While we're at it, I'm pretty sure we're missing the point by arguing whether it is demonstrating the ability to play soccer or football, since it was in fact a contestant in Bandai's annual Robo-One where the goal was to have little anthropomorphic (.PNG) robots pummel (.MPG) the crap (.MPG) out of each other to win by TKO. Dig around the sites and you'll find piles of highly entertaining videos.
For those of you who can't stomach anthropomorphic robot on anthropomorphic robot violence, click here for footage of the little suckers particpating in non-combative activities.
I hope his hood is *very* tight. Tight, plastic, without eyeholes, and cinched at the bottom with a rubber band. Of course, it will prevent the entry of enlightening information in the fields of biology, genetics, ethics, common decency, but at least it will also block the entry of oxygen.
Plastic KKK hoods are all the rage now. You know you want one. All the kool klan members are wearing them.
See now, there is an unnecessary association between rational thought/analysis and paranoia/cynicism. I've been telling my peers for years that there's no way that those silly little buttons could be functional in an urban (NYC, at that) setting, and that if anything, there have got to be more advanced systems manipulating those blinky lights.
What did I get? Years of mockery and ridicule. Well HA! SEE? I'M NOT PARANOID!!! ALL OF YOU, YOU ALWAYS THOUGHT I WAS PARANOID BUT I'M NOT!!! YOU THINK I'M CRAZY DON'T YOU? ANSWER ME DAMM...
...but jokes aside, I just want to say, "I told you so"
But statistically, is the threat of abuse by the powers controlling such systems high enough to significantly counter the benefits it provides? I understand the concern over abuse, but I don't quite have a good grasp over the magnitude of that concern.
What are Britain's per capita crime rates? How do they compare to those of America? How safe do you feel walking alone along British streets in the middle of the night?
Honestly, having grown up in NYC in the 80's and having gone to school in and around Harlem, I can't help but feel like I would welcome such a system here in the States.
Does it really bother the majority of Brits that there are security cameras present? Is it a hindrance, or a nagging fear of abuse of the surveillance system?
Were I to have children, I wouldn't think twice about whether or not I'd want the streets they walked along to be monitored.
In fact, the wrist-watch's popularity is rooted in its origins as a trendy-piece of personal accessorization, made famous by a trendy and popular individual, AlbertoSantos-Dumont. He had his friend Louis Cartier craft him a watch he could check time with while ballooning, a two-hand-required activity. Being the dashing, mad, wealthy, young bon-vivant that he was, soon *everyone* wanted one. I believe Cartier has reissued the original Santos-Dumont design as well, if you happen to have a few thousand bucks to blow.
But the spirit of the watch still flows with fashion, and I think that the personal timepiece is one of those magical places in which technology and fashion can merge to produceabsolutelywonderfulthings.
Actually, this is exactly the kind of thing I'd been hoping noone would bother to publish as "news", precisely because I (in my cheapass, impoverished, bargainhunting gadgetlusting ways) have always managed to find the things I've wanted on eBay for great prices simply by repeatedly performing searches on what I'd expect to be common misspellings/permutations of spellings of the names of the items (whew... long sentence... deep breath...).
That having been said, I wound up with a MITS Altair for $100 because it was listed as "Vintage Altar Comp", and a "sonydcv1" for about $300.
My point being that as geeks, we should encourage all non-geeks we know who have an interest in selling items on eBay to forgo spellchecks and not worry about spelling in general. We stand to profit from it! Any attempt to educate the general populace (as this NYT article attempts to do) will reduce the number of magic bargains to be found on eBay;)
That's another corporate-work-place strategy for dealing with problems, and now it's been proved effective by actual scientists performing actual research!
"In the experiments conducted by Wagner and his colleagues, volunteers tackled arithmetic problems and then took twenty minutes to masturbate furiously while being lectured on mathematics. A second group was instructed to fornicate with a set of oversized-novelty-foam-numeral-character figures. Those who reached orgasm were twice as likely to realize that there was a hidden rule that substantially simplified calculations."
So the next time you can't figure out how to solve a problem, just fuck it!
PS: I refuse to cite the source of this quotation.
Think my Windows box will be upset when it knows how much I hate it?
Do you seriously think your Windows box cares if you love it or not? If it did, it'd be treating you much better.
Actually, that *is* a fairly interesting proposition. Even if it were terribly inaccurate at reading the subtleties of emotional responses, maybe it could be used by machines as a source of additional input. Really now, imagine a kiosk at a retail clothing chain which offers you selections on what you might want, and gauges from its love-o-meter readings how strongly you hate the silk-sheen mauve stretch-fabric tee shirts and love the traditional white polo. At an even more granular level, such a kiosk would be able to gather tiny bits of information on what shades of which colors, what fabrics in what cuts, and such that you prefer. And all that with less interaction than would have been required otherwise.
If you think about it, this kind of technology, if moderately effective and economically manufacturable, could be applied to any expert-system-type application that guides users to recommendations. Just imagine: An interactive porn catalogue that requires NO hands to operate (now *both* hands can be free)! Okay, that isn't my ideal application of the technology, but it's worth consideration.
...and that may be why the majority of Lego-set-purchasers I know (myself included) are over the age of 21 and purchasing them for themselves. With most of the sets that kids would actually be able to squeeze a decent amount of fun out of being over $40.00, and most of the affordable sets being so rinky-dink, a child given the choice would probably ask their parent for a comparably priced video game instead of a $50 Lego set.
I had (and dearly loved) piles of Legos when I was little, but most of those came as hand-me-downs in buckets. Maybe we can convince the folks at Lego to stop spending as much effort in producing new, specialized blocks for new, specialized sets with fancy graphics on their boxes and start selling things in buckets.
On another note, I bet that if someone were to set up a PayPal account to donate to the Lego corporation, that the mobs of Legomaniacsoutthere would be able to generate a significant amount of money for them.
All that learning has really been tempting me to get myself a television. I am information-ravenous, and it's taken every ouce of willpower I have to not succumb to the temptation to subscribe to cable television for access to TLC, the History Channel, Discovery, The Food Network, and so forth, but this... This could totally smash my resolve.
Oh television... It's been years. Should I give in?
...where Coach caves in to the efforts of a salesman and buys a love-tester (or pinball machine or some other gizmo) for the pub because it was "guaranteed to increase sales". Sam, upon learning of this, asks, "guaranteed or what?"...
...which is what I wonder about this email service that is "guaranteed to be secure". So if my email gets snooped out, can I drop into North Korea to file a complaint? Do they have a toll-free number I can call? Will I get my money back? Will I survive the experience of attempting to file a complaint? Or will they just mail me a conciliatory blob of yakbab?
Next on Entertainment Tonight: overnight particle physics sensation D Meson X(4158) is threatening legal action against the popular tabloid, "Physics Review" for what it claims is "misleading representation" of its relationship with D Meson X(1924), which it has recently been spotted interacting strongly with at the posh KEK Tsukuba Positron-Electron Supercollider in Japan. X(4158)'s lawyers also stated that further intrusions into the popular particle's privacy by the subatomic paparazzi would not be tolerated, and that a particle's spin-orientation is none of your business.
That is a very good idea, and just out of my own sick curiosity, I'd like to see this program you speak of hosted right here on/., just to see if anyone would take on the nerd Mecca itself, and if so, what miserable fate would befall them.
This is idiotic. I'm not even talking about the DRM, I'm thinking about the form factor. There's a limit to how small something can become while still being of a practical size to the average consumer.
Maybe if the plan were to distribute the files electronically and have them stored in bulk on one of these things the way you'd use a flash drive, but a fingernail sized format as the primary physical medium of music distribution? How on earth would these things be packaged and stored? We could have miniature jewel cases for them, or little binders, but what about the labels? How would you fit "The Mighty Mighty Bostones: More Noise and Other Disturbances" or "Beethoven Symphony No. 7, Movement 2, performed by the Philadelphia Orchestra under Christoph Eschenbach"? And what about track listings?
Can you imagine having an Altoids tin of tiny little chips labelled with teensy-tiny ittie-bitty text, and trying to find the album you want to pop into your portable music player, while standing in a subway car or say, while driving? Can you imagine how easy it would be to lose one of these things or swear profusely as a strong gust of wind just blows them out of your car window into a fluttering confetti of $10 albums?
I'd much rather see larger-sized storage mediums with greater capacity and do away with physical distribution of music altogether.
...people who retreat to OSX because Windows machines just aren't their thing. Now this may sound a little silly, but seriously, a large portion of the Flash content producers I know are OSX-based. They like OSX. They like Macs. They do art, and animation, and Flash banners, and I was under the impression that most of them were firmly rooted in Apple territory.
When MS releases this killer technology, they will require people to use it, to produce content for it, to give its output the same kind of appeal that the Flash gurus produce. Now, if the majority of the talent is Mac-based, and can't author "Sparkle" content from a Mac, then there won't be as much pretty, attractive output to convince people to adopt.
...oh crap. I guess it would be a problem if Microsoft were to also release a stable and robust IDE for producing Sparkle content on the Mac, huh?
What the government really needs to do is to ban vehicles altogether and require everything, including hazardous waste, to be carried by hand, in sacks, depending on the availability of suitable sacks.
Then, we could install GPS trackers and remote shutdown devices in people, and if one of these stout but horribly deformed hazardous waste carrying-peoples were to get personjacked, we could shut them down immediately!
A few months ago, I attended an impromptu cookies'n'soda seminar given at MIT by Tim Berners-Lee, and while the subject was of interest, I also took the time to take a quick look around at the machines being toted by all of the attendees. It was a small classroom, everyone was in plain view, and "everyone" included some high-profile names in the geek world (although I can't remember them now, I was too busy looking around at people's hardware;-) ). What surprised me at the time was the number of Macs present. Mr. Berners-Lee himself was toting a TiBook, and some of the MIT Computer Science professors even had the new-model iBooks.
It was a surprise to me, and a pretty powerful incentive for me to go with the sexy little thing I'd never previously considered worth the price-markup. Now all I have to do is starve for a few more months...
PS: For those of you who are wondering what the rest of the audience was carrying, there were two ThinkPads, and one or two grad-student-like fellows had desktop-replacement Inspirons.
1) Dingo Jehuty (PS2 - Zone of Enders 2)
2) Decoy Octopus (PS1 - Metal Gear Solid)
3) Quattro Vagina (PS1 - Gundam: Char's Counterattack)
We've got a dog, an 8-legged spy, and something which can only be theorized to be multi-cunted. Oh the number of times I've hit "game-over" because I was too busy giggling.
I switched to Mozilla recently too, and have discovered that it is a very nice little thing that almost never crashes. And despite some annoying issues with certain sites, I'm willing to use it exclusively *just* so that I can add to its usage statistics.
...but I think I still have a point. Sure, the same could be done with a little effort and devotion and surveillance, and whatnot, but the fact that it will become exponentially easier to carry out these tasks is what bugs me. Sure, there are all sorts of criminals (and government agencies) who will take the time to sift through your refuse and follow you around, but if Ron Popeil were to release over television infomercials a Ronco Scanomatic, then any Joe who would otherwise be too lazy and stupid to become a prosperous miscreant could get a head start on the path to figuring out what you own.
I've said it before, but think about it. There's been talk of placing RFID tags in paper currency. Doesn't this mean that I could say, hang out in front of a bar at night, having a smoke, scanning everyone who stumbles out to see how much they're carrying? It'd be like having your cash and valuables taped to your head, instead of tucked away in your wallet and bag.
Do you own an iPod? Top of the line? You carry that around with you everywhere. Same with your schwank new PDA/Phone. Do you advertise the fact that you're carrying a thousand dollars worth of gear when you're walking around the city at night? If everything has an RFID tag, you might as well.
...because the same way your garbage can could keep track of what you're tossing out, someone else could walk by your place on trash-pick-up-day and discern from all of the RFID tags in your waste that you lare likely elderly (tags present for hearing aid batteries and Metamucil), have a cold (tags present for Tylenol Flu and Cold), have a really severe cold (tags present for four boxes of Kleenex), own decent stereo equipment (tags present from packaging for monster audio patch cables and old issues of Hi-Fi magazines), a small dog (tags present for Purina Small Dog Chow), have a visiting infant (tags present for Pampers), and isn't the fact that this information would be available not only in your trash, but on your own body as you're walking around, isn't that the least bit scary to anyone else?
Slashdot Mirror
While we're at it, I'm pretty sure we're missing the point by arguing whether it is demonstrating the ability to play soccer or football, since it was in fact a contestant in Bandai's annual Robo-One where the goal was to have little anthropomorphic (.PNG) robots pummel (.MPG) the crap (.MPG) out of each other to win by TKO. Dig around the sites and you'll find piles of highly entertaining videos.
For those of you who can't stomach anthropomorphic robot on anthropomorphic robot violence, click here for footage of the little suckers particpating in non-combative activities.
...considering the Spacetraveller's SIX HUNDRED DOLLAR price
Plastic KKK hoods are all the rage now. You know you want one. All the kool klan members are wearing them.
What did I get? Years of mockery and ridicule. Well HA! SEE? I'M NOT PARANOID!!! ALL OF YOU, YOU ALWAYS THOUGHT I WAS PARANOID BUT I'M NOT!!! YOU THINK I'M CRAZY DON'T YOU? ANSWER ME DAMM...
...but jokes aside, I just want to say, "I told you so"
But statistically, is the threat of abuse by the powers controlling such systems high enough to significantly counter the benefits it provides? I understand the concern over abuse, but I don't quite have a good grasp over the magnitude of that concern.
Honestly, having grown up in NYC in the 80's and having gone to school in and around Harlem, I can't help but feel like I would welcome such a system here in the States.
Does it really bother the majority of Brits that there are security cameras present? Is it a hindrance, or a nagging fear of abuse of the surveillance system?
Were I to have children, I wouldn't think twice about whether or not I'd want the streets they walked along to be monitored.
But the spirit of the watch still flows with fashion, and I think that the personal timepiece is one of those magical places in which technology and fashion can merge to produce absolutely wonderful things.
That having been said, I wound up with a MITS Altair for $100 because it was listed as "Vintage Altar Comp", and a "sonydcv1" for about $300.
My point being that as geeks, we should encourage all non-geeks we know who have an interest in selling items on eBay to forgo spellchecks and not worry about spelling in general. We stand to profit from it! Any attempt to educate the general populace (as this NYT article attempts to do) will reduce the number of magic bargains to be found on eBay ;)
"In the experiments conducted by Wagner and his colleagues, volunteers tackled arithmetic problems and then took twenty minutes to masturbate furiously while being lectured on mathematics. A second group was instructed to fornicate with a set of oversized-novelty-foam-numeral-character figures. Those who reached orgasm were twice as likely to realize that there was a hidden rule that substantially simplified calculations."
So the next time you can't figure out how to solve a problem, just fuck it!
PS: I refuse to cite the source of this quotation.
Actually, that *is* a fairly interesting proposition. Even if it were terribly inaccurate at reading the subtleties of emotional responses, maybe it could be used by machines as a source of additional input. Really now, imagine a kiosk at a retail clothing chain which offers you selections on what you might want, and gauges from its love-o-meter readings how strongly you hate the silk-sheen mauve stretch-fabric tee shirts and love the traditional white polo. At an even more granular level, such a kiosk would be able to gather tiny bits of information on what shades of which colors, what fabrics in what cuts, and such that you prefer. And all that with less interaction than would have been required otherwise.
If you think about it, this kind of technology, if moderately effective and economically manufacturable, could be applied to any expert-system-type application that guides users to recommendations. Just imagine: An interactive porn catalogue that requires NO hands to operate (now *both* hands can be free)! Okay, that isn't my ideal application of the technology, but it's worth consideration.
I had (and dearly loved) piles of Legos when I was little, but most of those came as hand-me-downs in buckets. Maybe we can convince the folks at Lego to stop spending as much effort in producing new, specialized blocks for new, specialized sets with fancy graphics on their boxes and start selling things in buckets.
On another note, I bet that if someone were to set up a PayPal account to donate to the Lego corporation, that the mobs of Lego maniacs out there would be able to generate a significant amount of money for them.
All that learning has really been tempting me to get myself a television. I am information-ravenous, and it's taken every ouce of willpower I have to not succumb to the temptation to subscribe to cable television for access to TLC, the History Channel, Discovery, The Food Network, and so forth, but this... This could totally smash my resolve.
Oh television... It's been years. Should I give in?
...which is what I wonder about this email service that is "guaranteed to be secure". So if my email gets snooped out, can I drop into North Korea to file a complaint? Do they have a toll-free number I can call? Will I get my money back? Will I survive the experience of attempting to file a complaint? Or will they just mail me a conciliatory blob of yakbab?
That's why it's so scandalous ;-)
Next on Entertainment Tonight: overnight particle physics sensation D Meson X(4158) is threatening legal action against the popular tabloid, "Physics Review" for what it claims is "misleading representation" of its relationship with D Meson X(1924), which it has recently been spotted interacting strongly with at the posh KEK Tsukuba Positron-Electron Supercollider in Japan. X(4158)'s lawyers also stated that further intrusions into the popular particle's privacy by the subatomic paparazzi would not be tolerated, and that a particle's spin-orientation is none of your business.
That is a very good idea, and just out of my own sick curiosity, I'd like to see this program you speak of hosted right here on /., just to see if anyone would take on the nerd Mecca itself, and if so, what miserable fate would befall them.
Maybe if the plan were to distribute the files electronically and have them stored in bulk on one of these things the way you'd use a flash drive, but a fingernail sized format as the primary physical medium of music distribution? How on earth would these things be packaged and stored? We could have miniature jewel cases for them, or little binders, but what about the labels? How would you fit "The Mighty Mighty Bostones: More Noise and Other Disturbances" or "Beethoven Symphony No. 7, Movement 2, performed by the Philadelphia Orchestra under Christoph Eschenbach"? And what about track listings?
Can you imagine having an Altoids tin of tiny little chips labelled with teensy-tiny ittie-bitty text, and trying to find the album you want to pop into your portable music player, while standing in a subway car or say, while driving? Can you imagine how easy it would be to lose one of these things or swear profusely as a strong gust of wind just blows them out of your car window into a fluttering confetti of $10 albums?
I'd much rather see larger-sized storage mediums with greater capacity and do away with physical distribution of music altogether.
I'd reallly rather not, thanks :-)
When MS releases this killer technology, they will require people to use it, to produce content for it, to give its output the same kind of appeal that the Flash gurus produce. Now, if the majority of the talent is Mac-based, and can't author "Sparkle" content from a Mac, then there won't be as much pretty, attractive output to convince people to adopt.
...oh crap. I guess it would be a problem if Microsoft were to also release a stable and robust IDE for producing Sparkle content on the Mac, huh?
What the government really needs to do is to ban vehicles altogether and require everything, including hazardous waste, to be carried by hand, in sacks, depending on the availability of suitable sacks.
Then, we could install GPS trackers and remote shutdown devices in people, and if one of these stout but horribly deformed hazardous waste carrying-peoples were to get personjacked, we could shut them down immediately!
Yay future! Yay technology!
It was a surprise to me, and a pretty powerful incentive for me to go with the sexy little thing I'd never previously considered worth the price-markup. Now all I have to do is starve for a few more months...
PS: For those of you who are wondering what the rest of the audience was carrying, there were two ThinkPads, and one or two grad-student-like fellows had desktop-replacement Inspirons.
1) Dingo Jehuty (PS2 - Zone of Enders 2)
2) Decoy Octopus (PS1 - Metal Gear Solid)
3) Quattro Vagina (PS1 - Gundam: Char's Counterattack)
We've got a dog, an 8-legged spy, and something which can only be theorized to be multi-cunted. Oh the number of times I've hit "game-over" because I was too busy giggling.
Long live diversity! Say "no" to monoculture!
I've said it before, but think about it. There's been talk of placing RFID tags in paper currency. Doesn't this mean that I could say, hang out in front of a bar at night, having a smoke, scanning everyone who stumbles out to see how much they're carrying? It'd be like having your cash and valuables taped to your head, instead of tucked away in your wallet and bag.
Do you own an iPod? Top of the line? You carry that around with you everywhere. Same with your schwank new PDA/Phone. Do you advertise the fact that you're carrying a thousand dollars worth of gear when you're walking around the city at night? If everything has an RFID tag, you might as well.
PS: Of course I'm paranoid! I'm a geek!
...because the same way your garbage can could keep track of what you're tossing out, someone else could walk by your place on trash-pick-up-day and discern from all of the RFID tags in your waste that you lare likely elderly (tags present for hearing aid batteries and Metamucil), have a cold (tags present for Tylenol Flu and Cold), have a really severe cold (tags present for four boxes of Kleenex), own decent stereo equipment (tags present from packaging for monster audio patch cables and old issues of Hi-Fi magazines), a small dog (tags present for Purina Small Dog Chow), have a visiting infant (tags present for Pampers), and isn't the fact that this information would be available not only in your trash, but on your own body as you're walking around, isn't that the least bit scary to anyone else?