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Even if their neural interfaces are a bit out there. We've been growing humanized mice for years. I wonder if all they really needed to do, however, was to generate a chimera by seeding an embryo with a human nervous system before the immune system starts to develop. We've learned quite a bit about developmental biology from avian chimeras, mammalian chimeras are a bit more challenging but can be achieved.

I can't find any evidence of the realtek comment in the linux tree and since the driver its from is has a four clause BSD it seems unlikely it was ever in linux. It does seem to be in all 3 of the major BSD variants though.

http://cvsweb.netbsd.org/bsdweb.cgi/src/sys/dev/ic /rtl81x9.c?rev=1.68&content-type=text/x-cvsweb-mar kup
http://crypto.riken.go.jp/pub/OpenBSD/src/sys/dev/ ic/rtl81x9.c
http://fxr.watson.org/fxr/source/pci/if_rl.c

In realteks defense mind you i think the worst PCI ethernet controller comment is a bit unfair, sure its a bit heavy on the CPU and annoying to drive but it seems to be a pretty stable chip and its damn cheap.

TBH i suspect you will find lots of comments about hardware issues in any driver source unless its been through a comment stripper. Hardware has bugs and design flaws that can't really be fixed in the hardware either due to the cost of a respin or due to the fact that units are already in the wild. Some of those bugs will be in the IC makers errata but getting them to add newly found issues to the errata can be very hard. I strongly suspect the only difference is that linux/freebsd make those comments fully public whereas with propietry operating systems you'd probablly need a source license to see them.

what a picture of an invisible elephant looks like.

Thanks google image search!

Well, basically the "humaness" of entities is plain irrelevant to the really interesting question of how you make up for a "moral agent". As a moral agent, you have rights, you are a "person", not to be objectified in any circumstances. It has nothing to do with being human, it has something to do with your abilities. If we have robots that feel pain, that have a self with consciousness, we might have to admit that they, indeed, are not pure objects anymore. That they ought to have the same rights we currently only ascribe to the complex machine we call homo sapiens sapiens.

I believe this was a slashdot story a long time ago, but there was a "Snooker Playing Machine" built by the University of Bristol (UK) back in '98.

The only information I could find about it now is at: http://www.bmc.riken.go.jp/sensor/Ho/chicago/Robot ics/Snooker/snooker.html

The site includes some pictures and a couple very limited technical details.

The thing I like most about Slashdot is that when you make a mistake, people cal l you on it, and you learn.

The thing I like most about the 'net is that I can hop over to Google, enter "x- ray novae mechanism" and find a paper on a site in Japan - Black-Hole X-Ray Transients: Th e Effect of Irradiation on Time-Dependent Accretion Disk Structure (OK, I had to use the Google cached copy) - and discover once again that the universe is not only more weird than I do imagine, it's more weird than I can imagine:

The disk instability due to the ionization of hydrogen and helium re mains the most plausible cause of the outburst of the black-hole candidate X-ray novae. For the orbital periods and mass-transfer rates inferred from observations,the disk is predicted to be unstable. A steady state is very unlikely.

High-energy astrophysics rocks.

Take a look here. It seems that LaserDiscs are analog too - as I read it they're putting an FM signal on the disk. This figures, since building digital video in the '70's would have been hard work at consumer prices.

I think there are examples of RCA and Philips video disk machines still on show at the Science Museum in London, but I haven't visited for a year or so.

OpenSSH runs great on my Red Hat boxen. The source and executable .rpms are downloadable .

FiSSH is being turned over to MIT, and as soon as they unscramble their (currently hosed) distribution and apply the known patch for Win98 compatibility (thot Win95/98 ran the same apps? think again) there will be a freely available SSH client for Winblows lamers, um, I meant mainstream users, built from True Free Open Source! Yay!

TeraTerm SSH is another Win32 client, but not really open source, because Teranishi-san has disappeared and the license is oddly written, but it does work for most purposes.

For file transfer, don't use FTP, use rsync.