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I guess. Does that mean I've interpreted it at least somewhat correctly? It was puzzling why so many of my friends seemed to think it would be impossible to understand, or rather, impossible to absorb, in just one sitting...

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I don't get what the big deal is. I had a friend or two mention I'd be confused as heck while watching the Akira movie on the silver screen, and I thought it made sense!

Of course, I'm not a newbie. Still, why would people say it shouldn't make sense?

Tell me if I got the story wrong:
Inferred: Akira the psychic monster is found/created, and later destroyed, yet his power and influence is so great that there is still a cult surrounding him and that he is still talked about and planned for by the government/military/psychic research institutes.

Implied by the end: Akira, and now Tetsuo, have the power to create universes, or something like that.

Story:
Tetsuo, average biker punk, has a run in with psychic escapee who's name escapes me at the moment. Government takes both.

Kaneda, trying to be smooth, has a run in with an anti-Akira/psychic group and joins them and tries to rescue/avenge/punish/find Tetsuo

Tetsuo is found to be a very powerful psychic, with the proper activation drugs.

The other psychics think he's too powerful and try to 'contain' him, but he's powerful enough to beat back all three of the kids. Confused and angry over the pain and treatment he's getting, he decides to confront Akira, who everyone compares him to.

He finds Akira; Kaneda finds him. Akira's history is explained to him by the general. Kaneda and the general both want to end Tetsuo, as he is a threat. Enter SOL, sub-orbital laser.

Tetsuo, in a drug and pain induced frenzy, loses control of his body and powers.

Akira re-appears, his psychic powers more than enough to overcome death and a lack of body. He takes Tetsuo with him, until everyone is ready for the next page in history, whatever that is. This triggers something like the birth of a universe, as implied by a stupid scientist who allowed Tetsuo to become too powerful.

Kaneda loses his best friend and rival.

That's what I saw in the theatre, and it seemed to make sense to me!

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It's not just the userbase, you understand, but the graphics and print culture that has to exist in Linux.

If Adobe were to port Photoshop, Illustrator, etc, to Linux, it almost requires that Linux have it's own printshop culture to sustain the growth and development efforts.

It's like asking the Japanese to import dolphin meat into the US just because we like Anime and eat sushi; there isn't the cultural support for the eating of dolphins for that to be feasible...

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Art is art regardless of how it was generated; ink, oils, canvas, paper, computer, etc.

On the other hand, because it's computer generated and it's visual doesn't mean it's art, either. The definition of art is vague and left as an exercise to the reader :)

If I were to claim computer generated art as, well, art, I'd be using it to do things impossible in any other medium. Truly push the computer generated portion. Animated 3d stereograms rendered on the fly from a filtered video sequence picked up from a USB cam. Or using multiple speakers and 3d sound generated from IP traffic modifying sounds picked up from the room itself, creating a shifting, moving, living soundspace.

My own take on art is that it's an expression of your soul.

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DNA is not merely a blueprint.

Unless you're going to tell me that binary machine language is just a blueprint?

Executables in the right platform are instructions.

It's just that DNA become a set of instructions executed by the human machine inside the womb.

Your high school education is insufficient. It is a blueprint, yes. The DNA forms the blueprint for protiens, which then go off and do stuff. However that just means they are about as close to blueprints as a stream of Java byte codes are blueprints for a program ^^;

As per the recessiveness... if you work out your logic, then a recessive gene exists in 25% of the population, inactive. Because it never expresses itself, it doesn't get weeded out or promoted. In true random fashion, it never, ever, goes away.

Only dominant genes that have negative survival value get removed from the pool. Dominant genes *always* express themselves, and if they always reduce the chance for survival, then they will statistically over time get removed.

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Um, you really want to know?

What the Zentradi are looking for;

What the connection between Zentradi, Maltrendi, and humans are;

The power of music;

Post-apocalyptic earth;

What else is there? I mean, that's the whole story, isn't it?

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Oh, Macross Plus is another anime with a decent dub. In fact, I think it's dub sounds better than the Japanese track!

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I wouldn't cout Akira, Ghost in the Shell, or Ninja Scroll as 'popular' anime.

Popular anime: Ranma one half, Rouroni Kenshin, Evangelion are popular anime.

So you've fallen for the classic trap of anime is just a 'friggin cartoon'. It's basic storytelling (no different than TV, movie, CG, or any other live acting) but expressed in paints and cels.

So if you want good anime, you need to know what you like. Do you want drama and adventure? Soul searching?

Here are a smattering of good anime:
Evangelion: Story of a boy pilot and 100 feet tall robots. The crux of the story is the humanity and fraility of the boy and his peers.

Why to watch Evangelion: Very strong portrayals of human emotion without actually jerking you around on a rollercoaster.

Escaflowne: The story of a girl transported to an alternative world with 40 feet tall robots. She's mystical and can see the future. The story is really about fate, conviction, and strength of will.

Why to watch Escaflowne: Exciting and touching

Mononoke Hime: Evidently you didn't like this one. The story of Iron Town, the Great Forest, and immortality. A prince is cursed by a dying Boar God/Demon and travels to the Great Forest and Iron Town to try to lift the curse. Focus is on the conflict between human nature, human expansion, and the health of the world we live in and depend on.

Why to watch Mononoke: Very mystic, spiritual, and exciting.

Macross Plus: Story of a fighter pilot Isamu Dyson who gets to fly a state of the art airplane as part of a military design competition. Things get complicated when a complex AI system starts taking over everything. This story is mainly about the complex love triangle between the two X-plane pilots and their best friend/singer.

Why to watch Macross Plus: It's a love story and the story about best friends.

Trigun: A western sci-fi set on a desert planet. Vash is a wandering gunman with a bounty on his head. You follow his adventures as you figure out who this mysterious gunman is and why someone hates him so much. In the end it's a morality tale about the value of life and living.

Why to watch Trigun: It's funny, it's exciting, it's emotional. Very cool.

Jubei-Chan: A great samurai dies leaving the legacy of a legendary eyepatch bestowed with is soul and spirit. Jiyo Nanohana is his spiritual reincarnation when she wears this eyepatch. The story is about her struggles against who she is, what she is, what she's capable of, and why she's doing it, especially when her friends and loved ones cannot escape her destiny.

Why to watch Jubei-Chan: It's cute, it's funny, it's sad. Did I mention it's funny?

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You have *perfectly* described science, my anonymous friend.

The big problem then is that if you choose to ignore science and it's many approximations, you lose out on the wonderful things we get out of it...

Like cars, watches, computers, TVs, radios, plastic bottles, aluminum alloy wheels, titanium golf clubs, etc.

With each refinement of science we get ever more unexpected observations, and with each new observation we get new opportunities in which to create new and unexpected devices.

As we refine the neutrino and the elementary particles we can eventually devise gadgets that rely on the characteristics that these neutrinos have.

Seriously, what would you have us do? Decide "Physics, chemistry, and science is done. No more research, everything is finished."

Science is the process by which we try to deduce the pattern, the weave, the weft, of creation, and to satisfy your set of beliefs, the underlying structure as given to us by God. Without science we would have no understanding. Science is constrained to be an approximation, to use heretical thoughts, because the Universe and God is unknowable; we can get infinitely close without ever reaching our destination.

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The neat thing about radar is that a stealth aircraft also has the ability and opportunity to broadcast signals as well as absorb and redirect signals.

So this bistatic radar, these cellular networks, are working off of reflected signals off multi band and distributed receivers, without taking into account that a squad of stealthy aircraft can broadcast, in a manner, misinformation about location and direction and velocity.



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Very well put.

Somehow you manage to be funny where TLA doesn't.

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It's data encoding/hiding of the neatest sort :)

It's fundamentally different than IR; imagine, for example, if street lamps using this technology had localization data encoded into them?

Of course this would only register at night, but imagine if you your car could tell what streets you were approaching? Consideing how difficult it is to read street signs at night? Or if the lamps had more intelligence, if the lamps could relay traffic conditions to the cars below? Accidents, etc?

Or if this were hooked up to traffic lights?

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It would only lose something if it weren't so routine; if nothing else, encapsulate the thing inside of a perl/Apple-script that is hackable/editable and then when a user wants a GIMP optimized for their system, they can edit it, and when the user doesn't have a clue how or what for, the system just uses defaults.

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Conceivably both of those command sequences could be subsumed by a pair of actions; a selection and double click.

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Of course it can compete, it offers features and functionality far ahead of, say, Photoshop Elements.

But Photoshop Elements is affordable, at $100, and good enough. Of course I'm not comparing Apples to Apples, as I haven't played with the *latest* GIMP, but the ease of use of installation and maintainance is pretty big. Have those issues been dealt with, on the GIMP?

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After buying a PowerBook G4, I now start to notice the *hum* of the electrical components of other laptops! It's a curse!

I can also hear my own internal modem! I have to reseat it to shut it up. I'm almost consideing disconnecting it in order to remove it, since I don't use it... but the utility of having it seems more than worth the fairly small hum it produces...

But having a quiet computer sensitizes you to noise!

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Right there, all your dreams and hopes come true;

No fan. Hugh heat sink on the CPU. Case is metal enshrouded in thick plastic.

It doesn't use a commodity motherboard, and you do pay a premium for it; rather than an overclocked P3 @1.2GHs you get an underclocked G4 at 450MHz, and even then at a 10 to 20 percent price delta.

Oh well, good luck finding a PC manufacturer who tries to design a silent computer. People care too much about performance (which generates heat) or price (which sacrifices quality).

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Of course you're right. That's why I own a Titanium Powerbook, now; mobile, powerful, quiet, wirelessly networked, and I can sleep with it on :)

My PC is *damn* loud, and I'm looking at doing something to it, and it's currently close to 60db, so a 34db power supply isn't bad at all...

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Actually in terms of relative comparison, you might as well use your examples as arguments *for* his 4th power noise/efficiency claim.

What would happen if you overclocked the G4s/G3s to GHz speeds? Power consumption would go up. So would heat disappation, which would necessitate more effective and noisy cooling solutions.

Of course the reality is that you cannot effectively OC these CPUs because there are physical limitations that prevent us just doubling the voltage and clock frequency to these chips. On the other hand I'm pretty confident that even as these CPUs get clocked higher, they will still radiate less heat than an Intel CPU :)

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It was for a quiet power supply! I think I've only seen one or two relevant posts so far; most of the rest are harping about computers, Macs, Suns, etc.

try this site, PC Power-Cooling.

My friend tells me they are really quiet (I've heard them) and swears by them, despite the slightly higher cost.

In their power supply section they have an ultra quiet section, and they even 'measure' the dB of their power supplies. The ultra quiet 275 ATX is only 34dB!

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?
Jellyfish genes in plants. What are you talking about?

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Not even wowed by glowing plants!

Glowing plants, not jellyfish, has N possible payoffs. Are you smart enough to figure them out? No? Then why don't you let the NASA guys figure out what these N possible payoffs are.

Don't you get it? Life is a gamble with no guarantees. Risks and payoffs is the name of the game. Are you telling me that you want to risk *not* sending plants that glow in the dark to Mars as an analytic tool? This is the ultimate in self sufficient robotic analysis! You get to measure the soil, water, oxygen, and mineral conditions through a self propogating self sustaining device, a genetically engineered mustard plant!

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I prefer subtitles. I'd rather lose a little in attention span than ruin a movie with poor dubbing.

Actually, I like subtitles. I like reading though.

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I'm tired of this kind of attitude. Is The Lover's Arrival giving out lessons now?

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Size. 8x8x9 is really small, cute, and nifty. The next closest hardware is a Cobalt Qube, which is, what, $3k?

Fanless. Cool. Low powered.

Aesthetics. Not a terribly profound reason, but a Cube does look rather nifty.

That's my guesses, at least.

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3d is just a technology, just like music, sprites, voice, networking, etc.

Do you question the use of technology to make a better game experience? No, of course not!

The question is whether Westwood, in Dune3d happens to use 3d graphics to it's advantage.

3d has a few good points to it that cannot be addressed by 2d:
Zoom and scale, being able to see as much or as little of the map as possible.
Rotation and height, being able to navigate the map more flexible as the need allows.
Lighting and shadow. 2d cannot cast shadows except in very limited scopes.
Tactical terrain; 3d landscapes allows for more variety, rather than just a flat map, or fixed height surfaces.

Take these advantages together:
Units that can hide in shadows
Minimaps that tell you correct location and orientation no matter where you are
Units that behave differently at different heights and locations
Being able to play more flexibly; zoom in on units for small squad combat, or zoom out to half the battle field to see scope and maneuvers, such as pinchers, blitzes, ambushes, etc.

It's not the 3d that is the problem, it's the project leads for not using it correctly :)

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Unless Apple releases it's code for Microsoft systems (it might, given it's streaming server and Quicktime softwares).

Apple code for Apple OS, right?

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I happen to like the first, fourth, and fifth books.

Dune: Good
Heretic of Dune: Weak, pulpy
Children of Dune: Weak
God Emperor of Dune: Very good, epic
Dune:Chapterhouse: Very, very good.

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You find that Sex does Not Sell.

That the biggest crowds were around Metal Gear Solid II, gawking at Warcraft 3, listening intently to the designers of Sims and other ground breaking games.

Sex causes commotion, yes, but if the game being tied to the commotion holds no appeal, the crowd walks on as soon as the performance ends.

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If you say so. It didn't seem all that good or sarcastic, and I have the unfortunate luck of knowing people who act and believe very similar philosophies, and the net being as sterile as it is, could not tell it as good sarcasm vs ignorant bigotry.

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I don't own an iFruit. Titanium, baby!

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A funny post about PCs being better than gadgets and half assed toys, faster and more powerful than consoles, and my feeble attempt at humor is off topic.

Over-rated, sure, off topic?

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You can say, think, and believe all that, and not have problems living with yourself?

What, should we nuke them again, put them in their place, and indoctrinate them again?

You speak as if the US has the moral or ethical superiority in which to even judge the Japanese.
You speak as if the viewpoint of a single individual, you, can decide and analyze the culture and behavior of an entire nation, the Japanese.

Here, let me rephrase:
"Geeks, a mysterious race."

I went on holiday to Silicon Valley a couple of years ago, and stayed for 6 months or so. At first it seemed quite similar to the east, the same skyscrapers, billboards, TV, films, cars, etc. The mark of mass consumerism was all around.

But the difference with the geeks is not external, it's internal. Looking at the geeks, talking to them and trying to penetrate the alien geeky mind is very difficult indeed. What are their motivations? What do they want?

Unfortunately the geeks have not changed since the dawn of time. The americans tried after Columbine, but that was set back against Pinkerton's vision by the need to get geeks into industry against the Indian threat.

The result is that the geeks now hae the same abitions as they did since the dawn of time - the same ambitions that spawned the nuclear fucking bomb. The difference now is that those ambitions are exercised through the internet, the dot coms, rather than through the scientific field as it was last time.

I think we should be wary of the geeks, and institute sanctions. We already know they are an insensitive and inscrutible race, from the way they treat girls, Christians and the establishment - with astonishing rebellion and wholescale anti-orthodoxy.

We should force geeks to adopt the same values as civilised citizens in the USA - we do not desire to spread our values everywhere and forge uniformity, so why should they be allowed to?

Buying their products (which are produced by uncreative minds, good at technical things but not at language and art as we are) is weakening the USA and the commity of civilised peoples.

Lets put an end to it.

Aren't you at all bothered by the trash you write? Gah. And you got modded up for it, even!

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I actually prefer the LCDs to CRTs, though I do know I spend entirely too much time in front of computers.

Another Pro someone else mentioned:
LCDs are pure digital, from source to display
CRTs convert from digital to analog.

But I think that may have been covered in my 'digital clarity' and 'analog degradation' comments.

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So when did I invoke Godwin's Law? No Hitler or Nazism. I did invoke the comparison that individual action taken by the RBL can be described as vigilante action because they are self regulated in an environment not clearly delinated by laws, regulations, or regulatory bodies such as government, culture, religion, or tradition.

Is that the Godwin component?

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If I don't want to be part of what?
I don't question the actions of the RBL; they acted, and I didn't criticize their actions, other than mentioning that it was symptomatic of something grander than RBL or Macromedia.

Tell me what my high horse is? When did I advocate forcing anyone to lose money?

When did I criticize or advocate or demonize the RBL and bitch about getting of the RBL?

When did I bitch and moan about my damn rights? When did I complain about the ISPs?

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Hey, self regulation is fine until you're one of those people caught in the cross fire, right?

I'm not advocating government interference, even though I mentioned government.

My thought was that there is a bigger issue that the net creates an international cross political, cross ethnicity, cross religion population that is not bound by the traditional religious, geographic, cultural, or political boundaries, except that all those bodies must somehow interact on the net.

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I have one too! It's a Mac!

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LCD pros:
Size
Power requirements
Digital clarity

CRT pros:
Price

LCD cons:
Viewing angle limitations

CRT cons:
Heat generation
Refresh rate limitations
Analog degradation

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Don't forget other cool toys: DVD-R, dual processors, and Unix on the desktop!

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Sorry, I'm melodramatic. What McCartyite tactics, and what is Godwin's Law?

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From a certain spin, it sounds like terrorism.

It can also be called vigilanteism, guerilla warfare, or vandalism, if you treat the pipes to macromedia as a street that has been destroyed...

Subjective name calling and semantics aside, this might revolve around the fact that there is no kind of 'rules of engagement' among netizens. In real life there are governments, societies, and political bodies to define right behavior and civic mindedness and stuff. Wars are fought over this.

So Macromedia, and others, are accused/defined as spammers, and are treated as such.

Spin, sensationalism, defamy, etc, spring up to attack, defend, rationalize, explain the event.

What can we do to address the bigger issues? What can we do to define and understand what these issues may be?

It's very vague for me; parts privacy, security, trust, parts honesty, integrity, and cooperation. There is probably more I'm not defining as well. All netizens need to be involved. Governments, net bodies, and corporations are also strongly tied into this, as well.

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Not per platter, but per ^2cm.

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When IBM released their 25Gb per platter drives.

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Well, as the other replies said:

It took them considerably less than a day.

That is actually an achievement. As far as I can tell, the costs of personnel dwarf the costs of hardware, where an engineer costs upwards of $800 a day, and engineers sitting idle costs as much as engineers busy doing work, so the cost deltas of the Macs is offset by the speed and effectiveness of setting up and maintaining the array.

In the long run, it's not the fixed, sunk costs that a PC represents that is meaningful, it's the daily ongoing performance, productivity, and maintanence costs that mean anything, especially in a place that runs plasma tokamaks at $125k a day...

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How about time?
Say it takes N people 1 day to set up the Appleseed vs the same N people 1 week to set up the Linux array?

What's 7 days worth of time? $300*N a day? $4k*N a day? While price is a legitamate concern, so is time to ramp and operating costs, and from what I've seen, the costs of an engineer and of support staff dwarf the costs of a PC; what's $800 when your engineer makes that much in a day? So 3 days where the array is not spent computing is 3 days where you're paying for no work done.

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Um, the problem is that you don't know before hand which problems will be solved by which research...

Sure we can specifically target things like AI for ocean probes, but what's from stopping someone just like you saying 'That's sooo expensive, why not just do AI for automatic vacuum cleaners instead?'

The difference being that for Hoover or Eureka, good enough is what sells, and AI research will stop when the vacuums figure out how to navigate, plug themselves into an outlet, and not get destroyed by running into the street. AI research for Mars, or even the ocean, will hopefully design for robustness, learning capability, flexibility, and reliability.

How do we know that traveling to Mars doesn't unlock some sort of cancer cure as a side effect of making humans more fit in space? How do we know we won't cure baldness or the common cold by designing anti-radiation treatments? How do we know that we won't find the secret to room temperature superconducting electronics in the design of a lightweight yet sturdy heat transfer support structure (since there is no convection or radiative heat loss, you have to use other means)?

There is applied research, where you know the problem and try to find an answer, and there is pure research, where you don't know the problem, and thus finding an answer is as much about finding the problem as anything else. Going into space offers a lot of pure research problems; materials sciences, medicine, genetics, biology, physics, mechanical engineering, electronics, etc. How do we know how they all fit? If we did, we would already know how to solve problems and questions; we don't, so the public has to be satisfied with the fact that such lofty, grand, and otherwise pointless expeditions do have many positive secondary effects.

Traveling to Mars may unlock the secrets of buckyball transistors, or new lubricants that use buckyballs, or whatever. We don't know, yet.

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Uh, that's why the quotes.

A fingerprint such that different papers from the same author show the same 'fingerprint', as well as showing that a paper plagarized to some extent has a similar fingerprint; the size of the match indicates the size of the plagarism.

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Heh, if they're re-wording the copied work to break down the search strings, then it means they must be rewriting significant stretches of the papers...

Which means that some thought had to go in.

Now, if the prof could somehow develop a 'fingerprint' technology... :)

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I dunno...

Isn't conventional cryptography just 'hiding' a message 'inside' a string of random bits?

Apply the key, and out pops the message?

Why isn't stenography just the symmetric case, where instead of one random and one non random data stream, you have two non random data streams?

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