A better analogy would be if Saab were to release a car which runs on hydrogen, and they were to say it's the next great thing, and you'll get superior performance, yadda yadda to gasoline, and then when the infrastructure is finally in place for the car to run (on hydrogen) years after the car is released, the car gets inferior performance ot other hydrogen cars released in the meantime.... what would you call that?
There actually have been theory's put forward that there will be a second 'uncanny valley' when it comes to transhumanism.
In other words, as 'normals' begin modifying their appearance outside of what is considered normal, they will start to slide down that valley and become socially unacceptable till they get to the point where they are back on the other side of the valley and just accepted as 'freaks'.
I think you misunderstand the uncanny valley concept. In fact, your entire rebuttal is mostly a restatement of the concept itself.
The point is the more realistic something is, the more disturbing any 'defects' in it's simulation are. Stuffed animals don't breath, they don't move, they don't growl. Neither do paintings. These things may be realistic in the sense that they portray a snapshot of the thing they are based on, but they don't come anywhere close actually convincing you that they ARE the thing they were based on. I don't know of anyone who would mistake a stuffed bob cat sitting in someone's den or a museum as the real thing for more than a few seconds. Likewise, people pretty much know when they are looking at a painting or even a photo.
All of those things are on the 'safe' side of the valley. The problem comes when you start getting things that move, sound, and mostly act as if they are alive but clearly aren't. Your actor with the no-spill glass would be in the valley, so to would be photorealistic computer models that didn't have facial expressions when they spoke (ala FF).
And for the record, while the uncanny valley was popularized by talking about computer generated graphics, it was actually coined by a roboticst back in the 70's, and was based on an idea first presented by Freud in the 1910's.
Amazingly enough, OTA (which are what this Ask Slashdot was about) broadcasts are capable of traveling North, South, West, and East of the transmtter tower. I'm told some extremely rare ones travel along the diagonals as well.
Regardless, the point was that leases and HOA's that state "No external antennas" typically are of the unenforceable kind. They are put in for the same reason EULA's include a metric ton of unenforceable leaglese. To intimidate you into not doing something you have every right to do.
I've been waiting for this whole ordeal to happen. I consider this technology to be the next medium that everyone will use and it will supplant HTTP. It needed two requirements for it to take off though. First, an open protocol needed to be developed and second it needed to be possible to interconnect different servers together to make once cohesive environment. Well, we have the first part now, is this the second part?
With respect, there have been numerous attempts to replace text based protocols with visual worlds since before the web. I remember drooling over ads in my dad's old Atari ST magazines where BBSes were advertising virtual worlds where everything was represented as a building in a isometric 3d city and people ran along the streets talking to each other.
These have never taken off as the main stream interface because even if you were able to achieve a completely believeable virtual world, it still wouldn't present the same information bandwidth as simply pulling up pages and reading them. And porn jokes aside, the real drive of the internet is presenting information, not pretty visuals.
These will always be the niche, rather than the mainstream, way of interacting because no one wants to 'run' for 30 mintutes to do something that could be accomplished in 30 seconds outside of the world.
That being said, I wouldn't mind seeing what could be created once the reigns were passed from corporations looking for money to Joe Six-Pack. Will it be a revolution or another eternal September?
Given Second Life is already exhibiting a second coming of 'GeoCities' crappy design, I'm not certain I'll be welcoming our new OpenSim overlords.
Actually in my analogy, I point out explicitly that it has nothing to do with Vista. ^_^
If we must do a Vista vs Car analogy. Vista is a car designed to travel in time when fed 1.21 gigawatts of electricity. Yet it somehow manages to miss having seats, a steering wheel, or the ability to go anywhere in time other than that embarrassing moment when you first tried to kiss Suzzy Sue and instead managed to throw up on her.
If, for instance, Saab released a new hybrid car which ran on hydrogen, and there was no infrastructure in place to supply that. I would not call the car stupid design because there was no infrastructure in place. I could, if I believed (or in foresight knew) that someday there would be, call it "Ahead of it's time" or "We just weren't ready for it".
In other words: "vista is to operating systems what the hydrogen fuel cell is to engines". Now I've heard everything.
Obviously not, as if you had you would have heard the next two paragraphs of what I wrote.
However, that has nothing to do with Vista, because it was stupid design. And while the hardware still isn't ready for it, even if it were, it'd be a stupid design.
I don't know if the people making decisions on Vista just weren't all on the same page or what, but Vista is a pile of poorly planned half implemented aborted attempts at doing what the marketers over sold it as being capable of doing.
In other words: "When posting rebuttals, go for reading comprehension, not speed."
It's a canard to say that the problem with Vista is that "the hardware is not ready for it".
If Saab made a car that could only run on some super high-test gasoline that is not sold in gas stations, would you say that "the gasoline was not ready for it" or that "it was a stupid design and poor business decision to release it"?
If, for instance, Saab released a new hybrid car which ran on hydrogen, and there was no infrastructure in place to supply that. I would not call the car stupid design because there was no infrastructure in place. I could, if I believed (or in foresight knew) that someday there would be, call it "Ahead of it's time" or "We just weren't ready for it".
However, that has nothing to do with Vista, because it was stupid design. And while the hardware still isn't ready for it, even if it were, it'd be a stupid design.
I don't know if the people making decisions on Vista just weren't all on the same page or what, but Vista is a pile of poorly planned half implemented aborted attempts at doing what the marketers over sold it as being capable of doing.
That has nothing to do with hardware other than the fact that having a beefier machine might, might, mitigate the issues the same way an elephant gun might do as a fly swatter.
I'm sorry but due to the Geneva Convention of 2005 but you can only use the sentence "Worf then kills, dresses and eats Wesley" in terms of a slash fanfic as it has an entirely different connotation.
The difference, I imagine, is in the 'quality' of the public that surrounds the toilets. The particular venue these were installed at in Seattle is a prime tourist area mixed in with a hefty homeless population.
And since it is thriving with tourists, there is a bit of a crime problem as the more enterprising homeless find ways of making do off them.
I've never visited Berlin, but my limited knowledge of it is you enjoy moderately pleasant, if unpredictable, summers with bitter winters. That tends to keep the homeless population either down or 'pinned down' to specific areas.
There hasn't been one time that I've visited Seattle/downtown and not had a problem avoiding tripping over people living on the streets there. It didn't matter where in the area I was.
Granted, that was downtown. But still, you'd have to be a fool to put out any sort of public facilities there without either the expectation that either they would be trashed almost immediately and continuously, or that you'd have to actually pay someone to monitor them almost 24/7.
It was 15 minutes. No cleaning, the doors just popped open to expose you in all your glory.
And while the idea was 'no need for a janitor' it turned out that "self cleaning" didn't include the ability to handle the amount of garbage people were leaving in them, so they still had to have a visit regularly to clean them out.
*eye roll* Yes, living is dangerous and someone could get hurt doing it. There is a difference, however, in the physical injury when something goes wrong during routine training, and the large likelihood of reducing your lifespan when using performance enhancing drugs correctly.
What you may not realize is that SoundExchange is the mandatory collector for EVERYONE. Even if you release your works under CC license and explicitly say "no royalties for 'web radio'" in your license, the operator still has to play the fee.
Doping = Dangerously modifying YOURSELF to beat everyone else. This rapidly becomes an arms race which only leads to dead athletes and wasted potential.
Finding better ways of doing things to beat everyone else by applying thought isn't the same.
Nor are all 'better ways' allowed. I've yet to see someone use a jet ski or a powered scuba sled in any of these contests.
And the US Supreme Court will rule that software is not patentable, software is copyrightable but EULA's are 100% unenforcable. And DRM will be outlawed.
And Microsoft, the RIAA, and most of the telecom industry will be broken up for various illegal activities, and forced to reform as smaller non-profit organizations with strict oversight.
I'd feel safer with a 15 year old with daddy's CC playing hobbist chemist in their basement than I would be with a 60 (yes, that's an age out of my hiney) year old retired chemist playing reseach chemist in his. The number of items may or may not be relevant to the idea that he was doing something 'wrong'. But they were enough for me to feel that the firemen who reported the incident weren't abusing their authority when they called in the DOE. And the fact that this is someone who willingly admitted to the folk who showed up that he was in fact doing research and development pretty much blows away the "it's just a hobby" arguement.
The issue isn't "chemisty bad, don't play with beakers" the issue is "don't set up an industrial scale lab in a residential area".
Then stop acting like a sheeple and knee jerking to everything you read.
Start actually using your brain and educating yourself on matters before you open your mouth.
That way the next time some snake oil salesman tells you the 'bad man is going to hurt you' you don't end up giving everything you own to the shyster trying to prevent something that would have never happened anyway.
Or in short, RTFA. What the submitter wrote and what actually was said in the article are 180 degrees apart. Not only that, but if you actually read the article you'd realize that nothing nefarious was occuring on either side. Retired chemist still doing research in his basement. Fire fighters notice the chemicals while responding to a fire in his house. The events that followed from that are 100% predictable.
This 'black and white', my side vs your side BS is exactly how we got to the point we are.
Except the book is not from the man in the article, it's from the blog author that's stirring up the mess by acting as if this was a big deal while plugging his book.
Firefighters found more than 1,500 vials, jars, cans, bottles and boxes in the basement Tuesday afternoon, after they responded to an unrelated fire in an air conditioner on the second floor of the home.
Vessels of chemicals were all over the furniture and the floor, authorities said. The ensuing investigation involved a state hazardous materials team, fire and police officials, health officials, environmental officials and code enforcement officials. The Deebs were told to stay in a hotel while the slew of officials investigated and emptied the basement.
Pamela A. Wilderman, Marlboro's code enforcement officer, said Mr. Deeb was doing scientific research and development in a residential area, which is a violation of zoning laws.
"It is a residential home in a residential neighborhood," she said. "This is Mr. Deeb's hobby. He's still got bunches of ideas. I think Mr. Deeb has crossed a line somewhere. This is not what we would consider to be a customary home occupation.... There are regulations about how much you're supposed to have, how it's detained, how it's disposed of."
Mr. Deeb's home lab likely violated the regulations of many state and local departments, although officials have not yet announced any penalties.
"He's been very cooperative," Ms. Wilderman said. "I won't be citing him for anything right at this moment."
Really, the above is a bit far from the inflamitory accusations of ironshod goosestepping that the blog author insinuates.
There is a difference between having a hobby bench and doing 'science' and running a chem lab. One is harmless, the other is only harmless when you take the proper safety percautions.
Perhaps the old saw that the further removed from war becomes, the more inhumane one acts is just that. Certainly, I've heard more stories of people actually thrust into the face of war breaking and becoming inhuman, torturing and killing more for pleasure than necessity, than I've ever heard of these unmanned missions doing so.
I think the Cold War has possibly been the worst thing we could have ever inflicted on the world. We've spent over 50 years playing Risk with smaller countries simply because we were afraid to fight the one big country we were at odds with. You only have to take a cursory look at the world today and see the effects of that. And for that matter, none of the people who were making the calls of whether to push the button or not really felt THEY were in danger. They knew they had bunkers and mountains to hide in.
Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft?
There actually have been theory's put forward that there will be a second 'uncanny valley' when it comes to transhumanism.
In other words, as 'normals' begin modifying their appearance outside of what is considered normal, they will start to slide down that valley and become socially unacceptable till they get to the point where they are back on the other side of the valley and just accepted as 'freaks'.
I think you misunderstand the uncanny valley concept. In fact, your entire rebuttal is mostly a restatement of the concept itself.
The point is the more realistic something is, the more disturbing any 'defects' in it's simulation are. Stuffed animals don't breath, they don't move, they don't growl. Neither do paintings. These things may be realistic in the sense that they portray a snapshot of the thing they are based on, but they don't come anywhere close actually convincing you that they ARE the thing they were based on. I don't know of anyone who would mistake a stuffed bob cat sitting in someone's den or a museum as the real thing for more than a few seconds. Likewise, people pretty much know when they are looking at a painting or even a photo.
All of those things are on the 'safe' side of the valley. The problem comes when you start getting things that move, sound, and mostly act as if they are alive but clearly aren't. Your actor with the no-spill glass would be in the valley, so to would be photorealistic computer models that didn't have facial expressions when they spoke (ala FF).
And for the record, while the uncanny valley was popularized by talking about computer generated graphics, it was actually coined by a roboticst back in the 70's, and was based on an idea first presented by Freud in the 1910's.
You are only SOL if you are relying on a dish.
Amazingly enough, OTA (which are what this Ask Slashdot was about) broadcasts are capable of traveling North, South, West, and East of the transmtter tower. I'm told some extremely rare ones travel along the diagonals as well.
Regardless, the point was that leases and HOA's that state "No external antennas" typically are of the unenforceable kind. They are put in for the same reason EULA's include a metric ton of unenforceable leaglese. To intimidate you into not doing something you have every right to do.
And you are covered under the same law. They still stick those stipulations into the agreement, but it doesn't mean they can legally enforce them.
With respect, there have been numerous attempts to replace text based protocols with visual worlds since before the web. I remember drooling over ads in my dad's old Atari ST magazines where BBSes were advertising virtual worlds where everything was represented as a building in a isometric 3d city and people ran along the streets talking to each other.
These have never taken off as the main stream interface because even if you were able to achieve a completely believeable virtual world, it still wouldn't present the same information bandwidth as simply pulling up pages and reading them. And porn jokes aside, the real drive of the internet is presenting information, not pretty visuals.
These will always be the niche, rather than the mainstream, way of interacting because no one wants to 'run' for 30 mintutes to do something that could be accomplished in 30 seconds outside of the world.
That being said, I wouldn't mind seeing what could be created once the reigns were passed from corporations looking for money to Joe Six-Pack. Will it be a revolution or another eternal September?
Given Second Life is already exhibiting a second coming of 'GeoCities' crappy design, I'm not certain I'll be welcoming our new OpenSim overlords.
Actually in my analogy, I point out explicitly that it has nothing to do with Vista. ^_^
If we must do a Vista vs Car analogy. Vista is a car designed to travel in time when fed 1.21 gigawatts of electricity. Yet it somehow manages to miss having seats, a steering wheel, or the ability to go anywhere in time other than that embarrassing moment when you first tried to kiss Suzzy Sue and instead managed to throw up on her.
Obviously not, as if you had you would have heard the next two paragraphs of what I wrote.
In other words: "When posting rebuttals, go for reading comprehension, not speed."
If, for instance, Saab released a new hybrid car which ran on hydrogen, and there was no infrastructure in place to supply that. I would not call the car stupid design because there was no infrastructure in place. I could, if I believed (or in foresight knew) that someday there would be, call it "Ahead of it's time" or "We just weren't ready for it".
However, that has nothing to do with Vista, because it was stupid design. And while the hardware still isn't ready for it, even if it were, it'd be a stupid design.
I don't know if the people making decisions on Vista just weren't all on the same page or what, but Vista is a pile of poorly planned half implemented aborted attempts at doing what the marketers over sold it as being capable of doing.
That has nothing to do with hardware other than the fact that having a beefier machine might, might, mitigate the issues the same way an elephant gun might do as a fly swatter.
Then, I must be the real one and not that poser from xkcd.
No.
Summer Glau
I'm sorry but due to the Geneva Convention of 2005 but you can only use the sentence "Worf then kills, dresses and eats Wesley" in terms of a slash fanfic as it has an entirely different connotation.
The difference, I imagine, is in the 'quality' of the public that surrounds the toilets. The particular venue these were installed at in Seattle is a prime tourist area mixed in with a hefty homeless population.
And since it is thriving with tourists, there is a bit of a crime problem as the more enterprising homeless find ways of making do off them.
I've never visited Berlin, but my limited knowledge of it is you enjoy moderately pleasant, if unpredictable, summers with bitter winters. That tends to keep the homeless population either down or 'pinned down' to specific areas.
There hasn't been one time that I've visited Seattle/downtown and not had a problem avoiding tripping over people living on the streets there. It didn't matter where in the area I was.
Granted, that was downtown. But still, you'd have to be a fool to put out any sort of public facilities there without either the expectation that either they would be trashed almost immediately and continuously, or that you'd have to actually pay someone to monitor them almost 24/7.
It was 15 minutes. No cleaning, the doors just popped open to expose you in all your glory.
And while the idea was 'no need for a janitor' it turned out that "self cleaning" didn't include the ability to handle the amount of garbage people were leaving in them, so they still had to have a visit regularly to clean them out.
*eye roll* Yes, living is dangerous and someone could get hurt doing it. There is a difference, however, in the physical injury when something goes wrong during routine training, and the large likelihood of reducing your lifespan when using performance enhancing drugs correctly.
What you may not realize is that SoundExchange is the mandatory collector for EVERYONE. Even if you release your works under CC license and explicitly say "no royalties for 'web radio'" in your license, the operator still has to play the fee.
Which? Care to describe them and what makes them dangerous?
Doping = Dangerously modifying YOURSELF to beat everyone else. This rapidly becomes an arms race which only leads to dead athletes and wasted potential.
Finding better ways of doing things to beat everyone else by applying thought isn't the same.
Nor are all 'better ways' allowed. I've yet to see someone use a jet ski or a powered scuba sled in any of these contests.
And the US Supreme Court will rule that software is not patentable, software is copyrightable but EULA's are 100% unenforcable. And DRM will be outlawed.
And Microsoft, the RIAA, and most of the telecom industry will be broken up for various illegal activities, and forced to reform as smaller non-profit organizations with strict oversight.
Maybe I'll even have a date by then.
I'd feel safer with a 15 year old with daddy's CC playing hobbist chemist in their basement than I would be with a 60 (yes, that's an age out of my hiney) year old retired chemist playing reseach chemist in his. The number of items may or may not be relevant to the idea that he was doing something 'wrong'. But they were enough for me to feel that the firemen who reported the incident weren't abusing their authority when they called in the DOE. And the fact that this is someone who willingly admitted to the folk who showed up that he was in fact doing research and development pretty much blows away the "it's just a hobby" arguement.
The issue isn't "chemisty bad, don't play with beakers" the issue is "don't set up an industrial scale lab in a residential area".
You want your rights?
Then stop acting like a sheeple and knee jerking to everything you read.
Start actually using your brain and educating yourself on matters before you open your mouth.
That way the next time some snake oil salesman tells you the 'bad man is going to hurt you' you don't end up giving everything you own to the shyster trying to prevent something that would have never happened anyway.
Or in short, RTFA. What the submitter wrote and what actually was said in the article are 180 degrees apart. Not only that, but if you actually read the article you'd realize that nothing nefarious was occuring on either side. Retired chemist still doing research in his basement. Fire fighters notice the chemicals while responding to a fire in his house. The events that followed from that are 100% predictable.
This 'black and white', my side vs your side BS is exactly how we got to the point we are.
Except the book is not from the man in the article, it's from the blog author that's stirring up the mess by acting as if this was a big deal while plugging his book.
Really, the above is a bit far from the inflamitory accusations of ironshod goosestepping that the blog author insinuates.
There is a difference between having a hobby bench and doing 'science' and running a chem lab. One is harmless, the other is only harmless when you take the proper safety percautions.
This story doesn't seem to bear out your theory.
Perhaps the old saw that the further removed from war becomes, the more inhumane one acts is just that. Certainly, I've heard more stories of people actually thrust into the face of war breaking and becoming inhuman, torturing and killing more for pleasure than necessity, than I've ever heard of these unmanned missions doing so.
I think the Cold War has possibly been the worst thing we could have ever inflicted on the world. We've spent over 50 years playing Risk with smaller countries simply because we were afraid to fight the one big country we were at odds with. You only have to take a cursory look at the world today and see the effects of that. And for that matter, none of the people who were making the calls of whether to push the button or not really felt THEY were in danger. They knew they had bunkers and mountains to hide in.
Sir, I'm a recruiter from Monster Cables. We like your style and wonder if you'd like to come work for us...