "wake up" until midday anyway. I know *I* was a zombie until about 10:30 AM. Actually, I still am...
See the word "battlespace" in the description - that's DoD-ese for "battleground." They're talking about being able to go back and rapidly review/search recordings from satellites and other sensors monitoring combat zones. It's a very good idea - if you could track a car back to a house, you can then see who went in a out, and so forth. You could backtrack a small boat coming out of a sheltered hiding spot, and so forth. It's about time someone thought of this, frankly.
This isn't domestic surveillance that they're talking about.
I think that it's been a matter of tech and ability more than some one thinking about it. We've had scifi and space folks and 1984 folks think of this for a long time. We've only recently started to have the tech. Just wait. I could see vastly smaller and cheaper cameras everywhere. Folks worry about RFID, but its far too expensive. What if we developed a very "cheap" barcode replacement that was no more expensive than current printed barcodes except included 100 TB of datastorage on the device, GPS tracking, A/V recording from the barcode, a range of chemical/enviromental monitors, and the means to dump the data to the government, the orginial source of the barcode, or the current owner of the barcode. That's when we'd really start having to worry about this of course by then it'll have been implemented on a large scale so we'd know if we need to panic over it or not. I predict a 1984ish tv series shortly with all this magic scifi tech in it used for both good and evil.
What gets me the most is that currently publishers make you sign the copyright waver to transfer rights to them. All such forms that I have seen start with "The copyright law requires that you transfer the copyright..." which is a complete bullshit. I could have held the copyright and just given them permission to publish it once, there's nothing in any law that requires copyright transfer for publishing.
But if I don't sign that form then I don't get published, and then I don't get funded for research because I have no publications. Catch-22.
We need to push for federal and state laws that basically says that research sponsered by tax payer money belongs to the various government organizations and that the various researches never held the copyright to transfer to a publisher in the first place and that the government just took back its socalled transfered copyrights and any publisher that wants to protest gets to deal with the government.
Slashdot Mirror
You meant "custom made costumes", right?
Give me a break. I've been off all day cause of DST.
Something tells me that there would be more of a market for technology that makes people in real life look more like their avatar, instead.
We can't do that yet. The easiest way for us to develop that tech, would be to have display glasses that would overlay others avatars when you see them. Problem with that is that it only works for those that have the VR glasses. What we'd really like is the genetic engineering/body mods to make any fully grown human adult look like "anything" out of any of the various online games. Things like switching genders, races, species would have to be have to be a trival outpatient process. If you want to spend your 2 weeks vaction as the opposite gender or a different race, it should be quite easy to do. Um, outside of movies and maybe spy agencies we don't have that kinda of tech, yet. The low tech solution would be a costum shop that could custom make customs based on your body scan and on-line avator profile.
Two aircraft were flown for four and a half and six hours respectively, the maximum flight times permitted under range restrictions. The maximum altitude attained was 27,000 feet above sea level. The ultra-light aircraft is designed to fly at altitudes as high as 132,000 feet (25 miles/40km), above normal commercial air-lanes and most weather.
QinetiQ believes that stratospheric platforms will rapidly become commercially viable and revolutionize future communications. High altitude platforms of this sort could provide a cheaper alternative to satellites in remote areas and developing countries. They can also enable observation of natural disasters and humanitarian crises."
I've never thought about it, but how high could a plane fly before the air is just too thin to fly any higher? These things have the potential to kill commerical satellites. These things have the advantages of satellites except have the possibility of being much cheaper just due to launch costs. I could also see sending up replacement craft as being much easier compared to if a satellite had a malfuncion.
Stop with the " global warming is a political agenda driven conclusion" crapola like this. It's totally unacceptable. The mechanism for carbon dioxide IR trapping has been known since 1935 and it's not up for debate.
It's statements like this that drives home how much global warming is a political agenda. It's totally unacceptable for scientists to have locked believes in a theory. They are supposed to constantly question, experiment and update their theories. After 2-3 decades they are only now somewhat certain that the Earth is in a heating tread. There is debate on the causes, and it may take another 2-3 decades to even start answering them. There are alot of folks that just want to say humans caused it now we should fix it. That may or may not be true. The only thing everyone seems to agree on is that we need more study.
All of our clients live in an 8-5 world so I too live in an 8-5 world. I'm rather fond of my 8-5 world including more daylight after I get off of work. That's extra usable daylight which is the real pro DST argument as far as I can tell.
What the heck you don't do any business outside of your timezone? Gosh, if you were in the central time zone and used to atleast talking to customers all over the nation you have to figure people one hour ahead and 2-3 hours behind. That isn't anything compared to if you want to do regular meetings with someone in Europe or Asia. You and I work from 8-5, but it is stupid to think that everyone around you works those hours just because you do. I have coworkers in my office that work 7-3, 9-5, 3-11, and 11-7. Just becuase I work from 8-5 doesn't mean the folks at gas stations, fast food places, or grocery stores work the same hours.
Gosh, this is the same mindset as "Hey I use windows and office so no other OS or office suite exists because I and everyone that I work with already have a MS solution." Just because you are happy with your forced time change doesn't mean all your neighbors actually like it. I'd get rid of DLS in 5 seconds if it were up to me.
Personally, I don't understand why humans are so clock oriented vs sun oriented. It kills me that houses in the US are built in random directions (unless there is a nice view) instead of oriented around the Sun.
;)
Because we aren't supposed to worship the sun any more cause that's something pagans do.
The existence of a chip does not imply that said chip actually works.
But, it's NASA! Come on, they've had enough bad press lately.
Though I wouldn't want to be involved in a project to hide an entire country behind a single public NAT IP. Unless of course it would make me Oprah rich. The biggest problem would accountability as the rest of the world could track it down and say OMG look what someone in China did but without China's help there would be no way to limit the possible suspects beyond that their IP sourced from China.
I didn't know that it could be that easy to actually do. I've heard of the great firewall of China and several other countries that where controlling their part of the internet. Now, I don't care if the US or UK can track down some thing to my big bad country. (Actually, I would be concerned about them, and would actually use US or UK ISPs for foreign intel work, but for domestic uses let's hide my citizens from them!) Yes, that would mean that the US or UK couldn't spy or track down a Chinese IP address without Chinese help. I liked your explanation. I was thinking, we could have 1 US IP, 50 state IPs, and each state would have various county IPs, then each county could just look at the zip codes and say they need that many ip addresses. You could have a town/city level in there as well. No here is where it gets "interesting." I live the US in the State of AR, in Miller county in the city of Texarkana. That's 4 levels of potential privacy law protections that others would have to break through before getting to my local ISP would would add a 5th level of protection. How difficult would it be for the RIAA or MPAA to back track through that? Of course, the flip side is would any P2P program work through that?
People ALWAYS say this and it's crap. That's not how the real world works. Maybe that's how it works at burger king, but in almost every industry I've dealt with there are people whom aren't in their current positions because of merit. I work in government now and people constantly complain that "X person should be fired, that's the way it works in the private sector". News flash, I've worked extensively in both private and public sectors, and the same crap goes on in each. There really isn't a whole lot of difference. People know people and get promoted unfairly. Unions exist and make it hard to fire people. People sleep with their boss. People obtain cushy jobs where there work isn't noticed and do nothing all day. It happens everywhere. I'm not saying it's right, but I am saying that's how the real world works. Not this fantasy land of moving people and salaries and resources like a commodity.
To really encourage and teach our students, we need a teacher job paying $90K that has just 1 class and 1 student and its mainly the teacher and kid playing on the computer. The teacher in that position needs to be a direct relative of either a school board member or school superintendent. The other teachers should make something like $20-25 and have 40-50 students and teach 6-7 classes a day. It should be constantly pointed out to the students that if I was a relative of some one with power in this school that I could have a cushy job with no students to pester me either, but I'm not related to any one so I have to make the attempt to teach students.
The students should all be aware this is vastly unfair. But that's the point. Life, home, school, and work aren't fair. Learn how to make the most of it with the least personal effort.
While I understand that this is probably good for pageviews and thus revenue, do we really have to encourage these people?
Yes, we should. There is a part of me that would love to have the cash to just throw up a DVR security system for 1.5-2K with 4 cameras and record everything that flies over head or also cars passing by my house. I'd want to be able to have pics/videos of what passed, and a date/time stamp, with the GPS cordinates, of my home. To me, every plane flying over my home is a UFO and every car that passes infront of my house is a UDO (UnId'd Driving Object.)
If I had a setup recording that type of data, I'd be willing to exchange it with others to ID all those objects. I'd like to know the ID for every plane, car, or just jogger that passes by my house.
A hide NAT is when many systems using private address space all use the same IP address as their source when they leave their ISP. So, instead of the good ol (not so good) days where ever user needed a public IP address now an ISP can hide thousands of customers behind a single IP address. ...
...
Two factors drove this movement. First was the fear of running out of IPV4 addresses
The Internet has become a more efficient secure place and the main driving force behind that was the fear of running out of IP addresses. A fear that was never realized.
The big reason for upgrading to IP6 was politically Asia wasn't "assigned enough" IP address ranges for their use. The US and Europe will never have to leave IP4 just because of lack of address ranges. We've got most of them assigned to us. Reading your post made me think. Why not just hide my whole country behind a NAT? China/US just needs 1 public IP address and anyone within China/US w(c)ould show up as that one IP address to the rest of the world. How many public IP addresses would that need 1 per country? 256, 512, 1024? All the ISPs, companies, and citizens can be firewalled off from the rest of the world.
Should you get fired from your cashiers job just because you got fined for speeding?
Better question: Would you let somebody with obvious mental instability babysit your $1.3 billion kid?
Now I want to know how many "rich"/"extremely wealthy" people hire mentally unstable "nannies"/"tutors" for their billionaire heirs.
Minimum sanity standards for officers? Good Lord, man, why not minimum sanity standards for the Commander in Chief?
Oh, wait...
Why not maximum sanity standards for leaders? That's obviously what we've always wanted as a species. Come on our "favorite" "leaders" were all loopy. They wouldn't make it in normal sane society, so we make them our leaders. I'm sure there is a good reason that we do this.
I think the only right we have left is the one that says they can't quarter soldiers in your house. .
Expect that one to be gone by the end of the year, *sigh* . .
Nah, soliders expect better housing than my place nowadays. I could see us "housing" 1-2 soliders, but we don't have the driveway space for a hummer or jeep. No, this is definitely the only one they'd leave want to alone. I really couldn't see the government being that cheap unless we had a war on our homefront. Heck, we have enough hotels/motels that the government/military could just sieze them. My place? The soliders wouldn't want to cram in there...
Human mates couldn't compete against either the unlimited sex or the emotional attachment level. Of course there could be those that feel that the robot is "too needy," but the robot would recongize the signs and change its behavior so that it acts just as the human would like.
The end result of such a society would be one in which no human can relate to any other human. We would raise basically two types of people; the leaders, and the servile - those who learn by doing, and those who learn by example, respectively.
So you are saying they'd have zero effect on our current society?
I think there are basically two ways you could go on the issue of the social ramifications of sexbots. Presumably they will be a perfect fuck every time, or at least as close as is possible to get - humans are imperfect, therefore nothing can ever be perfect for them. The first way is to say that it will lead to a breakdown of relationships because without sex there will always be a missing element. The counterargument as I see it is that sex is not the most important aspect of our existence and it should probably be made a lot less important in some ways.
Of course, there is the question of whether a robot can actually truly satisfy a human. There is something to be said for interaction between equals.
I tend to think that humans can be satisfied by machines/robots. I don't think sex would be an element of human mating if we got our sex kick from sex bots. Male and female humans could be perfectly happy with their sex maid bot. I could see them not even thinking of a human sex parnter until either the robot or human decides that its time for human reproduction. The name "sex bot" implies only sex. I think of "maid bot" as general house wife, and "wife bot" could raise and teach human offspring in addition to the other abilities. With just "sex bots" physical sex wouldn't be a mating factor. But what about when we get to "wife bots" and those bots have human like emotions and can replicate everything a human mate could except it is designed to complement/adapt to its human mate. Think having "near the perfect" wife/mate from 15 onward for you. Human mates couldn't compete against either the unlimited sex or the emotional attachment level. Of course there could be those that feel that the robot is "too needy," but the robot would recongize the signs and change its behavior so that it acts just as the human would like.
"Key considerations would include ensuring human control over robots, protecting data acquired by robots and preventing illegal use."
"The Ministry of Information and Communication has also predicted that every South Korean household will have a robot by between 2015 and 2020.
In part, this is a response to the country's aging society and also an acknowledgement that the pace of development in robotics is accelerating.
The new charter is an attempt to set ground rules for this future.
"Imagine if some people treat androids as if the machines were their wives," Park Hye-Young of the ministry's robot team told the AFP news agency.
"Others may get addicted to interacting with them just as many internet users get hooked to the cyberworld." "
Um, I want more details. I have to agree that I'd want human control over robots even if it meant sentient robots being enslaved. When it comes right down to it, we are human, and they are machines/tools. We shouldn't build some classes of robots just to avoid these problems. I actually kinda of giggled reading this thinking of sex/maid robots. Those would be a selective pressure on humanity. How many or what type of people would marry and reproduce when you could have a robot mate that actually follows your orders, cleans your house, has sex with you as often as you can medically handle, runs your errands and adapts itself to your preferences?
If every 15 year old could easily/cheapily buy their own robot that could do all those things, then the only reason to find a human parnter would be to mate/reproduce. Hmm, we'd need to think about putting in something for "robot mates" to want human offspring after awhile to ensure that their family/mate's geneline survives. These things could be a great form of birth control if nothing else!
I've been thinking that the only home use app lots of HD storage space would be A/V. Now, I guess when 10 PB of HD are $100-1120, then we'll be able to get copies of these 120 TB of hubble data or TBs of other datasets to fill up those future home PB HDs. One day we'll need home exabyte HD to store and play around with public PB datasets.
I can only hope that bandwidth can keep up. How long would it take to transfer a 120 TB bit torrent file over either cable or dsl?
Well, maybe we'll have small TB USB flashdrives that we can just mail those around instead of upgrading our bandwidth.
You mentioned getting email notifications about changes to the repository. You work with the code every day (or nearly every day). You see, these representatives in congress often times vote on bills which they have not even themselves read. They get the executive summary.
That is like the difference between you reading the code for a newly modified parser class and getting one of your underlings to brief you about the changes. You might spend an hour or more reading source code for a whole new class, and only two minutes getting briefed on it. You have to get them actually read the bills first.
Maybe we should require that all bills be read aloud in their entirety in an open session of congress?
Maybe we should just declare that all the bills/laws passed in congress for the year should not exceed 12 pages and that they have to review all previous bills/laws until all congressional bills/laws fit within 12 pages. (Actually, I'd like it to get down to only a page. I don't think that people can follow more than a page of laws/rules so anything that you expect or want people to follow needs to be short and fairly understandable.)
If France doesn't value freedom of speech as much as America, then tell my why the Annual Worldwide Press Freedom Index for 2006 rated America behind France in terms of freedom of the press?
Um, freedom of speech isn't and only about freedom of press. I could careless about most reporters being some what censored. I don't want myself or those that I talk to censored. When I think of freedom of speech it's on the individual level, not the press or web level where you could shout out your message to anyone and be magically protected. Um, I don't believe absolute freedom of speech as a good thing. Think about why absolute freedom of speech is a bad thing. I can accept limits on journalists and governments limiting the things that "the press" publish world wide.
You know what's really funny to me? Slashdot seems to love to blame Bush as being the evil president limiting freedom of speech. He isn't what I tend to worry about. It's the local city mayor/city manager that fires the city accountant when the city accountant publishes the actual city financal budget that I worry about. Bush is really distant; it's the local governmental censors that I'd fear. They are the ones that are actually likely to censor your speech.
Does anyone else think this is a Bad Idea? If there's one thing we've learned from Second Life, it's that left to build their own world from scratch, adults on the internet will make a lot of sex shops. Now, even if the Lego MMO is targeted for kids, it's also going to be pretty popular with people who played with LEGOs as kids, which means it's inevitable that the entire world is filled with nothing but boobs and wieners made out of CGI little plastic blocks.
It's like, "think of the children," only for real this time, because seriously adults are going to fill Legoland with crap.
Actually the "easiest" solution to that potential problem is for the users to be able to declare their section age restricted and/or restricted by a nudity/lang/potential adult content tag and if their parents let them view that material, then no big problem. If the parents are complete spazs about this stuff then it would be right up their for the parents to block it. You'd have to have in your user agreement that the user is expected to properly mod his content correct, but some sort of rule/reviewing process that if there are enough complainers that some one that modded someing G could be bumped up to NC17. Part of me thinks that it would be good if we properly escorted kids through those adult content areas and pretend its all just museum art. We'd hear alot of giggles from the kids, but they'd not care about nudity. Lots of vulgar lang. isn't bad per se; it's just annoying to listen to when every few words are either an insult or sort of like constant compiler warnings. There can be real content underneath vuglar lang., but there is some sort of limit where if most of your content or communication is vuglar just for the sake of being vulgar most people tend to shun it.
There is also the concept of having adult areas or kid only areas and between gray areas. If lego MMPOG became "kid only" is could still succend, but it could also confuse parents that want user accounts to play in the same MMO as their kids that they can't go and monitor their kids in the "kid only" area.
Yes I agree, but remember, these are kids, they also have a childhood to live. Performance and the rage to be the first in everything should be something they gradually come to expect as they age
Um, we have childhood before we go into school and during school breaks. School isn't the time/place for them to do their down time. Actually, there is a part of me that likes "ranking" and "grading" abilities in all sorts of subject areas. There is a part of me that thinks that all grades for each class assignment needs to be published in a chart and the kids see how they rank within the class and how the class ranks within the school and how the school ranks compared to others. Let's use our natural drive to compete to improve education rather than ignoring that it exists.
Of course, this is the high school level I'm talking about, an age group that generally doesn't "wake up" until midday anyway. I know *I* was a zombie until about 10:30 AM. Actually, I still am...
Hey, they could just make 'em run laps from 8-9.
See the word "battlespace" in the description - that's DoD-ese for "battleground." They're talking about being able to go back and rapidly review/search recordings from satellites and other sensors monitoring combat zones. It's a very good idea - if you could track a car back to a house, you can then see who went in a out, and so forth. You could backtrack a small boat coming out of a sheltered hiding spot, and so forth. It's about time someone thought of this, frankly.
This isn't domestic surveillance that they're talking about.
I think that it's been a matter of tech and ability more than some one thinking about it. We've had scifi and space folks and 1984 folks think of this for a long time. We've only recently started to have the tech. Just wait. I could see vastly smaller and cheaper cameras everywhere. Folks worry about RFID, but its far too expensive. What if we developed a very "cheap" barcode replacement that was no more expensive than current printed barcodes except included 100 TB of datastorage on the device, GPS tracking, A/V recording from the barcode, a range of chemical/enviromental monitors, and the means to dump the data to the government, the orginial source of the barcode, or the current owner of the barcode. That's when we'd really start having to worry about this of course by then it'll have been implemented on a large scale so we'd know if we need to panic over it or not. I predict a 1984ish tv series shortly with all this magic scifi tech in it used for both good and evil.
What gets me the most is that currently publishers make you sign the copyright waver to transfer rights to them. All such forms that I have seen start with "The copyright law requires that you transfer the copyright..." which is a complete bullshit. I could have held the copyright and just given them permission to publish it once, there's nothing in any law that requires copyright transfer for publishing.
But if I don't sign that form then I don't get published, and then I don't get funded for research because I have no publications. Catch-22.
We need to push for federal and state laws that basically says that research sponsered by tax payer money belongs to the various government organizations and that the various researches never held the copyright to transfer to a publisher in the first place and that the government just took back its socalled transfered copyrights and any publisher that wants to protest gets to deal with the government.