You'd have to keep running back to the DVD player every time they wanted to watch one of the 10,000 Disney and other assorted DVDs that they like to watch endlessly.
This is crazy talk, really, and really prevents the fair use rights we have now (loaning to friends, etc.)
Why don't they just sell tickets every time we want to watch a DVD? "They're $2 cheaper per viewing than going to the theater!"
Re:Not to be a spoilsport here...
on
Star Wars Sickout
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Funny thing is, according to the short stories about the bounty hunters, Boba didn't die in the Sarlacc pit.
Car GPS systems with smaller displays cost $600 and up. A $400 system that includes a GPS and can also be used for other things would sell like hotcakes!
If the IR module is powerful enough, you could also use it for home automation and as a remote for your entertainment system.. or just use the wireless to connect to your network and control everything that way.
Touch screen would be ideal. If I could get one of these, it would be my car GPS and home automation pal.
Well, I'm looking forward to seeing these just for the special effects and nostalgia factor.
I remember back in grade school, one of my teachers (really nice guy, Mr. Snow I think) would take time out in the afternoons and read to us from the Narnia books for like an hour. One of the best memories I had from school. I could just relax and live in the story.
I re-"read" them recently as an audiobook when I was doing a lot of driving. It's good audiobook fodder; something light that won't distract you enough to get you into a car wreck, but something other than mile after mile of concrete, asphalt, and bumpers.
Anyone can be a poor public speaker; I forgive Bush his many gaffes at the podium where he says ridiculous, even stupid, things. I'm not a good public speaker, and I don't think a president necessarily needs to be able to make public speeches 100% eloquently in order to make informed, intelligent decisions about the running of the country.
Now, with that said, that statement about evolution was actually the most diplomatic thing Bush could have said. Think about it; all the morons who voted for him who seriously believe in a benevolent all powerful being outnumber the rest of us with brains who have already figured out for ourselves how primitive peoples resort to worshiping inanimate and/or unseen objects as a method of putting off fear of death and starvation. It's transference.
Now, considering that his popularity depends on these nutcases and intellectual infants, what else could he have said? If he had agreed with evolution, his popularity would plummet.
Personally, I don't know enough about Bush to hate him. I've heard bad things about the war, and about Bush being implicated in some bad things, but I've realized one thing about politics -- if I cared, it would consume me. The government is such a colossus, and the corruption and sincerity of its members are so questionable and intermingled that I believe it would take constant vigilance to know the system and its participants well enough to make judgment calls about an individual.
In my mind, politics is an all-or-nothing lifestyle, and I prefer to focus my energies into creative projects, enjoying my life, pursuing those entertainments that I find pleasurable. I have a lot of respect for those people that become interested in politics and fight for what they perceive as right. I'm just not one of those people.
I've had the opposite experience. I was trying to see a movie and purchase a child's ticket (I was like 11 at the time) but the dude didn't believe I was 11. I was an early sprouter.
He finally gave in at the child's price, but he gave me the evil eye.
Well, hopefully the performance issues are driver related and not hardware bottlenecks.
On a somewhat unrelated note, why don't these tests ever include MMORPGs? I'd like to think that a very crowded area in EverQuest during a raid with a lot of spell effects going off would challenge even the highest-end video card on the market. I think it's debatable that including some of these other types of games (MMORPG's specifically) would be more appropriate and well-rounded than 6 different FPS's.
Of course, the problem would be fair testing of what is obviously a dynamic environment. My opinion is that two identical machines attending the same event with an almost identical viewpoint could be achieved. It would just require some social coordination to get the testers included in these events.
I would contend that most young folks that read EG will identify with the young Ender and feel a little sad that all the Buggers were killed at the end, and that Ender was tricked.. but the thing that they remember was all that stuff about Ender being smart and not being accepted by his peers.
Older people reading EG for the first time will read into it the things you described. I'm not saying that you are wrong -- I'm saying that *my* description is what has garnered so many exhuberant fans for Card; mostly those that read EG when they were teens.
Also, I don't think Ender lost his soul... he just feels really really sorry for the Buggers, even though he was tricked into killing them. He wouldn't have done it had he known, and that was the point of the deception.
Ender is deeply capable of empathy, and he could have never killed the thousands of soldiers manning the ships, much less the millions or billions of Buggers. That is why Ender can go on to become Speaker for the Dead. He has as much empathy as he does intelligence. He was tricked because he was an inexperienced child in an adult playground, not because he was too proud and arrogant. Bean is arrogant. Ender was an innocent, comparatively.
Reading it as a teen is definitely a different experience. Most teenagers are uncomfortable in their development, unsure of themselves. A bookish type usually even more so for obvious reasons.
I think it depicts a very manipulative government, regardless of the age of the victim. Child, adult, senior citizen.. the novel depicts a government willing to go to any lengths to achieve their ends, including psychological torture and (active and passive) murder.
The leaders broke a lot of rules with regards to Ender, and being promoted to his own command was just one of them. I don't think it is a plot hole so much as evidence of how much Ender meant to the military at the time. They go into more detail in Ender's Shadow, which is basically a retelling of Ender's Game from a slightly different point of view; the character of Ender writ large, or small, as the case may be. Bean is a charicature of Ender taken to an extreme.
My opinion is that Ender's Shadow was Card trying to revitalize the series by trying to recapture the magic of Ender's Game. It was interesting, though.
When his books become dominated by his proselytization, and ideas I don't agree with, my distaste doesn't demonstrate intolerance.. it demonstrates my disagreement with having his views shoved in my face. I'd still be reading the Alvin Maker series if he hadn't done that.
I agree with your general sentiment, which I will apply to his anti-homosexual views. I shouldn't hold his homophobia against him... unless he writes about it (which he has). But then again, I'm only human, and even though I know objectively that the Ender series doesn't really discuss homosexuality (that I can recall offhand), I know that his Homecoming (? unsure of title at the moment) series does, and that ends up in my post.
Will I never read any Card again? Doubtful, he *is* a good storyteller, and I've enjoyed at least 50% of what I've read of his. Better track record than some other writers I know.
Sorry, I knew that he was a Mormon, but I'm not exactly clear on the relationship between the different religions. I thought Mormonism was a type of Christianity. I didn't intend to insult Christians by relating the two;)
But, if you believe the Earth was created 4,000 years ago, and Satan buried the dinosaur bones to confuse us, I'm perfectly willing to change that.
I didn't mean to imply that Card sucks. He has written some decent novels and stories. He's a good storyteller. I think he has a tendancy to give in to his impulse to preach as a series goes on, however.
When I was younger, the only Ender books I had read were Ender's Game and Speaker for the Dead, and honestly, Speaker bored me to tears when I was younger. I recently went back and purchased the rest of the Ender series, and re-read them from the beginning, and Speaker had a lot more to offer this time through. It does have some interesting things to say about relationships between disparate peoples and responsibility. Without Ender's Game, however, Speaker would have never made it into my library.
An interesting aside note; reading the Ender's Shadow, and reading some of the forum discussions about the novel series woke me up to the fact that what appealed to me about the books most was the identification with the characters, not the plot or character development. Once I started to analyze my interest in the books and the series, things became a bit clearer to me.
I believe Card himself has implied that the popularity of Ender's Game was the only reason that Speaker was written; Speaker was his experiment, his "morality play" and Ender's Game was the moneymaker that endorsed the checks on the rest of the series.
Alvin Maker has all the makings (no pun intended) of the same pattern. Intriguing first book, then the subsequent books are experiments or lessons in morality.
After going back through some of the other things Card has written, including unrelated novels and short stories, he plays the Ghost in the Machine card a little too much (again, no pun intended).
As geeks, we LOVED Card because he wrote about Ender Wiggin; a very bright young boy who could not get along with his peers because of his intellectual capacity. C'mon, this is Slashdot. If you read Slashdot, and you've read Ender's Game, you identified with Ender to some extent.
We all like to believe that we are special. Geeks like to believe they are smarter than the average person. Is it so crazy to believe that maybe it wasn't Card's extraordinary writing and plot that made Ender's Game so popular -- perhaps it was because Ender's Game was the ultimate braniac dream? To be smart enough to save the world, and get the accolades that go along with it.
His blatant religious proselytizing in his other books, most notably the Alvin Maker series, choked me with its sickly-sweet taint. I enjoyed the series at first because it was well written and fun, but it soon turned into a carousel of reptition. Alvin did and said the same things over and over, Card using him as a hand-puppet to express his Love Thy Neighbor and Turn the Other Cheek platitudes until I was racing through to the end of the novel not out of enjoyment and eagerness to see what happened, but just to be able to put the book down and go wash the veneer of his homophobic Christianity from my hands.
Card is not a saint. He wrote something that we all very much wanted to read; that we were alienated from our peers as children for a reason. There's a destiny waiting for us so we can use these big brains. We were humiliated on the playgrounds in grade school, but we'll show them! Someday!
Card gave us this pipe dream. But it's time to let go of the security blanket, Linus. You're smart, but you don't need a writer to give you a raison d'etre in a science fiction fairy tale.
In my house there are three laptops (14" 1024x768 Compaq, 15" 1400x1050 MicronPC, and 15.4" 1400x1050 ProStar) and three standalone LCD screens (1024x768 NEC, 1280x1024 Spectre, 1280x1024 Hyundai).
The NEC and Spectre are cheap pieces of washed-out poor-color-representing crap (consistent with what I paid, really), but NOT ONE of these LCDs has a dead/stuck pixel. I have tested them all with LCD testing apps that cycle through a variety of full-screen solid colors.
The Hyundai L70S was a great deal. Excellent screen for the price. The original ProStar LCD was a real gem; bright, vibrant.. but there was an accident and the LCD was destroyed, so I had to replace it. The replacement is not as vibrant as the original.
I also have a Gameboy Advanced SP (as does my fiancee), a Blackberry 7230, and a Sharp Zaurus 6000L (640x480 PDA). Again, no dead/stuck pixels.
I've either been extraordinarily lucky, or dead/stuck pixels are more rare than people would lead you to believe.
Oh, to explain why I have so much crap; some is my fiancee's stuff, some is for work (I telecommute.)
Troll./sarcasm on Yes, the world would be a much better place if we all stuck to our cultures and ideas and standards and said "screw you" to the rest of the world./sarcasm off
Are you deliberately burning kharma because you have an excess?
For all of you professional and amateur programmers out there who can actually accomplish something using code, kudos for you -- but that's not what natural language processing will be used for.
I envision natural language processing to be useful for all kinds of consumer and commercial devices that may be somewhat complicated to operate. The natural language interface allows someone without programming experience to execute somewhat complicated queries and functions without the aid of a programmer. It will also allow even professional programmers to do certain things very quickly.
Those posters that cited Star Trek TNG in relation to this are absolutely spot-on.
Let's take an example. Say you wanted to move all documents on your hard drive that haven't been modified in 6 months to "C:\docs\old" or for your diehard *nux junkies, "/home/gondola/docs/old".
Because of your natural habits to be disorganized or forget where things are over time, or because of accidental writes to the wrong directories, you have documents in several locations on your hard drive, under \download, \My Documents, whatever.
So you type a natural language program that reads, "Move all office documents that have not been modified in six months to \docs\old" (or you speak it).
The program runs and moves the documents in a matter of milliseconds, and you're back at the prompt, or the GUI emits a tone to indicate the process is complete, perhaps with a textual or graphic representation of the task performed, with the number of files moved, and the changes logged.
What if you did this manually, or tried to write a script to do it?
You can't just type "mv *.doc \docs\old" or "rename *.doc \docs\old". The documents can be.txt files, Word.doc files, Excel files, whatever.
Let's say you wanted to sort all of your mp3s by artist, album, and title, creating directories for each artist, and directories for each album underneath that? Depending on the number of mp3s you have, you could spend hours doing that.
With a natural language processor, (and a hook that allows your OS to read mp3 file tags, or look up the info online based on the mp3 fingerprint) your computer could do it in a matter of seconds. Without you having to know any programming -- because really, for "simple" things like this that you do once, are you going to sit down and write a program to do it?
"Move all mp3s to \mp3 and sort them into directories according to artist and album."
"Name all mp3s as track number dot space title."
Now, it's possible that there may be mp3s being used by commercial applications. Obviously you would have certain definitions and defaults set up that you could override if necessary. For example, moving all mp3s would imply "all mp3s that are not part of an installed application", and all office documents would imply "all office documents that are not part of an installed application," ie, it would not move documents under \Program Files\MS Word\" which would include all of your templates and etc.
I can really picture this as being the next big thing in human interface for computers. It would make some things so much easier, one-off tasks that you normally have to do manually, file by file.
"Agents" (and no, not like Agent Smith) are things that have been written about in SciFi for quite some time, and I believe that our need for organization and assistance in day-to-day activities has come to the point where developing these agents is going to be worth the effort, and it will improve productivity.
They won't have personality yet, except for whatever audio feedback mey be programmed into your agent.
I see progression like so;
-First Agents created. They do simple Operating System tasks, like file management. "Move all documents not edited in six months to \docs\old"
-Agents begin to do redundant tasks like monitoring web sites for specific key words, executing simple
Star Trek is a very large body of work encompassing many years, many cultures, and many interesting locales. Like Stargate, it's a framework that allows a writer to do whatever he wants.
Personally, I think the Star Trek still has a lot of potential left in it, but it's the writers, the actors, the directors, and the producers of any given project who will determine whether a new franchise is worth anything.
Sometimes that mixture has to age a bit before it matures enough for all of those ingredients to start working together. Star Trek TNG was embarrasingly overacted and rough in its first few episodes, perhaps even the first season or two -- but it eventually grew to be a favorite of mine. Enterprise was decent entertainment, and was getting better. I didn't like Kate Mulgrew, so I couldn't enjoy V-ger. DS9 was too political for me, but from all accounts it also matured with age and became something worth watching. However, the Trek movies are an exercise in nostalgia and CGI, and I despise them for their cheap tricks and bland plots. Although I really didn't care for the TOS-cast movies when they came out, they at least had character and substantial plot. The TNG-cast movies just seem to be blah excuses for a lot of CGI and routine plots.
I think a Starfleet Academy could be a great series if done well. It all depends on how the casting, writing, directing, etc work out. I don't think it's a good idea to feature the big characters from ST:TOS, however. Perhaps their younger selves, maybe even via CGI, can be featured in cameos or whatnot. If they went back and tried to put Kirk and Spock as major characters in a new series, it would be an exercise in nostalgic masturbation.
>If all parents were competent & rational, and actually gave a damn about preparing their children to become intelligent, thinking members of society, then I'd agree with you.
Well, my original intent when I started my post was to state that as a caveat, but I admit I was distracted mid-post and never completed my thought. Thank you for bringing that up.
>For those parents who seem intent on making their kids little programmed cult members, I think society would be a lot better off if those people weren't allowed to raise children at all.
Programming cult members is very difficult. The "rebellious son of the minister" is such a common occurance it's almost a cliche.
I'd rather see earnest parents trying to pass along morals and doctrine than uncaring parents using another overgrown zygote as a reason to increase their monthly stipend from the government. (*I am an atheist, so this is a strong statement.) I would bet some serious money that there are more uncaring parents who use television as a babysitter than there are caring parents who try to brainwash their children into some sort of religion.
I attended Baptist, Lutheran, and Catholic schools while growing up, and I can tell you that my experiences with mainstream religious ("private") schools demonstrate that those children are not mindless zombies; for the most part, they're just passing time until they can get out of their parents' house. They go through the motions, but they lie and cheat and steal just like everyone else.
Doctrinated children require some kind of education, even if it is slanted and biased. They have the opportunity to discover the hypocrisy and logic flaws of organizaed religions and hopefully go on to live a healthy life.
If they can't figure it out, well, at least it keeps them out of the grocery stores on Sunday morning so I can do my shopping in relatively empty aisles.
I think parents *should* be the final arbiter of every channel of information that their children receive.
I also think it's the parents' responsibility to make their children aware of the real world when they are mature enough to handle it. The parents will not be around forever, and it's their job to make mature, responsible adults out of these overgrown zygotes.
What use is it to shelter your children from the truth? When you die, your kid will be down in the basement waiting for his food until he starves to death.
I watched most of the first episode. It's very boring. 95% of it is us watching some guy on a webcam while he he chats in different IM programs with different people, and on IRC.
There's a repetitive music track in the background, and every once in a while the guy will break in with some voiceover delivered with too much drama.
Pacing is terrible; most of the time you're sitting there waiting for the guy to type more. Why would I want to watch someone else chat via IM and IRC when I can do the same about 4-5x faster?
There is nothing special or particularly redeeming about this (at least episode one).
The intro is much more creative and interesting than the rest of the movie. Watch the intro for a couple minutes then shut it off.
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You'd have to keep running back to the DVD player every time they wanted to watch one of the 10,000 Disney and other assorted DVDs that they like to watch endlessly.
This is crazy talk, really, and really prevents the fair use rights we have now (loaning to friends, etc.)
Why don't they just sell tickets every time we want to watch a DVD? "They're $2 cheaper per viewing than going to the theater!"
Funny thing is, according to the short stories about the bounty hunters, Boba didn't die in the Sarlacc pit.
Car GPS systems with smaller displays cost $600 and up. A $400 system that includes a GPS and can also be used for other things would sell like hotcakes!
If the IR module is powerful enough, you could also use it for home automation and as a remote for your entertainment system.. or just use the wireless to connect to your network and control everything that way.
Touch screen would be ideal. If I could get one of these, it would be my car GPS and home automation pal.
Well, I'm looking forward to seeing these just for the special effects and nostalgia factor.
I remember back in grade school, one of my teachers (really nice guy, Mr. Snow I think) would take time out in the afternoons and read to us from the Narnia books for like an hour. One of the best memories I had from school. I could just relax and live in the story.
I re-"read" them recently as an audiobook when I was doing a lot of driving. It's good audiobook fodder; something light that won't distract you enough to get you into a car wreck, but something other than mile after mile of concrete, asphalt, and bumpers.
Anyone can be a poor public speaker; I forgive Bush his many gaffes at the podium where he says ridiculous, even stupid, things. I'm not a good public speaker, and I don't think a president necessarily needs to be able to make public speeches 100% eloquently in order to make informed, intelligent decisions about the running of the country.
Now, with that said, that statement about evolution was actually the most diplomatic thing Bush could have said. Think about it; all the morons who voted for him who seriously believe in a benevolent all powerful being outnumber the rest of us with brains who have already figured out for ourselves how primitive peoples resort to worshiping inanimate and/or unseen objects as a method of putting off fear of death and starvation. It's transference.
Now, considering that his popularity depends on these nutcases and intellectual infants, what else could he have said? If he had agreed with evolution, his popularity would plummet.
Personally, I don't know enough about Bush to hate him. I've heard bad things about the war, and about Bush being implicated in some bad things, but I've realized one thing about politics -- if I cared, it would consume me. The government is such a colossus, and the corruption and sincerity of its members are so questionable and intermingled that I believe it would take constant vigilance to know the system and its participants well enough to make judgment calls about an individual.
In my mind, politics is an all-or-nothing lifestyle, and I prefer to focus my energies into creative projects, enjoying my life, pursuing those entertainments that I find pleasurable. I have a lot of respect for those people that become interested in politics and fight for what they perceive as right. I'm just not one of those people.
I've had the opposite experience. I was trying to see a movie and purchase a child's ticket (I was like 11 at the time) but the dude didn't believe I was 11. I was an early sprouter.
He finally gave in at the child's price, but he gave me the evil eye.
Well, hopefully the performance issues are driver related and not hardware bottlenecks.
On a somewhat unrelated note, why don't these tests ever include MMORPGs? I'd like to think that a very crowded area in EverQuest during a raid with a lot of spell effects going off would challenge even the highest-end video card on the market. I think it's debatable that including some of these other types of games (MMORPG's specifically) would be more appropriate and well-rounded than 6 different FPS's.
Of course, the problem would be fair testing of what is obviously a dynamic environment. My opinion is that two identical machines attending the same event with an almost identical viewpoint could be achieved. It would just require some social coordination to get the testers included in these events.
I would contend that most young folks that read EG will identify with the young Ender and feel a little sad that all the Buggers were killed at the end, and that Ender was tricked.. but the thing that they remember was all that stuff about Ender being smart and not being accepted by his peers.
Older people reading EG for the first time will read into it the things you described. I'm not saying that you are wrong -- I'm saying that *my* description is what has garnered so many exhuberant fans for Card; mostly those that read EG when they were teens.
Also, I don't think Ender lost his soul... he just feels really really sorry for the Buggers, even though he was tricked into killing them. He wouldn't have done it had he known, and that was the point of the deception.
Ender is deeply capable of empathy, and he could have never killed the thousands of soldiers manning the ships, much less the millions or billions of Buggers. That is why Ender can go on to become Speaker for the Dead. He has as much empathy as he does intelligence. He was tricked because he was an inexperienced child in an adult playground, not because he was too proud and arrogant. Bean is arrogant. Ender was an innocent, comparatively.
Reading it as a teen is definitely a different experience. Most teenagers are uncomfortable in their development, unsure of themselves. A bookish type usually even more so for obvious reasons.
I think it depicts a very manipulative government, regardless of the age of the victim. Child, adult, senior citizen.. the novel depicts a government willing to go to any lengths to achieve their ends, including psychological torture and (active and passive) murder.
The leaders broke a lot of rules with regards to Ender, and being promoted to his own command was just one of them. I don't think it is a plot hole so much as evidence of how much Ender meant to the military at the time. They go into more detail in Ender's Shadow, which is basically a retelling of Ender's Game from a slightly different point of view; the character of Ender writ large, or small, as the case may be. Bean is a charicature of Ender taken to an extreme.
My opinion is that Ender's Shadow was Card trying to revitalize the series by trying to recapture the magic of Ender's Game. It was interesting, though.
When his books become dominated by his proselytization, and ideas I don't agree with, my distaste doesn't demonstrate intolerance.. it demonstrates my disagreement with having his views shoved in my face. I'd still be reading the Alvin Maker series if he hadn't done that.
I agree with your general sentiment, which I will apply to his anti-homosexual views. I shouldn't hold his homophobia against him... unless he writes about it (which he has). But then again, I'm only human, and even though I know objectively that the Ender series doesn't really discuss homosexuality (that I can recall offhand), I know that his Homecoming (? unsure of title at the moment) series does, and that ends up in my post.
Will I never read any Card again? Doubtful, he *is* a good storyteller, and I've enjoyed at least 50% of what I've read of his. Better track record than some other writers I know.
Sorry, I knew that he was a Mormon, but I'm not exactly clear on the relationship between the different religions. I thought Mormonism was a type of Christianity. I didn't intend to insult Christians by relating the two ;)
But, if you believe the Earth was created 4,000 years ago, and Satan buried the dinosaur bones to confuse us, I'm perfectly willing to change that.
I didn't mean to imply that Card sucks. He has written some decent novels and stories. He's a good storyteller. I think he has a tendancy to give in to his impulse to preach as a series goes on, however.
When I was younger, the only Ender books I had read were Ender's Game and Speaker for the Dead, and honestly, Speaker bored me to tears when I was younger. I recently went back and purchased the rest of the Ender series, and re-read them from the beginning, and Speaker had a lot more to offer this time through. It does have some interesting things to say about relationships between disparate peoples and responsibility. Without Ender's Game, however, Speaker would have never made it into my library.
An interesting aside note; reading the Ender's Shadow, and reading some of the forum discussions about the novel series woke me up to the fact that what appealed to me about the books most was the identification with the characters, not the plot or character development. Once I started to analyze my interest in the books and the series, things became a bit clearer to me.
I believe Card himself has implied that the popularity of Ender's Game was the only reason that Speaker was written; Speaker was his experiment, his "morality play" and Ender's Game was the moneymaker that endorsed the checks on the rest of the series.
Alvin Maker has all the makings (no pun intended) of the same pattern. Intriguing first book, then the subsequent books are experiments or lessons in morality.
After going back through some of the other things Card has written, including unrelated novels and short stories, he plays the Ghost in the Machine card a little too much (again, no pun intended).
As geeks, we LOVED Card because he wrote about Ender Wiggin; a very bright young boy who could not get along with his peers because of his intellectual capacity. C'mon, this is Slashdot. If you read Slashdot, and you've read Ender's Game, you identified with Ender to some extent.
We all like to believe that we are special. Geeks like to believe they are smarter than the average person. Is it so crazy to believe that maybe it wasn't Card's extraordinary writing and plot that made Ender's Game so popular -- perhaps it was because Ender's Game was the ultimate braniac dream? To be smart enough to save the world, and get the accolades that go along with it.
His blatant religious proselytizing in his other books, most notably the Alvin Maker series, choked me with its sickly-sweet taint. I enjoyed the series at first because it was well written and fun, but it soon turned into a carousel of reptition. Alvin did and said the same things over and over, Card using him as a hand-puppet to express his Love Thy Neighbor and Turn the Other Cheek platitudes until I was racing through to the end of the novel not out of enjoyment and eagerness to see what happened, but just to be able to put the book down and go wash the veneer of his homophobic Christianity from my hands.
Card is not a saint. He wrote something that we all very much wanted to read; that we were alienated from our peers as children for a reason. There's a destiny waiting for us so we can use these big brains. We were humiliated on the playgrounds in grade school, but we'll show them! Someday!
Card gave us this pipe dream. But it's time to let go of the security blanket, Linus. You're smart, but you don't need a writer to give you a raison d'etre in a science fiction fairy tale.
I don't have eyes, you insensitive clod!
Mod the parent up. This is the point that most people seem to be missing. SOE is not going to /create 1000000 platinum pieces
and basically destroy its economy by flooding the market with instantly manufactured money and items.
SOE is going to be a mediator for players to buy and sell from other players, that's it.
I can't believe that was modded Insightful.
For a primary display at a desk, there's no beating a CRT. Laptops are a necessary evil.
Don't get the Spectre.
In my house there are three laptops (14" 1024x768 Compaq, 15" 1400x1050 MicronPC, and 15.4" 1400x1050 ProStar) and three standalone LCD screens (1024x768 NEC, 1280x1024 Spectre, 1280x1024 Hyundai).
The NEC and Spectre are cheap pieces of washed-out poor-color-representing crap (consistent with what I paid, really), but NOT ONE of these LCDs has a dead/stuck pixel. I have tested them all with LCD testing apps that cycle through a variety of full-screen solid colors.
The Hyundai L70S was a great deal. Excellent screen for the price. The original ProStar LCD was a real gem; bright, vibrant.. but there was an accident and the LCD was destroyed, so I had to replace it. The replacement is not as vibrant as the original.
I also have a Gameboy Advanced SP (as does my fiancee), a Blackberry 7230, and a Sharp Zaurus 6000L (640x480 PDA). Again, no dead/stuck pixels.
I've either been extraordinarily lucky, or dead/stuck pixels are more rare than people would lead you to believe.
Oh, to explain why I have so much crap; some is my fiancee's stuff, some is for work (I telecommute.)
Much love for the C64 flashback!
Shout out to all the old-school computer freaks..
Troll. /sarcasm on /sarcasm off
Yes, the world would be a much better place if we all stuck to our cultures and ideas and standards and said "screw you" to the rest of the world.
Are you deliberately burning kharma because you have an excess?
For all of you professional and amateur programmers out there who can actually accomplish something using code, kudos for you -- but that's not what natural language processing will be used for.
.txt files, Word .doc files, Excel files, whatever.
I envision natural language processing to be useful for all kinds of consumer and commercial devices that may be somewhat complicated to operate. The natural language interface allows someone without programming experience to execute somewhat complicated queries and functions without the aid of a programmer. It will also allow even professional programmers to do certain things very quickly.
Those posters that cited Star Trek TNG in relation to this are absolutely spot-on.
Let's take an example. Say you wanted to move all documents on your hard drive that haven't been modified in 6 months to "C:\docs\old" or for your diehard *nux junkies, "/home/gondola/docs/old".
Because of your natural habits to be disorganized or forget where things are over time, or because of accidental writes to the wrong directories, you have documents in several locations on your hard drive, under \download, \My Documents, whatever.
So you type a natural language program that reads, "Move all office documents that have not been modified in six months to \docs\old" (or you speak it).
The program runs and moves the documents in a matter of milliseconds, and you're back at the prompt, or the GUI emits a tone to indicate the process is complete, perhaps with a textual or graphic representation of the task performed, with the number of files moved, and the changes logged.
What if you did this manually, or tried to write a script to do it?
You can't just type "mv *.doc \docs\old" or "rename *.doc \docs\old". The documents can be
Let's say you wanted to sort all of your mp3s by artist, album, and title, creating directories for each artist, and directories for each album underneath that? Depending on the number of mp3s you have, you could spend hours doing that.
With a natural language processor, (and a hook that allows your OS to read mp3 file tags, or look up the info online based on the mp3 fingerprint) your computer could do it in a matter of seconds. Without you having to know any programming -- because really, for "simple" things like this that you do once, are you going to sit down and write a program to do it?
"Move all mp3s to \mp3 and sort them into directories according to artist and album."
"Name all mp3s as track number dot space title."
Now, it's possible that there may be mp3s being used by commercial applications. Obviously you would have certain definitions and defaults set up that you could override if necessary. For example, moving all mp3s would imply "all mp3s that are not part of an installed application", and all office documents would imply "all office documents that are not part of an installed application," ie, it would not move documents under \Program Files\MS Word\" which would include all of your templates and etc.
I can really picture this as being the next big thing in human interface for computers. It would make some things so much easier, one-off tasks that you normally have to do manually, file by file.
"Agents" (and no, not like Agent Smith) are things that have been written about in SciFi for quite some time, and I believe that our need for organization and assistance in day-to-day activities has come to the point where developing these agents is going to be worth the effort, and it will improve productivity.
They won't have personality yet, except for whatever audio feedback mey be programmed into your agent.
I see progression like so;
-First Agents created. They do simple Operating System tasks, like file management.
"Move all documents not edited in six months to \docs\old"
-Agents begin to do redundant tasks like monitoring web sites for specific key words, executing simple
Star Trek is a very large body of work encompassing many years, many cultures, and many interesting locales. Like Stargate, it's a framework that allows a writer to do whatever he wants.
Personally, I think the Star Trek still has a lot of potential left in it, but it's the writers, the actors, the directors, and the producers of any given project who will determine whether a new franchise is worth anything.
Sometimes that mixture has to age a bit before it matures enough for all of those ingredients to start working together. Star Trek TNG was embarrasingly overacted and rough in its first few episodes, perhaps even the first season or two -- but it eventually grew to be a favorite of mine. Enterprise was decent entertainment, and was getting better. I didn't like Kate Mulgrew, so I couldn't enjoy V-ger. DS9 was too political for me, but from all accounts it also matured with age and became something worth watching. However, the Trek movies are an exercise in nostalgia and CGI, and I despise them for their cheap tricks and bland plots. Although I really didn't care for the TOS-cast movies when they came out, they at least had character and substantial plot. The TNG-cast movies just seem to be blah excuses for a lot of CGI and routine plots.
I think a Starfleet Academy could be a great series if done well. It all depends on how the casting, writing, directing, etc work out. I don't think it's a good idea to feature the big characters from ST:TOS, however. Perhaps their younger selves, maybe even via CGI, can be featured in cameos or whatnot. If they went back and tried to put Kirk and Spock as major characters in a new series, it would be an exercise in nostalgic masturbation.
>If all parents were competent & rational, and actually gave a damn about preparing their children to become intelligent, thinking members of society, then I'd agree with you.
Well, my original intent when I started my post was to state that as a caveat, but I admit I was distracted mid-post and never completed my thought. Thank you for bringing that up.
>For those parents who seem intent on making their kids little programmed cult members, I think society would be a lot better off if those people weren't allowed to raise children at all.
Programming cult members is very difficult. The "rebellious son of the minister" is such a common occurance it's almost a cliche.
I'd rather see earnest parents trying to pass along morals and doctrine than uncaring parents using another overgrown zygote as a reason to increase their monthly stipend from the government. (*I am an atheist, so this is a strong statement.) I would bet some serious money that there are more uncaring parents who use television as a babysitter than there are caring parents who try to brainwash their children into some sort of religion.
I attended Baptist, Lutheran, and Catholic schools while growing up, and I can tell you that my experiences with mainstream religious ("private") schools demonstrate that those children are not mindless zombies; for the most part, they're just passing time until they can get out of their parents' house. They go through the motions, but they lie and cheat and steal just like everyone else.
Doctrinated children require some kind of education, even if it is slanted and biased. They have the opportunity to discover the hypocrisy and logic flaws of organizaed religions and hopefully go on to live a healthy life.
If they can't figure it out, well, at least it keeps them out of the grocery stores on Sunday morning so I can do my shopping in relatively empty aisles.
I think parents *should* be the final arbiter of every channel of information that their children receive.
I also think it's the parents' responsibility to make their children aware of the real world when they are mature enough to handle it. The parents will not be around forever, and it's their job to make mature, responsible adults out of these overgrown zygotes.
What use is it to shelter your children from the truth? When you die, your kid will be down in the basement waiting for his food until he starves to death.
I watched most of the first episode. It's very boring. 95% of it is us watching some guy on a webcam while he he chats in different IM programs with different people, and on IRC.
There's a repetitive music track in the background, and every once in a while the guy will break in with some voiceover delivered with too much drama.
Pacing is terrible; most of the time you're sitting there waiting for the guy to type more. Why would I want to watch someone else chat via IM and IRC when I can do the same about 4-5x faster?
There is nothing special or particularly redeeming about this (at least episode one).
The intro is much more creative and interesting than the rest of the movie. Watch the intro for a couple minutes then shut it off.