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1) Pearson is not a Dr. He has a BS in applied physics from some college in Northern Ireland. He has 10 years of experience in networking and none in science or AI, other than writing foolish op-ed pieces for BT.

2) Ask anyone who works in AI what the prospects are of doing what Pearson suggests within a predictable time frame, much less a *century*. Anyone with any integrity will answer, "I have no idea". In fact, the AI and neuroscience communities have made no real progress toward building a sentient machine or a respository for one, much less devising the means of transferring a human mind, or more importantly, a consciousness into such a device. And they're not working on it any more either. Nobody's willing to underwrite it any more, after 50 years of little or no progress toward strong AI.

If you doubt this, consider whether we have built intelligent devices that match the ability of "lower" organisms, and failing that, how we could then repositories for such. Even insect "minds" are phenomenally complicated and multidimensional, and we're basically lost when it comes to understanding much less building them.

As such, speculation on how or when this herculean technological feat will be accomplished is meaningless and should identify the source of such drivel as someone who just wants his name in lights, like Kevin Warwick's stunt to insert a RFID tag under his skin and then declare himself to be a cyborg. People like these do great harm to long term insanely hard enterprises like AI by trivializing, overpromising, and underdelivering. Can you say, "The boy who cried wolf"?

BT should be embarassed to have hired this goof. Shareholders should ask for their money back.

Pearson's web page:

http://www.btinternet.com/~ian.pearson/

Randy

From Ian's website:

Ian Pearson graduated in 1981 in Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics from Queens University, Belfast. He spent four years in Shorts Missile Systems, in many different disciplines from mechanical engineering to battlefield strategy simulation. He joined BT Laboratories in 1985 as a performance analyst, and has since worked in network design and evolution, cybernetics, and mobile systems. He now concentrates on mapping the progress of new developments throughout information technology, considering both technological and social implications. As BT's futurologist and a principal consultant, he lectures extensively on his futures views. In between conferences, current projects include machine consciousness, NBIC convergence, and advanced computing technology.

He has received ten awards for his papers, written several books and has made well over 250 TV and radio appearances. He is a fellow of both the Royal Society of Arts and the Institute of Nanotechnology. He is married (to Susan) with a daughter (Rachel). He runs a small art group, and enjoys swimming and writing.

I coulda swore this guy was just some overoptimistic kook genuinely believing the stuff he was spewing, but then it dawned upon me: the math obviously got to him, and drove him insane. It could be worse though - he coulda been one of those nuts from the TV show biases team today.

The only "natural" standards I know of are things like C, e, pi, alpha (the fine structure constant), and the charge of an electron.

If you use Windows, Webmon is a really nice freeware program that checks webpages for updates at regular intervals that you specify. I use it a lot.

Bah! You kids are so damn lazy. Back in my day we used one of these when space was a little tight. Or if one was an anal retentive neat freak (or the wall was structurally important), one could use one of these.

On the off chance that your walls are metal (maybe it's a bulkhead) or if you're just a bit crazy, there is a third option.

Yeah, but Taco also had to point out about the biggest doners. That's newsworthy in itself.. a $3 million doner.. tasty!

same way CIA actions help the safety http://www.btinternet.com/~nlpwessex/Documents/Fig htSmart18-11-2001.htm

Am I missing something?

Long-term memory, apparently. Do the names Scott Ritter and Hussein Kamel ring any bells?

Did not every serious observer, from John Kerry to MI5, believe that Saddam had WMD's prior to the war?

So, did John Kerry believe that because of what his intelligence service said? Oh, you mean Kerry didn't have his own intelligence service? Hm, I guess he had to rely on the Executive Branch.

People believed that Saddam had not accounted for all his weapons. Some intelligence reports, particularly from defectors, indicated that Saddam was hiding weapons. These reports had qualifications and equivocations that seemed to mysteriously get stripped out when declassified for public consumption.

Bush made his decision to go to war without even asking for a National Intelligence Estimate - Ahmed Chalabi's defectors speaking to the Office of Special Plans were good enough for him.

Not everyone believed that Saddam still had WMDs - former UN weapons inspector (and ex-Marine) Scott Ritter is a strong counter-example. Hans Blix was having no success because all of the US 'hot leads' were coming up a dry hole. Heck, even the State Department's intelligence service saw through most claims, such as those wacky aluminum tubes.

Hussein Kamel, Saddam's slain son-in-law, was frequently referenced as an expert in Iraq's WMD programs. But, after he defected, he claimed Saddam had unilaterally destroyed all his WMD. Didn't hear that a lot, did you?

Are you saying that they were all so stupid and gullible that they could be misled by the smooth lies of the inarticulate smirking chimp moron Bushitler?

Well, Colin Powell lied too, and so did Cheney, and Condi, and Rumsfeld...

But yes, I do say it was stupid and gullible for Congress to believe this administration, particularly in granting him a blank declaration of war.

You're missing a fundamental point - the issue is not that many people believed Saddam was lying about WMDs. The issue is that, when evidence to the contrary surfaced and the case began to collapse, Bush rushed to invade without a post-war plan more advanced than "collect rose petals thrown by grateful Iraqis, give keys to Chalabi".

Clinton never did that, and I doubt President Gore would have either.

There have been a long list of great Mac games that never made their way to Windows, but they are never blockbusters, so they never enter the conversation. Some examples would be:

Ferazel's Wand
Ares
Airburst
MAFFia (an incredibly addictive and disturbed game where you shoot sheep)
(thats just off the top of my head)

Not to mention the games that came out for Mac first: Myst, the Dark Castle series, the Marathon series, the Escape Velocity series, etc.

Mac gaming may not have the blockbusters, but it is not the wasteland that it is made out to be.

WTF, dude? Do you seriously think that GWB has anything to do with the thing failing?

If it weren't for GWB, this system in its current form wouldn't exist. Therefore yes, I don't see how anyone else could be blamed for it failing.

It is not so much that GWB is blamed for this particular test failing. It is definitely that GWB is to blame for the entire current existence of this ineffective system at a time where there are many desperately more important needs for that money, and GWB is the one directly to blame due to the single-minded and careless way in which he has railroaded the program into its current point.

If Dennis Kucinch became president and spent $10 billion on Universal Meditative Anti-Terrorism Field research, we would most definitely blame him when 4 years later there was no sign it works.

Why don't you complain that NASA spent billions of dollars only to have a few rockets explode on the launch pad?

Because NASA occasionally produces worthwhile things. Disasters are a minority, not a rule, and when the hardware works it has a productive effect. When efficacy declines, as it has somewhat in the last few years, the question becomes "how can we improve the safety and reliability of the program?" and not "will the program ever do anything?"

When someone spends several times the lifetime budget of NASA on a program which has no indication of working and whose only discernible effect if it does work seems to have been to inspire Russia to believe it is in an arms race and vastly upgrade its nuclear weapons arsenal, something is wrong. Spending money on research and development is only a goal as good as the research and development it produces. It is not an end unto itself.

Try foo_looks. I've not tried it myself, but it has Winamp skin emulator, aeroAMP, which can apparently load any Winamp 2.x skins.

+1 for fb2k. I use it with foo_ui_columns, and it looks and feels a hell of a lot nicer than WinAmp ever did (that is; like a real application, and not an ugly picture with buttons (although you can make it look like that too)). Don't let its rather, uh, conservative default look put you off.

You're thinking of foo_looks 2.0. I've been using this plugin for a couple of months, it's rock-solid and has some great looking skins out. You can read up on it at the foo_looks 2.0 Guide.

Kind of makes me wonder if you could take the gameplay refinements we take for granted today and apply them to an old machine. I'd love to see a (top-down, obviously) C64 version of Crazy Taxi! Or going the other way, how about a totally real-time version of The Sentinel powered by a G5 or 4Ghz Pentium?

There was a Playstation and PC version of The Sentinel (called Sentinel Returns), with music by John Carpenter.

A good friend of mine (Chris White) worked on one of the ports.

I love my Ti. It manages a laptop, mouse, power supply, camera, Mp3 player and disks of all sizes and sports a mess of those little slots for pens and pencils. The beautiful thing about Dana is that they still build a completely rugged pack and I can safely assure you that it will last longer than your next five laptops. It's also a lot better looking than anything else I've seen on the market. The only thing I regret is that they're no longer made in the US since Dana has broken down and moved the majority of their assembly to Mexico. You can even actually TAKE IT HIKING since it's got the built-in lumbar strap. It's great for day hikes but don't push it because the shoulder strap gets old after the first couple of hours. Built-in LED strobe runs on a watch battery so them Seattle drivers won't mow you down. You'll see them online for right around $90 but it was one REI.com a few months ago for under $40. They're also on sale right now in the local Helly Hansen store. Did I mention they're COOL?

Ok, let me get this straight. You want to compare taking a bath doing CHARITY WORK for an entire country and asking for a little help to do MORE CHARITY work to something like say....

Stuff Dick Cheney Has Done

Stuff Bush Has Done

The criminal records of his appointees

I'm just having a hard time seeing your point. No matter how much of a mountain you make out of that mole-hill, it just doesn't come close to a bunch of Enron buddies making a fortune off the peons. Now does it?

Double Donkey Kong: http://www.mikesarcade.com/cgi-bin/store.pl?action =link&sku=DDKUP

Galaxian Multigame: http://www.btinternet.com/~mike.coates/multigame3. htm

Atari Star Wars and Empire Strikes Back Multigame
Tempest/Vortex/Aliens Multigame
Sega Vector Multigame (Star Trek, Space Fury, Tac/Scan, Eliminator, Zektor)
Williams Multigame (Robotron, Defender, Joust, Stargate, Splat!, Bubbles)
Q*Bert Multigame (Q*Bert, FHMC Q*Bert, Q*Bert's Qubes): http://www.multigame.com/KITS.HTM

There's a multi-Pacman PCB out there somewhere, but I'm not sure who makes them anymore. I know twobits.com used to sell one, as did multigame.com. But there was some legal problems with Namco that led to them disappearing.

Carter: negotiating for the release of American hostages in Iran - result: 444 days of captivity. Reagan: threatening to do something about it - result: captives released within minutes of his inauguration.

It's a bit more complex than that.
October Surprise is a widely held belief that Reagan and GHW Bush made a deal with the Iranian hostage takers to delay releasing the hostages until after Reagan was inaugurated.
Plus, Carter tried to free the hostages through military means. Therefore, it can be said that Carter acted tough and had 444 days of hostages, Reagan capitulated and had the hostages kept for political gain.

Okay, I'm going to do you a favor, and recommend you check out a film called "Castle In The Sky". It's anime, but it's been released by Disney over here so you can find it in any video store under "animation" or "childrens films". Given what you said you liked about "Sky Captiain", you'll probobly like "Castle in the sky".

It doesn't have the funny irrellevance of the serials, but it does have the sense of adventure and mystery that a lot of action and sci-fi films lack these days. Plus, many of the design elements (flying ships, robots, air pirates) are shared, and the robots even look similar. The main plot is about a girl who has a mysterious jewel and a boy who becomes her friends, as they run from vaious people who want to take advantage of the powers of the jewel.

It's more like Indiana Jones and Star Wars than a direct copy of the old serials, but that's not nessecerily a bad thing. If you think no movie in 70 years has lived up to those, you should try looking harder : )

A couple of reviews here:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/style/longter m/movies/videos/laputacastleintheskynrharrington_a 0aac9.htm
http://www.abcb.com/laputa/lap_apga.htm
http://www.btinternet.com/~lawrencium2/laputa.html

Every Sunday I fire up my Quake2 Xatrix server to play with friends that live local.

Afterwards we all meet in a local boozer ( The boozer (be warned - real shitty web site design)

WELL! The discussions of the game get really heated "Camper" "No I wasn't, I had no health" "Yes you did, bloody camper" "No I didn't" "My mouse was playing up" "LAGGG" and are quite serious.

Great fun :D

Doner on google give 86000 hits, though some appear to be proper names, etc.

Donair gives 10500

This link was informative.

Amen, brother

They are doing special research for part of our new mars initiative. here

the real reason for the above.
http://www.btinternet.com/~nlpwessex/Documents/bus hnaziheraldtribunenewscoast.cfm.htm

"The president of the Florida Holocaust Museum said Saturday that George W. Bush's grandfather derived a portion of his personal fortune through his affiliation with a Nazi-controlled bank."

ie agent of a foreign gov.

see also "George Bush, the Unauthorized Biography" by Webster G. Tarpley & Anton Chaitkin chapter II

Congratulations, North Korea. You've finally worked out that America is a warmongering nation with an extensive corporate propaganda system operating through movies, news media and even video games.

This is not news. Many of us noticed this years ago. And picking a French-made video game as an example just makes the whole thing seem ludicrous to the US citizens who could stop the whole process if they really wanted to.

OSS, but for Windows, though I don't know what kind of hacking you'd want to do to get it on your OS of choice.

I use this EVERY day for my notes. The network communication feature for passing the notes around that are persistant on your desktop. Quick note that negates sending an email when I can send a persistant (See 'Always On Top') sticky that you have to acknowledge to put away.

Anyhow, the URL: http://www.btinternet.com/~tom.revell/

I had to send Tom (the maintainer) a thank you note after 2 weeks of using it. It's been a lifesaver a couple of times. The network features are excellent.

stickies --freeware, small, many features.

There are photos of his statue here and here. Having seen these, I think I should go and see it in person some day.

The city of Manchester would ask that you avoid eating the apples.

Well, the statue they made for him does feature the apple.

I wonder if that's how Jobs, Woz, and Co. got their name? At very least, they must have known about the connotation. It seems kind of sick to me.

Pros: It's SO DAMN COOL
Cons: the 900mhz phone screws up my wireless. I solved this by getting rid of my land line and going all cellular,

I also use PalmVNC at work to manage a large variety of machine, although only mac, windows and RH9 (damn I'm gonna miss you RH9). It's quite convenient to haev my palm with me and be able to read logs while in the bathroom. Ok, I know that's a bad pun, but I really DO read the log files from my servers on PalmVNC when I'm in the crapper. And it's not as bad as going to the bathroom to play solitaire with your Palm.

Quite true. It only jumped out at me because it seemed odd to compare a 3-dimensional object to a two-dimensional one. If they had specified how deep under alaska to measure in the 3rd dimension to obtain a volume of the same size, it would have made more sense.

I also noticed it because the tendancy of science writers to compare large things with "the size of France" has become a running joke. In addition to the Olympus Mons example, you might be interested to know that the Ross Ice Shelf (the largest ice shelf of Antarctica)is about the size of France. And another volcano (on Io) spews out ash that covers
an area of (guess what...) the size of France!

And for those who now want to know how big France is, exactly - well, it's 1/3 the size of Quebec, and more to the point, about the same as the area covered by coral reef worldwide. :)

Best wishes

Paul

Please, do not mod popular misunderstanding as "informative."

The Sheffield's superstructure was not aluminum, it was solid steel, like her hull, and like the superstructure and hull of all Type 42s.

And, no, the missile did not detonate.

What made the fire so catastrophic was not the mythical aluminum superstructure, but rather than the missile severed the fire mains, making shipboard firefight all but impossible.

Wasn't it just last year they were saying the PS3 would have 1000 processors in it.

Sony said it would have 1000 times the performance of the PS2, by using cell processors.

Anyway I thought Ensor from Blakes Seven invented the Tarial Cell computer.

"There have been several film and television versions of the novel"

The television series got some interesting reviews here and here

Although I don't think I'd want to collect every single orginal paper novel.

So speaketh the man with divx versions of every last Miyazaki film. But I'm buying legit DVDs as they come out, conditional only on there being a decent literal subtitle...

To throw further fat on the fire: there isn't a huge amount of pre-1980s stuff available anyway :(

look here

Best wishes

Paul

Same goes for a Doctor.

Medical personell still mostly use pager systems, and their pagers are not affected by cell phone blocking. Neither are other pagers for that matter. Hospitals choose to continue using pagers because cell phones are not nearly as reliable. Your soccer mom better learn to stay out of the dead spots that you'll find in any city as well, or be careful not to enter any of those old buildings down town with the fancy iron facades and tinned ceilings (great sheilding against cell phone signals), or not to take the subway anywhere, etc...

There's often times and places that the phone simply will not work. And as a cell phone user, I've learned to accept that. Locational and situational blocking is part of that reality.

Commentary on same.

Cheers.

So, we're now down to 108 missing episodes (in 1982, it was 136)... For more info, look here and here. For some info on lost UK TV in general, have a look at this page.

So, we're now down to 108 missing episodes (in 1982, it was 136)... For more info, look here and here. For some info on lost UK TV in general, have a look at this page.

So, we're now down to 108 missing episodes (in 1982, it was 136)... For more info, look here and here. For some info on lost UK TV in general, have a look at this page.

Logo

Great. Now we can sick our robot dogs on Japans running robots.

Will WW3 take place at Robot Wars?

I'm a firm believer in an "infinite hierarchy of universes" hypothesis (turtles all the way down) insofar as it is extremely possible that This Is The Way It Is. I find myself getting irritated when seemingly rational/intelligent people dismiss such a theory (or variants thereof) as stoner philosophy, i.e. Dude what if we're toejam on a big giant guy pass the bong etc etc. This is just a valid hypothesis as any, and I argue that it is equally, if not more elegant than many of the current Theories of Everything.

Hi all, Thought you might like to read my Ghost Hunting exploits and an article I wrote on the meagre scientific evidence for ghosts.

Hi all, Thought you might like to read my Ghost Hunting exploits and an article I wrote on the meagre scientific evidence for ghosts.

Right now, I couldn't spare even a buck for a tune. That's how low my income is at the moment. Soon, things will be available as far as good paying jobs, but for right now, I suffer from the effects of Bush economics, "Free Trade" agreements and other such wonderful economic hoo-haa.

I have good software as it is, don't need it unless I want to buy music. Once I'm ready to buy, though, this seems to be the best route. Apple is a well-respected company, I'm sure they'll have tunes I like since I like quite a variety of genres, and best of all, it's not M$.

And while I'm thinking about it, This Entry from This Thread on Fark might amuse you all...

Not too long ago (though it was several years) I was MUDding over a telnet connection to my ISP using my Commodore 128 in 64 mode using Novaterm hooked up a 28.8 hanging out the back of my Turbo232 cartridge.

In a short break between waxing goblins, the fellows I was adverturing with started bragging about who had the nicest hardware. A few people had apparently recently purchased new x86 hardware, and were bragging about processors, RAM, and video cards. Oooooooh, were they about to catch it.

After waiting for everyone to finish with their brags, I broke out with, "I'm using a Commodore 64."

"No way!"

A few Novaterm and CMDweb (stock now with CMDRKEY.com) links later and I had them convinced.

Though it pains me to say just how geeky that is, to think of the C=128 hanging out online with the lastest Nvidia-equipped Pentiums is pretty humorous.

1. SSH w/MochaTelnet. I like it better than TopGunSSH. Demo is free and doesn't seem to expire.
2. PalmVNC Installed it last night and works pretty well.
3. SnapperMail (allows auto-polling every X minutes) Using it for a couple of months now and I like it very much (includes attachments, and allows installing Palm modules (.prc) via emailing to yourself as an attachment...as opposed to hot-synching to install new software). Cost is $34.95, and I think worth it.

The next software I want to try is PdaNet which will recognize the Treo 300 as an external USB modem to a normal computer. Using the unlimited monthly bandwidth usage of the SprintPCS plan, it will supposedly allow up to 144kbps surfing on my laptop. Cost is $34, with 15 day trial period.