"With good reason, the people of the United States -- through judges and law enforcement -- can invade our private spaces," and those private spaces include houses and cars?
I think your notion of specific limited instances & warrants is a little naive. Consider all the cases the #BlackLivesMatter movement want us to consider: citizens obeying the law and still getting gunned down by officers of the law with neither warrant nor true probable cause. This is a larger issue of our ability to trust not a nanny state, but a police state.
How can we have an "adult conversation" with a fascist system wearing a Dudley Do-Right mask?
1. This is just a bad idea from the point of view of freedom of speech. I'd rather know if there are nutjobs out there, in increasing numbers, advocating shitty things.
2. If Jihadists can't post in obvious places, they'll go to non-obvious ones. Do we really need these assholes learning how to run dark-web sites?
As funny as that last story is, note that the Anonymous hacker in question also managed to post IP numbers, phone info... and shared it with other hackers. I call that "a nice start."
Absolutely correct, but the original poster's point still stands. The back of the late, great neuroscientist Gerald Edelman's book "Bright Air, Brilliant Fire" had a quote to the effect that the functioning of the human brain more closely resembles a rainforest ecosystem than the workings of a modern digital computer. Here is the story that I have always used to explain Edelman's theory of Neural Darwinism vis-a-vis human memory.
Imagine that you were in a car accident. A friend picked you up in his brand new shiny red Toyota pickup truck. As you go down the road, you are struck by the cloying new-car smell and the annoying new country music that he has dialed in on the radio. It was sunny as you embarked, but a light drizzle of rain happens as you begin your climb into the mountains on a shoulderless two-lane road. As your friend begins an ill-advised lane passing on a blind curve to pass a slow green Kharmann Ghia, an oncoming white Isuzu utility vehicle hits you and your friend is killed instantly. Certainly traumatic, and your adrenalized system takes a deep imprint.
Now how you remember this is dependant on what triggers each rememberance. Let's fork this out, Choose-Your-Own-Adventure style. Let's say that shortly after this event you buy a new car, a blue Mercedes sedan. You're not consciously aware of why your panic attacks keep cropping up, but it turns out that the new car smell is the trigger. You will remember the new car smell of your friend's pickup more potently, and will be more inclined to emphasize that part of the event when recounting the story. Eventually you might forget that her (see what I did there?) car was a pickup, or that it was painted red.
Let's choose another scenario. Let's say that during your therapy sessions it was constantly raining. As time goes on, those neuronal groups (networks of neurons) are reinforced and you begin to remember that event as the stereotypical "dark and stormy night." That feature will gain prominence in your memories and recountings. We can just as easily imagine scenarios in which a bunch of trips to shitty dive-bars results in you starting to have panic-attacks anytime someone has the poor taste to select "Achy Breaky Heart" on the jukebox. It is not at all implausible that you could eventually "remember" that you were in fact inside the green Karmann Ghia (vaguley), but that you were *definitely* hit by the white Isuzu truck. One way or the other, the emotional impact and intensity of the event will never be forgotten.
So, you're right: trauma increases memory retention. But we are all, as Neitzsche had it, better artists than we realize. (Or, if you prefer, the Zen koan: Who is the master that paints the grass green?) There is no place in memory that is a perfect, digital, untouched replica of an event. A memory is much more like a JPEG with lossy compression: it gets retouched every time it is revisited, with echoes of the particular context in which it was invoked.
"...a log that Ford can pull up wirelessly over the Internet..." is exactly the sort of thing that I'm thinking of. Most pop-culture discussion of self-driving cars falls into two polar camps: ill-advised or inevitable. I'm of the latter camp.
There was a story (I think it was "Network World" back in the late 90's) about the University of Hawaii researching the possibility of RFID-equipped speed limit signs. The idea was that your car would pick up that signal and throttle the fuel injection. The accompanying cartoon showed a car failing to escape an active volcano, illustrating the tragic stupidity of this idea.
But still... years later, watching I, Robot, two things occurred to me simultaneously. One, that autonomous vehicles are pretty much inevitable. Two, that AI will take the form of "swarm intelligence" long before some kind of HAL 9000 (or Ava from Ex Machina) self-aware Frankenstein's monster. Think about the likely next evolutionary steps of this tepid "Summon mode" technology in the Tesla in question. We already have cruise-control, and we have more-than-rudimentary collision detection. The logical next step from "fix speed at 65 mph" is "using my car's sensors, tether to this pod of cars I am currently matching speeds with." Now consider that it is absolutely in the interest of Tesla''s shareholders (let's not be naive or mince words) that the company does in fact have live, over-the-internet, real-time updates on black-box information from its vehicles.
Imagine an entire freeway full of traffic slowing down in tandem because of a Nixle SMS that a white Ford Bronco with a certain gun-wielding ex-football player was spotted in the vicinity. All without human interaction. The automotive equivalent of the "algotrades" behind the 2008 financial crisis, if you will. The imagination reels...
Am I the only one who stopped on that phrase? I wonder how long before a virus or even just a borked firmware update causes something like the great freeway ambush scene in "I, Robot." The singularity keeps inching closer....
"Pricing starts at US $121,000 per year..." I am always astonished at what people can charge for what is essentially tech-support for pre-installed open source software. Sounds like someone has pioneered PGaaS (Price-Gouging as a Service).
Thank you for that link! When I was reading TFA, I found his assertion that climate change was doing more good than harm rather startling, and was wondering if there was some research that I was unaware of which might change my opinions somewhat. From that exchange you linked to:
"Second, we do not know whether the recent changes in climate are on balance doing more harm than good. The strongest warming is in cold places like Greenland. More people die from cold in winter than die from heat in summer."...which is just a really special kind of logical fallacy. Special like it rides the short bus to school. He might be a brilliant physicist and/or mathematician, but when it comes to climate change he is just (as another suggested) an old codger.
How much time do you have to invest in this project, and how deep does their knowledge need to be?
I learned more from doing a slackware install (back in about '98 or so) then from all my experience with other Linux installs. I've heard people say similar things about Gentoo/Portage, so YMMV, but a distro that more or less forces people to do things by hand will both teach them, and teach them respect for, the system. You mention two systems that use apt, and one that uses rpm... Pick one architecture, your IT staff will thank you later.
You may simply want to give them an up-to-date Ubuntu (or Mint) that has several window manager/desktop environments installed, and let them experience the different UI flavors available... assuming that your company hasn't made the decision already. As someone else not-so-shallowly pointed out, you should have made a decision already, so train them on the distro your core dev team is using! Seriously, there are major support implications of allowing joe user to run off the flavor-of-the-month they just downloaded on a whim from distrowatch...
a bit prohibitively-expensive for the backyard amateur filmmaker, but I'd be curious to see what FX-guys like George Romero/Tom Savini/KNB group would do with this technology. i think old-school, in-camera analog effects are always more dramatic... how will the next Martin Scorcese or Sam Peckinpah make use of this?!?
I was testing the original iBook (the toilet seat cover-looking one) at Apple computers many years ago, and I complained to a friend that the USB ports were on the left-hand side. The original hockey-puck mouse had a fifteen inch cable, so this was especially annoying. "Only one out of nine people are left-handed... this makes no sense!" I fumed...
There was an Apple engineer there who was listening intently, and chimed in, "You're absolutely right--but do you know how many *Mac* users are left-handed?" No.... "One in two."
Never got any confirmation on that one, but it has seemed to jibe with personal experience... as well as the "liberal Mac vs. conservative PC" thing, hardly surprising.
I think you're getting old and crotchety. In my day, you'd start doing your research and educating yourself through USENET groups. Then #freenode on IRC. Why do you deem Ask Slashdot an inappropriate place to begin a geek's self-education?
Where else, then, should one begin? Google is a corporate entity with advertiser influence and paid links (*cough* do no evil *cough*), and frequently the offerings on faqs.org are anemic or out-of-date.
Maybe some enterprising geeks could comb through the most commented Ask Slashdot postings, cull the best of the 5-scored postings and summarize them into a BBS-style Ask Slashdot FAQ. (This is a good place to learn; let's not flame those with questions beneath our current, personal level of knowledge, hmm?)
Do you believe that a supreme being has influence over your day to day affairs?
And is that supreme being indeed called the Flying Spaghetti Monster?
Seriously, religion is a huge issue, but you've got to be subtle about asking that question. I would love to see someone ask Obama his position on Roe v. Wade. He'd squirm a bit, doing an awkward little two-step to avoid pissing off the religious right while still being honest. McCain would be smiling, waiting for his turn, thinking the follow-up question to him would be the same.
Then the change-up: "Senator McCain: what is your position on the Scopes trial?"
Of all the anonymous cowards on this thread, only one is honest and worth reading, to wit:
"Expect this discussion to be full of astroturf, red herrings and trolls."
For years I have browsed slashdot with filters set to block anything below Score:5. The last couple of months--since I was first entrusted with some mod points now and again--I'm seeing everything, down to the -1 trolls...
Here's my quite-serious, tangentially-related, "Ask Slashdot"-style question: what has been the evolution of spam- and troll-filtering with the slashcode? And, perhaps more importantly: is there any cross-pollination between slashdot and spamassassin (and/or Spamhaus, etc.)?
It just seems to me that the semantic intelligence of spammers has risen exponentially in the last few years, and the slashcoders probably have some deep wisdom to offer. (To those who would call me a karma-whore, let me offer a pre-emptive "fuckyomamma.")
I very much look forward to any constructive comments when I get back from Burning Man. Peace out.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, shit... I guess now we know what the fourth season is going to be about! I loves me some Silicon Valley.
The first C-SHELL will suck.
It will be followed by a new and improved TurboCSHELL...
Dubious...
"With good reason, the people of the United States -- through judges and law enforcement -- can invade our private spaces," and those private spaces include houses and cars?
I think your notion of specific limited instances & warrants is a little naive. Consider all the cases the #BlackLivesMatter movement want us to consider: citizens obeying the law and still getting gunned down by officers of the law with neither warrant nor true probable cause. This is a larger issue of our ability to trust not a nanny state, but a police state.
How can we have an "adult conversation" with a fascist system wearing a Dudley Do-Right mask?
Bash.... my all-time favorite piece of software, is coming to Windows 10 (which I am forced to use at work). This is cause to rejoice!
1. This is just a bad idea from the point of view of freedom of speech. I'd rather know if there are nutjobs out there, in increasing numbers, advocating shitty things.
2. If Jihadists can't post in obvious places, they'll go to non-obvious ones. Do we really need these assholes learning how to run dark-web sites?
3. This will prevent truly *fabulous* events like this one, just today:
http://www.techly.com.au/2016/...
As funny as that last story is, note that the Anonymous hacker in question also managed to post IP numbers, phone info... and shared it with other hackers. I call that "a nice start."
(Trauma increases memory retention.)
Absolutely correct, but the original poster's point still stands. The back of the late, great neuroscientist Gerald Edelman's book "Bright Air, Brilliant Fire" had a quote to the effect that the functioning of the human brain more closely resembles a rainforest ecosystem than the workings of a modern digital computer. Here is the story that I have always used to explain Edelman's theory of Neural Darwinism vis-a-vis human memory.
Imagine that you were in a car accident. A friend picked you up in his brand new shiny red Toyota pickup truck. As you go down the road, you are struck by the cloying new-car smell and the annoying new country music that he has dialed in on the radio. It was sunny as you embarked, but a light drizzle of rain happens as you begin your climb into the mountains on a shoulderless two-lane road. As your friend begins an ill-advised lane passing on a blind curve to pass a slow green Kharmann Ghia, an oncoming white Isuzu utility vehicle hits you and your friend is killed instantly. Certainly traumatic, and your adrenalized system takes a deep imprint.
Now how you remember this is dependant on what triggers each rememberance. Let's fork this out, Choose-Your-Own-Adventure style. Let's say that shortly after this event you buy a new car, a blue Mercedes sedan. You're not consciously aware of why your panic attacks keep cropping up, but it turns out that the new car smell is the trigger. You will remember the new car smell of your friend's pickup more potently, and will be more inclined to emphasize that part of the event when recounting the story. Eventually you might forget that her (see what I did there?) car was a pickup, or that it was painted red.
Let's choose another scenario. Let's say that during your therapy sessions it was constantly raining. As time goes on, those neuronal groups (networks of neurons) are reinforced and you begin to remember that event as the stereotypical "dark and stormy night." That feature will gain prominence in your memories and recountings. We can just as easily imagine scenarios in which a bunch of trips to shitty dive-bars results in you starting to have panic-attacks anytime someone has the poor taste to select "Achy Breaky Heart" on the jukebox. It is not at all implausible that you could eventually "remember" that you were in fact inside the green Karmann Ghia (vaguley), but that you were *definitely* hit by the white Isuzu truck. One way or the other, the emotional impact and intensity of the event will never be forgotten.
So, you're right: trauma increases memory retention. But we are all, as Neitzsche had it, better artists than we realize. (Or, if you prefer, the Zen koan: Who is the master that paints the grass green?) There is no place in memory that is a perfect, digital, untouched replica of an event. A memory is much more like a JPEG with lossy compression: it gets retouched every time it is revisited, with echoes of the particular context in which it was invoked.
"...a log that Ford can pull up wirelessly over the Internet..." is exactly the sort of thing that I'm thinking of. Most pop-culture discussion of self-driving cars falls into two polar camps: ill-advised or inevitable. I'm of the latter camp.
There was a story (I think it was "Network World" back in the late 90's) about the University of Hawaii researching the possibility of RFID-equipped speed limit signs. The idea was that your car would pick up that signal and throttle the fuel injection. The accompanying cartoon showed a car failing to escape an active volcano, illustrating the tragic stupidity of this idea.
But still... years later, watching I, Robot, two things occurred to me simultaneously. One, that autonomous vehicles are pretty much inevitable. Two, that AI will take the form of "swarm intelligence" long before some kind of HAL 9000 (or Ava from Ex Machina) self-aware Frankenstein's monster. Think about the likely next evolutionary steps of this tepid "Summon mode" technology in the Tesla in question. We already have cruise-control, and we have more-than-rudimentary collision detection. The logical next step from "fix speed at 65 mph" is "using my car's sensors, tether to this pod of cars I am currently matching speeds with." Now consider that it is absolutely in the interest of Tesla''s shareholders (let's not be naive or mince words) that the company does in fact have live, over-the-internet, real-time updates on black-box information from its vehicles.
Imagine an entire freeway full of traffic slowing down in tandem because of a Nixle SMS that a white Ford Bronco with a certain gun-wielding ex-football player was spotted in the vicinity. All without human interaction. The automotive equivalent of the "algotrades" behind the 2008 financial crisis, if you will. The imagination reels...
Am I the only one who stopped on that phrase? I wonder how long before a virus or even just a borked firmware update causes something like the great freeway ambush scene in "I, Robot." The singularity keeps inching closer....
"Pricing starts at US $121,000 per year..." I am always astonished at what people can charge for what is essentially tech-support for pre-installed open source software. Sounds like someone has pioneered PGaaS (Price-Gouging as a Service).
Thank you for that link! When I was reading TFA, I found his assertion that climate change was doing more good than harm rather startling, and was wondering if there was some research that I was unaware of which might change my opinions somewhat. From that exchange you linked to:
"Second, we do not know whether the recent changes in climate are on balance doing more harm than good. The strongest warming is in cold places like Greenland. More people die from cold in winter than die from heat in summer." ...which is just a really special kind of logical fallacy. Special like it rides the short bus to school. He might be a brilliant physicist and/or mathematician, but when it comes to climate change he is just (as another suggested) an old codger.
Nice analogy. Thanks for equating FreeBSD with Coke!
Good comeback. I like your use of the word "evolve."
"and will spread to the US at the end of September."
No.... no it won't.
Reporter: Mr. Gandhi, what do you think of this new automated loom that will do the work of four hundred men?
Gandhi: Will it pay their salaries?
How much time do you have to invest in this project, and how deep does their knowledge need to be?
I learned more from doing a slackware install (back in about '98 or so) then from all my experience with other Linux installs. I've heard people say similar things about Gentoo/Portage, so YMMV, but a distro that more or less forces people to do things by hand will both teach them, and teach them respect for, the system. You mention two systems that use apt, and one that uses rpm... Pick one architecture, your IT staff will thank you later.
You may simply want to give them an up-to-date Ubuntu (or Mint) that has several window manager/desktop environments installed, and let them experience the different UI flavors available... assuming that your company hasn't made the decision already. As someone else not-so-shallowly pointed out, you should have made a decision already, so train them on the distro your core dev team is using! Seriously, there are major support implications of allowing joe user to run off the flavor-of-the-month they just downloaded on a whim from distrowatch...
a bit prohibitively-expensive for the backyard amateur filmmaker, but I'd be curious to see what FX-guys like George Romero/Tom Savini/KNB group would do with this technology. i think old-school, in-camera analog effects are always more dramatic... how will the next Martin Scorcese or Sam Peckinpah make use of this?!?
I was testing the original iBook (the toilet seat cover-looking one) at Apple computers many years ago, and I complained to a friend that the USB ports were on the left-hand side. The original hockey-puck mouse had a fifteen inch cable, so this was especially annoying. "Only one out of nine people are left-handed... this makes no sense!" I fumed...
There was an Apple engineer there who was listening intently, and chimed in, "You're absolutely right--but do you know how many *Mac* users are left-handed?" No.... "One in two."
Never got any confirmation on that one, but it has seemed to jibe with personal experience... as well as the "liberal Mac vs. conservative PC" thing, hardly surprising.
The Glory Satellite is gone... leaving a great, big Glory Hole in the sky.
I think you're getting old and crotchety. In my day, you'd start doing your research and educating yourself through USENET groups. Then #freenode on IRC. Why do you deem Ask Slashdot an inappropriate place to begin a geek's self-education?
Where else, then, should one begin? Google is a corporate entity with advertiser influence and paid links (*cough* do no evil *cough*), and frequently the offerings on faqs.org are anemic or out-of-date.
Maybe some enterprising geeks could comb through the most commented Ask Slashdot postings, cull the best of the 5-scored postings and summarize them into a BBS-style Ask Slashdot FAQ. (This is a good place to learn; let's not flame those with questions beneath our current, personal level of knowledge, hmm?)
just my .02
http://live.linux-gamers.net/?s=download
also slashdotted. anyone got a torrent?
What do you plan to do about global poverty?
Mod parent brilliant.
"People's Judean Front? PISS OFF! We're the People's Front of Judea!!"
Do you believe that a supreme being has influence over your day to day affairs?
And is that supreme being indeed called the Flying Spaghetti Monster?
Seriously, religion is a huge issue, but you've got to be subtle about asking that question. I would love to see someone ask Obama his position on Roe v. Wade. He'd squirm a bit, doing an awkward little two-step to avoid pissing off the religious right while still being honest. McCain would be smiling, waiting for his turn, thinking the follow-up question to him would be the same.
Then the change-up: "Senator McCain: what is your position on the Scopes trial?"
Of all the anonymous cowards on this thread, only one is honest and worth reading, to wit:
"Expect this discussion to be full of astroturf, red herrings and trolls."
For years I have browsed slashdot with filters set to block anything below Score:5. The last couple of months--since I was first entrusted with some mod points now and again--I'm seeing everything, down to the -1 trolls...
Here's my quite-serious, tangentially-related, "Ask Slashdot"-style question: what has been the evolution of spam- and troll-filtering with the slashcode? And, perhaps more importantly: is there any cross-pollination between slashdot and spamassassin (and/or Spamhaus, etc.)?
It just seems to me that the semantic intelligence of spammers has risen exponentially in the last few years, and the slashcoders probably have some deep wisdom to offer. (To those who would call me a karma-whore, let me offer a pre-emptive "fuckyomamma.")
I very much look forward to any constructive comments when I get back from Burning Man. Peace out.