Since this century already seems to be the bad-anime-cliche century, I am assuming that sometime around the year of 2015, humanity will go through a forced evoloution planned by an old German man, and involving angels, genetic engineering, nuclear explosions and gigantic biorobots dropping out of 500 foot wide stealth bombers.
One of my first questions after finishing Cryptonomicon was whether Enoch Root was indeed human or wasn't some sort of angelic presence sent to meddle in human affairs. Since Cryptonomicon depicts Enoch as seeming to not age very fast, and this book is set almost 300 years ago, it will be interesting to see whether Enoch is still alive and the same age at that time.
For more about the Enoch Root, click here to read a little essay written by my colleague, e2 Glowing Fish.
I will believe that exoskeletons are possible when I see such other anime cliches as germ warfare, human cloning, apocalyptic events and cynical plots to form a one world government come true.
In the basic O'Rielly book on Linux, it makes a point that most textbooks on Linux go into detail about such topics as how to use the ed command and other things that most people never use.
There are some conceptual points about Linux that even a newbie needs to know...such as permission and the file tree, but there is a lot of stuff that you really can just open it up and click around on stuff.
I think the problem is that a lot of Unix work in general has been going on in academia, and so that a lot of books are written with a lot of traditional complicated busywork in them. Students now are learning about the vi editor for the same reason that students for a long time had to learn Latin, because it is a tradition.
After I found out just how bad the disaster was, I was afraid of stepping outside, for fear that going about my normal life would be somehow disrespectful. But we needed food (and I, for the fifth time in my life, needed some alcohol) so I decided to go to the bank and to the store.
Here, in Portland, OR every one seems pretty normal. People are talking about it, and of course everyone is upset, but it seems like people are not going into hysterics. People seem to be going about their daily lives. I don't know if that is a good thing or a bad thing.
the only thing that is really different is...no planes in the sky
This was also the subject of a very long and (mostly) serious novel called "Infinite Jest" about a movie that was so entertaining that anyone who watched it would just continue to watch it over and over again until they died of starvation.
Howevere, we are never told that the movie is specifically funny, as much as it is entertaining.
it was fun to investigate the web page that had pictures of all one hundred My Little Pony's
Did you know that about half of the TV snow signal is cosmic background radiation? Watching snow is like watching God create the universe
I have always considered television to be a far inferior medium to the computer. But when we put it this way, I suppose downloading a jpeg of Kissy Lips in mint condition is no where near as interesting as watching the creation of heaven and earth
When the television was first invented, people would turn it on just to see the snow, if their was no singal to pick up. Just using the technology was a thrill in itself.
I think the web was the same way. When people first got access to it, it was fun to investigate the web page that had pictures of all one hundred My Little Pony's, just because clicking was fun, and also just to see whether or not something that specialized really existed.
Of course, when novelty dies down, people are going to use things for what they need, not just to see "if they can".
While this is an interesting development, and I can't begin to guess what is the future possibilities of it, artificially causing neurons to grow rules out of one of their main strengths.
Neurons get to make their own decision on how to grow, taking into account factors such as present of growth inducing hormones, and how much a connection a neuron makes is used. But still, to a great extant, neurons get to make their own decisions about how much and in what direction they get to grow.
If you are directing neurons into what direction they are growing totally, then what you have is a really squishy computer circuit.
Recently, the supreme court decided that infared surveyance, and other "high technology" surveyance of someones's house was unconstitutional, since they involve an unreasonable invasion of privacy without a warrant. In other words, that to look in someone's house, you need a warrant, even if you aren't physically entering.
So how does this apply to a keystroke monitor? Isn't that an unresonable invading of privacy, using a technology to circumvent "searches of persons and papers"?
Does the FBI need a warrant to install one of these? Or if the computer is used for "business" (even illegal business) does the constituional prohibition against unreasonable search not apply.
And more important, if we don't know how this works on a technical level, how will we ever find out whether or not it is constitutional?
Do you still wonder why people
protest at the G-8 and other such summits?
There are many issues involved in anti-globalization rallies...wages, sweatshops, environmental laws, police brutality, corporate dominance, biotechnology, racism, classism. Of course, next to all of these, the ability to watch DVD's on Linux computers is also present, but it isn't what has been drawing hundreds of thousand of people into the streets since the Dedication in Seattle.
If (very theoretically speaking) we had never had libraries until the current day, and someone tried to start them, I think that the newfound libraries would be sued into the ground.
A library does exactly what Napster\Gnutella etc do, or try to do... allow people to pool their resources to have access to a large amount of copyrighted information.
And much like P2P, libraries don't seem to cause a large dent in the sale of books. There are enough realtivly wealthy people around who enjoy owning books and would still rather pay 20-30 dollars a pop then take a trip to the library.
Not that we really need to have it legalized, since obviously the people who need it can get access to it, as evidenced by the fact that we have ice cream cookie sandwhiches, and transisters one molecule wide, dude .
I can only imagine the brainstorming sessions.
Dude, what if we had a transister so small, you could fit a million of them into, like, a screen, and they would know how to let only the primo molecules through?
No way, man... I got even better idea. How 'bout we make a single molecule into a transister, and it would be all bio-enhanced to go right to the pre-frontal stonal gyrus?
dude, that is an awesome idea...and we could run the whole thing off a nine volt...er, 9 millivolt, er...pico, er...
Man, we could run it off of the breath of a spirit butterfly!
Most fascinating I think is the comparison between these ads and gangland street violence: "They?'re like drive-by shootings," said Kipp Cheng, interactive news editor at Adweek. "Consumers will not put up with that"
Am I the only one who thinks this is ridiculous? I see one thing in common between drive by shootings and pop ups ads, that they are unexpected and unpleasent. But having a little shiny thing advertising a visa and having a bullet cripple or kill you are very, very different things, both in scale and in intention.
If I was going to compare pop up ads to anything that is annoyingly found in everyday life, it would probably be dogshit or those damn sugar ants...
I would like to add a historical note to this that may, or may not be relevant.
When the Hearst collective and their various lackeys were railroading through anti-Marijuana legislation so many years ago, the only person who came up to speak against it was a representative of the American Medical Association, who pointed out the many medical uses of Marijuana, and the lack of any serious side effects.
Congress chose not to listen to him, and passed the legislation anyway. And the next two or three generations of doctors grew up believing that marijuana was the devil's weed.
the point being:
Professional associations often do the mature, responsible, right thing.
And that it often doesn't matter, since even the professional associations don't have the weight to throw around that large industry does.
Luckily this is the contract from Debian.org and not Sea.org... while Mozilla might be a good thing to play around with, I wouldn't want to be stuck into using it for one billion years.
While there is no reason to be on the main AOL page, if you are skipping out on all MS and Yahoo pages, you are either ignorant or know way more then I do.
I suppose the only MS page that I ever use is Hotmail. But Yahoo has lots of great stuff...google, maps, yahoo mail, the entire newsgroup archive. I suppose for the super-31337, going to one central place to get all these things instead of knowing super-specialized sites for all of them is l4m3, but yahoo works rather well for me for these things.
When I read the title of your post, I thought you were asking a rhetorical question.
And it could be that you are. I don't know of any movies that are specifically taught for historical accuracy as far as details go. Probably, there are movies that more or less capture the feeling of a historical event, but since even most trained historians don't agree on the details of what really happened at many times, how are moviemakers can sort out what happened? And why would they?
Slashdot Mirror
Since this century already seems to be the bad-anime-cliche century, I am assuming that sometime around the year of 2015, humanity will go through a forced evoloution planned by an old German man, and involving angels, genetic engineering, nuclear explosions and gigantic biorobots dropping out of 500 foot wide stealth bombers.
One of my first questions after finishing Cryptonomicon was whether Enoch Root was indeed human or wasn't some sort of angelic presence sent to meddle in human affairs. Since Cryptonomicon depicts Enoch as seeming to not age very fast, and this book is set almost 300 years ago, it will be interesting to see whether Enoch is still alive and the same age at that time.
For more about the Enoch Root, click here to read a little essay written by my colleague, e2 Glowing Fish.
I will believe that exoskeletons are possible when I see such other anime cliches as germ warfare, human cloning, apocalyptic events and cynical plots to form a one world government come true.
Oh wait...
In the basic O'Rielly book on Linux, it makes a point that most textbooks on Linux go into detail about such topics as how to use the ed command and other things that most people never use.
There are some conceptual points about Linux that even a newbie needs to know...such as permission and the file tree, but there is a lot of stuff that you really can just open it up and click around on stuff.
I think the problem is that a lot of Unix work in general has been going on in academia, and so that a lot of books are written with a lot of traditional complicated busywork in them. Students now are learning about the vi editor for the same reason that students for a long time had to learn Latin, because it is a tradition.
And a righteously pissed off one, too, for that matter.
I hate to be stereotypically geek, but does everyone remember the "simplified" ID card from "Mostly Harmless"?
Whats next, a national ID card?
If this was a game of Civ, that might be what I would do.
This isn't a game of Civ.
After I found out just how bad the disaster was, I was afraid of stepping outside, for fear that going about my normal life would be somehow disrespectful. But we needed food (and I, for the fifth time in my life, needed some alcohol) so I decided to go to the bank and to the store.
Here, in Portland, OR every one seems pretty normal. People are talking about it, and of course everyone is upset, but it seems like people are not going into hysterics. People seem to be going about their daily lives. I don't know if that is a good thing or a bad thing.
the only thing that is really different is...no planes in the sky
This was also the subject of a very long and (mostly) serious novel called "Infinite Jest" about a movie that was so entertaining that anyone who watched it would just continue to watch it over and over again until they died of starvation.
Howevere, we are never told that the movie is specifically funny, as much as it is entertaining.
it was fun to investigate the web page that had pictures of all one hundred My Little Pony's
Did you know that about half of the TV snow signal is cosmic background radiation? Watching snow is like watching God create the universe
I have always considered television to be a far inferior medium to the computer. But when we put it this way, I suppose downloading a jpeg of Kissy Lips in mint condition is no where near as interesting as watching the creation of heaven and earth
When the television was first invented, people would turn it on just to see the snow, if their was no singal to pick up. Just using the technology was a thrill in itself.
I think the web was the same way. When people first got access to it, it was fun to investigate the web page that had pictures of all one hundred My Little Pony's, just because clicking was fun, and also just to see whether or not something that specialized really existed.
Of course, when novelty dies down, people are going to use things for what they need, not just to see "if they can".
While this is an interesting development, and I can't begin to guess what is the future possibilities of it, artificially causing neurons to grow rules out of one of their main strengths.
Neurons get to make their own decision on how to grow, taking into account factors such as present of growth inducing hormones, and how much a connection a neuron makes is used. But still, to a great extant, neurons get to make their own decisions about how much and in what direction they get to grow.
If you are directing neurons into what direction they are growing totally, then what you have is a really squishy computer circuit.
Recently, the supreme court decided that infared surveyance, and other "high technology" surveyance of someones's house was unconstitutional, since they involve an unreasonable invasion of privacy without a warrant. In other words, that to look in someone's house, you need a warrant, even if you aren't physically entering.
So how does this apply to a keystroke monitor? Isn't that an unresonable invading of privacy, using a technology to circumvent "searches of persons and papers"?
Does the FBI need a warrant to install one of these? Or if the computer is used for "business" (even illegal business) does the constituional prohibition against unreasonable search not apply.
And more important, if we don't know how this works on a technical level, how will we ever find out whether or not it is constitutional?
There are many issues involved in anti-globalization rallies...wages, sweatshops, environmental laws, police brutality, corporate dominance, biotechnology, racism, classism. Of course, next to all of these, the ability to watch DVD's on Linux computers is also present, but it isn't what has been drawing hundreds of thousand of people into the streets since the Dedication in Seattle.
If (very theoretically speaking) we had never had libraries until the current day, and someone tried to start them, I think that the newfound libraries would be sued into the ground.
A library does exactly what Napster\Gnutella etc do, or try to do... allow people to pool their resources to have access to a large amount of copyrighted information.
And much like P2P, libraries don't seem to cause a large dent in the sale of books. There are enough realtivly wealthy people around who enjoy owning books and would still rather pay 20-30 dollars a pop then take a trip to the library.
I made this entire point a little bit more humorously at http://ursine.dyndns.org/~mnoelharris/warezportal. html
Not that we really need to have it legalized, since obviously the people who need it can get access to it, as evidenced by the fact that we have ice cream cookie sandwhiches, and transisters one molecule wide, dude .
I can only imagine the brainstorming sessions.
Dude, what if we had a transister so small, you could fit a million of them into, like, a screen, and they would know how to let only the primo molecules through?
No way, man... I got even better idea. How 'bout we make a single molecule into a transister, and it would be all bio-enhanced to go right to the pre-frontal stonal gyrus?
dude, that is an awesome idea...and we could run the whole thing off a nine volt...er, 9 millivolt, er...pico, er...
Man, we could run it off of the breath of a spirit butterfly!
Most fascinating I think is the comparison between these ads and gangland street violence: "They?'re like drive-by shootings," said Kipp Cheng, interactive news editor at Adweek. "Consumers will not put up with that"
Am I the only one who thinks this is ridiculous? I see one thing in common between drive by shootings and pop ups ads, that they are unexpected and unpleasent. But having a little shiny thing advertising a visa and having a bullet cripple or kill you are very, very different things, both in scale and in intention.
If I was going to compare pop up ads to anything that is annoyingly found in everyday life, it would probably be dogshit or those damn sugar ants...
If website design skills have anything to do with building space craft, these people aren't going to get further then Wales.
Of course, heroin is that bad, although it doesn't exactly make people's muscles work better...
I would like to add a historical note to this that may, or may not be relevant.
When the Hearst collective and their various lackeys were railroading through anti-Marijuana legislation so many years ago, the only person who came up to speak against it was a representative of the American Medical Association, who pointed out the many medical uses of Marijuana, and the lack of any serious side effects.
Congress chose not to listen to him, and passed the legislation anyway. And the next two or three generations of doctors grew up believing that marijuana was the devil's weed.
the point being:
Luckily this is the contract from Debian.org and not Sea.org ... while Mozilla might be a good thing to play around with, I wouldn't want to be stuck into using it for one billion years.
While there is no reason to be on the main AOL page, if you are skipping out on all MS and Yahoo pages, you are either ignorant or know way more then I do.
I suppose the only MS page that I ever use is Hotmail. But Yahoo has lots of great stuff...google, maps, yahoo mail, the entire newsgroup archive. I suppose for the super-31337, going to one central place to get all these things instead of knowing super-specialized sites for all of them is l4m3, but yahoo works rather well for me for these things.
If you change that to Blockstackers, then it is well over half. It is more everything2.com these days then Slashdot, though.
If this is not serious, it is just mean.
If the Slashdot readers and editors think this guy is serious, then I wonder about them.
If they think he is delusional, then asking him questions hoping to get funny asnwers is mean.
And if he is a fraud, then interviewing him is not the way to expose him.
When I read the title of your post, I thought you were asking a rhetorical question.
And it could be that you are. I don't know of any movies that are specifically taught for historical accuracy as far as details go. Probably, there are movies that more or less capture the feeling of a historical event, but since even most trained historians don't agree on the details of what really happened at many times, how are moviemakers can sort out what happened? And why would they?