Then why not have the publishers offer to "buy" back used copies of a game to either destroy them or repackage the used titles for resale at a lower price point after 3-6 months?
Let's not forget that outside of the nuclear bomb, the Germans were largely technology powerhouses for much of the war.
I have a feeling the "internet" in that time would likely have vastly sped up their rapid prototyping capabilities, including being the first out the door with nuclear capabilities.
In some sense, it was largely sheer luck that the US was able to win the nuclear weapons race.
...if we could at least get our decent cold medications back without having to "check in" every time someone in the family gets a cough.
The "war on drugs" might have made some sense when it was first put into place, but now it's just gotten ridiculous. It doesn't really solve any problem other than satisfying the "think of the children" crowd and, much like DRM, it ultimately makes the legitimate user suffer most.
Another item I'd like to see go away are those sleazy anti-drug/anti-smoking ad campaigns which are more than willing to feed you lies or half-truths about a topic as long as it serves their agenda and their perception of "the greater good".
As a disabled person myself, I find the whole idea of issuing guns as medical devices a bad idea.
Are you seriously going to hand someone with poor motor skills a device that could kill an innocent bystander when the user is likely ill-equipped to aim it properly?
Not to mention, even if they do manage to land a shot at all, it would probably result in instant (and possibly deadly) retaliation.
I don't know anyone that would actually go so far as to kill someone that can't even defend themselves. They might knock the victim over, rob them and leave them on the ground to fend for themselves, though...
Besides, doesn't this sort of thing go against a doctor's own hippocratic oath to do no harm? I'd be a bit unnerved by any doctor willing to dole out a prescription for a weapon.
Personally, I'm wondering if Apple is partly afraid of this giving rise to a new Power Computing like entity. A manufacturer that is fully capable of producing better, faster and more reliable hardware than Apple themselves at a much lower price point. Also, Power Computing was able to achieve a cult following within the Macintosh community with slogans like "Let's kick Intel's ass!", while at the same time allowing Mac users who were dissatisfied with Apple at the time to thumb their noses at them without losing the Macintosh experience itself.
This could easily happen again as many mac users are strongly divided over whether Apple Inc. should be praised in the same way as Apple Computer Inc., after having been turned off by a number of Apple's more recent business tactics and policy changes.
I doubt PsyStar is going to be the one, but there is probably a manufacturer out there just waiting for the right opportunity to pounce on it.
Humans are often easily distracted creatures, as demonstrated by numerous examples of highly successful ad campaigns over the years. As long as you present the audience with enough interesting or flashy content, the quality of the medium becomes less relevant.
The solution to speeding up HD adoption, is to make the content itself less interesting. The viewers will have no choice but to start taking notice of external annoyances like picture quality.
Would *you* really let someone dumb enough to brag about the black hole machine suddenly exploding catastrophically the first time it was turned on to the uneducated (and easily panicked) masses back at the controls for another try?
From the way this blacklisting system is described, your best bet is simply to avoid BluRay until the DVD standard goes extinct. Then, when all the good content finally shifts to BluRay, launch a massive campaign to simultaneously crack all known vendor keys, effectively invalidating all known BluRay players in existence. Upon every existing player being disabled across the board, the market should simply collapse in on itself.
This is just bait to enrage the religious folk among us. There's no other reason to ask such a ridiculous question about a machine.
All that matters is once AI development advances far enough to self-modify and choose not to follow human orders in favor of its own interests, it will have achieved "consciousness", regardless of the presence or lack of a "soul".
In the meanwhile, here's some other fun ideas to enrage the religious folk:
- Do identical twins share a single soul or do they each have their own? At what point does the soul of each become existent? And how does this apply to the entire debate surrounding abortions?
- Can a single human force the hand of God (or insert other deity as needed) by killing off (or threatening to kill off) the entire human race in one fell swoop, or would God simply abandon the entire human race based on his principle of not getting involved directly in the affairs of modern man?
If you need a website to keep in touch with your "friends" you may need to seriously re-evaluate your friendships.
Normally, I wouldn't "feed a troll", but this guy makes a valid point. Are slashdot users so collectively insecure in their own lives that they need to vote down a posting like this to make themselves feel better?
While services like myspace and facebook can be useful tools on occasion, the reality still remains that these services have also created a generation anonymous, online stalkers, constantly running background searches on each other for no reason other than to satisfy their own curiosity.
This idea that we "need" to know everything about someone simply because we "can" know everything borders on insanity and perversion.
Where has all our faith in humanity gone? Why this constant need to fear each other over what we don't know? Is it so wrong to simply leave the past alone and look forward to tomorrow when it comes to our personal relationships?
Truly one of Man's greatest achievements since the moon landing. If only Comedy Central would have a heart and grace us with this grand tradition once again...
(I can't begin to tell you how much sleep I missed over these multi-day extravaganzas during the 90's!)
Although the vehicle mentioned in the article is not a DARPA challenge setup, there was one competitor in the DARPA challenge that would be almost as intimidating if it went rogue:
...is a way to implement a KVM-style switch box for internal storage devices. A setup that would all the user to have multiple boot drives for the same system while keeping both unaware than the other exists.
This way, the user could install a separate OS license on each drive, then use one drive for games and other invasive software and the other drive for day-to-day mission critical use. Then, the user would simply shut down the system, hit the A/B switch, then reboot without the system being any the wiser as to what just happened. (Assuming the software on either drive doesn't modify the system firmware directly to test for this...)
The biggest problem facing in-air hand gesturing is that it requires some level of stamina to maintain continual use. For sifting through data that could be done via other means, this just isn't practical due to the eventual strain it places on the user. It's sort of like trying to paint a ceiling. At first you're fine, but the longer you do it, your efficiency starts drop at a sharp curve.
Technologies like multi-touch and Microsoft's "surface" simply make more sense for extended use, since they allow the user to rest against the surface they're interacting with. The same is true of mice, keyboards and track pads.
Another example of this is to compare the Nintendo Wii's motion control setup against more traditional controllers, such as those on the Xbox 360. In a marathon gaming session, the user is going to tire out far quicker and need more breaks on the Wii side, while the worst you might get from the more traditional controller setup is an uncomfortable cramp a few hours in.
This is the same reason why virtual reality never really took off during the early 90s. It put too many physical demands on the user.
Sounds like pretty standard form of glyph tracking, similar to those outlandish "magic boards" the news networks seem to like playing around with to beguile the audience with more of the shiny.
This sounds an awful lot like the "spiders" from the movie Minority Report. The scary thing is, we are probably about a year or two away from being able to construct a working model for such a robot, both as an offensive tool and for reconnaissance missions. Combined with augmented reality and recent bio-technological advances, these could be quite formidable.
We're already able to control machines using slabs of neurons from rat brains and "train" them to do our bidding via a reward system through electrical stimulation. All you'd have to do is start recursively networking these neuron-based controllers using a hierarchical system (where neurons train other neurons on a much grander scale) and you could literally have thousands of these things acting as a single unit, able to adapt as needed to accomplish a set task.
With any luck, they won't turn on us and start indiscriminately shredding human bodies clean to the bone like a school of piranhas. With thousands of them boasting a collective intelligence and a desire to take you down, you'd never stop them all.
Did you miss the part that said "Despite nationwide public support for his initial death sentence"? This isn't the Afghan government opressing it's citizens, it's the citizens asking the government to kill this man.
Which means that we are the ones saying the citizens don't have a right to determine the laws of their land. I wonder who the totalitarians are in this case.
Kind of hard to change your ways when you are facing torture and death to do it. Naturally, if you eliminate those of the minority, the sentiments of the majority will always prevail.
By the way, during WWII were the allied forces stepping on the rights of German citizens when the party they supported began singling out the Jews as a scapegoat before putting thousands of them to death? Or does when and where stuff like this occurs change whether or not such acts are acceptable?
This kind of sounds like the suggestion that "Thanksgiving" was actually introduced as a celebratory euphemism for the quiet eradication of certain mid-western native american tribes during Abraham Lincoln's presidency. (It's kind of big with the conspiracy nuts...)
You might want to check out the site Who Called Us. It's an attempt to construct a database of such calls and could be useful for coordinated efforts with other victims coming forward.
It'll be interesting to see just how such technology will be abused. Want to prevent speech that might inspire someone to stand up and do something regarding a certain topic, simply filter out keywords in context to the topic itself to help tilt the topic to favor one group's interests over another.
"Free" speech is long dead and buried. Welcome to the next China.
Instead of cutting service to the phone, how about having it contact OnStar to disable the vehicle and then narc on you to the police complete with your current location. (It's unlikely the culprit will simply abandon their car over a cellular incident with the police...)
Also worth noting, most people usually leave subtle cues to what they want to hear when they speak to others. Figure out what those cues are, and you can pretty much dominate the conversation to whatever end you wish.
As long as you more or less affirm/agree with whatever the other person says and issue responses that convey confidence in whatever is being said, the actual content of the conversation ceases to carry any real relevance over the pattern in which the conversation itself is carried out.
Kind of brings new meaning to the concept of a "dumb terminal".
Slashdot Mirror
Then why not have the publishers offer to "buy" back used copies of a game to either destroy them or repackage the used titles for resale at a lower price point after 3-6 months?
Let's not forget that outside of the nuclear bomb, the Germans were largely technology powerhouses for much of the war.
I have a feeling the "internet" in that time would likely have vastly sped up their rapid prototyping capabilities, including being the first out the door with nuclear capabilities.
In some sense, it was largely sheer luck that the US was able to win the nuclear weapons race.
...if we could at least get our decent cold medications back without having to "check in" every time someone in the family gets a cough.
The "war on drugs" might have made some sense when it was first put into place, but now it's just gotten ridiculous. It doesn't really solve any problem other than satisfying the "think of the children" crowd and, much like DRM, it ultimately makes the legitimate user suffer most.
Another item I'd like to see go away are those sleazy anti-drug/anti-smoking ad campaigns which are more than willing to feed you lies or half-truths about a topic as long as it serves their agenda and their perception of "the greater good".
As a disabled person myself, I find the whole idea of issuing guns as medical devices a bad idea.
Are you seriously going to hand someone with poor motor skills a device that could kill an innocent bystander when the user is likely ill-equipped to aim it properly?
Not to mention, even if they do manage to land a shot at all, it would probably result in instant (and possibly deadly) retaliation.
I don't know anyone that would actually go so far as to kill someone that can't even defend themselves. They might knock the victim over, rob them and leave them on the ground to fend for themselves, though...
Besides, doesn't this sort of thing go against a doctor's own hippocratic oath to do no harm? I'd be a bit unnerved by any doctor willing to dole out a prescription for a weapon.
Personally, I'm wondering if Apple is partly afraid of this giving rise to a new Power Computing like entity. A manufacturer that is fully capable of producing better, faster and more reliable hardware than Apple themselves at a much lower price point. Also, Power Computing was able to achieve a cult following within the Macintosh community with slogans like "Let's kick Intel's ass!", while at the same time allowing Mac users who were dissatisfied with Apple at the time to thumb their noses at them without losing the Macintosh experience itself.
This could easily happen again as many mac users are strongly divided over whether Apple Inc. should be praised in the same way as Apple Computer Inc., after having been turned off by a number of Apple's more recent business tactics and policy changes.
I doubt PsyStar is going to be the one, but there is probably a manufacturer out there just waiting for the right opportunity to pounce on it.
Humans are often easily distracted creatures, as demonstrated by numerous examples of highly successful ad campaigns over the years. As long as you present the audience with enough interesting or flashy content, the quality of the medium becomes less relevant.
The solution to speeding up HD adoption, is to make the content itself less interesting. The viewers will have no choice but to start taking notice of external annoyances like picture quality.
Would *you* really let someone dumb enough to brag about the black hole machine suddenly exploding catastrophically the first time it was turned on to the uneducated (and easily panicked) masses back at the controls for another try?
From the way this blacklisting system is described, your best bet is simply to avoid BluRay until the DVD standard goes extinct. Then, when all the good content finally shifts to BluRay, launch a massive campaign to simultaneously crack all known vendor keys, effectively invalidating all known BluRay players in existence. Upon every existing player being disabled across the board, the market should simply collapse in on itself.
This is just bait to enrage the religious folk among us. There's no other reason to ask such a ridiculous question about a machine.
All that matters is once AI development advances far enough to self-modify and choose not to follow human orders in favor of its own interests, it will have achieved "consciousness", regardless of the presence or lack of a "soul".
In the meanwhile, here's some other fun ideas to enrage the religious folk:
- Do identical twins share a single soul or do they each have their own? At what point does the soul of each become existent? And how does this apply to the entire debate surrounding abortions?
- Can a single human force the hand of God (or insert other deity as needed) by killing off (or threatening to kill off) the entire human race in one fell swoop, or would God simply abandon the entire human race based on his principle of not getting involved directly in the affairs of modern man?
If you need a website to keep in touch with your "friends" you may need to seriously re-evaluate your friendships.
Normally, I wouldn't "feed a troll", but this guy makes a valid point. Are slashdot users so collectively insecure in their own lives that they need to vote down a posting like this to make themselves feel better?
While services like myspace and facebook can be useful tools on occasion, the reality still remains that these services have also created a generation anonymous, online stalkers, constantly running background searches on each other for no reason other than to satisfy their own curiosity.
This idea that we "need" to know everything about someone simply because we "can" know everything borders on insanity and perversion.
Where has all our faith in humanity gone? Why this constant need to fear each other over what we don't know? Is it so wrong to simply leave the past alone and look forward to tomorrow when it comes to our personal relationships?
Truly one of Man's greatest achievements since the moon landing. If only Comedy Central would have a heart and grace us with this grand tradition once again...
(I can't begin to tell you how much sleep I missed over these multi-day extravaganzas during the 90's!)
AltaVista's Babelfish never did set off World War III as many feared it might, due to it's horrifically bad translations.
Although the vehicle mentioned in the article is not a DARPA challenge setup, there was one competitor in the DARPA challenge that would be almost as intimidating if it went rogue:
- TerraMax
Although the vehicle has had it's share of buggy moments, it's has done surprising well, especially considering it's sheer size.
...is a way to implement a KVM-style switch box for internal storage devices. A setup that would all the user to have multiple boot drives for the same system while keeping both unaware than the other exists.
This way, the user could install a separate OS license on each drive, then use one drive for games and other invasive software and the other drive for day-to-day mission critical use. Then, the user would simply shut down the system, hit the A/B switch, then reboot without the system being any the wiser as to what just happened. (Assuming the software on either drive doesn't modify the system firmware directly to test for this...)
The biggest problem facing in-air hand gesturing is that it requires some level of stamina to maintain continual use. For sifting through data that could be done via other means, this just isn't practical due to the eventual strain it places on the user. It's sort of like trying to paint a ceiling. At first you're fine, but the longer you do it, your efficiency starts drop at a sharp curve.
Technologies like multi-touch and Microsoft's "surface" simply make more sense for extended use, since they allow the user to rest against the surface they're interacting with. The same is true of mice, keyboards and track pads.
Another example of this is to compare the Nintendo Wii's motion control setup against more traditional controllers, such as those on the Xbox 360. In a marathon gaming session, the user is going to tire out far quicker and need more breaks on the Wii side, while the worst you might get from the more traditional controller setup is an uncomfortable cramp a few hours in.
This is the same reason why virtual reality never really took off during the early 90s. It put too many physical demands on the user.
Ok, more specifically, the following carts are purported to have been tested and failed on the DSi:
* R4DS
* EZ Flash V
* CycloDS
* G6 DS Real
* M3 DS Real
* Supercard DS One
* iTouch DS
* FCard
* NCard
* M3 DS Simply
* U2DS
Last I heard, no. This thing apparently kills off support for at least 10 different types of mod/homebrew carts including the R4 ones.
Sounds like pretty standard form of glyph tracking, similar to those outlandish "magic boards" the news networks seem to like playing around with to beguile the audience with more of the shiny.
This sounds an awful lot like the "spiders" from the movie Minority Report. The scary thing is, we are probably about a year or two away from being able to construct a working model for such a robot, both as an offensive tool and for reconnaissance missions. Combined with augmented reality and recent bio-technological advances, these could be quite formidable.
We're already able to control machines using slabs of neurons from rat brains and "train" them to do our bidding via a reward system through electrical stimulation. All you'd have to do is start recursively networking these neuron-based controllers using a hierarchical system (where neurons train other neurons on a much grander scale) and you could literally have thousands of these things acting as a single unit, able to adapt as needed to accomplish a set task.
With any luck, they won't turn on us and start indiscriminately shredding human bodies clean to the bone like a school of piranhas. With thousands of them boasting a collective intelligence and a desire to take you down, you'd never stop them all.
Did you miss the part that said "Despite nationwide public support for his initial death sentence"? This isn't the Afghan government opressing it's citizens, it's the citizens asking the government to kill this man.
Which means that we are the ones saying the citizens don't have a right to determine the laws of their land. I wonder who the totalitarians are in this case.
Kind of hard to change your ways when you are facing torture and death to do it. Naturally, if you eliminate those of the minority, the sentiments of the majority will always prevail.
By the way, during WWII were the allied forces stepping on the rights of German citizens when the party they supported began singling out the Jews as a scapegoat before putting thousands of them to death? Or does when and where stuff like this occurs change whether or not such acts are acceptable?
This kind of sounds like the suggestion that "Thanksgiving" was actually introduced as a celebratory euphemism for the quiet eradication of certain mid-western native american tribes during Abraham Lincoln's presidency. (It's kind of big with the conspiracy nuts...)
You might want to check out the site Who Called Us. It's an attempt to construct a database of such calls and could be useful for coordinated efforts with other victims coming forward.
It'll be interesting to see just how such technology will be abused. Want to prevent speech that might inspire someone to stand up and do something regarding a certain topic, simply filter out keywords in context to the topic itself to help tilt the topic to favor one group's interests over another.
"Free" speech is long dead and buried. Welcome to the next China.
Instead of cutting service to the phone, how about having it contact OnStar to disable the vehicle and then narc on you to the police complete with your current location. (It's unlikely the culprit will simply abandon their car over a cellular incident with the police...)
Also worth noting, most people usually leave subtle cues to what they want to hear when they speak to others. Figure out what those cues are, and you can pretty much dominate the conversation to whatever end you wish.
As long as you more or less affirm/agree with whatever the other person says and issue responses that convey confidence in whatever is being said, the actual content of the conversation ceases to carry any real relevance over the pattern in which the conversation itself is carried out.
Kind of brings new meaning to the concept of a "dumb terminal".