If posts and moderation are an indicator, then he's right. The place need not be a mono culture to censor (actively attempt to hide from general view and squash credible debate via moderation) the debate. That's generally what happens. Anything which isn't pro-pirating is generally negatively moderated. Occasionally anti-pirating comments are either left alone or moderated up, but that's fairly rare. It likely has more do with moderation point availability rather than a desire to openly debate the merits.
I've noticed the moderation trend too, but I don't think it means to much. A lot of "anti-piracy" posts are trollish for whatever reason. Not the point of view, but it seems trolls favor posting from that side of the issue more so than the other. A lot of them are "piracy is bad", with no logic or reason backing it up. This happens on the pro-side too, but not as often. I'm not saying that this is most of it, but it plays a roll.
Worse, many pro-pirates then troll moderate those who offered an alternate view in other, unrelated discussions.
This is just a popular new thing here. I first noticed it with the "whoever is a sock puppet" troll ("Twitter" I think), and then with the doubly obnoxious "HOSTS" troll.
When it comes to piracy, the community appears anything but diverse, or fair, or reasonable, or open to discussion/debate.
I've haven't really noticed this. I'm a general moderate on the issue (pro-piracy for certain reasons, against for others), and haven't noticed any nasty mods. Even when saying that 90% of piracy is wrong, but there needs to be exceptions I'm either ignored or get a slight up-mod. Every time it comes up I notice a fair amount of debate, but generally the anti-piracy crowd just mumbles about not being upmodded, which annoys me, stop complaining about mods and work on actually being "insightful" or "informative".
Those who question the pro-pirate position are targeted. That alone says they know full well their position is extremely weak and typically without any merit what-so-ever.
I'd down-mod you for that statement. Not because I agree or disagree with piracy, but because that was flamebait.
I generally moderate against anyone who has enters a discussion in an insulting manner, and who doesn't actually bring anything real to the table. But then again I rarely down-mod people, I try to stick with the positive moderation.
Grr... damn Slashdot and its random double-spacing.
I don't think that Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep would have been helped by in depth explanation of their function and manufacture.
Personally I'm willing to call anything science fiction is it is based on extrapolating future trends, or makes me pause for at least an hour after reading it, scratching my beard and pondering other implications. Yes, obvious blunders annoy the hell out of me, but there is a large gap between that and pure hard sci-fi. I'm also always annoyed by alien physiology and language.... Why the hell does every "space creature" have to be a biped which has some conceptual basis that allows it to understand English in anyway? Thats one reason I love Lem, his aliens are alien in every way.
Without a common history, and evolutionary environment, what makes us think that aliens would be understandable at all? Hell, sometimes I ponder whether even science and math would form a basis of communications, what if they have a consistent but differing system? What if they skipped large parts of intelligence that we consider important? How does forming a consensus on the atomic structure of hydrogen lead to higher level communications? How do we move from hydrogen to anything that matters (in fiction)?
Personally I think sci-fi is a very large genre with plenty of room for everything. There is no reason it can't be cut up into discrete little chunks.
Perhaps the communal view on the issue is much more complicated than you'd like?
Perhaps Slashdot isn't a mono-culture yet, and still has plenty of dissenting views?
Perhaps the author has a point, there is a line between open culture and exploitive culture. Remixing is fine, sharing can be fine, plagiarism is not fine.
Its been a very long time since I've watched MTV willingly (mid-90's, before Rap/Hip-Hop took over, and a bit before "reality" took over), but perhaps these music video channels switched formats because music videos became less relevant thanks to the internet. Even truer now than when MTV killed content, why sit around waiting for that awesome video when you can spend 10 seconds finding it online, then download it to your phone/ipod/tablet/laptop/refrigerator? Internet killed the video star? (ugh).
Note how many true Sci Fi authors have gravitated to to name "Speculative fiction" cf. they don't want their lofty ideas to be constrained by the weights of "Science".
This can be a decent thing. Novels like 1984 and Brave New World could be considered "speculative fiction". I don't find it a terrible sin against the genre to switch between exploring technology (hard sci-fi) and exploring concepts (speculative). My two favorite Sci-fi authors (Stanislaw Lem and Clifford Simak) are both light on hard science, and heavy on philosophical exploration.
I think the thing to keep in mind is that science fiction shouldn't just be about technology and physics (I've seen the over-explanation of both of these kill more novels than help), it should be about exploring the "what if?". "What if" can be both extrapolation of sceintific and technological trends, and the extrapolation of social, cultural, and other trends. Take Philip Dick, no one will deny his importance to the genre, but he had very little high techology, and practically no ad nauseum descriptions of how gadgets worked, his fiction was still highly engaging on an intellectual level.
I really don't get the "hardcore science" or it isn't sci-fi crowd, they always come off as boring snobs who completely ignore 90% of the genre, and nearly all of the early works and history. There are very few hard science fiction novels that I find enjoyable, I'd rather just read a non-fiction book on the concepts, since all the jargon and explanations often get in the way of the most important thing, an enjoyable story. Sometimes dragging out the Star-Trek-eque particle of the week is perfectly acceptable if it keeps things from becoming nothing more than a pedantic slog.
Contrast to the BS of "Transformers" or any superhero movie. Why do I care?
Transformers wasn't really sci-fi. You could replace the robots with giant space dinosaurs and the movie (cartoon) would be exactly the same. It was an action flick (or cartoon) using loose science fiction trappings. Contrast it with Blade Runner, which also lacks the "hard" bits of science, but manages to explore interesting concepts and consequences. I would happily call Blade Runner a sci-fi story, but Transformers is just action.
But you had no evidence to back your claim. I have some to back mine, albeit extremely weak evidence. I posted mostly to highlight the lack of evidence.
I don't see why "hardcore" games would have higher rates of piracy. People who are hardcore are willing to shell out big money on the experience (I need a new processor, two new ultra-expensive GPUs crossfired, DDR3 with cooling fins, a 10 million jiggawatt power supply... etc...), so what would lead you to conclude that they would not pay for the games? If you can afford all that, I'm guessing you'd want to pay money for the actual product too (barring DRM getting in the way of performance).
Perhaps by "hardcore" you meant "insanely popular FPS titles that are neither casual nor MMOs", like CoD and Halo. I'm really not sure what "hardcore" means anymore.
Traditional Netflix is more convenient than traditional movie renting, but that's not what they have to compete with. You have to compete with the other options that are currently out there
What else is there? Amazon's new and tiny selection stuck into an unrelated account type offering no actual, physical, rentals to make up the content difference? Redbox, which pretty much only stocks new movies and "mega-hits"? The aforementioned Blockbuster and chains like Hollywood? Apple's nasty, expensive and DRM ridden, rentals? Various On-Demand schemes from cable companies?
Torrent and piracy is a different thing altogether. Some people will go for free all the time, no matter how good the legitimate option is. If Netflix lowered their costs to $2/mo, and streaming everything that ever existed straight to your brain; people would still pirate. I'm willing to pay for Netflix for the convenience, even over piracy. A lot of movies I want to watch are popular or new enough to exist in the realm of torrents (which are almost completely about popularity and novelty by nature). I don't like having to deal with torrent sites, shifting media back and forth between my computers, praying for a decent quality rip, sound that actually syncs, etc... That and I'm okay with paying to avoid potential MPAA bombs and ridiculously over-scale legal and financial issues. That and there hasn't been a move made that I had to watch "right now, this very moment, or else". Who cares if I need to wait a couple days? If it was that big of a deal I would have seen it in the theater.
I have occasionally pirated movies, I'm not trying to sound like some sterling exemplar of moral perfectitude, or such. I often grab TV shows, I sometimes grab movies that don't really exist in any legitimate catalog (mostly foreign films). Also, there is a bit of a flaw here, of all the people I know who watch movies, very few of them pirate them. I know a couple "source" people, who spread pirated movies and shows among friends, but for the most part normal, non-nerd or college age, people don't. My father and mother both come to mind, they love Netflix (though think it is too complicated, meaning torrents would blow their minds), they aren't going to switch to bittorrent any time soon.
Right now Netflix has the largest selection of streaming movies and shows. Right now, if something isn't streaming, I can get a physical disk in the mail with basically no added effort ("oh no, I have to check my mail, as if I didn't do it daily already").
If a service goes 100% streaming, and somehow manages to get the totality of Netflix's catalog to stream, and costs fairly, then they will win. Right now I'd say Netflix is the best contender for this eventuality, since they are big, recognized, and have pre-existing deals with publishers/distributors. Amazon might be able to pull it off, but they have a fair amount of catching up to do. Ideally we'll end up with 3-4+ competitors offering comparable services with comparable selections, so I'd rather no one wins.
So one can't simply look at TPB raw data and get any real feel for the situation.
Agreed. I was basically showing that I could poke some holes in the parents baseless argument by spending less than a minute on Pirate Bay. Things fracture beyond that, as you state.
I'm not sure what the parent meant by "hardcore" anymore. I view hardcore gamers as those who spend tons of money for the most cutting edge machine, meaning they have a fair amount of extra cash sitting around. Depending on how cutting edge we're talking, far more cash than I have on hand. Most of these gamers have no problem coughing up cash, and probably would for the added support and experience (packaging, manual, added features) that come with buying games. I always figure that those metal box deluxe editions, which cost more, were for the "hardcore" crowd.
I suppose my definition is old and out of style. I think hardcore might just mean "plays first person shooters" these days. Halo and CoD is hardcore... It makes me sad for some inexplicable reason. And hurts the phrase a bit, since these games are among the MOST popular, meaning most people are "hardcore", so why bother with the term?
Most 'hardcore' pc gamers are not paying for the games, period. We should be past the point of calling anyone a troll for pointing out how bad the situation has become.
Citation Needed.
Really.
Browsing through some torrents, looking at their seed/leach rates, I have a very hard time buying that. Unless only a few thousand people play any given game. And somehow we should also completely ignore Steam, and the ungodly amount of money they make. I have an odd feeling that if you could deduce the total amount of unique seeders and leachers on Pirate Bay, pirating games, and compare that to the total number of unique Steam Users (much less World of Warcraft's 11 million active accounts) it would be very eye opening. I have a feeling Steam would win, handily.
Yes, my statement lacks empirical evidence... which... I suppose... makes it as valid a premise as yours.
When it you get right down to it its just regular old stealing.
It may not be legal, or morally, good; but it is not "just regular old stealing". Language fails here, it seems. If every pirated copy was a lost sale, or lead directly to lost revenue, then it would be closer to stealing (or rather theft of service). Right now it is just like "regular old intellectual property infringement".
I'm not going into a moralistic argument about piracy, nor will I argue here about its effects; it just isn't, semantically, like stealing. Conflating it as such isn't good, nor would be treating it as such, since it isn't. Whatever it is, it is a bit lesser than stealing, but greater than borrowing or mere copying. I prefer piracy, though there still are some lurking ambiguity, it is a much more accepted term. Copyright infringement is pretty damn good, but does lack the ring.
(disclaimer: I'm not a fan of pirates nor the actions of publishers/government/lawyers, though I think the pirates might be the least distasteful and dangerous)
Anecdotal evidence. You might pay and that is good but most 'hardcore' pc gamers are pirates. Torrent stats are public information.
In this case it is better than no evidence. Torrent stats mean nothing unless their compared to the total number of players and sales. Games make up a minority of torrents, thanks largely to their size, DRM, and pain of installing some pirated versions. A quick search of Pirate Bay reveals the that highest seeded game (CoD: Black Ops) has a "mere" 2390 seeders (1329 leaches), where the top seeded CD (some hiphop thing) has 5340 seeders and 400-odd leaches (not as fair, the amount of music out there far outweighs the number of PC games, splintering the market); the highest movie has 11114 seeders (15600 leaches), and the highest TV show sits at 13296 seeders (though Glee has 12430 leaches). Notice the trend? Also; Games might follow the same trend as music, where pirates spend more money on the whole than non-pirates. Who knows the truth of the matter, until there are decent, objective, statistics anecdotal is better than nothing.
Also the parent speaks some truth. While I still pirate some games (mostly as a demo), I pirate far less than when I was college age, where everything I had was basically pirated. I have disposable income now, I can can buy games and food at the same time, and do. And thanks to services like Steam, I even buy games on impulse (not through Impulse though.. heh heh), which used to be reserved for drunken nights on Pirate Bay. Some of it might be the hassle (okay, I can download, slowly, a 50Gb game that may or may not install, and may or may not run, or I can cough up a petty $50 for it?).
No I'm not rich, but I don't really have the desire to have EVERY game out there. I don't care about 90% of them. When I was younger I would pirate it, play it for three hours, then delete it out of lack of interest. Now I just abstain, and pretty much only buy games that look like they will, actually, hold my interest, and generally only after they have been around for a bit so I can read the reviews (who the hell thinks pre-ordering is a good idea?).
Piracy is never as big a deal as interested parties make out. Yes, it is a minor problem. No, it won't kill the industry (or at least won't kill it as fast as the publishers, EA I'm looking at you).
He meant "why would you add a game not installed via Steam to your Steam Library?", such as sticking a "link" to World of Warcraft in Steam, next to all your Steam purchases.
I do, but mostly because Steam games don't play well with Windows Start Menu (they never pop up in the most opened program list, since they aren't real shortcuts). All my games should be somewhere, the Start Menu is where they should be, but barring that Steam works. Its annoying, they used to work, but since the last version they stopped, since they are now all links to steam.exe with some augments.*
* I'm wrong, they actually are links to a service... ala "steam://rungameid/XXXXX"
I can tell you - when I search for a movie or show that is on Netflix, but only available via DVD (place order, wait for availability, have it mailed to you, check the mail, put it in the player, watch it, put it back in the envelope, mail it back, hope it doesn't get lost or pilfered in the USPS, etc) . . . the last option I'm considering is "yeah, I think I'll just go ahead and get the DVD from netflix". ..
But it is still many times easier then getting in your car, driving to Blockbuster, wandering around for an hour trying to decipher what "genre" your movie might be filed under, realizing that it didn't win an Oscar in the last 5 years so Blockbuster doesn't stock it, instead finding a movie cashing in on a big movie ("Transmorphers" "Snakes on a Train" "The Thing's Leach"), having to deal with a disinterested high school drop out, paying $6.00 for the priviledge, driving all the way back home, and then 3 days later repeating it under penalty of paying 120% for the movie, and being faced with a $15.00 "restocking fee".
I generally just toss any old movie into my queue when the whim takes me, if its streaming I add it to the instant one, if not I just add it. It comes, it sits on my speakers until I want feel like watching it (i.e. remember its there) or I decide I'll never watch it. Send it back. Then a couple days later I go to my mailbox and its like Christmas, until I open the package and realize that its some obscure French/Japanese/Polish movie about a person sitting in a room for three hours quoting philosophy while cutting to a child running through a field back-lit by the sunrise. Then the cycle repeats. Not a big deal.
We've had one movie lost in the mail. Didn't get charged. Though it might have eventually been found by the post office; no clue.
I do wish that everything was streaming though, it would make life a bit better; though disks aren't nearly as bad as you make them out to be.
More expensive than a paperback isn't my definition of cheap.
Their 3rd parties are a mixed blessing, as well. 90% of the time they aren't cheaper than driving down to a used bookstore and grabbing it, once you factor in the very silly shipping prices. I had a $0.99 book shipped to my house, it had $3.99 shipping. Upon getting it I noticed it shipped from less than five miles away, about a 10 minute drive, and for that I waited a week. Last time I went to the used bookstore I cross-referenced Amazon prices, the used bookstore won every single time once shipping was accounted for.
On rarer books (more uncommon than anything) their prices can get ridiculous. I've found a couple books listed for +$100, for a ten year old trade paperback that most bookstores can still probably order for you.
Their shipping... oh lord. I just ordered some stuff from Amazon after using Newegg for most of my needs, I now realize that I am spoiled. I order some random bit of hardware from Newegg with free to $0.99 shipping and it comes to my door within three days, no matter what. I order the same thing from Amazon (not even a third party), with $4.00 shipping and it comes to my door in a week, if not more (and spends around 4 days in a warehouse for no reason), and generally in a beaten up box 18 sizes too large with nothing but an airbag for protection.
I do use Amazon, I'm even fond of them, but they aren't the greatest thing in the world, and they haven't done everything right. They actually are quite mediocre on several areas. They win because they are big, ubiquitous, and convenient.
If you'd be schlepping around an e-reader instead, a tablet is pretty much a no-brainer:)
Nope. I could go get a tablet, but I'm not. I own a Nook, and a Droid, why the hell would I want a tablet? I can't stand reading for long periods on a backlit monitor, so the Nook is staying. When I'm on the go I only really need email and browsing capability. What would a tablet do to enhance my life?
Also how the hell did we forget the whole point of ebook readers already? They are meant to as closely emulate books as possible, for ease of reading; meaning high contrast, paper-like reflectivity, and obscenely high battery life. Being able to play Angry Birds doesn't help my ability to read a book. Having to lug something around the eats battery life like a fat kid eats Cheetos isn't a benefit. Having a goddamn built in camera doesn't (I have five goddamn cameras within arms reach, how does another improve my life?).
Also; how the hell did tablets becomes such a big meme? Anyone realize that an almost completely insignificant portion of the population actually own one? Its like everyone catering to the iPhone, which has a single digit percentage of the damn mobile market (hell, it isn't even 25% of the smart phone market). Going from the media this number sounds more like 145% of the population has one.
I know exactly one person who owns a tablet, an iPad. He loves it, but complains about how it is still pretty much useless (cognitive dissonance there, he's banking on it being useful in the next ten years or so). I'm pretty sure he loves it just because he can be seen with an iPad. No one else I know is even wanting one in any actual level, yes a couple people are vaguely positive towards them, and may buy them when they hit sub-$100 levels, but I would hardly call them enthusiastic.
Was the sun in her eyes like she and another witness said?
Well she admitted to it, and thus is guilty of something. Perhaps not of whatever "social mediating while driving" is, but at least of driving unsafely in a criminal manner. She should have slowed down until her ability to drive matched the external circumstances, in many places this is law.
Can they prove she was actually driving when she posted to Facebook?
Easily, phone records. Grab the phone records of the victim and the suspect, tie them together, and *poof* instant time-line. Not 100% conclusive, but this is a civil suit, so it doesn't have to be.
Why was the victim in the road and not on the sidewalk?
He was just in a minor accident. He could have been moving from the driver's side of his car to the sidewalk, in essence, just exiting the vehicle. He could have been doing an inspection of his vehicle. Etc... Not that it matters that much, she hit him, it was avoidable (slow down, or... you know... use that wheel mounted in front of the driver to avoid obstacles such as old men), it doesn't matter why he was in the road, all that matters is she hit him.
Barbarella was pretty bad to begin with. Heavy Metal wasn't bad, but it's very much a product of the time it was made.
Barbarella is also very much a product of its time, so you shouldn't judge it more harshly than Heavy Metal.
Barbarella, and all the other crappy, over-done, Dino DeLaurentis fantasies are among my favorite movies now. Heavy Metal, though, didn't age well for me.
I have to choose how to spend my limited entertainment budget: do I expose my children to media that will challenge or disturb them, or do I have a good time with my kids? For me, it's a no-brainer.
No, it isn't a no brainer. There were exactly three "banned" movies* when I was growing up, one of which was served with the caveat "don't watch it, but its on the video rack". My mom took me to see Silent of the Lambs when I was a kid (well I was 12 or 13), and then lent me the book. A Stephen King novel is the second actual adult book I've ever read (the first was a Clifford Simak novel, The Visitors). My favorite YA book was Z for Zachariah, which my mom loved more than me, and still is the bleakest post-apocalyptic novel I've ever read. I spent pretty much my whole childhood (up until teenage angst hit) staying up and watching horror movies with my Dad every weekend (Monster Vision on TNT was awesome, it is a shame nothing like it exists now).
My mom got into a very large fight with my Junior High school about whether, or whether not, I should be allowed to read adult books in class, the biggest point of contention was The Stand.
There were very few restrictions on me. My parents were open, and enjoyed (or convincingly acted like it) talking about my reaction to these movies, and what was going on in them. They basically treated me like a little adult. When I have children of my own I will treat them the same way. I have several friends who grew up the same way.
Oddly, the one thing on television that I wasn't really encouraged to watch was Sesame Street and Mr. Rogers. Nova, Cosmos, and Mr. Wizard was fine, but the things that were purely juvenile weren't really encouraged. Nor was any Disney movie beyond Fantasia. I'm fine with this, and will probably have the same outlook, I don't like talking down to children. Children aren't precious butterflies who need to be protected from the real world at all costs.
*David Lynch's Blue Velvet (still one of my favorite movies ever), Wes Craven's Last House and the Left, and Audrey Rose. I managed to catch all three by puberty.
I agree with your assessment. I have read some authors, and participated in some debates with people who have decided that passing a Turing test is enough to qualify it as AI. I find this silly for two reasons; the first being that it presumes that intelligence is merely the ability to hold a conversation. This ignores both the "inner" aspects (creativity, day dreaming, emotional states, etc...), and other external abilities (does it paint, doodle in the phone book while parsing the DNS tables). The second is that tt also ignores the fact that the appearance of intelligence is not intelligence; If I build a model of a horse that you can't tell isn't a real horse from a certain distance, it doesn't magically turn into a horse.
I think the AI has a deeper problem though; wtf does actually intelligence mean? Back in college the psychology capstone I took was titled "Animal Intelligence", which was a nice philosophical backdoor to the question of what intelligence is, how we can measure it, and how could we recognize it in non-humans. The fundamental problem that I found in the class (which the teacher refused to let me spread, but greatly enjoyed since it was his secret point, him being a crony with the philosophy department) was that we measure intelligence solely on our own yardstick (in comparison to recognized human traits), and it is difficult to move this beyond human experience. Often we read "intelligence" as "human like", which isn't actually contained in the definition. There is no reason that intelligence must be human like. But then we run into a nice "black box" problem, all we have access to is inputs and outputs, and not to any actual process. Which makes Turing tests sound nice and viable, but then they only measure "humanness" in the end. A dolphin (if they are intelligent) would fail a Turing test, as a hypothetical extra-terrestrial.
When people say "real AI" I interpret it as "Strong AI", i.e. human-like intelligence.
A bot in a video game is "weak AI", it is simple, and generally a unitasker. A QuakeIII bot isn't going to stop shooting me and question the purpose of fighting, nor is it going to decide to quit fighting and go browse Wikipedia instead. Hell, most bots in games (and other AIs) are very weak, they often can't actually learn beyond some very scripted and procedural levels. Most of them can be tricked very easily in such a way that they will never, ever, have a chance of learning (if they are capable in the first place). I'm sure I could script a game of Jeopardy in such a way that Watson loses 100% of the time (barring programmer interference).
I also can't see Watson, much less game AI, passing the Turing Test. Which, to many, is the entry level to being considered strong AI.*
* though I disagree with many AI affictionados, I doubt the Turing Test, itself, indicates a true strong AI, it just shows indications that it is possible.
There COULD be something magical about the human brain. But we have modeled the brains of animals with fewer neurons successfully and they are made of pretty much the same stuff just in lower quantities.
This always ignored me about the AI and CogSci crowds. They often confuse their metaphors. "The brain is like a computer" != "the brain is a computer". Even this is backwards, since a computer is more like brain than a brain like a computer. The current vogue is the "computational" model of cognition, but this doesn't transcend mere metaphor either, we mapped computer lingo and bits to the human brain.
Its like mapping your physiology to a motor vehicle; yes there are some very rough correspondences, but beyond this there is pretty much no similarity. The only reason we don't call "bullshit" on the brain::computer metaphor is that the brain is still a bit mysterious (okay, extremely, we probably don't even understand 10% yet), and most people find computers to be, basically, black boxes, just like the brain (input in, mysterious stuff happens, output).
Just because the brain isn't a computer doesn't make it magical, just like the fact that you aren't an automobile doesn't make your physiology magical. This isn't a black and white thing. Your brain probably functions in a pretty damn unique way, completely unlike many other things that also "compute" (especially since computation is a rather new development), and when it does compute it computes in a way completely different than an abacus, computer, or slide rule.
That said, I'm sure someday we'll have decent AI, though probably not in mine or my unborn children's life time. This AI will probably be either completely incomprehensible to us (and us to it), or developed by some other technique than the ones we are working on today. I personally don't see the point (outside of the nice geeky "because we can"), what would AI do for us? If we develop a "human like" intelligence it will probably be because we already understand the brain enough to model it, meaning its actual academic value is a bit wanting. I doubt it would make much economic sense either, since it would be as bad as a human worker. Unless, of course, we develop some "perfect" intelligence, and then why the hell would it want to control a factory for no benefit to itself?
Admittedly, it improved a bit in recent versions, but I almost regret just not buying a cheap Athlon+mobo and going with that instead. So, really, it's probably more the fault of the Atom, but given my general experiences with Flash being very hit or miss, I think there's plenty of blame to share around.
Naw, a decent Atom (I've got a D510) can handle Flash. I'm running Windows 7 on my HTPC (the same one that had Ubuntu and failed) and it handles streaming 1080p full-screen just fine. Considering the fact that my board maxes out at 2Gb of RAM, its a pretty zippy machine. Also, Boxee, under Ubuntu, ran fullscreen 1080p pretty well (not perfectly, but decently enough to get the job done), but it completely choked in Hulu, Firefox, Chromium, Rekonq (when I was playing with OpenSuse), and any other way you could be inflicted with Flash.
Doing my monthly "essential" back-up is a massive pain in Windows (I know, it should be weekly or daily, but my data doesn't have enough churn to really warrant it) , I get to spend an hour hunting down where some random program might want to stick files. I wouldn't even mind if they just stuck with "/user/name/", at least I could just copy the whole mess and be done with it (with the caveat that it easily lets me keep/user/ on a different partition or disk).
What the hell is up the spacing on these comments now? Go, Go Slashdot 3.0!
Read up on it, its a bit more complicated than that. Assange isn't painted in a very nice light, and if he isn't guilty of rape, he still doesn't emerge shit-free. Also he isn't being extradited for trial, he's being extradited to give testimony. No one has called him guilty of anything. Part of the charges ARE non-consensual sex (without protection, while a woman was sleeping), and while these charges wouldn't hold water in the US, that doesn't matter one bit. US law means nothing to anyone else.
And no, none of this is terribly suspicious. He's a celebrity, so there is greater scrutiny. It is sad that run of mill sex offenders (by legal standards if not your personal ones) aren't treated equally. I have seen no evidence whatsoever that the CIA put anyone up to anything. Lacking any evidence it really isn't a theory worth wasting time on. Might as well say the Grey Aliens put Interpol up to it since Assange is actually a lizard alien from Sirius IV. That premise has about the same amount of serious evidence as the CIA story. Or that Assange is in trouble because he spited the Time Cube. Or (on topic) that it is the will of Xenu.
Personally I find it all a bit strange; but... If that is Sweden's laws, and he broke them, then he is guilty. It doesn't matter if you and I don't agree with them. It doesn't matter if some people find Assange to be some form of modern day saint. It doesn't matter if he's fighting for your cause. If he broke the law of the land, he broke the law of the land. If Sweden calls it rape, then it is rape in Sweden.
Assange is the worst part of Wikileaks. He distracts from anything important, and from the general mission of the site. By all accounts he is an absolute asshat. I like Wikileaks, but can't, personally, stand him. Wikileaks would be stronger, and financially sound, if he just went away.
Slashdot Mirror
Damn double spacing... Bad /. 3.0! Bad.
If posts and moderation are an indicator, then he's right. The place need not be a mono culture to censor (actively attempt to hide from general view and squash credible debate via moderation) the debate. That's generally what happens. Anything which isn't pro-pirating is generally negatively moderated. Occasionally anti-pirating comments are either left alone or moderated up, but that's fairly rare. It likely has more do with moderation point availability rather than a desire to openly debate the merits.
I've noticed the moderation trend too, but I don't think it means to much. A lot of "anti-piracy" posts are trollish for whatever reason. Not the point of view, but it seems trolls favor posting from that side of the issue more so than the other. A lot of them are "piracy is bad", with no logic or reason backing it up. This happens on the pro-side too, but not as often. I'm not saying that this is most of it, but it plays a roll.
Worse, many pro-pirates then troll moderate those who offered an alternate view in other, unrelated discussions.
This is just a popular new thing here. I first noticed it with the "whoever is a sock puppet" troll ("Twitter" I think), and then with the doubly obnoxious "HOSTS" troll.
When it comes to piracy, the community appears anything but diverse, or fair, or reasonable, or open to discussion/debate.
I've haven't really noticed this. I'm a general moderate on the issue (pro-piracy for certain reasons, against for others), and haven't noticed any nasty mods. Even when saying that 90% of piracy is wrong, but there needs to be exceptions I'm either ignored or get a slight up-mod. Every time it comes up I notice a fair amount of debate, but generally the anti-piracy crowd just mumbles about not being upmodded, which annoys me, stop complaining about mods and work on actually being "insightful" or "informative".
Those who question the pro-pirate position are targeted. That alone says they know full well their position is extremely weak and typically without any merit what-so-ever.
I'd down-mod you for that statement. Not because I agree or disagree with piracy, but because that was flamebait.
I generally moderate against anyone who has enters a discussion in an insulting manner, and who doesn't actually bring anything real to the table. But then again I rarely down-mod people, I try to stick with the positive moderation.
Grr... damn Slashdot and its random double-spacing.
I don't think that Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep would have been helped by in depth explanation of their function and manufacture.
Personally I'm willing to call anything science fiction is it is based on extrapolating future trends, or makes me pause for at least an hour after reading it, scratching my beard and pondering other implications. Yes, obvious blunders annoy the hell out of me, but there is a large gap between that and pure hard sci-fi. I'm also always annoyed by alien physiology and language.... Why the hell does every "space creature" have to be a biped which has some conceptual basis that allows it to understand English in anyway? Thats one reason I love Lem, his aliens are alien in every way.
Without a common history, and evolutionary environment, what makes us think that aliens would be understandable at all? Hell, sometimes I ponder whether even science and math would form a basis of communications, what if they have a consistent but differing system? What if they skipped large parts of intelligence that we consider important? How does forming a consensus on the atomic structure of hydrogen lead to higher level communications? How do we move from hydrogen to anything that matters (in fiction)?
Personally I think sci-fi is a very large genre with plenty of room for everything. There is no reason it can't be cut up into discrete little chunks.
You have been invited to play Mafia Wars!!!1one
Yep, social networks are the best way to channel the collective intellect of collected morons.
Perhaps the communal view on the issue is much more complicated than you'd like?
Perhaps Slashdot isn't a mono-culture yet, and still has plenty of dissenting views?
Perhaps the author has a point, there is a line between open culture and exploitive culture. Remixing is fine, sharing can be fine, plagiarism is not fine.
Its been a very long time since I've watched MTV willingly (mid-90's, before Rap/Hip-Hop took over, and a bit before "reality" took over), but perhaps these music video channels switched formats because music videos became less relevant thanks to the internet. Even truer now than when MTV killed content, why sit around waiting for that awesome video when you can spend 10 seconds finding it online, then download it to your phone/ipod/tablet/laptop/refrigerator? Internet killed the video star? (ugh).
Note how many true Sci Fi authors have gravitated to to name "Speculative fiction" cf. they don't want their lofty ideas to be constrained
by the weights of "Science".
This can be a decent thing. Novels like 1984 and Brave New World could be considered "speculative fiction". I don't find it a terrible sin against the genre to switch between exploring technology (hard sci-fi) and exploring concepts (speculative). My two favorite Sci-fi authors (Stanislaw Lem and Clifford Simak) are both light on hard science, and heavy on philosophical exploration.
I think the thing to keep in mind is that science fiction shouldn't just be about technology and physics (I've seen the over-explanation of both of these kill more novels than help), it should be about exploring the "what if?". "What if" can be both extrapolation of sceintific and technological trends, and the extrapolation of social, cultural, and other trends. Take Philip Dick, no one will deny his importance to the genre, but he had very little high techology, and practically no ad nauseum descriptions of how gadgets worked, his fiction was still highly engaging on an intellectual level.
I really don't get the "hardcore science" or it isn't sci-fi crowd, they always come off as boring snobs who completely ignore 90% of the genre, and nearly all of the early works and history. There are very few hard science fiction novels that I find enjoyable, I'd rather just read a non-fiction book on the concepts, since all the jargon and explanations often get in the way of the most important thing, an enjoyable story. Sometimes dragging out the Star-Trek-eque particle of the week is perfectly acceptable if it keeps things from becoming nothing more than a pedantic slog.
Contrast to the BS of "Transformers" or any superhero movie. Why do I care?
Transformers wasn't really sci-fi. You could replace the robots with giant space dinosaurs and the movie (cartoon) would be exactly the same. It was an action flick (or cartoon) using loose science fiction trappings. Contrast it with Blade Runner, which also lacks the "hard" bits of science, but manages to explore interesting concepts and consequences. I would happily call Blade Runner a sci-fi story, but Transformers is just action.
But you had no evidence to back your claim. I have some to back mine, albeit extremely weak evidence. I posted mostly to highlight the lack of evidence.
I don't see why "hardcore" games would have higher rates of piracy. People who are hardcore are willing to shell out big money on the experience (I need a new processor, two new ultra-expensive GPUs crossfired, DDR3 with cooling fins, a 10 million jiggawatt power supply... etc...), so what would lead you to conclude that they would not pay for the games? If you can afford all that, I'm guessing you'd want to pay money for the actual product too (barring DRM getting in the way of performance).
Perhaps by "hardcore" you meant "insanely popular FPS titles that are neither casual nor MMOs", like CoD and Halo. I'm really not sure what "hardcore" means anymore.
Traditional Netflix is more convenient than traditional movie renting, but that's not what they have to compete with. You have to compete with the other options that are currently out there
What else is there? Amazon's new and tiny selection stuck into an unrelated account type offering no actual, physical, rentals to make up the content difference? Redbox, which pretty much only stocks new movies and "mega-hits"? The aforementioned Blockbuster and chains like Hollywood? Apple's nasty, expensive and DRM ridden, rentals? Various On-Demand schemes from cable companies?
Torrent and piracy is a different thing altogether. Some people will go for free all the time, no matter how good the legitimate option is. If Netflix lowered their costs to $2/mo, and streaming everything that ever existed straight to your brain; people would still pirate. I'm willing to pay for Netflix for the convenience, even over piracy. A lot of movies I want to watch are popular or new enough to exist in the realm of torrents (which are almost completely about popularity and novelty by nature). I don't like having to deal with torrent sites, shifting media back and forth between my computers, praying for a decent quality rip, sound that actually syncs, etc... That and I'm okay with paying to avoid potential MPAA bombs and ridiculously over-scale legal and financial issues. That and there hasn't been a move made that I had to watch "right now, this very moment, or else". Who cares if I need to wait a couple days? If it was that big of a deal I would have seen it in the theater.
I have occasionally pirated movies, I'm not trying to sound like some sterling exemplar of moral perfectitude, or such. I often grab TV shows, I sometimes grab movies that don't really exist in any legitimate catalog (mostly foreign films). Also, there is a bit of a flaw here, of all the people I know who watch movies, very few of them pirate them. I know a couple "source" people, who spread pirated movies and shows among friends, but for the most part normal, non-nerd or college age, people don't. My father and mother both come to mind, they love Netflix (though think it is too complicated, meaning torrents would blow their minds), they aren't going to switch to bittorrent any time soon.
Right now Netflix has the largest selection of streaming movies and shows. Right now, if something isn't streaming, I can get a physical disk in the mail with basically no added effort ("oh no, I have to check my mail, as if I didn't do it daily already").
If a service goes 100% streaming, and somehow manages to get the totality of Netflix's catalog to stream, and costs fairly, then they will win. Right now I'd say Netflix is the best contender for this eventuality, since they are big, recognized, and have pre-existing deals with publishers/distributors. Amazon might be able to pull it off, but they have a fair amount of catching up to do. Ideally we'll end up with 3-4+ competitors offering comparable services with comparable selections, so I'd rather no one wins.
So one can't simply look at TPB raw data and get any real feel for the situation.
Agreed. I was basically showing that I could poke some holes in the parents baseless argument by spending less than a minute on Pirate Bay. Things fracture beyond that, as you state.
I'm not sure what the parent meant by "hardcore" anymore. I view hardcore gamers as those who spend tons of money for the most cutting edge machine, meaning they have a fair amount of extra cash sitting around. Depending on how cutting edge we're talking, far more cash than I have on hand. Most of these gamers have no problem coughing up cash, and probably would for the added support and experience (packaging, manual, added features) that come with buying games. I always figure that those metal box deluxe editions, which cost more, were for the "hardcore" crowd.
I suppose my definition is old and out of style. I think hardcore might just mean "plays first person shooters" these days. Halo and CoD is hardcore... It makes me sad for some inexplicable reason. And hurts the phrase a bit, since these games are among the MOST popular, meaning most people are "hardcore", so why bother with the term?
Most 'hardcore' pc gamers are not paying for the games, period. We should be past the point of calling anyone a troll for pointing out how bad the situation has become.
Citation Needed.
Really.
Browsing through some torrents, looking at their seed/leach rates, I have a very hard time buying that. Unless only a few thousand people play any given game. And somehow we should also completely ignore Steam, and the ungodly amount of money they make. I have an odd feeling that if you could deduce the total amount of unique seeders and leachers on Pirate Bay, pirating games, and compare that to the total number of unique Steam Users (much less World of Warcraft's 11 million active accounts) it would be very eye opening. I have a feeling Steam would win, handily.
Yes, my statement lacks empirical evidence... which... I suppose... makes it as valid a premise as yours.
When it you get right down to it its just regular old stealing.
It may not be legal, or morally, good; but it is not "just regular old stealing". Language fails here, it seems. If every pirated copy was a lost sale, or lead directly to lost revenue, then it would be closer to stealing (or rather theft of service). Right now it is just like "regular old intellectual property infringement".
I'm not going into a moralistic argument about piracy, nor will I argue here about its effects; it just isn't, semantically, like stealing. Conflating it as such isn't good, nor would be treating it as such, since it isn't. Whatever it is, it is a bit lesser than stealing, but greater than borrowing or mere copying. I prefer piracy, though there still are some lurking ambiguity, it is a much more accepted term. Copyright infringement is pretty damn good, but does lack the ring.
(disclaimer: I'm not a fan of pirates nor the actions of publishers/government/lawyers, though I think the pirates might be the least distasteful and dangerous)
Anecdotal evidence. You might pay and that is good but most 'hardcore' pc gamers are pirates. Torrent stats are public information.
In this case it is better than no evidence. Torrent stats mean nothing unless their compared to the total number of players and sales. Games make up a minority of torrents, thanks largely to their size, DRM, and pain of installing some pirated versions. A quick search of Pirate Bay reveals the that highest seeded game (CoD: Black Ops) has a "mere" 2390 seeders (1329 leaches), where the top seeded CD (some hiphop thing) has 5340 seeders and 400-odd leaches (not as fair, the amount of music out there far outweighs the number of PC games, splintering the market); the highest movie has 11114 seeders (15600 leaches), and the highest TV show sits at 13296 seeders (though Glee has 12430 leaches). Notice the trend? Also; Games might follow the same trend as music, where pirates spend more money on the whole than non-pirates. Who knows the truth of the matter, until there are decent, objective, statistics anecdotal is better than nothing.
Also the parent speaks some truth. While I still pirate some games (mostly as a demo), I pirate far less than when I was college age, where everything I had was basically pirated. I have disposable income now, I can can buy games and food at the same time, and do. And thanks to services like Steam, I even buy games on impulse (not through Impulse though.. heh heh), which used to be reserved for drunken nights on Pirate Bay. Some of it might be the hassle (okay, I can download, slowly, a 50Gb game that may or may not install, and may or may not run, or I can cough up a petty $50 for it?).
No I'm not rich, but I don't really have the desire to have EVERY game out there. I don't care about 90% of them. When I was younger I would pirate it, play it for three hours, then delete it out of lack of interest. Now I just abstain, and pretty much only buy games that look like they will, actually, hold my interest, and generally only after they have been around for a bit so I can read the reviews (who the hell thinks pre-ordering is a good idea?).
Piracy is never as big a deal as interested parties make out. Yes, it is a minor problem. No, it won't kill the industry (or at least won't kill it as fast as the publishers, EA I'm looking at you).
I don't think you read the comment.
He meant "why would you add a game not installed via Steam to your Steam Library?", such as sticking a "link" to World of Warcraft in Steam, next to all your Steam purchases.
I do, but mostly because Steam games don't play well with Windows Start Menu (they never pop up in the most opened program list, since they aren't real shortcuts). All my games should be somewhere, the Start Menu is where they should be, but barring that Steam works. Its annoying, they used to work, but since the last version they stopped, since they are now all links to steam.exe with some augments.*
* I'm wrong, they actually are links to a service... ala "steam://rungameid/XXXXX"
I can tell you - when I search for a movie or show that is on Netflix, but only available via DVD (place order, wait for availability, have it mailed to you, check the mail, put it in the player, watch it, put it back in the envelope, mail it back, hope it doesn't get lost or pilfered in the USPS, etc) . . . the last option I'm considering is "yeah, I think I'll just go ahead and get the DVD from netflix". . .
But it is still many times easier then getting in your car, driving to Blockbuster, wandering around for an hour trying to decipher what "genre" your movie might be filed under, realizing that it didn't win an Oscar in the last 5 years so Blockbuster doesn't stock it, instead finding a movie cashing in on a big movie ("Transmorphers" "Snakes on a Train" "The Thing's Leach"), having to deal with a disinterested high school drop out, paying $6.00 for the priviledge, driving all the way back home, and then 3 days later repeating it under penalty of paying 120% for the movie, and being faced with a $15.00 "restocking fee".
I generally just toss any old movie into my queue when the whim takes me, if its streaming I add it to the instant one, if not I just add it. It comes, it sits on my speakers until I want feel like watching it (i.e. remember its there) or I decide I'll never watch it. Send it back. Then a couple days later I go to my mailbox and its like Christmas, until I open the package and realize that its some obscure French/Japanese/Polish movie about a person sitting in a room for three hours quoting philosophy while cutting to a child running through a field back-lit by the sunrise. Then the cycle repeats. Not a big deal.
We've had one movie lost in the mail. Didn't get charged. Though it might have eventually been found by the post office; no clue.
I do wish that everything was streaming though, it would make life a bit better; though disks aren't nearly as bad as you make them out to be.
fast and cheap books
More expensive than a paperback isn't my definition of cheap.
Their 3rd parties are a mixed blessing, as well. 90% of the time they aren't cheaper than driving down to a used bookstore and grabbing it, once you factor in the very silly shipping prices. I had a $0.99 book shipped to my house, it had $3.99 shipping. Upon getting it I noticed it shipped from less than five miles away, about a 10 minute drive, and for that I waited a week. Last time I went to the used bookstore I cross-referenced Amazon prices, the used bookstore won every single time once shipping was accounted for.
On rarer books (more uncommon than anything) their prices can get ridiculous. I've found a couple books listed for +$100, for a ten year old trade paperback that most bookstores can still probably order for you.
Their shipping... oh lord. I just ordered some stuff from Amazon after using Newegg for most of my needs, I now realize that I am spoiled. I order some random bit of hardware from Newegg with free to $0.99 shipping and it comes to my door within three days, no matter what. I order the same thing from Amazon (not even a third party), with $4.00 shipping and it comes to my door in a week, if not more (and spends around 4 days in a warehouse for no reason), and generally in a beaten up box 18 sizes too large with nothing but an airbag for protection.
I do use Amazon, I'm even fond of them, but they aren't the greatest thing in the world, and they haven't done everything right. They actually are quite mediocre on several areas. They win because they are big, ubiquitous, and convenient.
If you'd be schlepping around an e-reader instead, a tablet is pretty much a no-brainer :)
Nope. I could go get a tablet, but I'm not. I own a Nook, and a Droid, why the hell would I want a tablet? I can't stand reading for long periods on a backlit monitor, so the Nook is staying. When I'm on the go I only really need email and browsing capability. What would a tablet do to enhance my life?
Also how the hell did we forget the whole point of ebook readers already? They are meant to as closely emulate books as possible, for ease of reading; meaning high contrast, paper-like reflectivity, and obscenely high battery life. Being able to play Angry Birds doesn't help my ability to read a book. Having to lug something around the eats battery life like a fat kid eats Cheetos isn't a benefit. Having a goddamn built in camera doesn't (I have five goddamn cameras within arms reach, how does another improve my life?).
Also; how the hell did tablets becomes such a big meme? Anyone realize that an almost completely insignificant portion of the population actually own one? Its like everyone catering to the iPhone, which has a single digit percentage of the damn mobile market (hell, it isn't even 25% of the smart phone market). Going from the media this number sounds more like 145% of the population has one.
I know exactly one person who owns a tablet, an iPad. He loves it, but complains about how it is still pretty much useless (cognitive dissonance there, he's banking on it being useful in the next ten years or so). I'm pretty sure he loves it just because he can be seen with an iPad. No one else I know is even wanting one in any actual level, yes a couple people are vaguely positive towards them, and may buy them when they hit sub-$100 levels, but I would hardly call them enthusiastic.
Was the sun in her eyes like she and another witness said?
Well she admitted to it, and thus is guilty of something. Perhaps not of whatever "social mediating while driving" is, but at least of driving unsafely in a criminal manner. She should have slowed down until her ability to drive matched the external circumstances, in many places this is law.
Can they prove she was actually driving when she posted to Facebook?
Easily, phone records. Grab the phone records of the victim and the suspect, tie them together, and *poof* instant time-line. Not 100% conclusive, but this is a civil suit, so it doesn't have to be.
Why was the victim in the road and not on the sidewalk?
He was just in a minor accident. He could have been moving from the driver's side of his car to the sidewalk, in essence, just exiting the vehicle. He could have been doing an inspection of his vehicle. Etc... Not that it matters that much, she hit him, it was avoidable (slow down, or... you know... use that wheel mounted in front of the driver to avoid obstacles such as old men), it doesn't matter why he was in the road, all that matters is she hit him.
Barbarella was pretty bad to begin with. Heavy Metal wasn't bad, but it's very much a product of the time it was made.
Barbarella is also very much a product of its time, so you shouldn't judge it more harshly than Heavy Metal.
Barbarella, and all the other crappy, over-done, Dino DeLaurentis fantasies are among my favorite movies now. Heavy Metal, though, didn't age well for me.
I have to choose how to spend my limited entertainment budget: do I expose my children to media that will challenge or disturb them, or do I have a good time with my kids? For me, it's a no-brainer.
No, it isn't a no brainer. There were exactly three "banned" movies* when I was growing up, one of which was served with the caveat "don't watch it, but its on the video rack". My mom took me to see Silent of the Lambs when I was a kid (well I was 12 or 13), and then lent me the book. A Stephen King novel is the second actual adult book I've ever read (the first was a Clifford Simak novel, The Visitors). My favorite YA book was Z for Zachariah, which my mom loved more than me, and still is the bleakest post-apocalyptic novel I've ever read. I spent pretty much my whole childhood (up until teenage angst hit) staying up and watching horror movies with my Dad every weekend (Monster Vision on TNT was awesome, it is a shame nothing like it exists now).
My mom got into a very large fight with my Junior High school about whether, or whether not, I should be allowed to read adult books in class, the biggest point of contention was The Stand.
There were very few restrictions on me. My parents were open, and enjoyed (or convincingly acted like it) talking about my reaction to these movies, and what was going on in them. They basically treated me like a little adult. When I have children of my own I will treat them the same way. I have several friends who grew up the same way.
Oddly, the one thing on television that I wasn't really encouraged to watch was Sesame Street and Mr. Rogers. Nova, Cosmos, and Mr. Wizard was fine, but the things that were purely juvenile weren't really encouraged. Nor was any Disney movie beyond Fantasia. I'm fine with this, and will probably have the same outlook, I don't like talking down to children. Children aren't precious butterflies who need to be protected from the real world at all costs.
*David Lynch's Blue Velvet (still one of my favorite movies ever), Wes Craven's Last House and the Left, and Audrey Rose. I managed to catch all three by puberty.
I agree with your assessment. I have read some authors, and participated in some debates with people who have decided that passing a Turing test is enough to qualify it as AI. I find this silly for two reasons; the first being that it presumes that intelligence is merely the ability to hold a conversation. This ignores both the "inner" aspects (creativity, day dreaming, emotional states, etc...), and other external abilities (does it paint, doodle in the phone book while parsing the DNS tables).
The second is that tt also ignores the fact that the appearance of intelligence is not intelligence; If I build a model of a horse that you can't tell isn't a real horse from a certain distance, it doesn't magically turn into a horse.
I think the AI has a deeper problem though; wtf does actually intelligence mean? Back in college the psychology capstone I took was titled "Animal Intelligence", which was a nice philosophical backdoor to the question of what intelligence is, how we can measure it, and how could we recognize it in non-humans. The fundamental problem that I found in the class (which the teacher refused to let me spread, but greatly enjoyed since it was his secret point, him being a crony with the philosophy department) was that we measure intelligence solely on our own yardstick (in comparison to recognized human traits), and it is difficult to move this beyond human experience. Often we read "intelligence" as "human like", which isn't actually contained in the definition. There is no reason that intelligence must be human like. But then we run into a nice "black box" problem, all we have access to is inputs and outputs, and not to any actual process. Which makes Turing tests sound nice and viable, but then they only measure "humanness" in the end. A dolphin (if they are intelligent) would fail a Turing test, as a hypothetical extra-terrestrial.
When people say "real AI" I interpret it as "Strong AI", i.e. human-like intelligence.
A bot in a video game is "weak AI", it is simple, and generally a unitasker. A QuakeIII bot isn't going to stop shooting me and question the purpose of fighting, nor is it going to decide to quit fighting and go browse Wikipedia instead. Hell, most bots in games (and other AIs) are very weak, they often can't actually learn beyond some very scripted and procedural levels. Most of them can be tricked very easily in such a way that they will never, ever, have a chance of learning (if they are capable in the first place). I'm sure I could script a game of Jeopardy in such a way that Watson loses 100% of the time (barring programmer interference).
I also can't see Watson, much less game AI, passing the Turing Test. Which, to many, is the entry level to being considered strong AI.*
* though I disagree with many AI affictionados, I doubt the Turing Test, itself, indicates a true strong AI, it just shows indications that it is possible.
This greatly simplifies the problem.
And leaves it several orders of magnitude beyond our current knowledge and techniques.
There COULD be something magical about the human brain. But we have modeled the brains of animals with fewer neurons successfully and they are made of pretty much the same stuff just in lower quantities.
This always ignored me about the AI and CogSci crowds. They often confuse their metaphors. "The brain is like a computer" != "the brain is a computer". Even this is backwards, since a computer is more like brain than a brain like a computer. The current vogue is the "computational" model of cognition, but this doesn't transcend mere metaphor either, we mapped computer lingo and bits to the human brain.
Its like mapping your physiology to a motor vehicle; yes there are some very rough correspondences, but beyond this there is pretty much no similarity. The only reason we don't call "bullshit" on the brain::computer metaphor is that the brain is still a bit mysterious (okay, extremely, we probably don't even understand 10% yet), and most people find computers to be, basically, black boxes, just like the brain (input in, mysterious stuff happens, output).
Just because the brain isn't a computer doesn't make it magical, just like the fact that you aren't an automobile doesn't make your physiology magical. This isn't a black and white thing. Your brain probably functions in a pretty damn unique way, completely unlike many other things that also "compute" (especially since computation is a rather new development), and when it does compute it computes in a way completely different than an abacus, computer, or slide rule.
That said, I'm sure someday we'll have decent AI, though probably not in mine or my unborn children's life time. This AI will probably be either completely incomprehensible to us (and us to it), or developed by some other technique than the ones we are working on today. I personally don't see the point (outside of the nice geeky "because we can"), what would AI do for us? If we develop a "human like" intelligence it will probably be because we already understand the brain enough to model it, meaning its actual academic value is a bit wanting. I doubt it would make much economic sense either, since it would be as bad as a human worker. Unless, of course, we develop some "perfect" intelligence, and then why the hell would it want to control a factory for no benefit to itself?
Admittedly, it improved a bit in recent versions, but I almost regret just not buying a cheap Athlon+mobo and going with that instead. So, really, it's probably more the fault of the Atom, but given my general experiences with Flash being very hit or miss, I think there's plenty of blame to share around.
Naw, a decent Atom (I've got a D510) can handle Flash. I'm running Windows 7 on my HTPC (the same one that had Ubuntu and failed) and it handles streaming 1080p full-screen just fine. Considering the fact that my board maxes out at 2Gb of RAM, its a pretty zippy machine. Also, Boxee, under Ubuntu, ran fullscreen 1080p pretty well (not perfectly, but decently enough to get the job done), but it completely choked in Hulu, Firefox, Chromium, Rekonq (when I was playing with OpenSuse), and any other way you could be inflicted with Flash.
Doing my monthly "essential" back-up is a massive pain in Windows (I know, it should be weekly or daily, but my data doesn't have enough churn to really warrant it) , I get to spend an hour hunting down where some random program might want to stick files. I wouldn't even mind if they just stuck with "/user/name/", at least I could just copy the whole mess and be done with it (with the caveat that it easily lets me keep /user/ on a different partition or disk).
What the hell is up the spacing on these comments now? Go, Go Slashdot 3.0!
Read up on it, its a bit more complicated than that. Assange isn't painted in a very nice light, and if he isn't guilty of rape, he still doesn't emerge shit-free. Also he isn't being extradited for trial, he's being extradited to give testimony. No one has called him guilty of anything. Part of the charges ARE non-consensual sex (without protection, while a woman was sleeping), and while these charges wouldn't hold water in the US, that doesn't matter one bit. US law means nothing to anyone else.
And no, none of this is terribly suspicious. He's a celebrity, so there is greater scrutiny. It is sad that run of mill sex offenders (by legal standards if not your personal ones) aren't treated equally. I have seen no evidence whatsoever that the CIA put anyone up to anything. Lacking any evidence it really isn't a theory worth wasting time on. Might as well say the Grey Aliens put Interpol up to it since Assange is actually a lizard alien from Sirius IV. That premise has about the same amount of serious evidence as the CIA story. Or that Assange is in trouble because he spited the Time Cube. Or (on topic) that it is the will of Xenu.
Personally I find it all a bit strange; but... If that is Sweden's laws, and he broke them, then he is guilty. It doesn't matter if you and I don't agree with them. It doesn't matter if some people find Assange to be some form of modern day saint. It doesn't matter if he's fighting for your cause. If he broke the law of the land, he broke the law of the land. If Sweden calls it rape, then it is rape in Sweden.
Assange is the worst part of Wikileaks. He distracts from anything important, and from the general mission of the site. By all accounts he is an absolute asshat. I like Wikileaks, but can't, personally, stand him. Wikileaks would be stronger, and financially sound, if he just went away.