While the project sounds intrinsically good-spirited and the sample videos are really amazing, I can easily imagine one of these drivers getting bumped off or "vanishing" after recording something they "weren't supposed to see." Or, worse yet, someone mistakes their Beetle for a Geek Squad unit.
Seriously, what this "warning label" is really doing is sending a message to the millions of kids-now-adults who grew up with Sesame Street in the 70s: "we have analyzed what this stuff did to you and it ain't pretty." (even if they didn't do the analysis -- which I doubt they did -- that's still the undertone). Gee, thanks! On that note, I can say that gobbling tobacco pipes is really not as uncomfortable as it looks. This generation's award-winning children's programming is the next's NC-17 controversy.
What disturbs me the most isn't that there are random assholes on MySpace (or the Internet, for that matter) taunting people (I don't like it, but assume this -- 30 milliseconds on any FPS multiplayer server desensitizes you to that). Nor that a girl committed suicide (which is sad). Nor is it that some wacko blogger decided to post public information in an act of vigilante blog-justice (which is indeed very strange and unsettling). It's the implications of the comments on the jezebel blog. The comments on the other linked sites in the article are similar. It is clear these people (do they represent a typical American cross section?), have this attitude like: "if its on the internet it must be true exactly how it is printed. I want blood NOW!" No critical thinking. No common sense. No reality testing. Just pure reactionary tooth-and-claw emotion. It is the worst sort of groupthink one can imagine (wait, sounds a little like another popular internet forum I know about...oh, nevermind). A couple examples. One blogger writes "I'm not a vengeful person when it comes to my own life, so it always surprises me that my first instinct when I hear of these things happening to others is to plot murder." Oh really? Good to know. How about "If there was a loving God, so many people would be sterile. The parents playing 'Josh' [the fake MySpace account] are a good example." It actually makes slashdot seem like a pretty reasonable, organized, dare I say, civil place. Its a mad, mad, mad, mad world.
There should be no sympathy for those who pose as fictitious characters only to create malice and havoc in others lives, whether it's online or in real life. Realize you just eliminated sympathy for almost all +5 Funny posts on slashdot.
Scientists have gotten tiny robots to not only integrate into cockroach society but also control it So I guess (except for the cockroach part) it's a lot like life in the United States
Why irony to describe the result? irony: incongruity between what might be expected and what actually occurs. Here the expectation, even if misguided, is a historical one, not a nationalistic nor skill-based one. Since irony is based on expectation, it is as much an emotional process as an intellectual one. It is not necessarily a rational response; it CAN be just a sensation one gets. Obviously no one doubts Germans are technically capable of cracking codes, so expectation is not twisted around for that reason. From an earlier article on this: "Colossus was developed at Bletchley Park to decipher German messages during World War II...Two groups of amateur code breakers will be invited to crack transmissions encrypted by one of the original Lorenz cipher machines used by the German High Command during World War II." So I do think most people might find it justifiably ironic that in a blind test a German, who otherwise knows nothing about the original German code, is able to decipher it the fastest in a contest taking place over 60 years after the fact competing with the original machine designed to decipher it in the first place. In a naive post hoc sense, one might think "the result actually makes sense because perhaps there is something 'Germanocentric' about the code." But I seriously doubt this. The historical irony remains intact. However, again only after the initial glow of the ironic sensation fades do we realize our expectation was flawed: we should have guessed that a competent German was participating, so there was a pretty good chance a German would win from the start.
Why don't they just sign the "We'll Do Whatever The Fuck We Want Anytime We Want Act" and just get it over with already? Hell, calling it RIPA is starting to evoke that very image -- like "RIPA new goatse-like orifice"
Nuclear waste managment is an issue, of course, but not an insurmountable one. In contrast to some power sources, like coal, the fact that we can actually contain the nuclear waste at all is a good thing. Also, before we forget, smoke from coal production is also radioactive -- except its being dumped directly into the air and water )nevermind the other problems with particulate debris and hazardous chemicals). It would be nice to have hyperclean energy like wind or solar run the world, but those technologies can't currenly meet the power needs on a reasonable time scale. Nuclear may not be perfect, but it is a better alternative to coal and can be a transitional energy source until the hyperclean ones get their act together.
Something tells me these mice are an evolutionary dead end... I had the same response initially as well. However, the point of the research has nothing to do with mice or fear per se, rather, from TFA, the point is to:
better understand the structure of the brain's neural circuitry responsible for processing information about the outside world . Turning off and on various inputs (like smell) is a good way to proceed. Nevertheless, as a general principle, I think most mice would agree that turning off the fear of cats would be a bad thing. And, hey, let's face it, the cats would be pretty disappointed too since giving chase is 90% of the fun for them.
The functionality of this helmet is impressive, but I do take issue with the idea that because it looks good (does it?) it "kinda makes you wish you were in the army." There are potentially a lot of reasons to want to be in the military, but the way a helmet LOOKs should NOT be one of them.
I've done a very carefuly musical analysis of the words contained in TFA, and when mapped through the appropriate steganographic filters it sounds shockingly like a 1985 tribute to a 1973 tribute to Roy Harper called Hats Off To Charles Obscure.
The article is well written but has this annoyingly casual tone like "of course you know what this super-famous ubiquitous sound is and obviously, as someone 'in the know,' you care about its origins." No. In fact, I have no freaking idea what you are talking about. This makes me wonder if it isn't an attempt at a viral marketing scheme. Sadly, now when I finally do hear the otherwise amusing little sound (which would be much more amusing if I had no idea where it came from), I'll only think "this is a self-important hyper-over-engineered sound that was too self-consciously created for it's purpose."
"The beginning of the email read: 'Helloh bud, enclosed five of the questions in honor of the foreign minister: The mother your visit in Israel is a sleep to the favor or to the bed your mind on the conflict are Israeli Palestinian.'" As an English translation of an email in Dutch orginally written in Hebrew but translated through babel fish, it sounds more like they consulted Ali G or Miss South Carolina Teen USA. I wonder if it has the same impact in Dutch...
"Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT) and Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) have re-introduced the 'PIRATE Act' (pdf) to Congress. According to Ars Technica, the purpose of this act is to get the DoJ to go after individual copyright infringers. It would allow the Department of Justice to bring civil lawsuits instead of criminal ones so that they would be able to prosecute copyright infringers with only a minimal burden of proof, rather than the heavier burden required for criminal prosecution." Flying Spaghetti Monsterism is making more sense. It wasn't high seas pirates they were referring to, rather wasteful acts of congress called PIRATE whose resources and manpower energies could have been used to to fight global warming instead, thus becoming correlated with its rise.
The goal is for the robot to learn new tasks by following voice commands, which the researchers hope could eventually allow the robot to help the elderly or become a "good household mate" for families. Among other things, the bot can currently can plot out its own map of its surroundings and remember specific locations and, of course, change TV channels at your command (or, as you can see above, even serve as a TV itself). There are a lot of cats out there right now licking themselves acting aloof, pretending like they don't care, but really thinking, "there's no goddamn way I can compete with this thing."
Isn't _______ (space program, particle physics, string theory, insert science program that isn't directly applicable to everyday life here) totally useless and a huge waste of money? This money could be better used elsewhere! I'm sure people said the same myopic things about this crazy little thing called electromagnetism back in Faraday's day. Investment in basic science is pretty much a no brainer. The benefit-to-cost ratio is enormous. Even if the direct benefits are (only!) a generation away (patience!), the indirect benefits in trying to understand and solve difficult problems pays off almost instantly. Most of the everyday comforts and technologies you enjoy (and probably take for granted) are (or were) spinoff technologies from basic science drizzled into the private sector. One only need look at the gross asymmetries in the quality of life between cultures that invest in basic research and those that don't to see the impact.
Wow. Very cool. However, as I expected, HD really highlights the serious crop circle problem on the moon. Looks like a Led Zeppelin CD box set down there.
The issue also features an article entitled The Ending Has Not Yet Been Written, about the never-ending story of Massively Multiplayer Online Games. Many game story lines (HL2, for example) don't end anymore, not just Massively Multiplayer Online Games. Game companies have apparently taken a cue from TV writers and refuse to actually end anything. Every "ending's" a cliffhanger or leads to one. This may actually be a part of the business model, but I think it also comes from sloppy writing. Don't get me wrong, I think HL2 has an enjoyable set of characters with a cool setting. There is even some good dialogue. However, I think many recent writers have lost the ability to actually bring game stories and plots to a satisfying closure. Portal is a notable recent exception.
Over time the children grew to treat the robot as one of them -- playing games with the robot, hugging it, and covering it up with a blanket when its batteries ran down. Children? Robots? Us Mac users are already quite familiar with this effect.
Slashdot Mirror
Great link. Thanks!
While the project sounds intrinsically good-spirited and the sample videos are really amazing, I can easily imagine one of these drivers getting bumped off or "vanishing" after recording something they "weren't supposed to see." Or, worse yet, someone mistakes their Beetle for a Geek Squad unit.
Seriously, what this "warning label" is really doing is sending a message to the millions of kids-now-adults who grew up with Sesame Street in the 70s: "we have analyzed what this stuff did to you and it ain't pretty." (even if they didn't do the analysis -- which I doubt they did -- that's still the undertone). Gee, thanks! On that note, I can say that gobbling tobacco pipes is really not as uncomfortable as it looks. This generation's award-winning children's programming is the next's NC-17 controversy.
What disturbs me the most isn't that there are random assholes on MySpace (or the Internet, for that matter) taunting people (I don't like it, but assume this -- 30 milliseconds on any FPS multiplayer server desensitizes you to that). Nor that a girl committed suicide (which is sad). Nor is it that some wacko blogger decided to post public information in an act of vigilante blog-justice (which is indeed very strange and unsettling). It's the implications of the comments on the jezebel blog. The comments on the other linked sites in the article are similar. It is clear these people (do they represent a typical American cross section?), have this attitude like: "if its on the internet it must be true exactly how it is printed. I want blood NOW!" No critical thinking. No common sense. No reality testing. Just pure reactionary tooth-and-claw emotion. It is the worst sort of groupthink one can imagine (wait, sounds a little like another popular internet forum I know about...oh, nevermind). A couple examples. One blogger writes "I'm not a vengeful person when it comes to my own life, so it always surprises me that my first instinct when I hear of these things happening to others is to plot murder." Oh really? Good to know. How about "If there was a loving God, so many people would be sterile. The parents playing 'Josh' [the fake MySpace account] are a good example." It actually makes slashdot seem like a pretty reasonable, organized, dare I say, civil place. Its a mad, mad, mad, mad world.
Why irony to describe the result? irony: incongruity between what might be expected and what actually occurs. Here the expectation, even if misguided, is a historical one, not a nationalistic nor skill-based one. Since irony is based on expectation, it is as much an emotional process as an intellectual one. It is not necessarily a rational response; it CAN be just a sensation one gets. Obviously no one doubts Germans are technically capable of cracking codes, so expectation is not twisted around for that reason. From an earlier article on this: "Colossus was developed at Bletchley Park to decipher German messages during World War II...Two groups of amateur code breakers will be invited to crack transmissions encrypted by one of the original Lorenz cipher machines used by the German High Command during World War II." So I do think most people might find it justifiably ironic that in a blind test a German, who otherwise knows nothing about the original German code, is able to decipher it the fastest in a contest taking place over 60 years after the fact competing with the original machine designed to decipher it in the first place. In a naive post hoc sense, one might think "the result actually makes sense because perhaps there is something 'Germanocentric' about the code." But I seriously doubt this. The historical irony remains intact. However, again only after the initial glow of the ironic sensation fades do we realize our expectation was flawed: we should have guessed that a competent German was participating, so there was a pretty good chance a German would win from the start.
Hell, calling it RIPA is starting to evoke that very image -- like "RIPA new goatse-like orifice"
Nuclear waste managment is an issue, of course, but not an insurmountable one. In contrast to some power sources, like coal, the fact that we can actually contain the nuclear waste at all is a good thing. Also, before we forget, smoke from coal production is also radioactive -- except its being dumped directly into the air and water )nevermind the other problems with particulate debris and hazardous chemicals). It would be nice to have hyperclean energy like wind or solar run the world, but those technologies can't currenly meet the power needs on a reasonable time scale. Nuclear may not be perfect, but it is a better alternative to coal and can be a transitional energy source until the hyperclean ones get their act together.
What I want to know is who this evil Dr. Noone is and why she is allowed to deny things we mere mortals cannot.
Ahh. Right. Damn. Mod my origional post -1 notpayingattention.
The functionality of this helmet is impressive, but I do take issue with the idea that because it looks good (does it?) it "kinda makes you wish you were in the army." There are potentially a lot of reasons to want to be in the military, but the way a helmet LOOKs should NOT be one of them.
I've done a very carefuly musical analysis of the words contained in TFA, and when mapped through the appropriate steganographic filters it sounds shockingly like a 1985 tribute to a 1973 tribute to Roy Harper called Hats Off To Charles Obscure.
Somehow, "This one goes to twelve," doesn't have quite the same ring as, "This one goes to eleven." Ah, but this is slashdot. He was using base 9.
The article is well written but has this annoyingly casual tone like "of course you know what this super-famous ubiquitous sound is and obviously, as someone 'in the know,' you care about its origins." No. In fact, I have no freaking idea what you are talking about. This makes me wonder if it isn't an attempt at a viral marketing scheme. Sadly, now when I finally do hear the otherwise amusing little sound (which would be much more amusing if I had no idea where it came from), I'll only think "this is a self-important hyper-over-engineered sound that was too self-consciously created for it's purpose."
Wow. Very cool. However, as I expected, HD really highlights the serious crop circle problem on the moon. Looks like a Led Zeppelin CD box set down there.
Good point. Anticlosure?