Ok that's funny, but it got me to thinking. Why bother with artificial intelligence when we can just wire cat brains into machinery? I mean, cats are free, right? Seems like it'd save a lot of time and expense.
I'm sure they'll figure out how to prevent sapient assault droids from climbing the drapes.
> I maintain that the porn industry has done as much or more than anyone else has to push the development of the internet forward. Certainly they were the first to show that you could make money on this new media.
The porn industry is usually the first to seize a new media or transport. Porn pushed the development of the VCR, the DVD, (multiple angles) probably the BBS, indirectly image and video codecs, the internet, and is still practically the only legal use of fiber optic bandwidth to the home. Ask the Verizon salesguy "But what is all that bandwidth for?" and watch him avoid the question.
I suspect the great majority of traffic on the internet is porn. I wonder what Al thinks of that, or if he thinks of it at all.
In 1986, Al Gore proposed two amendments to the National Science Foundation Authorization Act:
WITHIN THIS BILL I HAVE TWO AMENDMENTS, THE COMPUTER NETWORK STUDY AND THE GREENHOUSE EFFECT REPORT. THE FIRST AMENDMENT WAS ORIGINALLY INTRODUCED WITH SENATOR GORTON AS S. 2594. IT CALLS FOR A 2-YEAR STUDY OF THE CRITICAL PROBLEMS AND CURRENT AND FUTURE OPTIONS REGARDING COMMUNICATIONS NETWORKS FOR RESEARCH COMPUTERS. THE SECOND AMENDMENT REQUIRES THE PRESIDENT TO SUBMIT A REPORT TO CONGRESS ON THE ACTIONS TAKEN TO ESTABLISH AN INTERNATIONAL YEAR OF THE GREENHOUSE EFFECT.
Gore spoke out in favor of the national high-performance computer technology act of 1988 [I was using what we now call the Internet in 1984, four years before this act -- ROC] which was not passed, but led to the High Performance Computing Act of 1991.
Al Gore is in some places credited with coining the term "internet superhighway", but doesn't appear to have done that either. He appears to have first used the term in 1989, years after the term was actually coined.
Vinton Cerf: While we're waiting for questions, I'd like to clear up one little item - about the Vice President... He really does deserve some credit for his early recognition of the importance of the Internet and the technology that makes it work. He was certainly among the first if not the first in Congress to realize how powerful the information revolution would be and both as Senator and Vice President he has been enormously helpful in supporting legislation and programs to help further develop the Internet [...] June 14, 2000
March 9, 1999
"During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet."
Even Al Gore's defenders call the quote a "slight mistatement". What he probably meant to say was: "While I was serving in the Senate, I took the initiative in supporting the basic research necessary to create the Internet as we know it today."
According to my notes, quotes are from "Al Gore and the Creation of the Internet" by Richard Wiggins. There are a lot of quotes on the, um, internet from this paper.
My own thoughts: What most likely happened was that Gore blew his lines in the Wolf Blitzer interview. He meant to say something like the above, or something like "I took the initiative in co-writing legislation to help create the internet" -- a small exaggeration, but true enough for TV news -- and in the stress of the moment flubbed it. In the course of his early career, Al Gore, along with senators from both sides of the aisle, supported and co-wrote bills that created some of the infrastructure which we collectively call "the internet". Although his contribution is undeniable, it doesn't strike me as particularly noteworthy.
It's true, detractors and comedians did substitute "invented the internet" or "built the internet" with much hilarity ensuing, but seriously, those lines are not that far off from Gore's actual quote "I took the initiative in creating the Internet", which is similarly laughable. I believe Gore misspoke -- he couldn't be naive enough to think he could say something like that and get away with it -- but Gore's actual quote is further from reality than Jay Leno's misquote is from Gore's quote.
> I believe the song was either "The end is the beginning is the end" or "The beginning is the end is the beginning" off of the Batman Forever soundtrack. Horrible, Horrible movie, but a pretty good soundtrack!
That explains it. I made a huge effort to forget everything to do with that film. Just bought the song off itunes, though.
> Ozymandius's costume looks completely different (I miss his purple one!), and Silk Spectre's costume is pretty generic looking.
Personally, I thought Ozymandius's costume in the comic book was kind of silly, and was somewhat relieved when they changed it for the movie. I'd tend to agree on silk spectre, except those faux garters are a little edgy.
> Nite Owl looks too much like Batman. (Sure they are similar characters, but very different also. I feel Nite Owl is not a very "dark" character, and making him into a 2nd rate Batman would not be doing his character justice.)
This is from memory way back in the eighties, but I seem to remember that Moore originally wanted to do this as a "parallel world" using the DC characters, but the company said no. I could be misremembering. But Night Owl was supposed to be this world's batman, and Dan Dreiberg struck me as the only really decent character of the whole bunch. As such, I'd expect him to be less "dark" than the other characters.
> Also I thought Rorshach's voice was a more distinctive monotone. He sounds just like any random guy whispering in this.
Did anyone else have trouble listening to Rorshach in the trailer? I could hear him fine in the "standard resolution" trailer, but his voice is drowned out by the music in the HD version. I wasn't expecting anything particularly different there -- Rorshach is a normal human, after all.
> But based on the production clips it seems like the director is really trying to be true to the story and look of the comic, so as long as they don't change the ending I don't see that it could be THAT horrible, no matter if Alan Moore has already disowned it (he disowns like ALL his movie adaptations, doesn't he?)
Agreed. The look is amazingly like the comic. And I applaud them for keeping it in 1985 instead of trying to twist the plot so it would fit in current times.
I'm not familiar with Smashing Pumpkins... what song was that?
I was looking forward to LED lights. I use compact fluorescents but don't like them for the mercury hazard and the slow turn-on time. Moreover, they don't save as much energy as you think, if used in situations where they're turned off and on frequently.
When they first came out, there was a positive advantage in longevity, (my first two CFLs -- purchased last century -- are still working) but "value engineering" since then has pretty much removed that advantage -- the CFLs I purchase now don't last much longer than regular light bulbs. And I have a sneaking suspicion that ten years from now we'll be looking back at disbelief at how we were increasing the mercury levels in our environment just to save a few kW-h.
LED light sources have a lot of technical advantages. They should use even less energy, don't have the mercury issue, and currently available LEDs last pretty much forever. So it could be a really good deal, right?
And yet... I harbor a secret fear that once LEDs become popular, in a couple of years, industry cost-cutting measures will remove all of these advantages.
Case in point -- have you noticed that stoplights are gradually being replaced with LED arrays? There was a big move in my town not long ago to replace all standard bulbs with LEDs, and quite frankly, they suck. Hard. Nowdays you can't find a stop light that doesn't have one-fourth to one-third of the LEDs completely out or randomly flashing.
Yeah, I know, it's a harsh environment and the city probably went to the lowest bidder, but there's a nagging part of me that whispers: as soon as LED light sources start to become popular, they'll start to suck, as they already do in traffic lights.
It seems to me that it is the business of the BSA to present software piracy as a significant problem, whether it is or not. I mean, their business model is to earn money by uncovering violations, right? So it would be bad for business if their software piracy report uncovered, say, a sharp decline in piracy. With such a clear conflict of interest, how could anyone believe what they say?
Reminds me of the year my daughter entered kindergarten. The school required me to identify her race. (We're mixed but could pass for white.) Well, it wasn't really a requirement. It was one of those odd situations where the law required them to keep records of racial percentages but forbade them to actually ask her race. I declined to answer. (Besides, at that time the choices were exactly one of: White, African-American, Hispanic (white), Hispanic (non-white) and Asian, and she was none of these.) The school bureaucrat solved the dilemma by looking my child over and writing down "white". (And thereby skewed their percentages a little, but oh well.)
So yeah, I could see a situation where you'd have to drop trou, be looked over, and an administrator would write down "male" or "female" or have to fill out "other (specify)" in the name of equality.
Man, that's a candidate for "worst jobs in education"...
It's possible backups are encrypted, (but then, why isn't the key in escrow?) but it's also possible they don't have effective backups.
For instance, they might have the business data backed up, but not the metadata that makes it relevant. They may be relying on redundant disks or data vaults. They may be backing up application data but not system data, where passwords are stored.
Companies mess up in this fashion all the time. Not to simply bash "the man", but local governments, which don't have to worry about things like competition or business continuance, and have leaders who are changed out every few years, are even more likely to screw up in this fashion.
Tops on my list of what Windows 7 should not be is Vista in a different shape box.
Seriously, if Microsoft thinks they can make a few tweaks on Vista, load up a new marketing effort and make a big hit with Windows 7, it'll be the final sign that the last of the brains have left the company.
But considering their announced delivery date, I don't see how Windows 7 can be anything else.
I think we're looking at a big splash in early 2010, not in a good way.
If it's a "hostile outsourcing" where the outsourcing company bullies the client into accepting their services, you might not want to be involved in the resulting bad blood with the surviving rank-and-file. In that case I'd say it's time to move on.
If you don't think the new company is a good fit, it may be time to move on.
If the culture/pay (whatever you're after) is good and the level of hostility is low enough, (or you don't care) go for it.
Slashdot Mirror
It chases the cleaning crew?
Wow...
Why hasn't someone made a movie about this??
Ok that's funny, but it got me to thinking. Why bother with artificial intelligence when we can just wire cat brains into machinery? I mean, cats are free, right? Seems like it'd save a lot of time and expense.
I'm sure they'll figure out how to prevent sapient assault droids from climbing the drapes.
>There's such a disconnect between what people experience in their cars and what they experience in the rest of their lives.'"
Yes. My car doesn't suddenly quit for no reason.
> I maintain that the porn industry has done as much or more than anyone else has to push the development of the internet forward. Certainly they were the first to show that you could make money on this new media.
The porn industry is usually the first to seize a new media or transport. Porn pushed the development of the VCR, the DVD, (multiple angles) probably the BBS, indirectly image and video codecs, the internet, and is still practically the only legal use of fiber optic bandwidth to the home. Ask the Verizon salesguy "But what is all that bandwidth for?" and watch him avoid the question.
I suspect the great majority of traffic on the internet is porn. I wonder what Al thinks of that, or if he thinks of it at all.
A little more info:
In 1986, Al Gore proposed two amendments to the National Science Foundation Authorization Act:
WITHIN THIS BILL I HAVE TWO AMENDMENTS, THE COMPUTER NETWORK STUDY AND THE GREENHOUSE EFFECT REPORT. THE FIRST AMENDMENT WAS ORIGINALLY INTRODUCED WITH SENATOR GORTON AS S. 2594. IT CALLS FOR A 2-YEAR STUDY OF THE CRITICAL PROBLEMS AND CURRENT AND FUTURE OPTIONS REGARDING COMMUNICATIONS NETWORKS FOR RESEARCH COMPUTERS. THE SECOND AMENDMENT REQUIRES THE PRESIDENT TO SUBMIT A REPORT TO CONGRESS ON THE ACTIONS TAKEN TO ESTABLISH AN INTERNATIONAL YEAR OF THE GREENHOUSE EFFECT.
Gore spoke out in favor of the national high-performance computer technology act of 1988 [I was using what we now call the Internet in 1984, four years before this act -- ROC] which was not passed, but led to the High Performance Computing Act of 1991.
Al Gore is in some places credited with coining the term "internet superhighway", but doesn't appear to have done that either. He appears to have first used the term in 1989, years after the term was actually coined.
Vinton Cerf: While we're waiting for questions, I'd like to clear up one little item - about the Vice President ... He really does deserve some credit for his early recognition of the importance of the Internet and the technology that makes it work. He was certainly among the first if not the first in Congress to realize how powerful the information revolution would be and both as Senator and Vice President he has been enormously helpful in supporting legislation and programs to help further develop the Internet [...] June 14, 2000
March 9, 1999 "During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet."
Even Al Gore's defenders call the quote a "slight mistatement". What he probably meant to say was: "While I was serving in the Senate, I took the initiative in supporting the basic research necessary to create the Internet as we know it today."
According to my notes, quotes are from "Al Gore and the Creation of the Internet" by Richard Wiggins. There are a lot of quotes on the, um, internet from this paper.
My own thoughts: What most likely happened was that Gore blew his lines in the Wolf Blitzer interview. He meant to say something like the above, or something like "I took the initiative in co-writing legislation to help create the internet" -- a small exaggeration, but true enough for TV news -- and in the stress of the moment flubbed it. In the course of his early career, Al Gore, along with senators from both sides of the aisle, supported and co-wrote bills that created some of the infrastructure which we collectively call "the internet". Although his contribution is undeniable, it doesn't strike me as particularly noteworthy.
It's true, detractors and comedians did substitute "invented the internet" or "built the internet" with much hilarity ensuing, but seriously, those lines are not that far off from Gore's actual quote "I took the initiative in creating the Internet", which is similarly laughable. I believe Gore misspoke -- he couldn't be naive enough to think he could say something like that and get away with it -- but Gore's actual quote is further from reality than Jay Leno's misquote is from Gore's quote.
> So that terrible M. Night Shyamalan garbage won't become a reality.
I checked, and unfortunately the movie still exists. (Man, that's 91 minutes I'll never see again.)
In other words, what are the chances that this is going to look really foolish in a decade or so?
> I believe the song was either "The end is the beginning is the end" or "The beginning is the end is the beginning" off of the Batman Forever soundtrack. Horrible, Horrible movie, but a pretty good soundtrack!
That explains it. I made a huge effort to forget everything to do with that film. Just bought the song off itunes, though.
> Ozymandius's costume looks completely different (I miss his purple one!), and Silk Spectre's costume is pretty generic looking.
Personally, I thought Ozymandius's costume in the comic book was kind of silly, and was somewhat relieved when they changed it for the movie. I'd tend to agree on silk spectre, except those faux garters are a little edgy.
> Nite Owl looks too much like Batman. (Sure they are similar characters, but very different also. I feel Nite Owl is not a very "dark" character, and making him into a 2nd rate Batman would not be doing his character justice.)
This is from memory way back in the eighties, but I seem to remember that Moore originally wanted to do this as a "parallel world" using the DC characters, but the company said no. I could be misremembering. But Night Owl was supposed to be this world's batman, and Dan Dreiberg struck me as the only really decent character of the whole bunch. As such, I'd expect him to be less "dark" than the other characters.
> Also I thought Rorshach's voice was a more distinctive monotone. He sounds just like any random guy whispering in this.
Did anyone else have trouble listening to Rorshach in the trailer? I could hear him fine in the "standard resolution" trailer, but his voice is drowned out by the music in the HD version. I wasn't expecting anything particularly different there -- Rorshach is a normal human, after all.
> But based on the production clips it seems like the director is really trying to be true to the story and look of the comic, so as long as they don't change the ending I don't see that it could be THAT horrible, no matter if Alan Moore has already disowned it (he disowns like ALL his movie adaptations, doesn't he?)
Agreed. The look is amazingly like the comic. And I applaud them for keeping it in 1985 instead of trying to twist the plot so it would fit in current times.
I'm not familiar with Smashing Pumpkins... what song was that?
I was looking forward to LED lights. I use compact fluorescents but don't like them for the mercury hazard and the slow turn-on time. Moreover, they don't save as much energy as you think, if used in situations where they're turned off and on frequently.
When they first came out, there was a positive advantage in longevity, (my first two CFLs -- purchased last century -- are still working) but "value engineering" since then has pretty much removed that advantage -- the CFLs I purchase now don't last much longer than regular light bulbs. And I have a sneaking suspicion that ten years from now we'll be looking back at disbelief at how we were increasing the mercury levels in our environment just to save a few kW-h.
LED light sources have a lot of technical advantages. They should use even less energy, don't have the mercury issue, and currently available LEDs last pretty much forever. So it could be a really good deal, right?
And yet... I harbor a secret fear that once LEDs become popular, in a couple of years, industry cost-cutting measures will remove all of these advantages.
Case in point -- have you noticed that stoplights are gradually being replaced with LED arrays? There was a big move in my town not long ago to replace all standard bulbs with LEDs, and quite frankly, they suck. Hard. Nowdays you can't find a stop light that doesn't have one-fourth to one-third of the LEDs completely out or randomly flashing.
Yeah, I know, it's a harsh environment and the city probably went to the lowest bidder, but there's a nagging part of me that whispers: as soon as LED light sources start to become popular, they'll start to suck, as they already do in traffic lights.
It seems to me that it is the business of the BSA to present software piracy as a significant problem, whether it is or not. I mean, their business model is to earn money by uncovering violations, right? So it would be bad for business if their software piracy report uncovered, say, a sharp decline in piracy. With such a clear conflict of interest, how could anyone believe what they say?
It's difficult to fire city employees, especially in San Francisco.
Who uses physical mail anymore? I pay all but two bills online (and it looks like water and trash are coming around) and the rest is junk.
Reminds me of the year my daughter entered kindergarten. The school required me to identify her race. (We're mixed but could pass for white.) Well, it wasn't really a requirement. It was one of those odd situations where the law required them to keep records of racial percentages but forbade them to actually ask her race. I declined to answer. (Besides, at that time the choices were exactly one of: White, African-American, Hispanic (white), Hispanic (non-white) and Asian, and she was none of these.) The school bureaucrat solved the dilemma by looking my child over and writing down "white". (And thereby skewed their percentages a little, but oh well.)
So yeah, I could see a situation where you'd have to drop trou, be looked over, and an administrator would write down "male" or "female" or have to fill out "other (specify)" in the name of equality.
Man, that's a candidate for "worst jobs in education"...
We must force women to enter careers in hard sciences and engineering.
It's possible backups are encrypted, (but then, why isn't the key in escrow?) but it's also possible they don't have effective backups.
For instance, they might have the business data backed up, but not the metadata that makes it relevant. They may be relying on redundant disks or data vaults. They may be backing up application data but not system data, where passwords are stored.
Companies mess up in this fashion all the time. Not to simply bash "the man", but local governments, which don't have to worry about things like competition or business continuance, and have leaders who are changed out every few years, are even more likely to screw up in this fashion.
Tops on my list of what Windows 7 should not be is Vista in a different shape box.
Seriously, if Microsoft thinks they can make a few tweaks on Vista, load up a new marketing effort and make a big hit with Windows 7, it'll be the final sign that the last of the brains have left the company.
But considering their announced delivery date, I don't see how Windows 7 can be anything else.
I think we're looking at a big splash in early 2010, not in a good way.
That's the one!
Windows for Warships
If it's a "hostile outsourcing" where the outsourcing company bullies the client into accepting their services, you might not want to be involved in the resulting bad blood with the surviving rank-and-file. In that case I'd say it's time to move on.
If you don't think the new company is a good fit, it may be time to move on.
If the culture/pay (whatever you're after) is good and the level of hostility is low enough, (or you don't care) go for it.
Perhaps a variation on this:
http://www.evanwashere.com/StolenSidekick/
> While the "geeks" are configuring their firewalls, grandma laughs and buys a mac and watches you try to avoid getting pwned.
And then she catches Melissa anyway.
'S all moot, 'cause she can't afford a Mac in the first place.