Ummm what -=planet=- have you been living on for the last 20 years?
The guys that count all want to die not live. This is why the rule books are being thrown out all over the world. No camera, Biometric Passport, ID card or pat down in an airport will stop them. All of these fake "security" responses are simply a gold rush land grab by the Shlumbergers of this world.
I think it is a rather fair deal, at least until they start using the footage as evidence in otherwise unrelated cases.
This is the problem; they ALWAYS extend a systems uses, often silently. As soon as the cameras for Cogestion Charging were put in place in London (which works brilliantly at reducing traffic) Ken Livingston started talking about its "secondary uses" in monitoring who goes in and out of London. All the data is being made available to every authority that wants it, no warrant or review of any kind, and there is aparently no limit to how long they can keep this data.
I dont have to spell out precisely what this means in a place like this.
This is the problem with surveilance; feature creep. We cannot (or at least SHOULD not) give up our privacy for a little convenience, wether its too much traffic or a plague of grafitti.
...the intent here is to provide additional protection..
People remotely monitoring will not provide "additional protection" thats just nonsense. If a place is that important, they should have armed sucurity 24-7.
...have their own indigenous security detachment....
Making the whole idea redundant. Now, why would someone put forward the idea of creating a scalable system where the populattion becomes the eyes and ears of the state for cash? Can you say "TIPS2".
These cameras are protecting the private or secure public areas.
Cameras dont protect anything. The collect "evidence". And unless the response time is around 60 seconds, no matter how many people are watching remotely, not a single act of sabotage will be prevented by the presence of a CCTV camera, no matter who is behind it.
The "security" industry in this case is a vile parasite, feeding off of the fear of crime and sabotage. It would be far better to spend time fixing the root causes than putting cameras on everything.
One of the major reasons for going to a studio at all is the sound.
At last, someone who is interested in THE SOUND of music.
Protools in the hands of the wrong people is a disaster; it is mercilessly unforgiving, unlike the previous generations of gear, that rewarded mistakes and happy accidents.
The sensibility of the origin of this thread is correct; Protools has changed the sound of popular music for the worse. All the about "dont blame the tools" talk doesnt change that fact.
making a room that has good acoustic qualities... still necessary for a decent recording.
This is 100% true, and part of the problem with Protools is that people believe that everything can be fixed once the sound is stored in the system, which is false; in fact, the more you try and fix the defects, the more the recording is damaged.
People with "ears" have woken up to this, and are moving to systems that dont damage music. This means relying on performers to deliver fine performances, which is what you desire when listening to played music.
Wether the masses can tell the difference in all of this or not is another story.
What Protools, Sound Forge, Audio Mulch and other pieces of software are brilliant at is making the new music that has nothing to do with "air" or performances by real people. This music (sometimes called "Glitchwerks") was not possible before fast cheap computers, sound cards and the software to mess it all up, but generally speaking, the public does not yet consider these works to be music at all. Hmmm this atually means that Protools is good for modern music!
A similar scenario would be the Civil Rights movement in the United States.
I was talking about revolution, in a very particular sense (Bolshevics, Cubans), and the use of violence in that context when a revolutionary forces through arms, replaces a government. The Civil Rights movement in the USA really isnt relevant to this at all.
I did not mean to "marginalize" the many acts of violence, (most of them perpetrated by the Racist Government in SA). What I am saying is, that the change in government in SA was not due to a violent revolution, as defined by the Cuban and Russian examples, and this is simply a fact.
Ok, ill give you another example. The type of revolution we are talking about when we say "violent revolution" is like the one that happened in Russia, The Bolshevic Revolution.
The South African Revolution was not like that.
Just because there are violent acts before or during a revolution does not mean that the revolution itself should be termed "violent". The Bolshevic revolution was a textbook violent revolution, complete with regicide.
The South African Revolution was non violent, by definition. The transition between governments was peaceful. There was not an armed mass uprising. There were elections. There was reconciliation.
This is of course, nothing new. FIPR just ran this story, and from the headline it looked like EMI was going to release singles for free...now THAT would have been news!
The tire necklacing of government informants is not like the beheading of aristocrats?
No, it is not. These acts were not acts of revolution. When I say "not a shot fired" I mean there was no revolutionary overthrow and replacement of the Government. This is a fact.
If you want (obviously need) an example of what revolution means in this context, look at Cuba.
They were not the cause of the revolution. The necklassing was not like the cutting off of royal heads in France, or the shooting of a president or government minister, or a mass armed uprising. Peoples arms are being cut off in Sierra Leone, but no one is calling that a revolution.
A revolution happened in South Africa, and not a shot was fired. No one has to die or even suffer for a revolution to take place. It is in no way too late for first world countries to have revolutions.
There is a revolution going on right now in the first world; everyone is switching to the Euro as their currency of choice for all transactions.
The effect of this will be felt world wide. The face of everything will be changed.
With face recognition, fingerprinting, and other biometric measures in place. I don't recall being asked for permission about any of these.
Would you go out of your way to stay in a hotel that respected your privacy as a matter of policy and a service "feature"?
How about a car rental company? Or a grocery store? Or $service ?
There is going to be an economy, (like the current "Black Market Economy") that will be HUGE, to cater for everyone that doesnt want everything about them to be writen down and stored.
OR
Everyone will practice dual identities. The problem with doing this is that if you "short circuit" your two identites, say, by using your two different credit cards (with different names) to pay one restaurant bill, a gateway between them would be created making it easy to get info on the real you.
This way, joined up government and or joined up databases can be broken down again. Into very small pieces.
If you want to provide content under your own licence, its your call. This DRM scheme is an open standard is not mandatory, and is not built in by default to 3G phones. You are free to use it or not.
Make your own mobile content and services and licence them in the way you see fit; its your business. The market will decide who is the winner.
What I am saying is that beliefs in aliens visiting earth is a belief that fills some extreme form of escapism that the more.. uh... loony people have.
you are an ignoramus, in the literal sence of the word. read this page written by a professional astronomer. You DO know how to read dont you? If you have read this and STILL think that people who think some UFOs are alien space craft, then it is YOU who are a loony escapist, filling the empty void that is your brain with ostrich posturing nonsense.
It doesnt matter how good your product is; the conditions for it spreading are more important than great technical capabilities and fantastic specs.
Now, if MS made the encoder and the players free, and made them free to incorporate into third party devices, then there might be a wildfire. This is simply not going to happen.
Since anyone anywhere can make use of the products that will come out of this two million dollars, the benefit to wider mankind far outbweighs the benefit to DARPA | TIA | $evil_project.
Now, if that same money went into one of the many secret software projects at Lawrence Livermore or teh NSA, then no one benefits except the evil parties.
The use of this money to develop OpenBSD can be nothing but a good thing, due to the security everyone will gain, world wide, which will further protect from the real bad guys.
Re:Uh oh, here we go again
on
AI in Sci-Fi
·
· Score: 1
Is that reasonable enough?
Not really; it assumes that entropy is irreversable, which is an arbitrary limitation on what can and cannot be done.
It assumes that this "civilization" of AIs would not want to infinitely punish humanity (like that AI that kept 5 people alive just to torment them for all eternity).
There are just too many negative assumptions, and the words "impossible" and "never" are used far too often, which was the point of my post.
The plot of The Matrix is a brilliant, poetic, and shocking plot; it inspires a great deal reflection in the viewer. It is internally consistent and satisfying. It is enlightening, not only about the consequences of AI but of the pandoras box of new technologies that are "right around the corner".
Good science fiction always introduces concepts that are "impossible" using todays technology (see teleportaion. For decades "scientists" have been baying about teleportation being impossible, now, its been done). If science fiction has to be based on only what is not "total nonsense" then for my money it isnt science ficiton, and certainly, most of the great, life changing science fiction would never have been written.
The best part of AI was the end, the totally surprising, far out, beyond imagination part, where you are gobsmacked by both the minute details, and the very idea; the idea that a "race" of AI would do archeaology to find out who they are...thats science fiction!
Minority report, again, pure sci-fi, surprising, enlighening, bizarre, and with a plot so internally consistent that you completely suspend belief for the duration of whole film.
To derisorily say that "ESP and remote viewing are against the laws of physics (nonsense)", truly, is to misunderstand why Minority Report, and indeed, science fiction in general is so very wonderful.
Two you left out:
"Demon Seed", incredibly surprising, 100% plausable, unimaginable middle and ending.
"The Forbin Project", again, flawless, plausable, cautionary, deeply effecting.
Uh oh, here we go again
on
AI in Sci-Fi
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
(This is of course total nonsense, because the vast life-support systems for billions of people comatose in pods must use much more energy than produced.)
And now, other great pronouncements from scientists:
"Man will never go to the moon"
"Anyone travelling on a train at more than 30MPH would suffocate"
"Teleportation is impossible"
"The distances between planets is too far to traverse"
IBM should really understtand this, after having worked on OS2 for so long.
They also have the bucks to put a team of developers on the case to create just such an installation system, so no excuse there.
I was expecting something completely different when I surfed to that site, but instead, got a taste of yet another geek only tool; admirable, but really not boundary breaking stuff.
They should at least take the lead from Ximian, and build something that a total computer illiterate can use. [asbestos] Whilst there can never be enough command line tools [/asbestos] someone, somewhere is going to have to bite the bullet and create this badly needed system, and its going to be someone with money.
Look how everyone has benefitted from Nautilus; the same thing has to happen with installers.
Why? "Discovered" is a loaded word. If life exists on Europa, its existence has nothing to do with anyone observing it. This is part of the conciet of scientists, who think that if they do not see something themselvs, then it simply is not real/does not exist/is fantasy.
This impacts the way that people live every day, mostly in the field of medicine. People are denied medicine that works and are made to suffer needlessly because a small number rationalist adherents have not (or cannot) measure the effictiveness of these cures that lie outside of thier narrow bands of knowledge and experience. That is certainly not "just fine".
The same goes for Europa and exobiology. Because someone somewhere has now said that it is "doubtful" that life exists there, (based on a mile high submarine sandwitch of false assumptions) mission plans might be altered and we will not get to see Europa close up.
There is no evidence one way or the other, so its illogical to doubt that life is there. There may or may not be life on Europa, and superimposing all of these terracentric preconditions and preconceptions on the subject is really rather silly and pointless.
Everyone knows that Extremophiles can live under conditions that we always find surprising.
It would be much better, clearer and honest to say that, "A newly observed [not discovered] gas cloud around Jupiter, created by ion radiation hitting the surface of Europa, [has cast doubt on possible life on the moon.] has interesting consequences for life on Europa".
Bacteria have been found living in nuclear reactors, sealed in caves for millions of years, and living in ecosystems fueled by volcanic vents. There is no reason why there might not be life on Europa. Any doubt about its being there is an illusion, thrown up by theories that have been demonstrated to be utterly false, or at best, very incomplete.
HaloSim3 Software is a sundog simulator which models how light passes through ice crystals that are suspended in the atmosphere. Beautiful and fascinating.
I'm not quite sure why this and ice crystals are so fascinating, but I have the book mentioned in the article, which consists of hundreds of black pages with 1" square images of snowflake magnifications. In the first instance it sounds insane, but it never fails to hold peoples attention.
Slashdot Mirror
some will wish to commit their acts and get away.
Ummm what -=planet=- have you been living on for the last 20 years?
The guys that count all want to die not live. This is why the rule books are being thrown out all over the world. No camera, Biometric Passport, ID card or pat down in an airport will stop them. All of these fake "security" responses are simply a gold rush land grab by the Shlumbergers of this world.
Come on!
I think it is a rather fair deal, at least until they start using the footage as evidence in otherwise unrelated cases.
This is the problem; they ALWAYS extend a systems uses, often silently. As soon as the cameras for Cogestion Charging were put in place in London (which works brilliantly at reducing traffic) Ken Livingston started talking about its "secondary uses" in monitoring who goes in and out of London. All the data is being made available to every authority that wants it, no warrant or review of any kind, and there is aparently no limit to how long they can keep this data.
I dont have to spell out precisely what this means in a place like this.
This is the problem with surveilance; feature creep. We cannot (or at least SHOULD not) give up our privacy for a little convenience, wether its too much traffic or a plague of grafitti.
People remotely monitoring will not provide "additional protection" thats just nonsense. If a place is that important, they should have armed sucurity 24-7.
Making the whole idea redundant. Now, why would someone put forward the idea of creating a scalable system where the populattion becomes the eyes and ears of the state for cash? Can you say "TIPS2".
I dont even have to mention the STASI do I?
These cameras are protecting the private or secure public areas.
Cameras dont protect anything. The collect "evidence". And unless the response time is around 60 seconds, no matter how many people are watching remotely, not a single act of sabotage will be prevented by the presence of a CCTV camera, no matter who is behind it.
The "security" industry in this case is a vile parasite, feeding off of the fear of crime and sabotage. It would be far better to spend time fixing the root causes than putting cameras on everything.
But you know this.
Amen pubjames.
Lets see: "it might actually work"
It's not monday morning
It's not April 1
hmmmmmm must be the drugs!
One of the major reasons for going to a studio at all is the sound.
At last, someone who is interested in THE SOUND of music.
Protools in the hands of the wrong people is a disaster; it is mercilessly unforgiving, unlike the previous generations of gear, that rewarded mistakes and happy accidents.
The sensibility of the origin of this thread is correct; Protools has changed the sound of popular music for the worse. All the about "dont blame the tools" talk doesnt change that fact.
making a room that has good acoustic qualities... still necessary for a decent recording.
This is 100% true, and part of the problem with Protools is that people believe that everything can be fixed once the sound is stored in the system, which is false; in fact, the more you try and fix the defects, the more the recording is damaged.
People with "ears" have woken up to this, and are moving to systems that dont damage music. This means relying on performers to deliver fine performances, which is what you desire when listening to played music.
Wether the masses can tell the difference in all of this or not is another story.
What Protools, Sound Forge, Audio Mulch and other pieces of software are brilliant at is making the new music that has nothing to do with "air" or performances by real people. This music (sometimes called "Glitchwerks") was not possible before fast cheap computers, sound cards and the software to mess it all up, but generally speaking, the public does not yet consider these works to be music at all. Hmmm this atually means that Protools is good for modern music!
A similar scenario would be the Civil Rights movement in the United States.
I was talking about revolution, in a very particular sense (Bolshevics, Cubans), and the use of violence in that context when a revolutionary forces through arms, replaces a government. The Civil Rights movement in the USA really isnt relevant to this at all.
I did not mean to "marginalize" the many acts of violence, (most of them perpetrated by the Racist Government in SA). What I am saying is, that the change in government in SA was not due to a violent revolution, as defined by the Cuban and Russian examples, and this is simply a fact.
I really don't see how
Ok, ill give you another example. The type of revolution we are talking about when we say "violent revolution" is like the one that happened in Russia, The Bolshevic Revolution.
The South African Revolution was not like that.
Just because there are violent acts before or during a revolution does not mean that the revolution itself should be termed "violent". The Bolshevic revolution was a textbook violent revolution, complete with regicide.
The South African Revolution was non violent, by definition. The transition between governments was peaceful. There was not an armed mass uprising. There were elections. There was reconciliation.
The difference couldnt be more clear.
You have just been PR'd.
This is of course, nothing new. FIPR just ran this story, and from the headline it looked like EMI was going to release singles for free...now THAT would have been news!
The tire necklacing of government informants is not like the beheading of aristocrats?
No, it is not. These acts were not acts of revolution. When I say "not a shot fired" I mean there was no revolutionary overthrow and replacement of the Government. This is a fact.
If you want (obviously need) an example of what revolution means in this context, look at Cuba.
They were not the cause of the revolution. The necklassing was not like the cutting off of royal heads in France, or the shooting of a president or government minister, or a mass armed uprising. Peoples arms are being cut off in Sierra Leone, but no one is calling that a revolution.
That definition of revolution is way too narrow.
A revolution happened in South Africa, and not a shot was fired. No one has to die or even suffer for a revolution to take place. It is in no way too late for first world countries to have revolutions.
There is a revolution going on right now in the first world; everyone is switching to the Euro as their currency of choice for all transactions.
The effect of this will be felt world wide. The face of everything will be changed.
That is revolution.
With face recognition, fingerprinting, and other biometric measures in place. I don't recall being asked for permission about any of these.
Would you go out of your way to stay in a hotel that respected your privacy as a matter of policy and a service "feature"?
How about a car rental company?
Or a grocery store?
Or $service ?
There is going to be an economy, (like the current "Black Market Economy") that will be HUGE, to cater for everyone that doesnt want everything about them to be writen down and stored.
OR
Everyone will practice dual identities. The problem with doing this is that if you "short circuit" your two identites, say, by using your two different credit cards (with different names) to pay one restaurant bill, a gateway between them would be created making it easy to get info on the real you.
This way, joined up government and or joined up databases can be broken down again. Into very small pieces.
If you want to provide content under your own licence, its your call. This DRM scheme is an open standard is not mandatory, and is not built in by default to 3G phones. You are free to use it or not.
Make your own mobile content and services and licence them in the way you see fit; its your business. The market will decide who is the winner.
What I am saying is that beliefs in aliens visiting earth is a belief that fills some extreme form of escapism that the more.. uh... loony people have.
you are an ignoramus, in the literal sence of the word. read this page written by a professional astronomer. You DO know how to read dont you? If you have read this and STILL think that people who think some UFOs are alien space craft, then it is YOU who are a loony escapist, filling the empty void that is your brain with ostrich posturing nonsense.
There really are some NUTS on Slashdot!
The professionals say different.
Betamax is widely accepted as being superior to VHS at the time; there are many docs online to "prove" it.
Remember Betamax.
It doesnt matter how good your product is; the conditions for it spreading are more important than great technical capabilities and fantastic specs.
Now, if MS made the encoder and the players free, and made them free to incorporate into third party devices, then there might be a wildfire. This is simply not going to happen.
Nothing to see here; move along.
Since anyone anywhere can make use of the products that will come out of this two million dollars, the benefit to wider mankind far outbweighs the benefit to DARPA | TIA | $evil_project.
Now, if that same money went into one of the many secret software projects at Lawrence Livermore or teh NSA, then no one benefits except the evil parties.
The use of this money to develop OpenBSD can be nothing but a good thing, due to the security everyone will gain, world wide, which will further protect from the real bad guys.
Is that reasonable enough?
Not really; it assumes that entropy is irreversable, which is an arbitrary limitation on what can and cannot be done.
It assumes that this "civilization" of AIs would not want to infinitely punish humanity (like that AI that kept 5 people alive just to torment them for all eternity).
There are just too many negative assumptions, and the words "impossible" and "never" are used far too often, which was the point of my post.
The plot of The Matrix is a brilliant, poetic, and shocking plot; it inspires a great deal reflection in the viewer. It is internally consistent and satisfying. It is enlightening, not only about the consequences of AI but of the pandoras box of new technologies that are "right around the corner".
Good science fiction always introduces concepts that are "impossible" using todays technology (see teleportaion. For decades "scientists" have been baying about teleportation being impossible, now, its been done). If science fiction has to be based on only what is not "total nonsense" then for my money it isnt science ficiton, and certainly, most of the great, life changing science fiction would never have been written.
The best part of AI was the end, the totally surprising, far out, beyond imagination part, where you are gobsmacked by both the minute details, and the very idea; the idea that a "race" of AI would do archeaology to find out who they are...thats science fiction!
Minority report, again, pure sci-fi, surprising, enlighening, bizarre, and with a plot so internally consistent that you completely suspend belief for the duration of whole film.
To derisorily say that "ESP and remote viewing are against the laws of physics (nonsense)", truly, is to misunderstand why Minority Report, and indeed, science fiction in general is so very wonderful.
Two you left out:
"Demon Seed", incredibly surprising, 100% plausable, unimaginable middle and ending.
"The Forbin Project", again, flawless, plausable, cautionary, deeply effecting.
(This is of course total nonsense, because the vast life-support systems for billions of people comatose in pods must use much more energy than produced.)
And now, other great pronouncements from scientists:
"Man will never go to the moon"
"Anyone travelling on a train at more than 30MPH would suffocate"
"Teleportation is impossible"
"The distances between planets is too far to traverse"
loosely generalizing in poor syntax:
"$hard_task is $negative_sucess_condition"
IBM should really understtand this, after having worked on OS2 for so long.
They also have the bucks to put a team of developers on the case to create just such an installation system, so no excuse there.
I was expecting something completely different when I surfed to that site, but instead, got a taste of yet another geek only tool; admirable, but really not boundary breaking stuff.
They should at least take the lead from Ximian, and build something that a total computer illiterate can use. [asbestos] Whilst there can never be enough command line tools [/asbestos] someone, somewhere is going to have to bite the bullet and create this badly needed system, and its going to be someone with money.
Look how everyone has benefitted from Nautilus; the same thing has to happen with installers.
Why? "Discovered" is a loaded word. If life exists on Europa, its existence has nothing to do with anyone observing it. This is part of the conciet of scientists, who think that if they do not see something themselvs, then it simply is not real/does not exist/is fantasy.
This impacts the way that people live every day, mostly in the field of medicine. People are denied medicine that works and are made to suffer needlessly because a small number rationalist adherents have not (or cannot) measure the effictiveness of these cures that lie outside of thier narrow bands of knowledge and experience. That is certainly not "just fine".
The same goes for Europa and exobiology. Because someone somewhere has now said that it is "doubtful" that life exists there, (based on a mile high submarine sandwitch of false assumptions) mission plans might be altered and we will not get to see Europa close up.
That, by any measure, is not "just fine".
Get some perspective, please.
There is no evidence one way or the other, so its illogical to doubt that life is there. There may or may not be life on Europa, and superimposing all of these terracentric preconditions and preconceptions on the subject is really rather silly and pointless.
Everyone knows that Extremophiles can live under conditions that we always find surprising.
It would be much better, clearer and honest to say that, "A newly observed [not discovered] gas cloud around Jupiter, created by ion radiation hitting the surface of Europa, [has cast doubt on possible life on the moon.] has interesting consequences for life on Europa".
Bacteria have been found living in nuclear reactors, sealed in caves for millions of years, and living in ecosystems fueled by volcanic vents. There is no reason why there might not be life on Europa. Any doubt about its being there is an illusion, thrown up by theories that have been demonstrated to be utterly false, or at best, very incomplete.
HaloSim3 Software is a sundog simulator which models how light passes through ice crystals that are suspended in the atmosphere. Beautiful and fascinating.
I'm not quite sure why this and ice crystals are so fascinating, but I have the book mentioned in the article, which consists of hundreds of black pages with 1" square images of snowflake magnifications. In the first instance it sounds insane, but it never fails to hold peoples attention.