After the police and military have been using this gun technology for at least a decade exclusively with no non-smart weapons, then we can make it a mandate. Until they embrace it, neither will I. Actually, even if they did I probably wouldn't. I would be jailbreaking that thing in a second.
And that's just an excuse to be as lazy as you choose.
"OMG, I can't instantly fix every problem in the world, so I'll just do nothing but carp about it. And, then tell everybody how right I was after it all falls down."
This makes no sense to me. If you want to fix the problem, then fix the actual problem. Don't go spending huge sums of money and take away everybody rights when that doesn't actually fix the problem anyway. It sounds exactly like the TSA and the radiation/nudity scanners. It's just a power/money grab by the politicians for their friends.
I have used the artificial sweetener Equal to get rid of ants that start investigating my kitchen. I hear that they take it back to the nest and it kills them off also. I don't know about that part for sure, but I can attest to it being very effective at getting rid of an infestation. One little packet picked up from a diner and sprinkled into a corner of the kitchen counter will keep them out for the season.
Especially when it is done so slowly that several generations grow up with the greater powers of the police state. They don't know anything different as that is how it has been their whole life.
And none of the other attempts has lasted over 200 years. I think we are nearing our end also. The citizens of the Roman empire didn't know it was over for 50 or 100 years.
The question that actually needs to be asked is, will the people who own the robots let the rest of us have any food?
Or how about the question, will the huge masses of people without jobs let the robot owners live? We are already in a country (U.S.) where voting to get rid of any type of welfare is pretty near impossible as a very large percentage take advantage of these programs. If it progresses further, the politicians will only have one place to get tax money from, the robot owners. So the taxes on the rich will be raised high enough to be able to feed everyone else. Either that or we are in for some violent times.
Someone will have to make the popular shows such as "Ow, My Balls!!!". And there will be plenty of advertising to go along with what ever form of entertainment you choose. Just watch Idiocracy to see what the future has in store for us.
I had a similar thing happen in L.A., CA. There were no meters on the street but there were parking restrictions. The sign I parked right next to said "No Parking -- Except Sat & Sun". It was a Sunday so parking is allowed. The word "Sun" on the sign had a scratch through it like someone did it with a key or something, but it was still readable. And I got a ticket. I sent in a letter contesting the ticket and they replied saying the ticket was valid. I was moving out of state right after that so I just didn't pay it. Never heard anything about it again.
You just need to throw an old tire set on fire up onto the box. You could fill the tire with oil and tape a lit fuse to it before sticking it up there. There was a site from Europe I saw last year that collected photos of speed cameras that people torched like that. Sometimes they would have a second picture of the replacement camera that gets burnt right after being installed. Once the cameras are no longer profitable, the problem goes away.
I have an inkling that a brain in a jar will never work. If it does not have the uncountable inputs from all the sensations of the body it will not develop as a brain should. Every nerve in the skin giving temperature, touch, movement of air on the hair folicles etc. Plus the vision and hearing, proprioception, internal signals from the heart, lungs, digestion and other organs that we are not even aware of. Even the sight we take for granted is too overwhelming for our mind to comprehend. A great deal is filtered out by our paradigms and other brain functions to give us a perception of the world that is not entirely accurate, but functional. You brain backfills time every time your eyes shift positions. The movement of the eyes gives a period of non-vision, but the brain fills that past time with a perception of sight. That is why the first second when you look at a clock will seem longer than the next ones. So without the brain having to deal with processing all of this input constantly you will not develop AI. You will at most have a computer. Capable of processing calculations or instructions fast, but no intelligence.
You will probably need a body to move also. I am thinking about the robots that people have made that start out with no concept of their own design. They try a movement and see what action happens. They work out a walking method from trial and error. The human brain does similar things while still growing in the womb. Kicking legs and arms out and receiving the sensations of touch from the actions. This continues to develop after birth for many years. The AI will probably need to have a similar learning experience. If it has no way of changing the incoming sensation data stream, it will not be able to sort out what all that data means.
I could be wrong and perhaps it is much easier that I imagine. But the human brain (in fact, all creatures' brains) always exists in a body. I think if you want to copy that you need to create a body also. Or at least a good enough simulation of one to give the brain the data from, and interaction with the simulated environment.
But what if the extraterrestrial mission end up solving the terrestrial problems. Just look at Tang and all the other great inventions that came about from the space program. More seriously, if we started moving populations into space that would probably help things quite a bit. There is only so much economic growth you can have in a closed system. And if the economy is not growing it is considered to be failing.
Nor should copying be considered some heinous crime. It isn't.
It is a heinous crime. It is a crime against our culture. It is a crime against everyone.
And the extensions of copyright for pre-existing works is stealing from the public domain. The deal was protection of the work for limited time in order to encourage more work to be created. If they change the deal afterwards then there is no deal. Since we do not have the ability to hold them accountable for the billions of thefts they have done, we can just assume the contract is null and void. In actuality the number of thefts they perpetrated is infinite, each work of art * total number of people in the world * totality of future time = infinity. So, yeah, they made their bed and now they can sleep in it. I feel more morally true with downloading than I do giving money to these thieves.
How could the roads be safer if no more people are being convicted and people have no more stigma about drinking. It sounds like you are saying nothing has changed but a number in a law and somehow the roads got safer.
And, in a free society, who are we to legislate that someone can't kill himself by his desired means as long as he doesn't injure another in the process?
I was thinking this exact thing. As the Earth's population continues to grow beyond the capacity to comfortably support it in our current lifestyle we will probably start thinking about suicide and assisted suicide more favorably. If someone wants to die, let them. In the long run it will sort itself out as the genes of the depressed and suicidal will become less common.
You have to consider the increased deaths caused by people who can no longer defend themselves once guns are removed. And if the police aren't the first ones getting rid of their guns, I'm not going in for it. I'm not going to be held victim to that group of assholes!
Well, I don't use Windows anymore. Unless it is to play a game, but I would need to build a newer more powerful system for that. My wife on the other hand was using linux on her laptop before upgrading to a newer laptop and she chose to stick with the Windows 7 that came with it. I made sure she understood that any administration and maintenance that it needed would be her own responsibility.
Thanks for the tip on getting an ebook onto the iPad. Would the file download to the iPad upon opening it, or will the same procedure need to be used each time the book was to be read some more? I also saw some posts in this thread about using dropbox or an iTunes replacement called CopyTrans. So these may be other options I can look into.
There are hundrets of reasons why one want to synch, the most imoortant is probably: backups. Or you want the photos to work on them with gimp orgotoshop on your PC...
But they are all poor reasons. I don't have to have any special software on my PC to copy files to and from my Android phone. It just works! My wife's iPad is unable to be used to read all the ebooks I have collected because we can't find a way to copy the files onto it without iTunes. And she does not want that piece of crap on her laptop. Once you install something in Windows, it is there forever. Uninstall does not clean out the registry, it just removes the files from the hard drive. The extra crap in the registry ends up slowing your computer down over time. Reinstalling Windows every year and a half is a big pain in the butt.
I won't disagree with you. But I take umbrage with anyone who says that attitude is all you need. No, it's a starting point. Nobody's going to tell the 400 pound asthmatic who dreams of winning a marathon to just show up at the starting line and if he wants it bad enough, he'll get it.
If he really wanted it bad enough, he would have been training for it. That example is really just silly.
Attitude is about an orientation, a direction, a focus... but attitude alone will not move you an inch, nor change your circumstances one iota.
To succeed also requires positioning yourself so that you're likely to be at that wonderful point of convergence where time and place meet to create opportunity.
This statement is really the core of the attitude theory. If you are ready and watching for the opportunities, you will be more likely to see them when they come along. I remember hearing a story about a person who needed a concrete sidewalk but could not afford it. They did the work of putting in the wood forms and everything was ready for when ever they might be able to afford it (not likely from the story). Lucky for them a truck with a load of concrete was in the neighborhood and the job was canceled for some reason. The concrete was going to be ruined. Since he was prepared, the truck driver dumped it into his forms and they got a free sidewalk. From your post I gather you would say the chance of having a concrete truck with a load of wasted concrete is too unlikely to ever happen to you, so you might as well not prepare the sidewalk.
The other part of having a positive attitude is that it is not that easy. It gets down into the core of your beliefs and paradigms. Saying that you believe in something isn't the same as believing in it. Understanding yourself and your inner motivations is something that people spend a lifetime learning. You don't become enlightened by reading a book or watching a movie.
I remember a Princeton study where they found a very small change to random number generators based on the operators mind. There is a lot about the universe and quantum effects we don't understand. I'm not about to claim I know things are impossible as you seem to be saying.
There are people who have a good attitude, work hard, and will never get their reward in this life. Until recently, America didn't have very many of them, because we had a lot of opportunities -- a lot of chances to win the lottery of success. But today, we have a lot of those people.
We've won every war we've fought in, and America has a lot of things to be proud of... but guys, we lost this fight. The economic fight. And nobody with a sense of practicality is going to suggest you fight on the side that's guaranteed to lose.
I think this is the way of the future. Being prepared for it will set you up better than thinking things will be ok on their own. Nothing is guaranteed to you in life, not even your life. You could drop dead tomorrow. Thinking we can have economic growth at an exponential rate for ever is pretty flawed thinking. That is how the economy is designed. If we don't have growth it is considered to be a failing economy. I don't see how that is sustainable in any stretch of the imagination. And I think your belief that people had it better in the past is too rose colored also. Most people have always worked hard and never got any reward in life. That's the way it is. Either enjoy it for what it is or give up and quite trying. If you can only find happiness in life by reaching some reward then I feel you are likely to be disappointed.
Bought my ticket to Somalia today! Success and wealth, here I come!!
On one hand, I want to tell you that there was the implicit understanding that you think about where you want to move to, and not just close your eyes, thumb a spot on the map, and buy a ticket to that place. On the other hand, I hesitate to get between a man and his Darwin Award...
I don't know. If his goal is to become a sea faring pirate, then that would be a good place to go. I can't comment on the likeliness of Success and wealth by going that route though.
* Yesterday I saw Star Trek, one part of which I'd say was soft porn.
My wife started watching through all of The Next Generations on Netflix as she didn't watch that many of them as a kid. The first half dozen episodes of the first season really make you think the whole show has a soft core porn focus. I think it was only episode 2 where everyone gets drunk and Cmdr Data gets it on with the chief of security. Now that we are into the second season she has noticed the focus on sex has lessened somewhat.
Who says you cannot mix them with other meats or even heat dry and grind them as a powder additive to other foods? The nutrition is what we are looking for here - not necessarily the "grossing out" of folks.
Unless you're going to covertly introduce ground insects to food, people will know. And if they know, they'll be grossed out.
You seem quite uninformed about the ingredients you already eat. Look at your ingredient list sometime. If you see castoreum or sometimes just natural flavoring, typically used as vanilla or raspberry flavoring, that is beaver anal gland juice. L-cysteine is used as a commercial dough conditioner to improve the texture of breads and baked goods, that is made from from dissolved human hair or duck feathers. Carmine, a bright red food colorant often listed as carmine, crimson lake, cochineal, or natural red #4 on ingredient labels is made is actually the crushed abdomen of the female Dactylopius coccus, an African beetle-like insect. So in the last example, people are already eating insects. All they need to do is give it an alternate name for the ingredient list and nobody would be the wiser.
I must say, my hat goes off to you for admitting your mistake. It is an attribute that I feel is lacking in too large a portion of humanity. Good form! And my apologies for the somewhat (actually extremely) cocky attitude expressed in the last sentence of my last post. It was uncalled for and now I feel like an ass.:-/
My main surprise was in how readily in absorbs through the skin. Before I learned that nicotine was so deadly I never would have thought that getting some on your skin would be a big deal. If tobacco was just discovered in the modern day, it would probably be illegal to have. I find things that don't fit my assumptions or that seem to be counter-intuitive to be very interesting. My guess would be that the smoke that is exhaled still contains a good deal of nicotine that doesn't get absorbed through the lungs. But when on the skin it can sit there long enough to get a much higher level into the blood. Just imagine if you put some nicotine resin onto a little dart and penetrated the skin. Who needs Ricin? But like I said, it is a slow death, so if there is any treatment or antidote it may not be very effective method of killing.
Slashdot Mirror
After the police and military have been using this gun technology for at least a decade exclusively with no non-smart weapons, then we can make it a mandate. Until they embrace it, neither will I. Actually, even if they did I probably wouldn't. I would be jailbreaking that thing in a second.
And that's just an excuse to be as lazy as you choose.
"OMG, I can't instantly fix every problem in the world, so I'll just do nothing but carp about it. And, then tell everybody how right I was after it all falls down."
This makes no sense to me. If you want to fix the problem, then fix the actual problem. Don't go spending huge sums of money and take away everybody rights when that doesn't actually fix the problem anyway. It sounds exactly like the TSA and the radiation/nudity scanners. It's just a power/money grab by the politicians for their friends.
I have used the artificial sweetener Equal to get rid of ants that start investigating my kitchen. I hear that they take it back to the nest and it kills them off also. I don't know about that part for sure, but I can attest to it being very effective at getting rid of an infestation. One little packet picked up from a diner and sprinkled into a corner of the kitchen counter will keep them out for the season.
Especially when it is done so slowly that several generations grow up with the greater powers of the police state. They don't know anything different as that is how it has been their whole life.
And none of the other attempts has lasted over 200 years. I think we are nearing our end also. The citizens of the Roman empire didn't know it was over for 50 or 100 years.
The question that actually needs to be asked is, will the people who own the robots let the rest of us have any food?
Or how about the question, will the huge masses of people without jobs let the robot owners live? We are already in a country (U.S.) where voting to get rid of any type of welfare is pretty near impossible as a very large percentage take advantage of these programs. If it progresses further, the politicians will only have one place to get tax money from, the robot owners. So the taxes on the rich will be raised high enough to be able to feed everyone else. Either that or we are in for some violent times.
Someone will have to make the popular shows such as "Ow, My Balls!!!". And there will be plenty of advertising to go along with what ever form of entertainment you choose. Just watch Idiocracy to see what the future has in store for us.
I had a similar thing happen in L.A., CA. There were no meters on the street but there were parking restrictions. The sign I parked right next to said "No Parking -- Except Sat & Sun". It was a Sunday so parking is allowed. The word "Sun" on the sign had a scratch through it like someone did it with a key or something, but it was still readable. And I got a ticket. I sent in a letter contesting the ticket and they replied saying the ticket was valid. I was moving out of state right after that so I just didn't pay it. Never heard anything about it again.
You just need to throw an old tire set on fire up onto the box. You could fill the tire with oil and tape a lit fuse to it before sticking it up there. There was a site from Europe I saw last year that collected photos of speed cameras that people torched like that. Sometimes they would have a second picture of the replacement camera that gets burnt right after being installed. Once the cameras are no longer profitable, the problem goes away.
I have an inkling that a brain in a jar will never work. If it does not have the uncountable inputs from all the sensations of the body it will not develop as a brain should. Every nerve in the skin giving temperature, touch, movement of air on the hair folicles etc. Plus the vision and hearing, proprioception, internal signals from the heart, lungs, digestion and other organs that we are not even aware of. Even the sight we take for granted is too overwhelming for our mind to comprehend. A great deal is filtered out by our paradigms and other brain functions to give us a perception of the world that is not entirely accurate, but functional. You brain backfills time every time your eyes shift positions. The movement of the eyes gives a period of non-vision, but the brain fills that past time with a perception of sight. That is why the first second when you look at a clock will seem longer than the next ones. So without the brain having to deal with processing all of this input constantly you will not develop AI. You will at most have a computer. Capable of processing calculations or instructions fast, but no intelligence.
You will probably need a body to move also. I am thinking about the robots that people have made that start out with no concept of their own design. They try a movement and see what action happens. They work out a walking method from trial and error. The human brain does similar things while still growing in the womb. Kicking legs and arms out and receiving the sensations of touch from the actions. This continues to develop after birth for many years. The AI will probably need to have a similar learning experience. If it has no way of changing the incoming sensation data stream, it will not be able to sort out what all that data means.
I could be wrong and perhaps it is much easier that I imagine. But the human brain (in fact, all creatures' brains) always exists in a body. I think if you want to copy that you need to create a body also. Or at least a good enough simulation of one to give the brain the data from, and interaction with the simulated environment.
And don't forget the sound of the food being opened!
But what if the extraterrestrial mission end up solving the terrestrial problems. Just look at Tang and all the other great inventions that came about from the space program. More seriously, if we started moving populations into space that would probably help things quite a bit. There is only so much economic growth you can have in a closed system. And if the economy is not growing it is considered to be failing.
Don't forget to multiply that by 3 for the treble damages.
Nor should copying be considered some heinous crime. It isn't.
It is a heinous crime. It is a crime against our culture. It is a crime against everyone.
And the extensions of copyright for pre-existing works is stealing from the public domain. The deal was protection of the work for limited time in order to encourage more work to be created. If they change the deal afterwards then there is no deal. Since we do not have the ability to hold them accountable for the billions of thefts they have done, we can just assume the contract is null and void. In actuality the number of thefts they perpetrated is infinite, each work of art * total number of people in the world * totality of future time = infinity. So, yeah, they made their bed and now they can sleep in it. I feel more morally true with downloading than I do giving money to these thieves.
How could the roads be safer if no more people are being convicted and people have no more stigma about drinking. It sounds like you are saying nothing has changed but a number in a law and somehow the roads got safer.
And, in a free society, who are we to legislate that someone can't kill himself by his desired means as long as he doesn't injure another in the process?
I was thinking this exact thing. As the Earth's population continues to grow beyond the capacity to comfortably support it in our current lifestyle we will probably start thinking about suicide and assisted suicide more favorably. If someone wants to die, let them. In the long run it will sort itself out as the genes of the depressed and suicidal will become less common.
You have to consider the increased deaths caused by people who can no longer defend themselves once guns are removed. And if the police aren't the first ones getting rid of their guns, I'm not going in for it. I'm not going to be held victim to that group of assholes!
Well, I don't use Windows anymore. Unless it is to play a game, but I would need to build a newer more powerful system for that. My wife on the other hand was using linux on her laptop before upgrading to a newer laptop and she chose to stick with the Windows 7 that came with it. I made sure she understood that any administration and maintenance that it needed would be her own responsibility.
Thanks for the tip on getting an ebook onto the iPad. Would the file download to the iPad upon opening it, or will the same procedure need to be used each time the book was to be read some more? I also saw some posts in this thread about using dropbox or an iTunes replacement called CopyTrans. So these may be other options I can look into.
There are hundrets of reasons why one want to synch, the most imoortant is probably: backups. Or you want the photos to work on them with gimp orgotoshop on your PC ...
But they are all poor reasons. I don't have to have any special software on my PC to copy files to and from my Android phone. It just works! My wife's iPad is unable to be used to read all the ebooks I have collected because we can't find a way to copy the files onto it without iTunes. And she does not want that piece of crap on her laptop. Once you install something in Windows, it is there forever. Uninstall does not clean out the registry, it just removes the files from the hard drive. The extra crap in the registry ends up slowing your computer down over time. Reinstalling Windows every year and a half is a big pain in the butt.
I won't disagree with you. But I take umbrage with anyone who says that attitude is all you need. No, it's a starting point. Nobody's going to tell the 400 pound asthmatic who dreams of winning a marathon to just show up at the starting line and if he wants it bad enough, he'll get it.
If he really wanted it bad enough, he would have been training for it. That example is really just silly.
Attitude is about an orientation, a direction, a focus... but attitude alone will not move you an inch, nor change your circumstances one iota.
To succeed also requires positioning yourself so that you're likely to be at that wonderful point of convergence where time and place meet to create opportunity.
This statement is really the core of the attitude theory. If you are ready and watching for the opportunities, you will be more likely to see them when they come along. I remember hearing a story about a person who needed a concrete sidewalk but could not afford it. They did the work of putting in the wood forms and everything was ready for when ever they might be able to afford it (not likely from the story). Lucky for them a truck with a load of concrete was in the neighborhood and the job was canceled for some reason. The concrete was going to be ruined. Since he was prepared, the truck driver dumped it into his forms and they got a free sidewalk. From your post I gather you would say the chance of having a concrete truck with a load of wasted concrete is too unlikely to ever happen to you, so you might as well not prepare the sidewalk.
The other part of having a positive attitude is that it is not that easy. It gets down into the core of your beliefs and paradigms. Saying that you believe in something isn't the same as believing in it. Understanding yourself and your inner motivations is something that people spend a lifetime learning. You don't become enlightened by reading a book or watching a movie.
I remember a Princeton study where they found a very small change to random number generators based on the operators mind. There is a lot about the universe and quantum effects we don't understand. I'm not about to claim I know things are impossible as you seem to be saying.
There are people who have a good attitude, work hard, and will never get their reward in this life. Until recently, America didn't have very many of them, because we had a lot of opportunities -- a lot of chances to win the lottery of success. But today, we have a lot of those people.
We've won every war we've fought in, and America has a lot of things to be proud of... but guys, we lost this fight. The economic fight. And nobody with a sense of practicality is going to suggest you fight on the side that's guaranteed to lose.
I think this is the way of the future. Being prepared for it will set you up better than thinking things will be ok on their own. Nothing is guaranteed to you in life, not even your life. You could drop dead tomorrow. Thinking we can have economic growth at an exponential rate for ever is pretty flawed thinking. That is how the economy is designed. If we don't have growth it is considered to be a failing economy. I don't see how that is sustainable in any stretch of the imagination. And I think your belief that people had it better in the past is too rose colored also. Most people have always worked hard and never got any reward in life. That's the way it is. Either enjoy it for what it is or give up and quite trying. If you can only find happiness in life by reaching some reward then I feel you are likely to be disappointed.
Bought my ticket to Somalia today! Success and wealth, here I come!!
On one hand, I want to tell you that there was the implicit understanding that you think about where you want to move to, and not just close your eyes, thumb a spot on the map, and buy a ticket to that place. On the other hand, I hesitate to get between a man and his Darwin Award...
I don't know. If his goal is to become a sea faring pirate, then that would be a good place to go. I can't comment on the likeliness of Success and wealth by going that route though.
* Yesterday I saw Star Trek, one part of which I'd say was soft porn.
My wife started watching through all of The Next Generations on Netflix as she didn't watch that many of them as a kid. The first half dozen episodes of the first season really make you think the whole show has a soft core porn focus. I think it was only episode 2 where everyone gets drunk and Cmdr Data gets it on with the chief of security. Now that we are into the second season she has noticed the focus on sex has lessened somewhat.
Who says you cannot mix them with other meats or even heat dry and grind them as a powder additive to other foods? The nutrition is what we are looking for here - not necessarily the "grossing out" of folks.
Unless you're going to covertly introduce ground insects to food, people will know. And if they know, they'll be grossed out.
You seem quite uninformed about the ingredients you already eat. Look at your ingredient list sometime. If you see castoreum or sometimes just natural flavoring, typically used as vanilla or raspberry flavoring, that is beaver anal gland juice. L-cysteine is used as a commercial dough conditioner to improve the texture of breads and baked goods, that is made from from dissolved human hair or duck feathers. Carmine, a bright red food colorant often listed as carmine, crimson lake, cochineal, or natural red #4 on ingredient labels is made is actually the crushed abdomen of the female Dactylopius coccus, an African beetle-like insect. So in the last example, people are already eating insects. All they need to do is give it an alternate name for the ingredient list and nobody would be the wiser.
I must say, my hat goes off to you for admitting your mistake. It is an attribute that I feel is lacking in too large a portion of humanity. Good form! And my apologies for the somewhat (actually extremely) cocky attitude expressed in the last sentence of my last post. It was uncalled for and now I feel like an ass. :-/
My main surprise was in how readily in absorbs through the skin. Before I learned that nicotine was so deadly I never would have thought that getting some on your skin would be a big deal. If tobacco was just discovered in the modern day, it would probably be illegal to have. I find things that don't fit my assumptions or that seem to be counter-intuitive to be very interesting. My guess would be that the smoke that is exhaled still contains a good deal of nicotine that doesn't get absorbed through the lungs. But when on the skin it can sit there long enough to get a much higher level into the blood. Just imagine if you put some nicotine resin onto a little dart and penetrated the skin. Who needs Ricin? But like I said, it is a slow death, so if there is any treatment or antidote it may not be very effective method of killing.
Just imagine how stupid you would look if he was able to edit his post. You would be complaining about spelling that was correct.
I do think we should have 10 or 15 minutes to edit formatting or spelling mistakes that we didn't notice before hitting the wrong button or whatever.