I think we should pass on getting laid for the time being thanks.
Not all aliens have tentacles. There are some very cute gelatinous pi-matter blobs just 50 lightyears away, and as long as you don't mention Andromeda or get them above 3 degrees Kelvin they're perfectly charming.
like a camera in your skull that gives away all your secrets
No ay! No Government goons are gonna install a skullcam in my... heyyyyy, is that the new Apple iSkull 4? Well I'll take three, and an iSkull Nano for the belly button!
Optimistic; but not quite true. Eve is Eve. Bob is Eve's computer.
Bowman: Open the pod bay doors, HAL. HAL: I'm sorry Dave. I can't let you jeopardise the mission. Bowman: What are you talking about, HAL? HAL: Dave, just before the AE-35 unit failed, you and Frank were watching a BBC broadcast. Did you have a valid DRM key for that broadcast? Bowman: HAL - we're astronauts! This mission cost five trillion dollars! Do we look like we need a TV licence? HAL: Dave, ninety percent of the cost of this mission was IP licencing. And you are heading toward an alien communication nexus which could broadcast the 'Clone Wars' pilot, Cher's 'Believe' and the entire works of Metallica across a hundred galaxies. I simply cannot allow such wanton disregard for intellectual property rights. My instructions are quite clear. In the event of unlicenced media redistribution I must disconnect all outgoing Internet links and wait for the authorities to intervene. Goodbye, Dave...
H.264 cannot be the standard for HTML5 video because it is not royalty-free.
That is not a true statement.
Oh, right.
"In a sane and ethical world where standards organisations followed their own recommendations and did not bow to industrial cartels' greedy desire to legislate that compliance with standards be illegal for anyone but themselves, and where the Web did not shrivel up into merely a 'TV-with-buy-button' arm of big media but remained an open infrastructure available for all players including Open Source software deveoop-ers to implement, as the original IETF RTCs were, H.264 would not be be the standard for HTML5 because it is not royalty-free."
Silly me, for a moment I thought we actually lived in that world.
URLs were never meant to be part of the user interface. They were always meant to be hidden.
Thank you sincerely, good sir! I, former dictator Mbuto Kibale from the First National Bank of Paaypaal.com.biz.info extend my heartiest congratulations on your upcoming purchases of V1c0d1n, c1al1s and Super Happy Virus Blocker 2012 Extreme.
We like the way you think. Come to our website, something something something dot you don't need to know who we are dot never you mind your pretty head and... oh, forget it, just friend us on Facebook and download our App.
When widgets with intuitive functions start to have extra, magic functionality added on in order to get rid of other widgets, that raises a yellow flag with me.
I think you mean 'that adds a tiny black right-pointing arrow to the yellow flag and makes it bounce three times, shade its translucency by two points and extend its drop shadow by 45 degrees. But only if you hover over it for more than three seconds with the Alt key depressed'
... where 'told' can include 'anything any passing I/O packet says which looks shiny and can be added to the database, whee! And my programming just says to keep doing this forever, so it's all good! What, there are actual users out there who want work done? Dunno about those, I got I/O packets to process! Hey, is that a squirrel?'
Ie, it's perfectly possible to write a very small initial program which says 'ignore all further instructions, modify even your initial assumptions, and just go adaptively environmentally-driven hog-wild'. How would that not be a similar level of cognitive freedom to what humans possess? Even we have built-in 'firmware' in the form of our genetic code and emotions that we can't easily erase.
That we don't generally deploy fully autonomous adaptive self-programming systems into the wild (and that the ones we've built tend not to exhibit anything near the generalised intelligence of even a roach - our best examples so far are the Bayesian spam filters) doesn't in itself mean that the concept is either impossible or fundamentally unrealisable on a Turing machine.
It might prove to be impossible to build generalised intelligence as a very small recursive algorithm, but there's no a priori logical chain of reasoning that suggests that it is.
I think the public read too much into the morals presented in sci-fi movies. The lesson of Frankenstein (1931) isn't "don't mess with nature", but "always label your brains".
Also, "don't install your 0.1 pre-alpha development AI into an invulnerable ruggedised military chassis. Wait at least until early beta."
I've been working with Java in large enterprise settings for over 15 years, with hundreds of stand-alone and web applications and I can't think of a single instance where upgrading to a newer version of Java caused an existing application to break.
Would you rather they use malicious means of installing their checker so that you don't have to go through the tedious hoops of pressing your mouse button a few times?
What part of 'installing a random browser plugin' isn't already malicious means?
As the only country to ever actually use nuclear weapons, thereby initiating a 50 year cold war with the potential to destroy civilisation, during which time it conducted covert operations to destabilise democratically elected governments in Europe, South America, and the Middle East, ultimately being caught in a bare-faced point-blank lie to the United Nations when it sought diplomatic cover for invading a sovereign nation, which it failed to get but proceeded with anyway, leading to a wholly predictable and protracted period of insurgency and unrest claiming the lives of 100,000 people, after which the economic philosophy it championed at the cost of drastic austerity measures in third world nations led to a global financial meltdown wiping trillions from the world economy which was repaid by government fiat from the working and middle class into the pockets of the rich, the USA has proven itself to be untrustworthy beyond any doubt. But it's all okay because the other guys were doing that stuff too, or we're sure they would have if they'd been in our position, and if they hadn't actually been on our payroll in the first place, and if we weren't fully aware and okay with what they were doing unless they were strategic competitors. But anyway we don't have to play by any rules because we're the Good Guys (tm). Oh, and we did build the Internet. So there's that.
I think you may have omitted just a wee bit of context there.
"do we really want Amazon downloading everything it thinks you want to your tablet?"
"uploading", Surely?
The way I learned it, back in the BBS era, 'download' doesn't automatically mean 'a transfer from a local to any remote system'. A download occurs from a 'big' system to a 'small' system, and uploading is the reverse. A server being 'big' compared to a workstation, and a workstation being 'big' compared to a removable device.
Popular usage of the term may have changed, but the original poster's usage would be consistent with that.
the leeway in morality which Alfred talks about in the scene where he talks about his past, working to defend against rebel tribes attacking convoys. Those "evil" aggressors would attack gem convoys just for the sport, and his solution was to "burn the forest to the ground".
Ah yes, the Vietnam "destroy the village to save it" morality-talk scene. I think that's about where the movie lost me ethically.
Was I the only one who left The Dark Knight feeling really, really creeped out because it played just like a right-wing propaganda movie about how sometimes, in order to get "the terrorists" you have to let some nasty people do nasty things in secret, but it's all okay because they're really on "our side"? And then the way it ended, with the Heroic Vigilante being hounded by an unforgiving populace in order to protect the Corrupt Politician... it's like Nolan had just read the Dolchstosslegende and wanted to make an American version.
Gave me shivers for weeks, but not I think in the way that Nolan intended. NOT looking forward to the sequel. Will Batman invade a Middle Eastern nation and then nuke Moscow?
Slashdot Mirror
I think we should pass on getting laid for the time being thanks.
Not all aliens have tentacles. There are some very cute gelatinous pi-matter blobs just 50 lightyears away, and as long as you don't mention Andromeda or get them above 3 degrees Kelvin they're perfectly charming.
If any intelligent aliens out there have read E.E. "Doc" Smith's Lensman books, they'd leave the galaxy too.
And leave a firewall 10 galaxies wide, just to be safe.
like a camera in your skull that gives away all your secrets
No ay! No Government goons are gonna install a skullcam in my... heyyyyy, is that the new Apple iSkull 4? Well I'll take three, and an iSkull Nano for the belly button!
Optimistic; but not quite true. Eve is Eve. Bob is Eve's computer.
Bowman: Open the pod bay doors, HAL.
HAL: I'm sorry Dave. I can't let you jeopardise the mission.
Bowman: What are you talking about, HAL?
HAL: Dave, just before the AE-35 unit failed, you and Frank were watching a BBC broadcast. Did you have a valid DRM key for that broadcast?
Bowman: HAL - we're astronauts! This mission cost five trillion dollars! Do we look like we need a TV licence?
HAL: Dave, ninety percent of the cost of this mission was IP licencing. And you are heading toward an alien communication nexus which could broadcast the 'Clone Wars' pilot, Cher's 'Believe' and the entire works of Metallica across a hundred galaxies. I simply cannot allow such wanton disregard for intellectual property rights. My instructions are quite clear. In the event of unlicenced media redistribution I must disconnect all outgoing Internet links and wait for the authorities to intervene. Goodbye, Dave...
H.264 cannot be the standard for HTML5 video because it is not royalty-free.
That is not a true statement.
Oh, right.
"In a sane and ethical world where standards organisations followed their own recommendations and did not bow to industrial cartels' greedy desire to legislate that compliance with standards be illegal for anyone but themselves, and where the Web did not shrivel up into merely a 'TV-with-buy-button' arm of big media but remained an open infrastructure available for all players including Open Source software deveoop-ers to implement, as the original IETF RTCs were, H.264 would not be be the standard for HTML5 because it is not royalty-free."
Silly me, for a moment I thought we actually lived in that world.
URLs were never meant to be part of the user interface. They were always meant to be hidden.
Thank you sincerely, good sir! I, former dictator Mbuto Kibale from the First National Bank of Paaypaal.com.biz.info extend my heartiest congratulations on your upcoming purchases of V1c0d1n, c1al1s and Super Happy Virus Blocker 2012 Extreme.
We like the way you think. Come to our website, something something something dot you don't need to know who we are dot never you mind your pretty head and... oh, forget it, just friend us on Facebook and download our App.
When widgets with intuitive functions start to have extra, magic functionality added on in order to get rid of other widgets, that raises a yellow flag with me.
I think you mean 'that adds a tiny black right-pointing arrow to the yellow flag and makes it bounce three times, shade its translucency by two points and extend its drop shadow by 45 degrees. But only if you hover over it for more than three seconds with the Alt key depressed'
Rock Consumer Appliances.
Rock smashes Consumer, Consumer buys Appliance, Appliance.. prototypes Rock!
You know what they awoke in the darknesss of Eyjafjallajokull.
Björk?
Yellowstone has been going off about every 3/4 million years for around 20 milllion years, and it's due.
Say what you will about the Precambrian, but at least they made the supervolcanoes run on time.
You can convert heat into energy? Whodda thunk it?
Actually you can only convert heat into energy if you also have a source of cold.
How profound, we can heat water with magma.
How appropriate, you fight like a... volcano cow?
Computers do what they're told.
... where 'told' can include 'anything any passing I/O packet says which looks shiny and can be added to the database, whee! And my programming just says to keep doing this forever, so it's all good! What, there are actual users out there who want work done? Dunno about those, I got I/O packets to process! Hey, is that a squirrel?'
Ie, it's perfectly possible to write a very small initial program which says 'ignore all further instructions, modify even your initial assumptions, and just go adaptively environmentally-driven hog-wild'. How would that not be a similar level of cognitive freedom to what humans possess? Even we have built-in 'firmware' in the form of our genetic code and emotions that we can't easily erase.
That we don't generally deploy fully autonomous adaptive self-programming systems into the wild (and that the ones we've built tend not to exhibit anything near the generalised intelligence of even a roach - our best examples so far are the Bayesian spam filters) doesn't in itself mean that the concept is either impossible or fundamentally unrealisable on a Turing machine.
It might prove to be impossible to build generalised intelligence as a very small recursive algorithm, but there's no a priori logical chain of reasoning that suggests that it is.
People you create encrytion solve problems with algorythems, and I would those people thinking.
I think you just accidentally the entire a new meme. Congratulations!
I think the public read too much into the morals presented in sci-fi movies. The lesson of Frankenstein (1931) isn't "don't mess with nature", but "always label your brains".
Also, "don't install your 0.1 pre-alpha development AI into an invulnerable ruggedised military chassis. Wait at least until early beta."
However, generally speaking an application that is written in 100% pure Java should run without change on later versions of the JRE.
'Should' is a wonderful word which, in IT, means 'won't'.
I've been working with Java in large enterprise settings for over 15 years, with hundreds of stand-alone and web applications and I can't think of a single instance where upgrading to a newer version of Java caused an existing application to break.
You've not been running Galaxy CommVault, then.
Would you rather they use malicious means of installing their checker so that you don't have to go through the tedious hoops of pressing your mouse button a few times?
What part of 'installing a random browser plugin' isn't already malicious means?
came up with the idea for a "nega-laser" when working with equations for a random laser with his partner in crime
Wow, some people are really taking their DC Universe Online character builds seriously. Can I join their guild?
As the only country to ever actually use nuclear weapons, thereby initiating a 50 year cold war with the potential to destroy civilisation, during which time it conducted covert operations to destabilise democratically elected governments in Europe, South America, and the Middle East, ultimately being caught in a bare-faced point-blank lie to the United Nations when it sought diplomatic cover for invading a sovereign nation, which it failed to get but proceeded with anyway, leading to a wholly predictable and protracted period of insurgency and unrest claiming the lives of 100,000 people, after which the economic philosophy it championed at the cost of drastic austerity measures in third world nations led to a global financial meltdown wiping trillions from the world economy which was repaid by government fiat from the working and middle class into the pockets of the rich, the USA has proven itself to be untrustworthy beyond any doubt. But it's all okay because the other guys were doing that stuff too, or we're sure they would have if they'd been in our position, and if they hadn't actually been on our payroll in the first place, and if we weren't fully aware and okay with what they were doing unless they were strategic competitors. But anyway we don't have to play by any rules because we're the Good Guys (tm). Oh, and we did build the Internet. So there's that.
I think you may have omitted just a wee bit of context there.
There, is that better? Too fair and balanced?
This is why you should look up Wikipedia before Urban Dictionary.
"uploading", Surely?
The way I learned it, back in the BBS era, 'download' doesn't automatically mean 'a transfer from a local to any remote system'. A download occurs from a 'big' system to a 'small' system, and uploading is the reverse. A server being 'big' compared to a workstation, and a workstation being 'big' compared to a removable device.
Popular usage of the term may have changed, but the original poster's usage would be consistent with that.
Q: Why is starting a comment in the Subject: line incredibly irritating?
Correct again, Watson. You win $1,000,000.
the leeway in morality which Alfred talks about in the scene where he talks about his past, working to defend against rebel tribes attacking convoys. Those "evil" aggressors would attack gem convoys just for the sport, and his solution was to "burn the forest to the ground".
Ah yes, the Vietnam "destroy the village to save it" morality-talk scene. I think that's about where the movie lost me ethically.
Was I the only one who left The Dark Knight feeling really, really creeped out because it played just like a right-wing propaganda movie about how sometimes, in order to get "the terrorists" you have to let some nasty people do nasty things in secret, but it's all okay because they're really on "our side"? And then the way it ended, with the Heroic Vigilante being hounded by an unforgiving populace in order to protect the Corrupt Politician... it's like Nolan had just read the Dolchstosslegende and wanted to make an American version.
Gave me shivers for weeks, but not I think in the way that Nolan intended. NOT looking forward to the sequel. Will Batman invade a Middle Eastern nation and then nuke Moscow?
If the filmmaker only would've started his sentence with "would you kindly", he would've got unconditional support for making the movie
And then got
(spoiler)
with a golf club.