"Somehow I feel that Linus' viewpoint would be slightly different than the average web reporter reviewing MacOS X. There's a big difference between educated users and Uber-developers/Kernel hackers."
Linus doesn't have any deeper insight on this than any semi-informed correspondent. Almost every review has pointed out these problems, by noting that "Classic" apps don't take advantage of OS X's "advanced features", such as protected memory and pre-emptive multi-tasking.
"Also, I'm sure the reviewers have mentioned lack of support for CD/DVD stuff... That's what this article infers is being affected by the memory protection."
That is not what the article implies, although it does seems to be what you inferred. The lack of support for DVD playback has nothing to do with memory protection. It has to do with development time: there wasn't enough. There is no technical reason why OS X cannot support DVD playback and CD burning, these are just features which weren't added in time for the March 24th launch date.
"That vicious assault of yours, when you laced into a satiric piece on the IRA *was* quite the classic. When I downvoted it and saw how low the rep was, a more-than-mild feeling of pity arose."
Um, I can only conclude that you've got mixed up somewhere along the line, for the following reasons:
I've never had a negative rep on a node about the IRA
I've yet to see a "satiric" piece about the IRA on E2
If you can show that I have ever written anything that could be described as a "vicious assault", I will be very surprised.
I'm not sure if you're trying to say that I wrote a satiric piece on the IRA, or that I "assaulted" such a piece. Either way, I have no idea what you're talking about. Anything I've written about the IRA on E2 is still available, so I would be obliged if you could point out the one you're talking about.
If you like,/msg ryano on E2 and we can discuss this further.
This is a genuinely funny hoax, but you should know that it is as almost as old as Slashdot itself. I first came across it in 1998, and I notice that the page hasn't been updated since October of that year.
On the general topic of April Fools stories, I suggest in future years you take a cue from the mainstream media, and just embed one carefully chosen hoax amongst a slew of actual news.
"It's pretty easy to pump out the same generic humor BS that will get upvoted- what's hard is writing something in disagreement with most E2 noders' beliefs. Such as something pro-Christianity, pro-life, anti-drugs, pro-Bush, etc."
I don't think this is an E2-specific problem. Weak, bland humour certainly does get upvoted, but this is because in general, it's non-controversial. Personally, I despise lame writeups of this type, but I feel I'm in the minority. Political nodes, on the other hand, are almost certain to draw downvotes from people who disagree with your stance. This does not only apply to the political stance you describe. I have had many nodes expressing my "liberal" European views downvoted into oblivion. Try writing a node which advocates gun control and, although there are many users who will agree with you, you will swiftly attract the downvotes of those who don't.
In the time I've been with E2, the political wind has blown in various different directions. Users have stormed out because they feel their Conservative views are unpopular, and other users have done the same because they felt Conservatives won't give them a hearing, but I don't feel there has been a consistent bias overall.
In any case, the trick is to remain above all this, and just contribute.
As you will probably detect from his comment, DMan was not the most conciliatory of writers. Many people felt that his incendiary writings were poisoning the atmosphere on E2. I'll leave you to judge this for yourself by reading the above comment, and his E2 writeups, 930 of which remain.
All I will say is that I've never before seen such consistent use of the "You started it" defence!
I think this would be an interesting question to round off the interview:
In recent months, we've heard a number of Microsoft executives giving off mixed signals about various issues: for example, you guys can't seem to agree whether Linux is a threat or not. Some might say that this shows that MS is not as paranoid about its press relations as is, say, Apple, but personally I get the impression that the views expressed may have been tailored towards their respective audiences.
With this in mind, can I ask:
In what way do you feel your answers to the questions so far have reflected the fact that Slashdotters are the target audience?
Were you able to submit these answers without reference to other units or senior management?
"<body bgcolor="..." > is deprecated in HTML 4 and later, as it is a presentational attribute and should be implemented in CSS instead."
That's as maybe, but this page uses neither HTML nor CSS to specify a background colour. The white background on the image, however, suggests that the designers were not allowing for the fact that many users may have a default background colour other than white.
There are well-designed sites which don't override your default stylesheet, and which still manage to look acceptable against different background colours, but this isn't one of them. The only example I can think of right now is Yahoo!, but there are a number of guidelines a web designer can follow to create a background-independent site, such as using transparent gifs without anti-aliasing, or using contrasting borders around images (the page under discussion would not have looked broken against a grey background if the image had a one-pixel black border).
Check out this page for the full range of Macs that will run OS X.
It goes back as far as the original "Bondi Blue" iMac and the first G3 desktops. My fruity 333Mhz iMac will just need a RAM upgrade, which it sorely needed anyhow.
"If you have a vested interest in the well being of your dot-com, are you going to organize an antagonistic force within it?"
It is a mistake to see unions of employees as necessarily antagonistic to the well-being of the company. Sensible unions look out for the well-being of their members, which means they have a vested interest in keeping the businesses which employ them healthy, and indeed the industry sector generally.
The well-being of a company is not synonymous with the well-being of its management. What unions in the tech industry could do is essentially ensure a fairer distribution of the company's success between management and staff.
It's worth noting that in the case of the Cobalt Group the antagonistic note is being struck by management: I read this as a fairly thinly veiled threat.
Don't joke about it. Here in Ireland, one of the most likely effects of global warming will be the diversion of the Gulf Stream - the warm air current which provides us with the temperate climate we enjoy here on the Western edge of Europe. If this current is disrupted, we will no longer be shielded from the extremes of low temperature experienced by areas on the same latitude, such as Newfoundland. The global increase in temperature will be more than offset by savage wintry conditions.
The only question is: will this happen before or after the island sinks beneath the waves of all that polar ice meltwater?
"I know some people will cry about Chernobyl, but that incident really just goes to show you the drawbacks of communism, not nuclear power."
That's not really a fair statement. Certainly the Russian communist system seems to have bred the kind of incompetence and laziness that led to Chernobyl, but you would be naive to think that these traits don't exist in spades under capitalism. Corporate culture is some ways similar to communism, in that it provides individuals all sorts of ways of abdicating personal responsibility.
I do agree that nuclear research should be pursued as an important counter-measure to global warming, but the problems with nuclear power generation are not limited to the potential for catastrophes such as Chernobyl. Modern reactor designs may be theoretically safer, but the process still produces (to my mind) an unacceptably large amount of toxic waste.
Well, I suppose it depends on how you interpret that. Everything I've read about this so far indicates that the new version will be Carbon. "Written specifically for OS X" does not necessarily mean developed in Cocoa.
This article at MacWeek seems pretty confident that what will be released is a Carbonised version of Office.
"From what I've heard IE for OS X is actually the same IE that runs on OS whateverbeforeX but it runs in OS X's emulator."
Not so. The IE (beta) that comes with OS X Public Beta is a native OS X application and is not run through the "Classic" Mac OS emulator. It is a "carbonised" application, which means that the code has been made compliant with the Carbon API, a cleaned-up version of the Mac OS 9 API. Carbon applications run natively on both OS X and OS 9, and they take on the interface behaviour of the host OS.
The current shipping version of IE would run without modifications through OS X's "Classic" environment, but would not be able to take advantage of any of the modern OS features intoduced in OS X. Carbon allows developers to take advantage of these features without submitting their application to a complete re-write. However, a good deal of code-cleaning is required, and my guess is that Microsoft still have a ways to go before IE is as stable as an OS X application should be.
Makes you wonder how other preOS X apps will run.
They should all run fine via Classic, but performance will be no better than on OS 9. If the applications are carbonised, you should notice significant gains in terms of stability and probably performance.
A Mac OS X version of Office doesn't really make versions for other Unices more likely. The version Microsoft will release in Autumn will be OS X native, but via the Carbon API. For those of you who haven't been keeping up, Carbon is a new version of the "Classic" Mac OS API and MS will not have to rewrite Office from scratch in order to make it OS X native.
So the chances of MS releasing Office for Unix remain slim, unless Carbon becomes available on other Unices. I would say that the chances of this are even slimmer.
However, perhaps there is a project I'm not aware of to implement the Carbon API on Unix? It strikes me as a prohibitively complex task.
"..when you select something with a single click, the far right pane displays a larger icon of that program/picture/folder &tc's icon there. This icon is double clickable as well. If for example
instead of IE it was QIII that was selected, the icon would merely be the QIII icon."
This is the "preview" feature of the new finder. Selecting an application icon will just give you a larger view of the icon (up to 128 x 128, I believe), but selecting a document can give you a preview of the document's contents. This means selecting a JPEG will show you a thumbnail of the image, while if you select a Quicktime movie it will actually play the movie for you in the preview pane.
I feel that Everything is approaching maturity, and as such the more active editorial presence is perhaps inevitable. There is a lot more quality content now than there was a year ago, but perhaps a corresponding increase in the amount of dross.
I also feel that the "pruning" is essential: consider what the place would be like if every flamebait, rambling writeup were allowed to stand. If anything, I feel that editorial control is exercised too laxly: most writeups which are deleted are short, inane ones. The real problem in my opinion is the longer inane ones. However, as these superficially seem to contain a lot of much-needed content, they are less likely, it seems to me, to be deleted.
However, Saige is right to say that it can be intimidating for newbies. More needs to be done to handhold new users and shield them from the righteous anger of more established users.
"I would love to see someone else do something with the Everything software, it seems like it has a lot of potential uses."
Everything2 is not the only site using the Everything code: check out The Everything Development Company for a list of examples. None of these are at the same stage of maturity as E2, most are pretty experimental.
More money is being thrown at this game than most, so let's hope that they can afford to replace the thirteen year-old boy who seems to have written the storyline and script to MGS 1.
I love the gameplay of MGS, but the whole thing for me was spoiled by the lame attempt at creating a "cinematic" experience. After succeeding in solving some puzzle, or defeating a Boss, you are "rewarded" with endless minutes of dull exposition. There is about 8 hours of top-notch gameplay, padded out with what seems like 3 days of cut scenes and dialogue.
I'm all in favour of bringing games to a new level, especially now that the technology exists to create the sort of realism which was not previously possible. If games are to become more cinematic, however, more attention will have to be paid to the writing. I think mant games developers believe that just having things like a storyline, characters and dialogue adds another level to their game. My feeling is that if you're not going to do these things right, don't do them at all.
"According to the essay 'The Singularity' by Vernor Vinge, the creation of an intelligent computer would spawn a moment of infinitely rapid technological progress, as each generation designs the next."
Well, I haven't read that essay, but it sounds like a pretty facile thesis. Why does an "intelligent" computer necessarily possess the ability to improve upon its own design? How is it guaranteed that the next generation will in turn be able to improve on its own more complex design?
"Humans would quickly become redundant in such a scenario, insofar as they would no longer have anything to contribute to the progress of our culture. The machines would inherit the Earth."
This is similar to other arguments which assume that intelligent machines, unlike humans, would be entirely self-sufficient. Surely these machines would continue to live within an ecosystem of some sort. Even if they were more intelligent than us, who's to say that interaction wouldn't continue.
Anyway, it sounds like an interesting sci-fi tale, but it's hardly a dire warning of future catastrophe. By the time we've created computers of that intelligence, we'll probably be long overdue for extinction from poisoning of our own habitat.
Don't bother - The Observer was suckered
on
Son of HAL For Sale
·
· Score: 1
In this case The Observer (normally my favourite Sunday newspaper) was suckered by fairly transparent PR hyperbole. The only salient fact contained in the article is that it the machine is endorsed by Arthur C. Clarke. It is painfully obvious that the journalist does not have even the basic technical know-how you would need to cut through the PR spin and realise that phrases such as "verging on Artificial Intelligence" are meaningless. I could make the same claim about a Furby.
I don't know where this character learned his journalism, but he has left potentially the most interesting part of his story at the bottom of his inverted pyramid. Apparently the businessman behind this widget:
"claims he was being harrassed [by MI5 and the National Criminal Intelligence Service] because an advanced new encryption programme he devised would make itdifficult for the security services to snoop on emails.
"A statement from Clarke's office this weekend said that the launch of the Omniputer would be put on hold until the legal issues have been resolved."
Anyway, does anybody see a mass market for a device to "address issues of consciousness"?
It's interesting to note that for some reason Ireland has the most Playstation One consoles per capita than any country other than Japan. For this reason the Irish allocation was relatively generous, but still totally inadequate.
"people aren't starving or suffering from malnutrition because food isn't constructed properly, they're starving because not enough people care to do anything about it. Don't blame the food, blame society."
Amen to that. I don't know whether GM foods are a Good Thing or not, but the I do know that they are not the solution to world hunger. Any company which attempts to promote them as such is engaging in propaganda.
The fact is that despite our best efforts to despoil the environment, the world still produces enough food to feed everybody. What's more, the food we produce contains all of the nutrients and vitamins we need, and does not need to be improved. The problem of world hunger occurs because food is not distributed globally according to need, but is subject to the constraints of capitalism and various other political and economic systems.
In Europe, for example, we produce massive surpluses of food which never reach our supermarket shelves, not to mention the food wasted through overconsumption. However, we have so much at stake in capitalism that redistributing this food according to need is considered anathema.
Okay, by now you may think that I'm engaging in propaganda myself. That's fine, I'm not going to try and change your mind about capitalism. But if you go along with the idea that this GM product could save lives, be honest with yourself: this product is not the only way of saving lives, it merely offer a possible way of doing so while preserving the economic system we love so much.
Slashdot Mirror
"Somehow I feel that Linus' viewpoint would be slightly different than the average web reporter reviewing MacOS X. There's a big difference between educated users and Uber-developers/Kernel hackers."
Linus doesn't have any deeper insight on this than any semi-informed correspondent. Almost every review has pointed out these problems, by noting that "Classic" apps don't take advantage of OS X's "advanced features", such as protected memory and pre-emptive multi-tasking.
"Also, I'm sure the reviewers have mentioned lack of support for CD/DVD stuff... That's what this article infers is being affected by the memory protection."
That is not what the article implies, although it does seems to be what you inferred. The lack of support for DVD playback has nothing to do with memory protection. It has to do with development time: there wasn't enough. There is no technical reason why OS X cannot support DVD playback and CD burning, these are just features which weren't added in time for the March 24th launch date.
"That vicious assault of yours, when you laced into a satiric piece on the IRA *was* quite the classic. When I downvoted it and saw how low the rep was, a more-than-mild feeling of pity arose."
Um, I can only conclude that you've got mixed up somewhere along the line, for the following reasons:
I'm not sure if you're trying to say that I wrote a satiric piece on the IRA, or that I "assaulted" such a piece. Either way, I have no idea what you're talking about. Anything I've written about the IRA on E2 is still available, so I would be obliged if you could point out the one you're talking about.
If you like, /msg ryano on E2 and we can discuss this further.
This is a genuinely funny hoax, but you should know that it is as almost as old as Slashdot itself. I first came across it in 1998, and I notice that the page hasn't been updated since October of that year.
On the general topic of April Fools stories, I suggest in future years you take a cue from the mainstream media, and just embed one carefully chosen hoax amongst a slew of actual news.
"It's pretty easy to pump out the same generic humor BS that will get upvoted- what's hard is writing something in disagreement with most E2 noders' beliefs. Such as something pro-Christianity, pro-life, anti-drugs, pro-Bush, etc."
I don't think this is an E2-specific problem. Weak, bland humour certainly does get upvoted, but this is because in general, it's non-controversial. Personally, I despise lame writeups of this type, but I feel I'm in the minority. Political nodes, on the other hand, are almost certain to draw downvotes from people who disagree with your stance. This does not only apply to the political stance you describe. I have had many nodes expressing my "liberal" European views downvoted into oblivion. Try writing a node which advocates gun control and, although there are many users who will agree with you, you will swiftly attract the downvotes of those who don't.
In the time I've been with E2, the political wind has blown in various different directions. Users have stormed out because they feel their Conservative views are unpopular, and other users have done the same because they felt Conservatives won't give them a hearing, but I don't feel there has been a consistent bias overall.
In any case, the trick is to remain above all this, and just contribute.
Presuming the author of the above comment is who I think he is, you can read about this whole sorry affair at http://everything2.com/index.pl?node=DMan
As you will probably detect from his comment, DMan was not the most conciliatory of writers. Many people felt that his incendiary writings were poisoning the atmosphere on E2. I'll leave you to judge this for yourself by reading the above comment, and his E2 writeups, 930 of which remain.
All I will say is that I've never before seen such consistent use of the "You started it" defence!
I think this would be an interesting question to round off the interview:
In recent months, we've heard a number of Microsoft executives giving off mixed signals about various issues: for example, you guys can't seem to agree whether Linux is a threat or not. Some might say that this shows that MS is not as paranoid about its press relations as is, say, Apple, but personally I get the impression that the views expressed may have been tailored towards their respective audiences.
With this in mind, can I ask:
"<body bgcolor="..." > is deprecated in HTML 4 and later, as it is a presentational attribute and should be implemented in CSS instead."
That's as maybe, but this page uses neither HTML nor CSS to specify a background colour. The white background on the image, however, suggests that the designers were not allowing for the fact that many users may have a default background colour other than white.
There are well-designed sites which don't override your default stylesheet, and which still manage to look acceptable against different background colours, but this isn't one of them. The only example I can think of right now is Yahoo!, but there are a number of guidelines a web designer can follow to create a background-independent site, such as using transparent gifs without anti-aliasing, or using contrasting borders around images (the page under discussion would not have looked broken against a grey background if the image had a one-pixel black border).
Check out this page for the full range of Macs that will run OS X.
It goes back as far as the original "Bondi Blue" iMac and the first G3 desktops. My fruity 333Mhz iMac will just need a RAM upgrade, which it sorely needed anyhow.
"Sadly, doesn't work in Netscape though."
Nor does it work in MSIE on the Mac, apparently.
They should have used the all-time classic Onion headline:
"If you have a vested interest in the well being of your dot-com, are you going to organize an antagonistic force within it?"
It is a mistake to see unions of employees as necessarily antagonistic to the well-being of the company. Sensible unions look out for the well-being of their members, which means they have a vested interest in keeping the businesses which employ them healthy, and indeed the industry sector generally.
The well-being of a company is not synonymous with the well-being of its management. What unions in the tech industry could do is essentially ensure a fairer distribution of the company's success between management and staff.
It's worth noting that in the case of the Cobalt Group the antagonistic note is being struck by management: I read this as a fairly thinly veiled threat.
"I say the Ice Age is coming."
Don't joke about it. Here in Ireland, one of the most likely effects of global warming will be the diversion of the Gulf Stream - the warm air current which provides us with the temperate climate we enjoy here on the Western edge of Europe. If this current is disrupted, we will no longer be shielded from the extremes of low temperature experienced by areas on the same latitude, such as Newfoundland. The global increase in temperature will be more than offset by savage wintry conditions.
The only question is: will this happen before or after the island sinks beneath the waves of all that polar ice meltwater?
"I know some people will cry about Chernobyl, but that incident really just goes to show you the drawbacks of communism, not nuclear power."
That's not really a fair statement. Certainly the Russian communist system seems to have bred the kind of incompetence and laziness that led to Chernobyl, but you would be naive to think that these traits don't exist in spades under capitalism. Corporate culture is some ways similar to communism, in that it provides individuals all sorts of ways of abdicating personal responsibility.
I do agree that nuclear research should be pursued as an important counter-measure to global warming, but the problems with nuclear power generation are not limited to the potential for catastrophes such as Chernobyl. Modern reactor designs may be theoretically safer, but the process still produces (to my mind) an unacceptably large amount of toxic waste.
Well, I suppose it depends on how you interpret that. Everything I've read about this so far indicates that the new version will be Carbon. "Written specifically for OS X" does not necessarily mean developed in Cocoa.
This article at MacWeek seems pretty confident that what will be released is a Carbonised version of Office.
"From what I've heard IE for OS X is actually the same IE that runs on OS whateverbeforeX but it runs in OS X's emulator."
Not so. The IE (beta) that comes with OS X Public Beta is a native OS X application and is not run through the "Classic" Mac OS emulator. It is a "carbonised" application, which means that the code has been made compliant with the Carbon API, a cleaned-up version of the Mac OS 9 API. Carbon applications run natively on both OS X and OS 9, and they take on the interface behaviour of the host OS.
The current shipping version of IE would run without modifications through OS X's "Classic" environment, but would not be able to take advantage of any of the modern OS features intoduced in OS X. Carbon allows developers to take advantage of these features without submitting their application to a complete re-write. However, a good deal of code-cleaning is required, and my guess is that Microsoft still have a ways to go before IE is as stable as an OS X application should be.
Makes you wonder how other preOS X apps will run.
They should all run fine via Classic, but performance will be no better than on OS 9. If the applications are carbonised, you should notice significant gains in terms of stability and probably performance.
What's more, these UI changes are discussed in much greater detail at Wincent.org
This is a hands-on review of the build which was demonstrated at MacWorld. Some of the key points are:
Plus lots of other stuff.
A Mac OS X version of Office doesn't really make versions for other Unices more likely. The version Microsoft will release in Autumn will be OS X native, but via the Carbon API. For those of you who haven't been keeping up, Carbon is a new version of the "Classic" Mac OS API and MS will not have to rewrite Office from scratch in order to make it OS X native.
So the chances of MS releasing Office for Unix remain slim, unless Carbon becomes available on other Unices. I would say that the chances of this are even slimmer.
However, perhaps there is a project I'm not aware of to implement the Carbon API on Unix? It strikes me as a prohibitively complex task.
"..when you select something with a single click, the far right pane displays a larger icon of that program/picture/folder &tc's icon there. This icon is double clickable as well. If for example instead of IE it was QIII that was selected, the icon would merely be the QIII icon."
This is the "preview" feature of the new finder. Selecting an application icon will just give you a larger view of the icon (up to 128 x 128, I believe), but selecting a document can give you a preview of the document's contents. This means selecting a JPEG will show you a thumbnail of the image, while if you select a Quicktime movie it will actually play the movie for you in the preview pane.
I feel that Everything is approaching maturity, and as such the more active editorial presence is perhaps inevitable. There is a lot more quality content now than there was a year ago, but perhaps a corresponding increase in the amount of dross.
I also feel that the "pruning" is essential: consider what the place would be like if every flamebait, rambling writeup were allowed to stand. If anything, I feel that editorial control is exercised too laxly: most writeups which are deleted are short, inane ones. The real problem in my opinion is the longer inane ones. However, as these superficially seem to contain a lot of much-needed content, they are less likely, it seems to me, to be deleted.
However, Saige is right to say that it can be intimidating for newbies. More needs to be done to handhold new users and shield them from the righteous anger of more established users.
"I would love to see someone else do something with the Everything software, it seems like it has a lot of potential uses."
Everything2 is not the only site using the Everything code: check out The Everything Development Company for a list of examples. None of these are at the same stage of maturity as E2, most are pretty experimental.
More money is being thrown at this game than most, so let's hope that they can afford to replace the thirteen year-old boy who seems to have written the storyline and script to MGS 1.
I love the gameplay of MGS, but the whole thing for me was spoiled by the lame attempt at creating a "cinematic" experience. After succeeding in solving some puzzle, or defeating a Boss, you are "rewarded" with endless minutes of dull exposition. There is about 8 hours of top-notch gameplay, padded out with what seems like 3 days of cut scenes and dialogue.
I'm all in favour of bringing games to a new level, especially now that the technology exists to create the sort of realism which was not previously possible. If games are to become more cinematic, however, more attention will have to be paid to the writing. I think mant games developers believe that just having things like a storyline, characters and dialogue adds another level to their game. My feeling is that if you're not going to do these things right, don't do them at all.
"OS X has the first functional man pages I've seen in my life (that is, they aren't written in geek speak for coders)"
Um, aren't practically all of them more or less the same man pages we know and love from other Unices? The Perl one you mention definitely is.
In any case, you can read them all here: http://www.osxfaq.com/man/
"According to the essay 'The Singularity' by Vernor Vinge, the creation of an intelligent computer would spawn a moment of infinitely rapid technological progress, as each generation designs the next."
Well, I haven't read that essay, but it sounds like a pretty facile thesis. Why does an "intelligent" computer necessarily possess the ability to improve upon its own design? How is it guaranteed that the next generation will in turn be able to improve on its own more complex design?
"Humans would quickly become redundant in such a scenario, insofar as they would no longer have anything to contribute to the progress of our culture. The machines would inherit the Earth."
This is similar to other arguments which assume that intelligent machines, unlike humans, would be entirely self-sufficient. Surely these machines would continue to live within an ecosystem of some sort. Even if they were more intelligent than us, who's to say that interaction wouldn't continue.
Anyway, it sounds like an interesting sci-fi tale, but it's hardly a dire warning of future catastrophe. By the time we've created computers of that intelligence, we'll probably be long overdue for extinction from poisoning of our own habitat.
In this case The Observer (normally my favourite Sunday newspaper) was suckered by fairly transparent PR hyperbole. The only salient fact contained in the article is that it the machine is endorsed by Arthur C. Clarke. It is painfully obvious that the journalist does not have even the basic technical know-how you would need to cut through the PR spin and realise that phrases such as "verging on Artificial Intelligence" are meaningless. I could make the same claim about a Furby.
I don't know where this character learned his journalism, but he has left potentially the most interesting part of his story at the bottom of his inverted pyramid. Apparently the businessman behind this widget:
"claims he was being harrassed [by MI5 and the National Criminal Intelligence Service] because an advanced new encryption programme he devised would make itdifficult for the security services to snoop on emails.
"A statement from Clarke's office this weekend said that the launch of the Omniputer would be put on hold until the legal issues have been resolved."
Anyway, does anybody see a mass market for a device to "address issues of consciousness"?
Here are a couple of articles from The Irish Times about the demand for the PS2 in Ireland:
Some buyers consoled as Sony game arrives
PlayStation2 demand wipes out national supply
It's interesting to note that for some reason Ireland has the most Playstation One consoles per capita than any country other than Japan. For this reason the Irish allocation was relatively generous, but still totally inadequate.
"people aren't starving or suffering from malnutrition because food isn't constructed properly, they're starving because not enough people care to do anything about it. Don't blame the food, blame society."
Amen to that. I don't know whether GM foods are a Good Thing or not, but the I do know that they are not the solution to world hunger. Any company which attempts to promote them as such is engaging in propaganda.
The fact is that despite our best efforts to despoil the environment, the world still produces enough food to feed everybody. What's more, the food we produce contains all of the nutrients and vitamins we need, and does not need to be improved. The problem of world hunger occurs because food is not distributed globally according to need, but is subject to the constraints of capitalism and various other political and economic systems.
In Europe, for example, we produce massive surpluses of food which never reach our supermarket shelves, not to mention the food wasted through overconsumption. However, we have so much at stake in capitalism that redistributing this food according to need is considered anathema.
Okay, by now you may think that I'm engaging in propaganda myself. That's fine, I'm not going to try and change your mind about capitalism. But if you go along with the idea that this GM product could save lives, be honest with yourself: this product is not the only way of saving lives, it merely offer a possible way of doing so while preserving the economic system we love so much.