> Legislatin morality [midwestoutreach.org] is one thing, but it should at least have some form of stability. This bill seems to be nothing more than an include() for a dynamically changeable external form of morality. If law were an operating system, the hackers would be pissing themselves out of excitement waiting for all the exploits they could write using this.
Law is an operating system, and those who hack it are called politicians. From their point of view, these exploits are features, not bugs.
And now the eternal question: what the fuck would be wrong with simply enforcing the existing, objective, ubiquitous rating system? You know, like we do here in Britain? It sounds to me like he's deliberately avoiding this because he wants to create a situation in which he can sit back and pick targets at his leisure.
"Did you really think that we want those laws to be observed?" said
Dr. Ferris. "We want them broken. You'd better get it straight that
it's not a bunch of boy scouts you're up against - then you'll know
that this is not the age for beautiful gestures. We're after power
and we mean it. You fellows were pikers, but we know the real trick,
and you'd better get wise to it. There's no way to rule innocent men.
The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals.
Well, when there aren't enough criminals, one makes them. One declares
so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live
without breaking laws. Who wants a nation of law-abiding citizens'
What's there in that for anyone? But just pass the kind of laws that
can neither be observed nor enforced nor objectively interpreted - and
you create a nation of law-breakers - and then you cash in on guilt.
Now that's the system, Mr. Rearden, that's the game, and once you
understand it, you'll be much easier to deal with."
> For those of us who think being a Librarian in real life is too risky, you can now do it on computer.
Considering what was in my library by the time I finished TES III / Morrowind, being a librarian was the most dangerous thing you could do in the game.
(About halfway through the main quest, I had already figured out most of what Dagoth Ur was up to, and that it ought to be a simple matter of reverse-engineering the thousands of pounds of Dwemer artifacts and plugging a few leaky steam tubes in order to pick up where he left off. Curse you, developers, I wanted my big steampunk robot apotheosis!)
Just what we need. Just one look at those pictures... the non-anti-aliased pictures of the CubeSats...
...can't resist... Brain failing...
The 10x10x10cm, 1kg CubeSat standard... musn't look at pictures. Mustn't - NO! P-POD Allocations for Dnepr L1 campaign is thinking inside the box! Initial Cubesat cluster velocity magnitude measured in thousands of meters per second! CubeSat projects have the potential to educate cubeless participants and implement successful harmonic simultaneous time cube!
> If they find a bunch of pulsating eggs in the back of the cave, Chest-busters will definitely be a new species to runaway from.
Never mind that. The cave has been sealed for 5 million years. It's so dark that everything in it has evolved away from eyesight. We're talking GReat Underground Empire levels of darkness.
> LOOK
Nothing to see here. It is dark. It is so dark that you are not merely likely, you are absolutely certain, to be eaten by a grue.
> Remember: Your right to "free speech" does NOT come with a corresponding right to be heard.
Yes it does -- every human being on the planet has a right to be heard every time they speak. Not just Americans! Every human being on the planet has this right.
NSA is out there, burning billions of dollars and quadrillions of exaflops of computing power, all in a valiant effort to defend your right to be heard. And you just knock 'em off like that. Such ingratitude!
> Doesn't this article violate the first and second rules of fight club?
It's geek fight club. There is no second rule; only a zeroth, first, and tenth rule.
Rule #0: You start counting from zero.
Rule #1: Do not talk about geek fight club.
Rule #10: Do not talk about geek fight club.
Rule #11: Only two bits to the rules.
> Three months ago, the dreams of a space elevator finally seemed to be coming true after a successful test. An article in Nature, however, suggests that there's reason to be pessimistic.
Reason #0 to be pessimistic: A "successful test" isn't a climbing robot. The climbing robot isn't the hard part of the problem. The hard part of the problem is the materials science.
Nor is it the sort of discoveries we've seen in the materials side of the equation; fibers measured in millimeters. That's not a prototype, it's just basic research. Interesting basic research, worthy basic research, and good basic research to be sure, but it's not a demonstration of practicality by any stretch of the imagination.
When someone builds a small footbridge out of these things, I'll be interested. When you can scale that to a mile-long suspension bridge that supports two lanes of traffic in each direction, I'll be optimistic.
> I don't think I want a screen that can scream to the rest of the office, "Oh, it's another dirty pervert looking at me again."
"It was terribly dangerous to let your thoughts wander when you were telecommuting or within range of a telescreen. The smallest thing could give you away. A nervous tic, an unconscious look of bedroom eyes, a habit of muttering to yourself, anything that carried with it the suggestion of looking at b00bies, or having something to hide from HR. In any case, to sport wood at the office, was itself a punishable offense. There was even a word for it in Cubespeak: pantcrime."
> > I wouldn't go so far as to call a dog filthy but they're definitely dirty. But, a dog's got personality. Personality goes a long way. > >That's gotta be one mothafuckin' charming pig.
"Windows is a bitch to use. I don't use things that are too complicated."
"Dude, DOS is gooood! Linux is gooood!"
"The OS may run like a wet dream, but I wouldn't know, 'cuz I wouldn't use the complicated motherfuckers."
1) Food is what goes into a dog, not what comes out of a dog. (Corollary: That which comes out of a dog isn't food.)
2) It's coming out of the end of the dog into which food doesn't go. (Corollary: Unless you're into that sort of thing, in which case, we don't wanna know.)
> one must ask that if the bond goes the other way could you end up with manicly depressed robots?:)
From TFA:
IRobot Chief Executive Colin Angle said one group of soldiers even named its robot "Scooby Doo" and grieved when it was blown up after completing 35 successful missions defusing improvised explosive devices.
"I've been ordered to disarm this IED. Here I am, brain the size of a planet and they ask me to disarm this IED. Call that job satisfaction? 'Cos I don't."
"You watch this IED," he muttered, "it's about to detonate. I
can tell by the intolerable air of smugness it suddenly
generates."
The IED exploded in a shower of parts.
"Thank you, IRobot CEO, Colin Angle. 'Let's build PackBot Tactical Mobile Robots with Genuine People Personalities,' he said. So they
tried it out with me. I'm a personality prototype. You can tell
can't you?"
"I hate that bomb," continued Scooby. "I'm not getting you down
at all am I?"
"Er, excuse me," said the Soldier following after him, "which government owns this war?"
"No government owns it," snapped the robot, "it's been stolen."
"Stolen? By who?"
"Zaphod Beeblebush. You know. Galactic President. Did I mention we're going to see Disaster Area after we stop off at Milliway's? I probably didn't because we're already here and who'd know the difference. I think you ought to know I'm feeling very depressed."
> I for one welcome our van der Waals force utilising Stickybot overlords.
...and I'd like to remind them that as an open-source HTML rendering engine, I could be useful in convincing people to save a bunch of money on their car insurance!
> Bigger spreadsheets are available in Excel -- over 1 million rows and over 16,000 columns per worksheet
> >
what kind of a jackass....? use a fucking relational database! I don't want to think how blazingly slow that big of a spreadsheet would be, not to mention any dataset that large is going to almost certainly be something that is supposed to be used by more than one person at a time
It looks like you are trying to implement a relational database in Excel!
Would you like to...
Add another 100,000 rows to the worksheet? (You're my kind of jackass!)
Use a fucking relational database? (but not MySQL or Oracle!)
Suck it, Ellison!, and don't show me this tip again or I'll throw a chair at you. (I'm still bitter about the year you beat me.)
> No, the reason the government doesn't like Zfone is because they want perform blanket surveillance on all American citizens; to listen to all our calls, all the time. By utilizing speech-recognition software and an ever growing list of suspect words and phrases, they will be able to keep tabs on the unruly U.S. population, weeding out terrorists, political dissidents, environmentalists, Democrats, and other 'undesirables'.
From an old.sig quote:
NSA is now funding research not only in cryptography, but in all areas
of advanced mathematics. If you'd like a circular describing these new
research opportunities, just pick up your phone, call your mother, and
ask for one.
...and to cut down on the costs of their recruitment budgets!
Considering that most of the parents of new postdoctorate-level mathematicians probably live overseas nowadays (and whose conversations are therefore legal to record), maybe the old.sig quote was always more true than funny.
> So bomb the houses of everyone in Baghdad named 'Ackbar' at the time of the supposed meeting...you can't make an omelet without breaking a few eggs after all
> From the country that criminalized privacy:
> >Let's convict Perl users.
First they came for the COBOL programmers, and I was silent,
Because ADD KEYSTROKES TO SYNTAX GIVING OBFUSCATION was always lame.
They they came for the BASIC programmers, and I was silent,
Because I considered GOTO harmful,
Then they came for the C++ programmers, and I was silent,
Because I could still write FORTRAN in any language,
Then they came for the Perl programmers, and now the only way I can win an obfuscated programming contest is to write it in APL.
(First they ignore you, then they fight you, then they mock you, then they come for the Brainf*ck programmers and their heads explode.)
> From the site: "The 3D animated short 'Elephants Dream' will today be released as a free and public download.
Also from the site:
> 425MB (USA #1)
Not for long, it won't be.
(Where are an elephant's genitals located? In his feet. Because if he steps on you, you're fucked. Any parallels between a webserver with a 425 MB.avi file that just got linked on the front page of Slashdot are purely coincidental.)
Slashdot Mirror
Speak for yourself.
In Canadian engineering schools at least, there is approximately a 1:1 ratio of "Oh Shit" posters to Iron Rings.
>
> I was just looking for that. Thanks!
What?! That's exactly the kind of combination a Slashdotter would use on his luggage!
Law is an operating system, and those who hack it are called politicians. From their point of view, these exploits are features, not bugs.
And now the eternal question: what the fuck would be wrong with simply enforcing the existing, objective, ubiquitous rating system? You know, like we do here in Britain? It sounds to me like he's deliberately avoiding this because he wants to create a situation in which he can sit back and pick targets at his leisure.
Considering what was in my library by the time I finished TES III / Morrowind, being a librarian was the most dangerous thing you could do in the game.
(About halfway through the main quest, I had already figured out most of what Dagoth Ur was up to, and that it ought to be a simple matter of reverse-engineering the thousands of pounds of Dwemer artifacts and plugging a few leaky steam tubes in order to pick up where he left off. Curse you, developers, I wanted my big steampunk robot apotheosis!)
The 10x10x10cm, 1kg CubeSat standard... musn't look at pictures. Mustn't - NO! P-POD Allocations for Dnepr L1 campaign is thinking inside the box! Initial Cubesat cluster velocity magnitude measured in thousands of meters per second! CubeSat projects have the potential to educate cubeless participants and implement successful harmonic simultaneous time cube!
Never mind that. The cave has been sealed for 5 million years. It's so dark that everything in it has evolved away from eyesight. We're talking GReat Underground Empire levels of darkness.
> LOOK
Nothing to see here. It is dark. It is so dark that you are not merely likely, you are absolutely certain, to be eaten by a grue.
*** You have died ***
Yes it does -- every human being on the planet has a right to be heard every time they speak. Not just Americans! Every human being on the planet has this right.
NSA is out there, burning billions of dollars and quadrillions of exaflops of computing power, all in a valiant effort to defend your right to be heard. And you just knock 'em off like that. Such ingratitude!
It's geek fight club. There is no second rule; only a zeroth, first, and tenth rule.
Rule #0: You start counting from zero.
Rule #1: Do not talk about geek fight club.
Rule #10: Do not talk about geek fight club.
Rule #11: Only two bits to the rules.
Reason #0 to be pessimistic: A "successful test" isn't a climbing robot. The climbing robot isn't the hard part of the problem. The hard part of the problem is the materials science.
Nor is it the sort of discoveries we've seen in the materials side of the equation; fibers measured in millimeters. That's not a prototype, it's just basic research. Interesting basic research, worthy basic research, and good basic research to be sure, but it's not a demonstration of practicality by any stretch of the imagination.
When someone builds a small footbridge out of these things, I'll be interested. When you can scale that to a mile-long suspension bridge that supports two lanes of traffic in each direction, I'll be optimistic.
"It was terribly dangerous to let your thoughts wander when you were telecommuting or within range of a telescreen. The smallest thing could give you away. A nervous tic, an unconscious look of bedroom eyes, a habit of muttering to yourself, anything that carried with it the suggestion of looking at b00bies, or having something to hide from HR. In any case, to sport wood at the office, was itself a punishable offense. There was even a word for it in Cubespeak: pantcrime."
- Little Sister, 1985
>
>That's gotta be one mothafuckin' charming pig.
"Windows is a bitch to use. I don't use things that are too complicated."
"Dude, DOS is gooood! Linux is gooood!"
"The OS may run like a wet dream, but I wouldn't know, 'cuz I wouldn't use the complicated motherfuckers."
- "User Friendliness Goes A Long Way", in .WMV, or .RA.
, from Cyberpunk Fiction" , 1998.
Just two things to say about dogfood:
1) Food is what goes into a dog, not what comes out of a dog. (Corollary: That which comes out of a dog isn't food.)
2) It's coming out of the end of the dog into which food doesn't go. (Corollary: Unless you're into that sort of thing, in which case, we don't wanna know.)
"I must think in... Japanese?!?!"
Naw, the only thing we've established is that the poster is an invertebrate punster. So slug him!
No, they're going public because they need the capital. For once it's OK to feed the troll!
From TFA:
"I've been ordered to disarm this IED. Here I am, brain the size of a planet and they ask me to disarm this IED. Call that job satisfaction? 'Cos I don't."
"You watch this IED," he muttered, "it's about to detonate. I can tell by the intolerable air of smugness it suddenly generates."
The IED exploded in a shower of parts.
"Thank you, IRobot CEO, Colin Angle. 'Let's build PackBot Tactical Mobile Robots with Genuine People Personalities,' he said. So they tried it out with me. I'm a personality prototype. You can tell can't you?"
"I hate that bomb," continued Scooby. "I'm not getting you down at all am I?"
"Er, excuse me," said the Soldier following after him, "which government owns this war?"
"No government owns it," snapped the robot, "it's been stolen."
"Stolen? By who?"
"Zaphod Beeblebush. You know. Galactic President. Did I mention we're going to see Disaster Area after we stop off at Milliway's? I probably didn't because we're already here and who'd know the difference. I think you ought to know I'm feeling very depressed."
>
> what kind of a jackass
It looks like you are trying to implement a relational database in Excel!
Would you like to...
From an old .sig quote:
Considering that most of the parents of new postdoctorate-level mathematicians probably live overseas nowadays (and whose conversations are therefore legal to record), maybe the old .sig quote was always more true than funny.
X-Bender: Fry: Stop being such a baby and chop my hands off!
Yeah, Ackbar never caught on
And then they came for the guys who didn't close their tags, and
NO CARRIER
>
>Let's convict Perl users.
First they came for the COBOL programmers, and I was silent,
Because ADD KEYSTROKES TO SYNTAX GIVING OBFUSCATION was always lame.
They they came for the BASIC programmers, and I was silent,
Because I considered GOTO harmful,
Then they came for the C++ programmers, and I was silent,
Because I could still write FORTRAN in any language,
Then they came for the Perl programmers, and now the only way I can win an obfuscated programming contest is to write it in APL.
(First they ignore you, then they fight you, then they mock you, then they come for the Brainf*ck programmers and their heads explode.)
Also from the site:
> 425MB (USA #1)
Not for long, it won't be.
(Where are an elephant's genitals located? In his feet. Because if he steps on you, you're fucked. Any parallels between a webserver with a 425 MB .avi file that just got linked on the front page of Slashdot are purely coincidental.)