I didn't even have to read TFA to know it's utter bullshit. How about some past predictions?
In 1876 a prescient fellow predicted a horroble ecological disaster 100 years in the future -- we'd all be up to our waists in horse shit.
Flying cars
Household robot maids
In 1869, who could have possibly predicted that we would land on the moon in a hundred years? In 1845 who could have predicted the electronic computer? In 1850 who would have predicted television? Before I was born in 1952, who could have predicted the internet (except for Murray Leinster)? Who could have predicted that by now, a computer a thousand times more powerful than the biggest three story monster in existance would fit in your pocket? Who predicted cell phones? VCRs, let alone DVDs?
When I was twenty there's no way you would have convinced me that when I was 50 I would have an implant giving my very nearsighted self better than 20-20 vision. Nobody even predicted LASIK. Carbon nanotubes. The list goes on.
In fact, very little of what was ever predicted ever came to pass, and what actually became reality was never predicted.
So when I see a story about what the next century will be like, I just laugh at people's gullibility. You young folks will be amazed at what they come up with, and little or none of it will have been predicted.
"Futurologist," LOL! Where can I get my PhD in "futurology"? Maybe the same place as a PhD in phrenology? What did the duck say when you asked who these guys were? The duck was right!
On the other side though are a large number of people who want to watch the latest movie or listen to what ever crap is in the charts but do not want to pay the amount the person who owns the copyright wants to charge.
These people are a decided minority; most people will pay if you let them and they can afford it. Lots of movies are unavailable outside a certain geographical region, and if anyone outside that region wants to see it, their only recourse is to download from TPB.
Then there are forty year old songs by dead musicians that the industry demands to be paid for. This is just disgusting. I will never see anything recorded in my lifetime reach the public domain. There is no reson for John Lee Hooker's or Janice Joplin's music to NOT be in the public domain.
So I think it's a good tradeoff. You have the MAFIAA stealing our culture, and the pirates infringing copyright on their newer works. It's a wash.
They're already doing that here in Springfield, IL (although they still pay in cash; why need direct deposit when you have a photo ID?) and it didn't cut losses at all, it just inconvenienced people who just want to recycle aluminum cans (there are thefts of aluminum siding as well).
That was very insightful for an AC. After all the evil and harm that Sony's done to their customers, any fool that buys a Sony deserves what he gets. Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.
I agree. But then again I was always more of an "individual components" kind of guy. When one part fails you don't have to replace the whole shebang, and you can upgrade one part at a time.
But that's just me, I think most people prefer a stereo to components, and a VCR/DVD/BluRay/wheteverisnext inside the TV rather than a pile of boxes they have to wire together.
I already have Ubuntu TV -- a computer running kubuntu sits next to the TV and uses it for a monitor. I sit on the couch with a wireless mouse to control it, occasionally using a wireless keyboard. I've had this setup for almost ten years (it used to be a Mandrake TV).
I'd say they're just fanboys, and modding someone down for not liking Linux is as bad as modding someone down for not liking Windows, unless it's just retarded (like "You Windows lusers don't even have a CLI" when in fact it's always had a CLI available).
It's possible that RedHat does employ shills; I have no clue. But some of the marketspeak comments about Windows (and other software companies as well) are obviously shills. Or maybe not, maybe they're just fools who swallow that marketspeak they saw elsewhere.
Your dog is sentient. It thinks, it feels. A sophisticated simulation by a big enough computer to model every subatomic particle in a human brain inreal time would still have no more real thought than a computer simulation of an atomic explosion produces real radiation; its radiation, too, is only a simulation.
If we were computers we' be a lot better at logic and a lot worse at playing frizbee. Even a dog can play frizbee, but no robot can.
My karma is, too, so there's no reason to worry about it. As to the shills, big bureaucracies like a huge corporation always have at least a few arrogant dummies in management who thing they're intelligent. "50 posts today? Attaboy!!"
Here's another reason - they played a snippet from SNL on the radio this morning, a Jimmy Fallon parody of David Bowie, "Tebowie". It was funny so I googled for an mp3 of it; there were videos but no MP3. So I search from BitTorrent, and a Bing page comes up, with few of the results having anything to do with Fallon, Bowie, or Tebow. No MP3s and no Tebowie at all.
I'm starting to believe that nobody uses Bing on purpose. The only way anybody gets there is from companies MS has paid. It's disgusting.
Compared to the outhouse that 98 and XP were, the Win 7 carraige house is pretty secure, although nowhere near as secure as Linux's and Apple's homes. And, er, even bank vaults get broken into occasionally.
Security is like safety, neither one really exists. There are only varying degrees of each. So for someone who's never used a Mac or a Linux box, who's familiar with W95 and W98 and XP, W7 is actually secure. "Wow, I can sit on the can and there's not only no cold breeze coming in, there's even a lock on the door!"
It's probably different here in the US, but they passed similar laws here, and the tobacco companies sued (and won) because the law was unconstitutional; 1st amendment rights were violated.
If they throw you in prison and you can prove your innocence, you can sue for civil rights violations, same if someone has video of a cop beating you.
But I'm pretty sure you can't sue the government here for not passing a law you want passed, or they'd sue rather than using campaign bribery.
I've been using bing more often simply due to mistrust of google
You trust Microsoft? Why?
And using an inferior product just so the superior product has competetion doesn't make a lot of sense to me. Microsoft has historically only competed when they've been forced to; look at the clucterfuck IE was after Netscape died. It never got any better until Mozilla and Opera. If they can get users even with an inferior product, why would they be compelled to improve that product? MS had search long before Google, back when your only choices were Yahoo, Altavista, etc, none of which were very good. Google forced MS to get to work, and ran all the crappier ones out of business, or at least into obscurity. The way to get MS to compete with ANYBODY is to only use MS when their product is the best. Right now the only thing I can think of where this applies is Excel, clearly the best spreadsheet out there; I'm forced at work to use Quattro, 123, and Excel.
This is the future, folks. Give it ten years, and only the hardest of the hardcore geeks will even know how to get to the Internet.
What was old is new again! I certainly hope you're wrong, you're talking about going back to Compuserve. Even BBSes were better than Compuserve, which is why I dropped Compuserve before finally getting direct internet access. I was on Compuserve back in 1983. Sucky sucky sucky!
But then, the failed quadrophonics from the 1970s came back as "surround sound", but that's a tad different; technological advances made it succeed the second time around.
Since you've been moderated "troll" by an obviously paid Microsoft shill, I'll let them waste some more mod points modding me down, too. You said "So, a shitty useless search engine overtakes a lame search engine. No wonder Yahoo is so useless it uses Bing." I agree completely.
The only person I know who uses Yahhoo is my 83 year old mother. I don't know anyone who uses Bing, for obvious reasons (it's second rate crapware).
Now go on, shill, mod me "troll" because you diasgree with my OPINION (and obviously not just mine, the parent poster's as well).
I know you're joking, but you're not going to find any alien species that look anything like human. There are no Romulans, Klingons, nor especially Betazoids. You're probably unlikely to find anything that more than remotely resembles any species from Earth -- look how diverse life here is. We may find intelligent life and not even realise it's alive, let alone intelligent.
Required reading: Isaac Asimov'sWhat is This Thing Called Love? (originally titled Playboy and the Slime God). I've read a lot of Asimov stories, and I don't think the good doctor (a biochemist) had a single alien that looked human-like, and the story I mentioned gives a clue why.
Terry Bison's They're Made Out Of Meat (online at Baen Books) is another good one.
And a thank you to slashdot for waking the muse with this topic!
People like you make me fear for my unborn grandchildren. I see folks with no understanding of how computers work thinking that they're "thinking machines", like idiots in the media have been calling them since ENIAC, which was less powerful than a Hallmark greeting card.
A computer is nothing more than an electric abacus. It works on exactly the same principle as an abacus. IT DOES NOT THINK, IT IS NOT ALIVE! I made a pseudoautonomous program thirty years ago on a machine with only 16k of memory and no disk drive. You'd have sworn it could think, but I assure you it's only David Copperfield trickery, not Merlin Magic.
But you people will have a "machine rights" movement anyway, if history is any indication.
However, I do tend to think that we might find life, even intelligent life, and not realise it's alive.
If we took all the culture/religion and all the technology away , what makes US humans different from animals?
We are animals. We're not different from animals, we're different from other animals. I'm sure bonobos think they're life's superiors and consider us less than bonoban, and probably dolphins as well (Douglas Adams comes to mind here).
If you would replace many of your organs with inorganic components and you weren't capable of reproduction through SEX , would you still consider yourself life?
I'm a cyborg, and although I can reproduce I wouldn't be able to if I were female, because I'd be past menopause. I do know post-menopausal female cyborgs, and yes, they're human as well as alive; their cells still reproduce. Are you trying to say that a eunuch isn't alive? That's just silly.
Many life forms don't reproduce through sex, but they do reproduce. Asexual reproduction doesn't mean an organism isn't alive.
I don't really care what the definition of life is because it surely is WRONG.
Words are defined by consensus. "Life" is whatever we say it is.
The shills are out in force today, and what's more they have mod points, so if your karma's not excellent, be careful.
Slashdot, PLEASE bring back the old style metamoderation! It did far better at keeping mod points out of the hands of shills, trolls, and idiots.
What I'd like to know without actually clicking that IT World link (I hate that web site) is how is AT&T building a walled garden using open source, and how is that the "ultimate" walled garden? Does that mean that after AT&T's garden there will be no more walled gardens? Does it affect their smartphone service only, or does it include their home internet delivery?
TFS is short on info, and in the past I've found IT World to be pretty info-free as well, so I'll thank anyone who can give me a detal or two, especially since AT&T is my ISP.
Indeed. The astroturfers have mod points as well. I can see your comment possibly being modded "offtopic" but only an idiot or a shill would have marked it "troll". I wish someone would mod you back up.
Bing didn't pass Yahoo because Bing's search engine is any good, it passed Yahoo because Bing's interface is clean and sharp and fast -- compared to Yahoo's incredibly shitty interface; plus, Yahoo search uses Bing's engine. Of COURSE Bing would pass them. Duh.
A fellow earlier responded to one of the shills saying that he contributed by mistake because of MS's underhanded tactics, and I have as well. A programn I DLed from C|NET changed Firefox's default search engine to Bing and even added a goddamned Bing toolbar. No more DLs from C|NET for me! That's just fucking sleazy. If you have to trick people into using your product, your product must REALLY suck.
When you have to resort to paying shills to post and moderate on messageboards, you're pretty goddamned sleazy as well. Even if their products didn't suck I'd still avoid them if possible just because of their sleaze. It's insulting and annoying.
I wouldn't worry about your eyes. Just think what happens when you eat the things.
Yeah, they have a "do not eat" warning on silica gel... one guy read it and starved to death. He was the same guy, I think, who it took six months to get from New York to Florida because of all the signs that said "clean rest rooms ahead".
Well, it's "for nerds" because we all use these devices, but it isn't "news that natters" because it's not news; we already know about RMS (repetetive motion syndrome, not Richard Stallman) etc because most of us have experienced it.
TFA is really bad, though. It claims that the danger of cell phone radiation is "inconclusive", when the facts are that not a single study has shown that cell phones or CRTs cause cancer or brain damage. It's not badly written but spans seven screens; I shouldn't have even clicked. Didn't waste my time past the second screen, if you haven't RTFA don't bother, it's a waste of time.
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Of course that's what the hypocrite -- whose own staff hacked people's phones, presumably with his blessing, would say.
Why don't we ask Jack the Ripper about prostitutes? John Wayne Gacy about young men? Timmy McVeigh about the Federal government?
I didn't even have to read TFA to know it's utter bullshit. How about some past predictions?
In 1869, who could have possibly predicted that we would land on the moon in a hundred years? In 1845 who could have predicted the electronic computer? In 1850 who would have predicted television? Before I was born in 1952, who could have predicted the internet (except for Murray Leinster)? Who could have predicted that by now, a computer a thousand times more powerful than the biggest three story monster in existance would fit in your pocket? Who predicted cell phones? VCRs, let alone DVDs?
When I was twenty there's no way you would have convinced me that when I was 50 I would have an implant giving my very nearsighted self better than 20-20 vision. Nobody even predicted LASIK. Carbon nanotubes. The list goes on.
In fact, very little of what was ever predicted ever came to pass, and what actually became reality was never predicted.
So when I see a story about what the next century will be like, I just laugh at people's gullibility. You young folks will be amazed at what they come up with, and little or none of it will have been predicted.
"Futurologist," LOL! Where can I get my PhD in "futurology"? Maybe the same place as a PhD in phrenology? What did the duck say when you asked who these guys were? The duck was right!
On the other side though are a large number of people who want to watch the latest movie or listen to what ever crap is in the charts but do not want to pay the amount the person who owns the copyright wants to charge.
These people are a decided minority; most people will pay if you let them and they can afford it. Lots of movies are unavailable outside a certain geographical region, and if anyone outside that region wants to see it, their only recourse is to download from TPB.
Then there are forty year old songs by dead musicians that the industry demands to be paid for. This is just disgusting. I will never see anything recorded in my lifetime reach the public domain. There is no reson for John Lee Hooker's or Janice Joplin's music to NOT be in the public domain.
So I think it's a good tradeoff. You have the MAFIAA stealing our culture, and the pirates infringing copyright on their newer works. It's a wash.
They're already doing that here in Springfield, IL (although they still pay in cash; why need direct deposit when you have a photo ID?) and it didn't cut losses at all, it just inconvenienced people who just want to recycle aluminum cans (there are thefts of aluminum siding as well).
That was very insightful for an AC. After all the evil and harm that Sony's done to their customers, any fool that buys a Sony deserves what he gets. Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.
I agree. But then again I was always more of an "individual components" kind of guy. When one part fails you don't have to replace the whole shebang, and you can upgrade one part at a time.
But that's just me, I think most people prefer a stereo to components, and a VCR/DVD/BluRay/wheteverisnext inside the TV rather than a pile of boxes they have to wire together.
I already have Ubuntu TV -- a computer running kubuntu sits next to the TV and uses it for a monitor. I sit on the couch with a wireless mouse to control it, occasionally using a wireless keyboard. I've had this setup for almost ten years (it used to be a Mandrake TV).
I believe you're right. I had a copy at one time and had to google for the name of the band, because I couldn't remember who did it.
I'd say they're just fanboys, and modding someone down for not liking Linux is as bad as modding someone down for not liking Windows, unless it's just retarded (like "You Windows lusers don't even have a CLI" when in fact it's always had a CLI available).
It's possible that RedHat does employ shills; I have no clue. But some of the marketspeak comments about Windows (and other software companies as well) are obviously shills. Or maybe not, maybe they're just fools who swallow that marketspeak they saw elsewhere.
Your dog is sentient. It thinks, it feels. A sophisticated simulation by a big enough computer to model every subatomic particle in a human brain inreal time would still have no more real thought than a computer simulation of an atomic explosion produces real radiation; its radiation, too, is only a simulation.
If we were computers we' be a lot better at logic and a lot worse at playing frizbee. Even a dog can play frizbee, but no robot can.
My karma is, too, so there's no reason to worry about it. As to the shills, big bureaucracies like a huge corporation always have at least a few arrogant dummies in management who thing they're intelligent. "50 posts today? Attaboy!!"
Here's another reason - they played a snippet from SNL on the radio this morning, a Jimmy Fallon parody of David Bowie, "Tebowie". It was funny so I googled for an mp3 of it; there were videos but no MP3. So I search from BitTorrent, and a Bing page comes up, with few of the results having anything to do with Fallon, Bowie, or Tebow. No MP3s and no Tebowie at all.
I'm starting to believe that nobody uses Bing on purpose. The only way anybody gets there is from companies MS has paid. It's disgusting.
Windows is also secure now a days
WHAT???
Compared to the outhouse that 98 and XP were, the Win 7 carraige house is pretty secure, although nowhere near as secure as Linux's and Apple's homes. And, er, even bank vaults get broken into occasionally.
Security is like safety, neither one really exists. There are only varying degrees of each. So for someone who's never used a Mac or a Linux box, who's familiar with W95 and W98 and XP, W7 is actually secure. "Wow, I can sit on the can and there's not only no cold breeze coming in, there's even a lock on the door!"
It's probably different here in the US, but they passed similar laws here, and the tobacco companies sued (and won) because the law was unconstitutional; 1st amendment rights were violated.
If they throw you in prison and you can prove your innocence, you can sue for civil rights violations, same if someone has video of a cop beating you.
But I'm pretty sure you can't sue the government here for not passing a law you want passed, or they'd sue rather than using campaign bribery.
I've been using bing more often simply due to mistrust of google
You trust Microsoft? Why?
And using an inferior product just so the superior product has competetion doesn't make a lot of sense to me. Microsoft has historically only competed when they've been forced to; look at the clucterfuck IE was after Netscape died. It never got any better until Mozilla and Opera. If they can get users even with an inferior product, why would they be compelled to improve that product? MS had search long before Google, back when your only choices were Yahoo, Altavista, etc, none of which were very good. Google forced MS to get to work, and ran all the crappier ones out of business, or at least into obscurity. The way to get MS to compete with ANYBODY is to only use MS when their product is the best. Right now the only thing I can think of where this applies is Excel, clearly the best spreadsheet out there; I'm forced at work to use Quattro, 123, and Excel.
This is the future, folks. Give it ten years, and only the hardest of the hardcore geeks will even know how to get to the Internet.
What was old is new again! I certainly hope you're wrong, you're talking about going back to Compuserve. Even BBSes were better than Compuserve, which is why I dropped Compuserve before finally getting direct internet access. I was on Compuserve back in 1983. Sucky sucky sucky!
But then, the failed quadrophonics from the 1970s came back as "surround sound", but that's a tad different; technological advances made it succeed the second time around.
I hope you're wrong, I fear you may be right.
Since you've been moderated "troll" by an obviously paid Microsoft shill, I'll let them waste some more mod points modding me down, too. You said "So, a shitty useless search engine overtakes a lame search engine. No wonder Yahoo is so useless it uses Bing." I agree completely.
The only person I know who uses Yahhoo is my 83 year old mother. I don't know anyone who uses Bing, for obvious reasons (it's second rate crapware).
Now go on, shill, mod me "troll" because you diasgree with my OPINION (and obviously not just mine, the parent poster's as well).
I know you're joking, but you're not going to find any alien species that look anything like human. There are no Romulans, Klingons, nor especially Betazoids. You're probably unlikely to find anything that more than remotely resembles any species from Earth -- look how diverse life here is. We may find intelligent life and not even realise it's alive, let alone intelligent.
Required reading: Isaac Asimov's What is This Thing Called Love? (originally titled Playboy and the Slime God). I've read a lot of Asimov stories, and I don't think the good doctor (a biochemist) had a single alien that looked human-like, and the story I mentioned gives a clue why.
Terry Bison's They're Made Out Of Meat (online at Baen Books) is another good one.
And a thank you to slashdot for waking the muse with this topic!
Considering that 4/5ths oof our own is under water, ours is alien, as well. Most of it, anyway.
What about by Flogging Molly? "We'll drink, and drink, and drink, and drink, and drink, and drink and fight!"
People like you make me fear for my unborn grandchildren. I see folks with no understanding of how computers work thinking that they're "thinking machines", like idiots in the media have been calling them since ENIAC, which was less powerful than a Hallmark greeting card.
A computer is nothing more than an electric abacus. It works on exactly the same principle as an abacus. IT DOES NOT THINK, IT IS NOT ALIVE! I made a pseudoautonomous program thirty years ago on a machine with only 16k of memory and no disk drive. You'd have sworn it could think, but I assure you it's only David Copperfield trickery, not Merlin Magic.
But you people will have a "machine rights" movement anyway, if history is any indication.
However, I do tend to think that we might find life, even intelligent life, and not realise it's alive.
If we took all the culture/religion and all the technology away , what makes US humans different from animals?
We are animals. We're not different from animals, we're different from other animals. I'm sure bonobos think they're life's superiors and consider us less than bonoban, and probably dolphins as well (Douglas Adams comes to mind here).
If you would replace many of your organs with inorganic components and you weren't capable of reproduction through SEX , would you still consider yourself life?
I'm a cyborg, and although I can reproduce I wouldn't be able to if I were female, because I'd be past menopause. I do know post-menopausal female cyborgs, and yes, they're human as well as alive; their cells still reproduce. Are you trying to say that a eunuch isn't alive? That's just silly.
Many life forms don't reproduce through sex, but they do reproduce. Asexual reproduction doesn't mean an organism isn't alive.
I don't really care what the definition of life is because it surely is WRONG.
Words are defined by consensus. "Life" is whatever we say it is.
The shills are out in force today, and what's more they have mod points, so if your karma's not excellent, be careful.
Slashdot, PLEASE bring back the old style metamoderation! It did far better at keeping mod points out of the hands of shills, trolls, and idiots.
What I'd like to know without actually clicking that IT World link (I hate that web site) is how is AT&T building a walled garden using open source, and how is that the "ultimate" walled garden? Does that mean that after AT&T's garden there will be no more walled gardens? Does it affect their smartphone service only, or does it include their home internet delivery?
TFS is short on info, and in the past I've found IT World to be pretty info-free as well, so I'll thank anyone who can give me a detal or two, especially since AT&T is my ISP.
Indeed. The astroturfers have mod points as well. I can see your comment possibly being modded "offtopic" but only an idiot or a shill would have marked it "troll". I wish someone would mod you back up.
Bing didn't pass Yahoo because Bing's search engine is any good, it passed Yahoo because Bing's interface is clean and sharp and fast -- compared to Yahoo's incredibly shitty interface; plus, Yahoo search uses Bing's engine. Of COURSE Bing would pass them. Duh.
A fellow earlier responded to one of the shills saying that he contributed by mistake because of MS's underhanded tactics, and I have as well. A programn I DLed from C|NET changed Firefox's default search engine to Bing and even added a goddamned Bing toolbar. No more DLs from C|NET for me! That's just fucking sleazy. If you have to trick people into using your product, your product must REALLY suck.
When you have to resort to paying shills to post and moderate on messageboards, you're pretty goddamned sleazy as well. Even if their products didn't suck I'd still avoid them if possible just because of their sleaze. It's insulting and annoying.
Now go ahead and mod me troll as well, shills.
I wouldn't worry about your eyes. Just think what happens when you eat the things.
Yeah, they have a "do not eat" warning on silica gel... one guy read it and starved to death. He was the same guy, I think, who it took six months to get from New York to Florida because of all the signs that said "clean rest rooms ahead".
Well, it's "for nerds" because we all use these devices, but it isn't "news that natters" because it's not news; we already know about RMS (repetetive motion syndrome, not Richard Stallman) etc because most of us have experienced it.
TFA is really bad, though. It claims that the danger of cell phone radiation is "inconclusive", when the facts are that not a single study has shown that cell phones or CRTs cause cancer or brain damage. It's not badly written but spans seven screens; I shouldn't have even clicked. Didn't waste my time past the second screen, if you haven't RTFA don't bother, it's a waste of time.
Sell them to the DEA, they love rats.