CIP: This is exactly why the Sydney Opera House ran years over schedule and millions of dollars overbudget. The committee in charge of choosing a design - picked a design represented by essentially nothing more than a few bar napkin sketches by an artist, mostly because it was 'beautiful and evocative'. No engineering, no studies, no analysis, no nothing.
And, as is the way of the world, the poor saps who had to manage and carry out the construction and make the building work were/are castigated for their 'failures'... While the artist is a 'genius'.
Ok, maybe it's a girl thing, but kids putting a blanket over the robot when his batteries run down is about the sweetest thing I have ever heard.
(and she notes that she called it "his", inferring gender to the asexual robot.)
And he notes that the male pronoun is the default in the English language - and does not imply gender. (English lacks gender, unlike many other languages.)
People are probably more likely to "socialize" with a robot if they can put it in its own separate category easily. Interacting with a non-human intelligence yet human container is bound to be disturbing (it's one of the sources of the uncanny valley)
Assuming that the uncanny valley is anything but hot air. Which, to date, there isn't any reason to assume otherwise.
Try actually reading my message jackass. I was helping him engineer the system - a necessary first step before you start calling in construction crews. But someone who knows what the fuck he is talking about would know that.
But you not only lack reading comprehension, you haven't a clue what you are talking about.
Towns and cities can do this easily. It's so easy that it's trivial.
An easy enough claim to make. Yet, reality is different - cities and towns have found it difficult to do.
This is why established businesses oppose it and politicians are paid to prevent it. That's pretty much the sum of it.
Yeah, that's the Slashdot default position - especially for anything they've decided is 'easy' to do. (Frequently without any actual experience in doing.)
Fact is, deploying municipal wi-fi is damn difficult. Doubly so if you have terrain that isn't flat - and triply so outside of densely populated area. Double it _again_ if your area has any significant amount of trees. Etc... Etc...
But what do I know - I've only helped a friend as he attempted to actually engineer muni Wi-Fi for our area. Hours in the field with him measuring signal strengths and surveying line-of-sight for nodes and relays couldn't possibly have given me any insight.
Forgive me for possibly being naive, but wouldn't it possibly be a LOT more practical to simply keep a highly-skilled physician on board the mission?
Not really - because after months-to-years of no surgical practice, he isn't going to be a highly skilled physician anymore. On top of which, there isn't going to be enough room on the crew who isn't wearing at least two hats, which mitigates against having more than average skill (if that) as a surgeon.
After all, ocean ships have been doing this for hundreds of years.
No they haven't.
Today, Antarctic expeditions usually have a surgeon on hand, along with a minimally stocked OR, because it's virtually impossible to get anything to or from the interior regions of the continent in the wintertime.
You are correct, today they have that - this has not always been true. (And I shouldn't have to point out the vast differences between an Antarctic base and a space station or Mars expedition.)
And, no I don't think brainwashing is a harsh word to use. Ads are designed specially to make you buy products you otherwise wouldn't, mostly by making you feel more familiar and comfortable with the product. Many slashdot readers probably think that they are above getting tricked by commercials, but that is the delusion that adcompanies want you to believe. Intelligence doesn't matter into it, because ads plays on more primal instincts. The only way to get away from it is to avoid the ads completly.
That would explain why I've spend hundreds, nay thousands of dollars purchasing items I don't need over the last year - because I've been seduced by the advertising I'm exposed to daily.
Oh, wait. I haven't.
I prefere getting the tampon commercials. Atleast that way I am not brainwashed into buying something I otherwise wouldn't. Of course, the optimal solution to avoid the subtle brainwashing is to use adblocking and adskipping to avoid ads completly.
I suspect you are projecting your own weaknesses onto other people.
Joe Consumer actually doesn't really give a shit one way or the other.
This is what your run-of-the-mill Slashbot fails to grasp.
What the run-of-the-mill Slashbot fails to grasp is that Joe Sixpack has, correctly, deduced that Slashbots are raving paranoid psychotics who've cried wolf so long and so loud that it is now impossible to determine when they are describing real threats and when they are describing their hallucinations.
Most people just don't care. And any attempt at educating family and friends (or the masses) goes in one ear and out the other.
Or, just _possibly_ the family and friends have different priorities, or have come to a conclusion other than the Slashbot privacy uber alles dogma.
Guess what? Communism doesn't work. See also: The Tragedy of the Commons.
Public libraries are the same. Let people borrow books? Yeah right, they're just going to steal them and not return them. These library things are never going to catch on. People would rather own books so that they can have them sitting on the shelf even after they're finished reading them.
A fact about libraries that you are either a) unacquainted with from not having visited and actual library, or b) deliberately ignore because it spoils your snarky little reply. Unlike the bicycles - books are not simply left about for anyone to take from a library. You have a library card, and the library knows full well who took them - and when. (And despite that, theft and vandalism are ongoing problems for libraries.)
And what's this I hear about a company called Zipcar offering hourly car rentals in cities all over the US? Ha! It'll never catch on. I'll bet those commies will find their shared cars being full of graffiti and ripped seats and radios ripped out for drug money.
As above, do I really need to explain to you the difference between bicycles left lying about for free usage - and a car that you rent with the owner of the car having full knowledge of who has it and when? (As well as having your credit card number and a record of insurance.)
When you read the actual indictment - the reasons for the high (potential) penalty become clear, because the alleged perpetrator(s) did much more than simply 'hack into the database' as implied by the summary. They stole multiple passwords, and entered the system multiple times under various identities. One of the accused abused his position of trust within the IT department in order to facilitate the above actions. Further, they did so across state lines - which, on top of everything else, makes their actions a federal crime.
You think that it's good that medical/pharmaceutical companies have increased their revenues year past year without any significant increases in reduction of the major diseases over time?
You say that as if there was some way to a) measure progress against 'major diseases' and in some meaningful way and b) as if progress were guaranteed if only (the mostly mythical) big pharma would just do it.
I'd say that the medical industry has been feeding on the community for way too long. Medical procedures are insanely expensive and the equipment and medicine costs are through the roof. But it's not like medicine got any better in the last 30 years, only the scale has been slowly tipping in our health's favour, but it should have swung completely over already.
The medical industry has consumed more input than it has given back for a very long time. It's time we start seeing some payback to *everyone* who put money in the system: the consumers of medical care.
Again with the assumptions that are based in bias and/or some fantasy world - not reality.
All of this stuff is pretty much a "lost art" these days, and it is likely that nobody will EVER be able to duplicate the quality of the best tubes of the past, as most of the people who did it are now dead.
Hardly. In what fantasy world do you live where people attempting to recreate something cannot do so incrementally and learning as they go - just as the people who originally created the thing did? Duplicating the tubes would be a difficult and expensive process, but hardly impossible.
The other parts aren't that hard. You have capacitors (just need sheets of metal foil and paper for between them), inductors (coils of wire), resistors (again, wire), and diodes (basically just a simpler version of a vacuum tube... i.e. without the grid).
No, many of those parts are not hard to make - individually. Doing so in any significant quantity and with consistent performance is the Hard Part.
Learn to blow glass. Put two electrodes in a glass bottle with a heater coil on one of them, and also a valve connected to a tube. Fill the bottle with mercury, then using just gravity, you drain the bottle of mercury without letting air in: this can create a good enough vacuum to make the diode work. The only difference between this and a vacuum tube is that there's no "grid" between the electrodes.
In other words - you don't actually have a vacuum tube. Pretty pointless.
Hell, an abacus can do the 'same basic things' as a modern computer. As a strawman, your argument is a sucess. It fails however when you move beyond abstract 'basic things' into the real world.
They "modified the company's domain"? How, exactly, did they go about doing that? If they can get access to internal DNS/email servers/etc from the outside, then your company has bigger security problems than those presented by a social engineering exercise...
Not entirely true for an institution where the public facing servers and administrative intranets are seperate from each other and from the production servers and networks.
"What does it matter if you get the message right away? Doesn't change your father's medical condition any."
If you got to the hospital an hour after he died, there'd be a large amount of 'matterin' about it. The difference is you being there when that person needs you.
Sure - if the guy being called was the surgeon who could have saved his own fathers life. Otherwise, if someone is dying of a heart attack - he isn't getting anywhere close to his father.
Boy do I agree with you about that. There was an article on that years ago on Slashdot. I brought up the 911 thing and was pulverized by rude comments and moderations. "They have payphones, go use those!" "Don't get bad news in a theater, I'm trying to watch!" "Why would you need to know about a loved one? You should be bringing them with you!" Yadda yadda yadda. I'd love to hear a damn good reason to justify all the bullshit I got over that.
The reason is simple - you're a stupid self centered git with no more clue than the average two week old infant.
You should be the guy that re-reads that post and gets the right meaning
IOW - one is not supposed to read what he wrote, but is supposed to assume some mystical meaning. Especially when he very plainly compared cell phones to CT scans.
instead of being the guy that calls bullshit on a comparison that wasn't made.
Ah, so in the second line of his post he didn't mention CT scans?
I find projects like this very comforting. Maybe I'm mildly paranoid, but every now and then I wonder what life would be like if society collapses. Most of the technology we enjoy today can only be produced via huge infrastructures made possible by large, advanced, stable societies. This project shows that fundamental computing technology can be reproduced with relative ease
Yeah - if you have the huge infrastructure to produce the IC's and LCD's, and the not inconsiderable infrastructure for the fan, switches, power supplies, wiring, etc... etc... you can reconstruct this computing capacity from 'scratch'. Or IOW, don't fool yourself - even though this machine is pretty low rent by 2007 standards it still represents the tip of a large and sophisticated infrastructure pyramid.
That depends on how the courts interpret matters. If the poster has ads on his domain, his case could be greatly weakened. The legal difference between a link farm and a blog with ads is, AFAICT, pretty slender.
There was kid named Mike Rowe who was a software developer. He registered the domains MikeRoweSoft.com and MikeRoweSoft.net. Microsoft threatened and sued and lost. They finally did what they should have in the first place. They bought the names from this highschool kid.
Not completely true - they reached an out of court of settlement which involved Microsoft (who wished to avoid bad press) purchasing the domain for a pittance. Every lawyer I spoke to seemed to be of the opinion that, had it gone to court, Mike Rowe would have lost - because he deliberately and knowingly infringed Microsoft's trademarks.
Someone else has already discussed the McDonald's case, but I'll note the third case you cite has nothing to say on point to this issue.
Slashdot Mirror
CIP: This is exactly why the Sydney Opera House ran years over schedule and millions of dollars overbudget. The committee in charge of choosing a design - picked a design represented by essentially nothing more than a few bar napkin sketches by an artist, mostly because it was 'beautiful and evocative'. No engineering, no studies, no analysis, no nothing.
And, as is the way of the world, the poor saps who had to manage and carry out the construction and make the building work were/are castigated for their 'failures'... While the artist is a 'genius'.
Profitable studios are being bought, and unprofitable ones shut down. That should be obvious.
I quit reading/watching when they started anthromorphizing.
And he notes that the male pronoun is the default in the English language - and does not imply gender. (English lacks gender, unlike many other languages.)
Assuming that the uncanny valley is anything but hot air. Which, to date, there isn't any reason to assume otherwise.
Try actually reading my message jackass. I was helping him engineer the system - a necessary first step before you start calling in construction crews. But someone who knows what the fuck he is talking about would know that.
But you not only lack reading comprehension, you haven't a clue what you are talking about.
The real problem with [free] municipal wi-fi is that everyone, slashgeeks especially, seem to have decided that it is the Next Big Thing.
Utterly without evidence that is a) desireable, let alone b) possible.
An easy enough claim to make. Yet, reality is different - cities and towns have found it difficult to do.
Yeah, that's the Slashdot default position - especially for anything they've decided is 'easy' to do. (Frequently without any actual experience in doing.)
Fact is, deploying municipal wi-fi is damn difficult. Doubly so if you have terrain that isn't flat - and triply so outside of densely populated area. Double it _again_ if your area has any significant amount of trees. Etc... Etc...
But what do I know - I've only helped a friend as he attempted to actually engineer muni Wi-Fi for our area. Hours in the field with him measuring signal strengths and surveying line-of-sight for nodes and relays couldn't possibly have given me any insight.
Not really - because after months-to-years of no surgical practice, he isn't going to be a highly skilled physician anymore. On top of which, there isn't going to be enough room on the crew who isn't wearing at least two hats, which mitigates against having more than average skill (if that) as a surgeon.
No they haven't.
You are correct, today they have that - this has not always been true. (And I shouldn't have to point out the vast differences between an Antarctic base and a space station or Mars expedition.)
Which is, to say the very least, quite different from what you now claim:
Your problem is obvious.
That would explain why I've spend hundreds, nay thousands of dollars purchasing items I don't need over the last year - because I've been seduced by the advertising I'm exposed to daily.
Oh, wait. I haven't.
I suspect you are projecting your own weaknesses onto other people.
What the run-of-the-mill Slashbot fails to grasp is that Joe Sixpack has, correctly, deduced that Slashbots are raving paranoid psychotics who've cried wolf so long and so loud that it is now impossible to determine when they are describing real threats and when they are describing their hallucinations.
Or, just _possibly_ the family and friends have different priorities, or have come to a conclusion other than the Slashbot privacy uber alles dogma.
A fact about libraries that you are either a) unacquainted with from not having visited and actual library, or b) deliberately ignore because it spoils your snarky little reply. Unlike the bicycles - books are not simply left about for anyone to take from a library. You have a library card, and the library knows full well who took them - and when. (And despite that, theft and vandalism are ongoing problems for libraries.)
As above, do I really need to explain to you the difference between bicycles left lying about for free usage - and a car that you rent with the owner of the car having full knowledge of who has it and when? (As well as having your credit card number and a record of insurance.)
When you read the actual indictment - the reasons for the high (potential) penalty become clear, because the alleged perpetrator(s) did much more than simply 'hack into the database' as implied by the summary. They stole multiple passwords, and entered the system multiple times under various identities. One of the accused abused his position of trust within the IT department in order to facilitate the above actions. Further, they did so across state lines - which, on top of everything else, makes their actions a federal crime.
You say that as if there was some way to a) measure progress against 'major diseases' and in some meaningful way and b) as if progress were guaranteed if only (the mostly mythical) big pharma would just do it.
Again with the assumptions that are based in bias and/or some fantasy world - not reality.
Very nice. So what? Your comment utterly fails to adress the issues I raised.
Hardly. In what fantasy world do you live where people attempting to recreate something cannot do so incrementally and learning as they go - just as the people who originally created the thing did? Duplicating the tubes would be a difficult and expensive process, but hardly impossible.
No, many of those parts are not hard to make - individually. Doing so in any significant quantity and with consistent performance is the Hard Part.
In other words - you don't actually have a vacuum tube. Pretty pointless.
Hell, an abacus can do the 'same basic things' as a modern computer. As a strawman, your argument is a sucess. It fails however when you move beyond abstract 'basic things' into the real world.
Not entirely true for an institution where the public facing servers and administrative intranets are seperate from each other and from the production servers and networks.
Sure - if the guy being called was the surgeon who could have saved his own fathers life. Otherwise, if someone is dying of a heart attack - he isn't getting anywhere close to his father.
The reason is simple - you're a stupid self centered git with no more clue than the average two week old infant.
IOW - one is not supposed to read what he wrote, but is supposed to assume some mystical meaning. Especially when he very plainly compared cell phones to CT scans.
Ah, so in the second line of his post he didn't mention CT scans?
Yeah - if you have the huge infrastructure to produce the IC's and LCD's, and the not inconsiderable infrastructure for the fan, switches, power supplies, wiring, etc... etc... you can reconstruct this computing capacity from 'scratch'. Or IOW, don't fool yourself - even though this machine is pretty low rent by 2007 standards it still represents the tip of a large and sophisticated infrastructure pyramid.
That depends on how the courts interpret matters. If the poster has ads on his domain, his case could be greatly weakened. The legal difference between a link farm and a blog with ads is, AFAICT, pretty slender.
Not completely true - they reached an out of court of settlement which involved Microsoft (who wished to avoid bad press) purchasing the domain for a pittance. Every lawyer I spoke to seemed to be of the opinion that, had it gone to court, Mike Rowe would have lost - because he deliberately and knowingly infringed Microsoft's trademarks.
Someone else has already discussed the McDonald's case, but I'll note the third case you cite has nothing to say on point to this issue.