These CDs will be out there forever, in users' libraries and bought and sold by used CD shops and flea markets. The end result of this fiasco is that Sony discs are something you watch out for and don't risk sticking in your computer, unless you're running the latest antivirus/antispyware software.
Fine, but publishing random crap is not a good thing.
The Associated Press is demonstrably not the infallible rock of reliable facts which many assume it to be. Their technology articles are also often very iffy.
But the average person will believe whatever they read and hear on cnn and on the Net and in the paper.
It's basically pots and pans that you can place RFID cooking cards in the handle with.
ENGLISH, CmdrTaco, ENGLISH! ! !
I only use one button on my microwave oven, MinutePlus. My mom always wonders how I get it to turn on by pressing one button without typing in the amount of time...
This is another example of why science is important and why it should be respected.
We did it this time. The previous mission didn't work right, but this one nailed it. The political naysayers and critics who want to redefine science should pay attention.
We did it this time, but even with our previous failure, how could we attain such a level of precision with our measuring and then engineering of the laws of physics and chemistry to achieve such a specific goal, to send out a space probe that mindlessly orbits around the solar system for years and comes back to us like a cosmic boomerang, and yet be drastically and unanimously incorrect when it comes to measuring the rate of radioactive decay of various elements in the extensive global collection of terrestrial geological samples and also the synthetic elements we've created during the twentieth century atomic age?
Have all the scientists in all the nations of the world simply got it exactly, equally wrong?
The scientific framework of ideas is well-established and the theories are interdependent. This is why we can readily reject challenges like "Intelligent Design".
Google is a fairly good (but obviously imperfect and incomplete) index of the current knowledge base of literate humans with access to the Internet.
Before the AP article that mentioned "Like Swift Dead", that phrase (in quotes) returned zero results. That means nobody who ever talked about LSD mentioned "Like Swift Dead" on a web page that got indexed by Google. That's all it means.
There is now a Wikipedia article where the facts can be hashed out and the prior existence of the term can be debated and/or documented. Let's see if the source of that term can come forth and tell us.
You, AC, can't even spell the word "sentence" (nor can I spell "Albert Hofmann")... but I suspect the New York Times got it right [registration-free link].
Often newspapers reprint AP content without any fact-checking or error correction. Check out the recent AP content related to Albert Hoffman. Many newspaper articles regurgitated the AP wire article which referenced a bogus name for LSD, "Like Swift Dead". Anybody ever heard that before? Nope. Even Google had no references to it, which could easily have been checked by the original AP reporter or any of the chorus of mass-media parrots who copied/reprinted the erroneous article.
Reminds me of Cyber Monday.
People have to learn to evaluate what they read critically and decide how believable it is. I'm not very optimistic about this happening in the U.S.
But IIRC Toffler's Future Shock completely missed out on the forthcoming new means of communication (such as the Internet) and the radically different ways we interact nowadays. Been awhile since I reread, but it seemed like an extrapolation of 1960s life with the only difference being acceleration of industrial change.
We need a new Future Shock for this new century, which can be snapshot periodically (for posterity) and updated regularly as technology allows. Er, maybe that's now called a wiki.
Why do we humans keep trying to predict our technological future? So-called (and self-proclaimed) experts have been trying for decades, and they aren't doing much better than psychics. Or are there wildly successful visionaries with high accuracy of whose publications we are now unaware? I'd love to see a discussion of futurists' predictions that HAVE been surprisingly accurate.
It seems pointless to make specific predictions, such as Technology X in Year Y. Might it not be better to simply steer our unwieldy technology, as well as we can, in a generally sensible direction?
Have any researchers considered carefully measuring the driving behaviour of cabbies, etc. (possibly by equipping cabs with gps/black box devices) and trying to distill useful information from this?
If cabbies were bad drivers, you'd expect they would wreck more often than usual. If they were exceptionally good, you'd expect better driving, hence good data on which to base your automated driving models.
To do this, you'd have to install monitoring equipment into a significant fraction of cabs in a given city, so that you can get a useful amount of interaction data when they are near other monitored vehicles.
I don't even know where to begin with this crap, and it's not worth my time. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timecube. Actually don't do that, it will make you worse.
My laptop PC works fine as an ebook reader, and while reading an ebook I can listen to music or watch video and simultaneously download more content. While I would like something more compact and power-conscious, I'm happy with what I've got. But I will avoid buying anything made by SONY. I don't even go to SONY movies anymore, and I dissuade my friends and family from doing so.
Hey SONY, your 2005 DRM fiasco has cost you more than you realize.
i suggest you look more into this matter, many things like the red shift are dependant to a degree on this, and its more voodoo than science (still.)
Boy, this thread is a trip. Parent's math is bunkum and your assertation which I directly quote above is also incorrect. Redshift has NOTHING to do with parallax measurements of distance, which can be calculated to many significant digits. Voodoo indeed. Don't believe everything you read on the internet that's modded +5, Informative...
I just realized that the software that supposedly runs this site is supposedly open source. Have any of you old farts (or younger ones) reviewed the code? How is bitchslapping implemented? How is moderator access revocation implemented?
When did this bullshit start anyway? Or has it just been a slow decline. I don't remember hearing any of this back in 1999.
It would be nice if the slashdot management would engage in a little give and take to keep the community here satisfied and (as zerocool mentioned) maintain some journalistic integrity. Why NOT strive for that, other than pure laziness?
Digg is not a substitute for slashdot. You can actually learn by reading the comments here.
If your name is tied into the file, then no restriction is needed. If a file appears on the illegal sites, look at the name of the DLer and sue them.
DRM in the form of personally-identifying watermarks is easily defeated when the first piece of spyware comes along which looks for these files on the infected users' machines and spreads them around on the P2P networks.
So they'll sue me for accidentally or inadvertently downloading some evil filesharing spyware? I hope not.
These types of stories we see over and over are clear symptoms of the crying need for a global, decentralized, free moderation system on the Internet. Basically from now on, there is always going to be a copious flood of junk data coming in from every direction, and we need to fashion new tools that allow us to discern what is good with a minimum of personal effort.
The concept behind PageRank propelled the Google search engine to number one. The simplicity of the algorithm and its democratic nature made it successful. It worked well when most web pages were constructed by humans.
Now, of course, the net has been overrun by link spam, link farms, blog spam, zombie networks, and email spam. Humans are still generating volumes of meaningful, valuable content, but machines have been spewing even larger volumes of pseudo-meaningful content designed to hijack the democratic principle that PageRank used to deliver relevant results in response to a search query.
The problem is that machines (and collaborative efforts by humans working with machines) can generate content that other machines do not recognize as garbage/spam. We can turn this around by allowing our machines to pay more attention to content that is generated or approved by entities that are verifiably human.
This is where the net is headed, and this is how we can mitigate the negative effects of the spam plague. Collaborative moderation and filtering will become the norm because the unfiltered net is a disaster.
We don't need new laws that outlaw spam. We need new algorithms that enable real people to subtly work together to help each other. Humans can easily discern good content from garbage. We just need to teach our computers how to pay more attention to us.
Consider the raw data that has been created by my writing this comment, and your reading it. You might assume that I'm a human being, and that the mind who wrote this article exists and is capable of discerning spam/garbage/misinformation from useful data.
But I could be a robot that just copied someone's article and pasted it in, claiming authorship. How do you tell the difference?
Ask your friends. If you're faced with a crowd of a billion people, all speaking their minds freely at once, you can filter out the junk and get to what's interesting if you just ignore what other people like you ignore, and pay attention to what people like you pay attention to. This can lead to groupthink unless you let some of the junk through randomly and deliberately, and that will require some tuning.
But one's personal view of the Internet is going to need to be filtered collaboratively. It must be decentralized and quickly adaptable.
Companies like Google are undoubtedly working on this. Wikipedia needs to pay attention too.
Slashdot Mirror
I think it's only a matter of time until they recognize and remove it, but as for future DRM malware, who knows?
The retail checkout line is not the place to wage these types of battles.
Sony == Dangerous to my PC
What a great way to promote a brand.
This statement deserves emphasis for linguists everywhere.
Sorry. They come fast and hard and it's easy to get sidetracked.
Maybe they'll teach you what a "Run-On Sentence" is.
:)
Take an English class yourself, and maybe they'll talk about poetry.
I like run-on sentences. I'm just trying to communicate. Don't like it? Bite me, foe
The Associated Press is demonstrably not the infallible rock of reliable facts which many assume it to be. Their technology articles are also often very iffy.
But the average person will believe whatever they read and hear on cnn and on the Net and in the paper.
And people criticize Wikipedia...
ENGLISH, CmdrTaco, ENGLISH! ! !
I only use one button on my microwave oven, MinutePlus. My mom always wonders how I get it to turn on by pressing one button without typing in the amount of time...
We did it this time. The previous mission didn't work right, but this one nailed it. The political naysayers and critics who want to redefine science should pay attention.
We did it this time, but even with our previous failure, how could we attain such a level of precision with our measuring and then engineering of the laws of physics and chemistry to achieve such a specific goal, to send out a space probe that mindlessly orbits around the solar system for years and comes back to us like a cosmic boomerang, and yet be drastically and unanimously incorrect when it comes to measuring the rate of radioactive decay of various elements in the extensive global collection of terrestrial geological samples and also the synthetic elements we've created during the twentieth century atomic age?
Have all the scientists in all the nations of the world simply got it exactly, equally wrong?
The scientific framework of ideas is well-established and the theories are interdependent. This is why we can readily reject challenges like "Intelligent Design".
Because they just don't fit in.
Before the AP article that mentioned "Like Swift Dead", that phrase (in quotes) returned zero results. That means nobody who ever talked about LSD mentioned "Like Swift Dead" on a web page that got indexed by Google. That's all it means.
There is now a Wikipedia article where the facts can be hashed out and the prior existence of the term can be debated and/or documented. Let's see if the source of that term can come forth and tell us.
You, AC, can't even spell the word "sentence" (nor can I spell "Albert Hofmann")... but I suspect the New York Times got it right [registration-free link].
Reminds me of Cyber Monday.
People have to learn to evaluate what they read critically and decide how believable it is. I'm not very optimistic about this happening in the U.S.
until the seniors come back and hack them to pieces at 60 FPS :)
I sure hope so. I usually set my iPod pacemaker to 120 BPM as soon as I wash down the morning Vivarin with a couple of Red Bulls.
We need a new Future Shock for this new century, which can be snapshot periodically (for posterity) and updated regularly as technology allows.
Er, maybe that's now called a wiki.
It seems pointless to make specific predictions, such as Technology X in Year Y. Might it not be better to simply steer our unwieldy technology, as well as we can, in a generally sensible direction?
If cabbies were bad drivers, you'd expect they would wreck more often than usual. If they were exceptionally good, you'd expect better driving, hence good data on which to base your automated driving models.
To do this, you'd have to install monitoring equipment into a significant fraction of cabs in a given city, so that you can get a useful amount of interaction data when they are near other monitored vehicles.
I don't even know where to begin with this crap, and it's not worth my time. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timecube. Actually don't do that, it will make you worse.
Hey SONY, your 2005 DRM fiasco has cost you more than you realize.
Boy, this thread is a trip. Parent's math is bunkum and your assertation which I directly quote above is also incorrect. Redshift has NOTHING to do with parallax measurements of distance, which can be calculated to many significant digits. Voodoo indeed. Don't believe everything you read on the internet that's modded +5, Informative...
I just realized that the software that supposedly runs this site is supposedly open source. Have any of you old farts (or younger ones) reviewed the code? How is bitchslapping implemented? How is moderator access revocation implemented?
It would be nice if the slashdot management would engage in a little give and take to keep the community here satisfied and (as zerocool mentioned) maintain some journalistic integrity. Why NOT strive for that, other than pure laziness?
Digg is not a substitute for slashdot. You can actually learn by reading the comments here.
Stellar parallax. Picture Homer Simpson watching a donut slowly rotating in front of his mouth.
DRM in the form of personally-identifying watermarks is easily defeated when the first piece of spyware comes along which looks for these files on the infected users' machines and spreads them around on the P2P networks.
So they'll sue me for accidentally or inadvertently downloading some evil filesharing spyware? I hope not.
These types of stories we see over and over are clear symptoms of the crying need for a global, decentralized, free moderation system on the Internet. Basically from now on, there is always going to be a copious flood of junk data coming in from every direction, and we need to fashion new tools that allow us to discern what is good with a minimum of personal effort.
The concept behind PageRank propelled the Google search engine to number one. The simplicity of the algorithm and its democratic nature made it successful. It worked well when most web pages were constructed by humans.
Now, of course, the net has been overrun by link spam, link farms, blog spam, zombie networks, and email spam. Humans are still generating volumes of meaningful, valuable content, but machines have been spewing even larger volumes of pseudo-meaningful content designed to hijack the democratic principle that PageRank used to deliver relevant results in response to a search query.
The problem is that machines (and collaborative efforts by humans working with machines) can generate content that other machines do not recognize as garbage/spam. We can turn this around by allowing our machines to pay more attention to content that is generated or approved by entities that are verifiably human.
This is where the net is headed, and this is how we can mitigate the negative effects of the spam plague. Collaborative moderation and filtering will become the norm because the unfiltered net is a disaster.
We don't need new laws that outlaw spam. We need new algorithms that enable real people to subtly work together to help each other. Humans can easily discern good content from garbage. We just need to teach our computers how to pay more attention to us.
Consider the raw data that has been created by my writing this comment, and your reading it. You might assume that I'm a human being, and that the mind who wrote this article exists and is capable of discerning spam/garbage/misinformation from useful data.
But I could be a robot that just copied someone's article and pasted it in, claiming authorship. How do you tell the difference?
Ask your friends. If you're faced with a crowd of a billion people, all speaking their minds freely at once, you can filter out the junk and get to what's interesting if you just ignore what other people like you ignore, and pay attention to what people like you pay attention to. This can lead to groupthink unless you let some of the junk through randomly and deliberately, and that will require some tuning.
But one's personal view of the Internet is going to need to be filtered collaboratively. It must be decentralized and quickly adaptable.
Companies like Google are undoubtedly working on this. Wikipedia needs to pay attention too.
To mod you Redundant. Except I never get mod points anymore. Oh well. Zonk is a tool.