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Comment Re:Amazing (Score 1) 845

Glass is very much tech - it may not be, at this moment, the revolutionary tech that some people think it is, but it's tech.

For example, Glass (or tech like it, I understand people's hesitation for such a product from Google) has the potential to remove doubt from situations that are "he said, she said", by being an impartial observer. If everyone was wearing HMDs with cameras, maybe people might think twice about being assholes, knowing that they might get called out on it. It wouldn't be some kind of tech panacea - nothing ever will be, IMO - but it has legitimate uses.

Remember kids, technology isn't good or bad, it's what people do with it.

AI

CMU AI Learning Common Sense By Watching the Internet 152

An anonymous reader writes with this excerpt from the Washington Post "Researchers are trying to plant a digital seed for artificial intelligence by letting a massive computer system browse millions of pictures and decide for itself what they all mean. The system at Carnegie Mellon University is called NEIL, short for Never Ending Image Learning. In mid-July, it began searching the Internet for images 24/7 and, in tiny steps, is deciding for itself how those images relate to each other. The goal is to recreate what we call common sense — the ability to learn things without being specifically taught."
The Internet

Legislation Would Prohibit ISPs From Throttling Online Video Services 222

Dega704 sends this story from Ars: "A Senate bill called the 'Consumer Choice in Online Video Act' (PDF) takes aim at many of the tactics Internet service providers can use to overcharge customers and degrade the quality of rival online video services. Submitted yesterday by U.S. Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-WV), the 63-page bill provides a comprehensive look at the potential ways in which ISPs can limit consumer choice, and it boots the Federal Communications Commission's power to prevent bad outcomes. 'It shall be unlawful for a designated Internet service provider to engage in unfair methods of competition or unfair or deceptive acts or practices, the purpose or effect of which are to hinder significantly or to prevent an online video distributor from providing video programming to a consumer,' the bill states. A little more specifically, it would be illegal to 'block, degrade, or otherwise impair any content provided by an online video distributor' or 'provide benefits in the transmission of the video content of any company affiliated with the Internet service provider through specialized services or other means.' Those provisions overlap a bit with the FCC's authority under its own net neutrality law, the Open Internet Order, which already prevents the blockage of websites and services. However, Verizon is in court attempting to kill that law, and there is a real possibility that it could be limited in some way. The Consumer Choice in Online Video Act could provide a hedge against that possible outcome."

Comment Re:Intellectual property is a hoax. (Score 5, Insightful) 212

This thread shows one of the biggest failings of humanity, which we see on a daily basis across many issues.

People don't know how to compromise and meet in the middle for the good of humanity. People are taught never to waver in their beliefs, and if they give in even slightly they're taught that they're weak.

One the one hand you have the copyright abolitionists, who would insist that all media be free for the taking from day one. On the other hand, you have the pro-copyright extremists who feel that things are fine the way they are.

Copyright is a good thing, but it shouldn't last for over a century. Things are too much in favor of copyright holders nowadays, and under current law, the public interest may as well be nonexistent.

This is why many people have no problem violating copyright, and arguably it is moral to do so, as long as it is carefully restricted to works owned by corporations who wish to de facto abolish the public domain. There's a difference between violating copyright because you want something for free, and violating copyright because you have a philosophical and moral opposition to the current handling of copyright. The latter can arguably be seen in the same light as other famous civil disobedience, the former is just greed and self-indulgence.

Comment Re:Doesn't that kinda defeat the point of the arch (Score 5, Informative) 234

It's not even a takedown request. IA will honor robots.txt totally and retroactively - if they have 10-15 years of archived data at a specific domain (or subdirectory on that domain), and someone puts up a robots.txt disallowing them access, not only will they refuse to archive it going forward, but they will remove all previously archived material from being viewable (I hope they don't actively remove it from their archive, but merely stop making it available).

Comment Re:Legacy Support (Score 1) 211

Screw Amiga Forever, if you still have a physical Amiga then just dump the ROM from it (or download them if you don't care about legality) and then run it in WinUAE, which is actually the base emulator in Amiga Forever (except newer, as it's currently in development).

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