10.29.04
Posted in SocialIssues at 3:50 pm by Danny Dawson
It’s not just Al-Qaeda that wants to see America burn to the ground. The Bush Administration has done a wonderful job of turning the world against our country. I think when the world starts comparing your nation’s elected officials to Adolf Hitler, it might be time to vote a new administration into office, or prepare to fight World War Three with no one else on your side.
Quicktime Movie (2 min, 40 sec long; 24.8MB filesize):
http://shurl.org/WWIII
In case that website goes down (or if you just want to have a copy on your own computer), I’m seeding a torrent:
http://shurl.org/BarryTorrent
For more information on PNAC, try this article:
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article1665.htm
More information on the “What Barry Says” video:
http://www.brooklynfilmfestival.org/films/detail.asp?cid=5&fid=353
http://www.lostinspace.com/htm/news/news-simon-robson.shtml
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10.23.04
Posted in Philosophy, Technology at 7:20 pm by Danny Dawson
Tell me: when you take neurons from a rat and put them in a dish, and cultivate them to create a neural network which interacts with the environment it is able to percieve, what have you created? Is it still a rat? Is it just a bunch of cells? Is it…human?
Now what if you take neurons from a human and put them in a dish, and cultivate them to create a neural network which interacts with the environment it is able to percieve: then what have you created? Is it still a human? Is it just a bunch of cells? Is it even any more human than the rat? Do the laws of morality still apply?
In the case below, scientists have given their “neural network” an environment it can interact with in the form of the dimensions such as up, down, left, right, tilt, etc., as well as a body it has the ability to control, in the form of a plane. But tell me, what motivation does the neural network have to maintain its bearings and stability unless it knows fear or joy? Does this neural network have a pleasure center, or a will to exist? If it does, is it any less of a living creature than a car-accident victim on life-support? What is this new being?
This news both excites and scares me. It excites me because studies such as these have the ability to provide a significant amount of information about our own consciousnesses. It scares me because I sincerely expect a strong backlash from religious conservatives about the morality of these studies if they are to continue. They will bring up the same points I have mentioned above.
And I will not be able to refute them.
Discuss.
Currently the brain has learned enough to be able to control the pitch and roll of the simulated F-22 fighter jet in weather conditions ranging from blue skies to hurricane-force winds. Initially the aircraft drifted, because the brain hadn’t figured out how to control its “body,” but over time the neurons learned to stabilize the aircraft to a straight, level flight…
While scientists can study neural activities from groups of cells in a dish, they can’t watch them learn and grow as they would within a living body unless the neurons have some kind of body to interact with.
By taking these cells and giving them back a “body,” the researchers hope to uncover how the neurons communicate with each other and eventually translate that knowledge to develop novel computing architecture.
“Granted, this is just a handful of neurons in a dish,” said Potter, an assistant professor at Georgia Tech’s neuroengineering laboratory. “It isn’t a full-blown brain. It doesn’t have a real body. But with this kind of system you can literally watch these things compute and you have a chance to learn how the brain does its computation.”
http://www.wired.com/news/medtech/0,1286,65438,00.html?tw=wn_tophead_1
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10.18.04
Posted in General at 10:37 am by Danny Dawson
Some time ago (a matter of about six months) I noticed that one or two small-time websites were beginning to use a new popup technique which circumvented Firefox’s built-in popup blocker. The instances I saw usually used an absolutely positoned div made to look like a popup window via CSS.
This worried me. Once one of the major internet advertising firms began to use the new technique, there would be a new breed of pop-ups that would be much more difficult to block. Sure, the developers of the Mozilla project could anticipate the types of absolutely-positioned divs that will be used as popups, but if they chose to include this code as part of the popup-blocking routine, many valid (non-faux-popups) would also end up being blocked, as absolutely-positioned divs are becoming more prevalent for non-commercial website layout, as well.
Today, while visiting an article on the Time Magazine website, I found exactly what I had been fearing. A javascript file hosted on atwola.com (one of the major internet advertising firms, owned and operated by AOL Time Warner) was used to serve either a standard popup or the new CSS version based on browser type. It made it past Firefox’s popup blocker.
Luckily, for the last two weeks I’ve been using a fantastic new plugin for Firefox called Adblock which allows me to block any images, scripts, and iframes loaded into pages I visit. I took 15 seconds to add an entry for atwola.com, and I will no longer see popups, banners, or any advertisements, for that matter, served by atwola.com.
In addition to blocking any ads from a specific domain, or folder within a domain, Adblock accepts regular expressions as a more robust, concise way to preemptively block ads you haven’t yet encountered. If you’re just starting with Adblock, try importing the Adblock Rules I’m using currently.
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10.15.04
Posted in Web, Technology at 9:59 am by Danny Dawson
I went ahead and created a Mycroft plugin for the Google Desktop Search utility. It requires slightly more work to install than the standard Mycroft plugin (three short steps instead of one), so I can’t submit it to the official Mycroft website. Thus, I offer it here. I don’t use my allocated bandwidth anyway.
Installation instructions are included in the ZIP file:
Google Desktop Search Plugin for Mozilla Firefox (2.11 KB)
For those of you that have no idea what I’m talking about: The plugin that I wrote allows you to search your computer’s hard drive using the new Google Desktop Search tool released yesterday by typing your search query into the search box in Firefox. It also displays 100 results by default, as opposed to the 10 that the standard GDS shows. I noticed people were requesting this. Enjoy. Let me know if you have issues with it.
Of course, this requires that you already have GDS installed on your system. You can download it here.
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10.01.04
Posted in Technology at 3:34 pm by Danny Dawson
I’m cancelling my Netflix account. My gripes:
- I keep getting broken DVDs in the mail
- The selection sucks
- I’d rather support local businesses
Instead, I’ll be going with Greencine, a San Francisco-based mail-based movie rental company that specializes in indie films. They do the blockbusters, too, but indie films are the heart of their business. They also have a fantastic business attitude, as represented by the wording of their FAQ, and the strong sense of community represented on the forums.
That said, if there is still anyone with a Netflix account who does not want to switch to Greencine, try to cancel your Netflix account anyway. I’m not kidding. Don’t actually cancel, but try to do so. You’ll probably get a message like this one:
Get a Great Deal on your monthly subscription price by staying with us for six more months. Here’s how it works:
* Remain a Netflix customer for the next six months.
* At the end of six months, your Netflix subscription will return to the regular price.
* If you cancel before the six months are over, you will be charged the difference between your regular subscription price and the discounted rate, but only for the number of months you’ve enjoyed the discount.
Get your next six months of Netflix Service for just $18.99/month. Save $18.00!
If you’re going to keep your Netflix service, you might as well pay less for it. Notice that this doesn’t lock you into any sort of contract which has cancellation penalties. You just pay less if you do stick around.
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