The film was OK, but if you habitually sit in the front row like I do, DON'T. Unless you fly the Space Shuttle for a living, you will get motion sick if the movie screen fills your peripheral vision.
I couldn't look directly at the screen for the last 20 minutes for fear of getting sick. Apparently I missed some of the best parts...
AI has been in fall-back-and-regroup mode since the early 1980s. Its germination was in the outlandish promises of the 1950s and early 1960s, when respected computer scientists were seriously predicting that computer brains would be in every way superior to human brains within the next decade. There were some remarkable successes (like SHRDLU) but these were few and far between.
Prodded by more realistic thinking such as Hubert Dreyfus' book What Computers Can't Do, in the early 1970s everyone began to realize that the promises were failing miserably. It turned out that the human brain was terribly complicated after all and that we didn't understand much about thinking.
So the "strong A.I." claims, as they've come to be known, fell out of favor and the industry has been working on less ambitious projects since then. Nobody's willing to try to write a General Problem Solver or a humanlike robot today, but when smarter programs on a million-dollar satellite allow it to realign its communications dish out of human contact, everyone agrees that's a good thing.
If you want to see where the new wave of research into humanlike intelligence will be going in the next decade or two, start with Marvin Minsky's seminal The Society of Mind and Daniel Dennett's brilliant Consciousness Explained.
"I wonder if they get paid for product placement."
You joke, but some censors have seriously accused us of shilling for the porn industry. We've got a really sarcastic and informative response to that, which you could read in our Admin section if it weren't totally slashdotted at the moment. Oh well.
One use of the "F-word"... and a movie becomes PG-13, minimum.
Actually, you are allowed to say "fuck" in a PG-13 movie precisely once. Twice and it's R. How often have we seen a PG-13 action flick where the big climactic battle sequence plays like this?
[Large explosion.]
[Bad guys appears out of nowhere and menace the hero.]
Hero:(closeup) "Oh... FUCK."
When you hear that, think back and you'll realize nobody else in the movie up to that point has said "what the fuck?" or "that's fucking great." The movie didn't want to blow its wad early.
Jamie McCarthy
Re:How to access block sites?? peacefire.org
on
Return of The Onion
·
· Score: 1
Your employer's censorware probably also blocks the Anonymizer (which someone else suggested).
To really get around it, you'll want to find out which product you're up against, and then visit PeaceFire. They have instructions to get around a variety of different products, possibly including yours.
As filtering software becomes more mainstream (the kind of thing that happens when more libraries are required to use it) it won't be controlled by a right-wing fringe. The classic abuses people are forever using to illustrate the flaws in the filtering software will fade away.
The majority of the flaws we've found at censorware.org are errors related to how poorly computers parse natural language. The standard example is that "breast cancer" and "chicken breast" considered smut until a special case is made for them.
Right-wing biases show up also, it is true, but the main source of the problem is that the miraculous breakthrough in A.I. just hasn't happened yet.
[I] think it's too over-reactive to think that SlashDot would be censored. I don't recall any nudie pics...
You're joking, right?
The censoring will be done by computer (because no humans can read the 1,000,000+ URLs added to the web every day). And it will be done broadly (because no human or computer can visit a site ten times a day to review what has changed).
Cyber Patrol, the most popular censorware program and widely regarded as one of the best, decided to block over 50 ISPs in their entirety. The whole domains. Gone. Often because of a few naughty words - or because of links to naughty sites - or sometimes not even for any reason we could figure out.
Slashdot does not have a naughty-words filter, so I can post the word "fuck" as much as I want. And it allows links to naughty sites, such as your link to Hustler. So slashdot.org will surely be blocked, in its entirety, by any censorware program that discovers it.
I'm only half-remembering, but wasn't there litigation in Viriginia that basically forbid a Library from using filtering software?
You're thinking of Loudoun Country, Virginia, and your memory is correct. The most complete and readable history of the suit is at http://censorware.org/legal/loudoun/.
"We were beaten like a rented mule in this lawsuit" - Loudoun Trustee Bob Twigg
The standards for Constitutionality are much looser when the feds tie their restrictions to funding, rather than applying them outright. Since libraries will only have to install censorware if they take the money, this amendment to the bill may well be found Constitutional.
If the decision in Loudoun County can be taken as an indication, then yes, library filtering is grossly unconstitutional. But don't get complacent. Loudoun was just the first battle; the war isn't over.
The Franks-Pickering amendment that requires mandatory filtering for schools and libraries has already been passed and thus is now incorporated into the Juvenile Justice Bill.
That bill will (almost certainly) be passed by the House within the week. It then gets shot back to the Senate, which has already passed a similar form; they too will have to vote on the modified bill.
There are numerous other amendments that make this bill a bad idea. Children as young as 13 will be tried as adults. Judeo-Christianity's Ten Commandments will be posted in public schools (though apparently Buddhism's Four Noble Truths are still unwelcome).
But the worst part of it will be the censorship of every federally-funded school and library across the nation. To be precise, we will be turning over responsibility for that censorship to unaccountable third-party software companies who use computers to scan for naughty keywords. (Information on this shoddy and biased software is available at censorware.org.) Third-party censorship is the worst threat that the net will face in coming years, because everyone thinks computers can magically determine what's porn.
Don't get complacent and think it will be overturned. This bill may well be Constitutional because it is tied to federal funds. Find your representatives, find out how they've voted, and call them at (202) 225-3121.
Nobody's ever come out and said it, but I've always assumed that the major motivation for TrollTech's freeing the Qt license was Red Hat's refusal to endorse a non-free library. They stuck by their principles, and the entire Linux community has benefited. Add this to their list of accomplishments.
Roughly: a journaling filesystem logs all transactions made to hard disk. This makes it possible to ensure that things are in a well-defined state if the power gets unplugged, or some other disaster happens, at any point during the write.
Journaling is frequently provided by high-end database programs, which grab an entire partition at a time and write to it however they see fit.
Providing it at the filesystem level helps ensure reliability of all data, not just data stored in high-end databases.
I recall someone was working on a journaling filesystem for Linux - a French graduate student, if memory serves - but I can't find the webpage anymore. Last I checked was a few months ago and it was still pre-beta.
Then try to convince Rob it's so important he should post a story about it. You'll slashdot eBay's servers and get a thousand bids. Offering to split the loot may help persuade.
E.B. White has offered the immortal advice, "if you don't know how to say a word, say it loud!"
That is: don't apologize for yourself. If you're wrong, you'll be forgiven. Move on. Don't call attention to the fact that you might be wrong ('cause what if you're right?).
The online equivalent is: "if you're worried you might be flamed for something, say it loud!"
I've never experienced stereooptic vision (and never will), so any of you who have tried setups like this: How realistic is the 3D effect?
Stereo imaging is nothing to write home about. Recently I had the pleasure of seeing Monsters of Grace, a Philip Glass opera computer-rendered in 3D. Though the three-dimensional effect was excellent, done far better than anything I've seen before, I could have lived without it, and would have gotten just as much out of it in 2D. (It's an amazing show, don't miss it if it comes near you.)
Generally speaking, depth of field is something you don't even notice unless there's some reason to pay attention to it - like the fact that you've got one-size-fits-all glasses sitting on your nose.
The Microsoft security website all but explained to this virus author how he should write his virus.
Microsoft Security Bulletin 99-002 points out the "vulnerability in Word 97 which could permit macros to run without warning the user when the user opens a document based on a template containing macros." Melissa modifies Word templates to do exactly this.
Microsoft's webpage continues with the warning "A malicious hacker could exploit this vulnerability to cause malicious macro code to be run without warning if a user opens a Word attachment that was sent by a malicious hacker..."
This security bulletin was posted to the Microsoft Knowledge Base on January 21, 1999.
Buried in their website, the page lamely suggests that "all affected customers" - i.e., every one of the tens of millions of Word users! - "download the patch to protect their computers." Those customers have had over two months to do exactly that, and the tiny fraction who did are presumably at least partially immune to Melissa's spread.
Posting to an obscure security webpage hints on what might make an effective virus - a virus for which the only fix is tens of millions of separate patch downloads - is asking for trouble. Microsoft created the problem by coding a laughably insecure macro language into their applications. And they may have turned the potential problem into a real one by calling attention to it.
"Security through obscurity" is never desirable, but when the system is already as broken as the Microsoft macro language and when the user community doesn't give a damn about applying patches, it might have been a better alternative.
Jon calls Truman Show "brave" no fewer than three times.
If there exists a film that can make that hackneyed, phony, predictable, uninspiring, scripted star vehicle look "brave," then Jon has made his point and I will stay as far away as possible.
But then, if there exists a reviewer that can call Truman Show "brave" in a serious comparison, I don't think that reviewer and I are likely to agree on anything so I should feel free to ignore whatever he says.
Contact was a beautiful, thoughtful film, well-acted and risky. I didn't need the Hollywood love story running through it, but I didn't much mind it either. Everything else was wonderful.
It helps if you have some kind of understanding of just how damn good an actress Jodie Foster is. The role was difficult but she made it look effortless and totally believable. I don't think anyone else could have filled her shoes.
Like I say, it's a thoughtful movie, and it's for thoughtful people. If the subject interests you, if you find the question of humanity's place in the universe to be interesting, then rent it. Watch it on a big-screen TV with the sound up loud, the phone unplugged and with people who won't talk through all the best scenes. A friend of mine called it "the 2001 for our generation," the highest compliment I can imagine for a film.
But there are also other configuration files that allow you to exempt sites and workstations. In short, there's flexibility.
It is unfair to expect this to serve in place of the vendor's inability to construct a sane blocking list. School officials and librarians cannot hope to keep up with the huge list of wrongly blocked URLs for SmartFilter and other censorware products. Librarians are not supposed to monitor the thousands of sites being added to the web daily - that's supposed to be the software's job.
In fact, as the report shows, certain blocks were overridden, such as Utah's own www.mormon.com (one wonders why that was blocked in the first place). But the list of wrongly censored sites dwarfs any attempt to catch up.
The book was controversial in the 1950s because the warring species symbolised communism fighting against fascism. The aliens of course were communists, and the human soldiers, while not terribly sympathetic, were sympathetic enough that it's a little scary. It seems to have been a not-very-subtle way for Heinlein to push his brand of social structure: I love his writing, but he was always just one small step left of Attila the Hun.
Paul Verhoeven's movie of Starship Troopers was a truly bastardized version of the book: almost nothing was kept except the name. But the director - whose parents had a hard time thanks to Hitler and who is keenly aware of what fascism is all about - decided to carry over some of the book's symbolic flavor. Mostly it shows up in, as you point out, the uniforms and various other details. Also, note the brainwashing going on in the "TV spots" between scenes, which are rather clever parody.
And if you think the character of Rasczak is antidemocratic in the film, wait 'til you start reading through his endless lectures in the book. Holy cow.
I'm not one of those who fret over how movies are going to be misunderstood by the unwashed masses, but unfortunately many people are going to see this as another bullets-and-gore flick, and boy do those Nazis dress well. Which kind of misses the big picture. Then again, possibly in the 1950s many people read the book the same way, and who knows, maybe that was the director's point.
And what is the transmission speed, in ideas per hour, of the front page of the New York Times? You have to ask the right questions before you can get a valid answer.
If you want to know the speed in miles per hour of the analog information conveyed by a motor nerve, ask about that and you can get a perfectly valid number. There is on the order of some hundredths, maybe a tenth of a second delay between your perception of a tap on your wrist and a tap on your elbow. (Tested clinically by machines delivering unseen taps at precise intervals and asking the subject "which came first?" - there's a crossover point beyond which the subject will give the wrong answer.)
But I suspect you're more interested in the "pixel refresh" of the optic nerve, or the "sampling rate" of the aural nerve. That kind of sensory perception is deeply tied to your brain itself, not just its nerves, and is incommensurate with the language of computer hardware. Studying optical illusions or psychoacoustics can give insight into this, and I also recommend Daniel Dannett's Consciousness Explained.
Slashdot Mirror
Jamie McCarthy
I couldn't look directly at the screen for the last 20 minutes for fear of getting sick. Apparently I missed some of the best parts...
Jamie McCarthy
AI has been in fall-back-and-regroup mode since the early 1980s. Its germination was in the outlandish promises of the 1950s and early 1960s, when respected computer scientists were seriously predicting that computer brains would be in every way superior to human brains within the next decade. There were some remarkable successes (like SHRDLU) but these were few and far between.
Prodded by more realistic thinking such as Hubert Dreyfus' book What Computers Can't Do, in the early 1970s everyone began to realize that the promises were failing miserably. It turned out that the human brain was terribly complicated after all and that we didn't understand much about thinking.
So the "strong A.I." claims, as they've come to be known, fell out of favor and the industry has been working on less ambitious projects since then. Nobody's willing to try to write a General Problem Solver or a humanlike robot today, but when smarter programs on a million-dollar satellite allow it to realign its communications dish out of human contact, everyone agrees that's a good thing.
If you want to see where the new wave of research into humanlike intelligence will be going in the next decade or two, start with Marvin Minsky's seminal The Society of Mind and Daniel Dennett's brilliant Consciousness Explained.
Jamie McCarthy
You joke, but some censors have seriously accused us of shilling for the porn industry. We've got a really sarcastic and informative response to that, which you could read in our Admin section if it weren't totally slashdotted at the moment. Oh well.
Jamie McCarthy
Actually, you are allowed to say "fuck" in a PG-13 movie precisely once. Twice and it's R. How often have we seen a PG-13 action flick where the big climactic battle sequence plays like this?
When you hear that, think back and you'll realize nobody else in the movie up to that point has said "what the fuck?" or "that's fucking great." The movie didn't want to blow its wad early.
Jamie McCarthy
To really get around it, you'll want to find out which product you're up against, and then visit PeaceFire. They have instructions to get around a variety of different products, possibly including yours.
Jamie McCarthy
The majority of the flaws we've found at censorware.org are errors related to how poorly computers parse natural language. The standard example is that "breast cancer" and "chicken breast" considered smut until a special case is made for them.
Right-wing biases show up also, it is true, but the main source of the problem is that the miraculous breakthrough in A.I. just hasn't happened yet.
Jamie McCarthy
You're joking, right?
The censoring will be done by computer (because no humans can read the 1,000,000+ URLs added to the web every day). And it will be done broadly (because no human or computer can visit a site ten times a day to review what has changed).
Cyber Patrol, the most popular censorware program and widely regarded as one of the best, decided to block over 50 ISPs in their entirety. The whole domains. Gone. Often because of a few naughty words - or because of links to naughty sites - or sometimes not even for any reason we could figure out.
Slashdot does not have a naughty-words filter, so I can post the word "fuck" as much as I want. And it allows links to naughty sites, such as your link to Hustler. So slashdot.org will surely be blocked, in its entirety, by any censorware program that discovers it.
Jamie McCarthy
You're thinking of Loudoun Country, Virginia, and your memory is correct. The most complete and readable history of the suit is at http://censorware.org/legal/loudoun/.
"We were beaten like a rented mule in this lawsuit"
- Loudoun Trustee Bob Twigg
Jamie McCarthy
If the decision in Loudoun County can be taken as an indication, then yes, library filtering is grossly unconstitutional. But don't get complacent. Loudoun was just the first battle; the war isn't over.
More information on censorware is at censorware.org.
Jamie McCarthy
That bill will (almost certainly) be passed by the House within the week. It then gets shot back to the Senate, which has already passed a similar form; they too will have to vote on the modified bill.
There are numerous other amendments that make this bill a bad idea. Children as young as 13 will be tried as adults. Judeo-Christianity's Ten Commandments will be posted in public schools (though apparently Buddhism's Four Noble Truths are still unwelcome).
But the worst part of it will be the censorship of every federally-funded school and library across the nation. To be precise, we will be turning over responsibility for that censorship to unaccountable third-party software companies who use computers to scan for naughty keywords. (Information on this shoddy and biased software is available at censorware.org.) Third-party censorship is the worst threat that the net will face in coming years, because everyone thinks computers can magically determine what's porn.
Don't get complacent and think it will be overturned. This bill may well be Constitutional because it is tied to federal funds. Find your representatives, find out how they've voted, and call them at (202) 225-3121.
More info on the bill is at the ACLU.
Jamie McCarthy
Their stock dropped 9.2% after they suffered 21 hours of downtime.
Estimated cost of downtime: $87,000,000 per hour.
Jamie McCarthy
Jamie McCarthy
Journaling is frequently provided by high-end database programs, which grab an entire partition at a time and write to it however they see fit.
Providing it at the filesystem level helps ensure reliability of all data, not just data stored in high-end databases.
I recall someone was working on a journaling filesystem for Linux - a French graduate student, if memory serves - but I can't find the webpage anymore. Last I checked was a few months ago and it was still pre-beta.
Jamie McCarthy
Then try to convince Rob it's so important he should post a story about it. You'll slashdot eBay's servers and get a thousand bids. Offering to split the loot may help persuade.
Jamie McCarthy
A suggestion.
E.B. White has offered the immortal advice, "if you don't know how to say a word, say it loud!"
That is: don't apologize for yourself. If you're wrong, you'll be forgiven. Move on. Don't call attention to the fact that you might be wrong ('cause what if you're right?).
The online equivalent is: "if you're worried you might be flamed for something, say it loud!"
Jamie McCarthy
I've never experienced stereooptic vision (and never will), so any of you who have tried setups like this: How realistic is the 3D effect?
Stereo imaging is nothing to write home about. Recently I had the pleasure of seeing Monsters of Grace, a Philip Glass opera computer-rendered in 3D. Though the three-dimensional effect was excellent, done far better than anything I've seen before, I could have lived without it, and would have gotten just as much out of it in 2D. (It's an amazing show, don't miss it if it comes near you.)
Generally speaking, depth of field is something you don't even notice unless there's some reason to pay attention to it - like the fact that you've got one-size-fits-all glasses sitting on your nose.
Jamie McCarthy
The Microsoft security website all but explained to this virus author how he should write his virus.
Microsoft Security Bulletin 99-002 points out the "vulnerability in Word 97 which could permit macros to run without warning the user when the user opens a document based on a template containing macros." Melissa modifies Word templates to do exactly this.
Microsoft's webpage continues with the warning "A malicious hacker could exploit this vulnerability to cause malicious macro code to be run without warning if a user opens a Word attachment that was sent by a malicious hacker..."
This security bulletin was posted to the Microsoft Knowledge Base on January 21, 1999.
Buried in their website, the page lamely suggests that "all affected customers" - i.e., every one of the tens of millions of Word users! - "download the patch to protect their computers." Those customers have had over two months to do exactly that, and the tiny fraction who did are presumably at least partially immune to Melissa's spread.
Posting to an obscure security webpage hints on what might make an effective virus - a virus for which the only fix is tens of millions of separate patch downloads - is asking for trouble. Microsoft created the problem by coding a laughably insecure macro language into their applications. And they may have turned the potential problem into a real one by calling attention to it.
"Security through obscurity" is never desirable, but when the system is already as broken as the Microsoft macro language and when the user community doesn't give a damn about applying patches, it might have been a better alternative.
(Credit to TBTF for the link.)
Jamie McCarthy
Marge: Homer, it's the thought that counts. The moral of the story is a good deed is its own reward.
Bart: Hey, we got a reward. The head is cool.
Marge: Then... I guess the moral is no good deed goes unrewarded.
Homer: Wait a minute. If I hadn't written that nasty letter, we wouldn't've gotten anything.
Marge: Well... Then I guess the moral is the squeaky wheel gets the grease.
Lisa: Perhaps there is no moral to this story.
Homer: Exactly! Just a bunch of stuff that happened.
- "Blood Feud"
Jamie McCarthy
If there exists a film that can make that hackneyed, phony, predictable, uninspiring, scripted star vehicle look "brave," then Jon has made his point and I will stay as far away as possible.
But then, if there exists a reviewer that can call Truman Show "brave" in a serious comparison, I don't think that reviewer and I are likely to agree on anything so I should feel free to ignore whatever he says.
Sort of a Liar's Paradox...
Jamie McCarthy
Contact was a beautiful, thoughtful film, well-acted and risky. I didn't need the Hollywood love story running through it, but I didn't much mind it either. Everything else was wonderful.
It helps if you have some kind of understanding of just how damn good an actress Jodie Foster is. The role was difficult but she made it look effortless and totally believable. I don't think anyone else could have filled her shoes.
Like I say, it's a thoughtful movie, and it's for thoughtful people. If the subject interests you, if you find the question of humanity's place in the universe to be interesting, then rent it. Watch it on a big-screen TV with the sound up loud, the phone unplugged and with people who won't talk through all the best scenes. A friend of mine called it "the 2001 for our generation," the highest compliment I can imagine for a film.
Jamie McCarthy
But there are also other configuration files that allow you to exempt sites and workstations. In short, there's flexibility.
It is unfair to expect this to serve in place of the vendor's inability to construct a sane blocking list. School officials and librarians cannot hope to keep up with the huge list of wrongly blocked URLs for SmartFilter and other censorware products. Librarians are not supposed to monitor the thousands of sites being added to the web daily - that's supposed to be the software's job.
In fact, as the report shows, certain blocks were overridden, such as Utah's own www.mormon.com (one wonders why that was blocked in the first place). But the list of wrongly censored sites dwarfs any attempt to catch up.
In short, this "flexibility" is a red herring.
Jamie McCarthy
Paul Verhoeven's movie of Starship Troopers was a truly bastardized version of the book: almost nothing was kept except the name. But the director - whose parents had a hard time thanks to Hitler and who is keenly aware of what fascism is all about - decided to carry over some of the book's symbolic flavor. Mostly it shows up in, as you point out, the uniforms and various other details. Also, note the brainwashing going on in the "TV spots" between scenes, which are rather clever parody.
And if you think the character of Rasczak is antidemocratic in the film, wait 'til you start reading through his endless lectures in the book. Holy cow.
I'm not one of those who fret over how movies are going to be misunderstood by the unwashed masses, but unfortunately many people are going to see this as another bullets-and-gore flick, and boy do those Nazis dress well. Which kind of misses the big picture. Then again, possibly in the 1950s many people read the book the same way, and who knows, maybe that was the director's point.
Jamie McCarthy
Jamie McCarthy
And what is the transmission speed, in ideas per hour, of the front page of the New York Times? You have to ask the right questions before you can get a valid answer.
If you want to know the speed in miles per hour of the analog information conveyed by a motor nerve, ask about that and you can get a perfectly valid number. There is on the order of some hundredths, maybe a tenth of a second delay between your perception of a tap on your wrist and a tap on your elbow. (Tested clinically by machines delivering unseen taps at precise intervals and asking the subject "which came first?" - there's a crossover point beyond which the subject will give the wrong answer.)
But I suspect you're more interested in the "pixel refresh" of the optic nerve, or the "sampling rate" of the aural nerve. That kind of sensory perception is deeply tied to your brain itself, not just its nerves, and is incommensurate with the language of computer hardware. Studying optical illusions or psychoacoustics can give insight into this, and I also recommend Daniel Dannett's Consciousness Explained.
Jamie McCarthy