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Why buy a UMD Movie, that is the same price as the DVD

If only it things were that good!! Almost always you can by the DVD equivalent for less. More quality, more versetile, less money. No brainer. UMD was doomed to fail from the get-go.

Compare two samples, a new release and an old release:

Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire: $15.76 vs $21.99
The Matrix: $9.76 vs. 17.99

Why buy a UMD Movie, that is the same price as the DVD

If only it things were that good!! Almost always you can by the DVD equivalent for less. More quality, more versetile, less money. No brainer. UMD was doomed to fail from the get-go.

Compare two samples, a new release and an old release:

Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire: $15.76 vs $21.99
The Matrix: $9.76 vs. 17.99

True, nobody will buy a gold-plated turd, for the same reason nobody will buy an unadorned turd. But people will buy gold-plated gadgets.

Did America invent roads? Why, yes!

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/stores/offeri ng/list/-/B000F7FSLO/all/ref=dp_bb_a/102-0989557-0 514530?s=videogames

there you go :)

I still keep one of their concise versions up at the cabin so when the wife and me get in an argument I can be proved wrong. She is the brains in the family, I'm the sexy!

From Wikipedia, "The Britannica was an important early English-language general encyclopedia and is still regarded as one of the most important reference books in the English language". About 2 pages of text at 1024x768 with a lively history and current direction the privately held company is heading.

Britannica, not a single word on perhaps the most important contribution to encyclopedia since Britannica. In a word disturbing.

However, I was surprized at how cheap Encyclopedia Britannica has become, I can remember when the CD version came on like 4 discs and cost 100 bucks. Wikipedia has to be the instigator of the price drop, if there were a level playing field I bet the same thing would of happened to windows when linux came out. An open API would be a cool punishment for Microsoft in any future antitrust cases.

They pass it to the customer. There are good arguments against free trade without having to diminish the short term financial benefits.

I wouldn't trust Sony no matter how good their format is, really, simple because of the fact that their formats, such as Memory Sticks, tend to be compatible only with their hardware, they don't like other formats, and there's none of that competition that makes the free market work so well. If I put music in an unsupported format on a Minidisc, I would have to re-encode, losing quality even more.

MP3 players work fine. As I mentioned before, I purchased an iAudio U2, which cost only a hundred and gets me MP3, WAV, and even Vorbis support (something I'll never see from Sony).

Finally, Sony's prices are a little too high for an item that's sure to get knocked around a lot. I'd rather have to replace a $100 MP3 player than a $300 machine from a company

Whoawhoa whoa, waitaminute.

"For example, their catalog wasn't available on CD until 1987 - years after CDs were accepted as mainstream."

OK, I remember the first(1986) few(1985) albums(1988) I remember buying on CD, which is about the time I'd peg the CD as being "mainstream." And even with these, the Cassette rack was still stocked larger and more fully-selected; few of those titles on Cassette or LP would be re-released on CD for quite some time.

And yet you're criticizing the Beatles for waiting all the way until 1987?

Now if you'd said 1997, you'd have a point, but cassettes were still king until at least 1988. You didn't even have CD players standard in most (non-luxury) cars until starting around the early 1990's.

Whoawhoa whoa, waitaminute.

"For example, their catalog wasn't available on CD until 1987 - years after CDs were accepted as mainstream."

OK, I remember the first(1986) few(1985) albums(1988) I remember buying on CD, which is about the time I'd peg the CD as being "mainstream." And even with these, the Cassette rack was still stocked larger and more fully-selected; few of those titles on Cassette or LP would be re-released on CD for quite some time.

And yet you're criticizing the Beatles for waiting all the way until 1987?

Now if you'd said 1997, you'd have a point, but cassettes were still king until at least 1988. You didn't even have CD players standard in most (non-luxury) cars until starting around the early 1990's.

Whoawhoa whoa, waitaminute.

"For example, their catalog wasn't available on CD until 1987 - years after CDs were accepted as mainstream."

OK, I remember the first(1986) few(1985) albums(1988) I remember buying on CD, which is about the time I'd peg the CD as being "mainstream." And even with these, the Cassette rack was still stocked larger and more fully-selected; few of those titles on Cassette or LP would be re-released on CD for quite some time.

And yet you're criticizing the Beatles for waiting all the way until 1987?

Now if you'd said 1997, you'd have a point, but cassettes were still king until at least 1988. You didn't even have CD players standard in most (non-luxury) cars until starting around the early 1990's.

I have never called them that. In my world it has always been Apple records or just Apple. I seldom refer to Apple computers as Apple computers. I refer to them as Macs or G5s ;)

Actually someone might confuse Apple Corps with Apple computers but I doubt they will confuse them with Apple records.

I don't make a penny off this but the Apple Corps thing rang a bell. House was the bell. It is a good book (as is The Soul of a New Machine) and Apple Corps were the contractors building the house.

They haven't been sued yet.

Yeah, I know... music.... houses.... no connection and no one is going to confuse the two.

Apple Computer.... Apple records.... Apple sells music.... Apple sells Beatles music... Apple doesn't sell Beatles music... my brain hurts!

Anway, I seem to recall somewhere where the agreement stated that Apple (the computer one) would not sell physical media. Can't find any evidence at the moment.

From TFA: Apple Corps was started by The Beatles in 1968 and is still owned by Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr, the widow of John Lennon and the estate of George Harrison.

The last I heard they don't need any money.

Back in 1970 Paul sued the others over a money issue. Read the part about Allen Klein.

Today they are worth a lot of money.

So who wants the money from the suit? I would guess it is not one of the original Beatles.

qz

Funny, this post shows up right after I ordered an iAudio U2 after looking at the Vorbis Hardware wiki. Since Ogg Vorbis is the nerd's audio format, we nerds must have a Vorbis-compatible player, and Apple's offering, while stylish, doesn't have that. Unfortunately, a lot of portable Vorbis compatible players have limited storage size (mine is 1GB), but I'm never away from my laptop long enough to hear more than that much, and so can fill it up with new music when necessary.

Given the unreality of the series, what premise could carry a movie that shouldn't simply be an episode?

I'm sure they'll come up with something. The Family Guy folks managed to come up with a movie that stands up very well when you watch it all at once, but can also be divided into three parts that could each be televised in a 30-minute timeslot if they so desired to air it.

Not to put too fine a point on it, if you ever read Watership Down, which was the inspiration for B&B, you know that even though bunnies look cute, there's all kinds of violence, dispair, chemical agents, deception, and mayhem goin' on underfoot.

This AbSOlutely has to be the CUUUTIST tanktop on the WORLD!!!!111 OOoohhhh it is so DARLING!!!!@@!!1211 If you wore this to work one day, you would be the MOST darling, Uber CUUUTTIST IT-tech in the WORLD!!!!111111 How can you go wrong with PONIES!!!! OMG!111

Do you mean like this mermaid?

The Venture Brothers

Other factors contribute to crime. That doesn't mean violent media doesn't contribute at all.

Indeed, anyone who believes that the decrease in violent crimes is well correlated with the rise of violent games should read Freakonomics and find out what it is much better correlated with. In fact, everyone should just go read Freakonomics anyway 'cause its an awesome book.

What I don't get is why blogging is where they chose to hit the brakes. They've got company reviews, customer reviews, customer images, book lists, citations, similar book listings, forums, and damned if they don't have wikis! It's A Magical World: A Calvin and Hobbes Collection (Paperback) has its own wiki! God help me if I scroll down too fast, or I'll never be able to find the book description again.

So why stop at blogs? Is this like my alcoholic pothead friend with a meth problem who doesn't take aspirin because he's afraid it'll mess up his system?

No, it's definitely not just you. I work with [removing] IM-based viruses as a hobby project, and there has been a clear shift from simple executable file viruses to full rootkits. Along the way I've seen everything from loading with the shell or userinit to winlogon to bogus kernel drivers.

It's my personal (and professional) opinion that this is likely to become the norm. I give it another year or two before the majority of malware is all rootkit-based. It's far too easy to incorporate rootkit technology, and far too difficult to remove. It seems only a natural step in malware evolution.

I recommend Rootkits: Subverting the Windows Kernel for further reading on the subject. The first two chapters were enough to convince me that rootkits are a more than viable path for malware to take. Perhaps more importantly, no matter what the security companies put into their software, once the system has been compromised, there is no way to trust the running system, period. The only way to verifiably clean a rootkit-infected system is to take it offline and scan it from a known clean (read-only) media.

"IBM and the Holocaust : The Strategic Alliance Between Nazi Germany and America's Most Powerful Corporation"
by Edwin Black
Paperback: 560 pages
Publisher: Three Rivers Press; Reprint edition (March 26, 2002)
ISBN: 0609808990

Robert

Well, I certainly agree. Real science can be very provocative however. Many recent missions have made headline news because the prospect of life on another world is surely sexy. So are giant glossy pictures from the surface of another world. I don't know many people that don't find that amazing. The Internet has created a new fan base for NASA and the availability of media, images and press-releases keeps them under scrutiny, which is good. (kudos to JPL by the way, I frequent their site almost daily) It could be worse.. or it couldn't. In the 60's we may have been enticed, for better or worse, into the Apollo missions under the guise of science, when really is was about testing our limits and beating the Russians. BTW -- Stephen Baxter's book, Voyage, is an excellent read and deals with such topics in a compelling science fiction story. It conveys what NASA looks like, smells like and runs like in a very believable way.

Oh they definitely will use it... the question is, will it still be successful? From what I've been hearing lately, the bloom has largely come off that rose. Bush's approval ratings are in the mid-30s (Cheney's at 18), and a majority of Americans polled now trust the Democrats more than the Republicans on just about every issue, even (gasp!) national security. Even the conservatives have lost faith in him. But I think the most telling aspect is that Bush goes on TV about once a week to talk up the war, and nobody listens to him at all. I think people have finally figured out that there is no point paying attention to those noises that keep coming out of his mouth, since they have no relation to reality.

That said, I suppose one can never be too cynical... but I think there is some room for hope here.

This is exactly the kind of thing our intelligence communities should be getting involved in. First off, this kind of stunt would be the first thing our own intelligence agencies would try to do if the Chinese government were buying computers built by an American company on American soil. Some arm of the US intelligence community planted bugs in wine bottles and other amusing places near the UN ambassadors on the Security Council during the buildup to the Iraq War.

The Chinese practically wrote the book on espionage. For some interesting reading on the subject take a look at The Tao of Spycraft". Interesting, if extremely dry, reading if you're interested in the intelligence community. A very good look at the LONG history of intelligence practice that the Chinese government has to draw on. I got interested working in computer security when everyone else in my office was ex-mil intelligence.

And not being particularly antagonistic toward us doesn't mean anything. Back in 1999/2000, the general opinion by most of my co-workers who knew something about it was that France and Israel were the countries that were spying on us the most, with China coming in third. The only reason Britain wasn't number 1 on the list was "we already give them everything we know."

I wouldn't put it past us to try it on them, so it would be ridiculous to trust that they wouldn't try it to us too.

Right, though I'm surprised civilians know about our plans. You'll find the extended discussion of the << dopamine and << endorphine operators in the ARM. And we use languages like Smalltalk for a reason, to get your guard down so we can invade your mind with recursion, and make a friend of your member.

It's a multifaceted problem, and no solution is readily available.

The way I see it, the problem is by design. It's well known that there's been a lot of "media consolidation" over the past few decades, so that the major outlets are controlled in the hands of a few corporations (e.g. Clearchannel).

John Taylor Gatto tells us in his books & presentations that the government's schools were set up to provide workers for industry. Before government schools, the American dream was an independant livelihood. After government schools, the expectation shifted to finding employment with a good company with good benefits.

The problem is that the same group of people are behind both efforts. Is it really so odd to propose that a small, dedicated group of families has been steadily concentrating wealth in their own pockets for centuries?

Furthermore, why is it that the same group of rotten scoundrels install themselves in government? George H. W. Bush was in the CIA at least as far back as the 60's. Head of the CIA, Vice President for 8 years, president for another 4.

Donald Rumsfeld was in the Nixon, Ford & Reagan administrations, according to Wikipedia. He even got his picture taken with Saddam Hussein back in 1983. Now he's secretary of defense. Dick Cheney was Secretary of Defense under Papa Bush, and before that he got himself elected as representative from Wyoming.

I'm sure there are more examples. The problem, as I see it, is that the same rotten bastards keep getting recycled through the political system. Watch for the keywords: Project for the New American Century, Bilderburg Group, Trilateral Commission, Council on Foreign Relations, etc... And that's not even mentioning the more secretive enclaves. See The Controllers: Secret Rulers of the World for a timeline of the consolidation of power over the last 100+ years.

What's more, anytime this sort of observation comes up, the masses have been conditioned to just snicker and dismiss the messenger as a "conspiracy theorist". But how do said masses know that there is no conspiracy? They don't "know", but social conditioning has implanted a nearly impervious belief.

Expose the so-called "illuminati" and their plots, and the problem will begin to go away.

I think there is a really excellent chapter in the following book Pair Programming Illuminated which discusses this. Basically, this is a teacher and student relationship in a sense. As such, you need to encourage the novice to ask questions about what you are doing (when you are driving), and to encourage the student to talk out loud about what they are thinking when they are driving. Finally, you must slow down and explain when things are tricky, and never confuse head-nodding or awed silence for understanding.

As the expert, you do need to delegate tasks. I think it is fine to send a student off on small individual assignments on the project, and then bring it back, they can explain it to you, and you provide comments on the work. Together, you can then bring the code into the codebase. This gives the novice the sense that you don't have to watching over their shoulder all the time, and ideally, moving the code into the your project is quick and simple.

If there is an existing code base, one of those assignment could be a simple "Present it to me" task. Learn this bit of code, and explain what purpose it has in the system, and bring me a list of questions and concerns about it. Then, after that, do a pair programming task that involves that code. The novice drives, you watch.

The list goes on and on. One other thing is to try to get the less experienced person to take on more and more tasks. In fact, you can almost challenge that person to know more about a part of the project than you do. This is good, because you don't have to be the expert on everything, which is tiring. And more you aren't the sole expert on, the better for you. You can just bring your experience to bear when it is requested, allowing you to focus on other tasks.

Unfortunately they have to cover their asses - with my Sennheiser CX 300s, the volume at full is uncomfortably loud. Anymore and I would be worried about permanent damage from even a short burst of music.

Here is an awsome book on drugs and their effects: Buzzed

I learned that Pot isn't as bad as the lawmakers say it is and alcohol is much worse than many drugs - including all of the controlled and illegal ones.

For the novels: 1886778175. Title: Martians and Madness.

Both published by NESFA Press, in 2002.

For the novels: 1886778175. Title: Martians and Madness.

Both published by NESFA Press, in 2002.

If you really think the 2004 election was "fair", you might want to read this well researched and documented book: Fooled Again

BTW, I agree with most of the rest of your little rant.

Actually, the title of the book is: The Wal-Mart Effect : How the World's Most Powerful Company Really Works--and How It's Transforming the American Economy. Amazon has it for $16.35. And if you use the "secret" A9.com discount, you can save an extra 1.57%!

Actually, the title of the book is: The Wal-Mart Effect : How the World's Most Powerful Company Really Works--and How It's Transforming the American Economy. Amazon has it for $16.35. And if you use the "secret" A9.com discount, you can save an extra 1.57%!

Save yourself $6.80 by buying the book here: Beginning Ubuntu Linux. And if you use the "secret" A9.com discount, you can save an extra 1.57%!

Save yourself $6.80 by buying the book here: Beginning Ubuntu Linux. And if you use the "secret" A9.com discount, you can save an extra 1.57%!

Bravo; you've made the most secure operating system available today. But, then, you have this firmly held belief that the rest of the world owes you something? That you're gracing the rest of the world with your glorious presence and regal software? That attitude is not welcome here.

Actually, no, he's not claiming that the world owes him something. He's claiming that his act of creation and contribution does not cause him (well, specifically, the OpenSSH developers) to be owe anything further to the people who take advantage of their contribution.

That is an entirely different issue.

"From the beginning of history, the two antagonists have stood face to face: the creator and the second-hander. When the first creator invented the wheel, the first second-hander responded. He invented altruism.

"The creator - denied, opposed, persecuted, exploited - went on, moved forward and carried all humanity along on his energy. The second-hander contributed nothing to the process except the impediments. The contest has another name: the individual against the collective." - Howard Roark in The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand.

That sounds like some crazy wild stuff. Any chance you have a link to the video?

Here ya go:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0679882812/002-78 31054-1659216?v=glance&n=283155

With enough reverse engineering experience reading disassembled code is not much harder than reading C source code.

I may have mentioned this previously, but I'll say it again, Amazon is hiring: http://amazon.com/jobs

Reality Master, I completely agree with you, and any others who claimed I was a cultural relativist, except for the white supremacist downthread.

Not all cultures are equivalent, and there's a base of morality that isn't relative. You listed a bunch of cultures that are indeed poisoned.

I was sort of replying to someone's post, and sort of commenting on the thread itself. The part of the guy's post (I can't find it now) I quoted struck me as someone making pretty superficial judgements, which I thought was stupid, and morally wrong. If you reject someone for being a white supremacist, or for endorsing barbaric practices, more power to you. I honestly didn't really have in mind the kind of cultures you listed, RealityMaster. I was thinking more along the lines of rejecting a black kid just because he spoke in ebonics or something like that, which no doubt a lot of people perceive as inferior (linguistically, and IAALinguist, it's no different than any other vernacular or dialect). Situations to that effect.

Now Jim-Callahan thinks he has me trapped as a hypocrite because while I identify with American culture (the melting pot thing is true to an extent, but we have a ton of obvious shared cultural norms), I say that we shouldn't discriminate, amd discrimination is the basis of culture. The thing here is that he's using two different definitions of discriminate. Cultures exist because the peoples of them discriminate against each other, which is to say, they note and recognize their differences from one another. There's another definition of discriminate, which cultures sometimes but do not necessarily do, which means treatment, adverse treatment in this case, without regard to individual merit or capability. It's the latter form of discrimination which I am against.

There was also an anonymous poster downthread, a borderline white supremacist, who said that WASP/white/European culture is obviously the best. Despite their flaws and mistakes, people of European descent have done so much to advance our technology (objectively true) and are so good looking (completely subjective) that they must be superior. Just that they accomplished these things does not mean they were the only ones capable of doing so. If you want a better explanation as to why Europe and its descendants have been ascendant in modern times, I suggest Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies as a starting place. There are plenty of great attributes to western culture, and the "tireless " protestant work ethic, a significant underpinning of American culture, is one of these, or at least responsible for so much success. But this is a cultural meme, not a genetic trait.

People who dress and look freaky do it for a reason -- because they ARE freaky.

And it turns out that creativity and freakiness are related. Read Touched with Fire: Manic-Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament for more information. It's no accident that the SF Bay Area is both known for being accepting of freaks and is the heart of the high-tech industry.

Eventually I think linux and OSS will take hold. I agree with the articles thesis: uptake of OSS (and, for the record, ANYTHING) is affected (negatively in this case) by sandals and ponytails.

In my long career pathetically ended after 21 years by an unfortunate "right-sizing" (let's get rid of the 20% MOST expensive employees in IT, but make sure to get rid of some of the kids too so we don't get sued...), I conducted an ongoing rant/argument/rage/discussion with my best friend at work about the impact of dress. Bob (not her real name) insisted not only are others impacted by your appearance and demeanor, but your very own work and feelings about yourself change based on your dress.

Being a long-haired sandaled techie I disagreed. It took Bob about fifteen years to win me over. I get it now, maybe a bit too late, but it does matter.

For doubters, read Robert Malloy's book. I love and hate this book. It's hard to dispute empirical research... you dress for your audience or risk losing them.

Still I like to wear my rose-colored glasses and think good conquers evil eventually, and still hold hope someday linux along with OSS gains the purchase it needs to be a viable and dominant market force unto itself (it already passes the viable test...).

As an aside: this does take an interesting turn when you consider that the "dress code" for "good tech" is oxymoronic, i.e., while it is true business leaders and decision makers like/prefer business dress and decorum from people they meet and strike deals with, at the same time it's a time-honored tradition that the most savvy and high-octane techies wear cutoffs, sandals, t-shirts (that probably say "fuck you" in some obfuscated way), and piercings. Go figure. (From my own personal experience, I would add, I found little correlation with the raggedy techie look and competence and would even submit many less competent techies cultivated the look as an offset to their less-than-great skills.)

And, now I'm off to install the new Firefox /. extension (God Bless OSS)

Alan Friedman, in his 1993 book Spider's Web: The Secret History of How the White House Illegally Armed Iraq describes and documents how US taxpayer dollars paid for, designed and shipped components for those WMD's you keep hearing about. That's why Bush kept thinking there were WMD's -- his fambly'd bought 'em, gol dang it! (With my money, in part, and without my permission, might I add.)

The most shocking and disgusting things are not how Bush Sr. helped Saddam Hussain build a nuclear arsenal that has somehow disappeared -- but how he helped Saddam Hussain purchase cluster Bombs --with US taxpayer dollars --that are being used to kill those very same taxpayers today, by the insurgents who captured those arsenals. Thanks, Dad!

There are a series of document facsimiles in the back, including receipts for cluster bombs purchased with USDA-guaranteed loans. Cluster bombs that were previously only built in the US -- but when the UN started asking difficult questions, the machine tools to build them were moved wholesale (also documented) for manufacture in Chile.

Bush Sr. helping Pinochet to build cluster bombs for Saddam Hussain. Isn't it nice how these people just help each other out all the time?

Both are more responsive than my 1.5 GHz Celeron with 512 MB RAM when it's running Windows.
You should check out Windows XP for Dummies
I've used all 3 of those for years and find your statement very funny. A P2 350 with 128M of RAM loaded with comparable functioning apps is never going to be more responsive. Booting up, loading Gnome/KDE and Openoffice alone is going to take like 4 minutes on that thing. Now if you're saying it's more responsive booting up into init 3, I can get DOS to load faster than your P2 350 with 128M RAM on a 486DX4 with 4 meg of RAM. AND it'll be more responsive (notice I'm leaving out which functions will be faster)
It's all about perspective and I happen to make a living delving deep into both sides.

One of the authors of the Washington Post article cited above is Rita Katz, director of the stupidly named "The Search for International Terrorist Entities (SITE), which seems to be an asinine play on SETI. The SITE website is actually very light on real original content. As I revisited it tonight, I found that they have given citation for their copy and paste of the US State Department's Patterns of Global Terrorism 2003 Report, which is the entire contents of SITE's "terrorism library". A year ago, they did not offer this bit of enlightening data. This should be enough to question the veracity of the whole story.

Katz obtained a degree from the Middle Eastern Studies program at Tel Aviv University, and is speaks Hebrew and Arabic. She emigrated to the US in 1997. She has both personal and financial issues which could bias her analysis.

• Katz is Iraqi born, and her father was tried and executed as an Israeli spy, whereupon her family emigrated to Israel.
• Katz is/was a paid consultant for the law firm, Motley-Rice, which file a 1 trillion dollar lawsuit on behalf of the 911 WTC victims.
• Katz is author of the book Terrorist Hunter (HarperCollins, 2003) in which she writes of infiltrating US-based Arab groups to investigate terrorist connections as a private investigator, and receives a plug for the book in every bio blurb that is published with her articles.

Katz got her terrorism expert start working for Stephen Emerson, who himself has credibility issues.

Katz was the anonymous source for a 60 Minutes segment that alleged a chicken farm supported terrorism, and for which both CBS and Katz were sued by Gainesville, Georgia based Mar-Jac Poultry Inc., as well as two Virginia-based muslim charity orgs, for libel.

Katz was also a principle player an an egregious example of of post-911 governmental misuse of prosecutorial powers in the case brought against a Saudi Arabian Computer Science doctoral student at the University of Idaho, Sami al-Hussayen.

Al-Hussayen was charged with giving material support to terrorist, for doing volunteer web mastering of the site of the Islamic Assembly of North America, an organization which the government has never charged. He was also charged with 11 minor visa violations, one being that his student visa didn't allow him to work, and he had received $300 from the Islamic Assembly of North America spread out over his five years of volunteer work for it.

The jury in Idaho acquitted on all three terrorism charges, and 3 of the visa charges, but hung on the remaining 8 visa charges.

The main thrust of the material support charges stemmed from the website Al-Hussayen worked on having published 4 fatwas by 4 radical immans on it. A government expert witness blew holes in that theory when he admitted that he had published the very same speeches on his anti-terrorism website.

When Katz testified, she admitted to the same visa violations that Al-Hussayen was charge with, only she had earned real money in violation of her entry terms.

Katz's testimony ended Friday with questioning about her own visa problems when she entered the United States. Katz testified that as a new immigrant in 1997, she misunderstood work permit requirements related to her visa and was employed, in at least one job and possibly two, before she was legally authorized to work. Under cross-examination, she acknowledged that she detailed those problems in her autobiographical book, in which she expressed disgust for burdensome government re

Your information is out of date.

Of course..... the question boils down to "is intelligence a physical process?" Everything we know about the brain's operation says that the answer is a resounding "yes"

You are right that that is the essential question. I am a little amused at everyone's assumption that the entirety of life can be boiled down into physical processes, however. I can't explain it but in my 34 years on this earth, having been a psych major and a CS minor with a concentration in biopsych and evolution and having taken a keen interest in life in all its forms since my earliest memory of reading Ranger Ricks and National Geographics and watching Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom, having family pets and volunteering for Zoo Crew and whatnot... even having played with things like Conway's Game of Life, read about Rodney Brooks' MIT robots with "emergent" behavior, having devoured every AI simulation and game that I can get my hands on over the years... my gut tells me that there is more, there is some kind of spark to it all, to all living things. If this very idea is turning you off, then perhaps your mind is a little too closed... But my current opinion is this:

Life... genuinely surprises, in a way that a calculated simulation... can't.

Though I do think the exercise in attempting to do this will be VERY educational. Hey, and if we pull it off... I stand corrected. But I think it is very foolish to assume "Of course".

If everything could be explained by physical processes, then we should also be able to create life in a test tube, and we have yet to pull that stunt off either... and frankly, I don't think we will, and that even a simple bacterium that is able to reproduce may remain forever out of our reach. Again, this is more a hunch than a proof... though again, I think the exercise in attempting to do so will ALSO be very educational.

I have a favorite anecdote from this really awesome book. The crew (which was on a tugboat in the middle of the ocean that became a popular seagull resting place) was attempting to figure out a way to keep seagulls from pooping all over the deck and making it dangerously slippery. One of them thought to rig an electric line around the whole boat where the seagulls perched. If too many were resting, they'd throw the switch and away the seagulls would go. They built it and it worked exactly as advertised. They were very happy with themselves for coming up with this. However, a couple of weeks later, an interesting development occurred. On an otherwise typical day, the seagulls were getting too numerous again and someone threw the switch. All of them flew away... save for one, who had lifted its leg. By lifting its leg it had broken the circuit through its body, preventing it from being shocked. They released the switch, the seagull lowered its leg. They threw the switch again, it raised its other leg... The following day, fully HALF the seagulls had learned to perform this feat (no pun intended). By the next day the crew found that they were coordinating Synchronized Seagull Foot-Lifting instead of actually shooing birds away, when they threw the power.

And this is exactly the type of "surprise" I'm referring to. ;) A genuinely creative solution to a never-before-encountered problem. Again, if I'm wrong... Great. Perhaps it was just a random walk through meatspace that caused them to stumble upon this solution, realize it, store it in the wet memory banks, and communicate it to the others, per whatever punishment/reward system in their brain directed them to. But I still think you're being more presumptuous than you think.

I know this probably smacks of metaphysics, spirituality, all that gross bathwater that we dismiss with creationism (and boy, do I dismiss creationism...), or at least, it hints at one more fundamental aspect of life that we perhaps have missed. But maybe there's still a baby there. Again, just a gut feeling...

I have fond memories of the LucasArt game Full Throttle , which has one badass protagonist, some hilarious music, and a couple of amusing references to that film franchise Lucas is known for. Anyone know if a sequel is in the works?