Re Ian M Banks, I have all his novels including the Culture series, and I think they're great. However, why do you call that a utopia? In many ways, Mankind there is a pet of the machines, well looked after but largely ignored.
Well, I suppose it's up to the reader to decide whether it's a utopia or not. Iain describes it as a utopia, so I'm going by his view:)
Oh yeah and it's Iain, not Ian. He publishes sci-fi under Iain and his other novels under Ian. For no particular reason apparently.
INAXenobioligist, but I've always thought that any intelligent alien life would quite likely be similar to us, despite the underlying biology. Two locomotive limbs, two manipulative limbs and most of the sense organs located at the top of the body for greatest efficiency. It's hard to think of a more advantageous setup.
Intelligence would probably come from smaller creatures; ie our size. Any bigger and they'd have to spend most of their time eating (and so not leave time for investigating monoliths, tying knots etc.); any smaller and their brains would be inadequate.
Being omnivorous would probably help. Tree climbing is an obvious pathway to manipulative limbs, so they could even have a similar evolutionary heritage. Of course, there would be differences, like fur, unusual facial arrangements, significant physiological changes etc. Nevertheless, IMHO any life-form evolving on a rocky planet anything like Earth would come to resemble us superficially.
...or else we will no longer be the dominant intelligence on this planet. And that we cannot possibly countenance.
Why not? It depends on whether you consider the goals of the human race to be self-advancement or individual happiness. Iain M Banks explores this quite well in his Culture novels; if you live in a utopia, why try to emulate machines that can think better than you can?
The future of our species is a mechanical/electronic one. Except maybe for those who want to be mere biological retro pets in the menagerie of machine intelligences.
I imagine a future where, rather than enhancing our minds (wouldn't that make us machines anyway? human vs machine intelligence, hmm), we would simply be able to integrate our minds with machine intelligence. You don't have enough computing power to come up with the optimum coding solution to a problem? Simply access the computer with your mind and initialise a process with defined parameters to solve it. The distinction would be blurred.
Britain is currently being governed by the Labour party, which is officially a socialist party. They even sing The Red Flag at party conferences. And like you point out, even though we have a socialist government, we have a free press, which rather sinks your argument.
Re:Threat to "secret ballot"?
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Online Voting?
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I was actually talking about someone actually looking over your shoulder as you voted.
I've been playing Deus Ex (surely it should be Deus Ex Machina?) recently, and it really is a superb game. One of the best games ever. So... who is Spector? How did I not hear about him all these years? What else did he do?
Re:A great step in the right direction
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If someone can't even be bothered to walk down to a polling station to vote, I don't think s/he has the intelligence to understand the issues anyway. I'm not sure we/should/ make it any easier for people to vote anyway. This is also the reason why I'm against fines for people who don't vote.
Threat to "secret ballot"?
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Online Voting?
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Is online voting threatening the right to vote by secret ballot at all? I mean, you are in a way giving it up voluntarily (by doing it from your computer rather than a private booth) but does anyone else see a situation in (say) a right-wing dominated workplace where someone says "OK, it's lunchtime, lets all vote for the 'Fascist Party' on the work's computer?" Obviously there would be social pressures for someone to vote in the same way as their peers as anyone declining to vote in private would get comments like "Oh! Going to vote for THE COMMIES then, are you?"
Common symptoms include much higher taxes, more government regulation, and more services provided to the citizen by the state.
Whilst the presence of the above does tend to indicate the presence of a more socialistic government, the strength of 'freedom of speech' laws is incidental to the socio-economic[1] model.
But it is naive to say that Europe should "get over it" in reference (even by symbolic proxy) to the holocaust. Nobody should "get over it"; it should be a part of our collective human conscious for all eternity as a reminder of the barbarism that we are capable of. Particularly when we let others decide our thoughts and morals and ethics.
Definitely. I'm still amazed that it actually happened. Given that two generations don't come up with much genetic change, I can only presume that most of us would go along with the holocaust under the same circumstances. Sobering.
SETTLEMENT Under the "stipulated judgment" filed with the court, Xpics Publishing and its principals, Mario G. Carmona and Brian M. Shuster, did not admit to any violations of the law.
Eh? If blatant stealing isn't a violation of the law, I don't know what is. It could hardly have been a more blatant "violation of the law" if he had knocked an old lady's teeth out with a cricket bat.
He is quite old and looking very frail. It wouldn't surprise me at all, actually. I read one book with his name on it (something about an earthquake IIRC) and he virtually admitted as much in thr foreword - he came up with the idea, or edited it or something. (the book was arse BTW). Wasn't the last thing he wrote on his own (not co-authored) 3001? I don't think it was a coincidence that it was about a third the length of the prequels.
Just because Napster users buy more music than non-Napster users doesn't mean that they aren't buying less music than before.
We seem to have cause and effect mixed up: people who buy a lot of music are more likely to use Napster than those who don't. I don't think it works the other way round. Whichever way you look at it, the music companies are going to lose money through Napster and (under present conditions) the artists too.
That might not be necessarily a bad thing, but I don't think many people seriously doubt it's happening.
The metric system is not "system internationale", it's "the metric system". Never heard it called system internationale before...
English != British
Although the Americans have been the major developers of the internet, lots of countries have been involded, particularly in recent years (eg WWW invented by T B-L). Besides, having one country follow a different system to the others breaks the model.
I'm just starting Perl (~chap#2 O'Reilly) and I don't have a clue what your Perl statement says. Mind you, I could have a stab at the French translation: a phrase in French is difficult to translate in English - and my French is worse than my Perl:)
How about a little experiment: let's have an experienced Perl hacker write a paragraph in obfuscated Perl and also a paragraph of almost random alphanumerics. Then we could have a straw poll of non Perl-learners to see if they can recognise which is which:)
Does spam actually work?
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Is it possible to actually sell stuff through spam drops? Is there any evidence that anyone can actually make cash through it? It seems to me that almost all the spam I get is just offers for buying more spam lists.
I can't understand why anyone would actually buy anything from a stranger emailing them with a lying subject line who is therefore already establishing themself as completely unprincipled. Has anyone on/. actually bought anything from a spam offer? Did you get what you paid for? Just curious. I find it hard to believe that any of the offers are genuine...
Well I'm not going to go outside and punch some old ladies in the face to relieve my frustration or anything, but it would be nice to see the media doing a little bit of research now and again.
What right does that give us to restrict access to violent videogames? Imagine if someone produced a game where the object was to rape as many children as possible before taking their corpses back to your house and dismembering them? Most people would draw the line before that point; thing is, everyone draws it in different places. Any age restriction is going to be arbitary, but that doesn't necessarily mean it's a bad thing.
I'll just dream for a second... you could have a little checkbox in Google to ignore *.nom... would make searches 100* (approx) more productive. Aaah....
Err, back to reality. How would you enforce this? Would/., for eg be a homepage? Probably not, but how about a homepage with a forum? Quite hard to decide, and who's going to do the deciding? You could do it voluntarily I suppose, but all the domains would be snapped up by spammers and porn redirect sites.
What pisses me off is when the media use the term "bug" to mean illness (at least here in the UK). Like "the meningitus bug" or whatever. I assume it's because the journalists can't get themselves off their fat arses to look up whether it's a virus or bacteria or whatever.
Slashdot Mirror
Re Ian M Banks, I have all his novels including the Culture series, and I think they're great. However, why do you call that a utopia? In many ways, Mankind there is a pet of the machines, well looked after but largely ignored.
:)
Well, I suppose it's up to the reader to decide whether it's a utopia or not. Iain describes it as a utopia, so I'm going by his view
Oh yeah and it's Iain, not Ian. He publishes sci-fi under Iain and his other novels under Ian. For no particular reason apparently.
INAXenobioligist, but I've always thought that any intelligent alien life would quite likely be similar to us, despite the underlying biology. Two locomotive limbs, two manipulative limbs and most of the sense organs located at the top of the body for greatest efficiency. It's hard to think of a more advantageous setup.
Intelligence would probably come from smaller creatures; ie our size. Any bigger and they'd have to spend most of their time eating (and so not leave time for investigating monoliths, tying knots etc.); any smaller and their brains would be inadequate.
Being omnivorous would probably help. Tree climbing is an obvious pathway to manipulative limbs, so they could even have a similar evolutionary heritage. Of course, there would be differences, like fur, unusual facial arrangements, significant physiological changes etc. Nevertheless, IMHO any life-form evolving on a rocky planet anything like Earth would come to resemble us superficially.
...or else we will no longer be the dominant intelligence on this planet. And that we cannot possibly countenance.
Why not? It depends on whether you consider the goals of the human race to be self-advancement or individual happiness. Iain M Banks explores this quite well in his Culture novels; if you live in a utopia, why try to emulate machines that can think better than you can?
The future of our species is a mechanical/electronic one. Except maybe for those who want to be mere biological retro pets in the menagerie of machine intelligences.
I imagine a future where, rather than enhancing our minds (wouldn't that make us machines anyway? human vs machine intelligence, hmm), we would simply be able to integrate our minds with machine intelligence. You don't have enough computing power to come up with the optimum coding solution to a problem? Simply access the computer with your mind and initialise a process with defined parameters to solve it. The distinction would be blurred.
I'm sorry, I appear to be drunk.
I thought the joke was:
...
Q: What do you call someone who speaks one language?
A: English
Q: What do you call someone who speaks no language?
A: American
Britain is currently being governed by the Labour party, which is officially a socialist party. They even sing The Red Flag at party conferences. And like you point out, even though we have a socialist government, we have a free press, which rather sinks your argument.
I was actually talking about someone actually looking over your shoulder as you voted.
I've been playing Deus Ex (surely it should be Deus Ex Machina?) recently, and it really is a superb game. One of the best games ever. So... who is Spector? How did I not hear about him all these years? What else did he do?
If someone can't even be bothered to walk down to a polling station to vote, I don't think s/he has the intelligence to understand the issues anyway. I'm not sure we /should/ make it any easier for people to vote anyway. This is also the reason why I'm against fines for people who don't vote.
Is online voting threatening the right to vote by secret ballot at all? I mean, you are in a way giving it up voluntarily (by doing it from your computer rather than a private booth) but does anyone else see a situation in (say) a right-wing dominated workplace where someone says "OK, it's lunchtime, lets all vote for the 'Fascist Party' on the work's computer?" Obviously there would be social pressures for someone to vote in the same way as their peers as anyone declining to vote in private would get comments like "Oh! Going to vote for THE COMMIES then, are you?"
Common symptoms include much higher taxes, more government regulation, and more services provided to the citizen by the state.
Whilst the presence of the above does tend to indicate the presence of a more socialistic government, the strength of 'freedom of speech' laws is incidental to the socio-economic[1] model.
[1]I've always wanted to say that.
But it is naive to say that Europe should "get over it" in reference (even by symbolic proxy) to the holocaust. Nobody should "get over it"; it should be a part of our collective human conscious for all eternity as a reminder of the barbarism that we are capable of. Particularly when we let others decide our thoughts and morals and ethics.
Definitely. I'm still amazed that it actually happened. Given that two generations don't come up with much genetic change, I can only presume that most of us would go along with the holocaust under the same circumstances. Sobering.
Given all your comments about anti-semitism, can I draw your attention to this sentence:
...a country[Israel] of people which hates all things not Jewish.
I do not believe it is a concidence that there is a law against anti-semitism in a country of people which hates all things not french.
Shall we insert "Jewish" into that sentence?
Would that be anti-semetic? Can you see the irony?
Even more ironically, it was just below the statement which made most sense...
That is, the French should not need the help of their government to understand why Anti-Semitism and racism is ridiculious and wrong.
...which I happen to agree with.
But at least one planet has been detected visually.
SETTLEMENT
Under the "stipulated judgment" filed with the court, Xpics Publishing and its principals, Mario G. Carmona and Brian M. Shuster, did not admit to any violations of the law.
Eh? If blatant stealing isn't a violation of the law, I don't know what is. It could hardly have been a more blatant "violation of the law" if he had knocked an old lady's teeth out with a cricket bat.
He is quite old and looking very frail. It wouldn't surprise me at all, actually. I read one book with his name on it (something about an earthquake IIRC) and he virtually admitted as much in thr foreword - he came up with the idea, or edited it or something. (the book was arse BTW). Wasn't the last thing he wrote on his own (not co-authored) 3001? I don't think it was a coincidence that it was about a third the length of the prequels.
Just because Napster users buy more music than non-Napster users doesn't mean that they aren't buying less music than before.
We seem to have cause and effect mixed up: people who buy a lot of music are more likely to use Napster than those who don't. I don't think it works the other way round. Whichever way you look at it, the music companies are going to lose money through Napster and (under present conditions) the artists too.
That might not be necessarily a bad thing, but I don't think many people seriously doubt it's happening.
Presumably, it would be co.us, just like co.uk and all the others. Not sure why co and not com, though. Anyone?
My choice would be to have the tld on the basis of the language used in the site: eg, slashdot.eng & so on
I'm just starting Perl (~chap#2 O'Reilly) and I don't have a clue what your Perl statement says. Mind you, I could have a stab at the French translation: a phrase in French is difficult to translate in English - and my French is worse than my Perl :)
:)
How about a little experiment: let's have an experienced Perl hacker write a paragraph in obfuscated Perl and also a paragraph of almost random alphanumerics. Then we could have a straw poll of non Perl-learners to see if they can recognise which is which
Is it possible to actually sell stuff through spam drops? Is there any evidence that anyone can actually make cash through it? It seems to me that almost all the spam I get is just offers for buying more spam lists.
/. actually bought anything from a spam offer? Did you get what you paid for? Just curious. I find it hard to believe that any of the offers are genuine...
I can't understand why anyone would actually buy anything from a stranger emailing them with a lying subject line who is therefore already establishing themself as completely unprincipled. Has anyone on
Well I'm not going to go outside and punch some old ladies in the face to relieve my frustration or anything, but it would be nice to see the media doing a little bit of research now and again.
What right does that give us to restrict access to violent videogames? Imagine if someone produced a game where the object was to rape as many children as possible before taking their corpses back to your house and dismembering them? Most people would draw the line before that point; thing is, everyone draws it in different places. Any age restriction is going to be arbitary, but that doesn't necessarily mean it's a bad thing.
I'll just dream for a second... you could have a little checkbox in Google to ignore *.nom ... would make searches 100* (approx) more productive. Aaah....
/., for eg be a homepage? Probably not, but how about a homepage with a forum? Quite hard to decide, and who's going to do the deciding? You could do it voluntarily I suppose, but all the domains would be snapped up by spammers and porn redirect sites.
Err, back to reality. How would you enforce this? Would
What pisses me off is when the media use the term "bug" to mean illness (at least here in the UK). Like "the meningitus bug" or whatever. I assume it's because the journalists can't get themselves off their fat arses to look up whether it's a virus or bacteria or whatever.