Looked at your site, liked what I saw, very interesting concept, the whole 'x people here, x people near you, x people looking at this other thing'. I noticed you apparently do it through php? I'm a semi-decent php coder, my own sites run on php, and I'd love to play around with something like this, as a learning experience if nothing else (ie. integrating it into existing CMS's like phpNuke and the like). I suppose could conceivably code something up similar to this given enough time and a lot more experience, but this being slashdot and all, I just have to ask if you're making the source code for that system open source (this is not a troll or an accusation, I'm just genuinely curious because I'd love to see the code), or if you'd be willing to share the code at least. It's perfectly okay if you're keeping it private, but I figure it doesn't hurt to ask, since, again, I'd love to play around with a system like this on a couple of my personal sites and see what I could create with it. Let me know, and don't worry, I won't hate you if you'd rather not share.:)
Well, the thing I see with *your* line of thinking is that, at least from your description and from the description and the video of this project, that this project could be considered as the start of one such 'point of actualization'. It's a single place from where the myriad bits and pieces and connections of the Internet all pop out. Of course, they're only sampling a limited amount of the internet's resources to produce this project, probably not nearly a complex enough system for something like consciousness to 'emerge' (and I'll rant about 'emergent phenomena' and their relation to life as we know it another time:), but, then again, there's that old truism that humans only use a fraction of their brains..
To sum up, wouldn't it be spooky if they kept adding nodes and sources to feed this project until they reached a minimum critical mass and all of a sudden the clatter of individual voices and tones coalesced into a single voice going 'Hello. My name is Bob. Bob Internet. Nice to meet you.'
Cute, yes, but not nearly the best.
on
PC in a.... Sphere?
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Allright, I was impressed by the whole sphere thing. I've been thinking about buying myself aocuple of those mini-itx mobos to play with, see where I can stick 'em. But then I started clicking around on links, and I found this. It leaves that ball mod in the dust. A full PC inside a shiny chrome GE toaster from the 60's. It's even got a cold cathode light, and an LCD screen! I particularly love how the CD tray pops up out of the toaster's slot.:D
hmm,didn't know that.. you know, this is actually kind of intriguing, in a 'I've got othing better to do with my time here at work' way.. maybe I should enlist google's help and see if I can track down what caused this phenomenon. Maybe once we find the source, we can kill it! (Just got a mental image of Yakov sitting in a dark room somewhere, laughing maniacally as he plots his misguided 'comeback' by brainwashing thousands of hapless Slashdot trolls...)
You know, I'm gonna go ahead and blame Goats for that one too. There was a strip not that long ago that had a minor appearance by Yakov, and it wasn't long after that that I started noticing those 'In Soviet Russia' posts.. of course, maybe it was the other way around, the artist for Goats is a lsashdot reader, and he might have gotten the idea for it from Slashdot.
Here's the deal: without superpowers, just being a normal guy who's pushed himself to the very limit of human physical and mental perfection (and acquired more than a few neuroses along the way), Batman routinely does things in the Justice League that the rest of the team, with all their earth-shattering superpowers, can't even begin to comprehend. My favorite example of all this was in one of the JLA comics, where the entire league was battling a group of Martian invaders. There were maybe 7 martians, every single one of them almost an equal for Superman in sheer power. Needless to say, they were mopping up the planet with the JLA. In the final confrontation, the team split up into pairs to try and take the martians down one by one. The only ones who didnt pair up with anyone were Supes and Bats. So Supes manages to take one down all by himself after a long, hard-fought battle. Meanwhile, wonder-woman and Aquaman take one down between the two of them.. Martian Manhunter and GL take down one.. and so on.. Except for Batman. He goes off to the Batlair for a bit.. does some research, and finds out that the Martian's weakness is fire. So.. he grabs a can of lighter fluid, some matches, and sets off to catch himself some aliens. He lures three of them to an abandoned warehouse.. and spritzes some lighter fluid in a circle around him. when the martians get close enough in a radius around him, he tosses a lit match into the lighter fluid, creating a nice little enclosed ring of fire. then he smiles, and gets to work.
Resolution? All the other JLA heroes show up dragging their subdued martians, everybody looking all beat up and bedraggled, and bitching about how there's still three more martians to take care of. Then someone notices Batman's not around. As they look around for him, he shows up, dragging *three* unconscious martians, and not a scratch on him, and a smile from ear to ear.
Score: Superman- One martian (and just barely at that). Batman- Three martians, without even breaking a sweat. Everyone else - maybe half a martian.
What can I say, it takes a lot to get me off my lazy ass and writing. I just felt like saying something. What I'm more concerned now is that I apparently have a stalker on Slashdot, with enough patience to wait about 11 months for me to post again so they could taunt me. I'm not interesting enough to merit that kind of stalking.
Uhm.. though I do appreciate the sentiment (as in 'no, don't steal my code.. ooh, the latest N'Sync MP3!'), that's not quite what we're talking about here. The Linux kernel hackers, in this case, aren't stealing SGI's IP.. they came up with these methods on their own, separately from SGI.. and only later did they find out that these methods they came up with were allready covered by SGI's patents. They did not go and read SGI's patent papers and then reverse engineer the methods from the descriptions, or dumpster dive through SGI's trash pieceing (sp?) together design documents. They came up with the same idea someone else allready had, the only problem is that this somebody else went throughthe trouble of patenting those ideas, and now, thanks to the beauty of the patent system, anyone who comes up with the same idea on their own has to pay the first guy who came up with it.
It might not be a coincidence. Read through that thread. The guy posts on the 4th that he willbe leaving in 7 days and not returning. 4 + 7 = 11th. Could this have been one of the suicide pilots?? This is scary.
There's no confirmation of who's firing the missiles. The city of Kabul is in a state of civil war right now, and it *could* be part of that civil war. However, it is still strange, and this kind of intense attack is not typical of this war. Still, they could be opportunists taking advantage of the confusion generated by all this to do their own attack. Still too early to tell either way.
Um, if you'll take a quick read up there *beforE* overreacting, he says 'give more blood' not give *me* more blood'. And as far as I am concerned, it is both appropriate and important. There is little that any of us can do in this tragedy, we cannot hunt down those responsible, we cannot directly aid those hurt, we cannot turn back the hands of time and stop this from ever having happened. But one thing that we can all do is donate blood, which is sorely needed in these relief efforts, especially if you are Type O. Next time, take a breath, calm down, and make sure you know what you're reading before writing.
I am ashamed to be part of the human race today. For those of you who don't know, a terrorist organization today attacked, deliberately and without apparent provocation, the World Trade Center towers in NYC, the Pentagon, and apparently even the State Department. They did this not with bombs or missiles, but with hijacked passenger planes. Using human life to end human life. Tens, possibly hundreds of thousands of people are dead due to this act. I have not yet heard what reasons the terrorist organization that claims responsibility for this act (Democratic Front for Palestinian Liberation, or some other idiocy). But there is no reason that could ever be valid for such an attack. Such an act is a product of utter and complete cowardice, and I say now that whoever is responsible for this, deserves nothing less than the worst possible punishment we as a race can devise. They may justify their acts by saying that the United States is some sort of evil nation, but no amount of lame excuses could justify the loss of even a single human life in the name of what amounts to nothing more than empty rethoric. I am deeply ashamed to be in the same species as the individuals responsible for this action. An act such as this cannot go unanswered, and yet, I almost fear the answer we give even more than this attack itself, for the nature of our response, both as a nation and as a race, will say much about our nature as human beings. I am not a religious man, but today, I'm praying, for all of us.
A part of me, a naive, innocent part, dares to hope that after witnessing such an act, we may understand the true value of human life once and for all, and put to an end the petty, ridiculous differences that we give so much importance to, and that lead to so muhc violence and needless loss of life. But I know that this will not be so. This act may well the beggingin of a war, or worse, a War. It makes me feel like I have been personally cheated out of a dream, and I cannot even begin to imagine what it must be for those directly affected by this attack. I feel powerless to act against this, yet do somethig I must. All I can do for now is write here and express my outrage, my anger, my disillusionment, my fear and my weak hope for something better to rise from the ashes of this disaster. I am desperate to find something more I can do.
Slashdot Mirror
Looked at your site, liked what I saw, very interesting concept, the whole 'x people here, x people near you, x people looking at this other thing'. I noticed you apparently do it through php? I'm a semi-decent php coder, my own sites run on php, and I'd love to play around with something like this, as a learning experience if nothing else (ie. integrating it into existing CMS's like phpNuke and the like). I suppose could conceivably code something up similar to this given enough time and a lot more experience, but this being slashdot and all, I just have to ask if you're making the source code for that system open source (this is not a troll or an accusation, I'm just genuinely curious because I'd love to see the code), or if you'd be willing to share the code at least. It's perfectly okay if you're keeping it private, but I figure it doesn't hurt to ask, since, again, I'd love to play around with a system like this on a couple of my personal sites and see what I could create with it. Let me know, and don't worry, I won't hate you if you'd rather not share. :)
Well, the thing I see with *your* line of thinking is that, at least from your description and from the description and the video of this project, that this project could be considered as the start of one such 'point of actualization'. It's a single place from where the myriad bits and pieces and connections of the Internet all pop out. Of course, they're only sampling a limited amount of the internet's resources to produce this project, probably not nearly a complex enough system for something like consciousness to 'emerge' (and I'll rant about 'emergent phenomena' and their relation to life as we know it another time :), but, then again, there's that old truism that humans only use a fraction of their brains..
To sum up, wouldn't it be spooky if they kept adding nodes and sources to feed this project until they reached a minimum critical mass and all of a sudden the clatter of individual voices and tones coalesced into a single voice going 'Hello. My name is Bob. Bob Internet. Nice to meet you.'
Allright, I was impressed by the whole sphere thing. I've been thinking about buying myself aocuple of those mini-itx mobos to play with, see where I can stick 'em. But then I started clicking around on links, and I found this. It leaves that ball mod in the dust. A full PC inside a shiny chrome GE toaster from the 60's. It's even got a cold cathode light, and an LCD screen! I particularly love how the CD tray pops up out of the toaster's slot. :D
hmm,didn't know that.. you know, this is actually kind of intriguing, in a 'I've got othing better to do with my time here at work' way.. maybe I should enlist google's help and see if I can track down what caused this phenomenon. Maybe once we find the source, we can kill it! (Just got a mental image of Yakov sitting in a dark room somewhere, laughing maniacally as he plots his misguided 'comeback' by brainwashing thousands of hapless Slashdot trolls...)
You know, I'm gonna go ahead and blame Goats for that one too. There was a strip not that long ago that had a minor appearance by Yakov, and it wasn't long after that that I started noticing those 'In Soviet Russia' posts.. of course, maybe it was the other way around, the artist for Goats is a lsashdot reader, and he might have gotten the idea for it from Slashdot.
Here's the deal: without superpowers, just being a normal guy who's pushed himself to the very limit of human physical and mental perfection (and acquired more than a few neuroses along the way), Batman routinely does things in the Justice League that the rest of the team, with all their earth-shattering superpowers, can't even begin to comprehend. My favorite example of all this was in one of the JLA comics, where the entire league was battling a group of Martian invaders. There were maybe 7 martians, every single one of them almost an equal for Superman in sheer power. Needless to say, they were mopping up the planet with the JLA. In the final confrontation, the team split up into pairs to try and take the martians down one by one. The only ones who didnt pair up with anyone were Supes and Bats. So Supes manages to take one down all by himself after a long, hard-fought battle. Meanwhile, wonder-woman and Aquaman take one down between the two of them.. Martian Manhunter and GL take down one.. and so on.. Except for Batman. He goes off to the Batlair for a bit.. does some research, and finds out that the Martian's weakness is fire. So.. he grabs a can of lighter fluid, some matches, and sets off to catch himself some aliens. He lures three of them to an abandoned warehouse.. and spritzes some lighter fluid in a circle around him. when the martians get close enough in a radius around him, he tosses a lit match into the lighter fluid, creating a nice little enclosed ring of fire. then he smiles, and gets to work.
:)
Resolution? All the other JLA heroes show up dragging their subdued martians, everybody looking all beat up and bedraggled, and bitching about how there's still three more martians to take care of. Then someone notices Batman's not around. As they look around for him, he shows up, dragging *three* unconscious martians, and not a scratch on him, and a smile from ear to ear.
Score: Superman- One martian (and just barely at that). Batman- Three martians, without even breaking a sweat. Everyone else - maybe half a martian.
My money's on the guy in the bat suit.
What can I say, it takes a lot to get me off my lazy ass and writing. I just felt like saying something. What I'm more concerned now is that I apparently have a stalker on Slashdot, with enough patience to wait about 11 months for me to post again so they could taunt me. I'm not interesting enough to merit that kind of stalking.
Uhm.. though I do appreciate the sentiment (as in 'no, don't steal my code.. ooh, the latest N'Sync MP3!'), that's not quite what we're talking about here. The Linux kernel hackers, in this case, aren't stealing SGI's IP.. they came up with these methods on their own, separately from SGI.. and only later did they find out that these methods they came up with were allready covered by SGI's patents. They did not go and read SGI's patent papers and then reverse engineer the methods from the descriptions, or dumpster dive through SGI's trash pieceing (sp?) together design documents. They came up with the same idea someone else allready had, the only problem is that this somebody else went throughthe trouble of patenting those ideas, and now, thanks to the beauty of the patent system, anyone who comes up with the same idea on their own has to pay the first guy who came up with it.
Just saw on CCN that offically the US is denying that the bombing in Kabul is theirs, and they are attributing it officially to the civil war.
It might not be a coincidence. Read through that thread. The guy posts on the 4th that he willbe leaving in 7 days and not returning. 4 + 7 = 11th. Could this have been one of the suicide pilots?? This is scary.
There's no confirmation of who's firing the missiles. The city of Kabul is in a state of civil war right now, and it *could* be part of that civil war. However, it is still strange, and this kind of intense attack is not typical of this war. Still, they could be opportunists taking advantage of the confusion generated by all this to do their own attack. Still too early to tell either way.
Um, if you'll take a quick read up there *beforE* overreacting, he says 'give more blood' not give *me* more blood'. And as far as I am concerned, it is both appropriate and important. There is little that any of us can do in this tragedy, we cannot hunt down those responsible, we cannot directly aid those hurt, we cannot turn back the hands of time and stop this from ever having happened. But one thing that we can all do is donate blood, which is sorely needed in these relief efforts, especially if you are Type O. Next time, take a breath, calm down, and make sure you know what you're reading before writing.
I am ashamed to be part of the human race today. For those of you who don't know, a terrorist organization today attacked, deliberately and without apparent provocation, the World Trade Center towers in NYC, the Pentagon, and apparently even the State Department. They did this not with bombs or missiles, but with hijacked passenger planes. Using human life to end human life. Tens, possibly hundreds of thousands of people are dead due to this act. I have not yet heard what reasons the terrorist organization that claims responsibility for this act (Democratic Front for Palestinian Liberation, or some other idiocy). But there is no reason that could ever be valid for such an attack. Such an act is a product of utter and complete cowardice, and I say now that whoever is responsible for this, deserves nothing less than the worst possible punishment we as a race can devise. They may justify their acts by saying that the United States is some sort of evil nation, but no amount of lame excuses could justify the loss of even a single human life in the name of what amounts to nothing more than empty rethoric. I am deeply ashamed to be in the same species as the individuals responsible for this action. An act such as this cannot go unanswered, and yet, I almost fear the answer we give even more than this attack itself, for the nature of our response, both as a nation and as a race, will say much about our nature as human beings. I am not a religious man, but today, I'm praying, for all of us.
A part of me, a naive, innocent part, dares to hope that after witnessing such an act, we may understand the true value of human life once and for all, and put to an end the petty, ridiculous differences that we give so much importance to, and that lead to so muhc violence and needless loss of life. But I know that this will not be so. This act may well the beggingin of a war, or worse, a War. It makes me feel like I have been personally cheated out of a dream, and I cannot even begin to imagine what it must be for those directly affected by this attack. I feel powerless to act against this, yet do somethig I must. All I can do for now is write here and express my outrage, my anger, my disillusionment, my fear and my weak hope for something better to rise from the ashes of this disaster. I am desperate to find something more I can do.
-out.