"Nanotech robots are actually less practical that Star Trek teleportation"
You've just made the argument that life is impossible. Im sorry, but all human beings are in fact, living nanotechnology. What exactly do you think every baby on earth is? An incredible feat of engineering.
But the good ol USA is a terrorist state. Exporting terror to the world via illegal wars, coups and economic warfare. Let's not mince words here, if your country was illegally invaded getting attacked and your family members were killed I would hardly call you a "terrorist" for hating the country that will not stop illegally meddling in you affairs.
The fact that the USA loves to criminally meddle in other states affairs is quite enough proof that US is a terrorist state.
I disagree entirely, open code is better then no code, it doesn't always have to be 're-usable' to everybody. In fact just because it susbtitutes money with cost in time does not mean others don't value it. We can see this with Freespace 2 SCP and Descent 2 X (and XL) based on open source code. Just because you can't make heads or tails of the code doesn't mean people smarter then you can't.
Right now closed source software means that many consumer goods go obsolete unnecessarily. We see this especially in the gaming industry, how many PC games could have had old parts scrubbed and rewritten and updated by fans of the game and still work today if the code was forced to be opened after it's sales run? A lot.
Software goods have more in common with real tangible items, but the fact is the economic system in fact bastardizes and destroys these goods/wealth by making sure it goes obsolete (breaks/doesn't work) by close sourcing the software.
There's no excuse for software to have to break when you have the source, the fact that customers (really investors) get screwed in their investment in this one way parasitic capitalism because of the lack of nuance and intellectual understanding is quite disturbing with anyone with any kind of serious intelligence.
"Many artists spend their whole life creating and virtually starving to death..."
They're free to get another job, the whole concept of "starving artists" is ridiculous in modern society, the fact is if a market is unprofitable and you knowingly go into it, it's not anyones fault but your own that you're starving. The poor nebulous image of starving artists is a bit bullshittery when you consider real poor countries have to eat mud:
Mosts "artists", today feel they are entitled to ridiculous amounts of money, just because the industry has become big they become accustomed to it and become very unrealistic.
Monopoly property rights is the whole reason artists are able to get rich in the first place. You get rich by having a large enough population, you don't get rich because of "merit" this whole myth of richness by merit is bs, if we killed everyone who was a customer, suddenly their skills have no value and they are unskilled or unneeded laborers.
Being rich is a matter of luck and population geometry as it is working to create something.
"Did your games come with an EULA or something? Mine didn't"
Yes actually they did, you technically don't 'own' the game only the liscense to play it, it's the same thing as a EULA essentially, I know if I dig through my old nintendo games I'll something like the EULA.
"If 7 dollars is too much for an unenhanced SNES game, what do you think a fair price is, 6 dollars? "
And this is what I hate about software, I own many said games games already. Technically I still own the liscense to play the game, so why exactly should I have to pay for it if I can provide proof of purchase? Saying Nintendo loses money or some other crap is just a bunch of BS. They have oodles of cash since the Wii is successful, emulation proves people will work and give away their work for free. After all emulators are not easy to make and yet people make them because they are fans and most importantly so that they can have access to the games they purchased if in sometime in the future the hardware company goes belly up or stops selling/supporting replacements.
Right now consumer rights for digital stuff is in the dark ages, you would never sell someone a car they couldn't fix or modify, yet we do that with software and I hate it. When you see great stuff like Freespace 2 SCP http://scp.indiegames.us/news.php
It just makes me angry that old games can't be updated to work when they break because of new hardware and newer OS's, etc, because of closed source bs. Hence the emulation seen, there's DOSBOX which has been around for a while, but doing other 'newer' games is more complicated.
"The idea of working on something for a few weeks or months then getting payed for the remainder of your life seems kind of odd to me"
They do it for software, lets face it. People in general don't give a rats ass about being "progressive" from a market standpoint, they want to get rich and STAY rich.
"Cannada CANNOT break (grammatically error on country placement inserted intentionally) copyright US law."
Since when has the US had respect for the law, with their illegal invasion of IRAQ? The US cares about one thing: It's corporate interests. If it has to bully or sanction other countries it will.
"War is never necessary except for those who's purpose it serves... war is not necessary."
This is incorrect, looking at ACTUAL history, those who've had the wealth, arms and power were one in the same, an they use fear of punishment to keep their power. We don't have the worker rights we do without our ancestors having fought employers (businesses), and against land owners (slavery), war is ABSOLUTELY necessary to gain your freedom and change society for the better in many instances, just look at the US government passing telecom immunity bill, that shit would not happen if an army of americans was going apeshit and destroying property, but most americans are too passified and too ignorant to understand their rights, easily lied to and mislead. Many things have never come without bloodshed. All wars are in the end mental in nature, an interest vs an interest, whether it be cultural oppression, or oppression based on resources.
I don't trust people to do this job, so why the hell would I trust a computer?
They don't drink, they don't smoke pot, they don't get tired, inattentive, they don't have wife/husband/kid problems, no financial problems and also no mental ones.
Some of us got a new hip installed by a robot, so why not trust a computer to tell our plane the right things, especially since their colleagues are already flying the planes most of the time. The AI should always have a human spotter.:)
"I think Gears of War did that with it's gameplay style"
The fact that you'd mention gears of war is a testament to your lack of gaming history. Many games have done the duck and cover, it wasn't 'new' so much as repackaged gameplay with new animations. Gears was not innovative it was just a game with awesome graphics, built in the fps mold.
The problem with gameboy's was LCD rot (if you're talking about the original), I imagine others will have this problem as well as time goes on and pixels go dead (unless they've fixed this) but it takes a while to happen.
Yes yes it does. For instance, did you know mathematics is a metaphorical language that's needed to describe geometric shapes? You have a sphere... now describe it. Oh what's that, you need to invent a language to describe the pattern!
Do you also know that metaphorical analysis is quite valid in scientific arena? Human beings understand the world through metaphors, any time you have an incomplete understanding of the totality of how something works or abstracted from the 'true nature' of something, you have to use 'placeholder' understanding. For instance newtons laws of gravitation are an approximation, if we make more accurate measurements he's incorrect, yet we got to the moon and back using an approximation (metaphor).
"The greatest thing by far is to be a master of metaphor. It is the one thing that cannot be learned from others; it is also a sign of genius, since a good metaphor implies an eye for resemblance. --Aristotle, De Poetica, 322 B.C.
One of my partial sentences I didn't delete before I posted, big whoop. Everyone else got the gist of it but you.
Intuition is pattern recognition and changing the lenses (angle) from which you look at something, that someone took the time to work out.
The key is, as Schopenhauer said: "to think something no one has thought yet, while looking at something that everybody see's" which is fancy way of saying: Keep changing the perspective (interpretive framework) and using other seemingly unrelated subjects to try and interpret it in terms of something else.
Millions of people have similar or the exact same leads on great ideas everyday but they don't have the time or the fast mind to follow up on them. IMHO it's not that people can't figure it out given enough time, it is who and what you come into contact with that triggers the lead up to deofuscate the idea and THEN the persistence to follow that 'intuition'. Intuition is necessary but intuition
Part of the problem is the education system itself amd it's attempt to rush learning and disavow thinking about things differently in order to pound out 'educated' workers. People that realize there are connections between everything that we can't see and have initiative despite lack of formal education were some of the greatest innovators.
There are already solutions for serious 3D artists/etc. Not to mention SSD's are going to replace hard drives soon for people with those workflows making your suggestion obsolete.
Even with the bandwidth increases, what you're spouting is nonsense. The local bandwidth of ram is infinitely faster and cheaper then flash, period. Not to mention: It doesn't wear out. Why would you put flash in a video card which does insane amounts of reads and writes per second? You'd have to be an idiot.
I'm not underestimating your powers of comprehension, I'm more concerned with acceptability of what I have to say given the current intellectual climate. Believe me.
Don't think of this a 'test', more like a barometer of where you are at.
Do we understand the world entirely metaphorically?
"scientists as a group are stupid, shortsighted, and dangerous..."
Movies are just that: Movies. They reflect what makes money.
Also, scientists are just people, they are not gods. History testifies to the fact that experts are just as human and often just as bone-headed as anyone else. Take a look at some of CIA history and research into "shock" therapy where idiotic Dr's with PHD's thought the could "cure" people.
These people were snake oil salesmen with degree's, the same is happening today with ADD, ADHD, etc, labelling normal behaviou as a 'medical condition' because it brings in the money and not questioning the basis of society itself (i.e. penning up children in classrooms for 6 (or more) hours a day teaching them god awful boring stuff) and sometimes it's entire industries have their head in the sand because of profit. These same types exist today in record numbers but their fraud and bad science will not be exposed until well after the fact. The fact is when you exist in a status system and often "without peer", you can manipulate other people with you gobbledygook and the aura and mystique acquired by use of your status as a result of your credentials.
Credentials don't ensure that you don't have part of yourself that has kooky ideas or are not a nutcase. While not all scientists are stupid, shortsighted and dangerous, others are. They are still just apes with degree's, subject to all the same bias's, corrupting influences as any other person. Scientists have committed fraud before and fleeced others, so lets not pretend all of them are good people.
"A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it."--Max Planck
His quote is a testament to the fact that scientists or no, human beings are an irrational lot.
"But that's okay. You're a "critical thinker." You're wisdom is inherently superior to the ignorant skeptics of your positions. Why, you're so righteous and wise in your beliefs that you presume to lecture a Muslim on the Qu'ran, a book with which is almost certainly more familiar than you. But don't let logic get in the way of the bitter, bile-filed diatribe that is born from your enlightened "critical thinking." After all, the guy who studies the book every week at his mosque is obviously the one arguing from a position of dogmatic ignorance here."
You make a lot of interesting points but you have to remember many of the/. crowd are very narrow in their thinking, religion is one stage of human development that is in fact required, people aren't born knowing things and many people here if they had been born in the past in different times and ages most likely would have become religious or had some kind of mythological or quasimythological characteristics in their culture and knowledge.
One does not build rome in a day, just as one does not build science de novo from nothing.
I agree with what you are saying but the vast majority of phishers are non-technical people. Let's face it in the end though, that nothing is 100% secure and we all take risks, it's just a matter of how risky and what you do with your computer.
The average user for certain doesn't understand much, but that's a failing of the industry itself and the engineering versus an economic challenge.
If we think of it in terms of traffic, the only way we'd ever remove traffic congestion and stop accidents (mostly barring say acts of god, weather, etc) would be to have total control over the car itself. Hence 'trusted computing' initiatives, and while great in theory in practice we all know people will abuse their power.
The fact is the biggest problem has always been between the keyboard and the chair, or simply the human being. The state of affairs in our world is a sad reflection of the quality of human beings that populate it
"You do realice that a piece of software on your own computer cannot stop any of that. Simply put, how should that programm find out if you are surfing the web or if a programm is controlling your browser to phone home?"
Yes I do realize it's not perfect. But FYI it definitely works for some programs. You're thinking of extremely malicious programs that will try anything, I'm just trying to catch the basic ones, and yes you can stop programs: Disabling the network card temporarily for instance or using said programs programs on an unconnected PC.
I have 4 PC's, one for websurfing, one for general work, another for apps (not connected to net), etc.
Slashdot Mirror
"Nanotech robots are actually less practical that Star Trek teleportation"
You've just made the argument that life is impossible. Im sorry, but all human beings are in fact, living nanotechnology. What exactly do you think every baby on earth is? An incredible feat of engineering.
http://aimediaserver.com/studiodaily/videoplayer/?src=harvard/harvard.swf&width=640&height=520
"the USA has been demonized by terrorist groups,"
But the good ol USA is a terrorist state. Exporting terror to the world via illegal wars, coups and economic warfare. Let's not mince words here, if your country was illegally invaded getting attacked and your family members were killed I would hardly call you a "terrorist" for hating the country that will not stop illegally meddling in you affairs.
The fact that the USA loves to criminally meddle in other states affairs is quite enough proof that US is a terrorist state.
"Didn't realize that free air is made by an intense effort of people applying their talents."
Bottled water. Just what kind of talent does that take? I rest my case.
I disagree entirely, open code is better then no code, it doesn't always have to be 're-usable' to everybody. In fact just because it susbtitutes money with cost in time does not mean others don't value it. We can see this with Freespace 2 SCP and Descent 2 X (and XL) based on open source code. Just because you can't make heads or tails of the code doesn't mean people smarter then you can't.
http://scp.indiegames.us/news.php
http://www.descent2.de/
Right now closed source software means that many consumer goods go obsolete unnecessarily. We see this especially in the gaming industry, how many PC games could have had old parts scrubbed and rewritten and updated by fans of the game and still work today if the code was forced to be opened after it's sales run? A lot.
Software goods have more in common with real tangible items, but the fact is the economic system in fact bastardizes and destroys these goods/wealth by making sure it goes obsolete (breaks/doesn't work) by close sourcing the software.
There's no excuse for software to have to break when you have the source, the fact that customers (really investors) get screwed in their investment in this one way parasitic capitalism because of the lack of nuance and intellectual understanding is quite disturbing with anyone with any kind of serious intelligence.
"Many artists spend their whole life creating and virtually starving to death ..."
They're free to get another job, the whole concept of "starving artists" is ridiculous in modern society, the fact is if a market is unprofitable and you knowingly go into it, it's not anyones fault but your own that you're starving. The poor nebulous image of starving artists is a bit bullshittery when you consider real poor countries have to eat mud:
http://abcnews.go.com/International/popup?id=4216121
Mosts "artists", today feel they are entitled to ridiculous amounts of money, just because the industry has become big they become accustomed to it and become very unrealistic.
Monopoly property rights is the whole reason artists are able to get rich in the first place. You get rich by having a large enough population, you don't get rich because of "merit" this whole myth of richness by merit is bs, if we killed everyone who was a customer, suddenly their skills have no value and they are unskilled or unneeded laborers.
Being rich is a matter of luck and population geometry as it is working to create something.
"Did your games come with an EULA or something? Mine didn't"
Yes actually they did, you technically don't 'own' the game only the liscense to play it, it's the same thing as a EULA essentially, I know if I dig through my old nintendo games I'll something like the EULA.
"If 7 dollars is too much for an unenhanced SNES game, what do you think a fair price is, 6 dollars? "
And this is what I hate about software, I own many said games games already. Technically I still own the liscense to play the game, so why exactly should I have to pay for it if I can provide proof of purchase? Saying Nintendo loses money or some other crap is just a bunch of BS. They have oodles of cash since the Wii is successful, emulation proves people will work and give away their work for free. After all emulators are not easy to make and yet people make them because they are fans and most importantly so that they can have access to the games they purchased if in sometime in the future the hardware company goes belly up or stops selling/supporting replacements.
Right now consumer rights for digital stuff is in the dark ages, you would never sell someone a car they couldn't fix or modify, yet we do that with software and I hate it. When you see great stuff like Freespace 2 SCP http://scp.indiegames.us/news.php
It just makes me angry that old games can't be updated to work when they break because of new hardware and newer OS's, etc, because of closed source bs. Hence the emulation seen, there's DOSBOX which has been around for a while, but doing other 'newer' games is more complicated.
Call me crazy but I do not see this as a good thing.
"The idea of working on something for a few weeks or months then getting payed for the remainder of your life seems kind of odd to me"
They do it for software, lets face it. People in general don't give a rats ass about being "progressive" from a market standpoint, they want to get rich and STAY rich.
"Cannada CANNOT break (grammatically error on country placement inserted intentionally) copyright US law."
Since when has the US had respect for the law, with their illegal invasion of IRAQ? The US cares about one thing: It's corporate interests. If it has to bully or sanction other countries it will.
"War is never necessary except for those who's purpose it serves... war is not necessary."
This is incorrect, looking at ACTUAL history, those who've had the wealth, arms and power were one in the same, an they use fear of punishment to keep their power. We don't have the worker rights we do without our ancestors having fought employers (businesses), and against land owners (slavery), war is ABSOLUTELY necessary to gain your freedom and change society for the better in many instances, just look at the US government passing telecom immunity bill, that shit would not happen if an army of americans was going apeshit and destroying property, but most americans are too passified and too ignorant to understand their rights, easily lied to and mislead. Many things have never come without bloodshed. All wars are in the end mental in nature, an interest vs an interest, whether it be cultural oppression, or oppression based on resources.
They don't drink, they don't smoke pot, they don't get tired, inattentive, they don't have wife/husband/kid problems, no financial problems and also no mental ones.
Some of us got a new hip installed by a robot, so why not trust a computer to tell our plane the right things, especially since their colleagues are already flying the planes most of the time. The AI should always have a human spotter.
"This dedication to strive for perfection is the sole reason I have every single game they released sitting on my shelf. "
Blizzard in the early years released some real turdy games, it wasn't really until warcraft and diablo they became a force.
"I think Gears of War did that with it's gameplay style"
The fact that you'd mention gears of war is a testament to your lack of gaming history. Many games have done the duck and cover, it wasn't 'new' so much as repackaged gameplay with new animations. Gears was not innovative it was just a game with awesome graphics, built in the fps mold.
The problem with gameboy's was LCD rot (if you're talking about the original), I imagine others will have this problem as well as time goes on and pixels go dead (unless they've fixed this) but it takes a while to happen.
"Does any of that even make sense? "
Yes yes it does. For instance, did you know mathematics is a metaphorical language that's needed to describe geometric shapes? You have a sphere... now describe it. Oh what's that, you need to invent a language to describe the pattern!
Do you also know that metaphorical analysis is quite valid in scientific arena? Human beings understand the world through metaphors, any time you have an incomplete understanding of the totality of how something works or abstracted from the 'true nature' of something, you have to use 'placeholder' understanding. For instance newtons laws of gravitation are an approximation, if we make more accurate measurements he's incorrect, yet we got to the moon and back using an approximation (metaphor).
"The greatest thing by far is to be a master of metaphor. It is the one thing that cannot be learned from others; it is also a sign of genius, since a good metaphor implies an eye for resemblance.
--Aristotle, De Poetica, 322 B.C.
One of my partial sentences I didn't delete before I posted, big whoop. Everyone else got the gist of it but you.
Intuition is pattern recognition and changing the lenses (angle) from which you look at something, that someone took the time to work out.
The key is, as Schopenhauer said: "to think something no one has thought yet, while looking at something that everybody see's" which is fancy way of saying: Keep changing the perspective (interpretive framework) and using other seemingly unrelated subjects to try and interpret it in terms of something else.
Millions of people have similar or the exact same leads on great ideas everyday but they don't have the time or the fast mind to follow up on them. IMHO it's not that people can't figure it out given enough time, it is who and what you come into contact with that triggers the lead up to deofuscate the idea and THEN the persistence to follow that 'intuition'. Intuition is necessary but intuition
Part of the problem is the education system itself amd it's attempt to rush learning and disavow thinking about things differently in order to pound out 'educated' workers. People that realize there are connections between everything that we can't see and have initiative despite lack of formal education were some of the greatest innovators.
There are already solutions for serious 3D artists/etc. Not to mention SSD's are going to replace hard drives soon for people with those workflows making your suggestion obsolete.
Even with the bandwidth increases, what you're spouting is nonsense. The local bandwidth of ram is infinitely faster and cheaper then flash, period. Not to mention: It doesn't wear out. Why would you put flash in a video card which does insane amounts of reads and writes per second? You'd have to be an idiot.
I'm not underestimating your powers of comprehension, I'm more concerned with acceptability of what I have to say given the current intellectual climate. Believe me.
Don't think of this a 'test', more like a barometer of where you are at.
Do we understand the world entirely metaphorically?
""If a tree falls in the woods, and there's nobody there to hear it, does it ever fail to make a sound?"
Actually it doesn't, what the question is asking is a person percieving a sound. But there is no person in the question.
"scientists as a group are stupid, shortsighted, and dangerous..."
Movies are just that: Movies. They reflect what makes money.
Also, scientists are just people, they are not gods. History testifies to the fact that experts are just as human and often just as bone-headed as anyone else. Take a look at some of CIA history and research into "shock" therapy where idiotic Dr's with PHD's thought the could "cure" people.
These people were snake oil salesmen with degree's, the same is happening today with ADD, ADHD, etc, labelling normal behaviou as a 'medical condition' because it brings in the money and not questioning the basis of society itself (i.e. penning up children in classrooms for 6 (or more) hours a day teaching them god awful boring stuff) and sometimes it's entire industries have their head in the sand because of profit. These same types exist today in record numbers but their fraud and bad science will not be exposed until well after the fact. The fact is when you exist in a status system and often "without peer", you can manipulate other people with you gobbledygook and the aura and mystique acquired by use of your status as a result of your credentials.
Credentials don't ensure that you don't have part of yourself that has kooky ideas or are not a nutcase. While not all scientists are stupid, shortsighted and dangerous, others are. They are still just apes with degree's, subject to all the same bias's, corrupting influences as any other person. Scientists have committed fraud before and fleeced others, so lets not pretend all of them are good people.
"A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it."--Max Planck
His quote is a testament to the fact that scientists or no, human beings are an irrational lot.
"But that's okay. You're a "critical thinker." You're wisdom is inherently superior to the ignorant skeptics of your positions. Why, you're so righteous and wise in your beliefs that you presume to lecture a Muslim on the Qu'ran, a book with which is almost certainly more familiar than you. But don't let logic get in the way of the bitter, bile-filed diatribe that is born from your enlightened "critical thinking." After all, the guy who studies the book every week at his mosque is obviously the one arguing from a position of dogmatic ignorance here."
/. crowd are very narrow in their thinking, religion is one stage of human development that is in fact required, people aren't born knowing things and many people here if they had been born in the past in different times and ages most likely would have become religious or had some kind of mythological or quasimythological characteristics in their culture and knowledge.
You make a lot of interesting points but you have to remember many of the
One does not build rome in a day, just as one does not build science de novo from nothing.
I agree with what you are saying but the vast majority of phishers are non-technical people. Let's face it in the end though, that nothing is 100% secure and we all take risks, it's just a matter of how risky and what you do with your computer.
The average user for certain doesn't understand much, but that's a failing of the industry itself and the engineering versus an economic challenge.
If we think of it in terms of traffic, the only way we'd ever remove traffic congestion and stop accidents (mostly barring say acts of god, weather, etc) would be to have total control over the car itself. Hence 'trusted computing' initiatives, and while great in theory in practice we all know people will abuse their power.
The fact is the biggest problem has always been between the keyboard and the chair, or simply the human being. The state of affairs in our world is a sad reflection of the quality of human beings that populate it
"You do realice that a piece of software on your own computer cannot stop any of that. Simply put, how should that programm find out if you are surfing the web or if a programm is controlling your browser to phone home?"
Yes I do realize it's not perfect. But FYI it definitely works for some programs. You're thinking of extremely malicious programs that will try anything, I'm just trying to catch the basic ones, and yes you can stop programs: Disabling the network card temporarily for instance or using said programs programs on an unconnected PC.
I have 4 PC's, one for websurfing, one for general work, another for apps (not connected to net), etc.