Alicebot Creator Dr. Richard Wallace Expounds News | Posted by Roblimo on 11:30 AM -- Friday July 26 2002 from the only-on-Slashdot dept. Okay, here are Alicebot inventor Dr. Richard Wallace's answers to your questions. You're about to enter a world that contains interesting thoughts on A.I., a bit of marijuana advocacy, a courtroom drama, tales of academic politics and infighting, personal ranting, discussion of the nature of mental illness, and comments about the state of American society and the world in general. Yes, all this in one interview so long and strong we had to break it up into three parts to make it fit on our pages. This is an amazing work, well worth reading all the way to the end.
1) AI through simulation? by Jeppe Salvesen
Do you think that the ever increasing processing power will eventually enable us to fully simulate the human brain? What ramifications would this have for the A.I. discipline?
Dr. Wallace:
My longstanding opinion is that neural networks are the wrong level of abstraction for understanding intelligence, human or machine.
Neurons are the transistors of the brain. They are the low level switching components out of which higher-order functionality is built. But like the individual transistor, studying the individual neuron tells us little about these higher functions.
Suppose an alien came down to Earth who had never seen a computer before. Assuming interstellar travel is possible without a computer! He/she might be tempted to break it open, and discover that it is made of millions of tiny transistors. The alien may try to discover how the computer works by measuring the electronic signals in the transistors. But they would miss the operating system completely. The transistors tell us nothing about the software.
Similarly, neurons tell us little about the higher order software running on our brains.
Significantly, no one has ever proved that the brain is a *good* computer. It seems to run some tasks like visual recognition better than our existing machines, but it is terrible at math, prone to errors, susceptible to distraction, and it requires half its uptime for food, sleep, and maintenance.
It sometimes seems to me that the brain is actually a very shitty computer. So why would you want to build a computer out of slimy, wet, broken, slow, hungry, tired neurons? I chose computer science over medical school because I don't have the stomach for those icky, bloody body parts. I prefer my technology clean and dry, thank you. Moreover, it could be the case that an electronic, silicon-based computer is more reliable, faster, more accurate, and cheaper.
I find myself agreeing with the Churchlands that the notion of consciousness belongs to "folk psychology" and that there may be no clear brain correlates for the ego, id, emotions as they are commonly classified, and so on. But to me that does not rule out the possibility of reducing the mind to a mathematical description, which is more or less independent of the underlying brain archiecture. That baby doesn't go out with the bathwater. A.I. is possible precisely because there is nothing special about the brain as a computer. In fact the brain is a shitty computer. The brain has to sleep, needs food, thinks about sex all the time. Useless!
I always say, if I wanted to build a computer from scratch, the very last material I would choose to work with is meat. I'll take transistors over meat any day. Human intelligence may even be a poor kludge of the intelligence algorithm on an organ that is basically a glorified animal eyeball. From an evolutionary standpoint, our supposedly wonderful cognitive skills are a very recent innovation. It should not be surprising if they are only poorly implemented in us, like the lung of the first mudfish. We can breathe the air of thought and imagination, but not that well yet.
And remember, no one has proved that our intelligence is a successful adaption, over the long term. It remains to be seen if the human brain is powerful enough to solve the problems it has created.
Functionalism is basically the view that the mind is the software, and the brain is the hardware. It holds that mental states are equivalent to the states of a Turing Machine. Behaviorism was a pre-computational theory, which imagines the nervous system as a complex piece of machinery like a telephone exchange, but they didn't think much about software. Dualism goes back to Descartes. It is the view that the mind and brain are separate and distinct things, possibly affecting each other, or possibly mirroring each other.
My view is a kind of modified dualism in which I claim that the soul, spirit, or consciousness may exist, but for most people, most of the time, it is almost infentesimally small, compared with the robotic machinery responsible for most of our thought and action. Descartes never talked about the relative weights of brain and mind, but you can read in an implicit 50-50 assumption in most Dualist literature. My idea is more like 99-1, or even 99.999999% automatic machinery and.00000001% self-awareness, creativity, consciousness, spirit or what have you.
That's not to say that some people can't be more enlightened than others. But for the vast herd out there, on average, consciousness is simply not a significant factor. Not even a second- or third-order effect. Consciousness is marginal.
I say this with such confidence because of my experience building robot brains over the past seven years. Almost everything people ever say to our robot falls into one of about 45,000 categories. Considering the astronomical number of things people could say, if every sentence was an original line of poetry, 45,000 is a very, very small number.
2) Turing Test by Transient0
I noticed that your AliceBot won the 2000 Loebner Prize for most human responses. My question is: "As an Artificial Intelligence researcher, do you feel that the Loebner Prize represents a legitimate variety of testing, or did you just want the $2000?"
I was pretty sure that almost all AI researchers came to the agreement about thirty years ago that the original imitation game as proposed by Turing in 1951 was useful only as a mental exercise, not in practice. Do you feel that the types of developments that the Loebner prize supports(intentional, hard-coded spelling mistakes, etc.) are actually productive in terms of the AI research project?
Dr. Wallace:
In case you haven't noticed, the field of Artificial Intelligence (defined however you wish) has almost nothing to do with science. It is all about politics. When you look at all the people working professionally in the field of A.I., it brings to mind the old joke:
Q: How many Carnegie Mellon Ph.D.s does it take to screw in a light bulb? A: Two. One to change the bulb, and one to pull the chair out from under him.
The only rule most of these people know is: undermine the competition at all costs, by whatever legal means, or whatever they can get away with. That is how you become King of the A.I. Anthill.
Having a good theory or better implementation of anything is beside the point. Being able to "play the game" and knock out the competition, that is what it is all about. Swim with sharks or be eaten by them.
Especially in the age of increased competition for diminishing jobs and funding, scientific truth takes a back seat to save-your-ass.
Unfortunately it seems that the A.I. problem is inseperable from politics.
When I say that academia is corrupt in America, I don't mean that professors are accepting bribes and giving kickbacks for government contracts. There may be a financial motive in some cases, such as the use of overhead funds for a "course buyout" to reduce a professor's workload, but I am not talking about the kind of corruption associated with Wall Street and Washington exactly. I am talking about the replacement of science with politics as the main item on the academic agenda.
It must not have always been so. At one time, I believe academics were appointed and promoted primarily on the basis of merit and accomplishment. Within the last 20 years or so in the United States this has gradually changed into a system in which political correctness, slickness, and good salesmanship are more highly valued than good science. I don't pretend to understand the reasons for this, but I can point to many examples within our own community.
I have written that it is like a dysfunctional family. Those in positions of leadership and authority have mental health, drug and/or alcohol problems that make them incapable of carrying out their administrative responsibilities. In response, people who are skilled at "enabling" or "nursing" the dysfunctional leaders get promoted and advanced. Those who are prone to logical thinking and speaking the truth are discarded, because they make the authorities face their unconscious anxieties.
I often say, people don't go into computer science because they enjoy working with the public. But as the field has matured, I think it has attracted people who are more comfortable wearing business suits and attending strategy meetings than tinkering on a lab bench or writing a research paper. As computer science departments matured, the people already in them began to want everything to remain the same until they retired. They didn't want to hire young professors with a lot of new ideas about the administration. They hired young professors who wanted everything to stay exactly like it was, no matter what.
You may think that the politicization of a field like computer science is no big deal. We can have slick politicians instead of scientists running university CS departments, and not cause a lot of problems. But I think it is a really big problem in other fields, especially in medical science, especially in drugs and mental health.
Take LSD for example. Discovered by Albert Hoffmann in 1945, LSD is the most powerful drug ever developed. If you have ever gotten a prescription for any drug, you may have noticed that the dosage is usally given in "milligrams". But the dosage of LSD is "micrograms". It has the lowest ED50 of any known drug.
In the early 1960's there was some very promising research at Harvard applying LSD to depressed patients like me. The work was never completed or published for, guess what, political reasons. Subsequently, LSD was classified as a "Schedule I" drug with no useful medical value. This was not a decision based on sound science but on politics and fear. Even today there is zero research on this topic. Did you ever wonder why there is no Department of Psychedelic Studies on any university campus? It is a gaping hole in the academic curriculum, filled only by the informal undergraduate ratings of colleges as "party schools".
Even the very name of the federal agency that provides funding for drug research, the National Institute on Drug Abuse, prejudices the applications and the results. The native born American hippie agronomy student who got his Ph.D. in the 1970's is growing pot underground in California today. The immigrant doctor who "proved" that marijuana causes cancer got the NIDA grant and has tenure at UCLA. What's wrong with this picture?
Until 2 years ago, there was no federally funded research on the medical benefits of marijuana since the 1970's. Even now the only funded research is for terminal illnesses, and it seems like it will take a long time before they consider mental illnesses like mine. I conducted a survey of patients in San Francisco and discovered that "pain" was the #1 symptom for medical marijuana but "depression" was #2, and terminal illnesses like AIDS and cancer were lower on the list. So I am not alone in the perception that there is a patient need for research on this drug.
The problem here, my friends, is that NIDA is part of a specturm of trouble that includes once respected agencies such as NASA, NSF and DARPA. It is an octopus of political corruption that reaches into MIT and CMU and Berkeley and darkens everything it touches. It calls into question the quality and even the veracity of the scientific results and publications. We all witnessed the beginning of this even when we were all friends together at the ICRA conferences in the acrimonious interchanges between academia and industry. I myself saw enough of the system from the inside at NYU and Lehigh to know that science plays almost no role in the hiring, promoting or review process. It's all politics.
Not to place blame, but I think graduate advisors should be more straightforward with students about this point. It would be better to put more time into training them how to "shmooze" and "work the system" than how to solve mathematical problems, if they want their students to be successful. Either that, or they should work on changing the system back to merit based promotion.
3) My question (with answer) by outlier
Historically, AI has done poorly managing public expectations. People expected thinking, understanding computers, while researchers had trouble getting computers to successfully disambiguate simple sentences. This is not good PR. Do you think the field has learned from this? If so, what should the public expect, and how do we excite them about it?
Just for fun, I asked slashwallace a shortened version of the question, do you think your response would differ?
Human: Historically AI has done poorly managing the public's expectations, do you think this will continue? SlashWallace: Where did he get it?
Dr. Wallace:
Hugh Loebner is an independently wealthy, eccentric businessman, activist and philanthropist. In 1990 Dr. Loebner, who holds a Ph.D. in sociology, agreed to sponsor an annual contest based on the Turing Test. The contest awards medals and cash prizes for the "most human" computer. Since its inception, the Loebner contest has been a magnet for controversy.
One of the central disputes arose over Hugh Loebner's decision to award the Gold Medal and $100,000 top cash prize only when a robot is capable of passing an "audio-visual" Turing Test. The rules for this Grand Prize contest have not even been written yet. So it remains unlikely that anyone will be awarded the gold Loebner medal in the near future. The Silver and Bronze medal competitions are based on the STT. In 2001, eight programs played alongside two human confederates. A group of 10 judges rotated through each of ten terminals and chatted about 15 minutes with each. The judges then ranked the terminals on a scale of "least human" to "most human." Winning the Silver Medal and its $25,000 prize requires that the judges rank the program higher than half the human confederates. In fact one judge ranked A.L.I.C.E. higher than one of the human confederates in 2001. Had all the judges done so, she might have been eligible for the Silver Medal as well, because there were only two confederates.
To really understand how we accomplished this, I have to teach you some AIML.
CATEGORIES
The basic unit of knowledge in AIML is called a category. Each category consists of an input question, an output answer, and an optional context.
The question, or stimulus, is called the pattern. The answer, or response, is called the template. The two types of optional context are called "that" and "topic."
The AIML pattern language is simple, consisting only of words, spaces, and the wildcard symbols _ and *.
The words may consist of letters and numerals, but no other characters. The pattern language is case invariant.
Words are separated by a single space, and the wildcard characters function like words.
The first versions of AIML allowed only one wild card character per pattern.
The AIML 1.01 standard permits multiple wildcards in each pattern, but the language is designed to be as simple as possible for the task at hand, simpler even than regular expressions.
The template is the AIML response or reply. In its simplest form, the template consists of only plain, unmarked text.
More generally, AIML tags transform the reply into a mini computer program which can save data, activate other programs, give conditional responses, and recursively call the pattern matcher to insert the responses from other categories.
Most AIML tags in fact belong to this template side sublanguage.
AIML currently supports two ways to interface other languages and systems. The tag executes any program accessible as an operating system shell command, and inserts the results in the reply. Similarly, the tag allows arbitrary scripting inside the templates.
The optional context portion of the category consists of two variants, called and . The tag appears inside the category, and its pattern must match the robot's last utterance.
Remembering one last utterance is important if the robot asks a question. The tag appears outside the category, and collects a group of categories together.
The topic may be set inside any template. AIML is not exactly the same as a simple database of questions and answers. The pattern matching "query" language is much simpler than something like SQL. But a category template may contain the recursive tag, so that the output depends not only on one matched category, but also any others recursively reached through .
RECURSION
AIML implements recursion with the operator. No agreement exists about the meaning of the acronym.
The "A.I." stands for artificial intelligence, but "S.R." may mean "stimulus-response," "syntactic rewrite," "symbolic reduction," "simple recursion," or "synonym resolution." The disagreement over the acronym reflects the variety of applications for in AIML. Each of these is described in more detail in a subsection below:
(1). Symbolic Reduction-Reduce complex grammatic forms to simpler ones. (2). Divide and Conquer-Split an input into two or more subparts, and combine the responses to each. (3). Synonyms-Map different ways of saying the same thing to the same reply. (4). Spelling or grammar corrections. (5). Detecting keywords anywhere in the input. (6). Conditionals-Certain forms of branching may be implemented with. (7). Any combination of (1)-(6).
The danger of is that it permits the botmaster to create infinite loops. Though posing some risk to novice programmers, we surmised that including was much simpler than any of the iterative block structured control tags which might have replaced it.
(1). Symbolic Reduction Symbolic reduction refers to the process of simplifying complex grammatical forms into simpler ones. Usually, the atomic patterns in categories storing robot knowledge are stated in the simplest possible terms, for example we tend to prefer patterns like "WHO IS SOCRATES" to ones like "DO YOU KNOW WHO SOCRATES IS" when storing biographical information about Socrates. Many of the more complex forms reduce to simpler forms using AIML categories designed for symbolic reduction:
DO YOU KNOW WHO * IS WHO IS
Whatever input matched this pattern, the portion bound to the wildcard * may be inserted into the reply with the markup . This category reduces any input of the form "Do you know who X is?" to "Who is X?"
(2). Divide and Conquer Many individual sentences may be reduced to two or more subsentences, and the reply formed by combining the replies to each. A sentence beginning with the word "Yes" for example, if it has more than one word, may be treated as the subsentence "Yes." plus whatever follows it.
YES * YES
The markup is simply an abbreviation for .
(3). Synonyms The AIML 1.01 standard does not permit more than one pattern per category. Synonyms are perhaps the most common application of . Many ways to say the same thing reduce to one category, which contains the reply:
HELLO Hi there!
HI HELLO
HI THERE HELLO
HOWDY HELLO
HOLA HELLO
(4). Spelling and Grammar correction The single most common client spelling mistake is the use of "your" when "you're" or "you are" is intended. Not every occurrence of "your" however should be turned into "you're." A small amount of grammatical context is usually necessary to catch this error:
YOUR A * I think you mean "you're" or "you are" not "your." YOU ARE A
Here the bot both corrects the client input and acts as a language tutor.
(5). Keywords Frequently we would like to write an AIML template which is activated by the appearance of a keyword anywhere in the input sentence. The general format of four AIML categories is illustrated by this example borrowed from ELIZA:
MOTHER Tell me more about your family.
_ MOTHER MOTHER
MOTHER _ MOTHER
_ MOTHER * MOTHER
The first category both detects the keyword when it appears by itself, and provides the generic response. The second category detects the keyword as the suffix of a sentence. The third detects it as the prefix of an input sentence, and finally the last category detects the keyword as an infix. Each of the last three categories uses to link to the first, so that all four cases produce the same reply, but it needs to be written and stored only once.
(6). Conditionals It is possible to write conditional branches in AIML, using only the tag. Consider three categories: WHO IS HE WHOISHE
WHOISHE * He is.
WHOISHE UNKNOWN I don't know who he is.
Provided that the predicate "he" is initialized to "Unknown," the categories execute a conditional branch depending on whether "he" has been set. As a convenience to the botmaster, AIML also provides the equivalent function through the tag.
CONTEXT
The keyword "that" in AIML refers to the robot's previous utterance. Specifically, if the robot responds with a multiple sentence paragraph, the value of that is set to the last sentence in the sequence. The choice of the keyword "that" is motivated by its use in ordinary language:
R: Today is yesterday. C: That makes no sense. R: The answer is 3.1412926 approximately. C: That is cool.
In AIML the syntax... encloses a pattern that matches the robot's previous utterance. A common application of is found in yes-no questions:
YES DO YOU LIKE MOVIES What is your favorite movie?
This category is activated when the client says YES. The robot must find out what is he saying "yes" to. If the robot asked, "Do you like movies?," this category matches, and the response, "What is your favorite movie?," continues the conversation along the same lines. One interesting application of are categories that enable the robot to respond to knock-knock jokes.
The categories:
KNOCK KNOCK Who is there?
* WHO IS THERE
who?
* * WHO Ha ha very funny,.
produce the following dialogue: C: Knock knock. R: Who's there? C: Banana. R: Banana who? C: Knock knock. R: Who's there? C: Banana. R: Banana who? C: Knock knock. R: Who's there? C: Orange. R: Orange who? C: Orange you glad I didn't say banana. R: Ha ha very funny, Nancy.
Internally the AIML interpreter stores the input pattern, that pattern and topic pattern along a single path, like: INPUT THAT TOPIC When the values of or are not specified, the program implicitly sets the values of the corresponding THAT or TOPIC pattern to the wildcard *.
The first part of the path to match is the input. If more than one category have the same input pattern, the program may distinguish between them depending on the value of . If two or more categories have the same and , the final step is to choose the reply based on the . This structure suggests a design rule: never use unless you have written two categories with the same , and never use unless you write two categories with the same and . Still, one of the most useful applications for is to create subject-dependent "pickup lines," like:
*
What's your favorite car?
What kind of car do you drive?
Do you get a lot of parking tickets?
My favorite car is one with a driver. Considering the vast size of the set of things people could say that are grammatically correct or semantically meaningful, the number of things people actually do say is surprisingly small. Steven Pinker,in his book How the Mind Works wrote, "Say you have ten choices for the first word to begin a sentence, ten choices for the second word (yielding 100 two-word beginnings), ten choices for the third word (yielding a thousand three-word beginnings), and so on. (Ten is in fact the approximate geometric mean of the number of word choices available at each point in assembling a grammatical and sensible sentence). A little arithmetic shows that the number of sentences of 20 words or less (not an unusual length) is about 1020."
Fortunately for chat robot programmers, Pinker's calculations are way off. Our experiments with A.L.I.C.E. indicate that the number of choices for the "first word" is more than ten, but it is only about two thousand. Specifically, about 2000 words covers 95% of all the first words input to A.L.I.C.E.. The number of choices for the second word is only about two. To be sure, there are some first words ("I" and "You" for example) that have many possible second words, but the overall average is just under two words. The average branching factor decreases with each successive word.
We have plotted some beautiful images of the A.L.I.C.E. brain contents represented by this graph (http://alice.sunlitsurf.com/documentation/gallery/).
More than just elegant pictures of the A.L.I.C.E. brain, these spiral images (see more) outline a territory of language that has been effectively "conquered" by A.L.I.C.E. and AIML. No other theory of natural language processing can better explain or reproduce the results within our territory. You don't need a complex theory of learning, neural nets, or cognitive models to explain how to chat within the limits of A.L.I.C.E.'s 25,000 categories. Our stimulus-response model is as good a theory as any other for these cases, and certainly the simplest. If there is any room left for "higher" natural language theories, it lies outside the map of the A.L.I.C.E. brain. Academics are fond of concocting riddles and linguistic paradoxes that supposedly show how difficult the natural language problem is. "John saw the mountains flying over Zurich" or "Fruit flies like a banana" reveal the ambiguity of language and the limits of an A.L.I.C.E.-style approach (though not these particular examples, of course, A.L.I.C.E. already knows about them).
In the years to come we will only advance the frontier further. The basic outline of the spiral graph may look much the same, for we have found all of the "big trees" from "A *" to "YOUR *". These trees may become bigger, but unless language itself changes we won't find any more big trees (except of course in foreign languages). The work of those seeking to explain natural language in terms of something more complex than stimulus response will take place beyond our frontier, increasingly in the hinterlands occupied by only the rarest forms of language. Our territory of language already contains the highest population of sentences that people use. Expanding the borders even more we will continue to absorb the stragglers outside, until the very last human critic cannot think of one sentence to "fool" A.L.I.C.E..
THE OFFICIAL TACO-SNOTTING FAQ [slashdot.org] By J. Wipo Troll, Esq. [slashdot.org], $Revision: 1.17 $ [This article attempts to document a vile, ungodly practice that runs rampant through the homosexual geek and hacker community, a practice known as Taco-snotting, or simply snotting. Taco-snotting is something that few geeks dare talk about in free or open conversation, but it is nonetheless a widely-practiced and dangerous form of homosexuality. If you or anyone you know has ever engaged in Taco-snotting, please get professional help [adequacy.org] before it is too late. ed.]
Why do I keep receiving emails from an individual calling himself CmdrTaco? You have been receiving unsolicited mailings from a certain Robert CmdrTaco Malda [cmdrtaco.net], owner of the popular technology website slashdot.org [slashdot.org]. Actually, its not a very popular site in the common sense of the word; the site is rife with pimply, antisocial geeks and hackers, zit-faced nerds, communists, dirty GNU hippies [yahoo.com], and other societal rejects and outcasts. Its also home to one of the worlds largest suspected pedophile rings, the infamous Slashdot crew. Whenever Mr. Malda gets bored (and who wouldnt, running a site like Slashdot all day), he roams through the user database, penis in hand, looking for people who might enjoy engaging in homosexual activities with him. How he determines this is anyones guess; but if you have a homosexual-sounding nickname, or a nick with a letter of the English alphabet in it, youre a potential candidate. This time, he found you. Lucky you.
Mr. Malda seems to be speaking in some sort of code. Do you know what it means? CmdrTacos code language is relatively easy to decipher. This pervert prefers to speak in thinly-veiled sexual innuendo (yes, thats right: he wants you) to evade the watchful eye of Slashdots parent corporation, VA Software [yahoo.com]. Mr. Malda's Commander is, of course, his penis: a small, withered little thing that lives in his pants and only comes out in the presence of other male geeks or at the beck and call of Maldas own lubed-up right hand. His Taco bells [sonymusic.com] are the shriveled testicles that droop beneath his Commander, and his Taco sauce is his thin, runny semen. It should be more than obvious to you now what he means if he asked you to ring his Taco bells or taste his gourmet Taco sauce. I would also guess CmdrTaco asked you to engage in a practice known as Taco-snotting and, if he was in a particularly depraved mood at the time, a circle-snot.
Good Lord. And, yes, he did. What is Taco-snotting? Taco-snotting is the term used by Robert Malda to refer to the depraved act of fellating another man (homo- or heterosexual; CmdrTaco is rumoured to prefer raping unwilling victims), then blowing the semen out his nose and back onto the face and body of his victim. Naturally, a long, bubbly stream of milky-white semen is left on CmdrTacos face [go.com], dribbling out of his nose and down his cheek: hence the term, Taco-snotting. And if thats not bad enough A circle-snot is a Taco-snotting circle-jerk, another practice common among the Slashdot crew [bastardgenres.com]. CmdrTaco, CowboiKneel [aol.com], and Homos get together and snot each other with their gooey, sticky cum spooging their jizz-snot all over each others faces and pasty, white bodies, until theyre covered head to toe with their own and each others man juice. This vile, ungodly ritual can go on for hours. For the homosexual penetration that follows this lengthy foreplay, Roblowme is usually there to provide plenty of anal lubricant; he owns a limousine service and has ample supplies of motor oil and axle grease ready to go. To complete this perverted orgy, fellow faggots Michael, Timothy, and Jamie will usually join in, dressed in tight leather mock-S.S. uniforms, jack boots, and leather gloves. The homosexual shenanigans that follow are nearly beyond description. The whole group begins to snot each others spunk and whip each others pudgy asses with riding crops and chains until their pale, white geek bodies are exhausted and soaked in stinking sweat from the hours of passionate, homosexual revelry.
Ewwwwww. So, can I stop receiving these emails? Hopefully, but I wouldnt count on it. To begin with, you most likely forgot to uncheck the Willing to Snot checkbox in your account preferences. CmdrTaco has probably already got the hots for your wad (do you have a homosexual-sounding nick?), and hes probably already been lurking outside your bathroom window for weeks with a camera, some tissues and lube, just waiting to pounce and declare you his new bitch. Theres no escaping a geek in heat (trust me), so its probably too late for you, but you can possibly rectify this situation. To remove yourself from CmdrTacos sights, log into your Slashdot account, go to your user page, click on Messages, and uncheck the box next to Willing to Snot. Maybe hell ignore you. Probably not.
I cant stop receiving these emails from CmdrTaco!? If you indulge him in a Taco-snot or two, hemight leave you alone. You might also want to look into mail filtering, restraining orders, or purchasing a heavy, blunt object capable of warding off rampaging homosexual geeks in heat. Trust me, when they charge oh, the humanity. If he gets you, and you let him Taco-snot all over you, you will most likely end up tied up in his basement to be used as his sex slave for the rest of your life (or until he accidentally drowns you in spunk in a circle-snot).
Have you ever been Taco-snotted? Unfortunately, yes. I first met Mr. Malda at an Open Source Convention [amazon.com]. He invited me back to his room for a game of Quake and some gourmet Tacos, but when I got there, the perverted geek jumped me and handcuffed me to his bed, stripping me. After taking his Commander out of his pants, Mr. Taco made me suck the withered thing six times, virtually nonstop. He then performed his vile Taco-snotting ritual on me three times over the next two hours, bringing me to orgasm after orgasm after sweaty, mind-numbing orgasm then he snotted my own thick, gooey jizz back onto my face out of his nostrils! He snotted me two more times, first into my mouth, then again on my exposed belly. CmdrTaco invited several of his Open Source (or rather, Open Sauce man sauce) buddies over to continue their ungodly snotfest. European hacker and known uberfaggot Linux Torvalds raped my ass [yahoo.com] with his monolithic kernel [yahoo.com]; his partner-in-crime Anal Cox used their network stack in a multitude of unspeakable ways on and in every orifice of my defenseless, tender, young body. Michael Sims was there in his leather Nazi uniform, caning my previously-virginal ass with a bamboo pole and ranting about all those Censorware [spectacle.org] freaks out to get him.
That is so disgusting! How did you finally escape? After about 16 hours of countless unholy, homosexual atrocities perpetrated against my restrained body, they all finally went to sleep on top of me, sweat-soaked and exhausted. I was left there, completely covered in bubbly, translucent jizz-snot, chained to the bed, with half a dozen fat, pasty-white fags lying around and on top of me. Fortunately the spooge coating my flesh worked wonderfully as a lubricant I was able to squirm my way out of the handcuffs and slip out the back door (of the apartment, not their back doors). Im just glad I survived the awful ordeal. These sexually-repressed hackers had alot of built-up spunk in their wads I couldve easily been drowned!
Thats horrible. Does Taco-snotting have anything to do with CmdrTacos special taco? No, thats a different disgusting perversion CmdrTaco indulges himself in. Mr. Malda is usually not satisfied with merely snotting your own jizz back onto your face, he most often enjoys involving his own bodily fluids in his twisted games. WeatherTroll [slashdot.org] has spent some time trying to educate the Slashdot readership [slashdot.org] about this vile practice (emphasis added): You may be wondering what CmdrTacos special taco is. You will be wishing that you hadnt been wondering after you finish reading this post. To make his special taco, CmdrTaco takes a taco shell and shits on it. He then adds lettuce, takes out his tiny withered dick (otherwise known as his Commander), puts his special taco sauce on it which means he jacks off on the taco, and adds a compound to make the person who eats the taco unconscious. Of course, the compound does not make the person unconscious until the taco is fully eaten. Thus CmdrTaco force-feeds the taco to the unsuspecting victim. After all, who would knowingly eat shit and CmdrTacos jizz? After the victim is unconscious, he is held against his will and used for CmdrTacos nefarious homosexual purposes. This includes shoving taco shells up the victims ass, Taco-snotting, and getting Jon Katz involved. Trust me, you do not want Jon Katz anywhere near your unconscious body. Also, rumor has it CmdrTaco is looking for a new goatse.cx guy [goatse.cx]. Dont let it be you! Different ungodly perversion, yet no less revolting. It should be clear to you now that Robert CmdrTaco Malda is a very, very sick individual, as are most of the Slashdot editors.
Does Jon Katz get involved in any of this? I thought he was a pedophile, not a homosexual. Actually, Jon Katz is a homosexual pedophile. Hes also a coprophiliac, and, many suspect, a zoophile. Mr. Katz is somewhat of a loner and doesnt involve himself in the circle-snots, but that doest mean hes any less of a freak than the rest of the Slashdot crew. Katz often engages in a game called juicy-douching [aol.com] with a harem of little-boy slaves that he has collected over the years: yet another vile practice which involves administering an enema to himself of the little boys urine (forced out of them with a pair of pincers), spooging the vile muck from his ass back into the enema bag, then dribbling and slathering the goo all over himself and the boys chained, naked bodies. If hes in the mood, he will sometimes skip refilling the enema bag from his distended anus and just squirt it from his ass [microsoft.com] onto the crying, terrified boys. Unwilling boys are further tortured with the pincers until they comply and allow Mr. Katz to juicy-douche them at will. A boy will usually last about two years before Mr. Katz either accidentally drowns them in diarrhea or kills them once they get too old, usually around 13 or 14. Not content with being a pedophilic coprophile, Mr. Katz is also quite the zoophile. As if the sexual escapades with the helpless little boys arent enough, Jon usually enjoys his juicy-douches best when his penis is firmly planted in a female goats anus [yahoo.com]. He is also rumoured to get off on watching his little boys eat the goats small, bean-like turds, and he often kills his older boys by letting his goats trample them.
Are you getting hard writing this? Why, yes.:) Join me in a WIPO-snot?
No, thanks. Im already CmdrTacos boi toi. ________________________________________
* The URL of this document is * Previous revisions are publicly available at
Yet another crippling bombshell hit the beleaguered Taco-snotting community when recently IDC confirmed that Taco-snotting accounts for less than a fraction of 1 percent of all homosexual acts. Coming on the heels of the latest Netcraft survey which plainly states that Taco-snotting has lost more fag practitioners, this news serves to reinforce what weve known all along. Taco-snotting faggots are collapsing in complete disarray, as further exemplified by failing dead last in the recent Faggot World comprehensive snotting test.
You dont need to be a Katz to predict Taco-snottings future. The handwriting is on the wall: Taco-snotting faces a bleak future. In fact there wont be any future at all for Taco-snotting because Taco-snotting is dying. Things are looking very bad for Taco-snotting. As many of us are already aware, Taco-snotting continues to lose faggotshare. White ink flows like a river of bubbly, thick jizz. The circle-snot is the most endangered of them all, having lost 93% of its core snotters.
Lets keep to the facts and look at the numbers.
Circle-snotting leader Jeff Homos Masterbates states that there are 7000 snotters of the circle-snot. How many users of anal snot are there? Lets see. The number of circle-snotting versus anal snot posts on Usenet is roughly in ratio of 5 to 1. Therefore there are about 7000/5 = 1400 anal snot users. SnotOS posts on Usenet are about half of the volume of anal snot posts. Therefore there are about 700 users of SnotOS. A recent article put the circle-snot at about 80 percent of the Taco-snotting market. Therefore there are (7000+1400+700)*4 = 36400 circle-snot users. This is consistent with the number of circle-snot Usenet posts.
Due to the troubles of CowboiKneels walnuts, abysmal sales and so on, the circle-snot went out of business and was taken over by SNOTi who sell another troubled Taco-snot. Now SNOTi is also dead, its corpse turned over to yet another gay whorehouse.
All major surveys show that Taco-snotting has steadily declined in faggotshare. Taco-snotting is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If Taco-snotting is to survive at all it will be among heterosexual hobbyist dabblers. Taco-snotting continues to decay. Nothing short of a jizz-soaked miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, Taco-snotting is dead.
The Stallion A full grown stallion's cock, when fully erect, will measure some two to three feet long. It can be three to six inches thick at the base, to about two inches thick at the head. Horses are somewhat different from other animals in the way their cock head works. When a horse is fully erect and excited and ready to mount, his cock head is somewhat pointed and not as thick as might be normally observed. This is to facilitate an easier entry into the mare. After the horse has entered and reaches a climax the head swells (though it is more spongy then hard) into a fist sized mass as he ejaculates. It is thought that this serves as a plug to force the semen deep into the mare rather then allowing it to leak out. A full grown stallion can ejaculate about one cup ( 8 ounces ) of semen. It will take quite a few spurts to accomplish this. Each time his tail will raise and lower in a brief flick. The first few jets are of a thin to average consistency of cum. The final few jets are of a thick gelatinous substance... it is thought that this serves to "seal" the mares pussy so that the semen has time to do it's thing before leaking out. Horse semen is extremely viscous, if you touch your finger to a pool of it you can draw a thin string of it five to six feet long! Horse cum has a nice flat taste to it...not at all bitter like man's cum. You can easily drink cups of it with no discomfort. The Mare - how to do it. Mares can be quite satisfactory for the average well endowed male. If you are somewhat less developed you might find better pleasure with a pony or Miniature Horse. These are also better as they are lower to the ground. A pony you can fuck standing up. A miniature horse on your knees or squatting depending on the size. A mare will require something to stand on or "platform shoes"...(IE mini stilts to raise you a foot off the ground) so that you can reach her pussy. Fucking any horse will depend on the horse. Some will be ready right away...some will take coaxing. Pet the animal, talk to it softly, spend time with it gaining it's trust. If something you are doing upsets it then don't force it. Talk to it and calm it. If you work slowly you can make an animal accept anything. It is just a question of helping it overcome it's fears. All animals fear man if raised in the wild. How any animal reacts will depend on it's own experiences. If you have raised the animal yourself in a loving environment, then you should have no problem associating with it, if it is a strange animal that you have met in the wild then you will have to go through an extended "courtship" to learn how to respond to the beast. MARES - TRAINING YOUR OWN When the filly reaches weaning age, separate her from her dam. If you have limited time to spend then she should be put to pasture. If you have plenty of time then you should keep her in a stall. Spend time with her during the day petting and grooming her and allow her some time to run free. Limit her access to other horses though and see that she spends at least 8-12 hours a day in the stall. (Start with more free time and as she approaches her first birthday confine her more...she is now at the right age and her confinement will have made her so bored that she is amenable to any new experience so long as it is not unpleasant)Young fillys have no objection to someone playing with their pussy's. I have walked up on a pen full of strange fillys at night and they came right up to me and I petted them and felt up their pussys and they just lifted their tales and seemed to enjoy it. These fillys didn't even know me but they were young, inexperienced and bored...also since they were penned they were used to the presence of people and did not fear me. Most horses in a large pasture will run when they scent a strange human in their pasture at night. If you sit on the ground and wait patiently, they will get downwind of you and snort and fret, but eventually they will get curious and come closer...you must wait until they have come close enough to smell and touch you before saying anything or moving. Even then speak softly and move VERY slowly so as not to spook them. If you can feed the horses and let them smell you during the day on several occasions then they will remember you and come to you more readily when you appear in the middle of the night. Also if you are seducing strange horses you should bring them food. This is a good way to start a relationship. Wild mares or those that have been artificially inseminated are usually reluctant to have sex. The wild ones are used to violent horsecock and the others have had peoples arms in their cunts so they can be apprehensive about sexual events. Start rubbing,scratching, etc in different areas and observe the mare to see what she likes...almost all horses enjoy being scratched under the chin and across the withers. Play with the horse until it is comfortable with you and as you stroke it slowly move toward it's hind end. Scratch her rump and around her tale and the move down her hind legs. If she reacts to this well she might raise her tail somewhat...gently rub her pussy and see how she reacts...if she doesn't get violent then spit on your fingers and rub a couple of them through her snatch...if she doesn't try to kick you then she is probably ready to fuck. Note on horses and getting kicked.... Standing directly in front of a horse is hazardous as it can raise on it's hind legs and come down with a front hoof on your head. Standing 3-6 feet behind a horse is hazardous as it has range to wind up and kick you a good one with the hind legs. Standing beside a horse is fairly safe. It can only stomp on your toes which can be avoided...standing behind a horse is safe if you are no farther then a foot from it's rump..you are so close that the horse can't develop a full swing and cannot kick you hard. If the horse can move forward you might fall into range so try to tie up or use a stall or something so the animal cannot pull away into striking range. If you make a good relationship however the above is unnecessary though. I have had mare that welcomed me...pushed back every time I shoved, and contracted her cunt to milk my cock dry. Horses are some of the best pussy I have ever tried! And I have tried plenty of PEOPLE & ANIMALS! Also horses are easily trainable! As long as you make sure they enjoy what is happening and don't force them or get angry with them if they misunderstand what you want of them, they will love you always. Above all try to understand what they like and do it to them....by doing whatever, to make them happy, they will respond by granting you greater freedoms. Once you have successfully fucked a filly a few times she will be used to it and look forward to your visits so long as you give her the attention she desires. You must experiment and treat her as a lover and see what turns her on. Treat her as she wants and she will give you all. The Stallion A stallion is one of the most proudest, powerful, masculine, things there is. All stallions are very oral and like to nibble and bite on anything available. This can be annoying and painful and they should be trained against it at a early age or else you should wear a padded suit, so that they can bite you painlessly. This might be considered as a horse that allows itself to be bitten without reacting is signaling that it is sexually receptive. Stallions that have successfully coupled in the wild are somewhat resistant from seduction by humans. If they are isolated, tempted and trained, then they will become more acquiescent but the best ones are those that have been raised in a human environment since weaning, since they have not had sex with other horses they are more amenable to having sex with humans when their hormones kick in and they are looking for some release. Bringing a wild horse to orgasm can be more difficult. They are used to a mares pussy which is several degrees hotter then a humans body heat. A person could fuck or suck them and not bring them to the point of orgasm unless they had been isolated and deprived and unable to help but cut loose with a load. Stallions can be readily trained though. Most stud farms use artificial insemination, the stallions are aroused by the scent of mares in heat and then an artificial vagina filled with warm water is slipped over their cock and they reach orgasm. The stallions soon learn the routine and just be leading them into the proper barn they know what is coming and obtain an erection. This can work for you too. By coming repeatedly to a horse and arousing him he will become trained to see you as a sexual object. Soon just your presence will give him a throbbing hard-on. Arousing the Stallion Stallions are aroused by the smell of horse pussy above all else. If you have access to a mare, then gentle her till she will let you finger her...then coat your fingers with her juice. Now rub your fingers across the stallions nose! He will react even if she is not in heat! He knows the smell! I have done this to geldings! Horses that have been castrated and they still got a hardon!!! Also pet & rub the horse and rub his cock...don't pull on it hard.. be gentle...big as it is it is still tender! If you rub his belly and sheath slowly and gently and let him smell some horse pussy juice then he will erect. If you can find a horse in heat then grab some urine and refrigerate it. Take some out and thaw it when you want it. Rubbing some hot mare piss on a stallions nose will make him horny as hell! He will be all over you! Once a stallion smells that he doesn't care what he fucks! He just wants a hot hole. Make sure there are no other horses around...otherwise he will jump them instead of you! Some horses have been trained too react to certain cues, others react to their own natural cues...I remember a $1,000,000.00 Arabian stallion I trained.. He stuck his tongue out about 1/2 inch...when someone would rub this small crescent he would instantly get a raging hardon...more proof that stallions are very oral. This stallion had never had sex with a mare...he had only climaxed through the intervention of humans and was quite happy with having sex in a artificial vagina with the help of humans...training does wonders. NOONE SHOULD ATTEMPT VAGINAL OR ANAL INTERCOURSE WITH A STALLION unless they have are experienced in fist fucking or have taken a large dog in to the max ( IE knot and all). A horse has an enormus cock and could do serious damage to someone who is not prepared. A horse cock can easily grow as big as the knot in a large dogs cock so if you can't take that in then you aren't ready. PS. A large dog can stretch you where a horse can fit if you make the switch before the hole shrivels. Country boys - you know where the animals are and how to get them...you don't need to read this. City Boys - Drive out to the suburbs and find some isolated horses.. try to encounter them in the day and get them used to you then return at night to have some fun. IF there are stables around then spend some time there. Sign up for riding lessons or whatever and then kind of fade out and help groom the horses and clean the stalls. Chances or whoever runs the scene will be glad for the help and won't question your presence there. You can help run the show by day and return for sex at night. Just be careful, there is less privacy in the city as compared to the country. You sure don't want to be caught! New animals on the block!! We now have miniature donkeys and horses as well as the larger ponies to play with! These animals reach a maximum of about 200 pounds for the purebreeds and somewhat larger for the crossbreeds. You can buy or breed an animal just for your size specifications! Male and female animals made to order. Miniatures are currently selling (dec. 1991) for $300 to $3000 depending on pedigree. Anyone can find a horse their size. Support and promote these animals. They are salvation to us all. The mares are tight and the stallions are all sizes...one can be found to fit any hole. ANIMAL TRAINER (C) 1991 EDITORS NOTE: I have known animal trainer for many years and he is very experienced with animals. Take his word as gospel....he knows what he speaks of and is a true beastie wonder! The 5 years he spent on the stud farm gave him extensive equine experience!
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Heroes in a half shell, Turtle power!
They're the world's most fearsome fighting team! They're heros in a half shell and they're green! When the evil Shedder attacks, These Turtle boys dont cut 'em no slack!
Splinter taught them to be ninja teens Leonardo leads, Donnatello does machines,(thats a fact jack!) Raphael is cool but rude,(gimme a break!) Michaelangelo is a party dude!(p-p-a-a-r-r-t-t-y-y!!!)
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Heroes in a half shell, Turtle power!
Are you saying that you want God to eat your assbaby, that you want God to eat your ass, and you refer to the deity as "baby", or was it "God, eat my ass, baby"????
I know that AC's lack basic language skills because of their moon-faced corky-esque Down-syndrome-like cerebral deformities, but in this particular case, commas are mandatory.
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The Chronoliths Space | Posted by timothy on 10:30 AM -- Friday July 12 2002 from the take-a-licking-keep-on-ticking dept. Brooks Peck writes: "The Chronoliths, by the underappreciated* Robert Charles Wilson, is a finalist for the 2001 Hugo Award and Campbell Award. The tale begins in 2021 with the abrupt arrival of the first Chronolith, a 200-foot-high monument of unknown composition that memorializes a military victory. It's dated twenty years in the future. More Chronoliths follow, blinking into existence with explosive force--usually in the centers of cities. Each is grander than the last, and each lauds another victory by a leader who does not currently exist."
Witness to it all is our narrator, Scott Warden. There's nothing special about this guy. He's no clever scientist, no tough soldier. He's just a computer programmer who happens to be close to the location of the first arrival. After that he's pulled into the Chronolith investigation by a series of seeming coincidences. But where the manipulation of time is involved, coincidence becomes a slippery concept--something his co-investigators are well aware of.
I consider this quiet, unassuming novel to be on the cutting edge of science fiction for this reason: it creates a literary metaphor for our current view (and fears) of the near future. Just as giant, mutant bugs stood for our fear of the bomb in the '50s, the Chronoliths represent our fear of what's just around the corner today. But today we can no longer easily predict what the future holds. Science changes things too quickly--so quickly that we can only say with confidence that we cannot say what the future will be like.
Science fiction writers have devised a variety of means to cope with this threat to their livelihood. Vernor Vinge pulls off a plausible (and excellent) space opera in A Fire Upon the Deep by having the universe limit how far science can progress depending on its location in the galaxy. Other writers retreat to the very near future. The rise in popularity of alternate history stories could be another byproduct of this dilemma.
But in The Chronoliths Wilson doesn't resort to any tricks. The novel is all about the unknowableness of the future, as represented by the Chronoliths themselves: impenetrable, unstoppable, and, most importantly, of our own making.
*Perhaps one reason Wilson isn't as well known as he should be is that his novels are not as strong as his short fiction. The Chronoliths, interestingly, is his first novel written in first-person, the point of view he chose for many of his best short stories including "The Perseids" and "The Inner Inner City."
You can purchase The Chronoliths from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
JismTroll (588456) [ Preferences ]
Related Links The Chronoliths from bn.com book review guidelines submission page Brooks Peck More on Space Also by timothy
Book Reviews Slashdot's book review section is brimming with reader-submitted commentary on interesting books. Here's a sampling of recent reviews -- read below for how you can add yours to the list.
For programmers, check out reviews of the Zope Bible, Programming Jabber and other specialized books.
If you're just trying to manage programmers, grumpy's review of Managing Einsteins might be just what you're looking for. Meanwhile, keep the company afloat with lessons learned from The MouseDriver Chronicles and The Bombast Transcripts.
Science buff? Read Tal Cohen's reaction to Rare Earth, and Peter Wayner on Digital Biology. Don't forget the grain of salt in Voodoo Science, either. His Dark Materials is one of the many Science Fiction titles that Slashdot readers have praised or panned for your pleasure.
And somewhere between Sci-Fi and reality are books like Flesh and Machines, reporting from the intersection of yesterday's fiction and current technology.
It's easy to submit your own reviews for consideration, too. Just read the Slashdot book review guidelines, and then use the web submission form.
Update: 20020427 12:50 by timothy
Re:Slashdot has confirmed:PWP is dying by poopbot
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The Chronoliths
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AC's have no claim to first post because they are teh fagit. All anonymous FP's belong to The CLIT.
In case post gets slashdotted
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Perl & XML
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Perl & XML Perl | Posted by timothy on 11:15 AM -- Thursday July 11 2002 from the merging-realms dept. dooling writes: "Perl & XML is a well-written book that accomplishes what it sets out to do. It states in the preface that it is written for Perl programmers who want to learn about XML and what is available in Perl for XML processing. It achieves this goal, but little else. When you are done reading this book you will have been given an overview of Perl and XML, know where to begin to attack an XML document, and know where to look to find more information." For dooling's more complete review, read on below.
The book starts out with a brief explanation of why XML and Perl are well-suited for each other. It then provides a teaser of things to come: an explanation of how to use the XML::Simple module. The first chapter concludes with some warnings and gotchas that seem a little premature since they have not really explained XML. Fortunately, most of these gotchas are covered in context later in the book.
The second chapter provides a whirlwind overview of XML -- covering its structure, DTDs, schemas, and XSLT (transformation). The discussion of XML in general, its history, and parts of an XML document are well done. They give someone who is familiar with static HTML the needed background to understand the structure of an XML document and the vocabulary used to describe it. Unfortunately, the discussion of where XML begins to distinguish itself from HTML, namely with DTDs, the new replacement for DTDs called schemas, and the transformation language XSLT, is too brief. They gloss over these topics with little explanation and few examples. That said, there are other books that do provide more in-depth coverage of XML (this book only promises an introduction).
The next five chapters cover Perl modules designed to process XML, starting with simple parsers and writers. Only methods and syntax relating to XML processing are explained. Therefore, if you are considering reading this book, you should be fairly comfortable with Perl and object-oriented (OO) interfaces to CPAN modules (nearly all the modules discussed provide OO APIs). Again, there are other books and perldoc documentation that cover Perl and it's OO features; so read them first if you are not familiar with OO Perl. If you are familiar with OO Perl, these chapters provide a good overview of the different ways XML can be processed (stream- and tree-based approaches), the advantages and disadvantages of each, and the Perl modules best suited for each approach. These chapters are the biggest strength of this book. The modules discussed in these chapters are by no means an exhaustive list of XML-related modules available from CPAN nor do the explanations of each module cover everything the module does. These chapters do, however, provide the reader with enough information that she can begin to process XML documents intelligently and know where to turn when she needs more information.
The next chapter, Chapter 8, covers XML tree iterators, XPath, XSLT, and XML::Twig. All of these topics are covered in a span of 16 pages (with only slightly over two pages dedicated to XSLT). Indeed, after reading the chapter, you may get the feeling that it was only included so the authors could cram more trite colloquialisms into the book. The short shrift given to these topics creates the impression, which is strengthened in the chapters that follow, that this book was rushed a bit to press.
Chapter 9 discusses applications of XML, including RSS and SOAP, and Chapter 10 is mostly example code. These chapters are intended to give you a feeling for what is possible without really giving you enough information to make it happen. The main problem with these chapters are the examples: the examples are long and the explanations are short. Thus, they are more useful as templates or a quick reference than for learning these topics in detail. Of course, the authors never promised you would be programming SOAP applications when you were done reading this book. And again, there are other books out there which discuss these topics in more detail. So the authors stay true to their promise throughout the book: they will introduce you to XML and tell you how to interact with XML using Perl, no more.
Personally, I found this book did, in general, give me enough information to get started using XML and pointed me where I needed to go to get more information. I am an experienced Perl programmer who is new to XML and comfortable with on-line documentation. This book seems to be written for people who fit this profile and who want to learn by doing (finding the answers to the "hard" questions as they arise). It does introduce a wide variety of XML-related topics and the Perl modules used to interact with them, which is what the authors promised to do in the preface. While it is by no means an authoritative text on Perl and XML, there is something to be said for keeping promises...
Index As with most first-edition books, the index was adequate but not complete. For example, XML::Twig, which has an entire section covering it, does not appear in the index at all.
Contents Preface
Perl and XML Why Use Perl with XML? XML Is Simple with XML::Simple XML Processors A Myriad of Modules Keep in Mind... XML Gotchas An XML Recap A Brief History of XML Markup, Elements, and Structure Namespaces Spacing Entities Unicode, Character Sets, and Encodings The XML Declaration Processing Instructions and Other Markup Free-Form XML and Well-Formed Documents Declaring Elements and Attributes Schemas Transformations XML Basics: Reading and Writing XML Parsers XML::Parser Stream-Based Versus Tree-Based Processing Putting Parsers to Work XML::LibXML XML::XPath Document Validation XML::Writer Character Sets and Encodings Event Streams Working with Streams Events and Handlers The Parser as Commodity Stream Applications XML::PYX XML::Parser SAX SAX Event Handlers DTD Handlers External Entity Resolution Drivers for Non-XML Sources A Handler Base Class XML::Handler::YAWriter as a Base Handler Class XML::SAX: The Second Generation Tree Processing XML Trees XML::Simple XML::Parser's Tree Mode XML::SimpleObject XML::TreeBuilder XML::Grove DOM DOM and Perl DOM Class Interface Reference XML::DOM XML::LibXML Beyond Trees: XPath, XSLT, and More Tree Climbers XPath XSLT Optimized Tree Processing RSS, SOAP, and Other XML Applications XML Modules XML::RSS XML Programming Tools SOAP::Lite Coding Strategies Perl and XML Namespaces Subclassing Converting XML to HTML with XSLT A Comics Index Index --- +
In case of slashdotting
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Perl & XML
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· Score: -1
Perl & XML Perl | Posted by timothy on 11:15 AM -- Thursday July 11 2002 from the merging-realms dept. dooling writes: "Perl & XML is a well-written book that accomplishes what it sets out to do. It states in the preface that it is written for Perl programmers who want to learn about XML and what is available in Perl for XML processing. It achieves this goal, but little else. When you are done reading this book you will have been given an overview of Perl and XML, know where to begin to attack an XML document, and know where to look to find more information." For dooling's more complete review, read on below.
The book starts out with a brief explanation of why XML and Perl are well-suited for each other. It then provides a teaser of things to come: an explanation of how to use the XML::Simple module. The first chapter concludes with some warnings and gotchas that seem a little premature since they have not really explained XML. Fortunately, most of these gotchas are covered in context later in the book.
The second chapter provides a whirlwind overview of XML -- covering its structure, DTDs, schemas, and XSLT (transformation). The discussion of XML in general, its history, and parts of an XML document are well done. They give someone who is familiar with static HTML the needed background to understand the structure of an XML document and the vocabulary used to describe it. Unfortunately, the discussion of where XML begins to distinguish itself from HTML, namely with DTDs, the new replacement for DTDs called schemas, and the transformation language XSLT, is too brief. They gloss over these topics with little explanation and few examples. That said, there are other books that do provide more in-depth coverage of XML (this book only promises an introduction).
The next five chapters cover Perl modules designed to process XML, starting with simple parsers and writers. Only methods and syntax relating to XML processing are explained. Therefore, if you are considering reading this book, you should be fairly comfortable with Perl and object-oriented (OO) interfaces to CPAN modules (nearly all the modules discussed provide OO APIs). Again, there are other books and perldoc documentation that cover Perl and it's OO features; so read them first if you are not familiar with OO Perl. If you are familiar with OO Perl, these chapters provide a good overview of the different ways XML can be processed (stream- and tree-based approaches), the advantages and disadvantages of each, and the Perl modules best suited for each approach. These chapters are the biggest strength of this book. The modules discussed in these chapters are by no means an exhaustive list of XML-related modules available from CPAN nor do the explanations of each module cover everything the module does. These chapters do, however, provide the reader with enough information that she can begin to process XML documents intelligently and know where to turn when she needs more information.
The next chapter, Chapter 8, covers XML tree iterators, XPath, XSLT, and XML::Twig. All of these topics are covered in a span of 16 pages (with only slightly over two pages dedicated to XSLT). Indeed, after reading the chapter, you may get the feeling that it was only included so the authors could cram more trite colloquialisms into the book. The short shrift given to these topics creates the impression, which is strengthened in the chapters that follow, that this book was rushed a bit to press.
Chapter 9 discusses applications of XML, including RSS and SOAP, and Chapter 10 is mostly example code. These chapters are intended to give you a feeling for what is possible without really giving you enough information to make it happen. The main problem with these chapters are the examples: the examples are long and the explanations are short. Thus, they are more useful as templates or a quick reference than for learning these topics in detail. Of course, the authors never promised you would be programming SOAP applications when you were done reading this book. And again, there are other books out there which discuss these topics in more detail. So the authors stay true to their promise throughout the book: they will introduce you to XML and tell you how to interact with XML using Perl, no more.
Personally, I found this book did, in general, give me enough information to get started using XML and pointed me where I needed to go to get more information. I am an experienced Perl programmer who is new to XML and comfortable with on-line documentation. This book seems to be written for people who fit this profile and who want to learn by doing (finding the answers to the "hard" questions as they arise). It does introduce a wide variety of XML-related topics and the Perl modules used to interact with them, which is what the authors promised to do in the preface. While it is by no means an authoritative text on Perl and XML, there is something to be said for keeping promises...
Index As with most first-edition books, the index was adequate but not complete. For example, XML::Twig, which has an entire section covering it, does not appear in the index at all.
Contents Preface
Perl and XML Why Use Perl with XML? XML Is Simple with XML::Simple XML Processors A Myriad of Modules Keep in Mind... XML Gotchas An XML Recap A Brief History of XML Markup, Elements, and Structure Namespaces Spacing Entities Unicode, Character Sets, and Encodings The XML Declaration Processing Instructions and Other Markup Free-Form XML and Well-Formed Documents Declaring Elements and Attributes Schemas Transformations XML Basics: Reading and Writing XML Parsers XML::Parser Stream-Based Versus Tree-Based Processing Putting Parsers to Work XML::LibXML XML::XPath Document Validation XML::Writer Character Sets and Encodings Event Streams Working with Streams Events and Handlers The Parser as Commodity Stream Applications XML::PYX XML::Parser SAX SAX Event Handlers DTD Handlers External Entity Resolution Drivers for Non-XML Sources A Handler Base Class XML::Handler::YAWriter as a Base Handler Class XML::SAX: The Second Generation Tree Processing XML Trees XML::Simple XML::Parser's Tree Mode XML::SimpleObject XML::TreeBuilder XML::Grove DOM DOM and Perl DOM Class Interface Reference XML::DOM XML::LibXML Beyond Trees: XPath, XSLT, and More Tree Climbers XPath XSLT Optimized Tree Processing RSS, SOAP, and Other XML Applications XML Modules XML::RSS XML Programming Tools SOAP::Lite Coding Strategies Perl and XML Namespaces Subclassing Converting XML to HTML with XSLT A Comics Index Index
That book totally sucks, except for the ending. I read the whole thing while I was standing around being bored one night at a Barnes and Noble. The book was made in the 80's, so it had all this cold war crap going on, and Batman was ELDERLY! He was pushing 70! Anyway, Superman and Batman do go at it, after Superman survives a ground-zero atomic detonation which weakens him before the fight.
First Batman uses the Batcopter (oldschool!) to fire some missles at Superman to further weaken him. Batman is wearing a robotically-assisted battle suit to make hand-to-hand a bit more even, and they meet in the alley where Batman's parents died. They start fighting, some kryptonite is used, Batman shocks Superman with a high voltage power line, throws acid on him, uses sonic weapons, and just about kicks his ass before Batman has a heart attack, cuz he's fucking old. Alfred blows up the mansion and dies with it.
Batman wears a leather bondage suit and spends his whole day in a dark cave chasing around his thong-sporting "ward" Robin.
Superman, on the other hand, lost his superpowers when he slept with Lois [Superman II] (who is hardly a prize). So he has to be gay to maintain his man-of-steel-ness. Why else would General Zod want to have Superman "kneel before him"?
Besides, everybody knows that Bruce and Clark are gay names.
It is with pleasure that the POV-Team announces that POV-Ray version 3.5 is now officially available for the Windows, Macintosh and Linux platforms.
In development for well over two years, v3.5 is a major improvement over all previous versions, not only in features, but in stability and the quality of the documentation and included example files. Of course, we don't claim it to be bug free (in fact, here's our known bugs list), but given our extensive alpha, pre-beta and beta program we feel that what we are releasing today is a stable, well-tested piece of software that can be used with confidence.
Since our first internal alpha version (early 2001), we have built 6 alphas, 14 private pre-betas, 16 public betas, and 6 release candidates to get us to today's final 3.5 release. During this time we read, reviewed, and in many cases answered over 12,000 newsgroup postings in our private and public beta test forums, resulting in many hundreds of bug fixes and improvements.
The POV-Team would like to extend its heartfelt thanks to all those who helped to make this possible, and particularly to our dedicated group of pre-beta testers, who not only performed testing functions but also made major contributions to the scene and documentation files, not only during the pre-beta stage but right up to the days before the final release.
The POV-Team co-ordinator, Chris Cason, would also like to extend his personal thanks to the POV-Team members who worked long and hard on this since we started on it all those years ago. Your dedication is truly appreciated.
Slashdot Mirror
> Do you have a smelly vagina?
That's an interesting question I don't hear everyday: Do I have a smelly vagina.
I have a great programmer.
News | Posted by Roblimo on 11:30 AM -- Friday July 26 2002
from the only-on-Slashdot dept.
Okay, here are Alicebot inventor Dr. Richard Wallace's answers to your questions. You're about to enter a world that contains interesting thoughts on A.I., a bit of marijuana advocacy, a courtroom drama, tales of academic politics and infighting, personal ranting, discussion of the nature of mental illness, and comments about the state of American society and the world in general. Yes, all this in one interview so long and strong we had to break it up into three parts to make it fit on our pages. This is an amazing work, well worth reading all the way to the end.
1) AI through simulation?
by Jeppe Salvesen
Do you think that the ever increasing processing power will eventually enable us to fully simulate the human brain? What ramifications would this have for the A.I. discipline?
Dr. Wallace:
My longstanding opinion is that neural networks are the wrong level of abstraction for understanding intelligence, human or machine.
Neurons are the transistors of the brain. They are the low level switching components out of which higher-order functionality is built. But like the individual transistor, studying the individual neuron tells us little about these higher functions.
Suppose an alien came down to Earth who had never seen a computer before. Assuming interstellar travel is possible without a computer! He/she might be tempted to break it open, and discover that it is made of millions of tiny transistors. The alien may try to discover how the computer works by measuring the electronic signals in the transistors. But they would miss the operating system completely. The transistors tell us nothing about the software.
Similarly, neurons tell us little about the higher order software running on our brains.
Significantly, no one has ever proved that the brain is a *good* computer. It seems to run some tasks like visual recognition better than our existing machines, but it is terrible at math, prone to errors, susceptible to distraction, and it requires half its uptime for food, sleep, and maintenance.
It sometimes seems to me that the brain is actually a very shitty computer. So why would you want to build a computer out of slimy, wet, broken, slow, hungry, tired neurons? I chose computer science over medical school because I don't have the stomach for those icky, bloody body parts. I prefer my technology clean and dry, thank you. Moreover, it could be the case that an electronic, silicon-based computer is more reliable, faster, more accurate, and cheaper.
I find myself agreeing with the Churchlands that the notion of consciousness belongs to "folk psychology" and that there may be no clear brain correlates for the ego, id, emotions as they are commonly classified, and so on. But to me that does not rule out the possibility of reducing the mind to a mathematical description, which is more or less independent of the underlying brain archiecture. That baby doesn't go out with the bathwater. A.I. is possible precisely because there is nothing special about the brain as a computer. In fact the brain is a shitty computer. The brain has to sleep, needs food, thinks about sex all the time. Useless!
I always say, if I wanted to build a computer from scratch, the very last material I would choose to work with is meat. I'll take transistors over meat any day. Human intelligence may even be a poor kludge of the intelligence algorithm on an organ that is basically a glorified animal eyeball. From an evolutionary standpoint, our supposedly wonderful cognitive skills are a very recent innovation. It should not be surprising if they are only poorly implemented in us, like the lung of the first mudfish. We can breathe the air of thought and imagination, but not that well yet.
And remember, no one has proved that our intelligence is a successful adaption, over the long term. It remains to be seen if the human brain is powerful enough to solve the problems it has created.
Functionalism is basically the view that the mind is the software, and the brain is the hardware. It holds that mental states are equivalent to the states of a Turing Machine. Behaviorism was a pre-computational theory, which imagines the nervous system as a complex piece of machinery like a telephone exchange, but they didn't think much about software. Dualism goes back to Descartes. It is the view that the mind and brain are separate and distinct things, possibly affecting each other, or possibly mirroring each other.
My view is a kind of modified dualism in which I claim that the soul, spirit, or consciousness may exist, but for most people, most of the time, it is almost infentesimally small, compared with the robotic machinery responsible for most of our thought and action. Descartes never talked about the relative weights of brain and mind, but you can read in an implicit 50-50 assumption in most Dualist literature. My idea is more like 99-1, or even 99.999999% automatic machinery and
That's not to say that some people can't be more enlightened than others. But for the vast herd out there, on average, consciousness is simply not a significant factor. Not even a second- or third-order effect. Consciousness is marginal.
I say this with such confidence because of my experience building robot brains over the past seven years. Almost everything people ever say to our robot falls into one of about 45,000 categories. Considering the astronomical number of things people could say, if every sentence was an original line of poetry, 45,000 is a very, very small number.
2) Turing Test
by Transient0
I noticed that your AliceBot won the 2000 Loebner Prize for most human responses. My question is: "As an Artificial Intelligence researcher, do you feel that the Loebner Prize represents a legitimate variety of testing, or did you just want the $2000?"
I was pretty sure that almost all AI researchers came to the agreement about thirty years ago that the original imitation game as proposed by Turing in 1951 was useful only as a mental exercise, not in practice. Do you feel that the types of developments that the Loebner prize supports(intentional, hard-coded spelling mistakes, etc.) are actually productive in terms of the AI research project?
Dr. Wallace:
In case you haven't noticed, the field of Artificial Intelligence (defined however you wish) has almost nothing to do with science. It is all about politics. When you look at all the people working professionally in the field of A.I., it brings to mind the old joke:
Q: How many Carnegie Mellon Ph.D.s does it take to screw in a light bulb?
A: Two. One to change the bulb, and one to pull the chair out from under him.
The only rule most of these people know is: undermine the competition at all costs, by whatever legal means, or whatever they can get away with. That is how you become King of the A.I. Anthill.
Having a good theory or better implementation of anything is beside the point. Being able to "play the game" and knock out the competition, that is what it is all about. Swim with sharks or be eaten by them.
Especially in the age of increased competition for diminishing jobs and funding, scientific truth takes a back seat to save-your-ass.
Unfortunately it seems that the A.I. problem is inseperable from politics.
When I say that academia is corrupt in America, I don't mean that professors are accepting bribes and giving kickbacks for government contracts. There may be a financial motive in some cases, such as the use of overhead funds for a "course buyout" to reduce a professor's workload, but I am not talking about the kind of corruption associated with Wall Street and Washington exactly. I am talking about the replacement of science with politics as the main item on the academic agenda.
It must not have always been so. At one time, I believe academics were appointed and promoted primarily on the basis of merit and accomplishment. Within the last 20 years or so in the United States this has gradually changed into a system in which political correctness, slickness, and good salesmanship are more highly valued than good science. I don't pretend to understand the reasons for this, but I can point to many examples within our own community.
I have written that it is like a dysfunctional family. Those in positions of leadership and authority have mental health, drug and/or alcohol problems that make them incapable of carrying out their administrative responsibilities. In response, people who are skilled at "enabling" or "nursing" the dysfunctional leaders get promoted and advanced. Those who are prone to logical thinking and speaking the truth are discarded, because they make the authorities face their unconscious anxieties.
I often say, people don't go into computer science because they enjoy working with the public. But as the field has matured, I think it has attracted people who are more comfortable wearing business suits and attending strategy meetings than tinkering on a lab bench or writing a research paper. As computer science departments matured, the people already in them began to want everything to remain the same until they retired. They didn't want to hire young professors with a lot of new ideas about the administration. They hired young professors who wanted everything to stay exactly like it was, no matter what.
You may think that the politicization of a field like computer science is no big deal. We can have slick politicians instead of scientists running university CS departments, and not cause a lot of problems. But I think it is a really big problem in other fields, especially in medical science, especially in drugs and mental health.
Take LSD for example. Discovered by Albert Hoffmann in 1945, LSD is the most powerful drug ever developed. If you have ever gotten a prescription for any drug, you may have noticed that the dosage is usally given in "milligrams". But the dosage of LSD is "micrograms". It has the lowest ED50 of any known drug.
In the early 1960's there was some very promising research at Harvard applying LSD to depressed patients like me. The work was never completed or published for, guess what, political reasons. Subsequently, LSD was classified as a "Schedule I" drug with no useful medical value. This was not a decision based on sound science but on politics and fear. Even today there is zero research on this topic. Did you ever wonder why there is no Department of Psychedelic Studies on any university campus? It is a gaping hole in the academic curriculum, filled only by the informal undergraduate ratings of colleges as "party schools".
Even the very name of the federal agency that provides funding for drug research, the National Institute on Drug Abuse, prejudices the applications and the results. The native born American hippie agronomy student who got his Ph.D. in the 1970's is growing pot underground in California today. The immigrant doctor who "proved" that marijuana causes cancer got the NIDA grant and has tenure at UCLA. What's wrong with this picture?
Until 2 years ago, there was no federally funded research on the medical benefits of marijuana since the 1970's. Even now the only funded research is for terminal illnesses, and it seems like it will take a long time before they consider mental illnesses like mine. I conducted a survey of patients in San Francisco and discovered that "pain" was the #1 symptom for medical marijuana but "depression" was #2, and terminal illnesses like AIDS and cancer were lower on the list. So I am not alone in the perception that there is a patient need for research on this drug.
The problem here, my friends, is that NIDA is part of a specturm of trouble that includes once respected agencies such as NASA, NSF and DARPA. It is an octopus of political corruption that reaches into MIT and CMU and Berkeley and darkens everything it touches. It calls into question the quality and even the veracity of the scientific results and publications. We all witnessed the beginning of this even when we were all friends together at the ICRA conferences in the acrimonious interchanges between academia and industry. I myself saw enough of the system from the inside at NYU and Lehigh to know that science plays almost no role in the hiring, promoting or review process. It's all politics.
Not to place blame, but I think graduate advisors should be more straightforward with students about this point. It would be better to put more time into training them how to "shmooze" and "work the system" than how to solve mathematical problems, if they want their students to be successful. Either that, or they should work on changing the system back to merit based promotion.
3) My question (with answer)
by outlier
Historically, AI has done poorly managing public expectations. People expected thinking, understanding computers, while researchers had trouble getting computers to successfully disambiguate simple sentences. This is not good PR. Do you think the field has learned from this? If so, what should the public expect, and how do we excite them about it?
Just for fun, I asked slashwallace a shortened version of the question, do you think your response would differ?
Human: Historically AI has done poorly managing the public's expectations, do you think this will continue?
SlashWallace: Where did he get it?
Dr. Wallace:
Hugh Loebner is an independently wealthy, eccentric businessman, activist and philanthropist. In 1990 Dr. Loebner, who holds a Ph.D. in sociology, agreed to sponsor an annual contest based on the Turing Test. The contest awards medals and cash prizes for the "most human" computer. Since its inception, the Loebner contest has been a magnet for controversy.
One of the central disputes arose over Hugh Loebner's decision to award the Gold Medal and $100,000 top cash prize only when a robot is capable of passing an "audio-visual" Turing Test. The rules for this Grand Prize contest have not even been written yet. So it remains unlikely that anyone will be awarded the gold Loebner medal in the near future. The Silver and Bronze medal competitions are based on the STT. In 2001, eight programs played alongside two human confederates. A group of 10 judges rotated through each of ten terminals and chatted about 15 minutes with each. The judges then ranked the terminals on a scale of "least human" to "most human." Winning the Silver Medal and its $25,000 prize requires that the judges rank the program higher than half the human confederates. In fact one judge ranked A.L.I.C.E. higher than one of the human confederates in 2001. Had all the judges done so, she might have been eligible for the Silver Medal as well, because there were only two confederates.
To really understand how we accomplished this, I have to teach you some AIML.
CATEGORIES
The basic unit of knowledge in AIML is called a category. Each category consists of an input question, an output answer, and an optional context.
The question, or stimulus, is called the pattern. The answer, or response, is called the template. The two types of optional context are called "that" and "topic."
The AIML pattern language is simple, consisting only of words, spaces, and the wildcard symbols _ and *.
The words may consist of letters and numerals, but no other characters. The pattern language is case invariant.
Words are separated by a single space, and the wildcard characters function like words.
The first versions of AIML allowed only one wild card character per pattern.
The AIML 1.01 standard permits multiple wildcards in each pattern, but the language is designed to be as simple as possible for the task at hand, simpler even than regular expressions.
The template is the AIML response or reply. In its simplest form, the template consists of only plain, unmarked text.
More generally, AIML tags transform the reply into a mini computer program which can save data, activate other programs, give conditional responses, and recursively call the pattern matcher to insert the responses from other categories.
Most AIML tags in fact belong to this template side sublanguage.
AIML currently supports two ways to interface other languages and systems. The tag executes any program accessible as an operating system shell command, and inserts the results in the reply. Similarly, the tag allows arbitrary scripting inside the templates.
The optional context portion of the category consists of two variants, called and . The tag appears inside the category, and its pattern must match the robot's last utterance.
Remembering one last utterance is important if the robot asks a question. The tag appears outside the category, and collects a group of categories together.
The topic may be set inside any template. AIML is not exactly the same as a simple database of questions and answers. The pattern matching "query" language is much simpler than something like SQL. But a category template may contain the recursive tag, so that the output depends not only on one matched category, but also any others recursively reached through .
RECURSION
AIML implements recursion with the operator. No agreement exists about the meaning of the acronym.
The "A.I." stands for artificial intelligence, but "S.R." may mean "stimulus-response," "syntactic rewrite," "symbolic reduction," "simple recursion," or "synonym resolution." The disagreement over the acronym reflects the variety of applications for in AIML. Each of these is described in more detail in a subsection below:
(1). Symbolic Reduction-Reduce complex grammatic forms to simpler ones.
(2). Divide and Conquer-Split an input into two or more subparts, and combine the responses to each.
(3). Synonyms-Map different ways of saying the same thing to the same reply.
(4). Spelling or grammar corrections.
(5). Detecting keywords anywhere in the input.
(6). Conditionals-Certain forms of branching may be implemented with
(7). Any combination of (1)-(6).
The danger of is that it permits the botmaster to create infinite loops. Though posing some risk to novice programmers, we surmised that including was much simpler than any of the iterative block structured control tags which might have replaced it.
(1). Symbolic Reduction
Symbolic reduction refers to the process of simplifying complex grammatical forms into simpler ones. Usually, the atomic patterns in categories storing robot knowledge are stated in the simplest possible terms, for example we tend to prefer patterns like "WHO IS SOCRATES" to ones like "DO YOU KNOW WHO SOCRATES IS" when storing biographical information about Socrates. Many of the more complex forms reduce to simpler forms using AIML categories designed for symbolic reduction:
DO YOU KNOW WHO * IS
WHO IS
Whatever input matched this pattern, the portion bound to the wildcard * may be inserted into the reply with the markup . This category reduces any input of the form "Do you know who X is?" to "Who is X?"
(2). Divide and Conquer
Many individual sentences may be reduced to two or more subsentences, and the reply formed by combining the replies to each. A sentence beginning with the word "Yes" for example, if it has more than one word, may be treated as the subsentence "Yes." plus whatever follows it.
YES *
YES
The markup is simply an abbreviation for .
(3). Synonyms
The AIML 1.01 standard does not permit more than one pattern per category. Synonyms are perhaps the most common application of . Many ways to say the same thing reduce to one category, which contains the reply:
HELLO
Hi there!
HI
HELLO
HI THERE
HELLO
HOWDY
HELLO
HOLA
HELLO
(4). Spelling and Grammar correction
The single most common client spelling mistake is the use of "your" when "you're" or "you are" is intended. Not every occurrence of "your" however should be turned into "you're." A small amount of grammatical context is usually necessary to catch this error:
YOUR A *
I think you mean "you're" or "you are" not "your."
YOU ARE A
Here the bot both corrects the client input and acts as a language tutor.
(5). Keywords
Frequently we would like to write an AIML template which is activated by the appearance of a keyword anywhere in the input sentence. The general format of four AIML categories is illustrated by this example borrowed from ELIZA:
MOTHER Tell me more about your family.
_ MOTHER MOTHER
MOTHER _
MOTHER
_ MOTHER *
MOTHER
The first category both detects the keyword when it appears by itself, and provides the generic response. The second category detects the keyword as the suffix of a sentence. The third detects it as the prefix of an input sentence, and finally the last category detects the keyword as an infix. Each of the last three categories uses to link to the first, so that all four cases produce the same reply, but it needs to be written and stored only once.
(6). Conditionals
It is possible to write conditional branches in AIML, using only the tag. Consider three categories:
WHO IS HE WHOISHE
WHOISHE *
He is
WHOISHE UNKNOWN
I don't know who he is.
Provided that the predicate "he" is initialized to "Unknown," the categories execute a conditional branch depending on whether "he" has been set. As a convenience to the botmaster, AIML also provides the equivalent function through the tag.
CONTEXT
The keyword "that" in AIML refers to the robot's previous utterance. Specifically, if the robot responds with a multiple sentence paragraph, the value of that is set to the last sentence in the sequence. The choice of the keyword "that" is motivated by its use in ordinary language:
R: Today is yesterday.
C: That makes no sense.
R: The answer is 3.1412926 approximately.
C: That is cool.
In AIML the syntax
YES
DO YOU LIKE MOVIES
What is your favorite movie?
This category is activated when the client says YES. The robot must find out what is he saying "yes" to. If the robot asked, "Do you like movies?," this category matches, and the response, "What is your favorite movie?," continues the conversation along the same lines. One interesting application of are categories that enable the robot to respond to knock-knock jokes.
The categories:
KNOCK KNOCK
Who is there?
*
WHO IS THERE
who?
*
* WHO
Ha ha very funny,
produce the following dialogue:
C: Knock knock.
R: Who's there?
C: Banana.
R: Banana who?
C: Knock knock.
R: Who's there?
C: Banana.
R: Banana who? C: Knock knock.
R: Who's there?
C: Orange.
R: Orange who?
C: Orange you glad I didn't say banana.
R: Ha ha very funny, Nancy.
Internally the AIML interpreter stores the input pattern, that pattern and topic pattern along a single path, like: INPUT THAT TOPIC When the values of or are not specified, the program implicitly sets the values of the corresponding THAT or TOPIC pattern to the wildcard *.
The first part of the path to match is the input. If more than one category have the same input pattern, the program may distinguish between them depending on the value of . If two or more categories have the same and , the final step is to choose the reply based on the . This structure suggests a design rule: never use unless you have written two categories with the same , and never use unless you write two categories with the same and . Still, one of the most useful applications for is to create subject-dependent "pickup lines," like:
*
What's your favorite car?
What kind of car do you drive?
Do you get a lot of parking tickets?
My favorite car is one with a driver. Considering the vast size of the set of things people could say that are grammatically correct or semantically meaningful, the number of things people actually do say is surprisingly small. Steven Pinker,in his book How the Mind Works wrote, "Say you have ten choices for the first word to begin a sentence, ten choices for the second word (yielding 100 two-word beginnings), ten choices for the third word (yielding a thousand three-word beginnings), and so on. (Ten is in fact the approximate geometric mean of the number of word choices available at each point in assembling a grammatical and sensible sentence). A little arithmetic shows that the number of sentences of 20 words or less (not an unusual length) is about 1020."
y /).
Fortunately for chat robot programmers, Pinker's calculations are way off. Our experiments with A.L.I.C.E. indicate that the number of choices for the "first word" is more than ten, but it is only about two thousand. Specifically, about 2000 words covers 95% of all the first words input to A.L.I.C.E.. The number of choices for the second word is only about two. To be sure, there are some first words ("I" and "You" for example) that have many possible second words, but the overall average is just under two words. The average branching factor decreases with each successive word.
We have plotted some beautiful images of the A.L.I.C.E. brain contents represented by this graph (http://alice.sunlitsurf.com/documentation/galler
More than just elegant pictures of the A.L.I.C.E. brain, these spiral images (see more) outline a territory of language that has been effectively "conquered" by A.L.I.C.E. and AIML. No other theory of natural language processing can better explain or reproduce the results within our territory. You don't need a complex theory of learning, neural nets, or cognitive models to explain how to chat within the limits of A.L.I.C.E.'s 25,000 categories. Our stimulus-response model is as good a theory as any other for these cases, and certainly the simplest. If there is any room left for "higher" natural language theories, it lies outside the map of the A.L.I.C.E. brain. Academics are fond of concocting riddles and linguistic paradoxes that supposedly show how difficult the natural language problem is. "John saw the mountains flying over Zurich" or "Fruit flies like a banana" reveal the ambiguity of language and the limits of an A.L.I.C.E.-style approach (though not these particular examples, of course, A.L.I.C.E. already knows about them).
In the years to come we will only advance the frontier further. The basic outline of the spiral graph may look much the same, for we have found all of the "big trees" from "A *" to "YOUR *". These trees may become bigger, but unless language itself changes we won't find any more big trees (except of course in foreign languages). The work of those seeking to explain natural language in terms of something more complex than stimulus response will take place beyond our frontier, increasingly in the hinterlands occupied by only the rarest forms of language. Our territory of language already contains the highest population of sentences that people use. Expanding the borders even more we will continue to absorb the stragglers outside, until the very last human critic cannot think of one sentence to "fool" A.L.I.C.E..
It's fantastic for the open source community that the ACLU has done this! This will really put it in the face of Microsoft and the RIAA! Linux rules!
THE OFFICIAL TACO-SNOTTING FAQ [slashdot.org]
:) Join me in a WIPO-snot?
By J. Wipo Troll, Esq. [slashdot.org], $Revision: 1.17 $
[This article attempts to document a vile, ungodly practice that runs rampant through the homosexual geek and hacker community, a practice known as Taco-snotting, or simply snotting. Taco-snotting is something that few geeks dare talk about in free or open conversation, but it is nonetheless a widely-practiced and dangerous form of homosexuality. If you or anyone you know has ever engaged in Taco-snotting, please get professional help [adequacy.org] before it is too late. ed.]
Why do I keep receiving emails from an individual calling himself CmdrTaco?
You have been receiving unsolicited mailings from a certain Robert CmdrTaco Malda [cmdrtaco.net], owner of the popular technology website slashdot.org [slashdot.org]. Actually, its not a very popular site in the common sense of the word; the site is rife with pimply, antisocial geeks and hackers, zit-faced nerds, communists, dirty GNU hippies [yahoo.com], and other societal rejects and outcasts. Its also home to one of the worlds largest suspected pedophile rings, the infamous Slashdot crew.
Whenever Mr. Malda gets bored (and who wouldnt, running a site like Slashdot all day), he roams through the user database, penis in hand, looking for people who might enjoy engaging in homosexual activities with him. How he determines this is anyones guess; but if you have a homosexual-sounding nickname, or a nick with a letter of the English alphabet in it, youre a potential candidate.
This time, he found you. Lucky you.
Mr. Malda seems to be speaking in some sort of code. Do you know what it means?
CmdrTacos code language is relatively easy to decipher. This pervert prefers to speak in thinly-veiled sexual innuendo (yes, thats right: he wants you) to evade the watchful eye of Slashdots parent corporation, VA Software [yahoo.com]. Mr. Malda's Commander is, of course, his penis: a small, withered little thing that lives in his pants and only comes out in the presence of other male geeks or at the beck and call of Maldas own lubed-up right hand. His Taco bells [sonymusic.com] are the shriveled testicles that droop beneath his Commander, and his Taco sauce is his thin, runny semen. It should be more than obvious to you now what he means if he asked you to ring his Taco bells or taste his gourmet Taco sauce.
I would also guess CmdrTaco asked you to engage in a practice known as Taco-snotting and, if he was in a particularly depraved mood at the time, a circle-snot.
Good Lord. And, yes, he did. What is Taco-snotting?
Taco-snotting is the term used by Robert Malda to refer to the depraved act of fellating another man (homo- or heterosexual; CmdrTaco is rumoured to prefer raping unwilling victims), then blowing the semen out his nose and back onto the face and body of his victim. Naturally, a long, bubbly stream of milky-white semen is left on CmdrTacos face [go.com], dribbling out of his nose and down his cheek: hence the term, Taco-snotting.
And if thats not bad enough
A circle-snot is a Taco-snotting circle-jerk, another practice common among the Slashdot crew [bastardgenres.com]. CmdrTaco, CowboiKneel [aol.com], and Homos get together and snot each other with their gooey, sticky cum spooging their jizz-snot all over each others faces and pasty, white bodies, until theyre covered head to toe with their own and each others man juice. This vile, ungodly ritual can go on for hours. For the homosexual penetration that follows this lengthy foreplay, Roblowme is usually there to provide plenty of anal lubricant; he owns a limousine service and has ample supplies of motor oil and axle grease ready to go.
To complete this perverted orgy, fellow faggots Michael, Timothy, and Jamie will usually join in, dressed in tight leather mock-S.S. uniforms, jack boots, and leather gloves. The homosexual shenanigans that follow are nearly beyond description. The whole group begins to snot each others spunk and whip each others pudgy asses with riding crops and chains until their pale, white geek bodies are exhausted and soaked in stinking sweat from the hours of passionate, homosexual revelry.
Ewwwwww. So, can I stop receiving these emails?
Hopefully, but I wouldnt count on it.
To begin with, you most likely forgot to uncheck the Willing to Snot checkbox in your account preferences. CmdrTaco has probably already got the hots for your wad (do you have a homosexual-sounding nick?), and hes probably already been lurking outside your bathroom window for weeks with a camera, some tissues and lube, just waiting to pounce and declare you his new bitch. Theres no escaping a geek in heat (trust me), so its probably too late for you, but you can possibly rectify this situation. To remove yourself from CmdrTacos sights, log into your Slashdot account, go to your user page, click on Messages, and uncheck the box next to Willing to Snot. Maybe hell ignore you. Probably not.
I cant stop receiving these emails from CmdrTaco!?
If you indulge him in a Taco-snot or two, hemight leave you alone. You might also want to look into mail filtering, restraining orders, or purchasing a heavy, blunt object capable of warding off rampaging homosexual geeks in heat. Trust me, when they charge oh, the humanity. If he gets you, and you let him Taco-snot all over you, you will most likely end up tied up in his basement to be used as his sex slave for the rest of your life (or until he accidentally drowns you in spunk in a circle-snot).
Have you ever been Taco-snotted?
Unfortunately, yes. I first met Mr. Malda at an Open Source Convention [amazon.com]. He invited me back to his room for a game of Quake and some gourmet Tacos, but when I got there, the perverted geek jumped me and handcuffed me to his bed, stripping me. After taking his Commander out of his pants, Mr. Taco made me suck the withered thing six times, virtually nonstop. He then performed his vile Taco-snotting ritual on me three times over the next two hours, bringing me to orgasm after orgasm after sweaty, mind-numbing orgasm then he snotted my own thick, gooey jizz back onto my face out of his nostrils! He snotted me two more times, first into my mouth, then again on my exposed belly.
CmdrTaco invited several of his Open Source (or rather, Open Sauce man sauce) buddies over to continue their ungodly snotfest. European hacker and known uberfaggot Linux Torvalds raped my ass [yahoo.com] with his monolithic kernel [yahoo.com]; his partner-in-crime Anal Cox used their network stack in a multitude of unspeakable ways on and in every orifice of my defenseless, tender, young body. Michael Sims was there in his leather Nazi uniform, caning my previously-virginal ass with a bamboo pole and ranting about all those Censorware [spectacle.org] freaks out to get him.
That is so disgusting! How did you finally escape?
After about 16 hours of countless unholy, homosexual atrocities perpetrated against my restrained body, they all finally went to sleep on top of me, sweat-soaked and exhausted. I was left there, completely covered in bubbly, translucent jizz-snot, chained to the bed, with half a dozen fat, pasty-white fags lying around and on top of me. Fortunately the spooge coating my flesh worked wonderfully as a lubricant I was able to squirm my way out of the handcuffs and slip out the back door (of the apartment, not their back doors). Im just glad I survived the awful ordeal. These sexually-repressed hackers had alot of built-up spunk in their wads I couldve easily been drowned!
Thats horrible. Does Taco-snotting have anything to do with CmdrTacos special taco?
No, thats a different disgusting perversion CmdrTaco indulges himself in. Mr. Malda is usually not satisfied with merely snotting your own jizz back onto your face, he most often enjoys involving his own bodily fluids in his twisted games. WeatherTroll [slashdot.org] has spent some time trying to educate the Slashdot readership [slashdot.org] about this vile practice (emphasis added):
You may be wondering what CmdrTacos special taco is. You will be wishing that you hadnt been wondering after you finish reading this post. To make his special taco, CmdrTaco takes a taco shell and shits on it. He then adds lettuce, takes out his tiny withered dick (otherwise known as his Commander), puts his special taco sauce on it which means he jacks off on the taco, and adds a compound to make the person who eats the taco unconscious. Of course, the compound does not make the person unconscious until the taco is fully eaten. Thus CmdrTaco force-feeds the taco to the unsuspecting victim. After all, who would knowingly eat shit and CmdrTacos jizz?
After the victim is unconscious, he is held against his will and used for CmdrTacos nefarious homosexual purposes. This includes shoving taco shells up the victims ass, Taco-snotting, and getting Jon Katz involved. Trust me, you do not want Jon Katz anywhere near your unconscious body. Also, rumor has it CmdrTaco is looking for a new goatse.cx guy [goatse.cx]. Dont let it be you!
Different ungodly perversion, yet no less revolting. It should be clear to you now that Robert CmdrTaco Malda is a very, very sick individual, as are most of the Slashdot editors.
Does Jon Katz get involved in any of this? I thought he was a pedophile, not a homosexual.
Actually, Jon Katz is a homosexual pedophile. Hes also a coprophiliac, and, many suspect, a zoophile. Mr. Katz is somewhat of a loner and doesnt involve himself in the circle-snots, but that doest mean hes any less of a freak than the rest of the Slashdot crew. Katz often engages in a game called juicy-douching [aol.com] with a harem of little-boy slaves that he has collected over the years: yet another vile practice which involves administering an enema to himself of the little boys urine (forced out of them with a pair of pincers), spooging the vile muck from his ass back into the enema bag, then dribbling and slathering the goo all over himself and the boys chained, naked bodies. If hes in the mood, he will sometimes skip refilling the enema bag from his distended anus and just squirt it from his ass [microsoft.com] onto the crying, terrified boys. Unwilling boys are further tortured with the pincers until they comply and allow Mr. Katz to juicy-douche them at will. A boy will usually last about two years before Mr. Katz either accidentally drowns them in diarrhea or kills them once they get too old, usually around 13 or 14.
Not content with being a pedophilic coprophile, Mr. Katz is also quite the zoophile. As if the sexual escapades with the helpless little boys arent enough, Jon usually enjoys his juicy-douches best when his penis is firmly planted in a female goats anus [yahoo.com]. He is also rumoured to get off on watching his little boys eat the goats small, bean-like turds, and he often kills his older boys by letting his goats trample them.
Are you getting hard writing this?
Why, yes.
No, thanks. Im already CmdrTacos boi toi.
________________________________________
* The URL of this document is
* Previous revisions are publicly available at
$Id: tacosnotting.html,v 1.16 2001/12/28 21:20:03 wipo Exp $
Copyright © 2001 J. Wipo Troll, Esq. [slashdot.org] Verbatim crapflooding of this document is permitted in any medium, provided this copyright notice is preserved, and next time you take a dump, you think of the WIPO Troll and all hes done to make Slashdot a better place.
Netcraft has confirmed: Taco-snotting is dying.
Yet another crippling bombshell hit the beleaguered Taco-snotting community when recently IDC confirmed that Taco-snotting accounts for less than a fraction of 1 percent of all homosexual acts. Coming on the heels of the latest Netcraft survey which plainly states that Taco-snotting has lost more fag practitioners, this news serves to reinforce what weve known all along. Taco-snotting faggots are collapsing in complete disarray, as further exemplified by failing dead last in the recent Faggot World comprehensive snotting test.
You dont need to be a Katz to predict Taco-snottings future. The handwriting is on the wall: Taco-snotting faces a bleak future. In fact there wont be any future at all for Taco-snotting because Taco-snotting is dying. Things are looking very bad for Taco-snotting. As many of us are already aware, Taco-snotting continues to lose faggotshare. White ink flows like a river of bubbly, thick jizz. The circle-snot is the most endangered of them all, having lost 93% of its core snotters.
Lets keep to the facts and look at the numbers.
Circle-snotting leader Jeff Homos Masterbates states that there are 7000 snotters of the circle-snot. How many users of anal snot are there? Lets see. The number of circle-snotting versus anal snot posts on Usenet is roughly in ratio of 5 to 1. Therefore there are about 7000/5 = 1400 anal snot users. SnotOS posts on Usenet are about half of the volume of anal snot posts. Therefore there are about 700 users of SnotOS. A recent article put the circle-snot at about 80 percent of the Taco-snotting market. Therefore there are (7000+1400+700)*4 = 36400 circle-snot users. This is consistent with the number of circle-snot Usenet posts.
Due to the troubles of CowboiKneels walnuts, abysmal sales and so on, the circle-snot went out of business and was taken over by SNOTi who sell another troubled Taco-snot. Now SNOTi is also dead, its corpse turned over to yet another gay whorehouse.
All major surveys show that Taco-snotting has steadily declined in faggotshare. Taco-snotting is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If Taco-snotting is to survive at all it will be among heterosexual hobbyist dabblers. Taco-snotting continues to decay. Nothing short of a jizz-soaked miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, Taco-snotting is dead.
Fact: Taco-snotting is dead.
Please remember to wipe thoroughly and flush after saying all of that.
FP!
I Agree With This Post
I Agree With This Post.
The Stallion A full grown stallion's cock, when fully erect, will measure some two to three feet long. It can be three to six inches thick at the base, to about two inches thick at the head. Horses are somewhat different from other animals in the way their cock head works. When a horse is fully erect and excited and ready to mount, his cock head is somewhat pointed and not as thick as might be normally observed. This is to facilitate an easier entry into the mare. After the horse has entered and reaches a climax the head swells (though it is more spongy then hard) into a fist sized mass as he ejaculates. It is thought that this serves as a plug to force the semen deep into the mare rather then allowing it to leak out. A full grown stallion can ejaculate about one cup ( 8 ounces ) of semen. It will take quite a few spurts to accomplish this. Each time his tail will raise and lower in a brief flick. The first few jets are of a thin to average consistency of cum. The final few jets are of a thick gelatinous substance... it is thought that this serves to "seal" the mares pussy so that the semen has time to do it's thing before leaking out. Horse semen is extremely viscous, if you touch your finger to a pool of it you can draw a thin string of it five to six feet long! Horse cum has a nice flat taste to it...not at all bitter like man's cum. You can easily drink cups of it with no discomfort. The Mare - how to do it. Mares can be quite satisfactory for the average well endowed male. If you are somewhat less developed you might find better pleasure with a pony or Miniature Horse. These are also better as they are lower to the ground. A pony you can fuck standing up. A miniature horse on your knees or squatting depending on the size. A mare will require something to stand on or "platform shoes"...(IE mini stilts to raise you a foot off the ground) so that you can reach her pussy. Fucking any horse will depend on the horse. Some will be ready right away...some will take coaxing. Pet the animal, talk to it softly, spend time with it gaining it's trust. If something you are doing upsets it then don't force it. Talk to it and calm it. If you work slowly you can make an animal accept anything. It is just a question of helping it overcome it's fears. All animals fear man if raised in the wild. How any animal reacts will depend on it's own experiences. If you have raised the animal yourself in a loving environment, then you should have no problem associating with it, if it is a strange animal that you have met in the wild then you will have to go through an extended "courtship" to learn how to respond to the beast. MARES - TRAINING YOUR OWN When the filly reaches weaning age, separate her from her dam. If you have limited time to spend then she should be put to pasture. If you have plenty of time then you should keep her in a stall. Spend time with her during the day petting and grooming her and allow her some time to run free. Limit her access to other horses though and see that she spends at least 8-12 hours a day in the stall. (Start with more free time and as she approaches her first birthday confine her more...she is now at the right age and her confinement will have made her so bored that she is amenable to any new experience so long as it is not unpleasant)Young fillys have no objection to someone playing with their pussy's. I have walked up on a pen full of strange fillys at night and they came right up to me and I petted them and felt up their pussys and they just lifted their tales and seemed to enjoy it. These fillys didn't even know me but they were young, inexperienced and bored...also since they were penned they were used to the presence of people and did not fear me. Most horses in a large pasture will run when they scent a strange human in their pasture at night. If you sit on the ground and wait patiently, they will get downwind of you and snort and fret, but eventually they will get curious and come closer...you must wait until they have come close enough to smell and touch you before saying anything or moving. Even then speak softly and move VERY slowly so as not to spook them. If you can feed the horses and let them smell you during the day on several occasions then they will remember you and come to you more readily when you appear in the middle of the night. Also if you are seducing strange horses you should bring them food. This is a good way to start a relationship. Wild mares or those that have been artificially inseminated are usually reluctant to have sex. The wild ones are used to violent horsecock and the others have had peoples arms in their cunts so they can be apprehensive about sexual events. Start rubbing ,scratching, etc in different areas and observe the mare to see what she likes...almost all horses enjoy being scratched under the chin and across the withers. Play with the horse until it is comfortable with you and as you stroke it slowly move toward it's hind end. Scratch her rump and around her tale and the move down her hind legs. If she reacts to this well she might raise her tail somewhat...gently rub her pussy and see how she reacts...if she doesn't get violent then spit on your fingers and rub a couple of them through her snatch...if she doesn't try to kick you then she is probably ready to fuck. Note on horses and getting kicked.... Standing directly in front of a horse is hazardous as it can raise on it's hind legs and come down with a front hoof on your head. Standing 3-6 feet behind a horse is hazardous as it has range to wind up and kick you a good one with the hind legs. Standing beside a horse is fairly safe. It can only stomp on your toes which can be avoided...standing behind a horse is safe if you are no farther then a foot from it's rump..you are so close that the horse can't develop a full swing and cannot kick you hard. If the horse can move forward you might fall into range so try to tie up or use a stall or something so the animal cannot pull away into striking range. If you make a good relationship however the above is unnecessary though. I have had mare that welcomed me...pushed back every time I shoved, and contracted her cunt to milk my cock dry. Horses are some of the best pussy I have ever tried! And I have tried plenty of PEOPLE & ANIMALS! Also horses are easily trainable! As long as you make sure they enjoy what is happening and don't force them or get angry with them if they misunderstand what you want of them, they will love you always. Above all try to understand what they like and do it to them....by doing whatever, to make them happy, they will respond by granting you greater freedoms. Once you have successfully fucked a filly a few times she will be used to it and look forward to your visits so long as you give her the attention she desires. You must experiment and treat her as a lover and see what turns her on. Treat her as she wants and she will give you all. The Stallion A stallion is one of the most proudest, powerful, masculine, things there is. All stallions are very oral and like to nibble and bite on anything available. This can be annoying and painful and they should be trained against it at a early age or else you should wear a padded suit, so that they can bite you painlessly. This might be considered as a horse that allows itself to be bitten without reacting is signaling that it is sexually receptive. Stallions that have successfully coupled in the wild are somewhat resistant from seduction by humans. If they are isolated, tempted and trained, then they will become more acquiescent but the best ones are those that have been raised in a human environment since weaning, since they have not had sex with other horses they are more amenable to having sex with humans when their hormones kick in and they are looking for some release. Bringing a wild horse to orgasm can be more difficult. They are used to a mares pussy which is several degrees hotter then a humans body heat. A person could fuck or suck them and not bring them to the point of orgasm unless they had been isolated and deprived and unable to help but cut loose with a load. Stallions can be readily trained though. Most stud farms use artificial insemination, the stallions are aroused by the scent of mares in heat and then an artificial vagina filled with warm water is slipped over their cock and they reach orgasm. The stallions soon learn the routine and just be leading them into the proper barn they know what is coming and obtain an erection. This can work for you too. By coming repeatedly to a horse and arousing him he will become trained to see you as a sexual object. Soon just your presence will give him a throbbing hard-on. Arousing the Stallion Stallions are aroused by the smell of horse pussy above all else. If you have access to a mare, then gentle her till she will let you finger her...then coat your fingers with her juice. Now rub your fingers across the stallions nose! He will react even if she is not in heat! He knows the smell! I have done this to geldings! Horses that have been castrated and they still got a hardon!!! Also pet & rub the horse and rub his cock...don't pull on it hard.. be gentle...big as it is it is still tender! If you rub his belly and sheath slowly and gently and let him smell some horse pussy juice then he will erect. If you can find a horse in heat then grab some urine and refrigerate it. Take some out and thaw it when you want it. Rubbing some hot mare piss on a stallions nose will make him horny as hell! He will be all over you! Once a stallion smells that he doesn't care what he fucks! He just wants a hot hole. Make sure there are no other horses around...otherwise he will jump them instead of you! Some horses have been trained too react to certain cues, others react to their own natural cues...I remember a $1,000,000.00 Arabian stallion I trained.. He stuck his tongue out about 1/2 inch...when someone would rub this small crescent he would instantly get a raging hardon...more proof that stallions are very oral. This stallion had never had sex with a mare...he had only climaxed through the intervention of humans and was quite happy with having sex in a artificial vagina with the help of humans...training does wonders. NOONE SHOULD ATTEMPT VAGINAL OR ANAL INTERCOURSE WITH A STALLION unless they have are experienced in fist fucking or have taken a large dog in to the max ( IE knot and all). A horse has an enormus cock and could do serious damage to someone who is not prepared. A horse cock can easily grow as big as the knot in a large dogs cock so if you can't take that in then you aren't ready. PS. A large dog can stretch you where a horse can fit if you make the switch before the hole shrivels. Country boys - you know where the animals are and how to get them...you don't need to read this. City Boys - Drive out to the suburbs and find some isolated horses.. try to encounter them in the day and get them used to you then return at night to have some fun. IF there are stables around then spend some time there. Sign up for riding lessons or whatever and then kind of fade out and help groom the horses and clean the stalls. Chances or whoever runs the scene will be glad for the help and won't question your presence there. You can help run the show by day and return for sex at night. Just be careful, there is less privacy in the city as compared to the country. You sure don't want to be caught! New animals on the block!! We now have miniature donkeys and horses as well as the larger ponies to play with! These animals reach a maximum of about 200 pounds for the purebreeds and somewhat larger for the crossbreeds. You can buy or breed an animal just for your size specifications! Male and female animals made to order. Miniatures are currently selling (dec. 1991) for $300 to $3000 depending on pedigree. Anyone can find a horse their size. Support and promote these animals. They are salvation to us all. The mares are tight and the stallions are all sizes...one can be found to fit any hole. ANIMAL TRAINER (C) 1991 EDITORS NOTE: I have known animal trainer for many years and he is very experienced with animals. Take his word as gospel....he knows what he speaks of and is a true beastie wonder! The 5 years he spent on the stud farm gave him extensive equine experience!
Here's some pr0n.
Thanks for the FP, even though you had no claim to it anyway, you fucking worthless AC.
I appreciate your saving my FP for me, and now I'm going to take that off your hands for you. KTHX!
AC's have no claim to FP, and never will.
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles,
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles,
Heroes in a half shell, Turtle power!
They're the world's most fearsome fighting team!
They're heros in a half shell and they're green!
When the evil Shedder attacks,
These Turtle boys dont cut 'em no slack!
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles,
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles,
Splinter taught them to be ninja teens
Leonardo leads,
Donnatello does machines,(thats a fact jack!)
Raphael is cool but rude,(gimme a break!)
Michaelangelo is a party dude!(p-p-a-a-r-r-t-t-y-y!!!)
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles,
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles,
Heroes in a half shell, Turtle power!
Are you saying that you want God to eat your assbaby, that you want God to eat your ass, and you refer to the deity as "baby", or was it "God, eat my ass, baby"????
I know that AC's lack basic language skills because of their moon-faced corky-esque Down-syndrome-like cerebral deformities, but in this particular case, commas are mandatory.
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The Chronoliths
Space | Posted by timothy on 10:30 AM -- Friday July 12 2002
from the take-a-licking-keep-on-ticking dept.
Brooks Peck writes: "The Chronoliths, by the underappreciated* Robert Charles Wilson, is a finalist for the 2001 Hugo Award and Campbell Award. The tale begins in 2021 with the abrupt arrival of the first Chronolith, a 200-foot-high monument of unknown composition that memorializes a military victory. It's dated twenty years in the future. More Chronoliths follow, blinking into existence with explosive force--usually in the centers of cities. Each is grander than the last, and each lauds another victory by a leader who does not currently exist."
Witness to it all is our narrator, Scott Warden. There's nothing special about this guy. He's no clever scientist, no tough soldier. He's just a computer programmer who happens to be close to the location of the first arrival. After that he's pulled into the Chronolith investigation by a series of seeming coincidences. But where the manipulation of time is involved, coincidence becomes a slippery concept--something his co-investigators are well aware of.
I consider this quiet, unassuming novel to be on the cutting edge of science fiction for this reason: it creates a literary metaphor for our current view (and fears) of the near future. Just as giant, mutant bugs stood for our fear of the bomb in the '50s, the Chronoliths represent our fear of what's just around the corner today. But today we can no longer easily predict what the future holds. Science changes things too quickly--so quickly that we can only say with confidence that we cannot say what the future will be like.
Science fiction writers have devised a variety of means to cope with this threat to their livelihood. Vernor Vinge pulls off a plausible (and excellent) space opera in A Fire Upon the Deep by having the universe limit how far science can progress depending on its location in the galaxy. Other writers retreat to the very near future. The rise in popularity of alternate history stories could be another byproduct of this dilemma.
But in The Chronoliths Wilson doesn't resort to any tricks. The novel is all about the unknowableness of the future, as represented by the Chronoliths themselves: impenetrable, unstoppable, and, most importantly, of our own making.
*Perhaps one reason Wilson isn't as well known as he should be is that his novels are not as strong as his short fiction. The Chronoliths, interestingly, is his first novel written in first-person, the point of view he chose for many of his best short stories including "The Perseids" and "The Inner Inner City."
You can purchase The Chronoliths from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
JismTroll (588456)
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Also by timothy
Book Reviews
Slashdot's book review section is brimming with reader-submitted commentary on interesting books. Here's a sampling of recent reviews -- read below for how you can add yours to the list.
For programmers, check out reviews of the Zope Bible, Programming Jabber and other specialized books.
If you're just trying to manage programmers, grumpy's review of Managing Einsteins might be just what you're looking for. Meanwhile, keep the company afloat with lessons learned from The MouseDriver Chronicles and The Bombast Transcripts.
Science buff? Read Tal Cohen's reaction to Rare Earth, and Peter Wayner on Digital Biology. Don't forget the grain of salt in Voodoo Science, either. His Dark Materials is one of the many Science Fiction titles that Slashdot readers have praised or panned for your pleasure.
And somewhere between Sci-Fi and reality are books like Flesh and Machines, reporting from the intersection of yesterday's fiction and current technology.
It's easy to submit your own reviews for consideration, too. Just read the Slashdot book review guidelines, and then use the web submission form.
Update: 20020427 12:50 by timothy
I Agree With This Post.
AC's have no claim to first post because they are teh fagit. All anonymous FP's belong to The CLIT.
Perl & XML
...
...
Perl | Posted by timothy on 11:15 AM -- Thursday July 11 2002
from the merging-realms dept.
dooling writes: "Perl & XML is a well-written book that accomplishes what it sets out to do. It states in the preface that it is written for Perl programmers who want to learn about XML and what is available in Perl for XML processing. It achieves this goal, but little else. When you are done reading this book you will have been given an overview of Perl and XML, know where to begin to attack an XML document, and know where to look to find more information." For dooling's more complete review, read on below.
The book starts out with a brief explanation of why XML and Perl are well-suited for each other. It then provides a teaser of things to come: an explanation of how to use the XML::Simple module. The first chapter concludes with some warnings and gotchas that seem a little premature since they have not really explained XML. Fortunately, most of these gotchas are covered in context later in the book.
The second chapter provides a whirlwind overview of XML -- covering its structure, DTDs, schemas, and XSLT (transformation). The discussion of XML in general, its history, and parts of an XML document are well done. They give someone who is familiar with static HTML the needed background to understand the structure of an XML document and the vocabulary used to describe it. Unfortunately, the discussion of where XML begins to distinguish itself from HTML, namely with DTDs, the new replacement for DTDs called schemas, and the transformation language XSLT, is too brief. They gloss over these topics with little explanation and few examples. That said, there are other books that do provide more in-depth coverage of XML (this book only promises an introduction).
The next five chapters cover Perl modules designed to process XML, starting with simple parsers and writers. Only methods and syntax relating to XML processing are explained. Therefore, if you are considering reading this book, you should be fairly comfortable with Perl and object-oriented (OO) interfaces to CPAN modules (nearly all the modules discussed provide OO APIs). Again, there are other books and perldoc documentation that cover Perl and it's OO features; so read them first if you are not familiar with OO Perl. If you are familiar with OO Perl, these chapters provide a good overview of the different ways XML can be processed (stream- and tree-based approaches), the advantages and disadvantages of each, and the Perl modules best suited for each approach. These chapters are the biggest strength of this book. The modules discussed in these chapters are by no means an exhaustive list of XML-related modules available from CPAN nor do the explanations of each module cover everything the module does. These chapters do, however, provide the reader with enough information that she can begin to process XML documents intelligently and know where to turn when she needs more information.
The next chapter, Chapter 8, covers XML tree iterators, XPath, XSLT, and XML::Twig. All of these topics are covered in a span of 16 pages (with only slightly over two pages dedicated to XSLT). Indeed, after reading the chapter, you may get the feeling that it was only included so the authors could cram more trite colloquialisms into the book. The short shrift given to these topics creates the impression, which is strengthened in the chapters that follow, that this book was rushed a bit to press.
Chapter 9 discusses applications of XML, including RSS and SOAP, and Chapter 10 is mostly example code. These chapters are intended to give you a feeling for what is possible without really giving you enough information to make it happen. The main problem with these chapters are the examples: the examples are long and the explanations are short. Thus, they are more useful as templates or a quick reference than for learning these topics in detail. Of course, the authors never promised you would be programming SOAP applications when you were done reading this book. And again, there are other books out there which discuss these topics in more detail. So the authors stay true to their promise throughout the book: they will introduce you to XML and tell you how to interact with XML using Perl, no more.
Personally, I found this book did, in general, give me enough information to get started using XML and pointed me where I needed to go to get more information. I am an experienced Perl programmer who is new to XML and comfortable with on-line documentation. This book seems to be written for people who fit this profile and who want to learn by doing (finding the answers to the "hard" questions as they arise). It does introduce a wide variety of XML-related topics and the Perl modules used to interact with them, which is what the authors promised to do in the preface. While it is by no means an authoritative text on Perl and XML, there is something to be said for keeping promises
Index As with most first-edition books, the index was adequate but not complete. For example, XML::Twig, which has an entire section covering it, does not appear in the index at all.
Contents
Preface
Perl and XML
Why Use Perl with XML?
XML Is Simple with XML::Simple
XML Processors
A Myriad of Modules
Keep in Mind
XML Gotchas
An XML Recap
A Brief History of XML
Markup, Elements, and Structure
Namespaces
Spacing
Entities
Unicode, Character Sets, and Encodings
The XML Declaration
Processing Instructions and Other Markup
Free-Form XML and Well-Formed Documents
Declaring Elements and Attributes
Schemas
Transformations
XML Basics: Reading and Writing
XML Parsers
XML::Parser
Stream-Based Versus Tree-Based Processing
Putting Parsers to Work
XML::LibXML
XML::XPath
Document Validation
XML::Writer
Character Sets and Encodings
Event Streams
Working with Streams
Events and Handlers
The Parser as Commodity
Stream Applications
XML::PYX
XML::Parser
SAX
SAX Event Handlers
DTD Handlers
External Entity Resolution
Drivers for Non-XML Sources
A Handler Base Class
XML::Handler::YAWriter as a Base Handler Class
XML::SAX: The Second Generation
Tree Processing
XML Trees
XML::Simple
XML::Parser's Tree Mode
XML::SimpleObject
XML::TreeBuilder
XML::Grove
DOM
DOM and Perl
DOM Class Interface Reference
XML::DOM
XML::LibXML
Beyond Trees: XPath, XSLT, and More
Tree Climbers
XPath
XSLT
Optimized Tree Processing
RSS, SOAP, and Other XML Applications
XML Modules
XML::RSS
XML Programming Tools
SOAP::Lite
Coding Strategies
Perl and XML Namespaces
Subclassing
Converting XML to HTML with XSLT
A Comics Index
Index
---
+
Perl & XML
...
...
Perl | Posted by timothy on 11:15 AM -- Thursday July 11 2002
from the merging-realms dept.
dooling writes: "Perl & XML is a well-written book that accomplishes what it sets out to do. It states in the preface that it is written for Perl programmers who want to learn about XML and what is available in Perl for XML processing. It achieves this goal, but little else. When you are done reading this book you will have been given an overview of Perl and XML, know where to begin to attack an XML document, and know where to look to find more information." For dooling's more complete review, read on below.
The book starts out with a brief explanation of why XML and Perl are well-suited for each other. It then provides a teaser of things to come: an explanation of how to use the XML::Simple module. The first chapter concludes with some warnings and gotchas that seem a little premature since they have not really explained XML. Fortunately, most of these gotchas are covered in context later in the book.
The second chapter provides a whirlwind overview of XML -- covering its structure, DTDs, schemas, and XSLT (transformation). The discussion of XML in general, its history, and parts of an XML document are well done. They give someone who is familiar with static HTML the needed background to understand the structure of an XML document and the vocabulary used to describe it. Unfortunately, the discussion of where XML begins to distinguish itself from HTML, namely with DTDs, the new replacement for DTDs called schemas, and the transformation language XSLT, is too brief. They gloss over these topics with little explanation and few examples. That said, there are other books that do provide more in-depth coverage of XML (this book only promises an introduction).
The next five chapters cover Perl modules designed to process XML, starting with simple parsers and writers. Only methods and syntax relating to XML processing are explained. Therefore, if you are considering reading this book, you should be fairly comfortable with Perl and object-oriented (OO) interfaces to CPAN modules (nearly all the modules discussed provide OO APIs). Again, there are other books and perldoc documentation that cover Perl and it's OO features; so read them first if you are not familiar with OO Perl. If you are familiar with OO Perl, these chapters provide a good overview of the different ways XML can be processed (stream- and tree-based approaches), the advantages and disadvantages of each, and the Perl modules best suited for each approach. These chapters are the biggest strength of this book. The modules discussed in these chapters are by no means an exhaustive list of XML-related modules available from CPAN nor do the explanations of each module cover everything the module does. These chapters do, however, provide the reader with enough information that she can begin to process XML documents intelligently and know where to turn when she needs more information.
The next chapter, Chapter 8, covers XML tree iterators, XPath, XSLT, and XML::Twig. All of these topics are covered in a span of 16 pages (with only slightly over two pages dedicated to XSLT). Indeed, after reading the chapter, you may get the feeling that it was only included so the authors could cram more trite colloquialisms into the book. The short shrift given to these topics creates the impression, which is strengthened in the chapters that follow, that this book was rushed a bit to press.
Chapter 9 discusses applications of XML, including RSS and SOAP, and Chapter 10 is mostly example code. These chapters are intended to give you a feeling for what is possible without really giving you enough information to make it happen. The main problem with these chapters are the examples: the examples are long and the explanations are short. Thus, they are more useful as templates or a quick reference than for learning these topics in detail. Of course, the authors never promised you would be programming SOAP applications when you were done reading this book. And again, there are other books out there which discuss these topics in more detail. So the authors stay true to their promise throughout the book: they will introduce you to XML and tell you how to interact with XML using Perl, no more.
Personally, I found this book did, in general, give me enough information to get started using XML and pointed me where I needed to go to get more information. I am an experienced Perl programmer who is new to XML and comfortable with on-line documentation. This book seems to be written for people who fit this profile and who want to learn by doing (finding the answers to the "hard" questions as they arise). It does introduce a wide variety of XML-related topics and the Perl modules used to interact with them, which is what the authors promised to do in the preface. While it is by no means an authoritative text on Perl and XML, there is something to be said for keeping promises
Index As with most first-edition books, the index was adequate but not complete. For example, XML::Twig, which has an entire section covering it, does not appear in the index at all.
Contents
Preface
Perl and XML
Why Use Perl with XML?
XML Is Simple with XML::Simple
XML Processors
A Myriad of Modules
Keep in Mind
XML Gotchas
An XML Recap
A Brief History of XML
Markup, Elements, and Structure
Namespaces
Spacing
Entities
Unicode, Character Sets, and Encodings
The XML Declaration
Processing Instructions and Other Markup
Free-Form XML and Well-Formed Documents
Declaring Elements and Attributes
Schemas
Transformations
XML Basics: Reading and Writing
XML Parsers
XML::Parser
Stream-Based Versus Tree-Based Processing
Putting Parsers to Work
XML::LibXML
XML::XPath
Document Validation
XML::Writer
Character Sets and Encodings
Event Streams
Working with Streams
Events and Handlers
The Parser as Commodity
Stream Applications
XML::PYX
XML::Parser
SAX
SAX Event Handlers
DTD Handlers
External Entity Resolution
Drivers for Non-XML Sources
A Handler Base Class
XML::Handler::YAWriter as a Base Handler Class
XML::SAX: The Second Generation
Tree Processing
XML Trees
XML::Simple
XML::Parser's Tree Mode
XML::SimpleObject
XML::TreeBuilder
XML::Grove
DOM
DOM and Perl
DOM Class Interface Reference
XML::DOM
XML::LibXML
Beyond Trees: XPath, XSLT, and More
Tree Climbers
XPath
XSLT
Optimized Tree Processing
RSS, SOAP, and Other XML Applications
XML Modules
XML::RSS
XML Programming Tools
SOAP::Lite
Coding Strategies
Perl and XML Namespaces
Subclassing
Converting XML to HTML with XSLT
A Comics Index
Index
However, as usual, your AC-ness prevented a first post. Have you ever considered suicide?
Your post has been duly ignored and claimed for the CLIT. AC's have no claim to first post, and never will, because they post above -1.
That book totally sucks, except for the ending. I read the whole thing while I was standing around being bored one night at a Barnes and Noble. The book was made in the 80's, so it had all this cold war crap going on, and Batman was ELDERLY! He was pushing 70! Anyway, Superman and Batman do go at it, after Superman survives a ground-zero atomic detonation which weakens him before the fight.
First Batman uses the Batcopter (oldschool!) to fire some missles at Superman to further weaken him. Batman is wearing a robotically-assisted battle suit to make hand-to-hand a bit more even, and they meet in the alley where Batman's parents died. They start fighting, some kryptonite is used, Batman shocks Superman with a high voltage power line, throws acid on him, uses sonic weapons, and just about kicks his ass before Batman has a heart attack, cuz he's fucking old. Alfred blows up the mansion and dies with it.
THE END.
Batman wears a leather bondage suit and spends his whole day in a dark cave chasing around his thong-sporting "ward" Robin.
Superman, on the other hand, lost his superpowers when he slept with Lois [Superman II] (who is hardly a prize). So he has to be gay to maintain his man-of-steel-ness. Why else would General Zod want to have Superman "kneel before him"?
Besides, everybody knows that Bruce and Clark are gay names.
FP for the CLIT
POV-Ray v3.5 is Now Available
It is with pleasure that the POV-Team announces that POV-Ray version 3.5 is now officially available for the Windows, Macintosh and Linux platforms.
In development for well over two years, v3.5 is a major improvement over all previous versions, not only in features, but in stability and the quality of the documentation and included example files. Of course, we don't claim it to be bug free (in fact, here's our known bugs list), but given our extensive alpha, pre-beta and beta program we feel that what we are releasing today is a stable, well-tested piece of software that can be used with confidence.
Since our first internal alpha version (early 2001), we have built 6 alphas, 14 private pre-betas, 16 public betas, and 6 release candidates to get us to today's final 3.5 release. During this time we read, reviewed, and in many cases answered over 12,000 newsgroup postings in our private and public beta test forums, resulting in many hundreds of bug fixes and improvements.
The POV-Team would like to extend its heartfelt thanks to all those who helped to make this possible, and particularly to our dedicated group of pre-beta testers, who not only performed testing functions but also made major contributions to the scene and documentation files, not only during the pre-beta stage but right up to the days before the final release.
The POV-Team co-ordinator, Chris Cason, would also like to extend his personal thanks to the POV-Team members who worked long and hard on this since we started on it all those years ago. Your dedication is truly appreciated.