I've pretty much given up on incoming calls on the land line at this point and don't give the number out to anyone.
What I need is some sort of small mac based program that answers my land line on the second ring and then plays a random series of chat-bot style queries and responses that I will record in my own voice.
Bonus points if the software can detect pauses from the other caller before playing it's responses. Extra bonus points if the software can detect the asking of a question by the caller. Extra extra bonus points if the software can also record both sides of the call so I can listen to the hilarity later.
I am upset about these kinds of situations not only because it's a clear abuse of power but also because thoughless actions such as these waste millions of taxpayer dollars.
Here's what I think could work as a deterrent to abuse by government officials...
For every lawsuit that is lost by the city, county, state in similar matters... the offending department has their next yearly budget reduced by half of the judgement. So if the police department does something bad and ends up settling out of court or loses a court case to the tune of 1 million... then their next yearly budget would automatically get reduced by 500k.
There has to be some sort of penalty to government workers that is more meaningful than just dipping into the general budget (our tax dollars) to pay for mistakes.
I hate to break it to you but America's pilgrims were not America's revolutionary founding fathers. See most of us here on this slashdot world wide web site tube thing have been a book learnin' for quite a while now.
What we are witnessing in Texas is a increasingly desperate grab at relevancy by the religious zealots. The want as much control of the public school system as they can possibly have but it won't work in the end.
Whispering in children's ears that all that "science" stuff just might be a lie or that the country was founded by god-fearing conservatives is what the zealots imagine will make kids more open to their religion but it won't.
The zealots themselves don't even bother to pay heed to their own teachings... and god help us all when they finally lash out like a rat backed into a corner
Creationism and Evolution can indeed exist together and I have no problem at all with the idea of "intelligent design". Personally, I've learned that there is more to life than meets the eye and science fiction is, I believe, a very healthy mind expanding way to look at life. My problem with creationism being taught in schools is that Christians want to insert their beliefs in our text books and nothing else.
I think it would be great if science teachers could theorise that super-intelligent aliens were responsible for life on earth or could talk about the plethora of creation theories that the world's many religions believe in.
There are quite a few that talk about exactly how the universe and the planet earth were created and it's great to think about.... as long as your "higher power" could just as easily be Nyx, the goddess of the void as it could be Jehova the Christian god that brought our universe into being then why not?
Any technology can be used for good or evil, especially technology that makes energy. Alfred Nobel, the inventor of TNT, knew this only too well. He created the Nobel prize so people wouldn't remember him as the creator of a weapon.
As far as understanding what technology's consequences are: technology is part of society. Its not that somehow society and technology can be separated and analyzed so that only the 'good' technology can interface somehow with society
You are exactly right that technology, seen as ideas, theories, inventions, etc... is inseparable from the society where they are born in the first place. The ever widening spread of electronic communication makes the bond between what can be imagined and/or created and society even tighter.
BUT... this has nothing to do with the countless hours of labor and the trillions upon trillions of dollars that the world's nations have spent to refine TNT into highly specialized weapons that are designed for more than just "shock and awe".
It's not like a few scientists grab some parts off the shelf at Circuit City and lego together a smart bomb. It takes a lot of hard human labor to turn basic technology into what we might consider "reliable" evil.
Like it or not, it's a simple matter of where we (in the grandest sense) choose to direct our efforts.
It's like in a hospital where you are probably more likely to get some raging new sort of bacterial infection BECAUSE they try so hard to keep everything free from the "evil" bacteria.
The reletively harmless bacteria gets killed off pretty easy by the bleach and chemicals used to clean the hospital (which is one reason why they're the reletively harmless ones) but the really tough bacteria doesn't die off completely and now has all this new empty space with no competition.
This is why some scientists were upset with the idea of all these anti-bacterial household products. Not because we would be breeding super-resistant bacteria, but because there is a large population of harmless bacteria that keeps the little pockets of bad bugs in check... and as others have stated here, we could just as easily say that IF there was some sort of unhealthy conditions being generated, it's more to do with the wonders of cheap plastic shower curtains than anything else.
I saw a great comic book story awhile ago where american teenagers (sometime in the future) were joining up with their concerned friends from all over the world to remotely fly these micro vehicles to some sort of international hotspot courtesy of the UN.
The teens were controlling the little flyers with thier home computers and were searching for some sort of evidence of WMDs or such.
Perhaps a thousand of these little flyers with video cameras could have helped avoid an Iraq invasion by showing the world that there really wasn't much going on?
I don't know if this has always been in OS X but I found a very helpful little area in the system preferences called "keyboard shortcuts" in the "keyboard & mouse" system preference panel. It allows you to assign keyboard shortcuts to any (menu?) command in any program including the Finder. Unfortunately it doesn't allow you to override the existing shortcuts that are already set up (very well that is... read on).
Shortcuts are very helpful for someone anyone with a laptop and some sort of trackpad device as it gets tiresome to do many simple or repetitive tasks... same as with a mouse but worse. With this internal keyboard shortcuts thingy Ive managed to set up my "f12" key as my "move to trash" key and have also set "Option + left arrow or right arrow" as my "page forward / page back" commands in Safari which comes in very handy. One bug ive noticed is that the new Opt+arrow key command in Safari gets disabled whenever you use the "History" menu. ???
Anyway, I wish I could change more of my keyboard this way without an expensive third party utility as it can make life much better for us powerbook users and I'm not one of those -powerusers- that uses the keyboard for just about everything. For instance... maybe it would be cool to assign the "Tab" key in finder to close windows (like Command + W does)? Too dangerous perhaps?
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Good Point! No absolute positives in the responses.
I've pretty much given up on incoming calls on the land line at this point and don't give the number out to anyone.
What I need is some sort of small mac based program that answers my land line on the second ring and then plays a random series of chat-bot style queries and responses that I will record in my own voice.
Bonus points if the software can detect pauses from the other caller before playing it's responses. Extra bonus points if the software can detect the asking of a question by the caller. Extra extra bonus points if the software can also record both sides of the call so I can listen to the hilarity later.
I am upset about these kinds of situations not only because it's a clear abuse of power but also because thoughless actions such as these waste millions of taxpayer dollars.
Here's what I think could work as a deterrent to abuse by government officials...
For every lawsuit that is lost by the city, county, state in similar matters... the offending department has their next yearly budget reduced by half of the judgement. So if the police department does something bad and ends up settling out of court or loses a court case to the tune of 1 million... then their next yearly budget would automatically get reduced by 500k.
There has to be some sort of penalty to government workers that is more meaningful than just dipping into the general budget (our tax dollars) to pay for mistakes.
I hate to break it to you but America's pilgrims were not America's revolutionary founding fathers. See most of us here on this slashdot world wide web site tube thing have been a book learnin' for quite a while now.
What we are witnessing in Texas is a increasingly desperate grab at relevancy by the religious zealots. The want as much control of the public school system as they can possibly have but it won't work in the end.
Whispering in children's ears that all that "science" stuff just might be a lie or that the country was founded by god-fearing conservatives is what the zealots imagine will make kids more open to their religion but it won't.
The zealots themselves don't even bother to pay heed to their own teachings... and god help us all when they finally lash out like a rat backed into a corner
Creationism and Evolution can indeed exist together and I have no problem at all with the idea of "intelligent design". Personally, I've learned that there is more to life than meets the eye and science fiction is, I believe, a very healthy mind expanding way to look at life. My problem with creationism being taught in schools is that Christians want to insert their beliefs in our text books and nothing else.
I think it would be great if science teachers could theorise that super-intelligent aliens were responsible for life on earth or could talk about the plethora of creation theories that the world's many religions believe in.
There are quite a few that talk about exactly how the universe and the planet earth were created and it's great to think about.... as long as your "higher power" could just as easily be Nyx, the goddess of the void as it could be Jehova the Christian god that brought our universe into being then why not?
It's pretty obvious now! We live on a metric planet, eh?
--------
----
-
Just imagine... juicy cooked tidbits will simply drop from the sky... time to buy a convertible!
Any technology can be used for good or evil, especially technology that makes energy. Alfred Nobel, the inventor of TNT, knew this only too well. He created the Nobel prize so people wouldn't remember him as the creator of a weapon.
As far as understanding what technology's consequences are: technology is part of society. Its not that somehow society and technology can be separated and analyzed so that only the 'good' technology can interface somehow with society
You are exactly right that technology, seen as ideas, theories, inventions, etc... is inseparable from the society where they are born in the first place. The ever widening spread of electronic communication makes the bond between what can be imagined and/or created and society even tighter.
BUT... this has nothing to do with the countless hours of labor and the trillions upon trillions of dollars that the world's nations have spent to refine TNT into highly specialized weapons that are designed for more than just "shock and awe".
It's not like a few scientists grab some parts off the shelf at Circuit City and lego together a smart bomb. It takes a lot of hard human labor to turn basic technology into what we might consider "reliable" evil.
Like it or not, it's a simple matter of where we (in the grandest sense) choose to direct our efforts.
It's like in a hospital where you are probably more likely to get some raging new sort of bacterial infection BECAUSE they try so hard to keep everything free from the "evil" bacteria.
The reletively harmless bacteria gets killed off pretty easy by the bleach and chemicals used to clean the hospital (which is one reason why they're the reletively harmless ones) but the really tough bacteria doesn't die off completely and now has all this new empty space with no competition.
This is why some scientists were upset with the idea of all these anti-bacterial household products. Not because we would be breeding super-resistant bacteria, but because there is a large population of harmless bacteria that keeps the little pockets of bad bugs in check... and as others have stated here, we could just as easily say that IF there was some sort of unhealthy conditions being generated, it's more to do with the wonders of cheap plastic shower curtains than anything else.
I saw a great comic book story awhile ago where american teenagers (sometime in the future) were joining up with their concerned friends from all over the world to remotely fly these micro vehicles to some sort of international hotspot courtesy of the UN.
The teens were controlling the little flyers with thier home computers and were searching for some sort of evidence of WMDs or such.
Perhaps a thousand of these little flyers with video cameras could have helped avoid an Iraq invasion by showing the world that there really wasn't much going on?
I don't know if this has always been in OS X but I found a very helpful little area in the system preferences called "keyboard shortcuts" in the "keyboard & mouse" system preference panel. It allows you to assign keyboard shortcuts to any (menu?) command in any program including the Finder. Unfortunately it doesn't allow you to override the existing shortcuts that are already set up (very well that is ... read on).
Shortcuts are very helpful for someone anyone with a laptop and some sort of trackpad device as it gets tiresome to do many simple or repetitive tasks... same as with a mouse but worse. With this internal keyboard shortcuts thingy Ive managed to set up my "f12" key as my "move to trash" key and have also set "Option + left arrow or right arrow" as my "page forward / page back" commands in Safari which comes in very handy. One bug ive noticed is that the new Opt+arrow key command in Safari gets disabled whenever you use the "History" menu. ???
Anyway, I wish I could change more of my keyboard this way without an expensive third party utility as it can make life much better for us powerbook users and I'm not one of those -powerusers- that uses the keyboard for just about everything. For instance ... maybe it would be cool to assign the "Tab" key in finder to close windows (like Command + W does)? Too dangerous perhaps?