Uh...high treason is a serious, serious charge. A death penalty charge, in some cases. I should hope the gov't would require more corroboration than an email (when we all know spammers are perfectly capable of forging addresses and headers) before sending someone to jail. Admittedly, those executives who admitted in the article that some sort of "joke" had been played, or that they had been misquoted but had sent emails, should at least be investigated. But no charges. Not based on something like this.
Saddam Hussein is a bloodthirsty, hitler-esque megalomaniac. He butchers his own people. So far as I'm concerned, this places him beyond the pale of the protections civilized people afford each other. If someone shot Saddam tomorrow, it wouldn't trouble me at all - heck, if Ari Fleischer threw a party I'd probably go. As was said of Eichman - and I know I'm butchering this quote - "He didn't want to share the world with Jews, so we should not be expected to share the world with him".
If we accept (and I wholeheartedly do) that killing Saddam would be at worst a not-bad thing and more likely a Good Thing, then hacking his mail pales in comparison. Anything that serves to humiliate or demean Saddam or those who would work with him is fine by me. Any "leader" as monstrous as Saddam deserves no rights whatsoever so far as I am concerned.
What sort of rights would a sentient AI like a person's mind downloaded to a computer have? Would it be considered human? Could it vote? Or would it be considered software, and therefor property? Someone made a joke about Kazaa, but I could seriously see people (if this technology ever exists) trading the minds of famous composers/scientists/etc. and using them as slave labor for think tanks. What sort of protections would there be? As much as it pains me to admit it, I really think we need strong, secure DRM before this would be a useable technology. Oh, and we need to know how the minds works, how to program a brain emulator, etc.
I wonder how this would feel to the unique set of electical and chemical impulses that I like to call "me". Would I be aware of the change? I guess it depends on whether I am the neurons themselves, or the pattern of data exchange that these neurons perform. If all I am is the data, then I would suppose there is no change - the data transfer is gradually being shifted to a different platform, but remains the same. But if my conciousness, my sense of self, is dependent solely on the physical neurons and NOT on the data they exchange alone, then this could be rather nightmarish. and what would happen when the artificial neurons had taken over, for example, my speech and movement centers, but enough of my own brain still remained for there to be a bit of the original conciousness still in there, but unable to interact with the outside environment?
"Re:Hmm...maybe too! (Score:1) by skinfitz on Sunday October 20, @03:58PM (#4490881) (User #564041 Info | http://www.mywebsitelinks.com/) The thing with Asperger's is that not everyone suffers with the *all* the symptoms, people typically have their own set out of the bunch, and also there are varying degrees of severity.
To be honest, it sounds to me like you might have Asperger's from what you say in your post - have you ever considered it?
I am convinced that I have it as it explains an awful lot in my life..."
Have I considered it? Yes, that's why I mentioned a couple things which could, concievably indicate Asperger's. But there are so many other, more mundane things which can cause social ineptitude and other "Asperger's symptoms" that it seems implausible that all or even most nerds are the product of this disease. People tend to have medical student's syndrome - they hear about a disease, and they say to themselves "Hey! I have that symptom! I have that symptom too! I must have Asperger's/cancer/pseumonia/pneumonoultramicroscop icsilicovolcanoconiosis!" And yeah, maybe you do. But you need to look at other, simply possibilities as well - simply choosing the most interesting one, like Asperger's, is intellectually dishonest.
First of all, note that I am not saying you don't have Asperger's. But it doesn't neccessarily follow from the definition you provided that Asperger's is even the most common cause for the behaviors described. For example, I was a bright little kid. I picked up reading early, enjoyed it greatly, and so of course I was made fun of often in elementary school. This, for a long time, made me reluctant to interact with other people or try to make friends - I thought they'd just make fun of me. (Sound familiar, slashdotters?) I got over it eventually, but for a lot of my early childhood, I missed out on a lot of the normal socialization process.
As a result, I'm a bit socially inept. A lot of social interactions other people take for granted - especially interacting with groups of people - I picked up later. But this isn't because of some sort of neurological problem - I just didn't have a normal social life, because the other kids made it hard to have one.
Likewise, I have above-average verbal skills (don't judge by this post, please), a strong interest in politics and history, and I'm a bit self-centered in my conversation. But this can all be easily enough explained as the product of social isolation and an affinity for the written word, not Asperger's. If you like to read, history (and politics, which is really just a subset of the same) is something you're going to have an easy time learning. And as for being a bit self-centered - again, that could be the result of social isolation. Or, I could just be an asshole, that's certainly a possibility.:-)
In the interests of intellectual honesty though, I feel the need to mention some things that I can't explain away with social/psychological factors. Asperger's suffers, if I read the definition write, tend to have mild speech problems - I had to visit a speech therapist for a while when I was seven. And my handwriting has always been very, very bad. And, as my friends and family can attest, I do seem to lack common sense.:-)
My point, however, is it makes no sense for the tends of thousands of fine people on/. to assume they have Asperger's - it's an easy explanation for nerdiness, but it needn't always (or even often) be the correct one.
It's worth pointing out that, if you're just ripping your own CDs, WMA isn't a *terrible* format. It's reasonable size, reasonable quality. It can't compare to a quality ten ogg vorbis file, but then again I don't believe it's meant to. For portable devices, it almost makes sense - except, of course, for the lack of linux support. And if you want to do anything involving sharing music and putting it on your player, than of course the WMA DRM features can be - but aren't always - a problem.
It's the American Revo clone with 16 megs of ram, keyboard, and rechargable built-in battery. Serial only, but you can find them under $100 when you can find them at all.
If you guys want to see what the state of the art is in BREW development (such as it is), check out www.chasma.net . My friend works there, the lucky [expletive].
Two problems with graphical terminals: One, they'll need extra bandwidth, and a lot of colleges (like mine until this year) are only 10 mbit. Also, the whole idea here is to turn out a solution that the techs will never, ever have to touch again. Terminal/server systems would be the responsibility of the techs.
Let me tell you something, my friend. I'm a college student at Roger Williams University, living in the Cedar freshman hall. The room across the hall from me, and the one next door, are both quads occupied by extremely attractive, cool women who are - ahem - not neccessarily conservative socially. But instead of talking with any of the many attractive women on my floor, I'm posting to slashdot. What does this tell you?
That said, if I want a top-notch prebuilt gaming system, I'll save a grand or two and buy alienware.
I have to say, Winamp (3.0) and commercial games have convinced me that *.0 releases of almost everything should really be *.0 beta. Zeros scare me, 2.6 sounds comfortingly mature.
No matter how much is automated, no matter how much is made so user-friendly my cat could do it, it will still break occasionally. And someone will still have to make technical decisions about how the network will run, how the workstations will be configured. The sysadmin's job may be simplified, but it can never be eliminated.
That guy was such a wuss. Why the heck did Card explain away his betrayal in two lines?
The wall was cool thought, especially the way that the girl became little more that a brick in the wall once it got reallt started. Yes, I had to make a lame Pink Floyd reference.
I gotta say, what is it about Card that he gets more moralistic with every book? Used to be, the Ender books were just about little kids fighting wars, having their minds broken, and killing other little kids. Now there's all this stuff about religion and the joy of marriage - why?
Seriously, this combination should fly on the system you're describing, and there IS a y2k patch available for win3.1 - run a search on google for it. If you install Calmira (calmira.org), it looks and feels very much like win95, is reasonably stable, and can run lots of old win3.1 browsers and word processors - tucows can help you with this. I suggest running DR-DOS win win 3.1, but I guess that MS thingie will do in a pinch. You'll never have this be a gaming box, but for what you need, it should be fine - the OS will take up well under 40 megs of hard drive space, and 4 megs of ram is plenty for win3.1, let alone 40.
it's only fraud if they people selling the product KNOW they're lying. If they believe some pill or gadget really will make your dick 6 feet long, then no fraud. And how can you prove they DON'T believe that?
At my old high school, ESD prevention practices for PCs didn't even exist - the tech generally didn't even bother with a wriststrap. For what it's worth, the hardware failure rate at that school was horrible - a lot of teachers would begin complaining of system instability within months of getting a comp. Don't know if this is entirely to do with ESD, though - most of these systems were donations, and the teachers would install all kinds of junk on them.
One example I've seen firsthand of ESD - my dad was poking around the inside of the family PC because he wanted to see what it looked like, and he didn't bother with a wriststrap. He touched the video card, and it immediately ceased to function. When he turned the computer back on, we got the "bad video card" beep code. Of course, this was a Virge chipset card, but that can't explain away an immediate failure like that.
The US actually isn't working all that hard to combat bigotry - it's been detaining Arab-looking men more or less at random. And as for how much damage Nazi punks will do in Germany - not much, for the simple reason German police don't put up with this nonsense. If you're a Nazi, they come and throw you in prison. Very simple.
Slashdot Mirror
Uh...high treason is a serious, serious charge. A death penalty charge, in some cases. I should hope the gov't would require more corroboration than an email (when we all know spammers are perfectly capable of forging addresses and headers) before sending someone to jail. Admittedly, those executives who admitted in the article that some sort of "joke" had been played, or that they had been misquoted but had sent emails, should at least be investigated. But no charges. Not based on something like this.
Saddam Hussein is a bloodthirsty, hitler-esque megalomaniac. He butchers his own people. So far as I'm concerned, this places him beyond the pale of the protections civilized people afford each other. If someone shot Saddam tomorrow, it wouldn't trouble me at all - heck, if Ari Fleischer threw a party I'd probably go. As was said of Eichman - and I know I'm butchering this quote - "He didn't want to share the world with Jews, so we should not be expected to share the world with him".
If we accept (and I wholeheartedly do) that killing Saddam would be at worst a not-bad thing and more likely a Good Thing, then hacking his mail pales in comparison. Anything that serves to humiliate or demean Saddam or those who would work with him is fine by me. Any "leader" as monstrous as Saddam deserves no rights whatsoever so far as I am concerned.
What sort of rights would a sentient AI like a person's mind downloaded to a computer have? Would it be considered human? Could it vote? Or would it be considered software, and therefor property? Someone made a joke about Kazaa, but I could seriously see people (if this technology ever exists) trading the minds of famous composers/scientists/etc. and using them as slave labor for think tanks. What sort of protections would there be? As much as it pains me to admit it, I really think we need strong, secure DRM before this would be a useable technology. Oh, and we need to know how the minds works, how to program a brain emulator, etc.
I wonder how this would feel to the unique set of electical and chemical impulses that I like to call "me". Would I be aware of the change? I guess it depends on whether I am the neurons themselves, or the pattern of data exchange that these neurons perform. If all I am is the data, then I would suppose there is no change - the data transfer is gradually being shifted to a different platform, but remains the same. But if my conciousness, my sense of self, is dependent solely on the physical neurons and NOT on the data they exchange alone, then this could be rather nightmarish. and what would happen when the artificial neurons had taken over, for example, my speech and movement centers, but enough of my own brain still remained for there to be a bit of the original conciousness still in there, but unable to interact with the outside environment?
"Re:Hmm...maybe too! (Score:1)
p icsilicovolcanoconiosis!" And yeah, maybe you do. But you need to look at other, simply possibilities as well - simply choosing the most interesting one, like Asperger's, is intellectually dishonest.
by skinfitz on Sunday October 20, @03:58PM (#4490881)
(User #564041 Info | http://www.mywebsitelinks.com/)
The thing with Asperger's is that not everyone suffers with the *all* the symptoms, people typically have their own set out of the bunch, and also there are varying degrees of severity.
To be honest, it sounds to me like you might have Asperger's from what you say in your post - have you ever considered it?
I am convinced that I have it as it explains an awful lot in my life..."
Have I considered it? Yes, that's why I mentioned a couple things which could, concievably indicate Asperger's. But there are so many other, more mundane things which can cause social ineptitude and other "Asperger's symptoms" that it seems implausible that all or even most nerds are the product of this disease. People tend to have medical student's syndrome - they hear about a disease, and they say to themselves "Hey! I have that symptom! I have that symptom too! I must have Asperger's/cancer/pseumonia/pneumonoultramicrosco
First of all, note that I am not saying you don't have Asperger's. But it doesn't neccessarily follow from the definition you provided that Asperger's is even the most common cause for the behaviors described. For example, I was a bright little kid. I picked up reading early, enjoyed it greatly, and so of course I was made fun of often in elementary school. This, for a long time, made me reluctant to interact with other people or try to make friends - I thought they'd just make fun of me. (Sound familiar, slashdotters?) I got over it eventually, but for a lot of my early childhood, I missed out on a lot of the normal socialization process.
:-)
:-)
/. to assume they have Asperger's - it's an easy explanation for nerdiness, but it needn't always (or even often) be the correct one.
As a result, I'm a bit socially inept. A lot of social interactions other people take for granted - especially interacting with groups of people - I picked up later. But this isn't because of some sort of neurological problem - I just didn't have a normal social life, because the other kids made it hard to have one.
Likewise, I have above-average verbal skills (don't judge by this post, please), a strong interest in politics and history, and I'm a bit self-centered in my conversation. But this can all be easily enough explained as the product of social isolation and an affinity for the written word, not Asperger's. If you like to read, history (and politics, which is really just a subset of the same) is something you're going to have an easy time learning. And as for being a bit self-centered - again, that could be the result of social isolation. Or, I could just be an asshole, that's certainly a possibility.
In the interests of intellectual honesty though, I feel the need to mention some things that I can't explain away with social/psychological factors. Asperger's suffers, if I read the definition write, tend to have mild speech problems - I had to visit a speech therapist for a while when I was seven. And my handwriting has always been very, very bad. And, as my friends and family can attest, I do seem to lack common sense.
My point, however, is it makes no sense for the tends of thousands of fine people on
It's worth pointing out that, if you're just ripping your own CDs, WMA isn't a *terrible* format. It's reasonable size, reasonable quality. It can't compare to a quality ten ogg vorbis file, but then again I don't believe it's meant to. For portable devices, it almost makes sense - except, of course, for the lack of linux support. And if you want to do anything involving sharing music and putting it on your player, than of course the WMA DRM features can be - but aren't always - a problem.
It's the American Revo clone with 16 megs of ram, keyboard, and rechargable built-in battery. Serial only, but you can find them under $100 when you can find them at all.
If you guys want to see what the state of the art is in BREW development (such as it is), check out www.chasma.net . My friend works there, the lucky [expletive].
Two problems with graphical terminals: One, they'll need extra bandwidth, and a lot of colleges (like mine until this year) are only 10 mbit. Also, the whole idea here is to turn out a solution that the techs will never, ever have to touch again. Terminal/server systems would be the responsibility of the techs.
That is a really good idea. Thank you very much. You know, that's also a cool idea for public speaking - do you do that for a living/hobby?
The zeroes - they're spreading, they're everywhere!
seriously, though, I'm happy so long as the 2nd digit isn't 0.
The hair was shaved off for convenience, and I bike/walk everywhere I go. It's the "Say hi/look them in the eye" part that's hard. :-)
Okay, my bad. Shoulda pointed out the lack of a gf.
Let me tell you something, my friend. I'm a college student at Roger Williams University, living in the Cedar freshman hall. The room across the hall from me, and the one next door, are both quads occupied by extremely attractive, cool women who are - ahem - not neccessarily conservative socially. But instead of talking with any of the many attractive women on my floor,
I'm posting to slashdot. What does this tell you?
That said, if I want a top-notch prebuilt gaming system, I'll save a grand or two and buy alienware.
I have to say, Winamp (3.0) and commercial games have convinced me that *.0 releases of almost everything should really be *.0 beta. Zeros scare me, 2.6 sounds comfortingly mature.
My campus radio station is in Bristol (WQRI) and we reach Newport and Providence. And we still qualify as nonprofit.
No matter how much is automated, no matter how much is made so user-friendly my cat could do it, it will still break occasionally. And someone will still have to make technical decisions about how the network will run, how the workstations will be configured. The sysadmin's job may be simplified, but it can never be eliminated.
I think we can all agree that if any fictional character ever *deserved* to get laid, it was Bean.
That guy was such a wuss. Why the heck did Card explain away his betrayal in two lines?
The wall was cool thought, especially the way that the girl became little more that a brick in the wall once it got reallt started. Yes, I had to make a lame Pink Floyd reference.
I gotta say, what is it about Card that he gets
more moralistic with every book? Used to be, the
Ender books were just about little kids fighting
wars, having their minds broken, and killing other
little kids. Now there's all this stuff about
religion and the joy of marriage - why?
Seriously, this combination should fly on the system you're describing, and there IS a y2k patch available for win3.1 - run a search on google for it. If you install Calmira (calmira.org), it looks and feels very much like win95, is reasonably stable, and can run lots of old win3.1 browsers and word processors - tucows can help you with this. I suggest running DR-DOS win win 3.1, but I guess that MS thingie will do in a pinch. You'll never have this be a gaming box, but for what you need, it should be fine - the OS will take up well under 40 megs of hard drive space, and 4 megs of ram is plenty for win3.1, let alone 40.
it's only fraud if they people selling the product KNOW they're lying. If they believe some pill or gadget really will make your dick 6 feet long, then no fraud. And how can you prove they DON'T believe that?
At my old high school, ESD prevention practices for PCs didn't even exist - the tech generally didn't even bother with a wriststrap. For what it's worth, the hardware failure rate at that school was horrible - a lot of teachers would begin complaining of system instability within months of getting a comp. Don't know if this is entirely to do with ESD, though - most of these systems were donations, and the teachers would install all kinds of junk on them.
One example I've seen firsthand of ESD - my dad was poking around the inside of the family PC because he wanted to see what it looked like, and he didn't bother with a wriststrap. He touched the video card, and it immediately ceased to function. When he turned the computer back on, we got the "bad video card" beep code. Of course, this was a Virge chipset card, but that can't explain away an immediate failure like that.
The US actually isn't working all that hard to combat bigotry - it's been detaining Arab-looking men more or less at random. And as for how much damage Nazi punks will do in Germany - not much, for the simple reason German police don't put up with this nonsense. If you're a Nazi, they come and throw you in prison. Very simple.