Cowboy Bebop has a textbook Film Noir feel to it. At least for the dramatic parts. Of course the show is liberally laced with action, and a fair amount of comedy too.
The whole "Chinese Future" concept has been done a number of times: Cowboy Bebop, Outlaw Star, Blade Runner. Probably others. Considering their population and rising economic status, it's not an unreasonable idea at all.
However, since Firefly is made for and in America, that means there could be no Asians in it. Only one Asian is allowed to play a primary character at any given time, currently filled by Hawaiian-Japanese Hoshi Sato (Played by the clearly Korean Linda Park) on Enterprise. An unlimited number of Asians may be cast as martial arts masters or hot chicks for single episodes. 75% of asian roles must be cast as Japanese, and only Japanese are allowed to play the parts of members of their own ethnic groups. Animation remains a legal gray area.
I also thought Firefly was boring and fake. Although I feel that way about Whedon's other work also. I programmed SciFi out of my TV after they cancelled Farscape, because there was nothing new and good to watch on it.
Alien Nation was one of the most original SciFi concepts to ever make it to Film or TV. The TV show could have been a bit better though. It aged like cheese.
Gosh, if only there was a programming block showing both Futurama AND Family Guy, back to back! The only thing that would make that more awesome is if it showed anime too!
Exactly. Art can be automated. Who's to say AI or even dumb creativity algorithms won't be improving in the near future, along with everything else? There's a very good possibility that EVERY kind of job will ultimately be done better with automation. Science. Art. Even business. In which case, humans are no longer useful as labor at all and exist only to consume the fruits of the automated economy. Which they will in abundance. I believe there was something in that article about letting the people profit off the exploitation of natural resources - what better way of encouraging the people to allow exploitation?
In fact, the only usefulness to the economy that people would have is their investment level. As he rightly pointed out, it's the stockholders who reap the profits while the employees are paid a relative pittance for their efforts. The implications are obvious. The new economy would become based on dividend-paying stock directly, rather than money per se. Not a bank account, but a paying portfolio.
Although the automated economy could probably easily support everyone at a comfortable level, it probably won't, because the market forces will still be at play. As the economy transitions, the lowest-level workers will be left floundering while the ones that are next higher will quickly demand to be paid in stock to get on the bandwagon. Rich people/countries will stay rich and in all likelihood tend to get richer. The converse is true for the poor. The government/world could level it out a bit with taxation to support benefits, but without directly increasing the portfolios of the poor their fortunes will not improve. And since rich people run the government, it's unlikely to ever do anything to decrease their fortunes.
As for what people will do with all that spending power they didn't need to do anything to earn... well, look at the independently wealthy. They play around, get bored with it, and then play around in a somewhat more extreme fashion to relieve that boredom. Then repeat the process and move towards wholehearted debauchery. They practice a particularly vicious form of social politics (government, incidentally, being another thing automation could probably handle MUCH better than humans do, but never will thanks to politics). Most significantly, they buy/do things not because they are better (quality/value/entertainment) but because of who's name is on the label. They spend a lot of time sucking up and being sucked up to.
That's right. The economy will become fad-based and chance-based. A constantly shifting maelstrom of cults of personality, self-absorbtion, and petty games of domination. Gambling, especially of the stock market variety, will become a crucial means of economic mobility. People will become increasingly isolated, victims of their own success. Sport becomes even more significant than now. The value of life will decrease, leading to a rise in risky behavior and conflict. War may be waged over increasingly trivial things, with extinction and genocide becoming increasingly more accepted.
Until the day some disgusted AI or human gets sick of our shit and puts us all out of our misery, leaving the machines to their own devices and problems.
I suppose that would be a good reason to use Darwin as a base for their own OS. It already has been designed with international languages in mind (read: the super complicated many thousands of glyph based CJK languages, with their complicated input schemes) via Unicode. And yes, it can be compiled for PC hardware, but of course then you aren't taking advantage of all of OS X's nice features and optimizations.
So what do we know about these countries?
Korea: Big producers of basic computer hardware. Not particularly rich. Significant economic power in the region. Limited OS options for their complicated language. Probably annoyed by spam and other insecurities. Has hardware production expertise.
Japan: Biggest technophiles in the world. Massive computer hardware industry, but not CPUs, which are almost exclusively american. A very expensive place to live. And deep in an economic recession. Dominant economic power in the region, along with America. Xenophobic tendencies. Limited OS options for their complicated language. Probably annoyed by spam and other insecurities. Has high-tech production and programming expertise.
China: Rapidly growing economy, nonetheless dominated to some degree by foreign investment. Non-democratic. Wants to be the dominant power in the region, and has the numbers to do it. Biggest software and media pirate in the world. Government tries to rule with an iron fist, and has invested heavily in firewalls to keep the people from reading bad things about them. Oddly enough, this country is the hub of spam distribution thanks to all the insecure sendmail servers. You'd almost think they were doing it intentionally. Has announced intentions to develop it's own chip for internal use, presumably including spying ability for the government and a heavily subsidized price to keep American chipmakers out. Needs an OS. Lacks expertise. Probably the force behind the operation.
"At this time, the National Do Not Call Registry is no longer taking deletions on line" can be found on the deletion page. Now why would they remove something like that? Perhaps because someone telemarketer was committing fraud and removing people from the list?
Sure you've got edutainment games that drill knowledge into you, or quiz you 'til you've got it, but what about games designed to develop ability and skill? Just as sports train your body to be stronger and faster, why not a computer game designed to develop your sense of hearing, or visual pattern recognition, or stuff like that? Sure there are biofeedback games to help you control heartrate or brainwave patterns or whatever, but why not basic abilities like that?
Apple's been doing this forever, with the latest incarnation being in the Aqua Human Interface Guidelines. Apple has put a TON of money and effort into creating computers that are easy to use. They've tried to promote good interface paradigms and discourage bad ones, both in house and with their developers.
Here Linux developers are confronting one of the prime insights of GUI design - a consistent interface is essential to the user's ability to use different applications. There's no need to rack your brain over learning and remembering every different command in different programs, if they follow a consistent, organized, and intuitive pattern. That's why themes aren't built into the OS or even encouraged. That's why there is countless arguing over how metal-style iApps are bad, and ought to go with the less-eyestrain-inducing pinstripe default. And that's a big part about why Mac OS users are so loyal.
I've been using zsh since yesterday and i like it. The autocomplete features are much nicer than tcsh. I can actually write little scripts now with little trouble thanks to functions. For the record, autolist and automenu seem to already be enabled on my os x install. You were right about specifying/bin/zsh in the terminal prefs speeding up load time considerably.
Guess I gotta study bash too if that will be the os x default. I know linux is the one driving shell choices now, but I reckon mac users will choose the more user advanced and user friendly choice over the more widespread choice any day.
Well apple can work with BSD source without having their lawyers looking over their shoulders all the time. So why not zsh? Is is not a BSD license? From what I've seen zsh seems to be a marginally smaller, faster, cleaner, better shell. I was using tcsh up 'til today, and now I've switched. zsh functions are real nice, they make scripting easy, and the interactive features of zsh are equivalent or better than the way I had tcsh set up.
What's so great about bash and/or zsh? Now that I've gotten used to tcsh I'm not sure why it should change. They all seem pretty much the same to me, except the do the same things in slightly different ways.
If you ask me, the default shell should be whichever one with a history that loads the fastest. Many os x users only use terminal.app for the occasional foray into command-line-only commands (like me). Waiting for your shell to load are precious seconds wasted.
I don't know much about shells, but there are a number of unique commands in the os x command line environment. One of them is "open", which works exactly like double clicking the icon in the finder - the file opens with the default os x application. I'm not sure why you would want to display media (particularly interactive media, which is everything besides plain images) directly in a command line environment, except maybe if you were lacking a GUI entirely.
They could carry a lot more information that the current various levels of "Oh Crap!". Like nature and location of threat. Yes they can do that now with synthesized speech, but a recognizeable noise at a set volume from a particular direction could do the job faster or with higher resolution.
Hell, I hated the original Matrix. Humans as batteries? Do they not teach high school physics, chemistry, or biology in the Matrix anymore? Reloaded pissed me off for less scientific reasons (in the future, there will be orgies), but the explanation of the Architect about the Matrix (and it's predecessors) itself as a sophisticated tool designed to keep humans occupied and to compensate with inevitable breakdowns in an inherently chaotic system, was pretty interesting. As was the impression that there was a whole world of machine culture outside of the Matrix Lighting and Power operation. Both are well within the bounds of hard SF.
I'm pretty hard nosed about insisting that the science of the film not be crap, but even I'm willing to accept this as artistic license. No sound can become boring.
Besides which, there ARE sounds in space. Just not in vacuum. Spacecraft are often quite noisy inside, and if you were firing a gun or knocked by an asteroid, you'd hear it. I like to additionally think that in the future, sensor systems will deliver information to your ears as well as your eyes. So if someone is shooting at you or machinery is doing stuff, you get quick feedback on it even if you're not looking in that direction.
Amen. I presume sobig is the one flooding my mailbox with multiple infected messages per hour. Thank goodness I have a mac so it doesn't affect me or my friends. Thank goodness for Mail.app's bayesian filtering so I don't even have to look at it anymore, and to my ISP for marking them all so consistently.
Yeah, I just downloaded the most recent version and tried it out just to be sure. VLC still blows on my iBook 600. Slow loading, chokes to death on files that it's not fast enough to play with lots of messages even when I turned on the "hurry up" option, and actually refused to play video on a couple of files. All mplayer does is drop frames when it has to, and virtually never complains/hangs/crashes. Also, mplayer has much nicer keyboard controls to skip around the file, and a simpler, functional interface.
actually, mplayer on os x is the ONLY video player worth dealing with when it comes to anything besides quicktime and real. For sure, it's the way to go with DivX/Xvid/etc. avis. Oddly enough though, Mplayer 2 is slower than Mplayer 1, at least when it comes to my G3.
It's an interesting but true observation that modern gaming has almost totally neglected two genres that were previously kings: puzzle games and smutty games. Sure, there's a puzzle every now and then (ICO) and there's plenty of smut IN games (GTA, DOA, every female character design, etc), though few are actually about sex in the manner of virtual valerie or Leisure Suit Larry were. Too bad (especially with regard to the puzzles).
I'm reminded about how Tetris was invented by a Russian programmer, who was strictly limited by the capabilities of his substandard hardware. Despite that it's arguably the best computer game of all time. I guess simplicity is out of style, and dirty thoughts (or at least acting on them in anything more serious than Maxim magazine) is out of favor.
It seems to me that digital wireless has so much room for improvement and so many possibilities for conflict that perhaps we should just freeze the standards for a while to let the technology sort itself out.
Wonder how this compares to ultrawideband technologies? Those promised better, cheaper, simpler devices. And what about directional antenna technology? That would smooth things out considerably.
Wouldn't the two technologies complement?
on
The Diamond Age
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· Score: 1
I mean if you want to grow a thick wafer by CVD, you need a thick seed. And if you want to get a thick diamond, the cheapest way would be the Russian ones. Right?
Of course once you've made a thick wafer, you can chop it up for making more wafers or whatever.
Free and open code is good and all... but the one real cost of a search engine is RUNNING it. It requires a far from trivial amount bandwidth and hardware, and somebody has to pay for all of it. Unless someone comes up with a novel P2P solution (and many are trying) it just won't happen.
What they should be doing is pressuring the existing search engine companies for some integrity.
Slashdot Mirror
Cowboy Bebop has a textbook Film Noir feel to it. At least for the dramatic parts. Of course the show is liberally laced with action, and a fair amount of comedy too.
The whole "Chinese Future" concept has been done a number of times: Cowboy Bebop, Outlaw Star, Blade Runner. Probably others. Considering their population and rising economic status, it's not an unreasonable idea at all.
However, since Firefly is made for and in America, that means there could be no Asians in it. Only one Asian is allowed to play a primary character at any given time, currently filled by Hawaiian-Japanese Hoshi Sato (Played by the clearly Korean Linda Park) on Enterprise. An unlimited number of Asians may be cast as martial arts masters or hot chicks for single episodes. 75% of asian roles must be cast as Japanese, and only Japanese are allowed to play the parts of members of their own ethnic groups. Animation remains a legal gray area.
More Info Here
I also thought Firefly was boring and fake. Although I feel that way about Whedon's other work also. I programmed SciFi out of my TV after they cancelled Farscape, because there was nothing new and good to watch on it.
Alien Nation was one of the most original SciFi concepts to ever make it to Film or TV. The TV show could have been a bit better though. It aged like cheese.
Gosh, if only there was a programming block showing both Futurama AND Family Guy, back to back! The only thing that would make that more awesome is if it showed anime too!
Exactly. Art can be automated. Who's to say AI or even dumb creativity algorithms won't be improving in the near future, along with everything else? There's a very good possibility that EVERY kind of job will ultimately be done better with automation. Science. Art. Even business. In which case, humans are no longer useful as labor at all and exist only to consume the fruits of the automated economy. Which they will in abundance. I believe there was something in that article about letting the people profit off the exploitation of natural resources - what better way of encouraging the people to allow exploitation?
In fact, the only usefulness to the economy that people would have is their investment level. As he rightly pointed out, it's the stockholders who reap the profits while the employees are paid a relative pittance for their efforts. The implications are obvious. The new economy would become based on dividend-paying stock directly, rather than money per se. Not a bank account, but a paying portfolio.
Although the automated economy could probably easily support everyone at a comfortable level, it probably won't, because the market forces will still be at play. As the economy transitions, the lowest-level workers will be left floundering while the ones that are next higher will quickly demand to be paid in stock to get on the bandwagon. Rich people/countries will stay rich and in all likelihood tend to get richer. The converse is true for the poor. The government/world could level it out a bit with taxation to support benefits, but without directly increasing the portfolios of the poor their fortunes will not improve. And since rich people run the government, it's unlikely to ever do anything to decrease their fortunes.
As for what people will do with all that spending power they didn't need to do anything to earn... well, look at the independently wealthy. They play around, get bored with it, and then play around in a somewhat more extreme fashion to relieve that boredom. Then repeat the process and move towards wholehearted debauchery. They practice a particularly vicious form of social politics (government, incidentally, being another thing automation could probably handle MUCH better than humans do, but never will thanks to politics). Most significantly, they buy/do things not because they are better (quality/value/entertainment) but because of who's name is on the label. They spend a lot of time sucking up and being sucked up to.
That's right. The economy will become fad-based and chance-based. A constantly shifting maelstrom of cults of personality, self-absorbtion, and petty games of domination. Gambling, especially of the stock market variety, will become a crucial means of economic mobility. People will become increasingly isolated, victims of their own success. Sport becomes even more significant than now. The value of life will decrease, leading to a rise in risky behavior and conflict. War may be waged over increasingly trivial things, with extinction and genocide becoming increasingly more accepted.
Until the day some disgusted AI or human gets sick of our shit and puts us all out of our misery, leaving the machines to their own devices and problems.
I suppose that would be a good reason to use Darwin as a base for their own OS. It already has been designed with international languages in mind (read: the super complicated many thousands of glyph based CJK languages, with their complicated input schemes) via Unicode. And yes, it can be compiled for PC hardware, but of course then you aren't taking advantage of all of OS X's nice features and optimizations.
So what do we know about these countries?
Korea: Big producers of basic computer hardware. Not particularly rich. Significant economic power in the region. Limited OS options for their complicated language. Probably annoyed by spam and other insecurities. Has hardware production expertise.
Japan: Biggest technophiles in the world. Massive computer hardware industry, but not CPUs, which are almost exclusively american. A very expensive place to live. And deep in an economic recession. Dominant economic power in the region, along with America. Xenophobic tendencies. Limited OS options for their complicated language. Probably annoyed by spam and other insecurities. Has high-tech production and programming expertise.
China: Rapidly growing economy, nonetheless dominated to some degree by foreign investment. Non-democratic. Wants to be the dominant power in the region, and has the numbers to do it. Biggest software and media pirate in the world. Government tries to rule with an iron fist, and has invested heavily in firewalls to keep the people from reading bad things about them. Oddly enough, this country is the hub of spam distribution thanks to all the insecure sendmail servers. You'd almost think they were doing it intentionally. Has announced intentions to develop it's own chip for internal use, presumably including spying ability for the government and a heavily subsidized price to keep American chipmakers out. Needs an OS. Lacks expertise. Probably the force behind the operation.
"At this time, the National Do Not Call Registry is no longer taking deletions on line" can be found on the deletion page. Now why would they remove something like that? Perhaps because someone telemarketer was committing fraud and removing people from the list?
Sure you've got edutainment games that drill knowledge into you, or quiz you 'til you've got it, but what about games designed to develop ability and skill? Just as sports train your body to be stronger and faster, why not a computer game designed to develop your sense of hearing, or visual pattern recognition, or stuff like that? Sure there are biofeedback games to help you control heartrate or brainwave patterns or whatever, but why not basic abilities like that?
Apple's been doing this forever, with the latest incarnation being in the Aqua Human Interface Guidelines. Apple has put a TON of money and effort into creating computers that are easy to use. They've tried to promote good interface paradigms and discourage bad ones, both in house and with their developers.
Here Linux developers are confronting one of the prime insights of GUI design - a consistent interface is essential to the user's ability to use different applications. There's no need to rack your brain over learning and remembering every different command in different programs, if they follow a consistent, organized, and intuitive pattern. That's why themes aren't built into the OS or even encouraged. That's why there is countless arguing over how metal-style iApps are bad, and ought to go with the less-eyestrain-inducing pinstripe default. And that's a big part about why Mac OS users are so loyal.
I've been using zsh since yesterday and i like it. The autocomplete features are much nicer than tcsh. I can actually write little scripts now with little trouble thanks to functions. For the record, autolist and automenu seem to already be enabled on my os x install. You were right about specifying /bin/zsh in the terminal prefs speeding up load time considerably.
Guess I gotta study bash too if that will be the os x default. I know linux is the one driving shell choices now, but I reckon mac users will choose the more user advanced and user friendly choice over the more widespread choice any day.
Well apple can work with BSD source without having their lawyers looking over their shoulders all the time. So why not zsh? Is is not a BSD license? From what I've seen zsh seems to be a marginally smaller, faster, cleaner, better shell. I was using tcsh up 'til today, and now I've switched. zsh functions are real nice, they make scripting easy, and the interactive features of zsh are equivalent or better than the way I had tcsh set up.
What's so great about bash and/or zsh? Now that I've gotten used to tcsh I'm not sure why it should change. They all seem pretty much the same to me, except the do the same things in slightly different ways.
If you ask me, the default shell should be whichever one with a history that loads the fastest. Many os x users only use terminal.app for the occasional foray into command-line-only commands (like me). Waiting for your shell to load are precious seconds wasted.
I don't know much about shells, but there are a number of unique commands in the os x command line environment. One of them is "open", which works exactly like double clicking the icon in the finder - the file opens with the default os x application. I'm not sure why you would want to display media (particularly interactive media, which is everything besides plain images) directly in a command line environment, except maybe if you were lacking a GUI entirely.
They could carry a lot more information that the current various levels of "Oh Crap!". Like nature and location of threat. Yes they can do that now with synthesized speech, but a recognizeable noise at a set volume from a particular direction could do the job faster or with higher resolution.
Hell, I hated the original Matrix. Humans as batteries? Do they not teach high school physics, chemistry, or biology in the Matrix anymore? Reloaded pissed me off for less scientific reasons (in the future, there will be orgies), but the explanation of the Architect about the Matrix (and it's predecessors) itself as a sophisticated tool designed to keep humans occupied and to compensate with inevitable breakdowns in an inherently chaotic system, was pretty interesting. As was the impression that there was a whole world of machine culture outside of the Matrix Lighting and Power operation. Both are well within the bounds of hard SF.
I'm pretty hard nosed about insisting that the science of the film not be crap, but even I'm willing to accept this as artistic license. No sound can become boring.
Besides which, there ARE sounds in space. Just not in vacuum. Spacecraft are often quite noisy inside, and if you were firing a gun or knocked by an asteroid, you'd hear it. I like to additionally think that in the future, sensor systems will deliver information to your ears as well as your eyes. So if someone is shooting at you or machinery is doing stuff, you get quick feedback on it even if you're not looking in that direction.
Amen. I presume sobig is the one flooding my mailbox with multiple infected messages per hour. Thank goodness I have a mac so it doesn't affect me or my friends. Thank goodness for Mail.app's bayesian filtering so I don't even have to look at it anymore, and to my ISP for marking them all so consistently.
It'd be a GIANT robot with a 5-year old at the controls. Saving the world of course.
Yeah, I just downloaded the most recent version and tried it out just to be sure. VLC still blows on my iBook 600. Slow loading, chokes to death on files that it's not fast enough to play with lots of messages even when I turned on the "hurry up" option, and actually refused to play video on a couple of files. All mplayer does is drop frames when it has to, and virtually never complains/hangs/crashes. Also, mplayer has much nicer keyboard controls to skip around the file, and a simpler, functional interface.
actually, mplayer on os x is the ONLY video player worth dealing with when it comes to anything besides quicktime and real. For sure, it's the way to go with DivX/Xvid/etc. avis. Oddly enough though, Mplayer 2 is slower than Mplayer 1, at least when it comes to my G3.
...and when he says "Preferably both together" that's one less semi-serious candidate to worry about.
It's an interesting but true observation that modern gaming has almost totally neglected two genres that were previously kings: puzzle games and smutty games. Sure, there's a puzzle every now and then (ICO) and there's plenty of smut IN games (GTA, DOA, every female character design, etc), though few are actually about sex in the manner of virtual valerie or Leisure Suit Larry were. Too bad (especially with regard to the puzzles).
I'm reminded about how Tetris was invented by a Russian programmer, who was strictly limited by the capabilities of his substandard hardware. Despite that it's arguably the best computer game of all time. I guess simplicity is out of style, and dirty thoughts (or at least acting on them in anything more serious than Maxim magazine) is out of favor.
It seems to me that digital wireless has so much room for improvement and so many possibilities for conflict that perhaps we should just freeze the standards for a while to let the technology sort itself out.
Wonder how this compares to ultrawideband technologies? Those promised better, cheaper, simpler devices. And what about directional antenna technology? That would smooth things out considerably.
I mean if you want to grow a thick wafer by CVD, you need a thick seed. And if you want to get a thick diamond, the cheapest way would be the Russian ones. Right?
Of course once you've made a thick wafer, you can chop it up for making more wafers or whatever.
Free and open code is good and all... but the one real cost of a search engine is RUNNING it. It requires a far from trivial amount bandwidth and hardware, and somebody has to pay for all of it. Unless someone comes up with a novel P2P solution (and many are trying) it just won't happen.
What they should be doing is pressuring the existing search engine companies for some integrity.