So... if someone has 20-year-old pictures of a 10-year-old being raped, it's okay because now the child in question is 30?
While I don't see the harm in cartoon-sex, you can't really expect the "but technically $person is over 18 today" defence to work or even be acceptable.
If you can, what's wrong with killing people? Technically they're already dead by the time you get to court over it, and there's no point in crying over spilt milk.
Except Maggie, Bart, and Lisa are not real people. They do not have human rights. They are not children. They are cartoon characters.
Child Pornography is illegal because it violates the rights of the children contained therein -- the right to consent, amongst others. The Simpsons "kids" have no such rights because they don't exist.
Treating this material differently is merely a way to punish people modern society considers "creepy." That's all.
They know that the unions WILL turn against them, cut good things like flexible hours and telecommuting, etc
Does this happen in the USA?
No. But why let logic and reason get in the way of a nice conservative frothy rant about the EVILS of Organized Labor.
You know, evils, like benefits, decent working conditions, fair pay, being able to say NO when management tries to say something like "Yeah, um, we're gonna need you to work 4-8 hours of unpaid overtime every night for the next year."
See? Evil evil evil! What do we think this is, Socialist France?
Cecil isn't in any of the screenshots...because he isn't in either of the games mentioned. That's Final Fantasy IV, which has been known by that name in every release except for the US SNES version.
I can see being confused by the renaming, but how do you see a character in the screenshots who just isn't there?
If you look at the first screenshot, Richard is dressed up almost the exact same as dark Knight Cecil. This is because Richard is also a dark knight -- of sorts. It's not an inexcusable mistake.
Kindle has it... but it is disabled mostly because of publishers not wanting to hurt their audiobooks sales.
The answer is to prohibit use of any ebooks in the classroom when the publishers won't allow students to use text to speech options.
There may be a separate issue with speech to control the ebook device.
How about we prohibit the use of any and all books without a braille edition. And require every teacher have an assistant who can do sign language. And since the US doesn't have any official language, translation services must be made available upon demand.
At the very least, requiring braille editions will stop chucklefuck professors from "requiring" copies of books they get a kickback from using (and then not using -- sorry, no refund, since they have a new "edition" out every 6 months).
Allow open development, and you've basically got a platform that the bad guys can target. There's already standards for signing code to prove that an app came from who you thought it did.
True translation is nigh impossible for a human, and requires comprehensive knowledge of both the source and target cultures. Not just the patterns of sound/text that represent the languages used by those cultures. A computer will not provide human-level-quality translation at any time in the foreseeable future. Maybe before the end of my life, especially if I take a lot of vitamins (if I'm to believe Kurzweil, which I stopped doing years ago--the guy is a hack), but not anytime soon.
I'd love for computers to be able to put me out of a job. But I don't see it happening.
And most scientists in the know thought mapping the Human Genome was a fool's errand due to the computing power requirements. Technology found a way to surprise almost everyone.
While I bow to your superior wisdom in the field, I remain convinced on some level that in 5-10 years we'll both be surprised at the amount of progress in getting computers to read. Will it replace human translation? Probably not... but it might supplement it enough that it'll make it possible for humans that aren't comprehensively knowledgeable in those languages to have a fighting chance.
For example, take Japanese -- Chosen as that is the second language I'm trying to learn. Take a bit of OCR technology -- the ReadIRIS suite of programs already do a great job of Kanji OCR, for example. Now add OCR to an augmented reality app, like something for an iPhone, or a web browser plugin, or what have you -- a simple enough prospect, really, it's just one step up from taking a scanned image and OCRing *that*.
I don't know Japanese. I can read some basic Kanji and the Kana, that's it. But with ReadIRIS and a few hours of time, I can get the gist of a chapter of Translucent or Doraemon. If I didn't have to spend hours cutting the text out of the pages using Photoshop - i.e., if ReadIRIS or other similar programs could pull text forward on their own...
Now, take that technology (on the fly OCR of Japanese characters from any source), and take it to some logical middle steps -- making the computer provide Furigana or SKIP numbers right next to the Kanji in a transparent overlay, for example. Would it translate? No, not technically, but it would certainly make it a lot easier for a Japanese-as-a-second-language student to figure it out -- instead of OCR, then copy, then paste into a machine translator, I'd look it up in a dictionary.
Or for simple translations (signs, menus, etc), you could whip out a cellphone, take a picture of a door or what have you, then look off to the side and see "Open" or "Express Vasectomy Service" -- you know, stuff you might wanna know about.;) This is stuff that's not too far out there -- we have OCR, it just needs to get better in order to go to this step.
The rest of the functions we already have, in stuff like the Furigana Injector for Firefox, or rikaichan, although they require HTML or Plaintext. Hooking that up to an OCR augmented reality app... well... It's just taking our current gadgets 1 step further, and using some duct tape to put them together.
And actually, apparently Toshiba is working on something similar to what I was gibbering about earlier -- Voice Recognition coupled to Machine Translation and Voice Synth. Hold up your phone and let it translate for you. Kurzweil predicted this would happen in "2009 or 2010" in a November 07 interview, as well as in his 1990 book -- although admittedly he was off by 10 years in the book.
As for more traditional, complete, "humanesque" translations... Well. Lets see what happens in 10 years. To quote Pterry -- I wouldn't take that bet, it looks like it'd go to the judges.
You mean like the free Acrobat Reader? No wait, that supports only PDFs.
Really the main advantage of this e-reader is that unlike Kindle, it uses a full sized monitor AND your computer, is NOT portable, and since it's plugged into your wall, will last as long as the power's on in your house, as opposed to that dreadful Kindle that lasts upwards of 10-15 days battery life (when wifi's turned off). So there!
Yes, because this will never ever be ported, ever, and the existence of this eReader, pushing technology forward, will not influence the Kindle 3 and Nook 2's features in any way.
I think the new toy in this (and it's Kurzweil, he ALWAYS has a neat toy in his stuff) that we should be paying attention to is that it has actually good Text to Speech, and it on-the-fly translates to 16 different languages. While neither are particuarly NEW technologies they are technologies that are:
1. Ripe for maturing (machine translation is getting better and better every year, for example) 2. World-changing if they get perfected.
The world changing thing I want to explain -- Kurzweil has already done something similar -- the first OCR + Text to Speech commercial application was the Kurzweil Reading Machine, back in 1976. 30 years later, those tabletop sized prototypes are now... hidden inside pen sized scanners. It kinda pushed forward Assistive Technology quite a bit, for the time -- before then, the only choice Blind people had to read things was braille. Now, with the right gadgets, they can read anything.
When you add on the fly translation to the mix, things get... interesting. Manga fans, for example, won't have to wait for translations, just click, click, bam, instant translations. You'll be able to subscribe to a French Newspaper, get it in the morning, auto translated, ready to go. And finally the US military can finally feel safe and justified in firing all those gay Arabic translators, cause they can finally be replaced by robots.
Technologies such as Vocaloid (an artificial pop star software kit... thing) put forth another idea -- combining this with Speech to Text. Automatic, in line translation of diplomatic speeches, news programs, and (of course), anime and entertainment, anyone?
In short, while as a bookreader it's pretty good (and it is, it looks a lot better than the Nook or Kindle PC apps)... I'm more excited about the translation tech inside it.
Huh? You think if there is a famine we will use available farmland to grow shit that we press for oil to put into our gastank? Didn't it occur to you that this would be rather strange behavior in a famine?
No, I think when we run out of cheap gas, the trucks bringing McDonalds Quarter Pounder w/ Cheese meals to most of our urban population centers will stop, and a very very LARGE number of people are going to be too pissed at $15/gallon milk to be upset at $15/gallon gas.
And before anyone points out "But most people don't survive on Fast Food" -- the same thing goes for just about everything we eat now. I live in Idaho. I think locally, as in, no imports from out of state, I could get Sugar, Potatoes, and Milk. Maybe some more supplies, if I really looked into it, I admittedly haven't.
Anything else would need to be shipped in from a factory farm someplace back East. No gas? Hope you like fried taters.
If we don't have the gas to send 18 wheelers around, food prices are going to go through the roof -- if we can even get food to the markets at any price -- and people will starve.
What type of nuclear reactor to use it completely unrelated to what fuel to use to power cars.
You aren't going to stick a nuclear reactor in the trunk, and how the grid gets its electricity has no impact on electric cars either.
My point is there is an existing system that involves large amounts of profit in doing it the old way, and the people making said profit have no reason to foster change just because science said so. In fact, given the dismal state of the US education and patent systems, companies often can actively push back by simply hiring, destroying, or buying out people with new ideas.
Look at digital music, for example -- we had to drag the music industry kicking and screaming into the 21st century, and they only came along after they had time to get their lawyers and executives to put down their clay tablets and abacuses long enough to think up some admittedly pretty innovative ways of screwing the rest of us over.
I guess a more succinct way to put it is that corporations have used profit to make science and progress their bitch this past century, and I see no reason why this won't continue going forward.
So still no explanation as to why no common use of Thorium reactors.
Same reason we don't use hemp paper, and why anyone thinking we'll move away from oil based cars before the famine starts is fooling themselves.
The existing corporate status quo makes money doing it this way, and they won't change unless made to (by, say, running out of uranium or oil or what have you).
No. You can't voluntarily leave the Google Index. And being found by Googlers is worth more than 1 Million Dollars to these companies. Now, paying a million so your biggest competitor isn't in the Google Index? That would be worth a million.
Simple question, simple answer. Next clueless rich idiot, please!
At speeds above Mach 8.0, you can drive a pencil through a 100mm armor steel plate - even the pencil tip stays intact and sharp.
At 36,000km/s (equal to Mach 36 at sea-level), the net or carbon fiber construction will not even have a chance to absorb anything. The net itself might be able to absorb this momentum and energy level at a whole, but I seriously believe a metal piece will just blast right through it, instantly shearing the filament at molecular level. The inertia of a single carbon nanotube will probably be all that is needed to cleanly cut it off.
But if it causes these small pieces of metal to fall towards the Earth, where the atmosphere will do a lot of the work for us, isn't that good enough?
I'd say "away from the Earth" too, but I think I'd rather not like to lose a large amount of metal to the interplanetary void...
Isn't the solution more obvious -- in developed societies, boys and girls won't be killed or beaten for doing things that don't fit the traditional gender roles. (Yes, I'm quite aware that the US still has plenty of bigots who would beat or kill transmen and transwomen.)
Sure, there may be chemicals damaging sperm production and the like, but it seems like a lot of this could be explained by more open minds.
You realize they could then TRACE your iphone location at a given time, right?
Epic Fail, dude. SSH into your home linux box and do the update there. There are many remote desktop apps for the iPhone, and you could use Lynx on a Linux box in a pinch.
Reality C: No withheld data. Data is disseminated with some initial shock that by 20xx we will have oil shortages. People get into panic buying mode. Dogs and cats living together... Come 20XX, new supplies are found, and there are no shortages. People who bought oil future loose their shirts.
You're forgetting: "President Jeb Bush passes sweeping Oil Future bailouts, shirts bought back with interest."
Slashdot Mirror
So ... if someone has 20-year-old pictures of a 10-year-old being raped, it's okay because now the child in question is 30?
While I don't see the harm in cartoon-sex, you can't really expect the "but technically $person is over 18 today " defence to work or even be acceptable.
If you can, what's wrong with killing people? Technically they're already dead by the time you get to court over it, and there's no point in crying over spilt milk.
Except Maggie, Bart, and Lisa are not real people. They do not have human rights. They are not children. They are cartoon characters.
Child Pornography is illegal because it violates the rights of the children contained therein -- the right to consent, amongst others. The Simpsons "kids" have no such rights because they don't exist.
Treating this material differently is merely a way to punish people modern society considers "creepy." That's all.
They know that the unions WILL turn against them, cut good things like flexible hours and telecommuting, etc
Does this happen in the USA?
No. But why let logic and reason get in the way of a nice conservative frothy rant about the EVILS of Organized Labor.
You know, evils, like benefits, decent working conditions, fair pay, being able to say NO when management tries to say something like "Yeah, um, we're gonna need you to work 4-8 hours of unpaid overtime every night for the next year."
See? Evil evil evil! What do we think this is, Socialist France?
Cecil isn't in any of the screenshots...because he isn't in either of the games mentioned. That's Final Fantasy IV, which has been known by that name in every release except for the US SNES version.
I can see being confused by the renaming, but how do you see a character in the screenshots who just isn't there?
If you look at the first screenshot, Richard is dressed up almost the exact same as dark Knight Cecil. This is because Richard is also a dark knight -- of sorts. It's not an inexcusable mistake.
Kindle has it... but it is disabled mostly because of publishers not wanting to hurt their audiobooks sales.
The answer is to prohibit use of any ebooks in the classroom when the publishers won't allow students to use text to speech options.
There may be a separate issue with speech to control the ebook device.
How about we prohibit the use of any and all books without a braille edition. And require every teacher have an assistant who can do sign language. And since the US doesn't have any official language, translation services must be made available upon demand.
At the very least, requiring braille editions will stop chucklefuck professors from "requiring" copies of books they get a kickback from using (and then not using -- sorry, no refund, since they have a new "edition" out every 6 months).
Sounds like someone doesn't understand Statistics.
Of course not! 90% of people don't, and 150% of people know that. Duh!
Wow. Apparently EVERYONE ELSE had the same idea. I feel special. Or something.
Nothing to see here (pun not intended), move along!
Anyone else get a Harrison Bergeron vibe here? I'm not blind, but because one of my coworkers are, it would be unfair for me to use my eyes.
The Kindle has text to speech. There is absolutely no justification for this.
Allow open development, and you've basically got a platform that the bad guys can target. There's already standards for signing code to prove that an app came from who you thought it did.
Steve? Is that you?
-B. Gates
It's prudent to note that Avira anti-virus used to be called "AntiVir"...but I'm pretty certain you're not talking about the same people..
Right. There's a rogue called AntiVir as well.
Nowhere near as annoying as the "heck with it, just backup and OSRI"-worthy "Internet Security 2010", however.
As a linguist, let me tell you something:
True translation is nigh impossible for a human, and requires comprehensive knowledge of both the source and target cultures. Not just the patterns of sound/text that represent the languages used by those cultures. A computer will not provide human-level-quality translation at any time in the foreseeable future. Maybe before the end of my life, especially if I take a lot of vitamins (if I'm to believe Kurzweil, which I stopped doing years ago--the guy is a hack), but not anytime soon.
I'd love for computers to be able to put me out of a job. But I don't see it happening.
And most scientists in the know thought mapping the Human Genome was a fool's errand due to the computing power requirements. Technology found a way to surprise almost everyone.
While I bow to your superior wisdom in the field, I remain convinced on some level that in 5-10 years we'll both be surprised at the amount of progress in getting computers to read. Will it replace human translation? Probably not... but it might supplement it enough that it'll make it possible for humans that aren't comprehensively knowledgeable in those languages to have a fighting chance.
For example, take Japanese -- Chosen as that is the second language I'm trying to learn. Take a bit of OCR technology -- the ReadIRIS suite of programs already do a great job of Kanji OCR, for example. Now add OCR to an augmented reality app, like something for an iPhone, or a web browser plugin, or what have you -- a simple enough prospect, really, it's just one step up from taking a scanned image and OCRing *that*.
I don't know Japanese. I can read some basic Kanji and the Kana, that's it. But with ReadIRIS and a few hours of time, I can get the gist of a chapter of Translucent or Doraemon. If I didn't have to spend hours cutting the text out of the pages using Photoshop - i.e., if ReadIRIS or other similar programs could pull text forward on their own...
Now, take that technology (on the fly OCR of Japanese characters from any source), and take it to some logical middle steps -- making the computer provide Furigana or SKIP numbers right next to the Kanji in a transparent overlay, for example. Would it translate? No, not technically, but it would certainly make it a lot easier for a Japanese-as-a-second-language student to figure it out -- instead of OCR, then copy, then paste into a machine translator, I'd look it up in a dictionary.
Or for simple translations (signs, menus, etc), you could whip out a cellphone, take a picture of a door or what have you, then look off to the side and see "Open" or "Express Vasectomy Service" -- you know, stuff you might wanna know about. ;) This is stuff that's not too far out there -- we have OCR, it just needs to get better in order to go to this step.
The rest of the functions we already have, in stuff like the Furigana Injector for Firefox, or rikaichan, although they require HTML or Plaintext. Hooking that up to an OCR augmented reality app... well... It's just taking our current gadgets 1 step further, and using some duct tape to put them together.
And actually, apparently Toshiba is working on something similar to what I was gibbering about earlier -- Voice Recognition coupled to Machine Translation and Voice Synth. Hold up your phone and let it translate for you. Kurzweil predicted this would happen in "2009 or 2010" in a November 07 interview, as well as in his 1990 book -- although admittedly he was off by 10 years in the book.
As for more traditional, complete, "humanesque" translations... Well. Lets see what happens in 10 years. To quote Pterry -- I wouldn't take that bet, it looks like it'd go to the judges.
You mean like the free Acrobat Reader? No wait, that supports only PDFs.
Really the main advantage of this e-reader is that unlike Kindle, it uses a full sized monitor AND your computer, is NOT portable, and since it's plugged into your wall, will last as long as the power's on in your house, as opposed to that dreadful Kindle that lasts upwards of 10-15 days battery life (when wifi's turned off). So there!
Yes, because this will never ever be ported, ever, and the existence of this eReader, pushing technology forward, will not influence the Kindle 3 and Nook 2's features in any way.
I think the new toy in this (and it's Kurzweil, he ALWAYS has a neat toy in his stuff) that we should be paying attention to is that it has actually good Text to Speech, and it on-the-fly translates to 16 different languages . While neither are particuarly NEW technologies they are technologies that are:
1. Ripe for maturing (machine translation is getting better and better every year, for example)
2. World-changing if they get perfected.
The world changing thing I want to explain -- Kurzweil has already done something similar -- the first OCR + Text to Speech commercial application was the Kurzweil Reading Machine, back in 1976. 30 years later, those tabletop sized prototypes are now... hidden inside pen sized scanners. It kinda pushed forward Assistive Technology quite a bit, for the time -- before then, the only choice Blind people had to read things was braille. Now, with the right gadgets, they can read anything.
When you add on the fly translation to the mix, things get... interesting. Manga fans, for example, won't have to wait for translations, just click, click, bam, instant translations. You'll be able to subscribe to a French Newspaper, get it in the morning, auto translated, ready to go. And finally the US military can finally feel safe and justified in firing all those gay Arabic translators, cause they can finally be replaced by robots.
Technologies such as Vocaloid (an artificial pop star software kit... thing) put forth another idea -- combining this with Speech to Text. Automatic, in line translation of diplomatic speeches, news programs, and (of course), anime and entertainment, anyone?
In short, while as a bookreader it's pretty good (and it is, it looks a lot better than the Nook or Kindle PC apps)... I'm more excited about the translation tech inside it.
Huh? You think if there is a famine we will use available farmland to grow shit that we press for oil to put into our gastank? Didn't it occur to you that this would be rather strange behavior in a famine?
No, I think when we run out of cheap gas, the trucks bringing McDonalds Quarter Pounder w/ Cheese meals to most of our urban population centers will stop, and a very very LARGE number of people are going to be too pissed at $15/gallon milk to be upset at $15/gallon gas.
And before anyone points out "But most people don't survive on Fast Food" -- the same thing goes for just about everything we eat now. I live in Idaho. I think locally, as in, no imports from out of state, I could get Sugar, Potatoes, and Milk. Maybe some more supplies, if I really looked into it, I admittedly haven't.
Anything else would need to be shipped in from a factory farm someplace back East. No gas? Hope you like fried taters.
If we don't have the gas to send 18 wheelers around, food prices are going to go through the roof -- if we can even get food to the markets at any price -- and people will starve.
What type of nuclear reactor to use it completely unrelated to what fuel to use to power cars.
You aren't going to stick a nuclear reactor in the trunk, and how the grid gets its electricity has no impact on electric cars either.
My point is there is an existing system that involves large amounts of profit in doing it the old way, and the people making said profit have no reason to foster change just because science said so. In fact, given the dismal state of the US education and patent systems, companies often can actively push back by simply hiring, destroying, or buying out people with new ideas.
Look at digital music, for example -- we had to drag the music industry kicking and screaming into the 21st century, and they only came along after they had time to get their lawyers and executives to put down their clay tablets and abacuses long enough to think up some admittedly pretty innovative ways of screwing the rest of us over.
I guess a more succinct way to put it is that corporations have used profit to make science and progress their bitch this past century, and I see no reason why this won't continue going forward.
So still no explanation as to why no common use of Thorium reactors.
Same reason we don't use hemp paper, and why anyone thinking we'll move away from oil based cars before the famine starts is fooling themselves.
The existing corporate status quo makes money doing it this way, and they won't change unless made to (by, say, running out of uranium or oil or what have you).
I liked these better when they were called PixelBlocks.
I have a FF1 Fighter and a DQ1 Slime on my desk. :)
I cannot imagine how much spam items these search results must get.
But having said that, an option "hide free items" would be nice, instead of just taking that option away from the users.
>> You can't voluntarily leave the Google Index.
wrong.
http://www.robotstxt.org/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robots_exclusion_standard
A fine point, but not quite the same thing as leaving it.
Let's just make sure it's 1 048 576 cores and not 1 000 000 cores... let's not make that mistake again.
But could such a plan ever work?
No. You can't voluntarily leave the Google Index. And being found by Googlers is worth more than 1 Million Dollars to these companies. Now, paying a million so your biggest competitor isn't in the Google Index? That would be worth a million.
Simple question, simple answer. Next clueless rich idiot, please!
At speeds above Mach 8.0, you can drive a pencil through a 100mm armor steel plate - even the pencil tip stays intact and sharp.
At 36,000km/s (equal to Mach 36 at sea-level), the net or carbon fiber construction will not even have a chance to absorb anything. The net itself might be able to absorb this momentum and energy level at a whole, but I seriously believe a metal piece will just blast right through it, instantly shearing the filament at molecular level. The inertia of a single carbon nanotube will probably be all that is needed to cleanly cut it off.
But if it causes these small pieces of metal to fall towards the Earth, where the atmosphere will do a lot of the work for us, isn't that good enough?
I'd say "away from the Earth" too, but I think I'd rather not like to lose a large amount of metal to the interplanetary void...
Isn't the solution more obvious -- in developed societies, boys and girls won't be killed or beaten for doing things that don't fit the traditional gender roles. (Yes, I'm quite aware that the US still has plenty of bigots who would beat or kill transmen and transwomen.)
Sure, there may be chemicals damaging sperm production and the like, but it seems like a lot of this could be explained by more open minds.
Epic fail yourself, they can trace where your iPhone was, no need to care about where that facebook update appeared to come from then.
Stop thinking like a tech. Start thinking like a criminal or defense attorney.
You only have to fool one of the jurors, not all 12.
"Well hell, Facebook says he posted on it from home at that time, and that's clear across town. He couldn't have done it." Ta da, hung jury.
Hi, you must be new here!
You realize they could then TRACE your iphone location at a given time, right?
Epic Fail, dude. SSH into your home linux box and do the update there. There are many remote desktop apps for the iPhone, and you could use Lynx on a Linux box in a pinch.
Reality C: No withheld data. Data is disseminated with some initial shock that by 20xx we will have oil shortages. People get into panic buying mode. Dogs and cats living together... Come 20XX, new supplies are found, and there are no shortages. People who bought oil future loose their shirts.
You're forgetting: "President Jeb Bush passes sweeping Oil Future bailouts, shirts bought back with interest."
Oil is cheap, so no one wants to pollute for marginal gains*
Employing Americans and keeping money at home instead of sending it to countries that finance extremism is a "marginal gain"?
To the corporations in charge? Yes.