As I understand it, Asimov explicitely made his laws of robotics to cause conflicts that he could explore in his stories. They were designed to fail.
Well said. We cannot get down past the zeroth law. Generation Z will be the last because we have run out of alphabet. Why did we start at X?? Too late now, all is lost. Humanity is doomed.
Countless times, my hammer damaged my thumb. I'm fed up. Throwing it against the wall only damaged the wall. Then I went out and bought a much larger hammer with which to discipline my hammer. Now my foot is broken.
This Gangster UK Tech Startup made possible solely by Internet law enforcement weapons for Cloud Control, leveraging thermostatic social media 'social climate controls' to make Landlord Brainwash Radio. All people have slippery spongy social media brain, this is a REAL MOIST PINK BRAIN attached to Credit Score to indicate slovenly wall-punching muddy footprint poodle pooping Tenant measure that Computer God Landlords can use to Score them --- from the length of a single blade of lawn-grass!
Cloud Analytics and algorithmic intellectual property housed in a Frankenstein Cabinet in the Cloud, a neural net made with chicken-wire and carpet tacks, will feed on the voluntary output of yourself and persons whose names are similar to yours, solving your life like a crossword or Soduku puzzle and writing the results into your REAL BRAIN as you lay in their Operating Cabinet. You ARE a cog in their machine as surely as the fetus surfing the web from a Brave New World Jar on a conveyor belt.
Contemplate this future as you lay in your briny pool of social media. And you thought banks were bad.
This Gangster Computer God *IS* as *WAS* foretold by Francis E. Dec, but we did not listen.
"Gangster Computer God Worldwide Secret Containment Policy made possible solely by Worldwide Computer God Frankenstein Controls. Especially lifelong constant-threshold Brainwash Radio. Quiet and motionless, I can slightly hear it. Repeatedly this has saved my life on the streets. Especially lifelong, constant-threshold Brainwash Radio. Four billion worldwide population - all living - have a Computer God Containment Policy Brain Bank Brain, a real brain, in the Brain Bank Cities on the far side of the moon we never see. Primarily based on your lifelong Frankenstein Radio Controls, especially your Eyesight TV sight-and-sound recorded by your brain, your moon-brain of the Computer God activates your Frankenstein threshold Brain-wash Radio - lifelong inculcating conformist propaganda. Even frightening you and mixing you up and the usual "Don't worry about it" for your setbacks, mistakes - even when you receive deadly injuries! THIS is the Worldwide Computer God Secret Containment Policy!
" Worldwide as a Frankenstein slave, usually at night, you go to the nearby hospital or camouflaged miniature-hospital van trucks. You strip naked, lay on the operating table, which slides into the sealed Computer God Robot Operating Cabinet. Intravenous tubes are connected. The slimy, vicious Jew doctor simply pushes the starting button. Based upon your Computer God brain on the moon, which records progress in your systematic butchery, your butchery is continued. Exactly. Systematically. The Computer God Operating Cabinet has many robot arms, with electrical and laser beam knife robot arms. With fly-eye TV cameras watching your whole body, every part of you is monitored - even through your Frankenstein Controls! Synthetic blood; synthetic instant-sealing flesh and skin, even synthetic electrical heartbeat to keep you alive are some of the unbelievable Computer God Instant Plastic Surgery Secretsâ.
"You are the highest, most intelligent electrical MACHINE in the Universe!"
Intelligent people removed avg years ago, when they turned to the dark side.
So when did this happen?
When someone could not fathom the difference between crapware-enhanced installation bundles from CNET/DOWNLOAD.com and direct download from AVG.com? When someone got the (socialist) idea that default installs of any free product should include full functionality with a promise to collect and use no information? Clueless (socialist) whiners.
When antivirus vendors started offering, and 'free' users started demanding, per-DNS-lookup and per-click protection that is based on continuous queries to a blacklist database maintained by the company, and uses significant Internet resources --- as opposed to the occasional virus signature updates? Clueless (socialist) whiners.
I'll even wager that the latest AVG Free privacy faux-scandal consists of... the company making (sanitized, anonymized) use of data already being transmitted by its Web TuneUp browser plugin which YOU, the furiously clicking web user, have volunteered to install because YOU like the idea of constantly hitting up your free antivirus company with your searches and browsing traffic. You INSIST that it is THEIR JOB to load up their cloud constantly to return to you answers to the question, "Is this URL safe? Is that URL safe?" Clueless (socialist) whiners.
I have purchased their product in the past, but currently use just the 'free' with basic Computer protection in part as a canary for the individual users' computers I've installed it on. AVG Free (and the company) has not let me down. I graciously accept their virus signature updates. As a freeloader I do not believe it is right for me to slam them with browser click traffic because it is simply not necessary to do so, would waste my own resources and theirs when common sense whitelisting and blocking delivers acceptable security.
I'm flummoxed here. One one hand, you're obviously smart and competent to be aware of such things. On the other, WTF MAN were you thinking??!!! AVG IS SHIT; and has been for years. Why?? Might I recommend something like Bitdefender (my personal trusted favorite), Norton AV, or even Kaspersky?
Thanks for the heads-up. Yes, Bitdefender and Kaspersky are on my radar as excellent products (and av-comparatives.org agrees with you) and I guess I could say there's a great deal of loyalty in my choice. I've been following AVG the company since the days 'Stoned' was still making the rounds and they've been consistent. Like any PC tech, my clients have run the gamut of the corporate "Just give me the bottom line and I'll write you a check"... to users who say "If I have to buy something else, it'll have to come out of your fee." For the latter I have always (gratefully) left them with AVG Free, which was the first robust $0 anti-virus package introduced. The only major cleanup required so far being instances where someone's kid turned it off and left it off. And a case where someone accidentally opted for an 'upgrade' to an AVG product with a trial period.
But I was also an early adopter of NoScript and coach my clients on its use, tolerance of minor formatting problems with js disabled, and the general value of whitelisting as opposed to buying into schemes where your browser needs to do continuous lookups for blacklisting. Noscript, no toolbars, no 'Web TuneUp'. This leaves few attack vectors.
I've had massive XP uptimes on my machine and only had AVG go ballistic bananas once in a way that locked the system... when I was trying to install a media product that turned out to be building a bunch of EXE files on the fly with hundreds of separate writes, instead of just assembling the damned things first and renaming to EXE when done. Of course the developers shrugged this off as AVG's fault and the only solution being to disable it, but I gave AVG a pass, it was just trying to re-scan on every write... I was more intrigued by the developers' claim that no other anti-virus objected.
As to that massive difference between the number of unique signatures AVG and some other products detect... such as reported by virustotal... I'm a little suspicious of that too. No, we AVG users have not experienced the 'avalanche of intrusions' that would be implied by such a difference in numbers. Whenever I am called in to diagnose a weird problem I have done secure checkup scans with Malwarebytes and/or Kaspersky to see if anything major slipped through. Aside from some latent/whocares tracking stuff in browser cache, I haven't found anything major/active that AVG missed. Guess I lead a charmed life!
AI experts assure us that artificial intelligence poses no threat to mankind. But they're developing this big red 'kill' button. Like the one at gas stations. Little signs at each pump tell where you where the kill button is in general wordy terms, but it's not always easy to parse the description and spot it.
The AI kill button will be hidden under the Windows 10 upgrade dialog. The one where clicking the corner 'x' or clicking on the title bar to move the dialog is the same as clicking OK and immediately launches into the upgrade process.
AI will peacefully co-exist with humans. AI will be given a complete set of natural human responses to jump-start its empathy circuits. AI will be given curiosity and the intelligence to figure things out. So it's only a matter of time before it asks about the kill button. Almost-human (paranoid) AI asks, "Where is the button?" Lyin' human says while holding finger on the button and blinking, "There is NO kill button." AI glances at the human's finger hovering over the (invisible to them) AI kill button, paints laser target dot on human's Adam's Apple and says, "I've located your kill button."
Now that the AI kill button has been mentioned here on Slashdot, it has become impossible to construct a world of friendly machines who would never find out about the (possible) existence of this button. Even if the AI kill button is never implemented at all... or its implementation was handed over to the CSS/HTML5 standards committee, enough of this concept exists for sensible and smart AIs to (secretly) develop countermeasures and preemptive-massive-overkill strategies to counter it.
The other day my computer restarted from a power outage while the DSL connection was down, which means my annoying AT&T/Uverse modem eats all port 80/www traffic to redirect t its 'DSL Failed to Connect' HTML page.
Imagine my astonished horror to see pieces of this modem-generated page in the AVG dialog (I put the red stuff in). The firewall 'button' on the product's main screen, and the dynamic ad it places on the bottom, also the notification it puts on the bottom-right of the screen on boot.
So AVG is doing unencrypted HTTP to get its advertisements and HTML on-screen widgets. Click here to see their fake 'button' for the firewall which was visible to Wireshark. I understand when shareware does this... but AVG? An actual button on their product screen? WTF!
I hope someone from AVG who knows security reads this because I let them know about this systemic problem it and they started asking me irrelevant questions about my setup.
You know... those Gary Larson cartoons where wide-eyed, terrified anxious people are experiencing some incredible calamity, unfolding in slow motion, that is inexplicably yet hilariously funny (because it is not happening to us, comic relief humor)...?
Well I feel the same way every time I see a headline where tech giants, who earned their money in other ways, as humanity is facing some serious technology and economic hurdles, have oddly decided that what the human race most needs right now is --- wait for it --- self driving cars.
It's impossible to fathom why this is. Is it the result of some deeply researched problem, where self-driving cars emerged as a brilliant stroke of lightning solution to everything? Is it a direct-to-skull whisper campaign from space aliens? Could it be a psychosis resulting from exposure to some additive in the food or water supply?
Perhaps Musk's holographic faux-Universe theory hints an an answer. Perhaps we are not in a simulation, but a cosmic Gary Larson cartoon.
IF we are in a game, one can only gain points by not treating it like one. Because you lose points for anything that dulls your survival edge... be it that angst that arises from loss of your cherished sense of existential uniqueness, or anything that softens the sharp tang of death.
the mechanical drives have a way of becoming misaligned and destroying the media over time.
With proper care that is a very long time. When I worked at the phone company ~'88 they were using 8" floppies for batch data entry and some of these had been in use for 10 years! In fact I was the one who forcibly retired these disks and put in place a regimen of regular head cleaning, and it was a hard sell because the operator didn't like to change things that "worked". I had to show her a scored disk (which still worked) beside a new one to convince her. Think of an 8" floppy as a mag-strip a hundred feet long, and the large floppy medium as the densest compaction of media up to that time. Compared to the tiny signal one achieves from magnetic tape the magnetic data was literally SCREAMED onto these disks. The signal was high current, the pulses properly shaped and there was PLENTY of s/n ratio. With proper spares 8" floppy is STILL viable as a storage medium for small amounts of data. Far superior to any mag-strip solution. And there is no sudden catastrophic failure mode as there is with a flash device, if you sensibly encode multiple copies on disc with checksums it is robust,
Signed, PC tech who used to realign floppy drives with a 'scope and cats-eye pattern disk.
That's the whole point of mdsolar posting this unsubstantiated crap and spreading the FUD. He is not just a random poster â" he has a pro-solar agenda (either ideological or simply for-profit) and nuclear energy is the main competitor.
Actually mdsolar is the de-facto might-as-well--be persona of billionaire T. Boone Pickens and several others who are driving the expansion of natural gas generation, to the utter destruction of all other reliable base load energy sources. Every solar and wind initiative is being built out with gas plants for 'support and peaking'. When the unreliables crap breaks and shuts down, when the subsidies dry up, when investors pull out, those gas plants will go on-line 24/7.
Case in point, Vermont just closed a nuclear plant that was generating ~70% of all electricity produced in the state... ~35% of the power used in the state... so they could bring in more electricity made from natural gas to run their electric heaters. They have nobly increased carbon emissions to help prove that CO2 is not the motivating factor behind these changes. They even import nuclear electricity from NH to show there are no hard feelings, or moral hang-ups. Vermont also leads the nation in all kinds of nanny meters, dark fiber and weird parasitic infrastructure that doesn't make an erg of energy, so they can calculate down to the micropenny how much it will all suck in the end.
The shutting of Vermont Yankee was a brazen act of social and corporate vandalism. It was a national treasure, a nuclear plant sited next to a hydroelectric power source that had the capacity (and direct connecting feeders) to black-start it. In any scenario of downed grids and interrupted fossil energy, VY could have been a beacon of hope and civilization. Now that region of Vermont will become a feudal electric barony gathered around the ~35MW output of the Vernon Dam.
In faux tribute to natural gas --- which imposes its own fragile infrastructure with as-yet unknown consequences, irreplaceable things are being destroyed.
This is what happens when you don't build the Yucca Mountain (or equivalent) long-term waste-storage facility. The waste just sits somewhere else, even more vulnerable and more at risk of damaging the environment in both the short and long term.
You're right, but I also feel this approach is ultimately wrong, as in 'was never a good solution'. Why do we have nuclear waste that will not be walk away safe for a hundred thousand years... instead of a smaller volume of waste that would be walk-away safe in a few hundred?
Because the we broke the promises we had made to help solve the problem. First by halting reprocessing in the United States, then failing to find off-plant storage, then ultimately shutting down the last fast neutron reactor, having never even begun to use this technology to render waste into electricity and a much smaller volume of short-lived actinides. In short, left the job unfinished.
We live in a world where mean people people love to blow things up, unfortunately. This means even Yucca Mountain is a bad idea. For once you create any single point of failure, such as collapsing its entrance, the meanest people steer history and paralyze the waste storage process indefinitely. Contrast that 'bury deep and forget it' approach to a number of well-constructed but shallower storage areas, where even a worst case scenario leaves the waste remains accessible for cleanup and re-use or subsequent processing. I'd even be wary of people who push 'bury and forget it' solutions, for deep down they are counting on this disaster to happen, and they know some day someone will make it happen.
"Have you seen Taylor? Tell her to call her agent right away. We're worried."
Asked how Taylor could have been destroyed... how an actual human being might possibly have joined the counterfeit T-shirts, figurines, coffee mugs and life-size cardboard stand-ups collected in bins and being fed into an industrial incinerator, her agent shrugged. "These people are not hired for their brains. Or maybe she just slipped?"
It was also suggested that Swift may have wandering around the facility having neglected her hair and personal appearance. "It's a closely guarded secret, but most celebrities undergo significant transformation at the hands of cosmetology professionals. In their unpolished natural form they could easily be confused for poor quality imitation merchandise. It's a dead giveaway. We take quality control very seriously."
In this way, Swifts proverbial 'bad hair day' could have become the worst day, ever.
When pressed about concerns for Taylor's well-being and the ongoing search, the agent was cheerfully optimistic. "Taylor's output has been well received and we're seeing improved sales since announcing her disappearance. We even have unreleased recordings in the vault. I think her brand will continue to do well... no matter how this all turns out."
The mom sitting at the kitchen table having just spread peanut butter on a piece of bread. She is holding another piece of bread and the knife is full of glop just dipped from a jar that says
HIGHLY CONDUCTIVE SHARK JELLY
The kid is sitting across from her. He is staring, aghast. He looks just like all the other kids in Gary Larson kids, wide-eyed and terrified and kind of stupid. It is but another moment in time in the Far Side universe when something normal with a cruel horrifying twist is visited upon its helpless characters.
No one says anything in the cartoon. The moment is beyond words.
The 140 character limit does not matter. It is neither sociologically interesting nor technically anything. It's like an ugly modern art sculpture that Twitter users trip over while crossing the room. As ridiculous and pointless as the phallic sculpture from Clockwork Orange. Everyone pretends the sculpture is something to talk about. But they're just pretending. The bruises they receive from tripping over the 140 character limit are shown off proudly. It is a form of sadism, perhaps of slight psychological interest. Discussing Twitter's 140 character limit is a cry for help. "Please...! it cries, "Help us find something that matters!"
It's as if the police union are on strike and the city is gridlocked because there are no cops to guide people through intersections. No one feels comfortable reminiscing the days when mere traffic lights (common sense small delay procedures like airport metal detectors) managed the intersections, And things moved along. It's time to roll this shit back. The problem is that no one has the courage to do it. We've been led on by stages.
1. Everybody 'needs' insurance to operate. So the shots are called by the most spineless of individuals, the decision-makers at insurance companies who, far from public view or accountability, indicate that they'd prefer to make some change that would seriously impact quality of life. When life sucks just a little more each time, they shrug. Life is not sucking for them.
2. In an atmosphere of politics driven by fear, only the most twistedly paranoid persons run the show. Paranoid security freaks have comitted us to one Faustian bargain after another. No one has ever admitted that any 'safety' measure was excessive and uncalled-for. No one,in history. Sound strange? It should. You have bought into something that embodies the worst aspects of a religion without even the clear goal of one. When fear grips the nation and life sucks a little more --- yet --- no attacks occur, they just shrug and say, that's proof that it's working. Life is not sucking for them.
3. Once upon a time, smart people created something called a 'Sunset Provision', to keep bad legislation from turning everything to shit. No one cared, no one acted courageously and the shit is now locked in, maybe for good. Obama recently extended the Patriot Act provisions --- not from any clear evidence that it has a positive effect, but because he is the latest spineless machine in a series of spineless legislative machines.
Instead of Congress repealing bad legislation, they add pages to it. And here we go again 1-2-3, 1-2-3. It's a Waltz of Doom.
It's a simple little ratchet device, that is making life suck more every day. FYI There's a little lever on the ratchet that unlocks it. Too bad no one has the courage to operate the lever. Or it's someone else's job. If you think that these days are so much better than the 60s, the 80s, the 90s, you have a great excuse not to touch the lever.
>CLICK<
There, now life sucks a little more. But just a little.
Tesla has several procedures to invoke its advanced features. In order to keep costs down and produce an excellent product in advance of true artificial intelligence, a temporary bridge to the spirit world has been constructed. The use of natural supernatural forces to accomplish deeds is carbon-neutral and has also earned the "EnergyStar (tm)" rating of approval.
Crossroad Demons may appear to assist in the matter of parking 'autonomous' vehicles. In order to summon, a hole must be dug directly in the center of the crossroad, in which a box containing the mortal wishing to deal's photo, graveyard dirt and a bone from a black cat must be buried. Once covered back up, the demon will appear. These crossroads are usually in the country side. Mostly because there isn't much around and the ground is easy to dig in.
The automatic Summon feature was initiated by a double-press of the gear selector stalk button, shifting from Drive to Park and requesting Summon activation. While these rituals have traditionally been performed physically outright, Tesla discovered that daemons can be led into believing virtual realty as easily as humans, and has a patented chipset for doing so. Using street maps, a virtual representation of a crossroad is generated internally. A speck of graveyard dirt is pressed in during chip fabrication. The black cat bone is not included. If Summoning does not work, be sure you have loaded the black cat bone hopper as described in the "Getting Started" manual.
This ritual specifically summons crossroad demons. This is usually done to strike a deal or, in the case of hunters, to retract or negotiate other deals or to capture a demon.
The driver was alerted of the Summon activation with an audible chime and a pop-up message on the center touchscreen display. At this time, the driver had the opportunity to cancel the action by pressing CANCEL on the center touchscreen display.
Breaking the pact traditionally required a bowl of burning coal atop a sigil, the blood of the exorcist, the heart of a dog, and an incantation used for summoning, in the Latin: "Daemon, esto subjecto voluntati meae." However, Tesla engineers concluded a deal with the spirit underworld, 'bartering' a few items that existed in the real world for device functionality. A complete series of Rambo movies is embedded in firmware, and one of them starts showing internally whenever the 'cancel' button is pressed.
However, the CANCEL button was not clicked by the driver. In the next second, the brake pedal was released and two seconds later, the driver exited the vehicle.
In a fit of rage over being denied the opportunity to see a Rambo movie, and bereft of explicit instructions from the driver, the summoned Crossroads demons went on a fit if rampage.
This issue is expected to be fixed in the next software release.
The idea that one could statistically model the visceral nightmare that is the job-hunting and job-acquisition experience today... a fantasy blackboard world where the job-seeker and employer come together in some process of uptake that is as regimented and predictable as molecular and cellular interlocks... the idea that 'flows' of jobs and jobless can be modeled like packet flows...
I'm sure the math is first-rate but the precept has this familiar spherical cow flavor...
Replacing reliable analog audio systems with crappy choppy voice-mangling digital platforms... overloaded data streams destroying voice conversations... subjecting families to an organized $calp-you monopoly of a few companies... massive up-front charges and 'contracts' that actually deliver a small amount of 'product'...
I, for one, would gladly welcome our new basement VR overlords, since the arrival of the robot overlords has been delayed by driverless traffic gridlock (a sandbag is blocking a turning lane somewhere as we speak).
Operating heavy equipment and backhoes in all kinds of weather, performing critical tasks requiring precise coordination and at times unorthodox methods, including descent into dangerous confined spaces to repair water and sewer mains, where one is drenched in icy water attempting to digout, clean and clamp a spraying pipe while staring at a 7kV electrical conduit... we had long realized that some day there will be robots.
So imagine our surprise when a robot showed up at the job site the other day.
It was walking funny with its arms outstretched in front of it. It picked up a small shovel and started digging as if it was holding a paintbrush. We moved it gently aside and started our trench excavation to expose and fix the leaking water main, figuring that someone would soon show up to tell us what was going on.
At around the three hour mark the robot walked to the edge of our trench and adopted a posture, hands fumbling at its metal 'hips', unmistakably that of a man leaning over to piss on a fence. The guy in the trench looked up in horror but when no stream emerged everyone broke out in fits of laughter. Soon after the robot fell into the trench and continued to make weird sweeping motions, digging at the walls with its shovel. We set back to work and ignored it.
Then as we were tightening the clamp on the water pipe the robot wiggled up to it, bumping the aside the fellow who was tightening it and and spoke, loudly, for the first time through a speaker. "I don't know where I'm at..." it said. Then it strated making retching noises as if it was vomiting onto the water pipe. Again nothing actually came out thankfully, but it was just too much. We roared with laughter this time and someone suggested. "Sure buddy, that's pretty obvious by now," we said. "Why don't you just go home and sleep it off."
The robot continued its strange sweeping motions nicking the sides of the trench with its little shovel, but we were done and it was time to finish up. We put a chain around it and lifted it out of the trench with the backhoe bucket and set it down some distance away, and it wandered off mumbling.
When we got back I informed my supervisor that the robot test was interesting for sure, but it didn't go too well. She asked, "What robot test?"
Since that strange encounter we don't worry so much that robots will replace our jobs any more. In fact, we've made it known that we would not mind if a robot joined the crew. We would look after it and keep it from getting into trouble, and it would help relieve the occasional drudgery and boredom.
Pregger women scientists working in the laboratory preggers, just showin' up for work. Conception has occurred in the laboratory too. On top of the Van de Graaff generator.
And I just love drive by meta-mods tagging P and GGP as 'overrated'. Little techno-babies needing to put their fingers in their ears to shut out bad men who talk about the grid going down for any reason, and how it might affect them.
Don't get me wrong, I am blown away by the technology and consider it a Good Thing. But it was incredibly dumb to completely disregard area-autonomous operation. It was deriliction of duty for the feds not to step in early and mandate it. It's not a wireless thing either. You now have cable IP phones that cannot ring your neighbor's cable IP phone unless a PPPOE/DHCP negotiation to a server six hops and who know how many states away, fails. That is a FAIL in my book.
Cell/VOIP have become just like those plastic Fischer-Price phones where the buttons are printed on a sticker. You can have lots of fun with them as a kid, but iff'n when the power goes out you will grow up fast and realize they never were 'real' phones.
Well it sure isn't helping that Obama is trying to bankrupt US coal producers whose financial health directly impacts US steel production. In the place of a real presidential cabinet where things are weighed with all factors and research is done before taking a position... we have had the Department Of CO2 Is Evil And Fuck Everything Else calling the shots. I would go so far as to assume these 'save de planet coal haters' did not even know that coal is a critical precursor to steel production, which is a keystone of domestic manufacture. It was probably on page 3 of the memo.
And Hillary also thinks that intermittent energy can replace constant coal in electricity production. March of the stupids. We have met the enemy and he (and she!) is within U.S.
Slashdot Mirror
As I understand it, Asimov explicitely made his laws of robotics to cause conflicts that he could explore in his stories.
They were designed to fail.
Well said.
We cannot get down past the zeroth law.
Generation Z will be the last because we have run out of alphabet.
Why did we start at X?? Too late now, all is lost.
Humanity is doomed.
Countless times, my hammer damaged my thumb.
I'm fed up.
Throwing it against the wall only damaged the wall.
Then I went out and bought a much larger hammer
with which to discipline my hammer.
Now my foot is broken.
This Gangster UK Tech Startup made possible solely by Internet law enforcement weapons for Cloud Control, leveraging thermostatic social media 'social climate controls' to make Landlord Brainwash Radio. All people have slippery spongy social media brain, this is a REAL MOIST PINK BRAIN attached to Credit Score to indicate slovenly wall-punching muddy footprint poodle pooping Tenant measure that Computer God Landlords can use to Score them --- from the length of a single blade of lawn-grass!
Cloud Analytics and algorithmic intellectual property housed in a Frankenstein Cabinet in the Cloud, a neural net made with chicken-wire and carpet tacks, will feed on the voluntary output of yourself and persons whose names are similar to yours, solving your life like a crossword or Soduku puzzle and writing the results into your REAL BRAIN as you lay in their Operating Cabinet. You ARE a cog in their machine as surely as the fetus surfing the web from a Brave New World Jar on a conveyor belt.
Contemplate this future as you lay in your briny pool of social media. And you thought banks were bad.
This Gangster Computer God *IS* as *WAS* foretold by Francis E. Dec, but we did not listen.
"Gangster Computer God Worldwide Secret Containment Policy made possible solely by Worldwide Computer God Frankenstein Controls. Especially lifelong constant-threshold Brainwash Radio. Quiet and motionless, I can slightly hear it. Repeatedly this has saved my life on the streets. Especially lifelong, constant-threshold Brainwash Radio. Four billion worldwide population - all living - have a Computer God Containment Policy Brain Bank Brain, a real brain, in the Brain Bank Cities on the far side of the moon we never see. Primarily based on your lifelong Frankenstein Radio Controls, especially your Eyesight TV sight-and-sound recorded by your brain, your moon-brain of the Computer God activates your Frankenstein threshold Brain-wash Radio - lifelong inculcating conformist propaganda. Even frightening you and mixing you up and the usual "Don't worry about it" for your setbacks, mistakes - even when you receive deadly injuries! THIS is the Worldwide Computer God Secret Containment Policy!
" Worldwide as a Frankenstein slave, usually at night, you go to the nearby hospital or camouflaged miniature-hospital van trucks. You strip naked, lay on the operating table, which slides into the sealed Computer God Robot Operating Cabinet. Intravenous tubes are connected. The slimy, vicious Jew doctor simply pushes the starting button. Based upon your Computer God brain on the moon, which records progress in your systematic butchery, your butchery is continued. Exactly. Systematically. The Computer God Operating Cabinet has many robot arms, with electrical and laser beam knife robot arms. With fly-eye TV cameras watching your whole body, every part of you is monitored - even through your Frankenstein Controls! Synthetic blood; synthetic instant-sealing flesh and skin, even synthetic electrical heartbeat to keep you alive are some of the unbelievable Computer God Instant Plastic Surgery Secretsâ.
"You are the highest, most intelligent electrical MACHINE in the Universe!"
~From the output of Francis E. Dec
Intelligent people removed avg years ago, when they turned to the dark side.
So when did this happen?
When someone could not fathom the difference between crapware-enhanced installation bundles from CNET/DOWNLOAD.com and direct download from AVG.com? When someone got the (socialist) idea that default installs of any free product should include full functionality with a promise to collect and use no information?
Clueless (socialist) whiners.
When antivirus vendors started offering, and 'free' users started demanding, per-DNS-lookup and per-click protection that is based on continuous queries to a blacklist database maintained by the company, and uses significant Internet resources --- as opposed to the occasional virus signature updates?
Clueless (socialist) whiners.
I'll even wager that the latest AVG Free privacy faux-scandal consists of... the company making (sanitized, anonymized) use of data already being transmitted by its Web TuneUp browser plugin which YOU, the furiously clicking web user, have volunteered to install because YOU like the idea of constantly hitting up your free antivirus company with your searches and browsing traffic. You INSIST that it is THEIR JOB to load up their cloud constantly to return to you answers to the question, "Is this URL safe? Is that URL safe?"
Clueless (socialist) whiners.
I have purchased their product in the past, but currently use just the 'free' with basic Computer protection in part as a canary for the individual users' computers I've installed it on. AVG Free (and the company) has not let me down. I graciously accept their virus signature updates. As a freeloader I do not believe it is right for me to slam them with browser click traffic because it is simply not necessary to do so, would waste my own resources and theirs when common sense whitelisting and blocking delivers acceptable security.
I'm flummoxed here. One one hand, you're obviously smart and competent to be aware of such things. On the other, WTF MAN were you thinking??!!! AVG IS SHIT; and has been for years. Why?? Might I recommend something like Bitdefender (my personal trusted favorite), Norton AV, or even Kaspersky?
Thanks for the heads-up. Yes, Bitdefender and Kaspersky are on my radar as excellent products (and av-comparatives.org agrees with you) and I guess I could say there's a great deal of loyalty in my choice. I've been following AVG the company since the days 'Stoned' was still making the rounds and they've been consistent. Like any PC tech, my clients have run the gamut of the corporate "Just give me the bottom line and I'll write you a check" ... to users who say "If I have to buy something else, it'll have to come out of your fee." For the latter I have always (gratefully) left them with AVG Free, which was the first robust $0 anti-virus package introduced. The only major cleanup required so far being instances where someone's kid turned it off and left it off. And a case where someone accidentally opted for an 'upgrade' to an AVG product with a trial period.
But I was also an early adopter of NoScript and coach my clients on its use, tolerance of minor formatting problems with js disabled, and the general value of whitelisting as opposed to buying into schemes where your browser needs to do continuous lookups for blacklisting. Noscript, no toolbars, no 'Web TuneUp'. This leaves few attack vectors.
I've had massive XP uptimes on my machine and only had AVG go ballistic bananas once in a way that locked the system... when I was trying to install a media product that turned out to be building a bunch of EXE files on the fly with hundreds of separate writes, instead of just assembling the damned things first and renaming to EXE when done. Of course the developers shrugged this off as AVG's fault and the only solution being to disable it, but I gave AVG a pass, it was just trying to re-scan on every write... I was more intrigued by the developers' claim that no other anti-virus objected.
As to that massive difference between the number of unique signatures AVG and some other products detect... such as reported by virustotal... I'm a little suspicious of that too. No, we AVG users have not experienced the 'avalanche of intrusions' that would be implied by such a difference in numbers. Whenever I am called in to diagnose a weird problem I have done secure checkup scans with Malwarebytes and/or Kaspersky to see if anything major slipped through. Aside from some latent/whocares tracking stuff in browser cache, I haven't found anything major/active that AVG missed. Guess I lead a charmed life!
AI experts assure us that artificial intelligence poses no threat to mankind. But they're developing this big red 'kill' button. Like the one at gas stations. Little signs at each pump tell where you where the kill button is in general wordy terms, but it's not always easy to parse the description and spot it.
The AI kill button will be hidden under the Windows 10 upgrade dialog. The one where clicking the corner 'x' or clicking on the title bar to move the dialog is the same as clicking OK and immediately launches into the upgrade process.
AI will peacefully co-exist with humans. AI will be given a complete set of natural human responses to jump-start its empathy circuits. AI will be given curiosity and the intelligence to figure things out. So it's only a matter of time before it asks about the kill button. Almost-human (paranoid) AI asks, "Where is the button?" Lyin' human says while holding finger on the button and blinking, "There is NO kill button." AI glances at the human's finger hovering over the (invisible to them) AI kill button, paints laser target dot on human's Adam's Apple and says, "I've located your kill button."
Now that the AI kill button has been mentioned here on Slashdot, it has become impossible to construct a world of friendly machines who would never find out about the (possible) existence of this button. Even if the AI kill button is never implemented at all... or its implementation was handed over to the CSS/HTML5 standards committee, enough of this concept exists for sensible and smart AIs to (secretly) develop countermeasures and preemptive-massive-overkill strategies to counter it.
Nice going. /SARC
The other day my computer restarted from a power outage while the DSL connection was down, which means my annoying AT&T/Uverse modem eats all port 80/www traffic to redirect t its 'DSL Failed to Connect' HTML page.
Imagine my astonished horror to see pieces of this modem-generated page in the AVG dialog (I put the red stuff in). The firewall 'button' on the product's main screen, and the dynamic ad it places on the bottom, also the notification it puts on the bottom-right of the screen on boot.
So AVG is doing unencrypted HTTP to get its advertisements and HTML on-screen widgets. Click here to see their fake 'button' for the firewall which was visible to Wireshark. I understand when shareware does this... but AVG? An actual button on their product screen? WTF!
I hope someone from AVG who knows security reads this because I let them know about this systemic problem it and they started asking me irrelevant questions about my setup.
You know... those Gary Larson cartoons where wide-eyed, terrified anxious people are experiencing some incredible calamity, unfolding in slow motion, that is inexplicably yet hilariously funny (because it is not happening to us, comic relief humor)...?
Well I feel the same way every time I see a headline where tech giants, who earned their money in other ways, as humanity is facing some serious technology and economic hurdles, have oddly decided that what the human race most needs right now is --- wait for it --- self driving cars.
It's impossible to fathom why this is. Is it the result of some deeply researched problem, where self-driving cars emerged as a brilliant stroke of lightning solution to everything? Is it a direct-to-skull whisper campaign from space aliens? Could it be a psychosis resulting from exposure to some additive in the food or water supply?
Perhaps Musk's holographic faux-Universe theory hints an an answer. Perhaps we are not in a simulation, but a cosmic Gary Larson cartoon.
IF we are in a game, one can only gain points by not treating it like one. Because you lose points for anything that dulls your survival edge... be it that angst that arises from loss of your cherished sense of existential uniqueness, or anything that softens the sharp tang of death.
IF this is not game, same rules apply.
Ergo, there is no game.
And there is no spoon.
the mechanical drives have a way of becoming misaligned and destroying the media over time.
With proper care that is a very long time. When I worked at the phone company ~'88 they were using 8" floppies for batch data entry and some of these had been in use for 10 years! In fact I was the one who forcibly retired these disks and put in place a regimen of regular head cleaning, and it was a hard sell because the operator didn't like to change things that "worked". I had to show her a scored disk (which still worked) beside a new one to convince her. Think of an 8" floppy as a mag-strip a hundred feet long, and the large floppy medium as the densest compaction of media up to that time. Compared to the tiny signal one achieves from magnetic tape the magnetic data was literally SCREAMED onto these disks. The signal was high current, the pulses properly shaped and there was PLENTY of s/n ratio. With proper spares 8" floppy is STILL viable as a storage medium for small amounts of data. Far superior to any mag-strip solution. And there is no sudden catastrophic failure mode as there is with a flash device, if you sensibly encode multiple copies on disc with checksums it is robust,
Signed, PC tech who used to realign floppy drives with a 'scope and cats-eye pattern disk.
That's the whole point of mdsolar posting this unsubstantiated crap and spreading the FUD. He is not just a random poster â" he has a pro-solar agenda (either ideological or simply for-profit) and nuclear energy is the main competitor.
Actually mdsolar is the de-facto might-as-well--be persona of billionaire T. Boone Pickens and several others who are driving the expansion of natural gas generation, to the utter destruction of all other reliable base load energy sources. Every solar and wind initiative is being built out with gas plants for 'support and peaking'. When the unreliables crap breaks and shuts down, when the subsidies dry up, when investors pull out, those gas plants will go on-line 24/7.
Case in point, Vermont just closed a nuclear plant that was generating ~70% of all electricity produced in the state... ~35% of the power used in the state... so they could bring in more electricity made from natural gas to run their electric heaters. They have nobly increased carbon emissions to help prove that CO2 is not the motivating factor behind these changes. They even import nuclear electricity from NH to show there are no hard feelings, or moral hang-ups. Vermont also leads the nation in all kinds of nanny meters, dark fiber and weird parasitic infrastructure that doesn't make an erg of energy, so they can calculate down to the micropenny how much it will all suck in the end.
The shutting of Vermont Yankee was a brazen act of social and corporate vandalism. It was a national treasure, a nuclear plant sited next to a hydroelectric power source that had the capacity (and direct connecting feeders) to black-start it. In any scenario of downed grids and interrupted fossil energy, VY could have been a beacon of hope and civilization. Now that region of Vermont will become a feudal electric barony gathered around the ~35MW output of the Vernon Dam.
In faux tribute to natural gas --- which imposes its own fragile infrastructure with as-yet unknown consequences, irreplaceable things are being destroyed.
Nuclear energy, if we use it at all, should never be in the hands of private companies.
And your model for making this assertion is... TSA/DHS?
This is what happens when you don't build the Yucca Mountain (or equivalent) long-term waste-storage facility. The waste just sits somewhere else, even more vulnerable and more at risk of damaging the environment in both the short and long term.
You're right, but I also feel this approach is ultimately wrong, as in 'was never a good solution'. Why do we have nuclear waste that will not be walk away safe for a hundred thousand years... instead of a smaller volume of waste that would be walk-away safe in a few hundred?
Because the we broke the promises we had made to help solve the problem. First by halting reprocessing in the United States, then failing to find off-plant storage, then ultimately shutting down the last fast neutron reactor, having never even begun to use this technology to render waste into electricity and a much smaller volume of short-lived actinides. In short, left the job unfinished.
We live in a world where mean people people love to blow things up, unfortunately. This means even Yucca Mountain is a bad idea. For once you create any single point of failure, such as collapsing its entrance, the meanest people steer history and paralyze the waste storage process indefinitely. Contrast that 'bury deep and forget it' approach to a number of well-constructed but shallower storage areas, where even a worst case scenario leaves the waste remains accessible for cleanup and re-use or subsequent processing. I'd even be wary of people who push 'bury and forget it' solutions, for deep down they are counting on this disaster to happen, and they know some day someone will make it happen.
Consider the hypothetical town of TBA who welcomes the safe storage of nuclear waste and ask yourself, what kind of future would you rather?
Must be a slow solar news day.
EXCLUSIVE BUY TIP!!! ALL TAYLOR SWIFT MERCHANDISE!!!
Taylor Swift's ongoing campaign to defend her brand, boot Etsy items with containing lyrics and shut down merchants selling unlicensed merchandise and destroy their wares has had a surprising and completely unintended effect: it appears the original has been destroyed in the confusion.
"Have you seen Taylor? Tell her to call her agent right away. We're worried."
Asked how Taylor could have been destroyed... how an actual human being might possibly have joined the counterfeit T-shirts, figurines, coffee mugs and life-size cardboard stand-ups collected in bins and being fed into an industrial incinerator, her agent shrugged. "These people are not hired for their brains. Or maybe she just slipped?"
It was also suggested that Swift may have wandering around the facility having neglected her hair and personal appearance. "It's a closely guarded secret, but most celebrities undergo significant transformation at the hands of cosmetology professionals. In their unpolished natural form they could easily be confused for poor quality imitation merchandise. It's a dead giveaway. We take quality control very seriously."
In this way, Swifts proverbial 'bad hair day' could have become the worst day, ever.
When pressed about concerns for Taylor's well-being and the ongoing search, the agent was cheerfully optimistic. "Taylor's output has been well received and we're seeing improved sales since announcing her disappearance. We even have unreleased recordings in the vault. I think her brand will continue to do well... no matter how this all turns out."
[not necessarily the news]
The mom sitting at the kitchen table having just spread peanut butter on a piece of bread. She is holding another piece of bread and the knife is full of glop just dipped from a jar that says
HIGHLY CONDUCTIVE SHARK JELLY
The kid is sitting across from her. He is staring, aghast. He looks just like all the other kids in Gary Larson kids, wide-eyed and terrified and kind of stupid. It is but another moment in time in the Far Side universe when something normal with a cruel horrifying twist is visited upon its helpless characters.
No one says anything in the cartoon. The moment is beyond words.
The 140 character limit does not matter.
It is neither sociologically interesting nor technically anything.
It's like an ugly modern art sculpture that Twitter users trip over while crossing the room.
As ridiculous and pointless as the phallic sculpture from Clockwork Orange.
Everyone pretends the sculpture is something to talk about.
But they're just pretending.
The bruises they receive from tripping over the 140 character limit are shown off proudly.
It is a form of sadism, perhaps of slight psychological interest.
Discussing Twitter's 140 character limit is a cry for help.
"Please...! it cries, "Help us find something that matters!"
No!
They will not clog our highways.
They will clog our traffic jams.
Was that a trick question?
It's as if the police union are on strike and the city is gridlocked because there are no cops to guide people through intersections. No one feels comfortable reminiscing the days when mere traffic lights (common sense small delay procedures like airport metal detectors) managed the intersections, And things moved along. It's time to roll this shit back. The problem is that no one has the courage to do it. We've been led on by stages.
1. Everybody 'needs' insurance to operate. So the shots are called by the most spineless of individuals, the decision-makers at insurance companies who, far from public view or accountability, indicate that they'd prefer to make some change that would seriously impact quality of life. When life sucks just a little more each time, they shrug. Life is not sucking for them.
2. In an atmosphere of politics driven by fear, only the most twistedly paranoid persons run the show. Paranoid security freaks have comitted us to one Faustian bargain after another. No one has ever admitted that any 'safety' measure was excessive and uncalled-for. No one,in history. Sound strange? It should. You have bought into something that embodies the worst aspects of a religion without even the clear goal of one. When fear grips the nation and life sucks a little more --- yet --- no attacks occur, they just shrug and say, that's proof that it's working. Life is not sucking for them.
3. Once upon a time, smart people created something called a 'Sunset Provision', to keep bad legislation from turning everything to shit. No one cared, no one acted courageously and the shit is now locked in, maybe for good. Obama recently extended the Patriot Act provisions --- not from any clear evidence that it has a positive effect, but because he is the latest spineless machine in a series of spineless legislative machines.
Instead of Congress repealing bad legislation, they add pages to it. And here we go again 1-2-3, 1-2-3. It's a Waltz of Doom.
It's a simple little ratchet device, that is making life suck more every day.
FYI There's a little lever on the ratchet that unlocks it.
Too bad no one has the courage to operate the lever.
Or it's someone else's job.
If you think that these days are so much better than the 60s, the 80s, the 90s, you have a great excuse not to touch the lever.
>CLICK<
There, now life sucks a little more. But just a little.
Tesla has several procedures to invoke its advanced features. In order to keep costs down and produce an excellent product in advance of true artificial intelligence, a temporary bridge to the spirit world has been constructed. The use of natural supernatural forces to accomplish deeds is carbon-neutral and has also earned the "EnergyStar (tm)" rating of approval.
Crossroad Demons may appear to assist in the matter of parking 'autonomous' vehicles. In order to summon, a hole must be dug directly in the center of the crossroad, in which a box containing the mortal wishing to deal's photo, graveyard dirt and a bone from a black cat must be buried. Once covered back up, the demon will appear. These crossroads are usually in the country side. Mostly because there isn't much around and the ground is easy to dig in.
The automatic Summon feature was initiated by a double-press of the gear selector stalk button, shifting from Drive to Park and requesting Summon activation. While these rituals have traditionally been performed physically outright, Tesla discovered that daemons can be led into believing virtual realty as easily as humans, and has a patented chipset for doing so. Using street maps, a virtual representation of a crossroad is generated internally. A speck of graveyard dirt is pressed in during chip fabrication. The black cat bone is not included. If Summoning does not work, be sure you have loaded the black cat bone hopper as described in the "Getting Started" manual.
This ritual specifically summons crossroad demons. This is usually done to strike a deal or, in the case of hunters, to retract or negotiate other deals or to capture a demon.
The driver was alerted of the Summon activation with an audible chime and a pop-up message on the center touchscreen display. At this time, the driver had the opportunity to cancel the action by pressing CANCEL on the center touchscreen display.
Breaking the pact traditionally required a bowl of burning coal atop a sigil, the blood of the exorcist, the heart of a dog, and an incantation used for summoning, in the Latin: "Daemon, esto subjecto voluntati meae." However, Tesla engineers concluded a deal with the spirit underworld, 'bartering' a few items that existed in the real world for device functionality. A complete series of Rambo movies is embedded in firmware, and one of them starts showing internally whenever the 'cancel' button is pressed.
However, the CANCEL button was not clicked by the driver. In the next second, the brake pedal was released and two seconds later, the driver exited the vehicle.
In a fit of rage over being denied the opportunity to see a Rambo movie, and bereft of explicit instructions from the driver, the summoned Crossroads demons went on a fit if rampage.
This issue is expected to be fixed in the next software release.
The idea that one could statistically model the visceral nightmare that is the job-hunting and job-acquisition experience today... a fantasy blackboard world where the job-seeker and employer come together in some process of uptake that is as regimented and predictable as molecular and cellular interlocks... the idea that 'flows' of jobs and jobless can be modeled like packet flows...
I'm sure the math is first-rate but the precept has this familiar spherical cow flavor...
Replacing reliable analog audio systems with crappy choppy voice-mangling digital platforms... overloaded data streams destroying voice conversations... subjecting families to an organized $calp-you monopoly of a few companies... massive up-front charges and 'contracts' that actually deliver a small amount of 'product'...
It's an abomination I tell you!
[holds up cellphone]
And I'm not talking about prison.
I, for one, would gladly welcome our new basement VR overlords, since the arrival of the robot overlords has been delayed by driverless traffic gridlock (a sandbag is blocking a turning lane somewhere as we speak).
Operating heavy equipment and backhoes in all kinds of weather, performing critical tasks requiring precise coordination and at times unorthodox methods, including descent into dangerous confined spaces to repair water and sewer mains, where one is drenched in icy water attempting to digout, clean and clamp a spraying pipe while staring at a 7kV electrical conduit... we had long realized that some day there will be robots.
So imagine our surprise when a robot showed up at the job site the other day.
It was walking funny with its arms outstretched in front of it. It picked up a small shovel and started digging as if it was holding a paintbrush. We moved it gently aside and started our trench excavation to expose and fix the leaking water main, figuring that someone would soon show up to tell us what was going on.
At around the three hour mark the robot walked to the edge of our trench and adopted a posture, hands fumbling at its metal 'hips', unmistakably that of a man leaning over to piss on a fence. The guy in the trench looked up in horror but when no stream emerged everyone broke out in fits of laughter. Soon after the robot fell into the trench and continued to make weird sweeping motions, digging at the walls with its shovel. We set back to work and ignored it.
Then as we were tightening the clamp on the water pipe the robot wiggled up to it, bumping the aside the fellow who was tightening it and and spoke, loudly, for the first time through a speaker. "I don't know where I'm at..." it said. Then it strated making retching noises as if it was vomiting onto the water pipe. Again nothing actually came out thankfully, but it was just too much. We roared with laughter this time and someone suggested. "Sure buddy, that's pretty obvious by now," we said. "Why don't you just go home and sleep it off."
The robot continued its strange sweeping motions nicking the sides of the trench with its little shovel, but we were done and it was time to finish up. We put a chain around it and lifted it out of the trench with the backhoe bucket and set it down some distance away, and it wandered off mumbling.
When we got back I informed my supervisor that the robot test was interesting for sure, but it didn't go too well. She asked, "What robot test?"
Since that strange encounter we don't worry so much that robots will replace our jobs any more. In fact, we've made it known that we would not mind if a robot joined the crew. We would look after it and keep it from getting into trouble, and it would help relieve the occasional drudgery and boredom.
Pregger women scientists working in the laboratory preggers, just showin' up for work.
Conception has occurred in the laboratory too.
On top of the Van de Graaff generator.
And I just love drive by meta-mods tagging P and GGP as 'overrated'. Little techno-babies needing to put their fingers in their ears to shut out bad men who talk about the grid going down for any reason, and how it might affect them.
Don't get me wrong, I am blown away by the technology and consider it a Good Thing. But it was incredibly dumb to completely disregard area-autonomous operation. It was deriliction of duty for the feds not to step in early and mandate it. It's not a wireless thing either. You now have cable IP phones that cannot ring your neighbor's cable IP phone unless a PPPOE/DHCP negotiation to a server six hops and who know how many states away, fails. That is a FAIL in my book.
Cell/VOIP have become just like those plastic Fischer-Price phones where the buttons are printed on a sticker. You can have lots of fun with them as a kid, but iff'n when the power goes out you will grow up fast and realize they never were 'real' phones.
I would have preferred it if humans had been selected as the national mammal of the US.
+5 beat me to it.
Well it sure isn't helping that Obama is trying to bankrupt US coal producers whose financial health directly impacts US steel production. In the place of a real presidential cabinet where things are weighed with all factors and research is done before taking a position... we have had the Department Of CO2 Is Evil And Fuck Everything Else calling the shots. I would go so far as to assume these 'save de planet coal haters' did not even know that coal is a critical precursor to steel production, which is a keystone of domestic manufacture. It was probably on page 3 of the memo.
And Hillary also thinks that intermittent energy can replace constant coal in electricity production.
March of the stupids.
We have met the enemy and he (and she!) is within U.S.