is to read the content on your PDA instead. You only get the top two or three articles in each section and no images, but having the text in your hand at the breakfast table sure beats reading the back of the cereal box.
Sorry, friend, I meant no offense to the country of Pakistan, nor to the middle class, educated members of its society.
Mainly I wanted to say that the simplistic "Osama=Afghanistan=Bad" kind of mentality at the level of the U.S. Executive branch just does not cut it in a world which is much, much more complex than that. There are a lot of people who think along the same lines as bin Laden, who might cause the West and So. Asia just as much grief if he were replaced.
At this juncture, a whole lot depends on Pakistan and how it handles the delicate situation.
I would go farther than that and say that Pakistan has not one, but two delicate situations to handle, the Taliban/Afghanistan issue and the unresolved Kashmir conflict on the other border. I am worried that this might be more than Gen. Musharraf can juggle at one time.
The NY Times Magazine printed an article back on June 25, 2000 by Jeffrey Goldberg on the training of "jihad machines" in Pakistan. You can pay for it online, or go to your friendly local library and look for a dead-tree version. Here's the lead:
In a Pakistani religious school called the Haqqania madrasa, Osama bin Laden is a hero, the Taliban's leaders are famous alums and the next generation of mujahedeen is being militantly groomed.
This is the quote that made the front cover of the magazine:
I then asked: Who wants to see Osama bin Laden armed with nuclear weapons? Every hand in the room shot up. The students laughed, and some applauded.
The emphasis of this first-hand account is on the utter ignorance of those being trained in the "10000 or so" madrasas in Pakistan about the world at large (ignorance not in the simply pejorative sense but in the literal sense) and of the apparent complicity of the authorities in this situation. There was surprisingly little in there about training of terrorists in Afghanistan itself.
Replying to people writing asking about my safety and that of my family (I'm in Northern NJ).
Writing to people I know to find out about their safety.
Checking to see which of my "friends" hasn't written..
Debating on some yahoogroups newsgroups about what this means for the future.
Deleting chain letters from the well-meaning.
Rarely do I spend a lot of time in front of the TV. It's the other electronic communications channel which occupies the most part of my time these days.
...from way back in 1973 according to this page [pigdog.org]. That explains why the author (who passed away in 1984!) seems not to have heard about the Concorde or Airbus.
I did the google search myself and found the same huge number of copies of this same editorial.
Disclaimer: I am not a Canadian. Nor am I a jingoist.
Here is an article at Infoworld about an 802.11b freenet deployment effort. There is mention of a home-brew antenna using a Pringles can to boost the gain. No picture of this cool hack, though.
If today's satellite orbits cannot be trusted, opponents reason, how will we verify the numbers of future space-based anti-missile lasers and anti-satellite weapons?
I don't get it. If we start having weapons in space, the only way the other countries plan to verify the numbers will be based on the information the owner of those weapons plans to give out? What happened to "trust, but verify?"
I think the Pentagon is thinking that as long as it is the only one putting up antisat weapons, they can program them with the correct orbital elements for their own classified satellites, not the erroneous UN-registered elements. It's like a business keeping double ledgers.
I wonder what would happen if some state the US has antagonistic relations with were to put up a satellite in the exact same orbit as the unregistered 1989-72A, saying "that wasn't supposed to be there!"
When I was a kid, I thought they were saying "The Cologne Wars". I really assumed there was some sort of fracas over fragrances.
Just you wait. The war is going to be led by the evil Prince Matchabelli...and you'll be able to purchase "Jar-Jar in a jar" at finer retailers everywhere.
(back on topic) You know, the disadvantage of having clones in a war is that you won't be able to use DNA identify the remains.
One I still miss too. But to me, this was maybe 25% Science Fiction and 75% Combat genre. So much of the plot revolved around the esprit de corps of the 58th, something I could tap into despite never having served myself. I always felt that this increased the realism one or two notches above the portrayals of war on all the other SF series on television (even B5 which I am an admirer of also).
I have a heavy glass front surface mirror, a couple of cm thick and cut on a slant so that its face is elliptical in shape, on a little stand on the desk of my cube at work. It looks ornamental, but it serves the vital function of letting me see who's lurking at my threshold also.
You know the saying that goes that you should dress like your boss in order to get ahead? My favorite way to carry around all the electronic paraphernalia is in a a hard-sided Samsonite attache case. When I'm driving to work, the hinges hold the lid open in case I need to take something out. When I'm stuck in a crowded airport, the sturdy shell allows me to use it as a seat. Samsonite also has two cool features: it won't let you open the thing upside down (so that you won't hear that sickening thunk of plastic on concrete and start sobbing "My Precious!"), if you have the case upright , it has a couple of latches letting you open the case partway in order to access the middle fold, where one would keep things like airline tickets and whatnot.
Yes, it weighs a little more than soft-sided bags, but exercise is good. Besides, I'm usually not carrying it all that far anyway.
In the example you mention, I don't think that you would run afoul of criminal laws, but I wouldn't think you'd stand much of a chance avoiding a civil case from their suits.
Which is the closest analogy to this sort of thing?
You are renovating your house and discover a wall containing some old letters containing incriminating evidence regarding an Uncle Scrooge, and send them to a historian.
You are out on a windy day in Atlanta and the wind drops a piece of paper at your feet. When you realize that it is the formula for the secret ingredient for Coca-Cola, and you proceed to post it to Usenet.
You are on IRC and someone just happens to mention the Sultan of Brunei's credit card number without your asking. You're off to Amazon.com to order a few items off of your wishlist.
You go to the Olympics not to watch the games but to collect mosquitoes, which you process in your personal human cloning lab in order to produce a master race.
If I were a boss I would be nervous to let a programer use a langauge like RUBY for a project. My fear would be that the employee would leave and no one would support the RUBY based app.
That decides it for me. How can I turn down that kind of guaranteed job security? But I think I'd go this one better by my own idiosyncratic language to write mission-critical code which nobody else can maintain.
Oh wait a minute, they already did that. It was called Fortran.
How's this for a marketing idea: no matter what your profile, a user would get streaming audio ads for the ultra-concealable x10 spy mic, perfect for eavesdropping on sultry babes.
Hit that mute button now...
Re:I saw AI this afternoon. (SPOILERS)
on
Review: A.I.
·
· Score: 1
The plot holes are many. What the heck happened to his father? His mother is all he talks about. It is so oedipal, it's rediculous. The movie even ends with his mother and him in bed. He calls his mother "Mommy" after he is imprinted and completely ignores the father. He pays more attention to his mean brother. Wouldn't his programmers make it so he was imprinted to 2 people? Thus his father becomes a static character that is quite flat. David calls his father "Henry" the whole movie.
Even if I agreed with that, I wouldn't call it a plot hole but a problem with characterization. But it seems totally plausible to me, since the father was not the one who spoke the imprinting words to David. Plus, it was this way in the original story by Aldiss.
I can't believe that David is the only "living" remnant of humans. If one robot survived, couldn't others?
All the rest who had empathy for humans (the Davids and Darlenes and whatever) had been used for parts by other robots, maybe, since they were in plain sight.
What engineer thought a 3-wheeled car would work? 4 wheels is the most efficient and stable design.
?!
Sorry you didn't like the movie. I went into it not expecting Science Fiction but more of a fairytale and was not nearly as disappointed.
I wish they'd bring that back, with or without a miraculous escape from the clutches death for Wang, Vansen, and Damphousse.
It was really less of a Science Fiction genre series and more of a Combat series which happened to have aliens and silicon-based beings. And a great ensemble cast.
Interesting, but nothing terrribly unexpected in the article.
If one wanted to be a little more adventurous, I think it should be possible to drop the noise level with mufflers, the same way they do it with vehicles?.First cut the vibration down by double-casing the unit with shocks in between the inner and outer enclosure, then deaden the sound from the fans by putting baffles in there.
Alternatively, you could drop the temperature of the ambient intake air so that less would be needed to cool the CPU and drives. Perhaps a chilled-water heat exchanger construction would suit.
But did this movie remind anyone else of Blade Runner _in atmosphere_?
I just watched SciFi channel's showing of that movie, and no, the atmosphere didn't remind me of that particularly. Everything just looked too clean and orderly, the sound was recorded on a single level. for that to be a good comparison for me. And John Williams ain't no Vangelis.
No, the movie this one reminded me of was Gattaca, both in terms of the atmosphere (check out the antiseptic look of the clinic and of the Swinton home>, and in the flaws in the editing. Some of the philosophical issues have parallels as well: just try replacing "genetic manipulation" with "cybernetic engineering" throughout. I think this movie might occupy the same sort of cult status that Gattaca has now in time to come.
I admire the filmmakers' attempt to reach for an unattainable goal in this movie. There's a reason why Kubrick wasn't able to bring this to fruition after fifteen years of toying with the idea. On the whole, I'm glad I saw the movie, but I'm not about to go around evangelizing for this pov.
As it happens, I ended up encrypting the piece of paper, such that the only thing that I definitely have to remember is the non-trivial decryption scheme. Of course, I also remember the passwords that I need most often, but for the others my encrypted paper has occasionally worked miracles.
So how do you encrypt a piece of paper? Are you talking about using an encryption program (scanning in that sheet of paper?) or something like cutting it into little confetti-like bits and hiding them around your neighborhood? Actually, that approach is more like steganography.
Has anyone mentioned Diceware already? (Another link here to the same site.) It's the system I like the most, especially because I get to real d6s in the process.
Slashdot Mirror
is to read the content on your PDA instead. You only get the top two or three articles in each section and no images, but having the text in your hand at the breakfast table sure beats reading the back of the cereal box.
Sorry, friend, I meant no offense to the country of Pakistan, nor to the middle class, educated members of its society.
Mainly I wanted to say that the simplistic "Osama=Afghanistan=Bad" kind of mentality at the level of the U.S. Executive branch just does not cut it in a world which is much, much more complex than that. There are a lot of people who think along the same lines as bin Laden, who might cause the West and So. Asia just as much grief if he were replaced.
I would go farther than that and say that Pakistan has not one, but two delicate situations to handle, the Taliban/Afghanistan issue and the unresolved Kashmir conflict on the other border. I am worried that this might be more than Gen. Musharraf can juggle at one time.
The NY Times Magazine printed an article back on June 25, 2000 by Jeffrey Goldberg on the training of "jihad machines" in Pakistan. You can pay for it online, or go to your friendly local library and look for a dead-tree version. Here's the lead:
This is the quote that made the front cover of the magazine: The emphasis of this first-hand account is on the utter ignorance of those being trained in the "10000 or so" madrasas in Pakistan about the world at large (ignorance not in the simply pejorative sense but in the literal sense) and of the apparent complicity of the authorities in this situation. There was surprisingly little in there about training of terrorists in Afghanistan itself.Rarely do I spend a lot of time in front of the TV. It's the other electronic communications channel which occupies the most part of my time these days.
...from way back in 1973 according to this page [pigdog.org]. That explains why the author (who passed away in 1984!) seems not to have heard about the Concorde or Airbus.
I did the google search myself and found the same huge number of copies of this same editorial.
Disclaimer: I am not a Canadian. Nor am I a jingoist.
Here is an article at Infoworld about an 802.11b freenet deployment effort. There is mention of a home-brew antenna using a Pringles can to boost the gain. No picture of this cool hack, though.
S-Cubed works by bending beams of electrons in a way that allows the electron gun -- which shoots out the beams -- to be moved closer to the screen.
This, to me is like saying "S-Cubed works by making CRTs smaller." With what, hyperspace? Gee, do you think you could be a little more specific?
Would appreciate it if someone could find a relevant patent application.
I'd just like a way to let them know that I like what they've done
Well, let's see, what do you look like in a thong?
If today's satellite orbits cannot be trusted, opponents reason, how will we verify the numbers of future space-based anti-missile lasers and anti-satellite weapons?
I don't get it. If we start having weapons in space, the only way the other countries plan to verify the numbers will be based on the information the owner of those weapons plans to give out? What happened to "trust, but verify?"
I think the Pentagon is thinking that as long as it is the only one putting up antisat weapons, they can program them with the correct orbital elements for their own classified satellites, not the erroneous UN-registered elements. It's like a business keeping double ledgers.
I wonder what would happen if some state the US has antagonistic relations with were to put up a satellite in the exact same orbit as the unregistered 1989-72A, saying "that wasn't supposed to be there!"
From the article: A GPS unit could locate a wandering Alzheimer's patient.
Or a wandering spouse...
Just you wait. The war is going to be led by the evil Prince Matchabelli...and you'll be able to purchase "Jar-Jar in a jar" at finer retailers everywhere.
(back on topic) You know, the disadvantage of having clones in a war is that you won't be able to use DNA identify the remains.
One I still miss too. But to me, this was maybe 25% Science Fiction and 75% Combat genre. So much of the plot revolved around the esprit de corps of the 58th, something I could tap into despite never having served myself. I always felt that this increased the realism one or two notches above the portrayals of war on all the other SF series on television (even B5 which I am an admirer of also).
I have a heavy glass front surface mirror, a couple of cm thick and cut on a slant so that its face is elliptical in shape, on a little stand on the desk of my cube at work. It looks ornamental, but it serves the vital function of letting me see who's lurking at my threshold also.
You know the saying that goes that you should dress like your boss in order to get ahead? My favorite way to carry around all the electronic paraphernalia is in a a hard-sided Samsonite attache case. When I'm driving to work, the hinges hold the lid open in case I need to take something out. When I'm stuck in a crowded airport, the sturdy shell allows me to use it as a seat. Samsonite also has two cool features: it won't let you open the thing upside down (so that you won't hear that sickening thunk of plastic on concrete and start sobbing "My Precious!"), if you have the case upright , it has a couple of latches letting you open the case partway in order to access the middle fold, where one would keep things like airline tickets and whatnot.
Yes, it weighs a little more than soft-sided bags, but exercise is good. Besides, I'm usually not carrying it all that far anyway.
In the example you mention, I don't think that you would run afoul of criminal laws, but I wouldn't think you'd stand much of a chance avoiding a civil case from their suits.
Which is the closest analogy to this sort of thing?
Thanks for posting this. I never would have known otherwise that "Terra" = rot13("Green").
Attention Federal Marshals: I never posted this.
Was this audio format developed in Redmond, or by some other company which Microsoft purchased?
That decides it for me. How can I turn down that kind of guaranteed job security? But I think I'd go this one better by my own idiosyncratic language to write mission-critical code which nobody else can maintain.
Oh wait a minute, they already did that. It was called Fortran.
(No, I'm not serious.)
How's this for a marketing idea: no matter what your profile, a user would get streaming audio ads for the ultra-concealable x10 spy mic, perfect for eavesdropping on sultry babes.
Hit that mute button now...
Even if I agreed with that, I wouldn't call it a plot hole but a problem with characterization. But it seems totally plausible to me, since the father was not the one who spoke the imprinting words to David. Plus, it was this way in the original story by Aldiss.
All the rest who had empathy for humans (the Davids and Darlenes and whatever) had been used for parts by other robots, maybe, since they were in plain sight.
?!
Sorry you didn't like the movie. I went into it not expecting Science Fiction but more of a fairytale and was not nearly as disappointed.
I wish they'd bring that back, with or without a miraculous escape from the clutches death for Wang, Vansen, and Damphousse.
It was really less of a Science Fiction genre series and more of a Combat series which happened to have aliens and silicon-based beings. And a great ensemble cast.
Interesting, but nothing terrribly unexpected in the article.
If one wanted to be a little more adventurous, I think it should be possible to drop the noise level with mufflers, the same way they do it with vehicles?.First cut the vibration down by double-casing the unit with shocks in between the inner and outer enclosure, then deaden the sound from the fans by putting baffles in there.
Alternatively, you could drop the temperature of the ambient intake air so that less would be needed to cool the CPU and drives. Perhaps a chilled-water heat exchanger construction would suit.
I just watched SciFi channel's showing of that movie, and no, the atmosphere didn't remind me of that particularly. Everything just looked too clean and orderly, the sound was recorded on a single level. for that to be a good comparison for me. And John Williams ain't no Vangelis.
No, the movie this one reminded me of was Gattaca, both in terms of the atmosphere (check out the antiseptic look of the clinic and of the Swinton home>, and in the flaws in the editing. Some of the philosophical issues have parallels as well: just try replacing "genetic manipulation" with "cybernetic engineering" throughout. I think this movie might occupy the same sort of cult status that Gattaca has now in time to come.
I admire the filmmakers' attempt to reach for an unattainable goal in this movie. There's a reason why Kubrick wasn't able to bring this to fruition after fifteen years of toying with the idea. On the whole, I'm glad I saw the movie, but I'm not about to go around evangelizing for this pov.
So how do you encrypt a piece of paper? Are you talking about using an encryption program (scanning in that sheet of paper?) or something like cutting it into little confetti-like bits and hiding them around your neighborhood? Actually, that approach is more like steganography.
Has anyone mentioned Diceware already? (Another link here to the same site.) It's the system I like the most, especially because I get to real d6s in the process.
Sun, you make way too much money to be cool.