This is not true. We do a lot of good things simply because we were wired that way in the process of evolution. Altriusm is in our genes. Egoism is too, but let's not deny either.
When asked to help (or even when I see that a person needs help), my natural reaction is to help them, regardless of possible payoff. And it doesn't feel particularly good - it simply feels right.
Yeah, dementia of all things possible. So you trade long-term clinical dementia for repeating short-term self-induced dementia, called "intoxication". Thanks, but I'd rather take my chances than voluntarily kill my brain cells and end up being tipsy most of the time (1-3 drinks a day means you are slightly drunk almost 100% of the time).
Bullshit, Mr. Mordaximus. From the FA one can find out that Windows fails more than 8% of the time. And 8% of the sessions require a reboot to solve one of the problems.
Interestingly, when similar users are given Win2k Pro machines, they need to reboot only 4% of the time.
Come on, moderators, stop modding up people who have no clue about statistics. Nobody cares about your personal anecdotes, jmcmunn, when we have a study carried out by professionals (from Microsoft, no less) on 1,285,000 computers.
Well, it depends on how you use it. Basically if you USE Windows, it will need to be rebooted - the sooner, the more you do with it. If you just start it and leave it running, it can rival Linux in uptime. I have a P200 running Windows 98 (largely unpatched with only WinRoute Pro for a firewall) that serves Internet to my home network, and I hardly ever need to reboot it (only when the Internet stops working and I don't know what to blame - it's always an ISP fault, though). But I am pretty sure that if I start running games there, editing video (yeah, on a P200) and images, browsing web and doing other kinds of stuff, it will die in a few days.
My main computer runs Win2k, and it BSODs regularly. The errors are different, some can be traced to specific software, some can't. I am sure someone will say the hardware is to blame, but I am not buying that excuse.
Well, someone had to invest the 5 billion. And I suspect that they had some very decent analysts to evaluate the project. In retrospect everyone is an investment guru, of course, but from their view the project was potentially very profitable. It was very risky as well, but that is not a reason to ignore it. High-risk, high-payoff - absolutely normal investment situation.
I am puzzled why everyone keeps adding "disclaimers" to their posts. Do you imply that you disclaim the liability for your research? Do you imply that being an author somehow makes you less qualified to write about it on Slashdot? Or do you imply that we should not trust your results at all?
May be you mean something completely different? May be you just want to inform us that you wrote the paper and so this post to some small extent results not from the story being objectively important, but from your desire to promote it. If so, then please call it "Disclosure" in the future, because this is what you do - you disclose information about your authorship.
Google Browser allows you to see at a glance clusters of sites that are "related" according to Google. If someone can make a similar display for search queries, not sites, using the same Google API, that would be a killer app. The best thing is that it could be naturally extended using a number of independent plugins.
Yeah, it sure is slick, at 92 kilobytes... In comparision, Google main page is only 9 kilobytes, of which 8 kilobytes is the logo. Result pages are upwards from 100 kilobytes. This includes bloated table-based design, some ugly javascript hacks of undeterminable usefulness, sign in for a search engine instead of anonymous cookies and a fucking diary!
While A9 may not win any bloat contests among search engines, calling it "slick" is a bit of a misnomer.
How about a virtual onscreen keyboard operated with a mouse where the layout is random and (optionally) requires a transparent screen overlay? In fact, it's quite easy to implement and should be a relatively strong impediment to keyloggers. You just place a custom overlay on the screen (unique one for each user), the application reads the coordinates and sends them to secure intermidiary proxy that converts them into passwords and sends them to the server that required them in the first place.
But even assuming that charities would be 2 times more efficient than the state, if taxes are abolished (or severely minimized) the average citizen will need to voluntarily pay 25% of his income. Do you think this will work?
Well, your argument doesn't hold water either. Iraq was a secular authoritarian state, hardly a pillar of Islamic faith. It would make more sense attacking Iran (at one point - don't know their current status) or some other theocracy.
And why not attack the Jews or Hindus? They are not Christian either...
I am not saying that irrational beliefs of the president have no impact on politics, I am just saying that if it was them that caused the war, they were totally misguided.
I'd say don't be so quick to judge him. Have you lived in the Soviet Union? I have and I can tell you it's not that simple. I would disagree with the statement that the fall of the USSR was the second worst mistake, but if you phrase it differently, say "The corruption and the ultimate collapse of the Soviet Union was one of the most terrible things in human history", I would probably agree. You see, there is and there always was a lot of propaganda in the US about the Soviets and it just happened that most of this propaganda was false. Some was true, but the USA needed an enemy and Soviets fitted the profile, so they were painted as black and evil as possible. In reality, while there has been many bad things in Soviet Union, a lot was very progressive.
It is impossible to explain in a short Slashdot post, suffice to say that the simple picture of the USSR that most Americans had in their head was wrong. Think of it - if you portray the French as traitors for not supporting one of your wars, how would you portray the nation that believes there is better way to build a society than on money and profit, that successfully works towards that goal, and that is opposing America on the global arena? Facts be damned, those Russkies are evil monsters! Everything is wrong with them!
Read Ken Wharton's comments. He wanted to speak about technology, but the author didn't care to ask. I am sure Ken understands something about the Singularity and its possible impact, just like several other sci-fi authors. Sadly, the round table chose to concentrate on obvious things instead, where a [almost] random sample of the population (with IQ>110 and liberal) would provide just as much insight.
But is it for you? You say you are "getting bored with the future" - does that mean you don't read books and only watch sci-fi movies? It certainly seems so, but then you are missing the fact that the roundtable involved 6 writers, not scriptwriter.
It was very intersting reading this round table article trying to understand each participant. Here are some conclusions about each author (based on their remarks, books not taken into account):
Ken Wharton - interesting and intelligent ideas. He is optimisting about our ability to handle the climate change (though he [stupidly] thinks we should have stabilised the population long ago). He seems to understand future technology the most. Kim Stanley - pretty confused guy Norman Spinrad - left-winger, hates Bush and the American hegemony, hates Christian fundies Pat Murphy - panic-monger, less government is good Cory Doctorow - anti-copyright guy, against more government too, doesn't like high American debt Bruce Sterling - fascinated by other countries and cultures (as always)
So if you want good SF, I suggest you check out Divine Intervention by Ken Wharton (haven't read it, but it must be good), if you want to have an anti-RIAA circle-jerk*, invite Cory. If you want to whine about Bush*, do it with Norman Spinrad. And if you want to watch some anime or eat sushi, call Bruce.:) Avoid Pat Murphy and Kim Stanley - they are just some two boring guys.
Some things that the authors agree on: - More government is probably bad - too bad we wrecked the environment - we'll have to deal with the global warming - war will change shape in the future - and they don't know who will win the elections.
* - not that I am pro-Bush, pro-copyright or anything, but I don't need a science fiction author for that.:)
P.S. I just hated the "The world seems dangerously chaotic" comment in the beginning. Yeah, as if it never was. Heck, Toffler wrote about it 25 years ago - everyone in the 21st century will be affected by a desease called "Future shock". Too bad, noone (besides him) realises that it is a desease and that it's irrational and harmful to think this way.
People don't change much, actually, so trying to explain the crisis of SF by anything other than bad books is silly. Vernes books were popular 150 years ago, I was fascinated with them in the 1980s, there is simply no reason why (correctly packaged and marketed) they should not sell like hot pancakes today.:) There is also no reason why other authors today can't repeat the success of Wells or Asimov. And the fact is that many are very successful.
Now the question is - why the decrease in readership and shelfspace? I think the answer is very simple, but not acceptable to the "old farts". The quality of science fiction churned out today sucks. And it doesn't suck because they have bad character development - it was always dreadful. It doesn't suck because people want to read fantasy - they always wanted to read both. And it doesn't suck because the world has changed, because it was changing like mad for the last two centuries and it hasn't prevented SF from being popular. The reason why it sucks is that writers are frightened by the future - those very people that were supposed to lead us there are scared of it. Of course, they invent and propagate lies about sci-fi "always never being about the future" (3 comments in this discussion with the same argument are already moderated to +5).
This is utterly stupid, like saying that woman's novels never being about love or detectives never being about murder. Don't overanalyse - people read SF because they want to read a story based on predictions - a story about future. I hate everyone who keeps spreading lies about humanity being scared of GM food or terrorists - we aren't! We are proudly looking into tomorrow and we want our SF to be about tomorrow, not yesterday. 52% of Europeans believe that science and technology will solve any problem we are faced with (2003 Eurobarometer study). If this is not an indication of technooptimism in our society, I don't know what is.
The solution is simple - write good SF about the future, make it solid hard science, add some passable character development and story and woo us with your informed speculation about expected developments. Make the reader excited to live, make him strive for a better world tommorrow - and your books will sell, SF magazines will increase their circulation again and everyone will be happy.
First, you don't launch ICBMs off the coast. There is a reason why they are called "intercontinental", you know. Second, the US is tied in Iraq a bit and there aren't enough soldiers to send anywhere in the world on a short notice. They can send a carrier battle group, though, but (third) don't you think China might be a little pissed off with all their plans to invade Taiwan? And you don't want to piss off China, because unlike North Korea, they definitely have nukes, and they have them on ICBMs. Fourth, I don't remember North Korea threatening the United State, although I clearly remember the opposite happening many times - why be so scared then?
Except that he is. The UN didn't have objections over the last Cuban elections, which is more than could be said about the US. And the election process in Cuba is much more democractic (I am speaking about their Congress, since the president is not elected by popular vote, though in the US it isn't either). TV ads^H^H^H propaganda is not allowed, candidates are selected on much lower level, nominated by people and not by Party, Party has no say (at least officially, but this is more than you could say about the USSR) in the elections, etc.
And that Castro owns Cuba is a lie, or at least a completely unsubstantiated claim. As for the asylum seekers, incomes in Cuba are "not too great", that's a fact, though to a very large extent the US can be blamed for this with their draconian and totally unreasonable sanctions. However, the number of people fleeing Cuba are relatively low, compared with the population. And people come to the US from Mexico too, and from other countries as well - this is more an indicator of the US being perceived as "the land of opportunity" than of Cuban president not keeping in touch with the 'proletariat'. Among most Cubans the approval ratings of Fidel are quite high and have been high for a long time.
The truth is that in a double blind test most people would probably not be able to distinguish between many CGI + live actors and live footage + a lot of post-production shots. And if you throw in some live footage + some CGI objects, this will only further confuse most of them.
Lest everyone forgets about the battle we are fighting let me remind that he is not "contributing years of effort to our cultural heritage", but to the profits of rapacious corporations, thanks to all the copyright extensions and the comatose public domain.
There is one fatal flaw in your logic - there actually are no child porn websites. That's why it's impossible to shut down these sites - they do not exist.:)
You may think I am nuts, but I am not. The legislators who force this kind of crap on us, ISPs that are willing to oblige and filtering companies that make money on wholesale blocking - they all know that child porn websites just don't exist and that it would be trivial to close them if they were.
What they prefer is to propagate myths about child porn, to scare people with tales of victimised kids and to persuade the public that censorship is an effective solution. In fact, this is not a solution at all.
Slashdot Mirror
This is not true. We do a lot of good things simply because we were wired that way in the process of evolution. Altriusm is in our genes. Egoism is too, but let's not deny either.
When asked to help (or even when I see that a person needs help), my natural reaction is to help them, regardless of possible payoff. And it doesn't feel particularly good - it simply feels right.
Yeah, dementia of all things possible. So you trade long-term clinical dementia for repeating short-term self-induced dementia, called "intoxication". Thanks, but I'd rather take my chances than voluntarily kill my brain cells and end up being tipsy most of the time (1-3 drinks a day means you are slightly drunk almost 100% of the time).
Bullshit, Mr. Mordaximus. From the FA one can find out that Windows fails more than 8% of the time. And 8% of the sessions require a reboot to solve one of the problems.
Interestingly, when similar users are given Win2k Pro machines, they need to reboot only 4% of the time.
Come on, moderators, stop modding up people who have no clue about statistics. Nobody cares about your personal anecdotes, jmcmunn, when we have a study carried out by professionals (from Microsoft, no less) on 1,285,000 computers.
Well, it depends on how you use it. Basically if you USE Windows, it will need to be rebooted - the sooner, the more you do with it. If you just start it and leave it running, it can rival Linux in uptime. I have a P200 running Windows 98 (largely unpatched with only WinRoute Pro for a firewall) that serves Internet to my home network, and I hardly ever need to reboot it (only when the Internet stops working and I don't know what to blame - it's always an ISP fault, though). But I am pretty sure that if I start running games there, editing video (yeah, on a P200) and images, browsing web and doing other kinds of stuff, it will die in a few days.
My main computer runs Win2k, and it BSODs regularly. The errors are different, some can be traced to specific software, some can't. I am sure someone will say the hardware is to blame, but I am not buying that excuse.
Well, someone had to invest the 5 billion. And I suspect that they had some very decent analysts to evaluate the project. In retrospect everyone is an investment guru, of course, but from their view the project was potentially very profitable. It was very risky as well, but that is not a reason to ignore it. High-risk, high-payoff - absolutely normal investment situation.
I am puzzled why everyone keeps adding "disclaimers" to their posts. Do you imply that you disclaim the liability for your research? Do you imply that being an author somehow makes you less qualified to write about it on Slashdot? Or do you imply that we should not trust your results at all?
May be you mean something completely different? May be you just want to inform us that you wrote the paper and so this post to some small extent results not from the story being objectively important, but from your desire to promote it. If so, then please call it "Disclosure" in the future, because this is what you do - you disclose information about your authorship.
Google Browser allows you to see at a glance clusters of sites that are "related" according to Google. If someone can make a similar display for search queries, not sites, using the same Google API, that would be a killer app. The best thing is that it could be naturally extended using a number of independent plugins.
Yeah, it sure is slick, at 92 kilobytes... In comparision, Google main page is only 9 kilobytes, of which 8 kilobytes is the logo. Result pages are upwards from 100 kilobytes. This includes bloated table-based design, some ugly javascript hacks of undeterminable usefulness, sign in for a search engine instead of anonymous cookies and a fucking diary!
While A9 may not win any bloat contests among search engines, calling it "slick" is a bit of a misnomer.
When I am in the mood for some indie searching, I'd rather use Vivisimo, Teoma or All the Web.
P.S. A9 may be great and all, but at 100KB per page I am not using it.
How about a virtual onscreen keyboard operated with a mouse where the layout is random and (optionally) requires a transparent screen overlay? In fact, it's quite easy to implement and should be a relatively strong impediment to keyloggers. You just place a custom overlay on the screen (unique one for each user), the application reads the coordinates and sends them to secure intermidiary proxy that converts them into passwords and sends them to the server that required them in the first place.
But even assuming that charities would be 2 times more efficient than the state, if taxes are abolished (or severely minimized) the average citizen will need to voluntarily pay 25% of his income. Do you think this will work?
Well, your argument doesn't hold water either. Iraq was a secular authoritarian state, hardly a pillar of Islamic faith. It would make more sense attacking Iran (at one point - don't know their current status) or some other theocracy.
And why not attack the Jews or Hindus? They are not Christian either...
I am not saying that irrational beliefs of the president have no impact on politics, I am just saying that if it was them that caused the war, they were totally misguided.
I'd say don't be so quick to judge him. Have you lived in the Soviet Union? I have and I can tell you it's not that simple. I would disagree with the statement that the fall of the USSR was the second worst mistake, but if you phrase it differently, say "The corruption and the ultimate collapse of the Soviet Union was one of the most terrible things in human history", I would probably agree. You see, there is and there always was a lot of propaganda in the US about the Soviets and it just happened that most of this propaganda was false. Some was true, but the USA needed an enemy and Soviets fitted the profile, so they were painted as black and evil as possible. In reality, while there has been many bad things in Soviet Union, a lot was very progressive.
It is impossible to explain in a short Slashdot post, suffice to say that the simple picture of the USSR that most Americans had in their head was wrong. Think of it - if you portray the French as traitors for not supporting one of your wars, how would you portray the nation that believes there is better way to build a society than on money and profit, that successfully works towards that goal, and that is opposing America on the global arena? Facts be damned, those Russkies are evil monsters! Everything is wrong with them!
Read Ken Wharton's comments. He wanted to speak about technology, but the author didn't care to ask. I am sure Ken understands something about the Singularity and its possible impact, just like several other sci-fi authors. Sadly, the round table chose to concentrate on obvious things instead, where a [almost] random sample of the population (with IQ>110 and liberal) would provide just as much insight.
But is it for you? You say you are "getting bored with the future" - does that mean you don't read books and only watch sci-fi movies? It certainly seems so, but then you are missing the fact that the roundtable involved 6 writers, not scriptwriter.
It was very intersting reading this round table article trying to understand each participant. Here are some conclusions about each author (based on their remarks, books not taken into account):
:) Avoid Pat Murphy and Kim Stanley - they are just some two boring guys.
:)
Ken Wharton - interesting and intelligent ideas. He is optimisting about our ability to handle the climate change (though he [stupidly] thinks we should have stabilised the population long ago). He seems to understand future technology the most.
Kim Stanley - pretty confused guy
Norman Spinrad - left-winger, hates Bush and the American hegemony, hates Christian fundies
Pat Murphy - panic-monger, less government is good
Cory Doctorow - anti-copyright guy, against more government too, doesn't like high American debt
Bruce Sterling - fascinated by other countries and cultures (as always)
So if you want good SF, I suggest you check out Divine Intervention by Ken Wharton (haven't read it, but it must be good), if you want to have an anti-RIAA circle-jerk*, invite Cory. If you want to whine about Bush*, do it with Norman Spinrad. And if you want to watch some anime or eat sushi, call Bruce.
Some things that the authors agree on:
- More government is probably bad
- too bad we wrecked the environment
- we'll have to deal with the global warming
- war will change shape in the future
- and they don't know who will win the elections.
* - not that I am pro-Bush, pro-copyright or anything, but I don't need a science fiction author for that.
P.S. I just hated the "The world seems dangerously chaotic" comment in the beginning. Yeah, as if it never was. Heck, Toffler wrote about it 25 years ago - everyone in the 21st century will be affected by a desease called "Future shock". Too bad, noone (besides him) realises that it is a desease and that it's irrational and harmful to think this way.
People don't change much, actually, so trying to explain the crisis of SF by anything other than bad books is silly. Vernes books were popular 150 years ago, I was fascinated with them in the 1980s, there is simply no reason why (correctly packaged and marketed) they should not sell like hot pancakes today. :) There is also no reason why other authors today can't repeat the success of Wells or Asimov. And the fact is that many are very successful.
Now the question is - why the decrease in readership and shelfspace? I think the answer is very simple, but not acceptable to the "old farts". The quality of science fiction churned out today sucks. And it doesn't suck because they have bad character development - it was always dreadful. It doesn't suck because people want to read fantasy - they always wanted to read both. And it doesn't suck because the world has changed, because it was changing like mad for the last two centuries and it hasn't prevented SF from being popular. The reason why it sucks is that writers are frightened by the future - those very people that were supposed to lead us there are scared of it. Of course, they invent and propagate lies about sci-fi "always never being about the future" (3 comments in this discussion with the same argument are already moderated to +5).
This is utterly stupid, like saying that woman's novels never being about love or detectives never being about murder. Don't overanalyse - people read SF because they want to read a story based on predictions - a story about future. I hate everyone who keeps spreading lies about humanity being scared of GM food or terrorists - we aren't! We are proudly looking into tomorrow and we want our SF to be about tomorrow, not yesterday. 52% of Europeans believe that science and technology will solve any problem we are faced with (2003 Eurobarometer study). If this is not an indication of technooptimism in our society, I don't know what is.
The solution is simple - write good SF about the future, make it solid hard science, add some passable character development and story and woo us with your informed speculation about expected developments. Make the reader excited to live, make him strive for a better world tommorrow - and your books will sell, SF magazines will increase their circulation again and everyone will be happy.
How about them "owning" your computer?
You memory is failing you. It was "A New Hope". The question is - how can we trust your memory now?
First, you don't launch ICBMs off the coast. There is a reason why they are called "intercontinental", you know. Second, the US is tied in Iraq a bit and there aren't enough soldiers to send anywhere in the world on a short notice. They can send a carrier battle group, though, but (third) don't you think China might be a little pissed off with all their plans to invade Taiwan? And you don't want to piss off China, because unlike North Korea, they definitely have nukes, and they have them on ICBMs. Fourth, I don't remember North Korea threatening the United State, although I clearly remember the opposite happening many times - why be so scared then?
Except that he is. The UN didn't have objections over the last Cuban elections, which is more than could be said about the US. And the election process in Cuba is much more democractic (I am speaking about their Congress, since the president is not elected by popular vote, though in the US it isn't either). TV ads^H^H^H propaganda is not allowed, candidates are selected on much lower level, nominated by people and not by Party, Party has no say (at least officially, but this is more than you could say about the USSR) in the elections, etc.
And that Castro owns Cuba is a lie, or at least a completely unsubstantiated claim. As for the asylum seekers, incomes in Cuba are "not too great", that's a fact, though to a very large extent the US can be blamed for this with their draconian and totally unreasonable sanctions. However, the number of people fleeing Cuba are relatively low, compared with the population. And people come to the US from Mexico too, and from other countries as well - this is more an indicator of the US being perceived as "the land of opportunity" than of Cuban president not keeping in touch with the 'proletariat'. Among most Cubans the approval ratings of Fidel are quite high and have been high for a long time.
The truth is that in a double blind test most people would probably not be able to distinguish between many CGI + live actors and live footage + a lot of post-production shots. And if you throw in some live footage + some CGI objects, this will only further confuse most of them.
Lest everyone forgets about the battle we are fighting let me remind that he is not "contributing years of effort to our cultural heritage", but to the profits of rapacious corporations, thanks to all the copyright extensions and the comatose public domain.
All the way back to Westworld (1973) then. :)
:)
Timeline of CGI in movies
Back in MY day we only had some wireframes on screen like in Star Wars or Alien and we liked it.
There is one fatal flaw in your logic - there actually are no child porn websites. That's why it's impossible to shut down these sites - they do not exist. :)
You may think I am nuts, but I am not. The legislators who force this kind of crap on us, ISPs that are willing to oblige and filtering companies that make money on wholesale blocking - they all know that child porn websites just don't exist and that it would be trivial to close them if they were.
What they prefer is to propagate myths about child porn, to scare people with tales of victimised kids and to persuade the public that censorship is an effective solution. In fact, this is not a solution at all.