Weak-kneed members of the public will have to be kept away from the giant culture vats, where hideous amorphous flesh lumps, studded with electrodes, thrash and strain;
Doesn't strike me as a problem. I'm sure the overlap is almost 100% between people who won't eat lab-grown meat once they see it being processed and people who won't eat animal-grown meat once they see it being processed.
A relevant Orwell reference... on the internet? Dear god, what is slashdot coming to!
Yeah, really. Let's all stop posting. And then we can see if Taco edits out references to the mass exodus on Slashdot's Wikipedia page, replacing it with "The number of people posting to Slashdot peaked about two and a half months ago, declined slightly for a brief period, and has remained stable since then. Every month, some people stop posting, and every month, they are replaced by new people."
I just searched for "bear" and found you. Despite a good start we also haven't had a thread demanding an "Australia" section where regular news items on insanity down under can be had.
...the dumbest thing I've ever heard. Calling 911 because someone is making you feel bad? Calling 911 because some guy 1000 miles away wrote some words that made you feel bad?
Calling 911 because the kid somehow finds it too difficult to close the chat window with the creepy guy?
How much more can we write about Louis Pasteur or the Treaty of Worms or Heilongjiang?
Or Barack Obama or the Vojislav Seselj trial or Jerusalem. Really, nothing more to happen there.
Not surprising they're trying to drive contributors off. One thing I've learned in life, when people are being dicks they're doing it for a reason that benefits them.
So Wikipedia's higher-ups don't want any more contributors? But that must mean nothing's ever going to happen again. Hmmmm....
OH MY GOD JIMBO WALES HAS BUILT A MACHINE TO STOP TIME!
Sorry, I've got some bad news for you all. The world did end, and everyone died. "But," you ask, "if I'm dead, why am I still at work?"
Uh, yeah, about that. We're kind of swamped up here with all the new souls looking to get in, so we've decided to fast track certain predominantly Godless groups to eternal damnation. You're now stuck at work.
Forever.
Respectfully yours,
The Archon V2.0
Trainee mortal/immortal liason, New Media Department, Heaven.
Yes, they're all considered dystopian in the context of the West, but I think his point is astute, that whether something is a dystopia is contextual.
Since all utopian and dystopian fiction (they're both the same genre anyway) is social commentary as seen from the point of view of the author, then someone is going to completely disagree with it. For instance, I read about three random pages of More's Utopia before I decided that it was one of the worst dystopias I'd ever seen. Assuming those three pages were characteristic, if I was Catholic with absolutely no sense of modern equality, it probably would've seemed great to me. With inferiors like children and women throwing themselves at my feet because they are so much more sinful than my perfect adult male form, what's not to love?
Similarly, if one rewrote 1984 from the point of view of the uppermost tier of the Party, I imagine it could be very utopian indeed. The entirety of several continents working for you, even when they don't know who you are. Godlike power AND total anonymity!
Some of these works give GREAT insight into their writers, though. I'm sure anyone, not just a psychologist or other licensed sort, could have a field day picking apart someone's brains based on what he/she sees as perfection in human society.
You get the sense that someone doesn't quite grasp the basic concepts.
No, actually, they got it right. Something real styled after something that doesn't exist must be simulated.
Thinking about any one of their props hard enough leads me to this train of thought: It's a real object, therefore it is real reality. So it can't be real virtual reality, it has to be simulated virtual reality which is what any real real reality made with real virtual reality in mind has to be, though since it's based on a cyberpunk novel it's really a simulated virtual fictional object, or a non-real non-real non-real object and now my ears are bleeding and I wonder why that is and it's all really real ooooh....
Hmmm. I seem to remember a scene in Fahrenheit 451 where the cameras "tagged" a pedestrian for displaying unusual behavior. And I remember things not going well for him. Glad to know that we're modeling our governments after dystopian fiction.
Yeah, they pretty much mined 1984 for the last of its ideas (now that they're so close to implementing all TVs having a camera built in) and they've started branching out. I hear some men of the ruling elite are rather intrigued with the idea of rehabilitating fallen young women by making them Handmaids. It is such an honorable profession, after all.
We need to make the technology a two-way street and get rid of the myth of privacy. I don't have a problem giving away my personal infomation as long as I know who has access to it and I'm able to get the same back in kind. Point a camera at my house, if you wish.... just as so long as I get to watch the live feed from yours.
No problem. Except that feed's been censored in interests of national security. Move along citizen, thank you for your cooperation, and for occasionally forgetting the blinds open.
One should fight for personal privacy because there IS a power imbalance. Privacy is the right of the individual to be free of not only their nosy neighbors (as in your example) but their nosy government, as well.
Ideally, it's a fair trade. They get the badges and the power, and we get the right to meet and talk to and buy from and sleep with whoever the hell we want without them knowing, even if they don't like it. If they want to know, they have to prove there's a good reason for it to a judge and leave some sort of paper trail for others to follow. Unfortunately, things have gone pear-shaped over the past few years, and are just getting worse.
Removing one's "mythical" privacy will provide those with the control of the surveillance with even more power, while getting nothing in return.
Since we now apparently have cat-machine-brain things.... Would any given Terminator movie have been better or worse if the Terminators' lines were entirely replaced by meows? What about LOLCat-themed lines?
Hopefully this will make people tweet a tad bit lesser.
I fear it's like hoping a large sponge will be able to lower ocean levels a foot. For some people, I'm sure they would only slack off on their Twitter use if the exploit made your computer grow a foot and kick you in the groin every time you tweeted.
Even they were that important, they should expect a legal requirement in exchange for a legal waiver. Like mandating that any title showing in theaters is simultaneously available on any local on-demand service for a set maximum price.
"Set maximum price" in their minds being a sly look followed by "how much you got"?
The MPAA is arguing that if they could directly turn those plugs on and off, they could offer more goods to consumers.
While I usually just laught at pirates stupid reasonings to pirate content (stupid record labels, support the artists directly, blabla), this is even more fun.
"Do what we demand, or suffer."
Ain't it great? They're basically saying that if we let them hold our electronics hostage, they'll stop holding their content hostage.
Problem with that (threats aside) is that they can't keep their stuff forever. Eventually they'll release it no matter what - after all, if they stop selling movies, they stop making money.
So shorter release waits? If someone is so desperate to see a movie that they have to see it NOW, then they probably saw it in theaters. People who rent are used to some wait.
So more content will be released? <sarcasm>Oh my goodness, it'll be so nice when we can actually rent Hollywood blockbusters that the MPAA normally plays in theaters and then burns the masters of because they NEVER release it anywhere else.</sarcasm> WHAT more content? Insanely popular movies sometimes come in normal, widescreen, director's cut, complete, ultimate, and home premium variations already. What else could they possibly add? More sequels?
My favorite part of this is the following quote: But the MPAA said Nov. 4 that granting its waiver request would be "an incredibly pro-consumer development." Isn't that just perfect doublethink? "Breaking consumer electronics is an incredibly pro-consumer development." I guess legalizing bank robbery would be an incredibly pro-bank development too.
Besides that, if the (dys)functionality they want is built into electronics, there's nothing requiring them to hold up their end of the bargain. So what's more likely is that we would hamstring our hardware and they'd say "Yeah, thanks for that. So, we'll move up the release date for The Complete Rob Schneider DVD box set by a week in return. Enjoy!"
In my experience, it is not an issue of easy-to-digest material, and explanations that they understand. It's a hard mental block. I've been in the same cycle for 10+ years, and my parents have said, flat out, they they "just can't learn". I've tried written, step-by-step instructions; I've tried demonstrating; I've tried tutorials. It's not the information or how it is presented. It's a mental block about learning new things.
(...)
What really gets me angry is that they are helpless to do anything in their daily lives without their computer, and blame me for that fact (Cause *I* created all malware and put it on their computer, clearly), while simultaneously ridiculing my choice of career as worthless, because "technology is not important". The irony is lost on them. Completely.
Okay, dude, I hate to comment on other people's personal lives, but.... If your parents are ridiculing, blaming, and refusing to listen to you, I think you've got bigger problems than one mere "hard mental block".
But what about all that helium? Won't that cause global warming or cooling or some other disastrous consequence for humanity?
Oh, definitely. We'll all have high-pitched squeaky voices which is, by most metrics, very unsexy. Thus, most humans will never get laid and humanity will die out.
Obviously, we must stop this lurking helium stalker before it takes our potential children from us! Think of the future children!
Slashdot Mirror
Weak-kneed members of the public will have to be kept away from the giant culture vats, where hideous amorphous flesh lumps, studded with electrodes, thrash and strain;
Doesn't strike me as a problem. I'm sure the overlap is almost 100% between people who won't eat lab-grown meat once they see it being processed and people who won't eat animal-grown meat once they see it being processed.
(cue a dozen replies of people talking about how cool they are because they use pirated copies for said purpose)
I'm cool because I use a pirated copy of Windows Server for said purpose.
(Looks around.) Hey, waitaminute! Where'd the other 11 guys go? I've been set up! Curse you Microsoft and your clever Slashdot traps!
A relevant Orwell reference... on the internet? Dear god, what is slashdot coming to!
Yeah, really. Let's all stop posting. And then we can see if Taco edits out references to the mass exodus on Slashdot's Wikipedia page, replacing it with "The number of people posting to Slashdot peaked about two and a half months ago, declined slightly for a brief period, and has remained stable since then. Every month, some people stop posting, and every month, they are replaced by new people."
It is not possible to have more editors than readers unless people are editing without looking at what they are editing
Given the tendency of some editors to edit without ever looking at any source material for what they are editing, it sounds about right.
Rain has nothing to do with this.
I don't know, I'd like some cash in weather. As long as it was bills. Coins dropping on us from miles up would hurt.
I just searched for "bear" and found you. Despite a good start we also haven't had a thread demanding an "Australia" section where regular news items on insanity down under can be had.
...the dumbest thing I've ever heard. Calling 911 because someone is making you feel bad? Calling 911 because some guy 1000 miles away wrote some words that made you feel bad?
Calling 911 because the kid somehow finds it too difficult to close the chat window with the creepy guy?
How much more can we write about Louis Pasteur or the Treaty of Worms or Heilongjiang?
Or Barack Obama or the Vojislav Seselj trial or Jerusalem. Really, nothing more to happen there.
Not surprising they're trying to drive contributors off. One thing I've learned in life, when people are being dicks they're doing it for a reason that benefits them.
So Wikipedia's higher-ups don't want any more contributors? But that must mean nothing's ever going to happen again. Hmmmm....
OH MY GOD JIMBO WALES HAS BUILT A MACHINE TO STOP TIME!
If you think Pokemon is adult, you sure have low standards for what adult is.
Shhhh! My evil plan to convince the world that everything on the Rule 34 site is official is almost complete! I don't need YOU ruining it!
But with Internet access... so how is that Hell again?
You'll find out when you hit the bandwidth cap.
Uh, yeah, about that. We're kind of swamped up here with all the new souls looking to get in, so we've decided to fast track certain predominantly Godless groups to eternal damnation. You're now stuck at work.
Forever.
Respectfully yours,
The Archon V2.0
Trainee mortal/immortal liason, New Media Department, Heaven.
Yes, they're all considered dystopian in the context of the West, but I think his point is astute, that whether something is a dystopia is contextual.
Since all utopian and dystopian fiction (they're both the same genre anyway) is social commentary as seen from the point of view of the author, then someone is going to completely disagree with it. For instance, I read about three random pages of More's Utopia before I decided that it was one of the worst dystopias I'd ever seen. Assuming those three pages were characteristic, if I was Catholic with absolutely no sense of modern equality, it probably would've seemed great to me. With inferiors like children and women throwing themselves at my feet because they are so much more sinful than my perfect adult male form, what's not to love?
Similarly, if one rewrote 1984 from the point of view of the uppermost tier of the Party, I imagine it could be very utopian indeed. The entirety of several continents working for you, even when they don't know who you are. Godlike power AND total anonymity!
Some of these works give GREAT insight into their writers, though. I'm sure anyone, not just a psychologist or other licensed sort, could have a field day picking apart someone's brains based on what he/she sees as perfection in human society.
The same people who hire porn stars to dub Hentai movies. Seriously, why do I care how hot the voice actresses are?
I think they do it partly so people will get that same bad acting experience they get from live-action porn.
sculpture-props simulating virtual reality
You get the sense that someone doesn't quite grasp the basic concepts.
No, actually, they got it right. Something real styled after something that doesn't exist must be simulated.
Thinking about any one of their props hard enough leads me to this train of thought: It's a real object, therefore it is real reality. So it can't be real virtual reality, it has to be simulated virtual reality which is what any real real reality made with real virtual reality in mind has to be, though since it's based on a cyberpunk novel it's really a simulated virtual fictional object, or a non-real non-real non-real object and now my ears are bleeding and I wonder why that is and it's all really real ooooh....
I heard they are banning all Wii games with the word "Party" in the title.
Will they at least let people play Dance Dance Cultural Revolution?
how money is considered speech, I don't know.
Simple. 'Speak' to powerful people who like being 'spoken' to.
I can't listen to the Pet Shop Boys song "Shopping" anymore. Too depressingly accurate.
Hmmm. I seem to remember a scene in Fahrenheit 451 where the cameras "tagged" a pedestrian for displaying unusual behavior. And I remember things not going well for him. Glad to know that we're modeling our governments after dystopian fiction.
Yeah, they pretty much mined 1984 for the last of its ideas (now that they're so close to implementing all TVs having a camera built in) and they've started branching out. I hear some men of the ruling elite are rather intrigued with the idea of rehabilitating fallen young women by making them Handmaids. It is such an honorable profession, after all.
We need to make the technology a two-way street and get rid of the myth of privacy. I don't have a problem giving away my personal infomation as long as I know who has access to it and I'm able to get the same back in kind. Point a camera at my house, if you wish.... just as so long as I get to watch the live feed from yours.
No problem. Except that feed's been censored in interests of national security. Move along citizen, thank you for your cooperation, and for occasionally forgetting the blinds open.
One should fight for personal privacy because there IS a power imbalance. Privacy is the right of the individual to be free of not only their nosy neighbors (as in your example) but their nosy government, as well.
Ideally, it's a fair trade. They get the badges and the power, and we get the right to meet and talk to and buy from and sleep with whoever the hell we want without them knowing, even if they don't like it. If they want to know, they have to prove there's a good reason for it to a judge and leave some sort of paper trail for others to follow. Unfortunately, things have gone pear-shaped over the past few years, and are just getting worse.
Removing one's "mythical" privacy will provide those with the control of the surveillance with even more power, while getting nothing in return.
Since we now apparently have cat-machine-brain things.... Would any given Terminator movie have been better or worse if the Terminators' lines were entirely replaced by meows? What about LOLCat-themed lines?
Hopefully this will make people tweet a tad bit lesser.
I fear it's like hoping a large sponge will be able to lower ocean levels a foot. For some people, I'm sure they would only slack off on their Twitter use if the exploit made your computer grow a foot and kick you in the groin every time you tweeted.
Even they were that important, they should expect a legal requirement in exchange for a legal waiver. Like mandating that any title showing in theaters is simultaneously available on any local on-demand service for a set maximum price.
"Set maximum price" in their minds being a sly look followed by "how much you got"?
I lost count. Can someone help me out again? This time I'll count using Binary on my fingers.
I tried that, but when I got to 132 vulnerabilities, I felt that was an appropriate enough representation of my opinion and stopped counting.
The MPAA is arguing that if they could directly turn those plugs on and off, they could offer more goods to consumers.
While I usually just laught at pirates stupid reasonings to pirate content (stupid record labels, support the artists directly, blabla), this is even more fun.
"Do what we demand, or suffer."
Ain't it great? They're basically saying that if we let them hold our electronics hostage, they'll stop holding their content hostage.
Problem with that (threats aside) is that they can't keep their stuff forever. Eventually they'll release it no matter what - after all, if they stop selling movies, they stop making money.
So shorter release waits? If someone is so desperate to see a movie that they have to see it NOW, then they probably saw it in theaters. People who rent are used to some wait.
So more content will be released? <sarcasm>Oh my goodness, it'll be so nice when we can actually rent Hollywood blockbusters that the MPAA normally plays in theaters and then burns the masters of because they NEVER release it anywhere else.</sarcasm> WHAT more content? Insanely popular movies sometimes come in normal, widescreen, director's cut, complete, ultimate, and home premium variations already. What else could they possibly add? More sequels?
My favorite part of this is the following quote: But the MPAA said Nov. 4 that granting its waiver request would be "an incredibly pro-consumer development." Isn't that just perfect doublethink? "Breaking consumer electronics is an incredibly pro-consumer development." I guess legalizing bank robbery would be an incredibly pro-bank development too.
Besides that, if the (dys)functionality they want is built into electronics, there's nothing requiring them to hold up their end of the bargain. So what's more likely is that we would hamstring our hardware and they'd say "Yeah, thanks for that. So, we'll move up the release date for The Complete Rob Schneider DVD box set by a week in return. Enjoy!"
In my experience, it is not an issue of easy-to-digest material, and explanations that they understand. It's a hard mental block. I've been in the same cycle for 10+ years, and my parents have said, flat out, they they "just can't learn". I've tried written, step-by-step instructions; I've tried demonstrating; I've tried tutorials. It's not the information or how it is presented. It's a mental block about learning new things.
(...)
What really gets me angry is that they are helpless to do anything in their daily lives without their computer, and blame me for that fact (Cause *I* created all malware and put it on their computer, clearly), while simultaneously ridiculing my choice of career as worthless, because "technology is not important". The irony is lost on them. Completely.
Okay, dude, I hate to comment on other people's personal lives, but.... If your parents are ridiculing, blaming, and refusing to listen to you, I think you've got bigger problems than one mere "hard mental block".
But what about all that helium? Won't that cause global warming or cooling or some other disastrous consequence for humanity?
Oh, definitely. We'll all have high-pitched squeaky voices which is, by most metrics, very unsexy. Thus, most humans will never get laid and humanity will die out.
Obviously, we must stop this lurking helium stalker before it takes our potential children from us! Think of the future children!