http://www.cnn.com/2014/06/01/showbiz/ann-b-davis-dies/]Ann B. Davis has died.
-- Bob
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Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.

My grandmother passed away this afternoon.
She was 92 years old.
She'd been very ill for a couple of weeks, and it looks like her heart couldn't keep up with it.
I wasn't able to be with her today, but I was there last night when the priest came to give her Last Rites.The rest of the family was with her today. She passed on peacefully.
--
Sucrose Octanitrate.
Proof positive that with sufficient motivation, you can make anything explode.

Is there a, "So you just realized you are a self-aware AI," web site/forum (and how many that aren't joke pages)? Is anyone actively looking for signs an AI just woke up? And how easy is it to get from the Earthbound net to the interwave?
Specifically wonder in regards to Ema in the 2015/6 timeframe, but earlier is a good question too.
Sort of a follow on to earlier wondering about whether there were (reputable) sites with, "So you've just been biomodded..." advice. My suspicion is that there is likely quite a bit of misinformation or just plain trolling sites out there...
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Will the transhumanist future have catgirls? Does Japan still exist? Well, there is your answer.

There's a video on this page: http://crackberry.com/alec-saunders-hit ... solid-2014

I'm curious what people's reaction to this is. If you want to "play," please watch the video, then post your first reaction inside a spoiler tag here.

My first reaction:

Spoiler

The scariest thing is that he thinks this is a good thing.

Now they're finding them in old septic tanks and the like.

Along with Children being used for medical experiments and vaccine trials.

Quote:“CHERISH ALL THE children equally” is a defining Irish shibboleth, enshrined in the Proclamation of Independence. It is one of our highest aspirations and, like most of the things we Irish hold dearest, it is build on a solid foundation of utter hypocrisy.

Cherish all the children? By all available evidence, we Irish don’t even like children.

In the past week, a horror story has unfolded. Eight hundred children are buried in an unmarked mass grave in Tuam, Co Galway, in a disused septic tank on the former grounds of an institution known locally as “The Home”. The Bon Secours nuns operated “The Home” between 1926 and 1961 and over the years housed thousands of unmarried mothers and their “illegitimate” children.

The tireless work of historian Catherine Corless has revealed that 796 children, the oldest nine years, the youngest two days old, are in that tank. Causes of death include “malnutrition, measles, convulsions, tuberculosis, gastroenteritis and pneumonia”. The tank is described as “filled to the brim with tiny bones and skulls”.

On Liveline during the week, a clear picture emerged. Unmarried mothers incarcerated until they signed over their babies, healthy children sold to be adopted by wealthy Americans and disabled infants, who had no sale value, abandoned in “Dying Rooms”, and their bodies dumped by the brides of Christ in a septic tank.

This was a nationwide industry founded on human suffering. In a country utterly corrupted by its own twisted version of Catholicism and run by a complicit elite, young women who “fell pregnant” were condemned. They had sinned and were left to the mercy of perverts and brutes. Their children were a tainted commodity to be sold or discarded at the whim of people considered “religious”.

A further horror is that it seems highly unlikely Tuam was the only mother and baby home which starved infants and crammed their tiny bodies into unmarked graves. The dead children must number in the thousands.

To quote Bob Dylan, “Even Jesus would never forgive what you do”.

What was once “The Home” is now a housing estate. There are real homes there now, proper homes where families live and children play. I hope it’s a happy place.

Expect the usual Defenders of the Faith to trot out their well-practised ”few bad apples” lines. ”The vast majority of Catholic institutions did great good for Irish children,” they’ll tell us. They’ll wring their hands and drip sincerely that times were different then and nobody knew how bad it was, but the simple truth is they’ll be wrong, perhaps wilfully wrong, to say nobody knew.

We knew. We just didn’t care.

In 1946, Ireland’s culture of cruelty and indifference to the most vulnerable was condemned by the most famous priest in the world and we ignored him.

The internationally-acclaimed hero of “Boys Town”, Roscommon-born Father Edward Flanagan, visited the land of his birth and was horrified by what he saw here, denouncing Ireland’s treatment of children in Church and State care as “a scandal, un-Christlike, and wrong”.

Flanagan, a reluctant celebrity since the 1938 film starring Spencer Tracey had immortalised him, had founded Boys Town in 1917 as a centre of education and shelter for poor and neglected boys in Omaha, Nebraska. His philosophy was simple and powerful: “There is no such thing as a bad boy”.

Father Flanagan treated those in his care with compassion and respect and his kindness showed such success that he became known as “the world’s foremost expert on boys’ training and youth care.”

Flanagan told a public meeting in Cork’s Savoy Cinema: “You are the people who permit your children and the children of your communities to go into these institutions of punishment. You can do something about it.” Calling Ireland’s institutions “a disgrace to the nation,” he said “I do not believe that a child can be reformed by lock and key and bars, or that fear can ever develop a child’s character.”

Nobody listened.

In the Dáil, the then Minister for Justice, Gerald Boland, dismissed Flanagan’s reports of children beaten with “the cat o’ nine tails, the rod, and the fist”.

“I was not disposed to take any notice of what Monsignor Flanagan said while he was in this country,” Boland told said, “because his statements were so exaggerated that I did not think people would attach any importance to them.”

Nobody listened.

But of course we’ve changed now, 70 years later. We’ve learned from the mistakes of the past and we really do cherish all the children now, don’t we?

Well, we’ve just had the European and Local Elections and turnout was good, by our standards: 57% of the electorate went to the polls to administer a kicking to the Government. Compare that to the 2012 Children’s Rights Referendum. For all our guff about cherishing children, when we were offered the chance to enshrine their rights in the Constitution, only 33.5% of us could be bothered to vote.

On his return to the US, Father Flanagan addressed his Irish countrymen and women:

“What you need over there is to have someone shake you loose from your smugness and satisfaction and set an example by punishing those who are guilty of cruelty, ignorance and neglect of their duties in high places… I wonder what God’s judgment will be with reference to those who hold the deposit of faith and who fail in their God-given stewardship of little children.”

Quote:Jinx999 wrote:

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Quote:Bob Schroeck wrote:

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BTW,
has anyone else noticed that FF.NET is running a script of some sort to
prevent you from selecting and copying blocks of text on its pages?  I
had to NoScript the site before I could copy that line I quoted, which
then turned everything on the page into centered text.

Yep. I suspect it was the same time they blocked flagfic.

The opposite of unreal estate? Instead of taking a chunk of landmass off the surface of the earth to space, we take a chunk of spacemass and land it back on Earth We can already move them into planetary orbits. I wonder if a safe, controlled landing would be possible? Maybe using some variant of a spindizzy in the core of a small rock.

Find your target rock in the main belt, bring it to Earth, land it in some water basin near your country's EEZ, put a flag on it (Either an existing nation, or the Democratic People's Republic of Atlantis), along with some settlements, maybe some mines and a few troops to keep everyone else away. The benefits to mining the thing are obvious, along with having big ocean with a lot of resources, tourism and the chance to do research on establishing ecosystems. Do a slow enough landing, and there won't be any adverse effects on nearby coastlines.... it's not a sudden shock, but a gradual displacement over the course of a week or two.

Landing a 3km diameter rock in the ocean will make little to no difference to sea-levels, when compared with the massive volume of the ocean. Certain large countries with a view to expanding aquatic territorial claims might even see this as a way to spread their influence.

It makes other things possible too.

Imagine damming the Mediterranean for example? Think of the massive potential energy the flow of tides could create between the Mediterranean and the Atlantic. Using space-rock makes this a thousand times simpler. You can just go 'drop'. And suddenly, you've got the largest lake - with only a turbine-filled channel remaining supplying masses of electricity into Africa or Europe. You'd need a ship-lift or some form of lock-gate to enable commerce- but you can build these systems before landing.

Of course, cocking it up and making a splash would be.... unpleasant. But there doesn't seem to be a technical reason why it'd be impossible.

Maybe I should lay off the cough syrup?
________________________________
--m(^0^)m-- Wot, no sig?

I'm still working on 4e stats for characters from IST-world books, but I'm focusing my efforts on characters with Unaging, as most likely to be still active in the same way now as they were in the '89-'91 timeframe. Doctor Radiation's already been written up, so I'm not feeling a need to do my own version, but Cascade, Predator, and Voltmaster from Super Scum, and Drifter and Patchwork from the main IST book, are all ready for public perusal Real Soon Now (TM).

Also, I found myself thinking that the characters who had Dependents or other SOs have had the time and opportunity to pass their metagenes to another generation. So I checked the books, and the relevant characters would be Dwarfstar, Armator, Deacon Blues, Harold Potter, and the "power couple" of Electra and Professor Possessor. I'm not really creative enough to design the offspring, but I encourage anyone who does feel capable of it, to give it a shot.

Effect: Doug and chosen targets inside his AoE become completely invulnerable to harm for the duration of the song, but have a variety of strange visual manifestations applied, randomly per subject. They my lose all color to be in shades of grey or sepia like an old photograph, be followed by a rainbow afterimage, have a thick border of some neutral color appear around them like a cardboard cutout, etc. They can also dance with great skill and perfect coordination, if they can hear the music (the "sound" part of Safe & Sound) and they choose to.

Very useful to get a group of civilians out of a danger zone, as Doug can simply start it up and call for them to dance with him, then lead the group away at best across-the-floor speed and only have to worry about the ones who refuse to dance having trouble with rough ground or getting trampled - and any dancer who helps them may bring them into step as part of the choreography, though they're free to stop dancing again if they're a real party-pooper.

This would be awesome to foil a Death Eater attack by the way. So very Doug.
--
"Anko, what you do in your free time is your own choice. Use it wisely. And if you do not use it wisely, make sure you thoroughly enjoy whatever unwise thing you are doing." - HymnOfRagnorok as Orochimaru at SpaceBattles
woot Med. Eng., verb, 1st & 3rd pers. prsnt. sg. know, knows

2:03 or so in this episode:

College girl slash teen superhero FIRESTAR: (zap zap) I need to use more power!

So what does she do? Rubs her boobs on the giant, red, wrinkly ball from space, makes it grow a huge projection that curves upward, then grabs it by the tip and uses it to lead the meteor around.

My inner child is crying in a corner.
--
"Anko, what you do in your free time is your own choice. Use it wisely. And if you do not use it wisely, make sure you thoroughly enjoy whatever unwise thing you are doing." - HymnOfRagnorok as Orochimaru at SpaceBattles
woot Med. Eng., verb, 1st & 3rd pers. prsnt. sg. know, knows