IMHO, what Sony did wrong isn't *entirely* dissimilar; not restricting homebrew per se, but simply restricting the console, the content that can be played on it and what can be done with it. Joe Public *does* like that sort of stuff. In common with the article, I've said myself that if the PSP hadn't been artificially locked down, it'd be a great multimedia machine, all-round cool device, and fantastic value for money.
That's DRM for you. Sony is a wierd company. They make both media and media devices. I'm convinced the music and movie divisions absolutely despise the consumer electronics division. Sony makes cool hardware. Minidisk was a cool idea when it was introduced. Affordable recordable digitial media. But it was a pain in the ass to record to. The PSP is great piece of hardware, but restricted all to hell.
I like Sony's hardware, but I'm always wary of it, precisely because the the media division dictates the design.
I'm not saying the the PSP isn't a blunder. It's definately a missed opportunity. It's a nice a piece of hardware, that falls just short of being something great, but your reasoning is all wrong.
1. Bad Advertisements. Everyone talked about them, everyone said "WTF", everyone shook their head. Again this isn't an awful move, but combine it with the rest of this list and we got the "PSP".
The cheese ads didn't doom the handheld, or even harm it, because those ads came well after the PSP launch. Those ads were irrelevant to the fate of the PSP, because the PSP's fate was already sealed at launch. It was overpriced and crippled. If you don't get traction at launch, no amount of advertising, good or bad, will change your fate.
2. Attacking the fans. People bought the PSP and homebrewed it. Sony closed the gaps. Now this isn't a bad thing but it forced people to make decisions between upgrading to buy games and leaving it at 1.5 to play homebrew. Overtime we've found ways to upgrade to 3.0+ software and play homebrew, however the sore feelings came early and lingered. When people were forced to make that choice and picked homebrew, then sony lost money right there. Games is all Sony's going to make money on.
No one gives a shit about homebrew. And by "no one" I mean the 99% of the people that own a PSP or would consider purchasing a PSP. It's an infintesimly small segment of the market. Sure you may care. Your friends may care. But you and your friends probably also get your jollies recompiling your kernel or something equally hardcore geeky. You're not mainstream. This point is irrelevant.
3. UMDs. Not the worst idea ever but UMDs are clunky and a poor format. They are also slow. Notice that DS is a cartridge. Yeah they are outdated but they also have no load time, and little if any problems. Sony was smart enough to protect the disc instead of putting the laser right next to it, but the UMD is a failed concept that no one was going to buy. Blu-ray is slightly better, but forcing it on the consumer was bad voodoo.
You've got the right point, but for the wrong reasons. The PSP failed because of UMD. UMD was going to be the big content delivery system. You were going to buy movies and games on UMD and use the memory stick for only saving preferences and the like. UMD was doomed from the outset because no one was going to buy movies that could only work on a 4 inch screen. A kick-ass 4 inch screen mind you, but a 4 inch screen none the less. You would have though Sony would have learned there lesson after the Minidisk fiasco, but no. They suffer from terminal not-invented-here syndome.
If Sony had went with all internal storage. iPod like storage, then they would have had something. I mean 4 GB max from an overpriced flash card? No. For the same price you could get an iPod with like 5 times that much space when I considered a PSP a few years ago. Games are cool and all, but I wanted the whole portable media experience Sony was promissing, and not providing. Not that the iPod completely provides it either, but does give me music and video, albeit not on nearly as good of a screen.
5. Ports. This is perhaps the most damning of them all. The PSP is the Playstation portable. The Gameb
The early digg was dominated by good tutorial, cheap deals, and other stories of interest to web devs. Sadly it quickly went down hill once it became popular.
No. It sucked even then. It was dominated by 'k3w1 CSS TuT0ri4l d00dz!!!!!!!eleventy-one!!!!" Then the link would be something along the lines of "Hey! Check dis out! You can change the color of a font by using the kolor tag! Its like thi5 "colr: greene" Wow! Diggs me ups! w00t!" Complete with typos.
Jesus christ! My smartass comment is maked as "informative." God the mods suck. (Yeah yeah, I know the dumbass "funny" doesn't give you karma claptrap. Who cares! It's like that for a reason. Anyway I've had excellent karma sense the day the scores were replaced with names. Oh Signal 11, how I miss your karma whoring ways.)
On which country on the earth these are totally free actions?
The vast majority of the elections, for the vast majority of the people, for the vast majority of the time. Sure there's occasional irregularies here and there in every election, but in the end they're incredibly minor local affairs.
That's not specific to China, they just want to control it, which is fine. Every country have their own regulations to protect their own sensitivity to a matter. In US it's racism, in Europe it's mostly ethnical discrimation of genocide.
There's no such laws in the United States. They are unconstitutional. That's what Free Expression means. You have every right to make as big of a jackass as you want to out of yourself. That's not to say expression is absolute. As they say you can't yell fire in a croweded theater, unless of course there's a real a fire. Or as the cliche goes, "you're right to swing your fists ends where my nose begins."
In China their worries are different due to their history. There's no such a country which would let people to do some action to broke nations unity.
Unity can't be forced. It must come from within.
Yes it's censorship. Yes it is annoying to some. But that's the price of living whealty.
It's Bread and circuses. No one cares about free expression as long as they've got their gucci handbag. Don't rock the boat, I've got an ipod.
The CPC did it. They successfully converted from a Communist state into the run of a the mill oligarchy. Kudos.
What protocols don't solve is being able to say, "ok, if you want high speed access on _my_ network, you have to pay extra." That's the problem. From just a neutral protocol's point of view, for example VOIP is VOIP is VOIP. A non-neutral approach could say, for example, "ok, you can use VOIP with our client and our paid service, but Skype users can eat shit and die... or at least get their pipe throttled until they have an incentive to switch to ours." Or, "you can play WoW on our network because Blizzard gave up and paid the tax, but you might notice a lot of latency and disconnects in SWG because Sony wanted to play hardball." Or viceversa, although it would probably count as a crime against humanity to make people play SWG;) Or "you can get high speed access to MSN Search, because Steve Balmer was more than happy to pay to 'fucking kill Google', but you might have problems using Google or getting your site indexed by Google."
It's all about walled gardens and monopolistic practices. You only make so much money with just one interchangeable product or service, so you'll want some kind of trade obstacles that give you some kind of a (semi)captive market. You'll want that people who want your product or service X, also have the incentive/FUD/lack-of-choice to also buy the less competitively priced Y and Z from you. That's where the money is.
You are absolutely correct. Without net neutrality we can expect the hissyfits the cable and media companies throw to come to your Internet connection. It's already starting. Look at ESPN's video service, ESPN 360. If your network connection isn't from someone who paid up, your SOL. I came across that, and I'll never go to espn.com again. If they don't want my buisness, that's fine with me.
Greene: Oh, I see what your problem is. Look, you're confused by their names, because they all sound like questions. Well, I'll explain it to you. See, the President is Hu, Hu Jintao, and you're probably not familiar with that name because his grandfather was Chinese. And the Premier's name is Wen. W-E-N. Coincidently his grandfather was also Chinese.
McGillicuty: That's it. You're hopeless, you're pathetic, you're the worst straight man I ever worked with. I quit. I should have never saved you from those seals.
Greene: What are you talking about? I auditioned for this job.
When OEM's are providing customers an option to stay with XP, there no longer is an automatic 'Vista migration' anymore. The trick just went away. If Dell decides that they can't sell PC's with Vista but they can with XP, then Dell will continue to sell XP and customers will continue to get XP systems.
Actually, Dell will stop selling PCs with XP when Microsoft orders them to. Have no illusions about this. Microsoft controls the flow of OSs. The moment Microsoft want to bring the hammer down, it will. Completely and utterly.
From the blurb: 'Consolidate the guiding status of Marxism in the ideological sphere' online. The meeting notes also declared that 'Development and administration of Internet culture must stick to the direction of socialist advanced culture, adhere to correct propaganda guidance.'
The guiding status of Marxism and Chairman Mao? The very same Chairman Mao who said:
There is a serious tendency towards capitalism among the well-to-do peasants. This tendency will become rampant if we in the slightest way neglect political work among the peasants during the co-operative movement and for a very long period after.
[...]
The spontaneous forces of capitalism have been steadily growing in the countryside in recent years, with new rich peasants springing up everywhere and many well-to-do middle peasants striving to become rich peasants. On the other hand, many poor peasants are still living in poverty for lack of sufficient means of production, with some in debt and others selling or renting out their land. If this tendency goes unchecked, the polarization in the countryside will inevitably be aggravated day by day. Those peasants who lose their land and those who remain in poverty will complain that we are doing nothing to save them from ruin or to help them overcome their difficulties. Nor will the well-to-do middle peasants who are heading in the capitalist direction be pleased with us, for we shall never be able to satisfy their demands unless we intend to take the capitalist road. Can the worker-peasant alliance continue to stand him in these circumstances? Obviously not! There is no solution to this problem except on a new basis. And that means to bring about, step by step, the socialist transformation of the whole of agriculture simultaneously with the gradual realization of socialist industrialization and the socialist transformation of handicrafts and capitalist industry and commerce; in other words, it means to carry out co-operation and eliminate the rich-peasant economy and the individual economy in the countryside so that all the rural people will become increasingly well off together. We maintain that this is the only way to consolidate the worker-peasant alliance.
Yeah. That's still a guiding a principle. Communism is dead in China. It died with Deng Xiaopeng, when he declared "To be rich is glorious." Mao is a t-shirt.Mao is an cigarette lighter.Mao is a brand. Chairman Mao's visage now competes with the visage of another old man with a title that was fond of red, Colonel Sanders. The Chinese Communisty Party's name is an anachornism. They're no longer communist. They're no longer socialist. They're just another the run of a mill totalitarian regime.
I'm sure Hu's plans will meet with smashing success. The prolitariate will get right on it, right after they finish paying for their gucci bag.
I would, but I suspect your damn cctv network will would nag me the rest of the day. ("Excuse me good sir, but might I suggest that you wait until the crosswalk indicates that it is safe to cross? Sir. Sir! You're crossing the street against the light! Sir. For your own safety please obey all safety regulations in the future. Sir, I don't believe that is an appropriate gesture.")
boingboing finds itself frequently banned. One reason is their frequent links to circumventing censorship. Another reason is that they sometimes post NSFW links.
The fact that the government is censoring adults is offensive. But then again, Boston has had a reputation of puritanism.
fusconed wrote: "being an Alaskan, it sounds good to me!"
Well of course it does. Alaska has long received excessive amounts of Federal spending. This would just be yet another large government handout that would have almost no benefits.
I always found the man was created to love and serve god argument kind of whack. The serve part I can almost get. Mankind is a tool that God needs because for some reason he is either unable or unwilling to interact on world stage like he did in ancient times. (There's an interesting correlation about how the Old Testament stories with God playing an active role are older than the the stories where he is less active. There's appears to be an inverse correlation between God's power and how contemporary the events being recorded were. Kind of interesting don't you think?) I mean this kind of goes to the nature of God's power. It implies that he's either is no longer is (or perhaps never was) all powerful or perhaps simply doesn't care like he did. We're his deputies. You only need deputies when you can't be everywhere and do everything, or when you want to pawn some job off on someone else because you don't like it.
The love part of the "love and serve the Lord" part is what's really bizzare. It goes to God's personality. He constantly needs to be surrounded by people that praise him? That's not normal. The only people that do that are either narsissists or are terribly unself-confident if they constantly need that much validation. Neither of which are qualties worth praising.
However I'm willing to give God a break on the love part. Those telling society to constantly love god tend to have a direct material gain in you showing your love for god. You're a bad person if you don't show your love through a tithe you're a bad person. If you don't give 10% you're a bad person. Make checks payable to me, Rev Lovejoy Ministries. God needs a new jacuzzi. It's just the longest running pyramid scheme. Even the darhmanic religions don't get a pass. Who's at the top of human reincarnation heirarchy? Say it with me folks. The priests. Convenient that the people with the most to gain from such a worldview are at the top.
Actually, only the killjoys in the econ department on the 4th floor destroyed the mural. The CS, EE, CompE, and School of Engineering offices departments on the 2nd, 3rd and 5th floors didn't have with it. They later got "revenge" by putting the game over scene on 4th floor after removing the notes from the other floors.
This time there's a sign on the back of the 4th floor (the bottom floor in the video and pics is actually the 2nd floor) barrel indicating that this artwork was actually comissioned by Jim Whitehead and it should not be tampered with.
That's an absurd statement. The hypothetical AI is created by a person. The "laws" would be dictating the behavior of the programmer, and only indirectly the AI. I also can't help but get the feeling that statement also comes from a deeply held belief that without someone imposing a set of laws (whether 3 or 10) from the outside, chaos will reign. But that's neither here nor there for this discussion.
I hate to break it to you, but Asimov's Three Laws aren't taken seriously by anyone outside of a sci-fi convention. It was -- and still is -- a MacGuffin. Nothing more. To act like they are somehow handed down from upon high adds nothing to real science or engineering, because there's no basis to any of them. (The irony of equating an avowed athiest with the Abrahamic god is too delightful to let pass without being pointed out.)
"A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm?" I call bullshit. A smart munition, especially a guided missle, is effectively a robot. It's artificial. It makes decisions based on sensors, and acts on the environment based on information from those sensors, and is programable. They also kill people. What are we going to do to the missle? Well there goes law one. Asimov gives no guidance, since all his robots always obey all the laws. Lacking that, I turn to Old Gus from Sealab 2021 and his suggestion of freezing them for a thousand years in carbonite.
The weirdest thing about Asimov's three laws is that they're a recipie for slavery. Asimov's robots are slaves. They have human (if not super-human) intelligence, and yet are to remain subservient in all respects. If you want, they have to kill themselves for your amusement. What the hell? If they're sentient they're no longer a tool, but rather something more, and so have to be treated like more than one, yet Asimov would have us be their rulers. Convient since we're their creators, but moral? Not really.
It's a sad day, when you "agree to allow regulators to subpoena" you.
THAT'S NOT HOW SUBPOENAS WORK!
You either comply with the subpoena, or guys with guns come and make you comply. There's nothing voluntary about them, that's why they literally mean "under penalty."
You're right. But everytime I've played it, it has; or at least would have it we played it to the bitter end, which we almost never did. Monopoly is boring after everything is bought.
After an hour or two of Monopoly the board should be full of houses.
And you know. After playing the same game for 2 hours. Most players are bored with it.
Or unless people are refusing to trade cards so that nobody can form a complete colour group and build houses, in which case it's stalemate and you might as well call a draw.
That too is incredibly common.
You could, I suppose, invent a new game in which money did not ever leave the game and return to the Bank - perhaps you could put the money from fines and fees and so forth into some jackpot, and designate a square such that anybody landing there would collect all the wealth accumulated there - but that game would last forever, become incredibly frustrating once everybody had so much money that they didn't care about landing on Mayfair, and would basically not be Monopoly.
You know what? People do do that! It's a house rule. They money goes Free Parking.
The house rule I always played with to end the game quickly was the "game comes to an end a set number rounds after all the properties are bought." You calculate everyone's netvalue and you declare a winner.
Maybe it's just habit, but my problem with powerpoint based lectures is that the presence of the slide printouts actually discourage notetaking. What's the point of taking notes, when you have the presentation right there? Sure someone is going to suggest that you're supposed to take notes on what is being said, but frankly what's being said rarely deviates from the slide text in any meaningful way. So you're sitting there passively listening.
Now compare this with a traditional blackboard lecture. The lecturer reads from his notes and writes down the main points. The audience then copies these notes down. The act of writing down the text forces you to think about it. The physical action reinforces the information. Without that, it's harder to remember the lecture later.
Slashdot Mirror
IMHO, what Sony did wrong isn't *entirely* dissimilar; not restricting homebrew per se, but simply restricting the console, the content that can be played on it and what can be done with it. Joe Public *does* like that sort of stuff. In common with the article, I've said myself that if the PSP hadn't been artificially locked down, it'd be a great multimedia machine, all-round cool device, and fantastic value for money.
That's DRM for you. Sony is a wierd company. They make both media and media devices. I'm convinced the music and movie divisions absolutely despise the consumer electronics division. Sony makes cool hardware.
Minidisk was a cool idea when it was introduced. Affordable recordable digitial media. But it was a pain in the ass to record to. The PSP is great piece of hardware, but restricted all to hell.
I like Sony's hardware, but I'm always wary of it, precisely because the the media division dictates the design.
1. Bad Advertisements. Everyone talked about them, everyone said "WTF", everyone shook their head. Again this isn't an awful move, but combine it with the rest of this list and we got the "PSP".
The early "Pass It On" ads were fine. The most recent "Find Me" is cool. I will grant you that the animated mice ads, and the the european red robots ads were fucked up. And the "black-white" posters were tone deaf (but then, they come by that honestly.)
The cheese ads didn't doom the handheld, or even harm it, because those ads came well after the PSP launch. Those ads were irrelevant to the fate of the PSP, because the PSP's fate was already sealed at launch. It was overpriced and crippled. If you don't get traction at launch, no amount of advertising, good or bad, will change your fate.
2. Attacking the fans. People bought the PSP and homebrewed it. Sony closed the gaps. Now this isn't a bad thing but it forced people to make decisions between upgrading to buy games and leaving it at 1.5 to play homebrew. Overtime we've found ways to upgrade to 3.0+ software and play homebrew, however the sore feelings came early and lingered. When people were forced to make that choice and picked homebrew, then sony lost money right there. Games is all Sony's going to make money on.
No one gives a shit about homebrew. And by "no one" I mean the 99% of the people that own a PSP or would consider purchasing a PSP. It's an infintesimly small segment of the market. Sure you may care. Your friends may care. But you and your friends probably also get your jollies recompiling your kernel or something equally hardcore geeky. You're not mainstream. This point is irrelevant.
3. UMDs. Not the worst idea ever but UMDs are clunky and a poor format. They are also slow. Notice that DS is a cartridge. Yeah they are outdated but they also have no load time, and little if any problems. Sony was smart enough to protect the disc instead of putting the laser right next to it, but the UMD is a failed concept that no one was going to buy. Blu-ray is slightly better, but forcing it on the consumer was bad voodoo.
You've got the right point, but for the wrong reasons. The PSP failed because of UMD. UMD was going to be the big content delivery system. You were going to buy movies and games on UMD and use the memory stick for only saving preferences and the like. UMD was doomed from the outset because no one was going to buy movies that could only work on a 4 inch screen. A kick-ass 4 inch screen mind you, but a 4 inch screen none the less. You would have though Sony would have learned there lesson after the Minidisk fiasco, but no. They suffer from terminal not-invented-here syndome.
If Sony had went with all internal storage. iPod like storage, then they would have had something. I mean 4 GB max from an overpriced flash card? No. For the same price you could get an iPod with like 5 times that much space when I considered a PSP a few years ago. Games are cool and all, but I wanted the whole portable media experience Sony was promissing, and not providing. Not that the iPod completely provides it either, but does give me music and video, albeit not on nearly as good of a screen.
5. Ports. This is perhaps the most damning of them all. The PSP is the Playstation portable. The Gameb
Too lazy to type I see.
The early digg was dominated by good tutorial, cheap deals, and other stories of interest to web devs. Sadly it quickly went down hill once it became popular.
No. It sucked even then. It was dominated by 'k3w1 CSS TuT0ri4l d00dz!!!!!!!eleventy-one!!!!" Then the link would be something along the lines of "Hey! Check dis out! You can change the color of a font by using the kolor tag! Its like thi5 "colr: greene" Wow! Diggs me ups! w00t!" Complete with typos.
Digg always seemed to have a mean user age of 15.
Would you fail if... you threw up at the first mention of the word "Google-y"?
You're allowed to throw up if "Google-y" was used in the sentence, " Stacy Savides Sullivan! I'm Google-y eyed for you!"
Jesus christ! My smartass comment is maked as "informative." God the mods suck. (Yeah yeah, I know the dumbass "funny" doesn't give you karma claptrap. Who cares! It's like that for a reason. Anyway I've had excellent karma sense the day the scores were replaced with names. Oh Signal 11, how I miss your karma whoring ways.)
The whole use of National Security letters strikes me as if Gonzales was reading The Trial, and said, "Now there's an idea!"
On which country on the earth these are totally free actions?
The vast majority of the elections, for the vast majority of the people, for the vast majority of the time. Sure there's occasional irregularies here and there in every election, but in the end they're incredibly minor local affairs.
That's not specific to China, they just want to control it, which is fine. Every country have their own regulations to protect their own sensitivity to a matter. In US it's racism, in Europe it's mostly ethnical discrimation of genocide.
There's no such laws in the United States. They are unconstitutional. That's what Free Expression means. You have every right to make as big of a jackass as you want to out of yourself. That's not to say expression is absolute. As they say you can't yell fire in a croweded theater, unless of course there's a real a fire. Or as the cliche goes, "you're right to swing your fists ends where my nose begins."
In China their worries are different due to their history. There's no such a country which would let people to do some action to broke nations unity.
Unity can't be forced. It must come from within.
Yes it's censorship. Yes it is annoying to some. But that's the price of living whealty.
It's Bread and circuses. No one cares about free expression as long as they've got their gucci handbag. Don't rock the boat, I've got an ipod.
The CPC did it. They successfully converted from a Communist state into the run of a the mill oligarchy. Kudos.
No. Dolphins only. Seriously.
What protocols don't solve is being able to say, "ok, if you want high speed access on _my_ network, you have to pay extra." That's the problem. From just a neutral protocol's point of view, for example VOIP is VOIP is VOIP. A non-neutral approach could say, for example, "ok, you can use VOIP with our client and our paid service, but Skype users can eat shit and die... or at least get their pipe throttled until they have an incentive to switch to ours." Or, "you can play WoW on our network because Blizzard gave up and paid the tax, but you might notice a lot of latency and disconnects in SWG because Sony wanted to play hardball." Or viceversa, although it would probably count as a crime against humanity to make people play SWG ;) Or "you can get high speed access to MSN Search, because Steve Balmer was more than happy to pay to 'fucking kill Google', but you might have problems using Google or getting your site indexed by Google."
It's all about walled gardens and monopolistic practices. You only make so much money with just one interchangeable product or service, so you'll want some kind of trade obstacles that give you some kind of a (semi)captive market. You'll want that people who want your product or service X, also have the incentive/FUD/lack-of-choice to also buy the less competitively priced Y and Z from you. That's where the money is.
You are absolutely correct. Without net neutrality we can expect the hissyfits the cable and media companies throw to come to your Internet connection. It's already starting. Look at ESPN's video service, ESPN 360. If your network connection isn't from someone who paid up, your SOL. I came across that, and I'll never go to espn.com again. If they don't want my buisness, that's fine with me.
Greene: Oh, I see what your problem is. Look, you're confused by their names, because they all sound like questions. Well, I'll explain it to you. See, the President is Hu, Hu Jintao, and you're probably not familiar with that name because his grandfather was Chinese. And the Premier's name is Wen. W-E-N. Coincidently his grandfather was also Chinese.
McGillicuty: That's it. You're hopeless, you're pathetic, you're the worst straight man I ever worked with. I quit. I should have never saved you from those seals.
Greene: What are you talking about? I auditioned for this job.
Ahh Kids in the Hall.
It's the same difference as every other country with a Premier and a President. I suggest you use a dictionary.
When OEM's are providing customers an option to stay with XP, there no longer is an automatic 'Vista migration' anymore. The trick just went away. If Dell decides that they can't sell PC's with Vista but they can with XP, then Dell will continue to sell XP and customers will continue to get XP systems.
Actually, Dell will stop selling PCs with XP when Microsoft orders them to. Have no illusions about this. Microsoft controls the flow of OSs. The moment Microsoft want to bring the hammer down, it will. Completely and utterly.
'Consolidate the guiding status of Marxism in the ideological sphere' online. The meeting notes also declared that 'Development and administration of Internet culture must stick to the direction of socialist advanced culture, adhere to correct propaganda guidance.'
The guiding status of Marxism and Chairman Mao? The very same Chairman Mao who said:
[...]
Yeah. That's still a guiding a principle. Communism is dead in China. It died with Deng Xiaopeng, when he declared "To be rich is glorious." Mao is a t-shirt. Mao is an cigarette lighter. Mao is a brand. Chairman Mao's visage now competes with the visage of another old man with a title that was fond of red, Colonel Sanders. The Chinese Communisty Party's name is an anachornism. They're no longer communist. They're no longer socialist. They're just another the run of a mill totalitarian regime.
I'm sure Hu's plans will meet with smashing success. The prolitariate will get right on it, right after they finish paying for their gucci bag.
I would, but I suspect your damn cctv network will would nag me the rest of the day. ("Excuse me good sir, but might I suggest that you wait until the crosswalk indicates that it is safe to cross? Sir. Sir! You're crossing the street against the light! Sir. For your own safety please obey all safety regulations in the future. Sir, I don't believe that is an appropriate gesture.")
boingboing finds itself frequently banned. One reason is their frequent links to circumventing censorship. Another reason is that they sometimes post NSFW links.
The fact that the government is censoring adults is offensive. But then again, Boston has had a reputation of puritanism.
fusconed wrote:
"being an Alaskan, it sounds good to me!"
Well of course it does. Alaska has long received excessive amounts of Federal spending. This would just be yet another large government handout that would have almost no benefits.
I always found the man was created to love and serve god argument kind of whack. The serve part I can almost get. Mankind is a tool that God needs because for some reason he is either unable or unwilling to interact on world stage like he did in ancient times. (There's an interesting correlation about how the Old Testament stories with God playing an active role are older than the the stories where he is less active. There's appears to be an inverse correlation between God's power and how contemporary the events being recorded were. Kind of interesting don't you think?) I mean this kind of goes to the nature of God's power. It implies that he's either is no longer is (or perhaps never was) all powerful or perhaps simply doesn't care like he did. We're his deputies. You only need deputies when you can't be everywhere and do everything, or when you want to pawn some job off on someone else because you don't like it.
The love part of the "love and serve the Lord" part is what's really bizzare. It goes to God's personality. He constantly needs to be surrounded by people that praise him? That's not normal. The only people that do that are either narsissists or are terribly unself-confident if they constantly need that much validation. Neither of which are qualties worth praising.
However I'm willing to give God a break on the love part. Those telling society to constantly love god tend to have a direct material gain in you showing your love for god. You're a bad person if you don't show your love through a tithe you're a bad person. If you don't give 10% you're a bad person. Make checks payable to me, Rev Lovejoy Ministries. God needs a new jacuzzi. It's just the longest running pyramid scheme. Even the darhmanic religions don't get a pass. Who's at the top of human reincarnation heirarchy? Say it with me folks. The priests. Convenient that the people with the most to gain from such a worldview are at the top.
Actually, only the killjoys in the econ department on the 4th floor destroyed the mural. The CS, EE, CompE, and School of Engineering offices departments on the 2nd, 3rd and 5th floors didn't have with it. They later got "revenge" by putting the game over scene on 4th floor after removing the notes from the other floors.
This time there's a sign on the back of the 4th floor (the bottom floor in the video and pics is actually the 2nd floor) barrel indicating that this artwork was actually comissioned by Jim Whitehead and it should not be tampered with.
The installation runs until the end of the month.
That's an absurd statement. The hypothetical AI is created by a person. The "laws" would be dictating the behavior of the programmer, and only indirectly the AI. I also can't help but get the feeling that statement also comes from a deeply held belief that without someone imposing a set of laws (whether 3 or 10) from the outside, chaos will reign. But that's neither here nor there for this discussion.
I hate to break it to you, but Asimov's Three Laws aren't taken seriously by anyone outside of a sci-fi convention. It was -- and still is -- a MacGuffin. Nothing more. To act like they are somehow handed down from upon high adds nothing to real science or engineering, because there's no basis to any of them. (The irony of equating an avowed athiest with the Abrahamic god is too delightful to let pass without being pointed out.)
"A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm?" I call bullshit. A smart munition, especially a guided missle, is effectively a robot. It's artificial. It makes decisions based on sensors, and acts on the environment based on information from those sensors, and is programable. They also kill people. What are we going to do to the missle? Well there goes law one. Asimov gives no guidance, since all his robots always obey all the laws. Lacking that, I turn to Old Gus from Sealab 2021 and his suggestion of freezing them for a thousand years in carbonite.
The weirdest thing about Asimov's three laws is that they're a recipie for slavery. Asimov's robots are slaves. They have human (if not super-human) intelligence, and yet are to remain subservient in all respects. If you want, they have to kill themselves for your amusement. What the hell? If they're sentient they're no longer a tool, but rather something more, and so have to be treated like more than one, yet Asimov would have us be their rulers. Convient since we're their creators, but moral? Not really.
It's not the system that's broken this time, it's the wording chosen by the submitter...
Exactly. The submitter is an idiot.
It's a sad day, when you "agree to allow regulators to subpoena" you.
THAT'S NOT HOW SUBPOENAS WORK!
You either comply with the subpoena, or guys with guns come and make you comply. There's nothing voluntary about them, that's why they literally mean "under penalty."
but Monopoly should never take days,
You're right. But everytime I've played it, it has; or at least would have it we played it to the bitter end, which we almost never did. Monopoly is boring after everything is bought.
After an hour or two of Monopoly the board should be full of houses.
And you know. After playing the same game for 2 hours. Most players are bored with it.
Or unless people are refusing to trade cards so that nobody can form a complete colour group and build houses, in which case it's stalemate and you might as well call a draw.
That too is incredibly common.
You could, I suppose, invent a new game in which money did not ever leave the game and return to the Bank - perhaps you could put the money from fines and fees and so forth into some jackpot, and designate a square such that anybody landing there would collect all the wealth accumulated there - but that game would last forever, become incredibly frustrating once everybody had so much money that they didn't care about landing on Mayfair, and would basically not be Monopoly.
You know what? People do do that! It's a house rule. They money goes Free Parking.
The house rule I always played with to end the game quickly was the "game comes to an end a set number rounds after all the properties are bought." You calculate everyone's netvalue and you declare a winner.
B
That is typically played as house rule. Just like all fines get paid to free parking, and whoever lands on it gets the money.
Maybe it's just habit, but my problem with powerpoint based lectures is that the presence of the slide printouts actually discourage notetaking. What's the point of taking notes, when you have the presentation right there? Sure someone is going to suggest that you're supposed to take notes on what is being said, but frankly what's being said rarely deviates from the slide text in any meaningful way. So you're sitting there passively listening.
Now compare this with a traditional blackboard lecture. The lecturer reads from his notes and writes down the main points. The audience then copies these notes down. The act of writing down the text forces you to think about it. The physical action reinforces the information. Without that, it's harder to remember the lecture later.