You're right. Corporations can't do what governments can do.
They can't put you in jail -- directly. They can command government leverage to do that. Think Elcomsoft. Think RIAA. Think Scientology. They can jail you anytime they want by picking up a phone and getting their legal staff on the job. It's up to you to raise millions to defend yourself.
Corporations can't die. They can come after you for all eternity. Governments can be unelected.
Corporations are just collections of men, with their own agendas, but they pretend to be faceless artificial people who are therefore untouchable.
You can't pick and choose news corporations to find the best news for you. IF THEY ARE ALTERING THE HISTORICAL RECORD, HOW WOULD YOU EVER KNOW??? Informed consent is necessary to make a decision in a free market.
Corporations can collude in secret to remove articles that a partisan mindset shared among managers deems unsuitable. Governments cannot, at least not until this administration, hide what they do for very long.
People do pick and choose governments with ease, every four years. Try firing Microsoft.
Corporations, though "persons" with constitutional rights, have absolutely no personal accountability whatsoever for their actions. Want to talk to Time Warner about erasing the record? What is "Time"? Can you schedule an appointment with it? Make it do jail time?
Corporations now are the government. What do you call that form of government, komrade? "Police state" is a question begging term. Who owns the cops? Apparently the Secret Service has been ordering all the local law enforcement around the country to round up protesters in the President's path and detain them. Who owns the cops? Skylarov was yanked by cops on the sayso of Adobe; who owned the cops? Kevin Mitnick spent years in prison without charges because the corporations he insulted wanted him to rot, period. They seem to own the courts, don't they? The RIAA now can issue its own subpoenas and ruin people financially without ever talking to a court or the cops.
When the corporation becomes the law, you have a real police state. All the trappings of a democracy run by immortal, untouchable god-kings, who do whatever they like to whomever they like.
Rightly or wrongly, you are misinterpreting the point by setting up a straw man.
He's not saying Bush is Stalin, or that he is acting in all ways like Stalin, and it is dishonest of you to say that he is. It is a lie of sorts.
Joe Stalin did indeed invent mass edittings of the historical records. Orwell barely exagerated the practice in 1984, a novel which was his response to Russian madness.
Presidential staff orders to rewrite the record, which has happened lately to Bush speech transcripts, efforts by neocon news managers to rewrite articles or eliminate them entirely from the internet -- these efforts are Stalinesque, for it was Stalin who created and perfected those techniques. If Bush and his people do not want to be compared to Stalin, then perhaps they should not be taking pages from Unca Joe's playbook.
As for Bush Sr. pulling the article -- I highly doubt it. He possesses old school honor, I must say. His son and his son's handlers simply do not. I'd give the nod to the neocons if words start disappearing.
It's the principle of the thing, for one. It's Orwellian. Secondly, Time readers searching the archives of Time will never find the article; it is now un-printed, nonexistent. And thirdly, how many other writings are being "un-printed" that are not favorable to the King? We can't look everywhere, all the time. And lastly, it's not beyond imagining that eventually the King's men will require Google and others to un-remember things they don't want remembered. A few laws here and there, and it's done. Hell, Scientology has tried it a few times, and actually succeeded in some cases in suppressing reality. They even did it to Google for a time; they really did it to Slashdot -- a thread critical of the Hubbardians that mentioned Xenu is now un-happened.
The intensity would barely warm your skin. the studies were done over thirty years ago. it's a matter of how you focus the beam. Anyway, rectennas would be placed miles away from human living areas any way. America's collective insane fear of risk would mandate that.
Definitely a new factor was Smith, I say in a flip-flop on my earlier statement. Or, at least Smith,the anti-Neo, had never before gone viral in any of the previous Zion-dies scenarios.
Smith not only had completely taken over the Matrix, he was on the path to take over the 01 (AI) nation as well -- remember, this was the gist of the deal that Neo made with the gestalt at the very end: let me defeat Smith, and you live, but the humans go free. Otherwise, Smith kills YOU, too.
What the AI may not have anticipated was Neo surrendering to Smith, being absorbed by the virus. Neo then controlled not only Smith's viral abilities, but he got the Oracle's perspective as well, since Smith had already absorbed her.
I think what we saw at the end was Neo giving orders to all the machines in the AI world -- he had virally infected every AI in the world. He was essentially God. Deal or no deal, those machines were told to stand down. But he didn't kill all the machines... he stuck to the deal, avoiding a sticky moral dilemma, ie mass murder of sentient beings.
Side thought: had Agent Smith at the point of the final Neo confrontation absorbed all the human minds of the matrix? Was any human mind alive in the Matrix at all at the end? Was Zion the last bastion of humanity in actual fact as Neo ended the war?
Hm. I spent years reading Asimovian essays on entropy and thermodynamics, but, let me put it this way: Soylent Green can't be people.
The input of energy and materials to maintain billions of humans in stasis pods would dwarf the electricty drawn from humans, and secondly, humans use the electricity in their bodies. It's part of the nervous system. Subtract the electromotive force, kill the human.
Perhaps the W bros. meant that the AI's used the heat emanating from the bodies to create electricity via thermocouples. Problem with that is that the process would cool the gel and the body within it, which would cause hypothermia. You'd have to heat the body externally to keep your podboy alive, which leads us back to the 2nd law again.
The energy needed to heat the pods,create the gels, create the organic foodstuffs, cycle clean water and air... all these things take energy. Not a lot, but a hell of a lot more than you can get off a coppertop human -- which is zot.
Now, the way out of this, I'd always supposed, is that the humans simply misunderstood what the human race was imprisoned for. They'd always assumed they were a power source. But it seems that the Zionistas had forgotten all their science... and a lot of their engineering as well. Remember, they don't know how their own recycling machinery works anymore. Physics are probably lost to them. They drive well, repair things well, and can hack existing systems. But physics is not their forte -- otherwise they'd be lobbing nuclear explosives out of the tunnels at the surface, or hell, just leaving the damned planet!
I think, and some of what the third installment reveals backs me up, that a large faction of the machine world didn't want to kill off their creators entirely, even if they tried to kill them. Their is a certain logic to not killing off a valuable, creative resource such as the human mind. So you lock it up where it can't hurt anything anymore. But the AIs still can interact with the human race. They can still learn from it. And after all, there're no other intelligent races nearby. Humans may kill all the cetaceans and then go have a beer, but the machines might be saner than us in that regard.
I think the Matrix trilogy could be seen as the climax of a centuries-old fight between factions of the machine world -- what to do with the damned humans?
"I actually said "WiFi, Neo is rigged with 802.11b" "
Actually, he's rigged with a hell of a lot more than that. The implants in his nervous system are extensive and hackable and most likely very intelligent; it might have been within Neo's newfound clarity to hack a simple wireless connection that, after all, the Nebuchanezzer used all the time to hack the data lines. The wireless communication libraries might have been part of the basic OS of all the AIs in the world -- including the semi-smart implants in all the podded humans.
"Number 3: nobody ever said there wasn't oxygen on the earth's surface. It may be polluted, but there is nothing to conclude that it isn't there."
Two reasons why:
1. No sun, no plants, no photosythesis.
Weirdly enough, the surface would warm as the CO2 levels built up to maxiumum levels (all free O2 combining with carbon as the animals consumed it all), causing a Venus-like runaway greenhouse effect.
But, maybe the machines were not suicidal, and kept CO2 scubbers running to maintain a decent, non-blast furnace temperature. If they can pod humans, they can run greenhouses.
I'd have to say there was some residual O2 being maintained, one, because the termperature at surface level wasn't 800 degrees F, and two, Neo and Trinity were breathing something.
From the evidence presented in the story, good science in the SF would mandate that CO2 was not built up in the atmosphere.
2. Zion manufactures/recycles air -- it was mentioned in the conversation between the councilor and Neo one night. The air, the water, the food the ate, all made on the engineering level of Zion. They'd HAVE to recycle it -- no plants to maintain a CO2 - O2 conversion cycle in the bowels of the earth.
Of course, the entire human being = coppertop idea violates a fundamental law of thermodynamics, so the basic idea of the series is impossible. Comic book writers/philosophy junkies aren't necessarily good science students.
The Matrix Trilogy really isn't SF, it's SciFi, in the sense that Metheselah's Children is SF and Godzilla is SciFi; the trappings of SF without the S.
Not Christian in the sense most Americans would have it. It was using the cross as a sign of sacrifice, martyrdom, and ressurection. Mithra or Persephone, also sacrifice/redemption stories, would work as well, but not many people would get it.
Good point... Oracle's cookies are hacks, aren't they? She at least gives the humans a boost in the direction they need. EVERYone who joins Zion goes to the Oracle, or at least those who travel the Matrix itself. She's upgrading their implant firmware?
Ah, but he didn't turn his flesh into the antenna, he hacked the the incredibly complex feedback mechanism implanted around his nervous system and brain, which was already installed for him. He Pringled it, if you get the ref; hacked it to a faretheewell until he made it sing.
And I don't think Neo was actually ALL human. He was carrying code of some sort, code which had migrated from previous incarnations of Neos. Code so complex that he and it had become symbiotic? That network wired into the farmed humans' bodies can't be just a collection of filaments. It has to be quite an AI in and of itself. The implants are intelligent, and hackable.
Just had an idea. Maybe the Neo, the One, isn't a particular person being reincarnated, a set of genes. Maybe the body network in the original Neo retained the pattern of logics that gave a Neo his "Oneness". Maybe the Neo network implant was salvaged and reimplanted into each new baby Neo, and the Zion program retested to destruction again.
"Notice how when his body was carried at the end on a machine ship it looked oddly like when Arthur is laying on a ship and going to the sea when he dies?"
Also notice the very obvious crucifixtion pose of Neo as he is held up by the tentacles of the machines after he dies (?). Ramming the point home, I thought, but not everyone noticed. Christ has died for everyone's sins, machines and humans, and now everyone gets a fresh start.
It also implies a resurrection. I at first also thought that it implies a circular timeline, in that Neo was in the Matrix all along, had indeed died to create it, and needed to realize it... that time in that world was circular, that even the "real world" inhabited by the machines was a virtual reality at a higher level, with a timeline that swallowed its own tail. Neo is God, who created the world and implicitly, clumsily created a mess, and is reborn as Christ, who redeems the mess and sets things right.
I'm sure the W brothers saw this clearly and wove it into the symbolism. Not that it is the STORY, or even true. Just inserted so everyone can have fun analyzing it. Movies are also supposed to be fun, too! Even for the W brothers. They wanted the trilogy to be "explained" with ideas that could all be the "right" answer. They gave no definitive answer on purpose. The crucifiction pose was the clincher for me; I knew they were having fun with it all.
"Now how did he get to feel the machines in the real world is what bums me and I'm hoping seeing two and three again will explain it."
Remember that Neo, and all the other humans rescued by Zion from the farms, has a machine interface built into his nervous system. It's used to enter the Matrix, yes, but the connection can be TWO way as well. Rather than simply getting input that overrides his senses, the death trauma he suffered in TM1 enabled him to hack his interface to detect and interact with the networks that are connected to the Matrix -- the networks of the machine world, in essense the AI matrices. He's hacked a bridge together out of software and meat that give him the ability to build a "mini-matrix" of his own, one that overlays his real-world (if it is that) perceptions with the world of the machines.. think of it in terms of a set of meatware cybergoggles, with the added ability to hack root of some of the lesser machines, shutting them down. He can be in the machine worldnet and the meat world at the same time, with control and feedback; when he loses his eyes, he uses the "googles" to move about the real world using cyberspace landmarks and flows. "I can see you", he sneers at a cowering Smithhack, before he takes his head clean off.
I saw the 8 AM showing at Navy Pier in Chicago. I agree with your analysis. Let's see if I can add a few things to the mix.
Neo most probably was not human. Or, if he was, perhaps he was a clone of many before him, created by the Architect and the Oracle to try to work out the the anomaly caused by their conflict, order versus chaos. He is the One, the anomaly that causes Zion to fall, and be reborn - and be reborn himself as well.
Neo has done this many times before. Trinity has not; she is new to the cycle.
The world without time is central to the story. Neo has always been the answer to his own questions, but never had the courage or the motivation in his prior incarnations to face that he either WAS the Matrix, in a circular karma sort of way, or had to BECOME the Matrix, a different way of stating it. To defeat the enemy he had to let Smith win, something he had never done before. Most likely he just kept fighting until he died, in the prior cycles of his last confrontation with Smith. But this time, with Trinity's loss and sacrifice still fresh as a bloody wound in his mind, Neo was able to understand that he had to lose, and in losing, take control of Smith. The Smith/Neo/Oracle conglomerate then simply took viral control of the entire 01 nation, and called off the hertofore inevitable destruction of Zion.
In previous incarnations, Neo simply lost as he fought Smith, and Zion fell. In this one, he took a measure of control over the situation. He also understood that he had messed it all up, many times before, and that this time he was doing it right.
Neo broke the karmic wheel, finally. Cue the Christ metaphor.
My head is still assimilating all this. I'm looking forward to reading anyone else's ideas.
And after the stock and bond markets rebound, the insurance companies won't reduce the rates, even though the reason for the increases no longer apply.
They can raise the rates, then cut off payoffs via the "torn reform" bullshit, and finally refuse to lower the rates even after the "reform" has taken place as their stock investments are soaring!
PROFIT!
And Americans fell for it. The insurance companies are looting us.
We are so stupid, we all deserve to lose health coverage.
I will interrupt this semantically corrupt thread for a moment:
What the hell does "left-wing" mean, a term used by the majority of the Slashdot posters?
Firstly, an erroneous equation of "liberal" and "left-wing" seems to be universal here.
"Liberal" does not mean "leftist".
Listen: left-wing means many things, all the way from communism on the very farthest fringe all the way to socialism on its farthest right. It generally means an abrogation of private ownership of industry in favor of government ownership in communism, to a mixture of private ownership and public ownership in socialism. Communism means total government planning for industry, socialism a mixed batch of the private and government control.
The idea that government should have a hand in regulating industry is NOT, NOT left-wing! Regulation is not ownership. It's what people do to control their own world. There isn't a damned congresscritter or mainstream media channel that is "left-wing". I don't hear any advocation of confiscation of the overlords' property for proper distribution to the proletariat.
The confusion between the two terms is intentional semantic warfare by the far-right wing. The attack is a classic Orwellian one, and one so obvious that I stand amazed that no one comments on it. The far-rightists are simply confusing and defusing the actual meaning of the terms used in the debate so that meaningful debate is impossible. Even Slashdotters, who have a great mechanism in place to call people on errors, cannot actually debate the Fox News vs Everyone Else argument because the terms "liberal", "left-wing", "conservative", and "right-wing" are so debased that no one will admit to being "liberal", a term equated with commies and loser hippies. The confusion is so great that the New York Times, one of the most objective and classic news outlets of the last century, is now "liberal" and suspect, while the FoxNews Channel and the Moonie Times is "balanced". Horsepoo.
Liberal has come to mean simply this:
Liberal = not agreeing with the neo-con far-right wing.
This is an amazing victory for the far-right. EVERONE is a liberal. Disagree with them and you are a liberal. Mention any other point of view than theirs, or simply come to a rational conclusion that the far-right is wrong in the facts, and you are left-wing.
On the other hand, if you present all the ideas of the far-right as proven facts, for example: supply-side economics, preemptive war, WMDs in Iraq, welfare as a black epidemic, an out-of-control crime epidemic, the need for homeland defense, the idea that science is wrong and that other "viewpoints" of non-scientists are equally valid... then you are "centrist" or "balanced". Also helps if you slander Clinton on a regular basis.
Also, another point. I have been, all my life, a rational libertarian in the Heinleinian model. In a sense, I am a conservative.
The people on FoxNews, the Times, and all the corporate critters running the government currently are not conservatives. They are radicals, determined to use enormous marketing acumen to convert a liberal country, by any measure, to a new world in which the people no longer choose their representatives. In which a large number of corporate and government interests directly control the levers of power, and most definitely control the debate by direct and draconian control of the news services themselves.
>OK, this is about as stupid as anything/. has EVER posted.
How in the hell did you come up with that idea? Have you seen some of the threads? Microsoft funneling money into a third party to destroy an enemy is not only not-stupid, but has the added cache of relying on the fact that they have done it many, many times in the past.
> It's pure conspiracy theory, and has been flatly refuted by everyone involved. Hell, the eWeek article only gets by at all by saying, "some in the open source community suspect..."
Yes, and it's a conspiracy theory that Nixon tried to cover up the Watergate break-ins, and that the Vietnam war was started using a trumped-up attack as an excuse, and that J. Edgar Hoover persecuted commies and homosexuals even as he wore a dress in his off hours. It's a conspiracy theory that MS faked a demonstration video for the judge a few years ago. It's a conspiracy theory that Bush and Company pushed emotional buttons and lied or misrepresented evidence to start a war they had wanted all along.
The thing about all those "conspiracies"? They were. People do conspire. Microsoft has. And in this case, their fingerprints are all over the SCO attack. Who else could possibly want this nonsense to go through? Who has the cash? Who SENT the cash?
I love the way the phrase "conspiracy theory" was promulgated as a negative this past year. Mostly right wing talkers used it as a smear against anyone who suggested that Bush was not being all that truthful about the Iraq attack. Now that the phrase has reached maximum semantic negative value, spinmeisters everywhere are labelling EVERYONE who dares suggest something wrong is going on somewhere as an (implied) looneytoon leftwing "partisan" nitwit.
Is every observation that some corporation is lying and attacking going to wind up labelled "conpiracy theory"? This is a wonderful trick! No one can accuse anyone of planning nastiness, ever, because it can't possibly happen: that would be a conspiracy theory. No evidence is ever enough; it can be dismissed outright as nonsense. Because it is a CONSPIRACY THEORY. OOFOES! BERMUDA TRIANGLE!
>It's not happening. Get over it.
What can I say to that? Bald assertion. A wrong one.
Wasn't there a case some years ago of a slot machine programmer who inserted an untraceable cheat in the system? I only heard an oral version of the story. Anyone else have some details?
Slashdot Mirror
You're right. Corporations can't do what governments can do.
They can't put you in jail -- directly. They can command government leverage to do that. Think Elcomsoft. Think RIAA. Think Scientology. They can jail you anytime they want by picking up a phone and getting their legal staff on the job. It's up to you to raise millions to defend yourself.
Corporations can't die. They can come after you for all eternity. Governments can be unelected.
Corporations are just collections of men, with their own agendas, but they pretend to be faceless artificial people who are therefore untouchable.
You can't pick and choose news corporations to find the best news for you. IF THEY ARE ALTERING THE HISTORICAL RECORD, HOW WOULD YOU EVER KNOW??? Informed consent is necessary to make a decision in a free market.
Corporations can collude in secret to remove articles that a partisan mindset shared among managers deems unsuitable. Governments cannot, at least not until this administration, hide what they do for very long.
People do pick and choose governments with ease, every four years. Try firing Microsoft.
Corporations, though "persons" with constitutional rights, have absolutely no personal accountability whatsoever for their actions. Want to talk to Time Warner about erasing the record? What is "Time"? Can you schedule an appointment with it? Make it do jail time?
Corporations now are the government. What do you call that form of government, komrade? "Police state" is a question begging term. Who owns the cops? Apparently the Secret Service has been ordering all the local law enforcement around the country to round up protesters in the President's path and detain them. Who owns the cops? Skylarov was yanked by cops on the sayso of Adobe; who owned the cops? Kevin Mitnick spent years in prison without charges because the corporations he insulted wanted him to rot, period. They seem to own the courts, don't they? The RIAA now can issue its own subpoenas and ruin people financially without ever talking to a court or the cops.
When the corporation becomes the law, you have a real police state. All the trappings of a democracy run by immortal, untouchable god-kings, who do whatever they like to whomever they like.
Rightly or wrongly, you are misinterpreting the point by setting up a straw man.
He's not saying Bush is Stalin, or that he is acting in all ways like Stalin, and it is dishonest of you to say that he is. It is a lie of sorts.
Joe Stalin did indeed invent mass edittings of the historical records. Orwell barely exagerated the practice in 1984, a novel which was his response to Russian madness.
Presidential staff orders to rewrite the record, which has happened lately to Bush speech transcripts, efforts by neocon news managers to rewrite articles or eliminate them entirely from the internet -- these efforts are Stalinesque, for it was Stalin who created and perfected those techniques. If Bush and his people do not want to be compared to Stalin, then perhaps they should not be taking pages from Unca Joe's playbook.
As for Bush Sr. pulling the article -- I highly doubt it. He possesses old school honor, I must say. His son and his son's handlers simply do not. I'd give the nod to the neocons if words start disappearing.
It's the principle of the thing, for one. It's Orwellian. Secondly, Time readers searching the archives of Time will never find the article; it is now un-printed, nonexistent. And thirdly, how many other writings are being "un-printed" that are not favorable to the King? We can't look everywhere, all the time. And lastly, it's not beyond imagining that eventually the King's men will require Google and others to un-remember things they don't want remembered. A few laws here and there, and it's done. Hell, Scientology has tried it a few times, and actually succeeded in some cases in suppressing reality. They even did it to Google for a time; they really did it to Slashdot -- a thread critical of the Hubbardians that mentioned Xenu is now un-happened.
The intensity would barely warm your skin. the studies were done over thirty years ago. it's a matter of how you focus the beam. Anyway, rectennas would be placed miles away from human living areas any way. America's collective insane fear of risk would mandate that.
Definitely a new factor was Smith, I say in a flip-flop on my earlier statement. Or, at least Smith,the anti-Neo, had never before gone viral in any of the previous Zion-dies scenarios.
Smith not only had completely taken over the Matrix, he was on the path to take over the 01 (AI) nation as well -- remember, this was the gist of the deal that Neo made with the gestalt at the very end: let me defeat Smith, and you live, but the humans go free. Otherwise, Smith kills YOU, too.
What the AI may not have anticipated was Neo surrendering to Smith, being absorbed by the virus. Neo then controlled not only Smith's viral abilities, but he got the Oracle's perspective as well, since Smith had already absorbed her.
I think what we saw at the end was Neo giving orders to all the machines in the AI world -- he had virally infected every AI in the world. He was essentially God. Deal or no deal, those machines were told to stand down. But he didn't kill all the machines... he stuck to the deal, avoiding a sticky moral dilemma, ie mass murder of sentient beings.
Side thought: had Agent Smith at the point of the final Neo confrontation absorbed all the human minds of the matrix? Was any human mind alive in the Matrix at all at the end? Was Zion the last bastion of humanity in actual fact as Neo ended the war?
Hm. I spent years reading Asimovian essays on entropy and thermodynamics, but, let me put it this way: Soylent Green can't be people.
The input of energy and materials to maintain billions of humans in stasis pods would dwarf the electricty drawn from humans, and secondly, humans use the electricity in their bodies. It's part of the nervous system. Subtract the electromotive force, kill the human.
Perhaps the W bros. meant that the AI's used the heat emanating from the bodies to create electricity via thermocouples. Problem with that is that the process would cool the gel and the body within it, which would cause hypothermia. You'd have to heat the body externally to keep your podboy alive, which leads us back to the 2nd law again.
The energy needed to heat the pods,create the gels, create the organic foodstuffs, cycle clean water and air... all these things take energy. Not a lot, but a hell of a lot more than you can get off a coppertop human -- which is zot.
Now, the way out of this, I'd always supposed, is that the humans simply misunderstood what the human race was imprisoned for. They'd always assumed they were a power source. But it seems that the Zionistas had forgotten all their science... and a lot of their engineering as well. Remember, they don't know how their own recycling machinery works anymore. Physics are probably lost to them. They drive well, repair things well, and can hack existing systems. But physics is not their forte -- otherwise they'd be lobbing nuclear explosives out of the tunnels at the surface, or hell, just leaving the damned planet!
I think, and some of what the third installment reveals backs me up, that a large faction of the machine world didn't want to kill off their creators entirely, even if they tried to kill them. Their is a certain logic to not killing off a valuable, creative resource such as the human mind. So you lock it up where it can't hurt anything anymore. But the AIs still can interact with the human race. They can still learn from it. And after all, there're no other intelligent races nearby. Humans may kill all the cetaceans and then go have a beer, but the machines might be saner than us in that regard.
I think the Matrix trilogy could be seen as the climax of a centuries-old fight between factions of the machine world -- what to do with the damned humans?
"I actually said "WiFi, Neo is rigged with 802.11b" "
Actually, he's rigged with a hell of a lot more than that. The implants in his nervous system are extensive and hackable and most likely very intelligent; it might have been within Neo's newfound clarity to hack a simple wireless connection that, after all, the Nebuchanezzer used all the time to hack the data lines. The wireless communication libraries might have been part of the basic OS of all the AIs in the world -- including the semi-smart implants in all the podded humans.
"Number 3: nobody ever said there wasn't oxygen on the earth's surface. It may be polluted, but there is nothing to conclude that it isn't there."
Two reasons why:
1. No sun, no plants, no photosythesis.
Weirdly enough, the surface would warm as the CO2 levels built up to maxiumum levels (all free O2 combining with carbon as the animals consumed it all), causing a Venus-like runaway greenhouse effect.
But, maybe the machines were not suicidal, and kept CO2 scubbers running to maintain a decent, non-blast furnace temperature. If they can pod humans, they can run greenhouses.
I'd have to say there was some residual O2 being maintained, one, because the termperature at surface level wasn't 800 degrees F, and two, Neo and Trinity were breathing something.
From the evidence presented in the story, good science in the SF would mandate that CO2 was not built up in the atmosphere.
2. Zion manufactures/recycles air -- it was mentioned in the conversation between the councilor and Neo one night. The air, the water, the food the ate, all made on the engineering level of Zion. They'd HAVE to recycle it -- no plants to maintain a CO2 - O2 conversion cycle in the bowels of the earth.
Of course, the entire human being = coppertop idea violates a fundamental law of thermodynamics, so the basic idea of the series is impossible. Comic book writers/philosophy junkies aren't necessarily good science students.
The Matrix Trilogy really isn't SF, it's SciFi, in the sense that Metheselah's Children is SF and Godzilla is SciFi; the trappings of SF without the S.
Not Christian in the sense most Americans would have it. It was using the cross as a sign of sacrifice, martyrdom, and ressurection. Mithra or Persephone, also sacrifice/redemption stories, would work as well, but not many people would get it.
Good point ... Oracle's cookies are hacks, aren't they? She at least gives the humans a boost in the direction they need. EVERYone who joins Zion goes to the Oracle, or at least those who travel the Matrix itself. She's upgrading their implant firmware?
Ah, but he didn't turn his flesh into the antenna, he hacked the the incredibly complex feedback mechanism implanted around his nervous system and brain, which was already installed for him. He Pringled it, if you get the ref; hacked it to a faretheewell until he made it sing.
And I don't think Neo was actually ALL human. He was carrying code of some sort, code which had migrated from previous incarnations of Neos. Code so complex that he and it had become symbiotic? That network wired into the farmed humans' bodies can't be just a collection of filaments. It has to be quite an AI in and of itself. The implants are intelligent, and hackable.
Just had an idea. Maybe the Neo, the One, isn't a particular person being reincarnated, a set of genes. Maybe the body network in the original Neo retained the pattern of logics that gave a Neo his "Oneness". Maybe the Neo network implant was salvaged and reimplanted into each new baby Neo, and the Zion program retested to destruction again.
"Notice how when his body was carried at the end on a machine ship it looked oddly like when Arthur is laying on a ship and going to the sea when he dies?"
Also notice the very obvious crucifixtion pose of Neo as he is held up by the tentacles of the machines after he dies (?). Ramming the point home, I thought, but not everyone noticed. Christ has died for everyone's sins, machines and humans, and now everyone gets a fresh start.
It also implies a resurrection. I at first also thought that it implies a circular timeline, in that Neo was in the Matrix all along, had indeed died to create it, and needed to realize it... that time in that world was circular, that even the "real world" inhabited by the machines was a virtual reality at a higher level, with a timeline that swallowed its own tail. Neo is God, who created the world and implicitly, clumsily created a mess, and is reborn as Christ, who redeems the mess and sets things right.
I'm sure the W brothers saw this clearly and wove it into the symbolism. Not that it is the STORY, or even true. Just inserted so everyone can have fun analyzing it. Movies are also supposed to be fun, too! Even for the W brothers. They wanted the trilogy to be "explained" with ideas that could all be the "right" answer. They gave no definitive answer on purpose. The crucifiction pose was the clincher for me; I knew they were having fun with it all.
"Now how did he get to feel the machines in the real world is what bums me and I'm hoping seeing two and three again will explain it."
Remember that Neo, and all the other humans rescued by Zion from the farms, has a machine interface built into his nervous system. It's used to enter the Matrix, yes, but the connection can be TWO way as well. Rather than simply getting input that overrides his senses, the death trauma he suffered in TM1 enabled him to hack his interface to detect and interact with the networks that are connected to the Matrix -- the networks of the machine world, in essense the AI matrices. He's hacked a bridge together out of software and meat that give him the ability to build a "mini-matrix" of his own, one that overlays his real-world (if it is that) perceptions with the world of the machines.. think of it in terms of a set of meatware cybergoggles, with the added ability to hack root of some of the lesser machines, shutting them down. He can be in the machine worldnet and the meat world at the same time, with control and feedback; when he loses his eyes, he uses the "googles" to move about the real world using cyberspace landmarks and flows. "I can see you", he sneers at a cowering Smithhack, before he takes his head clean off.
thanks. i do recall now that Smith-as-virus was new to this cycle.
ah, so much fun! there has got to be a final deconstruction of this story; let's have fun making one up.
thanks; i had only seen the movie once, and had forgotten.
"And since when has there been c/c++ libraries for controlling living flesh? "
Since Agent Smith wrote one. Agent Smith learned, baby. A program which learned how to hack itself, and the human brain as well.
I imagine she meant both human people and software people. What an interesting world...
I saw the 8 AM showing at Navy Pier in Chicago. I agree with your analysis. Let's see if I can add a few things to the mix.
Neo most probably was not human. Or, if he was, perhaps he was a clone of many before him, created by the Architect and the Oracle to try to work out the the anomaly caused by their conflict, order versus chaos. He is the One, the anomaly that causes Zion to fall, and be reborn - and be reborn himself as well.
Neo has done this many times before.
Trinity has not; she is new to the cycle.
The world without time is central to the story. Neo has always been the answer to his own questions, but never had the courage or the motivation in his prior incarnations to face that he either WAS the Matrix, in a circular karma sort of way, or had to BECOME the Matrix, a different way of stating it. To defeat the enemy he had to let Smith win, something he had never done before. Most likely he just kept fighting until he died, in the prior cycles of his last confrontation with Smith. But this time, with Trinity's loss and sacrifice still fresh as a bloody wound in his mind, Neo was able to understand that he had to lose, and in losing, take control of Smith. The Smith/Neo/Oracle conglomerate then simply took viral control of the entire 01 nation, and called off the hertofore inevitable destruction of Zion.
In previous incarnations, Neo simply lost as he fought Smith, and Zion fell. In this one, he took a measure of control over the situation. He also understood that he had messed it all up, many times before, and that this time he was doing it right.
Neo broke the karmic wheel, finally. Cue the Christ metaphor.
My head is still assimilating all this. I'm looking forward to reading anyone else's ideas.
And after the stock and bond markets rebound, the insurance companies won't reduce the rates, even though the reason for the increases no longer apply.
They can raise the rates, then cut off payoffs via the "torn reform" bullshit, and finally refuse to lower the rates even after the "reform" has taken place as their stock investments are soaring!
PROFIT!
And Americans fell for it. The insurance companies are looting us.
We are so stupid, we all deserve to lose health coverage.
"If it turns out that there is a naturally occuring substance that aids some cancer patients they'll probably lobby to have it outlawed."
They don't have to outlaw it; they merely have to patent it.
You aren't overreacting at all. They are patenting genes, for gosssakes.
I will interrupt this semantically corrupt thread for a moment:
What the hell does "left-wing" mean, a term used by the majority of the Slashdot posters?
Firstly, an erroneous equation of "liberal" and "left-wing" seems to be universal here.
"Liberal" does not mean "leftist".
Listen: left-wing means many things, all the way from communism on the very farthest fringe all the way to socialism on its farthest right. It generally means an abrogation of private ownership of industry in favor of government ownership in communism, to a mixture of private ownership and public ownership in socialism. Communism means total government planning for industry, socialism a mixed batch of the private and government control.
The idea that government should have a hand in regulating industry is NOT, NOT left-wing! Regulation is not ownership. It's what people do to control their own world. There isn't a damned congresscritter or mainstream media channel that is "left-wing". I don't hear any advocation of confiscation of the overlords' property for proper distribution to the proletariat.
The confusion between the two terms is intentional semantic warfare by the far-right wing. The attack is a classic Orwellian one, and one so obvious that I stand amazed that no one comments on it. The far-rightists are simply confusing and defusing the actual meaning of the terms used in the debate so that meaningful debate is impossible. Even Slashdotters, who have a great mechanism in place to call people on errors, cannot actually debate the Fox News vs Everyone Else argument because the terms "liberal", "left-wing", "conservative", and "right-wing" are so debased that no one will admit to being "liberal", a term equated with commies and loser hippies. The confusion is so great that the New York Times, one of the most objective and classic news outlets of the last century, is now "liberal" and suspect, while the FoxNews Channel and the Moonie Times is "balanced". Horsepoo.
Liberal has come to mean simply this:
Liberal = not agreeing with the neo-con far-right wing.
This is an amazing victory for the far-right. EVERONE is a liberal. Disagree with them and you are a liberal. Mention any other point of view than theirs, or simply come to a rational conclusion that the far-right is wrong in the facts, and you are left-wing.
On the other hand, if you present all the ideas of the far-right as proven facts, for example: supply-side economics, preemptive war, WMDs in Iraq, welfare as a black epidemic, an out-of-control crime epidemic, the need for homeland defense, the idea that science is wrong and that other "viewpoints" of non-scientists are equally valid... then you are "centrist" or "balanced". Also helps if you slander Clinton on a regular basis.
Also, another point. I have been, all my life, a rational libertarian in the Heinleinian model. In a sense, I am a conservative.
The people on FoxNews, the Times, and all the corporate critters running the government currently are not conservatives. They are radicals, determined to use enormous marketing acumen to convert a liberal country, by any measure, to a new world in which the people no longer choose their representatives. In which a large number of corporate and government interests directly control the levers of power, and most definitely control the debate by direct and draconian control of the news services themselves.
The European Union is already on the job. Euros will have RFID tags someday.
>OK, this is about as stupid as anything /. has EVER posted.
How in the hell did you come up with that idea? Have you seen some of the threads? Microsoft funneling money into a third party to destroy an enemy is not only not-stupid, but has the added cache of relying on the fact that they have done it many, many times in the past.
> It's pure conspiracy theory, and has been flatly refuted by everyone involved. Hell, the eWeek article only gets by at all by saying, "some in the open source community suspect..."
Yes, and it's a conspiracy theory that Nixon tried to cover up the Watergate break-ins, and that the Vietnam war was started using a trumped-up attack as an excuse, and that J. Edgar Hoover persecuted commies and homosexuals even as he wore a dress in his off hours. It's a conspiracy theory that MS faked a demonstration video for the judge a few years ago. It's a conspiracy theory that Bush and Company pushed emotional buttons and lied or misrepresented evidence to start a war they had wanted all along.
The thing about all those "conspiracies"? They were. People do conspire. Microsoft has. And in this case, their fingerprints are all over the SCO attack. Who else could possibly want this nonsense to go through? Who has the cash? Who SENT the cash?
I love the way the phrase "conspiracy theory" was promulgated as a negative this past year. Mostly right wing talkers used it as a smear against anyone who suggested that Bush was not being all that truthful about the Iraq attack. Now that the phrase has reached maximum semantic negative value, spinmeisters everywhere are labelling EVERYONE who dares suggest something wrong is going on somewhere as an (implied) looneytoon leftwing "partisan" nitwit.
Is every observation that some corporation is lying and attacking going to wind up labelled "conpiracy theory"? This is a wonderful trick! No one can accuse anyone of planning nastiness, ever, because it can't possibly happen: that would be a conspiracy theory. No evidence is ever enough; it can be dismissed outright as nonsense. Because it is a CONSPIRACY THEORY. OOFOES! BERMUDA TRIANGLE!
>It's not happening. Get over it.
What can I say to that? Bald assertion. A wrong one.
Wasn't there a case some years ago of a slot machine programmer who inserted an untraceable cheat in the system? I only heard an oral version of the story. Anyone else have some details?
Apple is not a monopoly. It is different. We will have no choice in the business world but to install Bill's DRM.
This is NOT GOOD.