Offtopic? Offtopic? Yes, by all means we must stick to the agenda gentlemen. The unwashed masses wait with baited breath for the appearance of the Beowulf cluster joke. I believe the secretary general of the U.N. is anxious to hear what everyone thinks about it, so for God's sake please stick to the topic.
Anyway, if I had mod points that would have gone "Funny".
Well... that's fair enough really. If the sterility trait is expressed or not depending upon the genetic background in which it exists (called "incomplete penetrance"), then it really could start moving about in the population.
All the same, any trait which is as inherently self-limiting as genetic sterility doesn't strike me as a big candidate for becoming widespread in a population. On the longer scale this one would almost certainly lose out to more prolific alleles. On the other hand, linking this gene (placing it very very close) to other GM food genes might be a usefull way of discouraging their spread...
You can get the abstract here for free and demonstrate to yourself that the news article was wrong, and that it was actually in Science, not Nature. Thus endeth my Karma whoring for today.:)
some new fancy algorith to calculate the phylogenetic trees.
Spot on. Bayesian estimation. The newest latest way to get the "right" answer. Althought that being said I really do like it myself - I need to work through the math some more, but it seems like a way of approaching parametric bootstrapping results without the gigantic computational overhead...
Well... the news article misses the beat on a few things, including which journal it was published in (Science, not Nature). The term "missing link" is often bandied about in the news whenever the topic turns to ancestral organisms. That wasn't really what the paper was about. The real issue was that this algae appears to be the closest living relative of the land plants. For that reason, any characteristics it has in common with the land plants are most likely ones which were present in the common ancestor of all land plants. Being able to place the ancestor of the land plants between two "frames" this way (common characters of land plants AND characters of Charales algae) gives us a window onto what kind of organism the land plants are derived from. Here's a tiny quote from the original paper:
Identification of the Charales as the sister taxon to land plants with the Coleochaetales as sister to the Charales/land plant clade suggests that the common ancestor of land plants was a branched, filamentous organism with a haplontic life cycle and oogamous reproduction...
Although it is tempting to envision the origin of land plants as having been from amorphous pond scum, these data indicate that the common ancestor of land plants and their closest algal relatives was a relatively complex organism.
It has been done lots of times. Based upon chromosomal organization here and based upon DNA sequences here, for example or here for a good set of lecture notes on the topic.
And strictly speaking there's really a host of other forms of bases found in tRNAs and rRNAs (pseudouracil, methylated bases, thiouridine, isopentenyladenosine, and on and on) thought they probably don't count 'cause they're derived forms of the canonical ones...
True, but there's a reason you're using the word "geek". The meaning has changed a *lot* over the past 20 years, but there is a reason why that word was originally applied... it wasn't appropriate to everyone, sure, but to enough, to enough...
The 4 most important things on this planet are:-
Air
Water
Topsoil
Biodiversity"
Again and again I see people criticizing this line. Are you all really that stupid, or just trolling on a collective basis?
Air - we breath it, you see. Water - we drink it. Topsoil - we grow food in it. Biodiversity - oh for crying out loud - anyone who doesn't understand this needs to go back to school. The air you breath is made by living things. Ditto the food you eat. It all exists in a rather complex relationship with...
A world which includes tigers is better than a world in which they are all dead. More broadly, the complex mesh of animals, plants, and whatnot that has evolved over the past few hundred million years has intrinsic value because of intangible things which cannot really be defined from an economic viewpoint: beauty, grace, otherness. It's possible to go too far with this point and get all soppy, sure, but that doesn't mean there isn't an important idea at the heart of it.
If there's no place for these values in our worldview (and I mean a real, functional place upon which we will work and invest capital to maintain it) then we might be best off burning down the museums - they're taking up valuable parking lot real estate just to house a bit of canvas and marble. Most libraries can go too - PDFs of computer manuals and investment guides will provide functional information to the maximum number of people and we can convert all those old illuminated medieval manuscripts into usefull toilet paper.
In the end I can't prove that anyone's personal balance sheet will be improved by living in a world that has tigers, gorillas, orangutans, and even a few annoyingly-placed owls in it. But just for me that's a marginally more pleasant world to live in.
I think the radical environmentalists have done more harm than good to the value people place on the environment. The issue has become amalgamated with a host of charged political issues: leftism, antiglobalism, feminism, etc. This is unfortunate and not the historical foundation of the conservation movement. Really at its roots it is apolitical: Teddy Roosevelt (Great White Big Game Hunter) and John Muir (would have been a tree-hugging environmentalist if the label had existed back then) both performed great works in setting up the national parks system out of a common understanding that the natural world has an intrinsic value even if it doesn't put food on your own personal table.
Well... the best reference on the multicellularity topic is probably Lynn Margulis's volume Five Kingdoms in which she points out all of the taxa in which multicellularity of one type or another has evolved. I think she defines anywhere between seven and eleven separate origins to multicellularity, depending on how you define the term and on the exact relationships between groups. Don't bank on her overall phylogeny of the Eucaryotes, though.
There's at least one (maybe two? It's been a while since I've been really up on this) obligately multicellular prokaryotic lineage - they cluster together in these rather cool-looking treelike thingies. Once one delves into the diversity of life beyond the "textbook" examples there's some pretty amazing variety out there.
Within the eucaryotes it's a whole different story of course - the three Great Big Multicellular Radiations are of course the Animals, Plants, and Fungi. However there's several other smaller lineages which appear to have come up with the multicellular solution on their own - slime molds and several algal lineages are the only ones which leaps to my mind right now because it's late, but again Lynn's book details all of them. These really do appear to be independant, convergent origins as they all appear to be derived from demonstrably unicellular sets of taxa. The really big step was the quantum leap in genomic complexity (and probably redundancy) inherent in the change from prokaryotes to eucaryotes. There's a lot of really exciting work being done in this area right now, based upon hard analysis of full genomes from both groups. The full story is way stranger than anything we learned in high school (spoiler: maybe it was a triple-endosymbiosis which concurrently resulted in both the eucaryotic genome and the mitochondrion). For some basic outlines of this stuff go here.
I think it could have worked. Clearly it did work for lots of people, and bully for them.
All the same Warburton's take on the Great Blue One really irritated me. He Mugged. Relentlessly.
I mean, I'm sorry, but a man in a huge blue rubber tick suit is inherently ridiculous. There's just no reason to constantly emphasize, "Hey, look how silly I am.". The only way to make it work is to go completely straight. That's where the conflict comes in that would make it funny. The Tick takes himself with utmost seriousness, and what Warburton was doing (I thought) made it seem like The Tick was in on the joke. He can't be.
I also found the whole Batmanuel/Libery-Woman-Or-Whatever thing really irritating. Relentlessly horny couples are the stock-in-trade of bad sitcom writers. I just expected better. I'm totally in tune with the idea of a communist robot stalking Jimmy Carter, but the execution left me cold.
I very much doubt that a corporation holding a conversation via press releases and policy statements could pass the Turing test.
Re:Why subscribe to software in the future...
on
Windows in 2020
·
· Score: 1
my Atari ST needs no maintainance. I don't use it for one simple reason - I have absolutely no use for it. Everything I do on my PC would be completely impossible with that little amount of computing power.
True, but I think this is wandering away from the initial topic - today's hardware is massively more powerful than an ST. I still use my PII/350 at home becuase it does everything that I actually need with speed and efficiency. I'll upgrade eventually, but I feel no burning desire to do so in the same way that I very much did feel the need to go from a 486 to a pentium.
I argree with the original poster's point - for the things your mom needs to do, today's hardware is and will continue to be just fine. The only thing that will increase the average computer user's need to upgrade will be bloatware and bells&whistles.
Which is not to say we shouldn't or won't upgrade, I just think it's a bit less necessary now than it has been.
I can just imagine the posts if slashdot had existed in the Roman Empire ca. the fourth or fifth centuries.
AndronicusXVII wrote: >and we cannot maintain civilization itself if Rome >in ruins, it is not safe to travel the roads for commerce, > and we cannot feed everyone
This is lame d00d! The barbarians are doing us a favour! They have swept away the corrupt power structure and a new era of opportunity awaits us all! I only wish I could be alive in the year 1300 man, the new ideas and the new ways of doing business will lead us all into an era of riches unimaginable by all the old skool l4m3rz!!!
I guess a crowd that equates digital information (infinitely copiable) with physics property (automatically scarce) -- and somehow believes that digital copying is the same as rape, pillage, and murder with an eyepatch and a parrot
Of course it isn't. Anyone who claims they are the same is an idiot.
Nonetheless since you and I are able (easily able) to infinitely copy someone else's work and distribute it as we see fit, it does not follow that we have a right to do so.
If you spend the next two years working on an amazing little piece of software and you choose not to release it as freeware, you absolutely have the right to make that choice. I don't have the right to take that choice away from you. I can argue till I'm blue in the face that it really doesn't hurt you all that much, but at the end of the day I am still making decisions that you (and only you) have the right to make.
It's a peculiar blind spot with slashdot - people honestly seem to believe that these technologies exist for some reason apart from massive-scale piracy. Maybe the authors never intended it this way, but the fact that that is precisely what it is used for never really seems to faze anyone...
I have a friend who started out by running scams in the streets of Beirut at age 13 and was a millionaire in the States by 20. This was thirty years ago.
There were teenage businessmen, self-made pop stars, etc etc etc for a long time before the net ever came around.
The point is that these people, successful as they may be, are not representative of Joe Average in any given generation. How many 15 year old coders actually write something which changes the world? As close to zero as you can get, is how many. Ditto with taking down corporate websites, writing viruses, etc.
What's much more interesting and relevant is our attitude towards these few people. They represent the achievement of an ideal that's running around in our collective brains.
Every fifteen year old who makes a little UT mod or has a moderately succcessful web site imagines him/herself in the place of these idols, but it ain't gonna happen.
Personally I think they're avatars of consumer culture. From a mythic standpoint they got rich and famous with relatively little effort or background knowledge (ie, they didn't have to spend 30 years in a soul-killing job in order to accumulate a modest little fortune). They've been raised to consumer godhood, and can now rest easy in the happy nirvana of big houses and boats and whatnot.
I've always hated this smug little aphorism of Sagan's. Which is not to say that I don't understand the thrust of it, but it sets up an arbitrary and unquantifiable standard of evidence required for any claim, the "extraordinary" nature of which is also an arbitrary valuation.
Claims demand evidence. Simple as that. If the experiment is repeatable and is not demonstrably an artifact of well-understood processes, then the effect must tentatively be considered genuine. The ferreting out of causes is another matter altogether, of course, but is subject to the same simple criterion.
Really, it's not like I'm an Ultima I fanatic or anything, but I managed to find this after searching a bit:
You have been exploring the four continents of Ultima, crossing plains and oceans, and increasing your attributes and possessions. Suddenly, you find advanced weapons, armour, and vehicles in the cities. Purchase a space shuttle as soon as you have enough gold. The shuttle will carry you out into space where you will strive to destroy 20 enemy vessels. If you do this, you will be designated a "Space Ace". You will want to be a Space Ace before rescuing the princess. If you destroy the enemy spacecraft, and return alive to Ultima, you will have gained thousands of experience points and will be ready to save the Princess. Space movement can be tricky, and the following strategy hints should help:
The one where you start out using horses and buggies, and by the end of the game technology has advanced to the point where you actually have to use a space shuttle to go out in space and
Nope, this was the original Ultima, number One. I remember it well. The whole spaceship theme never really fit in well with the game as a whole, and was properly dropped in later games.
Personally, I think the original Ultima deserved at least a mention on the top 50 list. Ultimas III, IV, and V are properly recognized for the completeness and depth of the worlds they presented, and they always pushed things to the edge for the technology of the time. All the same, the original Ultima was a true revelation. We'd never seen anything like it.
Previous to that, there were a few RPG-like graphics games which took place all on one permanent screen. You just moved a little icon around on the map and had "adventures" in various spots. The sheer scale of the first Ultima was astounding. Not merely four huge continents, but cities to do business in and whole dungeouns to explore, not to mention spaceships to fly. It was the harbinger of things to come, and had incredibly deep gameplay for the time.
Of course it all came to a sad and sloppy end with Ultimas 8 and 9, but that doesn't diminish to importance of the series to the RPG genre.
I wonder if Vinge ever considered that he was spawning a new religon.
Dude, the singularity is the idea of a science fiction writer. All the clever little arguments in the world about why it has to happen won't make it any more real. You're proceeding as if it was a revelation of absolute truth from on high. It's not.
It's already been referenced, but in case you haven't seen it you must immediately read the description of Cybernetic Totalism here. I can't pretend I'm on board with everything Lanier says, but he does a very nice job of debunking this mythos.
Oh come on. You have to admit it's great fun for fat middle-aged men who sit in front of computers all day to imagine that one day if they can just get enough bandwidth and enough other fat middle-aged men networked together they can alter the world and assume godlike powers all without leaving the comfortable glow of their CRTs. And it will all just happen in a transfigurative millenial instant.
Sadly the dot-bust and the passing of the millenium may put these fantasies on ice for a while.
Slashdot Mirror
Offtopic? Offtopic? Yes, by all means we must stick to the agenda gentlemen. The unwashed masses wait with baited breath for the appearance of the Beowulf cluster joke. I believe the secretary general of the U.N. is anxious to hear what everyone thinks about it, so for God's sake please stick to the topic.
Anyway, if I had mod points that would have gone "Funny".
Well... that's fair enough really. If the sterility trait is expressed or not depending upon the genetic background in which it exists (called "incomplete penetrance"), then it really could start moving about in the population.
All the same, any trait which is as inherently self-limiting as genetic sterility doesn't strike me as a big candidate for becoming widespread in a population. On the longer scale this one would almost certainly lose out to more prolific alleles. On the other hand, linking this gene (placing it very very close) to other GM food genes might be a usefull way of discouraging their spread...
You can get the abstract here for free and demonstrate to yourself that the news article was wrong, and that it was actually in Science, not Nature. Thus endeth my Karma whoring for today. :)
some new fancy algorith to calculate the phylogenetic trees.
Spot on. Bayesian estimation. The newest latest way to get the "right" answer. Althought that being said I really do like it myself - I need to work through the math some more, but it seems like a way of approaching parametric bootstrapping results without the gigantic computational overhead...
Well... the news article misses the beat on a few things, including which journal it was published in (Science, not Nature). The term "missing link" is often bandied about in the news whenever the topic turns to ancestral organisms. That wasn't really what the paper was about. The real issue was that this algae appears to be the closest living relative of the land plants. For that reason, any characteristics it has in common with the land plants are most likely ones which were present in the common ancestor of all land plants. Being able to place the ancestor of the land plants between two "frames" this way (common characters of land plants AND characters of Charales algae) gives us a window onto what kind of organism the land plants are derived from. Here's a tiny quote from the original paper:
Identification of the Charales as the sister taxon to land plants with the Coleochaetales as sister to the Charales/land plant clade suggests that the common ancestor of land plants was a branched, filamentous organism with a haplontic life cycle and oogamous reproduction... Although it is tempting to envision the origin of land plants as having been from amorphous pond scum, these data indicate that the common ancestor of land plants and their closest algal relatives was a relatively complex organism.It has been done lots of times. Based upon chromosomal organization here and based upon DNA sequences here, for example or here for a good set of lecture notes on the topic.
Don't wanna rain on your parade here, but:
C,T,U = pyrimidines
A,G = purines
And strictly speaking there's really a host of other forms of bases found in tRNAs and rRNAs (pseudouracil, methylated bases, thiouridine, isopentenyladenosine, and on and on) thought they probably don't count 'cause they're derived forms of the canonical ones...
Canada sucks.
America is great.
Everyone else sucks.
Fuck everyone else.
Did I miss one? I only wish it was possible to bring up **any** freaking topic that doesn't involve the USA without this dimwit ranting starting up.
True, but there's a reason you're using the word "geek". The meaning has changed a *lot* over the past 20 years, but there is a reason why that word was originally applied... it wasn't appropriate to everyone, sure, but to enough, to enough...
The 4 most important things on this planet are:- Air Water Topsoil Biodiversity"
Again and again I see people criticizing this line. Are you all really that stupid, or just trolling on a collective basis?
Air - we breath it, you see. Water - we drink it. Topsoil - we grow food in it. Biodiversity - oh for crying out loud - anyone who doesn't understand this needs to go back to school. The air you breath is made by living things. Ditto the food you eat. It all exists in a rather complex relationship with...
Oh forget it. What a bunch of twits.
Okay, honest answer (albeit just my opinion):
A world which includes tigers is better than a world in which they are all dead. More broadly, the complex mesh of animals, plants, and whatnot that has evolved over the past few hundred million years has intrinsic value because of intangible things which cannot really be defined from an economic viewpoint: beauty, grace, otherness. It's possible to go too far with this point and get all soppy, sure, but that doesn't mean there isn't an important idea at the heart of it.
If there's no place for these values in our worldview (and I mean a real, functional place upon which we will work and invest capital to maintain it) then we might be best off burning down the museums - they're taking up valuable parking lot real estate just to house a bit of canvas and marble. Most libraries can go too - PDFs of computer manuals and investment guides will provide functional information to the maximum number of people and we can convert all those old illuminated medieval manuscripts into usefull toilet paper.
In the end I can't prove that anyone's personal balance sheet will be improved by living in a world that has tigers, gorillas, orangutans, and even a few annoyingly-placed owls in it. But just for me that's a marginally more pleasant world to live in.
I think the radical environmentalists have done more harm than good to the value people place on the environment. The issue has become amalgamated with a host of charged political issues: leftism, antiglobalism, feminism, etc. This is unfortunate and not the historical foundation of the conservation movement. Really at its roots it is apolitical: Teddy Roosevelt (Great White Big Game Hunter) and John Muir (would have been a tree-hugging environmentalist if the label had existed back then) both performed great works in setting up the national parks system out of a common understanding that the natural world has an intrinsic value even if it doesn't put food on your own personal table.
Well... the best reference on the multicellularity topic is probably Lynn Margulis's volume Five Kingdoms in which she points out all of the taxa in which multicellularity of one type or another has evolved. I think she defines anywhere between seven and eleven separate origins to multicellularity, depending on how you define the term and on the exact relationships between groups. Don't bank on her overall phylogeny of the Eucaryotes, though.
There's at least one (maybe two? It's been a while since I've been really up on this) obligately multicellular prokaryotic lineage - they cluster together in these rather cool-looking treelike thingies. Once one delves into the diversity of life beyond the "textbook" examples there's some pretty amazing variety out there.
Within the eucaryotes it's a whole different story of course - the three Great Big Multicellular Radiations are of course the Animals, Plants, and Fungi. However there's several other smaller lineages which appear to have come up with the multicellular solution on their own - slime molds and several algal lineages are the only ones which leaps to my mind right now because it's late, but again Lynn's book details all of them. These really do appear to be independant, convergent origins as they all appear to be derived from demonstrably unicellular sets of taxa. The really big step was the quantum leap in genomic complexity (and probably redundancy) inherent in the change from prokaryotes to eucaryotes. There's a lot of really exciting work being done in this area right now, based upon hard analysis of full genomes from both groups. The full story is way stranger than anything we learned in high school (spoiler: maybe it was a triple-endosymbiosis which concurrently resulted in both the eucaryotic genome and the mitochondrion). For some basic outlines of this stuff go here.
I think it could have worked. Clearly it did work for lots of people, and bully for them.
All the same Warburton's take on the Great Blue One really irritated me. He Mugged. Relentlessly.
I mean, I'm sorry, but a man in a huge blue rubber tick suit is inherently ridiculous. There's just no reason to constantly emphasize, "Hey, look how silly I am.". The only way to make it work is to go completely straight. That's where the conflict comes in that would make it funny. The Tick takes himself with utmost seriousness, and what Warburton was doing (I thought) made it seem like The Tick was in on the joke. He can't be.
I also found the whole Batmanuel/Libery-Woman-Or-Whatever thing really irritating. Relentlessly horny couples are the stock-in-trade of bad sitcom writers. I just expected better. I'm totally in tune with the idea of a communist robot stalking Jimmy Carter, but the execution left me cold.
I very much doubt that a corporation holding a conversation via press releases and policy statements could pass the Turing test.
my Atari ST needs no maintainance. I don't use it for one simple reason - I have absolutely no use for it. Everything I do on my PC would be completely impossible with that little amount of computing power.
True, but I think this is wandering away from the initial topic - today's hardware is massively more powerful than an ST. I still use my PII/350 at home becuase it does everything that I actually need with speed and efficiency. I'll upgrade eventually, but I feel no burning desire to do so in the same way that I very much did feel the need to go from a 486 to a pentium.
I argree with the original poster's point - for the things your mom needs to do, today's hardware is and will continue to be just fine. The only thing that will increase the average computer user's need to upgrade will be bloatware and bells&whistles.
Which is not to say we shouldn't or won't upgrade, I just think it's a bit less necessary now than it has been.
Long-term, the stars are ours
And your evidence for this is...?
I can just imagine the posts if slashdot had existed in the Roman Empire ca. the fourth or fifth centuries.
AndronicusXVII wrote:
>and we cannot maintain civilization itself if Rome
>in ruins, it is not safe to travel the roads for commerce,
> and we cannot feed everyone
This is lame d00d! The barbarians are doing us a favour! They have swept away the corrupt power structure and a new era of opportunity awaits us all! I only wish I could be alive in the year 1300 man, the new ideas and the new ways of doing business will lead us all into an era of riches unimaginable by all the old skool l4m3rz!!!
I guess a crowd that equates digital information (infinitely copiable) with physics property (automatically scarce) -- and somehow believes that digital copying is the same as rape, pillage, and murder with an eyepatch and a parrot
Of course it isn't. Anyone who claims they are the same is an idiot.
Nonetheless since you and I are able (easily able) to infinitely copy someone else's work and distribute it as we see fit, it does not follow that we have a right to do so.
If you spend the next two years working on an amazing little piece of software and you choose not to release it as freeware, you absolutely have the right to make that choice. I don't have the right to take that choice away from you. I can argue till I'm blue in the face that it really doesn't hurt you all that much, but at the end of the day I am still making decisions that you (and only you) have the right to make.
Well you won't get modded up with that attitude.
You're right, but that's beside the point.
It's a peculiar blind spot with slashdot - people honestly seem to believe that these technologies exist for some reason apart from massive-scale piracy. Maybe the authors never intended it this way, but the fact that that is precisely what it is used for never really seems to faze anyone...
I have a friend who started out by running scams in the streets of Beirut at age 13 and was a millionaire in the States by 20. This was thirty years ago.
There were teenage businessmen, self-made pop stars, etc etc etc for a long time before the net ever came around.
The point is that these people, successful as they may be, are not representative of Joe Average in any given generation. How many 15 year old coders actually write something which changes the world? As close to zero as you can get, is how many. Ditto with taking down corporate websites, writing viruses, etc.
What's much more interesting and relevant is our attitude towards these few people. They represent the achievement of an ideal that's running around in our collective brains.
Every fifteen year old who makes a little UT mod or has a moderately succcessful web site imagines him/herself in the place of these idols, but it ain't gonna happen.
Personally I think they're avatars of consumer culture. From a mythic standpoint they got rich and famous with relatively little effort or background knowledge (ie, they didn't have to spend 30 years in a soul-killing job in order to accumulate a modest little fortune). They've been raised to consumer godhood, and can now rest easy in the happy nirvana of big houses and boats and whatnot.
extraordinary claims demand extraordinary proof
I've always hated this smug little aphorism of Sagan's. Which is not to say that I don't understand the thrust of it, but it sets up an arbitrary and unquantifiable standard of evidence required for any claim, the "extraordinary" nature of which is also an arbitrary valuation.
Claims demand evidence. Simple as that. If the experiment is repeatable and is not demonstrably an artifact of well-understood processes, then the effect must tentatively be considered genuine. The ferreting out of causes is another matter altogether, of course, but is subject to the same simple criterion.
Really, it's not like I'm an Ultima I fanatic or anything, but I managed to find this after searching a bit:
You have been exploring the four continents of Ultima, crossing plains and oceans, and increasing your attributes and possessions. Suddenly, you find advanced weapons, armour, and vehicles in the cities. Purchase a space shuttle as soon as you have enough gold. The shuttle will carry you out into space where you will strive to destroy 20 enemy vessels. If you do this, you will be designated a "Space Ace". You will want to be a Space Ace before rescuing the princess. If you destroy the enemy spacecraft, and return alive to Ultima, you will have gained thousands of experience points and will be ready to save the Princess. Space movement can be tricky, and the following strategy hints should help:
The one where you start out using horses and buggies, and by the end of the game technology has advanced to the point where you actually have to use a space shuttle to go out in space and
Nope, this was the original Ultima, number One. I remember it well. The whole spaceship theme never really fit in well with the game as a whole, and was properly dropped in later games.
Personally, I think the original Ultima deserved at least a mention on the top 50 list. Ultimas III, IV, and V are properly recognized for the completeness and depth of the worlds they presented, and they always pushed things to the edge for the technology of the time. All the same, the original Ultima was a true revelation. We'd never seen anything like it.
Previous to that, there were a few RPG-like graphics games which took place all on one permanent screen. You just moved a little icon around on the map and had "adventures" in various spots. The sheer scale of the first Ultima was astounding. Not merely four huge continents, but cities to do business in and whole dungeouns to explore, not to mention spaceships to fly. It was the harbinger of things to come, and had incredibly deep gameplay for the time.
Of course it all came to a sad and sloppy end with Ultimas 8 and 9, but that doesn't diminish to importance of the series to the RPG genre.
Wow.
I wonder if Vinge ever considered that he was spawning a new religon.
Dude, the singularity is the idea of a science fiction writer. All the clever little arguments in the world about why it has to happen won't make it any more real. You're proceeding as if it was a revelation of absolute truth from on high. It's not.
It's already been referenced, but in case you haven't seen it you must immediately read the description of Cybernetic Totalism here. I can't pretend I'm on board with everything Lanier says, but he does a very nice job of debunking this mythos.
Oh come on. You have to admit it's great fun for fat middle-aged men who sit in front of computers all day to imagine that one day if they can just get enough bandwidth and enough other fat middle-aged men networked together they can alter the world and assume godlike powers all without leaving the comfortable glow of their CRTs. And it will all just happen in a transfigurative millenial instant.
Sadly the dot-bust and the passing of the millenium may put these fantasies on ice for a while.
Right here in C