To the first person who sends me a photograph of a wealthy net-savvy Nigerian businessman smiling and holding up a genuine fake Super Bowl XXL Football.
The U.S. has a huge trade deficit. Why aren't we exporting this junk?
Stop contributing to the problem by buying media distributed by evil corporations. Share all the music you already have with all your friends and then buy your new music from the artists themselves, or make your own and give it away or try to sell it. Promote it yourself online. We don't need record companies anymore.
Why was this modded Funny? I'm serious, we're a lot more likely to see a small group of people with supercomputers at their fingertips leveraging technology to gain an overwhelming advantage over everyone else, than we are to see a strong AI suddenly appear out of nowhere. Or perhaps it will be an amalgamation of the two. Regardless we need to figure out how to detect such a thing. IMHO the ethical implications of disconnecting a self-aware AI from power and networking are important.
We'll see IA (Intelligence Augmentation) facilitated and enabled by global networked computing infrastructure, first.
Which is scarier than strong AI, if you think about it. A small group of evil superintelligent humans is more dangerous than a suddenly self-aware entity living in datacenters we can disconnenct and unplug if we notice anything weird going on. I hope a couple of PhDs at google are on top of detecting these sorts of things before they get out of hand.
They've got 5000 PhDs. Such a group may not be able to turn on a dime and innovate themselves out of a rut at the slightest hint of competition (like Microsoft keeps doing) but they're not exactly a gaggle of worthless lackeys, either.
But, for practicallity we taught one before the other to our kids. Why?
Why indeed. You passed up a chance to help your kids wire their brains to natively understand that there are many different ways of saying and understanding the same concepts, and of processing the same underlying symbolic ideas, and of expressing themselves in an appropriate way for different audiences.
they needed to know the language that was commonly used in our neibourghood.
They would have figured that out for themselves and learned much in the process of doing so.
I'm glad my grandmothers sprinkled French and German and Czech into their conversations with me while they helped teach me how to speak proper English.
Of course it's true that learning another language influences the way we think. That's why we shouldn't be obviating the need for interpersonal, social interaction by providing universal language translation capabilities via cheap technology.
Learning even some snippets of another language while trying to communicate with someone else (especially in a harmless context such as a game) would make us all smarter.
Howzat?
Cellphones are more ubiquitous than PCs in Africa; they're already networked and Microsoft feels obligated to offer a realistic alternative to the $100 laptop which with ad-hoc mesh networking could make their entire closed-source software platform irrelevant to this part of the developing world.
If Microsoft cannot get their tentacles embedded in order to extract a tax on every electronic device legally sold in Africa, that's a serious setback. When Vista bombs later this year and alternative platforms and free software continue to take off everywhere, and Google keeps bleeding them with more papercuts, MSFT stock is going to tank.
I don't want to listen to some podcaster ranting about some topic that they may or may not have a clueful opinion about. Is there a text version of that person's comments?
This is becoming a bigger problem on the net lately, people who post links to video/audio streams which do not have accompanying transcripts. The submitter may find it interesting, but I personally don't have a spare half hour to devote to your pet video/audio link (even if it is in a usable, open media format). I'll happily skim even a long page of text/html, but links to audio and video should be limited to digg-style funny videos or compelling interviews with meaningful summaries accompanying them. Anyone who expects clueful members of the slashdot/digg audience to waste their lives listening to some channel 9 msdn or other video stream and then make sensible comments on it is a fool.
My point is that now that we are recording our own digital collections, they still don't really max out current media, unless you obsessively record everything digitally at the expense of using your own wetware memory.
I predict that my digital music collection will not exceed 500GB in my lifetime. What new technologies are coming out that will require massive storage capabilities? Movies are the biggest things we sling around the net nowadays. I neither need nor want to store movies on my hard drive when I can go get one for $3.50 or download one given a few hours' notice.
I am not sure I want something spinning lethally fast either at eye level (tower on desktop) or in my lap. It's bad enough the family jewels are kept warm and toasty for several hours a day by conventional Lithium Ion electrical discharge while soaking up all that 802.11g radiation...
It still won't be enough to store all your holographic porn.
Even today, I can store essentially all the music I've collected over the years that I really care about having at my fingertips all on my laptop, backed up on a handful of DVDs and my other machines if I'm paranoid about losing it.
I can store everything I've ever written and all the digital images I've ever taken or scanned on another handful of DVDs. A few dozen hours of my childhood were filmed in Super-8, and have been converted to a bookshelf's worth of VHS tape in the late 1980s (which are now collecting dust) and digitized again to a handful of DVDs which are geographically backed up among several family members. Recordings of my grandparents singing folk songs, maybe that's another DVD worth of MP3 data. My dad and mom have separately scanned virtually all of the family photos back to the late 1800s. I could easily back up all of this content on my laptop and still have room to store the TV shows that are downloaded for me automatically and then normally deleted after watching.
I'm not sure I will ever need more than a few terabytes. I'm not into holographic pr0n and I don't want a TV-quality recording of my life archived for posterity. Nobody is ever going to watch it. I can barely keep up with current reality as it is.
I think wikipedia would be better understood, and therefore a better tool, if it were presented as multiple concurrent articles, instead of the latest winner of a revision war posing as a proper encyclopedia entry.
But that's precisely what Wikipedia is, the "discussion" tab is adjacent to the "article" and "history" tabs. The real battle consists of convincing the general public to understand that you can't always believe everything you read on the Internet at face value; you have to dig deeper.
I second what another poster here said about always checking the discussion page associated with an article if the information one is seeking is of more than trivial importance.
The Internet enables the general public to do this fact-checking easily and repeatedly, and makes errors and misinformation easy to expose. This practice is contagious; earlier today I checked a questionable fact which I read in a New York Times article by spending 5-10 minutes digging up multiple original sources. The fact turned out to be true (at least as far as I could ascertain). Had it been incorrent, there would have been hell to pay for that reporter as the fraud would have been exposed.
Of course with the Times, you have a handful of editors and a reputation based upon good fact-checking which allows you to put some confidence in believing what you read without further research. With wikipedia, it's different, not better, not worse, but different, and it should be regarded as such.
Delicious: the only site I've had to explicitly bookmark because "delicious" is one of the few English words whose spelling I cannot seem to commit to memory, and even if I could, I'd never remember where to put the frickin dots.
It is worth pointing out as well that the Lowell Sun is a rabidly right-wing rag ranking right up there with the Washington Times and the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review. It doesn't suprise me that they would want to manufacture a scandal out of every single action of Rep. Meehan and his staff however reasonable.
That may be true, but the Lowell Sun has just called attention how widespread this problem could be. This article has now been posted on both Slashdot and Digg. All the House and Senate pages will likely get a good looking over by many members of the net-savvy public with particular attention paid to IP addresses from house/senate staffers. It will backfire from a rabid right-wing point of view, if it turns out that lots of Republicans are also engaged in this practice.
All this nonsense from our current leaders is really coming to a head, like a boil. Nine more months until we get to lance it on the first Tuesday after the first Monday this coming November.
Homework assignment: by November, find out who's currently in office, if you don't already know. So you can vote for the other candidate.
I think a lot of senators and representatives are going to find out just what blowback means.
But of course, a terrorist attack or another bin Laden tape might come at just in time to alter the outcome of the elections.
Slashdot Mirror
I just don't understand what they could offer that would make me switch.
They can't compete on price, nor anonymity.
Come on ladies, how hard is it to raise the seat after you're finished using it?
The U.S. has a huge trade deficit. Why aren't we exporting this junk?
That was the sound of the joke flying over your head.
I don't make grammatical errors unintentionally, dipshit moron.
Stop contributing to the problem by buying media distributed by evil corporations. Share all the music you already have with all your friends and then buy your new music from the artists themselves, or make your own and give it away or try to sell it. Promote it yourself online. We don't need record companies anymore.
Who's been convicted of piracy by the RIAA? There are plenty of people who've settled for $3000 or whatever.
I've had it with this nonsense. I don't buy CDs from RIAA affiliates anymore and neither should anyone else.
I'm suing Slashdot for wasting wast quantities of my time for the past year.
CmdrTaco, you're goin' down.
Why was this modded Funny? I'm serious, we're a lot more likely to see a small group of people with supercomputers at their fingertips leveraging technology to gain an overwhelming advantage over everyone else, than we are to see a strong AI suddenly appear out of nowhere. Or perhaps it will be an amalgamation of the two. Regardless we need to figure out how to detect such a thing. IMHO the ethical implications of disconnecting a self-aware AI from power and networking are important.
Which is scarier than strong AI, if you think about it. A small group of evil superintelligent humans is more dangerous than a suddenly self-aware entity living in datacenters we can disconnenct and unplug if we notice anything weird going on. I hope a couple of PhDs at google are on top of detecting these sorts of things before they get out of hand.
They've got 5000 PhDs. Such a group may not be able to turn on a dime and innovate themselves out of a rut at the slightest hint of competition (like Microsoft keeps doing) but they're not exactly a gaggle of worthless lackeys, either.
Why indeed. You passed up a chance to help your kids wire their brains to natively understand that there are many different ways of saying and understanding the same concepts, and of processing the same underlying symbolic ideas, and of expressing themselves in an appropriate way for different audiences.
they needed to know the language that was commonly used in our neibourghood.
They would have figured that out for themselves and learned much in the process of doing so.
I'm glad my grandmothers sprinkled French and German and Czech into their conversations with me while they helped teach me how to speak proper English.
Learning even some snippets of another language while trying to communicate with someone else (especially in a harmless context such as a game) would make us all smarter. Howzat?
The firefox search engine toolbar thingee is overrated. You can do whatever you want entirely and efficiently from the keyboard.
If Microsoft cannot get their tentacles embedded in order to extract a tax on every electronic device legally sold in Africa, that's a serious setback. When Vista bombs later this year and alternative platforms and free software continue to take off everywhere, and Google keeps bleeding them with more papercuts, MSFT stock is going to tank.
This is becoming a bigger problem on the net lately, people who post links to video/audio streams which do not have accompanying transcripts. The submitter may find it interesting, but I personally don't have a spare half hour to devote to your pet video/audio link (even if it is in a usable, open media format). I'll happily skim even a long page of text/html, but links to audio and video should be limited to digg-style funny videos or compelling interviews with meaningful summaries accompanying them. Anyone who expects clueful members of the slashdot/digg audience to waste their lives listening to some channel 9 msdn or other video stream and then make sensible comments on it is a fool.
I predict that my digital music collection will not exceed 500GB in my lifetime. What new technologies are coming out that will require massive storage capabilities? Movies are the biggest things we sling around the net nowadays. I neither need nor want to store movies on my hard drive when I can go get one for $3.50 or download one given a few hours' notice.
I am not sure I want something spinning lethally fast either at eye level (tower on desktop) or in my lap. It's bad enough the family jewels are kept warm and toasty for several hours a day by conventional Lithium Ion electrical discharge while soaking up all that 802.11g radiation...
Even today, I can store essentially all the music I've collected over the years that I really care about having at my fingertips all on my laptop, backed up on a handful of DVDs and my other machines if I'm paranoid about losing it.
I can store everything I've ever written and all the digital images I've ever taken or scanned on another handful of DVDs. A few dozen hours of my childhood were filmed in Super-8, and have been converted to a bookshelf's worth of VHS tape in the late 1980s (which are now collecting dust) and digitized again to a handful of DVDs which are geographically backed up among several family members. Recordings of my grandparents singing folk songs, maybe that's another DVD worth of MP3 data. My dad and mom have separately scanned virtually all of the family photos back to the late 1800s. I could easily back up all of this content on my laptop and still have room to store the TV shows that are downloaded for me automatically and then normally deleted after watching.
I'm not sure I will ever need more than a few terabytes. I'm not into holographic pr0n and I don't want a TV-quality recording of my life archived for posterity. Nobody is ever going to watch it. I can barely keep up with current reality as it is.
Nippies?
But that's precisely what Wikipedia is, the "discussion" tab is adjacent to the "article" and "history" tabs. The real battle consists of convincing the general public to understand that you can't always believe everything you read on the Internet at face value; you have to dig deeper.
I second what another poster here said about always checking the discussion page associated with an article if the information one is seeking is of more than trivial importance.
The Internet enables the general public to do this fact-checking easily and repeatedly, and makes errors and misinformation easy to expose. This practice is contagious; earlier today I checked a questionable fact which I read in a New York Times article by spending 5-10 minutes digging up multiple original sources. The fact turned out to be true (at least as far as I could ascertain). Had it been incorrent, there would have been hell to pay for that reporter as the fraud would have been exposed.
Of course with the Times, you have a handful of editors and a reputation based upon good fact-checking which allows you to put some confidence in believing what you read without further research. With wikipedia, it's different, not better, not worse, but different, and it should be regarded as such.
Delicious: the only site I've had to explicitly bookmark because "delicious" is one of the few English words whose spelling I cannot seem to commit to memory, and even if I could, I'd never remember where to put the frickin dots.
That may be true, but the Lowell Sun has just called attention how widespread this problem could be. This article has now been posted on both Slashdot and Digg. All the House and Senate pages will likely get a good looking over by many members of the net-savvy public with particular attention paid to IP addresses from house/senate staffers. It will backfire from a rabid right-wing point of view, if it turns out that lots of Republicans are also engaged in this practice.
Homework assignment: by November, find out who's currently in office, if you don't already know. So you can vote for the other candidate.
I think a lot of senators and representatives are going to find out just what blowback means.
But of course, a terrorist attack or another bin Laden tape might come at just in time to alter the outcome of the elections.
The Republicans are all over it.