Sorry, just an example of the ever-narrowing line between professional-grade and consumer-grade electronics. No, you're right, it does not yield the same results. Not YET. But how long would you estimate? Be honest?
Just wanted to toss this at everybody. Here at Nanosoft Technologies, we're developing a brand-new entirely C++ widget set for Xwindows. Now I know many of you will just groan, but in truth, we have already succeeded in creating applications in a handful of lines using it. This is MUCH easier than gtk+... And fully OOP.
While our current page hasn't been updated in a while and will remain like that to mask our efforts, we are planning on writing a web-browser once our widget set is finished. With an extensible, dynamic framework. If something is missing, it can quickly be added.
The key to our design: Stability. This is why we still haven't made a public release of our current line. We are stress-testing everything, down to the simple classes that are too small to ever break. With our design standards, and an OOP framework (with special RAD tools and toolkits), we will have a workable web-browser eventually.
Of course, we are still anywhere up to a year from release date. But just wanted to mention it.
Just a thought, but movies are becoming MUCH less expensive to produce. Sure, there was a time when you needed multi-million-dollar equipment to make a movie. But now, if you can get ahold of a decent handycam, a Buz, a copy of blender for your special effects (for free, or $100 for the C-Key for the extra punch), then you can make a movie. As high quality? Well, it might look like its from the 1980's or something, but it is MUCH easier today.
Now for my little rant...
I think this is something that society will quickly learn. Information wants to be free. People play music because they LIKE to. Same with movies, same with computer games. Right now, capitalism is stifling the best and the brightest, making them more likely to try profiteering. But sooner or later, this will come to an end.
Who knows where this'll go, but given some of the recent breakthroughs in fusion and nanotech, I'd say we'll eventually end up with an OpenSource nanoassembler powered by fusion capable of self-replication (some assembly required). Yes, it's sci-fi now. But for how long... We can no longer simply dismiss the possibility. If tangible things were free, what would that mean?
Not necessarily. If you had rediculous amounts of hard-disk space and CPU time, you could always grab the digital data straight out of the audio/video output pipeline and just write it to a file. No quality degradation at all. (Except if you re-encoded it into something else, like MPEG, but then you don't encrypt it again, right?)
This becomes especially easy if they ever release a Linux player. Imitating an Xserver and/dev/dsp is actually not all that hard, several programs already function by pretending to be normal Xservers (VNC, 3Dwm, Xvfb). All you need to do is intercept all the digital writes. Hack Xvfb or VNC for the video, use NBD for the audio, and you have it.
Just replying to myself here, I just installed it and tried it out. It is truly amazing. I'm just going to kill my xserver right now....
There we are, I'm still here, even after killing my XServer! Just start up the server again, enter my password, and *POOF*.
The only thing that this is _SUPPOSED_ to change is your speed. I _DID_ notice a big speed difference, but, strangely, it was a POSITIVE one. X now runs about 2 to 3 times as fast on my system (not claiming I get it...).
I even tried ssh2'ing from a solaris box into my Linux box over a (rather slow) ADSL without even setting up the transfer mode properly, and it was actually usable!!! (rather slow, but if I had bothered to fix my transfer mode... Or, if I had bothered running a client on their side instead of remote-X'ing it.).
And I've even managed to get it fairly well secured (mind you, the dedicated firewall helps that;). I don't think there's any going back now... VNC has improved my system performance, and stability, all at the same time. I can just kill my XServer and keep running! (this helps a lot, the nVidia xserver is not that great stability-wise...).
I'm REALLY surprised that this isn't more popular, AT/T did a REALLY good job here. And its all GPL (or was that LGPL, can't quite recall...).
And it even lets you remote-X to windows or (gasp) Mac. Or remote-windows to your unix boxen! Or even remote-whatever to a java-enabled web-browser (if you enable that, which I did not.)
Then, with a bit of hacking around, and an ssh2 server, I should be able to get it working.... Hrm, (hacks madly)... Soon I'll be able to do this. THANKS!
Why not? I still use a (20 year old I think...) green dumb-terminal made by HP, and I have a hacked up little 386 (with an SMC ultra and an ATI Mach 64) as an Xterminal. If I could get these suckers for $200 each, then I'd probably go for one or three.
Just pointing out that there IS a way to set immutable files on Linux with the ext2 filesystem. I forget the exact command (it's in the ext2 tools though) but it IS there.
Well, my time is actually fairly valuable, but a homebuilt robot is WELL worth it. I've built a few, believe it or not the price drops considerably when you use custom-fab parts instead of prebuilt stuff. 32-bit processor? $20 or less. I agree that 18 degrees of freedom is a lot, but for about $5 each you can get decent servos and steppers (surplus of course). I have a crate (literally) of old 5 1/4 drives lying around (parts and other reasons...)
And walking robots (even bipedal in fact) are not that bad if you know how to program (although, some AI (neural net mostly) knowledge helps).
I dunno, maybe most people find robots a LOT harder to build than I do. Anyways, that's the end of my lunchbreak;)
This is exactly the point of what France (i think) is thinking of doing (making all government software require open source). To STOP these "closed" proprietary programs where nobody is quite sure how they work. I tend to trust a system I can think about more than one that is hidden from me.
If only I had some moderator points to burn.... Too bad he's an AC. Speaking as a robotics hobbiest myself (who was was on an award-winning robot team in my school years), $2500 could build a seriously mean robot. Why, you're talking, MANY embedded microcontrollers, full aluminum or titanium frame, lith-ion battery, the WORKS. Sure it wouldn't be "cute" as an AIBO, but it would LOOK cool! (and it could look like something else, too).
Personally, what _I_ want to get, is one of those Heathkit things from years ago. The ones with the arm on them. Forget the name now, but they were SO cool. (and a HELL of a lot less expensive).
Unless I miss my guess, this might even be enough to use "micro rocket thrusters" (forget the link now...) or similar (or a helium baloon!) and have a *FLYING* robot. Sorry, but the sci-fi-style flying black observer drones look SO much cooler.
Oh, the things I could do with $2500...
And of course, a homebuilt robot would run on opensource (not necessarily 100% on Linux, because of the multi-embedded-microcontrol systems in it, but developed on Linux certainly and maybe even with Linux on the main chip;) Put a couple Crystal DSPs and an Intermetal MP3 decoder chip in it, mount a camera, and you would have yerself a robot to be proud of...
Trust me on this, they are plenty stable. If I remember correctly, they have something like 4 or 5 times the needed tensile strength... Although I could be forgetting.... (it might be like 2 times... But I'm pretty sure it's more). I once knew;)
I had a thought. I know that not everybody writes this stuff the same way, but would some Perl guru want to give a l33tsp33k to english converter a try? I'd do it, but I'm not a Perl guy.
Then I could really say that something about that unintelligeble dialect actually impressed me. Heh.
And 99% (by your estimation anyway) call an "External Modem" a "Blinky Thing". And 99% call a "Network Card" a "thing that connects your computer to somebody elses computer". And 99% call "RAM" "space", and "Hard Drive" "space", completely oblivious to the difference.
Sorry, but just because people with little or no relation to a subject mislabel it does not mean that it is time to relabel it. So "close" the "web", turn off your "hard drive" and "screen", and go find someone else to bother with your name changes.
Hrm, well, I run a couple servers myself, a few of which do get SOME (small amount) of demand. What I can personally say is that, in the past month, I have been NMAP'ed a couple dozen times. I have been ping attacked a few times too, although it seemed like they were attacking me with a 33.6 modem or something, so it failed miserably.
But WHY are people worried about these 12-year-old "superhackers"?? I personally have no idea, my systems are not a model of perfect security (although they ARE fairly secure, I tend to take the "paranoid" approach with it...), but they have managed to deflect dozens of script-kiddie attacks at the front door. So far, with a 0% rate of intrusion, I personally don't worry about script kiddies. Let them have their sad little games for all I care. I keep backups and I use a filter firewall, and so should any sysadmin who's job matters at all to them.
If anything, this focus on security is a GOOD thing. Since the internet is SO hostile, we can get well-tested secure protocols. It makes me MUCH less nervous about SSH2'ing to my box.
I really hate to bring this up, because I am personally a big supporter of absolute equality for everybody, but lets just look at the big picture for a second. Forget we're talking about humans, let's instead deal with a hypothetical race called "Blorks".
Okay, during their evolution, lets look at how the Blork species evolved. During their evolution, lots of things were very natural to them, as they were, of course, little better than animals. Hence, sex was commonplace and often forceful, the strong dominated the weak, and the weak were left to die.
Now, as the Blorks evolved, they became more intelligent. Now, most reproduction was still done by the thugs who used force to get what they wanted. Since nobody "knew any better", it was just accepted.
The point being, intelligence still kept creeping in from the sides, even though it was not always a reproductive trait. (However, the reverse is true, stupidity IS an anti-reproductive trait!).
So now the Blorks develop a crazy religion which says that sex is bad, and then give all genders equality. Now the whole matter of "forcing the issue" becomes criminal instead of natural, so, of course, it becomes a MUCH less important factor in gene selection. But on TOP of that, their culture had, for the longest time, been male-instigated in reproduction, but they lost their grasp...
Now, try to draw some of the same parallels. I agree, it's not a pretty thought at all. But it appears that three things we all seem to love so very much contributed greatly to it: The high status of women, contraception, and Christianity (or similarly anti-sex flavored religions.)
Obviously the solution is NOT to lower the status of women. That is just WRONG. Eliminating contraception could only make matters worse. It seems that, in the end, our very beliefs will have to change.
Otherwise, the human race has peaked. And that could be VERY _BAD_.
I should clarify, "DOS 32" was the name applied to any DOS-based 32-bit system. This was usually based around the DPMI (Dos Protected-Mode Interface) in one way or another. Really, in terms of normal DOS usage, you could just mix and match 16-bit and 32-bit commands, but of course the 32-bit commands would have an advantage.
What I was working on was, of course, a hack to get it to boot without DOS at all, but still run a lot like DOS, while having memory protection, virtual memory and the like. (This was normally done by the DPMI provider. Windows was notoriously BAD at this, refusing to change the memory protection information (DENYING the ability to protect memory!), but CWSDPMI did a somewhat better job.)
For anybody who is intereseted, Quake I is very much a "DOS 32" program, being compiled using DJGPP (the 32-bit compiler for DOS, GNU C actually).
First I will say that Linux was VERY interesting to me because of the source code. Let me elaborate.
I've been pretty OS agnostic over time. I got my start with Basic 7 (the C128 was a terrific machine). Then I went through the DOS stage... DOS really was a terrible OS, and 16-bit realmode was a terrible platform, so for a long time I went back to the commodore (this was a long time ago...)
But then I went back to DOS... 16-bit C code was still a real pain, but I learned to hack it and started using other compilers... C-- was especially cool...
I tried windows 3.x, really didnt like programming in it, went back to DOS. Eventually I heard of DJGPP and got my first taste of DOS32. When properly set up, DOS32 feels very much like *NIX... And yes, it has long file names.
Back in those days, I was hacking OS bits together. I wrote the DLX dynamic linker, which is still in a decent amount of use by the DJGPP folks, as the basis of an OS-style project. I did some work on threading, and wrote a preliminary bootstrap loader. My real goal was to get a DJGPP-based system running without DOS. I tried Caldera OpenDOS/DRDOS/whatever, got some decent success..
But then I tried Linux... I was quite comfortable with the commandline, as I was already using bash and gcc on a daily basis. Really all I needed to learn to use Linux was how to navigate vim.
Anyways, to the point, I had already myself almost developed an OS kernel of my own. This meant that the Linux kernel, which already did many of the things that I was hacking on, was of a LOT of interest to me... I quickly began becoming familiar with the sourcecode. I've even done some kernel hacking myself, although it's pretty much limited to a video driver or two.
But if Linux were not open-sourced, I personally would have stuck with DJGPP, and finished off my true DOS32 kernel, and probably start using that... I was actually working on a few really neat dynamic linking hacks before I stopped...
I should probably put out an opensource project or two for Linux... Although, the company I'm with will be releasing a few that I head;)
Umm, in reality, these "positive" results often become whips and lashes to be used by bad parents. While any good parent would be rather upset with a positive result, a bad parent would simply use it against their kid over and over, until the kid turned bad.
It happens, what can I say.
By the way, has anybody thought about the fact that, in general, computer programming and psychology are usually two very differing fields? Who are they going to get to write this thing?
Ah well, it really IS too late, I should get some sleep so I stop rambling like this.
Speaking as somebody who has worked with most modern forms of "cutting-edge" AI (neural nets, KBS, etc.) I can personally vouch for the fact that this is exactly right. Computers have truly TERRIBLE pattern recognition, even the BEST neural-net can only do something as simple as, say, speech fragment recognition.
So, you say, this profiling is not much more complicated than that. Eh, one thing. I was assuming the best neural net system. Most of these burocratic-run categorization systems use some primitive non-adaptive KBS (basically just a big list with some conditions), which in actuallity would have trouble telling the difference between a mass-murderer and a barn door.
Will this thing work? Of course. It will probably find 80% of the targets are "violent". Why? Because it will MAKE them violent, that's why. This sort of thing usually has the opposite intended effect, but the "positive" statistics usually tell the people at the top that it works.
One of these days we'll all be virtual organisms anyways and it won't matter who's violent;)
I stated something similar above.. I've seen it happen to my younger brother, who is a pretty normal guy (not a geek, even) but who was stuck in a bad situation, and then labelled "violent".
Then again, the school he was in treated everybody like numbers, as if it were merely a big assembly line. Why do schools do this? Total and utter disinterest in future generations. That's why. (not to blame the teachers, in most cases they aren't to blame. But when can ANY of us say that we've met more than one or two DECENT school-board officials???)
Speaking from experience, this guy has a point. When I was a kid in a little small town, I had to learn to defend myself in any way necessary (in order to counteract gang attacks). So eventually I was labelled "violent" even though I really would not willingly hurt anybody, except to keep myself from losing teeth (which happened actually.)
Eventually I got out of that system, and I've never been "violent" since. In fact, I abhor violence in all forms (except Quake et al...)...
The whole idea of using some sort of AUTOMATED system to measure violence potential reeks of stupidity to me.
And has anybody pointed out that these demoralizing tests are a great deal at fault as well? I saw it happen to my kid brother, the system is screwing him over right now. He's not a geek, but he IS labelled as "violent". So they doped him up real good, and tossed him back into the same situation, except that now he sees HIMSELF as "violent" and thus exhibits little control...
Am I the only one here who has had a positive experience with a "geek" girl? I find that extrordinarily strange, and almost disturbing. I had to deal with more than my share of the usual geek shyness when I was young, worse than most in fact, because I started programming when I was only 5, and grew up in a small outport town... Then, somehow, I miraculously found somebody who was almost as obsessed with computers as me. Compete? Nah, the solution to that is TO GET A DAMN SECOND COMPUTER, and NETWORK them. Since I had all the above, we actually collaborated rather well. The trick is to NOT engage in a "battle of the sexes" but just to act like normal hackers coding up a storm. It especially helps if the computers are all in the bedroom;) And somebody who has been so badly isolated throughout life, if they can open up, tends to be the most loving people you will ever meet. Especially if you have the same experience. Anyways, that relationship had no immediate end in sight, but I went back to university... Still, at the current rate, we'll get back together after I graduate. Anyways, I've rambled... But still, am I the ONLY one around here with a positive experience in the "geek" circle?
Slashdot Mirror
I've made my point.
While our current page hasn't been updated in a while and will remain like that to mask our efforts, we are planning on writing a web-browser once our widget set is finished. With an extensible, dynamic framework. If something is missing, it can quickly be added.
The key to our design: Stability. This is why we still haven't made a public release of our current line. We are stress-testing everything, down to the simple classes that are too small to ever break. With our design standards, and an OOP framework (with special RAD tools and toolkits), we will have a workable web-browser eventually.
Of course, we are still anywhere up to a year from release date. But just wanted to mention it.
Now for my little rant...
I think this is something that society will quickly learn. Information wants to be free. People play music because they LIKE to. Same with movies, same with computer games. Right now, capitalism is stifling the best and the brightest, making them more likely to try profiteering. But sooner or later, this will come to an end.
Who knows where this'll go, but given some of the recent breakthroughs in fusion and nanotech, I'd say we'll eventually end up with an OpenSource nanoassembler powered by fusion capable of self-replication (some assembly required). Yes, it's sci-fi now. But for how long... We can no longer simply dismiss the possibility. If tangible things were free, what would that mean?
Think about it.
DivX. Nuff said.
This becomes especially easy if they ever release a Linux player. Imitating an Xserver and /dev/dsp is actually not all that hard, several programs already function by pretending to be normal Xservers (VNC, 3Dwm, Xvfb). All you need to do is intercept all the digital writes. Hack Xvfb or VNC for the video, use NBD for the audio, and you have it.
There we are, I'm still here, even after killing my XServer! Just start up the server again, enter my password, and *POOF*.
The only thing that this is _SUPPOSED_ to change is your speed. I _DID_ notice a big speed difference, but, strangely, it was a POSITIVE one. X now runs about 2 to 3 times as fast on my system (not claiming I get it...).
I even tried ssh2'ing from a solaris box into my Linux box over a (rather slow) ADSL without even setting up the transfer mode properly, and it was actually usable!!! (rather slow, but if I had bothered to fix my transfer mode... Or, if I had bothered running a client on their side instead of remote-X'ing it.).
And I've even managed to get it fairly well secured (mind you, the dedicated firewall helps that;). I don't think there's any going back now... VNC has improved my system performance, and stability, all at the same time. I can just kill my XServer and keep running! (this helps a lot, the nVidia xserver is not that great stability-wise...).
I'm REALLY surprised that this isn't more popular, AT/T did a REALLY good job here. And its all GPL (or was that LGPL, can't quite recall...).
And it even lets you remote-X to windows or (gasp) Mac. Or remote-windows to your unix boxen! Or even remote-whatever to a java-enabled web-browser (if you enable that, which I did not.)
Go ahead people, try it!
First, get the software
Then, with a bit of hacking around, and an ssh2 server, I should be able to get it working.... Hrm, (hacks madly)... Soon I'll be able to do this. THANKS!
Why not? I still use a (20 year old I think...) green dumb-terminal made by HP, and I have a hacked up little 386 (with an SMC ultra and an ATI Mach 64) as an Xterminal. If I could get these suckers for $200 each, then I'd probably go for one or three.
Just pointing out that there IS a way to set immutable files on Linux with the ext2 filesystem. I forget the exact command (it's in the ext2 tools though) but it IS there.
Well, my time is actually fairly valuable, but a homebuilt robot is WELL worth it. I've built a few, believe it or not the price drops considerably when you use custom-fab parts instead of prebuilt stuff. 32-bit processor? $20 or less. I agree that 18 degrees of freedom is a lot, but for about $5 each you can get decent servos and steppers (surplus of course). I have a crate (literally) of old 5 1/4 drives lying around (parts and other reasons...)
And walking robots (even bipedal in fact) are not that bad if you know how to program (although, some AI (neural net mostly) knowledge helps).
I dunno, maybe most people find robots a LOT harder to build than I do. Anyways, that's the end of my lunchbreak ;)
This is exactly the point of what France (i think) is thinking of doing (making all government software require open source). To STOP these "closed" proprietary programs where nobody is quite sure how they work. I tend to trust a system I can think about more than one that is hidden from me.
Um, not unless my system is called "localhost". Jeeze kid, get a life.
Personally, what _I_ want to get, is one of those Heathkit things from years ago. The ones with the arm on them. Forget the name now, but they were SO cool. (and a HELL of a lot less expensive).
Unless I miss my guess, this might even be enough to use "micro rocket thrusters" (forget the link now...) or similar (or a helium baloon!) and have a *FLYING* robot. Sorry, but the sci-fi-style flying black observer drones look SO much cooler.
Oh, the things I could do with $2500...
And of course, a homebuilt robot would run on opensource (not necessarily 100% on Linux, because of the multi-embedded-microcontrol systems in it, but developed on Linux certainly and maybe even with Linux on the main chip ;) Put a couple Crystal DSPs and an Intermetal MP3 decoder chip in it, mount a camera, and you would have yerself a robot to be proud of...
Trust me on this, they are plenty stable. If I remember correctly, they have something like 4 or 5 times the needed tensile strength... Although I could be forgetting.... (it might be like 2 times... But I'm pretty sure it's more). I once knew ;)
Then I could really say that something about that unintelligeble dialect actually impressed me. Heh.
And 99% (by your estimation anyway) call an "External Modem" a "Blinky Thing". And 99% call a "Network Card" a "thing that connects your computer to somebody elses computer". And 99% call "RAM" "space", and "Hard Drive" "space", completely oblivious to the difference.
Sorry, but just because people with little or no relation to a subject mislabel it does not mean that it is time to relabel it. So "close" the "web", turn off your "hard drive" and "screen", and go find someone else to bother with your name changes.
</FLAME>
But WHY are people worried about these 12-year-old "superhackers"?? I personally have no idea, my systems are not a model of perfect security (although they ARE fairly secure, I tend to take the "paranoid" approach with it...), but they have managed to deflect dozens of script-kiddie attacks at the front door. So far, with a 0% rate of intrusion, I personally don't worry about script kiddies. Let them have their sad little games for all I care. I keep backups and I use a filter firewall, and so should any sysadmin who's job matters at all to them.
If anything, this focus on security is a GOOD thing. Since the internet is SO hostile, we can get well-tested secure protocols. It makes me MUCH less nervous about SSH2'ing to my box.
Okay, during their evolution, lets look at how the Blork species evolved. During their evolution, lots of things were very natural to them, as they were, of course, little better than animals. Hence, sex was commonplace and often forceful, the strong dominated the weak, and the weak were left to die.
Now, as the Blorks evolved, they became more intelligent. Now, most reproduction was still done by the thugs who used force to get what they wanted. Since nobody "knew any better", it was just accepted.
The point being, intelligence still kept creeping in from the sides, even though it was not always a reproductive trait. (However, the reverse is true, stupidity IS an anti-reproductive trait!).
So now the Blorks develop a crazy religion which says that sex is bad, and then give all genders equality. Now the whole matter of "forcing the issue" becomes criminal instead of natural, so, of course, it becomes a MUCH less important factor in gene selection. But on TOP of that, their culture had, for the longest time, been male-instigated in reproduction, but they lost their grasp...
Now, try to draw some of the same parallels. I agree, it's not a pretty thought at all. But it appears that three things we all seem to love so very much contributed greatly to it: The high status of women, contraception, and Christianity (or similarly anti-sex flavored religions.)
Obviously the solution is NOT to lower the status of women. That is just WRONG. Eliminating contraception could only make matters worse. It seems that, in the end, our very beliefs will have to change.
Otherwise, the human race has peaked. And that could be VERY _BAD_.
What I was working on was, of course, a hack to get it to boot without DOS at all, but still run a lot like DOS, while having memory protection, virtual memory and the like. (This was normally done by the DPMI provider. Windows was notoriously BAD at this, refusing to change the memory protection information (DENYING the ability to protect memory!), but CWSDPMI did a somewhat better job.)
For anybody who is intereseted, Quake I is very much a "DOS 32" program, being compiled using DJGPP (the 32-bit compiler for DOS, GNU C actually).
Sorry if my post was a little fuzzy.
I've been pretty OS agnostic over time. I got my start with Basic 7 (the C128 was a terrific machine). Then I went through the DOS stage... DOS really was a terrible OS, and 16-bit realmode was a terrible platform, so for a long time I went back to the commodore (this was a long time ago...)
But then I went back to DOS... 16-bit C code was still a real pain, but I learned to hack it and started using other compilers... C-- was especially cool...
I tried windows 3.x, really didnt like programming in it, went back to DOS. Eventually I heard of DJGPP and got my first taste of DOS32. When properly set up, DOS32 feels very much like *NIX... And yes, it has long file names.
Back in those days, I was hacking OS bits together. I wrote the DLX dynamic linker, which is still in a decent amount of use by the DJGPP folks, as the basis of an OS-style project. I did some work on threading, and wrote a preliminary bootstrap loader. My real goal was to get a DJGPP-based system running without DOS. I tried Caldera OpenDOS/DRDOS/whatever, got some decent success..
But then I tried Linux... I was quite comfortable with the commandline, as I was already using bash and gcc on a daily basis. Really all I needed to learn to use Linux was how to navigate vim.
Anyways, to the point, I had already myself almost developed an OS kernel of my own. This meant that the Linux kernel, which already did many of the things that I was hacking on, was of a LOT of interest to me... I quickly began becoming familiar with the sourcecode. I've even done some kernel hacking myself, although it's pretty much limited to a video driver or two.
But if Linux were not open-sourced, I personally would have stuck with DJGPP, and finished off my true DOS32 kernel, and probably start using that... I was actually working on a few really neat dynamic linking hacks before I stopped...
I should probably put out an opensource project or two for Linux... Although, the company I'm with will be releasing a few that I head ;)
Enough ranting.
It happens, what can I say.
By the way, has anybody thought about the fact that, in general, computer programming and psychology are usually two very differing fields? Who are they going to get to write this thing?
Ah well, it really IS too late, I should get some sleep so I stop rambling like this.
So, you say, this profiling is not much more complicated than that. Eh, one thing. I was assuming the best neural net system. Most of these burocratic-run categorization systems use some primitive non-adaptive KBS (basically just a big list with some conditions), which in actuallity would have trouble telling the difference between a mass-murderer and a barn door.
Will this thing work? Of course. It will probably find 80% of the targets are "violent". Why? Because it will MAKE them violent, that's why. This sort of thing usually has the opposite intended effect, but the "positive" statistics usually tell the people at the top that it works.
One of these days we'll all be virtual organisms anyways and it won't matter who's violent ;)
Then again, the school he was in treated everybody like numbers, as if it were merely a big assembly line. Why do schools do this? Total and utter disinterest in future generations. That's why. (not to blame the teachers, in most cases they aren't to blame. But when can ANY of us say that we've met more than one or two DECENT school-board officials???)
Well, that's the world for you.
Speaking from experience, this guy has a point. When I was a kid in a little small town, I had to learn to defend myself in any way necessary (in order to counteract gang attacks). So eventually I was labelled "violent" even though I really would not willingly hurt anybody, except to keep myself from losing teeth (which happened actually.)
Eventually I got out of that system, and I've never been "violent" since. In fact, I abhor violence in all forms (except Quake et al...)...
The whole idea of using some sort of AUTOMATED system to measure violence potential reeks of stupidity to me.
And has anybody pointed out that these demoralizing tests are a great deal at fault as well? I saw it happen to my kid brother, the system is screwing him over right now. He's not a geek, but he IS labelled as "violent". So they doped him up real good, and tossed him back into the same situation, except that now he sees HIMSELF as "violent" and thus exhibits little control...
*grumble*
Anyway, I'll step down off my soapbox now.
Am I the only one here who has had a positive experience with a "geek" girl? I find that extrordinarily strange, and almost disturbing. I had to deal with more than my share of the usual geek shyness when I was young, worse than most in fact, because I started programming when I was only 5, and grew up in a small outport town... Then, somehow, I miraculously found somebody who was almost as obsessed with computers as me. Compete? Nah, the solution to that is TO GET A DAMN SECOND COMPUTER, and NETWORK them. Since I had all the above, we actually collaborated rather well. The trick is to NOT engage in a "battle of the sexes" but just to act like normal hackers coding up a storm. It especially helps if the computers are all in the bedroom ;) And somebody who has been so badly isolated throughout life, if they can open up, tends to be the most loving people you will ever meet. Especially if you have the same experience. Anyways, that relationship had no immediate end in sight, but I went back to university... Still, at the current rate, we'll get back together after I graduate. Anyways, I've rambled... But still, am I the ONLY one around here with a positive experience in the "geek" circle?