Actually, they can be considered fact. I think you will find, however, that discerning minds would only consider one of the two works you mention as fact.
Perhaps you meant to say that neither can be known as fact.
Then again perhaps not. I doubt you meant to say that at all. Writing accurately would belie your selfish agenda; that is, attempting to compare the culmination of human discernment and human logic that is modern science to the culmination of human creativity that is religion.
Trying to do that shows me you aren't very scientific. But you know what? It also shows me that you aren't very religious.
You seem to have made an argument for the potential danger represented by the potential simulating of having sex with children,
and tried to pass it off as
an argument for why simulated child pornography will ostensibly lead to the behavioral changes you described.
I guess I don't understand what you were getting at.
I think that there exists a slight chance that, in the flurry of rhetoric that's been bandied about, you confused yourself into thinking that maybe you were right.
And you know this because you are an image-thought-ologist, and you participate in research regarding this phenomenon? Truly leading in the field, I'm sure.
But no. You're just some dumbfuck who wasted his time posting drivel to an otherwise respectable (lol) website.
At least you made some effort to pass off your crap, if only with 3 words (4 if you count the contraction differently) of "trying" in the subject: It's about psychology.
You're full of shit. Forgive me on the very-off chance that you're a PhD (tell me where so I can call them and tell them they fucked up), but I'm pursuing a degree in psychology and you/Officially/ need to shut the fuck up.
But yeah, at least you tried to qualify your baseless assertions in the subject.
Finding a mass reserve will do nothing but encourage Americans to burn oil even more wantonly -- this would seem to [...]
There, I found the problem with your thinking that was preventing you from understanding the "energy independence" concept. It seems to be rooted in some sort of... bias. Anyways, you should take my card, the first one's always free.
All this talk of cohesive groups and "weakness" really reminds me of Scientology literature. Hmm. I sure doubt Scientology had anything to do with this, too...
Both of those websites, along with the Geert Wilders video, portray Muslims as a ideologically and politically solid group. This is a fallacy that is easy to fall into when describing any group with which you are unfamiliar (read: scared). What makes you so intent on portraying all Muslims as sabre rattling warmongers?
I am facing a battle for my life. It's called "I will die some day." It is idiotic to try and move people to action based on how we "are ALL facing a battle [...]." You're just trying to engender solidarity among "anti-Muslims" another presumed group that does not exist. Just cuz you aren't in the club...
"and there's no reason to think they wouldn't do something like this."
How about the fact that this isn't, well, that funny? It isn't very "troll" to post flashing gifs etc. It's not like the people seizing are going to make hilarious angry posts about how successful you were. This seems utterly different.
I dunno, it's pretty altruistic to me. I like being able to type in addresses and get convenient maps in the same place as my calendar, for free. But hey, I'm probably a minority. I'm sure there aren't that many people that use these free services.
I think I found your problem. In a single sentence, you managed to equate a "massive negative effect on the President and his administration" to "national security interests." I sure hope you don't vote.
Capitalizing "national security" in the beginning doesn't even begin to give the concept the level of credence as say, established law. The Presidential Records Act exists. Show me when the legislature voted on National Security.
Perhaps this is because there are more potential crimes than there are real crimes, and the current policy allows for a great number of salaries on the payroll, all in the name of Law, Order, and Justice?
You fallaciously assume that, simply because one takes another's property, they lack, either by choice or nature, a fundamental understanding of the concept of ownership. If I robbed a convenience store and immediately proceeded to be mugged, my profits lost, would I not feel wronged? For the purposes of succinctness I refrained from including the age-old "stealing vs. sharing" argument that inevitably arises in any file-sharing discussion, especially on Slashdot.
I find it hard to imagine that anyone can find the article genuinely humorous. If anything, it's an interesting piece about the technological capabilities of a peer-to-peer data transfer protocol and the ramifications of its functions.
The article notes that the container, while appearing very large, actually holds less coffee than one would originally think. Even after the author removed the insulation, there was still little room for the coffee itself.
Also, because it uses a water / calcium oxide reaction (basic high school chemistry stuff), which means that it'll heat once and then become nothing more than another cup. While I have no idea how much these retail for, I'm sure that the price is inflated more by the "oh shiny" factor than production or development costs.
Cookies are a tool like any other, and can be used for a variety of purposes. They can track your slashdot login and another can follow your shopping habits.
While I wouldn't go so far as to say, as the article claims online marketers do, that cookies "don't deserve their bad reputation", it's true that they aren't inherently malicious. With the word "cookies" being seen increasingly often alongside "virii" and "spyware", it's no surprise that they aren't the most popular components of the internet.
Frankly, I'm surprised an initiative like this one is so late in coming.
Apple's store/player integration reflects the ingenious planning that went into that venture. The competition will be hard-pressed to beat Apple's "convenience lock-in", which is one of the reasons that another store/player company will never enter the market.
It should be pointed out that Microsoft is only looking to establish themselves in the store part of the formula. With the kind of bandwidth needed to deliver XP hotfixes to millions of machines, they certainly have the infrastructure at their disposal. To compete completely with Apple, however, Microsoft will have to offer not only the ease-of-use of the iTMS system, but the cult following that iPods have acquired as both personal appliances and fashion statements.
Until Microsoft begins offering a product to compete with Apple's iPod (and let us hope that day will never come - just compare the operating systems), they will not be truely competing against Apple as a whole.
I wouldn't say that this will never happen. While it is not at all bandwidth-practical for digital music stores to provide.wav files equal to those of a compact disk, formats such as FLAC provide the same product in a more manageable form.
As has been pointed out in posts preceding mine, the main motivation behind picking a DRM'ed format is not necessarily control, but image. The online music stores need copyright holders to sign on, and with internet piracy of music being number one on their list of problems, the labels will certainly not support a store that servers up mp3 (or your format of choice) plain and simple.
The folks over at Rockbox are working on FLAC support for those of us with iRivers. Other than that, though, there is a serious lack of support for high-compression file formats among mobile devices. That said, I am sure that the majority of users of said devices couldn't tell the difference between FLAC and 64k mp3. Honestly, have you ever listened to music with earbuds? Encoding is the least of your concerns if you're worried about sound quality on your iPod.
For those who don't feel up to actually reading an article, the Blue Brain project does not intend to create artificial intelligence, but rather a replication of the physical side of the human mind - the brain. The 22.8 teraflops mentioned in the summary are going to be used to manage a database of "neural architecture." The whole project has little, if anything, to do with concsiousness.
As of this posting, there have been several "what if" posts about the project accidentally leading to the creation of artificial intelligence. Systems such as the fictitious Skynet will not rival the flexibility and depth of a single human mind until we fully understand the mind ourself. Lisa Fittipaldi, an astonishingly talented painter, is able to create beautiful scenes on what was once a blank canvas. At the same time, Ms. Fittipaldi is unable to paint an accurate portrait - she is blind.
[...] war against terrorism, the FBI needs the powers to conduct searches without judicial overview. WTF???
To quote the most (probably, I haven't reviewed them all) insightful line from the recent blockbuster - This is how liberty dies - to thunderous applause.
It is an all-too-common misconception that disagreeing with a nation's administration renders one "unpatriotic." As far as I know, the definition of a patriot remains "one who loves and defends his or her country."
What many these days seem to fail to realize is that one's country and one's government are too very different things. If that were not the case, those fighting for America's freedom from British rule during the American Revolution, the quintessential example of an American patriot, would not be considered patriotic at all.
I'd like to remind everyone that the kid wearing the "Fuck Bush" t-shirt is still very much a patriot, so long as he loves his country for blessing him with the freedom to express his beliefs that contradict the administration's policy.
(And yes, I do realize that anyone kid wearing said t-shirt is, in all likelihood, doing so for attention rather than to further a political opinion.)
I believe that strider44's post was written with the intent to dispel myths that a large scale "cyber-attack" could be nearly as destructive or deadly as the acts of September 11th, 2001 or December 7th, 1941.
Bringing down a power grid during rush hour,
At least where I live, traffic lights switch to backup power and default to timed red/yellow blinking.
changing details of patient notes on a hospital network,
Unless things changed recently, and someone who's stayed in a hospital recently, please correct me if things have, patient notes, such as prescibed medication and scheduled procedures, are still kept on one or more physical charts. While a hospital's loss of internal network connectivity would surely impair its efficiency, possibly causing an indirect cause of death, it would not rival an act of terrorism/war.
Disregard my post if you were joking (I haven't overlooked the smiley at the end of your's). I hope the +5, Insightful isn't deceiving me.
Your hypocrisy is nothing short of awesome. You reference the "tyranny of the majority," and proceed to back it up with two examples that are, in fact, contradictory!
I heard one time thousands of Americans owned slaves.
While this statement is, by itself, true, it does not work to reinforce your statement concerning the "tyranny of the majority". Yes, there was a time during which many Americans owned slaves. What you fail to point out is that there were more slaves than there were slave-owners. The slave-owners themselves were not representative of the majority of the population, much of which was firmly opposed to the concept of slavery.
I hear companies violate the GPL all the time. I guess that's ok as long as there are thousands of companies doing it, right?
Once again, unless the majority is working to effectively oppress a segment of the population, the scenario does not work to uphold your point. For the most part, coders of GPL'd OSS do not work for profit. How are they being oppressed by the "majority" of hypothetical copyright-infringing software companies?
While I agree with you that the enormous profits garnered by the movie industry are not necessarily proof that mainstream cinema is overpriced, I must object to the majority of statements made in your post. You should think hard about the examples you cite, lest they work against you.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, they can be considered fact. I think you will find, however, that discerning minds would only consider one of the two works you mention as fact.
Perhaps you meant to say that neither can be known as fact.
Then again perhaps not. I doubt you meant to say that at all. Writing accurately would belie your selfish agenda; that is, attempting to compare the culmination of human discernment and human logic that is modern science to the culmination of human creativity that is religion.
Trying to do that shows me you aren't very scientific. But you know what? It also shows me that you aren't very religious.
As it's "in vogue" in this country to throw those terms around (bias, etc.), you've revealed your identity as an American citizen.
gg
did you read a single thing in Davemania's post? I can't believe you're replying to what he said, with what you said.
I want to mod you funny, but I'd rather get this out there.
BR What happened to critical analysis. indeed.
That's what I was getting at.
Hmm.
You seem to have made an argument for the potential danger represented by the potential simulating of having sex with children,
and tried to pass it off as
an argument for why simulated child pornography will ostensibly lead to the behavioral changes you described.
I guess I don't understand what you were getting at.
I think that there exists a slight chance that, in the flurry of rhetoric that's been bandied about, you confused yourself into thinking that maybe you were right.
I hope that I accounted for that chance.
p.s. right now, you're my anger management.
And you know this because you are an image-thought-ologist, and you participate in research regarding this phenomenon? Truly leading in the field, I'm sure.
/Officially/ need to shut the fuck up.
But no. You're just some dumbfuck who wasted his time posting drivel to an otherwise respectable (lol) website.
At least you made some effort to pass off your crap, if only with 3 words (4 if you count the contraction differently) of "trying" in the subject: It's about psychology.
You're full of shit. Forgive me on the very-off chance that you're a PhD (tell me where so I can call them and tell them they fucked up), but I'm pursuing a degree in psychology and you
But yeah, at least you tried to qualify your baseless assertions in the subject.
You could have done worse.
There, I found the problem with your thinking that was preventing you from understanding the "energy independence" concept. It seems to be rooted in some sort of... bias. Anyways, you should take my card, the first one's always free.
lol wut
All this talk of cohesive groups and "weakness" really reminds me of Scientology literature. Hmm. I sure doubt Scientology had anything to do with this, too...
Both of those websites, along with the Geert Wilders video, portray Muslims as a ideologically and politically solid group. This is a fallacy that is easy to fall into when describing any group with which you are unfamiliar (read: scared). What makes you so intent on portraying all Muslims as sabre rattling warmongers? I am facing a battle for my life. It's called "I will die some day." It is idiotic to try and move people to action based on how we "are ALL facing a battle [...]." You're just trying to engender solidarity among "anti-Muslims" another presumed group that does not exist. Just cuz you aren't in the club...
"and there's no reason to think they wouldn't do something like this." How about the fact that this isn't, well, that funny? It isn't very "troll" to post flashing gifs etc. It's not like the people seizing are going to make hilarious angry posts about how successful you were. This seems utterly different.
I dunno, it's pretty altruistic to me. I like being able to type in addresses and get convenient maps in the same place as my calendar, for free. But hey, I'm probably a minority. I'm sure there aren't that many people that use these free services.
"Same with the Jews and same with the Muslims" because if you belong to a group you are the group, right? i better get me a group quick
I think I found your problem. In a single sentence, you managed to equate a "massive negative effect on the President and his administration" to "national security interests." I sure hope you don't vote.
Capitalizing "national security" in the beginning doesn't even begin to give the concept the level of credence as say, established law. The Presidential Records Act exists. Show me when the legislature voted on National Security.
Perhaps this is because there are more potential crimes than there are real crimes, and the current policy allows for a great number of salaries on the payroll, all in the name of Law, Order, and Justice?
You fallaciously assume that, simply because one takes another's property, they lack, either by choice or nature, a fundamental understanding of the concept of ownership. If I robbed a convenience store and immediately proceeded to be mugged, my profits lost, would I not feel wronged?
For the purposes of succinctness I refrained from including the age-old "stealing vs. sharing" argument that inevitably arises in any file-sharing discussion, especially on Slashdot.
I find it hard to imagine that anyone can find the article genuinely humorous. If anything, it's an interesting piece about the technological capabilities of a peer-to-peer data transfer protocol and the ramifications of its functions.
In short: you're trying too hard.
The article notes that the container, while appearing very large, actually holds less coffee than one would originally think. Even after the author removed the insulation, there was still little room for the coffee itself.
Also, because it uses a water / calcium oxide reaction (basic high school chemistry stuff), which means that it'll heat once and then become nothing more than another cup. While I have no idea how much these retail for, I'm sure that the price is inflated more by the "oh shiny" factor than production or development costs.
Cookies are a tool like any other, and can be used for a variety of purposes. They can track your slashdot login and another can follow your shopping habits.
While I wouldn't go so far as to say, as the article claims online marketers do, that cookies "don't deserve their bad reputation", it's true that they aren't inherently malicious. With the word "cookies" being seen increasingly often alongside "virii" and "spyware", it's no surprise that they aren't the most popular components of the internet.
Frankly, I'm surprised an initiative like this one is so late in coming.
Apple's store/player integration reflects the ingenious planning that went into that venture. The competition will be hard-pressed to beat Apple's "convenience lock-in", which is one of the reasons that another store/player company will never enter the market.
It should be pointed out that Microsoft is only looking to establish themselves in the store part of the formula. With the kind of bandwidth needed to deliver XP hotfixes to millions of machines, they certainly have the infrastructure at their disposal. To compete completely with Apple, however, Microsoft will have to offer not only the ease-of-use of the iTMS system, but the cult following that iPods have acquired as both personal appliances and fashion statements.
Until Microsoft begins offering a product to compete with Apple's iPod (and let us hope that day will never come - just compare the operating systems), they will not be truely competing against Apple as a whole.
I wouldn't say that this will never happen. While it is not at all bandwidth-practical for digital music stores to provide .wav files equal to those of a compact disk, formats such as FLAC provide the same product in a more manageable form.
As has been pointed out in posts preceding mine, the main motivation behind picking a DRM'ed format is not necessarily control, but image. The online music stores need copyright holders to sign on, and with internet piracy of music being number one on their list of problems, the labels will certainly not support a store that servers up mp3 (or your format of choice) plain and simple.
The folks over at Rockbox are working on FLAC support for those of us with iRivers. Other than that, though, there is a serious lack of support for high-compression file formats among mobile devices. That said, I am sure that the majority of users of said devices couldn't tell the difference between FLAC and 64k mp3. Honestly, have you ever listened to music with earbuds? Encoding is the least of your concerns if you're worried about sound quality on your iPod.
For those who don't feel up to actually reading an article, the Blue Brain project does not intend to create artificial intelligence, but rather a replication of the physical side of the human mind - the brain. The 22.8 teraflops mentioned in the summary are going to be used to manage a database of "neural architecture." The whole project has little, if anything, to do with concsiousness.
As of this posting, there have been several "what if" posts about the project accidentally leading to the creation of artificial intelligence. Systems such as the fictitious Skynet will not rival the flexibility and depth of a single human mind until we fully understand the mind ourself. Lisa Fittipaldi, an astonishingly talented painter, is able to create beautiful scenes on what was once a blank canvas. At the same time, Ms. Fittipaldi is unable to paint an accurate portrait - she is blind.
We can only recreate what we understand.
To quote the most (probably, I haven't reviewed them all) insightful line from the recent blockbuster -
This is how liberty dies - to thunderous applause.
It is an all-too-common misconception that disagreeing with a nation's administration renders one "unpatriotic." As far as I know, the definition of a patriot remains "one who loves and defends his or her country."
What many these days seem to fail to realize is that one's country and one's government are too very different things. If that were not the case, those fighting for America's freedom from British rule during the American Revolution, the quintessential example of an American patriot, would not be considered patriotic at all.
I'd like to remind everyone that the kid wearing the "Fuck Bush" t-shirt is still very much a patriot, so long as he loves his country for blessing him with the freedom to express his beliefs that contradict the administration's policy.
(And yes, I do realize that anyone kid wearing said t-shirt is, in all likelihood, doing so for attention rather than to further a political opinion.)
At least where I live, traffic lights switch to backup power and default to timed red/yellow blinking.
Unless things changed recently, and someone who's stayed in a hospital recently, please correct me if things have, patient notes, such as prescibed medication and scheduled procedures, are still kept on one or more physical charts. While a hospital's loss of internal network connectivity would surely impair its efficiency, possibly causing an indirect cause of death, it would not rival an act of terrorism/war. Disregard my post if you were joking (I haven't overlooked the smiley at the end of your's). I hope the +5, Insightful isn't deceiving me.
While this statement is, by itself, true, it does not work to reinforce your statement concerning the "tyranny of the majority". Yes, there was a time during which many Americans owned slaves. What you fail to point out is that there were more slaves than there were slave-owners. The slave-owners themselves were not representative of the majority of the population, much of which was firmly opposed to the concept of slavery.
Once again, unless the majority is working to effectively oppress a segment of the population, the scenario does not work to uphold your point. For the most part, coders of GPL'd OSS do not work for profit. How are they being oppressed by the "majority" of hypothetical copyright-infringing software companies?
While I agree with you that the enormous profits garnered by the movie industry are not necessarily proof that mainstream cinema is overpriced, I must object to the majority of statements made in your post. You should think hard about the examples you cite, lest they work against you.