"I also want to make sure that China and other such governments have no say over my Internet connection."
The counter argument to that of course being how do you think the Chinese (or Europeans, or Arabic nations) feel about the US having control over their internet connections (however theoretical that control actually is)?
One reason I haven't read any of his non sci-fi stuff is that half the fun of his Culture novels is waiting for the next planet to explode:-) Nothing quite like a smug Mind, without them I just feel there's something missing...
As Churchill once said about the whole you shouldn't end a sentence with a preposition thing : "This is the sort of bloody nonsense up with which I will not put".
"would you trade a lifetime of immunosuppresants causing kidney damage and joint disease for vision?"
To be honest, yes. To me being blind sounds like hell and I couldn't imagine a worse disability. Obviously that's because I've been able to see for the past 20 years, so it might be different for someone who was born blind, but if someone said "vision and kidney/joint problems or blindness" it wouldn't be a particularly hard decision for me to make.
I was going to post exactly that, John Major did a LOT to improve the situation in Northern Ireland, probably more than our current incumbent. He just didn't go for the photo shoots and "look what I've done" as much as Blair.
You have to remember though that WINE Is Not an Emulator. It allows Windows programs to run on Linux on the x86 platform but doesn't actually emulate the x86 processor.
So you could use it as a start for a new Mac emulator but you'd have to build the chip emulator to fit underneath that.
It can't be that hard, someone somewhere approved the script for "Dude, Where's My Car?". Compared to that a heavily armed Julius Caesar fighting Nazi's wearing really loud shorts is positively intellectual. It just needs a car chase scene and we're sorted
Julius Caesar and Daniel Boone got together to battle Nazis from the Bermuda dimension
I'll write the script and you can direct, we'll have Clint Eastwood in the Caesar role. I bet we can get a decent game franchise out of this one as well. Anything that contains Caesar with a shotgun is a sure fire hit.
Veni, Vidi...
JP
Re:Decoupling mind and body
on
Altered Carbon
·
· Score: 1
Excession has to be my favourite of the books you listed but I think Look to Windward has the most interesting slant on this idea out of all those books. It contrasts the Culture's choices (live forever, die naturally or get "stored" for some event in the future) with another race's choice which was to create an artificial heaven where an individual's digitised consciousness is sent to on their death.
Saying that you get to see more of the Minds in Excession and the Minds are great:-)
Actually the accepted German method of writing an umlaut where its not easy to add the umlaut (ie on some computer systems) is to put an e after the umlaut-ed letter. So über becomes ueber.
I don't know how you add them on a PC, but on a Mac it's Alt-u.
JP.
Actually coverage in Niedersachsen wasn't too hot for me, and Hamburg was pretty sketchy as well. My phone would often have to switch providers three times on the train from Cloppenburg to Bremen. I've had much better coverage in the UK, and while I'm not saying that we have it quieter or that our health service is as good as yours, you do not have 100% coverage, and in more rural areas its pretty patchy. You do also pay a LOT more tax than we do, and your schools got hammered by the PISA study.
JP.
Re:Let's have flat *reflective* LEDs
on
Thin, Flat LEDs
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Didn't the GameBoy Advance use a reflective LCD though? They're going to have to make them a lot better than that though if you want to read them like a newspaper, unless you regularly spend half an hour rearranging your lighting, room, pets friends and family just to ge the light right in order to read a paper. Honestly I used to give a little cheer when I actually could see the screen on that thing, it was nuts. I'm sure my nephews had started evolving into Lemurs after a few weeks gameplay...
The reason they didn't make contact at the time of the State of the Art was because they wanted to use us as a "control" planet, to see what happened. It looks like they say hello around 2100, so perhaps they decide they've learnt enough by then, you never know:)
At the end of Consider Phlebas, the Appendices start with a foreword that explains that the Appendices were taken from "A Short History of the Idiran War" (English language/Christian calendar version, original text 2110), and then goes on to say that this is part of a Contact approved Earth Extro-Information pack. So the suggestion is that Earth is being introduced to the Cultures history at this point.
Its actually The State of the Art itself, the story within the book of the same name. Its the one where the Arbitrary arrives, and they send down a few people, including Diziet Sma. They all have a wander round and then one of them refuses to leave. Great story, very well written. At one point the ship sends a postcard to the BBC World Service asking them to play "Space Oddity" for the good ship Arbitrary and all who sail in her:)
Just to clarify on the human thing. The books are set at varying times, Consider Phlebas was set about 3000 years ago, and the rest of the books are not too far removed from our time, just far more advanced species of humanoid. One of his short stories, "The State of the Art" is set during the 1970s, and involves a Culture "Contact" ship and crew visiting Earth, and is mainly about their decision whether or not to contact us. They decide not to, but do in the next century or two (although that's mentioned in a different book). For human just read humanoid really. Also, while people can be transcribed into electronic form, if they do decide to auto-euthanise, they do actually die, completely. As for the Minds, I always remember that quote, the "If god did not exist, then we would have to create one" one (Voltaire, probably misquoted but it was like that). The Minds are basically created Gods in the way that WE would make them. Almost infinitely powerful, caring, fair, but with their own very unique personalities.
He seems to be pretty popular over here in the UK, I have no idea how much he sells, but most high street bookstores tend to carry a fair selection of his work. His books all tend to be very good, but some really do shine out, Excession and Feersum Endjinn are absolutely superb.
How harmful is Rendezvous to have turned on if you have no services turned on? Also, Windows File Sharing was definitely turned off on install, all of the options in the System Preferences/Sharing pane were off to start with.
Is that only with IMAP accounts that aren't.Mac accounts? I've set up mine, my fiancee's and my sister-in-law's Mail apps and they've been fine with only the single IMAP (.Mac) account.
Probably a good thing, there doesn't seem to be many (or any?) security problems with OSX, and all the risky stuff like Apache and remote login is turned off by default.
JP.
I have a feeling that minuteman was first used as the codename for America's rapid response missile system, when the idea was that the missiles could be readied to fire within a minute. I guess the name is a nod to that.
JP.
Lenin's death had very little effect on how Soviet Communism became a farce, it already had. The military should have handed over power to the people after the revolution, it never happened. People who pointed out that Lenin was corrupting Communism were forced to re-write their work and then "disappeared", this is exactly what happened with Paschoukanis. Marx's ideas were brilliant, but as open to abuse as anything else. Whether they would ever be practicable I don't know, there seem to be far too many greedy people around.
Its true about them being easy to pick up if used in public places, but there is also the point that they'd either have to have AA batteries inside them, or have them plug in to recharge. The new iMac is Apple's consumer machine, its simple and uncomplicated. Its designed to be easy to use, and I think that a lot of potential iMac owners out there would get sick very quickly of replacing the batteries. If they were rechargeable via USB you could guarantee that 90% of people would just leave them plugged in all the time. So it would be extra expense for Apple, and I think that the majority of consumers are happy with mice that don't mean you have to keep a stock of spare batteries in the computer desk.
Slashdot Mirror
The counter argument to that of course being how do you think the Chinese (or Europeans, or Arabic nations) feel about the US having control over their internet connections (however theoretical that control actually is)?
One reason I haven't read any of his non sci-fi stuff is that half the fun of his Culture novels is waiting for the next planet to explode :-) Nothing quite like a smug Mind, without them I just feel there's something missing...
As Churchill once said about the whole you shouldn't end a sentence with a preposition thing : "This is the sort of bloody nonsense up with which I will not put".
To be honest, yes. To me being blind sounds like hell and I couldn't imagine a worse disability. Obviously that's because I've been able to see for the past 20 years, so it might be different for someone who was born blind, but if someone said "vision and kidney/joint problems or blindness" it wouldn't be a particularly hard decision for me to make.
I was going to post exactly that, John Major did a LOT to improve the situation in Northern Ireland, probably more than our current incumbent. He just didn't go for the photo shoots and "look what I've done" as much as Blair.
You have to remember though that WINE Is Not an Emulator. It allows Windows programs to run on Linux on the x86 platform but doesn't actually emulate the x86 processor.
So you could use it as a start for a new Mac emulator but you'd have to build the chip emulator to fit underneath that.
JP
It worked in Under Siege...
It can't be that hard, someone somewhere approved the script for "Dude, Where's My Car?". Compared to that a heavily armed Julius Caesar fighting Nazi's wearing really loud shorts is positively intellectual. It just needs a car chase scene and we're sorted
JP
I'll write the script and you can direct, we'll have Clint Eastwood in the Caesar role. I bet we can get a decent game franchise out of this one as well. Anything that contains Caesar with a shotgun is a sure fire hit.
Veni, Vidi...
JP
Excession has to be my favourite of the books you listed but I think Look to Windward has the most interesting slant on this idea out of all those books. It contrasts the Culture's choices (live forever, die naturally or get "stored" for some event in the future) with another race's choice which was to create an artificial heaven where an individual's digitised consciousness is sent to on their death.
Saying that you get to see more of the Minds in Excession and the Minds are great :-)
JP.
Actually the accepted German method of writing an umlaut where its not easy to add the umlaut (ie on some computer systems) is to put an e after the umlaut-ed letter. So über becomes ueber. I don't know how you add them on a PC, but on a Mac it's Alt-u. JP.
JP.
JP.
The reason they didn't make contact at the time of the State of the Art was because they wanted to use us as a "control" planet, to see what happened. It looks like they say hello around 2100, so perhaps they decide they've learnt enough by then, you never know :)
At the end of Consider Phlebas, the Appendices start with a foreword that explains that the Appendices were taken from "A Short History of the Idiran War" (English language/Christian calendar version, original text 2110), and then goes on to say that this is part of a Contact approved Earth Extro-Information pack. So the suggestion is that Earth is being introduced to the Cultures history at this point.
Its actually The State of the Art itself, the story within the book of the same name. Its the one where the Arbitrary arrives, and they send down a few people, including Diziet Sma. They all have a wander round and then one of them refuses to leave. Great story, very well written. At one point the ship sends a postcard to the BBC World Service asking them to play "Space Oddity" for the good ship Arbitrary and all who sail in her :)
Just to clarify on the human thing. The books are set at varying times, Consider Phlebas was set about 3000 years ago, and the rest of the books are not too far removed from our time, just far more advanced species of humanoid. One of his short stories, "The State of the Art" is set during the 1970s, and involves a Culture "Contact" ship and crew visiting Earth, and is mainly about their decision whether or not to contact us. They decide not to, but do in the next century or two (although that's mentioned in a different book). For human just read humanoid really. Also, while people can be transcribed into electronic form, if they do decide to auto-euthanise, they do actually die, completely. As for the Minds, I always remember that quote, the "If god did not exist, then we would have to create one" one (Voltaire, probably misquoted but it was like that). The Minds are basically created Gods in the way that WE would make them. Almost infinitely powerful, caring, fair, but with their own very unique personalities.
He seems to be pretty popular over here in the UK, I have no idea how much he sells, but most high street bookstores tend to carry a fair selection of his work. His books all tend to be very good, but some really do shine out, Excession and Feersum Endjinn are absolutely superb.
How harmful is Rendezvous to have turned on if you have no services turned on? Also, Windows File Sharing was definitely turned off on install, all of the options in the System Preferences/Sharing pane were off to start with.
Is that only with IMAP accounts that aren't .Mac accounts? I've set up mine, my fiancee's and my sister-in-law's Mail apps and they've been fine with only the single IMAP (.Mac) account.
Probably a good thing, there doesn't seem to be many (or any?) security problems with OSX, and all the risky stuff like Apache and remote login is turned off by default. JP.
I have a feeling that minuteman was first used as the codename for America's rapid response missile system, when the idea was that the missiles could be readied to fire within a minute. I guess the name is a nod to that. JP.
Lenin's death had very little effect on how Soviet Communism became a farce, it already had. The military should have handed over power to the people after the revolution, it never happened. People who pointed out that Lenin was corrupting Communism were forced to re-write their work and then "disappeared", this is exactly what happened with Paschoukanis. Marx's ideas were brilliant, but as open to abuse as anything else. Whether they would ever be practicable I don't know, there seem to be far too many greedy people around.
You can have multi-cores with the PowerPC ISA, its in the Book E specs, and I thought that IBM's Power4PC could be multi-cored.
Its true about them being easy to pick up if used in public places, but there is also the point that they'd either have to have AA batteries inside them, or have them plug in to recharge. The new iMac is Apple's consumer machine, its simple and uncomplicated. Its designed to be easy to use, and I think that a lot of potential iMac owners out there would get sick very quickly of replacing the batteries. If they were rechargeable via USB you could guarantee that 90% of people would just leave them plugged in all the time. So it would be extra expense for Apple, and I think that the majority of consumers are happy with mice that don't mean you have to keep a stock of spare batteries in the computer desk.