What with the apparently relentless rise of right-wing parties across Europe, it's inevitable that a right-leaning prankster with "authority" as defined by the European Parliament decides to send out mass demands for removal of far-leftist content on the grounds that it inherently promotes terrorism. The resultant political hullabaloo will drive up popcorn sales and produce millions of liters of hot air, but I'm not sure whether European national agencies or lawmakers would learn anything about the law of unintended consequences.
Personally, I think I'll whip up a batch of Buffalo-style hot chicken wings when that happens and lean back into the couch to enjoy the show.
Seems to me a lot depends on what sort of clear rewards are consistently associated with using the name. If your cat responds otherwise to your body language, your tone of voice, its own inner beat, and other nonverbal cues such as smelling like tuna to come when you call, always or almost always hearing the same sound -- the kitty's name -- just before getting ear rubs, small nummies, and other fun stuff will naturally become linked over time to the clearly enunciated name. Given sufficient native feline intelligence and enough repetitions, the name alone will become enough. I actually did this with my own kitty many years ago when I last owned a cat, and it worked a treat. (I was careful though not to overuse the name -- "here, kitty-kitty" was enough for ordinary occasions.) This does take some work and patience, of course, but that's the root of all effective animal training -- patience and bribery.
I guess it's interesting in a nebbish researcher fashion to try to measure how much the overall social environment affects fuzz-butt psychology. Is a fairly noisy environment detrimental to this kind of training, such as a household with multiple kids or punk-rock musicians in development? A hammer factor with testing facilities? NASA's rocket launching facilities? An otherwise quiet campus with frat boys who love to belt out off-color songs every day at noon? What about dogs in the household -- does their constant nose-poking and butt-sniffing make learning names more difficult for cats? Just how terrible does a "terrible-twos" toddler have to be before the average kitty loses all ability to focus on anything but surviving from day to day? Just speculating on the possibilities.
I suspect that the old practice of wealthy families employing full-time household servants will make a significant comeback over the next couple of decades, when legions of low-skill but able-bodied people find themselves irresistibly replaced by software and robotics. Sure, there'll be crying and grumbling over having to take jobs that many folks today consider to be beneath them, but personal servants for the rich were the norm for much of human history after the rise of agriculture and cities. Social expectations shifted during the Industrial Revolution and will shift again with the Robotics Revolution.
It also seems likely that that skillfully created handmade items such as fine furniture will see wider adoption among the upper crust as their wealth relentlessly increases, leading to steady employment for craftsmen in hundreds of thousands of small boutique shops. This is a historical norm as well although the scale will be larger. The rapidly advancing state of the art in low-cost but capable computer-controlled home milling machines and 3D printers obviously will help fuel this trend. In a side note, I suppose that using automated tools kind of blurs the definition of "handmade," but c'est la vie.
Likewise, personal services should see a continuing rise in popularity -- in-home pedicures, manicures, massages, and haircuts as well as expert home cooking by visiting chefs and so forth. In particular, cooking well is a wildly popular skill, and most otherwise low-skilled folks undoubtedly could pick up the knack if motivated. Really, this all happening already, but the pace should pick up quite a bit once robot-driven mass unemployment becomes a thing. Technology leads to fun possibilities -- for example, it's easy to visualize a lumbering beast of a food truck that hosts expert chefs who prepare custom orders for delivery within a limited service area around the truck by small, speedy delivery robots. Needless to say, said food truck bristles with touch screens that display a steady stream of orders from cellphone apps that also provide continuously updated GPS coordinates for the delivery robots. "Hey, Bob -- looks like your Maine lobster with lemon butter is here. I see the food truck bot coming from that corner."
The basic idea is that wealth always, always seeks avenues for spending. Few people indeed gather paper riches merely for the sake of giggling behind closed curtains over their bank balances. Admittedly, a lopsided distribution of wealth will kind of suck for those at the bottom, but outside of the true unfortunates who live on the streets, the bottom class will still be richer than kings were a thousand years ago. Who among us in the developed world doesn't have a cellphone, a color television, and access to enough cheap food to grow mightily into a fat boy or "woman of considerable girth"? Moreover, depending on political winds, a future United States might indeed see a universal basic income that very effectively persuades the have-littles from ever seriously contemplating revolution. I don't imagine the upper-crust types will squawk too much about the huge cost of such social bribery as long as they can keep tootling around in their auto-piloted Rolls-Royces and sipping their top-shelf boutique wines with Beluga caviar while smiling servants buff their toenails. That's the beauty of the increasingly automated production of wealth -- buying off the peasants becomes more and more affordable for the have-alls, and unlike ancient Rome, there aren't any Visigoths hammering on the gates.
Can we not start a pressure group to push federal lawmakers into passing a law dictating that all publicly funded research automatically be made available freely with no paywalls whatsoever? Private publishing outfits can still hide their resources behind paywalls if they wish, but informed citizens will ignore them and go directly for the multiple open websites that offer the full text of such publicly funded research. Is that too much to ask?
A couple of small thoughts occur. When drone deliveries of lightweight items become routine between multiple points in any metropolitan area, inevitably expanding beyond hospitals and other limited applications, illegal drug dealers will naturally hop on that bandwagon. Why wouldn't they? One more drone zipping along inside a virtual cloud of them won't stand out. Increasing sophistication in autopilot capabilities over wider and wider areas will allow illicit dealers to decrease the risk of their runners or their own precious selves being arrested. Maybe criminal hackers will even bamboozle hospital computer systems into delivering hospital narcotics and other high-value pharmaceuticals to one-time pickup points.
Still, drones are cool. It'd be fun to accept a prescription drug delivery from a second-floor window. Such low-cost delivery methods might work well for bedridden or frail patients living alone. I can also see drones flying around a house, peering into the windows for signs of life if a home security system indicates that the inhabitant hasn't been anywhere near as active as usual. That service can be part of a commercial package that includes the usual medical alert devices. A severe heart attack or stroke might prevent a patient from using an alert device.
Anyways. Point-to-point interchanges between hospitals seem like a good application. I do wonder about liability issues as mentioned by others here, but then, liability issues arise with motor-vehicle deliveries. A car or truck is way more smashy than a ten-pound drone, plus I'm sure a well-designed drone will cut off the spinning blades and blare a loud alarm when it detects an imminent, uncontrolled approach to ground level. Insurance covers the rare serious accident. Everything in life is risky. It's a tradeoff.
I've always suspected that electronic voting systems, in order to be truly resistant to incessant and widespread hacking attacks, will have to accept the concept of issuing encrypted, printed paper receipts of cast votes to individual voters that then can be voluntarily passed on to independent, third-party tabulation organizations that act as a reality check on official election results. Purely online voting systems can conveniently produce both electronic receipts and downloadable PDF documents. Sure, this move might be problematic for the fundamental concept of the secret vote, but what the hell. What's worse, having to cope with that particular can of worms, which arguably already is open, or having to cope with the strong possibility of invisibly stolen elections? You makes your trade-offs, and you takes your chances.
That's my two cents worth of thought on the matter. No refunds!:^)
This minor news item reminds me of the classic phenomenon of eyelash mites. A great many of us are infested with tiny, arguably disgusting but really, really small buggy-wuggies that live on our eyelashes. Few of us are any the wiser for it. Unsurprisingly, "The Beeb" has a reasonable statement about the scuttling insects that probably live on your face and have regular mite-pizza parties:
When can we expect an episode of Black Mirror that features this machine dispensing absolutely scrumptious burgers made with some unusual meats? Or has that been done already? Either way, I fully expect life to imitate art in the near future....
I realize some people will label this as uber-technological overoptimism, but I've always thought that the trash problem will ultimately be solved once and for all by a self-reproducing nanobot ecology that hunts down abandoned materials such as iron, copper, glass, and so forth for ultra-clean recycling. The notoriously appalling Great Pacific garbage patch -- gone. Active and closed landfills around the world -- emptied out, thoroughly sanitized, and turned into recreation parks. Centuries of trash dumped overboard onto the ocean floor by uncaring sailors and passengers -- poof. Sure, it'll probably take centuries to hunt down every last glass shard from broken bottles, every last rusty nail hiding a few feet under the soil in former construction sites, every last potsherd buried in the muck of the Marianas Trench alongside ancient sunken ships, and so on and on, but the trillions of future nanobots are relentless and powered by unending energy from fusion reactors and sunlight from orbital collectors.
In the meantime, I'm supportive of initiatives to burn combustible trash for energy and to seek even more efficient ways to extract as much reusable metal as possible from current trash streams. If they make economic sense, why not? Those trillions of nanobots might not arrive for decades yet, and every gram of metal saved today is a gram that needn't be freshly mined from gigantic holes in the ground.
Hey, you know what else would be funny? Tracking down the muppets that pull this crap and breaking their knees on video. It'd be a great testimonial for the baseball bats used. "See, they smash over and over without splintering! Buy Sweet Revenge brand baseball bats today!"
This behavior is why we need no-nonsense laws forcing car manufacturers to release the exact specifications, including manufacturing costs, for all of their car parts, right down to the weird little plastic part that holds the windshield shade in place up after it's been flipped down or up. If OEM prices for replacement parts rise too high, then third-party manufacturers who've been watching like a hawk with sophisticated analysis software for this kind of piggish gouging can jump quickly into the fray with better, much less expensive alternatives. I'm strongly libertarian in most realms, but raping consumers once they're stuck with their expensive investments is just nasty and strikes me as inherently fraudulent.
By all means let the robber barons play fast and loose with their prices as long as they understand that the free market will then smack them down fast and hard. That specifically means no disingenuous games with stuffing proprietary software and firmware into many automobile parts and then using the DMCA to forbid exact duplication of those parts. It also means design patents are null and void against third-party suppliers for precise drop-in replacements. By selling their products to the public, car manufacturers have automatically agreed to forgo shithead games with patents, embedded firmware and software, or any other conceivable method as part of basic consumer protections that guarantee that vehicle owners will be able to make the most of their private property without subsequently running into piggish grunting and squealing from the manufacturers as they grab for every last possible dollar.
More than that, having tried once to rape car owners on any replacement part should lead to a cloud-based red-flag warning on all parts thenceforth from that manufacturer. "Warning: This manufacturer does not adhere to the guidelines for pricing replacement parts as set down by the American Fair Commerce Association. Parts from third-party suppliers are likely to cost substantially less."
(Yeah, I know the DMCA parts aren't exactly related to the original article, but it's part and parcel of the whole stinking load of slobbering greed.)
At the risk of arousing any short-tempered teenager present at Slashdot into a brief, indignant rage followed by a momentary fit of existential angst followed by a sudden burst of inane remarks about the latest fusion garage band to explode onto YouTube this week, the youngsters have always wanted to natter and chatter about nothing that matters. I'll offer the pop-psychology explanation that taking and posting short videos to YouTube has become so quick and painless in an age of powerful cellphones with excellent video resolution that it beats struggling with the "felt" complexity of Facebook.
Mary sees a bee-YOO-tiful horsie galloping around a local farm pasture and snaps a quick video with lots of giggling and wavey "hi theres" to her besties. Off it goes to YouTube, and texts fly with the video URL. Why not?
Dan snaps a nice video of his totally rad dragster with selfie views of him grinning and punching out the "V" for victory sign from the driver's seat. Off it goes to YouTube, and texts fly with the video URL and "see-CRET" information about the next impromptu venue for screeching rubber and distant, wailing sirens. Why not?
It's rich media, and it's easy. Plus, YouTube is more happening than the Facebook with the disapproving grannies and the old farts who want to sell stuff. It's all in good fun! At least, I hope so. If it's an alien plot by the Betelgeusians to somehow subvert the next generation, then I'd prefer to be left alone with my little social illusions and my quaint notions about the general application of Ockham's Razor. And my vodka.
I'm an old(er) fart who has been watching the absolutely fascinating phenomenon of social media for decades. (Yes, I do mean decades -- Google "FidoNet" for interesting reading if you're into that dusty historical stuff. I arrived a little late in the game with my pokey 300-baud modem, but I was there. I even bought my first domain name when Network Solutions -- colloquially "NetSol" -- was still the only game in town. Network Solutions charged $70 a year per domain name and offered a horribly unintuitive user interface -- faugh!)
I've accumulated a few observations from watching the long rise of Google and Facebook as well as the rise and fall of other successful or not-so-successful social media and web search platforms such as AOL, MySpace, AltaVista, GeoCities, Twitter, Snapchat, etc., etc., etc. Shall I include hoary old Usenet in that list? It's virtually a tautology to attribute the wild success of the web to the absurd simplicity of posting a simple website with basic HTML tags. Nor does the swamping of the modern web with extremely complex frameworks meant to overcome profound design flaws in the web detract from this point.
Anyways. For whatever it's worth, I've noticed that once a web service, be it a search engine or a social media platform, moves beyond obviously useful and non-confusing features into self-important "lookit what we can do now" frippery, it starts losing its original appeal and eventually its regular visitors. Facebook currently holds immense power as the default destination for hundreds of millions of people, but the company isn't immune to the fickle mindsets of customers for its brand of free and paid services (advertising in particular). The recent antics of the ultra-liberal leaderships of Google, Facebook, and Twitter in subtly or obviously silencing prominent conservative and libertarian voices and thereby gradually alienating a wider audience constitute only one of several serious problems.
Possibly more critical to the futures of these companies is the constant, ruthless manipulation of their audiences for maximum profitability. Mind you -- I say "maximum" profitability and not an enlightened "optimum" profitability. The former is the attitude of a greedy robber baron, and the latter is the attitude of a cautious business that knows what its customers want. Put simply, Facebook and Twitter in particular have become seriously annoying. Google isn't all that far behind. Their hundreds of programmers scamper here and yon in an unending effort to add features with little regard to how they clutter up the user experience. Hey, they've got to justify their salaries. Students of private and government bureaucracies learn this in Governance and Corporate Culture 101.
Most people want to talk to their friends and share pictures and videos without having to fight and kick and struggle against manipulative, intrusive, self-serving algorithms that keep nudging and prodding them into buying this and that or forcing them to interact with their friends in certain ways and not others. Let's not even get into the absurdities of a grossly oversimplified "like" system at Facebook that permits no subtleties of approval or disapproval. Beyond a certain point -- don't ask me where that point lies -- they silently and almost invisibly become ready and willing in their tens of millions to to suddenly abandon an old, familiar platform for a better platform that does exactly what they want it to do and nothing further.
Please note the concept of "non-confusing," which isn't quite the same thing as the older and more limited concept of "user-friendly." "Non-confusing" encompasses everything about the user experience. It means the platform only does what it absolutely must for the mainstream experience while making side trips like photographic manipulation as obviously simple as possible -- in and out and done. Visual triggers are okay but only if they quietly hover in the background with nil annoying behavior like flashing, blinking, sliding, jittering
The thought occurs that an inevitable explosion of fake video and audio recordings will drive the development of encrypted authentication networks that verify that a supposed recording came from a sealed, supposedly tamper-proof recording device from a manufacturer whose production lines, parts suppliers, and design teams are closely monitored by government agencies and nonprofit organizations against the possibility of firmware tampering. Recordings produced by unvetted devices will be automatically assumed by courts and other interested parties to be inherently unreliable and very likely fake in all cases of controversy.
The enormous growth of computing power guarantees that this kind of seamless video and audio fakery will become mainstream faster than you might think. Heck, I'm looking forward to 2020 or 2021 at the latest as the year I can browse to a free spoofing website to make up a video of Hillary Rodham Clinton staggering in a drunken haze into the welcoming arms of Vladimir Putin on the steps of the Kremlin. Next, I'll play around with videos of Donald Trump soaring like a bird around the dome of the United States Capitol, whooping loudly and dropping dookies on passersby below. Then I'll gussy up an ultra-realistic video showing a mean neighbor porking a horrified dog and send that along to the ASPCA and to the local cops. They might not believe an unverified video in the age of universal fakes, but hey. Fun days!
I didn't know Blender could be used for that purpose. I'll look into Blender's CAD features and OpenSCAD both. I'd be happy to take advantage of your offer to print out these stupid little parts at a nominal cost for each plus shipping. (I looked again, and the top hinge also needs to be replaced as soon as I can figure out how it looked originally.) It might take me a while to overcome the learning curve for one or both of these CAD programs, though. I need to become thoroughly familiar with CAD anyway for other reasons, but the work queue is rather crushing at the moment. ^^;
Also, I goofed slightly in my original post and wrote "undoubtedly" as "undoubted." The writer in me winces at the inability to edit this appalling typographical error. -_-
I know this makes me a boring person who should be stripped of his nerd card, but I'd really like to use this or a similar service to get a small replacement part printed for an old refrigerator's freezer-door hinge. It broke a long time ago, and I've been propping the door on the remnant of the bottom hinge. Needless to say, the needed part is no longer available, and trying to hack a crude replacement for it promises to be just enough trouble that I've been putting it off for lo these many years. If I could somehow translate what I see of the part into a simple CAD model for Amazon, I'd be happy to pay $10 or so just to avoid the fuss of trying to drill and hammer and cut my way to a solution.
In the classic Slashdot tradition, of course, I haven't paid much attention yet to Amazon's pricing structure, which will undoubted turn out to be unreasonable for such small matters. Still, I'm looking forward to an eventual explosion in availability of quick three-dimensional approximation scanners and small-scale solid-matter printers in corner stores where I can take the pieces to be translated into a reasonable facsimile of the original part.
I have karma to burn, and anti-Jewish, anti-Christian Islamist terrorism really, really ticks me off, so what the hell.
If the murdering thugs from Hamas hadn't slurped off tens of millions of dollars in humanitarian aid to build terror tunnels and hundreds of terror rockets instead of paying attention to the decaying infrastructure that was the specific target of the humanitarian aid, then that power plant would have been in much better condition. If the murdering thugs from Hamas hadn't insisted in raining rockets on innocent Israeli citizens for months and years, then the Israeli military wouldn't have been forced to fight yet another war to cut down on the growing threat to the lives and safety of said Israeli citizens. If the murdering thugs from Hamas didn't insist on using mosques, schools, hospitals and private residences for stockpiling weapons and for firing on Israeli troops, then the death toll and damage to critical infrastructure would have been vastly lessened.
The Israelis already have lost a significant number of troops specifically from having been so careful to conduct pinpoint strikes and to put their troops in harm's way rather than simply flatten every possible Gazan target from afar. My sympathies lie utterly and totally with hard-pressed Israeli troops and not with the disingenuous apologists for murder and terrorism who frantically, convulsively and endlessly vomit pro-jihadist propaganda.
The squirming slugs who hysterically refuse to recognize Hamas and other Islamoterrorist groups as constituting quite literally 100 percent of the source of all war and misery in the Middle East should crawl back under their rocks and quietly excrete their slime until they suffocate and fossilize in dried crud.
We already knew ourselves to be essentially colony life forms riddled with remnant retroviruses and ancient symbionts such as mitochondria, but it's damn interesting to see just how deeply integrated we are into the extremely complex biosphere all around us. It's a little depressing, perhaps, but eventually the boffins will accumulate a body of knowledge that may finally sort out all the ridiculous little things that can and will go wrong with human bodies in the murk of general ignorance. Obesity, cancer and all manner of weird and supposedly unexplained ailments -- they could simply be unknown quirks of how our innumerable symbionts and parasites interact with our basic DNA programming. -_-
I'm not surprised by this discovery. Evolutionarily, we're all really complex support systems for long meat tubes that ingest energy and building materials and excrete whatever is not useful. Even the mighty brain only exists to increase the odds of the tube surviving. Bacterial strains that also increase the chances of a meat tube surviving will be favored by simple Darwinian logic. Naturally, they will influence every body system, including the brain.
Admittedly, one doesn't like to feel like a puppet. I wonder what this means for the free will that humans supposedly possess.
Basic incentive structures are a serious problem that will only grow worse over the years. The more successful become edge businesses such as for-profit streaming video providers and monetized social networks that go heavy on large images and video advertising, the more the data carriers will enviously demand a cut of the big pie that other businesses are dividing up.
I wish I knew of a good solution to this problem that still shows reasonable respect for the free market. Perhaps it's time to give heavy federal and state tax incentives to businesses that do absolutely nothing *but* provide consistently reliable, high-speed data-transmission channels. That means no end-user content provision or end-point Internet connections for individuals, businesses or other organizations. Let the innovators scramble to implement gigabit capabilities that end-point ISPs can resell to their customers. No doubt there are sorts of problems with this idea, but my brain has nothing better right now.:/
I've been observing this sort of greedy corporatism for years. We seriously need to first set up a nationally recognized, "voluntary" standard that at least four competing broadband providers should be available in each jurisdiction and then start a national nonprofit organization that relentlessly pressures non-compliant local and state governments into abolishing laws and regulations that discourage or outright prevent this kind of minimum coverage. Constant lawsuits that dig up dirt about payoffs to politicians and expose semi-monopolies would be an excellent idea as well. It may be a little early to truly establish the idea that universal access to low-cost, high-speed Internet communications is a basic human right, but it's a good propaganda tool.
I'm a dreaming fanatic about free markets, but we don't have free markets for broadband Internet access. We have utterly corrupt corporatism. It's high time to savagely fight back against the greedy parasites at Time Warner and Cox and the rest who absolutely hate the idea of having to give up their bloated, government-protected profits.
I tried to dream up a clever bon mot to utter about this scientific curiosity, but all that came out of this effort was a stupid joke about poor old Earth having peculiar skin problems across the geological ages. I'm sowwy. I weally am. -_-
At the risk of enraging automatic supporters of bloated government programs like the old Space Shuttle, it doesn't surprise me that lean, privately funded space-exploitation outfits do so well. Reliable execution of rocket science is difficult enough already without burdening the principals with all the artificial fears and running annoyances of a crusty bureaucracy. "Could I be fired for departing from the top-down plan if I do this instead of that? Does this possible change meet the 400-page outline set down by a large committee run by political appointees?" Every millisecond squandered on peripheral distractions is a millisecond lost to the subtle considerations of consistently productive and reliable thought.
Additionally, the people who work at the private firms tend more strongly to be there for the love of it than with any government agency. That counts for a lot when it comes to repeatedly avoiding those little errors of ennui and fatigue that can build up into a disaster. Enthusiastic workers are also more prone to realizing with a joyful start that a small change that could make a real difference will likely be actually used by a quick, responsive management team. Rocketry is often about very small changes marking the difference between a successful mission and a flaming ball of fuel and rocket parts.
Along these lines, I've always thought that China has consistently lagged behind the West in leading-edge technology for much the same reasons. The Chinese have no lack of smart people, but they're subtly and powerfully burdened with the habit of "self-censorship" to avoid offending the Communist Party and with the Confucian habit of observing "face-saving" deferment to the opinions of their alleged superiors. Sounds similar to and worse than just about any government agency in the West, eh?
These are my own thoughts, and only one puppy was temporarily scared into hiding under the couch during the production of this post. I also killed a small spider, but the dratted thing was trying to crawl into my coffee cup.
I checked out the website for the Mitsuku chatbot and took a rather pessimistic poke at it.
Chatbot: [boilerplate noises omitted]... "What is your name?" Myself: "I'm the fiddler." Chatbot: "Who made you the fiddler?" [A reasonable, albeit somewhat peculiar, response.] Myself: "I took too long once to feed my peckish cat." Chatbot: "Where did you take it?" [Instant FAIL.] Myself: "I took it to new heights of frustrated noises." (Bonus straight-man response.) Chatbot: "Where did you take it?" [Parrot-like repetition raises the chat to new heights of FAIL.]
As always, two lines were enough to trip it up. The third line was a bonus that only amplified its shortcomings. I'll admit to cheating a little by using a couple of words ("peckish", "frustrated") that might have required contextual glossing by less educated individuals, but those words were still relatively common. All known chatbots seem to rely on fairly simple-minded word triggers, and even a minor requirement for context sensitivity is enough to make them fall flat on their nonexistent faces. Anyone possessing even remote familiarity with efforts at artificial intelligence knows this, of course, but hope springs eternal.
(Notes for the lazy: The word "peckish" is a common slang term for "hungry", and http://www.mitsuku.com/ is the website for the chatbot in question.)
That's pretty cool. Of course, I knew about this post yesterday, before you'd even thought about writing it up on Slashdot. I'm not exactly how that worked, but thinking too hard on it makes my head hurt. I think I'll go lie down for a while and hope the future catches up with the past or something weird like that.
Slashdot Mirror
What with the apparently relentless rise of right-wing parties across Europe, it's inevitable that a right-leaning prankster with "authority" as defined by the European Parliament decides to send out mass demands for removal of far-leftist content on the grounds that it inherently promotes terrorism. The resultant political hullabaloo will drive up popcorn sales and produce millions of liters of hot air, but I'm not sure whether European national agencies or lawmakers would learn anything about the law of unintended consequences.
Personally, I think I'll whip up a batch of Buffalo-style hot chicken wings when that happens and lean back into the couch to enjoy the show.
Seems to me a lot depends on what sort of clear rewards are consistently associated with using the name. If your cat responds otherwise to your body language, your tone of voice, its own inner beat, and other nonverbal cues such as smelling like tuna to come when you call, always or almost always hearing the same sound -- the kitty's name -- just before getting ear rubs, small nummies, and other fun stuff will naturally become linked over time to the clearly enunciated name. Given sufficient native feline intelligence and enough repetitions, the name alone will become enough. I actually did this with my own kitty many years ago when I last owned a cat, and it worked a treat. (I was careful though not to overuse the name -- "here, kitty-kitty" was enough for ordinary occasions.) This does take some work and patience, of course, but that's the root of all effective animal training -- patience and bribery.
I guess it's interesting in a nebbish researcher fashion to try to measure how much the overall social environment affects fuzz-butt psychology. Is a fairly noisy environment detrimental to this kind of training, such as a household with multiple kids or punk-rock musicians in development? A hammer factor with testing facilities? NASA's rocket launching facilities? An otherwise quiet campus with frat boys who love to belt out off-color songs every day at noon? What about dogs in the household -- does their constant nose-poking and butt-sniffing make learning names more difficult for cats? Just how terrible does a "terrible-twos" toddler have to be before the average kitty loses all ability to focus on anything but surviving from day to day? Just speculating on the possibilities.
I suspect that the old practice of wealthy families employing full-time household servants will make a significant comeback over the next couple of decades, when legions of low-skill but able-bodied people find themselves irresistibly replaced by software and robotics. Sure, there'll be crying and grumbling over having to take jobs that many folks today consider to be beneath them, but personal servants for the rich were the norm for much of human history after the rise of agriculture and cities. Social expectations shifted during the Industrial Revolution and will shift again with the Robotics Revolution.
It also seems likely that that skillfully created handmade items such as fine furniture will see wider adoption among the upper crust as their wealth relentlessly increases, leading to steady employment for craftsmen in hundreds of thousands of small boutique shops. This is a historical norm as well although the scale will be larger. The rapidly advancing state of the art in low-cost but capable computer-controlled home milling machines and 3D printers obviously will help fuel this trend. In a side note, I suppose that using automated tools kind of blurs the definition of "handmade," but c'est la vie.
Likewise, personal services should see a continuing rise in popularity -- in-home pedicures, manicures, massages, and haircuts as well as expert home cooking by visiting chefs and so forth. In particular, cooking well is a wildly popular skill, and most otherwise low-skilled folks undoubtedly could pick up the knack if motivated. Really, this all happening already, but the pace should pick up quite a bit once robot-driven mass unemployment becomes a thing. Technology leads to fun possibilities -- for example, it's easy to visualize a lumbering beast of a food truck that hosts expert chefs who prepare custom orders for delivery within a limited service area around the truck by small, speedy delivery robots. Needless to say, said food truck bristles with touch screens that display a steady stream of orders from cellphone apps that also provide continuously updated GPS coordinates for the delivery robots. "Hey, Bob -- looks like your Maine lobster with lemon butter is here. I see the food truck bot coming from that corner."
The basic idea is that wealth always, always seeks avenues for spending. Few people indeed gather paper riches merely for the sake of giggling behind closed curtains over their bank balances. Admittedly, a lopsided distribution of wealth will kind of suck for those at the bottom, but outside of the true unfortunates who live on the streets, the bottom class will still be richer than kings were a thousand years ago. Who among us in the developed world doesn't have a cellphone, a color television, and access to enough cheap food to grow mightily into a fat boy or "woman of considerable girth"? Moreover, depending on political winds, a future United States might indeed see a universal basic income that very effectively persuades the have-littles from ever seriously contemplating revolution. I don't imagine the upper-crust types will squawk too much about the huge cost of such social bribery as long as they can keep tootling around in their auto-piloted Rolls-Royces and sipping their top-shelf boutique wines with Beluga caviar while smiling servants buff their toenails. That's the beauty of the increasingly automated production of wealth -- buying off the peasants becomes more and more affordable for the have-alls, and unlike ancient Rome, there aren't any Visigoths hammering on the gates.
Can we not start a pressure group to push federal lawmakers into passing a law dictating that all publicly funded research automatically be made available freely with no paywalls whatsoever? Private publishing outfits can still hide their resources behind paywalls if they wish, but informed citizens will ignore them and go directly for the multiple open websites that offer the full text of such publicly funded research. Is that too much to ask?
A couple of small thoughts occur. When drone deliveries of lightweight items become routine between multiple points in any metropolitan area, inevitably expanding beyond hospitals and other limited applications, illegal drug dealers will naturally hop on that bandwagon. Why wouldn't they? One more drone zipping along inside a virtual cloud of them won't stand out. Increasing sophistication in autopilot capabilities over wider and wider areas will allow illicit dealers to decrease the risk of their runners or their own precious selves being arrested. Maybe criminal hackers will even bamboozle hospital computer systems into delivering hospital narcotics and other high-value pharmaceuticals to one-time pickup points.
Still, drones are cool. It'd be fun to accept a prescription drug delivery from a second-floor window. Such low-cost delivery methods might work well for bedridden or frail patients living alone. I can also see drones flying around a house, peering into the windows for signs of life if a home security system indicates that the inhabitant hasn't been anywhere near as active as usual. That service can be part of a commercial package that includes the usual medical alert devices. A severe heart attack or stroke might prevent a patient from using an alert device.
Anyways. Point-to-point interchanges between hospitals seem like a good application. I do wonder about liability issues as mentioned by others here, but then, liability issues arise with motor-vehicle deliveries. A car or truck is way more smashy than a ten-pound drone, plus I'm sure a well-designed drone will cut off the spinning blades and blare a loud alarm when it detects an imminent, uncontrolled approach to ground level. Insurance covers the rare serious accident. Everything in life is risky. It's a tradeoff.
I've always suspected that electronic voting systems, in order to be truly resistant to incessant and widespread hacking attacks, will have to accept the concept of issuing encrypted, printed paper receipts of cast votes to individual voters that then can be voluntarily passed on to independent, third-party tabulation organizations that act as a reality check on official election results. Purely online voting systems can conveniently produce both electronic receipts and downloadable PDF documents. Sure, this move might be problematic for the fundamental concept of the secret vote, but what the hell. What's worse, having to cope with that particular can of worms, which arguably already is open, or having to cope with the strong possibility of invisibly stolen elections? You makes your trade-offs, and you takes your chances.
That's my two cents worth of thought on the matter. No refunds! :^)
This minor news item reminds me of the classic phenomenon of eyelash mites. A great many of us are infested with tiny, arguably disgusting but really, really small buggy-wuggies that live on our eyelashes. Few of us are any the wiser for it. Unsurprisingly, "The Beeb" has a reasonable statement about the scuttling insects that probably live on your face and have regular mite-pizza parties:
http://bbc.com/earth/story/201...
When can we expect an episode of Black Mirror that features this machine dispensing absolutely scrumptious burgers made with some unusual meats? Or has that been done already? Either way, I fully expect life to imitate art in the near future ....
I realize some people will label this as uber-technological overoptimism, but I've always thought that the trash problem will ultimately be solved once and for all by a self-reproducing nanobot ecology that hunts down abandoned materials such as iron, copper, glass, and so forth for ultra-clean recycling. The notoriously appalling Great Pacific garbage patch -- gone. Active and closed landfills around the world -- emptied out, thoroughly sanitized, and turned into recreation parks. Centuries of trash dumped overboard onto the ocean floor by uncaring sailors and passengers -- poof. Sure, it'll probably take centuries to hunt down every last glass shard from broken bottles, every last rusty nail hiding a few feet under the soil in former construction sites, every last potsherd buried in the muck of the Marianas Trench alongside ancient sunken ships, and so on and on, but the trillions of future nanobots are relentless and powered by unending energy from fusion reactors and sunlight from orbital collectors.
In the meantime, I'm supportive of initiatives to burn combustible trash for energy and to seek even more efficient ways to extract as much reusable metal as possible from current trash streams. If they make economic sense, why not? Those trillions of nanobots might not arrive for decades yet, and every gram of metal saved today is a gram that needn't be freshly mined from gigantic holes in the ground.
This shit is so evil as to be ... actively funny.
Hey, you know what else would be funny? Tracking down the muppets that pull this crap and breaking their knees on video. It'd be a great testimonial for the baseball bats used. "See, they smash over and over without splintering! Buy Sweet Revenge brand baseball bats today!"
This behavior is why we need no-nonsense laws forcing car manufacturers to release the exact specifications, including manufacturing costs, for all of their car parts, right down to the weird little plastic part that holds the windshield shade in place up after it's been flipped down or up. If OEM prices for replacement parts rise too high, then third-party manufacturers who've been watching like a hawk with sophisticated analysis software for this kind of piggish gouging can jump quickly into the fray with better, much less expensive alternatives. I'm strongly libertarian in most realms, but raping consumers once they're stuck with their expensive investments is just nasty and strikes me as inherently fraudulent.
By all means let the robber barons play fast and loose with their prices as long as they understand that the free market will then smack them down fast and hard. That specifically means no disingenuous games with stuffing proprietary software and firmware into many automobile parts and then using the DMCA to forbid exact duplication of those parts. It also means design patents are null and void against third-party suppliers for precise drop-in replacements. By selling their products to the public, car manufacturers have automatically agreed to forgo shithead games with patents, embedded firmware and software, or any other conceivable method as part of basic consumer protections that guarantee that vehicle owners will be able to make the most of their private property without subsequently running into piggish grunting and squealing from the manufacturers as they grab for every last possible dollar.
More than that, having tried once to rape car owners on any replacement part should lead to a cloud-based red-flag warning on all parts thenceforth from that manufacturer. "Warning: This manufacturer does not adhere to the guidelines for pricing replacement parts as set down by the American Fair Commerce Association. Parts from third-party suppliers are likely to cost substantially less."
(Yeah, I know the DMCA parts aren't exactly related to the original article, but it's part and parcel of the whole stinking load of slobbering greed.)
At the risk of arousing any short-tempered teenager present at Slashdot into a brief, indignant rage followed by a momentary fit of existential angst followed by a sudden burst of inane remarks about the latest fusion garage band to explode onto YouTube this week, the youngsters have always wanted to natter and chatter about nothing that matters. I'll offer the pop-psychology explanation that taking and posting short videos to YouTube has become so quick and painless in an age of powerful cellphones with excellent video resolution that it beats struggling with the "felt" complexity of Facebook.
Mary sees a bee-YOO-tiful horsie galloping around a local farm pasture and snaps a quick video with lots of giggling and wavey "hi theres" to her besties. Off it goes to YouTube, and texts fly with the video URL. Why not?
Dan snaps a nice video of his totally rad dragster with selfie views of him grinning and punching out the "V" for victory sign from the driver's seat. Off it goes to YouTube, and texts fly with the video URL and "see-CRET" information about the next impromptu venue for screeching rubber and distant, wailing sirens. Why not?
It's rich media, and it's easy. Plus, YouTube is more happening than the Facebook with the disapproving grannies and the old farts who want to sell stuff. It's all in good fun! At least, I hope so. If it's an alien plot by the Betelgeusians to somehow subvert the next generation, then I'd prefer to be left alone with my little social illusions and my quaint notions about the general application of Ockham's Razor. And my vodka.
I'm an old(er) fart who has been watching the absolutely fascinating phenomenon of social media for decades. (Yes, I do mean decades -- Google "FidoNet" for interesting reading if you're into that dusty historical stuff. I arrived a little late in the game with my pokey 300-baud modem, but I was there. I even bought my first domain name when Network Solutions -- colloquially "NetSol" -- was still the only game in town. Network Solutions charged $70 a year per domain name and offered a horribly unintuitive user interface -- faugh!)
I've accumulated a few observations from watching the long rise of Google and Facebook as well as the rise and fall of other successful or not-so-successful social media and web search platforms such as AOL, MySpace, AltaVista, GeoCities, Twitter, Snapchat, etc., etc., etc. Shall I include hoary old Usenet in that list? It's virtually a tautology to attribute the wild success of the web to the absurd simplicity of posting a simple website with basic HTML tags. Nor does the swamping of the modern web with extremely complex frameworks meant to overcome profound design flaws in the web detract from this point.
Anyways. For whatever it's worth, I've noticed that once a web service, be it a search engine or a social media platform, moves beyond obviously useful and non-confusing features into self-important "lookit what we can do now" frippery, it starts losing its original appeal and eventually its regular visitors. Facebook currently holds immense power as the default destination for hundreds of millions of people, but the company isn't immune to the fickle mindsets of customers for its brand of free and paid services (advertising in particular). The recent antics of the ultra-liberal leaderships of Google, Facebook, and Twitter in subtly or obviously silencing prominent conservative and libertarian voices and thereby gradually alienating a wider audience constitute only one of several serious problems.
Possibly more critical to the futures of these companies is the constant, ruthless manipulation of their audiences for maximum profitability. Mind you -- I say "maximum" profitability and not an enlightened "optimum" profitability. The former is the attitude of a greedy robber baron, and the latter is the attitude of a cautious business that knows what its customers want. Put simply, Facebook and Twitter in particular have become seriously annoying. Google isn't all that far behind. Their hundreds of programmers scamper here and yon in an unending effort to add features with little regard to how they clutter up the user experience. Hey, they've got to justify their salaries. Students of private and government bureaucracies learn this in Governance and Corporate Culture 101.
Most people want to talk to their friends and share pictures and videos without having to fight and kick and struggle against manipulative, intrusive, self-serving algorithms that keep nudging and prodding them into buying this and that or forcing them to interact with their friends in certain ways and not others. Let's not even get into the absurdities of a grossly oversimplified "like" system at Facebook that permits no subtleties of approval or disapproval. Beyond a certain point -- don't ask me where that point lies -- they silently and almost invisibly become ready and willing in their tens of millions to to suddenly abandon an old, familiar platform for a better platform that does exactly what they want it to do and nothing further.
Please note the concept of "non-confusing," which isn't quite the same thing as the older and more limited concept of "user-friendly." "Non-confusing" encompasses everything about the user experience. It means the platform only does what it absolutely must for the mainstream experience while making side trips like photographic manipulation as obviously simple as possible -- in and out and done. Visual triggers are okay but only if they quietly hover in the background with nil annoying behavior like flashing, blinking, sliding, jittering
The thought occurs that an inevitable explosion of fake video and audio recordings will drive the development of encrypted authentication networks that verify that a supposed recording came from a sealed, supposedly tamper-proof recording device from a manufacturer whose production lines, parts suppliers, and design teams are closely monitored by government agencies and nonprofit organizations against the possibility of firmware tampering. Recordings produced by unvetted devices will be automatically assumed by courts and other interested parties to be inherently unreliable and very likely fake in all cases of controversy.
The enormous growth of computing power guarantees that this kind of seamless video and audio fakery will become mainstream faster than you might think. Heck, I'm looking forward to 2020 or 2021 at the latest as the year I can browse to a free spoofing website to make up a video of Hillary Rodham Clinton staggering in a drunken haze into the welcoming arms of Vladimir Putin on the steps of the Kremlin. Next, I'll play around with videos of Donald Trump soaring like a bird around the dome of the United States Capitol, whooping loudly and dropping dookies on passersby below. Then I'll gussy up an ultra-realistic video showing a mean neighbor porking a horrified dog and send that along to the ASPCA and to the local cops. They might not believe an unverified video in the age of universal fakes, but hey. Fun days!
I didn't know Blender could be used for that purpose. I'll look into Blender's CAD features and OpenSCAD both. I'd be happy to take advantage of your offer to print out these stupid little parts at a nominal cost for each plus shipping. (I looked again, and the top hinge also needs to be replaced as soon as I can figure out how it looked originally.) It might take me a while to overcome the learning curve for one or both of these CAD programs, though. I need to become thoroughly familiar with CAD anyway for other reasons, but the work queue is rather crushing at the moment. ^^;
Also, I goofed slightly in my original post and wrote "undoubtedly" as "undoubted." The writer in me winces at the inability to edit this appalling typographical error. -_-
I know this makes me a boring person who should be stripped of his nerd card, but I'd really like to use this or a similar service to get a small replacement part printed for an old refrigerator's freezer-door hinge. It broke a long time ago, and I've been propping the door on the remnant of the bottom hinge. Needless to say, the needed part is no longer available, and trying to hack a crude replacement for it promises to be just enough trouble that I've been putting it off for lo these many years. If I could somehow translate what I see of the part into a simple CAD model for Amazon, I'd be happy to pay $10 or so just to avoid the fuss of trying to drill and hammer and cut my way to a solution.
In the classic Slashdot tradition, of course, I haven't paid much attention yet to Amazon's pricing structure, which will undoubted turn out to be unreasonable for such small matters. Still, I'm looking forward to an eventual explosion in availability of quick three-dimensional approximation scanners and small-scale solid-matter printers in corner stores where I can take the pieces to be translated into a reasonable facsimile of the original part.
I have karma to burn, and anti-Jewish, anti-Christian Islamist terrorism really, really ticks me off, so what the hell.
If the murdering thugs from Hamas hadn't slurped off tens of millions of dollars in humanitarian aid to build terror tunnels and hundreds of terror rockets instead of paying attention to the decaying infrastructure that was the specific target of the humanitarian aid, then that power plant would have been in much better condition. If the murdering thugs from Hamas hadn't insisted in raining rockets on innocent Israeli citizens for months and years, then the Israeli military wouldn't have been forced to fight yet another war to cut down on the growing threat to the lives and safety of said Israeli citizens. If the murdering thugs from Hamas didn't insist on using mosques, schools, hospitals and private residences for stockpiling weapons and for firing on Israeli troops, then the death toll and damage to critical infrastructure would have been vastly lessened.
The Israelis already have lost a significant number of troops specifically from having been so careful to conduct pinpoint strikes and to put their troops in harm's way rather than simply flatten every possible Gazan target from afar. My sympathies lie utterly and totally with hard-pressed Israeli troops and not with the disingenuous apologists for murder and terrorism who frantically, convulsively and endlessly vomit pro-jihadist propaganda.
The squirming slugs who hysterically refuse to recognize Hamas and other Islamoterrorist groups as constituting quite literally 100 percent of the source of all war and misery in the Middle East should crawl back under their rocks and quietly excrete their slime until they suffocate and fossilize in dried crud.
We already knew ourselves to be essentially colony life forms riddled with remnant retroviruses and ancient symbionts such as mitochondria, but it's damn interesting to see just how deeply integrated we are into the extremely complex biosphere all around us. It's a little depressing, perhaps, but eventually the boffins will accumulate a body of knowledge that may finally sort out all the ridiculous little things that can and will go wrong with human bodies in the murk of general ignorance. Obesity, cancer and all manner of weird and supposedly unexplained ailments -- they could simply be unknown quirks of how our innumerable symbionts and parasites interact with our basic DNA programming. -_-
I'm not surprised by this discovery. Evolutionarily, we're all really complex support systems for long meat tubes that ingest energy and building materials and excrete whatever is not useful. Even the mighty brain only exists to increase the odds of the tube surviving. Bacterial strains that also increase the chances of a meat tube surviving will be favored by simple Darwinian logic. Naturally, they will influence every body system, including the brain.
Admittedly, one doesn't like to feel like a puppet. I wonder what this means for the free will that humans supposedly possess.
Basic incentive structures are a serious problem that will only grow worse over the years. The more successful become edge businesses such as for-profit streaming video providers and monetized social networks that go heavy on large images and video advertising, the more the data carriers will enviously demand a cut of the big pie that other businesses are dividing up.
I wish I knew of a good solution to this problem that still shows reasonable respect for the free market. Perhaps it's time to give heavy federal and state tax incentives to businesses that do absolutely nothing *but* provide consistently reliable, high-speed data-transmission channels. That means no end-user content provision or end-point Internet connections for individuals, businesses or other organizations. Let the innovators scramble to implement gigabit capabilities that end-point ISPs can resell to their customers. No doubt there are sorts of problems with this idea, but my brain has nothing better right now. :/
I've been observing this sort of greedy corporatism for years. We seriously need to first set up a nationally recognized, "voluntary" standard that at least four competing broadband providers should be available in each jurisdiction and then start a national nonprofit organization that relentlessly pressures non-compliant local and state governments into abolishing laws and regulations that discourage or outright prevent this kind of minimum coverage. Constant lawsuits that dig up dirt about payoffs to politicians and expose semi-monopolies would be an excellent idea as well. It may be a little early to truly establish the idea that universal access to low-cost, high-speed Internet communications is a basic human right, but it's a good propaganda tool.
I'm a dreaming fanatic about free markets, but we don't have free markets for broadband Internet access. We have utterly corrupt corporatism. It's high time to savagely fight back against the greedy parasites at Time Warner and Cox and the rest who absolutely hate the idea of having to give up their bloated, government-protected profits.
I tried to dream up a clever bon mot to utter about this scientific curiosity, but all that came out of this effort was a stupid joke about poor old Earth having peculiar skin problems across the geological ages. I'm sowwy. I weally am. -_-
At the risk of enraging automatic supporters of bloated government programs like the old Space Shuttle, it doesn't surprise me that lean, privately funded space-exploitation outfits do so well. Reliable execution of rocket science is difficult enough already without burdening the principals with all the artificial fears and running annoyances of a crusty bureaucracy. "Could I be fired for departing from the top-down plan if I do this instead of that? Does this possible change meet the 400-page outline set down by a large committee run by political appointees?" Every millisecond squandered on peripheral distractions is a millisecond lost to the subtle considerations of consistently productive and reliable thought.
Additionally, the people who work at the private firms tend more strongly to be there for the love of it than with any government agency. That counts for a lot when it comes to repeatedly avoiding those little errors of ennui and fatigue that can build up into a disaster. Enthusiastic workers are also more prone to realizing with a joyful start that a small change that could make a real difference will likely be actually used by a quick, responsive management team. Rocketry is often about very small changes marking the difference between a successful mission and a flaming ball of fuel and rocket parts.
Along these lines, I've always thought that China has consistently lagged behind the West in leading-edge technology for much the same reasons. The Chinese have no lack of smart people, but they're subtly and powerfully burdened with the habit of "self-censorship" to avoid offending the Communist Party and with the Confucian habit of observing "face-saving" deferment to the opinions of their alleged superiors. Sounds similar to and worse than just about any government agency in the West, eh?
These are my own thoughts, and only one puppy was temporarily scared into hiding under the couch during the production of this post. I also killed a small spider, but the dratted thing was trying to crawl into my coffee cup.
I checked out the website for the Mitsuku chatbot and took a rather pessimistic poke at it.
Chatbot: [boilerplate noises omitted] ... "What is your name?"
Myself: "I'm the fiddler."
Chatbot: "Who made you the fiddler?" [A reasonable, albeit somewhat peculiar, response.]
Myself: "I took too long once to feed my peckish cat."
Chatbot: "Where did you take it?" [Instant FAIL.]
Myself: "I took it to new heights of frustrated noises." (Bonus straight-man response.)
Chatbot: "Where did you take it?" [Parrot-like repetition raises the chat to new heights of FAIL.]
As always, two lines were enough to trip it up. The third line was a bonus that only amplified its shortcomings. I'll admit to cheating a little by using a couple of words ("peckish", "frustrated") that might have required contextual glossing by less educated individuals, but those words were still relatively common. All known chatbots seem to rely on fairly simple-minded word triggers, and even a minor requirement for context sensitivity is enough to make them fall flat on their nonexistent faces. Anyone possessing even remote familiarity with efforts at artificial intelligence knows this, of course, but hope springs eternal.
(Notes for the lazy: The word "peckish" is a common slang term for "hungry", and http://www.mitsuku.com/ is the website for the chatbot in question.)
That's pretty cool. Of course, I knew about this post yesterday, before you'd even thought about writing it up on Slashdot. I'm not exactly how that worked, but thinking too hard on it makes my head hurt. I think I'll go lie down for a while and hope the future catches up with the past or something weird like that.