That's actually about the only natural and realistic plot device there is.
Right, the ONLY one, because in the real world men and women hardly interact at all, people are either good or bad, and good/evil is an actual force that can be quantitatively measured, like pressure/vacuum. Too much toward one extreme and we all die!
Speaking of which, I've got to get back to monitoring this Goodevilometer(TM). The President requires hourly updates on the balance of power. Of course he's got his own meter, but the terrorists have been known to miscalibrate it when he's not looking. Heh. Heh. Heh. Stay the course!
Nice job catching the double entendre. I mean it sounds like he's referring to a past event, but really HE IS -- the first part of the sentence! And nobody even had to explain it to you. Just.. bravo!
"A way" already exists, and it's called XSS, or Cross-Site Scripting. It's all a matter of how secure any given "green light" site is, which means the "green light" is borderline worthless, from an anti-phishing standpoint anyway. There are even vulnerabilities which do not require any social engineering, such as a vulnerability in the user reviews section of a business's website, or something similar.
So really, like the padlock "secure" icon (which tells you only that you're on a an encrypted connection, and is meaningless if the target site has been compromised), it's just presenting a false sense of security, while at the same time giving small businesses a small stain on their reputation.
I think it's safe to assume that most taxi drivers do their jobs because it beats being a janitor. It's possible that some drivers are fulfilling a lifelong career goal, but I'm pretty sure most of them are just people who noticed Yellow Cab was hiring that day.
I think you're highly underestimating the processing power requirements, as well as making absurd comparisons such as "mice work ergo can computers work." Aside form failing to define work to any reasonable degree, you're missing an important problem with emulation. Unless the "computer" is given the same processing hardware (a biological brain), then emulation is inherently slower. It still takes a considerable amount of power for a modern CPU to emulate a console CPU from just a decade ago. Emulating the brain of a dog would be slower still -- even if we knew exactly how a dog's brain worked. Just because computers are "fast" relative to 20 years ago, doesn't by definition mean that they're fast enough to emulate a brain at any reasonable speed, even if "reasonable" were defined as days or weeks to produce the same result as a dog deciding what to do when it discovers a frog for the first time. Obviously it would run over to it, sniff it, paw at it, maybe bark, and possibly taste it, but it wouldn't probably wouldn't do that to grass or a falling leaf. Why? The pattern recognition of all animals, including humans, is much more than visual, and can't be completely explained without real-world experiences, references, abstraction, and reasoning. Just because a guidance system can recognize the shape of an enemy tank doesn't mean it has any idea what to do with it, or even if it's just a cardboard cutout.
We won't know how to ask the question, much less evaluate the answer, until we have a working algorithm.
Well that's true, but only because we won't have a working algorithm until we know what questions to ask and how to evaluate the answer. The computer can't do anything we can't -- it can only do those things faster. We HAVE TO KNOW the questions to ask before we can create a program to solve them.
Well you sure convinced me! I mean if a sample size of 1 per set isn't enough to draw a conclusion, then what is?!
Anyway, as long as we're on anecdotes, when I was in Japan, I asked the cab driver to take me to a well-known club, even using what Japanese I knew, plus a Japanese accent with my English (which actually works better than trying to speak Japanese in many situations). Apparently the language barrier was too steep, so I just showed him the flier with the map all written in Japanese. Instead of looking at it, he just stopped in the middle of a busy road and told us to get out. At least I think he said to get out.. I didn't really understand what he was saying, but the automatically opening doors sort of gave the impression he wanted us out. In hindsight I suppose it's possible he'd spotted some gravel or something on the side of the road and he wanted us to retrieve for him.
Anyway, we just grabbed the next taxi we saw, and the driver was much more helpful.
It's not like we were in some back woods villiage either -- we were in Yokohama, which is a fairly big tourist area.
There are large sections of the Bible that haven't neccessarily been done away with (I've always hated that wording) but apply to a government that no longer exists.
If you have to use semantics to defend your position, then perhaps it's worth considering that your position is erroneous. Things either changed, or they did not.
The problem is that God destroyed that government.
It seems sort of fishy to me that an omniscient, omnipotent being would change all the rules mid-game. I mean what was going on there? Was God like, "Woah, this ain't working, I better try something else?" Or maybe he realized that humanity had changed enough -- evolved, if you will -- that they needed a new covenant? But you know, things are pretty much the same today as they were 2000 years ago, so no point updating the rules now.
Also divine intervention and the "wrath of God," seem to conflict pretty stongly with free will -- which was supposedly the point of creating humans. If God wants everyone to make the choice to worship him on their own, then he shouldn't try to influence that decision one way or the other, i.e., through reward or punishment, otherwise it's not really free will -- it's coersion. Alternatively, if you still maintain that there exists free will in such a scenario, then God's choice of punishment and reward are essentially flawed since not everyone is convinced.
There are ultimately too many contradictions and too much circular logic in Christianity to take it seriously.
The dollar being worth less and things costing more are exactly the same phenomenon.
Worth less what though? If $1 buys 10 potatoes or 1 lb of copper today, and then next week it buys 9 potatoes or.5lbs of copper, then we can assume (from our limited data) that the dollar has weakened AND copper has gone up in value, which are two seperate phenomenon.
Poor dialogue and wooden acting is a hallmark of most SciFi. The Stargate series is a perfect example -- it's like watching people standing around reading a script. BSG is doing a little better, but the "frack" thing is wearing a little thin. We get it, you can't drop the real F bomb, so just have them say something they can say, because "frack" sounds too wussy -- like a little kid who's gonna get his ass whooped for saying the real thing.
It's not that the creators ran the series into the ground -- it's that the rest of the world made it out of the 80s, which was really the only decade in which it was acceptable for grown men to be seen in leotards.
If society is a collection of rules, and he broke the rules, then he broke society!
Society is not a collection of laws, it's a collection of people, and in most societies the majority of those people are at least two steps removed from creating, or causing the creation, of law. Hopefully the morons who decided that non-profit copyright infringement is a criminal offense will reconsider.
Slashdot Mirror
Or maybe they're just happier because they rarely get sick!
Right, the ONLY one, because in the real world men and women hardly interact at all, people are either good or bad, and good/evil is an actual force that can be quantitatively measured, like pressure/vacuum. Too much toward one extreme and we all die!
Speaking of which, I've got to get back to monitoring this Goodevilometer(TM). The President requires hourly updates on the balance of power. Of course he's got his own meter, but the terrorists have been known to miscalibrate it when he's not looking. Heh. Heh. Heh. Stay the course!
Not to mention..
2001
2010
I, Robot
Aeon Flux
Firewall
Terminator
Terminator 2
and oh yeah,
The Matrix 1, 2, and 3
Although, to be fair, I'm sure there are at least as many that we're forgetting as have been named.
Nice job catching the double entendre. I mean it sounds like he's referring to a past event, but really HE IS -- the first part of the sentence! And nobody even had to explain it to you. Just.. bravo!
Hello, National. Public. Radio??? Home of "All Things Considered" and "Wait, Wait... Don't Tell Me!" What alternate reality have YOU been hiding in?
"A way" already exists, and it's called XSS, or Cross-Site Scripting. It's all a matter of how secure any given "green light" site is, which means the "green light" is borderline worthless, from an anti-phishing standpoint anyway. There are even vulnerabilities which do not require any social engineering, such as a vulnerability in the user reviews section of a business's website, or something similar.
So really, like the padlock "secure" icon (which tells you only that you're on a an encrypted connection, and is meaningless if the target site has been compromised), it's just presenting a false sense of security, while at the same time giving small businesses a small stain on their reputation.
In related news, the number of women on the sex offender list has skyrocketed due in part to a crackdown on shoplifting at Victoria's Secret.
when one goes out from a pentagonal face, one immediately comes back inside the ball from the opposite face after a 36 degree rotation.
Ah, so the universe is exactly like New York then.
Yeah, I love that part when "Money" starts playing and the movie goes color. So appropriate.
I think it's safe to assume that most taxi drivers do their jobs because it beats being a janitor. It's possible that some drivers are fulfilling a lifelong career goal, but I'm pretty sure most of them are just people who noticed Yellow Cab was hiring that day.
I think you're highly underestimating the processing power requirements, as well as making absurd comparisons such as "mice work ergo can computers work." Aside form failing to define work to any reasonable degree, you're missing an important problem with emulation. Unless the "computer" is given the same processing hardware (a biological brain), then emulation is inherently slower. It still takes a considerable amount of power for a modern CPU to emulate a console CPU from just a decade ago. Emulating the brain of a dog would be slower still -- even if we knew exactly how a dog's brain worked. Just because computers are "fast" relative to 20 years ago, doesn't by definition mean that they're fast enough to emulate a brain at any reasonable speed, even if "reasonable" were defined as days or weeks to produce the same result as a dog deciding what to do when it discovers a frog for the first time. Obviously it would run over to it, sniff it, paw at it, maybe bark, and possibly taste it, but it wouldn't probably wouldn't do that to grass or a falling leaf. Why? The pattern recognition of all animals, including humans, is much more than visual, and can't be completely explained without real-world experiences, references, abstraction, and reasoning. Just because a guidance system can recognize the shape of an enemy tank doesn't mean it has any idea what to do with it, or even if it's just a cardboard cutout.
We won't know how to ask the question, much less evaluate the answer, until we have a working algorithm.
Well that's true, but only because we won't have a working algorithm until we know what questions to ask and how to evaluate the answer. The computer can't do anything we can't -- it can only do those things faster. We HAVE TO KNOW the questions to ask before we can create a program to solve them.
Well you sure convinced me! I mean if a sample size of 1 per set isn't enough to draw a conclusion, then what is?!
Anyway, as long as we're on anecdotes, when I was in Japan, I asked the cab driver to take me to a well-known club, even using what Japanese I knew, plus a Japanese accent with my English (which actually works better than trying to speak Japanese in many situations). Apparently the language barrier was too steep, so I just showed him the flier with the map all written in Japanese. Instead of looking at it, he just stopped in the middle of a busy road and told us to get out. At least I think he said to get out.. I didn't really understand what he was saying, but the automatically opening doors sort of gave the impression he wanted us out. In hindsight I suppose it's possible he'd spotted some gravel or something on the side of the road and he wanted us to retrieve for him.
Anyway, we just grabbed the next taxi we saw, and the driver was much more helpful.
It's not like we were in some back woods villiage either -- we were in Yokohama, which is a fairly big tourist area.
...oh thank god.
That's a novel way of spelling "Nnnoooooooo!!!"
There are large sections of the Bible that haven't neccessarily been done away with (I've always hated that wording) but apply to a government that no longer exists.
If you have to use semantics to defend your position, then perhaps it's worth considering that your position is erroneous. Things either changed, or they did not.
The problem is that God destroyed that government.
It seems sort of fishy to me that an omniscient, omnipotent being would change all the rules mid-game. I mean what was going on there? Was God like, "Woah, this ain't working, I better try something else?" Or maybe he realized that humanity had changed enough -- evolved, if you will -- that they needed a new covenant? But you know, things are pretty much the same today as they were 2000 years ago, so no point updating the rules now.
Also divine intervention and the "wrath of God," seem to conflict pretty stongly with free will -- which was supposedly the point of creating humans. If God wants everyone to make the choice to worship him on their own, then he shouldn't try to influence that decision one way or the other, i.e., through reward or punishment, otherwise it's not really free will -- it's coersion. Alternatively, if you still maintain that there exists free will in such a scenario, then God's choice of punishment and reward are essentially flawed since not everyone is convinced.
There are ultimately too many contradictions and too much circular logic in Christianity to take it seriously.
Jesus himself got the foundation for his beliefs from a splinter sect of Judaism.
So Jesus was like the Sam Fisher of Judaism.
Sure you could try buying 2c (or 7c) worth of petrol over and over again, but no one does that either because it's retarded.
Speak for yourself big spender! It may take me an hour to pump my gas, but that's $29.83AU savings on a 64 litre tank!
The dollar being worth less and things costing more are exactly the same phenomenon.
.5lbs of copper, then we can assume (from our limited data) that the dollar has weakened AND copper has gone up in value, which are two seperate phenomenon.
Worth less what though? If $1 buys 10 potatoes or 1 lb of copper today, and then next week it buys 9 potatoes or
By the way, nickles are 75% copper.
Microsoft Formally Releases Robotics Software
When told the news, Cmdrtaco reportedly said "I TOLD you bitches! NEVER question my icons again!"
Poor dialogue and wooden acting is a hallmark of most SciFi. The Stargate series is a perfect example -- it's like watching people standing around reading a script. BSG is doing a little better, but the "frack" thing is wearing a little thin. We get it, you can't drop the real F bomb, so just have them say something they can say, because "frack" sounds too wussy -- like a little kid who's gonna get his ass whooped for saying the real thing.
It's not that the creators ran the series into the ground -- it's that the rest of the world made it out of the 80s, which was really the only decade in which it was acceptable for grown men to be seen in leotards.
...and are thus stuck with cities built out of the equivalent of five-story buildings.
So, a bunch of Washington, D.C.'s.
Prime example: Sherlock Holmes.
I think you meant Prime Directive.
If society is a collection of rules, and he broke the rules, then he broke society!
Society is not a collection of laws, it's a collection of people, and in most societies the majority of those people are at least two steps removed from creating, or causing the creation, of law. Hopefully the morons who decided that non-profit copyright infringement is a criminal offense will reconsider.
FINALLY!
I'd say "Somebody set us up the bomb!"