When listing robotic and cyborg animals from the cold war era, let's not forget poor Acoustic Kitty.
Some people might say that it was a myth, but one of the people on the project was my boss in the 1990s and he showed me a souvenir. Yes, I have held the skull of Acoustic Kitty in my hands. It had fine channels engraved in the bone so that the microphone wires would not cause bumps under the skin. The detail work was impressive, even more so when you realize that the cat lived through the operation.
My boss also told me how he was present on Acoustic Kitty's first and only mission. The poor thing was kidnapped from an ambassador's home and put through hellish surgery, including installation of batteries that were destined to kill it after a few months. Then they released it across the street so that it would walk back into the house and begin to spy on its owner. Can you blame it for jumping under the tires of a taxicab? 20 million dollars and months of work, down the drain.
My old boss is dead now. Sometimes I wonder what happened to AK's skull. It should be placed in the Smithsonian, as a visible reminder that some experiments just should not be done.
I don't know. Huffington Post and DailyKos were the two big attempts of the left wing to create their own "viral" websites. The end result's been a lot of hate speech, a whole lot of banned commentariat, and very little if anything accomplished.
I'd say that turning a $1 million investment into a $315 million buyout is one hell of an accomplishment.
I don't see this as someone making light of a bad situation. I see it more as an expression of capitalism -- 'Someone's gotta make money off this'.
With that in mind, there's a lot of analogues to Cantor and Seagal, who in 1994 launched the first mass Usenet spam. In hindsight it was surprising that nobody thought to do it before them. If you have a bunch of people talking in a public, unmoderated forum with a specific topic, why not (aside from good manners) drop advertisements on those people?
Twitter is now where Usenet was in 1994 -- lots of people, talking in public, unmoderated 'hash tag' discussion threads. Of course people are going to spam those threads with ads. There will be outrage over it, but if it proves profitable it'll become more prevalent. Spam could potentially flood the signal out of some long-standing hash tag discussions. If that happens, Twitter will go the way of Usenet.
Kenneth Cole is just the first person in Twitter's upcoming Eternal September. Don't hate him, he or someone like him was fated to appear eventually.
Yes, for high-end manufacturing, we can compete with skilled, well-paid workers in Germany or Japan or wherever. But that's not the bulk of international trade. The vast majority of trade is in low-end manufacturing -- clothing and shoes and childrens' toys. Those objects are manufactured by 6 year olds working for twenty cents a day. There's no way we can compete with that without dismantling our middle class and handing the country over to the oligarchs.
Can we base an economy as large as ours on just high-end manufacturing? Can we offer some low-end item that's innovative enough that it can be produced by our unskilled workers yet can't be replicated in Singapore or China? Or should we accept that we're a western nation and enact socialistic safeguards to protect the health and jobs of our middle class like they do in Germany?
We can be like Singapore, or we can be like Germany. For decades America has tried to split the difference and stay in the middle between those two extremes, but we can no longer compete with half-assed capitalism and half-assed socialism. We're going to have to choose one or the other.
Not all geeks are computer geeks. I'm a physics geek myself, so I can run an experiment to see if something is true or not, which means that P/NP problems are alien to me. Fascinating approach, though.
Anarchy Online was infamous for having European sensibilities, and because of that they had anatomically correct character models. You could get quite a view by using a 'bend over' emote on a character that was wearing a skirt. The animals were anatomically accurate also.
All you'd need for a Mature MMO would be to take the Anarchy Online engine and give the players the ability to import animations. It would be like Second Life with skill progressions. And you'd get ridiculed out of the industry.
One of my favorite teachers in high school told us a story about how he managed to be fired from a job instead of quitting it. The dress code required pants, a shirt, jacket and tie. He sewed himself an outfit of those using transparent plastic. He was following the required dress to the letter while still proudly showing his underwear and bare chest.
My lord, a handful of comments and already I've seen two comparisons to Hitler. That is pathetic, even by Slashdot standards. Why the vitriol?
You have to ask? Facebook is a social site. This is Slashdot, a nerd site. Nerds are not known for being social or for valuing social skills.
It's like asking a Tyrannosaurus to get excited about Time's pick for 'Best Vegetarian Recipe'. He doesn't understand it or want anything to do with it, but if you force him to discuss it he'll roar a lot.
That is like saying when a site gets slashdotted, there is a central intelligence with charisma behind it. It's just a bunch of people who want to jump on the bandwagon and cause trouble for something they think is a good cause.
But that is a central, group intelligence with persuasive power.
Don't confuse what I'm saying. I am not suggesting there's one Svengali-like figure behind either Anonymous or Slashdot. I am saying that there is a zeitgeist -- a bandwagon -- that has coercive power over the group. No one person is in control of that zeitgeist.
Slashdot readers collectively decide what is attractive to them. The editors then follow that decision and post links to sites that become slashdotted. It's not malicious, it's human nature, a mob mentality but one that is directed and that is enabled by a central group of elites. But the elites have to play to the will of the masses or the masses won't support their site.
Anonymous seems to work in the same way. The group decides on an attractive course of action. Elite individuals -- the ones in charge of the botnets -- then enable the group to take that action. The elites cannot work against the will of the people, and no one person has the power to both decide and enable.
Slashdot and Anonymous, looked at from a sociological perspective, are exactly the same. The elites aren't in charge, they're just enablers. All that matters is what the group finds persuasive...and since groupthink is self-reinforcing, this implies a hivemind with coercive charisma.
As a sociological study this could be fascinating, if everyone involved doesn't end up in jail first.
No, the most successful part is that a handful of hackers have convinced thousands of script kiddies to willingly slave their PCs to a botnet for the express purpose of breaking the law.
That indicates a central intelligence with charisma. It may be a group intelligence, but there's something there that is irresistable to disillusioned youths.
Now, now, let's not get up in arms about this. Lucas develops new filmmaking technology, then other directors put it to good use.
This tech could lead the way to a live-action Futurama. Those heads in jars are going to have to be CGI, might as well make them look as good as possible. And we need to perfect the technology so that Zoidberg isn't as annoying as Jar-Jar.
When someone steps in dogshit and tracks it all over the living room, you blame them, not the dog.
That's what conservatives are doing. There's no denying that Assange made a mess and he deserves the blame for that, but when conservatives ratchet up the blame to threats of assassination and trials for espionage then they deserve to be ridiculed too.
If what's being reported is accurate, they've discovered a life form whose DNA was previously thought to be completely, unequivocally, no-exceptions impossible. Not just "we haven't found it", but impossible.
HOW IS THAT NOT AWESOME???
It's not awesome because we can't eat it, ride it, screw it or go to war with it.
Gimme a carbon-(and phosphorous)-based alien lifeform that we can rally against as they attack our cities anyday. If it looks like Morena Baccarin, that's a bonus.
Mary had a little lamb, its fleece was slightly grey, It didn't have a father, just some borrowed DNA. It sort of had a mother, though the ovum was on loan, It was not so much a lambkin, as a little lamby clone.
And soon it had a fellow clone, and soon it had some more, They followed her to school one day, all cramming through the door. It made the children laugh and sing, the teachers found it droll, There were too many lamby clones, for Mary to control.
No other could control the sheep; their programs didn't vary, So the scientists resolved it all by simply cloning Mary. But now they feel quite sheepish, those scientists unwary, One problem solved! But what to do, with Mary, Mary, Mary...
-- by Anonymous (it's not mine; the writer's name is forgotten.)
Why is this to her credit? Bozo the Clown had a lot of followers. Pauly Shore has a lot of followers. Koko the Gorilla has a lot of followers. I still wouldn't prop any of them up as an electable politician, except maybe the gorilla.
Will this jamming technology stop you from calling for help after an accident? Will you have to get out of your car to make a call if your car breaks down? How about calling the police when you see a crime or a reckless driver? Is it incompatible with OnStar, LoJack, and other auto tracking devices? Will it break GPS navigation? If jamming phones becomes mandatory, will all existing cars have to be retrofitted to stay street legal?
Despite the transportation secretary's wet dreams, this will never, ever happen. It would be too much of an inconvenience and destroy too many entrenched technologies for the industry to allow such a mandate to happen.
The antineutron is not an elementary particle. It is composed of three anti-quarks. Each antimatter quark differs from its matter counterpart by only a reversed charge, but they do not combine to form a perfect counterpart to the neutron.
But you're right -- the difference in the anti-neutron might be enough to give antimatter some slight differences. We can account for those. The exciting differences would be any we didn't anticipate.
No, you are correct. The only difference we *expect* to see from anti-matter is that the electrical charge is reversed. The mass, spin states, etc. should all be the same.
What the scientists are looking for is the slim chance that anti-matter is different in some way. That would be exciting, because it would tell us something new.
Corporations try to steal your rights because it works until those contracts are challenged. And sometimes the challenge never comes.
The TSA procedures are the same. They'll go as far as they can go until a court challenge tells them to stop. They'll take as many of your rights as you allow them to. We're only noticing it now because they're near the end of our patience and trust.
Slashdot Mirror
It's possible his estate gave the skull back to the CIA. All I know that in 1996 he kept the skull in his living room on a nice wooden stand.
When listing robotic and cyborg animals from the cold war era, let's not forget poor Acoustic Kitty.
Some people might say that it was a myth, but one of the people on the project was my boss in the 1990s and he showed me a souvenir. Yes, I have held the skull of Acoustic Kitty in my hands. It had fine channels engraved in the bone so that the microphone wires would not cause bumps under the skin. The detail work was impressive, even more so when you realize that the cat lived through the operation.
My boss also told me how he was present on Acoustic Kitty's first and only mission. The poor thing was kidnapped from an ambassador's home and put through hellish surgery, including installation of batteries that were destined to kill it after a few months. Then they released it across the street so that it would walk back into the house and begin to spy on its owner. Can you blame it for jumping under the tires of a taxicab? 20 million dollars and months of work, down the drain.
My old boss is dead now. Sometimes I wonder what happened to AK's skull. It should be placed in the Smithsonian, as a visible reminder that some experiments just should not be done.
I don't know. Huffington Post and DailyKos were the two big attempts of the left wing to create their own "viral" websites. The end result's been a lot of hate speech, a whole lot of banned commentariat, and very little if anything accomplished.
I'd say that turning a $1 million investment into a $315 million buyout is one hell of an accomplishment.
I don't see this as someone making light of a bad situation. I see it more as an expression of capitalism -- 'Someone's gotta make money off this'.
With that in mind, there's a lot of analogues to Cantor and Seagal, who in 1994 launched the first mass Usenet spam. In hindsight it was surprising that nobody thought to do it before them. If you have a bunch of people talking in a public, unmoderated forum with a specific topic, why not (aside from good manners) drop advertisements on those people?
Twitter is now where Usenet was in 1994 -- lots of people, talking in public, unmoderated 'hash tag' discussion threads. Of course people are going to spam those threads with ads. There will be outrage over it, but if it proves profitable it'll become more prevalent. Spam could potentially flood the signal out of some long-standing hash tag discussions. If that happens, Twitter will go the way of Usenet.
Kenneth Cole is just the first person in Twitter's upcoming Eternal September. Don't hate him, he or someone like him was fated to appear eventually.
But that's the reality.
Yes, for high-end manufacturing, we can compete with skilled, well-paid workers in Germany or Japan or wherever. But that's not the bulk of international trade. The vast majority of trade is in low-end manufacturing -- clothing and shoes and childrens' toys. Those objects are manufactured by 6 year olds working for twenty cents a day. There's no way we can compete with that without dismantling our middle class and handing the country over to the oligarchs.
Can we base an economy as large as ours on just high-end manufacturing? Can we offer some low-end item that's innovative enough that it can be produced by our unskilled workers yet can't be replicated in Singapore or China? Or should we accept that we're a western nation and enact socialistic safeguards to protect the health and jobs of our middle class like they do in Germany?
We can be like Singapore, or we can be like Germany. For decades America has tried to split the difference and stay in the middle between those two extremes, but we can no longer compete with half-assed capitalism and half-assed socialism. We're going to have to choose one or the other.
2012 will be when they release the first official patch that makes the game playable. *Then* the world will end.
Not all geeks are computer geeks. I'm a physics geek myself, so I can run an experiment to see if something is true or not, which means that P/NP problems are alien to me. Fascinating approach, though.
Isn't "choosing to stay on earth" a suicide mission?
Everything is a suicide mission. None of us gets out of this universe alive.
The question is how to die in a way that means something. A trip to Mars is a good answer for that.
An appropriate filter being approx. 0.6 AU of hard vacuum.
Anarchy Online was infamous for having European sensibilities, and because of that they had anatomically correct character models. You could get quite a view by using a 'bend over' emote on a character that was wearing a skirt. The animals were anatomically accurate also.
All you'd need for a Mature MMO would be to take the Anarchy Online engine and give the players the ability to import animations. It would be like Second Life with skill progressions. And you'd get ridiculed out of the industry.
One of my favorite teachers in high school told us a story about how he managed to be fired from a job instead of quitting it. The dress code required pants, a shirt, jacket and tie. He sewed himself an outfit of those using transparent plastic. He was following the required dress to the letter while still proudly showing his underwear and bare chest.
My lord, a handful of comments and already I've seen two comparisons to Hitler. That is pathetic, even by Slashdot standards. Why the vitriol?
You have to ask? Facebook is a social site. This is Slashdot, a nerd site. Nerds are not known for being social or for valuing social skills.
It's like asking a Tyrannosaurus to get excited about Time's pick for 'Best Vegetarian Recipe'. He doesn't understand it or want anything to do with it, but if you force him to discuss it he'll roar a lot.
That is like saying when a site gets slashdotted, there is a central intelligence with charisma behind it. It's just a bunch of people who want to jump on the bandwagon and cause trouble for something they think is a good cause.
But that is a central, group intelligence with persuasive power.
Don't confuse what I'm saying. I am not suggesting there's one Svengali-like figure behind either Anonymous or Slashdot. I am saying that there is a zeitgeist -- a bandwagon -- that has coercive power over the group. No one person is in control of that zeitgeist.
Slashdot readers collectively decide what is attractive to them. The editors then follow that decision and post links to sites that become slashdotted. It's not malicious, it's human nature, a mob mentality but one that is directed and that is enabled by a central group of elites. But the elites have to play to the will of the masses or the masses won't support their site.
Anonymous seems to work in the same way. The group decides on an attractive course of action. Elite individuals -- the ones in charge of the botnets -- then enable the group to take that action. The elites cannot work against the will of the people, and no one person has the power to both decide and enable.
Slashdot and Anonymous, looked at from a sociological perspective, are exactly the same. The elites aren't in charge, they're just enablers. All that matters is what the group finds persuasive...and since groupthink is self-reinforcing, this implies a hivemind with coercive charisma.
As a sociological study this could be fascinating, if everyone involved doesn't end up in jail first.
No, the most successful part is that a handful of hackers have convinced thousands of script kiddies to willingly slave their PCs to a botnet for the express purpose of breaking the law.
That indicates a central intelligence with charisma. It may be a group intelligence, but there's something there that is irresistable to disillusioned youths.
Now, now, let's not get up in arms about this. Lucas develops new filmmaking technology, then other directors put it to good use.
This tech could lead the way to a live-action Futurama. Those heads in jars are going to have to be CGI, might as well make them look as good as possible. And we need to perfect the technology so that Zoidberg isn't as annoying as Jar-Jar.
When someone steps in dogshit and tracks it all over the living room, you blame them, not the dog.
That's what conservatives are doing. There's no denying that Assange made a mess and he deserves the blame for that, but when conservatives ratchet up the blame to threats of assassination and trials for espionage then they deserve to be ridiculed too.
::facepalm::
If what's being reported is accurate, they've discovered a life form whose DNA was previously thought to be completely, unequivocally, no-exceptions impossible. Not just "we haven't found it", but impossible.
HOW IS THAT NOT AWESOME???
It's not awesome because we can't eat it, ride it, screw it or go to war with it.
Gimme a carbon-(and phosphorous)-based alien lifeform that we can rally against as they attack our cities anyday. If it looks like Morena Baccarin, that's a bonus.
Mary had a little lamb, its fleece was slightly grey,
It didn't have a father, just some borrowed DNA.
It sort of had a mother, though the ovum was on loan,
It was not so much a lambkin, as a little lamby clone.
And soon it had a fellow clone, and soon it had some more,
They followed her to school one day, all cramming through the door.
It made the children laugh and sing, the teachers found it droll,
There were too many lamby clones, for Mary to control.
No other could control the sheep; their programs didn't vary,
So the scientists resolved it all by simply cloning Mary.
But now they feel quite sheepish, those scientists unwary,
One problem solved! But what to do, with Mary, Mary, Mary...
-- by Anonymous (it's not mine; the writer's name is forgotten.)
Well, to her credit, she has a lot of followers.
Why is this to her credit? Bozo the Clown had a lot of followers. Pauly Shore has a lot of followers. Koko the Gorilla has a lot of followers. I still wouldn't prop any of them up as an electable politician, except maybe the gorilla.
Now add to that merger a chair, toilet, and sex robot and you'll have office equipment that will really sell.
The same way I feel about the sun rising every day: I assume it's been happening for a long, long time.
Will this jamming technology stop you from calling for help after an accident? Will you have to get out of your car to make a call if your car breaks down? How about calling the police when you see a crime or a reckless driver? Is it incompatible with OnStar, LoJack, and other auto tracking devices? Will it break GPS navigation? If jamming phones becomes mandatory, will all existing cars have to be retrofitted to stay street legal?
Despite the transportation secretary's wet dreams, this will never, ever happen. It would be too much of an inconvenience and destroy too many entrenched technologies for the industry to allow such a mandate to happen.
The antineutron is not an elementary particle. It is composed of three anti-quarks. Each antimatter quark differs from its matter counterpart by only a reversed charge, but they do not combine to form a perfect counterpart to the neutron.
But you're right -- the difference in the anti-neutron might be enough to give antimatter some slight differences. We can account for those. The exciting differences would be any we didn't anticipate.
No, you are correct. The only difference we *expect* to see from anti-matter is that the electrical charge is reversed. The mass, spin states, etc. should all be the same.
What the scientists are looking for is the slim chance that anti-matter is different in some way. That would be exciting, because it would tell us something new.
Corporations try to steal your rights because it works until those contracts are challenged. And sometimes the challenge never comes.
The TSA procedures are the same. They'll go as far as they can go until a court challenge tells them to stop. They'll take as many of your rights as you allow them to. We're only noticing it now because they're near the end of our patience and trust.