the newspaper has terminated display of the images - does anyone have a mirror site or know an alternative location where they can be viewed?

short circuit was designed to appeal to kids, and also featured a robot that, whilst sentient, never went beyond child-like human-level consciousness. the difference here is that this machine consciousness quickly exceeds human-level intelligence whilst at the same time maintaining both an integrity and naivety that is a product of its fast and harsh yet poignant upbringing. in another post i point out that this film has aspects of other films and sci-fi stories that you will definitely have seen before, but please do consider suspending judgement and just enjoy the story as it is :)

i just went to see it at the cinema, i'm a big fan of sci-fi films, and this one i really liked. if you're an afficionado of sci-fi books and films, there will be nothing new, you should be able to predict everything that happens but i was still absorbed by the novel way the story unfolded. yes it was violent - if you're going to tell a story about out-of-control criminal activity then that's hardly not going to happen - but it was also poignant as well.

i think the best part about the film was that the robots, because they've been seen before in other stories by the same director (Elysium for example), are not "glorified", they're just "part of the story". the problem with novice sci-fi writers (book or film, especially film because it's a less mature medium for telling sci-fi stories) is that they tend to not really actually have a good background or story (which is why the marvel comics films are so damn good), so as a substitute the director "glorifies" the technology in a wealth of special effects. by complete contrast, the introduction of an entirely new type of consciousness - and its rapid development from child-like behaviour to above-average human intelligence through incredibly painful learning experiences and its desire to remain alive against a ticking clock - that's what really really makes this story so interesting.

but the best bit i think is how this new being changes the lives of those who initially sought to profit from it (admittedly out of desperation), surprising even themselves by finding that despite their desperation and ganster background they begin to see this robot as a valuable conscious being in its own right.

so although this film has aspects which have been covered before, i don't know of many films that have done proper justice to the emergence of machine consciousness and the respectf it engenders in those who come into contact with computer-based beings, in the way that this film has managed. it's just a pity that i feel that that message is completely over the heads of the average reviewer.

yaay, it's slashdot on steroids, yaay! with all the means by which true knowledge may be suppressed by misunderstandings, yaay! democracy at work to bubble up the sum of our ignorance rather than inconvenient and annoying truth. ahh gotta love it...

congratulations to you and chris. do you think it would do as a base for implementing 802.22 whitespace broadband? i have a draft version of the spec available. and what would one of these boards cost?

that's not a problem if you only need a one-time (or limited) campaign. or a IED remote trigger device for example. or you have a dead-drop location (online or otherwise) with up-to-date numbers. or a whole number of other scenarios that are probably and have been standard practice *anyway* for decades.

tell me... how come in a simple public discussion slashdot readers can come up with simple practical scenarios why mass-surveillance "solutions" like this will be completely ineffective, yet the people considering (or actually) deploying them cannot? and: why can the pakistani government not see that this knee-jerk response will have the terrorists celebrating the success of bringing awareness of their campaign to every single mobile phone user across pakistan in a very personal way.

i heard of someone who bought a prius: they live in scotland (south west, near ayr). they noticed a huge drop in fuel economy (down to 30mpg) so recorded it, and year after year they found a clear correlation between winter and the drop in fuel economy. the extra cost of the vehicle, the insane pricing for replacement batteries (over $1200 per battery and there are 30 of them), and, finally, the fact that they were not actually getting better fuel economy than an equivalent ICE car, they sold it... and used their daughter's 10-year-old VW diesel Polo which got a consistent 55mpg all year round.

you are _brainwashed_. absolutely brainwashed. read the independent assessment here:
http://www.softpanorama.org/Co...

FUCK you. fuck you and your attitude thinking you have the right to tell me or ANYONE that i should bow down to other people's decisions. FUCK you and fuck off. you have NO right to tell me that i must worship the ground on which other people walk.

*I* have the freedom to make my *own* assessment. that is my right. and it's people like you who are not helping, by saying "yeah we should all trust someone else to make our decisions for us".

historically we know that when we abdicate responsibility to others for important decisions, it doesn't go so well, does it? what is _wrong_ with you??

sorry, but... you really gave me a shock there, i couldn't believe what you wrote.

... and they're taking everyone else down with them in the short to medium term...

not "supposedly" - *really*. if you run apt-rdepends -r libsystemd0 | a bit of awk | sort | uniq there are four *THOUSAND* five hundred packages that, if you were ever to do "apt-get --purge remove libsystemd0" you would NEVER be able to install. that's a whopping FIFTEEN PERCENT of the entire debian package repository that you are prevented and prohibited from installing, should you ever make the decision that you wish to keep libsystemd0 off of machines that you manage!

the reason for this insane level of *hard* dependency is because lennart pottering is both the developer of libsystemd0 *and* many other packages such as pulseaudio... so of *course* he decided that pulseaudio had to include - as a hard dependency - one of his projects, libsystemd0. libsdl likewise also uses it as a hard compile-time dependency, along with about 100 other applications and libraries.

those applications and libraries then quickly spread as further hard dependencies to include the gimp, apache2-dev, php5 (??!), erlang, libreoffice, cups, bluez/bluetooth (because of the links to pulseaudio), *all* the games that use libsdl (i.e. pretty much all of them), *all* the music software available for GNU/Linux (because of the link to pulseaudio), openjdk7, the eclipse IDE, apache tomcat, the android SDK, i mean.... the list is a _real_ eye-opener. you can review it here for yourself:

      http://lkcl.net/reports/removi...

so yeah, not even _close_ to "supposedly", mate!

*thumbs-up* to both these things. thank you.

that's in.... *counts on fingers*... 9? days? :)

ok so let's look it up... a random google search shows these:

1. Of, on, relating to, involving, or affecting only one side: "a unilateral advantage in defense" (New Republic).
2. Performed or undertaken by only one side: unilateral disarmament.
3. Obligating only one of two or more parties, nations, or persons, as a contract or an agreement.
4. Emphasizing or recognizing only one side of a subject.
5. Having only one side.
6. Tracing the lineage of one parent only: a unilateral genealogy.
7. Botany Having leaves, flowers, or other parts on one side only.

yep. definitions 1 through 5 are perfectly relevant. unilateral. meaning that pottering made the decision and (2) did not consult any of us. he claims to be "listening to users" yet (4) in fact ignores everything they tell him and carries on regardless. he has therefore violated the implicit software freedom contract (3) between users and developers who choose to be of service to others.

so yeah. it would appear that yes i really do know english, if only by accident.

a *fraction* of the extent of the problem is actually illustrated here:
http://anfo.slavino.sk/libsyst...

those packages that i recompiled (policykit-1, d-bus, pulseaudio and util-linux) have a huge range of dependencies that cover something like 98% of the most commonly used software in the linux world. cups-daemon, the gimp, vlc, mplayer, and others too numerous to mention: all come under the fascist rule of libsystemd thanks to the unilateral decision making of a handful of people.

and i'll repeat it again because it seems not to be getting through: the problem is that there *is no alternative*. it's their way or fuck off: you are not permitted to argue your case even reasonably (because it will be ignored). and that's just... wholly unacceptable. *i don't care* who is techically right or wrong: i care that this is a situation that has become like the Microsoft Monopoly: dominate, dominate, dominate.

so that's the deadlock that i seek to break, by demonstrating that you *can* have a working desktop system without having a single part of the code written by people who do not listen and who act in such highly irresponsible ways.

your post is particularly insightful - i hope it is recognised as such by moderators. i wanted to emphasise what you said, because NT 3.5 and 4.0 used a recursive login system based on DCE/RPC function calls. a "domain" logon was (is) actually no diffferent from a "local" logon: the only difference being that the SAM database was running locally (and was marked in the registry as being the same name as the machine). as a result of this, there were actually simple registry hacks for NT 3.51 to turn a workstation into a Primary Domain Controller!

so thanks to DCE/RPC, all that happened with a Domain Logon was that the incoming function call would make an (identical) recursive *outgoing* login function call to the nearest PDC/BDC/Trusted Domain. that Trusted Domain Controller would, in turn, on receipt of the incoming function call, make an (identical) recursive outgoing function call to the nearest PDC/BDC... and eventually, through this chain, the answer would be "login success or fail".

incredibly neat, and technically brilliant... but the actual number of people in the world who really truly understand that must be limited to under a hundred people at most. *not all of them* work at microsoft....

no, i disagree: i feel you pretty much nailed it but didn't realise it. the problem i feel really *is* that they're not listening... in combination with there being no alternative. if there was an alternative - a less disruptive one - then the fact that these key high-impact decisions were being made would *not matter*. why? because we would be able to use the alternatives and the people who were not listening could go screw themselves, and nobody would care.

it really *is* the fact that these people have such disproportionate influence and effect, and that they really *are* ramming "Their Way" down everyone's throats in such a cavalier way.

they may well perfectly be technically right (i have seen multiple analyses of systemd which indicate that they are not), but that *doesn't matter*, because it's the fact that they gave us no choice that is of far greater priority.

of all the arguments that i've seen, i have never seen one presented to the systemd team that gets this across to them clearly. the majority of arguments are either technical or abusive. it's only when you take a step back and think "what's really going on here"..