I think it's just attempting to develop a personality for the software, similar to how Siri will have joking responses to certain questions or commands, such as asking her to close the pod bay doors or other queries related to competing products. Chalk it up to bored developers wanting to put a few Easter eggs into the product.
There's a strange type of inertia that applies to large companies. Even when they completely screw the pooch, they tend to hang on for years and years after the fact. RIM (or BlackBerry since they renamed themselves) are still around even though they haven't do anything relevant in years. Hell, even Real Networks is still around, seemingly stuck in some endless buffering state where they just can't die, and AOL still has 2 million dial-up subscribers. The technology graveyard is full of zombies.
Still presents a security vulnerability in that someone who thinks their device is secure may be under false assumptions due to a sensor that is doing nefarious things. Slip someone a phone with a sensor that will function as normal, but also has the ability to store a print (or the input data to simulate one) and bypass the regular encryption methods later on command.
It's shitty that Apple hordes the parts and requires you to go through them for repairs, but even if they didn't, I can see why third party hardware would be outright rejected.
What's so crazy about it? Google makes almost all of their money from advertising and Apple makes practically none of theirs that way. Is it that difficult to see that one company would rather sell you a cheap device that serves plenty of ads and the other would rather you pay a premium for a device that will block all the ads?
I never said it would be easy, which is why I also said it should be left up to trained experts. Further, pointing out that something is unhealthy is not belittling mental injuries. Suggesting someone get help for a debilitating condition is markedly different from referring to them as "psycho war vet" or dismissing them as a hopeless basket case. Acute mental injury still produces very really consequences whether anyone tries to place blame or not. Even if a person was wholly at fault (e.g. intentionally tormenting a dog until it lashed out at them) or it's completely no fault of their own, it still doesn't make it good to go through life suffering from that injury.
You are talking about someone with PTSD.
Is that any different than your example with the dog? Or someone who's been raped, assaulted, or experienced some other traumatic event? If so, why is it appropriate to label some potential triggers and not others? Who gets to decide what does and doesn't make the cut? The same goes for safe spaces. You can't use it outside of a specific professional setting without abuse or you get someone who decides that they're "triggered" by Muslims because of their own irrational fears and that their store is now a "safe space" where Muslims are not allowed. Even if someone legitimately believed all of that, it's still a horrible outcome when viewed objectively.
The problem is that the people who want all the trigger warnings are the same people who have no training and want to use them to actively avoid any exposure or to wield them like a club in order to effectively censor those things that they do not like.They want to live in a bubble walled off from the rest of the world and are demanding them everyone else accommodate their demands. If someone has had such a traumatic experience that they can't function in regular society, they need help and probably shouldn't be going to university until they can get to a healthier place. If something makes a person uncomfortable, they should seek the kind of professional help to get them beyond their past experiences. Demanding that anything which gives them discomfort be removed is ripe for abuse and history has shown no shortage of moralist busybodies who do exactly that.
Suggesting that the people at university who are clamoring for trigger warnings or safe spaces are using these appropriately is deluding yourself beyond all credibility. One group of students even published such in a list of demands that they presented to the administration. They directly state a demand for exclusive safe spaces on campus, which would be racially segregated. The idiots making these demands aren't using trigger warnings or safe spaces in the clinical and professional manner in which they might be helpful. Even in the case where individuals want (and it might even be a good idea to have) a private setting to discuss something, that does not entitle them to use public property and demand it be treated as a safe space where dissenting opinion is prohibited. Even less so in an institution where the youth of the world should be having their ideas challenged.
Trigger warnings are part of the problem. If you're still having problems dealing with dogs years after being attacked or bitten, that's not healthy. Professionals even tell you that continuing in that behavior is not good for a person and that they need to work to get over that fear.
But let's pick an example to illustrate exactly why they're bad. Let's suppose we have a woman named Karen who was mugged. Her mugger was black. Can Karen demand a safe space that contains no black people because that triggers her? Can she demand a new cashier at a store or a new server at a restaurant because black people trigger her? How can you distinguish between someone who may have actually been mugged and someone who's just a racist prick that wants to use trigger warnings to harass others or be a jerk? Outside of a therapy group designed to treat such problems, trigger warnings or safe spaces have no reason to exist. Being used otherwise, only leads to further infantilizing individuals and reinforcing their negative and unhealthy stereotypes.
Karen might have well been mugged and now has an unhealthy attitude toward black people. I'm pretty sure anyone with half a brain can see why that isn't something to be coddled. The same goes for anything else, even truly horrific events. It might take a lot of help and expert therapy, but leaving someone in a state that prevents them from functioning in society, or perhaps even their daily lives is horrible. The people demanding trigger warnings and safe spaces are only making people worse, not helping them.
The problem is that it's a lot of isolated incidents that are piling up. There was a famous case from several years prior where someone was found guilty of racial harassment for reading a book about the KKK because some other prat found it offensive. It wasn't even a book praising the Klan, but rather one about how people had stood up to them. You see it in plenty of other areas where campuses ban something because some group found it offensive. A Canadian university canceled a yoga class because some precious fuckwit was whining about cultural appropriation.
If someone wants to protest against something, that's their right, but it's another thing entirely to capitulate to the demands of those who seem to be looking for new ways to be offended. Look at the Mizzou professor who shoved a student journalist who was attempting to report on the protests there. It's not just the students who are participating in the idiotic ideology that makes the Tea Party look sane by comparison. The people getting offended are the kind of rabid zealots that want to shove their views on everyone else, not the type of people who will politely disagree or engage in some kind of dialog.
Eliminating AC is pointless. As with any other site lacking sign-up fees, you just get throwaway accounts spamming the same crap that would normally be posted by AC's.
Just look at the user profile and submission history. Every single submission in the first three pages contains at least one link to Dice. Even if it's not paid, it's pretty damned sad.
I think there are other ways to go about getting more content. If you're going to have a paid staff, you could have periodic features, such as an article going into more depth about an open source project on a regular basis. Another thing I wouldn't mind seeing is more articles related to scientific research without the usual media misrepresentation (i.e., it probably didn't cure cancer, but that doesn't mean it's not interesting) that seems to go along with the stories. Again, if you're going to have paid editors, have them reach out to scientists and do some interviews related to their research to generate some original content. Perhaps a weekly article highlighting a DIY project that might be of interest to the community. You could even try having more reviews of science fiction media or such things. There's all kinds of things to try that seem more interesting than aggregating news stories from elsewhere.
Try a few things out and see what sticks or what people respond to. At worst, something doesn't gain traction and you move on to something else instead.
Given that Scratch can be used through a web browser (which does allow kids to continue toying with it from home) you could probably get by with a few weeks of basic instruction in school which is enough to introduce the basic programming concepts and to pique the interest of some students enough that they'll stick with it and likely self-learn.
If they're going to throw $4 billion at something, I'd prefer a formal logic course. Introduce kids to basic logic, Boolean algebra, and simple set theory. It's different enough from the typical elementary mathematics that some kids who are otherwise math averse might not dislike it and it's also a great precursor to an eventual computer science course for those who are interested.
While that's true, computer science is a good way to teach problem solving skills that are going to be useful no matter what you do.
I don't think they need to go too in depth. Just give the kids some guidance and turn them loose with Scratch or something similar where they can be creative. You're not going to turn everyone into a programmer, but you might get a few more kids interested who might otherwise not be.
I don't know if it's fair to blame the people who just took over the site for a long-standing editor posting a story that was written by another third party. You might as well blame Obama for this, because I'm sure it's somehow his fault as well.
I don't think it would have mattered or gone anywhere, even if the state had the stones to pursue a case against the companies' leadership. If it came to a legal battle, Jobs would have probably fallen on that sword knowing he was dying or that he'd be dead before the legal proceedings could finish. What would they do then, dig up his corpse and put it in jail?
I'd disagree. The case for anonymous speech is well established and with Slashdot's default method of displaying comments, you won't see AC posts unless they've been moderated positively a few times. Also, there are plenty of people who don't want an account for whatever reason and the occasional inane troll (that is typically modded to -1 in a few minutes) isn't worth losing the random insightful AC post. You won't fix the problem either as the actual trolls will just create throwaway accounts.
I can't say that allowing moderation and posting in the same article is a better idea either. There're enough articles that have become political and the people who have strong opinions on the positions they take shouldn't be allowed to mod in the same article. People get too emotionally involved and it will result in more bad moderation or abuse than potential good.
One would think that it would have been easier for Doc to get his hands on some oil and refine it himself. The car didn't need to fly in the first movie to get up to speed, and oil was already being extracted commercially in the U.S. (and specifically in California) by the time the film takes place and California was one of the leading oil producing states at that time. It would be fair to assume that Doc would be able to create a small amount of high-octane gasoline, even if he had to spend some time creating a setup to do so. That he built an intricate contraption to produce an ice cube, easily suggests he had the engineering capabilities to work within the limitations of what was available at the time to produce something far more advanced than the time would normally have permitted.
Of course that wouldn't have made for a very exciting movie, so I can see why the did the bit with the train.
Can you imagine of other news stories were written using the same type of alarmist approach that we see with technology?
New report shows that toasters are extremely deadly!
Researchers have found that the common household toaster is an exceptionally dangerous product. Users who intentionally went out of their way to remove key safety features of the appliance and then connect an extension cord to the device so that they can submerge in a tub full of water while standing in that tub were found to suffer grievous bodily harm.
. ..
I can understand that is generates clicks, but we'd be better of spending time writing about why you shouldn't visit dodgy sites and install third party applications unless you know what you're doing and provide some examples of what these malicious programs might look like or how they might try to trick you. That would be far more useful to the average consumer.
Your position is certainly not a scientific one and you are rather severely misinformed about what software can do (most people are).
Can you point out a specific problem with any part of what I've stated or demonstrate with sufficient proof that it won't work or cannot be done, not just now, but also at no point in the future?
The problem is there is still absolutely no indication that human-equivalent intelligence can be implemented in machines.
At one point in human history there was no indication that humans would be able to travel through outer space either. It was squarely in the realm of fiction and human fancy or utterly beyond our ability to conceive of considering it possible because we could not yet fly through the air or rapidly travel over land without the aid of other animals.
There is no credible theory how it can be done.
What's to stop someone from building a hardware approximation using circuitry or other approaches that models the human brain? We know that we don't possess the technology to do that right now, but that's different from claiming that it's completely impossible. Even if you can't build an exact hardware approximation (assuming you can manipulate cells in a controlled way, we wouldn't even have to use different materials so it's not even a requirement to use a computer if you can learn how to create brain cells and get them to arrange themselves in a particular pattern), if you can build hardware that's powerful enough to allow software emulation of a larger brain, what would stop us from being able to conduct this experiment? We might someday attempt to test this hypotheses and find that the it is wrong, but proposing a hypotheses (there's nothing special about consciousness, it's merely an emergent property of the physical construction of our brains, much like water freezing is simply a consequence of how molecules of water behave at low temperatures. We might not know exactly why it happens, but it can be empirically demonstrated to occur under precise conditions.) is definitely science so long as the hypotheses is testable. Just because we currently lack the ability to actually perform the test doesn't mean that it's not science.
You seem to be arguing from a perspective of just because something hasn't yet been done it can never be done, while not demonstrating any formal proof as to why. To even declare it definitively impossible would require a far greater understanding of how the universe operates than we currently have available. Furthermore, we don't even need computers or software to test this theory if we can gain knowledge which allows scientists to construct and study primitive brains (of which we have enough living examples of to already perform rudimentary experiments). Do you also believe that such knowledge is also forever beyond our grasp and if so, why specifically? What is so special about it that we'll never be able to understand it more than other fields of knowledge that provide us a better understanding of the universe?
It also serves as warning for other patent trolls to stay away from Newegg because they will fight back. Even if it costs them money to continue with this lawsuit, it potentially saves them significantly more in the future from all of the lawsuits that they don't have to deal with as a result of any ruling that results from this case or even showing that they have no problem standing up to the bullies of the patent world.
Slashdot Mirror
I think it's just attempting to develop a personality for the software, similar to how Siri will have joking responses to certain questions or commands, such as asking her to close the pod bay doors or other queries related to competing products. Chalk it up to bored developers wanting to put a few Easter eggs into the product.
There's a strange type of inertia that applies to large companies. Even when they completely screw the pooch, they tend to hang on for years and years after the fact. RIM (or BlackBerry since they renamed themselves) are still around even though they haven't do anything relevant in years. Hell, even Real Networks is still around, seemingly stuck in some endless buffering state where they just can't die, and AOL still has 2 million dial-up subscribers. The technology graveyard is full of zombies.
The quality of the design, code, etc. is less important than some meaningless or circumstantial characteristic of person who wrote it.
Still presents a security vulnerability in that someone who thinks their device is secure may be under false assumptions due to a sensor that is doing nefarious things. Slip someone a phone with a sensor that will function as normal, but also has the ability to store a print (or the input data to simulate one) and bypass the regular encryption methods later on command.
It's shitty that Apple hordes the parts and requires you to go through them for repairs, but even if they didn't, I can see why third party hardware would be outright rejected.
What's so crazy about it? Google makes almost all of their money from advertising and Apple makes practically none of theirs that way. Is it that difficult to see that one company would rather sell you a cheap device that serves plenty of ads and the other would rather you pay a premium for a device that will block all the ads?
My grandfather once told me that every morning at 6 he would have a healthy bowel movement. The only problem was he usually didn't wake up until 7.
You are talking about someone with PTSD.
Is that any different than your example with the dog? Or someone who's been raped, assaulted, or experienced some other traumatic event? If so, why is it appropriate to label some potential triggers and not others? Who gets to decide what does and doesn't make the cut? The same goes for safe spaces. You can't use it outside of a specific professional setting without abuse or you get someone who decides that they're "triggered" by Muslims because of their own irrational fears and that their store is now a "safe space" where Muslims are not allowed. Even if someone legitimately believed all of that, it's still a horrible outcome when viewed objectively.
The problem is that the people who want all the trigger warnings are the same people who have no training and want to use them to actively avoid any exposure or to wield them like a club in order to effectively censor those things that they do not like.They want to live in a bubble walled off from the rest of the world and are demanding them everyone else accommodate their demands. If someone has had such a traumatic experience that they can't function in regular society, they need help and probably shouldn't be going to university until they can get to a healthier place. If something makes a person uncomfortable, they should seek the kind of professional help to get them beyond their past experiences. Demanding that anything which gives them discomfort be removed is ripe for abuse and history has shown no shortage of moralist busybodies who do exactly that.
Suggesting that the people at university who are clamoring for trigger warnings or safe spaces are using these appropriately is deluding yourself beyond all credibility. One group of students even published such in a list of demands that they presented to the administration. They directly state a demand for exclusive safe spaces on campus, which would be racially segregated. The idiots making these demands aren't using trigger warnings or safe spaces in the clinical and professional manner in which they might be helpful. Even in the case where individuals want (and it might even be a good idea to have) a private setting to discuss something, that does not entitle them to use public property and demand it be treated as a safe space where dissenting opinion is prohibited. Even less so in an institution where the youth of the world should be having their ideas challenged.
Trigger warnings are part of the problem. If you're still having problems dealing with dogs years after being attacked or bitten, that's not healthy. Professionals even tell you that continuing in that behavior is not good for a person and that they need to work to get over that fear.
But let's pick an example to illustrate exactly why they're bad. Let's suppose we have a woman named Karen who was mugged. Her mugger was black. Can Karen demand a safe space that contains no black people because that triggers her? Can she demand a new cashier at a store or a new server at a restaurant because black people trigger her? How can you distinguish between someone who may have actually been mugged and someone who's just a racist prick that wants to use trigger warnings to harass others or be a jerk? Outside of a therapy group designed to treat such problems, trigger warnings or safe spaces have no reason to exist. Being used otherwise, only leads to further infantilizing individuals and reinforcing their negative and unhealthy stereotypes.
Karen might have well been mugged and now has an unhealthy attitude toward black people. I'm pretty sure anyone with half a brain can see why that isn't something to be coddled. The same goes for anything else, even truly horrific events. It might take a lot of help and expert therapy, but leaving someone in a state that prevents them from functioning in society, or perhaps even their daily lives is horrible. The people demanding trigger warnings and safe spaces are only making people worse, not helping them.
The problem is that it's a lot of isolated incidents that are piling up. There was a famous case from several years prior where someone was found guilty of racial harassment for reading a book about the KKK because some other prat found it offensive. It wasn't even a book praising the Klan, but rather one about how people had stood up to them. You see it in plenty of other areas where campuses ban something because some group found it offensive. A Canadian university canceled a yoga class because some precious fuckwit was whining about cultural appropriation.
If someone wants to protest against something, that's their right, but it's another thing entirely to capitulate to the demands of those who seem to be looking for new ways to be offended. Look at the Mizzou professor who shoved a student journalist who was attempting to report on the protests there. It's not just the students who are participating in the idiotic ideology that makes the Tea Party look sane by comparison. The people getting offended are the kind of rabid zealots that want to shove their views on everyone else, not the type of people who will politely disagree or engage in some kind of dialog.
Eliminating AC is pointless. As with any other site lacking sign-up fees, you just get throwaway accounts spamming the same crap that would normally be posted by AC's.
Just look at the user profile and submission history. Every single submission in the first three pages contains at least one link to Dice. Even if it's not paid, it's pretty damned sad.
I think there are other ways to go about getting more content. If you're going to have a paid staff, you could have periodic features, such as an article going into more depth about an open source project on a regular basis. Another thing I wouldn't mind seeing is more articles related to scientific research without the usual media misrepresentation (i.e., it probably didn't cure cancer, but that doesn't mean it's not interesting) that seems to go along with the stories. Again, if you're going to have paid editors, have them reach out to scientists and do some interviews related to their research to generate some original content. Perhaps a weekly article highlighting a DIY project that might be of interest to the community. You could even try having more reviews of science fiction media or such things. There's all kinds of things to try that seem more interesting than aggregating news stories from elsewhere.
Try a few things out and see what sticks or what people respond to. At worst, something doesn't gain traction and you move on to something else instead.
I don't want to toot the site's horn too much, but have you looked at other communities on the internet lately?
Slashdot might not be objectively good, but compared to plenty of other places it may as well be the pinnacle of internet civilization.
If there were honestly something better in a general sense, there would be far fewer people here.
Given that Scratch can be used through a web browser (which does allow kids to continue toying with it from home) you could probably get by with a few weeks of basic instruction in school which is enough to introduce the basic programming concepts and to pique the interest of some students enough that they'll stick with it and likely self-learn.
If they're going to throw $4 billion at something, I'd prefer a formal logic course. Introduce kids to basic logic, Boolean algebra, and simple set theory. It's different enough from the typical elementary mathematics that some kids who are otherwise math averse might not dislike it and it's also a great precursor to an eventual computer science course for those who are interested.
While that's true, computer science is a good way to teach problem solving skills that are going to be useful no matter what you do.
I don't think they need to go too in depth. Just give the kids some guidance and turn them loose with Scratch or something similar where they can be creative. You're not going to turn everyone into a programmer, but you might get a few more kids interested who might otherwise not be.
I don't know if it's fair to blame the people who just took over the site for a long-standing editor posting a story that was written by another third party. You might as well blame Obama for this, because I'm sure it's somehow his fault as well.
It's also roughly the size of Trump Tower in New York, maybe a more relevant reference point here, since we're talking scale and bluster.
I don't think it would have mattered or gone anywhere, even if the state had the stones to pursue a case against the companies' leadership. If it came to a legal battle, Jobs would have probably fallen on that sword knowing he was dying or that he'd be dead before the legal proceedings could finish. What would they do then, dig up his corpse and put it in jail?
That's small potatoes when you could be a smiling poo.
I'd disagree. The case for anonymous speech is well established and with Slashdot's default method of displaying comments, you won't see AC posts unless they've been moderated positively a few times. Also, there are plenty of people who don't want an account for whatever reason and the occasional inane troll (that is typically modded to -1 in a few minutes) isn't worth losing the random insightful AC post. You won't fix the problem either as the actual trolls will just create throwaway accounts.
I can't say that allowing moderation and posting in the same article is a better idea either. There're enough articles that have become political and the people who have strong opinions on the positions they take shouldn't be allowed to mod in the same article. People get too emotionally involved and it will result in more bad moderation or abuse than potential good.
Leave it to the /. editors to find a way to make people wish for a Bennet Haselton article.
One would think that it would have been easier for Doc to get his hands on some oil and refine it himself. The car didn't need to fly in the first movie to get up to speed, and oil was already being extracted commercially in the U.S. (and specifically in California) by the time the film takes place and California was one of the leading oil producing states at that time. It would be fair to assume that Doc would be able to create a small amount of high-octane gasoline, even if he had to spend some time creating a setup to do so. That he built an intricate contraption to produce an ice cube, easily suggests he had the engineering capabilities to work within the limitations of what was available at the time to produce something far more advanced than the time would normally have permitted.
Of course that wouldn't have made for a very exciting movie, so I can see why the did the bit with the train.
New report shows that toasters are extremely deadly!
.
Researchers have found that the common household toaster is an exceptionally dangerous product. Users who intentionally went out of their way to remove key safety features of the appliance and then connect an extension cord to the device so that they can submerge in a tub full of water while standing in that tub were found to suffer grievous bodily harm.
. .
I can understand that is generates clicks, but we'd be better of spending time writing about why you shouldn't visit dodgy sites and install third party applications unless you know what you're doing and provide some examples of what these malicious programs might look like or how they might try to trick you. That would be far more useful to the average consumer.
Your position is certainly not a scientific one and you are rather severely misinformed about what software can do (most people are).
Can you point out a specific problem with any part of what I've stated or demonstrate with sufficient proof that it won't work or cannot be done, not just now, but also at no point in the future?
The problem is there is still absolutely no indication that human-equivalent intelligence can be implemented in machines.
At one point in human history there was no indication that humans would be able to travel through outer space either. It was squarely in the realm of fiction and human fancy or utterly beyond our ability to conceive of considering it possible because we could not yet fly through the air or rapidly travel over land without the aid of other animals.
There is no credible theory how it can be done.
What's to stop someone from building a hardware approximation using circuitry or other approaches that models the human brain? We know that we don't possess the technology to do that right now, but that's different from claiming that it's completely impossible. Even if you can't build an exact hardware approximation (assuming you can manipulate cells in a controlled way, we wouldn't even have to use different materials so it's not even a requirement to use a computer if you can learn how to create brain cells and get them to arrange themselves in a particular pattern), if you can build hardware that's powerful enough to allow software emulation of a larger brain, what would stop us from being able to conduct this experiment? We might someday attempt to test this hypotheses and find that the it is wrong, but proposing a hypotheses (there's nothing special about consciousness, it's merely an emergent property of the physical construction of our brains, much like water freezing is simply a consequence of how molecules of water behave at low temperatures. We might not know exactly why it happens, but it can be empirically demonstrated to occur under precise conditions.) is definitely science so long as the hypotheses is testable. Just because we currently lack the ability to actually perform the test doesn't mean that it's not science.
You seem to be arguing from a perspective of just because something hasn't yet been done it can never be done, while not demonstrating any formal proof as to why. To even declare it definitively impossible would require a far greater understanding of how the universe operates than we currently have available. Furthermore, we don't even need computers or software to test this theory if we can gain knowledge which allows scientists to construct and study primitive brains (of which we have enough living examples of to already perform rudimentary experiments). Do you also believe that such knowledge is also forever beyond our grasp and if so, why specifically? What is so special about it that we'll never be able to understand it more than other fields of knowledge that provide us a better understanding of the universe?
It also serves as warning for other patent trolls to stay away from Newegg because they will fight back. Even if it costs them money to continue with this lawsuit, it potentially saves them significantly more in the future from all of the lawsuits that they don't have to deal with as a result of any ruling that results from this case or even showing that they have no problem standing up to the bullies of the patent world.