I upgraded two systems ok and my laptop will be next.
I downloaded the ISO because I had more than one machine to upgrade and thought it would be nice to have the CD around for sharing with newbies.
I ran "sudo bash/cdrom/cdromupgrade" and it asks if you would like to use the network which I thought was cool because if there happens to be slightly newer packages out it can incorporate them immediately. Great.
I expected it to whiz through and pick up most deb's from the CD, but the curious thing is that it seemed to prefer to download them. I have no idea why, but the upgrades did work.
And that Firefox downloads figure probably doesn't even include all the downloads and CD copies of a file called firefox_2.0+0dfsg-0ubuntu3_i386.deb also going on this week...
The GNU/Linux platform doesn't lack documentation. There's adequate documentation for major applications that corporations would be running, especially in the form of web sites from the application projects, and independent books and articles. Just go see how much you can read about Apache or about Samba. And if you count newsgroups, there's tons of documentation on even very difficult to diagnose error scenarios. I have fixed many problems on *nix by following the advice of a more knowledgeable community member after finding his or her post in just a minute or two of googling. I can do that because *nix has excellent error reporting, unlike Windows which has a tendency to be vague or just crash.
The Yankee Group is simply betting on the fact that if they say it, people will believe it.
The one piece of truth is this: *nix is decumented how its built - in smaller pieces that fit together loosely. What we are lacking in documentation might be books like "How to run a Web Server for multiple domains with traffic analysis, POP3, IMAP, LDAP, and Daily Tape Backups" that pull together several applications and present them as a complete working system. Most people don't actually need to read a whole book on sendmail, and even though I own the O'Reilly one I've never read it all, and frankly it might be more useful to make it just one chapter in a more overall book where the points covered are just covering the basics and a wide range of common FAQ's.
A great deal of what corporations will pay for is the assurance that something will positively get done.
You might be willing to make free updates available for your software, but you're not required to do so. You could quit any day. You could take down the project web site any day. You could ignore a security bug for a long time because it only affects a small segment of your users so you figure it can wait. You can document lightly or not at all.
These are all your prerogatives in a hobby project.
Enter the open source software *support* contract, being made popular everywhere by companies popping up to maintain open source applications, often by the original programmers.
The customer purchases a promise from you to apply a certain amount of attention to the project and provide a path of convenience for them using it.
Examples: - Assurance that they can visit your web site for news, downloads, documentation, contact information at any time. - Assurance that you will fix all genuine bugs in a reasonable amount of time. - Assurance that you will provide help in installation, which most people (rightly) see as the hardest part of acquiring the software. - Perhaps, ways to obtain the software in more convenient, more timely, more automated, or better packaged methods than visiting your web site and downloading a tarball. - Perhaps, printed manuals which are more likely to get read because they land on an employee's desk. - Perhaps, telephone support....and maybe more.
You will find that this will please management and many will pay.
Then when someone asks management why they're using XYZ open source program for an important corporate activity (in your example HR) they can say, "Ah yes - it's free but we have the author under contract to supply support and upgrades directly to us."
The phrase "under contract" is a magic phrase in corporations, and it settles the minds of managers because they understand what has happened - they have parted with some money in exchange for a mitigation of risk, which is precisely what they seek to do in every single part of their business except their core competency where they accept the entire risk to generate profits. An auto parts company wants the risks associated with producing auto parts, but no other risk - certainly not a risk that, for example, their HR software program will fail and they can't get support to fix it immediately.
In business school I had the epiphany that just because you can get something for free doesn't mean people wouldn't pay for it; nor do you need to only ever charge for "tangible" things (using the term loosely). The key is that people will pay for things that are even free *today* for the assurance that they can still *rely on them being there later*; and people will also pay for intangible actions, because *having people do things for you* is what makes companies run.
This does of course mitigate one reason to use OSS - "that it's free" - but as we all know here, OSS has many, many virtues that far outweigh the low cost, including vendor freedom, data transparency, program reliability, enthusiastic community, etc.
To put it another way, the entire population of Glasgow could fly to New York and back again and the resulting emissions would still be less than that from devices left in sleep mode.
Precisely why American manufacturers invented Sleep Mode.
This wiki misses the fact that RSS 1.0 and RSS 2.0 are competing formats, not progressive versions of the same standard.
RSS 1.0 is RDF-based like the original Netscape version of RSS, and is more extensible and structured than RSS 2.0 or Atom.
Annoyingly, neither camp wants to let go of the name "RSS" because they both lay claim to it, but it does actually stand for different things ("RDF Site Summary" / "Really Simple Syndication").
If you walk into a French store and say "Where is your Louis Vuitton stuff?" are they prohibited from saying "Here - but you might be insterested in these Dior items as well"...?
One day it occurred to me that "skill level" (or perhaps "interest in learning skills level") was such a fundamental variable to using the system that it should go in/etc/passwd with your name.
Sort of like runlevels for users: 0 - UID not used by humans 1 - Superuser expert (required level for root) 2 - Expert (default) 3 - Power user 4 - General user 5 - Provide conveniences (learning) 6 - Hide details 7 - "Grandma"
So if I create an account for a family member who has little technical interest, I can simply set the skill level to Grandma and know that GNOME, KDE, the apps, etc will all baby the user a little.
In a PVR/DVR world, the only thing that matters is where my unit knows to get shows from. Right now it has two television tuner cards in it, and pulls shows from cable TV.
But there's not reason why it couldn't get on the Internet and download MPEG's of shows. All that matters is (a) I get advertisements for various shows, (b) I select some for recording and (c) they are recorded and shown to me on demand. That's all folks. Whoever can do that for me can make "television".
There's no reason why you couldn't start an indepedent company to produce shows and just post all their shows for download each day at midnight on the web - as long as they got, for example TiVo, to add support for retreiving their shows, they'd be viable.
I'm using the Mesa DRI driver and I can't get Battlefield 1942 to work with Cedega.
I have to give credit to Transgaming, Gavriel State himself dropped in on my forum thread and gave the reason why, which I thought was cool of him. (BTW, if you had experience with the old message board on Transgaming's site, they've now switched to phpBB - Thank God.)
The reason is because the driver doesn't expose the 'GL_ARB_vertex_program' OpenGL extension. I could use the official ATI driver which does have that extension, but Gavriel says there's a bug in that which makes it not work with BF1942 too well, and they're working with ATI on it.
Come on open source guys! Our 3D drivers are already more _stable_, let's make them more _capable_ as well so the card companies just shrug their shoulders and decide to endorse the open source version.;-)
Babylon 5 is an absolutely amazing piece of science fiction but only when you realize that the 5 seasons are really one 80-hour long movie.
When I saw it aired on TV, I thought it was contrived because I didn't understand all the constant references to prophecies, councils, past wars, Valen, etc. I thought that they were doing what Star Trek writers do - reference cool sounding things just to enhance the illusion of the future, but those things are not existant in the actual plot. B5 is completely different; almost all their references are to cool stories in other episodes (both forward and backward) including some mind-blowing plot twists (some that make you giggle when you watch earlier season episodes because you know some *huge* secrets revealed later). It's important to realize that the B5 plot was fully written before filming, something that Star Trek never benefited from.
My roommate got the DVDs for all the seasons and we started watching them one by one. I'm a few episodes from finishing the last season. B5 is a trememdous story, not just out of science fiction, but of any type of story I've ever watched or read. It's one of those real works of art you only see once every few years. Of course I take issue with some scientific points, like their premise of the "first ones" (first race in the galaxy) living for indefinite lifetimes and such, but they are just quibbles.
It's also worth noting that besides the brilliant story weaving, B5 also fantastically avoided the concept of "good guys" and "bad guys". I'm impressed to no end how they side-stepped that oh-so-common trapping and actually made several alien races really come to life with politics, emotions, and goals of their own. Very cool.
The third great thing about B5 is that the problems are solved with character solutions. The tech is there to enhance the experience, but unlike Star Trek where they can reconfigure the primary deflector to do the dishes and take out the dog, in B5 they actually work out the problems using more traditional methods, and the interesting tech is for there for the viewer's enjoyment as backdrop, not primary focus.
If you're a Star Trek fan but have never watched B5, do yourself a favor and start with Season 1. Watch them in order, and P.S. there is an extra prequel movie, but don't watch it until after you get into Season 5 because it gives a few things from the middle away.
It makes me curious as to how they'd give Star Trek the B5 treatment, but I'd have to guess that the first step would be to write out a cohesive plot that can cover the first few years of the show before they start filming.
Your mom isn't trying to learn programming, it's just her way of trying to identify with some control over the computer. She's asking you to help her understand the computer, that's all. What she really needs is for you to sit with her for a couple hours and show her fun stuff like web browsing, email, IM, etc.
A lot of us assume that older applications/games (those written for Win95/98) are easier for Wine to facilitate than newer ones (those for 2000/XP/.NET). Is this indeed true?
If so, how long do you think it will be before Wine has matured to the point that we finally catch up with Win95? That is to say, I can install Wine and be confident that 99% of the windows apps targetted for Win95 will just work with no fuss? Same question for Win98?
#ifdef's are not really used in the Perl world (I suppose technically you *could* use a preprocessor), so I would like some form of 'print' command that is optimized away in the absence of a debug variable. I don't mean the print is not evaluated - I mean the arguments and the whole command is ignored, like a comment, when compiling to bytecode.
So instead of this:
print join(', ', map("\"$_\", @array)) if $DEBUG;
have this:
debug(join(', ', map("\"$_\", @array)));
Having an official command: - allows much better optimization ($DEBUG can be set as a constant at compile-time) - allows editors to syntax-highlight the command in a special color - could let you override the debugging behavior (do something other than print it out) - allows the debugger, when you use it, to detect your debug commands and do something special (e.g. "please break on all my debug commands after printing the value")
Anyone know of anything like this for Perl? If not I think it would make a great Perl 6 feature.
Well for one thing that the 1% continue to extract the 99%, which was a huge principle that they believed in, in the original Matrix movie. They "forgot" in the second two movies as it became about Zion.
"In the end, it really was an ability best left undiscussed."
In SW, "the force" needs no explanation because it generally limits itself to small bendings of the laws of physics and the rest is simply tunneling energy to accomplish normal things better, and the main thesis of the movie is about good vs. evil not the force. In the Matrix, the powers are similar but the reason why they are possible is that reality is fundamentally different than people believe, and this central aspect of the story's thesis makes anything to do with the powers absolutely essential to explain.
The Matrix is about clever hackers who "get around the system" and so the methods, and thus explanations, are crucial and central. Further, people equate Neo's powers inside and outside the Matrix, but the inside powers were created by manipulation of computer logic, and this supposedly not being available outside, makes them two completely different things. Since we were *introduced* to his inside powers in the first movie as part of the storyline, it's natural to demand an explanation to his outside powers from the finale.
"coexistence is indeed the point of the movie, i don't quite understand the people who complain about it. it's as if they didn't hear Neo's speech at the end of The Matrix. (where it was quite clear that he wasn't out to destroy all machines)."
I'll let you defend that as the point of the movie, but let's agree that the ending does not convincingly leave us with that sort of resolution - a 16-year old boy bouncing around and a smiling Oracle do not prove that coexistance has been achieved.
What would have been amazingly more interesting is for the W. Bros to follow a matrix-within-a-matrix theory and let Neo perform a double escape. I realize this was done in 13th Floor and was an "ok" ending, so that's probably why they avoided it, thinking that the mystery would suffice. Unfortunately the Matrix made a name for itself as a story that explains illusion via compelling science and that's why we balk at their ending.
Not trying to be a troll, this is true because I've lived in both places - US intersections are about 5 times larger than UK intersections because of lane widths, number of lanes, intersection design, etc. Here in the US I've been surprised by ambulances appearing on the intersection several times, and I don't play my radio too loud.
For example, there is nothing intrinsically beneficial about being able to carry a firearm; that lump of steal on your belt doesn't feed you, clothe you, make you happy, or help build society. Heck, you're not even allowed to fire it at most people except under special circumstances. But it's a gateway right - it positively aids in the protection of all your other rights, e.g. freedom of speech, assembly, and religion. The government knows that at any given moment a sizeable group of citizens has the ability to bring physical force to bear.
We're entering a world where information is more powerful than weaponry. Witness how much work Bush had to do on the political stage before he could invade Iraq, and how much information his army had to continuously feed out in order to keep proper appearances. In days past none of this was necessary for a superpower.
The idea that freedom to access and trade information is superior to the freedom to carrying a firearm makes perfect sense to me. Not that I would support a cancellation of the latter right, but I do recognize the shifting priorities.
And remember, all "rights" are novel. We call them "basic" or "inherent," but nature plays no part in them. All rights are contrived fictions that people created; and so every "right" has a birthday, so to speak. Today is the birthday of the Right To Internet Access. And her mother is Estonian.
What may be interesting (and wonderful) is that we now live in a world where people don't necessarily have to die for the creation and recognition of new human rights.
Slashdot Mirror
I upgraded two systems ok and my laptop will be next.
/cdrom/cdromupgrade" and it asks if you would like to use the network which I thought was cool because if there happens to be slightly newer packages out it can incorporate them immediately. Great.
I downloaded the ISO because I had more than one machine to upgrade and thought it would be nice to have the CD around for sharing with newbies.
I ran "sudo bash
I expected it to whiz through and pick up most deb's from the CD, but the curious thing is that it seemed to prefer to download them. I have no idea why, but the upgrades did work.
And that Firefox downloads figure probably doesn't even include all the downloads and CD copies of a file called firefox_2.0+0dfsg-0ubuntu3_i386.deb also going on this week...
Of course, if they forgot to scan you, then you're going to trip EVERY SINGLE store inventory control alarm.
Try explaining to the Walmart greeter that you have a chip embedded in you accidentally that is setting off that forbidding voice.
Mosquito 2.0 - Ah, screw it, I'm not upgrading until the "point one" release. You know the round numbers are always unstable.
Because it's not even really true.
The GNU/Linux platform doesn't lack documentation. There's adequate documentation for major applications that corporations would be running, especially in the form of web sites from the application projects, and independent books and articles. Just go see how much you can read about Apache or about Samba. And if you count newsgroups, there's tons of documentation on even very difficult to diagnose error scenarios. I have fixed many problems on *nix by following the advice of a more knowledgeable community member after finding his or her post in just a minute or two of googling. I can do that because *nix has excellent error reporting, unlike Windows which has a tendency to be vague or just crash.
The Yankee Group is simply betting on the fact that if they say it, people will believe it.
The one piece of truth is this: *nix is decumented how its built - in smaller pieces that fit together loosely. What we are lacking in documentation might be books like "How to run a Web Server for multiple domains with traffic analysis, POP3, IMAP, LDAP, and Daily Tape Backups" that pull together several applications and present them as a complete working system. Most people don't actually need to read a whole book on sendmail, and even though I own the O'Reilly one I've never read it all, and frankly it might be more useful to make it just one chapter in a more overall book where the points covered are just covering the basics and a wide range of common FAQ's.
A great deal of what corporations will pay for is the assurance that something will positively get done.
...and maybe more.
You might be willing to make free updates available for your software, but you're not required to do so. You could quit any day. You could take down the project web site any day. You could ignore a security bug for a long time because it only affects a small segment of your users so you figure it can wait. You can document lightly or not at all.
These are all your prerogatives in a hobby project.
Enter the open source software *support* contract, being made popular everywhere by companies popping up to maintain open source applications, often by the original programmers.
The customer purchases a promise from you to apply a certain amount of attention to the project and provide a path of convenience for them using it.
Examples:
- Assurance that they can visit your web site for news, downloads, documentation, contact information at any time.
- Assurance that you will fix all genuine bugs in a reasonable amount of time.
- Assurance that you will provide help in installation, which most people (rightly) see as the hardest part of acquiring the software.
- Perhaps, ways to obtain the software in more convenient, more timely, more automated, or better packaged methods than visiting your web site and downloading a tarball.
- Perhaps, printed manuals which are more likely to get read because they land on an employee's desk.
- Perhaps, telephone support.
You will find that this will please management and many will pay.
Then when someone asks management why they're using XYZ open source program for an important corporate activity (in your example HR) they can say, "Ah yes - it's free but we have the author under contract to supply support and upgrades directly to us."
The phrase "under contract" is a magic phrase in corporations, and it settles the minds of managers because they understand what has happened - they have parted with some money in exchange for a mitigation of risk, which is precisely what they seek to do in every single part of their business except their core competency where they accept the entire risk to generate profits. An auto parts company wants the risks associated with producing auto parts, but no other risk - certainly not a risk that, for example, their HR software program will fail and they can't get support to fix it immediately.
In business school I had the epiphany that just because you can get something for free doesn't mean people wouldn't pay for it; nor do you need to only ever charge for "tangible" things (using the term loosely). The key is that people will pay for things that are even free *today* for the assurance that they can still *rely on them being there later*; and people will also pay for intangible actions, because *having people do things for you* is what makes companies run.
This does of course mitigate one reason to use OSS - "that it's free" - but as we all know here, OSS has many, many virtues that far outweigh the low cost, including vendor freedom, data transparency, program reliability, enthusiastic community, etc.
Martin
Precisely why American manufacturers invented Sleep Mode.
To keep Scottish people from spreading.
So just for the record, the command line in *nix that would check for xcpimages.sonybmg.com in named running on localhost could be this, correct?
host -r xcpimages.sonybmg.com localhost
If it can answer with the IP then it's cached and if it cannot then it is not cached; is that right?
Cheers.
This wiki misses the fact that RSS 1.0 and RSS 2.0 are competing formats, not progressive versions of the same standard.
t ml 5 /magazine/rss_tut.html
RSS 1.0 is RDF-based like the original Netscape version of RSS, and is more extensible and structured than RSS 2.0 or Atom.
Annoyingly, neither camp wants to let go of the name "RSS" because they both lay claim to it, but it does actually stand for different things ("RDF Site Summary" / "Really Simple Syndication").
Readers would get more value from pages such as these:
http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2003/07/23/rssone.html
http://www.burningdoor.com/eric/archives/000239.h
http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/network/2000/08/2
http://web.resource.org/rss/1.0/
How dumb.
If you walk into a French store and say "Where is your Louis Vuitton stuff?" are they prohibited from saying "Here - but you might be insterested in these Dior items as well"...?
No, of course not.
Ok, testing Google Suggest....
;-)
let's try "linux"
l...
lyrics
etc
li...
limewire
etc
lin...
lindsay lohan
etc
[pause]
Um, you know... I can get back to a linux search anytime...
I'd never get any work done with this!
One day it occurred to me that "skill level" (or perhaps "interest in learning skills level") was such a fundamental variable to using the system that it should go in /etc/passwd with your name.
Sort of like runlevels for users:
0 - UID not used by humans
1 - Superuser expert (required level for root)
2 - Expert (default)
3 - Power user
4 - General user
5 - Provide conveniences (learning)
6 - Hide details
7 - "Grandma"
So if I create an account for a family member who has little technical interest, I can simply set the skill level to Grandma and know that GNOME, KDE, the apps, etc will all baby the user a little.
In a PVR/DVR world, the only thing that matters is where my unit knows to get shows from. Right now it has two television tuner cards in it, and pulls shows from cable TV.
But there's not reason why it couldn't get on the Internet and download MPEG's of shows. All that matters is (a) I get advertisements for various shows, (b) I select some for recording and (c) they are recorded and shown to me on demand. That's all folks. Whoever can do that for me can make "television".
There's no reason why you couldn't start an indepedent company to produce shows and just post all their shows for download each day at midnight on the web - as long as they got, for example TiVo, to add support for retreiving their shows, they'd be viable.
I'm using the Mesa DRI driver and I can't get Battlefield 1942 to work with Cedega.
;-)
I have to give credit to Transgaming, Gavriel State himself dropped in on my forum thread and gave the reason why, which I thought was cool of him. (BTW, if you had experience with the old message board on Transgaming's site, they've now switched to phpBB - Thank God.)
The reason is because the driver doesn't expose the 'GL_ARB_vertex_program' OpenGL extension. I could use the official ATI driver which does have that extension, but Gavriel says there's a bug in that which makes it not work with BF1942 too well, and they're working with ATI on it.
Come on open source guys! Our 3D drivers are already more _stable_, let's make them more _capable_ as well so the card companies just shrug their shoulders and decide to endorse the open source version.
Quick, someone patent VIN's with one more digit....
Babylon 5 is an absolutely amazing piece of science fiction but only when you realize that the 5 seasons are really one 80-hour long movie.
When I saw it aired on TV, I thought it was contrived because I didn't understand all the constant references to prophecies, councils, past wars, Valen, etc. I thought that they were doing what Star Trek writers do - reference cool sounding things just to enhance the illusion of the future, but those things are not existant in the actual plot. B5 is completely different; almost all their references are to cool stories in other episodes (both forward and backward) including some mind-blowing plot twists (some that make you giggle when you watch earlier season episodes because you know some *huge* secrets revealed later). It's important to realize that the B5 plot was fully written before filming, something that Star Trek never benefited from.
My roommate got the DVDs for all the seasons and we started watching them one by one. I'm a few episodes from finishing the last season. B5 is a trememdous story, not just out of science fiction, but of any type of story I've ever watched or read. It's one of those real works of art you only see once every few years. Of course I take issue with some scientific points, like their premise of the "first ones" (first race in the galaxy) living for indefinite lifetimes and such, but they are just quibbles.
It's also worth noting that besides the brilliant story weaving, B5 also fantastically avoided the concept of "good guys" and "bad guys". I'm impressed to no end how they side-stepped that oh-so-common trapping and actually made several alien races really come to life with politics, emotions, and goals of their own. Very cool.
The third great thing about B5 is that the problems are solved with character solutions. The tech is there to enhance the experience, but unlike Star Trek where they can reconfigure the primary deflector to do the dishes and take out the dog, in B5 they actually work out the problems using more traditional methods, and the interesting tech is for there for the viewer's enjoyment as backdrop, not primary focus.
If you're a Star Trek fan but have never watched B5, do yourself a favor and start with Season 1. Watch them in order, and P.S. there is an extra prequel movie, but don't watch it until after you get into Season 5 because it gives a few things from the middle away.
It makes me curious as to how they'd give Star Trek the B5 treatment, but I'd have to guess that the first step would be to write out a cohesive plot that can cover the first few years of the show before they start filming.
Your mom isn't trying to learn programming, it's just her way of trying to identify with some control over the computer. She's asking you to help her understand the computer, that's all. What she really needs is for you to sit with her for a couple hours and show her fun stuff like web browsing, email, IM, etc.
Exactly. "Booble."
I'm going to buy into the IPO just so I can recommend this as a Shareholder.
A lot of us assume that older applications/games (those written for Win95/98) are easier for Wine to facilitate than newer ones (those for 2000/XP/.NET). Is this indeed true?
If so, how long do you think it will be before Wine has matured to the point that we finally catch up with Win95? That is to say, I can install Wine and be confident that 99% of the windows apps targetted for Win95 will just work with no fuss? Same question for Win98?
I code in Perl like a lot of web developers.
#ifdef's are not really used in the Perl world (I suppose technically you *could* use a preprocessor), so I would like some form of 'print' command that is optimized away in the absence of a debug variable. I don't mean the print is not evaluated - I mean the arguments and the whole command is ignored, like a comment, when compiling to bytecode.
So instead of this:
print join(', ', map("\"$_\", @array)) if $DEBUG;
have this:
debug(join(', ', map("\"$_\", @array)));
Having an official command:
- allows much better optimization ($DEBUG can be set as a constant at compile-time)
- allows editors to syntax-highlight the command in a special color
- could let you override the debugging behavior (do something other than print it out)
- allows the debugger, when you use it, to detect your debug commands and do something special (e.g. "please break on all my debug commands after printing the value")
Anyone know of anything like this for Perl?
If not I think it would make a great Perl 6 feature.
Well for one thing that the 1% continue to extract the 99%, which was a huge principle that they believed in, in the original Matrix movie. They "forgot" in the second two movies as it became about Zion.
"In the end, it really was an ability best left undiscussed."
In SW, "the force" needs no explanation because it generally limits itself to small bendings of the laws of physics and the rest is simply tunneling energy to accomplish normal things better, and the main thesis of the movie is about good vs. evil not the force. In the Matrix, the powers are similar but the reason why they are possible is that reality is fundamentally different than people believe, and this central aspect of the story's thesis makes anything to do with the powers absolutely essential to explain.
The Matrix is about clever hackers who "get around the system" and so the methods, and thus explanations, are crucial and central. Further, people equate Neo's powers inside and outside the Matrix, but the inside powers were created by manipulation of computer logic, and this supposedly not being available outside, makes them two completely different things. Since we were *introduced* to his inside powers in the first movie as part of the storyline, it's natural to demand an explanation to his outside powers from the finale.
"coexistence is indeed the point of the movie, i don't quite understand the people who complain about it. it's as if they didn't hear Neo's speech at the end of The Matrix. (where it was quite clear that he wasn't out to destroy all machines)."
I'll let you defend that as the point of the movie, but let's agree that the ending does not convincingly leave us with that sort of resolution - a 16-year old boy bouncing around and a smiling Oracle do not prove that coexistance has been achieved.
What would have been amazingly more interesting is for the W. Bros to follow a matrix-within-a-matrix theory and let Neo perform a double escape. I realize this was done in 13th Floor and was an "ok" ending, so that's probably why they avoided it, thinking that the mystery would suffice. Unfortunately the Matrix made a name for itself as a story that explains illusion via compelling science and that's why we balk at their ending.
Not trying to be a troll, this is true because I've lived in both places - US intersections are about 5 times larger than UK intersections because of lane widths, number of lanes, intersection design, etc. Here in the US I've been surprised by ambulances appearing on the intersection several times, and I don't play my radio too loud.
I'd be curious if somebody in the know commented on how this compares with the Plan 9 project?
It's a "gateway right", as are many US rights.
For example, there is nothing intrinsically beneficial about being able to carry a firearm; that lump of steal on your belt doesn't feed you, clothe you, make you happy, or help build society. Heck, you're not even allowed to fire it at most people except under special circumstances. But it's a gateway right - it positively aids in the protection of all your other rights, e.g. freedom of speech, assembly, and religion. The government knows that at any given moment a sizeable group of citizens has the ability to bring physical force to bear.
We're entering a world where information is more powerful than weaponry. Witness how much work Bush had to do on the political stage before he could invade Iraq, and how much information his army had to continuously feed out in order to keep proper appearances. In days past none of this was necessary for a superpower.
The idea that freedom to access and trade information is superior to the freedom to carrying a firearm makes perfect sense to me. Not that I would support a cancellation of the latter right, but I do recognize the shifting priorities.
And remember, all "rights" are novel. We call them "basic" or "inherent," but nature plays no part in them. All rights are contrived fictions that people created; and so every "right" has a birthday, so to speak. Today is the birthday of the Right To Internet Access. And her mother is Estonian.
What may be interesting (and wonderful) is that we now live in a world where people don't necessarily have to die for the creation and recognition of new human rights.