Not every single passerby in the video reacted to it, or reacted positively. Watch it again more carefully. You incorrectly filtered what you watched. Your description doesn't fit the actual event, thus your conclusion is inadequate to explain it.
The more "sophisticated" - the more HUMAN - a robot is, the less it would stand out from what the passersby expect, and the less likely they are to give it attention different from what they would to an actual human. What would be the response to a human making bizarre pleas for directions? What proportion would actually attempt to help, what proportion would acknowledge but shun, and what proportion would not even notice or at least pretend not to notice?
It wasn't a useful "experiment", if it even deserves that description. It was apparently performed only once, and there were no controls. The result demonstrates nothing conclusive, social or otherwise.
It's quite possible that the primary reason most of those people stopped to aid it was because of their fascination and the uniqueness of it. Had it not been something that stood out dramatically from the expected, I suspect it would have received little attention and even less help.
It likely demonstrates very little of a social nature at all.
Just because they chose to publish anonymously doesn't mean that it was necessary to the process, and the influence of the papers might have actually been greater had the authors been known at the time. They were eventually revealed, voluntarily by Hamilton IIRC.
Like I said, I'm not promoting the argument, rather merely restating it for the purpose of the discussion. It's not a defensible argument in my opinion, either.
A gun is also an indestructible tool for democracy... or an indestructible tool for totalitarianism. The American founding fathers used them to (try to) create democracy, but the British of the time also used them to try to prevent it. Tools are, by definition, agnostic to the human "causes" to which they are applied.
Democracy doesn't require the sort of anonymity you're promoting. No one else in human history has ever enjoyed or needed it for the sake of democracy. The founding fathers didn't need it. The American Constitution, contrary to popular misunderstanding, does not enshrine it; it is not a basic "right".
Actually, what is enshrined in our democratic system is quite the reverse: the right to be able to confront one's accuser. That is one of the fundamental tenets of our jurisdprudent system.
You can't have it both ways, but you and other misguided people will no doubt keep trying, for selfish reasons.
Isn't that demand based on some theory of "collateral" and cumulative damage caused by someone sharing a media file? In other words, you share the file, which thousands of other people receive for free and thus don't pay to own, so YOU are responsible for the (theoretical/estimated) cumulative loss of profit?
(Yes, I know there are other interpretations how that scenario actually plays out; I'm not drinking the Kool-Aid, merely pointing it out.)
I wonder if Time Warner is actually providing a means for people to track their own bandwidth usage in near real-time, in order to avoid the "overage" penalty, or does TW hoard that information and make people cower in fear?
I'm betting it's the latter, since that promises to make them far more money, either through penalties that people couldn't see coming or from people buying unnecessary bandwidth upgrades out of fear of said penalties.
Yeah, that's it, it's that network admin the city fired with prejudice and is now suing for refusing to give passwords to people who didn't have rights to them. He's gonna make 'em pay even before his day in court!
If one doesn't like eavesdropping, what's wrong with simply dropping connection attempts from the IPs of known or suspected eavesdroppers? If I'm using PeerGuardian, why do I need SwarmScreen?
... they should have nominated and been able to vote for someone like Dennis Kucinich for President. Instead people marginalized him, probably exactly as his peers did in high school. Obama can't instigate real change because his basic skill is diplomacy - being a schmoozer, smooth talker, and compromizer - and not advanced problem-solving skills (unless you count avoiding confrontation as solving a problem).
What we needed - have always needed - in a president is someone willing to bite the hand that feeds him when necessary, willing to work toward a necessary thing even when it's poorly understood and unpopular; part of a president's job is education of the people why an unpopular thing might still be the Right Thing to do. Is Obama now going to "educate" the public why the government needs to be able to toss out the Bill of Rights whenever it seems expedient? Dennis Kucinich risked his political career and his ties to his own party trying to get the ball rolling on impeachment, for instance, knowing full well what it would likely cost him.
We need a president with balls, and Obama ain't got 'em. I don't regret the fact that I am now in the position of being able to tell all the Obama Disciples "I told you so." I just wish I could have educated people to see it for themselves before they made a poor choice, AGAIN.
1a. Windows Desktop Search with added "IFilters", or 1b. Google Desktop Search
I recommend (1a), amazingly, because once you've located and installed all the third-party IFilters - including one(s) for PDF files - WDS will be able to index and make searchable MANY more files than GDS (in my case, about THREE TIMES as many). If the original PDFs from which so much of the binder material was printed are still available, then your effort with the following is greatly reduced.
2. Good major-manufacturer scanner with ADF.
I haven't kept up with scanners in recent years, so I'll leave it to you or someone else to make specific recommendations. It may be important to stick with well-known brands for purposes of compatibility with the scanning/OCR software (3).
3. Forget Adobe: buy the latest version of OmniPage Pro. Just like Adobe, it can OCR text and pump it into a PDF while "fronting" it with an image of the original page, for sake of complex layouts and possibility of future OCR corrections.
No need to worry about complex database systems to store all the stuff; just create a storage directory (or hierachy, if there are tens of thousands of files). When you're done, you'll have a library of PDF files that have been fully indexed by a desktop search engine, such that any snippet of text in a document can be used to locate it.
Yep: they've been watching those Harry Potter movies, and they've figured out a way to cast DRM spells on their books so that if you're not the guy who bought the book, the book bites back and injects you with a neurotoxin venom that makes you obedient and gullible. Oh, and you grow white curly hair all over and start baaaaaa-bbling all the time.
If you have a bad enough case of ADD, I don't know that you could ever suck down too much caffeine. Your brain wouldn't be reacting to it like a stimulant, because the brain was starved of stimulation in the first place, which is what the caffeine (or Ritialin or ?) provides. That's not to say you can't still get addicted to it; after all, it's performing a useful neurochemical service for you that you'll dearly miss when it's gone. Still, I'd figure that people with "real" ADD traits in abundance probably wouldn suffer withdrawal symptoms as bad as would a neurotypical person.
People believe in "medical treatments that don't work" for exactly the same reasons that people believe in gods and other things whose existence cannot be objectively demonstrated: emotional need. Some people so badly need to eliminate uncertainties in their existence that they resort to imagining conditions that allow them a necessary degree of it. With that certainty comes a feeling of safety, and perhaps a reduction in stress.
Another word for this behavior is self-delusion. Collective reinforced self-delusion is frequently a threat to democracy and freedoms, not to mention personal health as in the instances related here. It's possible that people prone to self-delusional behavior have an extremely low tolerance to hormones induced by stress. If we could treat the stress some other way, we might eliminate their reliance on delusions.
When I get my bionic eye implants, I don't want them in the usual old boring and inflexible location, I want them on stalks jutting out of my head. Maybe a spare one in back, too....
There's "apologists", sure, but then on the extreme other end of that spectrum... there's you.
You'd have us believe that all change is good, and all (specific) change is unavoidable? That's bullshit, spoken by someone who's too cowardly to take responsibility for stupid choices that cause BAD changes to occur.
While apologists may be too quick to adopt responsibility for things and flagellate themselves and their kin, you're too quick to distance yourself and your kin from any responsibility. Nice "fair and balanced" ya got goin' there.
Slashdot Mirror
Not every single passerby in the video reacted to it, or reacted positively. Watch it again more carefully. You incorrectly filtered what you watched. Your description doesn't fit the actual event, thus your conclusion is inadequate to explain it.
The more "sophisticated" - the more HUMAN - a robot is, the less it would stand out from what the passersby expect, and the less likely they are to give it attention different from what they would to an actual human. What would be the response to a human making bizarre pleas for directions? What proportion would actually attempt to help, what proportion would acknowledge but shun, and what proportion would not even notice or at least pretend not to notice?
It wasn't a useful "experiment", if it even deserves that description. It was apparently performed only once, and there were no controls. The result demonstrates nothing conclusive, social or otherwise.
You couldn't bribe me to use T(w)itter! Well, that's not entirely true... if the it was $n10^6 I suppose I might consider it....
It's quite possible that the primary reason most of those people stopped to aid it was because of their fascination and the uniqueness of it. Had it not been something that stood out dramatically from the expected, I suspect it would have received little attention and even less help.
It likely demonstrates very little of a social nature at all.
Just because they chose to publish anonymously doesn't mean that it was necessary to the process, and the influence of the papers might have actually been greater had the authors been known at the time. They were eventually revealed, voluntarily by Hamilton IIRC.
Like I said, I'm not promoting the argument, rather merely restating it for the purpose of the discussion. It's not a defensible argument in my opinion, either.
A gun is also an indestructible tool for democracy... or an indestructible tool for totalitarianism. The American founding fathers used them to (try to) create democracy, but the British of the time also used them to try to prevent it. Tools are, by definition, agnostic to the human "causes" to which they are applied.
Democracy doesn't require the sort of anonymity you're promoting. No one else in human history has ever enjoyed or needed it for the sake of democracy. The founding fathers didn't need it. The American Constitution, contrary to popular misunderstanding, does not enshrine it; it is not a basic "right".
Actually, what is enshrined in our democratic system is quite the reverse: the right to be able to confront one's accuser. That is one of the fundamental tenets of our jurisdprudent system.
You can't have it both ways, but you and other misguided people will no doubt keep trying, for selfish reasons.
Isn't that demand based on some theory of "collateral" and cumulative damage caused by someone sharing a media file? In other words, you share the file, which thousands of other people receive for free and thus don't pay to own, so YOU are responsible for the (theoretical/estimated) cumulative loss of profit?
(Yes, I know there are other interpretations how that scenario actually plays out; I'm not drinking the Kool-Aid, merely pointing it out.)
That is one of the best layman's explanations of income disparity I've ever read. Awesome! Blog that. :-)
I wonder if Time Warner is actually providing a means for people to track their own bandwidth usage in near real-time, in order to avoid the "overage" penalty, or does TW hoard that information and make people cower in fear?
I'm betting it's the latter, since that promises to make them far more money, either through penalties that people couldn't see coming or from people buying unnecessary bandwidth upgrades out of fear of said penalties.
Apparently we once were... ever heard of Atlantis?
Yeah, that's it, it's that network admin the city fired with prejudice and is now suing for refusing to give passwords to people who didn't have rights to them. He's gonna make 'em pay even before his day in court!
Dunno if it does or doesn't. SwarmScreen won't do anything to stop ISPs. Once your ISP is involved, your privacy and/or anonymity is screwed.
... because my doctor advised me just the other day that I need to be getting less exercise, for the sake of my health.
If one doesn't like eavesdropping, what's wrong with simply dropping connection attempts from the IPs of known or suspected eavesdroppers? If I'm using PeerGuardian, why do I need SwarmScreen?
... they should have nominated and been able to vote for someone like Dennis Kucinich for President. Instead people marginalized him, probably exactly as his peers did in high school. Obama can't instigate real change because his basic skill is diplomacy - being a schmoozer, smooth talker, and compromizer - and not advanced problem-solving skills (unless you count avoiding confrontation as solving a problem).
What we needed - have always needed - in a president is someone willing to bite the hand that feeds him when necessary, willing to work toward a necessary thing even when it's poorly understood and unpopular; part of a president's job is education of the people why an unpopular thing might still be the Right Thing to do. Is Obama now going to "educate" the public why the government needs to be able to toss out the Bill of Rights whenever it seems expedient? Dennis Kucinich risked his political career and his ties to his own party trying to get the ball rolling on impeachment, for instance, knowing full well what it would likely cost him.
We need a president with balls, and Obama ain't got 'em. I don't regret the fact that I am now in the position of being able to tell all the Obama Disciples "I told you so." I just wish I could have educated people to see it for themselves before they made a poor choice, AGAIN.
1a. Windows Desktop Search with added "IFilters", or
1b. Google Desktop Search
I recommend (1a), amazingly, because once you've located and installed all the third-party IFilters - including one(s) for PDF files - WDS will be able to index and make searchable MANY more files than GDS (in my case, about THREE TIMES as many). If the original PDFs from which so much of the binder material was printed are still available, then your effort with the following is greatly reduced.
2. Good major-manufacturer scanner with ADF.
I haven't kept up with scanners in recent years, so I'll leave it to you or someone else to make specific recommendations. It may be important to stick with well-known brands for purposes of compatibility with the scanning/OCR software (3).
3. Forget Adobe: buy the latest version of OmniPage Pro. Just like Adobe, it can OCR text and pump it into a PDF while "fronting" it with an image of the original page, for sake of complex layouts and possibility of future OCR corrections.
No need to worry about complex database systems to store all the stuff; just create a storage directory (or hierachy, if there are tens of thousands of files). When you're done, you'll have a library of PDF files that have been fully indexed by a desktop search engine, such that any snippet of text in a document can be used to locate it.
Isn't that the very definition of a salesman?
I didn't say they'd *get* the spells from Harry Potter, only that they'd get the *idea* from watching the movies....
Yep: they've been watching those Harry Potter movies, and they've figured out a way to cast DRM spells on their books so that if you're not the guy who bought the book, the book bites back and injects you with a neurotoxin venom that makes you obedient and gullible. Oh, and you grow white curly hair all over and start baaaaaa-bbling all the time.
If you have a bad enough case of ADD, I don't know that you could ever suck down too much caffeine. Your brain wouldn't be reacting to it like a stimulant, because the brain was starved of stimulation in the first place, which is what the caffeine (or Ritialin or ?) provides. That's not to say you can't still get addicted to it; after all, it's performing a useful neurochemical service for you that you'll dearly miss when it's gone. Still, I'd figure that people with "real" ADD traits in abundance probably wouldn suffer withdrawal symptoms as bad as would a neurotypical person.
Slashdot is copying the AutoPager Firefox extension concept? Was code re-used as well?
People believe in "medical treatments that don't work" for exactly the same reasons that people believe in gods and other things whose existence cannot be objectively demonstrated: emotional need. Some people so badly need to eliminate uncertainties in their existence that they resort to imagining conditions that allow them a necessary degree of it. With that certainty comes a feeling of safety, and perhaps a reduction in stress.
Another word for this behavior is self-delusion. Collective reinforced self-delusion is frequently a threat to democracy and freedoms, not to mention personal health as in the instances related here. It's possible that people prone to self-delusional behavior have an extremely low tolerance to hormones induced by stress. If we could treat the stress some other way, we might eliminate their reliance on delusions.
Maybe a third eye on my third leg? Can you imagine the vagina-cam possibilities?
When I get my bionic eye implants, I don't want them in the usual old boring and inflexible location, I want them on stalks jutting out of my head. Maybe a spare one in back, too....
There's "apologists", sure, but then on the extreme other end of that spectrum... there's you.
You'd have us believe that all change is good, and all (specific) change is unavoidable? That's bullshit, spoken by someone who's too cowardly to take responsibility for stupid choices that cause BAD changes to occur.
While apologists may be too quick to adopt responsibility for things and flagellate themselves and their kin, you're too quick to distance yourself and your kin from any responsibility. Nice "fair and balanced" ya got goin' there.