Note, this study had a sample size of 100 college students, possibly self selected (selection criteria wasn't readily presented). It's really dubious to make a generalization on that.
Ayttm http://ayttm.sourceforge.net had restored service on Sunday, including a 0.4.2 release that included the new support. I think it was the first of the Open Source clients to make it back on line.
And for other flame bate, it also support GPG encryption of packets over any IM protocol, and is interoperable with Kopete's encryption as well.
I have had DishNetwork for a couple of years because it has better programming than DirectTv (which I had the year before that). I got a Tivo this summer, and have been so happy with it. I actually looked at the DishPVR, but the features that come with the Tivo subscription are really worth it (and there is little to no information on what you get with the DishPVR subscription).
Since the 2.5 update of Tivo, and the addition of variable bit rate encoding, I get about 14 - 16 hours on my "30 hr tivo" at Best quality. I find that any more TV than that and I don't watch it anyway. Also, Tivo is about to beta 4 digit support for those extra 9000 channels that DishNetwork has. I'm psyched to be able to get the Research Channel on Tivo over the next couple of weeks.
Also, now that Echostar (DishNetwork) is trying to buy Hughes (DirectTv) (story here) I am really hoping for DishTivo.
Right before I left my last gig which was generating financial reports in html, I pointed the folks towards the Spreadsheet::WriteExcel module.
The clients had been used to getting Excel formatted reports for years, and many of the reports needed colors. This let them dynamically do all that from a web page, but still have excel to manipulate the data. May not be what you were looking for, but it was pretty neat. Plus the output from WriteExcel looks great in Gnumeric as well.
I got to see a presentation by one of the lead physicists working on RHIC (Relativistic Heavy Ion Colider) 3 or 4 years ago. Follows is as much as I can remember about it and quark gluon plasma (disclaimer: I have been out of the physics community for 2 years now, so some of my quantum may be rusty)
In order to create quark gluon plasma you need a lot of energy. Most colliders work on the principle of getting light ions (like stripped helium atoms) and making them go really fast. RHIC decided that what would be more useful is to take really heavy ions (E = mc^2) and collide them. The will be using stripped gold atoms. (When I say stripped, I mean they got every electron off of them, all 79 of them) The have the two streams going in oppisite directions till they get up to speed, then ram them into each other.
I'm going to butcher anything else I say about this, so go check out this cern page for more info on quark gluon plasma. It has a really cool animation on their main page showing the collision.
When I was first trying to test the web site I was working of for accessibility, I went out and got the IBM HomePage Reader, figured out how the commands worked, then turned off my monitor for the afternoon.
It was a very educational experience, and one that more people should do now and then. You get a better appreciation of what is going on, and you will never leave out alt tags after that.
I am hearing a lot of complaints that making a web site accessible is not easy. IMVHO that is a total cop out. If you use strict HTML 4.0 and CSS 1.0 you will find that your sites:
Look really good in multiple browsers
Load faster cause you don't have silly font tags all over the place
way easier to maintain and modify in the future
CSS is really the ultimate solution to all of this, as it seperates layout and display from content, which is the way it really should be. w3.org highly pushes the use of CSS because of this. (CSS has different media types, so in theory a text or voice browser could request a different style sheet then the one you are going to pass to 4.x or 5.x visual browsers)
Go thee now to w3.org and read the w3 web accessibility guidelines. They aren't that hard, and if you take them into consideration from the start, you will find that making web pages takes way less time. And if nothing else AT LEAST go and get HTML Tidy and let it mangle your HTML back into something that is near standards compliant. If people at least used it, the web would be significantly more multi-browser friendly than it is now. (Note: HTML tidy currently picks up 364 errors/warnings on the slashdot front page.)
P.S. To add a bit of flamebait here, any thoughts about a CSS version of slashdot, as it would be nice to get out of the nested table jail.
For the most part, no one does anything which is not good for themselves. However some people, and some companies even, have a wider and broader view of what is good for themselves other then what will drive up their stock price next quarter, and thankfully Ford seems to have this here.
My guess behind their motives is this. First, it definitely increases company loyalty. In the modern age company loyalty is all but out the window.
Second, it will help make the entire work force technologically more savy. This has two important effects. One is that it makes the current workforce easier to retrain when they upgrade their equipment used internally. The Second is it makes it a more attractive place to work for technology people. By being the first to do such a program, they greatly increase their competitive edge vs. others companies.
Third it gets them a lot of great press. People look at Ford differently 'cause they are doing something which is not blantantly in their self interets.
This is all a very cynical look at things, but I have started reading Heinlein books again so you must forgive me.:)
Ford should be congradulated a lot for taking a holistic view of their best interests, and realizing that further educating the american public in any way, keeping them competitive in any way, so that america continues to lead the world in technology, hence continues to have lots of disposable income, hence can buy high end Ford Explorers and such is in their best interests.
I actually read through much of the court transcripts trying to figure out how the defense didn't manage to prove any of their points. After reading the transcipts, I see why. The defense was often mis-quoting the statutes that they were trying to invoke, did not realize that they were being sued on something that was not defendable under the fair use act, and were late in filing some of their evidence.
Now I know that the movie industry is spending a lot of money on this whole thing vs. a community that has very little money, but can't with all these new linux ipo companies with all this money burning holes in their pockets, I would think they would try to back the DeCSS folks. RedHat is not taking over the desktop if they can't play DVD.
The over use of standardized test scores when it comes to colleges is really a bad thing. When at school I found that a vastly disproportionate number of the best/brightest/most interesting people on campus were actually transfer students. After a little investigation I found out that although the frosh admissions process is more or less just a numbers game, the transfer admissions people actually try to get to know who they are dealing with. Most of the people who transferred in would have been rejected in frosh admissions, but they became some of the most important people in the school community.
I currently have a friend of the family trying to get into my alma mater. She is most likely going to be rejected because her SATs aren't great, however, she would add so much to the school if she got accepted. I guess even universities follow the rule "There is never time to do it right, but there is always time to do it over", which is really a sad fact.
Having many friends who are foreign nationals I have seen first hand to total screwiness which is INS. Many have had to leave the country because their current visas expired before the paperwork could get through to get either new visas or greencards.
Another guy at work has had to go redo his finger prints as they have "expired". How exactly ones finger prints expire I will never know.
I noticed that no one really addressed the other media of sci fi. I'm going to add TV to the list, as I have an afiniti for a couple of shows (some running right now). (I will also warn you in advance that I can't spell worth anything, so all authors names are probably slightly off. I'm sorry for that.)
Books
Caves of Steel & The Naked Sun: Although Foundation has been brought forward (a book/series that I love) Caves of Steel was Asimov's first foray back into fiction after taking a many (~10) year hiatus. You'll notice that all the books writen after Caves of Steal are novels, where all those before are for the most part novellas. Plus he eventually wraps this storyline into foundation.
Stranger in a Strange Land: This is probably my favorite book, period. From my meager readings of Heinlein's life, the character of Jubal Harshaw (my favorite character ever created) is as close to himself as he ever puts in his books. The fact that grok has found it's way into many english dictionaries says something for how influencial this book is.
Dune: Much has been said on this list about this book, so I'll just leave it with the fact that because Herbert wanted to get the precience right and consistant, he wrote the first three books simultaneously. Dune is so strong that the following books don't quite hold up to it, UNTIL Heritics of Dune (Book 5), which I think is as good as Dune itself.
Battle Field Earth: Ok... I know that the second L. Ron Hubbard is brought up, many people turn off their ears. Battle Field Earth has NOTHING to do with Dianetics or any other of the various reasons people don't like Hubbard. It is a really good (really long) stand allone story about a fairly likey outcome with an alien species who was advanced enough to show up here. (IMHO) They are also turning it into a film this spring (the first half actually), and I really dug the trailer for it.
Red Mars: Kim Stanley Robinson writes really good sci fi, in the vain of Auther C. Clark. (i.e. Real science, no faciful explanations of things). The whole series gets you thinking about what it would be like to walk on the surface of Mars, and gets you thinking in Kelvins for tempature. It's a brisk 264 outside right now. If you ever wanted to go to space as a kid, this is really the next best thing
Ender's Game: I finally read this, and it really was as wonderful as everyone said. It makes you start looking at ordinary things in different ways, like what does "down" mean in outer space. Very wonderful, and very good for younger audiences as well, as it tackles the idea that gifted kids are really just grown up minds inside kid bodies.
Movies
2001: This is one of my all time favorite films. Kubrik and Clark really bring this together in a wonderful way. They wrote the book and script simultaneously, but reading the book afterwards is good to get some further explanation to the last 15 minutes.
Forbidden Planet: Ok, so you've got Lessley Neilson as a strapping young space lieutenent, the introduction of Robby the Robot (later to get great fame in Lost in Space), and basically the story of Shakespeare's Tempest done in space. What more can you ask for.
Close Encounter's of the 3rd Kind: Speilberg's first forray into the idea of alien life. This actually is my favorite movie. The original (1977) cut was a better story that the "enhanced" version (1980) cause it keeps you guessing longer. Do these things really exist, or is this guy just going nuts and playing with mashed potatoes. Can't wait for this one on dvd.
Blade Runner: The only problem with this film is that you can't find the original cut anywhere. Once you've seen it once, you'll want to watch the directors cut exclusively after that, but the voice over by Harrison Ford (in the original cut) adds a lot to your understanding of the story.
TV
Star Trek: I know this brings up very strong feelings from lots of people. My feeling is that anything that Roddenbury touched, was wonderful. Star Trek lost its vission (his vission) after his death, though there was enough left to make the final episode of ST:TNG, which was totally brilliant, and a perfect conclusion to the series.
Babylon 5: I love JMS's writing. I am a sucker for good writing, especially when good ideas are also involved. Be afraid of season 5, as it was kinda shoehorned in after they had already adapted the storyline to a 4 year schedule. (Also note: In watching some old tapes of Robotech episodes, I found that JMS wrote many episodes Jason and the Wheeled Wariors, now if I could only find those on tape.:)
Farscape: Sci Fi channel actually funded something good for a change, although when you get Hensen Studios involved it is really hard to go wrong. Very Dr. Who esqe scifi, meaning that you think yourself out of situations, you never shoot yourself out of them. As you have Brian Hensen involved, aliens look like aliens for the most part, and even the whole everyone speaks english deal was dealt with very nicely in the first episode, translator microbes attached to the brainstem at birth (or later in the case of our protagonist). Ok, so they ripped off Douglas Adams, but at least they ripped off someone good.
Earth Final Conflict: Majel Barrett (Rodenbury's widow) took forward a bunch of scripts and a series treatment to the studios, and has gotten the thing on the air. It is very much like Childhood's End by Clark in its basic story setup. Again, less shooting and more thinking, though after reading Heinlein books about how to run a conspiracy, all the "resistance" in EFC should have been killed long ago.:)
Robotech: This 85 episode animee series (adapted from 3 different japanese series) is just too awesome. I watched it all when I was 9, and it got me hooked on sci fi forever. It has the truest treatment of love in a show targetted towards kids that I have ever seen. You can only find this stuff on the net in real player format, though I really hope Harmony Gold comes out with a dvd version in the future.
As I didn't want to be writing this thing all day, I definitely left out a lot of worthy books, films, and tv shows. There really is so much good sci fi out there, which makes me a happy person. Again, all of the above is IMHO.
I ordered stuff from reel.com, amazon.com, bigstar.com, thinkgeek.com, and buy.com arround the 12th. All the orders except buy.com's were accounted for within 7 days, and were exactly what I ordered.
From buy.com I ordered a book and a movie. First, their site was fairly broken when I was there, which should have been my first clue that they were useless. I got a couple of really ugly asp errors. Then they sent me an email which said that my book was not shipped yet, but the movie had (this was 7 days later). When the package finally arrived, it was the book, and not the movie. I had to leave to visit family for the holiday's, so I don't know if the movie ever showed up, but I left on the 23rd, and hadn't heard anything else from them yet. I am very dissapointed with them, and WILL NEVER order from buy.com again.
I am kinda surprised to hear so many people against the idea that the web should not be made accessible to the blind.
There are more issues than just blindness, which is a big one, but many sites use inordinately small text, or colors that are not distinguishable to those who are color blind. Anyone who makes a web site should really check out The W3.org Accessibility Site. They really are good rules to follow, and do mean that your site will function right in lynx, netscape, hotjava, and every other god forsaken browser.
The thing that you have to remember is that besides porn, most of the reason that people use the web is to get access to information that really is just text. The IBM Homepage Reader that I have tested my stuff with is really pretty cool. I spent a whole day with my monitor off browsign the web with very little trouble.
Having Stephen Hawkins read you slashdot is a really cool experience.:)
I will admit to not having read all of the UN documentation, but what I can tell about it from what I have read, they are attempting to create a abstraction of language in general.
Although this is an interesting idea, it makes an assumption that all language is based off of one abstract "map". IMHO different languages have different maps. Having spent a fair ammount of time learning ancient greek in high school and college, I can say that the map for that language is quite different from english, and those are both Indo-European languages.
The concepts that exist in one language may not in many other languages, which is often very problematic. Eventually, to learn any language, you must actually just start thinking in it, and not doing translation to your native language. Contemplating the 3 voices in greek (active, passive, and middle) is something I rather enjoy doing, as it is very foreign to english.
I am just afraid that they will have to produce a Least Common Denominator language which won't be useful for anything beyond technical specifications and instructions. I will have to admit that that would be useful on many fronts, but may not be the dream that we were all hoping for.
I am a big fan of DB2, especially its speed with really large tables. Version 6.1 for linux installs really slickly, and has finally gotten rid of the need for ksh, which the 5.2 version had.
If you want to do big database stuff, you should look at who does it well. The US Patent Database runs on DB2, which is the largest public database in the world. (I think the numbers were 15 Terrabytes Compressed Data last time I read up on it)
My main feeling that this is a better option over something like MySQL is that if you are really shuffling arround that much data, you need a really robust transaction control engine. Last time I worked with MySQL, it was fast, but lacked real transaction control. This may have been added by now, as I haven't checked of late.
I am currently near the end of the Mars series by Kim Stanley Robinson. He is definitely one of the greatest scifi authors of the modern day. Very AC Clarkesque with the fact that he is very scientifically accurate about everything. As a physics major, I really appreciate it when an author does his research, and KSR really does.
Antartica will be one of my next reads, as I have become so enamored with his writing style in the Mars series.
I am currently near the end of the Mars series by Kim Stanley Robinson. He is definitely one of the greatest scifi authors of the modern day. Very AC Clarkesque with the fact that he is very scientifically accurate about everything. As a physics major, I really appreciate it when an author does his research, and KSR really does.
Antartica will be one of my next reads, as I have become so enamored with his writing style in the Mars series.
I am happy that they changed the official box pricing to $40 for OS and StarOffice, leaving the $80 version with two more CDs of fun extras. I think that the $80 v6.0 was a little much for a lot of people who did want to help out redhat and buy a "real" version.
I am definitely into buying an official product from RedHat once and a while, as they do pay people to write GPL code.
This makes me start to think about the translation AIs used in Kim Stanley Robinson's _Green Mars_. If it can recognize language, then it could pump it through a translator, and out the other side could come 80% correct french. That would be kinda cool.:)
Just trying to wrap up some points that were being put out here, and maybe answer some questions in the meantime with my intermediate knowledge of astronomy.
Finding this planet, if the evidence leans towards that theory, is a big deal, as so far all we have found arround other systems are very big gas giants. One solar system is really bad for statistical analysis. We could be the fluke of the universe, so just because it happened here doesn't mean it had to happen somewhere else.
Nearly all planet observations, an really all astronomical observations, are objects infered by the bizare behavior of well lit objects. Faint changes in spectrum of a single bright object, means that it is probably a binary system... etc. The best analogy I have heard about astronomy is a goldfish trying to figure out what the world outside its pond is like. It can never go there, but can learn from indirect observations.
I assume that the gravity lensing difference between the two stars can easily be picked out because although they both throw a lot of light, they don't have the same spectrum, and probably not even the same redshift. You can then subtract out the closer star because you very carefully observed it when there was nothing significant behind it.
I don't claim to be an expert on such issues, but hopefully someone got something from my little rant here.
Cloning of extinct species seems like potentially a really dangerous idea. The reason most things go extinct is because their ecological niche is complete destroyed. This also means that their predators have gone away or adapted to eat something else. The cane toads in Australia are the classic example of putting a species into an ecosystem that really is not expected them. What a disaster that has been.
Slashdot Mirror
Note, this study had a sample size of 100 college students, possibly self selected (selection criteria wasn't readily presented). It's really dubious to make a generalization on that.
"My days of not taking you seriously are definitely coming to a middle"
And for other flame bate, it also support GPG encryption of packets over any IM protocol, and is interoperable with Kopete's encryption as well.
I have had DishNetwork for a couple of years because it has better programming than DirectTv (which I had the year before that). I got a Tivo this summer, and have been so happy with it. I actually looked at the DishPVR, but the features that come with the Tivo subscription are really worth it (and there is little to no information on what you get with the DishPVR subscription).
Since the 2.5 update of Tivo, and the addition of variable bit rate encoding, I get about 14 - 16 hours on my "30 hr tivo" at Best quality. I find that any more TV than that and I don't watch it anyway. Also, Tivo is about to beta 4 digit support for those extra 9000 channels that DishNetwork has. I'm psyched to be able to get the Research Channel on Tivo over the next couple of weeks.
Also, now that Echostar (DishNetwork) is trying to buy Hughes (DirectTv) (story here) I am really hoping for DishTivo.
Right before I left my last gig which was generating financial reports in html, I pointed the folks towards the Spreadsheet::WriteExcel module.
The clients had been used to getting Excel formatted reports for years, and many of the reports needed colors. This let them dynamically do all that from a web page, but still have excel to manipulate the data. May not be what you were looking for, but it was pretty neat. Plus the output from WriteExcel looks great in Gnumeric as well.
There was actually a piece on All Things Considered last night on this as well. It can be found in real media format here.
Is it just me, or does the VA Linux logo remind you of the CORE logo from "Good vs. Evil"?
I got to see a presentation by one of the lead physicists working on RHIC (Relativistic Heavy Ion Colider) 3 or 4 years ago. Follows is as much as I can remember about it and quark gluon plasma (disclaimer: I have been out of the physics community for 2 years now, so some of my quantum may be rusty)
In order to create quark gluon plasma you need a lot of energy. Most colliders work on the principle of getting light ions (like stripped helium atoms) and making them go really fast. RHIC decided that what would be more useful is to take really heavy ions (E = mc^2) and collide them. The will be using stripped gold atoms. (When I say stripped, I mean they got every electron off of them, all 79 of them) The have the two streams going in oppisite directions till they get up to speed, then ram them into each other.
I'm going to butcher anything else I say about this, so go check out this cern page for more info on quark gluon plasma. It has a really cool animation on their main page showing the collision.
When I was first trying to test the web site I was working of for accessibility, I went out and got the IBM HomePage Reader, figured out how the commands worked, then turned off my monitor for the afternoon.
It was a very educational experience, and one that more people should do now and then. You get a better appreciation of what is going on, and you will never leave out alt tags after that.
I am hearing a lot of complaints that making a web site accessible is not easy. IMVHO that is a total cop out. If you use strict HTML 4.0 and CSS 1.0 you will find that your sites:
CSS is really the ultimate solution to all of this, as it seperates layout and display from content, which is the way it really should be. w3.org highly pushes the use of CSS because of this. (CSS has different media types, so in theory a text or voice browser could request a different style sheet then the one you are going to pass to 4.x or 5.x visual browsers)
Go thee now to w3.org and read the w3 web accessibility guidelines. They aren't that hard, and if you take them into consideration from the start, you will find that making web pages takes way less time. And if nothing else AT LEAST go and get HTML Tidy and let it mangle your HTML back into something that is near standards compliant. If people at least used it, the web would be significantly more multi-browser friendly than it is now. (Note: HTML tidy currently picks up 364 errors/warnings on the slashdot front page.)
P.S. To add a bit of flamebait here, any thoughts about a CSS version of slashdot, as it would be nice to get out of the nested table jail.
For the most part, no one does anything which is not good for themselves. However some people, and some companies even, have a wider and broader view of what is good for themselves other then what will drive up their stock price next quarter, and thankfully Ford seems to have this here.
:)
My guess behind their motives is this. First, it definitely increases company loyalty. In the modern age company loyalty is all but out the window.
Second, it will help make the entire work force technologically more savy. This has two important effects. One is that it makes the current workforce easier to retrain when they upgrade their equipment used internally. The Second is it makes it a more attractive place to work for technology people. By being the first to do such a program, they greatly increase their competitive edge vs. others companies.
Third it gets them a lot of great press. People look at Ford differently 'cause they are doing something which is not blantantly in their self interets.
This is all a very cynical look at things, but I have started reading Heinlein books again so you must forgive me.
Ford should be congradulated a lot for taking a holistic view of their best interests, and realizing that further educating the american public in any way, keeping them competitive in any way, so that america continues to lead the world in technology, hence continues to have lots of disposable income, hence can buy high end Ford Explorers and such is in their best interests.
(p.s. all statements are IMVHO)
I actually read through much of the court transcripts trying to figure out how the defense didn't manage to prove any of their points. After reading the transcipts, I see why. The defense was often mis-quoting the statutes that they were trying to invoke, did not realize that they were being sued on something that was not defendable under the fair use act, and were late in filing some of their evidence.
Now I know that the movie industry is spending a lot of money on this whole thing vs. a community that has very little money, but can't with all these new linux ipo companies with all this money burning holes in their pockets, I would think they would try to back the DeCSS folks. RedHat is not taking over the desktop if they can't play DVD.
The over use of standardized test scores when it comes to colleges is really a bad thing. When at school I found that a vastly disproportionate number of the best/brightest/most interesting people on campus were actually transfer students. After a little investigation I found out that although the frosh admissions process is more or less just a numbers game, the transfer admissions people actually try to get to know who they are dealing with. Most of the people who transferred in would have been rejected in frosh admissions, but they became some of the most important people in the school community.
I currently have a friend of the family trying to get into my alma mater. She is most likely going to be rejected because her SATs aren't great, however, she would add so much to the school if she got accepted. I guess even universities follow the rule "There is never time to do it right, but there is always time to do it over", which is really a sad fact.
Having many friends who are foreign nationals I have seen first hand to total screwiness which is INS. Many have had to leave the country because their current visas expired before the paperwork could get through to get either new visas or greencards.
Another guy at work has had to go redo his finger prints as they have "expired". How exactly ones finger prints expire I will never know.
Books
- Caves of Steel & The Naked Sun: Although Foundation has been brought forward (a book/series that I love) Caves of Steel was Asimov's first foray back into fiction after taking a many (~10) year hiatus. You'll notice that all the books writen after Caves of Steal are novels, where all those before are for the most part novellas. Plus he eventually wraps this storyline into foundation.
- Stranger in a Strange Land: This is probably my favorite book, period. From my meager readings of Heinlein's life, the character of Jubal Harshaw (my favorite character ever created) is as close to himself as he ever puts in his books. The fact that grok has found it's way into many english dictionaries says something for how influencial this book is.
- Dune: Much has been said on this list about this book, so I'll just leave it with the fact that because Herbert wanted to get the precience right and consistant, he wrote the first three books simultaneously. Dune is so strong that the following books don't quite hold up to it, UNTIL Heritics of Dune (Book 5), which I think is as good as Dune itself.
- Battle Field Earth: Ok... I know that the second L. Ron Hubbard is brought up, many people turn off their ears. Battle Field Earth has NOTHING to do with Dianetics or any other of the various reasons people don't like Hubbard. It is a really good (really long) stand allone story about a fairly likey outcome with an alien species who was advanced enough to show up here. (IMHO) They are also turning it into a film this spring (the first half actually), and I really dug the trailer for it.
- Red Mars: Kim Stanley Robinson writes really good sci fi, in the vain of Auther C. Clark. (i.e. Real science, no faciful explanations of things). The whole series gets you thinking about what it would be like to walk on the surface of Mars, and gets you thinking in Kelvins for tempature. It's a brisk 264 outside right now. If you ever wanted to go to space as a kid, this is really the next best thing
- Ender's Game: I finally read this, and it really was as wonderful as everyone said. It makes you start looking at ordinary things in different ways, like what does "down" mean in outer space. Very wonderful, and very good for younger audiences as well, as it tackles the idea that gifted kids are really just grown up minds inside kid bodies.
Movies- 2001: This is one of my all time favorite films. Kubrik and Clark really bring this together in a wonderful way. They wrote the book and script simultaneously, but reading the book afterwards is good to get some further explanation to the last 15 minutes.
- Forbidden Planet: Ok, so you've got Lessley Neilson as a strapping young space lieutenent, the introduction of Robby the Robot (later to get great fame in Lost in Space), and basically the story of Shakespeare's Tempest done in space. What more can you ask for.
- Close Encounter's of the 3rd Kind: Speilberg's first forray into the idea of alien life. This actually is my favorite movie. The original (1977) cut was a better story that the "enhanced" version (1980) cause it keeps you guessing longer. Do these things really exist, or is this guy just going nuts and playing with mashed potatoes. Can't wait for this one on dvd.
- Blade Runner: The only problem with this film is that you can't find the original cut anywhere. Once you've seen it once, you'll want to watch the directors cut exclusively after that, but the voice over by Harrison Ford (in the original cut) adds a lot to your understanding of the story.
TVAs I didn't want to be writing this thing all day, I definitely left out a lot of worthy books, films, and tv shows. There really is so much good sci fi out there, which makes me a happy person. Again, all of the above is IMHO.
I ordered stuff from reel.com, amazon.com, bigstar.com, thinkgeek.com, and buy.com arround the 12th. All the orders except buy.com's were accounted for within 7 days, and were exactly what I ordered.
From buy.com I ordered a book and a movie. First, their site was fairly broken when I was there, which should have been my first clue that they were useless. I got a couple of really ugly asp errors. Then they sent me an email which said that my book was not shipped yet, but the movie had (this was 7 days later). When the package finally arrived, it was the book, and not the movie. I had to leave to visit family for the holiday's, so I don't know if the movie ever showed up, but I left on the 23rd, and hadn't heard anything else from them yet. I am very dissapointed with them, and WILL NEVER order from buy.com again.
There are more issues than just blindness, which is a big one, but many sites use inordinately small text, or colors that are not distinguishable to those who are color blind. Anyone who makes a web site should really check out The W3.org Accessibility Site. They really are good rules to follow, and do mean that your site will function right in lynx, netscape, hotjava, and every other god forsaken browser.
The thing that you have to remember is that besides porn, most of the reason that people use the web is to get access to information that really is just text. The IBM Homepage Reader that I have tested my stuff with is really pretty cool. I spent a whole day with my monitor off browsign the web with very little trouble.
Having Stephen Hawkins read you slashdot is a really cool experience. :)
I will admit to not having read all of the UN documentation, but what I can tell about it from what I have read, they are attempting to create a abstraction of language in general.
Although this is an interesting idea, it makes an assumption that all language is based off of one abstract "map". IMHO different languages have different maps. Having spent a fair ammount of time learning ancient greek in high school and college, I can say that the map for that language is quite different from english, and those are both Indo-European languages.
The concepts that exist in one language may not in many other languages, which is often very problematic. Eventually, to learn any language, you must actually just start thinking in it, and not doing translation to your native language. Contemplating the 3 voices in greek (active, passive, and middle) is something I rather enjoy doing, as it is very foreign to english.
I am just afraid that they will have to produce a Least Common Denominator language which won't be useful for anything beyond technical specifications and instructions. I will have to admit that that would be useful on many fronts, but may not be the dream that we were all hoping for.
If you want to do big database stuff, you should look at who does it well. The US Patent Database runs on DB2, which is the largest public database in the world. (I think the numbers were 15 Terrabytes Compressed Data last time I read up on it)
Free 60 trial downloads can be snatched up at this fun address.
My main feeling that this is a better option over something like MySQL is that if you are really shuffling arround that much data, you need a really robust transaction control engine. Last time I worked with MySQL, it was fast, but lacked real transaction control. This may have been added by now, as I haven't checked of late.
I am currently near the end of the Mars series by Kim Stanley Robinson. He is definitely one of the greatest scifi authors of the modern day. Very AC Clarkesque with the fact that he is very scientifically accurate about everything. As a physics major, I really appreciate it when an author does his research, and KSR really does.
Antartica will be one of my next reads, as I have become so enamored with his writing style in the Mars series.
I am currently near the end of the Mars series by Kim Stanley Robinson. He is definitely one of the greatest scifi authors of the modern day. Very AC Clarkesque with the fact that he is very scientifically accurate about everything. As a physics major, I really appreciate it when an author does his research, and KSR really does.
Antartica will be one of my next reads, as I have become so enamored with his writing style in the Mars series.
I am happy that they changed the official box pricing to $40 for OS and StarOffice, leaving the $80 version with two more CDs of fun extras. I think that the $80 v6.0 was a little much for a lot of people who did want to help out redhat and buy a "real" version.
I am definitely into buying an official product from RedHat once and a while, as they do pay people to write GPL code.
This makes me start to think about the translation AIs used in Kim Stanley Robinson's _Green Mars_. If it can recognize language, then it could pump it through a translator, and out the other side could come 80% correct french. That would be kinda cool. :)
Just trying to wrap up some points that were being put out here, and maybe answer some questions in the meantime with my intermediate knowledge of astronomy.
I don't claim to be an expert on such issues, but hopefully someone got something from my little rant here.
Cloning of extinct species seems like potentially a really dangerous idea. The reason most things go extinct is because their ecological niche is complete destroyed. This also means that their predators have gone away or adapted to eat something else. The cane toads in Australia are the classic example of putting a species into an ecosystem that really is not expected them. What a disaster that has been.