Funny, but I think, more realistically, the reason that the future does not resemble the fiction we see in books and movies is because of the decidedly mundane lack of special effects.
In other words, contrary to the maxim "truth is stranger than fiction", the real future is too boring to put into movie format. Sorry, but no one is gonna buy tickets to see what we have in store for us.
Of course this guarantees the franchise on making movies about the interesting future indefinitely! Cash in now!
I checked the website. I think you may be dead on in your estimation of the direction of this behavior modification tool, however I am not as concerned as you about it being used in prisons.
The current model for "rehabilitation" in prisons is to throw a bunch of criminals into a holding area and let them prey on eachother, all the while providing them with clandestine access to the same drugs and vices that were probably instrumental in their incarceration. From the recidivism statistics I think everyone can agree that this doesn't work too well.
In my estimation, someone who commits violent crime repeatedly has something wrong with their social skill set. and regardless of my opinion, I think that everyone can agree, again, that there is something wrong with them. Constant self-reinforcement of their broken social tool set leaves deep psychic scars on them that make it hard for them to reintegrate with society. Leaving them to their own devices initially resulted in prison time, so why leave them to their own devices once they are incarcerated? Consider that to someone as messed up as a lifetime criminal, newspeak might be a blessing in disguise.
What concerned me more was the fact that "TruThought" advocated this program to schools. THAT is fucking scary. Hardened criminals need some intervention, maybe even some deep restructuring of their value system. School kids do not. At least until they engage in behaviors that betray comprehensive underlying problems, but that will land them in a corrective facility anyway, so no problem.
To roll this kind of cognitive behavior adjustment out in a school is unconscionable. If it is effective in helping violent miscreants live a productive life, it is unconscionable to not use it or something like it.
I like this one best for refuting that passage. It dosen't even require you to leave the Biblical text to do it.
"I tell you the truth, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven (Mat.18:2, Mk.10:15, Lk18:17).
It's sad when people who profess to be Christians do not understand the book that they have wagered their eternal fate on. This is the real hazard of living in the Bible belt: wanting to be a Christian or to understand the Bible but having nowhere to turn but to charlatans and morons.
"...government officials have closed down 8,907 shops and street vendors, 481 publishing companies and 942 illegal websites."
Sure they closed them now, but in a few days they will be back at their old tricks, albiet under new management. I bet you my entire collection of bootleg anime that a well placed bribe or the guaranteed employment of some politician's or magnate's mongoloid cousin will earn these pirates a clean bill of health from said "government officials."
Remember that this is a nation that won't let it's districts/states perform their own productivity audits because they tie the magistrate's pay to economic performance. Needless to say that when they did allow these provinces to do their own evaluations they made Arthur Anderson's accounting practices seem conservative. The last year that they did it the national aggregate GDP was several points higher thant he official numbers from the central accounting office. WOW!
About a year ago I traveled to Miami. My comapny bought the tickets and was trying to save cash. The result is that my travel arrangements included layovers and zig-zags like you have never seen.
Because of the unholy layovers I was close to first in line just about every flight. At the last connection to Miami I realized that while I had not been first to get in line every time I was usually the first or second to board because the VERY first dude got searched every time.
This little observation paid off bigtime on the way back. On the second or third connection I noticed this guy who was traveling the same toute as I was. He seemed to be getting pissed that I was boarding before him and getting preferential seating. Apparently he thought he deserved better than everyone else. As he approached the line he was flirting with the borders of decency: pushing just hard enough to make people get out of the way but not hard enough to get himself decked.
This big lug was mean-mugging me from behind, all angry like. I was seated closer and had stepped in front of him for the first spot. I guess he felt like I cut him off.
Then I rememberd the search protocol.
I motioned for him to go ahead of me.
By the time that a-hole got his shoes and belt back on all the good seats were long gone. I sat there, relaxed and lounging in the bulkhead isle seat, crunching on my honey-roast peanuts, and watched that jerk shoehorn his fat ass into a middle seat at the back of the plane.
"We also tend not to go around and meddle in other countries as a hobby."
Don't let this guy fool you, Canadians have staged attacks on every civilized nation in the world at one time or another in the last 16 months.
It's just that no one really notices the barrage of moose antlers and snowballs. The occasional bottle of Molson Golden or Labatt (empty of course) has caused a casualty or two, but most of those were livestock.
"...horizontal social connections between students..."
Reading/re-reading an extra page or two out of the text or rewinding the podcast is more likely to result in a correct answer on a test than asking another clueless undergrad. If it is a real bugbear of a question go see the TA or the prof. Even then, if "horizontal social connections" are sucha big deal, who is to say that two or more students from the same class won't watch the podcasts together? Ever heard of a study group?
"I also wonder how attentive students would be watching a podcast..."
You seem to be unaware of the sleeping/talking/420'd/out-of-it/distracted/textin g/lost/braindead students that actually attend class. Personally, if I was watching a podcast of my lectures I would be more likely to learn. I would not be scrambling to make sure I got all the obscure points in my notes and there would be no distractions that I could not rewind away.
Even then, college is where students take on and learn to manage additional responsibility. Questioning their atttentiveness is irrelevent. Testing their knowledge is completely relevant. If they learn from a podcast or from a lecture I don't really see how it matters.
Even better, schedule classes with students that are willing to take their course with ONLY podcasts and the text materials and you could scale up enrollment without having to change your infrastructure.
"On the other hand, if people want to freak out about possibilities, I'll give them other possibilities that are just as scary to push them back the other way..."
Since I am of homogenous race charateristics and native to this country I rely on quotes from movies...
"And this button-down, Oxford-cloth psycho might just snap, and then stalk from office to office with an Armalite AR-10 carbine gas-powered semi-automatic weapon, pumping round after round into colleagues and co-workers. This might be someone you've known for years. Someone very, very close to you."
No lawsuit, but I usually get a fast escort from the building.
It kind of makes sense to me. If some creatures have changed shape over millenia in response to changing environments why shouldn't a creature that maintains a single cell level of simplicity develop complexity and adaptation in other areas. In other words, instead of growing larger and/or adapting by moving through different enviromental strata (water, land, air) they have taken an optimization path.
I guess the development of higher brain function is a sort of "universal adaptor" for enviromental stresses. Where this little guy has volumes of genetically hard coded repsonses to environmental changes that his ancestors have adapted to overcome, humans are coded to have superior mentality and the ability to adapt on the fly to changes in environment through environmental manipulation, forethought and planning, and tool use. The fact that it takes almost the same quantity of genetic coding for each is pretty thought provoking.
I had not seen "badware" before. I immediately thought it was categorically different from malware. Parsing the roots of the words would lead most people to that conculsion. "Mal" meaning bad but having the connotation of evil (as in malefic, malicious) seems pretty natural, but "bad" as in "sucks ass" leads me down a different cognitive road.
I immediately thought that "badware" must be poorly designed, written, or implimented software. AOL would definitely be in this category, as well as the spawn-of-Satan Microsoft products.
But since these words are synonomous I am coining a new word for software that isn't downright nasty like malware is, but just fails to reach the mark it was intended to. I call it "krapware." Those more vulgar of mind could call it "shitware" but that might be difficult to use in all circumstances.
1) Make a game people like to play. 2) Toss in some incredibly hard puzzles that no sane person can figure out. 3) Sell the answers in a "Strategy Guide" 4) PROFIT!
You got modded troll because you tried to present this as sarcasm.
Next time phrase this as an accusation where Conservative principles and presidential policies have directly led to the death of countless sea creatures, even causing the extinction of a few species.
Your +5 on that post will recover your lost karma due to overreactive and humorless mods.
Humiliation? You think it is humiliating for a country to emasculate and topple another one on a false assumption?
We basically decimated their country and then said "Ooops!" If anything, being able to knock off daddy's old nemesis in spite of the lack of WMDs would embolden Bush. If I were him I would be thinking "SHIT! If they let me get away with that what else can I do!?!"
Comparing cars is a fantastic example in this instance.
The reason?
Cars cost what they do BECAUSE of government mandated equipment. Between airbags (front and side now), restraint devices, body reinforcement, ABS systems, special safety glass, emissions systems, and the accompanying computers to control and modualte them the price of a car is more government mandated equipment than it is actual "car."
I never saw it as "the failings that result from codifying morality into inflexible dogma" but more as the possible/probable permutations of the interaction of intelligence, reason, and free will with respect to an overarching absolute. For instance, submission to the laws and extrapolation from the laws by Daneel, a creature with intelligence above and beyond humanity, results in a variety of things that could be categorized as both good and bad.
I did not see it as simplistic as an blanket condemnation of dogmatism, but rather an exploration of the human condition with cleverly dressed up people called "robots" in order to allow the reader to be a bit more objective. In my mind it was more analogous to "what will people do when they run up against obstacles" than a "morality play" about the obstacles themselves.
Fantastic writing will do that though. Everone comes out of it with something slightly different, each feeling enriched and as if they have learned something about themselves and the world as well.
Anyways, where's the zereoth law in these guys' license? Sometimes killing people is a Good Thing or at least necessary to uphold the integrity of the first law. Sheesh!
The real irony is that withouth modern military power these guys would be too busy kowtowing to the local feudal lord and lamenting how their children had been pressed into military action and slave labor to even think about programming an operating system for a service based industry.
Like it or not, the personal freedoms that they express by choosing to work in a field like programming would not be as easy or as lucrative to pursue without the stability that a regulated modern military defense force provides. It is effortless for them to scoff and declare themselves "holier than thou," but when the existence of your entire profession is inextricably dependent upon the service that you are ridiculing, it makes you look a bit unappreciative and downright stupid.
Slashdot Mirror
No offence Insipid, but the irony is just too damn sweet.
In an discussion under a duped article we have a post that refers to Deja Vu that was modded Redundant! It doesn't get better than this folks!
Funny, but I think, more realistically, the reason that the future does not resemble the fiction we see in books and movies is because of the decidedly mundane lack of special effects.
In other words, contrary to the maxim "truth is stranger than fiction", the real future is too boring to put into movie format. Sorry, but no one is gonna buy tickets to see what we have in store for us.
Of course this guarantees the franchise on making movies about the interesting future indefinitely! Cash in now!
I checked the website. I think you may be dead on in your estimation of the direction of this behavior modification tool, however I am not as concerned as you about it being used in prisons.
The current model for "rehabilitation" in prisons is to throw a bunch of criminals into a holding area and let them prey on eachother, all the while providing them with clandestine access to the same drugs and vices that were probably instrumental in their incarceration. From the recidivism statistics I think everyone can agree that this doesn't work too well.
In my estimation, someone who commits violent crime repeatedly has something wrong with their social skill set. and regardless of my opinion, I think that everyone can agree, again, that there is something wrong with them. Constant self-reinforcement of their broken social tool set leaves deep psychic scars on them that make it hard for them to reintegrate with society. Leaving them to their own devices initially resulted in prison time, so why leave them to their own devices once they are incarcerated? Consider that to someone as messed up as a lifetime criminal, newspeak might be a blessing in disguise.
What concerned me more was the fact that "TruThought" advocated this program to schools. THAT is fucking scary. Hardened criminals need some intervention, maybe even some deep restructuring of their value system. School kids do not. At least until they engage in behaviors that betray comprehensive underlying problems, but that will land them in a corrective facility anyway, so no problem.
To roll this kind of cognitive behavior adjustment out in a school is unconscionable. If it is effective in helping violent miscreants live a productive life, it is unconscionable to not use it or something like it.
I like this one best for refuting that passage. It dosen't even require you to leave the Biblical text to do it.
"I tell you the truth, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven (Mat.18:2, Mk.10:15, Lk18:17).
It's sad when people who profess to be Christians do not understand the book that they have wagered their eternal fate on. This is the real hazard of living in the Bible belt: wanting to be a Christian or to understand the Bible but having nowhere to turn but to charlatans and morons.
"...government officials have closed down 8,907 shops and street vendors, 481 publishing companies and 942 illegal websites."
Sure they closed them now, but in a few days they will be back at their old tricks, albiet under new management. I bet you my entire collection of bootleg anime that a well placed bribe or the guaranteed employment of some politician's or magnate's mongoloid cousin will earn these pirates a clean bill of health from said "government officials."
Remember that this is a nation that won't let it's districts/states perform their own productivity audits because they tie the magistrate's pay to economic performance. Needless to say that when they did allow these provinces to do their own evaluations they made Arthur Anderson's accounting practices seem conservative. The last year that they did it the national aggregate GDP was several points higher thant he official numbers from the central accounting office. WOW!
"...and establishing a habit of exercise in a child ..."
I wonder if the Wii has a controller setting for "corpulent adolescent?"
Imagine the Star Wars Kid actually playing a game while he twitched and spun like an epileptic chipmunk.
THAT LIAR!
I carded him for some Peach Schnapps at the liquor store yesterday and it only said 1,467.
About a year ago I traveled to Miami. My comapny bought the tickets and was trying to save cash. The result is that my travel arrangements included layovers and zig-zags like you have never seen.
Because of the unholy layovers I was close to first in line just about every flight. At the last connection to Miami I realized that while I had not been first to get in line every time I was usually the first or second to board because the VERY first dude got searched every time.
This little observation paid off bigtime on the way back. On the second or third connection I noticed this guy who was traveling the same toute as I was. He seemed to be getting pissed that I was boarding before him and getting preferential seating. Apparently he thought he deserved better than everyone else. As he approached the line he was flirting with the borders of decency: pushing just hard enough to make people get out of the way but not hard enough to get himself decked.
This big lug was mean-mugging me from behind, all angry like. I was seated closer and had stepped in front of him for the first spot. I guess he felt like I cut him off.
Then I rememberd the search protocol.
I motioned for him to go ahead of me.
By the time that a-hole got his shoes and belt back on all the good seats were long gone. I sat there, relaxed and lounging in the bulkhead isle seat, crunching on my honey-roast peanuts, and watched that jerk shoehorn his fat ass into a middle seat at the back of the plane.
So, yeah, don't be first in line either.
"We also tend not to go around and meddle in other countries as a hobby."
Don't let this guy fool you, Canadians have staged attacks on every civilized nation in the world at one time or another in the last 16 months.
It's just that no one really notices the barrage of moose antlers and snowballs. The occasional bottle of Molson Golden or Labatt (empty of course) has caused a casualty or two, but most of those were livestock.
"...horizontal social connections between students..."
n g/lost/braindead students that actually attend class. Personally, if I was watching a podcast of my lectures I would be more likely to learn. I would not be scrambling to make sure I got all the obscure points in my notes and there would be no distractions that I could not rewind away.
Reading/re-reading an extra page or two out of the text or rewinding the podcast is more likely to result in a correct answer on a test than asking another clueless undergrad. If it is a real bugbear of a question go see the TA or the prof. Even then, if "horizontal social connections" are sucha big deal, who is to say that two or more students from the same class won't watch the podcasts together? Ever heard of a study group?
"I also wonder how attentive students would be watching a podcast..."
You seem to be unaware of the sleeping/talking/420'd/out-of-it/distracted/texti
Even then, college is where students take on and learn to manage additional responsibility. Questioning their atttentiveness is irrelevent. Testing their knowledge is completely relevant. If they learn from a podcast or from a lecture I don't really see how it matters.
Even better, schedule classes with students that are willing to take their course with ONLY podcasts and the text materials and you could scale up enrollment without having to change your infrastructure.
"On the other hand, if people want to freak out about possibilities, I'll give them other possibilities that are just as scary to push them back the other way..."
Since I am of homogenous race charateristics and native to this country I rely on quotes from movies...
"And this button-down, Oxford-cloth psycho might just snap, and then stalk from office to office with an Armalite AR-10 carbine gas-powered semi-automatic weapon, pumping round after round into colleagues and co-workers. This might be someone you've known for years. Someone very, very close to you."
No lawsuit, but I usually get a fast escort from the building.
Yeay, yeah, yeah...whatever.
But, how do they taste?
It kind of makes sense to me. If some creatures have changed shape over millenia in response to changing environments why shouldn't a creature that maintains a single cell level of simplicity develop complexity and adaptation in other areas. In other words, instead of growing larger and/or adapting by moving through different enviromental strata (water, land, air) they have taken an optimization path.
I guess the development of higher brain function is a sort of "universal adaptor" for enviromental stresses. Where this little guy has volumes of genetically hard coded repsonses to environmental changes that his ancestors have adapted to overcome, humans are coded to have superior mentality and the ability to adapt on the fly to changes in environment through environmental manipulation, forethought and planning, and tool use. The fact that it takes almost the same quantity of genetic coding for each is pretty thought provoking.
I had not seen "badware" before. I immediately thought it was categorically different from malware. Parsing the roots of the words would lead most people to that conculsion. "Mal" meaning bad but having the connotation of evil (as in malefic, malicious) seems pretty natural, but "bad" as in "sucks ass" leads me down a different cognitive road.
I immediately thought that "badware" must be poorly designed, written, or implimented software. AOL would definitely be in this category, as well as the spawn-of-Satan Microsoft products.
But since these words are synonomous I am coining a new word for software that isn't downright nasty like malware is, but just fails to reach the mark it was intended to. I call it "krapware." Those more vulgar of mind could call it "shitware" but that might be difficult to use in all circumstances.
Ok it goes like this:
1) Make a game people like to play.
2) Toss in some incredibly hard puzzles that no sane person can figure out.
3) Sell the answers in a "Strategy Guide"
4) PROFIT!
Nothing like making your own market.
You got modded troll because you tried to present this as sarcasm.
Next time phrase this as an accusation where Conservative principles and presidential policies have directly led to the death of countless sea creatures, even causing the extinction of a few species.
Your +5 on that post will recover your lost karma due to overreactive and humorless mods.
As I always say, it's not a party until the dwarf shows up.
Now if we only had a donkey planet...
"There is one major possibility that everybody is forgetting"
Yeah, DVD sales.
Just wait. Everyone that was embarrased to go see it in the theater is gonna rent it or buy it.
It'll be crazier than a plane full of snakes.
"Of three computers in my dorm room last year, none of them could play the newest Springsteen album"
Oh they could play it alright. They just flat refused to.
Humiliation? You think it is humiliating for a country to emasculate and topple another one on a false assumption?
We basically decimated their country and then said "Ooops!" If anything, being able to knock off daddy's old nemesis in spite of the lack of WMDs would embolden Bush. If I were him I would be thinking "SHIT! If they let me get away with that what else can I do!?!"
Not to mention the fact that this way you don't have to die with the taste of raw prison rat in your mouth.
Comparing cars is a fantastic example in this instance.
The reason?
Cars cost what they do BECAUSE of government mandated equipment. Between airbags (front and side now), restraint devices, body reinforcement, ABS systems, special safety glass, emissions systems, and the accompanying computers to control and modualte them the price of a car is more government mandated equipment than it is actual "car."
That is why his example is ironic.
I never saw it as "the failings that result from codifying morality into inflexible dogma" but more as the possible/probable permutations of the interaction of intelligence, reason, and free will with respect to an overarching absolute. For instance, submission to the laws and extrapolation from the laws by Daneel, a creature with intelligence above and beyond humanity, results in a variety of things that could be categorized as both good and bad.
I did not see it as simplistic as an blanket condemnation of dogmatism, but rather an exploration of the human condition with cleverly dressed up people called "robots" in order to allow the reader to be a bit more objective. In my mind it was more analogous to "what will people do when they run up against obstacles" than a "morality play" about the obstacles themselves.
Fantastic writing will do that though. Everone comes out of it with something slightly different, each feeling enriched and as if they have learned something about themselves and the world as well.
Anyways, where's the zereoth law in these guys' license? Sometimes killing people is a Good Thing or at least necessary to uphold the integrity of the first law. Sheesh!
The real irony is that withouth modern military power these guys would be too busy kowtowing to the local feudal lord and lamenting how their children had been pressed into military action and slave labor to even think about programming an operating system for a service based industry.
Like it or not, the personal freedoms that they express by choosing to work in a field like programming would not be as easy or as lucrative to pursue without the stability that a regulated modern military defense force provides. It is effortless for them to scoff and declare themselves "holier than thou," but when the existence of your entire profession is inextricably dependent upon the service that you are ridiculing, it makes you look a bit unappreciative and downright stupid.
Nice post and great link. Thanks.
I especially like the illumination of the circumstances and background of Ben's quote.