I dunno, I'd chance it given the fact that what they've found wouldn't even make one Nickel atom. Those tanj Puppeteers are doing the usual corporate spin so as to avoid paying out the indemnity.
I've been trying to contact the Planning Office at Alpha Centauri without any success. Apparently the sub-ether network employs a protocol other than TCP/IP. I'm beginning to suspect that the system isn't even based on binary.
If I read this correctly, researchers have found anti-protons, not anti-matter. There's a difference.
Matter is the result of particles organizing themselves in a particular way. Hydrogen is one proton with one electron orbiting it. Anti-hydrogen (assuming any exists in nature -- an idea that is totally theoretical at this point) would consist of an anti-proton with one positron orbiting it.
That's not what they found. They found anti-protons -- which can be created by any number of nuclear reactions. I would submit that on a planet this size, it wouldn't be unexpected to find some anti-protons from time to time. If there's any real news here, it's that they seem to have found some trapped anti-protons.
Furthermore, there's no empirical evidence to support the notion that matter and anti-matter actually annihilate each other when they come into contact. It's a theory that dates back to 1898 when Sir Franz Arthur Friedrich Schuster whimsically wrote about it. It has been popularized in science fiction, most notably the Star Trek franchise in which M-AM reactions power warp drive.
We have never seen antimatter in nature, neither on Earth nor anywhere we've pointed telescopes. We see some radioactivity in deep space that might be the result of M-AM annihilation. They could also be the result of any number of other processes. The universe is an extremely large place, and it's sheer folly to think that Earthbound observations adequately explain everything we see. There's a hell of a lot more going on out there than we imagine stuck on the ground on Earth. I point to Earthbound observations of Venus that produced theories about the planet that were totally at odds with observations made by probes as an example.
Antimatter annihilation reactions are almost certainly the stuff of fiction, much like the scientists assigned to the Manhattan Project occasionally worried that they'd inadvertently set the entire planet's atmosphere aflame. See also anthropogenic global warming. While it's true that the best math may indicate that these things could occur, observation disagrees with theory.
I'm rather pleased that Linus came to the same conclusion I did.
On Ubuntu:
Unity: Can't do work in it: sucks.
Gnome3: Can't do work in it: sucks
"Ubuntu Classic" (Gnome2): Somehow slower under 11.04 than 10.10: sucks
KDE: Very pretty, but a resource hog: sucks
XFCE: actually works. Yes, it's a downgrade from Gnome2, but the performance difference of Gnome2 on 11.04 versus 10.10 is dramatic. It's so dramatic that XFCE starts to make sense.
Bottom line: until Ubuntu 11.04, I was suggesting Ubuntu to my n00b relatives. It worked, it was reasonably fast, and someone could sit down in front of it coming from Windows and know how to do work.
This is now only true of Xubuntu. K/Ubuntu is not fast and in the case of Unity or Gnome3, a user cannot sit down in front of it and just work. They can work in Kubuntu if they have a fast enough system. However, only in Xubuntu can one both work and be fast.
I hope Ubuntu 11.10 and/or 12.04 make changes: serious, serious changes. Until it does, I'm sticking with Xubuntu.
What's killing all press (from local to world) isn't the Internet -- the Internet is just what's replacing the press.
What's killing the press is that the industry is laced from top to bottom with ignorant Statists capable of neither investigating nor reporting accurately on the events of the day. Almost every news story in existence originates with some Google search by a flunky desperately seeking something for the talking head to say so as to keep butts in the seats and hands off the remotes.
Amazingly, the entire industry is so insular and elitist that is neither capable of seeing its own obvious incompetence nor or recognizing the truth about their entire industry:
That is now nothing more than a batch of scandal sheets and hack-rags, and its former customers are starting to figure that out. Result: they're no longer buying what the press is selling -- because the press is selling total bullshit.
For thirty years, I've made a hobby of de-bunking the press. In the age of the Internet, give me any press story, Google, and fifteen minutes, and I can usually prove that the story never occurred in reality. There's typically a kernel of truth, but it will have been sensationalized and transformed to the point where it bears only a tangential relationship to reality.
Mark this and mark it well: the world beyond your immediate experience isn't what you think it is. Do not assume that anything the press reports is accurate -- in fact, it's a good bed that every report is made up of almost whole cloth.
If you can afford it, this always seems to work well. There's been a number of very successful designs based on this in the last 40 years, actually.
Basically, you have your two lead sysadmins and a senior sysadmin in the lower, central section. Surrounding them are secondary (usually unmanned) workstations and displays. Directly in front of them is the master display.
Personally, I can't wait for the US Federal Government to require all individuals to have these types of IDs. They think they're going to exert control over me by always being able to track me.
But I know that hackers will figure these things out, and ultimately no door that needs an ID will be safe from me.
Oh, sure, the non-technical people will suffer. But me? I'm going to do the things none of the other serfs will be able to do. For them, the ID will be a prison. For me, it will be my ticket to go anywhere I feel like.
I'm down with Obama flying a biplane as long as they recreate Randy Quaid's fate. Be the first time the little statist ever did anything useful with his life.
I'm writing this on Lucid beta1, and my window controls are in the upper right where I want them. As usual, my first download post-install was Ubuntu-Tweak, which has a handy configuration section that lets you order and position the window controls to your liking.
Open Source isn't a democracy, it's Open Source. That's kind of the point. With the source, you can write an app like Ubuntu-Tweak to overcome anything that you think is a deficit.
This won't last long (at least in the West) because they're going to find several things:
An extraordinary amount of time is spent walking, mostly to kill time. Fat chance dictating that people walk faster.
This is a phenomenon I've observed repeatedly in the IT infrastructure field. When I have to get off my ass and actually go somewhere, it's at a sprint because something broke so badly I couldn't remote it and it's probably frakking important. This has caused me to increase my walking speed in general over the years, to the point where the average employee's gait drives me insane when I run across them in the halls.
Another time-waster is just sitting at your desk pretending to be working but really just zoning out. See the movie Office Space for details. Fat chance dictating that people not zone out when there's clearly a spreadsheet sitting in front of them.
And finally, they're going to discover that the overwhelming majority of women in the workplace kill time chatting and socializing.
Fat chance getting a member of a protected class to do anything useful. The moment someone comes out with conclusive proof that most women spend three to five hours a day doing exactly nothing worth paying for, the Feminists will crawl out of the woodwork to blame men for it, and the entire science will die a quick death.
Not that I think this is a moral application of science, mind you. In fact, I see it as a huge opportunity to make money selling software to feed bogus accelerometer data to the monitoring program.
Subscribe to my service, and as far as your boss is concerned, you arrived at the office at 7am; had a 15-minute lunch and no coffee breaks; took one 2-minute bathroom break; and left work at 7pm.
Premium users have access to the AI engine, which generates topic-appropriate emails to co-workers to make it appear that you work and play well with others.
For a surcharge, you can even rent an illegal alien to actually sit at your desk while you lounge at home. This is my real money-maker, because I can hire illegals at $0.50 an hour, but I rent them out at $3.00 an hour. So for $36.00 a day, you can stay home and kick back while your phone and a body says you're at work.
And I know, you're saying, "But I'm a six-foot Aryan -- how will some Mexican illegal pull it off?" Oh, ye of little knowledge! There are far more than just Mexican illegals out there. U.S. immigration laws leak like a seive, and I can get you a six-foot blond Norwegian illegal just as easily as I can a hispanic. You just have to know where to look.
There's not a single newspaper in the United States worth paying for. Period. And that absolutely includes the New York Times.
The argument they're having is pointless. As long as the press continues to distort reality the way it has ever since my first experience with it over 20 years ago, it's not worth a dime. They can make up any kind of "fair" price they want, but the market has spoken: journalism is dead, and everyone knows it.
In 45 years on planet Earth, there has been no story with which I've been personally involved that was accurately reported. I assume that if they can't get it right with me once a year or so, they're probably never getting it right.
There's only one way for the American press to save itself, and that's by stringently limiting its reporting to verifiable facts. No editorializing, no emotionally loaded language, no half-truths or only telling one side of the story. No angles, no viewpoints. Just the facts, ma'am.
As long as I can report the facts more accurately than the press, the press is doomed. And that's a damned good thing.
Nah, this is the Internet, just not the stuff hanging off of it like Web servers...
I'm not sure how they'd even notify the Internet of its having won, assuming that it does. The most reliably way I can think of is to ping the entire supply of public IPv4 addresses. Once they have, say, 50% replies back, they can consider the Internet to have accepted.
But perhaps you'd need to make it a super-majority. After all, given the historic importance of the Nobel Prize, there should be as great a number of devices and computers as possible to make it representative.
Then there are all those pesky firewalls rejecting UNDP... how will we know if those devices can accept on behalf of the Internet?
I've got it. They get the most recent winner of the award to get a bill introduced in his nation's Congress requiring UNDP to be turned on for any device carrying a public IP addresses, including LinkSys home routers. Make it a Federal crime to fail to turn on UNDP, with a minimum sentence of ten years in prison and a $50,000 fine. Create and hire a whole new batch of flunkies whose job it is to hunt down those who've not turned on UNDP.
Revolt isn't necessary: the Federal Government is going to go bankrupt in the fairly near future and consequently collapse. With no money to fund it all, this becomes a self-correcting problem.
Uhhh... anyone with training in physical security. Any decent CISSP with even a modicum of training in physical security can tell you why what they've done is a pointless waste of time.
For over sixty years these guys have been messing with this clock, and for sixty years they've been wrong every time. Why do they think anyone cares what they have to say now?
I think it has something to do with Chinese savings now being the foundation of much of the western economy, and the fact that China is a major nuclear power.
What China realised and the USSR didn't, IMO, is that they could forget the cold war and essentially buy the west with the west's own money.
I agree except that the West's money is about to be hyper-inflated beyond all value and the world economy will drop like a rock for a long, long time.
China only survives because the West buys its products, thereby keeping its billion citizens working just enough to keep revolution in check. When we can no longer afford even inexpensive Chinese products, their economy is going to drop out from under them, half a billion people are going to start starving, and the Chinese Government will have a revolution on their hands.
If the US is very, very lucky, defaulting on all the money it owes the Chinese won't trigger World War III.
Sadly, with the timing, this is only going to antagonize a relationship that's doomed in the first place because of US financial policy.
I would really have ignored this the way it's been ignored as long as I've been in ITSec. There's nothing to be gained by antagonizing China at this time except to strain relations shortly before they're broken entirely. The break itself may trigger a nuclear exchange, after all: no reason to exacerbate things.
In case you can't afford the bot yet, Here is a hint: for many women porn and a "magic wand" are not the key to sexual bliss.
This isn't news to anyone.
Indeed, this is what I've aspired to my whole life. What I discovered after four decades' experience with Western women is that they do not, in fact, want what you're suggesting they want.
Western women want a free ride. They want to be able to do anything they like at someone else's expense. They use tactics that can only be called abuse to achieve this end. It's unnecessary to go into any details about this, but you can easily see it in pop culture trends.
Western women consider men to be foolish children incapable of achieving anything without female guidance. This leads them to look down on men, degrade them, and treat them like incompetents.
These two attitudes lead Western women to use psychologically damaging tactics to achieve their goals. This includes witholding affection or love (sex being a separate issue), verbal and emotional abuse, and occasionally even physical abuse. Men, in turn, are conditioned by women to see this as normal behavior and not kick the woman to the curb the way they should.
A real gyndroid (which this isn't) will allow us to kick women to the curb with the exception of procreation. That's an extremely good thing because it will require women to alter their behavior to at least the minimum standards of an unfeeling, uncaring robot. Failure to do so will mean that they'll end up alone and childless -- and there appears to be little that terrifies a woman more than that.
Bottom line: I've always treated women respectfully as human beings. The overwhelming majority of men treat women this way. However, the overwhelming majoring of Western women do not treat men this way.
I'm utterly thrilled that I'm going to live to see this change. It's too late for the men of my generation or the one that followed to have a loving, supportive relationship with a woman. The men of my grandchildren's age, however, will inherit a kinder, gentler woman.
All joking aside, I think the strong reaction by women against love robots for men stems from a perceived difference in what sex means for men and women.
I think it's actually a lot simpler than that:
If a real gyndroid (which this isn't -- the folks at AndyDroid are making a far more sophisticated device) ever became popular with men, the free ride is over for women.
There appears to be little that terrifies a woman more than the thought of living alone her whole life. I don't understand it, but I've certainly observed the behavior often enough.
If a real gyndroid hits the market, men will discover that they can, in fact, have a significantly less expensive artificial female around that provides the same or better emotional support than a human woman.
This means that a lot of women are going to be alone. Forever.
This frankly scares the shit out of them. They react with hostility toward anything that might upset the current status quo (i.e. being abusive toward a man while simultaneously getting him to buy expensive trinkets for her).
I hope the real gyndroid comes soon. Its widespread adoption is the only thing that will convince Western women to change their behavior.
I appreciate the compassion, however that doesn't solve the basic problem. My perspective is this:
There are a small number of people who fall out of window five stories up and survive totally unscathed. That doesn't mean you should follow their example and jump out a fifth-floor window.
In my experience (admittedly relatively limited, as everyone's experiences are), there are tens of millions of men in the West looking for a compassionate, supportive life partner in a woman. Almost none of them are finding it. The divorce rates alone would tend to support this. If you start talking to men about their wives or girlfriends, you find that virtually all of them share my experience to some extent or another
This suggests to me that this is a widespread problem in female behavior and not just my bad luck. It suggest that the overwhelming majority of women are simply incapable of compassion or support -- certainly not at the level that men provide to women on a daily basis.
There's a problem with female behavior in the West, plain and simple. It has nothing to do with being subservient and everything to do with being just plain abusive toward men.
The real issue is that it's so politically incorrect to point this out that men cannot convince women to alter their behavior.
Consequently, men vote with their feet by not marrying and by resorting to sex with strangers simply to meet our physical needs.
A gyndroid is a perfect way for men to vote with their feet. A real, functioning gyndroid capable of being programmed with a minimum amount of simulated compassion and affection is now better than having a relationship with a woman.
Frankly, I hope this takes off in a huge way. When the majority of women can't find a mate because men have decided that an uncaring, unfeeling robot is better than a woman, they'll be forced to change their behavior
Watch closely. You'll know it's working when women start trying to outlaw these devices.
I really hope I'm just feeding the troll here, because the alternative that it might be genuine is horrifying.
Get ready to be horrified.
I don't think I've ever read a bigger load of misogynistic tripe in my life.
It's not misogynistic to point out the truth.
No modern Western man goes into a relationship looking for a slave. They go into it looking for a compassionate, supportive life partner.
Sadly, at least in the West, women are generally incapable of fulfilling this desire. Indeed, typically the reverse is true.
Women are not angels. They are not cooks, they are not money whores, they are not 'skilled life companions'. They are *people*. They are all individuals with different desires, loves, lusts, skills and minds.
Indeed. And in general, none of those desires, loves, lusts, or skills in any way assists them in being compassionate, supportive life partners. Typically, it drives them to be precisely the opposite.
If this weren't so, there wouldn't be a market for a gyndroid. A gyndroid will always be expensive and no doubt require tinkering to perfect it to your liking. It's clearly a massive undertaking, particularly from the engineering perspective.
So consider: the situation has now become so bad that men will consider a soulless, unfeeling, uncaring robot rather than a human woman.
Rather than looking at it from the perspective that men are pigs, one should consider that Western women's behavior is now so bad that a gyndroid looks pretty good.
Are men to blame for this situation? I can't speak for anyone else, but I didn't begin to support the idea until 40 years on planet Earth had demonstrated that a compassionate, supportive life partner isn't possible with a human woman.
I feel sorry for you, and I feel sorry for the women in your life, that you see them as just after the money in your wallet; that romance is about counting up how much the bill costs.
I think perhaps I wasn't clear. I don't see women as just after the money in my wallet: I'm reacting to the experience of being treated like a human wallet by every woman I've ever had a relationship with. No exceptions.
Men of my generation were trained to think of the Alan Alda type as the feminine ideal. We go into a relationship wanting to share ourselves and our hopes and feelings... only to smack into a brick wall when the woman gets upset when we're short of cash.
How do you have romance when it's success depends not on you being a compassionate, supportive life partner... but rather how much money you can spend on a woman?
But it's one thing to be an asshole, and it's another thing to then classify hundreds millions of women as all self-centered money-grubbing liabilities.
Ok, find me an American woman who isn't. I've spent 45 years, now, actively looking. All I've found is mercenarily self-centered emotional and financial black holes. Frankly, I didn't believe in the concept of a succubus until fairly recently...
Again, bottom line and to stay topical: modern Western women are incapable of being good life mates. Or at best, if there are some who are, they are in such a tiny minority as to be impossible to locate. Consequently, there is nothing to recommend a human woman over a gyndroid except procreation.
Well, yes, duh. Why do you think feminists got a reputation for being so grouchy all the time? Realizing just how often men are sexist pigs, and how often other men support them in being so, tends to do that...
That turns out not to be the case.
Any woman under the age of 45 has probably never met a sexist. If she has, it wasn't anything like the level of sexism that would have been commonplace a century ago.
Not to mention the entire rest of recorded human history.
Women today have it considerably better than men, yet they appear to be incapable of appreciating this fact.
I have a feeling there's another side of the story that's rather different...
There are always two sides of a story, of course.
In this case, it would be multiple sides, as it would be every woman I've ever had a relationship with -- and that would include my sister, my mother, every single one of my five aunts, and my 90-year-old grandmother. Every single one has displayed the kind of mercenary self-centeredness that makes them poor mates
And again, this is a problem that simply sells a gyndroid. What if you never had to put up with all the crap again, while receiving exactly the same level of emotional support as you'd get from a human woman?
When the beauty wears off, as it does for most women (especially those who spend a lot of time eating restaurant food) then they'll find themselves floating home.
If only that were true. Sadly, the situation is that when the beauty wears off, the women divorce the men, take all their possessions, and drive his car home.
Which, naturally, simply makes the gyndroid all the more appealing. There's no worry that if things don't work out, you'll end up in the poorhouse.
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I dunno, I'd chance it given the fact that what they've found wouldn't even make one Nickel atom. Those tanj Puppeteers are doing the usual corporate spin so as to avoid paying out the indemnity.
I've been trying to contact the Planning Office at Alpha Centauri without any success. Apparently the sub-ether network employs a protocol other than TCP/IP. I'm beginning to suspect that the system isn't even based on binary.
If I read this correctly, researchers have found anti-protons, not anti-matter. There's a difference.
Matter is the result of particles organizing themselves in a particular way. Hydrogen is one proton with one electron orbiting it. Anti-hydrogen (assuming any exists in nature -- an idea that is totally theoretical at this point) would consist of an anti-proton with one positron orbiting it.
That's not what they found. They found anti-protons -- which can be created by any number of nuclear reactions. I would submit that on a planet this size, it wouldn't be unexpected to find some anti-protons from time to time. If there's any real news here, it's that they seem to have found some trapped anti-protons.
Furthermore, there's no empirical evidence to support the notion that matter and anti-matter actually annihilate each other when they come into contact. It's a theory that dates back to 1898 when Sir Franz Arthur Friedrich Schuster whimsically wrote about it. It has been popularized in science fiction, most notably the Star Trek franchise in which M-AM reactions power warp drive.
We have never seen antimatter in nature, neither on Earth nor anywhere we've pointed telescopes. We see some radioactivity in deep space that might be the result of M-AM annihilation. They could also be the result of any number of other processes. The universe is an extremely large place, and it's sheer folly to think that Earthbound observations adequately explain everything we see. There's a hell of a lot more going on out there than we imagine stuck on the ground on Earth. I point to Earthbound observations of Venus that produced theories about the planet that were totally at odds with observations made by probes as an example.
Antimatter annihilation reactions are almost certainly the stuff of fiction, much like the scientists assigned to the Manhattan Project occasionally worried that they'd inadvertently set the entire planet's atmosphere aflame. See also anthropogenic global warming. While it's true that the best math may indicate that these things could occur, observation disagrees with theory.
I'm rather pleased that Linus came to the same conclusion I did.
On Ubuntu:
Bottom line: until Ubuntu 11.04, I was suggesting Ubuntu to my n00b relatives. It worked, it was reasonably fast, and someone could sit down in front of it coming from Windows and know how to do work.
This is now only true of Xubuntu. K/Ubuntu is not fast and in the case of Unity or Gnome3, a user cannot sit down in front of it and just work. They can work in Kubuntu if they have a fast enough system. However, only in Xubuntu can one both work and be fast.
I hope Ubuntu 11.10 and/or 12.04 make changes: serious, serious changes. Until it does, I'm sticking with Xubuntu.
I get my retro geek on via the C=64 emulator on my Motorola Droid.
What's killing all press (from local to world) isn't the Internet -- the Internet is just what's replacing the press.
What's killing the press is that the industry is laced from top to bottom with ignorant Statists capable of neither investigating nor reporting accurately on the events of the day. Almost every news story in existence originates with some Google search by a flunky desperately seeking something for the talking head to say so as to keep butts in the seats and hands off the remotes.
Amazingly, the entire industry is so insular and elitist that is neither capable of seeing its own obvious incompetence nor or recognizing the truth about their entire industry:
That is now nothing more than a batch of scandal sheets and hack-rags, and its former customers are starting to figure that out. Result: they're no longer buying what the press is selling -- because the press is selling total bullshit.
For thirty years, I've made a hobby of de-bunking the press. In the age of the Internet, give me any press story, Google, and fifteen minutes, and I can usually prove that the story never occurred in reality. There's typically a kernel of truth, but it will have been sensationalized and transformed to the point where it bears only a tangential relationship to reality.
Mark this and mark it well: the world beyond your immediate experience isn't what you think it is. Do not assume that anything the press reports is accurate -- in fact, it's a good bed that every report is made up of almost whole cloth.
If you can afford it, this always seems to work well. There's been a number of very successful designs based on this in the last 40 years, actually.
Basically, you have your two lead sysadmins and a senior sysadmin in the lower, central section. Surrounding them are secondary (usually unmanned) workstations and displays. Directly in front of them is the master display.
As I say, a lot of successful designs based on this one. That's why there's a complete set of blueprints online
-- damned thing's practically open source.
Awesome. Truly awesome.
Personally, I can't wait for the US Federal Government to require all individuals to have these types of IDs. They think they're going to exert control over me by always being able to track me.
But I know that hackers will figure these things out, and ultimately no door that needs an ID will be safe from me.
Oh, sure, the non-technical people will suffer. But me? I'm going to do the things none of the other serfs will be able to do. For them, the ID will be a prison. For me, it will be my ticket to go anywhere I feel like.
Bring it. :D
I'm down with Obama flying a biplane as long as they recreate Randy Quaid's fate. Be the first time the little statist ever did anything useful with his life.
Um ... who cares?
I'm writing this on Lucid beta1, and my window controls are in the upper right where I want them. As usual, my first download post-install was Ubuntu-Tweak, which has a handy configuration section that lets you order and position the window controls to your liking.
Open Source isn't a democracy, it's Open Source. That's kind of the point. With the source, you can write an app like Ubuntu-Tweak to overcome anything that you think is a deficit.
This is a phenomenon I've observed repeatedly in the IT infrastructure field. When I have to get off my ass and actually go somewhere, it's at a sprint because something broke so badly I couldn't remote it and it's probably frakking important. This has caused me to increase my walking speed in general over the years, to the point where the average employee's gait drives me insane when I run across them in the halls.
Fat chance getting a member of a protected class to do anything useful. The moment someone comes out with conclusive proof that most women spend three to five hours a day doing exactly nothing worth paying for, the Feminists will crawl out of the woodwork to blame men for it, and the entire science will die a quick death.
Not that I think this is a moral application of science, mind you. In fact, I see it as a huge opportunity to make money selling software to feed bogus accelerometer data to the monitoring program.
Subscribe to my service, and as far as your boss is concerned, you arrived at the office at 7am; had a 15-minute lunch and no coffee breaks; took one 2-minute bathroom break; and left work at 7pm.
Premium users have access to the AI engine, which generates topic-appropriate emails to co-workers to make it appear that you work and play well with others.
For a surcharge, you can even rent an illegal alien to actually sit at your desk while you lounge at home. This is my real money-maker, because I can hire illegals at $0.50 an hour, but I rent them out at $3.00 an hour. So for $36.00 a day, you can stay home and kick back while your phone and a body says you're at work.
And I know, you're saying, "But I'm a six-foot Aryan -- how will some Mexican illegal pull it off?" Oh, ye of little knowledge! There are far more than just Mexican illegals out there. U.S. immigration laws leak like a seive, and I can get you a six-foot blond Norwegian illegal just as easily as I can a hispanic. You just have to know where to look.
There's not a single newspaper in the United States worth paying for. Period. And that absolutely includes the New York Times.
The argument they're having is pointless. As long as the press continues to distort reality the way it has ever since my first experience with it over 20 years ago, it's not worth a dime. They can make up any kind of "fair" price they want, but the market has spoken: journalism is dead, and everyone knows it.
In 45 years on planet Earth, there has been no story with which I've been personally involved that was accurately reported. I assume that if they can't get it right with me once a year or so, they're probably never getting it right.
There's only one way for the American press to save itself, and that's by stringently limiting its reporting to verifiable facts. No editorializing, no emotionally loaded language, no half-truths or only telling one side of the story. No angles, no viewpoints. Just the facts, ma'am.
As long as I can report the facts more accurately than the press, the press is doomed. And that's a damned good thing.
Nah, this is the Internet, just not the stuff hanging off of it like Web servers ...
I'm not sure how they'd even notify the Internet of its having won, assuming that it does. The most reliably way I can think of is to ping the entire supply of public IPv4 addresses. Once they have, say, 50% replies back, they can consider the Internet to have accepted.
But perhaps you'd need to make it a super-majority. After all, given the historic importance of the Nobel Prize, there should be as great a number of devices and computers as possible to make it representative.
Then there are all those pesky firewalls rejecting UNDP ... how will we know if those devices can accept on behalf of the Internet?
I've got it. They get the most recent winner of the award to get a bill introduced in his nation's Congress requiring UNDP to be turned on for any device carrying a public IP addresses, including LinkSys home routers. Make it a Federal crime to fail to turn on UNDP, with a minimum sentence of ten years in prison and a $50,000 fine. Create and hire a whole new batch of flunkies whose job it is to hunt down those who've not turned on UNDP.
I mean, come on, it's for the children.
Well, after exposing themselves for the utter frauds they are after the last winner, I'd hardly put it past the Committee.
There's no reason to give a Nobel Prize of any kind to an inanimate collection of circuits. You give the prize to people who built the circuits.
I mean, you know ... duh.
I wondering if my knowing this particular tidbit of sanity would qualify me for a Nobel Prize of my own ... ?
Revolt isn't necessary: the Federal Government is going to go bankrupt in the fairly near future and consequently collapse. With no money to fund it all, this becomes a self-correcting problem.
Who could have guess this to be the case?
Uhhh ... anyone with training in physical security. Any decent CISSP with even a modicum of training in physical security can tell you why what they've done is a pointless waste of time.
Nobel laureates or not, these people are dimwits.
For over sixty years these guys have been messing with this clock, and for sixty years they've been wrong every time. Why do they think anyone cares what they have to say now?
I think it has something to do with Chinese savings now being the foundation of much of the western economy, and the fact that China is a major nuclear power.
What China realised and the USSR didn't, IMO, is that they could forget the cold war and essentially buy the west with the west's own money.
I agree except that the West's money is about to be hyper-inflated beyond all value and the world economy will drop like a rock for a long, long time.
China only survives because the West buys its products, thereby keeping its billion citizens working just enough to keep revolution in check. When we can no longer afford even inexpensive Chinese products, their economy is going to drop out from under them, half a billion people are going to start starving, and the Chinese Government will have a revolution on their hands.
If the US is very, very lucky, defaulting on all the money it owes the Chinese won't trigger World War III.
Sadly, with the timing, this is only going to antagonize a relationship that's doomed in the first place because of US financial policy.
I would really have ignored this the way it's been ignored as long as I've been in ITSec. There's nothing to be gained by antagonizing China at this time except to strain relations shortly before they're broken entirely. The break itself may trigger a nuclear exchange, after all: no reason to exacerbate things.
Sadly, no longer feasible. The modern Western woman only uses love as a tactic.
In case you can't afford the bot yet, Here is a hint: for many women porn and a "magic wand" are not the key to sexual bliss.
This isn't news to anyone.
Indeed, this is what I've aspired to my whole life. What I discovered after four decades' experience with Western women is that they do not, in fact, want what you're suggesting they want.
Western women want a free ride. They want to be able to do anything they like at someone else's expense. They use tactics that can only be called abuse to achieve this end. It's unnecessary to go into any details about this, but you can easily see it in pop culture trends.
Western women consider men to be foolish children incapable of achieving anything without female guidance. This leads them to look down on men, degrade them, and treat them like incompetents.
These two attitudes lead Western women to use psychologically damaging tactics to achieve their goals. This includes witholding affection or love (sex being a separate issue), verbal and emotional abuse, and occasionally even physical abuse. Men, in turn, are conditioned by women to see this as normal behavior and not kick the woman to the curb the way they should.
A real gyndroid (which this isn't) will allow us to kick women to the curb with the exception of procreation. That's an extremely good thing because it will require women to alter their behavior to at least the minimum standards of an unfeeling, uncaring robot. Failure to do so will mean that they'll end up alone and childless -- and there appears to be little that terrifies a woman more than that.
Bottom line: I've always treated women respectfully as human beings. The overwhelming majority of men treat women this way. However, the overwhelming majoring of Western women do not treat men this way.
I'm utterly thrilled that I'm going to live to see this change. It's too late for the men of my generation or the one that followed to have a loving, supportive relationship with a woman. The men of my grandchildren's age, however, will inherit a kinder, gentler woman.
All joking aside, I think the strong reaction by women against love robots for men stems from a perceived difference in what sex means for men and women.
I think it's actually a lot simpler than that:
If a real gyndroid (which this isn't -- the folks at AndyDroid are making a far more sophisticated device) ever became popular with men, the free ride is over for women.
There appears to be little that terrifies a woman more than the thought of living alone her whole life. I don't understand it, but I've certainly observed the behavior often enough.
If a real gyndroid hits the market, men will discover that they can, in fact, have a significantly less expensive artificial female around that provides the same or better emotional support than a human woman.
This means that a lot of women are going to be alone. Forever.
This frankly scares the shit out of them. They react with hostility toward anything that might upset the current status quo (i.e. being abusive toward a man while simultaneously getting him to buy expensive trinkets for her).
I hope the real gyndroid comes soon. Its widespread adoption is the only thing that will convince Western women to change their behavior.
I appreciate the compassion, however that doesn't solve the basic problem. My perspective is this:
There are a small number of people who fall out of window five stories up and survive totally unscathed. That doesn't mean you should follow their example and jump out a fifth-floor window.
In my experience (admittedly relatively limited, as everyone's experiences are), there are tens of millions of men in the West looking for a compassionate, supportive life partner in a woman. Almost none of them are finding it. The divorce rates alone would tend to support this. If you start talking to men about their wives or girlfriends, you find that virtually all of them share my experience to some extent or another
This suggests to me that this is a widespread problem in female behavior and not just my bad luck. It suggest that the overwhelming majority of women are simply incapable of compassion or support -- certainly not at the level that men provide to women on a daily basis.
There's a problem with female behavior in the West, plain and simple. It has nothing to do with being subservient and everything to do with being just plain abusive toward men.
The real issue is that it's so politically incorrect to point this out that men cannot convince women to alter their behavior.
Consequently, men vote with their feet by not marrying and by resorting to sex with strangers simply to meet our physical needs.
A gyndroid is a perfect way for men to vote with their feet. A real, functioning gyndroid capable of being programmed with a minimum amount of simulated compassion and affection is now better than having a relationship with a woman.
Frankly, I hope this takes off in a huge way. When the majority of women can't find a mate because men have decided that an uncaring, unfeeling robot is better than a woman, they'll be forced to change their behavior
Watch closely. You'll know it's working when women start trying to outlaw these devices.
I really hope I'm just feeding the troll here, because the alternative that it might be genuine is horrifying.
Get ready to be horrified.
I don't think I've ever read a bigger load of misogynistic tripe in my life.
It's not misogynistic to point out the truth.
No modern Western man goes into a relationship looking for a slave. They go into it looking for a compassionate, supportive life partner.
Sadly, at least in the West, women are generally incapable of fulfilling this desire. Indeed, typically the reverse is true.
Women are not angels. They are not cooks, they are not money whores, they are not 'skilled life companions'. They are *people*. They are all individuals with different desires, loves, lusts, skills and minds.
Indeed. And in general, none of those desires, loves, lusts, or skills in any way assists them in being compassionate, supportive life partners. Typically, it drives them to be precisely the opposite.
If this weren't so, there wouldn't be a market for a gyndroid. A gyndroid will always be expensive and no doubt require tinkering to perfect it to your liking. It's clearly a massive undertaking, particularly from the engineering perspective.
So consider: the situation has now become so bad that men will consider a soulless, unfeeling, uncaring robot rather than a human woman.
Rather than looking at it from the perspective that men are pigs, one should consider that Western women's behavior is now so bad that a gyndroid looks pretty good.
Are men to blame for this situation? I can't speak for anyone else, but I didn't begin to support the idea until 40 years on planet Earth had demonstrated that a compassionate, supportive life partner isn't possible with a human woman.
I feel sorry for you, and I feel sorry for the women in your life, that you see them as just after the money in your wallet; that romance is about counting up how much the bill costs.
I think perhaps I wasn't clear. I don't see women as just after the money in my wallet: I'm reacting to the experience of being treated like a human wallet by every woman I've ever had a relationship with. No exceptions.
Men of my generation were trained to think of the Alan Alda type as the feminine ideal. We go into a relationship wanting to share ourselves and our hopes and feelings ... only to smack into a brick wall when the woman gets upset when we're short of cash.
How do you have romance when it's success depends not on you being a compassionate, supportive life partner ... but rather how much money you can spend on a woman?
But it's one thing to be an asshole, and it's another thing to then classify hundreds millions of women as all self-centered money-grubbing liabilities.
Ok, find me an American woman who isn't. I've spent 45 years, now, actively looking. All I've found is mercenarily self-centered emotional and financial black holes. Frankly, I didn't believe in the concept of a succubus until fairly recently ...
Again, bottom line and to stay topical: modern Western women are incapable of being good life mates. Or at best, if there are some who are, they are in such a tiny minority as to be impossible to locate. Consequently, there is nothing to recommend a human woman over a gyndroid except procreation.
Well, yes, duh. Why do you think feminists got a reputation for being so grouchy all the time? Realizing just how often men are sexist pigs, and how often other men support them in being so, tends to do that...
That turns out not to be the case.
Any woman under the age of 45 has probably never met a sexist. If she has, it wasn't anything like the level of sexism that would have been commonplace a century ago.
Not to mention the entire rest of recorded human history.
Women today have it considerably better than men, yet they appear to be incapable of appreciating this fact.
I have a feeling there's another side of the story that's rather different...
There are always two sides of a story, of course.
In this case, it would be multiple sides, as it would be every woman I've ever had a relationship with -- and that would include my sister, my mother, every single one of my five aunts, and my 90-year-old grandmother. Every single one has displayed the kind of mercenary self-centeredness that makes them poor mates
And again, this is a problem that simply sells a gyndroid. What if you never had to put up with all the crap again, while receiving exactly the same level of emotional support as you'd get from a human woman?
When the beauty wears off, as it does for most women (especially those who spend a lot of time eating restaurant food) then they'll find themselves floating home.
If only that were true. Sadly, the situation is that when the beauty wears off, the women divorce the men, take all their possessions, and drive his car home.
Which, naturally, simply makes the gyndroid all the more appealing. There's no worry that if things don't work out, you'll end up in the poorhouse.