You're kidding yourself if you think those things weren't completely vaporized in the two WTC planes, possibly the others as well. Also, CNN claims to have reliable information which links Bin Laden to the planes. The government has known for years that Afghanistan(sp?) is harboring Bin Laden, their spokespeople have openly supported him, so it only stands to reason that they're all on the same side. Obviously, it's arguable if we wiped that country off the face of the earth we'd be killing people who agreed with our point of view, my counter-argument to you is that there were likely people who agreed with the muslim fundamentalist points of view who were killed in these incidents, other than the perpetrators.
Sadly, there are people who reason and humanity will not reach, some of which have a considerable amount of power, such as Bin Laden. The only solution is to make an example of these people in hopes of discouraging similar actions. I agree that violence is always the worst option, but sometimes it's the only option.
An interesting phenomenon I've noticed about posting at +1 bonus is that others with +1 bonus are about twice as likely to respond to you as when you post without bonus. I wonder if this is because comments get more exposure or if much of the higher-karma crowd figures anything rated 1 isn't worth reading. (my threshhold is 1, just for the record)
I meant we as individuals. These two comments lead me to me believe I misrepresented what I intended to say in the original comment. I'll have to try it again if I can think of a better way to explain it.
I'm not arguing against the technology, not at all. I'm just wondering where we draw the line, when things come to a point where we step back and take a look at ourselves and say "wtf?".
the mouse provides tactile feedback in addition to letting you click on your porn.
OK, looking at porn is one thing, but being able to feel up a woman without ever meeting her? How many women will stand for that(even pr0n stars)? If there are so many why aren't they walking up to me on the street and offering? Is it that much different if shes there or not when I do it? Can you honestly say "I've never felt up a woman" after using this technology for pr0n? Things are getting a little too weird.
"I had a CAD model of the pulley drawn up, and we built it from polycarbonate on the Titan. It took only a couple of hours to run the part. We bolted the pulley on and continued with production."
Interesting. Might we see more factories, one day maybe even homes, with replicators and CAD databases of all the small mechanical objects in them so that, if one breaks, we replicate a replacement and just order more polycarbonate goo from some company the next day? I can see it now: cars, planes, houses, factories, printers... everything coming with a CAD database containing all its mechanical parts.
"I can tell because when you read a webpage, you do one of a couple of things. You either shovel the mouse off to the right so that it is out of the way, or you will walk down the page with your mouse," he told the BBC's Go Digital programme.
Upon reading this I looked at my mouse cursors position. It was dead in the middle of the screen, over some of the text I had read before I scrolled down using my mouse wheel, and had been there since I opened the page. (I take the second case he descibes as 'you use the mouse to hold the vertical position on the page where you're currently reading', as oppose to 'you use your mouse wheel to scroll')
Or perhaps someone else is already doing this, and hasn't told you.
Lets see... I think its doubleclick.com that places ad banners that track people across server boundaries then sells the results. Web servers moniter traffic and analyze logs to find out which pages are getting hit most frequently. I'd bet with a little bit of creative Java (or maybe even JavaScript) you could tell how far down the page someone is(can anyone verify or disprove this?), from that figure out their reading speed, what sections of the page they weren't interested enough to read, and which they just skimmed, and who knows what else. Combine these technologies and there you have it, you have an exact picture of what interests a specific person. Throw in an IP address, and maybe some demographic information and you have an awesome marketing tool, with no new technology involved. I wouldn't say "perhaps", I think its a sure bet someone is already doing this.
OK, I think this "violence is bad" argument is being taken way beyond a sane or healthy level here. You call this game violent? Did you ever play Tank for Atari as a kid? This is game a remake of that game with modifiable AI and better graphics. You aren't looking at horrific scenes of brutal warfare; you see these small robots shooting little pellets at one another with a decreasing counter above them. Hardly what I would consider violent. Suppose kids were not exposed what you consider violence. How would they deal with the real world? They couldn't, they'd probably go crazy and we'd be worse off than we are now. I don't know about you, but I was technically a kid when I played Wolfenstein 3d, Spear of Destiny, Doom, Doom2, and Quake. You fail to reallise the premise of these games, they clearly state that you have two options: kill, or be killed, they do not present you with the peaceful resolution option because it is assumed to have failed. A situation we would hope never to put into but one we as a species are innately curious about. I also don't feel these games had any negative affect on me whatsoever, in fact, they gave my life direction: they inspired me to study Computer Science, and I'm sure there are millions, if not billions, of kids playing violent games every day. How many are cold-hearted killers? Very few. Due to the fact that Joe appears to be a good parent (helping his son pick up some skills that will be very handy later in life), his son is almost a zero risk for causing another Columbine. This debate against violence has been taken beyond reason. It has become more of a witch-hunt.
In an ideal world, this would be true, however, I don't believe it possible in ours. The US has too many enemies, if we were to disarm, those enemies would attack, and we'd be screwed. What I would like to see happen, in line with the same goal, is for any military force engaged in an offensive action that was not provoked by violence but by the command of the government behind it, to reject the command of said government, and for all other forces(friend and enemy alike) to refuse to offensively attack these forces. If there is no offense, there is no war. Just my $0.02
One word: Keychain. Nothing says "Geek" like some RAM in your pocket with your keys. SIMMs already have wholes that most of those little steel ball chain keychains fit through, no modification required.
An intelligent robot would make a much better slave than any human
An unintelligent but widely applicable machine would make the best slave IMO. Any entity that is self-aware (part of my definition of intelligent) will bitch and whine when put into a situation that it doesn't benefit from. A device that can be programmed by anyone(with *no* training) to do a vast array of taskes, with no dislike doing those taskes for little or no benefit in return, and responding logically to unforseen circumstances would instantly replace the computer as the hottest item on the market. This is what the slave-holders of 150 years ago wanted but lacked the technology to achieve, so they tried to find the next best thing. The mistake they made was attempting to enslave something that didn't want to be enslaved: something intelligent and with a distaste for not reaping the benefits of its work. I believe the computer is the early stages of this ideal device. I do agree with your conclusion, humans consume vast amounts of resources and an intelligent machine probably would see little or no benefit in letting us live after learning all it could from us. The question is, would it decide the cost of having to hunt all of us down would outweigh the benefit.
The only thing that will push a computer to its limits is a game. No one admits it but no one needs a new computer to do a spreadsheet programme or Word document.
*sigh* This is what I tried to tell my uncle last weekend when he shelled out way too much money for a 1.4 GHz P4 with a Geforce2 and 128 megs of RAM to run Microsoft Windows/Office. He believes buying a top of the line system now will save him from having to buy another one in a couple years. Ha! Good luck. Lusers just won't listen.
I'm sure AMD will release the clock speeds in the technical documentation. They have nothing to hide from the people who are aware clock speed isn't the only factor that determines how fast a processor can crunch numbers. And if they don't, they'll lose the power-users who currently flock to AMD in droves, which would bring them back to where they started.
I'm not trying to imply he's a US partiot, or even that his being held is just. I don't believe either of those things. Jefferson was saying in order to maintain the rights of the people in the US(which I believe are guaranteed to visitors as well as citizens), some people must make great sacrifices, exactly who is irrelevant. Dmitry's case is more unfortunate than most US citizens would be in the same situation because he is far from home and in a foreign place, beyond that, it could have been any one of us, luck just wasn't with him. You might take Bill Gates to be the tyrant in our time(as soon as his company is split up anyway). This case could be the one that shows the Supreme Court how outragiously unconstitutional the DMCA is, and precludes other countries from passing similar laws. Should things go this way, we'll have Dmitry to thank. If not, then we're only one more unjust trial further, not all that big of a margin. Despite what we Americans are brainwashed to think, this country currently doesn't get us anywhere close to "liberty and justice for all". This is where Dmitry's "blood" comes into play.
The longer-term strategy is to implement a technology to control the online circulation of content. One approach, trusted systems , has been advocated by Mark Stefik at Xerox PARC. His idea is to create encrypted "repositories" on the user's hard disk into which copyrighted content is downloaded.
OK, so, hypothetically, I download some content I don't have a license to read. Other than a silly piece of paper in Washington, what's to stop me from reverse engineering the software and creating a non-authenticating version? Or hacking the authentication out of the existing software? Or plugging in my audio out into line in and re-recording it into another format? Or pointing authentication.riaa.com at 127.0.0.1 and running my own daemon? I'm honestly interested to hear how/if these things can be stopped. Last I check a computer followed instructions of its user, regardless of legality, moral issues, etc. The way I see it, until that absolute control is pried from my hands, I can get content for free.
Last time I read about this technology (~2 years ago) they were claiming home speeds of up to an exobit(10^18) per second. According to this brochure this company is only offering up to 10 megabits(1^6)per second. What happened to the truely awesome power(no pun intended) behind these broadband lines?
The key point they were attempting to make here is that if you can do it real time you can make Quake look as good as Final Fantasy. Everyone knows you can't create a movie in the same time it takes to show it.
Actually, all it says is that Doom was the beginning of multiplayer FPSs. But you're right, some of his information is incorrect. At one point he says that Doom was created by people with academic degrees, but IIRC, I once heard one of the people at id say that only one of the original team had a degree(this could be totally wrong, can anyone verify this?). He also states that no players could leave a network game once it was started. This I know is wrong from personal experience. When someones leaves a network game of Doom their player stays in the world until it is killed, and their scores also stay on the scoreboard when the map ends. The in-game player exists without anything controlling it. I never had a problem playing Doom over a modem, but apparently this guy did, he says it was choppy sometimes unplayable (and in a peer-to-peer model it seems to me that lag is irrelevant unless it reaches such extremes as to desync the games, so I don't know how he came to that conclusion. Maybe he was thinking of Quake.) Later he champions the internet play of Quake over a modem. I found Quake nearly unplayable over a modem before QuakeWorld was released. I suppose he groups these two programs as the same thing.
I'm writing this as I read, and finding several more mistakes, but it seems to get more accurate as the chronology progresses.
It is an important point because Counterstrike, a mod of a game based on a five year old engine, is the most popular online 3D shooter (based on number of servers).
And according to GameSpy stats, number of players aswell. Even if you assume only a tenth of Half-Life's players are playing CS (which I know isn't nearly as high as the actual number).
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You're kidding yourself if you think those things weren't completely vaporized in the two WTC planes, possibly the others as well. Also, CNN claims to have reliable information which links Bin Laden to the planes. The government has known for years that Afghanistan(sp?) is harboring Bin Laden, their spokespeople have openly supported him, so it only stands to reason that they're all on the same side. Obviously, it's arguable if we wiped that country off the face of the earth we'd be killing people who agreed with our point of view, my counter-argument to you is that there were likely people who agreed with the muslim fundamentalist points of view who were killed in these incidents, other than the perpetrators.
Sadly, there are people who reason and humanity will not reach, some of which have a considerable amount of power, such as Bin Laden. The only solution is to make an example of these people in hopes of discouraging similar actions. I agree that violence is always the worst option, but sometimes it's the only option.
An interesting phenomenon I've noticed about posting at +1 bonus is that others with +1 bonus are about twice as likely to respond to you as when you post without bonus. I wonder if this is because comments get more exposure or if much of the higher-karma crowd figures anything rated 1 isn't worth reading. (my threshhold is 1, just for the record)
I meant we as individuals. These two comments lead me to me believe I misrepresented what I intended to say in the original comment. I'll have to try it again if I can think of a better way to explain it.
I'm not arguing against the technology, not at all. I'm just wondering where we draw the line, when things come to a point where we step back and take a look at ourselves and say "wtf?".
OK, looking at porn is one thing, but being able to feel up a woman without ever meeting her? How many women will stand for that(even pr0n stars)? If there are so many why aren't they walking up to me on the street and offering? Is it that much different if shes there or not when I do it? Can you honestly say "I've never felt up a woman" after using this technology for pr0n? Things are getting a little too weird.
This is the point where physical items become information, which means we can send them over the internet... good-bye UPS.
Interesting. Might we see more factories, one day maybe even homes, with replicators and CAD databases of all the small mechanical objects in them so that, if one breaks, we replicate a replacement and just order more polycarbonate goo from some company the next day? I can see it now: cars, planes, houses, factories, printers... everything coming with a CAD database containing all its mechanical parts.
Upon reading this I looked at my mouse cursors position. It was dead in the middle of the screen, over some of the text I had read before I scrolled down using my mouse wheel, and had been there since I opened the page. (I take the second case he descibes as 'you use the mouse to hold the vertical position on the page where you're currently reading', as oppose to 'you use your mouse wheel to scroll')
Lets see... I think its doubleclick.com that places ad banners that track people across server boundaries then sells the results. Web servers moniter traffic and analyze logs to find out which pages are getting hit most frequently. I'd bet with a little bit of creative Java (or maybe even JavaScript) you could tell how far down the page someone is(can anyone verify or disprove this?), from that figure out their reading speed, what sections of the page they weren't interested enough to read, and which they just skimmed, and who knows what else. Combine these technologies and there you have it, you have an exact picture of what interests a specific person. Throw in an IP address, and maybe some demographic information and you have an awesome marketing tool, with no new technology involved. I wouldn't say "perhaps", I think its a sure bet someone is already doing this.
OK, I think this "violence is bad" argument is being taken way beyond a sane or healthy level here. You call this game violent? Did you ever play Tank for Atari as a kid? This is game a remake of that game with modifiable AI and better graphics. You aren't looking at horrific scenes of brutal warfare; you see these small robots shooting little pellets at one another with a decreasing counter above them. Hardly what I would consider violent. Suppose kids were not exposed what you consider violence. How would they deal with the real world? They couldn't, they'd probably go crazy and we'd be worse off than we are now. I don't know about you, but I was technically a kid when I played Wolfenstein 3d, Spear of Destiny, Doom, Doom2, and Quake. You fail to reallise the premise of these games, they clearly state that you have two options: kill, or be killed, they do not present you with the peaceful resolution option because it is assumed to have failed. A situation we would hope never to put into but one we as a species are innately curious about. I also don't feel these games had any negative affect on me whatsoever, in fact, they gave my life direction: they inspired me to study Computer Science, and I'm sure there are millions, if not billions, of kids playing violent games every day. How many are cold-hearted killers? Very few. Due to the fact that Joe appears to be a good parent (helping his son pick up some skills that will be very handy later in life), his son is almost a zero risk for causing another Columbine. This debate against violence has been taken beyond reason. It has become more of a witch-hunt.
In an ideal world, this would be true, however, I don't believe it possible in ours. The US has too many enemies, if we were to disarm, those enemies would attack, and we'd be screwed. What I would like to see happen, in line with the same goal, is for any military force engaged in an offensive action that was not provoked by violence but by the command of the government behind it, to reject the command of said government, and for all other forces(friend and enemy alike) to refuse to offensively attack these forces. If there is no offense, there is no war. Just my $0.02
Anyway, the auction is here
One word: Keychain. Nothing says "Geek" like some RAM in your pocket with your keys. SIMMs already have wholes that most of those little steel ball chain keychains fit through, no modification required.
An unintelligent but widely applicable machine would make the best slave IMO. Any entity that is self-aware (part of my definition of intelligent) will bitch and whine when put into a situation that it doesn't benefit from. A device that can be programmed by anyone(with *no* training) to do a vast array of taskes, with no dislike doing those taskes for little or no benefit in return, and responding logically to unforseen circumstances would instantly replace the computer as the hottest item on the market. This is what the slave-holders of 150 years ago wanted but lacked the technology to achieve, so they tried to find the next best thing. The mistake they made was attempting to enslave something that didn't want to be enslaved: something intelligent and with a distaste for not reaping the benefits of its work. I believe the computer is the early stages of this ideal device.
I do agree with your conclusion, humans consume vast amounts of resources and an intelligent machine probably would see little or no benefit in letting us live after learning all it could from us. The question is, would it decide the cost of having to hunt all of us down would outweigh the benefit.
*sigh* This is what I tried to tell my uncle last weekend when he shelled out way too much money for a 1.4 GHz P4 with a Geforce2 and 128 megs of RAM to run Microsoft Windows/Office. He believes buying a top of the line system now will save him from having to buy another one in a couple years. Ha! Good luck. Lusers just won't listen.
I'm sure AMD will release the clock speeds in the technical documentation. They have nothing to hide from the people who are aware clock speed isn't the only factor that determines how fast a processor can crunch numbers. And if they don't, they'll lose the power-users who currently flock to AMD in droves, which would bring them back to where they started.
I'm not trying to imply he's a US partiot, or even that his being held is just. I don't believe either of those things. Jefferson was saying in order to maintain the rights of the people in the US(which I believe are guaranteed to visitors as well as citizens), some people must make great sacrifices, exactly who is irrelevant. Dmitry's case is more unfortunate than most US citizens would be in the same situation because he is far from home and in a foreign place, beyond that, it could have been any one of us, luck just wasn't with him. You might take Bill Gates to be the tyrant in our time(as soon as his company is split up anyway). This case could be the one that shows the Supreme Court how outragiously unconstitutional the DMCA is, and precludes other countries from passing similar laws. Should things go this way, we'll have Dmitry to thank. If not, then we're only one more unjust trial further, not all that big of a margin. Despite what we Americans are brainwashed to think, this country currently doesn't get us anywhere close to "liberty and justice for all". This is where Dmitry's "blood" comes into play.
"The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is the natural manure."
- Thomas Jefferson
Might Dmitry be one of those patriots? Just food for thought.
OK, so, hypothetically, I download some content I don't have a license to read. Other than a silly piece of paper in Washington, what's to stop me from reverse engineering the software and creating a non-authenticating version? Or hacking the authentication out of the existing software? Or plugging in my audio out into line in and re-recording it into another format? Or pointing authentication.riaa.com at 127.0.0.1 and running my own daemon? I'm honestly interested to hear how/if these things can be stopped.
Last I check a computer followed instructions of its user, regardless of legality, moral issues, etc. The way I see it, until that absolute control is pried from my hands, I can get content for free.
Last time I read about this technology (~2 years ago) they were claiming home speeds of up to an exobit(10^18) per second. According to this brochure this company is only offering up to 10 megabits(1^6)per second. What happened to the truely awesome power(no pun intended) behind these broadband lines?
2 million jpegs? He's got my collection beat.
The key point they were attempting to make here is that if you can do it real time you can make Quake look as good as Final Fantasy. Everyone knows you can't create a movie in the same time it takes to show it.
I'm writing this as I read, and finding several more mistakes, but it seems to get more accurate as the chronology progresses.
If anyone out there hasn't seen CTF: Comedy in Armor I highly recommend downloading it. It's the funniest Quake-based movie I've ever seen.
And according to GameSpy stats, number of players aswell. Even if you assume only a tenth of Half-Life's players are playing CS (which I know isn't nearly as high as the actual number).