Oh yes, please do so. The only thing that would make this screwed-up campaign even more fun would be to throw it back into the hands of the courts, just like that wonderful nail-biting excitement of 2000.
Well, I am a southerner and I would *love* to argue with your statement, but, alas, I cannot.
Once, after I started working at a small company, we were on a installation trip, about 10 of us -- developers and salespeople. We had been out drinking the night before, we'd gone through every dirty joke we knew, we were dog-cussing our product and the slow servers that it was running on. In other words, I wasn't with a bunch of preachers or choir boys. One day, at lunch, I was reading a newspaper article about a local school board voting to allow teaching of "creation science" and I commented out loud that there must be a lot of stupid people there.
Dead silence.
Then, all of sudden, *I'm* going to hell because I'm "callin' God a monkey" and I've been brainwashed by the grand atheist conspiracy that denies the truth of the 6,000 year old universe. The whole gang did everything but convene an impromptu prayer meeting to make me see the light and forget my evil ways.
I was stunned. All but one of my coworkers were on the creationist side. Completely creeped me out.
I'm really sorry if my post decended into a mocking tone.
I was raised and still consider myself religious. I do "believe" in micro and macro evolution the same way I "believe" in Newton's laws of motion (in that they are good approximations of physical reality which are subject to future tweaking and refinement).
I do also agree that no one would seriously attempt a scientific test of transubstantiation for any other reason than an attempt to discredit religious thought, I just threw that out as an example.
My remark about the Greg Egan book was fairly serious -- I actually *liked* the idea of the Church of the God That Doesn't Matter (even if it was bit like the current Unitarian church). The idea was that the members believed in God, believed that God created the universe, and that God had a direct influence over their lives, but he does it in such as way as to be indistinguishable from not doing so. Therefore, you could thank God for all of the good things in your life and, at the same time, curse God for your misfortunes. For some reason, I don't have a problem with that:-)
Where we do part company in agreeing is your truck analogy. Long ago on talk.origins, someone presented the same argument about a laptop computer being shown to Leonardo da Vinci or even Ben Franklin. The poster argued that they would clearly think it was magic/created by a supernatural being. On the contrary, no matter how much they might be amazed by it, you could probably give them a rough idea of its "evolution" in a couple of hours. If you told them that it was "magic", I'm sure they would not believe you.
Way back when, I also posted my opinion on the blind watchmaker. Suppose you paid a craftsman to build you a nice pocket watch "from scratch". You watch him cut and polish the glass, measure and create the gears, cast and etch the case, put the whole thing together, etc. As you leave the shop, a gentleman steps out, waves his hands in the air and produces an almost identical watch from thin air. No matter how much you examine the two, you can't find any differences in quality, although a few details may vary. Which watch would you value the most? Which one would you trust? Would you think the man was a magician, or a trickster?
I find the "how" of scientific enquiry very exciting, even when it creates more new questions than it answers. And, while I'm not in the group that says the "why" is always in the realm of religion, I find the "why" interesting as well on a scientific as well as philosophical level. Why did the Big Bang occur? Why are the cosmological constants conducive to the formation of heavy elements, planets, and eventually life (aside from the "because we have a sample set of 1 to compare it against")? What is below the level of quantum mechanics and why does matter and time even exist (see Greg Egan again -- that book gives me serious existential nightmares)? Is human consciousness purely a result of macro-biological processes (suggested reading: The Mind's I)?
To me, all of that is much more interesting than trying to contort facts to convince myself that dinosaurs and man co-existed, that the Grand Canyon was carved by Noah's flood, or that the physical and mental aspects of humanity are directly modeled on the image of God. Why is saying that apes and humans share a common ancestor calling God a monkey, when it is demonstrably true that, genetically and biologically we are so extremely close (and yes, I know, we are also genetically close to cockroaches or whatever the CS and ID people are using for examples these days). If they don't ignore those facts, are these people saying that chimps are 99.7% in the image of God?
I like to think of myself as being extremely open-minded, but skeptical.
There are a lot of tantalizing problems in evolution and I fully expect there will be several Darwin-sized shakeups in the future as new things are discovered, but I don't expect the rabid anti-creationist element to blindly stick to Darwin any more than they did to Lamarck.
Unfortunately, the problems in evolution that the "creation science" and ID crowd keep spouting are, for the most part, ridiculous.
As for being suspicious of scientific "progress" that is contradictory to Christianity, I'm not sure if I can buy that proposition as-is. I am reasonably sure that you can prove scientifically that physical transubstantiation does not take place during communion, for example. That scientific research would be contradictory to certain Christian groups, but to most people, religious or not, it would not invalidate the spiritual aspect of the act.
As I, and many others, have stated repeatedly, my big beef with creation science, ID, young-Earth, etc. is that (a) it is *not* good science, no matter how you look at it, (b) it is based on untestable premises (see (a)), and (c) IMHO, it isn't even good theology.
I think it is poor theology because it comes down to being forced to accept a premise that is contrary to actual, observable facts and experiments. It leads to absurd arguements about whether rabbits chew their cud like cows (the Bible says they do). It means that "good Christians" should either ignore the preponderance of physical evidence such as geological formations, the fossil record, and basic cosmology or accept the idea that either God is testing their faith by apparently deceiving people or that Satan has so much power over the physical universe that he can create fossils and strew the universe with the evidence of a 15+ billion year history to lead people away from the true teachings of the Bible.
Finally, any argument that "God created man through evolution" or "God used the big bang to create the universe and defined the laws that govern it" are valid, but on closer inspection, they are no more valid than the idea that God wouldn't be necessary for the same solution or the "Last Wednesday'ism" idea that, if the universe was created with a built-in history that predates it's creation, it might as well have been created last Wednesday and *all* of human history was implanted on the moment of creation.
Suggested reading: Permutation City by Greg Egan, particularly the parts about the Church of the God That Doesn't Matter.
Oh yeah, the universe was *actually* created just now. Wait, no, just *now*.
I think that I would have to publicly admit that I am a total moron if I were to say that, assuming I understood the technology behind the time machine/viewer to be valid, that I would not believe the results if it showed a white-bearded gentleman forging the earth and all life on it 6,000 years ago.
Detached retinas, appendicitis, cancer, male nipples, and premature balding are all due to Original Sin. If Adam and Eve had obeyed God, we would all have perfect bodies.
This is, of course, intended to be sarcasm (although I have heard a close variation of this exact arguement from fundamentalist acquaintances).
Personally, I love reading articles like this, but I always have the depressing thought that *nothing* researchers can do will change creationist thinking.
If someone were to create a time machine or "past viewer" so we could watch the entire history of the planet at any accelerated rate we wanted and trace the evolution of all life, it might change the mind of 10% of the True Believers. The rest would consider it to be a deceiving tool of Satan.
I would love to see someone continuing and improving on the idea created with that VR tour of Notre Dame. While that building's digital version had a few flaws (and a few 2D objects masquerading as 3D), it was good enough to give me a severe case of deja vu when I visited the real thing in Paris a few years ago.
A couple of weeks before I left, I explored the cathedral thoroughly using that software, then was able to walk directly to different parts of the real cathedral and see what I expected to see. It was kind of a weird feeling, like suddenly finding yourself in a real-world FPS location...
I would love to see detailed simulation models of other locations like that.
On a related, and possibly more ominous, tangent. The Notre Dame experience made me realise that using FPS and VR techniques such as this for military and police training (good guys *or* bad guys) could be very effective. Think about a particularly well known deathmatch level from your favorite FPS shooter game -- if the place were real, could you find your way around it quickly for the "first" time? Would you know where to hide? Be able to pick out good sniper holes?
You don't even need CAVE environments or VR goggles, your brain can do a good job of interpreting the visual clues from a single monitor and building an environment map from it.
Evidently, I haven't been keeping up, so feel free to correct me if I'm wrong (oh yeah, this is Slashdot, so I don't have to ask for that, do I?)
The P2P uses different media (not DVDs) for its games, so while it is code-compatible, it is not media compatible, so if I buy it, I have to buy all new games for it, even though I have a shelf full of PS2 games.
I was under the impression that the DS was 100% compatible with GB/GBA/SP games. I learned reading this that it doesn't support multi-player or GameCube interaction. Even so, if I buy a DS, I can play anything from original GB Tetris to the latest SP releases? Even with just single player, that's good enough for me.
One of the consequences I've seen due to the complications of hiring H1-B's is that often (and in particular the Indian workers) the employee finds it hard to move jobs while working under an H1-B, which means that a savvy (read: unscrupulous) company can corner the market on H1-B workers, pay them less, and make them work long hours on salary. It becomes a kind of indentured servitude -- if they don't like it, good luck finding another company willing to do the paperwork before you get deported.
I am ashamed to admit that I sat through my database classes in college getting my CS degree and thinking, "This is kind of interesting, but I'm not interested in writing software with databases. After all, I'm not going to work for a bank or an insurance company."
Well, no bank or insurance company, but I am writing applications that sit on top of many gigabytes of data. Of course, when I took those courses, people were still arguing over whether relational databases were a good idea and how long it would take before someone implement Codd's rules in a useable product.
Running Virtual PC on MacOS using CherryOS on Windows using VMWare on FreeBSD using Linux binary compatibility. Actually there are several points of recursion possible here...
As much as I agree with your sentiment, if Bill Gates decided to hire someone to fly to Mars, picking up Viking I and bring it back to his mansion to be a lawn ornament, I would cheer him on.
I was hoping there wasn't, but I wasn't sure, particularly since the all of the copies at B&N were shrinkwrapped with a really thick, resiliant shrinkwrap. Odd.
I bought the black copy -- didn't care much for the white.
Probably a safe bet, as I said in another post, its a lot like a Victorian Neil Gaiman novel.
One think the author does extremely well is balancing the fantastic with the ordinary. The way certain aspects of Faerie fade from memory and people are prevented from telling of them by magical compulsions is making it very interesting to me.
I'm about a third of the way through it now, so I can't give a full review, but I am enjoying it greatly. I bought it after reading about it on Neil Gaiman's blog, which is what inspired my elevator pitch for the book (when my wife asked what it was like):
"It's like Jane Austin or Charles Dickens writing a Neil Gaiman book about English magicians."
As others have opined, the style is deliberately (and so far, convincingly) Victorian. Lots of subtle characters who hide their feelings motivations from each other; lots of characters, period (I've almost had to start taking notes when minor characters from Chapter 1 show up 150 pages later); no sex, violence, or profanity (so far, I think, one "D---"); and many footnotes (some which run 80% of the page for 4 pages!).
I haven't looked at Wikipedia for a long time. This weekend, my son was looking up state facts for a series of short essays and my wife was helping him. I checked in on them and found that they were almost exclusively using Wikipedia, so I looked over their shoulder to see how good the info was and I was surprised at how much Wikipedia has grown and matured since I last looked.
These were just short essays about "Why I would like to visit...", so rigorous citations and fact checking weren't that important.
Let's say, for the sake of arguement, that I *am* an intelligent person who understands the nature of Wilipedia and I look up a subject that I know next to nothing about.
I search and find an article that does indeed look like a dozen people contributed separate paragraphs and I decide that some of these people may not know what they are talking about.
So, I read them all, follow some links, and learn enough about the subject to do some separate research. So, Wikipedia has done its job admirably. Finally, if I am a good citizen, I go back and, if necessary, edit the page with any new or corrective information that I encountered and the world is a better place.
It's preferable to searching for something on Google and finding that the first 10 links are crappy autogenerated ad and spyware redirects and half of the other sites are full of misinformation. Google is wonderful, but you can't edit it and make it better if it doesn't return what you want.
I guess your question got answered. The level of evidence I would accept is CBS admitting that they were duped by obvious forgeries, which they now have.
Also, I had asked that someone provide other contemporary Killian memos for comparison, and The Washington Post did just that. Nowhere close.
Re-reading this/. thread has been very illuminating. There would seem to be a lot of crow on the menu for quite a few posters.
Burkett seems to be a member of the tin-foil hat crowd, as well. Hardly a trusted source unless you really, really want to believe what he says.
You know, the best thing I'd heard a reviewer say about this film was, "If you saw the previews and said, 'Wow, I want to see this' you will like it. Otherwise, you'll hate it."
Did the people hating this movie so bad actually expect to like it? Did they see the trailers, go, "that looks cheesy, but maybe the movie will be much better"? Could anyone actually be stupid enough to watch this and accuse it of being a "rip off" of other movies? (BTW, yes they could...)
I saw the trailers and went "Wow, I want to see this". Expected no-plot. Expected silly characters. Expected eye-candy. Expected references and homages(sp?) to old movies and pulp SF. Got it all and actually enjoyed it a bit more than I expected. Particularly once they got to island at the end -- the early trailers showed nothing of that, so it was more of a surprise.
It was a bit slow and it could have really used a good writer. With one or two exceptions, the dialogue was horrible. They tried to get the cadence of 1930's and 1940's films, but they forgot to make the words themselves interesting.
My favorite thing was making a mental list of everything they "ripped off" -- THX-1138, Star Wars, Wizard of Oz, Forbidden Planet, Metropolis, Nick Fury and S.H.I.E.L.D., Fleicher Superman cartoons, King Kong, Land that Time Forgot, When Worlds Collide, Lost Horizon, Raiders of the Lost Ark, old pulp fiction covers. Those were off the top of my head and I'm sure I missed a lot more.
I think the director shows promise. He seems to be an excellent choice for the John Carter movie (assuming they keep it as a period piece) as long as they get him a good screenwriter. I'll watch Sky Captain again and my consider buying it on DVD.
Finally, CGI, while overused to bad effect in films like Van Helsing, has finally given us tools so that anything that can be imagined can be filmed and it will only get better. Sky Captain is, if nothing else, a milestone experimental film. Despite being #1 this weekend, its box-office and word of mouth hasn't been great, so anyone thinking that it was a brainless attempt at making a buck are, I think, missing the point and/or misunderstanding the market a bit.
First of all, I live in a great neighborhood. The only crimes I can remember (other than the neighbors and us setting off illegal fireworks) are simple vandalism (like shaving cream on cars). Granted, not everyone can move or afford to live where they would like, but that *is* the first level of protection -- don't live in bad neighborhood.
As for the rest of the comments, if I lived in a neighborhood where alarm stickers, barking dogs (of any size), motion sensor lights, the racking of a shotgun (with any kind of ammo), and/or the brandishment of any type of weapon isn't going to scare someone off, I would move even if I couldn't afford to.
Many burglaries are done by neighbors or people you know. A friend of mine who lives in a "bad" neighborhood has had his house broken into 2 or 3 times, all by neighborhood kids looking for stuff to sell for drug money. Unless they are drugged out severely at the time, why would they pick the house with the motion sensors, the dog, the possible alarm system, and the NRA sticker on the car when the next door neighbor's house has none of these things?
Well, obviously there is no reason to get furious over it. I don't know for sure, I was just expressing my opinion. I still think that it is suspicious that a first-cut attempt at duplicating the document in Word produces such a close attempt.
I do accept that Word was designed to mimic typewriting and hot-metal type. I do also know that there are hundreds, if not thousands, of different results you can get from different office equipment. I also find it an interesting coincidence that the equipment these letters were purportedly typed on was one that matched Word so closely.
I understand and have read CBS's response and I understand that their entire story was not based on these documents, but it is strongly supported by them. When you are looking at the original documents, it is trivial to decide if they were produced on a typewriter and fairly trivial to accurately determine their age. If CBS wants to CYA (joke intended), they could:
(a) Present the originals for analysis (b) Provide contemporary documents from the same offices and personnel for comparison (c) Find someone who can produce similar (or exact) documents from vintage hardware
Neither of these are very hard to do if everything is on the up-and-up.
Finally, I'm not into left wing or right wing conspiracy theories and I'm also not a right-wing ditto-head. I do not vote along party lines. I voted for Clinton in his first term, Libertarian on his second term (out of protest), for Bush over Gore (even though I originally voted for Clinton *because* of Gore), and I will vote for Bush this time. Not because I think he is that great, but as a lesser of two evils. Neither Kerry, or the rest of the inner-circle of the Democratic Party, has said anything believable about how they will do what they say they will do if elected. Sure, I like what they say some of the time, but I don't believe it. Despite the popularity polls around the world, I think the election of Kerry will be seen by other nations (and yes, by Islamic terrorists) as a sign of capitulation and weakness.
I will accept that the documents are genuine if someone can produce a document on a circa-1972 typewriter that matches nearly as well as the out of the printer Word doc.
My really old typewriter (don't know the brand or anything, it was thrown out long ago), had a subscripted 'th' key that was probably consistent with the 'th' on the monospaced, courier looking typed documents.
Personally, I think the tinfoil hat conspiracists in the this thread are the ones trying to defend the authenticity of the memos. Occam's Razor would seem to indicate forgery:
There is the slight possibility that: someone at the TexANG had a high end typewriter that provided both proportional spacing, superscripted 'th', kerning, and uneven interparagraph spacing. The one person who had this rare (and possibly impossible) machine happened to be the one who typed these 3 or 4 memos over a few month (year?) period. They don't match military style guidelines. No one can produce a matched document using early 1970's technology. No one has produced authentic non-controversial documents from the same offices in the same style and matching typography.
vs.
If you fire up Microsoft Word and type the document with default settings and print it out, it matches about 99%. Combine with faxes, repeated photocopying, and a bit of smudging and the differences amount to noise (and insanely bitter and partisan bickering on Slashdot).
Slashdot Mirror
Oh yes, please do so. The only thing that would make this screwed-up campaign even more fun would be to throw it back into the hands of the courts, just like that wonderful nail-biting excitement of 2000.
Well, I am a southerner and I would *love* to argue with your statement, but, alas, I cannot.
Once, after I started working at a small company, we were on a installation trip, about 10 of us -- developers and salespeople. We had been out drinking the night before, we'd gone through every dirty joke we knew, we were dog-cussing our product and the slow servers that it was running on. In other words, I wasn't with a bunch of preachers or choir boys. One day, at lunch, I was reading a newspaper article about a local school board voting to allow teaching of "creation science" and I commented out loud that there must be a lot of stupid people there.
Dead silence.
Then, all of sudden, *I'm* going to hell because I'm "callin' God a monkey" and I've been brainwashed by the grand atheist conspiracy that denies the truth of the 6,000 year old universe. The whole gang did everything but convene an impromptu prayer meeting to make me see the light and forget my evil ways.
I was stunned. All but one of my coworkers were on the creationist side. Completely creeped me out.
I'm really sorry if my post decended into a mocking tone.
:-)
I was raised and still consider myself religious. I do "believe" in micro and macro evolution the same way I "believe" in Newton's laws of motion (in that they are good approximations of physical reality which are subject to future tweaking and refinement).
I do also agree that no one would seriously attempt a scientific test of transubstantiation for any other reason than an attempt to discredit religious thought, I just threw that out as an example.
My remark about the Greg Egan book was fairly serious -- I actually *liked* the idea of the Church of the God That Doesn't Matter (even if it was bit like the current Unitarian church). The idea was that the members believed in God, believed that God created the universe, and that God had a direct influence over their lives, but he does it in such as way as to be indistinguishable from not doing so. Therefore, you could thank God for all of the good things in your life and, at the same time, curse God for your misfortunes. For some reason, I don't have a problem with that
Where we do part company in agreeing is your truck analogy. Long ago on talk.origins, someone presented the same argument about a laptop computer being shown to Leonardo da Vinci or even Ben Franklin. The poster argued that they would clearly think it was magic/created by a supernatural being. On the contrary, no matter how much they might be amazed by it, you could probably give them a rough idea of its "evolution" in a couple of hours. If you told them that it was "magic", I'm sure they would not believe you.
Way back when, I also posted my opinion on the blind watchmaker. Suppose you paid a craftsman to build you a nice pocket watch "from scratch". You watch him cut and polish the glass, measure and create the gears, cast and etch the case, put the whole thing together, etc. As you leave the shop, a gentleman steps out, waves his hands in the air and produces an almost identical watch from thin air. No matter how much you examine the two, you can't find any differences in quality, although a few details may vary. Which watch would you value the most? Which one would you trust? Would you think the man was a magician, or a trickster?
I find the "how" of scientific enquiry very exciting, even when it creates more new questions than it answers. And, while I'm not in the group that says the "why" is always in the realm of religion, I find the "why" interesting as well on a scientific as well as philosophical level. Why did the Big Bang occur? Why are the cosmological constants conducive to the formation of heavy elements, planets, and eventually life (aside from the "because we have a sample set of 1 to compare it against")? What is below the level of quantum mechanics and why does matter and time even exist (see Greg Egan again -- that book gives me serious existential nightmares)? Is human consciousness purely a result of macro-biological processes (suggested reading: The Mind's I)?
To me, all of that is much more interesting than trying to contort facts to convince myself that dinosaurs and man co-existed, that the Grand Canyon was carved by Noah's flood, or that the physical and mental aspects of humanity are directly modeled on the image of God. Why is saying that apes and humans share a common ancestor calling God a monkey, when it is demonstrably true that, genetically and biologically we are so extremely close (and yes, I know, we are also genetically close to cockroaches or whatever the CS and ID people are using for examples these days). If they don't ignore those facts, are these people saying that chimps are 99.7% in the image of God?
I like to think of myself as being extremely open-minded, but skeptical.
There are a lot of tantalizing problems in evolution and I fully expect there will be several Darwin-sized shakeups in the future as new things are discovered, but I don't expect the rabid anti-creationist element to blindly stick to Darwin any more than they did to Lamarck.
Unfortunately, the problems in evolution that the "creation science" and ID crowd keep spouting are, for the most part, ridiculous.
As for being suspicious of scientific "progress" that is contradictory to Christianity, I'm not sure if I can buy that proposition as-is. I am reasonably sure that you can prove scientifically that physical transubstantiation does not take place during communion, for example. That scientific research would be contradictory to certain Christian groups, but to most people, religious or not, it would not invalidate the spiritual aspect of the act.
As I, and many others, have stated repeatedly, my big beef with creation science, ID, young-Earth, etc. is that (a) it is *not* good science, no matter how you look at it, (b) it is based on untestable premises (see (a)), and (c) IMHO, it isn't even good theology.
I think it is poor theology because it comes down to being forced to accept a premise that is contrary to actual, observable facts and experiments. It leads to absurd arguements about whether rabbits chew their cud like cows (the Bible says they do). It means that "good Christians" should either ignore the preponderance of physical evidence such as geological formations, the fossil record, and basic cosmology or accept the idea that either God is testing their faith by apparently deceiving people or that Satan has so much power over the physical universe that he can create fossils and strew the universe with the evidence of a 15+ billion year history to lead people away from the true teachings of the Bible.
Finally, any argument that "God created man through evolution" or "God used the big bang to create the universe and defined the laws that govern it" are valid, but on closer inspection, they are no more valid than the idea that God wouldn't be necessary for the same solution or the "Last Wednesday'ism" idea that, if the universe was created with a built-in history that predates it's creation, it might as well have been created last Wednesday and *all* of human history was implanted on the moment of creation.
Suggested reading: Permutation City by Greg Egan, particularly the parts about the Church of the God That Doesn't Matter.
Oh yeah, the universe was *actually* created just now. Wait, no, just *now*.
I think that I would have to publicly admit that I am a total moron if I were to say that, assuming I understood the technology behind the time machine/viewer to be valid, that I would not believe the results if it showed a white-bearded gentleman forging the earth and all life on it 6,000 years ago.
Detached retinas, appendicitis, cancer, male nipples, and premature balding are all due to Original Sin. If Adam and Eve had obeyed God, we would all have perfect bodies.
This is, of course, intended to be sarcasm (although I have heard a close variation of this exact arguement from fundamentalist acquaintances).
Personally, I love reading articles like this, but I always have the depressing thought that *nothing* researchers can do will change creationist thinking.
If someone were to create a time machine or "past viewer" so we could watch the entire history of the planet at any accelerated rate we wanted and trace the evolution of all life, it might change the mind of 10% of the True Believers. The rest would consider it to be a deceiving tool of Satan.
If you have been waiting so long for this, you should have spent the time spell-checking your submission.
I would love to see someone continuing and improving on the idea created with that VR tour of Notre Dame. While that building's digital version had a few flaws (and a few 2D objects masquerading as 3D), it was good enough to give me a severe case of deja vu when I visited the real thing in Paris a few years ago.
A couple of weeks before I left, I explored the cathedral thoroughly using that software, then was able to walk directly to different parts of the real cathedral and see what I expected to see. It was kind of a weird feeling, like suddenly finding yourself in a real-world FPS location...
I would love to see detailed simulation models of other locations like that.
On a related, and possibly more ominous, tangent. The Notre Dame experience made me realise that using FPS and VR techniques such as this for military and police training (good guys *or* bad guys) could be very effective. Think about a particularly well known deathmatch level from your favorite FPS shooter game -- if the place were real, could you find your way around it quickly for the "first" time? Would you know where to hide? Be able to pick out good sniper holes?
You don't even need CAVE environments or VR goggles, your brain can do a good job of interpreting the visual clues from a single monitor and building an environment map from it.
Evidently, I haven't been keeping up, so feel free to correct me if I'm wrong (oh yeah, this is Slashdot, so I don't have to ask for that, do I?)
The P2P uses different media (not DVDs) for its games, so while it is code-compatible, it is not media compatible, so if I buy it, I have to buy all new games for it, even though I have a shelf full of PS2 games.
I was under the impression that the DS was 100% compatible with GB/GBA/SP games. I learned reading this that it doesn't support multi-player or GameCube interaction. Even so, if I buy a DS, I can play anything from original GB Tetris to the latest SP releases? Even with just single player, that's good enough for me.
One of the consequences I've seen due to the complications of hiring H1-B's is that often (and in particular the Indian workers) the employee finds it hard to move jobs while working under an H1-B, which means that a savvy (read: unscrupulous) company can corner the market on H1-B workers, pay them less, and make them work long hours on salary. It becomes a kind of indentured servitude -- if they don't like it, good luck finding another company willing to do the paperwork before you get deported.
Aaargh, major college flashback...
I am ashamed to admit that I sat through my database classes in college getting my CS degree and thinking, "This is kind of interesting, but I'm not interested in writing software with databases. After all, I'm not going to work for a bank or an insurance company."
Well, no bank or insurance company, but I am writing applications that sit on top of many gigabytes of data. Of course, when I took those courses, people were still arguing over whether relational databases were a good idea and how long it would take before someone implement Codd's rules in a useable product.
Running Virtual PC on MacOS using CherryOS on Windows using VMWare on FreeBSD using Linux binary compatibility. Actually there are several points of recursion possible here...
As much as I agree with your sentiment, if Bill Gates decided to hire someone to fly to Mars, picking up Viking I and bring it back to his mansion to be a lawn ornament, I would cheer him on.
I was hoping there wasn't, but I wasn't sure, particularly since the all of the copies at B&N were shrinkwrapped with a really thick, resiliant shrinkwrap. Odd.
I bought the black copy -- didn't care much for the white.
Probably a safe bet, as I said in another post, its a lot like a Victorian Neil Gaiman novel.
One think the author does extremely well is balancing the fantastic with the ordinary. The way certain aspects of Faerie fade from memory and people are prevented from telling of them by magical compulsions is making it very interesting to me.
I'm about a third of the way through it now, so I can't give a full review, but I am enjoying it greatly. I bought it after reading about it on Neil Gaiman's blog, which is what inspired my elevator pitch for the book (when my wife asked what it was like):
"It's like Jane Austin or Charles Dickens writing a Neil Gaiman book about English magicians."
As others have opined, the style is deliberately (and so far, convincingly) Victorian. Lots of subtle characters who hide their feelings motivations from each other; lots of characters, period (I've almost had to start taking notes when minor characters from Chapter 1 show up 150 pages later); no sex, violence, or profanity (so far, I think, one "D---"); and many footnotes (some which run 80% of the page for 4 pages!).
I haven't looked at Wikipedia for a long time. This weekend, my son was looking up state facts for a series of short essays and my wife was helping him. I checked in on them and found that they were almost exclusively using Wikipedia, so I looked over their shoulder to see how good the info was and I was surprised at how much Wikipedia has grown and matured since I last looked.
...", so rigorous citations and fact checking weren't that important.
These were just short essays about "Why I would like to visit
Let's say, for the sake of arguement, that I *am* an intelligent person who understands the nature of Wilipedia and I look up a subject that I know next to nothing about.
I search and find an article that does indeed look like a dozen people contributed separate paragraphs and I decide that some of these people may not know what they are talking about.
So, I read them all, follow some links, and learn enough about the subject to do some separate research. So, Wikipedia has done its job admirably. Finally, if I am a good citizen, I go back and, if necessary, edit the page with any new or corrective information that I encountered and the world is a better place.
It's preferable to searching for something on Google and finding that the first 10 links are crappy autogenerated ad and spyware redirects and half of the other sites are full of misinformation. Google is wonderful, but you can't edit it and make it better if it doesn't return what you want.
I guess your question got answered. The level of evidence I would accept is CBS admitting that they were duped by obvious forgeries, which they now have.
/. thread has been very illuminating. There would seem to be a lot of crow on the menu for quite a few posters.
Also, I had asked that someone provide other contemporary Killian memos for comparison, and The Washington Post did just that. Nowhere close.
Re-reading this
Burkett seems to be a member of the tin-foil hat crowd, as well. Hardly a trusted source unless you really, really want to believe what he says.
You know, the best thing I'd heard a reviewer say about this film was, "If you saw the previews and said, 'Wow, I want to see this' you will like it. Otherwise, you'll hate it."
Did the people hating this movie so bad actually expect to like it? Did they see the trailers, go, "that looks cheesy, but maybe the movie will be much better"? Could anyone actually be stupid enough to watch this and accuse it of being a "rip off" of other movies? (BTW, yes they could...)
I saw the trailers and went "Wow, I want to see this". Expected no-plot. Expected silly characters. Expected eye-candy. Expected references and homages(sp?) to old movies and pulp SF. Got it all and actually enjoyed it a bit more than I expected. Particularly once they got to island at the end -- the early trailers showed nothing of that, so it was more of a surprise.
It was a bit slow and it could have really used a good writer. With one or two exceptions, the dialogue was horrible. They tried to get the cadence of 1930's and 1940's films, but they forgot to make the words themselves interesting.
My favorite thing was making a mental list of everything they "ripped off" -- THX-1138, Star Wars, Wizard of Oz, Forbidden Planet, Metropolis, Nick Fury and S.H.I.E.L.D., Fleicher Superman cartoons, King Kong, Land that Time Forgot, When Worlds Collide, Lost Horizon, Raiders of the Lost Ark, old pulp fiction covers. Those were off the top of my head and I'm sure I missed a lot more.
I think the director shows promise. He seems to be an excellent choice for the John Carter movie (assuming they keep it as a period piece) as long as they get him a good screenwriter. I'll watch Sky Captain again and my consider buying it on DVD.
Finally, CGI, while overused to bad effect in films like Van Helsing, has finally given us tools so that anything that can be imagined can be filmed and it will only get better. Sky Captain is, if nothing else, a milestone experimental film. Despite being #1 this weekend, its box-office and word of mouth hasn't been great, so anyone thinking that it was a brainless attempt at making a buck are, I think, missing the point and/or misunderstanding the market a bit.
First of all, I live in a great neighborhood. The only crimes I can remember (other than the neighbors and us setting off illegal fireworks) are simple vandalism (like shaving cream on cars). Granted, not everyone can move or afford to live where they would like, but that *is* the first level of protection -- don't live in bad neighborhood.
As for the rest of the comments, if I lived in a neighborhood where alarm stickers, barking dogs (of any size), motion sensor lights, the racking of a shotgun (with any kind of ammo), and/or the brandishment of any type of weapon isn't going to scare someone off, I would move even if I couldn't afford to.
Many burglaries are done by neighbors or people you know. A friend of mine who lives in a "bad" neighborhood has had his house broken into 2 or 3 times, all by neighborhood kids looking for stuff to sell for drug money. Unless they are drugged out severely at the time, why would they pick the house with the motion sensors, the dog, the possible alarm system, and the NRA sticker on the car when the next door neighbor's house has none of these things?
Well, obviously there is no reason to get furious over it. I don't know for sure, I was just expressing my opinion. I still think that it is suspicious that a first-cut attempt at duplicating the document in Word produces such a close attempt.
I do accept that Word was designed to mimic typewriting and hot-metal type. I do also know that there are hundreds, if not thousands, of different results you can get from different office equipment. I also find it an interesting coincidence that the equipment these letters were purportedly typed on was one that matched Word so closely.
I understand and have read CBS's response and I understand that their entire story was not based on these documents, but it is strongly supported by them. When you are looking at the original documents, it is trivial to decide if they were produced on a typewriter and fairly trivial to accurately determine their age. If CBS wants to CYA (joke intended), they could:
(a) Present the originals for analysis
(b) Provide contemporary documents from the same offices and personnel for comparison
(c) Find someone who can produce similar (or exact) documents from vintage hardware
Neither of these are very hard to do if everything is on the up-and-up.
Finally, I'm not into left wing or right wing conspiracy theories and I'm also not a right-wing ditto-head. I do not vote along party lines. I voted for Clinton in his first term, Libertarian on his second term (out of protest), for Bush over Gore (even though I originally voted for Clinton *because* of Gore), and I will vote for Bush this time. Not because I think he is that great, but as a lesser of two evils. Neither Kerry, or the rest of the inner-circle of the Democratic Party, has said anything believable about how they will do what they say they will do if elected. Sure, I like what they say some of the time, but I don't believe it. Despite the popularity polls around the world, I think the election of Kerry will be seen by other nations (and yes, by Islamic terrorists) as a sign of capitulation and weakness.
I will accept that the documents are genuine if someone can produce a document on a circa-1972 typewriter that matches nearly as well as the out of the printer Word doc.
Anyone?
My really old typewriter (don't know the brand or anything, it was thrown out long ago), had a subscripted 'th' key that was probably consistent with the 'th' on the monospaced, courier looking typed documents.
Personally, I think the tinfoil hat conspiracists in the this thread are the ones trying to defend the authenticity of the memos. Occam's Razor would seem to indicate forgery:
There is the slight possibility that: someone at the TexANG had a high end typewriter that provided both proportional spacing, superscripted 'th', kerning, and uneven interparagraph spacing. The one person who had this rare (and possibly impossible) machine happened to be the one who typed these 3 or 4 memos over a few month (year?) period. They don't match military style guidelines. No one can produce a matched document using early 1970's technology. No one has produced authentic non-controversial documents from the same offices in the same style and matching typography.
vs.
If you fire up Microsoft Word and type the document with default settings and print it out, it matches about 99%. Combine with faxes, repeated photocopying, and a bit of smudging and the differences amount to noise (and insanely bitter and partisan bickering on Slashdot).
Gee, which one is more likely?