While I certainly agree that there are many issues that we could be working on, I don't see the harm in adding this to the list. As you said:
Where is the warming? In "#$"#$ cold places! There are lots of benefits to global warming that offset the costs
Two of those cold places happen to be the poles. There's lots of ice there. Lots. I read somewhere that 20% of humans live in coastal areas. That's a lot of people who'll need new homes if all that ice melts. Of course, inland peoples will not be happy about the influx. So, we end up with political, economic, and social collapse and global civil war. Sounds like fun. Maybe we ought to at least think about it for a minute or two?
When I was about 9 years old, my family was very poor. We lived in an old two-story farmhouse where you could feel the wind in the bathroom because it was pretty much just some boards tossed up around an old porch. Our only heat was from a stove. One year things got so bad that we couldn't buy firewood and we were walking a mile or so to the woods to get it. Then, a friend of my parents rolled up in his old pickup on christmas eve, said, "Ho ho ho! You've been very naughty!", and proceeded to dump half a ton of coal in our backyard. Being warm for the rest of the winter was the best present ever. So, don't knock coal.:)
IANAM (I Am Not A Mechanic), but could the problem have been in the car's computer? Perhaps a bug that is temporarily fixed by rebooting? If that's the case, it could be very hard to track down and would also explain why they didn't find anything.
It seems a bit unrealistic that he would endanger his life for this. Wait.. not unrealistic. Irrational maybe. Oh, and he's a human. Nevermind.
I Am Not A Linguist, but I once heard (and it makes sense to me) that "jerry-rig" was coined in WWII as a disparagement of German engineering. Gerry-rig, perhaps? Weren't the Germans called Gerries like the Japanese were called Japs?
While I agree that THX-1138 is obviously inspired by Brave New World, I think calling it a "ripoff" is a bit harsh. That implies that he just ganked the plot and made a few bucks. What it is, is a reworking of some of the same themes within a different medium. That's perfectly legitimate and valuable in many cases.
THX-1138 is also one of a depressingly few science fiction movies that isn't watered-down drivel with some special effects thrown in. I highly recommend it.
My first reaction was exactly the opposite. Even the article's author didn't catch on it seemed. He said was a project for which people didn't have a commercial use yet. But, isn't it obvious that one would immediately have to turn the service off to avoid spam? Every time you walked by any business your phone would ding and say "Big Macs only 99c" or something. The only time it would be moderately useful would be in residential districts. Of course, then you'd just get the vulgar comments every 2 feet.
Perhaps it could be set up so you'd only see comments from certain groups or something? You could subscribe to the city run tourist comments to see information on landmarks. You could allow guests to read your directions, too. "Turn right here."
It sounds cool, but there'd have to be some kind of structure to make it useful.
Speaking of blaming murders, suicides, and littering on Doom... Have they moved on yet? I mean, Doom is pretty old at this point. It can't possibly be creating all that much havoc anymore. Wouldn't it be refreshing to see some deaths blamed on Unreal Tournament or something?
You can refuse to show your ID to a cop in some circumstances. As I understand it, if you are not driving and the police do not have "reasonable suspicion" that you have committed a crime, then you are free to say no.
The application of Tex. Penal Code Ann., Tit. 8, 38.02 (1974), to detain appellant and require him to identify himself violated the Fourth Amendment because the officers lacked any reasonable suspicion to believe appellant was engaged or had engaged in criminal conduct. 3 Accordingly, appellant may not be punished for refusing to identify himself, and the conviction is Reversed.
Just a few days ago I found a DVD of the 1981 film version in a video store. Of course, I immediately grabbed it. The special effects and graphics are horrible but it's still Hitchhiker's.. I enjoyed it immensely.
I bring this up because the original has a ton of narration (accompanied by bad graphics) but, hell, it could be a starfield screensaver with some guy reading the entire text in the background and I would still love it. I think it's too good of a book to be ruined by a change of medium. It's been a radio show, a book, a film, an Infocom text-adventure game, and who knows what else. There's a reason for that...
An Altavista server which fell through a timewarp from 10,000 years in the future describes the legal department of SCO as "a bunch of mindless jerks who were first against the wall when the revolution came."
A few years ago I took a class on the history of jazz. At one point, the instructor mentioned that around the turn of the century (err.. the other one.. 19th->20th), artists were up in arms about the distribution of sheet music. After all, if people could play the songs at home, why would they go to concerts?
Change is bad. It makes us think. Thinking is hard.
I know almost nothing about the subject of AI, but this topic sparked my curiousity. If we were to build a 10000000 teraflop computer, wouldn't it still just be a really, really fast calculator? In order to create a 'thinking' machine or even a reasonable fraud, won't we have to come up with some new algorithms? I don't the the above-mentioned machine would spontaneously develop consciousness in the middle of calculating nuclear reactions.
The human brain is far better than any computer at interpreting text, for instance. Is that because the human brain is so fast, or because the text-recognition software on computers sucks?
Judgement seems a harsh word, but your opinion of something is still a form of judgement in your own mind, a decision to think a certain way about something.
That's an excellent point. I guess I do judge Fischer, and he doesn't come out well. In fact, I'm not even sure I would go so far as to be nice to him.. except that I'd want to convince him to play me so I could say, "I lost to Fischer."
I used the wrong word. What I meant was that we should not overly criticize someone for merely being a troll in a topic they know little about. Just ignore them. It's sort of like getting angry at Britney Spears for her screwed up views on the ethics of Biochemistry. (it's just an example. i don't know that she has any views on biochem. or anything else, for that matter.)
As a chess player? Certainly. As an example of a well-balanced and decent human being? Of course not. I don't now and I am not a Jew. Did you even read my whole post?
What does it "pay" to be the 500th Grandmaster at chess? Might this have something to do with peoples lack of interested in it?
It depends partly on where you are from. It is possible to make a decent living as an International Master (the next step down) or even lower, just by playing lots of tournaments with cash prizes. But, it is easier in certain countries. Communist Russia had a huge program devoted to chess. Their grandmasters didn't have to worry about a thing (other than the KGB being worried about people travelling to the West for tournaments). In the US, part of one's dues to the US Chess Federation goes to buy health insurance for our grandmasters. That's why Fischer's win against Spassky in '72 was so incredible. Basically, one man with relatively little support took down the best the Russian chess organization could send. Other than Fischer the Russians have owned the World Championship since at least the '60s.
I have played chess for years. Ever since I was a kid and received my first chess book as a gift, "Bobby Fischer Teaches Chess", I have idolized Fischer. I have gone over his games over and over. They are amazing.
Of course, he has problems. Many geniuses, and by extension, chess grandmasters, have severe psychological issues. I read Karpov's autobiography (World Champion 75-85) and it is filled with stories of both genius and complete emotional immaturity. Sometimes I felt like I was reading about the antics at a playground.
One doesn't become a grandmaster overnight. Generally, if you are not on your way by your teens, you will never make it. It involves studying chess every day for years and years. There is a reason there are less than 500 in the world. As a result of their studies, however, I think many miss out on the basic socialization acquired by most people. They would probably make the average Slashdot reader look like a well-adjusted socialite.
Now, I am not trying to make excuses for Fischer's comments. I'm just trying to put them in perspective. Try not to judge him too harshly for his screwed up views on politics and society. He's not exactly an expert on either. He's an idiot, in fact.
I still idolize Fischer, but not for anything but his chess. That is quite enough for me. He created works of art in his games that will be studied for as long as people play the game.
This is not attempting to be another law, and thereby conflicting with the DMCA. It ammends the DMCA..
"Section 5 makes the necessary changes to the DMCA to restore the historic balance in U.S. copyright law."
You can't (AFAIK) make changes to law without going through the process of sponsoring another bill, etc.. It doesn't mean we will have two sets of laws, only that the originals will be changed. They do not want to repeal the entire DMCA, just correct it.
Re:what every library needs is...
on
Libraries Are 31337
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Using digital copies is somewhat dangerous, IMHO. One of the purposes of libraries is simply to warehouse information. If they were to emphasize the digital copies and not the hardcopy, eventually the digital versions would degrade or the media would become obsolete. Imagine going to your local library to find a book and discovering that they only have it on 8.5" floppy disks. Obviously files could be copied but it would require constant upkeep. Paper, on the other hand, lasts MUCH longer. Personally, I am far more concerned about the information existing than in ease of access..
That is exactly why the humans are still competitive. How does a computer decide what is or is not productive? A move that hangs one's queen may seem unproductive unless you see the forced mate afterwards. Therefore, the computer must analyze every possible move whereas humans can easily ignore whole branches.
Of course this means that humans (especially me) can easily miss very important moves as well..
The whole thing seems like Talsorian's Cyberpunk 2020 is coming to pass. If this goes much farther, companies will have teams of geeks trying to shut down the competition.. then maybe we can move on to corporate armies and such. Weee!
Re:I don't think so...
on
Social Robot?
·
· Score: 1
good try but you went too far. not only do i not believe in girls who run linux, i don't believe any linux geek has two girlfriends..:P
Slashdot Mirror
While I certainly agree that there are many issues that we could be working on, I don't see the harm in adding this to the list. As you said:
Where is the warming? In "#$"#$ cold places! There are lots of benefits to global warming that offset the costs
Two of those cold places happen to be the poles. There's lots of ice there. Lots. I read somewhere that 20% of humans live in coastal areas. That's a lot of people who'll need new homes if all that ice melts. Of course, inland peoples will not be happy about the influx. So, we end up with political, economic, and social collapse and global civil war. Sounds like fun. Maybe we ought to at least think about it for a minute or two?
"This new protocol promises to deliver possible speed up to 100Mbit/s transfer rates."
Why don't you just say "doesn't"?
So you're saying I should give up on my tech support job ever coming back to the states?
Damn these people!
I didn't play with the coal, but I did burn it...
:)
When I was about 9 years old, my family was very poor. We lived in an old two-story farmhouse where you could feel the wind in the bathroom because it was pretty much just some boards tossed up around an old porch. Our only heat was from a stove. One year things got so bad that we couldn't buy firewood and we were walking a mile or so to the woods to get it. Then, a friend of my parents rolled up in his old pickup on christmas eve, said, "Ho ho ho! You've been very naughty!", and proceeded to dump half a ton of coal in our backyard. Being warm for the rest of the winter was the best present ever. So, don't knock coal.
IANAM (I Am Not A Mechanic), but could the problem have been in the car's computer? Perhaps a bug that is temporarily fixed by rebooting? If that's the case, it could be very hard to track down and would also explain why they didn't find anything.
It seems a bit unrealistic that he would endanger his life for this. Wait.. not unrealistic. Irrational maybe. Oh, and he's a human. Nevermind.
I Am Not A Linguist, but I once heard (and it makes sense to me) that "jerry-rig" was coined in WWII as a disparagement of German engineering. Gerry-rig, perhaps? Weren't the Germans called Gerries like the Japanese were called Japs?
While I agree that THX-1138 is obviously inspired by Brave New World, I think calling it a "ripoff" is a bit harsh. That implies that he just ganked the plot and made a few bucks. What it is, is a reworking of some of the same themes within a different medium. That's perfectly legitimate and valuable in many cases.
THX-1138 is also one of a depressingly few science fiction movies that isn't watered-down drivel with some special effects thrown in. I highly recommend it.
My first reaction was exactly the opposite. Even the article's author didn't catch on it seemed. He said was a project for which people didn't have a commercial use yet. But, isn't it obvious that one would immediately have to turn the service off to avoid spam? Every time you walked by any business your phone would ding and say "Big Macs only 99c" or something. The only time it would be moderately useful would be in residential districts. Of course, then you'd just get the vulgar comments every 2 feet.
Perhaps it could be set up so you'd only see comments from certain groups or something? You could subscribe to the city run tourist comments to see information on landmarks. You could allow guests to read your directions, too. "Turn right here."
It sounds cool, but there'd have to be some kind of structure to make it useful.
Speaking of blaming murders, suicides, and littering on Doom... Have they moved on yet? I mean, Doom is pretty old at this point. It can't possibly be creating all that much havoc anymore. Wouldn't it be refreshing to see some deaths blamed on Unreal Tournament or something?
You can refuse to show your ID to a cop in some circumstances. As I understand it, if you are not driving and the police do not have "reasonable suspicion" that you have committed a crime, then you are free to say no.
From Brown vs Texas:
</IANAL>
Just a few days ago I found a DVD of the 1981 film version in a video store. Of course, I immediately grabbed it. The special effects and graphics are horrible but it's still Hitchhiker's.. I enjoyed it immensely.
I bring this up because the original has a ton of narration (accompanied by bad graphics) but, hell, it could be a starfield screensaver with some guy reading the entire text in the background and I would still love it. I think it's too good of a book to be ruined by a change of medium. It's been a radio show, a book, a film, an Infocom text-adventure game, and who knows what else. There's a reason for that...
An Altavista server which fell through a timewarp from 10,000 years in the future describes the legal department of SCO as "a bunch of mindless jerks who were first against the wall when the revolution came."
A few years ago I took a class on the history of jazz. At one point, the instructor mentioned that around the turn of the century (err.. the other one.. 19th->20th), artists were up in arms about the distribution of sheet music. After all, if people could play the songs at home, why would they go to concerts?
Change is bad. It makes us think. Thinking is hard.
I know almost nothing about the subject of AI, but this topic sparked my curiousity. If we were to build a 10000000 teraflop computer, wouldn't it still just be a really, really fast calculator? In order to create a 'thinking' machine or even a reasonable fraud, won't we have to come up with some new algorithms? I don't the the above-mentioned machine would spontaneously develop consciousness in the middle of calculating nuclear reactions.
The human brain is far better than any computer at interpreting text, for instance. Is that because the human brain is so fast, or because the text-recognition software on computers sucks?
Judgement seems a harsh word, but your opinion of something is still a form of judgement in your own mind, a decision to think a certain way about something.
That's an excellent point. I guess I do judge Fischer, and he doesn't come out well. In fact, I'm not even sure I would go so far as to be nice to him.. except that I'd want to convince him to play me so I could say, "I lost to Fischer."
I used the wrong word. What I meant was that we should not overly criticize someone for merely being a troll in a topic they know little about. Just ignore them. It's sort of like getting angry at Britney Spears for her screwed up views on the ethics of Biochemistry. (it's just an example. i don't know that she has any views on biochem. or anything else, for that matter.)
would you still idolize him if you were a Jew?
As a chess player? Certainly. As an example of a well-balanced and decent human being? Of course not. I don't now and I am not a Jew. Did you even read my whole post?
What does it "pay" to be the 500th Grandmaster at chess? Might this have something to do with peoples lack of interested in it?
It depends partly on where you are from. It is possible to make a decent living as an International Master (the next step down) or even lower, just by playing lots of tournaments with cash prizes. But, it is easier in certain countries. Communist Russia had a huge program devoted to chess. Their grandmasters didn't have to worry about a thing (other than the KGB being worried about people travelling to the West for tournaments). In the US, part of one's dues to the US Chess Federation goes to buy health insurance for our grandmasters. That's why Fischer's win against Spassky in '72 was so incredible. Basically, one man with relatively little support took down the best the Russian chess organization could send. Other than Fischer the Russians have owned the World Championship since at least the '60s.
I have played chess for years. Ever since I was a kid and received my first chess book as a gift, "Bobby Fischer Teaches Chess", I have idolized Fischer. I have gone over his games over and over. They are amazing.
Of course, he has problems. Many geniuses, and by extension, chess grandmasters, have severe psychological issues. I read Karpov's autobiography (World Champion 75-85) and it is filled with stories of both genius and complete emotional immaturity. Sometimes I felt like I was reading about the antics at a playground.
One doesn't become a grandmaster overnight. Generally, if you are not on your way by your teens, you will never make it. It involves studying chess every day for years and years. There is a reason there are less than 500 in the world. As a result of their studies, however, I think many miss out on the basic socialization acquired by most people. They would probably make the average Slashdot reader look like a well-adjusted socialite.
Now, I am not trying to make excuses for Fischer's comments. I'm just trying to put them in perspective. Try not to judge him too harshly for his screwed up views on politics and society. He's not exactly an expert on either. He's an idiot, in fact.
I still idolize Fischer, but not for anything but his chess. That is quite enough for me. He created works of art in his games that will be studied for as long as people play the game.
This is not attempting to be another law, and thereby conflicting with the DMCA. It ammends the DMCA..
"Section 5 makes the necessary changes to the DMCA to restore the historic balance in U.S. copyright law."
You can't (AFAIK) make changes to law without going through the process of sponsoring another bill, etc.. It doesn't mean we will have two sets of laws, only that the originals will be changed. They do not want to repeal the entire DMCA, just correct it.
Using digital copies is somewhat dangerous, IMHO. One of the purposes of libraries is simply to warehouse information. If they were to emphasize the digital copies and not the hardcopy, eventually the digital versions would degrade or the media would become obsolete. Imagine going to your local library to find a book and discovering that they only have it on 8.5" floppy disks. Obviously files could be copied but it would require constant upkeep. Paper, on the other hand, lasts MUCH longer. Personally, I am far more concerned about the information existing than in ease of access..
Many moves are also "not productive"
That is exactly why the humans are still competitive. How does a computer decide what is or is not productive? A move that hangs one's queen may seem unproductive unless you see the forced mate afterwards. Therefore, the computer must analyze every possible move whereas humans can easily ignore whole branches.
Of course this means that humans (especially me) can easily miss very important moves as well..
The whole thing seems like Talsorian's Cyberpunk 2020 is coming to pass. If this goes much farther, companies will have teams of geeks trying to shut down the competition.. then maybe we can move on to corporate armies and such. Weee!
good try but you went too far. not only do i not believe in girls who run linux, i don't believe any linux geek has two girlfriends.. :P
Next to the wealth of dangerous and or illegal content on the web, copyright seems kinda harmless.
What do you mean? Copyright violations are far worse than kiddie porn. After all, porn doesn't affect a corporation's profits.
When corporations are involved, morality is almost never the issue. Money is.
no kidding.. that was my poor attempt at facetious humor :P