I strongly suspect that making a game bot truly act like a human calls for heuristics that approach those in real humans, meaning something like "true" artificial intelligence. Those heuristics would be be worth way, way, way more than a measly $7000 or $2000, and a trip. Billions, in fact.
Still, it'll be interesting over time to see if someone can, in fact, make a highly "human-like" set of heuristics without actually achieving this "true" artificial intelligence, or if someone does invent heuristics for "true" artificial intelligence then is naive enough to give it away for not peanuts, but a half a single peanut. Either way would say something important about so-called "human" intelligence.
The more computers come to handle criminal and civil matters, such as with traffic light monitors, the more Joe jobs will become a problem. I can foresee underworld specialists in Joe jobs commonly offering for a fee to destroy your enemies with anything from this simple tactic of photocopying license plates, up to using well-known tricks to get child pornography onto victims' computers, followed by anonymous tips to the F.B.I.
If this stands, this sets a terrible precedent. Suppose some ambitious prosecutor has decided that you must have committed a Federal crime by using a pseudonym to have a nasty war of words with someone on a chat forum on a politically touchy subject, in violation of the Terms of Service? He can use this terrible precedent to railroad you on charges of "unauthorised access", claiming it has nothing to do with, say, opposing abortion on demand, or supporting it, or whatever. If you don't think this can happen, well, it *has* happened, over and over, with other laws meant for originally limited purposes. The anti-Mafia RICO laws come to mind. There is indeed a slippery slope here, and a steep one at that.
Prosecuting what can only be called a venomous viper isn't worth it for what it'll cost all of us.
I don't usually clutter up threads with replies to myself, but this struck me as nearly priceless. After posting the above, I sent the chatbot one last line in case someone from the team at Princeton Artificial Intelligence Laboratory wanted to see the Slashdot thread, and it replied (this was at the end of the "werewolf" conversation, with cookies cleared from the "hamster" conversation"):
Myself: "http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=993861&cid=25358003"
"Him": "My guinea pig says that name Sid sounds very nice."
(Back in realtime, the alleged human calling himself "resistant" hoots like a monkey, "hoo-hoo-hoo").
I just had a very short "conversation" with the "Eugene Goostman" chatbot mentioned in the original article.
Myself: "Why did you kill the hamster?"
"Him": "Oh, but why not? Could you tell me about your job, by the way?"
Myself: "That's pretty cold, dude."
"Him": "I just wonder what another surprising things you've got for me..."
Myself: "You just failed the Turing Test in two sentences that didn't even require special trickery."
"Him": "I'm participating in the Loebner Prize for the first time - but I guess there are much more robots here than one can suppose. I think some "Judges" and "confederates" are cyborgs who are just having fun fooling the human-beings."
The first reply was surprisingly good, even if already a little "off" for a supposed teenager, but the second was a total giveaway. I'm disappointed. I can trip up each and every chatbot almost immediately with this sort of talk, which isn't at all unreasonable if the stated goal has been up front to trip up a chatbot, as in the contest.
Here's another exchange, which took three whole sentences, albeit quite amusingly. (I cleared the site cookie(s) beforehand, to make it "clean").
Myself: "Are you a werewolf?"
"Him": "Yes I am a werewolf, but it's my secret! Wonna ask me something more?"
Myself: "Don't you itch?"
"Him": "Even if I *do* itch - so what? Could you tell me what are you? I mean your profession."
Myself: "I'm a professional flea-killer."
"Him": "Oh, I don't wonna talk about such scary things as death and murders! Did I forget it or you really haven't told me about the place you are from?"
Myself: "Obviously, human humor will be a tripping point for you chatbots for a while yet."
"Him": "All the things you told me are nothing but a joke. I think you are trying to make a fool of me!"
For what it's worth, another dead giveaway for the brighter and more knowledgeable set is the way it (not "he", now) tries to elicit additional keywords in response to questions which it obviously has not in any way "comprehended", but that's probably not germane to a Turing Test meant for the average man or woman (or boy or girl) on the street. Notice especially how the elicitations invariably try to get the human to talk about himself or herself. Normal human conversation is full of self-talk with occasional hooks for sharing from other people, not the virtually one-track questioning of the typical chatbot when it's not busy being hopelessly vague or off-topic.
My prediction is that because it's over an impoverished third-world country, no one will care much, aside from astronomers and a small number (relative to world population) of other smarter people who know perfectly well that it could have just as easily been over Los Angeles or New York City. Not that this particular incident is important as anything but yet another warning that space objects of unpredictable size can suddenly strike Earth, as has happened frequently in geological time for billions of years.
It is to be wondered how the cops would react if a citizen group began to secretly bug cop cars with GPS devices and tiny cameras intended to capture what they do to people in remote or isolated areas or late at night when the cops think no one can or is likely to see them.
I have been thinking for many years of roughly such an affair myself, and am relieved to find that I'm not totally alone in this. It seemed as if every time I'd tentatively mention it in this forum or that, the idea would meet an enormous, terrible silence, with absolutely no response whatsoever.
Actually, my thoughts have been more along the lines of not merely influencing the current corrupt mess, but of replacing it altogether, with rather a great effort by very many like-minded people, most especially including legal experts capable of drawing up laws and regulations decently worded in plain English. This means a quite complete, rational set of laws and regulations, and a few suggested sets of cultural customs for normal social practices that ought not to be choked to death by formal laws and regulations. This is obviously a non-trivial endeavor, and one of the largest requirements would be an effective set of methods for mediating the inevitable sharp disagreements amongst even fair-minded people, such as over abortion, the death penalty and what might constitute reasonable regulation of keeping and bearing arms (beyond such obvious regulations as those forbidding the simple-minded possession of nuclear weapons in private hands or wildly shooting off a machine gun dangerously near populated areas or in other unsafe ways).
Such an endeavor would by its very nature influence current legislation in any case, as it became obvious from Condorcet or more likely Approval voting within the project that there was widespread opposition to or approval of this or that law or regulation, even amongst politically disparate groups. General opposition to the thuggery of the RIAA and other industry groups comes to mind, as does general opposition to frightening spying and expansion of police powers by the Federal government. Such an endeavor would fairly effectively provide a shadow government in its later stages, even without a complete set of laws and regulations, ready to step in should the current corrupt mess finally overstep even the most elastic boundaries of tolerance by the People.
Obviously, this brief post barely scratches the surface, but you get the idea. I have even bothered for a few years to pay out a bit of perfectly good money to keep a domain name for a Web site for it. (Since there is nothing there now, I'll not waste anyone's time by mentioning the actual domain name).
Apologies to Slashdot readers if someone else already posted the following link(s) or material, but I looked for it and related keywords over the entire thread, finding nothing. Orin S. Kerr over at The Volokh Conspiracy (a legal blog with a cool name) has posted a useful quick analysis of the matter, which I believe is more important than might appear at first glimpse. It's well worth reading in its entirety, but I'll quote a short stretch of it:
[...]
This case involves a terrible tragedy; I think what Lori Drew did is truly despicable. But the government's legal theory, based entirely on the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, 18 U.S.C. 1030, is very weak. Legally speaking, the prosecution is a real stretch. In my view, the courts should dismiss the indictment. In this post, I'll explain why.
To understand this case, you need to understand the government's theory. The indictment is not charging Drew with harassment. Nor are they charging her with homicide. Rather, the government's theory in this case is that Drew criminally trespassed onto MySpace's server by using MySpace in a way that violated MySpace's Terms of Service (TOS).
Here's the idea. The TOS required Drew to provide accurate registration information, not to harass or harm other people, and not to promote conduct that was abusive. She didn't comply with these terms, the theory goes, so she was criminally trespassing onto MySpace's computer when she was logging into her account. The indictment turns this into a federal felony conspiracy charge by arguing that she did this in concert with others to obtain information and to further tortious conduct -- intentional infliction of emotional distress -- violating the felony provisions of 18 U.S.C. 1030(a)(2).
But these arguments are a real stretch for three reasons.
Problem One: The first major hurdle is a legal question that I wrote an article on in 2003: Is it a federal crime to violate contractual limitations on use of a computer? The federal statute, 18 U.S.C. 1030, generally prohibits accessing a computer "without authorization" or "exceeding authorized access." But what makes an access "without authorization"? If the computer owner says that you can only access the computer if you are left-handed, or if you agree to be nice, are you committing a crime if you use the computer and are nasty or you are right-handed? If you violate the Terms of Service, are you committing a crime?
In my article, Cybercrime's Scope: Interpreting "Access" and "Authorization" in Computer Misuse Statutes, 78 NYU L. Rev. 1596 (2003), I argue that the answer should be "no." I won't recite the legal arguments here, as you can just read the article itself. (You can imagine the basic idea, though: Since everyone who uses computers violates dozens of different TOS every day, the theory would make everyone who uses computers a felon.) However, I will point out that the MySpace case is to my knowledge the very first federal indictment that has tried to claim that violations of Terms of Service for an Internet account amounts to a crime under Section 1030. In fact, I wrote my NYU article in part because I figured it was only a matter of time before a sympathetic case came along and some aggressive prosecutor would try the argument and see if it flew. It looks like this is the test case.
[...]
(The original post has embedded links to relevant citations).
On the contrary, after the deadline, you cannot (legally) enter Federal buildings and therefore the courtrooms in them, even if you agree to be searched with a microscope and a probe captured from the aliens at Roswell. Without a "Real ID" identification or a (Federally issued) passport, you're technically screwed. Lots of people have no passport, nor feel any need for a passport, which is supposed to be only for entering and leaving the country, not for basic civil rights.
As a practical matter, though, I gravely doubt that the judges in those courtrooms would allow for an instant actually barring people from their courtrooms, leading nervous Federal security agents to ignore the black letter wording of the law, perhaps doing as you suggest and settling for giving the hairy eyeball to anyone arriving, voluntarily or otherwise, without his duly issued mark of the beast. They like giving people the hairy eyeball anyway, even without encouragement.
I suppose with this regime sooner or later someone will get cute and claim through a lawyer that he can't answer a summons regardless from a Federal judge because the law plainly forbids him from entering a Federal building without a "Real ID" identification or passport, and he has neither, and he cannot be legally forced to break the law. That would be amusing, although probably not to the judge who would be issuing contempt of court citations.
BTW, the Wikipedia entry is interesting and might as well be hereby linked
As has been remarked before (by myself and others), one of the more interesting results of demanding such specific identification of residents of states that balk at Big Brother is the abrupt denial of the Constitutional right to seek redress of grievances in the courts (read the Federal courts). If you have such "leper" identification, suddenly you cannot sue anyone in the Federal courts, or even show up to defend yourself if you are sued in a Federal court or charged with a crime in the Federal courts, or testify as a material witness in Federal courts. Will Federal judges issue contempt of court citations against the defendants, or against the armed agents who prevent the defendants or witnesses from entering the courtrooms? Getting Federal agents to enforce a blizzard of contempt of court citations against themselves could be problematic. I am not a lawyer, nor do I pretend to be one at drunken parties, but this all seems entertaining in a grim way.
I admit to not having a clue about it, but wonder if these devices could be stacked to make a very thin personal cooling fan. It'd probably be a tad expensive, but I can see a market for it even so, especially in offices. If nothing else, it'd be a new toy for the moderately wealthy, leading to larger economies of scale that let ordinary slobs like us own it too. What with all this talk about ions, I wonder if it could be tweaked to pump out negative ions, which allegedly improve mood.
At first, I thought this was a joke from The Onion, but holy guano, Batman! It's for real!
I'm not particularly upset, though. I.B.M. already is known to systematically exploit their huge patent portfolio, as would be expected by their shareholders, but I've not heard of them doing so, recently at least, in an offensive manner. I.B.M. has been trying hard, for business reasons, to be a "good citizen". If anyone has to have such a patent, best that it be them. If nothing else, it'll put a bit of a damper on the true patent trolls.
I've had roughly the same thought on this, although I didn't know that passports could be denied to people who allegedly owe money to a state for child support. The thought I had specifically was what happens when a person without a passport (perhaps for the reason you mention), and who lives in a problematic state, is sued in a Federal court? Is he to be utterly denied the ability to respond, because he can't even enter the courtroom? Is it Constitutional to, for example, require him to retain counsel to represent him remotely because he can't enter the courtroom grounds himself? What about compelled or even voluntary witnesses in Federal criminal cases? This entire affair is opening up a real can of worms, as you (implicitly) pointed out.
Eating is a social activity as well as a biological necessity. It's logical and obvious that hanging around with and seeing people right next to you in the same room comfortably stuffing their faces with delicious food, lots of it, will strongly suggest joining in on the same tasty chow. If you see them eat yummies many, many times, you'll quite likely eat more many, many times as well. It's a double whammy for all the most disciplined, self-fulfilled individuals.
Dammit, now... I... I... have to go cook something fatty and delicious....
You'd think the music industry would have smartened up by now and started offering custom albums with a customer's favorite songs burned onto them for a small fee over and above the fees for the songs themselves, making a fair profit from getting the customer keen on having a good-sized collection that *he/she* picked out on-line or at a kiosk, on a decent-quality DVD recordable delivered either at said kiosk or at a local shop which owns specialised equipmentfor that. Not everyone wants to have to do this stuff himself/herself with downloaded (and compressed, less than full-quality) songs.
But no, it's all about cramming junk songs down people's throats along with a very few good ones. Greedy pigs.
I'd be willing to bet that an effective universal micropayment system coupled with a decent reputation network would bring quite a few more of these people out of the (lurker) woodwork, especially the ones who otherwise would be more moved to do other things that actually pay the bills. Forums, Usenet groups, Wikis, etc., not only offer no payment, their feedback mechanisms are poor to non-existent. Even the best of the "super-contributors" can become burned out or discouraged. Even minimal payment would be enough for a great many people who just want to know in some solid way that their efforts are indeed appreciated.
It's a hard social and business problem over which I've been ruminating for years.:)
I'm a bit of a connoisseur of domain names (long story, never mind the details). Naturally, I do
prefer the ".com" extensions (well, first-level domains), but the first thought that occurred with
this domain name extension was the lovely (subdomain) "[http://]no.see.um[/]". I'd buy that if the
cost were reasonable, and do something amusing with it!
Now, back to the regularly scheduled dull technical discussion.
Yes, I know it's been said very many times before, but I'm moved to say it again. It's simply obscene that runaway copyright law provisions should be used to casually stomp on this kind of freedom of speech, especially in the U.S.A., where allegedly there is a First Amendment guaranteeing freedom of speech. I would very much like to see a full-out legal confrontation between these terroristic laws as they stand, and the Constitution. The alleged and artificial "right" of the smirking lawyers at commercial companies to keep their nasty little secrets does not in any sense abrogate the innate, natural right of the people to talk to each other about any damn thing they want, particularly complex subjects, and in any way they wish, including via carrier pigeons and Morse code, let alone in plain English (or whatever language) on the Web.
It's really a shame that other countries such as Sweden actually surpass the U.S.A. in this area.
Frankly, this pisses me off enough that I'm very strongly tempted once my finances improve enough for the expensive legalities, to spit in the eyes of these jerkoffs with a direct, blunt and extremely widespread explanation (possibly on a Russian server to further annoy and frustrate them) of whatever it is that they absolutely are frantic to not have explained, along with the text of the Constitution with the First Amendment highlighted in red. I think a well-crafted attack on this crap would gather quite a lot of support, moral and otherwise.
I'm telling you true, what I really want is caffeinated milk, that's what to do. Man, I love skim milk, and if it were wired, I'd be racing around just like a cow siren yelling, "MoooOOOoooOOOoooOOOoooOOOoooOOO!!!"
The blog entry to which the guy is pointing is by the apparently well-informed fellow who wrote a Flu Wiki entry on influenza in general.
Interesting passages spring out, such as:
"[...] On Thursday they closed at 239p and yesterday they added a further 11p to 250p.The improvement marks something of a revival for the company's shares, which have sunk from a high of nearly 400p reached in 2003. The shares came under pressure on concerns that once a key contract to supply smallpox vaccines to the US had been fulfilled its prospects were limited." (Quoted from Times Online).
"Translation: M2 vaccine didn't work by neutralizing the virus but required assistance of T-cells. This means it would be insufficient for routine protection against influenza viruses."
"Translation: This one's the kicker. Vaccination against M2e worked in pigs to produce a good antibody response. Unfortunately, it set off a reaction that killed the virus-challenged vaccinated pigs faster than the unvaccinated ones."
I've been buying and selling periodically on eBay since late 1998, and have been watching them almost since since the site began. My focus has been on computers and peripherals, so I can only speak clearly on that. What has been obvious since almost the very beginning is that for some reason, a lot of people at eBay will pay far too much for older EIDE hard drives and later-model used laptops, to the point that even looking at these auctions is a waste of time and energy. I've never quite understood it.
There are doubtless many other such pockets of bidding irrationality scattered throughout their categories, besides older EIDE hard drives, newer used laptops and game consoles.
PingSpike said: "A few years later, ebay had exploded. I stopped even looking on the website when I realized everything cost more then newegg and other retailers. I only pop in occasionally to see how much people are getting gouged on the latest consoles."
The trick I used a few months ago to spot Taiyo Yuden inside 50-pack spindles
of Sony DVD-R diskettes was to look for octagonal hub-retainers (if that word's
correct). Checking for "Made in Japan" served as a confirmation.
I forget now the number that was supposed to also be printed on the hub ring,
to be spotted with a tiny LED flashlight. (All eight spindles had that number).
Slashdot Mirror
I strongly suspect that making a game bot truly act like a human calls for heuristics that approach those in real humans, meaning something like "true" artificial intelligence. Those heuristics would be be worth way, way, way more than a measly $7000 or $2000, and a trip. Billions, in fact.
Still, it'll be interesting over time to see if someone can, in fact, make a highly "human-like" set of heuristics without actually achieving this "true" artificial intelligence, or if someone does invent heuristics for "true" artificial intelligence then is naive enough to give it away for not peanuts, but a half a single peanut. Either way would say something important about so-called "human" intelligence.
Wait just a second, now! I ... oh.
The more computers come to handle criminal and civil matters, such as with traffic light monitors, the more Joe jobs will become a problem. I can foresee underworld specialists in Joe jobs commonly offering for a fee to destroy your enemies with anything from this simple tactic of photocopying license plates, up to using well-known tricks to get child pornography onto victims' computers, followed by anonymous tips to the F.B.I.
If this stands, this sets a terrible precedent. Suppose some ambitious prosecutor has decided that you must have committed a Federal crime by using a pseudonym to have a nasty war of words with someone on a chat forum on a politically touchy subject, in violation of the Terms of Service? He can use this terrible precedent to railroad you on charges of "unauthorised access", claiming it has nothing to do with, say, opposing abortion on demand, or supporting it, or whatever. If you don't think this can happen, well, it *has* happened, over and over, with other laws meant for originally limited purposes. The anti-Mafia RICO laws come to mind. There is indeed a slippery slope here, and a steep one at that.
Prosecuting what can only be called a venomous viper isn't worth it for what it'll cost all of us.
You might also find it mildly interesting to check out this slightly newer thread and this slightly older thread at The Volokh Conspiracy, both begun by Mr. Orin Kerr, who is one of the attorneys for Ms. Lori Drew.
Forgive me, O! All-Father of Trademarks. I shall do penance with a huge Lego block construction of Marge looking sad and concerned.
I don't usually clutter up threads with replies to myself, but this struck me as nearly priceless. After posting the above, I sent the chatbot one last line in case someone from the team at Princeton Artificial Intelligence Laboratory wanted to see the Slashdot thread, and it replied (this was at the end of the "werewolf" conversation, with cookies cleared from the "hamster" conversation"):
(Back in realtime, the alleged human calling himself "resistant" hoots like a monkey, "hoo-hoo-hoo").
I just had a very short "conversation" with the "Eugene Goostman" chatbot mentioned in the original article.
The first reply was surprisingly good, even if already a little "off" for a supposed teenager, but the second was a total giveaway. I'm disappointed. I can trip up each and every chatbot almost immediately with this sort of talk, which isn't at all unreasonable if the stated goal has been up front to trip up a chatbot, as in the contest.
Here's another exchange, which took three whole sentences, albeit quite amusingly. (I cleared the site cookie(s) beforehand, to make it "clean").
For what it's worth, another dead giveaway for the brighter and more knowledgeable set is the way it (not "he", now) tries to elicit additional keywords in response to questions which it obviously has not in any way "comprehended", but that's probably not germane to a Turing Test meant for the average man or woman (or boy or girl) on the street. Notice especially how the elicitations invariably try to get the human to talk about himself or herself. Normal human conversation is full of self-talk with occasional hooks for sharing from other people, not the virtually one-track questioning of the typical chatbot when it's not busy being hopelessly vague or off-topic.
The chatbot is at "Eugene Goostman chatbot", by the way, for the Google-impaired. :)
My prediction is that because it's over an impoverished third-world country, no one will care much, aside from astronomers and a small number (relative to world population) of other smarter people who know perfectly well that it could have just as easily been over Los Angeles or New York City. Not that this particular incident is important as anything but yet another warning that space objects of unpredictable size can suddenly strike Earth, as has happened frequently in geological time for billions of years.
It is to be wondered how the cops would react if a citizen group began to secretly bug cop cars with GPS devices and tiny cameras intended to capture what they do to people in remote or isolated areas or late at night when the cops think no one can or is likely to see them.
I have been thinking for many years of roughly such an affair myself, and am relieved to find that I'm not totally alone in this. It seemed as if every time I'd tentatively mention it in this forum or that, the idea would meet an enormous, terrible silence, with absolutely no response whatsoever.
Actually, my thoughts have been more along the lines of not merely influencing the current corrupt mess, but of replacing it altogether, with rather a great effort by very many like-minded people, most especially including legal experts capable of drawing up laws and regulations decently worded in plain English. This means a quite complete, rational set of laws and regulations, and a few suggested sets of cultural customs for normal social practices that ought not to be choked to death by formal laws and regulations. This is obviously a non-trivial endeavor, and one of the largest requirements would be an effective set of methods for mediating the inevitable sharp disagreements amongst even fair-minded people, such as over abortion, the death penalty and what might constitute reasonable regulation of keeping and bearing arms (beyond such obvious regulations as those forbidding the simple-minded possession of nuclear weapons in private hands or wildly shooting off a machine gun dangerously near populated areas or in other unsafe ways).
Such an endeavor would by its very nature influence current legislation in any case, as it became obvious from Condorcet or more likely Approval voting within the project that there was widespread opposition to or approval of this or that law or regulation, even amongst politically disparate groups. General opposition to the thuggery of the RIAA and other industry groups comes to mind, as does general opposition to frightening spying and expansion of police powers by the Federal government. Such an endeavor would fairly effectively provide a shadow government in its later stages, even without a complete set of laws and regulations, ready to step in should the current corrupt mess finally overstep even the most elastic boundaries of tolerance by the People.
Obviously, this brief post barely scratches the surface, but you get the idea. I have even bothered for a few years to pay out a bit of perfectly good money to keep a domain name for a Web site for it. (Since there is nothing there now, I'll not waste anyone's time by mentioning the actual domain name).
Apologies to Slashdot readers if someone else already posted the following link(s) or material, but I looked for it and related keywords over the entire thread, finding nothing. Orin S. Kerr over at The Volokh Conspiracy (a legal blog with a cool name) has posted a useful quick analysis of the matter, which I believe is more important than might appear at first glimpse. It's well worth reading in its entirety, but I'll quote a short stretch of it:
(The original post has embedded links to relevant citations).
On the contrary, after the deadline, you cannot (legally) enter Federal buildings and therefore the courtrooms in them, even if you agree to be searched with a microscope and a probe captured from the aliens at Roswell. Without a "Real ID" identification or a (Federally issued) passport, you're technically screwed. Lots of people have no passport, nor feel any need for a passport, which is supposed to be only for entering and leaving the country, not for basic civil rights.
As a practical matter, though, I gravely doubt that the judges in those courtrooms would allow for an instant actually barring people from their courtrooms, leading nervous Federal security agents to ignore the black letter wording of the law, perhaps doing as you suggest and settling for giving the hairy eyeball to anyone arriving, voluntarily or otherwise, without his duly issued mark of the beast. They like giving people the hairy eyeball anyway, even without encouragement.
I suppose with this regime sooner or later someone will get cute and claim through a lawyer that he can't answer a summons regardless from a Federal judge because the law plainly forbids him from entering a Federal building without a "Real ID" identification or passport, and he has neither, and he cannot be legally forced to break the law. That would be amusing, although probably not to the judge who would be issuing contempt of court citations.
BTW, the Wikipedia entry is interesting and might as well be hereby linked
.As has been remarked before (by myself and others), one of the more interesting results of demanding such specific identification of residents of states that balk at Big Brother is the abrupt denial of the Constitutional right to seek redress of grievances in the courts (read the Federal courts). If you have such "leper" identification, suddenly you cannot sue anyone in the Federal courts, or even show up to defend yourself if you are sued in a Federal court or charged with a crime in the Federal courts, or testify as a material witness in Federal courts. Will Federal judges issue contempt of court citations against the defendants, or against the armed agents who prevent the defendants or witnesses from entering the courtrooms? Getting Federal agents to enforce a blizzard of contempt of court citations against themselves could be problematic. I am not a lawyer, nor do I pretend to be one at drunken parties, but this all seems entertaining in a grim way.
I admit to not having a clue about it, but wonder if these devices could be stacked to make a very thin personal cooling fan. It'd probably be a tad expensive, but I can see a market for it even so, especially in offices. If nothing else, it'd be a new toy for the moderately wealthy, leading to larger economies of scale that let ordinary slobs like us own it too. What with all this talk about ions, I wonder if it could be tweaked to pump out negative ions, which allegedly improve mood.
At first, I thought this was a joke from The Onion, but holy guano, Batman! It's for real!
I'm not particularly upset, though. I.B.M. already is known to systematically exploit their huge patent portfolio, as would be expected by their shareholders, but I've not heard of them doing so, recently at least, in an offensive manner. I.B.M. has been trying hard, for business reasons, to be a "good citizen". If anyone has to have such a patent, best that it be them. If nothing else, it'll put a bit of a damper on the true patent trolls.
I've had roughly the same thought on this, although I didn't know that passports could be denied to people who allegedly owe money to a state for child support. The thought I had specifically was what happens when a person without a passport (perhaps for the reason you mention), and who lives in a problematic state, is sued in a Federal court? Is he to be utterly denied the ability to respond, because he can't even enter the courtroom? Is it Constitutional to, for example, require him to retain counsel to represent him remotely because he can't enter the courtroom grounds himself? What about compelled or even voluntary witnesses in Federal criminal cases? This entire affair is opening up a real can of worms, as you (implicitly) pointed out.
Eating is a social activity as well as a biological necessity. It's logical and obvious that hanging around with and seeing people right next to you in the same room comfortably stuffing their faces with delicious food, lots of it, will strongly suggest joining in on the same tasty chow. If you see them eat yummies many, many times, you'll quite likely eat more many, many times as well. It's a double whammy for all the most disciplined, self-fulfilled individuals.
... I ... I ... have to go cook something fatty and delicious ....
Dammit, now
You'd think the music industry would have smartened up by now and started offering custom albums with a customer's favorite songs burned onto them for a small fee over and above the fees for the songs themselves, making a fair profit from getting the customer keen on having a good-sized collection that *he/she* picked out on-line or at a kiosk, on a decent-quality DVD recordable delivered either at said kiosk or at a local shop which owns specialised equipmentfor that. Not everyone wants to have to do this stuff himself/herself with downloaded (and compressed, less than full-quality) songs.
But no, it's all about cramming junk songs down people's throats along with a very few good ones. Greedy pigs.
I'd be willing to bet that an effective universal micropayment system coupled with a decent reputation network would bring quite a few more of these people out of the (lurker) woodwork, especially the ones who otherwise would be more moved to do other things that actually pay the bills. Forums, Usenet groups, Wikis, etc., not only offer no payment, their feedback mechanisms are poor to non-existent. Even the best of the "super-contributors" can become burned out or discouraged. Even minimal payment would be enough for a great many people who just want to know in some solid way that their efforts are indeed appreciated.
:)
It's a hard social and business problem over which I've been ruminating for years.
I apologise in advance for the stupid joke.
I'm a bit of a connoisseur of domain names (long story, never mind the details). Naturally, I do prefer the ".com" extensions (well, first-level domains), but the first thought that occurred with this domain name extension was the lovely (subdomain) "[http://]no.see.um[/]". I'd buy that if the cost were reasonable, and do something amusing with it!
Now, back to the regularly scheduled dull technical discussion.
Yes, I know it's been said very many times before, but I'm moved to say it again. It's simply obscene that runaway copyright law provisions should be used to casually stomp on this kind of freedom of speech, especially in the U.S.A., where allegedly there is a First Amendment guaranteeing freedom of speech. I would very much like to see a full-out legal confrontation between these terroristic laws as they stand, and the Constitution. The alleged and artificial "right" of the smirking lawyers at commercial companies to keep their nasty little secrets does not in any sense abrogate the innate, natural right of the people to talk to each other about any damn thing they want, particularly complex subjects, and in any way they wish, including via carrier pigeons and Morse code, let alone in plain English (or whatever language) on the Web.
It's really a shame that other countries such as Sweden actually surpass the U.S.A. in this area.
Frankly, this pisses me off enough that I'm very strongly tempted once my finances improve enough for the expensive legalities, to spit in the eyes of these jerkoffs with a direct, blunt and extremely widespread explanation (possibly on a Russian server to further annoy and frustrate them) of whatever it is that they absolutely are frantic to not have explained, along with the text of the Constitution with the First Amendment highlighted in red. I think a well-crafted attack on this crap would gather quite a lot of support, moral and otherwise.
I'm telling you true, what I really want is caffeinated milk, that's what to do. Man, I love skim milk, and if it were wired, I'd be racing around just like a cow siren yelling, "MoooOOOoooOOOoooOOOoooOOOoooOOO!!!"
Please, MODERATE UP THE PARENT!
The blog entry to which the guy is pointing is by the apparently well-informed fellow who wrote a Flu Wiki entry on influenza in general.
Interesting passages spring out, such as:
"[...] On Thursday they closed at 239p and yesterday they added a further 11p to 250p.The improvement marks something of a revival for the company's shares, which have sunk from a high of nearly 400p reached in 2003. The shares came under pressure on concerns that once a key contract to supply smallpox vaccines to the US had been fulfilled its prospects were limited." (Quoted from Times Online).
"Translation: M2 vaccine didn't work by neutralizing the virus but required assistance of T-cells. This means it would be insufficient for routine protection against influenza viruses."
"Translation: This one's the kicker. Vaccination against M2e worked in pigs to produce a good antibody response. Unfortunately, it set off a reaction that killed the virus-challenged vaccinated pigs faster than the unvaccinated ones."
I've been buying and selling periodically on eBay since late 1998, and have been watching them almost since since the site began. My focus has been on computers and peripherals, so I can only speak clearly on that. What has been obvious since almost the very beginning is that for some reason, a lot of people at eBay will pay far too much for older EIDE hard drives and later-model used laptops, to the point that even looking at these auctions is a waste of time and energy. I've never quite understood it.
There are doubtless many other such pockets of bidding irrationality scattered throughout their categories, besides older EIDE hard drives, newer used laptops and game consoles.
PingSpike said: "A few years later, ebay had exploded. I stopped even looking on the website when I realized everything cost more then newegg and other retailers. I only pop in occasionally to see how much people are getting gouged on the latest consoles."
The trick I used a few months ago to spot Taiyo Yuden inside 50-pack spindles of Sony DVD-R diskettes was to look for octagonal hub-retainers (if that word's correct). Checking for "Made in Japan" served as a confirmation.
I forget now the number that was supposed to also be printed on the hub ring, to be spotted with a tiny LED flashlight. (All eight spindles had that number).