The idea of the "Singularity" is largely the cultural effluvia of people indoctrinated in post-aboriginal-apocalypse millenarian cultures where the original inhabitants were forcibly displaced and eliminated within recent history. That is, American and Australia. To me, its absolutist finality indicates some deep-seated compensatory anxiety or insecurity that can most easily be resolved through a massive-yet-indeterminate process of transcendent redemption. It's a classic Waiting For the Messiah Complex (ala Bion).
Re:The important thing is...
on
Goodbye, Dolly
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· Score: 1
Atrocitites committed by governments is not a counterargument to someone arguing for freedom to conduct research.
Government by written constitution or by an unwritten agreement between individuated supernerds that THERE SHOULD BE NO LIMITS is still government. Remember kids, government is the complex of political institutions, laws, and customs through which the function of governing is carried out. Nobody said it had to be Big Government... tiny anarcho-syndicalist research-oriented communes are just as capable of governing their members, and of influencing them towards atrocities, as "typical" Western Nation State top-down Big Governments.
Re:The important thing is...
on
Goodbye, Dolly
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· Score: 1
Imagine how much more we as humans would know if *all* research was unfettered by government regulation and/or religious superstition.
I have been thinking about using an iPod for storage of files that aren't music-related. Specifically, I'd love to be able to use it as a hard drive to dump extra images that I take from my digital camera when I'm on the road.
I was going to say that the Archos with Rockbox would do that, but then I remembered that its USB2 is a slave-mode device. But my gf uses it as a music player and a handy 20GB sneakernet device.
Can I use the Archos as an USB harddisk to store data from my PDA/ digital camera/phone etc.
No. USB is a master/slave protocol, and both the Archos and your device are slaves. Two slaves cannot communicate without a master (usually a PC). (An upcoming extension called USB On-The-Go will let slaves communicate without a master, but current Archoses will not be able to support that.)
So it's Firewire only for your camera, it seems...
Californians don't realize it, but they're held in contempt throughout the rest of the world - when some actress announces she's converted to Buddhism or taken to a macrobiotic diet or started wearing crystals, the rest of the world just rolls its eyes.
Re:He gave man speech, and speech created thought
on
How to be a Programmer
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· Score: 1
The reason it sounds strange is due to the fact that you expect to hear two "P"s. No malice behind that thinking... Considering the different ways people can listen to something and find it linguistically jarring
You're quite right, it's about the qualia of the sensation. I am loathe to go all metaphysical, but you can derive a similar approach from using something like the Personal Construct Grid to ascertain a ladder or hierarchy of responses so that two people, who both seem to react manifestly similar to a stimulus, turn out to have quite different subconscious motivations.
However I submit to you that playing a child's spelling game and playing with people's perceptions of gender roles are quite, quite different, and we should not expect much concordance in the psychological reaction to both, despite perhaps similar neurological responses.
Re:He gave man speech, and speech created thought
on
How to be a Programmer
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· Score: 1
Whorf is a little discredited these days.
Ah yes, the slings and arrows and unsubstantiated mutterings of Anonymous Cowards are really refuting this hypothesis. Some substance please?
Thanks mostly to freedom (social and financial freedom)...not Big Government policy wonks. There have been a few things that Big Government has done to help things along
I never said Big Gov, you are pulling fears from your own brain and trying to make them my words. Where do you think those freedoms came from? They came from little people learning how to make better socieites, and through struggle and education. Who do you think "The Government" is? It's the social worker who looks after children, or the environmental engineer who checks your water, or the D.A. who prosecutes criminals who've infringed against you. You are carrying a bogeyman view of "The Goverment" around in your head.
For no other reason than the way that the phrase hits the ear.
"Phrases" don't hit your ear. Amplitude- and frequency- modulated sound vibrations are detected by your ear and eventually converted into electrical impulses that are interpreted by your brain. During the initial construction nothing jars. Yet at some level, the phrase "she" is recognized within your mind and this is what you find upsetting. "grammar fascist" is right. You need to ask yourself how deeply ingrained is sexist language within our minds that some simple pronoun usage can feel deeply disturbing to us. How important you think language is to the development of people's minds depends really onyour attitude to the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis (linguistic determinism and linguistic relativity).
> Well, yes. Why do you think those systems are so screwed up?
You're alive, aren't you, and pretty well fed, and relatively well-educated, and somewhat free of disease, and with a moderate chance of social improvement? We've come a long way in the last hundred years or so.
Most programmers are not female. Using "She" makes the work sound peculiar and unprofessional. It implies a anti-sexist bent which has nothing to
do with the subject matter.
Methinks this non-lady doth protest too much. Why should it be "weird" to use she? Is it any mistake that when we think of great doings of the past we think of HIStory and hot HERstory? As a society we are gradually unburdening ourselves from centuries of ingrained racism and classism that permeated our unconsciousnesses. It seems fitting to me that we make strenuous efforts to also rid ourselves of unconscious sexism. I think this poster needs to think about why using the female pronoun makes him feel uneasy.
Perhaps it is because people's lives hang in the balance when they interact with the products and structures designed by science/engineering students.
Riiiiiight. So all those polsci and sociology and psychology and health policy people who go on to devise the social and political systems that deploy the resources in the institutions that care for you when you're sick, or regulate toxins in your environment, or create a legal and punishment system, or induce or alleviate recessions and monetary policy (and so on) are just pissing in the wind? I mean, what's the construction and regulation of the byzantine complexity of social economies compared with building a bridge or a new Linux kernel?
When I got a Mac and started using iTunes, I was a much happier person.
That's probably because you never got to play with Media Jukebox. But yeah, most skins for most players seem to have been done by deranged schizophrenics on PCP.
What would be good ways to build a multichannel VCR? Think of a cluster of 4 PCs, each having 4 TV-cards?
More to the point, how to we get the gene engineers to redesign the human frame with several extra ocular inputs and a quad-cameral consciousness so they can absorb all this TV you seem intent on capturing?
You have stated your position ad nauseum. If you actually read what I wrote:
I posted no personal information but pulled some facts from publicly accessible and regulated databases. And I found this information from the links you posted in your email header, deliberately. It was also you who decided to circulate your real phone number on web. Again, deliberately.
I never said you worked for Segway. I never even said any of the companies you are affiliated with have any sort of relationship with any of Kamen's companies. I am satisfied that you believe you are making a true statement here.
You work for a marketing company. You are thus, by definition, a marketroid.
You were also pimping Segway. And your posting was inflammatory and read like a buzzword dronathon... hence a troll.
I've been reverse googled, it seems, and so I must take what Mr Torrone says at face value. He is not, nor has he ever been, a member of the Segway Party.
And then he goes and leaves his regular advertising site URL unmasked in the header: www.flashenabled.com. Where he outs himself as a bigwig with Fallon Worldwide. And spends a lot of time pimping PocketPC gadgets.
Come on, it's even written in obviously dumb marketing buzzwords futzed around a bit to look "cool" and "hip" and "with it". The same 206-372-2651 phone number is re-used for the POCKETPCMAGIC.COM website, registered to phillip torrone 627 broadway suite 504 new york, NY 10012. There are other interesting websites operating from this nice Manhattan location.
I have a working Jupiter Ace with a big honking 16K RamPack expansion. The world's only ever released FORTH-based micro. This machine rules! It's the machine that the designers of the Spectrum (Timex-Sinclair 2000) went on to designfor an encore, and was hardware compatible. You can think of it in terms of Jay Miner's Atari->Amiga progression. Of course, if you really want to see what it's all about why bother with emulators? You can build your own Jupiter Ace.
Software for money is held to a higher standard than free software. iTunes is incredible: it's fast, has plenty of features, and works great.
iTunes is surprisingly good for a Mac app, but JRiver's Media Jukebox is better. In fact, it's in a class of its own. And it costs only $25. It seems to me that a lot of the "ihub" software copies best-of-breed innovative shareware from the Windows world and puts an Aqua front on it. Compare iPhoto with the awesome ThumbsPlus, for example. Anyway, I think once Mac people start paying for these applications, they will be better able to judge them on their merits versus similar software on other platforms.
And they were never "free". Their users have already paid a significant price premium for buying Apple's hardware/software combination and accepting the lock-in.
You just don't get it, do you? Do you think the web would have succeeded in its early days if it had required proprietary and expensive tools and signed deployment modules? There were any number of such schemes pre-HTTP/HTML but they all failed because the barriers to entry were too large. It took non-obfuscated HTML code and open sourced servers to create the impetus for our current boom in distributed systems. Creating a similar boom in distributed mobile applications will require a similar open access paradigm.
Slashdot Mirror
The idea of the "Singularity" is largely the cultural effluvia of people indoctrinated in post-aboriginal-apocalypse millenarian cultures where the original inhabitants were forcibly displaced and eliminated within recent history. That is, American and Australia. To me, its absolutist finality indicates some deep-seated compensatory anxiety or insecurity that can most easily be resolved through a massive-yet-indeterminate process of transcendent redemption. It's a classic Waiting For the Messiah Complex (ala Bion).
Or I think Ken MacLeod put it more succinctly: Rapture For Nerds .
Atrocitites committed by governments is not a counterargument to someone arguing for freedom to conduct research.
Government by written constitution or by an unwritten agreement between individuated supernerds that THERE SHOULD BE NO LIMITS is still government. Remember kids, government is the complex of political institutions, laws, and customs through which the function of governing is carried out. Nobody said it had to be Big Government... tiny anarcho-syndicalist research-oriented communes are just as capable of governing their members, and of influencing them towards atrocities, as "typical" Western Nation State top-down Big Governments.
Imagine how much more we as humans would know if *all* research was unfettered by government regulation and/or religious superstition.
Yeah right on. There are a few people who agree with you. Enjoy the company.
The found a Katz clone. Someone please save us.
That's not fair, but the average Katz-like sentence length does tend to indicate a sixth day violation.
I was going to say that the Archos with Rockbox would do that, but then I remembered that its USB2 is a slave-mode device. But my gf uses it as a music player and a handy 20GB sneakernet device.
From the FAQ:
So it's Firewire only for your camera, it seems...
Californians don't realize it, but they're held in contempt throughout the rest of the world - when some actress announces she's converted to Buddhism or taken to a macrobiotic diet or started wearing crystals, the rest of the world just rolls its eyes.
Actually, Ayn Rand-spouting Technical Consultants in cut-off sheer tops are held in contempt through much of the civilized world. When one of them begins spewing crude stereotypes, the rest of us just feel sad.
The reason it sounds strange is due to the fact that you expect to hear two "P"s. No malice behind that thinking ... Considering the different ways people can listen to something and find it linguistically jarring
You're quite right, it's about the qualia of the sensation. I am loathe to go all metaphysical, but you can derive a similar approach from using something like the Personal Construct Grid to ascertain a ladder or hierarchy of responses so that two people, who both seem to react manifestly similar to a stimulus, turn out to have quite different subconscious motivations.
However I submit to you that playing a child's spelling game and playing with people's perceptions of gender roles are quite, quite different, and we should not expect much concordance in the psychological reaction to both, despite perhaps similar neurological responses.
Whorf is a little discredited these days.
Ah yes, the slings and arrows and unsubstantiated mutterings of Anonymous Cowards are really refuting this hypothesis. Some substance please?
Thanks mostly to freedom (social and financial freedom)...not Big Government policy wonks. There have been a few things that Big Government has done to help things along
I never said Big Gov, you are pulling fears from your own brain and trying to make them my words. Where do you think those freedoms came from? They came from little people learning how to make better socieites, and through struggle and education. Who do you think "The Government" is? It's the social worker who looks after children, or the environmental engineer who checks your water, or the D.A. who prosecutes criminals who've infringed against you. You are carrying a bogeyman view of "The Goverment" around in your head.
For no other reason than the way that the phrase hits the ear.
"Phrases" don't hit your ear. Amplitude- and frequency- modulated sound vibrations are detected by your ear and eventually converted into electrical impulses that are interpreted by your brain. During the initial construction nothing jars. Yet at some level, the phrase "she" is recognized within your mind and this is what you find upsetting. "grammar fascist" is right. You need to ask yourself how deeply ingrained is sexist language within our minds that some simple pronoun usage can feel deeply disturbing to us. How important you think language is to the development of people's minds depends really onyour attitude to the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis (linguistic determinism and linguistic relativity).
> Well, yes. Why do you think those systems are so screwed up?
You're alive, aren't you, and pretty well fed, and relatively well-educated, and somewhat free of disease, and with a moderate chance of social improvement? We've come a long way in the last hundred years or so.
Most programmers are not female. Using "She" makes the work sound peculiar and unprofessional. It implies a anti-sexist bent which has nothing to do with the subject matter.
Methinks this non-lady doth protest too much. Why should it be "weird" to use she? Is it any mistake that when we think of great doings of the past we think of HIStory and hot HERstory? As a society we are gradually unburdening ourselves from centuries of ingrained racism and classism that permeated our unconsciousnesses. It seems fitting to me that we make strenuous efforts to also rid ourselves of unconscious sexism. I think this poster needs to think about why using the female pronoun makes him feel uneasy.
Perhaps it is because people's lives hang in the balance when they interact with the products and structures designed by science/engineering students.
Riiiiiight. So all those polsci and sociology and psychology and health policy people who go on to devise the social and political systems that deploy the resources in the institutions that care for you when you're sick, or regulate toxins in your environment, or create a legal and punishment system, or induce or alleviate recessions and monetary policy (and so on) are just pissing in the wind? I mean, what's the construction and regulation of the byzantine complexity of social economies compared with building a bridge or a new Linux kernel?
When I got a Mac and started using iTunes, I was a much happier person.
That's probably because you never got to play with Media Jukebox. But yeah, most skins for most players seem to have been done by deranged schizophrenics on PCP.
What would be good ways to build a multichannel VCR? Think of a cluster of 4 PCs, each having 4 TV-cards?
More to the point, how to we get the gene engineers to redesign the human frame with several extra ocular inputs and a quad-cameral consciousness so they can absorb all this TV you seem intent on capturing?
Actually, the United Nations was designed by the Soviets with the goal of achieving the old dream of global communism.
And I suppose the Jews and the Gnomes of Zurich were also involved?
Avid Readers, of whom there at least two, will be undoubtedly overjoyed to know that they can read my gripping final comments on this debacle.
You have stated your position ad nauseum. If you actually read what I wrote:
I posted no personal information but pulled some facts from publicly accessible and regulated databases. And I found this information from the links you posted in your email header, deliberately. It was also you who decided to circulate your real phone number on web. Again, deliberately.
I never said you worked for Segway. I never even said any of the companies you are affiliated with have any sort of relationship with any of Kamen's companies. I am satisfied that you believe you are making a true statement here.
You work for a marketing company. You are thus, by definition, a marketroid.
You were also pimping Segway. And your posting was inflammatory and read like a buzzword dronathon... hence a troll.
Hence, Marketroid Pimp Trolling for Segway.
I've been reverse googled, it seems, and so I must take what Mr Torrone says at face value. He is not, nor has he ever been, a member of the Segway Party.
WHOIS on the obviously bogus-named bookofseg.com:
Organization: phillip torrone 424 second ave west seattle, wa 98119 US Phone: 206-372-2651 Email: phillip@flashenabled.com
I note from a Google search that this is a Tony neighbourhood of Seattle, with one of "Puget Sound area's largest advertising agencies" located at 424 second ave west. So this seems like a hotspot for marketing companies.
And then he goes and leaves his regular advertising site URL unmasked in the header: www.flashenabled.com. Where he outs himself as a bigwig with Fallon Worldwide. And spends a lot of time pimping PocketPC gadgets.
Some of our other clients include; BMW of North America, Citibank, EDS, Gulfstream Aerospace Corp., Holiday Inn, International Truck and Engine Corp., Lee Jeans, Microsoft, Nikon, Nordstrom, Nuveen Investments, PBS, Ralston Purina, Timberland, Timex, and United Airlines.
Come on, it's even written in obviously dumb marketing buzzwords futzed around a bit to look "cool" and "hip" and "with it". The same 206-372-2651 phone number is re-used for the POCKETPCMAGIC.COM website, registered to phillip torrone 627 broadway suite 504 new york, NY 10012. There are other interesting websites operating from this nice Manhattan location.
I have a working Jupiter Ace with a big honking 16K RamPack expansion. The world's only ever released FORTH-based micro. This machine rules! It's the machine that the designers of the Spectrum (Timex-Sinclair 2000) went on to designfor an encore, and was hardware compatible. You can think of it in terms of Jay Miner's Atari->Amiga progression. Of course, if you really want to see what it's all about why bother with emulators? You can build your own Jupiter Ace.
Software for money is held to a higher standard than free software. iTunes is incredible: it's fast, has plenty of features, and works great.
iTunes is surprisingly good for a Mac app, but JRiver's Media Jukebox is better. In fact, it's in a class of its own. And it costs only $25. It seems to me that a lot of the "ihub" software copies best-of-breed innovative shareware from the Windows world and puts an Aqua front on it. Compare iPhoto with the awesome ThumbsPlus, for example. Anyway, I think once Mac people start paying for these applications, they will be better able to judge them on their merits versus similar software on other platforms.
And they were never "free". Their users have already paid a significant price premium for buying Apple's hardware/software combination and accepting the lock-in.
I think the coolest, rarest game I ever saw an advert for was Attack Of The Mutant Zombie Flesh Eating Chickens From Mars (starring Zippo the Dog) for the old Spectrum (Timex-Sinclair 1000). The vapourware advert cassette cover art was amazing -- anyone who somehow still has a copy please scan it!
You just don't get it, do you? Do you think the web would have succeeded in its early days if it had required proprietary and expensive tools and signed deployment modules? There were any number of such schemes pre-HTTP/HTML but they all failed because the barriers to entry were too large. It took non-obfuscated HTML code and open sourced servers to create the impetus for our current boom in distributed systems. Creating a similar boom in distributed mobile applications will require a similar open access paradigm.
You must submit...
From my reading of your "refuation", none of what he says is incorrect, and you put it very plainly:
You Must Submit
Thanks for clearing that up. Java may not be an ECMA standard, but at least I don't have to submit my binaries to for "approval".