GLaDOS is about as evil as a smart bomb... it just does what the programmers told it to do. evil implies choice and sentience.
Without getting into a great deal of philosophical discussion, I think that you would be in the outlier in claiming that GLaDOS was not sentient/sapient.
GLaDOS expressed characteristics such as anger, frustration, hope, and fear. She also had the capability to empathize with the character as expressed by her ability to taunt the character.
I don't think there is any doubt that GLaDOS was sentient/sapient and thus capable of being evil.
And if you actually lived next to someone like that, your resale value would go down 10-15%. While I agree in theory with that for most property, this is a case where their actions effect others.
You should have purchased more land to create a buffer between you and your neighbors. I was concerned about that when I bought my home in NY. I wanted 6 acres for myself, and I purchased 40 total.
6 for me, 34 between me and anyone else.
Did you know that one of my neighbors built a freaking gravel pit/quarry off the back end of my property? Took me 9 months to even find out. It was a 10-15 minute hike to even get to the side of the property where he built it.
Now, I'm not advocating that everyone out there goes and purchases 40 acres, but YOU have to understand that if you are purchasing a house where your neighbor's bedroom window is 10' from your bedroom window, then his actions are just part of what you bought.
Don't like it? Then buy a home, and not an investment. It isn't your neighbor's responsibility to minimize YOUR investment risk.
False analogy; tuna is food with trace amounts of contamination. What those people drank was clearly labelled as poison (or added by fraudsters to supposedly "good" alcohol)
So the solution to fraudsters is to introduce a substance which makes it more likely that the victims will die before they can get medical help?
Damn I wish I hadn't already posted in this thread or I'd mod you up.
I'm having a hard time of determing that there would be any other use of this system other than:
"This DNA was found at the crime scene, run it through the database.... Ok, looks like Clark Jones is a match. Send someone to his house to question him, or better yet, bring him in to be interrogated."
Just by finding the DNA, you can be sure that the police will spend a little extra time investigating you when otherwise they might not have. As a result, they are spending MORE time investigating a currently circumstantial trail when they normally would collect evidence through a process which has been scientifically vetted to result in locating more appropriate suspects.
Almost everybody on/. knows that it is almost impossible to delete data from fail-over sites, backups, archived data, etc. in a way that one can guarantee that all traces of the data has really been destroyed everywhere...
Hell I don't even really run a real backup system (Just a few HDs sitting in a closet) but the other day I came across files that I thought were long since lost from 10 years ago when I was curious before formatting and reusing a HDD. Data is amazingly persistent, we just know not to rely on that fact.
It is also amazingly viral, as data gets handed around to third parties, or simply just copied over from one system to the next.
It is the viral aspect that I imagine would bother me the most. Even if I went into their data centers, burned it to the ground, as well as their off-site backup locations, I can't be sure that it hasn't been copied and sent to a third party the instant they received it.
And that third party? Who the hell knows who THEY sent it to.
I was trying to avoid this since I figured it would just generate "it's only unsafe because the man says so" comments, but what part of "it's unsafe to consume, period, because methyl alcohol [wikipedia.org] is not the same thing as ethyl alcohol [wikipedia.org]" do you not understand?
What part of "They took a previously dangerous, but not lethal substance and intentionally made it more dangerous?
Or what about introducing sarin into Paint Thinner to stop huffers?
Blaming all those deaths on "authoritarianism and christianity" is as ridiculous as blaming fuel manufacturers for deaths that result from someone drinking gasoline that has ethanol mixed in with it.
No, not even close.
It would be like the fuel manufacturers replacing the dye for on-road vs heating diesel with one that cause the vehicle to explode if you use the non-taxed version in an on-road vehicle. Sure they shouldn't have been using it, but is a painful and horrific death an acceptable punishment for a trivial and non-violent offence?
Sounds a lot like the "No True Scotsman" fallacy to me. Christianity is defined by its followers, and only by its tenets in how its followers take them up. Its like saying the Judeo-Christian religions are peaceful because one of the Ten Commandments says "thou shall not murder". Or saying politicians are inherently honest because all of them claim to be truthful
So what percentage of followers do you consider to be the 'breaking point' at which the actions of a minority become the will of a majority? Let's say you have a political group calling for some arbitrary law to be changed "Repeal the tax on moon-rocks." What percentage of 'wing-nuts' must that group contain before the message of those wing-nuts becomes what you accept to be the position of the majority?
In a free and open organization, you cannot prevent the inclusion of people who present undesired opinions without enforcing some strict code upon them.
Do you apply a multiplyer to that variable if the groups cause is popular on the internet, or an already fringe group?
since when does "I'm giving you the chance to find salvation by not doing the things I don't want you to do" not authoritarian?
If you go on the basis that God literally created everything from himself, isn't it authoritarian by nature? Even if God created everything and a nanosecond later said "Laters, I'm gone, do what you will" the actual act of creation is still authoritarian. When you really get down to it, if you believe in creation, he demanded that the universe 'be'.
Getting back to your original statement, would it be authoritarian to say "Do not swallow an entire bottle of Tylenol and wash it down with a liter of vodka or you will die." That consequences exist for a given choice does not mean the choice ceases to exist. (Of course, I agree with you on the concept of the consequences being delivered by the same person offering the choice)
The extender has just enough hardware to pull the data from the remote storage decode it and output it via HDMI/DVI/Component to your television.
In a way, your non-DVR cable box that you use for On-Demand shows is acting as an extender. The media is stored by the cable company in some place OTHER than you cable box.
Verizon now offers a DVR that uses the other cable boxes as extenders for the primary DVR.
I try to explain to him he would be better off just buying a phone directly and not getting locked into a contract but he won't hear it.
Except that he woudln't be better off if he doesn't plan to leave Verizon. Strange as it sounds, a 2 year contract with a company you plan to do business with for >2 years is likely to be a good deal.
Certainly a better deal than buying the phone directly.
I get your joke, and like it. However, is this a British slang term? I keep waiting for the next word. It feels like a sneeze that just didn't come, leaving you feeling odd and unsatisfied.
A cup of... WHAT? Sulfuric acid? I hate commercials as much as anyone, but throwing a cup full of 30mm lug nuts at the TV seems a bit much.
That is pretty messed up, I'll agree. Perhaps a lawyer (or a better one) would have been of use?
As you said, I 'knowingly' chose to break the law. A lawyer will do nothing as the background investigation asks 'Have you ever been arrested'. So the fact that I had the charge dismissed by speaking with the magistrate does nothing.
There isn't a single thing I can do. I was charged, it was listed in the newspaper. Case closed. There is no record to seal or expunge.
And regardless of your rationale, I still feel it was unjust as I was subjected to a different legal system because of my age and I was still considered an adult.
Which raises the question: If the US is so vulnerable, why hasn't this happened already? What is preventing the type of attacks they were simulating? It seems to me either the US is not as vulnerable as claimed to be, or there is really no interest in cyber-attacking the US. I know one of them is false, and suspect the other may be as well.
Because no nation in the world can defeat the US Military. Yes, I know the fun thing is to say they are bogged down in Iraq and Afghanistan, but the simple matter is that if there were any form of limited warfare against the US, you would see the military drop all pretense in Iraq and Afghanistan and confront a true threat. Even though our IT infrastructure is weak, and you somehow eliminated 95% of the US military, that remaining 5% could still provide that Mutually Assured Destruction that was originally targeted against the Soviet Union.
This isn't necessarily some dick waving thing. The fact of the matter is that a single SSBN (Ballistic Missile Submarine) that could receive orders is capable of eradicating every major city in a country which would launch a cyber attack.
You would have to assume that a true cyber attack (the kind you wonder why it hasn't happened) would have some rather dire repercussions on the US, and as a result it would be seen as a form of total warfare.
I suppose for lack of a better way to put it: If you enter into a state of total warfare with the United States, do you think you could win?
If the answer to that is no, then it explains why no true large scale cyber attack has ever been launched. Since it would be targeting the lives of civilians, and likely killing hundreds of thousands of Americans, nuclear retaliation would be a very likely outcome if the US thought it might lose the war.
The Patriot Act (which should have been named "traitorous coward act") only covers federal agencies, not any state law enforcement agencies. I don't see how this bill will stand judicial scrutiny.
It will withstand judicial scrutiny because the judicary was bought and paid for years ago.
Slashdot Mirror
If you're involved with a commercial transaction with someone, don't you want them to be suckers?
Not if I'm relying on hardware that they built/designed.
If someone has physical access to your machine, then you have already lost.
So everyone who ever uses colocation has lost?
GLaDOS is about as evil as a smart bomb... it just does what the programmers told it to do. evil implies choice and sentience.
Without getting into a great deal of philosophical discussion, I think that you would be in the outlier in claiming that GLaDOS was not sentient/sapient.
GLaDOS expressed characteristics such as anger, frustration, hope, and fear. She also had the capability to empathize with the character as expressed by her ability to taunt the character.
I don't think there is any doubt that GLaDOS was sentient/sapient and thus capable of being evil.
The requirement is that they have LIVE plant landscaping. Dead grass wouldn't qualify, and would be violating the code also.
I'd counter with this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lichen
And if you actually lived next to someone like that, your resale value would go down 10-15%. While I agree in theory with that for most property, this is a case where their actions effect others.
You should have purchased more land to create a buffer between you and your neighbors. I was concerned about that when I bought my home in NY. I wanted 6 acres for myself, and I purchased 40 total.
6 for me, 34 between me and anyone else.
Did you know that one of my neighbors built a freaking gravel pit/quarry off the back end of my property? Took me 9 months to even find out. It was a 10-15 minute hike to even get to the side of the property where he built it.
Now, I'm not advocating that everyone out there goes and purchases 40 acres, but YOU have to understand that if you are purchasing a house where your neighbor's bedroom window is 10' from your bedroom window, then his actions are just part of what you bought.
Don't like it? Then buy a home, and not an investment. It isn't your neighbor's responsibility to minimize YOUR investment risk.
What people do to their own yards is non of the governments business, with a few obvious exceptions. (e.g drug plantations)
I'm not even sure I agree with your exception.
False analogy; tuna is food with trace amounts of contamination. What those people drank was clearly labelled as poison (or added by fraudsters to supposedly "good" alcohol)
So the solution to fraudsters is to introduce a substance which makes it more likely that the victims will die before they can get medical help?
Damn I wish I hadn't already posted in this thread or I'd mod you up.
I'm having a hard time of determing that there would be any other use of this system other than:
"This DNA was found at the crime scene, run it through the database.... Ok, looks like Clark Jones is a match. Send someone to his house to question him, or better yet, bring him in to be interrogated."
Just by finding the DNA, you can be sure that the police will spend a little extra time investigating you when otherwise they might not have. As a result, they are spending MORE time investigating a currently circumstantial trail when they normally would collect evidence through a process which has been scientifically vetted to result in locating more appropriate suspects.
Almost everybody on /. knows that it is almost impossible to delete data from fail-over sites, backups, archived data, etc. in a way that one can guarantee that all traces of the data has really been destroyed everywhere...
Hell I don't even really run a real backup system (Just a few HDs sitting in a closet) but the other day I came across files that I thought were long since lost from 10 years ago when I was curious before formatting and reusing a HDD. Data is amazingly persistent, we just know not to rely on that fact.
It is also amazingly viral, as data gets handed around to third parties, or simply just copied over from one system to the next.
It is the viral aspect that I imagine would bother me the most. Even if I went into their data centers, burned it to the ground, as well as their off-site backup locations, I can't be sure that it hasn't been copied and sent to a third party the instant they received it.
And that third party? Who the hell knows who THEY sent it to.
I was trying to avoid this since I figured it would just generate "it's only unsafe because the man says so" comments, but what part of "it's unsafe to consume, period, because methyl alcohol [wikipedia.org] is not the same thing as ethyl alcohol [wikipedia.org]" do you not understand?
What part of "They took a previously dangerous, but not lethal substance and intentionally made it more dangerous?
Or what about introducing sarin into Paint Thinner to stop huffers?
It's like a built in Executioner!
the whole system would be undermined.
Maybe it should be. Why should it be taxed at anything other than the sales tax rate?
It's classy? Does the blindness come with a tuxedo?
No tuxedo, but dark glasses and a cane.
People have decided to risk killing themselves by drinking poison.
So it's ok to make it more deadly? Since there is mercury in the tuna I eat, is it OK if they also put asenic in it?
Blaming all those deaths on "authoritarianism and christianity" is as ridiculous as blaming fuel manufacturers for deaths that result from someone drinking gasoline that has ethanol mixed in with it.
No, not even close.
It would be like the fuel manufacturers replacing the dye for on-road vs heating diesel with one that cause the vehicle to explode if you use the non-taxed version in an on-road vehicle. Sure they shouldn't have been using it, but is a painful and horrific death an acceptable punishment for a trivial and non-violent offence?
Sounds a lot like the "No True Scotsman" fallacy to me. Christianity is defined by its followers, and only by its tenets in how its followers take them up. Its like saying the Judeo-Christian religions are peaceful because one of the Ten Commandments says "thou shall not murder". Or saying politicians are inherently honest because all of them claim to be truthful
So what percentage of followers do you consider to be the 'breaking point' at which the actions of a minority become the will of a majority? Let's say you have a political group calling for some arbitrary law to be changed "Repeal the tax on moon-rocks." What percentage of 'wing-nuts' must that group contain before the message of those wing-nuts becomes what you accept to be the position of the majority?
In a free and open organization, you cannot prevent the inclusion of people who present undesired opinions without enforcing some strict code upon them.
Do you apply a multiplyer to that variable if the groups cause is popular on the internet, or an already fringe group?
since when does "I'm giving you the chance to find salvation by not doing the things I don't want you to do" not authoritarian?
If you go on the basis that God literally created everything from himself, isn't it authoritarian by nature?
Even if God created everything and a nanosecond later said "Laters, I'm gone, do what you will" the actual act of creation is still authoritarian. When you really get down to it, if you believe in creation, he demanded that the universe 'be'.
Getting back to your original statement, would it be authoritarian to say "Do not swallow an entire bottle of Tylenol and wash it down with a liter of vodka or you will die." That consequences exist for a given choice does not mean the choice ceases to exist. (Of course, I agree with you on the concept of the consequences being delivered by the same person offering the choice)
Higher than a double decker bus?
What do you mean by extender?
Stick the storage in a server in your closet.
The extender has just enough hardware to pull the data from the remote storage decode it and output it via HDMI/DVI/Component to your television.
In a way, your non-DVR cable box that you use for On-Demand shows is acting as an extender. The media is stored by the cable company in some place OTHER than you cable box.
Verizon now offers a DVR that uses the other cable boxes as extenders for the primary DVR.
I try to explain to him he would be better off just buying a phone directly and not getting locked into a contract but he won't hear it.
Except that he woudln't be better off if he doesn't plan to leave Verizon. Strange as it sounds, a 2 year contract with a company you plan to do business with for >2 years is likely to be a good deal.
Certainly a better deal than buying the phone directly.
Tivo brought the ability to timeshift in real time while recording something a vcr cant do.
Coax to VCR and from VCR to TV. Set VCR to record channel 32, press TV/VCR button and then use the TV as you would.
Unless you are literally talking about timeshifting in real time, in that case, a lot of physicists would like to have a word with you.
and make a cuppa.
I get your joke, and like it. However, is this a British slang term? I keep waiting for the next word. It feels like a sneeze that just didn't come, leaving you feeling odd and unsatisfied.
A cup of... WHAT? Sulfuric acid? I hate commercials as much as anyone, but throwing a cup full of 30mm lug nuts at the TV seems a bit much.
That is pretty messed up, I'll agree. Perhaps a lawyer (or a better one) would have been of use?
As you said, I 'knowingly' chose to break the law. A lawyer will do nothing as the background investigation asks 'Have you ever been arrested'. So the fact that I had the charge dismissed by speaking with the magistrate does nothing.
There isn't a single thing I can do. I was charged, it was listed in the newspaper. Case closed. There is no record to seal or expunge.
And regardless of your rationale, I still feel it was unjust as I was subjected to a different legal system because of my age and I was still considered an adult.
Which raises the question: If the US is so vulnerable, why hasn't this happened already? What is preventing the type of attacks they were simulating? It seems to me either the US is not as vulnerable as claimed to be, or there is really no interest in cyber-attacking the US. I know one of them is false, and suspect the other may be as well.
Because no nation in the world can defeat the US Military. Yes, I know the fun thing is to say they are bogged down in Iraq and Afghanistan, but the simple matter is that if there were any form of limited warfare against the US, you would see the military drop all pretense in Iraq and Afghanistan and confront a true threat. Even though our IT infrastructure is weak, and you somehow eliminated 95% of the US military, that remaining 5% could still provide that Mutually Assured Destruction that was originally targeted against the Soviet Union.
This isn't necessarily some dick waving thing. The fact of the matter is that a single SSBN (Ballistic Missile Submarine) that could receive orders is capable of eradicating every major city in a country which would launch a cyber attack.
You would have to assume that a true cyber attack (the kind you wonder why it hasn't happened) would have some rather dire repercussions on the US, and as a result it would be seen as a form of total warfare.
I suppose for lack of a better way to put it: If you enter into a state of total warfare with the United States, do you think you could win?
If the answer to that is no, then it explains why no true large scale cyber attack has ever been launched. Since it would be targeting the lives of civilians, and likely killing hundreds of thousands of Americans, nuclear retaliation would be a very likely outcome if the US thought it might lose the war.
The Patriot Act (which should have been named "traitorous coward act") only covers federal agencies, not any state law enforcement agencies. I don't see how this bill will stand judicial scrutiny.
It will withstand judicial scrutiny because the judicary was bought and paid for years ago.
Well remember, like cures like. What is the cause of lack of funding? Lack of money.
So to take the proper Homeopathic path:
1. Dilute NOTHING into water.
2. Have homeopathic 'doctors' drink this water.
3. They are now rich, and may retire.
You don't even need the original dollar to dilute