You didn't consider that making people feel uncomfortable was the whole point of it all? If it didn't sometimes touch a nerve, I could just as well watch Star Trek.
You still use what to pay with? If I went to any store here in northern Europe and handed the cashier a check, that person would look at me as if I were some neanderthal, and probably refuse it outright. Actually I have no idea if any store around here would accept a check anymore, and it has been more than ten years since I last saw a check.
For all its modern technology and massive research budgets, the US of A is really backwards in some areas, and especially in banking and mobile phones.
Live without any rights, without any privacy, without anything you can call your own, no hope for release, no way to fight back, with no due process, totally powerless, and absolutely at the mercy of your guards, and you will go mad eventually. There is plenty of reports already that the people held at Gitmo are either gradually losing their sanity, or have already lost it, and who should be surprised? The confinement procedures at Gitmo follow well known brain-washing techniques that we were told the Soviets were using during the Cold War, to demonize them. That the US is now the mirror image of their own anti-Soviet propaganda would be hillarious, if it were not so sad and so outrageous.
It seems that neither the submitter nor the slashdot editor read the article in question. The attack is not specific to multi-core systems, and it works only against programs that wrap system calls to add additional system protection. So it does not pierce through standard OS security, and you already need to have execution privileges. The writeup is just hype and FUD, IMHO.
I fail to see how anyone other than MS would have anything to gain from pushing OOXML, unless they are getting kickbacks. Even companies partnering with MS would benefit greatly if a more open standard, such as ODF, was being used into which they could integrate into more easily and actually do something useful with. This all sounds like a corruption of the standards organization unlike anything I have ever heard of previously. If this does not become anti-trust material a few years down the road, at least in the EU and Japan, I would very surprised.
I did RTFA. 3D image fusion is not new, either. There is a lot of exciting research in the area, though, and if they had spoken about new ways to accurately co-register different image modalities, it would have been interesting, but this was apparently all about visualization, which is not. I am also not all that much of a fan of completely merging image modalities. It can be useful to get an overview of where you are, but I am afraid you could easily lose important tissue boundaries since the algorithms used are not yet better than a trained human eye. In any case, visualization is only as valuable as its accuracy under real world conditions. Once you surgically open the brain, you can often expect significant brain shift, which means that your preoperative images can be way off course. IMHO, correcting such shifts during surgery is far more important than fancy 3D visualization. Although, fancy 3D visualization is starting to look quite cool.
I work within the field of medical imaging, and this is nothing new. People have been doing image fusion with images from different image modalities for over a decade. There are lots of products like this one, some even open source and with more impressive screenshots. Why is this particular product, which is not even named or referenced, featured? If you want to see impressive open source work within the medical world, check out ITK and VTK (http://www.vtk.org/ and http://www.itk.org/). Now that is really cutting edge work done with free software.
My reasoning is that open source software suffers from poor presentation. Definitely true. Part of the reason is that programmers often just like to program, not make things easier for the user. Writing a manual and making things easy can take 90% of the development time. The reason is also partly, in my experience, that free software developers listen way too much to the few, vocal power users who want all kinds of special adaptations and options, rather than finding out what the great majority of users actually need and want. The result is often over-complicated user interfaces, and hard to maintain code because of all the codepaths added to accomodate the hard to satisfy wants of some power users. Once the interface becomes hard to use, the ordinary, quiet users turn to other programs, and power users become even more dominating, leading to a vicious circle of program sectarianism.
It is not only the programmers' fault, though. Far too few users bother to suggest interface simplification,or even know how to advocate it. Merely complaining will not work - developers need to be shown that it can be done, and how, by means of mock-ups or illustrations. A few innovative user interface interested users could do wonders for many projects simply by drawing new user interfaces and submitting them to various free software projects, asking if they are interested in going a few rounds of design iterations with them. Often an outside eye, and interest in doing some adapting from both sides, is all that is needed.
Now, if only they can make it draw sugar from human blood and make the device and all its waste products fully biocompatible, they will revolutionize the parts of the medical industry that deal with electrically powered implants. Think artificial hearts, for example. Of course, lots of hurdles in that direction will remain.
Because food is cheaper to import than produce locally so all the farms would go out of business. And you don't want to depend on other, potentially unstable, countries for food. That is just silly. The US is the world's biggest corn exporter, and has pretty much the most efficient corn production in the world.
Please give me back the 10 minutes reading that article took me. I am by no means a historian of the computing era, but I lived through those years reading computer magazines and programming the things, so I have no problem seeing bullshit presented as history when I encounter it. That guy is such a flaming Apple apologist, he can't even get his head around the fact that despite all its short-comings, win32 had pre-emptive multithreading and protected memory for all of eight years (1993 vs 2001) before Apple got out a consumer OS with the same. Apple nearly died waiting for its vapourware before it bought NeXT. And Microsoft got into that game late, too, and I mean really late. It was implemented in Unix and other systems in the 1970s. He forgot to mention Windows 3.1, which was one of the most important Windows releases ever, because it proved to the world that Windows could succeed. WordPerfect thought it couldn't, and died. Most sat on the fence for Windows 3.0, because while it was pretty, it was horribly unstable and lacking in essential OS features.
Now what would be really cool...
on
Google Earth In 4D
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I wish Google Earth would add the ability to go really far back in time, and see what the Earth (probably) looked like in prehistoric times. Always wanted to watch the movement of the tectonic plates in fast forward on my own PC...
My guess would be that this is similar to Microsoft's investments in Apple some years ago when that company was struggling. While Microsoft are very aggressive about always being the top dog, they may not actually want total market domination, because being too dominating would lead to more government regulation through uses of anti-monopoly laws. You can get away with a lot more when there is competition, and it would not look good if they were to go after Apple in a big way and with the old dirty tactics, if Apple was seen as the only competitor in the market.
Truecrypt is a nice idea, except that if the interrogators find truecrypt on your harddisk, they may automatically assume you have a hidden volume inside your encrypted volume. It is only when truecrypt is distributed on your distro of choice by default, and is used there regularly to encrypt volumes without a hidden volume, that it provides plausible deniability.
I wish I had mod points just about now. JSTOR is an invaluable resource for research and learning, containing the back issues of a vast number of scientific journals, but it is open only to institutions that subscribe to it, and subscriptions do not come cheap. Getting it opened to the public would be an enormous boon for freedom of information and people's ability to educate themselves on any subject outside of educational institutions.
I see a lot of posts pushing the 'it is a free choice' fetish. The human brain is not purposefully designed to satisfy the requirements of the rational choice crowd, it is a byproduct of millions of years of accidential and pretty messy evolution. To put this in words that the slashdot geek can understand, the human brain has lots of exploits, and they cannot be patched, only worked around with difficulty. Our prospensity to addiction and short-term gratification at the expense of long-term goals are among these. As the marketing industry learns more about how the brain really works, these exploits become more effective, and the workarounds harder.
The companies peddling MMO games that are designed to exploit a basic human weakness in a way that is ruinous to many people's lives are being deeply unethical, and should be held responsible for their actions. I've seen friends lose touch with everyone around them, becoming social hermits, unable to break loose from their WoW-induced addiction. They "must" join hour-long raids to live up to expectations in their guild, and taking breaks to be with friends or family is strongly discouraged by the game mechanics.
You may say that this is what you choose to do with your life. However, since the game is designed to subvert the ability to make free choices, just like hard drugs, an increasing number of people are not making a free choice to play the game. When they consider the balance of pros and cons, some of the "pros" are not there because that person has decided this is a good outcome, but because the game designers have exploited an irrational part of the brain that is not directly under conscious control. When such factors swing the balance in favour of continuing the game, you are not making a free decision, you are being owned.
Kudos to everyone out there who are playing WoW only by free, conscious decision. But are you sure you are one of them? It is very hard to tell the difference, especially when you are in the middle of it yourself. Ask anyone who has been through some serious addiction. I made a decision long ago never to play an MMO because I am not confident that I could stop before my decision to play more was determined by the game mechanics, and not by me.
I am usually impressed by feats of intelligence. But for once, I must say that I am duly impressed by idiocy. I thought the post was satire at first. But then, of course, requiring people to phone the factory for every product they want to buy to ask what it contains and hope for someone clueful to tell you something truthful, just makes sense if you will just, I don't know, stand on your head and sing 'lalalalalala' at the same time.
I do not really know how labelling works in the US, but it works fine over here in Old Europe.
University institutions write grant applications too, and they need to aim where the money is at. That seems to be in 'homeland security' at the moment, so they take their current research interests and make it fit whatever they think the bureaucrats on the other end will like. This is Soviet economics all over again. The central planning authority wants lots of nails? Fine, make lots of small nails, useless for anything but satisfying quotas. Nothing will come out of this unless they suddenly solve basic natural language AI problems.
Expect someone to produce a statistical program that can "analyse" news reports, and finds exactly those results that the government wants to see. Then govt interest will move on to some other shiny fad.
The only scary thing is that someone might produce such a program, which gives tons of seemingly correct info (because it reproduces the info you want to see) with tons of errors, and the govt starts using this to discriminate against individuals and news media on that basis. Suddenly journalists are denied entry to the US because some computer program misinterpreted their articles, and someone who once wrote something on his blog which seemed anti-US cannot ever board an aircraft that has the US on its flight route. The US govt is stupid and corrupt enought to do that....... and so maybe I should not have written that. To balance any statistical analysis of this post, I'll throw this in: BUSH GOOD, BUSH GOOD, BUSH GOOD! I SUPPORT EVERYTHING THE US DOES! ALL HAIL KING GEORGE!
Despite needing a much higher % of votes to get an MP for the EU Parliament, it might be easier to get in there. Scandinavians consider the EU Parliament a joke anyway, so why not just vote for a "less-serious" party? Voter turnout is much lower, so any party that can mobilize its core constituency can do well. Once inside the EU Parliament, there is a lot that can be done, it will mean lots of publicity, and lots of money will pour into the party coffers.
Also, getting 1% in the first election so fast after being founded isn't bad, and if it can stay around until the next election, it will be an "established name", and gain more credibility that way.
I have not read the articles you refer to, but there is a big difference between being able to project actions such as looking, jumping and throwing as vectors through space, which all higher level animals can do, and being able to understand a symbol such as pointing a finger to draw attention to a point elsewhere.
The essential test of self-awareness is put to a marker on the animal on some spot which it normally cannot see, and which, if seen, will make the animal react in some distinct way. Put the animal in front of a mirror, and see if it reacts to the spot in the normal way, indicating that it thinks the spot is on it, not on a mirror. As far as I am aware, no cats will respond to it. Hence, no self awareness in this sense. Dolphins pass this test, however.
What is really disturbing about this story is not how wrong it is, but how it spread like wildfire through the echo chamber that is the web pages of the "respectable" news media. There seems to be zero interest in vetting stories anymore. Anything that sounds like a sensation and be linked to some other news page somewhere, is worth publishing, without a critical word added.
Back on topic, did you know that as far as we know, only three animals understand the concept of 'pointing at something'? These three are humans, chimpanzees and dolphins. Try it with your cat or dog. It will continue to look at your hand, not where you want it look, until the cows come home. Understanding symbols that stand for vectors in space require a greal deal of abstract thinking.
Isn't that what Israel did? They withdrew completely from Lebanon. They gave back all of the Gaza and the West Bank, and withdrew all their settlements. They gave the terrorists everything they asked for and complied with every request the UN made. So now how should the respond to continued aggression? Just throw up their hands and wait for death to come?
In which alternative reality did all this happen?
Israel did not withdraw from all of Libanon, they kept a small slice of it, "for security", and did not release prisoners of war, keeping thousands of enemy combatants in jail without being charged of anything. That is sure to keep tensions up, if anything. They have never withdrawn from the West Bank. To the contrary, every year more of the West Bank is being taken over by Israeli settlers, slicing up the area, taking the best land and most of the water. They did withdraw from Gaza, but that was just self interest - it cost too much to protect the religious wackos who insisted on settling on occupied territory in the middle of the densest populated area on the planet - and now they are back. Israel is the number one violator of UN resolutions on the planet. So everything you said suggests you are reading a very selective choice of "news" media.
Slashdot Mirror
You didn't consider that making people feel uncomfortable was the whole point of it all? If it didn't sometimes touch a nerve, I could just as well watch Star Trek.
You still use what to pay with? If I went to any store here in northern Europe and handed the cashier a check, that person would look at me as if I were some neanderthal, and probably refuse it outright. Actually I have no idea if any store around here would accept a check anymore, and it has been more than ten years since I last saw a check.
For all its modern technology and massive research budgets, the US of A is really backwards in some areas, and especially in banking and mobile phones.
Live without any rights, without any privacy, without anything you can call your own, no hope for release, no way to fight back, with no due process, totally powerless, and absolutely at the mercy of your guards, and you will go mad eventually. There is plenty of reports already that the people held at Gitmo are either gradually losing their sanity, or have already lost it, and who should be surprised? The confinement procedures at Gitmo follow well known brain-washing techniques that we were told the Soviets were using during the Cold War, to demonize them. That the US is now the mirror image of their own anti-Soviet propaganda would be hillarious, if it were not so sad and so outrageous.
It seems that neither the submitter nor the slashdot editor read the article in question. The attack is not specific to multi-core systems, and it works only against programs that wrap system calls to add additional system protection. So it does not pierce through standard OS security, and you already need to have execution privileges. The writeup is just hype and FUD, IMHO.
I fail to see how anyone other than MS would have anything to gain from pushing OOXML, unless they are getting kickbacks. Even companies partnering with MS would benefit greatly if a more open standard, such as ODF, was being used into which they could integrate into more easily and actually do something useful with. This all sounds like a corruption of the standards organization unlike anything I have ever heard of previously. If this does not become anti-trust material a few years down the road, at least in the EU and Japan, I would very surprised.
I did RTFA. 3D image fusion is not new, either. There is a lot of exciting research in the area, though, and if they had spoken about new ways to accurately co-register different image modalities, it would have been interesting, but this was apparently all about visualization, which is not. I am also not all that much of a fan of completely merging image modalities. It can be useful to get an overview of where you are, but I am afraid you could easily lose important tissue boundaries since the algorithms used are not yet better than a trained human eye. In any case, visualization is only as valuable as its accuracy under real world conditions. Once you surgically open the brain, you can often expect significant brain shift, which means that your preoperative images can be way off course. IMHO, correcting such shifts during surgery is far more important than fancy 3D visualization. Although, fancy 3D visualization is starting to look quite cool.
I work within the field of medical imaging, and this is nothing new. People have been doing image fusion with images from different image modalities for over a decade. There are lots of products like this one, some even open source and with more impressive screenshots. Why is this particular product, which is not even named or referenced, featured? If you want to see impressive open source work within the medical world, check out ITK and VTK (http://www.vtk.org/ and http://www.itk.org/). Now that is really cutting edge work done with free software.
It is not only the programmers' fault, though. Far too few users bother to suggest interface simplification,or even know how to advocate it. Merely complaining will not work - developers need to be shown that it can be done, and how, by means of mock-ups or illustrations. A few innovative user interface interested users could do wonders for many projects simply by drawing new user interfaces and submitting them to various free software projects, asking if they are interested in going a few rounds of design iterations with them. Often an outside eye, and interest in doing some adapting from both sides, is all that is needed.
Now, if only they can make it draw sugar from human blood and make the device and all its waste products fully biocompatible, they will revolutionize the parts of the medical industry that deal with electrically powered implants. Think artificial hearts, for example. Of course, lots of hurdles in that direction will remain.
This proposal is unethical on so many levels. Most urgently - many species of shark are already nearing extinction, and if subs and other sea vessels that would like to go undetected start killing any sharks that come close "just in case", they will disappear quickly. As noted in this slashdot story: http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/02/2 3/0214242, and this one: http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/01/1 7/1815250
0 2/0031225 was the previous one.
Besides, this story is a dupe: http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/03/
Please give me back the 10 minutes reading that article took me. I am by no means a historian of the computing era, but I lived through those years reading computer magazines and programming the things, so I have no problem seeing bullshit presented as history when I encounter it. That guy is such a flaming Apple apologist, he can't even get his head around the fact that despite all its short-comings, win32 had pre-emptive multithreading and protected memory for all of eight years (1993 vs 2001) before Apple got out a consumer OS with the same. Apple nearly died waiting for its vapourware before it bought NeXT. And Microsoft got into that game late, too, and I mean really late. It was implemented in Unix and other systems in the 1970s. He forgot to mention Windows 3.1, which was one of the most important Windows releases ever, because it proved to the world that Windows could succeed. WordPerfect thought it couldn't, and died. Most sat on the fence for Windows 3.0, because while it was pretty, it was horribly unstable and lacking in essential OS features.
I wish Google Earth would add the ability to go really far back in time, and see what the Earth (probably) looked like in prehistoric times. Always wanted to watch the movement of the tectonic plates in fast forward on my own PC...
My guess would be that this is similar to Microsoft's investments in Apple some years ago when that company was struggling. While Microsoft are very aggressive about always being the top dog, they may not actually want total market domination, because being too dominating would lead to more government regulation through uses of anti-monopoly laws. You can get away with a lot more when there is competition, and it would not look good if they were to go after Apple in a big way and with the old dirty tactics, if Apple was seen as the only competitor in the market.
Truecrypt is a nice idea, except that if the interrogators find truecrypt on your harddisk, they may automatically assume you have a hidden volume inside your encrypted volume. It is only when truecrypt is distributed on your distro of choice by default, and is used there regularly to encrypt volumes without a hidden volume, that it provides plausible deniability.
I wish I had mod points just about now. JSTOR is an invaluable resource for research and learning, containing the back issues of a vast number of scientific journals, but it is open only to institutions that subscribe to it, and subscriptions do not come cheap. Getting it opened to the public would be an enormous boon for freedom of information and people's ability to educate themselves on any subject outside of educational institutions.
I see a lot of posts pushing the 'it is a free choice' fetish. The human brain is not purposefully designed to satisfy the requirements of the rational choice crowd, it is a byproduct of millions of years of accidential and pretty messy evolution. To put this in words that the slashdot geek can understand, the human brain has lots of exploits, and they cannot be patched, only worked around with difficulty. Our prospensity to addiction and short-term gratification at the expense of long-term goals are among these. As the marketing industry learns more about how the brain really works, these exploits become more effective, and the workarounds harder.
One easy article to start with is professor Clay Shirky's provokative essay on the end of free will: http://www.edge.org/q2006/q06_2.html#shirky
The companies peddling MMO games that are designed to exploit a basic human weakness in a way that is ruinous to many people's lives are being deeply unethical, and should be held responsible for their actions. I've seen friends lose touch with everyone around them, becoming social hermits, unable to break loose from their WoW-induced addiction. They "must" join hour-long raids to live up to expectations in their guild, and taking breaks to be with friends or family is strongly discouraged by the game mechanics.
You may say that this is what you choose to do with your life. However, since the game is designed to subvert the ability to make free choices, just like hard drugs, an increasing number of people are not making a free choice to play the game. When they consider the balance of pros and cons, some of the "pros" are not there because that person has decided this is a good outcome, but because the game designers have exploited an irrational part of the brain that is not directly under conscious control. When such factors swing the balance in favour of continuing the game, you are not making a free decision, you are being owned.
Kudos to everyone out there who are playing WoW only by free, conscious decision. But are you sure you are one of them? It is very hard to tell the difference, especially when you are in the middle of it yourself. Ask anyone who has been through some serious addiction. I made a decision long ago never to play an MMO because I am not confident that I could stop before my decision to play more was determined by the game mechanics, and not by me.
I am usually impressed by feats of intelligence. But for once, I must say that I am duly impressed by idiocy. I thought the post was satire at first. But then, of course, requiring people to phone the factory for every product they want to buy to ask what it contains and hope for someone clueful to tell you something truthful, just makes sense if you will just, I don't know, stand on your head and sing 'lalalalalala' at the same time.
I do not really know how labelling works in the US, but it works fine over here in Old Europe.
University institutions write grant applications too, and they need to aim where the money is at. That seems to be in 'homeland security' at the moment, so they take their current research interests and make it fit whatever they think the bureaucrats on the other end will like. This is Soviet economics all over again. The central planning authority wants lots of nails? Fine, make lots of small nails, useless for anything but satisfying quotas. Nothing will come out of this unless they suddenly solve basic natural language AI problems.
.... and so maybe I should not have written that. To balance any statistical analysis of this post, I'll throw this in: BUSH GOOD, BUSH GOOD, BUSH GOOD! I SUPPORT EVERYTHING THE US DOES! ALL HAIL KING GEORGE!
Expect someone to produce a statistical program that can "analyse" news reports, and finds exactly those results that the government wants to see. Then govt interest will move on to some other shiny fad.
The only scary thing is that someone might produce such a program, which gives tons of seemingly correct info (because it reproduces the info you want to see) with tons of errors, and the govt starts using this to discriminate against individuals and news media on that basis. Suddenly journalists are denied entry to the US because some computer program misinterpreted their articles, and someone who once wrote something on his blog which seemed anti-US cannot ever board an aircraft that has the US on its flight route. The US govt is stupid and corrupt enought to do that...
I bet it won't understand sarcasm.
Despite needing a much higher % of votes to get an MP for the EU Parliament, it might be easier to get in there. Scandinavians consider the EU Parliament a joke anyway, so why not just vote for a "less-serious" party? Voter turnout is much lower, so any party that can mobilize its core constituency can do well. Once inside the EU Parliament, there is a lot that can be done, it will mean lots of publicity, and lots of money will pour into the party coffers.
Also, getting 1% in the first election so fast after being founded isn't bad, and if it can stay around until the next election, it will be an "established name", and gain more credibility that way.
I have not read the articles you refer to, but there is a big difference between being able to project actions such as looking, jumping and throwing as vectors through space, which all higher level animals can do, and being able to understand a symbol such as pointing a finger to draw attention to a point elsewhere.
The essential test of self-awareness is put to a marker on the animal on some spot which it normally cannot see, and which, if seen, will make the animal react in some distinct way. Put the animal in front of a mirror, and see if it reacts to the spot in the normal way, indicating that it thinks the spot is on it, not on a mirror. As far as I am aware, no cats will respond to it. Hence, no self awareness in this sense. Dolphins pass this test, however.
Did you even read the links you posted?
What is really disturbing about this story is not how wrong it is, but how it spread like wildfire through the echo chamber that is the web pages of the "respectable" news media. There seems to be zero interest in vetting stories anymore. Anything that sounds like a sensation and be linked to some other news page somewhere, is worth publishing, without a critical word added.
Back on topic, did you know that as far as we know, only three animals understand the concept of 'pointing at something'? These three are humans, chimpanzees and dolphins. Try it with your cat or dog. It will continue to look at your hand, not where you want it look, until the cows come home. Understanding symbols that stand for vectors in space require a greal deal of abstract thinking.
Isn't that what Israel did? They withdrew completely from Lebanon. They gave back all of the Gaza and the West Bank, and withdrew all their settlements. They gave the terrorists everything they asked for and complied with every request the UN made. So now how should the respond to continued aggression? Just throw up their hands and wait for death to come?
In which alternative reality did all this happen? Israel did not withdraw from all of Libanon, they kept a small slice of it, "for security", and did not release prisoners of war, keeping thousands of enemy combatants in jail without being charged of anything. That is sure to keep tensions up, if anything. They have never withdrawn from the West Bank. To the contrary, every year more of the West Bank is being taken over by Israeli settlers, slicing up the area, taking the best land and most of the water. They did withdraw from Gaza, but that was just self interest - it cost too much to protect the religious wackos who insisted on settling on occupied territory in the middle of the densest populated area on the planet - and now they are back. Israel is the number one violator of UN resolutions on the planet. So everything you said suggests you are reading a very selective choice of "news" media.