Best as I can tell, all but one of the scenes involving Turing are taken almost word-for-word from a Turing biography titled "Alan Turing: The Enigma" by...Andrew Hodges, I think it was. I was...somewhat amused by this, to say the least. -- "HORSE."
Could a Linux (not windows) user answer this for me please.
Just how does Microsoft control *your* desktop?
Oh come on, ask me a *hard* one next time. MS controls my desktop because my *spit* school seems to think.doc is some kind of standard document format, and I have to keep re-booting into frickin' windows95 to read messages from my profs. Oh, and the drone teaching my CS class refuses to acknowledge the existence of c++ compilers other than msvc++, there's that, too. -- "HORSE."
Okay, get this: Money is a fiction. Right now, it's a useful fiction, but if automation advances to the level where people don't need to do manual labor at all it won't be nearly as useful.
Of course, you saying that people need money to go to college sounds absolutely ridiculous to anyone living outside of the United States, y'know? -- "HORSE."
Why would they want to actually prove that someone used this spec? They're not interested in/proving/ anything, only in establishing doubt. If it was possible to prove that someone used the spec, then it would be easier for a team of reverse-engineers to prove that they didn't use the spec, since their work wouldn't contain the bug. It's called Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt, not Fear, Uncertainty, and Proof. -- "HORSE."
So why is the U.S. per capita imprisonment rate so much higher than the rest of the civilized world's, then? Are we just generally nastier people than everyone else? -- "HORSE."
Been there, done that. Sending money through the mail is a bad idea, but a check works. The trick is tracking down an address where you're certain the artist will get the check. For most bands, a fan club address will work, but MAKE SURE it's run by the band or someone who knows them. -- "HORSE."
Whatever the problem was, It's Been Fixed. For a while. I've been using the most recent litestep development builds for the past couple of months, and it's been nothing but absolutely perfect. I strongly recommend it to anyone else who's stuck behind windows. -- "HORSE."
The traditional tactic for supressing rebellion is to assign military units to areas as far away from their hometowns as possible. So presumably if there was an armed rebellion in the US, soldiers from Seattle would be machine-gunning citizens from Florida, New York national guard units would be machine-gunning Californians, and so on. Very few soldiers would be ordered to kill anyone they actually knew. -- "HORSE."
It's too late for this now, but the next time this sort of thing happens, would it be too much to ask for CmdrTaco to put up a little blurb on the front page saying "we're planning on using some of your posts in a future book, please write to foo@slashdot.org to give us permission (or deny us permission, as the case may be) if any of these posts are yours."
Presumably this would have to stay up for a couple of weeks, and obviously some people won't respond, but in this case I suspect that, with a little editing, it would be more than possible to publish the book using only posts which their respective posters had given permission to use in the book.
When the maintainers started to post their "well, we would have tracked everyone down, but it just would have been too hard to find everyone." messages, I was tempted to reply with (in allcaps) "TRY HARDER!". -- "HORSE."
This has got to be a troll. No one but hardcore fundies still try to assert that there can be no intersubjective morality without the presence of a deity - in fact, that assertion (that only God can dictate morality) has serious problems, since it assumes that if the deity were to declare (say) murder to be ethical, that it would therefore be ethical to murder.
Though I may be projecting, I suspect Stallman is a utilitarian - one who believes that those acts which have a "positive" effect on society as a whole are moral, and those which have a "negative" effect are immoral. Generally the terms "positive" and "negative" are defined in terms of the net happiness of the members of the society, and the society is defined as being an arbitrarily large grouping of persons. In particular, Stallman's essays on the relative immorality of commercial software licenses seem to be written from a utilitarian standpoint, since he claims that by denying copying they deny persons the ability to "help their neighbors" and thus increase the net happiness of the members of their community. -- "HORSE."
Whatever. What I was saying was just that analogies between Vader and Hiter are just dumb. Admittedly, analogies between Vader and any other nazi leader might be equally stupid. -- "HORSE."
Brin makes one particularly interesting point about Darth Vader's redemption in Return of the Jedi. He writes:
To put it in perspective, let's imagine that the United States and its allies managed to capture Adolf Hitler at the end of the Second World War, putting him on trial for war crimes. The prosecution spends months listing all the horrors done at his behest. Then it is the turn of Hitler's defense attorney, who rises and utters just one sentence:
"But, your honors... Adolf did save the life of his own son!"
Gasp! The prosecutors blanch in chagrin. "We didn't know that! Of course all charges should be dismissed at once!"
The allies then throw a big parade for Hitler, down the avenues of Nuremberg.
I've read Brin's essay a couple of times, once when it first came out and once again the last time this particular flamewar hit Slashdot:)
I have to say that I agree with most of Brin's essay, especially the bit about the only good part of Return of the Jedi being how the final climactic Jedi battle had nothing to do with the Rebellion. The one thing I really can't agree with in the essay is Brin's Vader-Hitler analogy (as quoted above). If there's a character in RotJ that's supposed to be a Hitler analogue, obviously it's the Emperor himself. Vader, after all, is just a trusted lieutenant.
If we absolutely must make WWII analogies, Vader betraying the Emperor at the last moment could be (very loosely) seen as parallelling Rommel's involvement in the Hitler assassination plot. Most people do (correct me if I'm wrong) see Rommel's involvement in that attempt as being something which redeems him, at least a little bit. -- "HORSE."
Re:Bad science when good science available...
on
Battlefield Earth
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· Score: 1
Along these lines, here's something that bugged me about everyone's favorite movie-length music video, the Matrix - why use the battery/energy-source explanation for keeping humans around when laying on the table is a better explanation - using humans as nodes in a distributed computing net? And maybe a half-assed gesture to obeying Asimov's laws of robotics - farming humans isn't hurting humans (hehehehe). And that's not even starting in on the silliness that the AIs have to follow the physical laws inside the Matrix at all.
*sigh*, I know. Otherwise though it's just the perfect action movie. The battery explanation seems so patently stupid that I can only think that the Wach*mumble*ski brothers originally used the humans-as-nodes explanation, but some nimrod at Warner Brothers made them change it because they thought that Your Average American Viewer would find the good explanation too confusing.
As for the Asimov thing, the Laws of Robotics are overrated anyway. Agent Smith obviously comes from the HAL 9000 branch of AI, not the R. Daneel line. See, Agent Smith is *cool*. -- "HORSE."
Re:I don't think this is a film about scientology.
on
Battlefield Earth
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· Score: 1
Ew, you started Heinlein with "The Cat Who Walks Through Walls"? That was one of the ones written after he got totally and completely stupid. Try "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress" if you ever decide to give him another go; I won't say it's not stupid, but at the very least it's stupid in an amusing way. -- "HORSE."
While the animation on both Powerpuff Girls and Dexter's Lab is crude, they both pay homage to anime - Dexter's lab has a great "Speed Racer" take-off, and Powerpuff Girls do the giant robot vs. monster thing in one episode.
Alright, dude. Look. The animation style for the Powerpuff Girls is not "crude". It's "simple", maybe, or "heavily stylized", but it is in no way "crude". Swine. "Crude" is Superfriends, alright? "Crude" is Scooby Doo. "Crude" is artless animation done on the cheap for the express purpose of filling time between commercials. The Powerpuff Girls is frickin' ART, man. Do you understand the distinction here? -- "HORSE."
All opinions are valid and subjective, however, the utility of an opinion can be measured by how accurately it reflects intersubjective reality. Right? Am I just talking through my hat here? -- "HORSE."
Slashdot Mirror
Best as I can tell, all but one of the scenes involving Turing are taken almost word-for-word from a Turing biography titled "Alan Turing: The Enigma" by...Andrew Hodges, I think it was. I was...somewhat amused by this, to say the least.
--
"HORSE."
I'm so lame, I find it almost impossible to read ReiserFS as anything but "Rei-serfs". I've been watching waaay too much Evangelion...
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"HORSE."
Plus, Prince Roy says he expanded Sealand's territorial waters to 18 miles right before the U.K. extended theirs to 12 :)
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"HORSE."
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"HORSE."
Of course, you saying that people need money to go to college sounds absolutely ridiculous to anyone living outside of the United States, y'know?
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"HORSE."
What you're overlooking is that Bleem sucks no matter WHAT you put it on.
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"HORSE."
Cripes, the DOE uses polygraphs? Haven't those things been proven fairly conclusively to be completely and totally ineffective?
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"HORSE."
Why would they want to actually prove that someone used this spec? They're not interested in /proving/ anything, only in establishing doubt. If it was possible to prove that someone used the spec, then it would be easier for a team of reverse-engineers to prove that they didn't use the spec, since their work wouldn't contain the bug. It's called Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt, not Fear, Uncertainty, and Proof.
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"HORSE."
Well, that and relativism is logically self-defeating....
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"HORSE."
That's why (IMO) the Utilitarian position is better than Lockean "natural rights". But, of course, I'm a damn fool.
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"HORSE."
So why is the U.S. per capita imprisonment rate so much higher than the rest of the civilized world's, then? Are we just generally nastier people than everyone else?
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"HORSE."
Been there, done that. Sending money through the mail is a bad idea, but a check works. The trick is tracking down an address where you're certain the artist will get the check. For most bands, a fan club address will work, but MAKE SURE it's run by the band or someone who knows them.
--
"HORSE."
Whatever the problem was, It's Been Fixed. For a while. I've been using the most recent litestep development builds for the past couple of months, and it's been nothing but absolutely perfect. I strongly recommend it to anyone else who's stuck behind windows.
--
"HORSE."
The traditional tactic for supressing rebellion is to assign military units to areas as far away from their hometowns as possible. So presumably if there was an armed rebellion in the US, soldiers from Seattle would be machine-gunning citizens from Florida, New York national guard units would be machine-gunning Californians, and so on. Very few soldiers would be ordered to kill anyone they actually knew.
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"HORSE."
Of course, game companies that don't suck *waves hi to everyone at Blizzard* do give you printed manuals.
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"HORSE."
Presumably this would have to stay up for a couple of weeks, and obviously some people won't respond, but in this case I suspect that, with a little editing, it would be more than possible to publish the book using only posts which their respective posters had given permission to use in the book.
When the maintainers started to post their "well, we would have tracked everyone down, but it just would have been too hard to find everyone." messages, I was tempted to reply with (in allcaps) "TRY HARDER!".
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"HORSE."
Interesting. This joke can be interpreted in two different ways.
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"HORSE."
Though I may be projecting, I suspect Stallman is a utilitarian - one who believes that those acts which have a "positive" effect on society as a whole are moral, and those which have a "negative" effect are immoral. Generally the terms "positive" and "negative" are defined in terms of the net happiness of the members of the society, and the society is defined as being an arbitrarily large grouping of persons. In particular, Stallman's essays on the relative immorality of commercial software licenses seem to be written from a utilitarian standpoint, since he claims that by denying copying they deny persons the ability to "help their neighbors" and thus increase the net happiness of the members of their community.
--
"HORSE."
Whatever. What I was saying was just that analogies between Vader and Hiter are just dumb. Admittedly, analogies between Vader and any other nazi leader might be equally stupid.
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"HORSE."
I have to say that I agree with most of Brin's essay, especially the bit about the only good part of Return of the Jedi being how the final climactic Jedi battle had nothing to do with the Rebellion. The one thing I really can't agree with in the essay is Brin's Vader-Hitler analogy (as quoted above). If there's a character in RotJ that's supposed to be a Hitler analogue, obviously it's the Emperor himself. Vader, after all, is just a trusted lieutenant.
If we absolutely must make WWII analogies, Vader betraying the Emperor at the last moment could be (very loosely) seen as parallelling Rommel's involvement in the Hitler assassination plot. Most people do (correct me if I'm wrong) see Rommel's involvement in that attempt as being something which redeems him, at least a little bit.
--
"HORSE."
As for the Asimov thing, the Laws of Robotics are overrated anyway. Agent Smith obviously comes from the HAL 9000 branch of AI, not the R. Daneel line. See, Agent Smith is *cool*.
--
"HORSE."
Ew, you started Heinlein with "The Cat Who Walks Through Walls"? That was one of the ones written after he got totally and completely stupid. Try "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress" if you ever decide to give him another go; I won't say it's not stupid, but at the very least it's stupid in an amusing way.
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"HORSE."
The only way this could possibly scan (or rhyme) is if you mispronounced vi to rhyme with "rye".
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"HORSE."
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"HORSE."
All opinions are valid and subjective, however, the utility of an opinion can be measured by how accurately it reflects intersubjective reality. Right? Am I just talking through my hat here?
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"HORSE."