"Is it just me, or are Hot Keys for thinks like Copying and Pasting really over rated,"
I was originally going to poke fun at Linux over this topic. The gist of the joke was "Linux is so user friendly, it only needs another 29 keys to use!" But in thinking about that, and in reading your comment, it did point out that Linux users tend to be more keyboard saavy. I would hope they'd accept something like this into the market as opposed to waving their paw and saying "bah".
Personally, I'd love if typical keyboards had specific keys for common operations amongst apps. There is an unofficial standard. No denying that, but not all apps follow that rule. Clearly marked copy, paste, undo, redo, refresh, and a few other buttons I'm too lazy to brainstorm would be a good UI addition to the PC, be it Linux or Windows. (boy I'd love it for the Mac, too...)
Eh maybe it's too late for that. I'm just remembering how much easier my computing life became when I figured out some of the commonalities of apps. Knowing where to start looking is a good thing.
I firmly believe this is why X-Files was so interesing to people. Left a lot to the imagination. I hate to think what that show would have been had they had a more extensive budget.
"YES IE SUXS!, and move on to mozilla, but the general public"
The "IE SUX" part is the part you all needta toss. Brag about the benefits of Firefox/Opera instead of saying "uh it's more secure and stuff". Nobody cares until they're burned, and despite all the Slashdot sensationalism about it, a lot of Windows users out there haven't been burned.
You know what would make me interested? If Lucas could only spend $10 million per movie. Why? Because then he'd have to think more about how to make them interesting. Maybe with a challenge, he'd be forced to do something interesting.
So why do I feel this way? I have the Back to the Future triology on DVD. Somewhere in that DVD, they mention that in the original script getting the DeLorean back to the future would have resulted to a little journey to the testing of a nuclear bomb in the desert side of the USA. Unfortunately, they had no budget for doing that kind of set, so they kept it in Hill Valley. Hence, the lightning strike idea was born. I'm hoping (crossed fingers here) that if Lucas were to actually hit some of these limitations instead of having his original ideas be 'possible' with all the neato technology they have at ILM, he'd have to revise his ideas a few times and something interesting would be born.
This is not a guarantee, of course, but I'd at least have interest in another trilogy if he had SOME kind of hurdle to overcome.
"So you wouldn't think it odd if a car were named "Nogo"?"
Sure I would. But that's not the same. Nova is a word in spanish. It means 'something new', or something like that. (It's related to the word 'nuevo'.) "Nogo" isn't even a related word to something in english.
"Oh, your doctor called. He says your new sense of humor is ready."
Couple of things:
1.) When complaining about somebody's defective sense of humor, don't use the old "so and so called, they have something for you" joke. I just can't muster up any offense to your comment when it's obvious you are not qualified to be a judge.
"He believes that the solution to movie piracy is bigger file formats."
Umm no.
1.) Bigger files can be shrunk down. See how an 8 gig DVD gets knocked down to 700 megs.
2.) This doesn't solve the problem of piracy. It's barely a hurdle. The solution to piracy is making money, not stopping it from happening. There are lots of ways to do that, most of them involve making the product better. I'm perfectly saavy when it comes to watching movies without paying for them. I don't. Why? Because I'm a good honest person? Nah. It's because going to the store and plunking down a few bucks is better than downloading it over a period of several days. Plus I like commentaries etc.
Overrated? C'mon, what was wrong with my comment? The reason why PDF files seem bloated is that they're made as a print format. Often they use really high res images etc in these documents. When you run across a lot of PDF files like that, it's easy to generalize about how 'too huge' they are.
I'm only answering the guy's question about why he didn't get the joke. If you have a problem with that, hit reply instead of mod.
"Wouldn't something like Mandrake or SuSe be better for beginners?"
I'd nominate Knoppix. Burn a disc, pop it in, reboot, read a friendly written manual to play with it. I've never thought of Linux as easy to use, but Knoppix seriously turned my head. Nice pleasant combination of auto-detecting everything and having the right stuff pre-installed.
Is a lot of Suse like that? I ask because one of my main reasons for not running Linux is that I'm sick of running to Google every time I want to do something. It's very encouraging to hear that at least one distro's moving in the right direction UI wise. If they've put a lot of that type of attention into Suse, I might just try again.
"For sure this is the thing what MS wanted, making you captive."
Captive? What's making us captive is the lack of competition. It's fun to blame MS and all for that, but all it takes is for somebody to come up with something better. See Firefox.
"We're at least *trying* to make it fair for our customers."
I thank you and the theater you work for that. Wish I had something omre insightful to say but that's really all I'm thinking.
I was thinking more about DVDs than theaters, but I did mention it, so I apologize if my post was disheartening to the theaters that understand the value of good service.
I have a question: Does the info about people who complain about a movie ever make it back to those who make it? I ask because because I hate for the theater to pay for it. Their service isn't in the movie itself, but in the display of it. I guess in the case of a free ticket it doesn't bite the theater owner so much, but it saddens me if movie makers aren't made aware of what people think of their movie.
".. is that there is alot of reason to believe that it is impossible to have the intelligence to be ethical without also having what is best described as free will. (or non deterministic intelligence)"
Depends on how you define ethical. Is ethical something the robot comes up with on his own, or are his ethics based on the programmer's definition of ethics? In the latter case, no, the robot would not need free will to act ethically.
I have a feeling, though, that I'm splitting hairs more than to your liking. Ethics to a robot, in my opinion, is a matter of task prioritization. That prioritization could be defined without the robot's ability to really realize what is ethical or not.
"Or that time that band didn't perform all the "good" songs that you wanted to hear?"
Fair point. However, at least in a live performance, you can shout 'boo'. In the case of a movie, your money is gone. Every single movie is advertised as the best movie ever made. Right. That's not false advertising. They give you a clever little teaser designed to hook you in and grab your money, and gee, it sure is convenient that they have the no refunds policy in place. Buy a crummy DVD? You're stuck with it. So what recourse do customers have to drive the industry to try harder? Welp, until that policy is repealed or there's some actual competition, they have piracy. What's the best way to combat piracy? It's not to cripple the content or get the laws changed, it's to make something people want so much that they'll take the most direct route to get it.
There are a few leeches out there, but people in general are honest. I understand why content makes want to protect their content. Heck, I want to take reasonable measures myself. But trying to get laws passed? Calling my customers thieves? Turning down a return because somebody bought the movie and they hated it? These aren't 'wrong'?
I'm not a fan of people downloading content, enjoying it, and not paying for it, but I won't say that I don't understand where they're coming from. They may be 'in the wrong', but it is up to the *AA to make it right. At least we have iTunes now. I doubt that would have happened if consumers out there hadn't expressed demand for it.
"As much as I hate cigarette smoke, I'm not sure I want robots running around yanking cigarettes from people's mouths. After all, letting someone smoke would clearly be a violation of the "harm through inaction " law of robotics."
I doubt that'd happen in anything but a lab test. I Robot (the movie) touched on this. Take the laws to an extreme, and you'll get undesired behaviour. A robot wouldn't leave the lab if it ran around over-doing its job. There'd be a threshold set. There'd be a definition of harm set. There'd likely be incidents, but nothing like every robot ripping cigarettes out of peoples' mouthes.
Do we really want paternalistic robots? The answer is "Yes, if they work." I'd like a robot to defend me in a mugging. I'd like a robot to come to my rescue in a car crash. I'd like a robot to stop my kid from running into the street. Why? Because I enjoy life. Anything that can be done to lessen the number of unpleasant surprises down the road is welcome.
The neat thing about making a business of selling robots is that the greed surrounding the desire to make money will motivate robot manufacturers to make sure that their products don't piss me off.
Slashdot Mirror
"Is it just me, or are Hot Keys for thinks like Copying and Pasting really over rated,"
I was originally going to poke fun at Linux over this topic. The gist of the joke was "Linux is so user friendly, it only needs another 29 keys to use!" But in thinking about that, and in reading your comment, it did point out that Linux users tend to be more keyboard saavy. I would hope they'd accept something like this into the market as opposed to waving their paw and saying "bah".
Personally, I'd love if typical keyboards had specific keys for common operations amongst apps. There is an unofficial standard. No denying that, but not all apps follow that rule. Clearly marked copy, paste, undo, redo, refresh, and a few other buttons I'm too lazy to brainstorm would be a good UI addition to the PC, be it Linux or Windows. (boy I'd love it for the Mac, too...)
Eh maybe it's too late for that. I'm just remembering how much easier my computing life became when I figured out some of the commonalities of apps. Knowing where to start looking is a good thing.
"Good observation, I think. Thank you. ;)"
:)
Appreciated.
I firmly believe this is why X-Files was so interesing to people. Left a lot to the imagination. I hate to think what that show would have been had they had a more extensive budget.
"It wasn't a comment on whether you can produce humour, but whether you can recognise it."
If that was a joke (as opposed to simply a lame MS bash) then I'm not the one who needs a sense of humor installed.
"YES IE SUXS!, and move on to mozilla, but the general public"
The "IE SUX" part is the part you all needta toss. Brag about the benefits of Firefox/Opera instead of saying "uh it's more secure and stuff". Nobody cares until they're burned, and despite all the Slashdot sensationalism about it, a lot of Windows users out there haven't been burned.
Not interested.
You know what would make me interested? If Lucas could only spend $10 million per movie. Why? Because then he'd have to think more about how to make them interesting. Maybe with a challenge, he'd be forced to do something interesting.
So why do I feel this way? I have the Back to the Future triology on DVD. Somewhere in that DVD, they mention that in the original script getting the DeLorean back to the future would have resulted to a little journey to the testing of a nuclear bomb in the desert side of the USA. Unfortunately, they had no budget for doing that kind of set, so they kept it in Hill Valley. Hence, the lightning strike idea was born. I'm hoping (crossed fingers here) that if Lucas were to actually hit some of these limitations instead of having his original ideas be 'possible' with all the neato technology they have at ILM, he'd have to revise his ideas a few times and something interesting would be born.
This is not a guarantee, of course, but I'd at least have interest in another trilogy if he had SOME kind of hurdle to overcome.
"So you wouldn't think it odd if a car were named "Nogo"?"
Sure I would. But that's not the same. Nova is a word in spanish. It means 'something new', or something like that. (It's related to the word 'nuevo'.) "Nogo" isn't even a related word to something in english.
"Oh, your doctor called. He says your new sense of humor is ready."
Couple of things:
1.) When complaining about somebody's defective sense of humor, don't use the old "so and so called, they have something for you" joke. I just can't muster up any offense to your comment when it's obvious you are not qualified to be a judge.
2.) I wasn't using humor in that post. Heh.
"He believes that the solution to movie piracy is bigger file formats."
Umm no.
1.) Bigger files can be shrunk down. See how an 8 gig DVD gets knocked down to 700 megs.
2.) This doesn't solve the problem of piracy. It's barely a hurdle. The solution to piracy is making money, not stopping it from happening. There are lots of ways to do that, most of them involve making the product better. I'm perfectly saavy when it comes to watching movies without paying for them. I don't. Why? Because I'm a good honest person? Nah. It's because going to the store and plunking down a few bucks is better than downloading it over a period of several days. Plus I like commentaries etc.
Don't close doors, open new ones.
"This is a dupe. Too bad the editors don't bother checking the dupe email box."
It's a dupe! How insightful, interesting, and informative! After reading that, I think I'm ready to accept an invitation to Mensa!
"Not to mention the Chevy Nova. "no va" in Spanish means "won't go"."
"no va" != "nova"
I mean, if I sell a work "of art", nobody's gonna refuse to buy it because it sounds like "o fart".
"If it's true, however, it explain a lot, like the security issues in Windows."
Um, no it doesn't. That's like saying that somebody's love of Reese's Peanut Butter cups explains their fondness for Disney's version of Peter Pan.
What a stupid comment to twist into an MS bash. Unless you're Indiana Jones, you qualify right along with his employees in his comment.
"you do not make any of the sense"
Heh. "Someone set us up the bomb!"
"i am going to beat the fucking shit out of you"
Double heh. "I'm going to make anonymous threats to kick your ass! I'm so brave!"
So what would ya say if you didn't have that post anonymously button?
"Wouldn't something like Mandrake or SuSe be better for beginners?"
They should complete the experience by asking for $100!
Overrated? C'mon, what was wrong with my comment? The reason why PDF files seem bloated is that they're made as a print format. Often they use really high res images etc in these documents. When you run across a lot of PDF files like that, it's easy to generalize about how 'too huge' they are.
I'm only answering the guy's question about why he didn't get the joke. If you have a problem with that, hit reply instead of mod.
"Wouldn't something like Mandrake or SuSe be better for beginners?"
I'd nominate Knoppix. Burn a disc, pop it in, reboot, read a friendly written manual to play with it. I've never thought of Linux as easy to use, but Knoppix seriously turned my head. Nice pleasant combination of auto-detecting everything and having the right stuff pre-installed.
"I don't get it... PDF files are small and pdfviewers are ubiquitous..."
PDF files can be small, but more often than not they're large. I think his joke is about generalizations.
Or maybe I just think it's funny because my recently downloaded Lightwave manual is a >90 meg PDF file.
Is a lot of Suse like that? I ask because one of my main reasons for not running Linux is that I'm sick of running to Google every time I want to do something. It's very encouraging to hear that at least one distro's moving in the right direction UI wise. If they've put a lot of that type of attention into Suse, I might just try again.
So whatcha think?
"For sure this is the thing what MS wanted, making you captive."
Captive? What's making us captive is the lack of competition. It's fun to blame MS and all for that, but all it takes is for somebody to come up with something better. See Firefox.
"We're at least *trying* to make it fair for our customers."
I thank you and the theater you work for that. Wish I had something omre insightful to say but that's really all I'm thinking.
I was thinking more about DVDs than theaters, but I did mention it, so I apologize if my post was disheartening to the theaters that understand the value of good service.
I have a question: Does the info about people who complain about a movie ever make it back to those who make it? I ask because because I hate for the theater to pay for it. Their service isn't in the movie itself, but in the display of it. I guess in the case of a free ticket it doesn't bite the theater owner so much, but it saddens me if movie makers aren't made aware of what people think of their movie.
"maybe the new Games editor will change the color scheme to something other than retina-blasting ultraviolet?"
SURGEON GENERAL's WARNING: Use of this color range may result in skin cancer.
"I believe there will be an announcement about a new Slashdot Games editor reasonably soon."
And a new hot-pink color scheme!
".. is that there is alot of reason to believe that it is impossible to have the intelligence to be ethical without also having what is best described as free will. (or non deterministic intelligence)"
Depends on how you define ethical. Is ethical something the robot comes up with on his own, or are his ethics based on the programmer's definition of ethics? In the latter case, no, the robot would not need free will to act ethically.
I have a feeling, though, that I'm splitting hairs more than to your liking. Ethics to a robot, in my opinion, is a matter of task prioritization. That prioritization could be defined without the robot's ability to really realize what is ethical or not.
"Or that time that band didn't perform all the "good" songs that you wanted to hear?"
Fair point. However, at least in a live performance, you can shout 'boo'. In the case of a movie, your money is gone. Every single movie is advertised as the best movie ever made. Right. That's not false advertising. They give you a clever little teaser designed to hook you in and grab your money, and gee, it sure is convenient that they have the no refunds policy in place. Buy a crummy DVD? You're stuck with it. So what recourse do customers have to drive the industry to try harder? Welp, until that policy is repealed or there's some actual competition, they have piracy. What's the best way to combat piracy? It's not to cripple the content or get the laws changed, it's to make something people want so much that they'll take the most direct route to get it.
There are a few leeches out there, but people in general are honest. I understand why content makes want to protect their content. Heck, I want to take reasonable measures myself. But trying to get laws passed? Calling my customers thieves? Turning down a return because somebody bought the movie and they hated it? These aren't 'wrong'?
I'm not a fan of people downloading content, enjoying it, and not paying for it, but I won't say that I don't understand where they're coming from. They may be 'in the wrong', but it is up to the *AA to make it right. At least we have iTunes now. I doubt that would have happened if consumers out there hadn't expressed demand for it.
"As much as I hate cigarette smoke, I'm not sure I want robots running around yanking cigarettes from people's mouths. After all, letting someone smoke would clearly be a violation of the "harm through inaction " law of robotics."
I doubt that'd happen in anything but a lab test. I Robot (the movie) touched on this. Take the laws to an extreme, and you'll get undesired behaviour. A robot wouldn't leave the lab if it ran around over-doing its job. There'd be a threshold set. There'd be a definition of harm set. There'd likely be incidents, but nothing like every robot ripping cigarettes out of peoples' mouthes.
Do we really want paternalistic robots? The answer is "Yes, if they work." I'd like a robot to defend me in a mugging. I'd like a robot to come to my rescue in a car crash. I'd like a robot to stop my kid from running into the street. Why? Because I enjoy life. Anything that can be done to lessen the number of unpleasant surprises down the road is welcome.
The neat thing about making a business of selling robots is that the greed surrounding the desire to make money will motivate robot manufacturers to make sure that their products don't piss me off.
"didn't anyone get a little bit annoyed with news about robotics and a company called CYBERDYNE?"
Nope. I'm annoyed that fallout shelters are too expensive.