I wish somebody made a small, easy to hold in your hand universal remote that only did the things I do 99% of the time:
A Power button
0-9 buttons
A button to toggle devices
Play, Stop, Foward, Reverse.
Volume up and down
Channel up and down
A menu button.
Thats only 19-20 buttons, depending on how they configure it, and would satisfy me for my receiver, VCR, cable, DVD, CD, and TV. My TV remote has more that I never use.
Anyone know of a good quality simple one like that?
You're baseing this on the assumption that they will forget to collect information on how you respond to advertising.
I'm very much like you. I refuse to buy products or services because of how they are advertised. I refuse, for example, to purchase or donate anything to unsolicited telemarketers. It would be nice that after the umpteenth time I said 'I refuse to do this', and stuck to it, the marketers would stop: why waste the money?
I will not spend any money on companies who use spam, as well as companies who utilize pop up/under windows (which is a shame, as I was just about to sign up for netflix on the advise of freinds. Too bad they decided to annoy me instead).
Personally, I don't mind junk mail in the form of cupons or advertisments (it does'nt bother me. I'll occasionally look at it). Misleading envelopes or ads for credit cards are instant food for the paper shredder.
The point is, just as a cashless society can tip off marketers to our likes and dislikes, it can give them insight on how we don't like to be approched.
There are two major objections I keep seeing pop up here: The first is that the 'big bad government' will be able to snoop on all of our purchases, the second is that marketers will be able to know what were buying.
However, the more I think about it, I realize that with some careful consideration and common sense legislation, both could be a great boon to us.
If the government is able to receive real time, compleatly accurate consumer and business spending information (in the aggregate, of course), it suddenly has access up-to-the-second and 100% reliable data for forming economic indicators, which are at best currently formed quarterly.
At that point, the governments economists can catch onto economic trends quickly and react before any major problem begins to occur. From an economic standpoint, it would be wonderful.
The other issue surrounds marketers collecting information. I can't seem to understand the danger in this. I for one really want marketers to know what I'm interested in; We have a real chance to change the role of advertising from a broadbased attack on our senses to facilitate brand reconition for products and services we don't need or want (current) to a tool that educates us to the availibility of products and services we genuinanly would like to know about.
The only key to making this work is a continued diligance in making sure our lawmakers are very specific in the drafting of legislation so information does'nt belong in the wrong hands: For example, governments can only collect data in the aggregate and cannot submit individual information to law inforcement. Or Advertisers can only collect the most basic of demographic information (zip code, income range) about us.
Being a few thousand miles away from it, I can't say I was directly invovled. I was onsite yesterday, and did'nt get home until very late. Only having to do paperwork today, I decided not to set my alarm (I work from home).
What surprised me was the constant chimes from my computer all morning from IMs being sent, while at the same time the conspicious lack of chimes from my outlook giving me email. Somewhere around 9am PST I decided to roll over and investigate. Dozens of messages from freinds asking 'do you belive this' and 'oh my God' littered my desktop.
When I finally woke up, I sent a message back to one of my closer freinds asking what was up. 'Turn on the TV', she replied. What I saw horrified me. I paniced, and immediatly dialed my sister in LA, waking her up. She had no idea what was going on either, until I filled her in.
I finally told everyone I needed a few minutes to collect my thoughts. I live very close to the flight path of Sky Harbor airport, and as I left the apartment towards the store to pick up some caffene to put my head on streight, I noticed a conspicious lack of air traffic. It was almost eerie.
The clerk at the circle K was frantically telling everyone to 'buy gas now' before it was all gone, and I got a sick feeling in my stoumach. The worst was not over; nothing the terrorists could do to us will be as bad as what we do to ourselves. I realized for the time being anyone with Arab extent was screwed in this country, and would be blamed and persicuted for quite some time.
This feeling was compounded as I got back home and saw messages from freinds advocating 'Lets get drunk and beat up an A-Rab'. I walked to to the local bar for lunch, hearing all too often 'kill those fucking rag heads'. In the bathroom there was scratched into the wall 'Arabs go home'.
And while this all made me a bit sad, nothing disturbed me more then the feeling in the late afternoon of absolute anger. Seeing the anti-US dancing in the street, reading news bits from various mid-east nations feeling proud of the attack... it made me angry, and, for a while, made me want blood.
It's a terrible feature of human nature that we can so easily substitute sadness over something horrid like this with revenge. I watched Kabul being bombed and secretly hoped we were kicking the shit out of the bastards who did this, and that feeling made me feel a little bit better, if only for a while.
I fear the real outcome of this incident will be that we find ourselves to be nothing more then knee-jerk reactionaries. Don't get me wrong, I still want those responsible to pay for this, but I hope to dear God that we do things right, don't compromise our principals of justice, and can feel justified when it's all over that we did the right thing.
Everytime the entertainment industry fights a new medium and looses, they prosper and we prosper. Cassete tapes, VCRs, CD-burners....
Everytime the entertainment industry fights a new medium and wins, they loose out and we loose out. Screwy DAT copy protection ruined the format for consumer use, or AM radio as an example. They can either chose not to particpate or try to fight it in court. Either way, when they get their way, they get hurt.
(Funny how much money they were making on VCR tape sales/rentals even before copy-protection was used).
No matter what, consumers will always go to the theatres. They will always go to rock shows and buy physical recordings.
Typically radio stations subscribe to a service that holds a rebroadcast copywrite to a large collection of music. There are a few of them out there, but one I can think of off the top of my head is seasac .
Stations pay a flat fee depending on type of broadcast/range and (supposedly) the artists are compinsated indirectly via the service.
There are some Internet streaming services that have already made blanket agreements with these copywrite repositories, so it's best to read the fine print.
Before we get upset and assume that there is some sort of corporate conspiracy keeping multi-OS systems off the shelfs, it seems a more reasonable explination that most people simply would'nt want to deal with Two OSws.
There are execptions, of course (for example, many of the readers here). But why would your average end user want to have to learn two (or more) seperate OSes?
At best, out of the box multi-OS machines could satisfy a small niche market of hobbyists and power users, and I'm sure somewhere those would make up a large enough marketshare to support a couple of vendors.
But me, personally, I'll keep BSD on my machine I made for BSD, and my Windows on my machine taylored for windows.
Just because anyone can become an expert and enter any field regardless of age or education, does'nt mean they will be listened to.
The only real revolution here is that experts will no longer be identified by education or experience, but instead their ability to market themselves; to find a way for people to look at what they have to say.
Valid points, but I think you missed the issue I was trying to address.
The technology implied in this article are not auto-gyros, but personal flying craft that can literaly 'take off from your drive way'. Now, if they can actually make these craft is another story altogether, but for the sake of the point, I was assuming they can.
The real issue at hand has to do with the way air traffic is handled. The technology implicit with this kind of craft assumes a greated degree of control that a triditional aircraft does not have. Using your figure of 160 knots for a stall speed (and you don't want run jets in a controled envrionment right at stall speed), there is very little margin for error. (Imagine if cars would blow up if they travled less then 182 miles per hour unless they performed a carefully orchistrated manuvers in special areas). Hence the need for a very advanced air traffic control system manned by experienced, trained professionals.
Now, take away the required for speed to stay aloft. Take away all the special areas to land, and suddenly you can be far more flexible with how you control things in the air.
I don't see this as a major problem here. The majority of current air traffic is difficult to control because it needs to maintain a certian degree of velocity to stay airborn.
But this technology thows that out the window. If we can get a personal vehicle to cheaply take off vertically and reach high crusing speeds, most likely, we can do it with a large commerical/passenger vehicle. If a 400 passenger literal 'air bus' can land in a city block in your down town, shoot up to 30,000 feet and and then reach speeds close to our current airliners, I doubt the triditional airports (and aircraft) will see much business.
If we ever get this sort of thing to ever actually work, it's not too unreasonable that in a few years conventional air traffic control will be a thing of the past. While we may not get total automation to prevent people from running into each other, it should be pretty easy to install a GPS in these things with pre-programed 'rules' that govern the piloting style (ie, you are above a city. You can not drop below 3,000 feet unless your hortizontal speed is at zero).
Of course, just because things CAN be done this way, does'nt mean they should.
Has anyone programmed a hidden bomb that must be disabled every couple times you boot up, by the user. If this disabling action isn't completed after a few boots, it starts sending information to a secure location
I think that's how the new Windows XP works, sans the 'secure location' part.
Reminds me of that time not too long ago before windows when department stores sold computers.
It was a demented pre-occupation of myself and a close group of freinds to go to various stores (like sears or radio shack... espically radio shack) and modify the autoexec.bat file to display the prompt to read 'fuck the duck'.
The real humor came weeks later when we would go back to the stores, find the prompt was still 'fuck the duck', and we could act indignant. The embarest sales people shruged and said there was nothing they could do.
The implication is that attention can only be obtained via brute force (excessive advertising), a flashy presintation, or by paying people.
If this is true, the why do so many dang people read slashdot? I've never seen an ad for it, I don't find it a particularly well designed as a website, and they sure as heck are'nt paying me. It certianly has'nt 'homogonized' and generally stays close to it's intial purpose.
In the 'information economy', ultimatly, the only thing that will keep peoples attention is quality. The net is different from things like television or gas insofar as the resources needed to produce and distribute information are so small. Nobody has to get stuck with an information provider that caters to the lowest common demoninator.
And how do people find out where the good stuff is? In the end, word of mouth. A freind told me about Slashdot. I discover most of the websites I visit through word of mouth, or through 'portal' sites like Fark.
And after a while, when we no longer have time to search out the best information, we will search out the best places that tell us where the information is... and nobody will have to pay us.
Don't keep logs. Don't run any port scanner detection software. Don't restrict any ports on your machine. Don't run TCPdump.
Don't look for anything out of the ordinary. Run NT, and if anything goes wrong and the boss asks, blame it on Microsoft.
Don't let your users download anything. Make them save all their files to a floppy. Burn a CD with a good hdd image and make them re-install everything once a week.
Don't read security updates, don't bother running virus scan programs. Force all of your users e-mails to run through you first. Complain that you don't have enough time to monitor everything and make them hire you an assistant. Make your assistant run to the store to buy you beer.
Trust me. This works.
What the film was about
on
Review: A.I.
·
· Score: 2
I watched it with high expectations. At the end, at best, I could say this was a good movie, but not a great movie.
The part that got me was in the first few minutes: We can design a robot that loves, but can people love him back. That's what the film was all about. More specifically, we can make a movie about a robot that loves, but will the audience love him?
You've got to give kudos to the filmakers here. David was robot. He is irrational, he does'nt follow logic, and ultimatly, he NEVER strays from his programming. All he cares about is getting his mother's love (even at the expense of her). But it still makes him loveable.
I hated the plot holes. I hated the fact that any rational person watching this film has to, at least a few times, go 'uh... what?' with the way the characters interact. But, I still like the movie.
On a side note, Man, the 'supertoy' Teddy was the coolest sci-fi side kick in years. If only George Lucas would watch this and give us the personalities of Teddy instead of JarJar, I'd be in heaven.
That's a great question, and one I've thought about quite a bit myself.
There are a couple of issues: Unlike the colonization of North America, there is, as far as we know, no indiginous life that exists in space. Suprisingly, this makes things a bit more complicated, because we are not going to be bound by any humainly directed decisions based on the atrocities of past conquests.
Which means we can grab real estate in space with impunity. If history guides us here, chances are who is first, who claims it first will mean nothing (heck, there are people on Earth now selling land on the moon!).
My guess is, when we figure out a reason to make space valuable (weather it be minerals, military.. who knows), the people who will end up with it will be the people who can win in the courts and ultimatly, on the battlefield.
And chances are, yes, we will end up governments on other bodies (the moon, for example) who will want their independance. It's going to be exciting.
It depends on what you want. There are really two questions in there. "Will computer generated art ever be accepted as a 'fine art'?", and "Will computer generated art ever enjoy the same status as triditional art?"
The answer to the second question is is probably no. But this needs to be qualified. The assumption is you want to be able to display your art in a mesume, have art critics poke and fawn over it, and hopefully take it seriously. That's not going to happen. Computer art is'nt a new genre that we are going to have to wait decades for the art world to catch up with--because computer generated art is'nt so much a new genre, it's a new medium.
Computer generated art is a different medium in the same way that music, books, or movies are different mediums for art. And, like these other mediums, it will be eventually be delt with on it's own merets. A lot of this has to do with the distribution: A book will never hang in a mesume because, as a general rule, any copy of the book holds the same artistic value as the orginal manuscript. A movie is a medium desiged exclusivly to be projected on a screen, the experience only varied by the quality of the technology displaying it. Music can only be enjoyed in the first person as a performance art only once, as it is different each time it's performed, or as a replication of that performance (in an audio recording). We are faced with a few questions about the distribution and experience with computer generated art, because it is so new, the prefered methods of distribution have'nt been determined.
Triditional 'art' is static, and for the most part, rare. And so a world has grown around it to try to explain it, display it, and criticize it. So, if your asking if computer art is going to be a part of that world, the answer is no. But neither will films, music, or lititature, because the expression of that art is so different, and as a consiquence, entirly different worlds have grown around them.
Nobody is expecting triditional art critics to begin pontificating on the artistic merit of film. We should'nt expect them to start doing the same for computer generated art; in fact, we should'nt want them to. If we ever want computer generated art to be taken seriously, we have to allow a world to grow around it on it's own terms. Cowtowing to the old school is a search for acceptance that will never come, and threatens to limit your artistic freedom by placing yourself into a strict set of rules and triditions.
Which brings us to the first question, will it ever be considered a fine art? I think almost certianly yes. In the same way lititature, music, or film is. But in the world of higher education, the mistake will be made to try to lump computer generated art in with triditional art (painting and sculpture) because at first view, that's what it seems to most closley resemble.
It will take some time, but I see eventually universitys having seperate departments in their college of fine arts for computer/electronically generated art, just as they have seperate departments for film, writing, or music. And yes, it will be taken seriously.
You: I can't reach my favorate site:
ISP: Ok, can you reach other sites?
You: Yes, but I can't reach this one. It must be your fault.
ISP: Well, what site are you trying to reach?
You: Slashdot. It's never down. It always works
ISP: I can't seem to reach it from here either. My guess is it's down.
You: No, it's your fault. I want to see my slashdot.
ISP: Let me do some tests. No, I'm sorry, that sight is down.
You: You are lying to me!! Just like AOL did. Your ISP sucks! I want a refund.
ISP: Well, you can reach every other site, right?
You: Yes.
ISP: Then most likely, the problem is with the website.
You: *explitive deleted* I want you supervisor.
ISP: Fine.
Be careful what you wish for. Do you really want all of those services to be centralized?
No.. and that's just it. I don't want one provider of e-mail, or news. I want hundreds. And I don't want to live in a world where the assumption is the guys who provide your bandwidth are the ones who provide your services.
Also, I can't say that I mind it when people use bandwidth to exchange media. Far be it from me to decide what is worth while and what is not. But, I sure as heck don't want to pay for servers (news servers, in this case) if I'm not a part of it.
Slashdot Mirror
I wish somebody made a small, easy to hold in your hand universal remote that only did the things I do 99% of the time:
A Power button
0-9 buttons
A button to toggle devices
Play, Stop, Foward, Reverse.
Volume up and down
Channel up and down
A menu button.
Thats only 19-20 buttons, depending on how they configure it, and would satisfy me for my receiver, VCR, cable, DVD, CD, and TV. My TV remote has more that I never use.
Anyone know of a good quality simple one like that?
I'm very much like you. I refuse to buy products or services because of how they are advertised. I refuse, for example, to purchase or donate anything to unsolicited telemarketers. It would be nice that after the umpteenth time I said 'I refuse to do this', and stuck to it, the marketers would stop: why waste the money?
I will not spend any money on companies who use spam, as well as companies who utilize pop up/under windows (which is a shame, as I was just about to sign up for netflix on the advise of freinds. Too bad they decided to annoy me instead).
Personally, I don't mind junk mail in the form of cupons or advertisments (it does'nt bother me. I'll occasionally look at it). Misleading envelopes or ads for credit cards are instant food for the paper shredder.
The point is, just as a cashless society can tip off marketers to our likes and dislikes, it can give them insight on how we don't like to be approched.
However, the more I think about it, I realize that with some careful consideration and common sense legislation, both could be a great boon to us.
If the government is able to receive real time, compleatly accurate consumer and business spending information (in the aggregate, of course), it suddenly has access up-to-the-second and 100% reliable data for forming economic indicators, which are at best currently formed quarterly.
At that point, the governments economists can catch onto economic trends quickly and react before any major problem begins to occur. From an economic standpoint, it would be wonderful.
The other issue surrounds marketers collecting information. I can't seem to understand the danger in this. I for one really want marketers to know what I'm interested in; We have a real chance to change the role of advertising from a broadbased attack on our senses to facilitate brand reconition for products and services we don't need or want (current) to a tool that educates us to the availibility of products and services we genuinanly would like to know about.
The only key to making this work is a continued diligance in making sure our lawmakers are very specific in the drafting of legislation so information does'nt belong in the wrong hands: For example, governments can only collect data in the aggregate and cannot submit individual information to law inforcement. Or Advertisers can only collect the most basic of demographic information (zip code, income range) about us.
Being a few thousand miles away from it, I can't say I was directly invovled. I was onsite yesterday, and did'nt get home until very late. Only having to do paperwork today, I decided not to set my alarm (I work from home).
What surprised me was the constant chimes from my computer all morning from IMs being sent, while at the same time the conspicious lack of chimes from my outlook giving me email. Somewhere around 9am PST I decided to roll over and investigate. Dozens of messages from freinds asking 'do you belive this' and 'oh my God' littered my desktop.
When I finally woke up, I sent a message back to one of my closer freinds asking what was up. 'Turn on the TV', she replied. What I saw horrified me. I paniced, and immediatly dialed my sister in LA, waking her up. She had no idea what was going on either, until I filled her in.
I finally told everyone I needed a few minutes to collect my thoughts. I live very close to the flight path of Sky Harbor airport, and as I left the apartment towards the store to pick up some caffene to put my head on streight, I noticed a conspicious lack of air traffic. It was almost eerie.
The clerk at the circle K was frantically telling everyone to 'buy gas now' before it was all gone, and I got a sick feeling in my stoumach. The worst was not over; nothing the terrorists could do to us will be as bad as what we do to ourselves. I realized for the time being anyone with Arab extent was screwed in this country, and would be blamed and persicuted for quite some time.
This feeling was compounded as I got back home and saw messages from freinds advocating 'Lets get drunk and beat up an A-Rab'. I walked to to the local bar for lunch, hearing all too often 'kill those fucking rag heads'. In the bathroom there was scratched into the wall 'Arabs go home'.
And while this all made me a bit sad, nothing disturbed me more then the feeling in the late afternoon of absolute anger. Seeing the anti-US dancing in the street, reading news bits from various mid-east nations feeling proud of the attack... it made me angry, and, for a while, made me want blood.
It's a terrible feature of human nature that we can so easily substitute sadness over something horrid like this with revenge. I watched Kabul being bombed and secretly hoped we were kicking the shit out of the bastards who did this, and that feeling made me feel a little bit better, if only for a while.
I fear the real outcome of this incident will be that we find ourselves to be nothing more then knee-jerk reactionaries. Don't get me wrong, I still want those responsible to pay for this, but I hope to dear God that we do things right, don't compromise our principals of justice, and can feel justified when it's all over that we did the right thing.
"Hey buddie, I'm really messed up. Can you give me a ride home?"
"No way dude, all that booze on your breath will set off my car breathilizer thingie and I'll be a cop magnet"
"What do you care? You're not drunk. The cop will just let you go"
"...but I'm so high"
Everytime the entertainment industry fights a new medium and looses, they prosper and we prosper. Cassete tapes, VCRs, CD-burners....
Everytime the entertainment industry fights a new medium and wins, they loose out and we loose out. Screwy DAT copy protection ruined the format for consumer use, or AM radio as an example. They can either chose not to particpate or try to fight it in court. Either way, when they get their way, they get hurt.
(Funny how much money they were making on VCR tape sales/rentals even before copy-protection was used).
No matter what, consumers will always go to the theatres. They will always go to rock shows and buy physical recordings.
Stations pay a flat fee depending on type of broadcast/range and (supposedly) the artists are compinsated indirectly via the service.
There are some Internet streaming services that have already made blanket agreements with these copywrite repositories, so it's best to read the fine print.
There are execptions, of course (for example, many of the readers here). But why would your average end user want to have to learn two (or more) seperate OSes?
At best, out of the box multi-OS machines could satisfy a small niche market of hobbyists and power users, and I'm sure somewhere those would make up a large enough marketshare to support a couple of vendors.
But me, personally, I'll keep BSD on my machine I made for BSD, and my Windows on my machine taylored for windows.
With this kind of logic, does this mean I can ask for a tax refund from the department of transportation because people keep ramming my car?
Now anyone can get in and read all the porn ads I get in my hotmail inbox.
The only real revolution here is that experts will no longer be identified by education or experience, but instead their ability to market themselves; to find a way for people to look at what they have to say.
The technology implied in this article are not auto-gyros, but personal flying craft that can literaly 'take off from your drive way'. Now, if they can actually make these craft is another story altogether, but for the sake of the point, I was assuming they can.
The real issue at hand has to do with the way air traffic is handled. The technology implicit with this kind of craft assumes a greated degree of control that a triditional aircraft does not have. Using your figure of 160 knots for a stall speed (and you don't want run jets in a controled envrionment right at stall speed), there is very little margin for error. (Imagine if cars would blow up if they travled less then 182 miles per hour unless they performed a carefully orchistrated manuvers in special areas). Hence the need for a very advanced air traffic control system manned by experienced, trained professionals.
Now, take away the required for speed to stay aloft. Take away all the special areas to land, and suddenly you can be far more flexible with how you control things in the air.
Buisness does'nt see why they should respond to consumer demand unless they can control exactly what the consumer gets.
But this technology thows that out the window. If we can get a personal vehicle to cheaply take off vertically and reach high crusing speeds, most likely, we can do it with a large commerical/passenger vehicle. If a 400 passenger literal 'air bus' can land in a city block in your down town, shoot up to 30,000 feet and and then reach speeds close to our current airliners, I doubt the triditional airports (and aircraft) will see much business.
If we ever get this sort of thing to ever actually work, it's not too unreasonable that in a few years conventional air traffic control will be a thing of the past. While we may not get total automation to prevent people from running into each other, it should be pretty easy to install a GPS in these things with pre-programed 'rules' that govern the piloting style (ie, you are above a city. You can not drop below 3,000 feet unless your hortizontal speed is at zero).
Of course, just because things CAN be done this way, does'nt mean they should.
I think that's how the new Windows XP works, sans the 'secure location' part.
It was a demented pre-occupation of myself and a close group of freinds to go to various stores (like sears or radio shack... espically radio shack) and modify the autoexec.bat file to display the prompt to read 'fuck the duck'.
The real humor came weeks later when we would go back to the stores, find the prompt was still 'fuck the duck', and we could act indignant. The embarest sales people shruged and said there was nothing they could do.
If this is true, the why do so many dang people read slashdot? I've never seen an ad for it, I don't find it a particularly well designed as a website, and they sure as heck are'nt paying me. It certianly has'nt 'homogonized' and generally stays close to it's intial purpose.
In the 'information economy', ultimatly, the only thing that will keep peoples attention is quality. The net is different from things like television or gas insofar as the resources needed to produce and distribute information are so small. Nobody has to get stuck with an information provider that caters to the lowest common demoninator.
And how do people find out where the good stuff is? In the end, word of mouth. A freind told me about Slashdot. I discover most of the websites I visit through word of mouth, or through 'portal' sites like Fark.
And after a while, when we no longer have time to search out the best information, we will search out the best places that tell us where the information is ... and nobody will have to pay us.
Your future looks good... but does that mean at the present time you are aspiring to become a competant campus security guard?
Anything?
That's a pretty bold and all inclusive statement. I'll expect him at my door soon to help satisfy my..er, needs.
Don't keep logs. Don't run any port scanner detection software. Don't restrict any ports on your machine. Don't run TCPdump.
Don't look for anything out of the ordinary. Run NT, and if anything goes wrong and the boss asks, blame it on Microsoft.
Don't let your users download anything. Make them save all their files to a floppy. Burn a CD with a good hdd image and make them re-install everything once a week.
Don't read security updates, don't bother running virus scan programs. Force all of your users e-mails to run through you first. Complain that you don't have enough time to monitor everything and make them hire you an assistant. Make your assistant run to the store to buy you beer.
Trust me. This works.
The part that got me was in the first few minutes: We can design a robot that loves, but can people love him back. That's what the film was all about. More specifically, we can make a movie about a robot that loves, but will the audience love him?
You've got to give kudos to the filmakers here. David was robot. He is irrational, he does'nt follow logic, and ultimatly, he NEVER strays from his programming. All he cares about is getting his mother's love (even at the expense of her). But it still makes him loveable.
I hated the plot holes. I hated the fact that any rational person watching this film has to, at least a few times, go 'uh... what?' with the way the characters interact. But, I still like the movie.
On a side note, Man, the 'supertoy' Teddy was the coolest sci-fi side kick in years. If only George Lucas would watch this and give us the personalities of Teddy instead of JarJar, I'd be in heaven.
There are a couple of issues: Unlike the colonization of North America, there is, as far as we know, no indiginous life that exists in space. Suprisingly, this makes things a bit more complicated, because we are not going to be bound by any humainly directed decisions based on the atrocities of past conquests.
Which means we can grab real estate in space with impunity. If history guides us here, chances are who is first, who claims it first will mean nothing (heck, there are people on Earth now selling land on the moon!).
My guess is, when we figure out a reason to make space valuable (weather it be minerals, military.. who knows), the people who will end up with it will be the people who can win in the courts and ultimatly, on the battlefield.
And chances are, yes, we will end up governments on other bodies (the moon, for example) who will want their independance. It's going to be exciting.
The answer to the second question is is probably no. But this needs to be qualified. The assumption is you want to be able to display your art in a mesume, have art critics poke and fawn over it, and hopefully take it seriously. That's not going to happen. Computer art is'nt a new genre that we are going to have to wait decades for the art world to catch up with--because computer generated art is'nt so much a new genre, it's a new medium.
Computer generated art is a different medium in the same way that music, books, or movies are different mediums for art. And, like these other mediums, it will be eventually be delt with on it's own merets. A lot of this has to do with the distribution: A book will never hang in a mesume because, as a general rule, any copy of the book holds the same artistic value as the orginal manuscript. A movie is a medium desiged exclusivly to be projected on a screen, the experience only varied by the quality of the technology displaying it. Music can only be enjoyed in the first person as a performance art only once, as it is different each time it's performed, or as a replication of that performance (in an audio recording). We are faced with a few questions about the distribution and experience with computer generated art, because it is so new, the prefered methods of distribution have'nt been determined.
Triditional 'art' is static, and for the most part, rare. And so a world has grown around it to try to explain it, display it, and criticize it. So, if your asking if computer art is going to be a part of that world, the answer is no. But neither will films, music, or lititature, because the expression of that art is so different, and as a consiquence, entirly different worlds have grown around them.
Nobody is expecting triditional art critics to begin pontificating on the artistic merit of film. We should'nt expect them to start doing the same for computer generated art; in fact, we should'nt want them to. If we ever want computer generated art to be taken seriously, we have to allow a world to grow around it on it's own terms. Cowtowing to the old school is a search for acceptance that will never come, and threatens to limit your artistic freedom by placing yourself into a strict set of rules and triditions.
Which brings us to the first question, will it ever be considered a fine art? I think almost certianly yes. In the same way lititature, music, or film is. But in the world of higher education, the mistake will be made to try to lump computer generated art in with triditional art (painting and sculpture) because at first view, that's what it seems to most closley resemble.
It will take some time, but I see eventually universitys having seperate departments in their college of fine arts for computer/electronically generated art, just as they have seperate departments for film, writing, or music. And yes, it will be taken seriously.
You: I can't reach my favorate site:
ISP: Ok, can you reach other sites?
You: Yes, but I can't reach this one. It must be your fault.
ISP: Well, what site are you trying to reach?
You: Slashdot. It's never down. It always works
ISP: I can't seem to reach it from here either. My guess is it's down.
You: No, it's your fault. I want to see my slashdot.
ISP: Let me do some tests. No, I'm sorry, that sight is down.
You: You are lying to me!! Just like AOL did. Your ISP sucks! I want a refund.
ISP: Well, you can reach every other site, right?
You: Yes.
ISP: Then most likely, the problem is with the website.
You: *explitive deleted* I want you supervisor.
ISP: Fine.
No.. and that's just it. I don't want one provider of e-mail, or news. I want hundreds. And I don't want to live in a world where the assumption is the guys who provide your bandwidth are the ones who provide your services.
Also, I can't say that I mind it when people use bandwidth to exchange media. Far be it from me to decide what is worth while and what is not. But, I sure as heck don't want to pay for servers (news servers, in this case) if I'm not a part of it.