No, Asimov outlined something more sinister in the second or third "Robots" novel. Make a spaceship with a positronic brain. It is basically a space-going robot. Instruct it to destroy other space-going robots. It won't know the other space-going robots are actually spaceships with humans onboard. When it is in attack mode, it of course doesn't monitor incoming broadcast signals.
Over their streaming wifi bluetooth podcast-based real-time worldwide virtual reality broadcasts on their iPodMacroVRGPSHDDVDIPv6B2B's with optional...
Ouch, now my brain hurts. Who can think of something to finish this off with?
Hey sicko, that kind of so-called humor isn't funny. Slashdot shouldn't tolerate the jokes you people make about a very serious problem...oh wait. I thought you were leading up to a 'prisoner ass-rape' joke. You were pulling a switch on the '1000 dead lawyers' joke. Ok, now I see it. That's funny, right there. hehehe 1000 spammers on murder charges. hahaha Gotta admit, I didn't see that one coming.
I wonder if there will be specialty companies that guarantee their products are RFID free. Their shipping containers may use them, since they are the next step for inventory control. But what of smaller companies that would make or sell clothing with no imbedded RFIDs, which are of course all of our concerns?
Just like there is 'hemp' clothing that seems to be bought as a stand against "The Man", does anyone see 'RDID-free' as a growing market? And if so, how long until they are bought out by the large corporations, and tags start going in?
I know, it looks silly, but that was the first article Google showed that had the accusation that the US was bad for not invading. I can't seem to find other articles right now, but I do remember hearing the French accuse us for not being in there already. I specifically remember that because Haiti is of course a French former colony, and they would be the logical choice to send peacekeeping troops. Plus it wasn't like their army was very busy at the time.
I will look for more articles. THey must be there. They couldn't have all been destroyed. They are just buried somewhere.:^P
"and that you are not reluctant *at* *all* when it comes to sending that army to wage wars in other parts of the world."
I love these assertions. We are critisized for going to war in Afghanistan, because we are killing innocent civilians, and the Afghanistan government didn't attack us, 19 Saudis did. (Or maybe it was the Jews, with Bush's help.)
We are blasted for attacking Iraq, when the entire world thought Saddam had biological weapons. And with France, Germany, and Russia balking at using force, Saddam had enough time to move tons of the stuff out of the country or bury it in the middle of the desert. Who knows, we might find it yet, in Syria. (And of course France, Germany, and Russia were objecting for humanitarian reasons, not because any invasion would show how much corruption was in the Oil-for-food program, and how much public officials and business leaders in those three countries profited.)
All well and good, if you are going to hate us for sticking our nose in, feel free. But be consistant. While the US was still locked in battle with terrorists (people who detonate car bombs in front of school children are terrorists, not insurgents), the world blasted us for not invading another country which had a repressed population being savaged by a dictator. That was Haiti. Here is a link to one article I found, which carried a theme similar to most at the time: http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/english/doc/2004-02/1 8/content_307092.htm
Notice how it is assumed that the US would invade this country to save the innocents, and since we didn't, we are bad people.
Yet we are still being called bad for invading other countries. Which way do you want it?
And personally, for your information, I personally think the US should pull out of the nation-building mentality. We should stop acting like the Europeans, thinking we have the right to interfere in other cultures like they always did. The United States was founded as a repulsion of that idea. Why did we lose sight of that and start to emulate them again?
So, how many acres of pristine Amazonian rain-forest have you purchased to prevent its being cut down? That's the problem with you left wackos, you bitch and complain, but you don't do anything that will solve the problem. You 'tree-hugging hippies' want the government to do all the hard, expensive work of protecting forests. And then there are the idiots of ELF, that burn down ski resorts and housing developments _after_ the trees are already cut down and the land bulldozed. Would it be that hard for all of you to just throw $100 each into buying land and keeping if from being commercialized? Even if only 10,000 people contributed directly, it would raise one million dollars, which could buy a lot of rainforest.
By the way, I mean 'wackos' in the kindest possible sense.
I read the first edition
on
Mapping the Mind
·
· Score: 5, Funny
In the last two weeks, I have received mod points 4 times. In the two years or so that I have been posting, I only ever received them twice before this. Is it because I finally switched from IE to Firefox half of the time? Or am I now one of the 'oldtimers' because my number is under the half-million mark? (What is the current number level?)
Has anyone else been in this situation lately? I want to post comments, but spend all my time deciding where to mod comments. The hardest part is not automatically modding down all you liberals that say things that make me want to flame you.
Hey thanks. I was wondering why the writeup mentioned "billionths of a trillionth" when refering to the metric system. It seems like saying something is "thousands of hundreds of meters" away, rather than "hundreds of kilometers". Just goes to show the shortfall of the metric system.
It's funny you mention that you first thought of the Pythagorean principle. That is why I first noticed that the squares of 24 and 26 are exactly 100 apart. Back in high school geometry or trig.
I couldn't believe any of the other kids couldn't figure this out on their own. It was because they all had those new-fangled scientific calculators, and never figured out the relationships between numbers. They never even figured out the 3, 4, 5 set, which was the basis of half the examples; and 5, 12, 13 was the basis of most of the rest. No wonder they couldn't figure out the radius of a circle whose center is at the origin, and which passes through point (-3, 4).
Now that I am a parent, I am teaching my daughter these things, even though she is only in the third grade. I don't expect her to remember them right away, but by high school they should be part of her brainwaves.
"I'd personally much rather hire someone who got in A in calculus without using a calculator rather than one who did it with a TI-89."
Where do I fax my resume?
Actually, to be honest, I did use a calculator to do the long multiplication and division steps of various problems. Never did use the scientific or plotting ones, couldn't afford them. Just the basic $5 throw-away ones from the drug store. And judging from the replies you recieved, the expensensive ones rotted several people's minds.
I wrote a letter to the editor of Science Fiction Age magazine in 1993. Not only was it printed, it closed a long running debate about the contents of the magazine. I had gotten tired of reading letters complaining about the one 'fantasy' story in a 'science fiction' mag, and the supporting letters were annoying too. One month, three of the four letters printed were on this topic. So I wrote in and told the guys at the magazine to just make a decision, tell us readers what it was, and stick to it. They would then at least have our respect, if not our agreement. I think they kept the one fantasy story, and I don't remember another letter about it.
until all the Road Runner customers jump on it, and the bandwidth goes to hell. My three-d real-time animation of last week's blizzard with slow to a crawl, and then I'll probably get a pop-up advising me to switch to that other supercomputer the Japanese made last year.
Maybe DVDs surpass what a standard TV can produce, but not all DVDs are at that standard. I have a new Sony TV, it has good clarity. A couple months ago we were watching "Gothika" with Halle Berry. As she was sneaking around the mental hospital, the subtle shadows were generally just large blotches of black surrounded by jagged blotches of not-quite-black. I figure this is from the compression they use to fit the movie and all extras on one disk, but I find that to be a poor excuse.
So, BluRay may be just what we need, even for standard TVs like mine. That or use two disks for every movie, one for the movie and a second one for the extras. But that second DVD costs money, so most movies released aren't going to have it.
The place would have to have a registered nurse on duty as well. One who can insert a catheter.
No, not for me, for my wife. She has to pee about every 20 minutes when we are watching a movie.
So, a discreet waitress to get us food and beverage, a catheter for my wife to remove the beverage, and a comfortable chair with restraints so that my wife doesn't do her other movie-enjoyment-destroying bit, washing dishes. Because she can't sit and watch a movie if there are dirty dishes in the sink.
Hey, I like this idea of yours. I would care to invest in this project with you. Please post your bank acount numbre so that I may send my payment to you quinkly. Also, my uncle would like to here of this, I will forward his replie soon; once it is tomorrow in Nigeria.
said Drakonite: "crumple pages etc of it up"... if I applied the same force in crumpling a book as it'd take for my PDA to flex at all it'd rip the book in half.
Really??? You have used your PDA as a step when you needed a couple inches more reach? And the LCD screen didn't crack at all? You must have the Knight Rider 2000 version of the Palm Pilot.
For me, it isn't so much "the look of paper", it's the physical aspects of a book I can't do without. If confused at a certain plot twist, I can easily flip back to a previous page, and re-read a line, while not loosing my current place, because my finger is holding the pages open. I don't have to try to guess what page number to turn to, just how far into the story I think I have to look. And I can easily read a line on the previous page, then a line on the current page that is causing the confusion, then the previous line again, etc. until I get it right in my mind.
I can flip back one page and read the whole thing, knowing exactly that that is the previous page, and knowing exactly where on the current page to jump back to.
If an e-book has that ability, I would consider using one to read something. But not if it is just a simplified Palm Pilot or TabletPC, ie single flat screen that can only show one page at a time, or worse if it scrolls at all.
I just now spent 5 minutes googling for ebook devices, and my worst fears were right. Most of the devices are nothing more than Palm Pilots, some are tablet PC style. One was actually a two-page reader that could almost make the cut. Maybe I should claim patent rights to a "Multi-Leaf Electronic Book Device" that uses several LCD sheets so I can 'flip' through them as I described above.
Slashdot Mirror
No, Asimov outlined something more sinister in the second or third "Robots" novel. Make a spaceship with a positronic brain. It is basically a space-going robot. Instruct it to destroy other space-going robots. It won't know the other space-going robots are actually spaceships with humans onboard. When it is in attack mode, it of course doesn't monitor incoming broadcast signals.
Great books.
but I have to go all Slashdot Nazi on you. You didn't misspell "grammar", and you let us all down.
Someone think of the children posts!!
...but what state is Calgary in?
The first four possible futures for Jeeves looked stupid. Gay even.
But that last one cracked me up. "Look out for bounty hunters and their carbonite." That made it worth it.
Why would Mexicans have nickels?
Over their streaming wifi bluetooth podcast-based real-time worldwide virtual reality broadcasts on their iPodMacroVRGPSHDDVDIPv6B2B's with optional ...
Ouch, now my brain hurts. Who can think of something to finish this off with?
Hey sicko, that kind of so-called humor isn't funny. Slashdot shouldn't tolerate the jokes you people make about a very serious problem...oh wait. I thought you were leading up to a 'prisoner ass-rape' joke. You were pulling a switch on the '1000 dead lawyers' joke. Ok, now I see it. That's funny, right there. hehehe 1000 spammers on murder charges. hahaha Gotta admit, I didn't see that one coming.
I wonder if there will be specialty companies that guarantee their products are RFID free. Their shipping containers may use them, since they are the next step for inventory control. But what of smaller companies that would make or sell clothing with no imbedded RFIDs, which are of course all of our concerns?
Just like there is 'hemp' clothing that seems to be bought as a stand against "The Man", does anyone see 'RDID-free' as a growing market? And if so, how long until they are bought out by the large corporations, and tags start going in?
Hey, don't knock the China Daily news! lol
:^P
I know, it looks silly, but that was the first article Google showed that had the accusation that the US was bad for not invading. I can't seem to find other articles right now, but I do remember hearing the French accuse us for not being in there already. I specifically remember that because Haiti is of course a French former colony, and they would be the logical choice to send peacekeeping troops. Plus it wasn't like their army was very busy at the time.
I will look for more articles. THey must be there. They couldn't have all been destroyed. They are just buried somewhere.
"and that you are not reluctant *at* *all* when it comes to sending that army to wage wars in other parts of the world."
1 8/content_307092.htm
I love these assertions. We are critisized for going to war in Afghanistan, because we are killing innocent civilians, and the Afghanistan government didn't attack us, 19 Saudis did. (Or maybe it was the Jews, with Bush's help.)
We are blasted for attacking Iraq, when the entire world thought Saddam had biological weapons. And with France, Germany, and Russia balking at using force, Saddam had enough time to move tons of the stuff out of the country or bury it in the middle of the desert. Who knows, we might find it yet, in Syria. (And of course France, Germany, and Russia were objecting for humanitarian reasons, not because any invasion would show how much corruption was in the Oil-for-food program, and how much public officials and business leaders in those three countries profited.)
All well and good, if you are going to hate us for sticking our nose in, feel free. But be consistant. While the US was still locked in battle with terrorists (people who detonate car bombs in front of school children are terrorists, not insurgents), the world blasted us for not invading another country which had a repressed population being savaged by a dictator. That was Haiti. Here is a link to one article I found, which carried a theme similar to most at the time:
http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/english/doc/2004-02/
Notice how it is assumed that the US would invade this country to save the innocents, and since we didn't, we are bad people.
Yet we are still being called bad for invading other countries. Which way do you want it?
And personally, for your information, I personally think the US should pull out of the nation-building mentality. We should stop acting like the Europeans, thinking we have the right to interfere in other cultures like they always did. The United States was founded as a repulsion of that idea. Why did we lose sight of that and start to emulate them again?
So, how many acres of pristine Amazonian rain-forest have you purchased to prevent its being cut down? That's the problem with you left wackos, you bitch and complain, but you don't do anything that will solve the problem. You 'tree-hugging hippies' want the government to do all the hard, expensive work of protecting forests. And then there are the idiots of ELF, that burn down ski resorts and housing developments _after_ the trees are already cut down and the land bulldozed. Would it be that hard for all of you to just throw $100 each into buying land and keeping if from being commercialized? Even if only 10,000 people contributed directly, it would raise one million dollars, which could buy a lot of rainforest.
By the way, I mean 'wackos' in the kindest possible sense.
It was called Dianetics. ;^)
In the last two weeks, I have received mod points 4 times. In the two years or so that I have been posting, I only ever received them twice before this. Is it because I finally switched from IE to Firefox half of the time? Or am I now one of the 'oldtimers' because my number is under the half-million mark? (What is the current number level?)
Has anyone else been in this situation lately? I want to post comments, but spend all my time deciding where to mod comments. The hardest part is not automatically modding down all you liberals that say things that make me want to flame you.
Hey thanks. I was wondering why the writeup mentioned "billionths of a trillionth" when refering to the metric system. It seems like saying something is "thousands of hundreds of meters" away, rather than "hundreds of kilometers". Just goes to show the shortfall of the metric system.
No, you said it wrong.
It's supposed to be:
I don't care who you are, that's funny. That's funny, that thar is. Git R Done.
salute to Larry the Cable Guy.
It's funny you mention that you first thought of the Pythagorean principle. That is why I first noticed that the squares of 24 and 26 are exactly 100 apart. Back in high school geometry or trig.
I couldn't believe any of the other kids couldn't figure this out on their own. It was because they all had those new-fangled scientific calculators, and never figured out the relationships between numbers. They never even figured out the 3, 4, 5 set, which was the basis of half the examples; and 5, 12, 13 was the basis of most of the rest. No wonder they couldn't figure out the radius of a circle whose center is at the origin, and which passes through point (-3, 4).
Now that I am a parent, I am teaching my daughter these things, even though she is only in the third grade. I don't expect her to remember them right away, but by high school they should be part of her brainwaves.
"I'd personally much rather hire someone who got in A in calculus without using a calculator rather than one who did it with a TI-89."
Where do I fax my resume?
Actually, to be honest, I did use a calculator to do the long multiplication and division steps of various problems. Never did use the scientific or plotting ones, couldn't afford them. Just the basic $5 throw-away ones from the drug store. And judging from the replies you recieved, the expensensive ones rotted several people's minds.
Building on this, why are the squares of 24 and 26 exactly 100 apart? And how does this tie in with work done by 'a Greek math guy'?
I wrote a letter to the editor of Science Fiction Age magazine in 1993. Not only was it printed, it closed a long running debate about the contents of the magazine. I had gotten tired of reading letters complaining about the one 'fantasy' story in a 'science fiction' mag, and the supporting letters were annoying too. One month, three of the four letters printed were on this topic. So I wrote in and told the guys at the magazine to just make a decision, tell us readers what it was, and stick to it. They would then at least have our respect, if not our agreement. I think they kept the one fantasy story, and I don't remember another letter about it.
until all the Road Runner customers jump on it, and the bandwidth goes to hell. My three-d real-time animation of last week's blizzard with slow to a crawl, and then I'll probably get a pop-up advising me to switch to that other supercomputer the Japanese made last year.
Man, I hate when that happens.
Maybe DVDs surpass what a standard TV can produce, but not all DVDs are at that standard. I have a new Sony TV, it has good clarity. A couple months ago we were watching "Gothika" with Halle Berry. As she was sneaking around the mental hospital, the subtle shadows were generally just large blotches of black surrounded by jagged blotches of not-quite-black. I figure this is from the compression they use to fit the movie and all extras on one disk, but I find that to be a poor excuse.
So, BluRay may be just what we need, even for standard TVs like mine. That or use two disks for every movie, one for the movie and a second one for the extras. But that second DVD costs money, so most movies released aren't going to have it.
The place would have to have a registered nurse on duty as well. One who can insert a catheter.
No, not for me, for my wife. She has to pee about every 20 minutes when we are watching a movie.
So, a discreet waitress to get us food and beverage, a catheter for my wife to remove the beverage, and a comfortable chair with restraints so that my wife doesn't do her other movie-enjoyment-destroying bit, washing dishes. Because she can't sit and watch a movie if there are dirty dishes in the sink.
Hey, I like this idea of yours. I would care to invest in this project with you. Please post your bank acount numbre so that I may send my payment to you quinkly. Also, my uncle would like to here of this, I will forward his replie soon; once it is tomorrow in Nigeria.
said Drakonite: ... if I applied the same force in crumpling a book as it'd take for my PDA to flex at all it'd rip the book in half.
"crumple pages etc of it up"
Really??? You have used your PDA as a step when you needed a couple inches more reach? And the LCD screen didn't crack at all? You must have the Knight Rider 2000 version of the Palm Pilot.
For me, it isn't so much "the look of paper", it's the physical aspects of a book I can't do without. If confused at a certain plot twist, I can easily flip back to a previous page, and re-read a line, while not loosing my current place, because my finger is holding the pages open. I don't have to try to guess what page number to turn to, just how far into the story I think I have to look. And I can easily read a line on the previous page, then a line on the current page that is causing the confusion, then the previous line again, etc. until I get it right in my mind.
I can flip back one page and read the whole thing, knowing exactly that that is the previous page, and knowing exactly where on the current page to jump back to.
If an e-book has that ability, I would consider using one to read something. But not if it is just a simplified Palm Pilot or TabletPC, ie single flat screen that can only show one page at a time, or worse if it scrolls at all.
I just now spent 5 minutes googling for ebook devices, and my worst fears were right. Most of the devices are nothing more than Palm Pilots, some are tablet PC style. One was actually a two-page reader that could almost make the cut. Maybe I should claim patent rights to a "Multi-Leaf Electronic Book Device" that uses several LCD sheets so I can 'flip' through them as I described above.
A møøse bit your sister once? Was is very nasti?