You know how many sugar laden pitchers of Kool-Aid I drank waiting for a massive jolly anthropomorphic red pitcher to burst through the side of my house?
And all I ever got was diabetes. Misleading advertising indeed.
At least four of Microsoft’s own applications have been confirmed as exploitable through this vector, two of which were already being addressed by the time I contacted them.
I like how we can talk about peak helium but the second you try to discuss peak oil or peak coal you're a treehugger, an alarmist or trying to destroy the economy. I guess we have to wait until we're certain we're only a century away from using the last of a resource that took the Earth 4.7 billion years to accumulate before it's okay to start to talk about appropriate measures...
The leader was issued a citation for creating hazardous conditions in the parks.
Also, your reasoning that this is the 'same old story' doesn't work when this evidence is presented to you
The group’s leader had hiked the Grand Canyon once before, but the other man had little backpacking experience. Rangers reported that the leader told them that without the device, "we would have never attempted this hike."
Emphasis mine. If the National Park Service claims this is increasing their encounters with such idiots then this isn't the 'same old story.' As technology is further exacerbating the age old idiot complex.
I'm suing you for making your comments too entertaining!
I'm suing you for giving my addiction positive reinforcement and feedback! I also want the logs so I can see which moderators continue to mod me up so I can add defendants to my lawsuit! By the time I'm done sobbing in front of the jury, they'll believe I never had a choice to quit!
What the hell, did you just add me to your friend's list? Oh you better believe that's a lawsuit.
Oh. My. God. Did you see my achievements?! My lawyer's head just exploded.
Yeah, not a whole lot of sympathy from me either on this one. In fact, I'm a little upset this hasn't been thrown out:
A federal judge is allowing the court case to go forward (PDF), stating that the plaintiff has a claim for negligence and gross negligence against the publisher.
So what the judge is saying is that if online gaming services don't regulate against lengthy usage of their services by adult citizens they may face lawsuits like this? Hopefully this sets a precedent that such a claim is a load of horse shit and should never be considered in a court of law again. Where does The "Science" of Game Addiction draw the line?
In America, you're suppose to have the freedom to do whatever you want with your time so long as it doesn't impair another person's life, liberty and pursuit of happiness. This includes, for better or for worse, devoting as much time as you see fit to a game. It's called "responsibility" and I'd rather you accept it before the decision is made for you and you never had a choice to begin with (a la China's government regulations for online game play time).
Myers, who apparently based his second-hand comments on erroneous press reports (he wasn’t at my talk), goes on to claim that my thesis is that we will reverse-engineer the brain from the genome.
So put your speech up on your site, all I can find are videos from previous summits. TED seemingly posted videos as they happened and therefore we could openly debate them. Summits are great but not everyone has the time or resources to attend them. I would suggest you move towards a more open format of disseminating your ideas and the very specific and lengthy details about them. I'm not going to buy a book on futurism and wade through it for the details you provide about neurobiology and I don't think PZ Meyers would do that either.
I mentioned the genome in a completely different context. I presented a number of arguments as to why the design of the brain is not as complex as some theorists have advocated. This is to respond to the notion that it would require trillions of lines of code to create a comparable system. The argument from the amount of information in the genome is one of several such arguments. It is not a proposed strategy for accomplishing reverse-engineering. It is an argument from information theory, which Myers obviously does not understand.
Well, frankly, I don't understand it either. You're applying information theory to lines of code... and that just doesn't make any sense to me. I haven't heard of it. I haven't heard of anyone say "theoretically could be reduced to x lines of code." I don't know why we're talking about information theory when we're talking about simulating the brain or even understanding the brain.
The amount of information in the genome (after lossless compression, which is feasible because of the massive redundancy in the genome) is about 50 million bytes (down from 800 million bytes in the uncompressed genome). It is true that the information in the genome goes through a complex route to create a brain, but the information in the genome constrains the amount of information in the brain prior to the brain’s interaction with its environment.
So first it was information theory on the genome and now you're on about compression of the genome. Great, you've applied theoretical limits to lines of code in order to describe a complex biological system and then argued that due to redundancy we can reduce it to 50 million bytes. And what did that buy us exactly? Look at how many lines of code we've devoted to simulating a single neuron or synapse... and it's not even a complete and accurate simulation. Your theoretical limits are amusing but pointless... to further apply your 'exponential growth' of the lines of code we can program is further amusing.
Kurzweil is a futurist with just enough knowledge to sell people. His exponential growth to a singularity and proof of it doesn't do him much good when he doesn't understand the complexity of the brain and then applies theoretical limits to that from other disciplines. He's free to keep preaching, I just question at what point people will give up on him. If he dies soon and pulls a L. Ron Hubbard what sort of cult then will we have on our hands?
Do we have the option to get our cable TV without comercials? there are a few pay on-demand channels, but as a general rule, no.
HBO? Cinemax? Showtime? And why are you comparing books -- a single finite length of words -- to a streaming service that continually offers new and different content? Wouldn't it be better to compare books to DVDs? Your comparison of a 24/7 service that provides semi-unique programming versus a book smacks of an "apples to oranges" comparison.
Broadcast radio? no
NPR? XM Radio? If they could sell you subscriptions to FM and AM bands, I bet they would (similar to HBO/SHOW/CINE). Again, try comparing books to CDs instead of a 24/7 service of semi-unique programming. No advertisements on CDs.
Magizines? no
There are specialty magazines that don't have advertisements. It just turns out that people are used to magazines and newspapers having advertisements so they use this to subsidize the cost. Just like television used these same advertisements to pay for costs, it seems we are used to this and will accept it largely. I highly doubt it will be the same with books, albums and movies. I subscribe to Specialten and it has no advertisements. The subscription price is also outrageous. I think people put magazines in the "service" category and accept advertisements with services. This isn't always the case as ISPs have suffered from trying to put advertisements into failed DNS request redirects.
Think like a distributer... why charge less for the version with ads in them when you can charge full price AND get the advertising money and make it the only version offered. If I were a heartless corp, I would offer the two versions, then when the next big hit comes out only offer it with ads at full price, then slowly increase the number of ad-only books till that was all I offered in about 5 years or so.
The simple answer to that is to think like the consumer. Why should I could keep paying full price and suffer through advertisements, I know that they are supposed to reduce the cost unless I've been living in a cave on Mars during the advent of the internet? I have faith in the market in this one and speculate books -- both physical and digital -- will remain mostly advertisement free as most albums and movies have.
If the Kindle provides me a service to access a vast array of copyrighted books for free or cheaply, I would expect that to change though and would assume advertising would be necessary to mitigate the costs.
I apologize for not RTFA but I was brought to the same paywall whether I went through Google or not. Is it some sort of lottery?
'I hope it's the last. Books are one of the last refuges in our world from the constant cry by advertisers to spend money and fill our lives with unnecessary things.'
I would just like to say that I welcome both options. Reader A can pay a high premium and enjoy the original novel as the author intended it to be enjoyed and Reader B can pay little or nothing and try to read Fahrenheit 451 with moving advertisements marketing gallons of premium kerosene at wholesale prices (BUY BUY BUY!). And you know what? I'm really not opposed to this. Maybe the authors are and maybe it offends the your *ism but as long as they keep the old model as an option who cares? I haven't noticed a decline in my ability to purchase paperbacks and hardcovers following the advent of e-readers so why should I fear e-readers installing advertisements into books?
Meanwhile, Ralph Lauren has confused the issue even more by publishing a 'shoppable' children's storybook online...
It's a 'storybook' except that the children are real children acting in front of a green screen that has superimposed images of chidren's-bookish scenes done up in a flash video. Congratulations, the "fierce" blog has done little more than positively re-enforce this marketing maneuver because I just watched an advertisement for children's clothes!
I also am a little bit annoyed that we complain about the RIAA and MPAA as clinging to an old business model and then as book publishers and retailers try something new (or are even rumored to try something new) we hop all over it and denounce it as a crime against humanity. And yet daily I read news sites laden with advertisements. The very site I write this comment on transfers my comments to you, the reader, alongside political advertisements trying to raise your ire about "ObamaCare" or "Barack the Magic Negro." Yes, yes, there are tools like AdBlock, NoScript and Flash blockers specifically designed to circumvent this but to the average reader of Slashdot, this is reality.
And despite the horror of advertising, here we are...
HTML 5. Until that's finalized, I luckily don't require any of the features these two hold as RIAs (like Video). And, if I had the need for video, I would only evaluate these two on their video capabilities and only use it for that component on my content. And since neither of them list Ogg Theora in their codecs on this review and that's what browsers I care about support so far in HTML 5, I'd have to weigh storing videos in multiple codecs... everyone's really done such a good job of making me just not want to think about video right now as a web developer. I guess I suffer from video anxiety.
When I was a kid, I used to sit there smashing mosquitoes that bit me. Every time I smashed one fat with blood, I relished the idea that I had just killed a female mosquito who was about to lay thousands of eggs. And those mosquitoes would in turn breed and lay thousands of eggs and I had essentially just ended the lives of an infinite number of mosquitoes!
Please, just let me have this -- your environmental constraints and logical reasoning be damned!
Is there any reason based on security or ease of management – unless you're running a 100,000-seat network or a national-level ISP – for you to move up to it? No.
What if you're writing web applications that monitor IP addresses? Shouldn't you be making sure that your regexp fits for IPv6 as well? What if you're storing IP addresses and your sanitizing your data? What if you're doing anything at all with IP addresses? Like monitoring logs for abuse? Shouldn't be preparing for the inevitable move to IPv6? What if you collect metrics so you can report to management your country by userbase? I say this because we've started to account for IPv6 in our coding and auditing.
What if you write any sort of firmware or software for network devices?
And if you're a consumer and you're about to purchase something that's going to last you more than three years you should probably make sure it supports IPv6 in case the computer you buy down the line can only handle IPv6 addresses allocated to it.
Go ahead and tell your readers that it's cool, Microsoft's got it covered. I'm going to err on the side of safety whether the armageddonists are right or wrong about the ETA.
Actually, I do block certain things, but for some reason they still get through anyways. Book reviews, aka Slashvertisements, I have those blocked, guess what though, they still show up for me. Blocking on this site has never worked for my account. So keep saying to click the block button and I'll keep verifying I have it checked yet it won't do anything.
Here's a big hint: if you're using the dynamic (new) index it's not about checking a box. It's about excluding 'idle' and putting it into the Other Terms to Exclude box under the Exclusions tab. DO NOT click on Classic Indexes and Slashdboxes. Believe it or not, there are some people that still prefer classic index and that's what those preferences are for. It just took me five seconds to exclude all things marked 'idle' and I verified that yes it does work -- you can do it too. I know you can. I believe in you.
The best part is.. This is great.. It's filed under "Science".. I would have chosen Idle, but Conspiracy theories are Science now and fully/. worthy.
Actually it's filed under both scienceandidle so to be fair it would have been blocked if you took the time to block 'idle' in your preferences. I've probably outlined how to do that a hundred times in posts and heavily recommend it so we don't have to continually put up with discussions on why Slashdot is so craptacular. Your other option is to just stop reading it all together as I'm sure most of the people that complain don't bother to tweak the preferences options that have been there since as long as I've been reading.
Nowhere. But right now it's the most widely adopted and implemented (pretty much everyone but Firefox either does or is planning to support it).
Huh, that's really confusing. Because according to Wikipedia, Ogg Theora looks more supported in browsers than H.264. Perhaps you meant that there are more videos online in H.264 than Ogg Theora -- that goes without dispute.
On top of that, IE's H.264 is only implemented so far in a nightly build and not released.
But, come on, big players like Apple and Google have been pushing HTML 5 and if Ogg Theora gets accepted in the HTML 5 spec and H.264 doesn't... well, guess how long people would use IE if it suddenly didn't work with YouTube and currently Firefox, Chrome and Opera do support Ogg Theora. You want to see people migrate from IE to Chrome? Put up a big tutorial to install and use Chrome right in the little YouTube window for every video that won't load because it's in Ogg Theora.
Someone's going to lose users and I don't think it'll be Google.
If you can program with any programming language without understanding every sublayer beneath it, I don't see why you couldn't do the same with DNA without understanding all the physics and chemistry that makes it work.
I'm going to go out on a limb here and guess that you're one of the computer scientists with little or no background in neurobiology that Kurzweil has convinced we will magically live forever starting... now! Listen, unless you're writing science fiction, you should probably stop drawing analogies between two unrelated fields and start reading about our limitations in understanding the human brain.
Besides, if you read Kurzweil's statement, he's saying we'll reverse engineer the various inputs that can be given to the brain, not the brain it's in entirety.
We can't even do a brain transplant and you're telling me we just need to reverse engineer the 'various inputs' of the human brain? Are you serious?
PZ Myers has got it all wrong and jumped to ridiculous conclusions.
PZ Myers has got it all wrong? Well, he's a professor of biology at the University of Minnesota and has a PhD from the University of Oregon so what credentials do you (or even Kurzweil) hold to be commenting in this manner on the indefinite preservation of the human brain?
Would be nice if the summary even hinted at what the ridiculous claim actually WAS...
Namely, that we'll be able to reverse engineer the human brain in the next 10 years.
It's a little more complicated than that. You see, the article actually breaks down the logic behind that statement and points out how poor it is. Here's the initial part of Kurzweil's argument:
Sejnowski says he agrees with Kurzweil's assessment that about a million lines of code may be enough to simulate the human brain.
Here's how that math works, Kurzweil explains: The design of the brain is in the genome. The human genome has three billion base pairs or six billion bits, which is about 800 million bytes before compression, he says. Eliminating redundancies and applying loss-less compression, that information can be compressed into about 50 million bytes, according to Kurzweil.
About half of that is the brain, which comes down to 25 million bytes, or a million lines of code.
I have only taken high school biology but I know that the genome doesn't magically become the brain. It goes through a very complex process to amino acids which fold into proteins which in turn make cells that in turn make tissues that in turn comprise the human brain. To say we fully understand this transformation entirely is a complete and utter falsity as demonstrated by our novice understanding of the twisted beta amyloid protein that we think leads to Alzheimer's. How amino acids turn into which proteins I believe is largely an unsolved search problem that we don't understand (hence efforts like Folding@Home). And he claims that in ten years not only will we understand this process but we will... reverse engineer it?
The man is insane. I've posted about this same biologist criticizing him before and it looks like P.Z. Myers just decided to take some extra time to point out how imprudent Kurzweil's statements are becoming. Kurzweil will show you tiny pieces of the puzzle that support his wild conclusions and leave you in the dark about the full picture and pieces that directly contradict his statements. This is a dangerous and deceptive practice that -- despite my respect for Kurzweil's work in other fields -- is rapidly turning me off to him and his 'singularity.' He's becoming more Colonel Kurtz than Computer Kurzweil.
I know what people do with it, but why do they do it?
The same could be said of that post you just posted. I know what you do on Slashdot but why do you do it?
And I think the answer is very simple: communication with a nominal reward. People love debate and communication and giving advice and the like. Just because FourSquare focuses on restaurants and eateries doesn't make it any less pointless than our banter and talk of tech here on Slashdot. It simply has a different target market. It might be bigger, it might be smaller but it's something evidently.
"I'm Mayor of the 1st St. Chipotle" vs "I just got a +5 Insightful on this post!" Simple meaningless reward that means something to the user.
Think of it like a game. Personally I think it's worthless but I wouldn't consider myself very keen on the internet if I didn't realize what it does effectively and how it appeals to the users. Of course that means eyeballs and of course Facebook wants their users to lock in and stay. Maybe they'll make a native FourSquare to Facebook to appeal to that market?
sexual harassment is pretty serious. one would think we should be more sympathetic to jodie fisher, not hurd
I agree, sexual harassment is a very serious problem and should not be taken lightly. But could you present the evidence of sexual harassment? Larry Ellison said of it '"The H.P. board admits that it fully investigated the sexual harassment claims against Mark and found them to be utterly false." Furthermore the reason Hurd was fired appeared to be "numerous instances where [Hurd's love interest, Jodie Fisher] received compensation and/or expense reimbursement where there was not a legitimate business purpose, as well as numerous instances where inaccurate expense reports were submitted by Mark or on his behalf that intended to or had the effect of concealing Mark's personal relationship with the contractor." If that's true, misuse of company funds is also serious but not on the level of sexual harassment.
oh right, his browsing history was used against him. therefore, we should be sympathetic to him (rolls eyes)
My concern here -- and what I think the general readership thinks -- is that Hurd did some questionable things or possibly made some enemies and so they tried to dig up anything they could on them. When the sexual harassment charges didn't stick well enough, they used a company policy that everyone is guilty of: using company resources and time to google silly things or read tabloids or do things unrelated to work. "Racy" means "Mildly risque, exciting." So he visited some mildly risque sites?
Basically this looks to be a scenario where Hurd upset someone and they simply looked through his browsing history in order to find a reason to terminate him. Are they constantly searching through browsing histories of all 304,000 employees to find which employment they should terminate? No, they are not. You speak so highly of ethics regarding sexual harassment but what about the ethics of terminating the employment of just one person when he is no more guilty than thousands of other employees -- which you also have the means and option to investigate.
If it was consumer focused, this feature would be advertised as a selling point on cell phones. Turns out it's not for several reasons. One is that, in my opinion, commercial radio sucks. I rarely listen to the radio and when I do it's some form of public radio. There's probably a number of size and power constraints as well that result in every single leading cell phone lacking this 'feature.'
The two sides hope to strike a grand bargain: radio would agree to pay around $100 million a year (less than it feared), but in return it would get access to a larger market through the mandated FM radio chips in portable devices.
Wait, wait, wait. What part of that deal was consumer focused?
I think instead of 'consumer focused' you mean 'consumer manipulation' but to be fair they didn't define whether the focus was positive or negative.
Take your market mandated regulations, take your backroom deals, take your advertisement laden radio, take your same damn song repetition and firmly shove them up your ass. Most importantly: leave me and device companies alone. You've already done far too much damage.
And yes, I put my money where my mouth is and only buy music from labels unaffiliated with the RIAA and bands with no labels at all. I love sites that promote this like bandcamp and even Amazon MP3 occasionally. If you agree with me, do the same. Powerful lobbying has proven that it's the only way to stop this from our end.
Every time you get into a car drunk and endanger other innocent people on the road. Exactly how many times am I supposed to let your old girlfriend try to kill me and/or my family before we crack down?
Oh I hear you man. Now that you put it that way and appealed to my emotion of my old girlfriend endangering your family, I am pissed. But you know what's really gone unchecked? Texting while driving is as bad or worse than drinking and driving. You know what I think should be instituted on the first offense? Lose your license for a year and you should have to have a device that verifies no cell phones are in the car before you start and periodically check while you operate it. And you should have to pay for that just like the Interlock device.
Listen, there's a happy medium here. And every year it seems like the legal limit gets lower or the first offense ranges get lowered. All I'm asking is how low those limits are going to go before you're okay with it.
Fine, you can't argue with MADD, hell, you can't even reason with them and if you're fine with the above impositions on driving then you'll be fine with cops taking away licenses when they see a woman doing her hair in her car or applying lipstick or texting/talking on a cell phone. Because all of those things endanger you and your family to some degree. They're just not as sinful as drinking.
To address some questions... I'm sad to say but I dated a girl who had one of these and it really did destroy the relationship because she could only drive to work and home from work. I would have to drive out and pick her up since she had a restricted license after getting a DUI.
So to address people's questions: you have to make a sound with your voice as you blow and you have to blow strong while making that sound. I think it's calibrated to your voice so if you try a dust buster (not going to make the force needed) or your child you're not going to get your voice. The kid might work if you have enough time for them to try different ranges but it has to be a long continuous breath of full air.
To address the questions about drinking after you start the car, the system will beep loudly indicating you must blow into it again while you're driving or your vehicle will shut off. This happens once every 20-40 minutes.
To answer the questions about why it's 1/3 the legal limit, my (now ex) girlfriend had also been ordered by her program to not drink for a year. If you blow anything recognizable, it locks out you out of your vehicle and reports it. If you don't believe me look at how they keep track of starts. This isn't something for you to wonder if it's okay for you to drive or to test your friends with. She was warned by other friends with DUIs (that's DUI) that they will get you the morning after if you still have alcohol on your breath.
A month before she blew this, she was in the lowest range and then she blew right on the edge of this range that demanded this. I know there's a lot of people out there that have been negatively affected by drunk drivers but in most states the punishment really can be life destroying. I avoid it by using public transportation in DC when I drink but not everyone has that option.
I'm not against these things being used in serious cases. But your first offense with a DUI... where do we draw the line?
Slashdot Mirror
You know how many sugar laden pitchers of Kool-Aid I drank waiting for a massive jolly anthropomorphic red pitcher to burst through the side of my house?
And all I ever got was diabetes. Misleading advertising indeed.
In the 70s and 80s, though, companies tried to grab a consumer's attention with fancy artwork that bore no resemblance to the actual game.
You mean your box didn't have pages of perforated LSD blotters in the back of the manual? You got fleeced.
There are no reports of any Microsoft or default Windows applications containing the bug
Really? That's odd, from the original blog posting:
At least four of Microsoft’s own applications have been confirmed as exploitable through this vector, two of which were already being addressed by the time I contacted them.
I like how we can talk about peak helium but the second you try to discuss peak oil or peak coal you're a treehugger, an alarmist or trying to destroy the economy. I guess we have to wait until we're certain we're only a century away from using the last of a resource that took the Earth 4.7 billion years to accumulate before it's okay to start to talk about appropriate measures ...
The leader was issued a citation for creating hazardous conditions in the parks.
Also, your reasoning that this is the 'same old story' doesn't work when this evidence is presented to you
The group’s leader had hiked the Grand Canyon once before, but the other man had little backpacking experience. Rangers reported that the leader told them that without the device, "we would have never attempted this hike."
Emphasis mine. If the National Park Service claims this is increasing their encounters with such idiots then this isn't the 'same old story.' As technology is further exacerbating the age old idiot complex.
I'm suing you for making your comments too entertaining!
I'm suing you for giving my addiction positive reinforcement and feedback! I also want the logs so I can see which moderators continue to mod me up so I can add defendants to my lawsuit! By the time I'm done sobbing in front of the jury, they'll believe I never had a choice to quit!
What the hell, did you just add me to your friend's list? Oh you better believe that's a lawsuit.
Oh. My. God. Did you see my achievements?! My lawyer's head just exploded.
A federal judge is allowing the court case to go forward (PDF), stating that the plaintiff has a claim for negligence and gross negligence against the publisher.
So what the judge is saying is that if online gaming services don't regulate against lengthy usage of their services by adult citizens they may face lawsuits like this? Hopefully this sets a precedent that such a claim is a load of horse shit and should never be considered in a court of law again. Where does The "Science" of Game Addiction draw the line?
In America, you're suppose to have the freedom to do whatever you want with your time so long as it doesn't impair another person's life, liberty and pursuit of happiness. This includes, for better or for worse, devoting as much time as you see fit to a game. It's called "responsibility" and I'd rather you accept it before the decision is made for you and you never had a choice to begin with (a la China's government regulations for online game play time).
3142 comments?
Submission Summary: 36 pending, 879 rejected, 607 accepted (1522 total, 39.88% accepted)?
Yes, surely that is why I have no life! See you in court, Slashdot!
Myers, who apparently based his second-hand comments on erroneous press reports (he wasn’t at my talk), goes on to claim that my thesis is that we will reverse-engineer the brain from the genome.
So put your speech up on your site, all I can find are videos from previous summits. TED seemingly posted videos as they happened and therefore we could openly debate them. Summits are great but not everyone has the time or resources to attend them. I would suggest you move towards a more open format of disseminating your ideas and the very specific and lengthy details about them. I'm not going to buy a book on futurism and wade through it for the details you provide about neurobiology and I don't think PZ Meyers would do that either.
I mentioned the genome in a completely different context. I presented a number of arguments as to why the design of the brain is not as complex as some theorists have advocated. This is to respond to the notion that it would require trillions of lines of code to create a comparable system. The argument from the amount of information in the genome is one of several such arguments. It is not a proposed strategy for accomplishing reverse-engineering. It is an argument from information theory, which Myers obviously does not understand.
Well, frankly, I don't understand it either. You're applying information theory to lines of code ... and that just doesn't make any sense to me. I haven't heard of it. I haven't heard of anyone say "theoretically could be reduced to x lines of code." I don't know why we're talking about information theory when we're talking about simulating the brain or even understanding the brain.
The amount of information in the genome (after lossless compression, which is feasible because of the massive redundancy in the genome) is about 50 million bytes (down from 800 million bytes in the uncompressed genome). It is true that the information in the genome goes through a complex route to create a brain, but the information in the genome constrains the amount of information in the brain prior to the brain’s interaction with its environment.
So first it was information theory on the genome and now you're on about compression of the genome. Great, you've applied theoretical limits to lines of code in order to describe a complex biological system and then argued that due to redundancy we can reduce it to 50 million bytes. And what did that buy us exactly? Look at how many lines of code we've devoted to simulating a single neuron or synapse ... and it's not even a complete and accurate simulation. Your theoretical limits are amusing but pointless ... to further apply your 'exponential growth' of the lines of code we can program is further amusing.
Kurzweil is a futurist with just enough knowledge to sell people. His exponential growth to a singularity and proof of it doesn't do him much good when he doesn't understand the complexity of the brain and then applies theoretical limits to that from other disciplines. He's free to keep preaching, I just question at what point people will give up on him. If he dies soon and pulls a L. Ron Hubbard what sort of cult then will we have on our hands?
Do we have the option to get our cable TV without comercials? there are a few pay on-demand channels, but as a general rule, no.
HBO? Cinemax? Showtime? And why are you comparing books -- a single finite length of words -- to a streaming service that continually offers new and different content? Wouldn't it be better to compare books to DVDs? Your comparison of a 24/7 service that provides semi-unique programming versus a book smacks of an "apples to oranges" comparison.
Broadcast radio? no
NPR? XM Radio? If they could sell you subscriptions to FM and AM bands, I bet they would (similar to HBO/SHOW/CINE). Again, try comparing books to CDs instead of a 24/7 service of semi-unique programming. No advertisements on CDs.
Magizines? no
There are specialty magazines that don't have advertisements. It just turns out that people are used to magazines and newspapers having advertisements so they use this to subsidize the cost. Just like television used these same advertisements to pay for costs, it seems we are used to this and will accept it largely. I highly doubt it will be the same with books, albums and movies. I subscribe to Specialten and it has no advertisements. The subscription price is also outrageous. I think people put magazines in the "service" category and accept advertisements with services. This isn't always the case as ISPs have suffered from trying to put advertisements into failed DNS request redirects.
Think like a distributer... why charge less for the version with ads in them when you can charge full price AND get the advertising money and make it the only version offered. If I were a heartless corp, I would offer the two versions, then when the next big hit comes out only offer it with ads at full price, then slowly increase the number of ad-only books till that was all I offered in about 5 years or so.
The simple answer to that is to think like the consumer. Why should I could keep paying full price and suffer through advertisements, I know that they are supposed to reduce the cost unless I've been living in a cave on Mars during the advent of the internet? I have faith in the market in this one and speculate books -- both physical and digital -- will remain mostly advertisement free as most albums and movies have.
If the Kindle provides me a service to access a vast array of copyrighted books for free or cheaply, I would expect that to change though and would assume advertising would be necessary to mitigate the costs.
(Paywalled unless you go through Google.)
I apologize for not RTFA but I was brought to the same paywall whether I went through Google or not. Is it some sort of lottery?
'I hope it's the last. Books are one of the last refuges in our world from the constant cry by advertisers to spend money and fill our lives with unnecessary things.'
I would just like to say that I welcome both options. Reader A can pay a high premium and enjoy the original novel as the author intended it to be enjoyed and Reader B can pay little or nothing and try to read Fahrenheit 451 with moving advertisements marketing gallons of premium kerosene at wholesale prices (BUY BUY BUY!). And you know what? I'm really not opposed to this. Maybe the authors are and maybe it offends the your *ism but as long as they keep the old model as an option who cares? I haven't noticed a decline in my ability to purchase paperbacks and hardcovers following the advent of e-readers so why should I fear e-readers installing advertisements into books?
Meanwhile, Ralph Lauren has confused the issue even more by publishing a 'shoppable' children's storybook online ...
It's a 'storybook' except that the children are real children acting in front of a green screen that has superimposed images of chidren's-bookish scenes done up in a flash video. Congratulations, the "fierce" blog has done little more than positively re-enforce this marketing maneuver because I just watched an advertisement for children's clothes!
...
I also am a little bit annoyed that we complain about the RIAA and MPAA as clinging to an old business model and then as book publishers and retailers try something new (or are even rumored to try something new) we hop all over it and denounce it as a crime against humanity. And yet daily I read news sites laden with advertisements. The very site I write this comment on transfers my comments to you, the reader, alongside political advertisements trying to raise your ire about "ObamaCare" or "Barack the Magic Negro." Yes, yes, there are tools like AdBlock, NoScript and Flash blockers specifically designed to circumvent this but to the average reader of Slashdot, this is reality.
And despite the horror of advertising, here we are
Which one should you choose?
HTML 5. Until that's finalized, I luckily don't require any of the features these two hold as RIAs (like Video). And, if I had the need for video, I would only evaluate these two on their video capabilities and only use it for that component on my content. And since neither of them list Ogg Theora in their codecs on this review and that's what browsers I care about support so far in HTML 5, I'd have to weigh storing videos in multiple codecs ... everyone's really done such a good job of making me just not want to think about video right now as a web developer. I guess I suffer from video anxiety.
Side note: Anyone else find that these *world sites release similar yet different articles daily?
When I was a kid, I used to sit there smashing mosquitoes that bit me. Every time I smashed one fat with blood, I relished the idea that I had just killed a female mosquito who was about to lay thousands of eggs. And those mosquitoes would in turn breed and lay thousands of eggs and I had essentially just ended the lives of an infinite number of mosquitoes!
Please, just let me have this -- your environmental constraints and logical reasoning be damned!
Is there any reason based on security or ease of management – unless you're running a 100,000-seat network or a national-level ISP – for you to move up to it? No.
What if you're writing web applications that monitor IP addresses? Shouldn't you be making sure that your regexp fits for IPv6 as well? What if you're storing IP addresses and your sanitizing your data? What if you're doing anything at all with IP addresses? Like monitoring logs for abuse? Shouldn't be preparing for the inevitable move to IPv6? What if you collect metrics so you can report to management your country by userbase? I say this because we've started to account for IPv6 in our coding and auditing.
What if you write any sort of firmware or software for network devices?
And if you're a consumer and you're about to purchase something that's going to last you more than three years you should probably make sure it supports IPv6 in case the computer you buy down the line can only handle IPv6 addresses allocated to it.
Go ahead and tell your readers that it's cool, Microsoft's got it covered. I'm going to err on the side of safety whether the armageddonists are right or wrong about the ETA.
Actually, I do block certain things, but for some reason they still get through anyways. Book reviews, aka Slashvertisements, I have those blocked, guess what though, they still show up for me. Blocking on this site has never worked for my account. So keep saying to click the block button and I'll keep verifying I have it checked yet it won't do anything.
Here's a big hint: if you're using the dynamic (new) index it's not about checking a box. It's about excluding 'idle' and putting it into the Other Terms to Exclude box under the Exclusions tab. DO NOT click on Classic Indexes and Slashdboxes. Believe it or not, there are some people that still prefer classic index and that's what those preferences are for. It just took me five seconds to exclude all things marked 'idle' and I verified that yes it does work -- you can do it too. I know you can. I believe in you.
The best part is.. This is great.. It's filed under "Science".. I would have chosen Idle, but Conspiracy theories are Science now and fully /. worthy.
Actually it's filed under both science and idle so to be fair it would have been blocked if you took the time to block 'idle' in your preferences. I've probably outlined how to do that a hundred times in posts and heavily recommend it so we don't have to continually put up with discussions on why Slashdot is so craptacular. Your other option is to just stop reading it all together as I'm sure most of the people that complain don't bother to tweak the preferences options that have been there since as long as I've been reading.
You know how they say evolution would be falsified by a bunny in the pre-cambrian.
Well, it's not a bunny, but it's not in the stratum it's supposed to be.
Time to stop teaching the discredited theory of evolution.
*stares blankly for a moment*
I don't want to live on this planet anymore.
Nowhere. But right now it's the most widely adopted and implemented (pretty much everyone but Firefox either does or is planning to support it).
Huh, that's really confusing. Because according to Wikipedia, Ogg Theora looks more supported in browsers than H.264. Perhaps you meant that there are more videos online in H.264 than Ogg Theora -- that goes without dispute.
... well, guess how long people would use IE if it suddenly didn't work with YouTube and currently Firefox, Chrome and Opera do support Ogg Theora. You want to see people migrate from IE to Chrome? Put up a big tutorial to install and use Chrome right in the little YouTube window for every video that won't load because it's in Ogg Theora.
On top of that, IE's H.264 is only implemented so far in a nightly build and not released.
But, come on, big players like Apple and Google have been pushing HTML 5 and if Ogg Theora gets accepted in the HTML 5 spec and H.264 doesn't
Someone's going to lose users and I don't think it'll be Google.
If you can program with any programming language without understanding every sublayer beneath it, I don't see why you couldn't do the same with DNA without understanding all the physics and chemistry that makes it work.
I'm going to go out on a limb here and guess that you're one of the computer scientists with little or no background in neurobiology that Kurzweil has convinced we will magically live forever starting ... now! Listen, unless you're writing science fiction, you should probably stop drawing analogies between two unrelated fields and start reading about our limitations in understanding the human brain.
Besides, if you read Kurzweil's statement, he's saying we'll reverse engineer the various inputs that can be given to the brain, not the brain it's in entirety.
We can't even do a brain transplant and you're telling me we just need to reverse engineer the 'various inputs' of the human brain? Are you serious?
PZ Myers has got it all wrong and jumped to ridiculous conclusions.
PZ Myers has got it all wrong? Well, he's a professor of biology at the University of Minnesota and has a PhD from the University of Oregon so what credentials do you (or even Kurzweil) hold to be commenting in this manner on the indefinite preservation of the human brain?
Would be nice if the summary even hinted at what the ridiculous claim actually WAS... Namely, that we'll be able to reverse engineer the human brain in the next 10 years.
It's a little more complicated than that. You see, the article actually breaks down the logic behind that statement and points out how poor it is. Here's the initial part of Kurzweil's argument:
Sejnowski says he agrees with Kurzweil's assessment that about a million lines of code may be enough to simulate the human brain.
Here's how that math works, Kurzweil explains: The design of the brain is in the genome. The human genome has three billion base pairs or six billion bits, which is about 800 million bytes before compression, he says. Eliminating redundancies and applying loss-less compression, that information can be compressed into about 50 million bytes, according to Kurzweil.
About half of that is the brain, which comes down to 25 million bytes, or a million lines of code.
I have only taken high school biology but I know that the genome doesn't magically become the brain. It goes through a very complex process to amino acids which fold into proteins which in turn make cells that in turn make tissues that in turn comprise the human brain. To say we fully understand this transformation entirely is a complete and utter falsity as demonstrated by our novice understanding of the twisted beta amyloid protein that we think leads to Alzheimer's. How amino acids turn into which proteins I believe is largely an unsolved search problem that we don't understand (hence efforts like Folding@Home). And he claims that in ten years not only will we understand this process but we will ... reverse engineer it?
The man is insane. I've posted about this same biologist criticizing him before and it looks like P.Z. Myers just decided to take some extra time to point out how imprudent Kurzweil's statements are becoming. Kurzweil will show you tiny pieces of the puzzle that support his wild conclusions and leave you in the dark about the full picture and pieces that directly contradict his statements. This is a dangerous and deceptive practice that -- despite my respect for Kurzweil's work in other fields -- is rapidly turning me off to him and his 'singularity.' He's becoming more Colonel Kurtz than Computer Kurzweil.
I know what people do with it, but why do they do it?
The same could be said of that post you just posted. I know what you do on Slashdot but why do you do it?
And I think the answer is very simple: communication with a nominal reward. People love debate and communication and giving advice and the like. Just because FourSquare focuses on restaurants and eateries doesn't make it any less pointless than our banter and talk of tech here on Slashdot. It simply has a different target market. It might be bigger, it might be smaller but it's something evidently.
"I'm Mayor of the 1st St. Chipotle" vs "I just got a +5 Insightful on this post!" Simple meaningless reward that means something to the user.
Think of it like a game. Personally I think it's worthless but I wouldn't consider myself very keen on the internet if I didn't realize what it does effectively and how it appeals to the users. Of course that means eyeballs and of course Facebook wants their users to lock in and stay. Maybe they'll make a native FourSquare to Facebook to appeal to that market?
sexual harassment is pretty serious. one would think we should be more sympathetic to jodie fisher, not hurd
I agree, sexual harassment is a very serious problem and should not be taken lightly. But could you present the evidence of sexual harassment? Larry Ellison said of it '"The H.P. board admits that it fully investigated the sexual harassment claims against Mark and found them to be utterly false." Furthermore the reason Hurd was fired appeared to be "numerous instances where [Hurd's love interest, Jodie Fisher] received compensation and/or expense reimbursement where there was not a legitimate business purpose, as well as numerous instances where inaccurate expense reports were submitted by Mark or on his behalf that intended to or had the effect of concealing Mark's personal relationship with the contractor." If that's true, misuse of company funds is also serious but not on the level of sexual harassment.
oh right, his browsing history was used against him. therefore, we should be sympathetic to him (rolls eyes)
My concern here -- and what I think the general readership thinks -- is that Hurd did some questionable things or possibly made some enemies and so they tried to dig up anything they could on them. When the sexual harassment charges didn't stick well enough, they used a company policy that everyone is guilty of: using company resources and time to google silly things or read tabloids or do things unrelated to work. "Racy" means "Mildly risque, exciting." So he visited some mildly risque sites?
Basically this looks to be a scenario where Hurd upset someone and they simply looked through his browsing history in order to find a reason to terminate him. Are they constantly searching through browsing histories of all 304,000 employees to find which employment they should terminate? No, they are not. You speak so highly of ethics regarding sexual harassment but what about the ethics of terminating the employment of just one person when he is no more guilty than thousands of other employees -- which you also have the means and option to investigate.
The two sides hope to strike a grand bargain: radio would agree to pay around $100 million a year (less than it feared), but in return it would get access to a larger market through the mandated FM radio chips in portable devices.
Wait, wait, wait. What part of that deal was consumer focused?
I think instead of 'consumer focused' you mean 'consumer manipulation' but to be fair they didn't define whether the focus was positive or negative.
Take your market mandated regulations, take your backroom deals, take your advertisement laden radio, take your same damn song repetition and firmly shove them up your ass. Most importantly: leave me and device companies alone. You've already done far too much damage.
And yes, I put my money where my mouth is and only buy music from labels unaffiliated with the RIAA and bands with no labels at all. I love sites that promote this like bandcamp and even Amazon MP3 occasionally. If you agree with me, do the same. Powerful lobbying has proven that it's the only way to stop this from our end.
. where do we draw the line?
Every time you get into a car drunk and endanger other innocent people on the road. Exactly how many times am I supposed to let your old girlfriend try to kill me and/or my family before we crack down?
Oh I hear you man. Now that you put it that way and appealed to my emotion of my old girlfriend endangering your family, I am pissed. But you know what's really gone unchecked? Texting while driving is as bad or worse than drinking and driving. You know what I think should be instituted on the first offense? Lose your license for a year and you should have to have a device that verifies no cell phones are in the car before you start and periodically check while you operate it. And you should have to pay for that just like the Interlock device.
Listen, there's a happy medium here. And every year it seems like the legal limit gets lower or the first offense ranges get lowered. All I'm asking is how low those limits are going to go before you're okay with it.
Fine, you can't argue with MADD, hell, you can't even reason with them and if you're fine with the above impositions on driving then you'll be fine with cops taking away licenses when they see a woman doing her hair in her car or applying lipstick or texting/talking on a cell phone. Because all of those things endanger you and your family to some degree. They're just not as sinful as drinking.
To address some questions ... I'm sad to say but I dated a girl who had one of these and it really did destroy the relationship because she could only drive to work and home from work. I would have to drive out and pick her up since she had a restricted license after getting a DUI.
... where do we draw the line?
So to address people's questions: you have to make a sound with your voice as you blow and you have to blow strong while making that sound. I think it's calibrated to your voice so if you try a dust buster (not going to make the force needed) or your child you're not going to get your voice. The kid might work if you have enough time for them to try different ranges but it has to be a long continuous breath of full air.
To address the questions about drinking after you start the car, the system will beep loudly indicating you must blow into it again while you're driving or your vehicle will shut off. This happens once every 20-40 minutes.
To answer the questions about why it's 1/3 the legal limit, my (now ex) girlfriend had also been ordered by her program to not drink for a year. If you blow anything recognizable, it locks out you out of your vehicle and reports it. If you don't believe me look at how they keep track of starts. This isn't something for you to wonder if it's okay for you to drive or to test your friends with. She was warned by other friends with DUIs (that's DUI) that they will get you the morning after if you still have alcohol on your breath.
A month before she blew this, she was in the lowest range and then she blew right on the edge of this range that demanded this. I know there's a lot of people out there that have been negatively affected by drunk drivers but in most states the punishment really can be life destroying. I avoid it by using public transportation in DC when I drink but not everyone has that option.
I'm not against these things being used in serious cases. But your first offense with a DUI