it's even worse than we thought
Grok Headline matches for it's even worse than we thought
LexisNexis Breach May Be Worse Than
Thought (AP)
LexisNexis Breach May Be Worse Than
Thought (AP)
04/12/2005 11:50 AMAP - Up to 10 times as many people as originally thought may have had
their profiles stolen from a LexisNexis database in the United States,
publisher and data broker Reed Elsevier Group PLC said Tuesday.
Picture messaging - it's worse than you
thought
Picture messaging - it's worse than you
thought
09/15/2004 03:23 PMBut might get better
LexisNexis Breach Worse Than Thought
LexisNexis Breach Worse Than Thought
04/12/2005 10:20 AMLexisNexis said on Tuesday that a security breach which resulted in
personal information of thousands its customers potentially being
compromised could be ten times worse than originally thought. An
investigation has discovered that 310,000 U.S. citizens may have had
their addresses and Social Security numbers accessed.
Kids' Obesity May Be Worse Than Thought
(AP)
Kids' Obesity May Be Worse Than Thought
(AP)
06/03/2004 03:43 PMAP - Forty percent of public schoolchildren in Arkansas are
overweight, and nearly one in four is obese, a sign that obesity among
children nationwide is probably far worse than health officials had
thought.
Women perform worse than men on average
but even worse when playing against men
Women perform worse than men on average
but even worse when playing against men
04/24/2004 06:22 AMNotes from the paper Performance in Competitive Environments- Gender
Differences
marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2004/04/politi
cally_inc.html
track this
site | 5 links
bought thought -- free thought has a
price
bought thought -- free thought has a
price
03/08/2004 11:12 PMBought Thought .. john
boughtthought.com
track this
site | 4 links
It was worse than you think. Also
better.
It was worse than you think. Also
better.
07/06/2004 06:43 AMThe cd of images from my running of the Marathon des Sables arrived
this morning, just as the temperature here hit the low 90s. I'm
starting to have flashbacks. I've been training for the my manhauling
attempt on the North...
It's only going to get worse
It's only going to get worse
04/09/2004 04:08 PMThis analysis of the spread of the
witty worm is fascinating for a whole bunch of different
reasons.
Firstly, the analysis was made possible by USCD's Network
Telescope, a network monitoring system on a massive scale which takes
advantage of the fact that IP arranges were handed out like candy back when
the 'net was in its infancy. USCD controls a huge chunk of all
potential IPv4 addresses, and their network telescope tracks data sent
to 1/256th of all IPv4 traffic. Since most worms target random IP
addresses this makes the telescope a unique tool in analysing the
spread of hostile code in the wild.
Next, Witty Worm was no ordinary worm. It targeted an exploit in ISS firewall products, which include
the popular BlackICE product
targeted at home users; this means the worm was actively attacking
people who had made an effort to secure their machines! It also
carried a destructive payload - a rarity for worms in the wild.
Additionally, the exploit it used had only been publically announced
the day before. It's possible the authors new of the vulnerability in
advance, but it's far more likely they had already written the payload
and were just waiting for a new vulnerability to use as the
carrier.
From reading the report, it seems that the worm managed to infect
virtually every one of its potential targets that were connected to
the internet. This critical point is what makes the worm so
interesting, because it destroys the idea that non-Windows users are
made more secure by their relatively lesser numbers. If a worm came
out with a similar methodology to Witty Worm but that targeted Linux,
OS X or even something with a truly tiny statistical footprint like
BeOS it could still achieve almost total infection of its chosen
target audience.
The worm also appears to have used a number of techniques that had
previously been hypothesized by the security communit, such as
spreading from a number of pre-infected hosts.
If a worm can spread this fast, with this little notice, and infect
almost all of the vulnerable population, we're in a pretty precarious
state.
Related reading: The Peon's Guide to
Secure System Development, Slashdot's thread on the Witty Worm
analysis (some of the +5 comments are pretty good).
From Bad To Worse?
From Bad To Worse?
12/30/2003 01:22 AM403(b)etter or Worse?
403(b)etter or Worse?
03/31/2005 05:35 PMTeachers and others stand to gain and lose with new retirement plan
rules.
Security: From bad to worse?
Security: From bad to worse?
01/05/2004 12:19 PMWe've seen worse than Sasser - MS
We've seen worse than Sasser - MS
05/04/2004 03:06 PMClean up gets underway
GAO: P2P Porn no Worse Than on Web
GAO: P2P Porn no Worse Than on Web
12/12/2003 11:35 AMInternet News Dec 12 2003 10:38AM ET
New state, same as old but worse.
New state, same as old but worse.
12/02/2003 02:39 PM The
Miami Model... ["What is the Miami
Model? It is several things:
extremely violent
police response to nonviolent demonstrators, embedded
reporters behind police lines - and arresting and harassing
"non-embedded" journalists...(and) mass arrests and an
arsenal of "non-lethal"
weapons.]...represents the next step in the
criminalization and repression of dissent that is occurring in the
United States right now." It is part of the newly emerging
"
Technologies
of political control" (1.1m PDF) which are rapidly consuming
American democracy from within. This is more than crowd control. This
is the new
Information
Warfare. Oh - and thinking of protesting? -
The
FBI would like your name, please. (more inside)
The
scene was a "massive police state," - John Sweeney,
President
of the United Steelworkers of America. At the
Miami protest against
provisions in the
"Free Trade
of the Americas Act", the massive police presence was paid
for by $8.5 million from the 87 billion dollar "War on
Terror" bill passed by Congress. 30 to 90 busloads of retirees
were blocked from the protest by police, and
Amnesty
International has called for an investigation into allegations of
widespread police brutality - over 100 protestors were injured. (some
photos and
some
more, courtesy of Leif Utne) Bonus -
Watch Miami police
use a tazer on a peaceful protestor. (Quicktime/Video 14M)
Two businesses that can only get worse
Two businesses that can only get worse
06/15/2004 08:32 AM 1. Perhaps your newspaper's funny pages includes Whatzit, the
syndicated daily puzzle that takes some everyday phrase and presents
it as a clever arrangement of words. For example, "nv emerald" is
"green with envy" and "TTT" is "big tease." Imagine it runs for the
next 40 years. That's 14,600 common phrases from now. Whatzit will be
down to obscure taglines from the 1950s and hepcat cliches that were
last uttered in 1928. 2. When a store makes a commitment to everything
costing a dollar, it is guaranteeing that it will lose value precisely
at the rate of inflation....
It gets worse for the N-Gage
It gets worse for the N-Gage
11/11/2003 03:18 PMWe wouldn't keep kicking the N-Gage when it's down like this, but the
bad news keeps on coming. The latest calamity: the encryption that
prevents N-Gage games from being played on other cellphones has been
cracked, so now there's no reason to buy Nokia's gamephone if you just
want to play one of its games. Normally this wouldn't be such a big
deal since Nokia would at least see some money from people buying the
games, but copies of N-Gage games are already being swapped online. So
Nokia is doubly screwed. Read [Thanks everyone who wrote in with
this]...
BSA Wants To Make The DMCA Worse
BSA Wants To Make The DMCA Worse
01/06/2005 07:34 PMWhile the BSA has mostly sat back and let the RIAA and MPAA take the
brunt of the bad publicity for suing customers, you can be pretty sure
that they're also freaking out over file sharing and avoiding any and
all evidence about how it could help their member companies. Just as
the RIAA lost
yet
another case saying they have to actually file lawsuits before
sending subpoenas to ISPs for user info, the BSA is
asking Congress to modify the DMCA to force ISPs to
cooperate and give up user info
without a lawsuit being filed.
This is very problematic for plenty of reasons -- not the least of
which is that it would turn ISPs into an enforcement arm that will be
forced to monitor how people use their network. ISPs just provide the
service. If companies have a problem with what an individual is
doing, they should file a lawsuit and then request the info from the
ISP. Without a lawsuit, it's all just a fishing expedition. At the
same time, however, the BSA
is at least interested in exploring
some amount of patent reform -- including plans to make it easier to
challenge granted patents. That might be a slight improvement -- but
it could also lead to many frivolous challenges. It seems a much more
reasonable idea is to open up the patent process so that people have
an easy process to make prior art claims
before a patent is
granted.
Spam epidemic gets worse
Spam epidemic gets worse
12/04/2003 04:53 AMBut you knew that already
Is it just me, or has Firefox gotten
worse with the last two releasese (since
0.7)?
Is it just me, or has Firefox gotten
worse with the last two releasese (since
0.7)?
06/11/2004 03:24 AMI just finished reading Neil Turner's the review of the latest version
of Firefox, and my first thought is, "I'm not installing that." Of
course, I probably will end up doing so at some point, but it is so
disappointing to see a project that started with such promise getting
worse and worse with every release (although to be fair, it is also
getting faster). Still, I'm still running Firebird .7 on one of my
computers, and on the whole I prefer it to 0.8. If this review and the
release notes are accurate, it looks like the situation just worsens
with 0.9. The new download dialog foisted on users in 0.8 has been
kept, the theme has been changed to one that looks quite ugly and is
acknowledged as being worse than the current one, and the disregard
for the most popular extensions and current users that was
demonstrated when 0.8 was released is strikingly repeated. From the
release notes, "when you run 0.9 for the first time all of your
extensions will be automatically disabled." There were a lot of
comments a year ago about all the problems with design by committee --
now we are starting to see some of the problems with design by
dictatorship, and disregard of users. As someone said on the
mozzilazine forum, "The capacity of this project to repeatedly shoot
itself in the foot never ceases to amaze me." As a believer in open
source, this is really disappointing. I hope that I am wrong, and that
when the dust settles there is still a superior product to Internet
Explorer in there somewhere, but the current direction isn't
promising. At the moment I am considering returning to Mozilla as my
default browser, or testing the Opera waters again....
"Pupils 'do worse with computers'"
"Pupils 'do worse with computers'"
03/26/2005 05:07 AMIt's Not Rocket Science -- It's Worse
It's Not Rocket Science -- It's Worse
12/22/2004 01:13 AMThe iPod is brilliant. I don't understand why they're not more
popular. By Deborah Ross, The Independent
2004: How could it be worse than last
year?
2004: How could it be worse than last
year?
01/02/2004 09:30 AMSan Jose Mercury News Jan 2 2004 8:29AM ET
YUKOS: From Dismal to Worse
YUKOS: From Dismal to Worse
07/28/2004 04:30 PMThe Russian government claims it doesn't want to take down YUKOS, but
that's what it's doing.
New Forecast Says Inflation May Get
Worse (AP)
New Forecast Says Inflation May Get
Worse (AP)
05/24/2004 07:52 AMAP - Fed by escalating energy prices and a rebounding economy,
inflation will pick up more this year than previously thought, a group
of economic forecasters says.
Is spim worse than spam?
Is spim worse than spam?
04/09/2004 04:13 PMNo.. but shonky IM throws up new set of issues
"could the Boston Herald be any worse?"
"could the Boston Herald be any worse?"
08/22/2004 03:41 PMCan Janus' News Get Worse?
Can Janus' News Get Worse?
07/23/2004 02:34 PMThe company's latest report was unfavorable. Are more dreary days
ahead, or is Janus readying for a revival?
Is it just me, or has Firefox gotten
worse with the last two releases (since
0.7)?
Is it just me, or has Firefox gotten
worse with the last two releases (since
0.7)?
06/11/2004 06:51 AMI just finished reading Neil Turner's the review of the latest version
of Firefox, and my first thought is, "I'm not installing that." Of
course, I probably will end up doing so at some point, but it is so
disappointing to see a project that started with such promise getting
worse and worse with every release (although to be fair, it is also
getting faster). Still, I'm still running Firebird .7 on one of my
computers, and on the whole I prefer it to 0.8. If this review and the
release notes are accurate, it looks like the situation just worsens
with 0.9. The new download dialog foisted on users in 0.8 has been
kept, the theme has been changed to one that looks quite ugly and is
acknowledged as being worse than the current one, and the disregard
for the most popular extensions and current users that was
demonstrated when 0.8 was released is strikingly repeated. From the
release notes, "when you run 0.9 for the first time all of your
extensions will be automatically disabled." There were a lot of
comments a year ago about all the problems with design by committee --
now we are starting to see some of the problems with design by
dictatorship, and disregard of users. As someone said on the
mozzilazine forum, "The capacity of this project to repeatedly shoot
itself in the foot never ceases to amaze me." As an open source
enthusiast, this is really disappointing. I hope that I am wrong, and
that when the dust settles there is still a superior product to
Internet Explorer in there somewhere, but the current direction isn't
promising. At the moment I am considering returning to Mozilla as my
default browser, or testing the Opera waters again....
MIT Presidency worse than feared
MIT Presidency worse than feared
08/27/2004 01:40 PMCatching up on the mail I read through the latest Technology
Review, MIT's alumni magazine. Things are far worse than
feared. One letter calculates the cost of the $283 million
new computer science building as $17 million in 1916
dollars. The main buildings, which are enormous by comparison,
were completed in 1916 at a cost of $7 million.
Much more depressing than the backwards slide of the American
construction industry in terms of efficiency is an article about Chuck
Vest's 14 years running MIT. The article touches briefly on
Vest's achievements in increasing research funds between 1990 and
2003, which sound very impressive due to the lack of
inflation-adjustment (the actual increase in 2003 dollars was from
$430 million to $472 million). Nothing having to do with
innovation in research or education is mentioned. If the article
is accurate, Vest's major focuses turned out to have been
- fighting with the Federal Government over MIT's price-fixing
arrangement with the Ivy League colleagues. This agreement was
predicted to be illegal by Stanford, which refused to join the cartel,
and deemed illegal by a Federal District Court Judge but we ultimately
beat the rap in the Court of Appeals (see my
tuition-free MIT article for more)
- studying the extent to which female faculty members had less lab
space than male faculty members and whether this was due to
discrimination
- pursuing sex- and race-based discrimination in student admissions
and faculty recruitment and promoting such discrimination nationwide
in briefs to the U.S. Supreme Court in affirmative action
cases
I guess Phil Sharp, the Nobel Prize-winning biologist who turned
the job down is feeling pretty good about his decision to stay in the
lab.
The only encouraging news in the magazine concerned Erika Ebbel,
MIT Class of 2004 in Chemistry, who as Miss Massachusetts will
compete in the Miss America pageant on September 18.
Wildfire Forecast Goes From Bad to Worse
(AP)
Wildfire Forecast Goes From Bad to Worse
(AP)
05/23/2004 03:08 PMAP - Months ago, national fire managers predicted the 2004 wildfire
season would be a bad one in the West. Now, they're changing their
forecast: It's going to be worse.
Lottery Millionaire's Troubles Get Worse
(AP)
Lottery Millionaire's Troubles Get Worse
(AP)
02/18/2004 04:07 PMAP - Michael Carroll picked up his $18 million lottery check
wearing a court-issued electronic tracing tag.
TIME.com: "I've Been in Worse
Situations" -- Sep. 20, 2004
TIME.com: "I've Been in Worse
Situations" -- Sep. 20, 2004
09/13/2004 03:42 AMRumsfeld Apologizes for Abuse, Says
Worse to Come
Rumsfeld Apologizes for Abuse, Says
Worse to Come
05/07/2004 09:52 PMReuters via Wired News May 8 2004 1:48AM GMT
Patching: The cure that's worse than the
disease?
Patching: The cure that's worse than the
disease?
03/08/2004 11:22 PMI'll go along with the thought that most of today's nefarious hackers
(and they have brought into ill repute what was once a term of
respect) are lazy. But I think they're too lazy even to do a spot of
reverse-engineering. All they need to do is to read the Microsoft
Knowledgebase article detailing the extent and cause of the
vulnerability to help them create an exploit by adapting someone
else's real hacking work.
IRAQ'S BASIC SERVICES WORSE NOW THAN
BEFORE WAR, GAO SAYS
IRAQ'S BASIC SERVICES WORSE NOW THAN
BEFORE WAR, GAO SAYS
07/01/2004 03:42 AMlatest installment of hand-wringing and self-flagellation .. From the
Seattle Times comes an article .. sheer
incompetence
seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld/2001968744_g
ao30.html
track this
site | 5 links
TCS: Tech Central Station - How Much
Worse Off Are We?
TCS: Tech Central Station - How Much
Worse Off Are We?
07/16/2004 03:17 AMMitnick: corporates are their own worse
enemy
Mitnick: corporates are their own worse
enemy
09/16/2004 03:05 PMIntel's Numbers Worse Than Feared
Intel's Numbers Worse Than Feared
09/03/2004 12:10 PMosOpinion Sep 3 2004 3:58PM GMT
Beagle worm variant getting worse
Beagle worm variant getting worse
07/17/2004 01:39 AMSunday Times South Africa Jul 17 2004 5:16AM GMT
Grok Description matches for it's even worse than we thought
GrokA matches for it's even worse than we thought
XML Tourist: Checkmate XML
XML Tourist: Checkmate XML
08/27/2004 01:49 PMIn John E. Simpson's first XML Tourist column, he leads us on a tour
of the world of XML-based chess applications.
Microsoft to Google: Checkmate
Microsoft to Google: Checkmate
08/27/2004 02:05 PMMemo to Bill: Change the Rules of the Game. The most highly
anticipated event of the year in the business world was made official
on April 29, 2004 – Google filed with the SEC and is going public.
You’ve heard the optimistic rhetoric: "This could change Wall Street
again." "This is the shot-in-the-arm our economy has been waiting
for." "This could change EVERYTHING." I am going to tell you what this
means – nothing.
Install and tweak the Checkmate tripwire
Install and tweak the Checkmate tripwire
04/11/2005 02:58 PMThere is a simple and effective way to protect yourself against
trojans, rootkits etc. Such threats may be at a low level on our
platform at the moment, but unless you have defences in place before
one strikes, you may be una...
Checkmate Selects Q Comm’s Qxpress 200
Point-of-Sale Terminals through
Universal Prepaid Solutions
Checkmate Selects Q Comm’s Qxpress 200
Point-of-Sale Terminals through
Universal Prepaid Solutions
07/04/2004 02:31 AMQ Comm International, Inc. (Amex: QMM; QMM.WS), a provider of prepaid
transaction processing and electronic point-of-sale (POS) distribution
solutions and Universal Prepaid Solutions, an independent sales,
marketing and distribution organization and an authorized distributor
of Q Comm International, today announced that Checkmate, a rapidly
growing provider of check cashing and payday loan services has
installed Q Comm’s Qxpress terminals in all of their retail locations
in 7 states through an agreement with Universal Prepaid Solutions.
[PRWEB Jul 4, 2004]
Swinger music player 0.1
Swinger music player 0.1
02/14/2004 03:53 AMA 100% Java music player using standard UI components.
Siemens SF65 Swinger Phone
Siemens SF65 Swinger Phone
09/15/2004 03:20 PM
Maybe it's just because I'm a sucker for white bricks,
but I think the new Siemens SF65 swing-out phone looks sort of nice.
It's a good thing, too, because beyond the color, the flip-out screen,
compact size, and the 1.3-megapixel camera built-in there's not a lot
to make it stand out.
Er, actually, scratch that. I guess it stands out quite a bit,
doesn't it? Too bad it's Euro-only - it has not the dual-bandery we
need.
Read -
Siemens SF65 Mobile Phone Digital Camera [MobileMag]
Look - Tons of
Pictures [Slashphone]
Ridiculopathy.com: Crappy Flash Game:
swinger
Ridiculopathy.com: Crappy Flash Game:
swinger
06/26/2004 10:54 AMFlash: Swinger game ..
Swingers
ridiculopathy.com/crappy_flash_games.php?gamename=swingertrack
this site | 4 links
"Teachers At California High School
Refuse To Act When Founder Of A
Conservative Club Is Threatened And
Harassed By Other Students -- One
Teacher Called Tim A Nazi, While Another
Described The Club As "A Bunch Of
Bigots.""
"Teachers At California High School
Refuse To Act When Founder Of A
Conservative Club Is Threatened And
Harassed By Other Students -- One
Teacher Called Tim A Nazi, While Another
Described The Club As "A Bunch Of
Bigots.""
01/01/2004 03:19 AMThe Club For Growth - The Club for
Growth Blog: DNC 'Lawyers Up' Against
the Club for Growth
The Club For Growth - The Club for
Growth Blog: DNC 'Lawyers Up' Against
the Club for Growth
08/06/2004 02:31 AMDNC Lawyers Also Try To Stop Anti-Kerry Ads By The 'Club For Growth'
From Being Played .. independent ads from this other group .. making a
habit .. life
clubforgrowth.org/blog/archives/013644.php
track this
site | 4 links
There's a club if you'd like to go
There's a club if you'd like to go
02/14/2004 02:28 AM
The photo inside The Smiths' The Queen is Dead album depicts the boys
in front of the
Salford
Lads Club in Manchester, England. Ever since the record was
released in 1986, the building has become a mecca for Smiths fans--a
notoriously, er, dedicated bunch. At first, the Club was less than
thrilled at being associated with the kinds of characters who would
sing about "stealing lead from a church roof." Now though, the charity
is dedicating an entire room to those charming men who made their
gateway famous.
Link (Thanks, Chris!)
CD Club ... first get-together
CD Club ... first get-together
04/09/2004 03:59 PMHad a fantastic first meeting of our little music club last night at
St. James Gate. Unfortunately, Greg was a no-show: too embarrassed to
appear without CDs after losing a wrestling match with technology
(I've promised to help get him back on his feet). Mark showed no such
reluctance or guilt, appearing like one of his students talking of
canines and homework. Both have been assured they're still welcome and
both promise gifts of music to come shortly.Three great hours sipping
beers and talking music. The group seems to be the perfect mix:
strongly shared tastes, sensibilities and knowledge but...
Hospitality Club
Hospitality Club
04/18/2004 08:23 PM
The Hospitality Club
is a similar idea to
CouchSurfing in that
both sites provide a database of people offering free lodging to each
other when visiting foreign countries. The Hospitality Club has been
going for nearly three years and has over 12,500 members in 142
coun
tries. The site has wiki-like features allowing members to edit
travel guides for each
country,
region and
city.
The Belmont Club :
The Belmont Club :
03/23/2005 08:12 AMWretchard's The Belmont
Club
wretchard.com/blogs/the_belmont_club/default.aspx
track this
site | 7 links
The Album Club
The Album Club
07/31/2004 12:10 AM
No time to pick out your own music? Still like the CD format? Live
in the UK? Well has
The Rough
Trade Shop got a
club
for you. Is this outmoded on arrival or an interesting variant on old
style "X-Of-the-Month" clubs? I know I sometimes find it
overwhelming to keep up with what's new'n'exciting.
Working At The Club
Working At The Club
06/14/2004 05:11 AMWith more and more people telecommuting or "freelancing," the home
office has been getting a lot more attention. Still, not everyone
likes to work from home (and for some people, it's really difficult).
There are tons of "temporary office space" companies that buy up
buildings and let people rent out single offices. However, one
company is trying to go (just slightly) beyond that by
setting up a "work club", where you pay your
membership dues and get to hang out in the common areas and meet your
co-workers. You also can use meeting rooms, phone booths, and some
limited amount of personal office space. Honestly, though, this
doesn't seem all that different from most temporary or executive
office space operations - other than they seem to be trying to make it
sound cooler with trendy phrases to describe everything. For example,
meeting rooms are "team spaces" while the cubicle farm is a "touchdown
space." Right.
Six Months to the UPS Club
Six Months to the UPS Club
06/05/2005 11:27 PM"...how long have you been running Adsense? And you're not in the UPS
club yet? Why not?"
"The Belmont club"
"The Belmont club"
06/12/2004 09:26 AMThe iPod Club
The iPod Club
08/27/2004 02:03 PM By Damien Barrett (via MyAppleMenu)
Stupid Fun Club
Stupid Fun Club
06/04/2004 01:14 AMSoftware Development Magazine: Inside the Stupid
Fun Club.
Software Development Magazine wrote an article called "Inside the Stupid Fun Club" (registration
required).
The author, Alexandra Weber Morales, unexpectedly encountered the
Sad Robot, broken down and crying for help on the streets of
Oakland.
We were shooting a couple of hidden camera reality TV "One Minute Movies" for NBC: one of a Sad Robot torn
apart into pieces and pleading for help from passers by, and the other
of a Robot Waiter taking orders, serving food and bantering for
a tip in a barbecue restaurant.
I (Don Hopkins) developed the custom "robot brain" software
for Will Wright's Stupid Fun Club, mostly in Python. It
involved writing lots of high level Python code and XML data, and
integrating all kinds of different software components together with
SWIG, C++, ActiveX, Java, IRC, HTTP and WiFi. The robot features
3D facial animation, speech synthesis and recognition,
conversational scripting, artificial intelligence, personality
simulation, telerobotic remote control via wireless
networking, with an interactive web interface for controling its
behavior in real time.
For another Stupid Fun Club project, I also used Python to
develop expressive synthetic speech authoring tools (audio speech
“phonoscoping”, like visual animation
“rotoscoping”), and talking toy simulations.
Python is ideally suited for brainstorming and prototyping new
product ideas, as well as developing custom
real-time robotic software for supporting creative
Stupid Fun Club projects like reality TV production.
Eventually, Alexandra Weber Morales tracked down the person
responsible, Will Wright, at his private production company, the Stupid Fun Club. She asked
Will about the Sad Robot:
[I've added my own comments
like this.
-Don]
Uh, OK. So, what kinds of reactions did people have to Sad
Robot?
Wright: A lot of people were talking directly to it. Most of
the women who were walking alone just sped up like they were spooked
by it. Most of the single men would stop and start stripping it for
parts, ignoring that the robot was talking to them. And it was mostly
the couples who would actually interact with it and try to help it.
Some would have long conversations, pushing the buttons.
We had a whole sort of troubleshooting thing, and we wanted to see
how far people would go to help it. It was sort of a Good Samaritan
experiment.
She also asked about the software we developed to control the
robot, simulate its personality, animate its face, and listen and talk
with people.
Have you heard of an AI knowledge base called Cyc?
Wright: For the conversational side of it, we’re
using something similar to Cyc—in fact, we were looking at Cyc.
There’s so many different layers. First of all, there’s the
voice recognition, which is getting much better but is still pretty
limited. Then, once you have the voice, you go into the conversation
engine, and then it’s doing something like Cyc or Alice or Eliza:
trying to give an appropriate response to what your input was. One of
the projects we’re working on here is this toy design where we
have these toys that converse with each other via infrared
text-to-speech.
There are all these different approaches to AI. Some of them are
more brute force, like Cyc. There’s also artificial life, an
attempt to evolve systems rather than build them from the ground
up.
Where’s this work being done?
Wright: The Santa Fe Institute is one place. There’s
genetic programming, or adaptive systems, to give computers a way to
learn and get feedback. That looks like a more promising approach.
Back in the ’60s, when computers were first being used in
business, everybody assumed we’d have artificial intelligence in
10 years. When 2001 came out, in 1967, and people came out of that
movie saying, “I can’t believe that a computer will be able
to play chess that well.” But they took the conversation with HAL
for granted. In fact, it was the opposite: Chess turned out to be the
easy part; natural conversation turned out to be the hard part. Within
20 years, we’re going to have machines like this that have full
autonomy and pretty good conversational ability. We could build a
stove that would have a long conversation with you. So the real
interesting question for me now is, what’s going to happen when
our world is surrounding us with intelligent machines? These are going
to be the first aliens we meet.
Describe the software running this
thing.
Wright: The conversational chatbot is Alice. It
takes input and you give it a dictionary to define what it knows
about.
[ALICE is written in
Java, so Python talks to it through an IRC server running on the
robot. We can connect to the same IRC channel over the wireless
network, watch the messages going between ALICE and the brain,
interject text to speak and think, switch moods, play facial
animations, tweak the personality, execute commands, etc. Later I
developed a more powerful web based "
Homunculus" interface, for operating the robot in real time,
with a web browser on a remote laptop or handheld.
-Don]
Winter: That’s connected to Microsoft speech
recognition, which is fantastic.
[I wouldn't go that far. It doesn't suck,
but "fantastic" is a stretch.
-Don]
Winter: And some simple AI, since Alice may or may not
understand what you’re talking about.
[In other words, Alice is like the mad old aunt with
Tourette's Syndrome you keep locked away in the attic. Alice is only
used as a backstop, when the Python/XML/AI layer of the robot
brain can't think of anything to say. But it's turned off when
we don't want the robot to seem insane.
-Don]
Winter: The most intelligent thing it ever did is we had an
opera singer in here singing to the robot, but the robot didn’t
like it. So she said, “maybe I should explain the story,”
and after the singer finished, the robot paraphrased the whole thing
back to her. It was about the most amazing thing we’d ever seen;
we all just about started believing in robots at that moment.
[What's really interesting is abusing the speech
recognizer, by putting the robot brain into a mode where it listens to
itself (and anyone else) talk! It's like the mutating
telephone gossip game, or the news media echo
chamber: The robot repeats what it thinks it heard itself
say, which it then mis-recognizes and distorts again and again, in a
feedback loop of quasi-coherent rhyming speech! Any words you
interject get mixed in and distorted in the speech
recognition/synthesis feedback loop. It naturally finds and converges
on extremely strange attractors in the recognizer's hidden markov
models of the English language, chanting and
mutating gramatically plausible but semantically ridiculous phrases,
in response to whatever it thinks it hears. When properly
configured, the robot can actually compose live performances of
original surrealistic beat robopoetry, responding to the audience
in real time! Stanislaw Lem calls that "Bitic
Literature".
-Don]
Winter: When we take these in public, it seems like the
people who are less technical savvy are the ones who interact with it,
whereas the people with technical backgrounds are standing there
reverse-engineering it.
Are you following what MIT has done with humanoid robots such as
Kismet?
Wright: There are lots of research labs around the country
building these types of robots, but they never take them out into the
public. We drive them into a laundromat or a restaurant and see what
the response is.
When we filmed Sad Robot, we also filmed a scene in a restaurant
with a robot waiter. It was interesting how many people totally bought
it. Usually within three or four minutes, they were completely normal
about it. People kind of expect that there will be robots in the
future; it’s just a matter of when.
[The Sad Robot: A pitiful broken down female robot
is crying for help, bent out of shape and fallen on its side with a
mangled tractor tread, next to a stinky garbage dumpster, begging
reluctant passers by to turn it upright, describe its condition, press
its big red reset button, adjust its controls, step away before it
explodes, and call a mysterious professor on their cell phone.
The Robot Waiter: An earnest robot
waiter, just trying to do its job taking orders, delivering food to
tables, telling jokes and bantering for tips, and collecting dirty
dishes. Afterwards submits itself to a Robot Waiter Performance
Evaluation Survey, and begs the human to give it good marks, otherwise
it might lose its job.
-Don]
Robot: If you could have any kind of robot, what would it
be? The goal is elimination of crime, combined with rehabilitation of
criminals … Yes, it seems very long to me, too.
What do you use for automated testing?
Wright: Our own suites. Most of our stuff is in C++, but
we have a proprietary visual scripting language I designed, called
Edith, for the behavioral code for the Sims. It’s totally geared
to AI and the Sims.
[The robot software is written in C++, Python and
XML. Edith is used to program simulated personalities, but
for simulated people instead of real robots. Edith
is the tool for programming The Sims, for scripting
the artificial intelligence of the characters and objects. The
Sims visual programming language itself is called SimAntics. Edith is
Maxis's official tool for programming SimAntics code, while
iffpencil2 is another third party SimAntics programming
tool, developed outside of Maxis.
-Don]
Winter: I think it’s time for the Christmas robot.
Wright: Are you running that … weapon? I don’t
know if we want to sit here. [A dancing snowman on a wheeled platform
with a circular saw mounted on its front bumper approaches a plastic
toy-store robot.]
Winter: No, you would die. You’d better take cover.
[The interview ends.]
The snowman quickly demolishes the toy, shooting debris throughout
the warehouse. With Winter’s encouragement, I spend 10 minutes in
a nonsensical conversation with the robot. He also shows me the
Minute Movie that have been made for NBC—and they’re
hilarious.
I leave this unconventional interview impressed with the way the
Stupid Fun Club has turned a fascination with robots and toys into a
lucrative and wholly entertaining enterprise. Meanwhile, the larger
concerns about the technical strengths, limitations and implications
of these semiautonomous machines go mostly unanswered. Wright and
Winter seem firmly on the side of presentation, and somewhat unwilling
to delve deeply into how their toys work—as if to say,
“Where’s the fun in asking all these questions? Just talk to
the robot.”
I'm certainly interested in delving deeply into how the
robot brain works myself, but not everyone else is. So I used Python
to develop a high-level XML based AI and wireless web remote
control system, which enables creative writers and designers like Will
Wright to script and control the robot behavior, and reconfigure it
for different scenarios, without needing to deal with Python, C++ or
the other software components that went into building it.
[
Don Hopkins' RadiOMatic
BlogUTron]
Belmont Club
Belmont Club
02/15/2004 10:18 PMWretchard at the Belmont club wrote: .. Wretchard ..
observes:
belmontclub.blogspot.com/2004_02_01_belmontclub_archive.ht
ml#107681898064838240
track this
site | 5 links
Fat Club redux
Fat Club redux
08/27/2004 01:34 PM
Yesterday, Mutsumi in our office told me half a
dozen times that I looked "bigger". I'd been thinking about how to
lose some weight and I remembered
Fa
t Club because
Jan
e linked to a Fat Club entry on her blog. For some reason, I seem
to be able to motivate myself to lose weight when I'm competing. I
asked everyone in our office if they wanted to join Fat Club 2004.
Kuri,
Jim and
Nob agreed to participate. The race
is to see who can lose 10% of their body weight first and sustain it
for one week. The last one in has to be a slave to the winner for a
day. Slave rights can be sold or rented. We decided to set up a
private wiki to organize this event.
Mizuka bought a fancy scale awhile ago hinting that I should
probably lose some weight. I jumped on it this morning and it told me
that I had the body of a 49 year old. (I'm 38.) The fancy scale uses
Bioelectric Impedance to measure your body fat and calculates basal
metabolism, body fat percentage, muscle percentage, internal body fat
level, your body mass index and your body age equivalent. Let me just
say it was very motivating. This new scale has 6 contacts, two for
your hands and 4 for your feet and seems more accurate than some of
the older models.
Comment -
TrackBack
Tarot Club
Tarot Club
12/03/2003 11:05 AMCréation
The Belmont Club
The Belmont Club
09/11/2004 04:28 PMview
belmontclub.blogspot.com/2004/09/escaping-kill-zone-dan-rathers
-defense.html
track this
site | 4 links
"Belmont Club"
"Belmont Club"
05/03/2004 02:23 AM"club Mandrake"
"club Mandrake"
01/03/2004 10:00 PMFan Club Kit For 2005
Fan Club Kit For 2005
03/17/2005 03:10 AMStarwars.com have posted all the goodies you get in the new and
improved Hyperspace Fan Club kit. There's a sticker, poster, trading
card and so much more!
Check it out!
"The Belmont Club "
"The Belmont Club "
09/18/2004 08:51 AMHi, Sarah - Welcome to the Club!
Hi, Sarah - Welcome to the Club!
01/17/2004 11:15 PMHello. My name is Sarah and I'm an
RSS-addict.
"OK, so the # of feeds I'm getting just went over 100. I officially
cannot live without RSS now...." [Librarian
InBlack]
Club A Penguin
Club A Penguin
01/05/2005 02:01 PM
Club a
Penguin [Flash] is a combination of a batting cage
and a driving range. One click sets the bat; a second click swings.
Strip Club
Strip Club
04/09/2004 04:03 PM0.6.2 released
it's even worse than we thought
