You confuse isomorphism with compliment. While information hiding is not a replacement for all other security measures, it does stack nicely on top of them. Just like locking your car door can only hope to keep lazy people and determined racoons out of your car. The only viable result of security is to delay and deter possible loss. If you think stronger security measures do anything else, and information hiding doesnt do it at all, you are misinformed. I dont think the indian government is trying to hide its keys under the doormat.

People who 'outrage' at the realism and graphic nature of art, in a hope that such a reaction does anything but reenforce the purpose of its exhibition, obviously have no idea what the point of art is. So... maybe someone should tell them. The point of art, is to evoke emotion. The more you 'outrage' at art, the more effective said art is. You cannot really argue with art by outraging at its exposition. All you do is affirm its effectiveness and the reason we have a need for such art to exist.

If gore and realism are repulsive... then how is depicting it 'glorification' of some situation in which it takes place? People play the games because it gets them close to something they normally would never get the chance to experience. I am more offended by the war movies of the 50's and 60's that took most of the gore and realism out of war. If you want to talk about glorification, THAT is a more fitting example.

If you want people to understand the ramifications of violent behavior, then censorship is very counter-productive. You protect noone by throwing a rug over the bloodstain. You simply doom people to repeat the same mistakes by taking from them the wisdom of experience, however detached such experience may be.

I think what offends the majority more than anything, is the fact that other people revel in violence. Unfortunately for them, humans have, and always will, find entertainment value in the suffering of others, most of all those that 'outrage' at things they do not have the depth to comprehend. Concepts like justice, which very few people have ever had much of any issue with at all, hinge on the administration of human suffering. Be thankful that we live in an era when there are more avenues available to satisfy our inate bloodlust than ACTUAL acts of cruelty.

But doesn't the proclamation of something's newsworthiness denote that it is something interestingly new? Not just some kind of mild iterative improvement, or coexisting thing? "Man in Utah discovers chemical composition of PAINT and PEANUT BUTTER"... ohhh ahhhh.

Some of us professional geeks never had a short term or long term memory to speak of anyway, so count yourself lucky. I can barely remember my mothers first name or where my car keys are, but somehow, people think I'm competent. Idiots. It pays the bills, and i enjoy the humility of it all, so who cares?

I dunno where I got empathy from. But, for the sake of self defense, I'd like to add that empathy is the only emotion from a robot that has any deep meaning. A cardboard box with a smileyface drawn on it can convey emotional information, it takes thus far, magical sorts of logic to come to conclusions about already present emotional information. A rubber head that can do that would be interesting.

No, I don't, and thats a piss poor plea (theirs' not your) for mod points. People are generally smart, they just lower themselves for social reasons, in groups or otherwise. You may or may not know that, but I think its more accurate than saying groups are inherently stupid.

How is complaining, superficially, empathy? I do not understand the basis for considering an animatronic rubber head that bitches about its life empathy.

Flaimbait? this whole topic is flaimbait, the robot isnt even a good conversationalist, it just whines and moans about being a disembodied head. If that is empathy... whatever. I've had better conversations with a chiapet.

Well cool. I dunno why people have such a tendency to start commenting on slashdot posts with ridicule. This is laudable, not laughable.

I doubt its at all what the military wants. The reasearch has nothing to do with fps's, or combat, or video games at all, its to do with human-human interaction where the focus is not completely on language. Computers can deal with spacial information a lot easier than irregular linguistic information. I think the goal is to have them 'fool' 'people' (yes, both in quotes), without tackling the hard problem of imitating spoken language.

I do not think the goal is artificial intelligence, i think, from the description of the research, its artificial stupidity. First it will fool WoW players, then it will move on up the ladder to tests subjects like mice with cancerous brain tumors, piles of cardboard, and eventually, cocker spaniels.

You would either have to be a hopeless moralist or simply dull around the edges to not fun such an idea fun/interesting. Interest in criminal ideas no more makes you a criminal than interest in horror movies makes you a masochist, or someone harboring murderous intent. What a naive comment.