I think you would have to ditch anonymity altogether. i.e. a system like"you can only review if you have an account" and "you can only get an account if you buy something, so we have your real name, shipping address and credit card number."
then simply put (name, city) on every post. you would have to go through some hoops to game that. admittedly many would still try.
the idea is that as the process gets more refined and widespread, many of those tractors, harvesters and delivery trucks can run on.... ethanol!
the idea is not to create some thermodynamically pure system (you'd never even break even no matter what), but rather to change to a renewable system that can *move* energy more efficiently and with less dependence on foreign entities.
So we can still call it a win if we can move energy (with obvious lossage) from cornfields in Kansas to cars in Chicago. Also, by centralizing the use of whatever fossil fuels are still needed we can focus on making a few distribution/manufacturing sites more efficient instead of trying to clean up 100 million automobiles sprawled out across the US.
from a strict thermodynamic sense, lots of fossil fuel is also spent getting you your gallon of gas today (prospecting equipment, the computers they use, oil rigs and platforms... etc). But that doesn't matter, the idea is to get energy from where it is (underground) to where it isn't (your gas tank), no matter thet cost.
Palm probably started designing their new system around.Net, activex, ms access/outlook, visual studio and other technologies that nail them to Microsoft. By the time somebody remembered to ask about Mac support, it was probably impossible without porting giant chunks of Windows along with it.
Cross platform stuff really needs careful design up front, the right choice in widget sets/dev tools/libraries WILL make the difference. Just ask the Neverwinter Nights folks, who even chose the wrong *installer file* format and got hosed at the end.
I would not be surprised if MS watermarked the sources somehow for each recipient (in the comments, telltale spacing or whitespace, etc).
it would be easy to automate and hard to detect. I'm sure the list of suspects will be small, and blame will probably land on a hacked/wormed workstation.
the kind of data that was disclosed was stuff like parent's schedules, birthdays, names, addresses etc.
all the kind of stuff a criminal could use to gain the trust of the child. "hi, your mother is still at the therapist, she sent me to come get you. and she told me today's your birthday... here's a gift..."
(yes, in some cases the parents therapy schedules and times were posted too). that's why this rises beyond the merely stupid.
In academia there tends to be a strong bias against anyone who becomes "popular." Any academic who can write such that people who haven't studied the field for 15 years will understand will probably get labelled as a "hack" or "completely without merit" and some other unsavory adjectives, regardless of the quality of their other work. The closeted insiders that nobody's ever heard of can't stand anyone who makes it into the daylight.
I've seen this reaction across any number of technical or non-technical academic fields. Sometimes the thrashing is justified, usually it's not. But it always happens.
As someone once said: "The politics in academia are so nasty only because the stakes are so small."
The additional RAM and HD give the XBox the edge. Without that, the VPU would only be a teeny notch above the one in the GC. in game console land, "it's the games, stupid." hd vpu cpu == nothing compared to the power of Mario. until the XBOX has the killer *exclusive* titles, it will be an also-ran on the same shelf with the 3DO.
The other thing to remember is that the XBox renders *everything* at 480p resolution... The Gamecube renders at 480i... there are four people on the planet who have the eyes/equipment to tell the difference. and only one of *them* cares. Everyone else is too busy playing the killer games to count scan lines.
First, as a pre-screening criteria for hiring managers I would qualify that by saying it serves also as CYA for hiring managers. if anything goes wrong, they can say "Well, he was certified in Blah by the 800lb gorilla himself. I did due diligence.. the explosion is somebody else's fault".
So you need minimal certs so that tech-unsavvy managers can pick you out without exposing themselves. you do get diminishing returns on the advanced certs for that reason, so don't waste time getting too far into the field. The comp sci or comp sys engr degree will age very well.
copy on select is extremely broken as a concept. When I select text (or anything else for that matter) I may want to copy it, or maybe NOT.
Select means "I intend to do something with this chunk," like change the font, italicize, bold, drag and drop. Sometimes I select text to be pasted over by what's in the clipboard "select - cut; select alternate text to be replaced - paste." The X way is internally inconsistent since you must select to do the non-copy jobs (and kill your clipboard), regardless of your actual intentions.
If you start using modifier keys to use "alternate" clipboard buffers, then you are no better off than "ctrl-c or apple-c" to copy, but you STILL have the problem where selecting does more than you intend.
I'll tell the computer what to do with selections, thank you.
In Gnome the supporting libraries are almost never Gnome dependent...
this is indeed a great theory. in real world practice, however, we see that installing one app has 12,000 dependent libraries, and now you have to track them all down *in the right order* to proceed (yeah, I almost gave up trying to compile evolution from source). Got gnome-supercool-addressbook-lib 2.1? well, this app needs 2.0 and wont compile with what you got. or worse, it needs 2.2b1r5 off the developer's laptop and you can't find it anywhere. And then you find that 2.2b1r5 itself needs quarko-coldfusion-libxml 0.34r12 to compile.
I certainly agree with the spirit of modular-is-better, but the gnome folks need to either show some more organization or trust in the "package managed distro fairy."
smtp will not die for a very long time, it has reached "critical mass" and anything new will have to be backwards compatible (and hence, subject to all the problems of SMTP itself.)
There is no silver antispam bullet, because there are many different kinds and motivations for it. Laws can make life less profitable for hardened pro superspammers like Ralsky AND the companies who hire him, yahoo's "sender auth via DNS key" will help against joe-jobs, spamassassin and its ilk can help against the rest.
Nobody is saying US laws will stop the likes of nigerian 419 scammers (and other wholly evil types), but a multi-pronged approach using technology, law enforcement and plain old user education can help a great deal with the broader problem.
Lets not disparage once specific defense just because "it won't stop them all." there is no silver bullet.
"...choosing to ignore the true impacts of these turbines, which are the equivalent of a terrestrial Exxon Valdez every year." - insane environmentalist in story.
Lets see: exxon valdez killed 250,000 birds, whole wind farm kills 20,000 *over twenty years*. It's these kinds of crazy enviro-whacko statements that actually do a disservice to ALL pro-environment activists. These statements just make folks want to ignore them all. Some folks won't rest until we are all subsistence-farming vegetarians.
if i recall correctly, the problem was the Mac version of Office not providing Hebrew support. OS X provides quite rich hebrew support in their libraries, so the technical barriers to a Hebrew Mac Office were perceived to be quite low, nobody is sure why MS wouldn't do it. There were no plans for adding it either. The Israeli government offered to pay for programmer time to add support but MS still refused.
This is where the Office monopoly started to look sour, it looked like MS was not going to do a Hebrew Mac Office "just because. Buy Windows." This demonstrated the effects of monopoly lock in and led to the search for alternatives.
a local coffeeshop does just this. they dont use WEP (useless overhead) and it's all 802.11b (why go for the lower range of a or g when you are only sharing a 1.5m DSL uplink anyway??). at the register they have a bunch of preprinted username/password cards you buy for $8 (they are obviously computer generated, each userid/password is unique). $8 buys you an hour, $20 buys you an all-day access card, and I think $30 buys you an all-month.
The first time you connect to any website you are redirected to a local webserver that prompts you for your name/pass. you key it in, and now your mac or ip is "authorized," and the rest of your connection is completely unrestricted. You cant do anything else until you login to their web server, and once you log in your ID is "used up."
pretty slick, since it requires zero geekness for whoever is at the register, they just sell cards like any other product. I'm pretty sure their backend is based on nocatauth
faxes are still useful for one big reason: forms and signatures. The usual "sign, fill out and refax" contract dance is very easy via fax and very hard via PC. PDF Forms require the sender to shell out for Adobe Acrobat Advanced XP (or whatever it's called), then learn how to use it properly. Then you have to somehow type in all your data (hard without commercial adobe software), then you have to sign it somehow, and finally email a multi-megabyte file around.
the article doesn't say "60% more efficient than all other hybrid or electric designs," presumably they mean 60% more efficient than your normal gas powered city bus.
also, the article does not claim 60% "more efficiency" solely due to the lack of a transmission. All the improvements together (drivetrain, tuned gas motor for electricity generation only, regenerative braking, small elves to get out and push every now and then, etc) add up to a 60% more efficient bus. And what do they mean by more efficient? More fuel efficient? more mechanically efficient? Cost efficient?
it's just a pop media article, not an engineering paper.
Also I recall reading that a number of astronauts in training for future flights said they would have volunteered for a rescue mission, even on a rescue shuttle with drastically curtailed safety checks.
even if rescue was impossible (and there's no guarantee that it would have been), they could have said "goodbye" to their loved ones and set some affairs in order.
I read your linked piece, it's quite good. Nobody really explains what "The Source" is, besides perhaps being a geeky reference to source code. it's possible that he exists now as a purely mental being in their world, along with the other 6 "Ones."
but I hope we never find out for sure; the wachowski brothers' storytelling ability seems to be degrading. (I also think that 2 and 3 were not that bad, but they did lack the clear storytelling edge present in the first. contrast Morpheus clear dialogue with the pretzel-like speeches of the Architect and the Frenchman.)
I actually just saw it for the second time a few hours ago. I think I have it now: When Neo meets the oracle again, he asks her where all these powers come from. She responds by saying "do you remember the first time you walked through that door? look at you now, you've surprised me. but I still like candy" and offers him a *red* candy, just like in #2.
Neo thinks for a moment (keanu really is a terrible actor) and then pointedly declines the candy. he says "you left me a few surprises too." The red candy, like the red pill of the first movie, might actually be a program that changed neo somehow, giving him this wireless capability. Or activating built in chips as another poster mentioned (we do know that ALL matrix/computer activity is wireless, as they always go up to "broadcast depth" to connect.) maybe their ships' "brain needle connectors" are just amplifiers for the signals generated/received by the wired in gear.
Also note that the infamous train station is "Mobil Station."
of course, I might also be completely full of shit.;) other interesting stuff I noticed the second time around: in the rave/techno club room where they meet the frenchman (obvious reverse image to the humans' rave scene in the second) there's a lady with a black mask with giant spikes sticking out--JUST like the face neo meets at the end. there's a few other masks that are quite similar.
Before they fight Smith says to Neo: "Like what I've done with the place?" Smith has not only taken over the living programs and humans, even the nonliving stuff like the black cat and weather programs. It's ALL Smith. It's raining because... he can make it rain.
he probably gained the ability to do that after he got the Oracle, (remember the maniacal laughter? he now sees... EVERYTHING.)
I understand that subtext, it's the "overtext" that I don't get. the underlying point is well made but it does seem to connect with the visible film. how exactly does he do all this? is he psychic? is he a mutant? did the oracle have an 802.11 chipset embedded into his brain at birth? when he blows up the machines is he logging into the matrix and sending them destruct signals? Or is he like the girl in Stephen King's "Firestarter" and Just Nuking?
there isn't even a hint as to what's going on, and deus ex machina is... unworthy of the rest of the film.
in the first two films we get the feeling that all the superpower schtick comes from the power of mind/willpower. it's a nice premise and makes it all believable. but the third sets neo up as a "superhero with unexplained superpowers" in a Marvel Comics kind of way. "he just... can." It's a cop-out, and lame in a Lucas-esque "the Force is really generated by bacterial midichlorians infections" style.
that part is lame, or at least I haven't figured out any intelligence behind it. As for the rest, see the film "Waking Life" for a quick intro to philosophy that will aid understanding the Matrix.
Major Matrix 3 Spoiler alert: you have been warned.
what did we learn in the train station scene? 1. there is an outer computer world that is much like the matrix, where the machine programs live.
2. they combine to produce new mental "offspring," the mother and dad figures. they do NOT reproduce via cloning, like agent smith does. Societies of perfect (agent smith-like) clones can fail to a single infection/problem (see Ghost in the Shell for more on this, pretty sure the comics-crazy watchowski brothers did). that's why agent smith is a fundamental threat against the machines. Smith gains the ability to break the rules and ignore "kill" and "do not clone" signals, which is exactly what Neo learned in #1 in order to become The One.
3. there is a link between the outer world and the Matrix human playpen/pigsty that is tightly controlled but also subject to a black market (the frenchman likes his kicks, and sells them to others)
4. program offspring in the outer matrix must already have a reason to exist, otherwise they are terminated. the matrix is a bit of a legal backwater where unneeded programs can live and perhaps FIND a purpose ("what good is a newborn babe?")
5. misc. other: the "eyes of the oracle", why are the so important? the oracle is one of the two designers of the matrix. she knows the state of everything in it (omniscient in a way that is not possible in the real world due to heisenberg). She also has a deep understanding of humans, and can usually predict what they will do. this is the nature of her "fortune telling." it is not perfect, human choices sometimes are unpredictable (this is the fundamental flaw in the matrix according to the Architect). She also "cannot see past the choices we don't understand." If she doesn't understand a decision fully, she cannot predict it's outcome.
This plays back to the Frenchman's longwinded speech in 2: action-reaction. He believes that if you poke a human a certain way, you can predict the response. we have no free will, we are just deterministic biological computers (he demonstrates this with the chocolate cake.) so he seeks knowlege, and ultimately control via gaining the "eyes of the oracle," which must allow the owner to see all of the matrix from a "programmer with debugger tool" perspective.
however, the oracle knows that perfect knowlege of the world and it's history DOES NOT give one perfect prescience. whatever drives human free will (choice) is sometimes unpredictable. we are NOT deterministic creatures.
And for the final mega spoiler theory: smith and neo cannot kill each other at the end of #3. they both know it, they can both ignore kill signals. smith infects neo, then Neo *chooses to die*!!! smith cannot avoid this internal kill signal. all his clones fall prey to the same signal. they *all* die. smith even with the oracle's powers can not have known that trinity had died in the real world and that neo would choose follow her in death. so he could not forsee beyond that choice he did not understand. (if trinity were alive, neo probably would not have made that choice).
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I think you would have to ditch anonymity altogether. i.e. a system like"you can only review if you have an account" and "you can only get an account if you buy something, so we have your real name, shipping address and credit card number."
then simply put (name, city) on every post. you would have to go through some hoops to game that. admittedly many would still try.
the idea is that as the process gets more refined and widespread, many of those tractors, harvesters and delivery trucks can run on.... ethanol!
the idea is not to create some thermodynamically pure system (you'd never even break even no matter what), but rather to change to a renewable system that can *move* energy more efficiently and with less dependence on foreign entities.
So we can still call it a win if we can move energy (with obvious lossage) from cornfields in Kansas to cars in Chicago. Also, by centralizing the use of whatever fossil fuels are still needed we can focus on making a few distribution/manufacturing sites more efficient instead of trying to clean up 100 million automobiles sprawled out across the US.
from a strict thermodynamic sense, lots of fossil fuel is also spent getting you your gallon of gas today (prospecting equipment, the computers they use, oil rigs and platforms... etc). But that doesn't matter, the idea is to get energy from where it is (underground) to where it isn't (your gas tank), no matter thet cost.
Palm probably started designing their new system around .Net, activex, ms access/outlook, visual studio and other technologies that nail them to Microsoft. By the time somebody remembered to ask about Mac support, it was probably impossible without porting giant chunks of Windows along with it.
Cross platform stuff really needs careful design up front, the right choice in widget sets/dev tools/libraries WILL make the difference. Just ask the Neverwinter Nights folks, who even chose the wrong *installer file* format and got hosed at the end.
I would not be surprised if MS watermarked the sources somehow for each recipient (in the comments, telltale spacing or whitespace, etc).
it would be easy to automate and hard to detect. I'm sure the list of suspects will be small, and blame will probably land on a hacked/wormed workstation.
the kind of data that was disclosed was stuff like parent's schedules, birthdays, names, addresses etc.
all the kind of stuff a criminal could use to gain the trust of the child. "hi, your mother is still at the therapist, she sent me to come get you. and she told me today's your birthday... here's a gift..."
(yes, in some cases the parents therapy schedules and times were posted too). that's why this rises beyond the merely stupid.
In academia there tends to be a strong bias against anyone who becomes "popular." Any academic who can write such that people who haven't studied the field for 15 years will understand will probably get labelled as a "hack" or "completely without merit" and some other unsavory adjectives, regardless of the quality of their other work. The closeted insiders that nobody's ever heard of can't stand anyone who makes it into the daylight.
I've seen this reaction across any number of technical or non-technical academic fields. Sometimes the thrashing is justified, usually it's not. But it always happens.
As someone once said: "The politics in academia are so nasty only because the stakes are so small."
The additional RAM and HD give the XBox the edge. Without that, the VPU would only be a teeny notch above the one in the GC.
in game console land, "it's the games, stupid." hd vpu cpu == nothing compared to the power of Mario. until the XBOX has the killer *exclusive* titles, it will be an also-ran on the same shelf with the 3DO.
The other thing to remember is that the XBox renders *everything* at 480p resolution... The Gamecube renders at 480i...
there are four people on the planet who have the eyes/equipment to tell the difference. and only one of *them* cares. Everyone else is too busy playing the killer games to count scan lines.
First, as a pre-screening criteria for hiring managers
I would qualify that by saying it serves also as CYA for hiring managers. if anything goes wrong, they can say "Well, he was certified in Blah by the 800lb gorilla himself. I did due diligence.. the explosion is somebody else's fault".
So you need minimal certs so that tech-unsavvy managers can pick you out without exposing themselves. you do get diminishing returns on the advanced certs for that reason, so don't waste time getting too far into the field. The comp sci or comp sys engr degree will age very well.
copy on select is extremely broken as a concept. When I select text (or anything else for that matter) I may want to copy it, or maybe NOT.
Select means "I intend to do something with this chunk," like change the font, italicize, bold, drag and drop. Sometimes I select text to be pasted over by what's in the clipboard "select - cut; select alternate text to be replaced - paste." The X way is internally inconsistent since you must select to do the non-copy jobs (and kill your clipboard), regardless of your actual intentions.
If you start using modifier keys to use "alternate" clipboard buffers, then you are no better off than "ctrl-c or apple-c" to copy, but you STILL have the problem where selecting does more than you intend.
I'll tell the computer what to do with selections, thank you.
wow. that is a dramatic difference! it's probably slower in actual (stopwatch) time, but it does SEEM visibly faster.
In Gnome the supporting libraries are almost never Gnome dependent ...
this is indeed a great theory. in real world practice, however, we see that installing one app has 12,000 dependent libraries, and now you have to track them all down *in the right order* to proceed (yeah, I almost gave up trying to compile evolution from source). Got gnome-supercool-addressbook-lib 2.1? well, this app needs 2.0 and wont compile with what you got. or worse, it needs 2.2b1r5 off the developer's laptop and you can't find it anywhere. And then you find that 2.2b1r5 itself needs quarko-coldfusion-libxml 0.34r12 to compile.
I certainly agree with the spirit of modular-is-better, but the gnome folks need to either show some more organization or trust in the "package managed distro fairy."
smtp will not die for a very long time, it has reached "critical mass" and anything new will have to be backwards compatible (and hence, subject to all the problems of SMTP itself.)
There is no silver antispam bullet, because there are many different kinds and motivations for it. Laws can make life less profitable for hardened pro superspammers like Ralsky AND the companies who hire him, yahoo's "sender auth via DNS key" will help against joe-jobs, spamassassin and its ilk can help against the rest.
Nobody is saying US laws will stop the likes of nigerian 419 scammers (and other wholly evil types), but a multi-pronged approach using technology, law enforcement and plain old user education can help a great deal with the broader problem.
Lets not disparage once specific defense just because "it won't stop them all." there is no silver bullet.
"...choosing to ignore the true impacts of these turbines, which are the equivalent of a terrestrial Exxon Valdez every year." - insane environmentalist in story.
Lets see: exxon valdez killed 250,000 birds, whole wind farm kills 20,000 *over twenty years*. It's these kinds of crazy enviro-whacko statements that actually do a disservice to ALL pro-environment activists. These statements just make folks want to ignore them all. Some folks won't rest until we are all subsistence-farming vegetarians.
if i recall correctly, the problem was the Mac version of Office not providing Hebrew support. OS X provides quite rich hebrew support in their libraries, so the technical barriers to a Hebrew Mac Office were perceived to be quite low, nobody is sure why MS wouldn't do it. There were no plans for adding it either. The Israeli government offered to pay for programmer time to add support but MS still refused.
This is where the Office monopoly started to look sour, it looked like MS was not going to do a Hebrew Mac Office "just because. Buy Windows." This demonstrated the effects of monopoly lock in and led to the search for alternatives.
a local coffeeshop does just this. they dont use WEP (useless overhead) and it's all 802.11b (why go for the lower range of a or g when you are only sharing a 1.5m DSL uplink anyway??). at the register they have a bunch of preprinted username/password cards you buy for $8 (they are obviously computer generated, each userid/password is unique). $8 buys you an hour, $20 buys you an all-day access card, and I think $30 buys you an all-month.
The first time you connect to any website you are redirected to a local webserver that prompts you for your name/pass. you key it in, and now your mac or ip is "authorized," and the rest of your connection is completely unrestricted. You cant do anything else until you login to their web server, and once you log in your ID is "used up."
pretty slick, since it requires zero geekness for whoever is at the register, they just sell cards like any other product. I'm pretty sure their backend is based on nocatauth
faxes are still useful for one big reason: forms and signatures. The usual "sign, fill out and refax" contract dance is very easy via fax and very hard via PC. PDF Forms require the sender to shell out for Adobe Acrobat Advanced XP (or whatever it's called), then learn how to use it properly. Then you have to somehow type in all your data (hard without commercial adobe software), then you have to sign it somehow, and finally email a multi-megabyte file around.
Or, fax, markup with pen, fax back.
Long live the fax.
please do not feed the pro-ms astroturfing shills. they will drag you down to their level, then beat you with experience.
the article doesn't say "60% more efficient than all other hybrid or electric designs," presumably they mean 60% more efficient than your normal gas powered city bus.
also, the article does not claim 60% "more efficiency" solely due to the lack of a transmission. All the improvements together (drivetrain, tuned gas motor for electricity generation only, regenerative braking, small elves to get out and push every now and then, etc) add up to a 60% more efficient bus. And what do they mean by more efficient? More fuel efficient? more mechanically efficient? Cost efficient?
it's just a pop media article, not an engineering paper.
Also I recall reading that a number of astronauts in training for future flights said they would have volunteered for a rescue mission, even on a rescue shuttle with drastically curtailed safety checks.
even if rescue was impossible (and there's no guarantee that it would have been), they could have said "goodbye" to their loved ones and set some affairs in order.
I read your linked piece, it's quite good. Nobody really explains what "The Source" is, besides perhaps being a geeky reference to source code. it's possible that he exists now as a purely mental being in their world, along with the other 6 "Ones."
but I hope we never find out for sure; the wachowski brothers' storytelling ability seems to be degrading. (I also think that 2 and 3 were not that bad, but they did lack the clear storytelling edge present in the first. contrast Morpheus clear dialogue with the pretzel-like speeches of the Architect and the Frenchman.)
I actually just saw it for the second time a few hours ago. I think I have it now: When Neo meets the oracle again, he asks her where all these powers come from. She responds by saying "do you remember the first time you walked through that door? look at you now, you've surprised me. but I still like candy" and offers him a *red* candy, just like in #2.
;) other interesting stuff I noticed the second time around: in the rave/techno club room where they meet the frenchman (obvious reverse image to the humans' rave scene in the second) there's a lady with a black mask with giant spikes sticking out--JUST like the face neo meets at the end. there's a few other masks that are quite similar.
Neo thinks for a moment (keanu really is a terrible actor) and then pointedly declines the candy. he says "you left me a few surprises too." The red candy, like the red pill of the first movie, might actually be a program that changed neo somehow, giving him this wireless capability. Or activating built in chips as another poster mentioned (we do know that ALL matrix/computer activity is wireless, as they always go up to "broadcast depth" to connect.) maybe their ships' "brain needle connectors" are just amplifiers for the signals generated/received by the wired in gear.
Also note that the infamous train station is "Mobil Station."
of course, I might also be completely full of shit.
Before they fight Smith says to Neo: "Like what I've done with the place?" Smith has not only taken over the living programs and humans, even the nonliving stuff like the black cat and weather programs. It's ALL Smith. It's raining because... he can make it rain.
he probably gained the ability to do that after he got the Oracle, (remember the maniacal laughter? he now sees... EVERYTHING.)
I understand that subtext, it's the "overtext" that I don't get. the underlying point is well made but it does seem to connect with the visible film. how exactly does he do all this? is he psychic? is he a mutant? did the oracle have an 802.11 chipset embedded into his brain at birth? when he blows up the machines is he logging into the matrix and sending them destruct signals? Or is he like the girl in Stephen King's "Firestarter" and Just Nuking?
there isn't even a hint as to what's going on, and deus ex machina is... unworthy of the rest of the film.
in the first two films we get the feeling that all the superpower schtick comes from the power of mind/willpower. it's a nice premise and makes it all believable. but the third sets neo up as a "superhero with unexplained superpowers" in a Marvel Comics kind of way. "he just... can." It's a cop-out, and lame in a Lucas-esque "the Force is really generated by bacterial midichlorians infections" style.
that part is lame, or at least I haven't figured out any intelligence behind it. As for the rest, see the film "Waking Life" for a quick intro to philosophy that will aid understanding the Matrix.
Major Matrix 3 Spoiler alert: you have been warned.
what did we learn in the train station scene?
1. there is an outer computer world that is much like the matrix, where the machine programs live.
2. they combine to produce new mental "offspring," the mother and dad figures. they do NOT reproduce via cloning, like agent smith does. Societies of perfect (agent smith-like) clones can fail to a single infection/problem (see Ghost in the Shell for more on this, pretty sure the comics-crazy watchowski brothers did). that's why agent smith is a fundamental threat against the machines. Smith gains the ability to break the rules and ignore "kill" and "do not clone" signals, which is exactly what Neo learned in #1 in order to become The One.
3. there is a link between the outer world and the Matrix human playpen/pigsty that is tightly controlled but also subject to a black market (the frenchman likes his kicks, and sells them to others)
4. program offspring in the outer matrix must already have a reason to exist, otherwise they are terminated. the matrix is a bit of a legal backwater where unneeded programs can live and perhaps FIND a purpose ("what good is a newborn babe?")
5. misc. other: the "eyes of the oracle", why are the so important? the oracle is one of the two designers of the matrix. she knows the state of everything in it (omniscient in a way that is not possible in the real world due to heisenberg). She also has a deep understanding of humans, and can usually predict what they will do. this is the nature of her "fortune telling." it is not perfect, human choices sometimes are unpredictable (this is the fundamental flaw in the matrix according to the Architect). She also "cannot see past the choices we don't understand." If she doesn't understand a decision fully, she cannot predict it's outcome.
This plays back to the Frenchman's longwinded speech in 2: action-reaction. He believes that if you poke a human a certain way, you can predict the response. we have no free will, we are just deterministic biological computers (he demonstrates this with the chocolate cake.) so he seeks knowlege, and ultimately control via gaining the "eyes of the oracle," which must allow the owner to see all of the matrix from a "programmer with debugger tool" perspective.
however, the oracle knows that perfect knowlege of the world and it's history DOES NOT give one perfect prescience. whatever drives human free will (choice) is sometimes unpredictable. we are NOT deterministic creatures.
And for the final mega spoiler theory: smith and neo cannot kill each other at the end of #3. they both know it, they can both ignore kill signals. smith infects neo, then Neo *chooses to die*!!! smith cannot avoid this internal kill signal. all his clones fall prey to the same signal. they *all* die. smith even with the oracle's powers can not have known that trinity had died in the real world and that neo would choose follow her in death. so he could not forsee beyond that choice he did not understand. (if trinity were alive, neo probably would not have made that choice).
End of Class.