Those cultures had public schools (even though you might not consider them as such because they were different to your notion of 'school') and Europeans were not exactly strong on educating anyone other than upper class males.
True enough... India (back to the original subject) had advanced states of education... and a more egalitarian culture than many of its neighbors, at that time. However... not all cultures in Sub-Saharan Africa (or North or South America, or Japan, or Western Europe, or the Mediteranian Region) had what we currently hold to be acceptable levels of education for the general populace. It is very important to understand that, for all of its flaws (massive imbalances between first and third world, single-religion control of huge blocks of the planet, rapid transmission of virulant diseases across the globe, overconsumption in the first world, overbreeding and resistance to birth control and education in the third world (just a note that much of South America has joined the first world - under the radar of the English speaking quadrant - in the last few decades... ironically, India and Nepal, once the heart of advanced education, philosophy, and culture in the world, ultimately birthing the rational cultures of the Greeks and the Hebrews via migratory philosophies, and leading to the "modern" value system, have become almost irredeemably third world - and not all the blame can be laid at the feet of the British), and a general refusal to acknowledge the transient nature of our current resource flow, not to mention the vulnerability of the entire ecosystem it is being extracted from (thanks, dubya, for making us look like the utter asses the worst of us are in the eyes of the world - someday, I hope you drown in toxic waste), we are still, as a planetary culture, orders of magnitude better than anything that has preceeded us. Cultural relativism only goes so far. Remember, the British Empire was a primitive culture as well... and use the same damned grain of salt you use for looking at their (and American, and whoever else's) history when looking at the histories of the rest of the world. The things I could tell you about, to take an example, the tribes of Tahiti, or Arizona, or Malaysia... taking them apart over their centuries and millenia... would make you go into as great a fervor, if you could look beyond the blinders of cultural relativism.
Both Africa and India had advanced cultures.
Your reference to tribal warfare merely demonstrates your ignorance of the mess and chaos created, then left behind, by the colonists. This is directly responsible for pretty much all the conflict on the continent.
While I am aware of a handful of long standing peaceful tribes, they mostly survived by isolation. As aware as I am of the mess and chaos left behind by the colonists, and the disruptive influence they had on some of the local equilibriums, I am also aware of many attrocities and inhumanities (with a long 'a', not a short) that existed in much of Africa, North-Eastern India, the Central Plains of North America, and across the Pacific Islands.
And let's not forget that European and American corporations continue to inflame for their own gain the tensions left behind by colonialism - they provide weapons, encouraging as much torture and murder as possible so they can rape the countries with impunity - they do not want the wars to end - how will they ever get away with stealing all those natural resources if that happens?
Do a deja news (groups.google.com) search for
adams, pratchett, unseen, and you should get an article (the third one on the list when I did it) written by Terry, about his reaction to the news. It ends, "I spent the rest of the day with the sense that the world had faded to grey, and feeling very, very angry."
I felt a dull sense of betrayal by the universe, myself.
Re:I hope they don't make fridge magnets
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Magnet Patent Suits
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· Score: 2
It seems you can mail order them. I'm putting in a large order at the moment, as these look too good to pass up. Their claims are indeed plausible, and impressive, and I have a number of uses for these little.25" disks. Some of which involve ordering some of their cups... I think I can manage washers on my own, but their prices are reasonable, so I might just grab those while I'm at it... and I'm afraid to start looking at other stuff on that site... I could indeed see myself spending thousands...
That also means you could overload functions differently for unint16 and unsigned short int. and enums etc.
I completely agree with this. Obviously, you can use a cast if you really do want to assign one type to the other.
Yes. But it shouldn't use the same keyword... How about:
typegen unsigned short int uint16;
typedef unsigned short int Uint16;
unsigned short int foo = 1;
Uint16 bar = foo;// OK, same type.
uint16 baz = foo;// Warning, need cast conversion
Tell me about it. I've got a program here that does client/server interactions with mixed binary data streams, and I have to runtime identify the data type and handle the byte-swapping for conversion. Unfortunately, the protocols were developed for an Intel platform, and are not inet ordered (bigendian). But... shrug...you go after what you can, when you can. Self-ordering types would be... problematic... for optimal processing.
Not precisely. I want it to be a different type. That just makes it an alias for an unsigned short... which means you can't have a unique signature for a function with a unsigned int16 as an argument, as opposed to an unsigned short int.
As a programmer who often works on massively cross platform C++ server and client applications, a lot of these proposals (distributed processing, standard thread libraries) are nice, but there's one major gripe with the language under all platforms: the lack of standard sized types. What I mean is, integral types in parallel to the short int, int, long int, long long int (C99 standardized, not C++) etc, with names like int8, int16, int32, int64, int128... allowing portability without meticulous work in wrapping and handling functions, outside libs, autoconf scripts, etc. It would be especially nice if these types were *not* considered, for the sake of signatures, type-identical to counterpart size-variant types, and if enums were also given a generic root type instead of being int in signature (eg, operator(ClassName&, enum) ) and a variant size integral type defined to the size of a pointer were included. Just some thoughts from a person who has to extensively use the language.
If people want to marry, it's a personal thing between them and their religion (if applicable). Whatever you may claim happens spiritually, I am still an individual human being and so is my wife. I don't see that government has any reason to see things any differently
I agree, absolutely. I'm a social libertarian. The problem is, the majority aren't, and a little at a time works... but not the whole flood.
Actually, I don't entirely agree. Six men and nine women, sure, why not. The dog? I doubt the dog got much of a chance to defend itself in the matter, and while private actions between consenting adults (I don't believe children have the inherent ability to consent to something like that with an adult, and with teens it's borderline. Experience counts for a lot.) should be none of the state's damn business, what is done to a nonconsenting sentient (and I suspect dogs are, while not even remotely sapient, borderline sentient, eg, aware enough of themselves and their surroundings to recall suffering with associations, rather than just imprinted instinctive reactions) is, and must be, the business not only of the state, but each and every citizen of said state. If a bestial rapist (or any other sort of rapist) used "marriage" as a defense of his (or, occasionally, her) crimes, I wouldn't have any qualms about jailing, lynching, or otherwise sensoring him in a manner in accordance with the regional laws, and to hell with his personal belief system... I count female circumcision as such a crime, fwiw.
Did you actually follow the original case? There was a lot more to it than "feeling threatened". The maintainers of the site counted among their number convicted murderers who had perpetrated their crimes in the same clause. They were actively soliciting similar behavior against the people on the list. Someone mod this %@#$@% troll down... what idiot thought him insightful?
Only until the judicial decision was overturned by a ballot measure thanks to a large number of brain dead members of the general public (trusting the majority is like hoping for a benevolant dictator. I say we start engineering a better human, cause we, as a species, are too f*cked up to have any hope as we stand) who were swayed by ludicrous adverts (Daddy, why can't I marry my dog? I love him!) paid for by hundreds of millions of dollars poured into the campaign by the Morman church and the Christian Coalition, neither of which have more than 3% of the state population represented. Personally, I think outside monies on ballot measures should be banned...
Sorry for the rant, but at the time this occured, I was a political cartoonist in Hawai'i, and saw firsthand what was happening, and at that point, I stopped believing in democracy. At least democracy in which telivision adverts are legal. There isn't much of a connection, even tentatively, between gay marriage rights and pedophilia. Just a little note... the man in charge of the anti-gay marriage campaign, a year earlier, had been under investigation for spousal abuse. Healthy, natural union indeed...
There were also risks that we could take some Sun or BSD piece of the market but really that was not in our plans to take over the world... However "including the Mac"??? Who knows Mac users, perfectly understands that these are the ones in the end of the line. A Mac user will more probably to turn to Windows and barely will ever risk to enter our world. Because, apart of the good looking desktops "a-la Mac", everything else is a Mac user worst nightmare.
You know that the Mac has a history as a hacker (not h@x0r, not cracker) OS, yes? We've been geeks and coders and asm slingers longer than Linux has existed. Before linux, many of us were unix gurus at work... I was SunOS, then later IRIX, now Solaris and Linux... but before Linux, the mac was our toy machine/OS at home. Now... well, many of us have Linux boxen. Many have LinuxPPC or Yellow Dog on our Macs, in dual boot. Many also play with BeOS, and now, many are flipping out over this wonderful new toy. A few lucky ones had NeXT boxes. A few others got their hands on OPENSTEP later... These ones love the union of the two. Most have complaints and reservations, but many are going to stop paying quite as much attention to Linux for a few months... but we'll be around still.
But we are mac users, and for many of us, Linux was a dream come true. As is OS X.
Credit Card Sized?! WTF? I don't suppose they had a prototype or detailed schematics, did they? What idiot patent clerk granted this one? I know there are supposed to be restrictions on gross speculation in patents...
Course, you can see what it looked like in a now multiply acadamied (well, nominated) Chinese film. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon is entirely based on this...
Re:Why the preoccupation with "intelligent" animal
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Uplifting Dolphins
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· Score: 2
On the other hand, speaking as a Hawai'i boy who has, in his life, pulled a reasonable number of ahi and akule out of the water (mmm... good eating!), and who has a reasonable familiarity with their internals, I have to say there is a point to the nerve complexity angle. Not much there in the ahi skull... and those are some of the big, and relatively clever, tunas. clever in the sense of put up a good fight... survival instincts.
I've never met a cognizant fish. Yes, I value conciousness, in some degree, at least, much more highly than respiration, much less cell division. Yes, I'd place a marginally self aware computer higher on the deserves-consideration-for-not-being-killed scale than an essentially automated organic. No, I don't consider killing individuals with self awareness inherently immoral. Someone who intends to kill me, and cannot be dissuaded by other means, dies. Someone who kills, or deliberately hurts or tortures someone I care about, or who is obviously willing to kill with malice without reason of defense or fear, dies. I find this in no way ethically reprehensible. Killing self aware, nearly sentient life forms for no better reason than a few dollars in profit and a cheaper can of tuna, I think, falls into the reprehensible category.
You can buy such a beastie. It'll run PalmOS or one of the similar OSs (Psion, fer ex) and let you read a book, compose a letter or a book (they sell fold-up keyboards, and the handwriting input isn't that bad)... it's just that they've shrunk it a little (not much, looking at those early laptops... at least, not the display) and made it cheaper, and are calling it a PDA instead.
You know what was a brilliant cartoon? The first two seasons of Batman: The Animated Series. Is this a reaction based on age? No, I was a TF baby, of the most extreme sort. What else do I consider brilliant? A sampling:
Beanie and Cecil - the original version, not that one season of "New Beanie and Cecil" in the early 90s... with the same pun problems as the Xanth books, but with a much subtler underlying wit.
Dark Water (original 10 eps only) - More than brilliant, it was the extraction of what was good about 80s toons, in the 90s, without the toys (yes, I know, but those came much later... after the five part pilot and the five followups)
Two Stupid Dogs - simple, entertaining, and way more subtle than it seemed.
PowerPuff Girls - have you actually watched it with a critical eye?
I'm avoiding listing anything marketted as an adult toon... no Simpsons, South Park, or Beavis and Butt-Head... because I feel that the type of show I mention above is far more interesting. There was someone involved in that show who thought, "let's see what we can slide in under these kids' subconciences"...
I don't know if anyone's seen the new Spiderman or X-Men toons. Those are created by people from the five-year period immediately before the toy toons. They're awful. Worse than the toy toons, in a lot of ways. And things like the new crop of sloppy animation shows (Recess, for a perfect example) are just as bad. Cartoon Network and Nick are exceptions to this rule, and some of the newest stuff that is obviously the start of the TF era redux (Beast Wars, the other CGIs like Action Man, Max Steel, Starship Troopers, the remarkable extension to the Batman series Batman Beyond) are fantastic. I'm not sure where to place the new (also really good) Jackie Chan 'toon...
I've dabbled enough in the industry to know that there's no real age component in the talent creating the best shows. The factors are more social and economic... Do the marketting people think the public (kids or no) are gullible and shallow at the moment... or more reachable with wit? What's going to get ratings? And given the Pokemon/Saban (gag) grab of the share, is it better to do more of the same and try for their leavings, or go in the radical opposite direction and see if you can't pull yourself an admittedly smaller, but still respectable share of the disposessed savier viewers?
And of course, it all comes down to the pitch of the guy who came up with the concept in the first place... me, I'm looking forward to the new Reboot series.
This isn't the first I've seen of this... I got wind of the (repeatable) work that was going on in the UK on this issue a few months ago... but it's a really huge deal.
It's not so much a huge matter scientifically, aside from the novelty of actually triggering differentiation in adult cells that had been (to a far lesser degree than the majority of adult cells, but to some degree, inevitably, nonetheless) differentiated already... it's the scientific ethics (and avoidance of the smack up-face with the so-called "moral majority" in the US, and probably similar issues abroad) advantage of being able to produce undifferentiated human cell culture (generic blastosphere-like cells?) without actually going through a fertilization-and-extraction stage.
Long term, this could be the key to cloning organs from the same individual, maybe with added gene therapy and some telemerase baths on the organ in question, for surgical replacement. "Your heart's bad? Let's take a look at your records... oh, you've got a weak valve from a developmental shortage of hormone G... we'll just clone you up a new one without the bad valve. Come back in three months for the surgery..."
Short term, it means more capacity for researching into human aging, desease, and genetics without running afoul of morality laws, or genuine ethical issues.
It's nice to think there might be a good side, someday, to the tech that's railroading us toward a Gattaga situation...
I keep wondering about the barely-differentiated cells mentioned in the first paper I read on this. It seems to me that an undifferentiated cell in an adult human, without the correct hormonal elements of gestation, would likely be cancerous... perhaps they don't have whatever triggers cause cell division firing yet. at this level, human biology is so complex... I keep wishing I'd done my grad work in biomedical science or human genetics... solid state physics doesn't really delve far enough into the subject matter to give any expertise...
Technically, there *was* another movie set in the same universe, or at least (loosely) based on a short story by PKD that was (according to his agent) supposed to be in the same universe as DADoES... The movie was entitled "Screamers", and the short was entitled "Second Variety". Having read the short, I could (sort of) see the possible colocation... having seen the movie, I'd say "Cr*p".
The only other author that writes short stories with that level of gut-wrench in such a short space, suitable for movie conversion, is Brian W. Aldis (only one so far that became a movie was his novel "Frankenstein Unbound", but his 8-page short "Super-Toys last all Summer Long" is soon to be a movie directed by Speilberg, originally under the direction of Stanley Kubric, entitled "AI"... I've got a bad feeling about this one. Kubric could have made it work. I've got fears of too much early "Third Kind" in it, and they've already spoiled the point of the short in the tag line alone...
I remember a contract for this floating around when I was in defense, except the laser was for tracking and locking for anti-icbm missiles... a huge LADAR/LIDAR array mounted (at the time) in the cargo hold, not the nose, somewhere below what would be first class.
Working on ground based LIDAR tracking (on top of a volcano), my employers were naturally interested in this contract. It never materialized...
Geez, I remember when Martin came out with that on rec.games.mud.admin and MUD-Dev.
AeMUD seems to have vanished, MUD++ is off the map... and those of us who were there at the begining, well...
If you want a look at the state-of-the-art in muddom, read the FAQs on the MUD-Dev site at www.kanga.nu. There are a few good men (and women) still pressing the bleeding edge. For those of us who have gone off in pursuit of other things (like a living wage), there are still dreams of starting our own great enterprise in the online games industry. Someday.
So, we start with a kiosk terminal in a polling booth. You access it with your registration stub. It has the candidates, lined up like choices on an ATM terminal. You can pull up more info (picture, bio, positions on issues) for each based on the same criteria as the mailed brochures. When you settle on the choice you like, you hit that one on the screen. It highlights, and you go on to the next page. When you're all done with all the voting, you get a page showing the list of positions, the candidate you chose for each, and an edit/print choice. You choose print, and a punched (with nice round holes) card comes out, showing the choices under the names in clear boxes. You notice that something is wrong, feed it back into the machine, and run a fresh session. You print it again, and all's better. You go to another machine and slide the card into it, magnetic strip up. The machine counts your vote and stores the card for auditing...
(... ho hum... another page... should I let the kiddies see it? Hmm... it seems to be about Gore. Violence and blood is a no-no and bad. Children shouldn't be seeing this... ---CENSOR---...Ah, better, my job is done... what's this? Now the tykes are trying to look at a site about Bush? Naughty-naughty, they're too young to be looking at ladies' privates. ---CENSOR--- Hum. What's this "Nader", then? Sounds like a dirty word. ---CENSOR--- Ho hum... )
All I have to say is that up here in Canada, it has been decided that if you folks vote Bush into office, we are coming down there to burn the White House again!
Funny... down here, among many of us, it has been decided that if the idiots vote Bush into office, we are moving to Canada.
Slashdot Mirror
Those cultures had public schools (even though you might not consider them as such because they were different to your notion of 'school') and Europeans were not exactly strong on educating anyone other than upper class males.
True enough... India (back to the original subject) had advanced states of education... and a more egalitarian culture than many of its neighbors, at that time. However... not all cultures in Sub-Saharan Africa (or North or South America, or Japan, or Western Europe, or the Mediteranian Region) had what we currently hold to be acceptable levels of education for the general populace. It is very important to understand that, for all of its flaws (massive imbalances between first and third world, single-religion control of huge blocks of the planet, rapid transmission of virulant diseases across the globe, overconsumption in the first world, overbreeding and resistance to birth control and education in the third world (just a note that much of South America has joined the first world - under the radar of the English speaking quadrant - in the last few decades... ironically, India and Nepal, once the heart of advanced education, philosophy, and culture in the world, ultimately birthing the rational cultures of the Greeks and the Hebrews via migratory philosophies, and leading to the "modern" value system, have become almost irredeemably third world - and not all the blame can be laid at the feet of the British), and a general refusal to acknowledge the transient nature of our current resource flow, not to mention the vulnerability of the entire ecosystem it is being extracted from (thanks, dubya, for making us look like the utter asses the worst of us are in the eyes of the world - someday, I hope you drown in toxic waste), we are still, as a planetary culture, orders of magnitude better than anything that has preceeded us. Cultural relativism only goes so far. Remember, the British Empire was a primitive culture as well... and use the same damned grain of salt you use for looking at their (and American, and whoever else's) history when looking at the histories of the rest of the world. The things I could tell you about, to take an example, the tribes of Tahiti, or Arizona, or Malaysia... taking them apart over their centuries and millenia... would make you go into as great a fervor, if you could look beyond the blinders of cultural relativism.
Both Africa and India had advanced cultures. Your reference to tribal warfare merely demonstrates your ignorance of the mess and chaos created, then left behind, by the colonists. This is directly responsible for pretty much all the conflict on the continent.
While I am aware of a handful of long standing peaceful tribes, they mostly survived by isolation. As aware as I am of the mess and chaos left behind by the colonists, and the disruptive influence they had on some of the local equilibriums, I am also aware of many attrocities and inhumanities (with a long 'a', not a short) that existed in much of Africa, North-Eastern India, the Central Plains of North America, and across the Pacific Islands.
And let's not forget that European and American corporations continue to inflame for their own gain the tensions left behind by colonialism - they provide weapons, encouraging as much torture and murder as possible so they can rape the countries with impunity - they do not want the wars to end - how will they ever get away with stealing all those natural resources if that happens?
True, and a vitally biting accusation it is.
Do a deja news (groups.google.com) search for adams, pratchett, unseen, and you should get an article (the third one on the list when I did it) written by Terry, about his reaction to the news. It ends, "I spent the rest of the day with the sense that the world had faded to grey, and feeling very, very angry."
I felt a dull sense of betrayal by the universe, myself.
It seems you can mail order them. I'm putting in a large order at the moment, as these look too good to pass up. Their claims are indeed plausible, and impressive, and I have a number of uses for these little .25" disks. Some of which involve ordering some of their cups... I think I can manage washers on my own, but their prices are reasonable, so I might just grab those while I'm at it... and I'm afraid to start looking at other stuff on that site... I could indeed see myself spending thousands...
Or F. Randall Farmer. I'm thinking of posting this bit on a forum he frequents (MUD-Dev), and I'm sure he still has a bit of Habitat stuff around.
typedef unsigned short int uint16 ;
uint16 i ;
unsigned short int j ;
i = j ;
should throw up a compiler error or warning.
That also means you could overload functions differently for unint16 and unsigned short int. and enums etc.
I completely agree with this. Obviously, you can use a cast if you really do want to assign one type to the other.
Yes. But it shouldn't use the same keyword... How about:
Tell me about it. I've got a program here that does client/server interactions with mixed binary data streams, and I have to runtime identify the data type and handle the byte-swapping for conversion. Unfortunately, the protocols were developed for an Intel platform, and are not inet ordered (bigendian). But... shrug ...you go after what you can, when you can. Self-ordering types would be... problematic... for optimal processing.
Not precisely. I want it to be a different type. That just makes it an alias for an unsigned short... which means you can't have a unique signature for a function with a unsigned int16 as an argument, as opposed to an unsigned short int.
As a programmer who often works on massively cross platform C++ server and client applications, a lot of these proposals (distributed processing, standard thread libraries) are nice, but there's one major gripe with the language under all platforms: the lack of standard sized types. What I mean is, integral types in parallel to the short int, int, long int, long long int (C99 standardized, not C++) etc, with names like int8, int16, int32, int64, int128... allowing portability without meticulous work in wrapping and handling functions, outside libs, autoconf scripts, etc. It would be especially nice if these types were *not* considered, for the sake of signatures, type-identical to counterpart size-variant types, and if enums were also given a generic root type instead of being int in signature (eg, operator(ClassName&, enum) ) and a variant size integral type defined to the size of a pointer were included. Just some thoughts from a person who has to extensively use the language.
Crap. My Letters sub just ran out a few months ago, and they've already deactivated my login.
If people want to marry, it's a personal thing between them and their religion (if applicable). Whatever you may claim happens spiritually, I am still an individual human being and so is my wife. I don't see that government has any reason to see things any differently
I agree, absolutely. I'm a social libertarian. The problem is, the majority aren't, and a little at a time works... but not the whole flood.
Actually, I don't entirely agree. Six men and nine women, sure, why not. The dog? I doubt the dog got much of a chance to defend itself in the matter, and while private actions between consenting adults (I don't believe children have the inherent ability to consent to something like that with an adult, and with teens it's borderline. Experience counts for a lot.) should be none of the state's damn business, what is done to a nonconsenting sentient (and I suspect dogs are, while not even remotely sapient, borderline sentient, eg, aware enough of themselves and their surroundings to recall suffering with associations, rather than just imprinted instinctive reactions) is, and must be, the business not only of the state, but each and every citizen of said state. If a bestial rapist (or any other sort of rapist) used "marriage" as a defense of his (or, occasionally, her) crimes, I wouldn't have any qualms about jailing, lynching, or otherwise sensoring him in a manner in accordance with the regional laws, and to hell with his personal belief system... I count female circumcision as such a crime, fwiw.
"doctors" "reproductive services."
In quotes, no less.
Did you actually follow the original case? There was a lot more to it than "feeling threatened". The maintainers of the site counted among their number convicted murderers who had perpetrated their crimes in the same clause. They were actively soliciting similar behavior against the people on the list. Someone mod this %@#$@% troll down... what idiot thought him insightful?
Hawaii legalized gay marraiages
Only until the judicial decision was overturned by a ballot measure thanks to a large number of brain dead members of the general public (trusting the majority is like hoping for a benevolant dictator. I say we start engineering a better human, cause we, as a species, are too f*cked up to have any hope as we stand) who were swayed by ludicrous adverts (Daddy, why can't I marry my dog? I love him!) paid for by hundreds of millions of dollars poured into the campaign by the Morman church and the Christian Coalition, neither of which have more than 3% of the state population represented. Personally, I think outside monies on ballot measures should be banned...
Sorry for the rant, but at the time this occured, I was a political cartoonist in Hawai'i, and saw firsthand what was happening, and at that point, I stopped believing in democracy. At least democracy in which telivision adverts are legal. There isn't much of a connection, even tentatively, between gay marriage rights and pedophilia. Just a little note... the man in charge of the anti-gay marriage campaign, a year earlier, had been under investigation for spousal abuse. Healthy, natural union indeed...
There were also risks that we could take some Sun or BSD piece of the market but really that was not in our plans to take over the world... However "including the Mac"??? Who knows Mac users, perfectly understands that these are the ones in the end of the line. A Mac user will more probably to turn to Windows and barely will ever risk to enter our world. Because, apart of the good looking desktops "a-la Mac", everything else is a Mac user worst nightmare.
You know that the Mac has a history as a hacker (not h@x0r, not cracker) OS, yes? We've been geeks and coders and asm slingers longer than Linux has existed. Before linux, many of us were unix gurus at work... I was SunOS, then later IRIX, now Solaris and Linux... but before Linux, the mac was our toy machine/OS at home. Now... well, many of us have Linux boxen. Many have LinuxPPC or Yellow Dog on our Macs, in dual boot. Many also play with BeOS, and now, many are flipping out over this wonderful new toy. A few lucky ones had NeXT boxes. A few others got their hands on OPENSTEP later... These ones love the union of the two. Most have complaints and reservations, but many are going to stop paying quite as much attention to Linux for a few months... but we'll be around still.
But we are mac users, and for many of us, Linux was a dream come true. As is OS X.
Credit Card Sized?! WTF? I don't suppose they had a prototype or detailed schematics, did they? What idiot patent clerk granted this one? I know there are supposed to be restrictions on gross speculation in patents...
Course, you can see what it looked like in a now multiply acadamied (well, nominated) Chinese film. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon is entirely based on this...
On the other hand, speaking as a Hawai'i boy who has, in his life, pulled a reasonable number of ahi and akule out of the water (mmm... good eating!), and who has a reasonable familiarity with their internals, I have to say there is a point to the nerve complexity angle. Not much there in the ahi skull... and those are some of the big, and relatively clever, tunas. clever in the sense of put up a good fight... survival instincts.
I've never met a cognizant fish. Yes, I value conciousness, in some degree, at least, much more highly than respiration, much less cell division. Yes, I'd place a marginally self aware computer higher on the deserves-consideration-for-not-being-killed scale than an essentially automated organic. No, I don't consider killing individuals with self awareness inherently immoral. Someone who intends to kill me, and cannot be dissuaded by other means, dies. Someone who kills, or deliberately hurts or tortures someone I care about, or who is obviously willing to kill with malice without reason of defense or fear, dies. I find this in no way ethically reprehensible. Killing self aware, nearly sentient life forms for no better reason than a few dollars in profit and a cheaper can of tuna, I think, falls into the reprehensible category.
You can buy such a beastie. It'll run PalmOS or one of the similar OSs (Psion, fer ex) and let you read a book, compose a letter or a book (they sell fold-up keyboards, and the handwriting input isn't that bad) ... it's just that they've shrunk it a little (not much, looking at those early laptops... at least, not the display) and made it cheaper, and are calling it a PDA instead.
Beanie and Cecil - the original version, not that one season of "New Beanie and Cecil" in the early 90s... with the same pun problems as the Xanth books, but with a much subtler underlying wit.
Dark Water (original 10 eps only) - More than brilliant, it was the extraction of what was good about 80s toons, in the 90s, without the toys (yes, I know, but those came much later... after the five part pilot and the five followups)
Two Stupid Dogs - simple, entertaining, and way more subtle than it seemed.
PowerPuff Girls - have you actually watched it with a critical eye?
I'm avoiding listing anything marketted as an adult toon... no Simpsons, South Park, or Beavis and Butt-Head... because I feel that the type of show I mention above is far more interesting. There was someone involved in that show who thought, "let's see what we can slide in under these kids' subconciences"...
I don't know if anyone's seen the new Spiderman or X-Men toons. Those are created by people from the five-year period immediately before the toy toons. They're awful. Worse than the toy toons, in a lot of ways. And things like the new crop of sloppy animation shows (Recess, for a perfect example) are just as bad. Cartoon Network and Nick are exceptions to this rule, and some of the newest stuff that is obviously the start of the TF era redux (Beast Wars, the other CGIs like Action Man, Max Steel, Starship Troopers, the remarkable extension to the Batman series Batman Beyond) are fantastic. I'm not sure where to place the new (also really good) Jackie Chan 'toon...
I've dabbled enough in the industry to know that there's no real age component in the talent creating the best shows. The factors are more social and economic... Do the marketting people think the public (kids or no) are gullible and shallow at the moment... or more reachable with wit? What's going to get ratings? And given the Pokemon/Saban (gag) grab of the share, is it better to do more of the same and try for their leavings, or go in the radical opposite direction and see if you can't pull yourself an admittedly smaller, but still respectable share of the disposessed savier viewers?
And of course, it all comes down to the pitch of the guy who came up with the concept in the first place... me, I'm looking forward to the new Reboot series.
This isn't the first I've seen of this... I got wind of the (repeatable) work that was going on in the UK on this issue a few months ago... but it's a really huge deal.
It's not so much a huge matter scientifically, aside from the novelty of actually triggering differentiation in adult cells that had been (to a far lesser degree than the majority of adult cells, but to some degree, inevitably, nonetheless) differentiated already... it's the scientific ethics (and avoidance of the smack up-face with the so-called "moral majority" in the US, and probably similar issues abroad) advantage of being able to produce undifferentiated human cell culture (generic blastosphere-like cells?) without actually going through a fertilization-and-extraction stage.
Long term, this could be the key to cloning organs from the same individual, maybe with added gene therapy and some telemerase baths on the organ in question, for surgical replacement. "Your heart's bad? Let's take a look at your records... oh, you've got a weak valve from a developmental shortage of hormone G... we'll just clone you up a new one without the bad valve. Come back in three months for the surgery..."
Short term, it means more capacity for researching into human aging, desease, and genetics without running afoul of morality laws, or genuine ethical issues.
It's nice to think there might be a good side, someday, to the tech that's railroading us toward a Gattaga situation...
I keep wondering about the barely-differentiated cells mentioned in the first paper I read on this. It seems to me that an undifferentiated cell in an adult human, without the correct hormonal elements of gestation, would likely be cancerous... perhaps they don't have whatever triggers cause cell division firing yet. at this level, human biology is so complex... I keep wishing I'd done my grad work in biomedical science or human genetics... solid state physics doesn't really delve far enough into the subject matter to give any expertise...
Technically, there *was* another movie set in the same universe, or at least (loosely) based on a short story by PKD that was (according to his agent) supposed to be in the same universe as DADoES... The movie was entitled "Screamers", and the short was entitled "Second Variety". Having read the short, I could (sort of) see the possible colocation... having seen the movie, I'd say "Cr*p".
The only other author that writes short stories with that level of gut-wrench in such a short space, suitable for movie conversion, is Brian W. Aldis (only one so far that became a movie was his novel "Frankenstein Unbound", but his 8-page short "Super-Toys last all Summer Long" is soon to be a movie directed by Speilberg, originally under the direction of Stanley Kubric, entitled "AI"... I've got a bad feeling about this one. Kubric could have made it work. I've got fears of too much early "Third Kind" in it, and they've already spoiled the point of the short in the tag line alone...
I remember a contract for this floating around when I was in defense, except the laser was for tracking and locking for anti-icbm missiles... a huge LADAR/LIDAR array mounted (at the time) in the cargo hold, not the nose, somewhere below what would be first class.
Working on ground based LIDAR tracking (on top of a volcano), my employers were naturally interested in this contract. It never materialized...
Geez, I remember when Martin came out with that on rec.games.mud.admin and MUD-Dev.
AeMUD seems to have vanished, MUD++ is off the map... and those of us who were there at the begining, well...
If you want a look at the state-of-the-art in muddom, read the FAQs on the MUD-Dev site at www.kanga.nu. There are a few good men (and women) still pressing the bleeding edge. For those of us who have gone off in pursuit of other things (like a living wage), there are still dreams of starting our own great enterprise in the online games industry. Someday.
I've been thinking about this one...
So, we start with a kiosk terminal in a polling booth. You access it with your registration stub. It has the candidates, lined up like choices on an ATM terminal. You can pull up more info (picture, bio, positions on issues) for each based on the same criteria as the mailed brochures. When you settle on the choice you like, you hit that one on the screen. It highlights, and you go on to the next page. When you're all done with all the voting, you get a page showing the list of positions, the candidate you chose for each, and an edit/print choice. You choose print, and a punched (with nice round holes) card comes out, showing the choices under the names in clear boxes. You notice that something is wrong, feed it back into the machine, and run a fresh session. You print it again, and all's better. You go to another machine and slide the card into it, magnetic strip up. The machine counts your vote and stores the card for auditing...
Does anyone do this? If not, why not?
I can just see it now... inside the filter...
...Ah, better, my job is done... what's this? Now the tykes are trying to look at a site about Bush? Naughty-naughty, they're too young to be looking at ladies' privates. ---CENSOR--- Hum. What's this "Nader", then? Sounds like a dirty word. ---CENSOR--- Ho hum... )
(... ho hum... another page... should I let the kiddies see it? Hmm... it seems to be about Gore. Violence and blood is a no-no and bad. Children shouldn't be seeing this... ---CENSOR---
All I have to say is that up here in Canada, it has been decided that if you folks vote Bush into office, we are coming down there to burn the White House again!
Funny... down here, among many of us, it has been decided that if the idiots vote Bush into office, we are moving to Canada.