>Do you believe rehabilitation is impossible or do you want revenge?
I don't believe that someone who commits mass murder can be rehabilitated, no. It isn't about revenge; it's about public safety.
Someone once pointed out that hoping a rapist gets raped in prison isn't a victory for his victim(s), because it somehow gives him what he had coming to him, but it's actually a victory for rape and violence. I wish I could remember who said that, because they are right. The score doesn't go Rapist: 1 World: 1. It goes Rape: 2.
What this man did is unspeakable, and he absolutely deserves to spend the rest of his life in prison. If he needs to be kept away from other prisoners as a safety issue, there are ways to do that without keeping him in solitary confinement, which has been shown conclusively to be profoundly cruel and harmful.
Putting him in solitary confinement, as a punitive measure, is not a victory for the good people in the world. It's a victory for inhumane treatment of human beings. This ruling is, in my opinion, very good and very strong for human rights, *precisely* because it was brought by such a despicable and horrible person. It affirms that all of us have basic human rights, even the absolute worst of us on this planet.
This is precisely why I lost all interest in Oculus the instant I heard that it had been acquired by Facebook.
> First, there is no reason to believe that we can built robots that can reproduce themselves.
What? This is exactly the technology humans are trying to reach! We're already a significant way down this path!!
> Second, there is no evidence that we or anyone else can build intelligent machines, as the original story seems to presuppose.
Nature did it. We can do it.
> Third, biological organisms are so many orders of magnitude more efficient and flexible than machines that it barely makes sense to put them into the same qualitative category "form of life".
This whole conversation is about extrapolating on the cosmic scale. If you look at the path robotics has taken in the last century it does, as pointed out, actually support the premise of this article.
> Hint: A human consumes only about 2.9 kilowatt hours per day, the equivalent of 1-2 light bulbs
Not relevant. Once machines are replicating and repairing themselves they'll do exactly what we do and find other sources of energy.
Frankly I agree with you that it's hard to picture Transformers inhabiting the universe, but OP did make a really good point that extrapolation isn't even in the ballpark of refuting this clown. Honestly I'm shocked he didn't come back with that XKCD cartoon.
The mass censorship of gamers over the last month has raised questions about how well functioning that immune system really is. Gamers and the game media have never gotten along. But the degree to which gamers were thrown out of sites for talking about Gamergate was disturbing, and the "trivial" nature of gaming as a subject matter does not soften the blow.
Gamers were ejected from all major game news sites/blogs, almost all major game forums, news media outlets, subjected to shadow bans and mass deletions across the whole of Reddit, barred from editing Wikipedia, and finally -- in the the most absurd capstone to the whole farce -- all gamergate discussion was banned from 4chan, a place which still openly permits the posting of severed human body parts and rabidly anti-semetic hate speech. What few remaining forums for discussion were left ended up being DDoSed.
What happened during gamergate was what we were told could never happen to free discussion on the web: Site by site, the lights on the internet went out for video gamers.
In retrospect, it could only have happened for something as "trivial" as video games, and to a group as "subcultural" as the gaming community. But it has happened; It is still happenning. The entire concept of the Internet as a "fifth estate" or a forum for open debate has been severely discredited by recent events. If video gamers are unable to discuss or dispute that "Gamers are dead", or that games are not misogynist on the internet, then what can be discussed or disputed?
If the internet has an immune system, I don't see the patient recovering yet, and even in the event of a return to "health", the complications of this acute inflammation of censorship will be with us for a long time. This may yet end up being a watershed for the medium and our assumptions about it. Something has just gone very, very wrong.
The majority of the gamers who wrote Intel agree with you. In fact, the entire furore over the past month seems to have cemented the idea of "gamer" as a inclusive, universal identity into the collective mind of the gaming community across the web.
However, that was not the argument the Gamasutra and other articles made. The gaming press collectively declared that "Gamers were dead", that gaming as a descriptor was obsolete, that the "identity was dead", or referred only to a obsolete subset of exclusionary, female unfriendly, "selfish", "conservative", "tribalistic", and -- implied by the accompanying stock images -- fat angry unkempt adult males.
Meanwhile, games companies, marketing firms and online game fansites were still actively using the term to refer to everyone who, well, plays games. Even Forbes magazine was shaking its head in disbelief at the game media's attack on its own consumers. People are now asking how much damage recent controversies may have done to the public image of the gaming industry.
A $80 billion dollar industry which had achieved almost universal consumer acceptance and success may have just been torpedoed as a woman-hating "Cathedral of Misogyny" by its own press publications. Intel is cutting its losses before the conflagration spreads to the rest of tech.
For anyone interested, here is a link to the article Intel pulls ads from Gamasutra over. It is
'Game culture' as we know it is kind of embarrassing -- it's not even culture. It's buying things, spackling over memes and in-jokes repeatedly, and it's getting mad on the internet.
... It's young men queuing with plush mushroom hats and backpacks and jutting promo poster rolls. Queuing passionately for hours, at events around the world, to see the things that marketers want them to see. To find out whether they should buy things or not. They don't know how to dress or behave.
... Traditional "gaming" is sloughing off, culturally and economically, like the carapace of a bug.
... These obtuse shitslingers, these wailing hyper-consumers, these childish internet-arguers -- they are not my audience. They don't have to be yours. There is no 'side' to be on, there is no 'debate' to be had.
About ten or so articles like this appeared over the course of a few days at the end of August across most of the top game news sites. Apparently, a lot of gamers were upset enough to write into site advertisers to request they stop sponsoring the offending site with ads. Intel have evidently made a dash for the door out of a building the owners have decided to set on fire.
The author of the piece, Leigh Alexander is a described feminist critique of video games and video game culture, as well as wider "geek" cultures. Her personal views on geeks and their fandoms are
Why do you sometimes mock 'nerds' and 'gamers' so virulently? Isn't that the same kind of bullying you rail against?
... Self-identified nerds are often so obsessed with their identity as cultural outcasts that they are willfully blind to their privilege, and for the sake of relatively-absurd fandoms â" space marines, dragons, zombies, endless war simulations â" take their myopic and insular attitudes to "art" and "culture" with tunnel-visioned, inflexible, embarrassing seriousness that often leads to homogeneity, racism, sexism and bullying.
Nerds escaped high school. Some of them made millions making video games. Digital literacy doesn't make you special anymore, it makes you baseline employable. Fantasy is on mainstream cable.
... The fact you got a Game Boy for Christmas and liked it so much you stopped doing anything else doesn't entitle you to a revolution. Your fandom is not your identity. Your fandom is not a race.
I am not convinced that this person is not an ultra-conservative plant sent to discredit feminist and progressivism in geek and gaming culture. If she is, she's making a spectacular effort at doing so. This entire furore is doing real damage to the genuine participation of women in the video game and even wider tech. Intel's pulling of ads might help take the oxygen out of this fire before the industry gets burned.
Just wanted to thank you for the links. I was especially pleased to find that Python is supported!
Thank you! You've given me reason to sit up and pay attention when 3 rolls around, I appreciate that.
I would recommend against showing the more diehard Photoshop fans that link, though. It won't get you anywhere because what it really needs to be is a list like this:
- GIMP has a plugin/feature for automatically generating normal maps from elevation data.
- GIMP has a perspective correction feature that is superior to Photoshops in that it...
- GIMP's 'save all layers' button saves all of the layers in your file into seperate files.
5 is horribly overrated. Lots of artists can script, but few (if any) can make actual plugins or modify the source code. (Even if they do dig in to the code how do they maintain those features when a new version of GIMP comes along?) I do want to mention, though, that there's another reply to my original post that seems to have covered the scripting point. I haven't checked it out yet but given that scripting is something I do, I'm certainly interested in trying that out.
6 needs an extra line, something like: "its better than Photoshop's Batch feature because...."
10... actually this is a really good one. In fact, just before this thread started, I went and found the portable version and downloaded in. Why? Welp, if the scripting that Culture20 posted a link to turns out to be worthwhile for me, coupling that with a portable version of GIMP is *awesome*. What that means is I will be able to automate certain tasks AND keep a fresh install on my DropBox account so I can even use it off-site. This is 1 out of 9.5 (I gave partial credit to the source-code bit) and, as you can already see from other replies you've gotten, most are refutable.
I'm a little worried you might read my post and think that I'm trying to perpetuate the GIMP vs. Photoshop debate. I'm not, instead I'm trying to explain what needs to happen explanation-wise to get more Photoshop people to try GIMP out. I think there's this mentality that people should switch to GIMP and that's simply not true. If you got the professional Photoshop users to start using GIMP for certain tasks, you may find that some studios may find it worth their time to invest some development time into improving it. Given how Adobe has been dicking around with the licensing, this would be a good time to get that ball rolling. Start touting the unique features it has that shave man-hours off a project. If those features don't exist, then the team needs to start talking to people like me and finding out what else they need.
Care to run off a list of ways that "GIMP doesn't come close"? If it's really so bad, it shouldn't be that difficult to name at least a dozen or so... In actuality, I expect that enumerating the shortcomings of GIMP will not be in quantity, but in terms of a relatively small number of particularly desirable features that many may perceive as critically important in such software.
Hi, professional artist here. Your latter point, at least from my perspective, is correct. I know Photoshop really well, but since I make my living doing this work I am not biased in a way that'd prevent me from using a free tool. Let me be extra clear: It would hurt me to be fanboyishly loyal to be any particular app. I do pick up and mess with GIMP from time to time, but it has two critical omissions from Photoshop that make it unusable in my field. First, it lacks adjustment layers. Second, it lacks Smart Objects.
These are both features intended to do non-destructive editing of imagery. Let's say you have a tree with green leaves. You can create a Hue/Saturation 'adjustment layer' that will turn all the green pixels beneath it blue. If you put a picture of a different tree below that layer, its leaves would turn blue, too. If you took that tree and made it a 'smart object', you'd effectively be snapshotting that image and every operation you do causes it to regenerate itself. In other words, if you shrank a Smart Object down, then scaled it back up again, you'd get all its original detail back.
If you're creating imagery it doesn't take long for these two features to change your workflow in such a way that you gain a HUGE time savings. In fact I have created several templates to speed up the generation of images I do that I just plain cannot do in GIMP. Realistically speaking that is enough man-hours lost that I'd actually make a greater profit paying for Photoshop than I would saving the cost of the license in favor of GIMP.
With that said, I'd be *very* happy if you told me that version 3 would add these features. I'd also be very happy if somebody could tell me what GIMP does that Photoshop doesn't. It's free. if it shaves man-hours off my work, then load me up with the tips. I ain't gonna switch, but I ain't above using both.
Upon loading the site just now, I found I've been moved back to the classic slashdot system. I'd like to thank the admin responsible. It's nice to be able to read posts again.
P.S.
Timothy and other Slashdot Editors,
I am afraid that I must post an addendum to my previous call for assistance. The difficulty of the interface appears to be more considerable than I had initially realised.
Unfortunately, the interface does not load all comments on the page. In fact, only one comment is loaded on any given page, and the "load more comments" area / button provided, when pressed, does not in fact load anything. As such I am unable to determine whether my previous comment has been replied to, or indeed whether it has been posted at all. In short I can no longer see or read comments.
In the hope that this message will be seen, I will periodically attempt to post messages of aid in a scattering of stories. Whether these "post in a bottle" will reach you, or float at all, is something I can only hope for at this point.
In the meantime I shall see if the pieces of flat design driftwood can be lash togther into a makeshift civilisation of sorts. However this island appears quite desolate. The floating header follows whereever I go. Perhaps I will try to converse with it.
In any case I remain your hopeful servant,
A poster trapped in Beta
Timothy and other Slashdot Editors,
I regret making such an offtopic post, but I am afraid that I have found myself trapped on the "new" new Slashdot Beta site and I cannot seem to leave it.
The site features an extremely modern "flat" design. So modern in fact that there do not appear to be any visible links, menus, navigation bars, page divisions, or icons at all. A "slide out" option to move back to Slashdot classic pops up from time to time, only to disappear as I try to click it. I believe I may need to use a "charm" type gesture or spell in order to properly summon such advanced features, but I am not privy to the precise incantations.
As such I am currently stuck on the new Slashdot Beta with no way of returning to a more usable interface. I find this most unsatisfactory, somewhat frustrating, and feel I have little other option but to send this call for assistance.
I possess an advanced STEM degree and over 25 years expierience with technology, software and the web. I feel I can positively contribute to discussion on this site, but this new interface is making the site too difficult to use.
Yours
A user trapped on Beta
NSA officials were unable to find any evidence Snowden ever had.
This is essentially the "I do not recall" equivalent of paperwork investigations.
The essential question here is whether the NSA can conclusively deny that Snowden never raised concerns at the agency. Since if he did raise concerns, he probably would have raised them to people personally, a document search is not nessesarily going to uncover whether he did.
What will uncover this conclusively is a simple interview of NSA and affiliate company employees and especially supervisors who worked with Snowden. But since such a set of interviews would either a) reveal that he did raise concerns, b) involve people having to sign their names to untruths, or most unlikely c) reveal he really raised nothing, then I think it's easier for the NSA to just pretend that a half-assed email server word search constitutes an appropriate investigation.
First Person Shooter players do not represent the entire gaming community. This stereotype is being used to label Pokemon and Super Mario players as misogynists and bigots. All gamers are being tarred with a toxic brush.
This kind of labelling is wrong and morally bankrupt. The gaming community is being forced to defend itself against these kinds of disgraceful libels, by people who are genuinely ethical bankrupts. Simply browse the #Gamergate and #NotYourShield twitter hashtags to get a sense of where these accusations are coming from, and exactly who is in denial.
You know you've been spending too much time on the computer when your friend misdates a check, and you suggest adding a "++" to fix it.
