So - humans playing God, synthesizing life from its basic components. Hubris, or something better?
Without stating a position either way on the existence
(or nonexistence) of God, what better way to glorify a Creator
than by showing Him we've learned some of His tricks?
(Allow me one assumption here: the assumption that if God exists, He's not a copyright lawyer, and
will be flattered by our success, rather than whomping us with a Deistic
Millenium Copyright Act violation notice in the form of a 20-mile-wide asteroid.)
God: I created you by breathing life into dirt.
Man: Cool trick, God. We've learned to do the same thing.
God: Cool trick. Now try it from first principles.
Man: What do you mean?
God: Well, next time, make your own dirt.
And before you point out - correctly - that with a sufficiently large energy input we could indeed synthesize all the components that make up "dirt" out of hydrogen, you haven't solved the problem. Ultimately, it comes down to this:
God: Look, I appreciate the flattery, and I encourage you to keep at it. But read the job description -- you qualify for My job when you derive a universe capable of evolving intelligent life based on the setting of a small number of physical constants, and you can have My job when your resume' includes experimental proof in the form of a portfolio that includes your worshippers.
Hams were the only functional communication for many people after the Loma Prieta quake hit California. Hams ran the only functioning communications network on 9/11. And yes, hams were there for the tsunami victims too.
If you need a technology that'll enable coordination of disaster relief -- or even just help out by offloading a few million "Yes, Mom, I'm OK, and I'll talk to you when I can" messages from overloaded communications channels, chances are you're going to be using ham radio.
Better yet -- become a ham yourself. In most countries, it's cheap and easy. And if you're reading this, you're already geeky enough that it'll be a hell of a lot of fun no matter where you live.
Another poster on this thread was talking about SMS. When you have no cellular towers, you're not going to get even 20 seconds a day of uptime.
These rules are meant to be broken. In both senses of the word.
"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."
- Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged
The most useful kinds of rules are the ones that everyone violates, and that are therefore unworkable. In other words - rules are made to be broken.
> According to most predictions we were meant to be enjoying lives of leisure by this point - working a 5-hour week in the paperless office, and driving to work in our hovercars.
Judging from these pictures of the Intel retail boxed heatsink for the Pentium 4 560J (3.6 GHz), by the time we get 10 GHz PCs, the hovercar problem will take care of itself.
It's from Wowwee,
Site says "owee!"
Slashvertisement for,
Robosapien 2!
Mark the Tilden,
BEAM he's buildin',
10" filled in,
Robosapien 2!
And I just hope and pray that my two hundred bucks is at hand,
You and I, me and you, Franklin Benjamins two - understand?
And this filk is so wrong and their webserver's not strong enough
(And you really don't want to see JPGs and GIFs of our love)
I don't wanna classify you like an animal in the zoo,
But it seems good to me to know you want a Robosapien too!
Connection failed,
Server got nailed,
Sysadmin bailed,
Robosapien too.
Robosuperior,
In my interior,
Controlled from shell scripts,
It's Robosapien 2,
And you're Robosapien too,
It's my Robosapien V2!
And we're Robosapien toooooo...
> > [doublem] That some day, somehow, I will get the elusive First Post. > > [nine-times] ep... you have your proof... no longer counts.
...for proof denies faith, and without faith, getting a first post is nothing.
"Oh dear", says doublem, "I hadn't thought of that", and promptly vanishes in a fog of (-1, Overrated) moderation.
"Oh, that was easy", says nine-times, and for an encore, goes on to prove that (+1, Funny) is indistinguishable from (-1, Troll), and gets himself confirmed dead at the next Netcraft parody post.
That is, that Minsky was fundamentally right, and that the brain can be modeled as a computing device (although not necessarily a deterministic Turing machine) made of meat.
Meta-belief: Just as I believe that mind is an epiphenomenon of certain configurations of matter, I believe that free will is an epiphenomenon of random processes in the brain.
Side note: I do not believe we'll solve the Hard AI problem in the next 50 years. (I'd very much like to be proven wrong on that, however.)
RBOC: "Regulations, motherfucker, do you write them?"
FCC: "Yes..."
RBOC: "Now describe to me what our customers look like."
FCC: "T-they're kinda wooly... and have four legs..."
RBOC: "Go on"
FCC: "...and they eat grass..."
RBOC: "Do they look like one of our customers?"
FCC: "What?
RBOC: "DO. THEY. LOOK. LIKE. A. CUSTOMER?"
FCC: "N-no?"
RBOC: "Then why you tryin' to stop us from fuckin' them like one?"
> Why? The Judicial branch is mostly the only form of government that is not corrupted. They don't take bribes like Senators and the Executive branches do.
Give us time, we're still charging people by the 8.5"x14" double-spaced printed page for court transcripts!
> I hate frivilous lawsuits, but at least with a human doing the filling of drugs there is some common sense that can be a fail-safe. With a machine all it takes is a bug to have 300 vials of poison dealt to unsuspecting patients. Won't there still need to be human oversight?
Take a look at your doctor's handwriting the next time you get a prescription. If you can't figure it out, your pharmacist probably can't either.
Human oversight is having sufficient presence of mind to ask your doctor "What drug am I being prescribed? At what dosage? In what form?", remembering the answer, and comparing what your doc told you with what's on your prescription... and with your pharmacist gives you after reading your prescription. In at least one recent study, around 6% of prescriptions result in errors.
In the absence of that oversight, I'll take my chances with the robot.
> > One phone uses a 500Mhz processor and other had a 3Gbyte Hard Drive for music."
> >
In other news, the RIAA has filed a lawsuit against Samsung for encouraging pirating of music on mobile phones. Details to follow...
"Can you hear me now?"
"Yes."
"Good. Now my record label can sue you!"
> I guess noone noticed their chips were manafactured by "Advanced Moocro Devices".
So how is the remarked-CPU problemm getting in the way of...
their new Alchemy chipset which boasts direct transfer of video from digital
video recorders to portable players without the need to transcode through a
PC.
I mean, seriously. Turning a Gateway/e-machines into an FX-53/3400+, that's what I call Alchemy!
> if nothing else works, tell them there's porn on the internet;)
There's porn in this.tar file. Here's a spec for the.tar file format. If you can write a program that extracts the.tar, you can keep the pr0n!
If you replace "pr0n" and "tarfile" with "game" and "disk", that's pretty much how I got started.
I asked what the computer was for. They told me it could be programmed. I RTFM'd, and figured out how to use the thing to "program" a game whose source code was in the form of ink spots on dead trees.
From there on, it wasn't too hard to figure out that I could make the game better by changing some of the numbers (probability of hitting a target, radius of a targeting circle, etc).
By the end of the day, I realized I was having more fun programming the thing than I ever did playing the game.
It's been 20 years now, and I'm not hooked. I could quit any day I want to. I just don't want to.
> > The Shadow Internet is just like the real internet, except we all have goatees.
> >The Real Internet is just like the Shadow Internet, except we all have goatses...urgh...
The Vorlon Internet is just like the Shadow Internet, except we are all Goat.
The idea of phone-home product activation and 30MB of DRM^H^H^H spyw^H^H^H^Hcontent distribution mechanism resident in memory whether you're going to play the game today or not, no.
The idea that you no longer buy software, but that you merely rent it until the company that wrote it goes under and pulls the plug on the authentication server, no.
The idea that the first sale doctrine no longer applies, no.
Bottom line: When HL2 came out, I thought about buying the retail CD and sending $10 to Valve on principle, but the more I learned about Steam, the less I liked it.
To date, I have yet to purchase HL2. Neither Vivendi nor Valve have (or will) see a penny from me. I will not install Steam or any Steamlike clones. I will not purchase any game that requires them.
I hate warez puppies and won't warez HL2, but anybody that manages to break Steam and puts Valve and this horrid idea out of business -- has my congratulations and my eternal thanks.
Vivendi is to Valve what RIAA is to musicians.
Tell me -- did your favorite indie artist break free from RIAA middlemen by foisting DRM-crippled, plays-only-in-his-custom-phone-home-audio-player music files on you?
Or did he find another way of offering you better value for your money?
> > Going to one of her concerts is like watching those old 50's nuclear tests where they put soldiers in the desert 10 miles away from ground zero just to see what happens. > > You make it sound too good. I've been to many a rock concert that do just that.
Both of you. Stop it. Hotblack Desiato and Alicia Keys do not belong in my mind at the same time, particularly as I live in a time zone where I have yet to smash my brains out with a slice of lemon wrapped 'round a large gold brick.
>
If you're wondering why people would still want Vioxx, it's only dangerous if you a pre-existing cardiac condition. So if you're a healthy 20-something with a bad knee, you're probably really pissed that Vioxx got taken off the market.
Who cares. All I want to see is spammers being sued into oblivion by the surviving relatives 80-year-olds with heart conditions click "buy" and subsequently kick off.
We've got enough law enforcement resources to go after 12-year olds who download Titney's Pears albums. Why the fuck can't we have someone go after these "pharmacies" who dispense prescription medications without a license?
The laws against illegal dispensation of prescription medicine aren't unenforceable like the War On Drugs Paid For By Handing Cash To That Dude On The Corner. These are non-anonymous transactions performed with credit cards and shipped by non-anonymous shippers, and often shipped across national borders over which law enforcement has a legal right to inspect packages for contraband.
> If they would of taken all the money that they spent on NASA and NASA programs, and put it into agriculture development, or social welfare programs, mankind would of been better
Right. Social welfare programmes like the ones we've spent trillions on in the US -- and yet, we've got tons of poor folks at home and abroad.
Right. Agricultural development. Because crop yields would be so much higher without infrared imaging to spot diseased areas (or brush fires) in nearby areas, GPS to send him (or firefighters) out there to fix it, weather satellites to tell him whether or not it's going to rain this week, or other monitoring stations so that he can prepare a year or two in advance for an El Nino or La Nina event.
The reason you have a higher standard of living than Louis XIV could have dreamed of is because people decided to invest in technology rather than bandaid fixes to immediate problems.
At the turn of the century, people were worried that New York City was growing at a rate that would result in the streets being literally knee-deep in horseshit by the 50s.
There was even one chap who printed out handbills at a printing shop called Ink-blot Dot Org, saying "If they'd have taken all that money that people spent on Henry Ford's silly contraption, and put it into hiring the poor as street sweepers, New Yorkers would have been better off!"
> The idea is not that bad - instead of thousands of sites and message boards requiring registration, login and confirmation of the e-mail, have just one single entity provide and verify the virtual avatar.
Bad idea, implementation irrelevant.
Instead of having to compromise each site (presumably on a semi-secure server), have just one single entity provide and verify the virutal avatar... based on data resident on a machine administered so incompetently as to have six types of spyware and four spammer worms on it because the underlying operating system is as secure as swiss cheese.
> Small sites who would benefit frim such service don't have $10,000 to throw around, and large sites, which do have the money, just will write their own username+password code.
...thereby saving themselves $10K, thereby limiting the damage from compromise to Just One Site, and thereby offering better security to the end user by accident.
I've lucky in that got a good "mind" for (secure!) passwords and have no trouble remembering dozens of them.
But even if I didnt... even if I wrote all my userid/password combinations on Post-It notes, a Post-It note resides in an area with reasonably secure physical access controls. Not so with a network-connected PC and a single-signon application.
Slashdot Mirror
Without stating a position either way on the existence (or nonexistence) of God, what better way to glorify a Creator than by showing Him we've learned some of His tricks?
(Allow me one assumption here: the assumption that if God exists, He's not a copyright lawyer, and will be flattered by our success, rather than whomping us with a Deistic Millenium Copyright Act violation notice in the form of a 20-mile-wide asteroid.)
God: I created you by breathing life into dirt.
Man: Cool trick, God. We've learned to do the same thing.
God: Cool trick. Now try it from first principles.
Man: What do you mean?
God: Well, next time, make your own dirt.
And before you point out - correctly - that with a sufficiently large energy input we could indeed synthesize all the components that make up "dirt" out of hydrogen, you haven't solved the problem. Ultimately, it comes down to this:
God: Look, I appreciate the flattery, and I encourage you to keep at it. But read the job description -- you qualify for My job when you derive a universe capable of evolving intelligent life based on the setting of a small number of physical constants, and you can have My job when your resume' includes experimental proof in the form of a portfolio that includes your worshippers.
We hairless apes still have a bit of work to do.
Ham Radio.
Google for your country's equivalent to the ARRL.
Hams were the only functional communication for many people after the Loma Prieta quake hit California. Hams ran the only functioning communications network on 9/11. And yes, hams were there for the tsunami victims too.
If you need a technology that'll enable coordination of disaster relief -- or even just help out by offloading a few million "Yes, Mom, I'm OK, and I'll talk to you when I can" messages from overloaded communications channels, chances are you're going to be using ham radio.
Better yet -- become a ham yourself. In most countries, it's cheap and easy. And if you're reading this, you're already geeky enough that it'll be a hell of a lot of fun no matter where you live.
Another poster on this thread was talking about SMS. When you have no cellular towers, you're not going to get even 20 seconds a day of uptime.
And that's when you'll be helped by a ham.
The most useful kinds of rules are the ones that everyone violates, and that are therefore unworkable. In other words - rules are made to be broken.
Yeah, you and every other bugger out there just want a chance to come back in the sequel. Stop playing mind games with us.
Your friend,
Demosthenes.
P.S. Locke sux!
Judging from these pictures of the Intel retail boxed heatsink for the Pentium 4 560J (3.6 GHz), by the time we get 10 GHz PCs, the hovercar problem will take care of itself.
Site says "owee!"
Slashvertisement for,
Robosapien 2!
Mark the Tilden,
BEAM he's buildin',
10" filled in,
Robosapien 2!
And I just hope and pray that my two hundred bucks is at hand,
You and I, me and you, Franklin Benjamins two - understand?
And this filk is so wrong and their webserver's not strong enough
(And you really don't want to see JPGs and GIFs of our love)
I don't wanna classify you like an animal in the zoo,
But it seems good to me to know you want a Robosapien too!
Connection failed,
Server got nailed,
Sysadmin bailed,
Robosapien too.
Robosuperior,
In my interior,
Controlled from shell scripts,
It's Robosapien 2,
And you're Robosapien too,
It's my Robosapien V2!
And we're Robosapien toooooo...
The more you tighten your grip, Ms. Fiorina, the more engineering talent will slip through your fingers.
>
> [nine-times] ep... you have your proof... no longer counts.
"Oh dear", says doublem, "I hadn't thought of that", and promptly vanishes in a fog of (-1, Overrated) moderation.
"Oh, that was easy", says nine-times, and for an encore, goes on to prove that (+1, Funny) is indistinguishable from (-1, Troll), and gets himself confirmed dead at the next Netcraft parody post.
That is, that Minsky was fundamentally right, and that the brain can be modeled as a computing device (although not necessarily a deterministic Turing machine) made of meat.
Meta-belief: Just as I believe that mind is an epiphenomenon of certain configurations of matter, I believe that free will is an epiphenomenon of random processes in the brain.
Side note: I do not believe we'll solve the Hard AI problem in the next 50 years. (I'd very much like to be proven wrong on that, however.)
RBOC: "Regulations, motherfucker, do you write them?"
FCC: "Yes..."
RBOC: "Now describe to me what our customers look like."
FCC: "T-they're kinda wooly... and have four legs..."
RBOC: "Go on" FCC: "...and they eat grass..."
RBOC: "Do they look like one of our customers?"
FCC: "What?
RBOC: "DO. THEY. LOOK. LIKE. A. CUSTOMER?" FCC: "N-no?" RBOC: "Then why you tryin' to stop us from fuckin' them like one?"
Give us time, we're still charging people by the 8.5"x14" double-spaced printed page for court transcripts!
Take a look at your doctor's handwriting the next time you get a prescription. If you can't figure it out, your pharmacist probably can't either.
Human oversight is having sufficient presence of mind to ask your doctor "What drug am I being prescribed? At what dosage? In what form?", remembering the answer, and comparing what your doc told you with what's on your prescription... and with your pharmacist gives you after reading your prescription. In at least one recent study, around 6% of prescriptions result in errors.
In the absence of that oversight, I'll take my chances with the robot.
If the freeloaders have convinced you to build a bureaucracy to sort out the freeloaders from the needy, it's already over.
>
> In other news, the RIAA has filed a lawsuit against Samsung for encouraging pirating of music on mobile phones. Details to follow...
"Can you hear me now?"
"Yes."
"Good. Now my record label can sue you!"
So how is the remarked-CPU problemm getting in the way of...
I mean, seriously. Turning a Gateway/e-machines into an FX-53/3400+, that's what I call Alchemy!
There's porn in this .tar file. Here's a spec for the .tar file format. If you can write a program that extracts the .tar, you can keep the pr0n!
If you replace "pr0n" and "tarfile" with "game" and "disk", that's pretty much how I got started.
I asked what the computer was for. They told me it could be programmed. I RTFM'd, and figured out how to use the thing to "program" a game whose source code was in the form of ink spots on dead trees.
From there on, it wasn't too hard to figure out that I could make the game better by changing some of the numbers (probability of hitting a target, radius of a targeting circle, etc).
By the end of the day, I realized I was having more fun programming the thing than I ever did playing the game.
It's been 20 years now, and I'm not hooked. I could quit any day I want to. I just don't want to.
~fitzprrklpop~ople of Earth, can you hear us now?~fwopzzwwep~
>
>The Real Internet is just like the Shadow Internet, except we all have goatses
The Vorlon Internet is just like the Shadow Internet, except we are all Goat.
Which idea?
The idea of cutting out the publisher, yes.
The idea of phone-home product activation and 30MB of DRM^H^H^H spyw^H^H^H^Hcontent distribution mechanism resident in memory whether you're going to play the game today or not, no.
The idea that you no longer buy software, but that you merely rent it until the company that wrote it goes under and pulls the plug on the authentication server, no.
The idea that the first sale doctrine no longer applies, no.
Bottom line: When HL2 came out, I thought about buying the retail CD and sending $10 to Valve on principle, but the more I learned about Steam, the less I liked it.
To date, I have yet to purchase HL2. Neither Vivendi nor Valve have (or will) see a penny from me. I will not install Steam or any Steamlike clones. I will not purchase any game that requires them.
I hate warez puppies and won't warez HL2, but anybody that manages to break Steam and puts Valve and this horrid idea out of business -- has my congratulations and my eternal thanks.
Vivendi is to Valve what RIAA is to musicians.
Tell me -- did your favorite indie artist break free from RIAA middlemen by foisting DRM-crippled, plays-only-in-his-custom-phone-home-audio-player music files on you?
Or did he find another way of offering you better value for your money?
> NEXT->
> that most web browsers
> NEXT->
> have these things called
> NEXT->
> "scroll bars", don't you?
Hey, I know you! You're the guy from Tom's Hardware Guide!
>
> You make it sound too good. I've been to many a rock concert that do just that.
Both of you. Stop it. Hotblack Desiato and Alicia Keys do not belong in my mind at the same time, particularly as I live in a time zone where I have yet to smash my brains out with a slice of lemon wrapped 'round a large gold brick.
CmdrTaco always regretted his decision to stare into the beam with his remaining good eye.
Who cares. All I want to see is spammers being sued into oblivion by the surviving relatives 80-year-olds with heart conditions click "buy" and subsequently kick off.
We've got enough law enforcement resources to go after 12-year olds who download Titney's Pears albums. Why the fuck can't we have someone go after these "pharmacies" who dispense prescription medications without a license?
The laws against illegal dispensation of prescription medicine aren't unenforceable like the War On Drugs Paid For By Handing Cash To That Dude On The Corner. These are non-anonymous transactions performed with credit cards and shipped by non-anonymous shippers, and often shipped across national borders over which law enforcement has a legal right to inspect packages for contraband.
Right. Social welfare programmes like the ones we've spent trillions on in the US -- and yet, we've got tons of poor folks at home and abroad.
Right. Agricultural development. Because crop yields would be so much higher without infrared imaging to spot diseased areas (or brush fires) in nearby areas, GPS to send him (or firefighters) out there to fix it, weather satellites to tell him whether or not it's going to rain this week, or other monitoring stations so that he can prepare a year or two in advance for an El Nino or La Nina event.
The reason you have a higher standard of living than Louis XIV could have dreamed of is because people decided to invest in technology rather than bandaid fixes to immediate problems.
At the turn of the century, people were worried that New York City was growing at a rate that would result in the streets being literally knee-deep in horseshit by the 50s.
There was even one chap who printed out handbills at a printing shop called Ink-blot Dot Org, saying "If they'd have taken all that money that people spent on Henry Ford's silly contraption, and put it into hiring the poor as street sweepers, New Yorkers would have been better off!"
Bad idea, implementation irrelevant.
Instead of having to compromise each site (presumably on a semi-secure server), have just one single entity provide and verify the virutal avatar... based on data resident on a machine administered so incompetently as to have six types of spyware and four spammer worms on it because the underlying operating system is as secure as swiss cheese.
> Small sites who would benefit frim such service don't have $10,000 to throw around, and large sites, which do have the money, just will write their own username+password code.
I've lucky in that got a good "mind" for (secure!) passwords and have no trouble remembering dozens of them.
But even if I didnt... even if I wrote all my userid/password combinations on Post-It notes, a Post-It note resides in an area with reasonably secure physical access controls. Not so with a network-connected PC and a single-signon application.