I'm afraid they have a history of problems with this SINGLE EXPLETIVE ALONE...Cartoon Network was going to air a hilarious underground hit cartoon called Rejected, and cancelled at the last minute (literally about 15 min before the show aired!) because it contained the words "Sweet Jesus!" and the artist wouldn't submit to censorship.
Apparently it's okay to say Jesus, just as long as you don't imply that he is sweet, or nice, or anything else complimentary.
So, I'm said to say it, but "Holy Benevolent Old-Lady-Helping Christ" is right out.
+1 Funny, baby. Good work. It's a shame the well-formatted one is buried under the munged one. If I hadn't lost my ENTIRE previous batch of mod points to weekend inattentiveness, I'd give you my vote.
The difference is that your old 486 landscape generator used voxel terrain. Voxels are a great way to fool the eye into thinking its looking at a detailed, textured solid surface -- but they stink if you want to interact with the terrain, or rotate the camera, or do pretty much anything other than pan around.
Compare this to Soul Ride, which uses an implementation of ROAM (rigorously optimized adaptive mesh). While it isn't quite cutting-edge anymore--the original ROAM paper was written a few years back--no other published game that I know of has used it yet.
ROAM allows arbitrarily detailed terrain. It represents the terrain as a quadtree -- a space which is subdivided into four parts, each of which is subdivided into four parts, etc ad infinitum -- and by intelligently collapsing and expanding quadtree nodes based on the distance from the viewer to the terrain.
For you, this means that the hillock in front of your nose will look perfectly smooth, and the jagged peak in the background will also look perfectly smooth, and each of them will only use as many polygons as it needs to maintain the appearance of smoothness. That translates to a vastly improved framerate for you, and better memory usage to boot.
We have voluntary donation boxes on our tax returns for campaign advertising contributions. If we can afford to pay for some podunk House member's bid for another term, then we can certainly afford to pay for our space program.
Let me get this straight: new 802.11 equipment (typical output: 1 watt) is going to shut the hell up whenever it detects military radar transmsisions (typical output: 1 kilowatt).
What the hell for? Wouldn't radar signals squelch the hell out of any wi-fi carrier around? Even if wi-fi did manage to interfere with military radar, how can you confuse a weak, intermittent signal (wi-fi is spread-spectrum, remember) with a radar return?
Of course, as for the newly-created vulnerability of wireless access points to radar noise...I'm sure that homeland security (and other unsavory types) would *never* use this feature irresponsibly....say, in order to disrupt a potential terrorist's communications.
I'm equally sure that no enterprising young hacker out there with some basic RF skills would *ever* produce a wi-fi jamming device that mimicked the signature of military radar, but with much less amplification.
I read The State of the Art awhile back, but was never able to reconcile its message -- that the Culture is happening right now, out in the galaxy -- with the way Banks sometimes vaguely implies that humans had a role in the Culture's founding. I'd be interested in reading this latter short story, where the Culture decides to contact us. Can you recall its name?
Having read his entire Mars trilogy, his Antarctic novel, and two short story collections, I must say the guy's better than most -- but he has some very real problems.
To borrow a phrase from Greg Bear, Robinson's characters frequently exist in kataspace: no action, and all interaction. It's not uncommon for an entire chapter to pass without any event occuring other than detached, philosophical discussion of whatever the current situation is in the story.
Robinson has the capacity for telling a very human story, but the narrative sometimes becomes so mired in ponderous intellectual humdrum, that I become bored and put the book down.
MODS AND READERS: Please note that this comment is a duplicate -- the original appears somewhere below, and was posted without formatting because of a slip of the mouse. In that state it was unreadable, so I had no choice but to repost. (When, oh when, will we be able to edit our posts?)
Despite his wacky first name (just say "Ian"), Banks is really worth a try. He isn't originally a sci-fi author by trade; his first book (The Wasp Factory) was a contemporary novel, but we've seen some of his very best work since he started writing his Culture series of novels. And Iain Banks, even at his worst, is better with prose and with ideas than many sci-fi authors at their best.
His primary science fiction offering is a series of novels set in the distant future (perhaps 10,000 years from now), chronicling the adventures of humanity's descendents. The Culture is a vast interstellar civilization, a pseudo-anarchic meritocracy comprised of dozens of humanoid and nonhumanoid races -- it's unclear whether homo sapiens were founding members of the Culture, or if they joined the Culture sometime after its development, or even if they exist at all. Members of the Culture are referred to as "human" throughout the books, but Banks follows the panspermia hypothesis, so many of his races share the same basic biochemical and physiological traits.
The Culture has spread to perhaps 10,000 systems, filling space with planets, starships and Orbitals -- immense, ringworld-like structures that house as many as 100 billion people. In all, the population of the Culture is probably around 500 trillion (that's 5.0x10^14) souls. Of these, a sizeable fraction are plain old biological humans, and the rest of them are digitized people, Minds, or group minds.
The lifespan of a human is somewhere from 200 to 500 years; Culture citizens, the result of thousands of years of genetic tinkering, could conceivably extend their lives indefinitely. But human existence is seen as a sort of gestation period, and after a few hundred years of life, most biologicals get bored and euthanize. After death, they are converted into electronic form and continue to pursue an active and vigorous life in the collective virtual reality that forms the real meat-and-bones of the Culture.
Many of the Culture's most powerful citizens are Minds, vast, artificially-created intelligent constructs with dozens or hundreds of threads of consciousness. Typically, any structure or vehicle larger than a personal transport is inhabited by a Mind.
The Mind doesn't merely control the machine, the Mind is the machine, able to interact with the physical world using its "body" which is the ship, or house, or city, or Orbital, or whatever. Of course, a Mind could also be simultaneously inhabiting a dozen different android "avatars," manifesting itself as a holograph in front of an audience, and corresponding with other Minds in a virtual reality.
OK, all this is well and good -- but what can you expect from a Banks novel?
No strife. Material wealth is meaningless when resources are unlimited. In the Culture, social reputation counts more than money. There is no standard form of money; rather, Minds operate factories in every habitat to provide (quite extensive) basic goods and services for free, and luxuries are traded through the social network.
No death. People (and other entities) die in Banks novels, but this is the exception rather than the rule. Despite the fact that nobody is ever in any danger, and would just end up being restored from backup if he were to die, there is still plenty of suspense in a Banks novel -- I can't describe it; you'll just have to read and find out for yourself.
Fantastic combat. Banks has a magnificent style when it comes to combat, both space- and ground-based. He runs the whole gamut, from exotic antimatter weapons and computer metaviruses, to simple bladed combat and projectile weapons.
Intensely cerebral discourse. Because so many of Banks' characters are hyper-intelligent Minds, you'll often find a few paragraphs of calm discussion between Minds in the middle of an intense combat sequence.
Great human characters. Whenever Banks introduces a character, you come to care about the person, his likes and dislikes, his motivations -- even if he's only a minor character. Banks' characters really come alive like no other.
Despite his wacky first name (just say "Ian"), Banks is really worth a try. He isn't originally a sci-fi author by trade; his first book (The Wasp Factory) was a contemporary novel, but we've seen some of his very best work since he started writing his Culture series of novels. And Iain Banks, even at his worst, is better with prose and with ideas than many sci-fi authors at their best.
His primary science fiction offering is a series of novels set in the distant future (perhaps 10,000 years from now), chronicling the adventures of humanity's descendents. The Culture is a vast interstellar civilization, a pseudo-anarchic meritocracy comprised of dozens of humanoid and nonhumanoid races -- it's unclear whether homo sapiens were founding members of the Culture, or if they joined the Culture sometime after its development, or even if they exist at all. Members of the Culture are referred to as "human" throughout the books, but Banks follows the panspermia hypothesis, so many of his races share the same basic biochemical and physiological traits.
The Culture has spread to perhaps 10,000 systems, filling space with planets, starships and Orbitals -- immense, ringworld-like structures that house as many as 100 billion people. In all, the population of the Culture is probably around 500 trillion (that's 5.0x10^14) souls. Of these, a sizeable fraction are plain old biological humans, and the rest of them are digitized people, Minds, or group minds.
The lifespan of a human is somewhere from 200 to 500 years; Culture citizens, the result of thousands of years of genetic tinkering, could conceivably extend their lives indefinitely. But human existence is seen as a sort of gestation period, and after a few hundred years of life, most biologicals get bored and euthanize. After death, they are converted into electronic form and continue to pursue an active and vigorous life in the collective virtual reality that forms the real meat-and-bones of the Culture.
Many of the Culture's most powerful citizens are Minds, vast, artificially-created intelligent constructs with dozens or hundreds of threads of consciousness. Typically, any structure or vehicle larger than a personal transport is inhabited by a Mind.
The Mind doesn't merely control the machine, the Mind is the machine, able to interact with the physical world using its "body" which is the ship, or house, or city, or Orbital, or whatever. Of course, a Mind could also be simultaneously inhabiting a dozen different android "avatars," manifesting itself as a holograph in front of an audience, and corresponding with other Minds in a virtual reality.
OK, all this is well and good -- but what can you expect from a Banks novel?
No strife. Material wealth is meaningless when resources are unlimited. In the Culture, social reputation counts more than money. There is no standard form of money; rather, Minds operate factories in every habitat to provide (quite extensive) basic goods and services for free, and luxuries are traded through the social network.
No death. People (and other entities) die in Banks novels, but this is the exception rather than the rule. Despite the fact that nobody is ever in any danger, and would just end up being restored from backup if he were to die, there is still plenty of suspense in a Banks novel -- I can't describe it; you'll just have to read and find out for yourself.
Fantastic combat. Banks has a magnificent style when it comes to combat, both space- and ground-based. He runs the whole gamut, from exotic antimatter weapons and computer metaviruses, to simple bladed combat and projectile weapons.
Intensely cerebral discourse. Because so many of Banks' characters are hyper-intelligent Minds, you'll often find a few paragraphs of calm discussion between Minds in the middle of an intense combat sequence.
Great human characters. Whenever Banks introduces a character, you come to care about the person, his likes and dislikes, his motivations -- even if he's only a minor character. Banks' characters really come alive like no other.
You've covered the easy case. If the display flicks to furlongs/fortnight, you just need to remember the simple and easy conversion factor, 16.4 coulomb-liters per cubic hectare.
If the dashboard speed display switches to km/h from mph, you'll likely end up getting a ticket for going vastly *under* speed.
Nitpicking aside, if you could show criminal negligence on the part of the (car manufacturer|music publisher|software company), then you could still bring a suit against them regardless of any contract between you and them, or between them and another.
You cannot waive your right to sue for negligence.
Anyone want to submit a joint patent application for the hotograph? With a snazzy name like that, I bet we could sneak a real whizbanger past the patent inspectors. "Device and Method for Producing Intense Gonadal Discomfort" or something like that.
Few people know it, but the PS2 is only backward-compatible with the PS1 due to a happy accident. As I understand it, the PS2 uses a PS1 CPU for its I/O and sound processing. When you pop a PS1 game into the system, the PS2 BIOS switches control of all the peripherals over to the PS1 CPU and busies itself emulating the PS1 graphics subsystem.
With the radical changes inherent in a cell design (as nebulously defined as the term is right now), I can't see how they could pull off the same trick twice. In theory, if they managed to do a full software emulation of PS2, they'd get free PS1 support.
With the introduction of premium channels and analog signal scrambling, cable TV providers began to mandate the use of set-top boxes. Although the "CATV ready" moniker was a step in the right direction, the new set-tops changed that. While one could still theoretically run a BNC cable directly into his TV, he wouldn't be able to receive premium programming without a box. So he plugged in the box. Thus, his TV became stuck on Channel 3 forever, and he needed a separate remote control for his set-top.
Digital cable only made the problem an order of magnitude worse, because now there is a plausible reason for providers to *absolutely require* a set-top box, for any kind of cable television viewing. Once again, they are projecting their authority into your domain.
Originally you paid for video signals coming into your house through a wire. You were free to watch, record or timeshift the signals as you pleased.
Then came cable boxes. You still paid for the signals, but you were at the mercy of this little black box, which they controlled. It was okay though -- because you still had a signal coming out; you had the marginal freedom of doing what you wanted with the CATV signal.
What they're proposing now is that you buy a new TV, which accepts an encrypted HDTV signal and displays the contents, but obeys the restrictions they place on the viewing, recording and re-use of the contents. Now, your TV itself is their domain.
OK, let's see if I got this right. The pact promises to:
1) Standardize digital cable TV reception in TV sets so as to eliminate set-top boxes -- meaning that your TV will, after 30 years of cable TV imprisonment, finally regain the ability to CHANGE THE DAMNED CHANNEL. Thanks, guys, but I would rather've seen you do this in 1980, when you first forced me to use your stupid boxes.
2) Mandate that any set-top box with two output connectors (analog and digital), support output to both connectors. Because there are dozens of manufacturers out there just begging to sell boxes with connectors that don't do anything. Thank you, cable TV industry, for protecting us from these monsters!
3) Place severe restrictions on the programming you can record, after putting the cable 'box' inside the TV, giving you no chance to intercept the video signal. Of course, I'm sure that cable HDTV hardware built into the TV will obey the same copying restrictions as the set-tops. Voila! Uncopyable television. It's a DRM wet dream -- total control of your viewing experience!
Thank you, oh benevolent HDTV overlords, for blessing us with thy loving oversight!
Re:"Moral" problems are often the commenter's
on
Google vs. Evil
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
A discussion of porn and society wouldn't be complete without mention of Japan.
Japanese porn is plentiful, sold almost anywhere magazines are sold. It's also quite pervereted by Western standards. Themes of violence against women, nonconsenting sex with school girls, and domination are quite common. It's perfectly acceptable to read rape-themed manga (comic books) on the subway.
Yet, across the board, crime rates in Japan are much lower than in America.
"Moral" problems are often the commenter's
on
Google vs. Evil
·
· Score: 2
Porn does not cause direct harm to the watcher's body; you can't kill yourself from an overdose of porn; porn depicts a natural human behavior that has healthful side effects; porn can save troubled relationships and bring friends closer.
Now, compare this to the list of pros and cons for cigarettes. Or alcohol.
Clearly, porn is not evil. You may find it distasteful, but there is a huge difference between distasteful and evil.
That's how I feel: buy 'em cheap and make the most out of 'em, because there'll be something fundamentally better within 18 months anyway.
For awhile, the modem was the most frequently updated disposable peripheral; it seemed I found myself buying a faster modem every year. Of course, the hardware didn't always live up to the hype and noisy phone lines usually knocked your speed back down to 28.8 no matter how fast your modem.
I don't quite follow. Wouldn't even-numbered ones be the new cards to buy? Give everyone else a chance to mess with the bleeding edge when they come out with a GeForce 5 or 7, and then snap up a technology-perfected GeForce 6 or 8 for half the price of the original 5 (or 7) series, with more features, more memory and many small improvements.
I've done this for the GeForce series up until now, sticking with my Riva TNT until GeForce 2 came out and then keeping my GF2 until I could afford a Radeon 9000 (which is a GF4 equivalent). I've always been happy with my affordable, yet cheap graphics performance (my last three cards have been less than $100 apiece).
OK, so it's not open source's fault that Microsoft are information-bigots who won't open their standards or permit people to write third-party filesystem drivers.
Whoever said the world was fair?
Regardless of who's to blame, if Linux had decent NTFS write support, or even if it had a stable NTFS read-only driver, I would find myself booting into Linux much more of the time.
Until such time as we get full NTFS support for Linux (or full ext2 support for NT/2000/XP), FAT32 must play the role of Switzerland in the filesystem world, hosting shared data and apps.
And guess what: FAT32 just don't cut the mustard anymore. It's got a ridiculously small maximum partition size, weird file size restrictions, bad fragmentation problems...if the real Switzerland were this buggy, they would've all frozen to death long ago.
I find myself still using Windows on the desktop primarily because of hardware incompatabilities.
Yeah, yeah, I know, kernel 2.4 has support for every device and its brother. But listen:
Until recently, I had a very quirky system setup. I had 2 SCSI hard drives hanging off an old Adaptec ultrawide controller, and an ATA100 hard drive hooked up to one of my motherboard's built-in IDE channels. My motherboard's BIOS didn't support the IDE drive (too large) and there was no BIOS update available, so booting from IDE was out of the question.
LILO never has, and probably never will, boot off the SCSI drives. As far back as I can remember, from the day I first got SCSI drives, LILO would hang after printing "LI" with no further error messages.
I've tried installing four separate distros on probably a dozen occasions; I've installed onto fresh, unpartitioned hard drives and made sure I have a small boot partition well under the 1024-cylinder limit. I've put LILO on primary and secondary partitions, had a brief flirtation with GRUB--the only thing ever to work was a boot floppy, and I'll be damned if I'm going to leave a floppy in the drive just so I can boot.
Now, recently I bit the bullet and bought a new motherboard and brand-spanking-new ATA6 compatible IDE drive. I'm thrilled with its performance, which far surpasses my measly old ultrawide SCSI drives. Now I've got a modern BIOS and IDE-only drives, there's no reason that LILO shouldn't work.
But consider: my new motherboard has onboard 6-channel audio and an onboard Ethernet adapter, neither of which are supported in the latest Redhat release. I have an old Turtle Beach audio card which would be a suitable replacement for the onboard sound, but I strongly suspect I won't find any mixers with support for four-channel audio.
I'm not even going to think about support for my Radeon 9000-based video card. I'm sure there's an X server that'll support it, but it seems a shame to let its awesome 3D capabilities lie fallow. And even if I can get Mesa or another OpenGL workalike to support it, there are few 3D apps available for Linux. I'd need to keep a Windows install around for games, or look into WineX.
Now consider my schedule: I work a 40-55 hour work week and participate in a number of sports and recreational activities outside of work. I typically have less than four hours of discretionary time available in the evening; into these four hours I have to pack: dinner, TV, household chores, and whatever else needs to be done. Some evenings, it's all I can do just to scan Slashdot for late-breaking headlines!
With my schedule, why on earth would I want to spend two weeks of valuable evenings to install a new OS, simply so I could then fetch a Linux build of Mozilla and continue using it where I left off using Mozilla under Windows? It's sheer madness.
I hold Linux close to my heart; I use it in all of my servers and all of my clients' servers. I wouldn't be able to get through the workday without GNU utilities. But, at least for the time being, the overhead of switching to a Linux desktop is simply too great.
"Look, someone's leaked the new Harry Potter movie onto the Internet! Geeze, being as how I'm such a tremendous fan, I think I'll download it."
(days pass, as the movie is slowly and painfully downloaded, in pieces, from any number of p2p networks)
"Boy, the movie was awesome, but the pirated copy sucked ass! The picture was lopped off at the edges, someone didn't adjust the camcorder and the colors were washed out, the dialog was basically incomprehensible, and people kept standing up and blocking the screen."
"I'm SUCH a huge Harry Potter fan, but since I've already seen the crappy camcorder rip, I guess I don't need to spend $8 to go see the movie anymore. And I certainly don't need to drop $30 on the DVD, nosir. 'Cause the noisy, incomplete DivX-encoded version was enough for me. Come to think of it, perhaps I'll stop buying Harry Potter merchandise as well."
I'm not going to argue that it's *right* to distribute copyrighted works over the Internet. But you cannot by any means claim that Chamber of Secrets being leaked is somehow going to cut into the movie's box office gross. At best, the camcorder rip or the telesync (which is what they call it when they pipe the sound in from a theater-supplied hearing aid) is a pale imitation of the real cinema experience. People who were going to see the movie in the first place, won't be satisfied.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm afraid they have a history of problems with this SINGLE EXPLETIVE ALONE...Cartoon Network was going to air a hilarious underground hit cartoon called Rejected, and cancelled at the last minute (literally about 15 min before the show aired!) because it contained the words "Sweet Jesus!" and the artist wouldn't submit to censorship.
Apparently it's okay to say Jesus, just as long as you don't imply that he is sweet, or nice, or anything else complimentary.
So, I'm said to say it, but "Holy Benevolent Old-Lady-Helping Christ" is right out.
+1 Funny, baby. Good work. It's a shame the well-formatted one is buried under the munged one. If I hadn't lost my ENTIRE previous batch of mod points to weekend inattentiveness, I'd give you my vote.
The difference is that your old 486 landscape generator used voxel terrain. Voxels are a great way to fool the eye into thinking its looking at a detailed, textured solid surface -- but they stink if you want to interact with the terrain, or rotate the camera, or do pretty much anything other than pan around.
Compare this to Soul Ride, which uses an implementation of ROAM (rigorously optimized adaptive mesh). While it isn't quite cutting-edge anymore--the original ROAM paper was written a few years back--no other published game that I know of has used it yet.
ROAM allows arbitrarily detailed terrain. It represents the terrain as a quadtree -- a space which is subdivided into four parts, each of which is subdivided into four parts, etc ad infinitum -- and by intelligently collapsing and expanding quadtree nodes based on the distance from the viewer to the terrain.
For you, this means that the hillock in front of your nose will look perfectly smooth, and the jagged peak in the background will also look perfectly smooth, and each of them will only use as many polygons as it needs to maintain the appearance of smoothness. That translates to a vastly improved framerate for you, and better memory usage to boot.
We have voluntary donation boxes on our tax returns for campaign advertising contributions. If we can afford to pay for some podunk House member's bid for another term, then we can certainly afford to pay for our space program.
Let me get this straight: new 802.11 equipment (typical output: 1 watt) is going to shut the hell up whenever it detects military radar transmsisions (typical output: 1 kilowatt).
What the hell for? Wouldn't radar signals squelch the hell out of any wi-fi carrier around? Even if wi-fi did manage to interfere with military radar, how can you confuse a weak, intermittent signal (wi-fi is spread-spectrum, remember) with a radar return?
Of course, as for the newly-created vulnerability of wireless access points to radar noise...I'm sure that homeland security (and other unsavory types) would *never* use this feature irresponsibly....say, in order to disrupt a potential terrorist's communications.
I'm equally sure that no enterprising young hacker out there with some basic RF skills would *ever* produce a wi-fi jamming device that mimicked the signature of military radar, but with much less amplification.
Wow...after such a superlative exposition of alternative schlong slang, the only question remaining to be asked is:
Did that qualify as a troll, or flamebait?
Ah, the famous Banks wit.
I wonder what Bowie would sound like, translated into Marain?
I read The State of the Art awhile back, but was never able to reconcile its message -- that the Culture is happening right now, out in the galaxy -- with the way Banks sometimes vaguely implies that humans had a role in the Culture's founding. I'd be interested in reading this latter short story, where the Culture decides to contact us. Can you recall its name?
Having read his entire Mars trilogy, his Antarctic novel, and two short story collections, I must say the guy's better than most -- but he has some very real problems.
To borrow a phrase from Greg Bear, Robinson's characters frequently exist in kataspace: no action, and all interaction. It's not uncommon for an entire chapter to pass without any event occuring other than detached, philosophical discussion of whatever the current situation is in the story.
Robinson has the capacity for telling a very human story, but the narrative sometimes becomes so mired in ponderous intellectual humdrum, that I become bored and put the book down.
MODS AND READERS: Please note that this comment is a duplicate -- the original appears somewhere below, and was posted without formatting because of a slip of the mouse. In that state it was unreadable, so I had no choice but to repost. (When, oh when, will we be able to edit our posts?)
Despite his wacky first name (just say "Ian"), Banks is really worth a try. He isn't originally a sci-fi author by trade; his first book (The Wasp Factory) was a contemporary novel, but we've seen some of his very best work since he started writing his Culture series of novels. And Iain Banks, even at his worst, is better with prose and with ideas than many sci-fi authors at their best.
His primary science fiction offering is a series of novels set in the distant future (perhaps 10,000 years from now), chronicling the adventures of humanity's descendents. The Culture is a vast interstellar civilization, a pseudo-anarchic meritocracy comprised of dozens of humanoid and nonhumanoid races -- it's unclear whether homo sapiens were founding members of the Culture, or if they joined the Culture sometime after its development, or even if they exist at all. Members of the Culture are referred to as "human" throughout the books, but Banks follows the panspermia hypothesis, so many of his races share the same basic biochemical and physiological traits.
The Culture has spread to perhaps 10,000 systems, filling space with planets, starships and Orbitals -- immense, ringworld-like structures that house as many as 100 billion people. In all, the population of the Culture is probably around 500 trillion (that's 5.0x10^14) souls. Of these, a sizeable fraction are plain old biological humans, and the rest of them are digitized people, Minds, or group minds.
The lifespan of a human is somewhere from 200 to 500 years; Culture citizens, the result of thousands of years of genetic tinkering, could conceivably extend their lives indefinitely. But human existence is seen as a sort of gestation period, and after a few hundred years of life, most biologicals get bored and euthanize. After death, they are converted into electronic form and continue to pursue an active and vigorous life in the collective virtual reality that forms the real meat-and-bones of the Culture.
Many of the Culture's most powerful citizens are Minds, vast, artificially-created intelligent constructs with dozens or hundreds of threads of consciousness. Typically, any structure or vehicle larger than a personal transport is inhabited by a Mind.
The Mind doesn't merely control the machine, the Mind is the machine, able to interact with the physical world using its "body" which is the ship, or house, or city, or Orbital, or whatever. Of course, a Mind could also be simultaneously inhabiting a dozen different android "avatars," manifesting itself as a holograph in front of an audience, and corresponding with other Minds in a virtual reality.
OK, all this is well and good -- but what can you expect from a Banks novel?
You've covered the easy case. If the display flicks to furlongs/fortnight, you just need to remember the simple and easy conversion factor, 16.4 coulomb-liters per cubic hectare.
If the dashboard speed display switches to km/h from mph, you'll likely end up getting a ticket for going vastly *under* speed.
Nitpicking aside, if you could show criminal negligence on the part of the (car manufacturer|music publisher|software company), then you could still bring a suit against them regardless of any contract between you and them, or between them and another.
You cannot waive your right to sue for negligence.
Anyone want to submit a joint patent application for the hotograph? With a snazzy name like that, I bet we could sneak a real whizbanger past the patent inspectors. "Device and Method for Producing Intense Gonadal Discomfort" or something like that.
Few people know it, but the PS2 is only backward-compatible with the PS1 due to a happy accident. As I understand it, the PS2 uses a PS1 CPU for its I/O and sound processing. When you pop a PS1 game into the system, the PS2 BIOS switches control of all the peripherals over to the PS1 CPU and busies itself emulating the PS1 graphics subsystem.
With the radical changes inherent in a cell design (as nebulously defined as the term is right now), I can't see how they could pull off the same trick twice. In theory, if they managed to do a full software emulation of PS2, they'd get free PS1 support.
With the introduction of premium channels and analog signal scrambling, cable TV providers began to mandate the use of set-top boxes. Although the "CATV ready" moniker was a step in the right direction, the new set-tops changed that. While one could still theoretically run a BNC cable directly into his TV, he wouldn't be able to receive premium programming without a box. So he plugged in the box. Thus, his TV became stuck on Channel 3 forever, and he needed a separate remote control for his set-top.
Digital cable only made the problem an order of magnitude worse, because now there is a plausible reason for providers to *absolutely require* a set-top box, for any kind of cable television viewing. Once again, they are projecting their authority into your domain.
Originally you paid for video signals coming into your house through a wire. You were free to watch, record or timeshift the signals as you pleased.
Then came cable boxes. You still paid for the signals, but you were at the mercy of this little black box, which they controlled. It was okay though -- because you still had a signal coming out; you had the marginal freedom of doing what you wanted with the CATV signal.
What they're proposing now is that you buy a new TV, which accepts an encrypted HDTV signal and displays the contents, but obeys the restrictions they place on the viewing, recording and re-use of the contents. Now, your TV itself is their domain.
OK, let's see if I got this right. The pact promises to:
1) Standardize digital cable TV reception in TV sets so as to eliminate set-top boxes -- meaning that your TV will, after 30 years of cable TV imprisonment, finally regain the ability to CHANGE THE DAMNED CHANNEL. Thanks, guys, but I would rather've seen you do this in 1980, when you first forced me to use your stupid boxes.
2) Mandate that any set-top box with two output connectors (analog and digital), support output to both connectors. Because there are dozens of manufacturers out there just begging to sell boxes with connectors that don't do anything. Thank you, cable TV industry, for protecting us from these monsters!
3) Place severe restrictions on the programming you can record, after putting the cable 'box' inside the TV, giving you no chance to intercept the video signal. Of course, I'm sure that cable HDTV hardware built into the TV will obey the same copying restrictions as the set-tops. Voila! Uncopyable television. It's a DRM wet dream -- total control of your viewing experience!
Thank you, oh benevolent HDTV overlords, for blessing us with thy loving oversight!
A discussion of porn and society wouldn't be complete without mention of Japan.
Japanese porn is plentiful, sold almost anywhere magazines are sold. It's also quite pervereted by Western standards. Themes of violence against women, nonconsenting sex with school girls, and domination are quite common. It's perfectly acceptable to read rape-themed manga (comic books) on the subway.
Yet, across the board, crime rates in Japan are much lower than in America.
Porn does not cause direct harm to the watcher's body; you can't kill yourself from an overdose of porn; porn depicts a natural human behavior that has healthful side effects; porn can save troubled relationships and bring friends closer.
Now, compare this to the list of pros and cons for cigarettes. Or alcohol.
Clearly, porn is not evil. You may find it distasteful, but there is a huge difference between distasteful and evil.
The way I understand the system, you control the rate of trust decay by assigning weights to each of your friends in the network.
If you trust everyone with weight 1.0 (implicit total trust), then your node will not contribute to decay.
That's how I feel: buy 'em cheap and make the most out of 'em, because there'll be something fundamentally better within 18 months anyway.
For awhile, the modem was the most frequently updated disposable peripheral; it seemed I found myself buying a faster modem every year. Of course, the hardware didn't always live up to the hype and noisy phone lines usually knocked your speed back down to 28.8 no matter how fast your modem.
I don't quite follow. Wouldn't even-numbered ones be the new cards to buy? Give everyone else a chance to mess with the bleeding edge when they come out with a GeForce 5 or 7, and then snap up a technology-perfected GeForce 6 or 8 for half the price of the original 5 (or 7) series, with more features, more memory and many small improvements.
I've done this for the GeForce series up until now, sticking with my Riva TNT until GeForce 2 came out and then keeping my GF2 until I could afford a Radeon 9000 (which is a GF4 equivalent). I've always been happy with my affordable, yet cheap graphics performance (my last three cards have been less than $100 apiece).
OK, so it's not open source's fault that Microsoft are information-bigots who won't open their standards or permit people to write third-party filesystem drivers.
Whoever said the world was fair?
Regardless of who's to blame, if Linux had decent NTFS write support, or even if it had a stable NTFS read-only driver, I would find myself booting into Linux much more of the time.
Until such time as we get full NTFS support for Linux (or full ext2 support for NT/2000/XP), FAT32 must play the role of Switzerland in the filesystem world, hosting shared data and apps.
And guess what: FAT32 just don't cut the mustard anymore. It's got a ridiculously small maximum partition size, weird file size restrictions, bad fragmentation problems...if the real Switzerland were this buggy, they would've all frozen to death long ago.
I find myself still using Windows on the desktop primarily because of hardware incompatabilities.
Yeah, yeah, I know, kernel 2.4 has support for every device and its brother. But listen:
Until recently, I had a very quirky system setup. I had 2 SCSI hard drives hanging off an old Adaptec ultrawide controller, and an ATA100 hard drive hooked up to one of my motherboard's built-in IDE channels. My motherboard's BIOS didn't support the IDE drive (too large) and there was no BIOS update available, so booting from IDE was out of the question.
LILO never has, and probably never will, boot off the SCSI drives. As far back as I can remember, from the day I first got SCSI drives, LILO would hang after printing "LI" with no further error messages.
I've tried installing four separate distros on probably a dozen occasions; I've installed onto fresh, unpartitioned hard drives and made sure I have a small boot partition well under the 1024-cylinder limit. I've put LILO on primary and secondary partitions, had a brief flirtation with GRUB--the only thing ever to work was a boot floppy, and I'll be damned if I'm going to leave a floppy in the drive just so I can boot.
Now, recently I bit the bullet and bought a new motherboard and brand-spanking-new ATA6 compatible IDE drive. I'm thrilled with its performance, which far surpasses my measly old ultrawide SCSI drives. Now I've got a modern BIOS and IDE-only drives, there's no reason that LILO shouldn't work.
But consider: my new motherboard has onboard 6-channel audio and an onboard Ethernet adapter, neither of which are supported in the latest Redhat release. I have an old Turtle Beach audio card which would be a suitable replacement for the onboard sound, but I strongly suspect I won't find any mixers with support for four-channel audio.
I'm not even going to think about support for my Radeon 9000-based video card. I'm sure there's an X server that'll support it, but it seems a shame to let its awesome 3D capabilities lie fallow. And even if I can get Mesa or another OpenGL workalike to support it, there are few 3D apps available for Linux. I'd need to keep a Windows install around for games, or look into WineX.
Now consider my schedule: I work a 40-55 hour work week and participate in a number of sports and recreational activities outside of work. I typically have less than four hours of discretionary time available in the evening; into these four hours I have to pack: dinner, TV, household chores, and whatever else needs to be done. Some evenings, it's all I can do just to scan Slashdot for late-breaking headlines!
With my schedule, why on earth would I want to spend two weeks of valuable evenings to install a new OS, simply so I could then fetch a Linux build of Mozilla and continue using it where I left off using Mozilla under Windows? It's sheer madness.
I hold Linux close to my heart; I use it in all of my servers and all of my clients' servers. I wouldn't be able to get through the workday without GNU utilities. But, at least for the time being, the overhead of switching to a Linux desktop is simply too great.
"Look, someone's leaked the new Harry Potter movie onto the Internet! Geeze, being as how I'm such a tremendous fan, I think I'll download it."
(days pass, as the movie is slowly and painfully downloaded, in pieces, from any number of p2p networks)
"Boy, the movie was awesome, but the pirated copy sucked ass! The picture was lopped off at the edges, someone didn't adjust the camcorder and the colors were washed out, the dialog was basically incomprehensible, and people kept standing up and blocking the screen."
"I'm SUCH a huge Harry Potter fan, but since I've already seen the crappy camcorder rip, I guess I don't need to spend $8 to go see the movie anymore. And I certainly don't need to drop $30 on the DVD, nosir. 'Cause the noisy, incomplete DivX-encoded version was enough for me. Come to think of it, perhaps I'll stop buying Harry Potter merchandise as well."
I'm not going to argue that it's *right* to distribute copyrighted works over the Internet. But you cannot by any means claim that Chamber of Secrets being leaked is somehow going to cut into the movie's box office gross. At best, the camcorder rip or the telesync (which is what they call it when they pipe the sound in from a theater-supplied hearing aid) is a pale imitation of the real cinema experience. People who were going to see the movie in the first place, won't be satisfied.