Re:Riaa to fight hackers on own terms...
on
RIAA to DoS Pirates?
·
· Score: -1, Flamebait
Quoth the.sig:
We had to destroy the village in order to save it - Calley
We had to destroy America in order to save it - Bush
You ignorant troll cunt!
No AC, no fake, no fear of moderation. This needed to be said out loud and in public, and bears repeating. Think very hard about changing your signature. Please.
Abso-fucking-lutely! Any interface (100% working or not) is better than this bullshit, that looks like it was bodged together by some l33t 14-year old between classes. I never found the Deja interface all that bug-ridden, anyway...
How about if they simply brought back the existing Deja interface (which works well enough for me) until they've got an interface with equivalent functionality to replace it, instead of the shit-stupid search-mode they've bodged into place? How about if they got a decent interface together **before** announcing the switch? How about if the announced the switch **before** it happened, so I didn't find out "mid-browse"?
All in all it's bollocks, and frankly I'd prefer *ANY* functionality to what they've ended up with!
Wrong in so many ways. There's more to acting than that. Much more. Arguing that sales ability is better than performance ability is like arguing that Bill is better than Linus. (At best an amusing diversion, at worst not so amusing) To say that Sir Alec hasn't done anything more entertaining than Star Wars is simply daft (Kind Hearts & Coronets), and to argue that he hasn't done anything more moving is equally vaccous (Bridge over the river Kwai).
If you only watch movies for cheap, easy thrills, then you're missing so very much of life.
Another film that moved me powerfully, was "The bridge on the river Kwai". Guinness is scarily good in that one as well.
BBC News 24 is showing news of his passing, and are showing a short scene from "Kwai" as part of it, as well as a piece from "Kind Hearts and Coronets" and a lot of other stuff. I haven't seen "Kwai" in soooo long, and forgotten just how powerful a performance it was. /* USA readers can see the News 24 footage on BBC America, as they rebroadcast the same output */
Without wishing to advertise or advocate anything...
The Web != the Internet. There are other means of communication available, some of which (such as USENET) make child pr0n very easy to locate, orders of magnitude more so than the WWW.
The point was that it could have been any country.
To even further generalise this trivial example for the hard of thinking...
Imagine two locations: L1 and L2 Imagine two entities: E1 and E2
E1 lives in and is bound by the laws of L1 E2 lives in and is bound by the laws of L2
E1 has no rights (as an individual or organisation) to prosecute E2 for doing something within L2 that is not prosecutable in L2 and that's all there is to it.
I live in the Kingdom of Quert, where there are no laws regarding the publishing nor expressing of defamatory material.
On my website (physically located within the territorial boundaries of Quert) I disclose certain distasteful allegations concerning US Citizen X.
How can X sue me, and what for?
Likewise for a country whose laws invalidate or contradict the GPL (it could happen!), or a country with relatively lax computer-intrusion laws. Etc, etc, etc.
I don't need to ask you anything to get your IP address if you willingly install my software.
Yeah. Or your login name, your password (in encrypted form if needs be, I can decrypt it at my leisure), your bookmarks, your email address book, your tastes in online pr0n, or any other data stored (however ephemerally) on your PC.
BUT... the problem quickly becomes one of line-drawing. [snip] 40 years ago, a "CF kid" was lucky to see an eighth birthday. Now, the average CF patient survives into his 30s. Should we kill off babies born with CF?
Every minute spent by every person increasing the likelyhood of this mutation spreading is a crime against humanity, and must be stopped. This includes both letting mutated zygotes develop and wasting resources lengthening the lifespan of these mutants, and thereby increasing the odds that they will breed.
Which brings me to my next point: There are "severe disabilities" that are NOT apparent at birth.
The mutation for genetic diseases is apparent in the genetic code of the zygote from day one of the pregnancy. The tech to do the checks is a bit primitive and/or expensive, but we'll soon have mapped the human genome.
It would take one international law requiring 1st trimester abortion of all foetuses carrying certain mutations to rid the human race of this poison within one century.
Last but not least, I am bisexual. My housemate is gay. If a "gay gene" is ever found, those who consider us "undesirable" might engage in selective abortion or infanticide. This gives me the chills on a very irrational, personal level. Likewise, I know that in ancient Scandanavia and in modern China, babies are killed or left to die for the "defect" of being female. Since I'm female, this does not sit well with me at all. "But those abuses won't happen!" How do you know that?
Those abuses might well happen. Some people harbor prejudices, that's human nature (or is it nurture:-) However, to wipe out a mutation, or at least slow its incedence to "negligable", it'll take a global (or very nearly global) effort. Whatever your (or my) personal feelings, that ain't going to happen any time soon.
A national effort would be feasible, as long as a country (temporarily?) sterilised all visiting foreigners. Still unlikely.
Does anyone else think that the linked website shows definate signs of having been created by the UNL computer program? If it is, then it's actually a darned fine piece of work.
New slant on Turing: What about a prize for the machine that produces a translation that you can't decide is machine-translated or human-translated?
Nobody. Prior art is all over the place, as is reasonably capable source code.
NLT via a "generic" metalanguage is one of the Big Goals of computer linguistics after Speech recognition and production.
It's a fascinating field, and any Joe Q Programmer can write a "reasonable" interpretation of the idea. Nobody has written a really good version just yet, and I don't think we're likely to for a while.
Once again, it's from Frontiers magazine, and in fact, from the same issue.
If the arguement is about simply putting things into space for less cash, y'all might be interested to read about the British space program (obit 1970, one successful orbital payload delivery). They used a propellant of Kerosene and Hydrogen Peroxide, and launched things for a tiny, tiny fraction of the cost of an equivalent NASA launch. The project was abandonned when the government "couldn't see a practical purpose" for a Space Program. Black Arrow was just one of a set of rockets produced using the same tech.
I hate to rant (honest:-), but this is the exact same article verbatim that appeared in Frontiers magazine some months ago, and to which I refered (I think) in a reply before the weekend.
Perhaps Mr Clarke figured that a marginal UK sci-f((i)|(act)) zine simply wasn't making enough cash for him? Perhaps CNN hasn't checked up on the contract he must have signed with Frontiers? Perhaps this is a new era in Open-source journalism? Perhaps I'm just jealously screaming "I saw it first!!!"? Who knows...
Re:Applications and ethics
on
The Cat Cam
·
· Score: 1
There is a "bright" side of course, this type of recording could be used to train people how to do a by giving them the experiences of someone skilled in that area.
There was a piece in Frontiers magazine about half a year ago by Arthur C Clarke called "The History of the 21st Century". One of the things he postulated was a device to allow someone to review somebody else's sensory memory. (I laughed out loud when I read that, but there you go...) As well as being great for Education and Entertainment, the more important point he makes is that they'd also revolutionise the legal system, by making deliberate lying impossible.
That's a bit double-plus ungood, in many respects (imagine being a captured spy), but has to be a good thing for the "big picture".
Science, man... like, wow!
*That* is Flamebait???
on
The Cat Cam
·
· Score: 1
Flamebait it might appear to be, to a bot.
Surely though, in context of the parent post it deserved to be moderated up one (Funny), not down one. Given the choice, that's what I'd have done.
I can't see how anyone sane would take this as genuine flame-bait, especialy if marked (Funny).
Anyway, to make this on-topic, I'd like to suggest that "the future" is approaching faster and faster. It scares me, but I like it.
Medication be damned, I prefer the leprechauns over you wierdos any day
I memmy a while back, there was a bit of bother over a probe (Pioneer 10?) that was deccelerating far more than it ought to, and was subsequently "knocked off course" by an unknown object or force.
I have three questions:
1) Would any hypothetical interstellar drive do things to space-time that would look like an object of incredible mass?
2) Was that probe heading in a direction anything like "towards" Planet X?
3) Would the super-mass of Planet X have caused the probe to have started to head significantly towards it?
"Conspiracy theories are put about by the Illuminati to deliberately mislead the public"
The argument about the guy who would have died in a car crash through wearing a seatbelt is flawed, because far more people die through not wearing them than do through wearing them.
By this same arguement, then, the arguement about Stephen Hawkins is also flawed. The number of relative geniuses and the proportion of the population that are bornseverely disabled are so small that the odds of them coinciding more often than is good are vanishingly tiny.
If this is not the case, and certain physically disabling mutations are reliably associated with better-than-average intellect, we'd expect to see that correlation over several generations of the same family, in a predictable manner. If Hawkins disease is such a case, then I stand corrected and would be greatly pleased. Could someone post a URL with a reliable study?
I know this is verging on flame-bait, as this is probably a more controversal viewpoint than even most/.ers can withstand, but...
I have to agree completely. It's just cold, hard, darwinism. The incidence of mutations like Downs and so forth has rocketed enormously (and alarmingly) over the last few hundred years. It's a basic principle that any mutation which does not detrimentally effect the fertility of ones offspring will tend to propogate and spread throughout a species. Not as fast as a mutation that actively increases the same factor, true, but with nothing to hold it back, any mutation will tend to spread.
In the "modern world" where such an enormous (an until recently unthinkable) amount of our resources is being squandered on the preservation and extension of the lives of those who would ordinarily be unable to fend for themselves, we're feeling the strain every day.
The line should quite clearly be drawn at "genetic disorder causing serious physical and/or mental impairment".
Genetic defects such as these need to be wiped out, or by the basic principles of evolution, they will become uniformly distributed across the whole species.
The biggest threat to the human race is not Global Warming, nor the Atomic Bomb, nor even Four Digit Years.
Note, I'm not normally this Fascist, in fact I consider myself fairly Liberal, but in this matter, I feel very strongly that it's another case of the Human race naively and arrogantly ignoring the laws of nature in the name of sentimentality. Usually it's done in the name of "progress" or "money", but _any_ attempt to beat Mother Nature will be met by a just and equal retribution.
These guys are into reverse engineering and several far shadier activities. There's no real "beginners guide", nor do I think they're the kind of folks to produce one.
You need to be a genuine super-hairy assembly wizzard to even contemplate RE anyway, so if you don't understand what they're saying, it's best to go away and read up on the whole assembly thang.
http://www.phrack.com/main-index.html
They do recommend a few really groovy tools, if you hunt around the site a bit.
Slashdot Mirror
Quoth the .sig:
We had to destroy the village in order to save it - Calley
We had to destroy America in order to save it - Bush
You ignorant troll cunt !
No AC, no fake, no fear of moderation. This needed to be said out loud and in public, and bears repeating. Think very hard about changing your signature. Please.
No. Excalibur's original British name was Caliburn, which has a legitimate (if hazy) Celtic etymology.
Holy Crap!
I hadn't even noticed that!
That has to be the single scariest thing I've seen all day.
Ho-hum.
Abso-fucking-lutely! Any interface (100% working or not) is better than this bullshit, that looks like it was bodged together by some l33t 14-year old between classes. I never found the Deja interface all that bug-ridden, anyway...
How about if they simply brought back the existing Deja interface (which works well enough for me) until they've got an interface with equivalent functionality to replace it, instead of the shit-stupid search-mode they've bodged into place?
How about if they got a decent interface together **before** announcing the switch?
How about if the announced the switch **before** it happened, so I didn't find out "mid-browse"?
All in all it's bollocks, and frankly I'd prefer *ANY* functionality to what they've ended up with!
Wrong in so many ways. There's more to acting than that. Much more. Arguing that sales ability is better than performance ability is like arguing that Bill is better than Linus. (At best an amusing diversion, at worst not so amusing) To say that Sir Alec hasn't done anything more entertaining than Star Wars is simply daft (Kind Hearts & Coronets), and to argue that he hasn't done anything more moving is equally vaccous (Bridge over the river Kwai). If you only watch movies for cheap, easy thrills, then you're missing so very much of life.
Another film that moved me powerfully, was "The bridge on the river Kwai". Guinness is scarily good in that one as well.
BBC News 24 is showing news of his passing, and are showing a short scene from "Kwai" as part of it, as well as a piece from "Kind Hearts and Coronets" and a lot of other stuff.I haven't seen "Kwai" in soooo long, and forgotten just how powerful a performance it was.
/* USA readers can see the News 24 footage on BBC America, as they rebroadcast the same output */
Somebody PLEASE moderate this "Funny", preferably more than one person...
The Web != the Internet. There are other means of communication available, some of which (such as USENET) make child pr0n very easy to locate, orders of magnitude more so than the WWW.
To even further generalise this trivial example for the hard of thinking...
Imagine two locations: L1 and L2
Imagine two entities: E1 and E2
E1 lives in and is bound by the laws of L1
E2 lives in and is bound by the laws of L2
E1 has no rights (as an individual or organisation) to prosecute E2 for doing something within L2 that is not prosecutable in L2 and that's all there is to it.
Imagine the following trivial example:
I live in the Kingdom of Quert, where there are no laws regarding the publishing nor expressing of defamatory material.
On my website (physically located within the territorial boundaries of Quert) I disclose certain distasteful allegations concerning US Citizen X.
How can X sue me, and what for?
Likewise for a country whose laws invalidate or contradict the GPL (it could happen!), or a country with relatively lax computer-intrusion laws. Etc, etc, etc.
Yeah. Or your login name, your password (in encrypted form if needs be, I can decrypt it at my leisure), your bookmarks, your email address book, your tastes in online pr0n, or any other data stored (however ephemerally) on your PC.
I think I just figured out exectly why the NSA (et al) have been patenting all that echelon tech recently. The pieces are all falling into place...
---
Pb
Pssst... wanna buy some Red Mercury?
Every minute spent by every person increasing the likelyhood of this mutation spreading is a crime against humanity, and must be stopped. This includes both letting mutated zygotes develop and wasting resources lengthening the lifespan of these mutants, and thereby increasing the odds that they will breed.
Which brings me to my next point: There are "severe disabilities" that are NOT apparent at birth.
The mutation for genetic diseases is apparent in the genetic code of the zygote from day one of the pregnancy. The tech to do the checks is a bit primitive and/or expensive, but we'll soon have mapped the human genome.
It would take one international law requiring 1st trimester abortion of all foetuses carrying certain mutations to rid the human race of this poison within one century.
Last but not least, I am bisexual. My housemate is gay. If a "gay gene" is ever found, those who consider us "undesirable" might engage in selective abortion or infanticide. This gives me the chills on a very irrational, personal level. Likewise, I know that in ancient Scandanavia and in modern China, babies are killed or left to die for the "defect" of being female. Since I'm female, this does not sit well with me at all. "But those abuses won't happen!" How do you know that?
Those abuses might well happen. Some people harbor prejudices, that's human nature (or is it nurture :-) However, to wipe out a mutation, or at least slow its incedence to "negligable", it'll take a global (or very nearly global) effort. Whatever your (or my) personal feelings, that ain't going to happen any time soon.
A national effort would be feasible, as long as a country (temporarily?) sterilised all visiting foreigners. Still unlikely.
New slant on Turing: What about a prize for the machine that produces a translation that you can't decide is machine-translated or human-translated?
NLT via a "generic" metalanguage is one of the Big Goals of computer linguistics after Speech recognition and production.
It's a fascinating field, and any Joe Q Programmer can write a "reasonable" interpretation of the idea. Nobody has written a really good version just yet, and I don't think we're likely to for a while.
If the arguement is about simply putting things into space for less cash, y'all might be interested to read about the British space program (obit 1970, one successful orbital payload delivery). They used a propellant of Kerosene and Hydrogen Peroxide, and launched things for a tiny, tiny fraction of the cost of an equivalent NASA launch. The project was abandonned when the government "couldn't see a practical purpose" for a Space Program. Black Arrow was just one of a set of rockets produced using the same tech.
You can read about it here.
Perhaps Mr Clarke figured that a marginal UK sci-f((i)|(act)) zine simply wasn't making enough cash for him? Perhaps CNN hasn't checked up on the contract he must have signed with Frontiers? Perhaps this is a new era in Open-source journalism? Perhaps I'm just jealously screaming "I saw it first!!!"? Who knows...
There was a piece in Frontiers magazine about half a year ago by Arthur C Clarke called "The History of the 21st Century". One of the things he postulated was a device to allow someone to review somebody else's sensory memory. (I laughed out loud when I read that, but there you go...) As well as being great for Education and Entertainment, the more important point he makes is that they'd also revolutionise the legal system, by making deliberate lying impossible.
That's a bit double-plus ungood, in many respects (imagine being a captured spy), but has to be a good thing for the "big picture".
Science, man ... like, wow!
Surely though, in context of the parent post it deserved to be moderated up one (Funny), not down one. Given the choice, that's what I'd have done.
I can't see how anyone sane would take this as genuine flame-bait, especialy if marked (Funny).
Anyway, to make this on-topic, I'd like to suggest that "the future" is approaching faster and faster. It scares me, but I like it.
Medication be damned, I prefer the leprechauns over you wierdos any day
I have three questions:
1) Would any hypothetical interstellar drive do things to space-time that would look like an object of incredible mass?
2) Was that probe heading in a direction anything like "towards" Planet X?
3) Would the super-mass of Planet X have caused the probe to have started to head significantly towards it?
"Conspiracy theories are put about by the Illuminati to deliberately mislead the public"
By this same arguement, then, the arguement about Stephen Hawkins is also flawed. The number of relative geniuses and the proportion of the population that are born severely disabled are so small that the odds of them coinciding more often than is good are vanishingly tiny.
If this is not the case, and certain physically disabling mutations are reliably associated with better-than-average intellect, we'd expect to see that correlation over several generations of the same family, in a predictable manner. If Hawkins disease is such a case, then I stand corrected and would be greatly pleased. Could someone post a URL with a reliable study?
I have to agree completely. It's just cold, hard, darwinism. The incidence of mutations like Downs and so forth has rocketed enormously (and alarmingly) over the last few hundred years. It's a basic principle that any mutation which does not detrimentally effect the fertility of ones offspring will tend to propogate and spread throughout a species. Not as fast as a mutation that actively increases the same factor, true, but with nothing to hold it back, any mutation will tend to spread.
In the "modern world" where such an enormous (an until recently unthinkable) amount of our resources is being squandered on the preservation and extension of the lives of those who would ordinarily be unable to fend for themselves, we're feeling the strain every day.
The line should quite clearly be drawn at "genetic disorder causing serious physical and/or mental impairment".
Genetic defects such as these need to be wiped out, or by the basic principles of evolution, they will become uniformly distributed across the whole species.
The biggest threat to the human race is not Global Warming, nor the Atomic Bomb, nor even Four Digit Years.
Note, I'm not normally this Fascist, in fact I consider myself fairly Liberal, but in this matter, I feel very strongly that it's another case of the Human race naively and arrogantly ignoring the laws of nature in the name of sentimentality. Usually it's done in the name of "progress" or "money", but _any_ attempt to beat Mother Nature will be met by a just and equal retribution.
You need to be a genuine super-hairy assembly wizzard to even contemplate RE anyway, so if you don't understand what they're saying, it's best to go away and read up on the whole assembly thang.
http://www.phrack.com/main-index.html
They do recommend a few really groovy tools, if you hunt around the site a bit.