If you mean the century in which some minds cut their umbilical cord to biology, then you could well be right.
But if you expect that will provide an end game for things biological then you need to remember that despite all the progress of multi-cellular eukaryotes, the prokaryotes continue to be the underlying drivers.
And even if we do manage to bring some planetary-scale biological disaster to ourselves and much of the rest of the biosphere, whatever biology is left will soon enough adapt to vacant niches.
Castorocauda has the ankle spurs characteristic of its nearest living relative, the platypus, which uses them for territorial defense. And like the platypus, Castorocauda was probably an egg-layer, Luo says.
The article's authors must have been less interested in generating Australian interest than Slashdot sometimes seems to be, but save for the shape of its mouth the fossilised critter appears to have had much more in common with Australia's peculiar aquatic monotreme than with the mentioned northern hemisphere placentals.
The fossil even has spurs on its hind legs just where the modern platypus has its unique-amongst-mammalia poison delivery system. Front legs equipped for burrowing suggests in may have also used very playpus-like diggings.
While detailed dental structure is particularly important for cladistics, it is also something that can be subject to high selection pressure -- you have to keep eating -- so it would not be that unlikely that an otter-like snout would evolve into that equally unique to mammals duck bill during a 165 million year river journey from China to Oz.
Sheesh! My Memes page is anything but a vision of what the web/net might be. It's just a mess of stuff that only makes sense together to me.
But, yes, I was sold in 1981 on the online potential as a small 'p' political medium, without at the time having noticed the earlier work of Doug Engelbart, Ted Nelson et al. Though I only spoke about it in private confidence, my betting at that time was that we would all finish up doing our information work inside a universally interconnected MMORPG. Still might happen when somebody develops the MSN killer.
"Anarchist" is also an insufficient label for somebody who has burnt a lifetime organising and whose vocabulary has moved on to "devolution" and "diversity".
On the subject of video archives I really don't care as long as somebody can get me Mavis Bramston. The medium is not the only massage in the Storyverse[TM].
What I'm really hanging out for is Apple to hook the 56" Chi Mei display to the NVIDIA GeForce 6800 Ultra DDL so I can make real use of OmniGraffle (4 Professional, for SVG), with a fully optioned runout G5 tower to make the most of it, courtesy a perceptive sponsor.
I've been having this night^H^H^H^H^Hday-mare for some time that I was driving down the road and Phil and Johnny were crossing in front of me but so far apart that I could only choose one.
Now I just need to find somewhere to show the contrasting pics of graffiti and authorised murals I took at the weekend.
Maybe a carrot for the kids in terms of something interesting to do might achieve a lot more than forever telling them what not to do.
... but with a big, for those days, TV as a monitor which was supposed to also double as a TV, and a modified IBM Selectric typewriter as a printer.
Also got the extra 16K for Pascal but never got into it. Used Electric Pencil as a word processor. And at least we had got into Macs before my mother started writing her books.
All up the North Star cost me as much as a new car would have cost at the time ($A7K). Wouldn't mind having todays equivalent to spend on a bunch of new gear.
Of course my real first computer was an IBM 1440, but I let them keep it in the big airconditioned room.
I was getting so sick of the BS that a while before the (southern) summer holidays I dragged my ancient but previously unopened The Origin of Species out of my bookshelves as occasional train reading, now 90% done.
When Darwin wrote it, heritability was clearly accepted as a fact, but nobody was close to thinking about the mechanisms in any more detail than an almost prurient interest in the diversity of mechanisms for reproduction.
Over and over Darwin emphasises that variation necessarily precedes selection without pretending to have any detailed idea as to how such variation occurs. IMNSHO, the subsequent and continuing lack of interest in the mechanism(s) of variation is a big reason so many otherwise often reasonable people have trouble getting their heads around evolutionary theory. And it's not as though there hasn't been a lot of progress on that front, especially our increasing understanding of genetic recombination and regulation.
All Darwin basically said about natural selection was based on the idea of a struggle for life, something familiar to nature and those living closest to it, but something most humans want to deny themselves and theirs any experience of. He realised that natural selection provided a much slower acting analogue of the artificial selection long practiced by breeders of varieties of domesticated animals and plants, where the breeders' fancies replaced the struggle for life as the detemining factor.
What was most surprising was how few mistakes of detail Darwin actually made, having been born into a culture that just assumed separate creation and having to see past that himself before he could organise his thoughts.
He was able to develop an appreciation of deep time based on little more than the obvious age of geological strata and without well understood evidence of anything more traumatic than the end of the most recent glacial advance. Plate tectonics and receding galaxies needed to wait for another century.
Without the powerful notion of fractal self-similarity to explain the shape of the tree of life, he felt he had to go through the argument at several levels as to how a few descendants of a successful line would diversify over time, most recently to form separate species, then families*, etc. all the way back up the Linnean heirarchy.
The understanding of evolutionary mechanism works at the level of genes, and populations whereas Darwinism was concerned mainly with species.
It isn't the mechanism that works at the level of genes but a very narrow mathematical approach to allele frequency and similar. That power of that math still doesn't let you escape the fact that it is whole organisms through at least some kind of relationship with others of their species who either successfully breed or die virgins. Viability in nature's struggle for life is determined at every point of an organism's life cycle.
*the prior use of terms like 'families' suggested an unstated wider awareness that some kind of relatedness might exist between species.
Apparently based only on the/. summary, a poster concluded:
(...) so no, early puberty doesn't "damage you", being too immature to handle it damages you.
while TFA already said exactly that:
Socializing with older people "places these kids in difficult situations that they may not be cognitively able to handle," Piquero said, explaining that, although a 13-year-old may start hanging out with a 16-year-old, he or she "may not be at the 16-year-old level yet."
Still there was a lot worse from all those who wrongly jumped to the conclusion that it was a particular problem for girls and (consequent?) moderations declaring the worthlessness and irrelevance of such research.
Clearly such people got nowhere near seeing that the evidence was weakest for whites, for two-parent families and for those who spent more time with girls, which may well bring the count to three out of four for relevance to/. Interestingly at least the CNN report makes no mention of gays who might really need to be factored out of any data on victimisation before you placed too much weight on its conclusions.
And it is also unfortunate for this and many similar studies that we don't have historical data and rarely cross cultural data, so we don't have anything beyond our vivid imaginations to help us decide whether the decline of parenting skills (through loss of tradition and lack of practice as families nucleate ever smaller) or the prevailing paranoia about children's social contacts might be other contributing factors.
(...) a population of intelligent, creative people who could solve the country's problems and revitalize the economy?
It is seductively easy for those of us who like to consider ourselves intelligent to assume greater intelligence will get more done, but there is precious little evidence that this works reliably, neither individually nor, even moreso, at a collective level.
Eventually, with an open mind, you start to see how far our preoccupation with jobs, with keeping our larvae safe, and with supressing sex are taking us down the ant road. The collective can do unthinking marvels while the individuals are kept too busy to act independently. Even our more intelligent researchers are every day burdened with more and more demands for grant application paperwork before they have a chance to apply their intelligence to worthy problems.
I should try to avoid polluting one of the most insightful discussions ever on Slashdot with soapbox rhetoric on broader issues, no matter how tempting. In the West there is an historic scarcity of children which may have long term environmental benefits but is certainly making it hard to allow those kids we do have to enjoy the traditional challenges of their growing years.
(quick: count the nested sections spread accross pages of text to guess the heading level you're at)
HTML's H1 through H6 tags are the second* worst design decision in terms of producing unrecoverable ugliness in the history of graphical user interface. Nested sections with one heading tag is incomparably better. There should almost never be any need to know exactly how deep you are nested, especially as you can easily define a section class to say ensure that main body text in a complexly nested document is stylistically consistent without sacrificing the ability to extract meaningful ToCs, etc.
*Even worse was orthogonal font-style-size menus which would have been much better mediated by style sheets from the beginning.
I understand bonobos have more appealing methods of conflict resolution, maybe assisted by not having attained a population density where STDs became a selection factor.
Alston was a numbers man who was given the Arts portfolio as a sop which was bundled with Communications about which he was embarrassingly clueless.
Harradine was a religious conservative independent from Tasmania who often had the balance of power in the Senate and used it to get the govt to pass laws enshrining his extreme moral position in exchange for his support for their reactionary economic changes.
Not that even mainsteam Islam (nor Christianity, nor whatever) should be protected from criticism on its fundamentals, but mindlessly repeating negative stereotytpes of any unfashionable group just increases the chances that the more impressionable amongst them will move towards the stereotype as they stop hearing more constructive views about how they might live their lives.
However the early moderations in this thread have been so deliberately viscious that the least anyone who finds them so can do is try to metamoderate them off the moderator list.
I'd take my chances with the Singapore government any day.
David Zindell: Neverness, Requiem for Homo Sapiens
on
Top 20 Geek Novels
·
· Score: 1
While we were getting over our longing for stories short enough to read in one sitting, it seems like Zindell's four sf tomes (Requiem is a trilogy) slid under almost everybody's radar in the rush to get to the new millennium.
Without a line of mathematics, it is surely a sufficiently geeky approach that FTL travel is achived in Zindell's universe by master pilots proving mathematical theorems on the fly to safely navigate a "thick" space between portals into "near space" at stars.
A gifted copy of Neverness sat neglected on my bookshelf through the '90s, but having finally decided to give it a try, I soon turned up the trilogy and read them in quick succession.
Personally I'd rate all of them ahead of half that list and Tbe Broken God on a par with Dune and Neuromancer, the latter of which I just finished rereading.
Was it suicidal for me to spend the morning buying ten unrelated tracks:
I Want to Know What Love Is: Foreigner
Nights In White Satin: The Moody Blues
Reckless (Don't Be So...): Australian Crawl
Original Sin: INXS
Nature Boy: Nat King Cole
If: Bread
Exodus: Ferrante and Teicher
Day-O (The Banana Boat Song): Harry Belafonte
With a Little Help from My Friends: Joe Cocker
Memory: Debbie Byrne
for $A16.90 the lot? To me that's a lot better value that I could otherwise get without leaving my chair, albeit with maybe a 50% hit rate amongst the tracks I went looking for and plenty left on my priority list to spend a similar amount on in future months.
(The prospect of iTMS was the only reason I relented and got a credit card a couple of years ago, so I could even make an argument that it has cost me over $A1,000 per track in the interim, but that is another story.)
I'm certainly glad its finally here and can only hope the back catalogue improves further with time.
And maybe the claim that iTMS Australia has been launched with "over a million tracks" should be taken with a grain of salt as there were two or more almost identical versions offered of most of the tracks I searched for, reflecting their repackaging in various collections. That most likely also reduces the value of any popularity stats iTMS might provide.
In a closely related current issue federal Agriculture Minister Peter McGauran displayed the scientific illiteracy so recently evident in more governments than ours by getting all in a tizz about some Canadian pigeons that flew in ahead of the customs slow down only to be discovered to have viral antibodies but not live viruses and be sentenced to immediate death for having beaten the dreaded avian flu or, in four cases, Newcastle disease.
If only we could do the same to politicans carrying antibodies, let alone their sick computer systems.
Better not think about juxtaposing the importation of pigeons from the other side of the world with the wish of local authorities to wipe out the feral pigeons already settled in here.
Don't worry, it gets worse. Just check out the support for teaching "intelligent design" from the general practitioner our over-tired and under-opposed federal government have given responsibility for education.
Vinge's True Names predated Gibson's Neuromancer by three years and contained a comparable description of what we only learnt to call 'cyberspace' after Gibson coined the term in the latter work.
Such details aside, the diverse contributions to this thread show some of the better side of Slashdot comments, so I'll let slide the opportunity to rant about the dubiousness of claims that 'intelligence' might deliver the inflated expectations we too easily burden it with.
Perl syntax is absolutely awful, and that's the reason Perl will never have macros
According to Synopsis 6, Damian Conway and Allison Randal's summary of Perl 6's "Subroutines and Other Code Objects":
Macros are routines whose calls execute as soon as they are parsed (i.e. at compile-time). Macros may return another source code string or a parse-tree.
Having once upon a time built an application based almost entirely on IBM System/360 Assembler macros, even Perl < 6 syntax is a breeze in comparison.
Despite the prevailing "wisdom" of those who have become impatient with the Perl 6 project, it is meant for the long term and I suspect its strong linguistic roots might enable us to start looking for meaning in text, and that might be a reasonable candidate as a future disruptive application technology.
Presumably that scenario would require a stronger mix of automated and by hand programming, which Perl 6's macros should facilitate.
Ok, we can't do it today, but our planning direction needs to be towards making sure everything that goes up does not come back down.
What we really need to find is the minimal long term cost track to establishing independently viable industrial societies off this planet.
The environmental cost to the only environment which actually matters, the earth's biosphere, of keeping returning space travellers alive for the rest of their days on earth will at some point exceed the cost to the earth of keeping them alive in settlements elsewhere. Not soon certainly, but eventually.
Humanity would not be anywhere near where it is today if our pioneering ancestors had insisted on return tickets.
Canvas always was one of computer graphics' best kept secrets.
In what seems like another lifetime I started a software distribution business which introduced desktop publishing to Australia and which I see is still operating, albeit under a newly revised name.
Of all the products I was involved in sourcing, Canvas still features on Pica's front page in what must be some kind of a record for an international software distribution arrangement.
Deneba drew me to Miami a few times in the early days of the arrangement, none more memorable than when I had to leave a rental car in a no stopping area at Gatwick and still missed my flight to New York, but managed to switch to one 15 minutes later to Dallas which flew over Greenland where the clouds below cleared revealing a spectacular view, which put the need to reverse the order of my scheduled one day visits to Miami and New York into perspective.
It might have been another Miami visit when I first saw GhostScript.
Now I just can't wait for SVG in DOM so plans that have been brewing through 20 years of PostScript might finally find the platform they need.
As any decent farmer knows pigs are often smarter than dogs are. They're also some of the biggest assholes you'll find in the animal kingdom, and that alone qualifies them for the dinner table.
(Resisting the temptation to be distasteful about eating arseholes...) I've been struggling to draw a similar line but on the other side of pigs for some time and without the advantage of being a practitioner of certain desert religions.
Still dunno if it is reasonable to take behavioural style into account when handing out moral status. That sounds like the kind of thing that has got humans into no end of trouble over places like Kurdistan.
And it all has to be balanced against the delights of ham, bacon, roast pork and pizza. For now I think I'm still stuck with "it's better to have lived and fed the hungry than not to have lived at all." If only the plight of fish stocks and omega-3 was so simple.
Maybe the only way Neanderthals managed to coexist with modern humans for 15,000 years was that they dominated local encounters, often confiscating the victims of successful human hunts the way bigger cats do on National Geographic Channel today.
Humans could survive and prosper at the margins because of their more varied diet and generally greater adaptability, so were never in danger of being globally exterminated by the competition they suffered in Neandertal territory.
But gradually humans impacted the environment and tilted the balance so there were less and less places Neandertals could make their traditional living. Their populations fragmented, they were on a one way road to extinction.
I didn't read anything in the reports of Jobs's remarks that suggested he was claiming more than to have been sensitised to wider design issues by his calligraphy classes and being in a position, chief head kicker for the Mac development project, where he could force a brake through the conceptual bottlenecks which had long separated end user computing and elegance.
It may be worth reflecting that there has been no comparable "inevitable revolution" in the development process itself, I suspect in a large part because of the high cost of retooling developers' brains. But that hasn't stopped generation after generation insisting such a revolution was also inevitable.
Obviously the Internet itself was the definitive "inevitable revolution", except that those of us who knew where it had to go, and even those who were developing key components, still needed Gore's politial initiative to break through the final barriers to the commercial Web, "progress" which much of the early developer community resisted religiously.
Slashdot Mirror
If you mean the century in which some minds cut their umbilical cord to biology, then you could well be right.
But if you expect that will provide an end game for things biological then you need to remember that despite all the progress of multi-cellular eukaryotes, the prokaryotes continue to be the underlying drivers.
And even if we do manage to bring some planetary-scale biological disaster to ourselves and much of the rest of the biosphere, whatever biology is left will soon enough adapt to vacant niches.
Back before the restart of time, I was sufficiently out of synch to ask (w)hat happens if there is no "Next Great Thing"? on July 19th, 2001.
Only goes to show how stupid such predictions can soon look when I therein also predicted "(t)he inevitable Peace with Drugs".
But with even the war machines increasingly looking outside for innovation, it isn't hard to wonder just where left field went.
The article's authors must have been less interested in generating Australian interest than Slashdot sometimes seems to be, but save for the shape of its mouth the fossilised critter appears to have had much more in common with Australia's peculiar aquatic monotreme than with the mentioned northern hemisphere placentals.
The fossil even has spurs on its hind legs just where the modern platypus has its unique-amongst-mammalia poison delivery system. Front legs equipped for burrowing suggests in may have also used very playpus-like diggings.
While detailed dental structure is particularly important for cladistics, it is also something that can be subject to high selection pressure -- you have to keep eating -- so it would not be that unlikely that an otter-like snout would evolve into that equally unique to mammals duck bill during a 165 million year river journey from China to Oz.
Sheesh! My Memes page is anything but a vision of what the web/net might be. It's just a mess of stuff that only makes sense together to me.
But, yes, I was sold in 1981 on the online potential as a small 'p' political medium, without at the time having noticed the earlier work of Doug Engelbart, Ted Nelson et al. Though I only spoke about it in private confidence, my betting at that time was that we would all finish up doing our information work inside a universally interconnected MMORPG. Still might happen when somebody develops the MSN killer.
"Anarchist" is also an insufficient label for somebody who has burnt a lifetime organising and whose vocabulary has moved on to "devolution" and "diversity".
On the subject of video archives I really don't care as long as somebody can get me Mavis Bramston. The medium is not the only massage in the Storyverse[TM].
What I'm really hanging out for is Apple to hook the 56" Chi Mei display to the NVIDIA GeForce 6800 Ultra DDL so I can make real use of OmniGraffle (4 Professional, for SVG), with a fully optioned runout G5 tower to make the most of it, courtesy a perceptive sponsor.
You certainly got me with that heading.
I've been having this night^H^H^H^H^Hday-mare for some time that I was driving down the road and Phil and Johnny were crossing in front of me but so far apart that I could only choose one.
Now I just need to find somewhere to show the contrasting pics of graffiti and authorised murals I took at the weekend.
Maybe a carrot for the kids in terms of something interesting to do might achieve a lot more than forever telling them what not to do.
... but with a big, for those days, TV as a monitor which was supposed to also double as a TV, and a modified IBM Selectric typewriter as a printer.
Also got the extra 16K for Pascal but never got into it. Used Electric Pencil as a word processor. And at least we had got into Macs before my mother started writing her books.
All up the North Star cost me as much as a new car would have cost at the time ($A7K). Wouldn't mind having todays equivalent to spend on a bunch of new gear.
Of course my real first computer was an IBM 1440, but I let them keep it in the big airconditioned room.
When Darwin wrote it, heritability was clearly accepted as a fact, but nobody was close to thinking about the mechanisms in any more detail than an almost prurient interest in the diversity of mechanisms for reproduction.
Over and over Darwin emphasises that variation necessarily precedes selection without pretending to have any detailed idea as to how such variation occurs. IMNSHO, the subsequent and continuing lack of interest in the mechanism(s) of variation is a big reason so many otherwise often reasonable people have trouble getting their heads around evolutionary theory. And it's not as though there hasn't been a lot of progress on that front, especially our increasing understanding of genetic recombination and regulation.
All Darwin basically said about natural selection was based on the idea of a struggle for life, something familiar to nature and those living closest to it, but something most humans want to deny themselves and theirs any experience of. He realised that natural selection provided a much slower acting analogue of the artificial selection long practiced by breeders of varieties of domesticated animals and plants, where the breeders' fancies replaced the struggle for life as the detemining factor.
What was most surprising was how few mistakes of detail Darwin actually made, having been born into a culture that just assumed separate creation and having to see past that himself before he could organise his thoughts.
He was able to develop an appreciation of deep time based on little more than the obvious age of geological strata and without well understood evidence of anything more traumatic than the end of the most recent glacial advance. Plate tectonics and receding galaxies needed to wait for another century.
Without the powerful notion of fractal self-similarity to explain the shape of the tree of life, he felt he had to go through the argument at several levels as to how a few descendants of a successful line would diversify over time, most recently to form separate species, then families*, etc. all the way back up the Linnean heirarchy.It isn't the mechanism that works at the level of genes but a very narrow mathematical approach to allele frequency and similar. That power of that math still doesn't let you escape the fact that it is whole organisms through at least some kind of relationship with others of their species who either successfully breed or die virgins. Viability in nature's struggle for life is determined at every point of an organism's life cycle.
*the prior use of terms like 'families' suggested an unstated wider awareness that some kind of relatedness might exist between species.
Clearly such people got nowhere near seeing that the evidence was weakest for whites, for two-parent families and for those who spent more time with girls, which may well bring the count to three out of four for relevance to
And it is also unfortunate for this and many similar studies that we don't have historical data and rarely cross cultural data, so we don't have anything beyond our vivid imaginations to help us decide whether the decline of parenting skills (through loss of tradition and lack of practice as families nucleate ever smaller) or the prevailing paranoia about children's social contacts might be other contributing factors.
Eventually, with an open mind, you start to see how far our preoccupation with jobs, with keeping our larvae safe, and with supressing sex are taking us down the ant road. The collective can do unthinking marvels while the individuals are kept too busy to act independently. Even our more intelligent researchers are every day burdened with more and more demands for grant application paperwork before they have a chance to apply their intelligence to worthy problems.
I should try to avoid polluting one of the most insightful discussions ever on Slashdot with soapbox rhetoric on broader issues, no matter how tempting. In the West there is an historic scarcity of children which may have long term environmental benefits but is certainly making it hard to allow those kids we do have to enjoy the traditional challenges of their growing years.
*Even worse was orthogonal font-style-size menus which would have been much better mediated by style sheets from the beginning.
I understand bonobos have more appealing methods of conflict resolution, maybe assisted by not having attained a population density where STDs became a selection factor.
Alston was a numbers man who was given the Arts portfolio as a sop which was bundled with Communications about which he was embarrassingly clueless.
Harradine was a religious conservative independent from Tasmania who often had the balance of power in the Senate and used it to get the govt to pass laws enshrining his extreme moral position in exchange for his support for their reactionary economic changes.
However the early moderations in this thread have been so deliberately viscious that the least anyone who finds them so can do is try to metamoderate them off the moderator list.Even if it means a mandatory death sentence?
While we were getting over our longing for stories short enough to read in one sitting, it seems like Zindell's four sf tomes (Requiem is a trilogy) slid under almost everybody's radar in the rush to get to the new millennium.
Without a line of mathematics, it is surely a sufficiently geeky approach that FTL travel is achived in Zindell's universe by master pilots proving mathematical theorems on the fly to safely navigate a "thick" space between portals into "near space" at stars.
A gifted copy of Neverness sat neglected on my bookshelf through the '90s, but having finally decided to give it a try, I soon turned up the trilogy and read them in quick succession.
Personally I'd rate all of them ahead of half that list and Tbe Broken God on a par with Dune and Neuromancer, the latter of which I just finished rereading.
- I Want to Know What Love Is: Foreigner
- Nights In White Satin: The Moody Blues
- Reckless (Don't Be So...): Australian Crawl
- Original Sin: INXS
- Nature Boy: Nat King Cole
- If: Bread
- Exodus: Ferrante and Teicher
- Day-O (The Banana Boat Song): Harry Belafonte
- With a Little Help from My Friends: Joe Cocker
- Memory: Debbie Byrne
for $A16.90 the lot? To me that's a lot better value that I could otherwise get without leaving my chair, albeit with maybe a 50% hit rate amongst the tracks I went looking for and plenty left on my priority list to spend a similar amount on in future months.(The prospect of iTMS was the only reason I relented and got a credit card a couple of years ago, so I could even make an argument that it has cost me over $A1,000 per track in the interim, but that is another story.)
I'm certainly glad its finally here and can only hope the back catalogue improves further with time.
And maybe the claim that iTMS Australia has been launched with "over a million tracks" should be taken with a grain of salt as there were two or more almost identical versions offered of most of the tracks I searched for, reflecting their repackaging in various collections. That most likely also reduces the value of any popularity stats iTMS might provide.
In a closely related current issue federal Agriculture Minister Peter McGauran displayed the scientific illiteracy so recently evident in more governments than ours by getting all in a tizz about some Canadian pigeons that flew in ahead of the customs slow down only to be discovered to have viral antibodies but not live viruses and be sentenced to immediate death for having beaten the dreaded avian flu or, in four cases, Newcastle disease.
If only we could do the same to politicans carrying antibodies, let alone their sick computer systems.
Better not think about juxtaposing the importation of pigeons from the other side of the world with the wish of local authorities to wipe out the feral pigeons already settled in here.
Don't worry, it gets worse. Just check out the support for teaching "intelligent design" from the general practitioner our over-tired and under-opposed federal government have given responsibility for education.
Vinge's True Names predated Gibson's Neuromancer by three years and contained a comparable description of what we only learnt to call 'cyberspace' after Gibson coined the term in the latter work.
Such details aside, the diverse contributions to this thread show some of the better side of Slashdot comments, so I'll let slide the opportunity to rant about the dubiousness of claims that 'intelligence' might deliver the inflated expectations we too easily burden it with.
Our local telephone directory service unambiguously lists the person named in the Warrnambool Standard article linked in the parent.
Maybe the knee jerk skeptics from Zonk down could back up their skepticism with some fact checking, but I guess that is asking a bit much.
Despite the prevailing "wisdom" of those who have become impatient with the Perl 6 project, it is meant for the long term and I suspect its strong linguistic roots might enable us to start looking for meaning in text, and that might be a reasonable candidate as a future disruptive application technology.
Presumably that scenario would require a stronger mix of automated and by hand programming, which Perl 6's macros should facilitate.
Ok, we can't do it today, but our planning direction needs to be towards making sure everything that goes up does not come back down.
What we really need to find is the minimal long term cost track to establishing independently viable industrial societies off this planet.
The environmental cost to the only environment which actually matters, the earth's biosphere, of keeping returning space travellers alive for the rest of their days on earth will at some point exceed the cost to the earth of keeping them alive in settlements elsewhere. Not soon certainly, but eventually.
Humanity would not be anywhere near where it is today if our pioneering ancestors had insisted on return tickets.
Canvas always was one of computer graphics' best kept secrets.
In what seems like another lifetime I started a software distribution business which introduced desktop publishing to Australia and which I see is still operating, albeit under a newly revised name.
Of all the products I was involved in sourcing, Canvas still features on Pica's front page in what must be some kind of a record for an international software distribution arrangement.
Deneba drew me to Miami a few times in the early days of the arrangement, none more memorable than when I had to leave a rental car in a no stopping area at Gatwick and still missed my flight to New York, but managed to switch to one 15 minutes later to Dallas which flew over Greenland where the clouds below cleared revealing a spectacular view, which put the need to reverse the order of my scheduled one day visits to Miami and New York into perspective.
It might have been another Miami visit when I first saw GhostScript.
Now I just can't wait for SVG in DOM so plans that have been brewing through 20 years of PostScript might finally find the platform they need.
Still dunno if it is reasonable to take behavioural style into account when handing out moral status. That sounds like the kind of thing that has got humans into no end of trouble over places like Kurdistan.
And it all has to be balanced against the delights of ham, bacon, roast pork and pizza. For now I think I'm still stuck with "it's better to have lived and fed the hungry than not to have lived at all." If only the plight of fish stocks and omega-3 was so simple.
Maybe the only way Neanderthals managed to coexist with modern humans for 15,000 years was that they dominated local encounters, often confiscating the victims of successful human hunts the way bigger cats do on National Geographic Channel today.
Humans could survive and prosper at the margins because of their more varied diet and generally greater adaptability, so were never in danger of being globally exterminated by the competition they suffered in Neandertal territory.
But gradually humans impacted the environment and tilted the balance so there were less and less places Neandertals could make their traditional living. Their populations fragmented, they were on a one way road to extinction.
I didn't read anything in the reports of Jobs's remarks that suggested he was claiming more than to have been sensitised to wider design issues by his calligraphy classes and being in a position, chief head kicker for the Mac development project, where he could force a brake through the conceptual bottlenecks which had long separated end user computing and elegance.
It may be worth reflecting that there has been no comparable "inevitable revolution" in the development process itself, I suspect in a large part because of the high cost of retooling developers' brains. But that hasn't stopped generation after generation insisting such a revolution was also inevitable.
Obviously the Internet itself was the definitive "inevitable revolution", except that those of us who knew where it had to go, and even those who were developing key components, still needed Gore's politial initiative to break through the final barriers to the commercial Web, "progress" which much of the early developer community resisted religiously.