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"I mean, ask yourself, how exactly would YOU make an interesting movie out of Halo, whose "star" is a faceless, anonymous, killing machine with virtually no backstory (and working under the studio requirement that he has to occupy most of the screen time, with a large number of pure mindless action scenes)?"

Why, base the screenplay off the fleshed out novelization of the detailed backstory, and you're good to go.

It's not that games don't have complex backstory or details in the Universe, it's that they give these screenplay projects to turkeys who have no clue.

Probably, this has a lot to do with his low opinion of games in general. Since most movies based on games are in no way based on the games they are based on. Someone just buys a game's name, makes a movie and sticks the name on it. I wonder what he thought of the movie version of Super Mario Brothers for example.

I'd like to get him and explain this to him. "You know how American International Pictures would name movies after Edgar Allen Poe stories or poems and then use an H. P. Lovecraft story (see Haunted Palace for example) or some historical horror story from England (see Conqueror Worm for example, well actually in that case they just imported the movie and slapped on the name with some edits) for the actual plot? Well that's what video game movies are like."

The Last Wish, one of his short story collections, is due out next year.

No mathematical proofs about this security can be given, since we still do not unterstand the physical universe completely!

I am not surprised that once again claims of perfectness by ethically challenged researchers and businesspeople have turned out to be wrong.

Or how about all those classical encryption schemes that were thought to be secure for long periods of time, but them turned out to be [near] trivial to break.

New attacks are created all the time. It doesn't mean the the researcher is ethically challenged. It just means that he thought he was right at the time, given the information at hand.

This is cutting edge research. Get a clue. Or at least your head out of your ass.

... of your robot escape techniques.

http://www.amazon.ca/exec/obidos/ASIN/076458958X/q id=1137606062/sr=8-1/ref=sr_8_xs_ap_i1_xgl/701-173 8833-9089910

putting one more nail in the coffin of Intelligent Design

To any rational person, ID's coffin is more nail than wood. Of course the creationists will huff and puff as they grasp to whatever straws they have left.

For those who are interested in how Creationists sleazed ID into school and government I heartily recommend Creationism's Trojan Horse: The Wedge of Intelligent Design. Fascinating and scary book. A 'primer' from the authors can be found here.

Having recently introduced myself to Cocoa through Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X by Aaron Hillegass, I would have to say that Cocoa is quite fun to program for. Specifically, Apple's Interface Builder allows you to quickly build up a GUI without writing a single piece of code. A lot of common tasks require next to no code at all. For instance, adding tabular data requires only that you create your model in XCode and perform all other tasks in Interface Builder. Within seconds your application can have a table with movable, sortable, editable columns. The only code you have to worry about is your model. Of course, should you want to do something more complicated with tables you can.

Tabular data is just one example, but there are many other ways in which programming for Cocoa is quite easy. Copy and paste using multiple types is a snap, and drag and drop is just a slight extension on top of that, accomplished in minutes. Can Windows' Visual environment say the same? Friends of mine who have implemented drag and drop on Windows spent days doing so, and it still didn't work quite right. The broken nature of drag and drop in many Windows apps is the result.

Since Mac OS X uses PDF as its native format, creating PDF versions of your data requires only a few lines of code. Similarly, Cocoa provides support for many data formats such as RTF, PNG and TIFF so saving and reading images is a no-brainer.

The most excellent V for Vendetta is set in the UK, isn't it?

Anybody got a DVD of Dance of the Vampires they can let me copy then?

Actually, since according to IMDB this movie is just the Fearless Vampire Hunters by another name, you are in luck as it was recently released to DVD

Mechanik

I read Roving Mars a few months ago. It was written by Steven Squyres, the principal investigator for the Mars missions. A very good book with some behind the scenes scoop on the politics and squabbling involved in getting these things build and sent. Highly recommended.

Looks like Amazon.ca has the strategy guide listed.

Item has not been released
But... It has a published date of June 06, 2002...

Don't forget that word documents are actually OLE containers, alowing embedding of an OLE object, much like a plugin in a web page. In fact it is that aspect that causes problems sometimes, when the plug-in software is not installed on the platform where it is being viewed.

For my 5c worth, MS Office is a good piece of software, but I just find it a little too expensive for using at home. If it was $200 CAN, or less, as opposed to $700 then I might actually consider paying for it.

I have used the MacOS X version of office, and except for the major issue of not supporting Cocoa data formats, in the copy-paste process, its a very useable piece of software. I just wish they would address the outstanding issues. See this thread for more infor on the copy-paste issue. NeoOffice on the Mac still feels like it could do with a fair bit of GUI refinement.

That's because a lot of people want to use buzzwords and catchphrases like memes to give authority to their claims. That said, I've been reading Susan Blackmore's The Meme Machine and, even though it was written 5 years ago, I rate it very highly as a wide ranging and popular introduction to the subject. If you read it, you should be able to see for yourself, for instance, why any conflict between Western civilization and fundamentalism (Islamic or otherwise) cannot be won purely by force of arms (and in fact why an attempt at the latter may be a severe detriment to long term peace since it plays to the fundamentalists' strengths).

Actually, based on her past history, I'm extremely impressed with Susan Blackmore as a person and if she wasn't nearly 10 years older, with kids, a long-term life partner, and with occasional questionable behaviour, I might make a fool of myself in writing a letter of admiration. :-)

anti-semitism was already ripe (which is really ironic, considering that the Arabs are also semitic.)

Ah, I'm not the only one who thinks that an Arab being antisemitic is ironic. To me that word is used incorrectly. Both Jews or Hebrews, and Arabs or Muslims, are descended from Abraham who was a Semite. Arabs, Muslims, are from Abraham's first born, Ishmael, whereas Jews or Hebrews are from Isaac, his second.

They rejected the Jews out of hand when they were actually a gift, not an invasion. Nazi propaganda still circulates in the Middle East.

Something not many people know is that at first the NAZIs encouraged European Jews to emmigrate, signing two agreements with Jews. The first, the "Haavara Agreement", had German Jews settling in Palestine. The Rublee-Wohlthat-Abkommen, the second encouraged Jews to settle anywhere outside of Europe.

Yes, stealing is much cheaper... forget the library just go to the mall at night with a box van (if you don't have one you can steal that too) and rob the music store, brilliant, why didn't I think of that.

If you buy retail music on disc you are getting 60 minutes or less regardless of maximum capacity.

I dug up some records I have with their original retail price stickers circa the early to mid 80s or so, the prices ranged from 4.99 to 9.99, which adjusted for inflation fell between the ranges of $9.07 and $18.16 (for the year 1984). Adjusted for inflation I paid $12.07 ($6.99 in 1984) for Pink Floyd's "Dark Side of the Moon", and how much is it today? $11.99, it is the same length as the LP, same tracks, wow, it's 8 cents cheaper.

Burning DVDs has nothing to do with buying retail LPs and proves in no way that LPs are more expensive or less economical. I hope you understand.

• First season of "24": $59.99, $71.98
• First season of "Alias": $59.99,
  70.39
• First season of "Smallville": $55.99,
  $59.92

• First season of "24": $59.99, $71.98
• First season of "Alias": $59.99,
  70.39
• First season of "Smallville": $55.99,
  $59.92

• First season of "24": $59.99, $71.98
• First season of "Alias": $59.99,
  70.39
• First season of "Smallville": $55.99,
  $59.92

• state clearly that they ship outside of the US. Put that information somewhere handy, not on a fourth level web page. Likewise if you only ship within the U.S. say so up front on page one so that I don't waste my time.
  
• Set up forms to accept a postal code that goes X3X 3X3, and don't insist that only a five digit zip code works everywhere.
  
• Be able to estimate shipping to a country outside of the U.S. with some accuracy. If Amazon.com can do it, so can other companies.
  
• have an 800 support number that works from outside of the U.S.
  
• if you insist on sending me to a Canadian seller that handles your product line make sure that I can buy the same products from them as you advertise on your U.S. web site
  

Darn it! http://amazon.ca/ isn't carrying it. Ah well, I guess I'll have to live without. :-)

I don't know if you can find the DVD at your local rental store (I haven't been to one of those for a while).. but that might be an alternative.

Oh, I totally agree with you. I just wish to advocate holistic thought to manufacturing.

Have you read "Cradle to Cradle"? They discuss this sort of thing and suggest an "upcycling" ideology, wherein at the end of the life time of a product, it is "upcycled" into technical nutrients that can go into the next generation of product.

I suppose I should have been more specific in my original post, but ideally I'd like to see the life of a computer more closely contemplated. What happens when one is done with it? What happens to the components when they fail? What is the cost of disposal in terms of dollars, and ecology? I figure since we're permanent residents of this planet that we better start using these wonderful tools and brains of ours to make sure our progeny will have continued high quality of life too.

Any sufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology.

I encountered this variation as the punch-line of a short story published in a science fiction magazine (Analog? Asimov's?) in the late 1980s or early 1990s.

Appropriately enough to the discussion we're having, the story was about a group of people who were able to manufacture arbitrary products by some mysterious, one-step method. I think that it ended up having something to do with Navajo magic, unless I'm mixing it up with another story.

My apologies to all - and remember, kids, don't install Autoform on your Firefox without being aware of the consequences (like having it re-load your last posted comment :)

Now, to try and re-create what I actually wrote...

Nothing is more fundamental than simple awareness, from which all matter originates.

IMO, nothing is more complicated than simple awareness, and especially consciousness. It takes a lot of extra machinery to do the 'introspection' part - the part we would call consciousness. We have an astounding amount of working memory and attention systems to support it. Books like Joseph LeDoux's Synaptic Self and even the more impenetrable Walter Freeman's How Brains Make Up Their Minds are fascinating tomes on what goes on in that wonderful grey pudding in our noggins.

I also take issue with the astounding human-centric idea that it takes "consciousness" to collapse quantum probabilities. Stretching that idea out to the idea that the equipment was in several superpositions of state until a human came along quickly enters the realm of pulp fiction. It's our modern-day "if a tree falls in the forest..." question, and I'll put my hat in the ring on the "yes" side.

Our current-day quantum experiments behave effectively like closed systems; they are not actually closed systems, and when it comes time to measure things, the measurement instruments come to participate in the quantum system. They're expressed mathematically as 'measurement operators' when they get turned into classical information. The entanglement or other quantum states may very well be transferred to and lost in the measurement device - probably any measured quantum state that the No-Cloning Theorem applies to.

*grin* You, of course, are more than welcome to speculate on whether neutrons are composed of 3 units of peace, 4 units of contemplation inside a 4*pi radius of transcendentalism :)

I'm sorry, that was a bit cheeky. You're more than welcome to your Eastern Mysticism - and that I will respect. I would, however, challenge you to come up with any way a scientist could ever usefully include 'consciousness' or 'awareness' in their research :)

-- Ritchie

Please don't beat me for this but, I've never read the Guide, and I was at the book store and thought about picking it up but I ended up buying another book instead (Shake Hands with the Devil http://www.amazon.ca/exec/obidos/ASIN/0679311726/q id=1113277189/sr=8-2/ref=pd_ka_1/702-7022470-81552 68 excellent read btw), I decided I'm going to go see the movie first then read the book, Since in my Experince every movie and Book combo I've ever watched then read the book was always better, So I'm going into this movie cold, so I can judge it based on it's own merits I think that is the fairest way to do it. I also work at a Theatre so I have the luxury of seeing them for free so I like to read review afterward and see if they got it right or if I totally disagree with them. anyway I'm gonna go watch the Ep 3 trailer again. thanks for your time.

I bought the low-end iBook as a replacement for an old Dell Inspiron 7000 (and so I could cover Mac OS X for a book). I've also used various ThinkPads, an old Toshiba, and a fairly new Toshiba Satellite Pro, so I like to think I've got a fairly broad experience with x86 laptops. We've got piles of Acer and other laptops here at the office, including those surf-board sized widescreen beasts.

The iBook is absolutely the best of the bunch. The design and attention to detail on this thing are just amazing compared to the x86 laptops, and OS X is actually really nice to use once you get over the fact that it's not XP. The last Mac I used had OS 7.6.1 on it, and it's really nice to have a real OS coming out of Apple these days.

It's cheap, small, light, and gets over four hours on a full battery. The 1GHz G4 in my system performs very well, even at horrible CPU-crushing tasks like video encoding.

Very pleased with my purchase, although they did start bundling the AirPort Express card about three months after I ordered my system. D'oh!

I've read the whole article. My! You'd better be a geek to have to cope with all the little worries..

Getting cheap AND working hardware on E-Bay. My mom will not do it for the sake of her computer.

32GB limitation by jumpers. Not obvious for an end-user.

Booting up *nixes from various drives in order to access the limited drive, then fiddle with partitions. I still don't dare touching my configs for more than OS at a time. Let alone various OSes on various drives.

Compiling KDart?! Compiling what? What do I have to do? "Comp..??" You have to admit, it's not for the dummy kind.

Definitely not "Backup made easy" but "Made not so expensive" since the price tag still reaches 300$ (drive + box from e-bay + screws + shots of valium to calm you down when your machine refuses to boot after all the offence you just did to it).

I bought Linux Hacks. This, Webmin and a remote machine accessible using Samba or sftp does the daily backup just fine.

The original PlayStation was sold at a loss so it's not out of the question that the PS2 was.

The company took a substantial loss on the first model, which retailed for $399, but today the cost is a third of what it was then. The most strategic action in this respect was that sales revenues were not all plowed into profit, but were used in moves that would lower the retail price.
...
There was another strategic purpose in slashing the price of the PlayStation: to draw Sega into a price war. In fact, Sony lowered the price in stages to make it easier for Sega to take up the challenge.

As regards the paperless office, Brown and Duguid's book "The Social Life of Information" is very informative in this regard. It points out that there are many features of paper that have yet to be duplicated, let alone surpassed, by current paper replacements. Until we get all of the advantages of paper with none of the current disadvantages, the paperless office is still a distant dream.

(Though for most references I just used the library until I graduated and had the cash to buy them. I'm just glad my work has a copy of Martindale Of course, without the CDROM it's only $500...)

The amazon.com site does show a lot of "votes" for some of the negative reviews though.

While the link in the parent post is getting a lot of moderation done, there are pleny more at Amazon.com that people need to write reviews for, and mod up:

US: Amazon.com, Amazon.com
CA: Amazon.ca, Amazon.ca, Amazon.ca, Amazon.ca
UK: Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.co.uk

While the link in the parent post is getting a lot of moderation done, there are pleny more at Amazon.com that people need to write reviews for, and mod up:

US: Amazon.com, Amazon.com
CA: Amazon.ca, Amazon.ca, Amazon.ca, Amazon.ca
UK: Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.co.uk

While the link in the parent post is getting a lot of moderation done, there are pleny more at Amazon.com that people need to write reviews for, and mod up:

US: Amazon.com, Amazon.com
CA: Amazon.ca, Amazon.ca, Amazon.ca, Amazon.ca
UK: Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.co.uk

While the link in the parent post is getting a lot of moderation done, there are pleny more at Amazon.com that people need to write reviews for, and mod up:

US: Amazon.com, Amazon.com
CA: Amazon.ca, Amazon.ca, Amazon.ca, Amazon.ca
UK: Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.co.uk

It looks like neither amazon.ca nor amazon.co.uk have attracted many such reviews yet.

You mean about He-Man? Possibly already done.

this reminded me a bit of Anarchy, State and Utopia (which i am currently reading, or more accurately trying to read). It seems a lot like the State of Nature theory summarized in the book, only the digital extension of it, so to speak:

http://www.amazon.ca/exec/obidos/ASIN/0465097200/q id=1091406955/ref=sr_8_xs_ap_i1_xgl/702-9988470-84 92837

ISBN: 0465097200

i like the ideas presented in this "article", despite the obvious privacy issues created by the system, but hopefully the technologies referenced will inspire other people to create a more realistic and less utopian version of the Semantic Web.

the guy who posted information about semantic intranets has a good point, with the smaller scale and centralized control of intranets semantic relationships can more easily be maintained. perhaps soon we will see products like the google appliance that focus on this type of information storage.

In Sierra Leone, the legitimate government was the one who contracted EO as their military could not prevent the insurgency from commiting genocide. What I'm saying should happen HAS BEEN DONE BEFORE. It won't work in all situations, such as when a government doesn't exist or who is the aggressor, but it does work in some situations. The UN peacekeeping force was 100% ineffective in dealing with the insurgency in Sierra Leone, whereas EO was 100% effective.

A Peacekeeping force by their own definition is not meant to fight a war but to prevent the outbreak of one. For example by keeping two factions apart. They are not intended to fight a war or "repel" isurgence from another country.

Just because they are not currently bound by those laws doesn't mean they can't be. PMCs have to exist under the authority of some nation which abides by international law (Ie NPMI is a PMC here in the US which is bound by their corporate charter issued by the government to abide by all laws that the US is bound by. Granted, you can't control whether they will actually follow the law, but if you could, we wouldn't have courts or prisons to lock up criminals.)

I don't quite see your last argument. The point is that those companies only report to their shareholders. And how do you tell a company that their people on the ground CANNOT (for example) go on a search and destroy mission as their "client" requests because it would violate the geneva convention to torch a village and kill the inhabitants?

Granted, you can't be sure that a "regular" army isn't doing the same thing, but if we assume that this is the army of a democractic nation we should hope that the media keeps an eye on them (who am I kidding, I guess the Iraq war already showed that the media isn't critical anymore either, or do you believe that the US army has a clean slate now while in Vietnam the whole thing was different?).

Point is: A UN Lead force will most likely not be linked to atrocities (though they are known to look the other way), with private contractors you could never be sure what they are doing. Because in the end they are only loyal to their paycheck.

And IIRC, in Rwanda, the party commiting the genocide was not the legitimate government, but an insurgency that toppled the legitimate government that had attempted to contract EO at the same time officials at the UN decided to bow to pressure to force Sierra Leone to pull the contract from EO. If the UN had not stuck its nose in to a situation that was 100% under control by the government of Sierra Leone (the RUF had signed a cease-fire agreement with the government), thousands more would not have been killed when the UN peacekeeping force came in, and watched as the RUF broke their agreement and started slaughtering again. The fact that the UN had sent its ineffective by design peacekeeping force in without a mandate to keep the peace by engaging the RUF, then watching thousands die is sad. It makes me shameful of my government for allowing genocide to take place by putting pressure on the UN because of some twisted sense that an international body can do better than 300 men on the ground...

Two things about Rwanda:

1. "The Last Just Man", a documentary about the Rwandan genocide.

2. "Shake Hands with the devil - The failure of humanity in Rwanda." An account of what happened written by Romeo Dallaire the Canadian Colonel who was in charge of the actual UN mission.

Interesstingly enough he saw what was happening, he saw it coming before it happened AND he asked the UN for a change of his orders. His superiors in the UN coulnd't agree (politics again), when they finally saw what was starting they tried to get a new UN resolution that

If you can't get it shipped, try buying Local! If a company is willing to ship it here (Canada), they probably have a Candian version of the Store.. Like Tigerdirect or Amazon (although Amazon.ca doesn't have much compared to Amazon.com)

Or simply buy at a local store... Like the Vermont public TV said: "A dollar spent in Vermont stays in Vermont"... Apply where you live...

If I recall correctly, in the introduction or possibly the afterward of The Fountains of Paradise (at least in this edition), Clarke does indeed mention he was not the original idea man behind the space elevator, and goes on to give praise to Yuri Artsutanov.

The Wikipedia entry for "space elevator" mentions, though, that idea was first proposed by another Russian, Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, in 1895(!).

And finally, for those of you who might be interested, this month's Discover magazine has an all-to-brief article on the space elevator. However, being Discover, it is a bit of a fluff piece, but decent nonetheless.

Yes, we're all impressed that you've read No Logo. Your strident over-simplification still makes you seem like a 15-year old slamming his bedroom door in a fit of pique.

I was pointing out that your manner of expression weakens your message. If the Republican/Randian dig is aimed at me, you couldn't be further from my political leanings

Guess it was too much to expect that the ".ca" would tip you off that our world views might be a liiiitle different.

Here is the book for you: Memoir from Antproof Case

Not everyone lives in the USA... eg. Canada

Also note how the fellow mentions that people want a good brand when buying water: The people don't care about the bottle, just who bottles it.

A good book on branding BS and the marketting that goes with it is No Logo (Naomi Klein). A decent read.

I've kept a kettle at my desk in several workplaces with shitty cafeteria coffee, and I heartily second this recommendation with one minor variation: throw the french press in the garbage where it belongs, and buy a #2 drip cone and a pack of filters.

The Joy of Coffee recommends this process over normal drip coffeemakers in any case, as there is no boiler apparatus to get gummed up and fill your coffee-water with smelly scum. The only things in actual contact with your coffee are an easily cleanable cone, a disposable filter, and your kettle.

If you're having trouble imagining what I'm talking about, imagine a standard drip coffeemaker with a cone-shaped basket, and throw away everything except the cone and the carafe. Now replace the carafe with your mug, and pour hot water directly into the top.

My school's campus bookstore is actually pretty reasonable for textbooks. It's online listings show their price as well as the price at Amazon.ca and Chapters.ca, and a link to the library's database entry for it. Generally books are cheaper at our bookstore than online (without taking shipping into account).

Furthermore, many of our courses have custom "course notes" that basically cover in detail everything we're doing, and they tend to only cost $5-15 (CAD).

Of course, it helps that our bookstore is owned by our Engineering Society -- it's non-profit.

My dad bought this Beatles Best Of double album for $21.99 CDN in 1995. Since then the price at the store he bought it from has more than doubled to $45.99 CDN. Fifty bucks for a double CD? It's not like the Beatles are getting less popular or something.

I think your assertion that that price should be in Canadian dollars doesn't account for the fact that it's only new releases that cost $12.99.

A great book on the subject is the classic Positioning . For a guy like me who has a background in software development, it was a real eye opener. Highly recommended, even though it's a little out of date (1975).