Along this line, you could also tell your player to play other songs with similar fractal signatures to the song you are currently listening to, if you want to hear MORE songs like it - or the exact opposite, play songs which have greatly different fractal signatures, if you want a greatly varying selection of music.
Doesn't this break the web-wide caching system being implemented by companies such as "akamai"? I thought they provided load-balanced web services for those web services which were expecting high peaks of service requests.
The impression *I* got, is that Apple was also applying pressure to stop the media who got their hands on that leaked information from publishing.
It's one thing to try and punish somebody who is violating a contract they signed with you, but its a whole new ball game when you try and use the legal system to muzzle the press who signed no such agreement.
It might be interesting to have a single chip with multiple 486 processors, running off an on-chip shared 16MB chip-speed RAM.
What's the transistor count of current day processors, and what's the transistor count of the 486 chips? Throwing in a factor for the SRAM, how many 486 processors could we fit on a single die the size of a Pentium III or Athlon?
...hey've inadvertently created a market for systems like Gnutella and Freenet, which are virtually unstoppable because of their decentralized, distributed nature
Isn't Gnutellanet being stopped right now due to some kind of DoS attack (randomized request packets & such)? Have they figured out how to fight those attacks yet?
What makes you so much more fit to judge who's a criminal and who's not than your government?
Everybody has to make that decision, one way or another. Most people make the decision to allow the government/media to decide for them, but they are ultimately responsible for the formation of their own opinion. Sometimes people decide that the people in the government are "criminals".
They were undermining the stability of the state, a charge that most Westerners greatly underestimate the importance of.
Well, they were trying to undermine the stability of the government anyway, the constituents of which would like everyone to think they are the sole defenders of the state.
Isn't it amusing how often the people who are doing well in the society resist change, even at the expense of the people who aren't doing so well?
Well, I doubt it will be a full simulation - probably a massive expert system which just checks that whatever change you make isn't going to interact badly with any other process we know is going on. (Of course, it can't check against stuff we DON'T know is going on...)
As for the immune system - it gets compromised by attacks from organisms which were generated by natural evolution - it's certainly not ready to handle stuff which will be "intelligently" designed to get around it. It would probably be intelligent to use the immune system as part of the defense, but we are definitely going to have to build some kind of "authentication" system for our genes which makes it very difficult for "unauthorized changes" to occur.
Whether or not we can accomplish this w/o majorly reengineering our basic genetic machinery is a whole another topic...
I think thee is a definate worry about creating perfect humans from genetics.
Aside from the obvious philosophical/engineering arguments about what would constitute a "perfect" human, frankly I'd be happy if I had some kind of genetic defect which made my standard of living lower, and could fix it.
It's that interim period, where you can detect the defect but not fix it, where society is going to struggle.
There is, of course, the problem of deciding whether or not something IS a defect (and possibly WHO gets to decide such things), and what you want to do about someone who disagrees with you.
Actually, aside from fixing up little things like health, I can see do-it-yourself-genetic-engineering becoming popular primarily through COSMETIC application.
The first time someone comes up with a pill with a retrovirus in it that changes your natural hair/eye/skin color, they're going to make billions, genetic engineering will become a widely accepted reality in "fashion conscious society", and the Klu Klux Klan will have a mental meltdown trying to apply their standards of racial purity to a population trying out new "looks" every other week...
Probably, part of doing-your-own-gene-splicing will have to be a simulator capable of telling you whether you're going to kill (or maim) yourself severely.
Frankly, the first thing I want to be able to do if I *could* program my genes, is to build some kind of genetic "ICE" into my cells to prevent OTHER people from changing my genes if I don't want them to...
As per your AOL user remarks, with the loss of the US, the rest of the world network wouldn't have to carry US traffic, therefore it might actually be faster:)
(The assumption is that the US uses Internet resources like it uses other global natural resources - using an amount of resources totally out of proportion to their small percentage of the world population, all to maintain their God-Given-Right to indulge to excess).
(Before anyone comments, yes I am an whitish, overweight American citizen.:)
Do you remember the originating post. Experiments have shown over and over that given permission to do human beings will torture and kill other human beings.
am not at all religious but all teh religions of the world as well as most secular philosophers agree that killing, torturing, stealing, stuffing your face, fucking anybody you want to are wrong/evil.
Yes, I remember the original quote - and I disagreed with it, and your opinion. Given permission to do so, MOST human beings do NOT torture and kill other humans beings. SOME humans beings do - which is NOT equivalent to ALL.
In a bad situation, most humans beings try and keep a low profile so that THEY don't get tortured and killed. This doesn't mean that they are evil - it just means they want to survive.
You can take all the issue you want but history shows again and again that people enjoy killing and torturing and would do it in an instant if somebody told them it was OK to do so.
And I say again - bullshit - history doesn't show any such thing. SOME people enjoy killing & torturing - MOST people are just concerned with living comfortably.
I don't think they're exactly dead, but they're not exactly being heavily marketed. They've certainly gone down in price - I got some cheap LCD shutter-type glasses for about $50 (ELSA Revelator), and the common video cards can now drive the monitors fast enough to avoid flicker severe enough to cause headaches.
The most important development I've seen is that the latest drivers for the shutter glasses allow any game using the Direct3D interface in Windows to generate the proper stereoscopic perspectives. Since most popular, recent Windows 3D games are doing this, that means there's suddenly a large number of 3D images to look at (can you say Lara Croft in true color 3D - I knew you could...:)
Unfortunately, and as usual, there hasn't been the same development for alternative OSes (after all, where's the money?:)
The main problems I saw with the LCD shutter glasses were two:
1. ghosting
Mainly because the LCDs don't completely block out the images for one eye from the other, so you can get a little double vision. It's not too bad though.
2. nausea
I get this in first person shooters & racing games, because the viewpoint is changing quickly & violently w/o my head moving. When I get "into" the image enough, my stomach starts heaving:(
The best way I've found to use the shutter glasses are for 3D demos where the viewpoint doesn't change, but the displayed objects move around. Feels like your monitor is a window and you're looking into some other universe (esp. if you've got some cool music to go along with the entertainment).
Dunno, with proper movement ratios (so that the robotics move at a fraction of the surgeon's distance & speed), a surgeon COULD be a helluva lot more precise through a remote interface than any human could possibly be.
Of course, this is given that the robotics are moving as smoothly as the surgeon's movements (and not those damn jerking movements that seem to be the given in cheap robots on the market...)
This argument is still rather bizarre - YOU may have decided to brand humans as inherently evil, and maybe some people who think like you, but that hardly translates to "human beings have branded our natural instinct to kill as evil". In my experience, the "rest of society" does not perceive someone as evil until that someone has actively done something to hurt the society.
The nature of your words indicates that you are looking at the world through a strongly religiously-flavored context - a viewpoint which I do not share, and which I doubt a majority of people on the planet share. (My impression that, while most of the people on the planet are religious to some extent, they tend to be a lot more secular & pragmatic than your words indicate.)
I take issue with your belief that humans have a natural instinct to kill. Humans have a natural instinct to want stuff for themselves. If someone else gets in the way of getting that stuff, then it is a "natural", animalistic reaction to get mad (and perhaps violent). This is NOT the same thing as a "natural instinct to kill".
It's because human beings are by nature evil. By evil I mean animals who enjoy causing pain and killing (a totally natural thing if you even watched a cat play with a grasshopper).
Oh, come on! Your application of the definition of evil is stupid.
The cat plays with the grasshopper because the cat is having fun practicing its hunting skills - and doesn't really have enough of a concept about another creature's "pain" to feel any empathy toward the grasshopper. That's NOT evil. You have to be able to conceive that you are actually CAUSING another creature pain, before you can enjoy it. Most non-human animals don't meet this criteria.
I also feel that most humans aren't inherently evil - they're SELFISH, which isn't the same thing (although it might result in some of the same kinds of pain & suffering). ESPECIALLY in a survival situation, where people are feeling insecure about the possibility they will be able to wake up alive the next day. That's NOT evil.
About the only thing you got right is that an EVIL person enjoys causing others unnecessary pain & suffering. I differentiate this between someone who causes people NECESSARY pain & suffering, or someone who causes people pain & suffering but doesn't ENJOY it. (This two types of people might be classified as "dangerous", but not evil.) You're spreading that definition of evil across way too many people who don't deserve it.
Dunno - maybe people suggested steganography because, if you do it RIGHT, it doesn't matter whether a professional is looking for it - it's still hard to find, esp. if they're not actually SURE there is a message in there somewhere.
Of course, doing it RIGHT isn't as easy as you seem to think it is.
Of course, if a government is suspicious of a citizen, then it would be much easier for them to wiretap/bug/peep/Van Eyck-monitor/Trojan that citizen than try and crack encrypted messages.
I for one don't understand cheaters anyway - whats the point of playing a game if your just going to cheat? It stops getting fun really quick.
I occasionally cheat (on single-player modes) because, and I'm not ashamed anymore to admit it, I'm not good enough at most of the games out on the market.
I used to be able to keep up with the arcade stuff & early Doom-clones, but as each type of game has matured & there are people with lots of time to do nothing but practice, the companies have cranked up the base difficulty level to the point where it would take me months of constant playing to improve my skill level to the point where I could complete the game (I'm usually into RPGs & first-person-working-toward-a-goal-type games).
I'm busy working, I visit my family a lot, I like to get more than 2 hours sleep per night - I don't have the time or health to build up the skills necessary to complete the popular games (which are not necessarily useful to me in the rest of my life). So, in single-person modes, I cheat so that I can enjoy the game in about a week of a few hours/night.
On the other hand, I wouldn't cheat in any kind of multi-player mode, due to the ethical concerns. (Of course, that generally means that I just get my butt kicked, because I still have problems with the difficulty level...) I don't agree with your statement about cheating being a practical joke - I think people who cheat in multi-player mode just want to win in any manner possible.
The article says that Penenberg quit because he failed to testify the way the newspaper wanted him to. Forbes worked out a deal where all Penenburg would have had to say was that his article was accurate.
It sounded like Penenberg didn't want to be called as a witness in a grand jury indictment setup, because the prosecutor has a great deal more latitude about what they can do in the indictment hearing than what they can do in an actual trial (they could basically violate any "deal" they made with Penenberg about only asking about certain things, w/o fear of repercussion - and then legally punish Penenberg if he didn't cooperate.
If you WANTED to be homosexual...you could force yourself through mental willpower to be sexually attracted to men?
Could you force yourself to be sexually attracted to horses?
Do you really believe that sexual attraction is completely a conscious decision that a person can just sit up and decide?
Yes, yes & yes - with the proper "brainwashing" techniques (which is still brainwashing, even if it's self-imposed), anyone's mind can be "bent" to believe things they did not have any previous "natural" tendency to do - even more easily if they are actually cooperating.
All I am saying is that a person has no control over what they fantasise about.
And I believe this is bullshit rationalization - anyone who hasn't suffered brain damage causing total lack of inhibitions can control what they fantasize about - they just don't want to control it.
No I would go farther...no person should be judged merely upon what their fantasy is.
If I know someone is fantasizing about having sex with kids, I judge them as unsafe to be around children. I judge them this way because fantasizing about having sex with kids is a precursor to the act, placing them one step closer to being dangerous to my kids. Damn right I'll prejudge them, because the result of making a mistake the other way is too horrible to allow.
I believe that one of the controversial provisions of this UK law, is that it doesn't matter whether you CAN physically produce the key or not - if you don't hand it over when the police ask for it, they can throw you in jail until you do.
I remember reading a news story where someone sent an encrypted message containing details about a "crime" to an important high official, but without giving him the key (and they threw away the key themselves). They challenged the UK police to arrest that high official, since he had "evidence of a crime", but wouldn't(couldn't) give the key.
Funny how law enforcement seems to be a little more reasonable about enforcing stupid laws (in just about any country) when it comes to arresting "important" people.
A person has no control over what sexually arouses them. This type of "wireing" is setup very early in life. It is by no means a conscious choice.
Complete and utter bullshit. A total copout.
Anyone who has the control to hide their "affliction" from society, also has the control necessary to keep themselves from acting on those impulses, and over time, to change their own feelings.
The human mind is malleable, no matter what those assholes who use the "it's-not-my-fault" excuse say. They could change themselves if they wanted - they just don't give enough of a damn about anyone except themselves to want to.
While I'm not going to be witch-hunting for people who have child-rape pictures on their harddrives, if I discover someone has such fantasies, I'm sure as hell not going to trust them with anyone *I* care about!
Slashdot Mirror
Along this line, you could also tell your player to play other songs with similar fractal signatures to the song you are currently listening to, if you want to hear MORE songs like it - or the exact opposite, play songs which have greatly different fractal signatures, if you want a greatly varying selection of music.
Doesn't this break the web-wide caching system being implemented by companies such as "akamai"? I thought they provided load-balanced web services for those web services which were expecting high peaks of service requests.
The impression *I* got, is that Apple was also applying pressure to stop the media who got their hands on that leaked information from publishing.
It's one thing to try and punish somebody who is violating a contract they signed with you, but its a whole new ball game when you try and use the legal system to muzzle the press who signed no such agreement.
It might be interesting to have a single chip with multiple 486 processors, running off an on-chip shared 16MB chip-speed RAM.
What's the transistor count of current day processors, and what's the transistor count of the 486 chips? Throwing in a factor for the SRAM, how many 486 processors could we fit on a single die the size of a Pentium III or Athlon?
Isn't Gnutellanet being stopped right now due to some kind of DoS attack (randomized request packets & such)? Have they figured out how to fight those attacks yet?
I'll bite on some of this.
Everybody has to make that decision, one way or another. Most people make the decision to allow the government/media to decide for them, but they are ultimately responsible for the formation of their own opinion. Sometimes people decide that the people in the government are "criminals".
Well, they were trying to undermine the stability of the government anyway, the constituents of which would like everyone to think they are the sole defenders of the state.
Isn't it amusing how often the people who are doing well in the society resist change, even at the expense of the people who aren't doing so well?
Well, I doubt it will be a full simulation - probably a massive expert system which just checks that whatever change you make isn't going to interact badly with any other process we know is going on. (Of course, it can't check against stuff we DON'T know is going on...)
As for the immune system - it gets compromised by attacks from organisms which were generated by natural evolution - it's certainly not ready to handle stuff which will be "intelligently" designed to get around it. It would probably be intelligent to use the immune system as part of the defense, but we are definitely going to have to build some kind of "authentication" system for our genes which makes it very difficult for "unauthorized changes" to occur.
Whether or not we can accomplish this w/o majorly reengineering our basic genetic machinery is a whole another topic...
Aside from the obvious philosophical/engineering arguments about what would constitute a "perfect" human, frankly I'd be happy if I had some kind of genetic defect which made my standard of living lower, and could fix it.
It's that interim period, where you can detect the defect but not fix it, where society is going to struggle.
There is, of course, the problem of deciding whether or not something IS a defect (and possibly WHO gets to decide such things), and what you want to do about someone who disagrees with you.
Actually, aside from fixing up little things like health, I can see do-it-yourself-genetic-engineering becoming popular primarily through COSMETIC application.
The first time someone comes up with a pill with a retrovirus in it that changes your natural hair/eye/skin color, they're going to make billions, genetic engineering will become a widely accepted reality in "fashion conscious society", and the Klu Klux Klan will have a mental meltdown trying to apply their standards of racial purity to a population trying out new "looks" every other week...
Probably, part of doing-your-own-gene-splicing will have to be a simulator capable of telling you whether you're going to kill (or maim) yourself severely.
Frankly, the first thing I want to be able to do if I *could* program my genes, is to build some kind of genetic "ICE" into my cells to prevent OTHER people from changing my genes if I don't want them to...
As per your AOL user remarks, with the loss of the US, the rest of the world network wouldn't have to carry US traffic, therefore it might actually be faster :)
:)
(The assumption is that the US uses Internet resources like it uses other global natural resources - using an amount of resources totally out of proportion to their small percentage of the world population, all to maintain their God-Given-Right to indulge to excess).
(Before anyone comments, yes I am an whitish, overweight American citizen.
Yes, I remember the original quote - and I disagreed with it, and your opinion. Given permission to do so, MOST human beings do NOT torture and kill other humans beings. SOME humans beings do - which is NOT equivalent to ALL.
In a bad situation, most humans beings try and keep a low profile so that THEY don't get tortured and killed. This doesn't mean that they are evil - it just means they want to survive.
And I say again - bullshit - history doesn't show any such thing. SOME people enjoy killing & torturing - MOST people are just concerned with living comfortably.
I don't think they're exactly dead, but they're not exactly being heavily marketed. They've certainly gone down in price - I got some cheap LCD shutter-type glasses for about $50 (ELSA Revelator), and the common video cards can now drive the monitors fast enough to avoid flicker severe enough to cause headaches.
:)
:)
:(
The most important development I've seen is that the latest drivers for the shutter glasses allow any game using the Direct3D interface in Windows to generate the proper stereoscopic perspectives. Since most popular, recent Windows 3D games are doing this, that means there's suddenly a large number of 3D images to look at (can you say Lara Croft in true color 3D - I knew you could...
Unfortunately, and as usual, there hasn't been the same development for alternative OSes (after all, where's the money?
The main problems I saw with the LCD shutter glasses were two:
1. ghosting
Mainly because the LCDs don't completely block out the images for one eye from the other, so you can get a little double vision. It's not too bad though.
2. nausea
I get this in first person shooters & racing games, because the viewpoint is changing quickly & violently w/o my head moving. When I get "into" the image enough, my stomach starts heaving
The best way I've found to use the shutter glasses are for 3D demos where the viewpoint doesn't change, but the displayed objects move around. Feels like your monitor is a window and you're looking into some other universe (esp. if you've got some cool music to go along with the entertainment).
Dunno, with proper movement ratios (so that the robotics move at a fraction of the surgeon's distance & speed), a surgeon COULD be a helluva lot more precise through a remote interface than any human could possibly be.
Of course, this is given that the robotics are moving as smoothly as the surgeon's movements (and not those damn jerking movements that seem to be the given in cheap robots on the market...)
This argument is still rather bizarre - YOU may have decided to brand humans as inherently evil, and maybe some people who think like you, but that hardly translates to "human beings have branded our natural instinct to kill as evil". In my experience, the "rest of society" does not perceive someone as evil until that someone has actively done something to hurt the society.
The nature of your words indicates that you are looking at the world through a strongly religiously-flavored context - a viewpoint which I do not share, and which I doubt a majority of people on the planet share. (My impression that, while most of the people on the planet are religious to some extent, they tend to be a lot more secular & pragmatic than your words indicate.)
I take issue with your belief that humans have a natural instinct to kill. Humans have a natural instinct to want stuff for themselves. If someone else gets in the way of getting that stuff, then it is a "natural", animalistic reaction to get mad (and perhaps violent). This is NOT the same thing as a "natural instinct to kill".
Oh, come on! Your application of the definition of evil is stupid.
The cat plays with the grasshopper because the cat is having fun practicing its hunting skills - and doesn't really have enough of a concept about another creature's "pain" to feel any empathy toward the grasshopper. That's NOT evil. You have to be able to conceive that you are actually CAUSING another creature pain, before you can enjoy it. Most non-human animals don't meet this criteria.
I also feel that most humans aren't inherently evil - they're SELFISH, which isn't the same thing (although it might result in some of the same kinds of pain & suffering). ESPECIALLY in a survival situation, where people are feeling insecure about the possibility they will be able to wake up alive the next day. That's NOT evil.
About the only thing you got right is that an EVIL person enjoys causing others unnecessary pain & suffering. I differentiate this between someone who causes people NECESSARY pain & suffering, or someone who causes people pain & suffering but doesn't ENJOY it. (This two types of people might be classified as "dangerous", but not evil.) You're spreading that definition of evil across way too many people who don't deserve it.
Dunno - maybe people suggested steganography because, if you do it RIGHT, it doesn't matter whether a professional is looking for it - it's still hard to find, esp. if they're not actually SURE there is a message in there somewhere.
Of course, doing it RIGHT isn't as easy as you seem to think it is.
Of course, if a government is suspicious of a citizen, then it would be much easier for them to wiretap/bug/peep/Van Eyck-monitor/Trojan that citizen than try and crack encrypted messages.
I occasionally cheat (on single-player modes) because, and I'm not ashamed anymore to admit it, I'm not good enough at most of the games out on the market.
I used to be able to keep up with the arcade stuff & early Doom-clones, but as each type of game has matured & there are people with lots of time to do nothing but practice, the companies have cranked up the base difficulty level to the point where it would take me months of constant playing to improve my skill level to the point where I could complete the game (I'm usually into RPGs & first-person-working-toward-a-goal-type games).
I'm busy working, I visit my family a lot, I like to get more than 2 hours sleep per night - I don't have the time or health to build up the skills necessary to complete the popular games (which are not necessarily useful to me in the rest of my life). So, in single-person modes, I cheat so that I can enjoy the game in about a week of a few hours/night.
On the other hand, I wouldn't cheat in any kind of multi-player mode, due to the ethical concerns. (Of course, that generally means that I just get my butt kicked, because I still have problems with the difficulty level...) I don't agree with your statement about cheating being a practical joke - I think people who cheat in multi-player mode just want to win in any manner possible.
Dunno, last few times I tried to use my brain to block a collision, it hurt a lot. My head hurt too. Using other parts of my body didn't help either.
Eventually I decided to use a friend of mine to block the collisions for me - is that what you meant by using your brain?
It sounded like Penenberg didn't want to be called as a witness in a grand jury indictment setup, because the prosecutor has a great deal more latitude about what they can do in the indictment hearing than what they can do in an actual trial (they could basically violate any "deal" they made with Penenberg about only asking about certain things, w/o fear of repercussion - and then legally punish Penenberg if he didn't cooperate.
I still think the only "secure" method is the vat of molten metal...
"Just drop it in the bubbling mass of molten metal to your left on your way out of the secure area!"
Yes, yes & yes - with the proper "brainwashing" techniques (which is still brainwashing, even if it's self-imposed), anyone's mind can be "bent" to believe things they did not have any previous "natural" tendency to do - even more easily if they are actually cooperating.
And I believe this is bullshit rationalization - anyone who hasn't suffered brain damage causing total lack of inhibitions can control what they fantasize about - they just don't want to control it.
If I know someone is fantasizing about having sex with kids, I judge them as unsafe to be around children. I judge them this way because fantasizing about having sex with kids is a precursor to the act, placing them one step closer to being dangerous to my kids. Damn right I'll prejudge them, because the result of making a mistake the other way is too horrible to allow.
I believe that one of the controversial provisions of this UK law, is that it doesn't matter whether you CAN physically produce the key or not - if you don't hand it over when the police ask for it, they can throw you in jail until you do.
I remember reading a news story where someone sent an encrypted message containing details about a "crime" to an important high official, but without giving him the key (and they threw away the key themselves). They challenged the UK police to arrest that high official, since he had "evidence of a crime", but wouldn't(couldn't) give the key.
Funny how law enforcement seems to be a little more reasonable about enforcing stupid laws (in just about any country) when it comes to arresting "important" people.
Complete and utter bullshit. A total copout.
Anyone who has the control to hide their "affliction" from society, also has the control necessary to keep themselves from acting on those impulses, and over time, to change their own feelings.
The human mind is malleable, no matter what those assholes who use the "it's-not-my-fault" excuse say. They could change themselves if they wanted - they just don't give enough of a damn about anyone except themselves to want to.
While I'm not going to be witch-hunting for people who have child-rape pictures on their harddrives, if I discover someone has such fantasies, I'm sure as hell not going to trust them with anyone *I* care about!
Even if they promised, in no uncertain terms, not to sell your info?
If they break a straightforward promise like that, what other things are they going to be dishonest about?
Too bad the corporate structure prevents executives, managers (AND SHAREHOLDERS) from doing a little jailtime for violating the law.