Exactly. I would definitely not wear such a product, not with the news floating around that England's trying to track all car travel and my own country working on a similar system. I don't want some lout watching me, even though "I have nothing to hide."
Instead, what if we encouraged major sites (that Chinese people actually use) to post extensive Tiananmen info and other subversive stuff in a prominent place for a few days? Or simply a script that IDs Chinese IPs and displays a little message viz., "We're sorry, this page is not compatible with your government?"
OK, although if I recall, the Manchus imposed a hairstyle that was supposed to represent the total subservience of the Han. What about the takeover of what Neil Stephenson called the "Mao Dynasty?"
What does "an unbroken history" mean? The Chinese themselves have a saying that "the Empire long united, tends to divide" (and vice versa), and they've been through plenty of dynasties and several fairly successful foreign invasions. What would constitute a "break?"
Heh, appropriate name!
Actually certain fantasy scenarios are good test cases for designing an AI. Say that a certain doctor sends a robotic minion to seize a bird from a girl in a prison cell.
Robot: Give me the bird.
Girl: No!
Robot: Resistance is futile. Give me the bird.
Girl: I wanna know why you want it!
Robot:...Data unavailable.
Solve this problem and you're on your way to good AI. For another test case, think of the guards in Swamp Castle in "Monty Python and the Holy Grail"!
(I used a "tailed_frog" as a test object for early AI characters to fetch.)
History: I've been thinking about this and related concepts from some experiments of my own. One way to build a more realistic setting includes large-scale "evolution" of societies. Create models of tribes that move around and interact, semi-randomly developing different cultural traits, eg. cultures that spend time in Steppe terrain sometimes get horses (Chocobos?) as domestic animals and are more likely to invent chariots and compound bows. Run the simulation for a while and you have a virtual guidebook to the world's cultures. Then, use that data combined with something like "Medieval Demographics Made Easy" to design and place some random cities and other structures, with data on the kinds of people present there. Then you can randomly generate specific locations within an area, specific quests etc. A really crude old demo of the kind of thing I mean is here, wrapping a dinky game around the world-viewer program.
Dialogue: From talking with fellow Loebner Prize Contest entrants, I get the impression that dialogue is very important to people's impression of a game world. In most RPGs, dialogue is severaly limited ("Welcome to our town!"), and even in "Morrowind" (haven't yet played "Oblivion") it all has to be written by a human. What if, instead, dialogue were generated by the AI, based on its own desires and experiences? If you used the "History" system above, that could also affect dialogue. "Long ago, it's said our people lived to the east..."
In general, what I want to see are characters that have their own motivations and are capable of learning and reasoning. This is more likely to be noticable among ally characters whom the hero can get to know over time, rather than enemies whose function is to die after a minute's struggle. One approach would involve lots of specialized "codelets" as in Hofstadter's Metacat program.
I cannot spread whatever information I want (for example a movie)
Sure you can! Are you speaking of the technical difficulty? That's not a matter of "free speech." And you can use sites like YouTube or Google Video to make homemade video accessible to the world.
As for yours and the other poster's comments about ethnic Chinese not minding the lack of free speech, that's disappointing but fine... for those people. So some -- let's say most -- Chinese don't mind political oppresion. Does that justify complicity with that oppression, or the actual harm to those who'd like to practice freedom of speech and religion? Why not let people vote and worship as they choose, or not, rather than killing those who try?
What's the difference between a China's one-party system and our two-party system? Basically, error-checking. When our politicians are corrupt or incompetant we have some chance of finding out, complaining, and maybe replacing them. If China's government were honest it would welcome criticism, as a way of uncovering mistakes and corruption. What the censorship tells you is that the politicians there can't handle the truth about what they're doing.
Direct democracy? Yes, if we can find a way to make it work. I don't want Diebold making the machines. 8p
Mass censorship and the imprisonment of dissenters isn't oppression?
And again, "religious and cultural reasons" means that some authority in those countries has decided to force its views on culture on everyone, using violence to tell individuals how to behave. If the culture really opposed the viewing of sites on democracy etc., then people would choose not to view those sites. They wouldn't need to be threatened. Same with dictatorship: do people really choose to submit to a guy who's willing to murder their families?
But yes, it's ultimately up to the people in oppressive countries to fight for their own freedom. These hackers are just giving them the tools.
And for comparison, I feel the same way about the US "war on drugs."
I like this idea. To implement part of it, what if we make a ZIP of the top 100 Popular Forbidden Books and mirror it everywhere? (How to keep censors from identifying that file? Start burying the data in desktop wallpaper or MP3s?) Or is it mainly dynamic content (like the latest Tibet news) that's in demand?
I think part of the reason for this is Tivo et. al, and Web-based shows. Each format allows people some means of skipping over ads, right? If the ads are extremely short, maybe people will be more willing to sit through them. Or at least they'll be unable to get up and grab a beer during the commercial break, unless there are thirty ads in a row...
Reminds me of that WarioWare game, except that the theme every time is "Buy!"
Some of the GURPS books really are good references for other things, like writing. I especially recommend GURPS Religion (the design of gods, real-in-the-setting or not), Atlantis (the original legend and spin-offs), Bio-Tech (gengineering), and the Transhuman Space books (advanced tech of all kinds).
According to recent legislation, they do. Many states are considering laws banning malware that collects personal information and scans victims' computers to identify and delete software, but declaring that said laws don't apply to software makers looking for illegal or unauthorized activity.
Most likely those +42 Boots of Butt-Kicking, and your pile of Linden Dollars, will fall under the tax code's doctrine of the "realization requirement." Basically, you're not taxed on "profits" that are part of some speculative, fluctuating state like an investment until you try to pull cash out of it. What's more likely to draw the attention of the IRS's Eye of Sauron is the day someone claims a gaming rig as a business expense, or tries to offset capital losses in-game against real-world capital gains, or sets up a real-world barter network using virtual currency. (See eg. Bruce Sterling's story "Maneki Neko.")
Alternatively, just require that the IRS come to collect the taxes in-game. Fun PK action!
(I can't believe I voluntarily opened this copy of the tax code again after the exam.)
The Disney-led modifications to American copyright law go farther than just extending the term to life + 70 years. The 1976 (c) act also made copyright automatic, without registration or renewal, and this change may be more harmful than the extension itself. (See eg. Diebold's attempt to suppress key memos via copyright.)
Also worth noting is the fact that Disney makes proprietary works out of public domain ones, making it harder for new authors to tell a story about Alice in Wonderland or the Little Mermaid without fear of a lawsuit.
Yes, let's prove how much better the OS product is by going out of our way to be obnoxious to people who don't use it! The site's "Level 3" ad actually, arbitrarily forbids people to access a page using IE, with a dishonest "not compatible" notice.
You jest, but see David Brin's book "The Transparent Society," in which he argues that surveillance against ordinary citizens is inevitable and that the proper response is to monitor politicians and other powerful people too. (This becomes more practical for NGOs with ROVs, and IPv6-based wireless sensors.) How about a Web site that constantly posts each Congressman's physical location? That information alone would be amusing and useful.
True. We shouldn't be blaming AT&T so much as NSA. If men in dark suits contacted me and started making demands in the name of national security, I'd be hard-pressed to tell them "no." AT&T is/are victims of bullying.
Have already e-mailed Sen. Specter with praise.
I recommend Python to kids wanting to learn programming. It's free, it's very easy to get started with command-line stuff and simple programs, and it doesn't take some rediculously complex installation process just to get it working. (Although creating a shortcut to IDLE is an unadvertised Useful Thing To Do.) There's also Pygame, a library for graphics/sound/other game stuff, and I'm just starting to play with Panda3D, a Python 3D engine (that includes a copy of Python itself). I found that C/C++ gave me headaches, as did attempting to get other 3D engines working with Python bindings, while Python simplifies a lot of tasks (variable declarations, memory management) without sacrificing functionality. So, Python is a relatively easy way to get into programming.
Slashdot Mirror
Exactly. I would definitely not wear such a product, not with the news floating around that England's trying to track all car travel and my own country working on a similar system. I don't want some lout watching me, even though "I have nothing to hide."
Instead, what if we encouraged major sites (that Chinese people actually use) to post extensive Tiananmen info and other subversive stuff in a prominent place for a few days? Or simply a script that IDs Chinese IPs and displays a little message viz., "We're sorry, this page is not compatible with your government?"
OK, although if I recall, the Manchus imposed a hairstyle that was supposed to represent the total subservience of the Han. What about the takeover of what Neil Stephenson called the "Mao Dynasty?"
What does "an unbroken history" mean? The Chinese themselves have a saying that "the Empire long united, tends to divide" (and vice versa), and they've been through plenty of dynasties and several fairly successful foreign invasions. What would constitute a "break?"
That's what the Real ID Act is for, and the cameras.
Author David Brin argues that people will take advantage of the IPv6 system to litter the landscape with cheap sensors and cameras.
Heh, appropriate name! Actually certain fantasy scenarios are good test cases for designing an AI. Say that a certain doctor sends a robotic minion to seize a bird from a girl in a prison cell. Robot: Give me the bird. Girl: No! Robot: Resistance is futile. Give me the bird. Girl: I wanna know why you want it! Robot: ...Data unavailable.
Solve this problem and you're on your way to good AI. For another test case, think of the guards in Swamp Castle in "Monty Python and the Holy Grail"!
(I used a "tailed_frog" as a test object for early AI characters to fetch.)
History: I've been thinking about this and related concepts from some experiments of my own. One way to build a more realistic setting includes large-scale "evolution" of societies. Create models of tribes that move around and interact, semi-randomly developing different cultural traits, eg. cultures that spend time in Steppe terrain sometimes get horses (Chocobos?) as domestic animals and are more likely to invent chariots and compound bows. Run the simulation for a while and you have a virtual guidebook to the world's cultures. Then, use that data combined with something like "Medieval Demographics Made Easy" to design and place some random cities and other structures, with data on the kinds of people present there. Then you can randomly generate specific locations within an area, specific quests etc. A really crude old demo of the kind of thing I mean is here, wrapping a dinky game around the world-viewer program.
Dialogue: From talking with fellow Loebner Prize Contest entrants, I get the impression that dialogue is very important to people's impression of a game world. In most RPGs, dialogue is severaly limited ("Welcome to our town!"), and even in "Morrowind" (haven't yet played "Oblivion") it all has to be written by a human. What if, instead, dialogue were generated by the AI, based on its own desires and experiences? If you used the "History" system above, that could also affect dialogue. "Long ago, it's said our people lived to the east..."
In general, what I want to see are characters that have their own motivations and are capable of learning and reasoning. This is more likely to be noticable among ally characters whom the hero can get to know over time, rather than enemies whose function is to die after a minute's struggle. One approach would involve lots of specialized "codelets" as in Hofstadter's Metacat program.
I thought we were mostly using sugar beets these days.
And as with asynchronous processors, hasn't this been done before?
I cannot spread whatever information I want (for example a movie)
Sure you can! Are you speaking of the technical difficulty? That's not a matter of "free speech." And you can use sites like YouTube or Google Video to make homemade video accessible to the world.
As for yours and the other poster's comments about ethnic Chinese not minding the lack of free speech, that's disappointing but fine... for those people. So some -- let's say most -- Chinese don't mind political oppresion. Does that justify complicity with that oppression, or the actual harm to those who'd like to practice freedom of speech and religion? Why not let people vote and worship as they choose, or not, rather than killing those who try?
What's the difference between a China's one-party system and our two-party system? Basically, error-checking. When our politicians are corrupt or incompetant we have some chance of finding out, complaining, and maybe replacing them. If China's government were honest it would welcome criticism, as a way of uncovering mistakes and corruption. What the censorship tells you is that the politicians there can't handle the truth about what they're doing.
Direct democracy? Yes, if we can find a way to make it work. I don't want Diebold making the machines. 8p
Mass censorship and the imprisonment of dissenters isn't oppression?
And again, "religious and cultural reasons" means that some authority in those countries has decided to force its views on culture on everyone, using violence to tell individuals how to behave. If the culture really opposed the viewing of sites on democracy etc., then people would choose not to view those sites. They wouldn't need to be threatened. Same with dictatorship: do people really choose to submit to a guy who's willing to murder their families?
But yes, it's ultimately up to the people in oppressive countries to fight for their own freedom. These hackers are just giving them the tools.
And for comparison, I feel the same way about the US "war on drugs."
May be westerners should get themselves a break for a change and let Chinese decide what to do with the country?
The point is that we'd like the Chinese to have that opportunity. They don't.
at least one such page on every web site
I like this idea. To implement part of it, what if we make a ZIP of the top 100 Popular Forbidden Books and mirror it everywhere? (How to keep censors from identifying that file? Start burying the data in desktop wallpaper or MP3s?) Or is it mainly dynamic content (like the latest Tibet news) that's in demand?
UNATCO agent: "You're not really going to wear those sunglasses on a night mission, are you?"
JC Denton: "I have augmented vision."
Deus Ex
I admit, but what's the big deal? It's like SimEarth only you drive the bugs now? I don't get it.
DT, why do you hate America?
I think part of the reason for this is Tivo et. al, and Web-based shows. Each format allows people some means of skipping over ads, right? If the ads are extremely short, maybe people will be more willing to sit through them. Or at least they'll be unable to get up and grab a beer during the commercial break, unless there are thirty ads in a row... Reminds me of that WarioWare game, except that the theme every time is "Buy!"
The software is already out there. Check out Naurus' scary stuff, indended for universal monitoring and automatic analysis of large networks.
Some of the GURPS books really are good references for other things, like writing. I especially recommend GURPS Religion (the design of gods, real-in-the-setting or not), Atlantis (the original legend and spin-offs), Bio-Tech (gengineering), and the Transhuman Space books (advanced tech of all kinds).
According to recent legislation, they do. Many states are considering laws banning malware that collects personal information and scans victims' computers to identify and delete software, but declaring that said laws don't apply to software makers looking for illegal or unauthorized activity.
Most likely those +42 Boots of Butt-Kicking, and your pile of Linden Dollars, will fall under the tax code's doctrine of the "realization requirement." Basically, you're not taxed on "profits" that are part of some speculative, fluctuating state like an investment until you try to pull cash out of it. What's more likely to draw the attention of the IRS's Eye of Sauron is the day someone claims a gaming rig as a business expense, or tries to offset capital losses in-game against real-world capital gains, or sets up a real-world barter network using virtual currency. (See eg. Bruce Sterling's story "Maneki Neko.") Alternatively, just require that the IRS come to collect the taxes in-game. Fun PK action! (I can't believe I voluntarily opened this copy of the tax code again after the exam.)
The Disney-led modifications to American copyright law go farther than just extending the term to life + 70 years. The 1976 (c) act also made copyright automatic, without registration or renewal, and this change may be more harmful than the extension itself. (See eg. Diebold's attempt to suppress key memos via copyright.) Also worth noting is the fact that Disney makes proprietary works out of public domain ones, making it harder for new authors to tell a story about Alice in Wonderland or the Little Mermaid without fear of a lawsuit.
Yes, let's prove how much better the OS product is by going out of our way to be obnoxious to people who don't use it! The site's "Level 3" ad actually, arbitrarily forbids people to access a page using IE, with a dishonest "not compatible" notice.
You jest, but see David Brin's book "The Transparent Society," in which he argues that surveillance against ordinary citizens is inevitable and that the proper response is to monitor politicians and other powerful people too. (This becomes more practical for NGOs with ROVs, and IPv6-based wireless sensors.) How about a Web site that constantly posts each Congressman's physical location? That information alone would be amusing and useful.
True. We shouldn't be blaming AT&T so much as NSA. If men in dark suits contacted me and started making demands in the name of national security, I'd be hard-pressed to tell them "no." AT&T is/are victims of bullying. Have already e-mailed Sen. Specter with praise.
I recommend Python to kids wanting to learn programming. It's free, it's very easy to get started with command-line stuff and simple programs, and it doesn't take some rediculously complex installation process just to get it working. (Although creating a shortcut to IDLE is an unadvertised Useful Thing To Do.) There's also Pygame, a library for graphics/sound/other game stuff, and I'm just starting to play with Panda3D, a Python 3D engine (that includes a copy of Python itself). I found that C/C++ gave me headaches, as did attempting to get other 3D engines working with Python bindings, while Python simplifies a lot of tasks (variable declarations, memory management) without sacrificing functionality. So, Python is a relatively easy way to get into programming.