Can't wait for the 'Linux classified as a weapon ' ad campaign. Imagine an army of camo-clad Tuxes invading a certain corporate complex in Redmond, WA.
Hopefully MTV will wise up and shut off the power, lock the door from the outside, make sure all the canned foods are rotten, and leave the cameras running. Then, I might even set the VCR to record this.
Wow. A slashdotter pounding his chest with his materistic mechanical view of the universe while making bold predictions of an AI future.
Maybe we can stop being naive for 10 seconds and see you've fallen straight into the 'futurist making predictions' trap that's just laughable.
What we know about consciousness is next to nothing and out currently theories badly fit the data, especially Behaviorism. Behaviorism, really now, you might as well unearth Aristolian physics while you're at it.
Your 'humans aren't special' belief and Hollywood's 'humans are special' belief about AI wanting to be like people are both fiction to me. Here's my bold prediction for you: The future will be utterly unpredictable because past predictions are always wrong. For some reason modern 'thinkers' know better because they 'know' today's accepted science is the unalterable perfect truth. What surprises are in store for you? Who knows at least you'll be surprised.
In the end its just a lame plot device for a lame movie. Even if AI, today, was that advanced and content to be just a robot this idea would still fly with a lot of writers.
Why? Cause anthrocentrism sells tickets and books. Just ask Williams's or Asimov's accountants.
Gasp. Another Williams vehicle that aims only to warm your heart and ignore your brain. Like its competitor The Green Mile this movie begs for Oscar attention with its brain numbing simplicity. Remember when Robin Williams was cutting edge? Remember when he was funny? Yeah, neither can I.
What's this KatzSpeak about computer animation becoming an artform of its own? That would be nice if it was viewed as fine art, but its mostly used for movies which are about as far as you can get from fine art. Snazzy animation has replaced the only thing worthwhile in SciFi - the story. I've seen bubblegum anime with stronger plots than most big budget sci-fi flicks. Great graphics in the hands of today's filmmakers has more or less ruined the genre. I say they rename Sci-Fi Com-Ani and be done with it.
I was gonna write a little story about a future where most of your paycheck goes towards an android fund and after a few short years you retire and an android with your name and a DMV-type picture of your face gets your old job.
You spend the rest of your days living off its salary and loving life, doing all those things you wish you could do but are stuck at work. Oh course this isn't for everyone. Some people stay at their jobs for work they love, while there's people who have little to no interests and are bland boring specimins who deserve to work all day in an office full of robots like themselves.
The poster wrote something aobut how amatuerish the web page is and how unpleasant looking the lil' critter is.
Lay off the drugs or at least start sharing them. This is one of the nicer webpages I've come across in a while. Wonderful use of nicely drawn comic strips, very soft colors which are easy to look at, and simple text. Its seems pointed towards children though with its simplicity, which makes you wonder who the target demographic really is.
As far as the robot goes, yeah its ugly until someone paints him black and attaches a beak and flippers to it and calls it Tux. Then slashdotters will come a runnin'.
My robotic dog eats spam!
on
Win an AIBO
·
· Score: 2
Yes, they're getting tons of free valid email addresses and phone numbers for the demographic of 'people who want a plastic dog' for the price of one plastic robotic dog.
Yes, you will get spammed.
No, you probably wont get the doggie.
But.. What the hell I did it. I already get spam on my hotmail account. I made that account, oh about a month ago, didn't tell anyone and found 2 pieces of spam 10 minutes later. Can we say security problem. Oh, and I did use the enctypted login, though there isn't an encryption option when creating the account. I'm sure there's a low-level hotmail/MSN employee pulling up to work in a Ferrari ala Richard Prior in Superman 3.
I should be telling you not to join in, the less of you the more chances for me, so whatever you do DON'T join in.
Every story that involves genes and people ALWAYS has this pathetic PR bid on the religious community. Essentialy if you don't acknowledge their existance and importance to human civilization by giving them condescending explanations of your work for their blessing then expect all sorts of angry publicity and demonstrations.
Its a lot like opening a new business in small town, there are certain established public figures that you have to bribe to even get the business license. These being, in every case, useless people we can do without.
Child pornography is illegal to own, produce or sell just like narcotics. Except in your inane reply to your own banal post, my analogy works. The government doesn't need special censorship powers to remove such content, the same way it doesn't need new laws to get my crack rock. A legal warrant will do.
Most ISP's will accept by default a new newsgroup given the right control message, and a lot will also ignore remove group control messages also. alt.i.like.8.year.old.poontang on your newserver only self-criminalizes the posters who, if breaking the law, should be sought out by the police.
So please spare me your 'save the children!' hysterics. The disregard here isn't for human decancy as this is already illegal. The disregard here is in the lack of thinking and ignornace of the rights of others when it comes to your hot button issues.
I don't see how this even comes near the definition of a 'sit-in.' All they're doing is trying their best to crash the WTO web server. Which isn't at all like demanding to be served as much as it is a lot like silencing your opponents. Lets say the WTO wanted to post something important or *gasp* something critical about eHippies on their page. Too bad, because all these well-meaning brain-donors are busy clogging up the works. This effectivly turns into a free speech issue. The only speech allowed now is eHippies speech.
You'd think hippie liberalism would include such comforts as free speech, but then again the word hippie is synonymous with hypocrisy, now add the 90's marketing catch-letter 'e' and you've got the makings of a brand new 21st century stupidity.
Imagine if this caught on, fundies organizing on-line and jamming talk-origins.org. Anyone seriously thinking of joining this should consider what happens when others try to silence you.
The technology that I think is most promising and -gasp- practical and affordable today that might be a staple of the future, instead of most high-tech throwaway toys, are the Mind Machines. They're devices that combine sound and light at specific frequencies to cause electro-checmical shifts in the brain, sometimes known as entrainment, usually to produce alpha, theta, or delta waves.
Unfortunatly they're clumped together with New Age crap like orgone fields and psycho-magnets, but there's studies that show their effectiveness. For more info consult your local library or goto http://www.us-shamanics.com/mm-faq.html
How many fortune 500's out there are constanly getting their fingers caught in the cookie jar?
Consumers won't care as long as the product ships with a MSRP that's 5% lower than the competition or they've bought enough positive reviews with ad revenue to create a decent demand.
Lets not be naive here, in the end I'm sure this'll affect sales by 0.0 percent.
Now, all you have to do is make the source available, you could just have a little message in the back of the manual pointing them towards a P.O . BOX to send a request. Or you can make it easy and just put up a web page, but I say make em suffer.
A&E had a pretty informative documentary on $cientology a little bit ago, which is pretty amusing to watch because they did try to make it objective but there's just so little good anyone wants to say about the CoS. Their spokespeople really convinced me more than anything they're a bunch of asses with their neurotic defensive attitudes and half-assed arguments. One of the guys totalaly reminded me of Martin Short's SNL skit about the chain-smoking ultra-defensive nutty lawyer.
Everyone is posting the problem is this or the problem is that, but no one's mentioned that there are millions upon millions of depressed, dejected, and hopeless people out there just dying to find something to cheer them up. Usually its in the form of the 'ultimate' truth that's always available from someone or another.
Religions of concilation like Christianity are big for these kinds of people, think of the born-agains, but their religious zeal is nothing compared to the capitalist zeal of the CoS. What these people need isn't some religious BS, but mental healthcare. Historicaly overly religious people suffer from neurosis or some other ailment. They are very very easy pickings (note to potential messiahs.) Go to any major city and in 45 minutes you'll find about 100 people who are on the verge of losing it in some way. Chat for a bit, push your product and if they have any money you've just scored a point for old L.Ron. These people don't care how much anti-$cientology crap there is out there, they just want some answers and a couple of friends.
Amerika, founded on the concept of 'lets put our nutty religions here'(which includes anti-science agendas, the media, and all sorts of protections for irrational cults) combined with a complete lack of health care will continously churn out Branch Davidians, Heaven's Gaters, and $cientologists.
If this kind of thing really gets your goat, then do a couple of simple things that will probably go a long way.
Actively boycott $cientologists, after all its your $7 movie ticket that funds most of this crap. When people ask you why you won't see the new Travolta or Cruise flick tell em, don't go nuts about it just tell them its your little way of helping the world.
Give a shit about the people you know who are a bit screwed up, don't let them become suicide statistics, or worse $cientologists.
It ain't much, but most of us don't have the resources to give legal help to their victims. You can also keep yourself busy with providing webspace and posting anti-CoS messages but they'll usually, not always, fall on the deaf ears of people who really really want to believe. It might make someone go towards a born-again group instead of the CoS but that's only a slight improvement.
SETI said the same thing about releasing the source to the 3Dnow team and they certainly aren't going to release it to the public now.
Personaly, I think its a major waste of computing power when other projects like GIMPS have 30,000 members while SETI is pushing half a MILLION.
The Spielbergesque lure of meeting ET keeps morons happy with their number crunching competitions while real science like GIMPS is mostly ignored.
Now the number crunching competition has gotten to the point where people with a lot of time to kill have written patches to have the fastest team on the net.
Its the geek equivilent of drag racing. SETI open source advocates should admit they're in a bloated project, swallow their BS techie pride and crunch slowly away for science or go do something else to show off.
Airplay, actually the whole radio/record company dynamic is based on a system of favors(collusion) now that payola scams get caught too easy.
Record companies tell radio stations to play so-and-so this many times a day and radio stations agree but they want 100 cd's to give away, concert tickets, promotial royalties for concerts etc.
Maybe even a promise for the band to come in for an interview, think they want to be up at 6am for your local annoying inane morning show?? Sure its promotion, but its mandatory for the band and they'll get in contractural troubles if they don't show up.
Phone calls to popular radio stations mean nothing. People are calling over and over again for a song thats on the playlist anyway. So the DJ might say, 'This one goes out to Carol in Woodridge.' Carol could have sat on her fat ass eating bonbons and saved herself the nickel and Ricky Martins would still be spewing from her box.
Who decides what bands will be aired is strictly up to the record companies. They *might* make their decision based on fan approval and quality of music, but from my experience its image + profitability + market saturation + minor ability in music. A million dollar studio and a band of good studio musicians plus a decent producer can even make Ricky Martin a star.
In the end copying music probably doesn't steal shit, most people wouldn't or couldn't buy most downloadable songs in the first place. And the ones who do 'steal' are, if they try REAL hard, taking pennies from multi-millionares and a few billionares. Most established musicians don't even care, its the record companies who stare all day at the profit margin, well except maybe Garth Brooks.
This is how clueless I've become, this whole time I thought the BSA was the Boy Scouts of America, like there's a new merit badge for 'Protection of Profits.'
The only real reason I can imagine for Gore to go see MS is to give them a pat on the back while saying, "Keep up the crumby security, you're doing the intelligence community a favor."
Its not a public place if you have the option of silencing the 'yelling of curses' with a killfile. Its like like having the ability to block numbers from your phone yet complaining about harassing phone calls.
The judgment was based on petitioners, so yes it was brought about much like a lawsuit. Maybe I can hold your hand and we can read the article together.
1. Regardless who went to the police first, the petitioners agreed to the terms and are responsible for using the law to moderate a newsgroup. In fact petitioner Ted Waldron closely worked with the cops.
2. ok
3. ok
4. The austrialian government's opinion in a Seatle case shouldn't matter, this isn't global terrorism regardless of what they want you to think. I doubt Scott Abraham was ready to hop a Quatis and blow up the Sydney Opera House.
Regardless how mean the messages were a killfile doesn't care. Not that they were willing to use one, but instead got into an immature fight that eventually led to legal action, bringing Big Brother that much closer to home.
A judge passing a ruling on a medium he certainly doesn't understand. How can anoyone support that?
Starting a precedent for the legal moderation of newsgroups because the collective AOL-lusers couldn't write a killfile to save their lives, you think is a good idea.
Not to mention its completely unenforcable, I think those who oppose this should create 'Two Buddha' accounts on free Usenet servers and start posting to prove that Usenet will always = anarchy.
Its pretty obvious they didn't want a kill file, and he just flamed the wrong guys. That flamees being clueless twits with a huge bruised egos and a lawyer.
"Buffy dearest, we're just not gonna stand for this abuse, get Judge Smith on the phone."
Slashdot Mirror
Can't wait for the 'Linux classified as a weapon ' ad campaign. Imagine an army of camo-clad Tuxes invading a certain corporate complex in Redmond, WA.
The first? Actually watching this show.
Hopefully MTV will wise up and shut off the power, lock the door from the outside, make sure all the canned foods are rotten, and leave the cameras running. Then, I might even set the VCR to record this.
Wow. A slashdotter pounding his chest with his materistic mechanical view of the universe while making bold predictions of an AI future.
Maybe we can stop being naive for 10 seconds and see you've fallen straight into the 'futurist making predictions' trap that's just laughable.
What we know about consciousness is next to nothing and out currently theories badly fit the data, especially Behaviorism. Behaviorism, really now, you might as well unearth Aristolian physics while you're at it.
Your 'humans aren't special' belief and Hollywood's 'humans are special' belief about AI wanting to be like people are both fiction to me.
Here's my bold prediction for you: The future will be utterly unpredictable because past predictions are always wrong. For some reason modern 'thinkers' know better because they 'know' today's accepted science is the unalterable perfect truth. What surprises are in store for you? Who knows at least you'll be surprised.
In the end its just a lame plot device for a lame movie. Even if AI, today, was that advanced and content to be just a robot this idea would still fly with a lot of writers.
Why? Cause anthrocentrism sells tickets and books. Just ask Williams's or Asimov's accountants.
Gasp. Another Williams vehicle that aims only to warm your heart and ignore your brain. Like its competitor The Green Mile this movie begs for Oscar attention with its brain numbing simplicity. Remember when Robin Williams was cutting edge? Remember when he was funny? Yeah, neither can I.
What's this KatzSpeak about computer animation becoming an artform of its own? That would be nice if it was viewed as fine art, but its mostly used for movies which are about as far as you can get from fine art. Snazzy animation has replaced the only thing worthwhile in SciFi - the story. I've seen bubblegum anime with stronger plots than most big budget sci-fi flicks. Great graphics in the hands of today's filmmakers has more or less ruined the genre. I say they rename Sci-Fi Com-Ani and be done with it.
I was gonna write a little story about a future where most of your paycheck goes towards an android fund and after a few short years you retire and an android with your name and a DMV-type picture of your face gets your old job.
You spend the rest of your days living off its salary and loving life, doing all those things you wish you could do but are stuck at work. Oh course this isn't for everyone. Some people stay at their jobs for work they love, while there's people who have little to no interests and are bland boring specimins who deserve to work all day in an office full of robots like themselves.
The poster wrote something aobut how amatuerish the web page is and how unpleasant looking the lil' critter is.
Lay off the drugs or at least start sharing them. This is one of the nicer webpages I've come across in a while. Wonderful use of nicely drawn comic strips, very soft colors which are easy to look at, and simple text. Its seems pointed towards children though with its simplicity, which makes you wonder who the target demographic really is.
As far as the robot goes, yeah its ugly until someone paints him black and attaches a beak and flippers to it and calls it Tux. Then slashdotters will come a runnin'.
Yes, they're getting tons of free valid email addresses and phone numbers for the demographic of 'people who want a plastic dog' for the price of one plastic robotic dog.
Yes, you will get spammed.
No, you probably wont get the doggie.
But.. What the hell I did it. I already get spam on my hotmail account. I made that account, oh about a month ago, didn't tell anyone and found 2 pieces of spam 10 minutes later. Can we say security problem. Oh, and I did use the enctypted login, though there isn't an encryption option when creating the account. I'm sure there's a low-level hotmail/MSN employee pulling up to work in a Ferrari ala Richard Prior in Superman 3.
I should be telling you not to join in, the less of you the more chances for me, so whatever you do DON'T join in.
Every story that involves genes and people ALWAYS has this pathetic PR bid on the religious community. Essentialy if you don't acknowledge their existance and importance to human civilization by giving them condescending explanations of your work for their blessing then expect all sorts of angry publicity and demonstrations.
Its a lot like opening a new business in small town, there are certain established public figures that you have to bribe to even get the business license. These being, in every case, useless people we can do without.
Child pornography is illegal to own, produce or sell just like narcotics. Except in your inane reply to your own banal post, my analogy works.
The government doesn't need special censorship powers to remove such content, the same way it doesn't need new laws to get my crack rock. A legal warrant will do.
Most ISP's will accept by default a new newsgroup given the right control message, and a lot will also ignore remove group control messages also. alt.i.like.8.year.old.poontang on your newserver only self-criminalizes the posters who, if breaking the law, should be sought out by the police.
So please spare me your 'save the children!' hysterics. The disregard here isn't for human decancy as this is already illegal. The disregard here is in the lack of thinking and ignornace of the rights of others when it comes to your hot button issues.
I don't see how this even comes near the definition of a 'sit-in.' All they're doing is trying their best to crash the WTO web server. Which isn't at all like demanding to be served as much as it is a lot like silencing your opponents.
Lets say the WTO wanted to post something important or *gasp* something critical about eHippies on their page. Too bad, because all these well-meaning brain-donors are busy clogging up the works. This effectivly turns into a free speech issue. The only speech allowed now is eHippies speech.
You'd think hippie liberalism would include such comforts as free speech, but then again the word hippie is synonymous with hypocrisy, now add the 90's marketing catch-letter 'e' and you've got the makings of a brand new 21st century stupidity.
Imagine if this caught on, fundies organizing on-line and jamming talk-origins.org. Anyone seriously thinking of joining this should consider what happens when others try to silence you.
The technology that I think is most promising and -gasp- practical and affordable today that might be a staple of the future, instead of most high-tech throwaway toys, are the Mind Machines. They're devices that combine sound and light at specific frequencies to cause electro-checmical shifts in the brain, sometimes known as entrainment, usually to produce alpha, theta, or delta waves.
Unfortunatly they're clumped together with New Age crap like orgone fields and psycho-magnets, but there's studies that show their effectiveness.
For more info consult your local library or goto http://www.us-shamanics.com/mm-faq.html
How many fortune 500's out there are constanly getting their fingers caught in the cookie jar?
Consumers won't care as long as the product ships with a MSRP that's 5% lower than the competition or they've bought enough positive reviews with ad revenue to create a decent demand.
Lets not be naive here, in the end I'm sure this'll affect sales by 0.0 percent.
Read the GPL for starters.
Now, all you have to do is make the source available, you could just have a little message in the back of the manual pointing them towards a P.O . BOX to send a request. Or you can make it easy and just put up a web page, but I say make em suffer.
Actually I interpret the comment as saying prayer = superstitious nonsense, computers praying = superstitious nonsense.
A&E had a pretty informative documentary on $cientology a little bit ago, which is pretty amusing to watch because they did try to make it objective but there's just so little good anyone wants to say about the CoS. Their spokespeople really convinced me more than anything they're a bunch of asses with their neurotic defensive attitudes and half-assed arguments. One of the guys totalaly reminded me of Martin Short's SNL skit about the chain-smoking ultra-defensive nutty lawyer.
Everyone is posting the problem is this or the problem is that, but no one's mentioned that there are millions upon millions of depressed, dejected, and hopeless people out there just dying to find something to cheer them up. Usually its in the form of the 'ultimate' truth that's always available from someone or another.
Religions of concilation like Christianity are big for these kinds of people, think of the born-agains, but their religious zeal is nothing compared to the capitalist zeal of the CoS. What these people need isn't some religious BS, but mental healthcare. Historicaly overly religious people suffer from neurosis or some other ailment.
They are very very easy pickings (note to potential messiahs.) Go to any major city and in 45 minutes you'll find about 100 people who are on the verge of losing it in some way. Chat for a bit, push your product and if they have any money you've just scored a point for old L.Ron. These people don't care how much anti-$cientology crap there is out there, they just want some answers and a couple of friends.
Amerika, founded on the concept of 'lets put our nutty religions here'(which includes anti-science agendas, the media, and all sorts of protections for irrational cults) combined with a complete lack of health care will continously churn out Branch Davidians, Heaven's Gaters, and $cientologists.
If this kind of thing really gets your goat, then do a couple of simple things that will probably go a long way.
Actively boycott $cientologists, after all its your $7 movie ticket that funds most of this crap. When people ask you why you won't see the new Travolta or Cruise flick tell em, don't go nuts about it just tell them its your little way of helping the world.
Give a shit about the people you know who are a bit screwed up, don't let them become suicide statistics, or worse $cientologists.
It ain't much, but most of us don't have the resources to give legal help to their victims. You can also keep yourself busy with providing webspace and posting anti-CoS messages but they'll usually, not always, fall on the deaf ears of people who really really want to believe. It might make someone go towards a born-again group instead of the CoS but that's only a slight improvement.
Could be worse, BGates could join...
Don't dis Ricky Martin, or you'll be accused of racism. It's safer to dis Backstreet Boys
Jeez I hope you're kidding, cause I don't give a shit what PC-thugs think of me, I've been called worse before.
Te obligatory this isn't news reply:
SETI said the same thing about releasing the source to the 3Dnow team and they certainly aren't going to release it to the public now.
Personaly, I think its a major waste of computing power when other projects like GIMPS have 30,000 members while SETI is pushing half a MILLION.
The Spielbergesque lure of meeting ET keeps morons happy with their number crunching competitions while real science like GIMPS is mostly ignored.
Now the number crunching competition has gotten to the point where people with a lot of time to kill have written patches to have the fastest team on the net.
Its the geek equivilent of drag racing. SETI open source advocates should admit they're in a bloated project, swallow their BS techie pride and crunch slowly away for science or go do something else to show off.
You don't hear the flamer insulting you. But all your friends do.
Ah but the magic here is THEY can use a killfile too.
Airplay, actually the whole radio/record company dynamic is based on a system of favors(collusion) now that payola scams get caught too easy.
Record companies tell radio stations to play so-and-so this many times a day and radio stations agree but they want 100 cd's to give away, concert tickets, promotial royalties for concerts etc.
Maybe even a promise for the band to come in for an interview, think they want to be up at 6am for your local annoying inane morning show?? Sure its promotion, but its mandatory for the band and they'll get in contractural troubles if they don't show up.
Phone calls to popular radio stations mean nothing. People are calling over and over again for a song thats on the playlist anyway. So the DJ might say, 'This one goes out to Carol in Woodridge.' Carol could have sat on her fat ass eating bonbons and saved herself the nickel and Ricky Martins would still be spewing from her box.
Who decides what bands will be aired is strictly up to the record companies. They *might* make their decision based on fan approval and quality of music, but from my experience its image + profitability + market saturation + minor ability in music. A million dollar studio and a band of good studio musicians plus a decent producer can even make Ricky Martin a star.
In the end copying music probably doesn't steal shit, most people wouldn't or couldn't buy most downloadable songs in the first place. And the ones who do 'steal' are, if they try REAL hard, taking pennies from multi-millionares and a few billionares. Most established musicians don't even care, its the record companies who stare all day at the profit margin, well except maybe Garth Brooks.
I've just aquired the patent on patently stupid patents.
Pat me on the back and thank me later.
This is how clueless I've become, this whole time I thought the BSA was the Boy Scouts of America, like there's a new merit badge for 'Protection of Profits.'
The only real reason I can imagine for Gore to go see MS is to give them a pat on the back while saying, "Keep up the crumby security, you're doing the intelligence community a favor."
Hypersonic airliners like, say, the Concord? Or is that just Supersonic?
Its not a public place if you have the option of silencing the 'yelling of curses' with a killfile. Its like like having the ability to block numbers from your phone yet complaining about harassing phone calls.
The judgment was based on petitioners, so yes it was brought about much like a lawsuit. Maybe I can hold your hand and we can read the article together.
1. Regardless who went to the police first, the petitioners agreed to the terms and are responsible for using the law to moderate a newsgroup. In fact petitioner Ted Waldron closely worked with the cops.
2. ok
3. ok
4. The austrialian government's opinion in a Seatle case shouldn't matter, this isn't global terrorism regardless of what they want you to think. I doubt Scott Abraham was ready to hop a Quatis and blow up the Sydney Opera House.
Regardless how mean the messages were a killfile doesn't care. Not that they were willing to use one, but instead got into an immature fight that eventually led to legal action, bringing Big Brother that much closer to home.
A judge passing a ruling on a medium he certainly doesn't understand. How can anoyone support that?
Starting a precedent for the legal moderation of newsgroups because the collective AOL-lusers couldn't write a killfile to save their lives, you think is a good idea.
Not to mention its completely unenforcable, I think those who oppose this should create 'Two Buddha' accounts on free Usenet servers and start posting to prove that Usenet will always = anarchy.
Its pretty obvious they didn't want a kill file, and he just flamed the wrong guys. That flamees being clueless twits with a huge bruised egos and a lawyer.
"Buffy dearest, we're just not gonna stand for this abuse, get Judge Smith on the phone."