Several 'skill levels' that let you handicap a player (limit number of shots, limit firing frequency)
Unlike the mini-RC cars which use a capacitor, these things have quick-charge NiMH batteries. It takes about 10 minutes to charge 'em up, but they last about 20 minutes of continuous play.
A 'hit' tank spins and flashes, so there's some real effects to getting hit. They also slow down as they get hit.
The several tanks they have all have slightly different characteristics: speed, firing speed, number of shots, damage done per shot, 'hit points'. This adds to the fun of the variety of tanks. The characteristics are controlled by a key chip on the controller which can be traded out, or perhaps upgraded?
The turret may turn, but the IR that fires is beneath the turret. A motorized turret would not change the game.
They are a bit pricey, but the WWII Winter set includes two tanks, plus obstacles to hide behind and decals.
The only other downside is that they're a little fragile.
The article seems a bit naive about data structures and their evolution into objects.
Strings aren't lists, they're structures.
Most strings use in programs is a holdover from teletype-style programming, where all you could display is a short (ahem) string of characters. Today's string use is a label to a data item, a menu item on a menu, a data object in a domain.
XML -- as clunky as it can seem -- and XUL in particular, are ways of describing user interface to a system as a tree of objects.
So I don't want lists of characters, I want associative structures of objects which can be of many different types, used in the manner required by the program (it's a string, it's a number, it's a floor wax, it's a desert topping).
I'm trying really hard to avoid saying "object-oriented," but objects will become more complex and more abstract. Computers of the future may not have to worry about pixels in an image, but rather know the object itself, where a bitmap is just an attribute of the thing.
Perhaps driver- and compiler-writers will still need stripped-down languages for efficient access to hardware, but as an app programmer and end user, I want the computer to handle statements like,
BUY FLOWERS FOR ANNIVERSARY
Currently, that would be something like event("Anniversary").celebrate.prepare.purch ase($f lowers)
Hopefully this is explainable by someone with more physics knowledge than I have, but if you can make a laser move 127mph through a ruby, what happens if you shoot a matter-based beam, say, a beta (electron) ray through the same ruby that goes nearly the same speed or perhaps faster?
Will we see relativistic effects, or is it unrelated to the medium, and only speed-in-vacuum is the limit?
First of all, the example data sent is available free, as one poster above already listed. There's no software described there other than Windows itself.
Second, the System Info Schema, as posted by another above, is pretty explicit about what registry keys are available to be sent, and it's pretty tame.
Frankly, I have no problem letting them know exactly what hardware I've got running. How can they harm me there? Perhaps a malicious hacker could grab this data and find ways to abuse my network card? Pretty slim.
Call me too open, if you will, but I'd be happy if it would let me know about other MS updates, such as Office, without having to also visit MS' office site. Update those automatically? Never. But it's much less convenient than the Windows Update site.
I greatly doubted that it would be sending large quantities of personal data, because it just doesn't take that long. The ones to worry about are the virus scanners, that take the time to examine every freakin' file.
In summary:
They're not sending your entire hard drive
They're not sending your entire registry
They're not sending a full software inventory
They're probably gathering a little more than they need
In the US, sales taxes are onsidered 'regressive' in that they consume a largest portion of the poorest incomes.
Sales takes are most often applied to 'sin' and 'tourist' items (alchohol, tobacco, gasoline, restaurants, hotels) and are often excempt on neccessities (depending on the state, food, pharmaceuticals, even clothing).
Because of the federal vs state vs local system, sales taxes are a means by which states and villages can raise funds without begging for a federal handout.
And from what I hear from our neighbors in the frozen north, the GSAT and PSAT there are so oppressive as to make buying most things ridiculously expensive compared to in the US.
No pr0n jokes, please... how big does a hard drive need to be? I mean, once everyone is doing their own digital video, PVR software, archiving their entire music library in MP3 format... you're only up to a couple-hundred GB.
Does a 4TB hard drive make sense in a personal computer?
Can you apply the TB/inch in much smaller form factors, such as SD cards? Even there, do I need more than, say 20GB on a palm pilot?
How do you back up such huge systems?
Summary: the server market has a use for these future maxi-drives, but they'll be a hard sell to the general public.
Currently, they're subject to the same tax rule as internet, and as I'd said the last time this came up on Slashdot, they're 4-10X the size of all internet sales.
The recent changes merely clarified that, for instance, BN.com really is Barnes & Noble and subject to the same taxation where they have physical presences, i.e. everywhere.
There's lots of catalog sales out there. If they're not collecting sales tax, I shouldn't either. We collect it for Illinois, where we're based (and even that's fuzzy: my server's in Connecticut).
Always collecting for the 'home' state tax is a bad idea too: It'll just force businesses to incorporate in states such as Alaska without sales tax. But on $130K sales on our little company, a monthly check to 47 states is a huge burden.
...and the first product will be an add-on to the Genesis that requires the 32X and Genesis CD that adds little bouncing ball bearings to all Sonic games.
At least in Illinois, they have reciprocal agreements with adjacent states -- and even counties -- so that the right (cough) tax gets collected for where the car will be licensed.
It's called "use tax" instead of "sales tax" -- you're supposed to pay it for items you purchase out of state already.
The issue that's coming up is that the states want the responsibility for collecting that use tax to be on the heads of the retailers, even when they have no physical presence at all in the state.
The paperwork for a momNpop.example.com store is horrendous. My wife's website does very little in-state business, and the paperwork for that is a pain already. Imaging having to mail pennies -- or even $100 -- to 40-something states (not all states have sales tax).
Figure $75/page in time and effort for every form filled out, and the states are putting an enormous burden on the little retailers.
I grew up on VAX/VMS at school after a highschool exposure to (and part-time job thru the college years using) PDP-11s.
Compared to the various dialects of unix, the VMS environment was so much friendlier and forgiving... I'm only now realizing how much my hands were in mittens using it. I'd still prefer a system that wasn't so case-sensitive.
The chief engineers behind VMS then went to work at Micro$oft to develop NT, so some of the legacy is still there: expensive process starts, but a nice memory model to work with.
Strengths: Linkers in the early 80s that were easy to cross languages in a single project A powerful set of run-time libraries, including some excellent flatfile databases A scripting language that had access to a nice library of "lexical" functions.
But like I said, I wish I still cared. While we still have Alphas around running openVMS at the office, I haven't logged onto one for about three years. Somewhere, I have a huge library of shell routines, login scripts, and ancient forms-oriented code.
Blood Music, by Greg Bear: One of the original grey goo stories. The short story version is somewhat different from the novel, both fascinating. Queen of Angels and Slant deal with nano/bio modifications to people.
Deception Well by Linda Nagata (also The Bohr Maker, and Vast, the prequel and sequel -- though DW reads fine on its own). Nano-infected planet holds keys to all kinds of mysterious stuff, including how this not-quite human person is able to live among the humans.
Limit of Vision by Linda Nagata. OK, I reallyreally like her stuff. This one is closer to present-time, and doesn't quite hit the grey goo phase... but avoids it narrowly. Not her best, but still very entertaining.
Truly, NanoSF is a bit passe. Blood Music dates from '86 (according to Amazon). Current cutting-edge SF tends more towards bioengineering, plagues, eco-crashes (Dust), or truly wonky time travel (Chronoliths).
It's been almost 18 years since college as IT at a big non-IT, but science-oriented corporation, all at the same location (the company's been merged up three times now)... the 'job' has been different things: Grunt programmer, support JOAT (Mac evangelist forced to become Windows migrator), technology pilot...
My current title is "IT Architect" which means I do what needs to be done, whether or not the users wrote requirements, pull rabbits out of hats, never say, "It can't be done," and still I manage to get away with the "It'll take eight weeks" and finishing it in one trick.
I don't work 80-hour weeks, I get well compensated, I'm known in the field and respected by my management.
Will it last? Maybe not. That third merger is just happening, and the rumor mill says our facility may close.
But it's never been boring, because I'm always willing to learn something else. No, I'm not doing.NET and Linux, because it's too cutting-edge for a big corp, but most of the other shlubs around me can't seem to find their way around JSP, ASP or even some basic DOM and HTML.
Recognition is key... to card counting
on
Tetris AI System
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
If this robot can respond to Tetris' higher levels at reasonable speed, then the next project ought to be a glasses-mounted camera with bluetooth to an iPod-camoflaged CPU that can count cards at Blackjack.
A wide-angle lens ought to be able to pick up the whole table. Watching cards being laid down is relatively easy -- surely no harder than seeing pieces fall down the screen. Then just ID the cards, keep a running total, and put a piezo buzzer in the glasses' arms to let you know when to bet big and when to get the heck out of there.
Maybe a camera in the rear also, to spot pit bosses?
The article never makes its point
on
Immortal Code
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
It shows no examples of immortal code. The closest thing they mention is that when Scour got bought, the new company archived the code, but never used it.
That's hardly immortal, that's entombed.
Examples of immortality would be things like
* Bits of BIOS still in use from the original IBM PC through today's pentiums
* Bits of Multiplan that percolated through Excel
* Bits of CP/M still floating through Linux
The article makes a bigger point on how transient software is, and how 99% of what's created is tossed out. How many times, when asked to fix code, do you just rewrite it anyway?
I'm just not sure I can prove it. Our web store was established 17 April 1996, using static links to content that changed as the catalog is updated.
That's a month before the patent was applied for.
The problem is, the first few months of our business, our backup policies, were, well, nonexistent. I don't believe that ANY of those original pages with any kind of datestamp exist.
I will check with my previous service provider, and see if they might have a backup tape from before May 1996 -- but it's doubtful.
Exactly my point -- ASP isn't the language, it's the environment. VBScript, JavaScript, PerlScript, Ruby? can all be used within HTML pages in IE, I'm not sure about other browsers.
The real missing item is VBScript. Sure, it's 99% Windoze (1% Macintosh -- who probably don't realize they have it).
It's the engine behind ASP -- which isn't a language in its own right.
It's the replacement for DOS Shell scripts/batch files.
It's the preferred platform for management scripts on Win2K/WinXP (see WMI)
It's the preferred platform for trojan horse programs... maybe I shouldn't claim that as a positive, huh?
Probably Javascript should have been mentioned too, but it's rarely used as shell-style scripting.
Why do I use VBScript when I've got Perl and Python on the same machine? Frobbable code at Microsoft's website. If nothing else, I prototype it there, then acces the same COM objects through Python or Perl.
e-Commerce only accounts for about 1% of total retail sales -- see department of commerce: http://www.census.gov/mrts/www/current.html
Traditional catalog mail/phone order sales account for about 10% (I haven't found a definitive internet source for this -- the articles I've found are about a year old, and may include e-Commerce too).
If these are not taxed as well -- and they have a powerful existing lobby much stronger than even Amazon, let alone Ma & Pa Website -- it would be a blatant disregard of the economics, let alone the legality of taxing one kind of interstate commerce over another.
If they can tax all mail/phone sales, then there's a significant income source. Taxing just the internetters is only going to drive them out of business, while those Brick & Mortars already out there with catalogs will endure. They'll just encourage people to call after browsing.
It was certainly an exaggeration. It was more of a complaint about how short the ride is.
I was at Cedar Point two years ago in late August, and the lines were not bad most places.
I really prefer coaster with more entertainment value than just quick thrill. Favorites include Seaworld Orlando's Kraken, Rock N Roller Coaster at MGM/Disney, Viper at Six Flags Great America. The Mantis rating is actually based on my family's response: stand-up and suspended coasters do not support 6'7" tall people.
Ok, 20 seconds to ride, 60 seconds to load and unload 7014 seconds in line...
Not for me. Give me an entertaining ride that lasts a couple minutes at least. Millenium Force was down when we were there, but they've got some great rides.
Mantis -- Woot!
Just avoid the indoor dark bobsled-style coaster on days when it's 90 degrees out -- the AC in the building can't keep up.
...and I'm far from liking DRM in most cases. But with digital images so easy to manipulate, I need a trackable, reliable image for:
a) Insurance claims -- So the insurance company won't declare that I hacked the 60" plasma TV onto that blank wall, then claimed it was stolen
b) Reliably submitting news/crimestopper photos, so that they can't be debunked
c) Plagiarized photos can be tracked to their sources
This isn't a panacea, and I would certainly want to be able to not mark some images. The audio environment currently has issues where you can't dup your own personal recordings -- this is wrong. But I should be able to fingerprint my own media, and declare its copyright.
[TROLL]Isn't Canada part of the US?[/TROLL]
Sorry, I couldn't resist.
Regarding schlock, remember Sturgeon's Law: 95% of everything is crap.
Regarding biotech, everybody's biotech is perpetually on the verge of breakthrough -- it just rarely materializes. Until you've got a product that puts you in the Amgen/Genentech club, you're small potatoes. There are hundreds of companies like that in the US with nearly the next big thing.
Lupin is mild compared to Japanese tentacle porn, but there's high levels of violence, and a fair amount of sexual content and nudity -- well beyond TOON's standards and practices, where the word "kill" is forbidden on translated shows (it creeps in on some WB superhero stuff without getting edited).
What's steaming me, though, is that once again, TOON will not complete a run of Mobile Suit Gundam. Sure it's old an cheesy, but it's classic old and cheesy. They stopped the first run of it after Sept 11, on the excuse that it was a bad time for a cartoon about war. Now, they're going to cut it off about midway (it's tough for a 50-ep anime to run once a week without reruns).
I'm catching a few I missed the first time 'round, but I still want to see the newtypes battle.
Slashdot Mirror
Cool features I haven't seen mentioned here yet:
They are a bit pricey, but the WWII Winter set includes two tanks, plus obstacles to hide behind and decals.
The only other downside is that they're a little fragile.
The article seems a bit naive about data structures and their evolution into objects.
h ase($f lowers)
Strings aren't lists, they're structures.
Most strings use in programs is a holdover from teletype-style programming, where all you could display is a short (ahem) string of characters. Today's string use is a label to a data item, a menu item on a menu, a data object in a domain.
XML -- as clunky as it can seem -- and XUL in particular, are ways of describing user interface to a system as a tree of objects.
So I don't want lists of characters, I want associative structures of objects which can be of many different types, used in the manner required by the program (it's a string, it's a number, it's a floor wax, it's a desert topping).
I'm trying really hard to avoid saying "object-oriented," but objects will become more complex and more abstract. Computers of the future may not have to worry about pixels in an image, but rather know the object itself, where a bitmap is just an attribute of the thing.
Perhaps driver- and compiler-writers will still need stripped-down languages for efficient access to hardware, but as an app programmer and end user, I want the computer to handle statements like,
BUY FLOWERS FOR ANNIVERSARY
Currently, that would be something like
event("Anniversary").celebrate.prepare.purc
That's not nearly abstract enough.
Hopefully this is explainable by someone with more physics knowledge than I have, but if you can make a laser move 127mph through a ruby, what happens if you shoot a matter-based beam, say, a beta (electron) ray through the same ruby that goes nearly the same speed or perhaps faster?
Will we see relativistic effects, or is it unrelated to the medium, and only speed-in-vacuum is the limit?
Big Deal.
42.
What's the question?
Tricky....
First of all, the example data sent is available free, as one poster above already listed. There's no software described there other than Windows itself.
Second, the System Info Schema, as posted by another above, is pretty explicit about what registry keys are available to be sent, and it's pretty tame.
Frankly, I have no problem letting them know exactly what hardware I've got running. How can they harm me there? Perhaps a malicious hacker could grab this data and find ways to abuse my network card? Pretty slim.
Call me too open, if you will, but I'd be happy if it would let me know about other MS updates, such as Office, without having to also visit MS' office site. Update those automatically? Never. But it's much less convenient than the Windows Update site.
I greatly doubted that it would be sending large quantities of personal data, because it just doesn't take that long. The ones to worry about are the virus scanners, that take the time to examine every freakin' file.
In summary:
Spend some of that money you're saving for college and do Spring Break right when you're a freshman or sophmore. You'll never get another chance.
Or go to Europe right out of school. Screw that idea of a job right away. They can wait a couple months.
In the US, sales taxes are onsidered 'regressive' in that they consume a largest portion of the poorest incomes.
Sales takes are most often applied to 'sin' and 'tourist' items (alchohol, tobacco, gasoline, restaurants, hotels) and are often excempt on neccessities (depending on the state, food, pharmaceuticals, even clothing).
Because of the federal vs state vs local system, sales taxes are a means by which states and villages can raise funds without begging for a federal handout.
And from what I hear from our neighbors in the frozen north, the GSAT and PSAT there are so oppressive as to make buying most things ridiculously expensive compared to in the US.
No pr0n jokes, please... how big does a hard drive need to be? I mean, once everyone is doing their own digital video, PVR software, archiving their entire music library in MP3 format... you're only up to a couple-hundred GB. Does a 4TB hard drive make sense in a personal computer? Can you apply the TB/inch in much smaller form factors, such as SD cards? Even there, do I need more than, say 20GB on a palm pilot? How do you back up such huge systems? Summary: the server market has a use for these future maxi-drives, but they'll be a hard sell to the general public.
Currently, they're subject to the same tax rule as internet, and as I'd said the last time this came up on Slashdot, they're 4-10X the size of all internet sales.
The recent changes merely clarified that, for instance, BN.com really is Barnes & Noble and subject to the same taxation where they have physical presences, i.e. everywhere.
There's lots of catalog sales out there. If they're not collecting sales tax, I shouldn't either. We collect it for Illinois, where we're based (and even that's fuzzy: my server's in Connecticut).
Always collecting for the 'home' state tax is a bad idea too: It'll just force businesses to incorporate in states such as Alaska without sales tax. But on $130K sales on our little company, a monthly check to 47 states is a huge burden.
...and the first product will be an add-on to the Genesis that requires the 32X and Genesis CD that adds little bouncing ball bearings to all Sonic games.
At least in Illinois, they have reciprocal agreements with adjacent states -- and even counties -- so that the right (cough) tax gets collected for where the car will be licensed.
It's called "use tax" instead of "sales tax" -- you're supposed to pay it for items you purchase out of state already.
The issue that's coming up is that the states want the responsibility for collecting that use tax to be on the heads of the retailers, even when they have no physical presence at all in the state.
The paperwork for a momNpop.example.com store is horrendous. My wife's website does very little in-state business, and the paperwork for that is a pain already. Imaging having to mail pennies -- or even $100 -- to 40-something states (not all states have sales tax).
Figure $75/page in time and effort for every form filled out, and the states are putting an enormous burden on the little retailers.
I grew up on VAX/VMS at school after a highschool exposure to (and part-time job thru the college years using) PDP-11s.
Compared to the various dialects of unix, the VMS environment was so much friendlier and forgiving... I'm only now realizing how much my hands were in mittens using it. I'd still prefer a system that wasn't so case-sensitive.
The chief engineers behind VMS then went to work at Micro$oft to develop NT, so some of the legacy is still there: expensive process starts, but a nice memory model to work with.
Strengths:
Linkers in the early 80s that were easy to cross languages in a single project
A powerful set of run-time libraries, including some excellent flatfile databases
A scripting language that had access to a nice library of "lexical" functions.
But like I said, I wish I still cared. While we still have Alphas around running openVMS at the office, I haven't logged onto one for about three years. Somewhere, I have a huge library of shell routines, login scripts, and ancient forms-oriented code.
Blood Music, by Greg Bear: One of the original grey goo stories. The short story version is somewhat different from the novel, both fascinating. Queen of Angels and Slant deal with nano/bio modifications to people.
Deception Well by Linda Nagata (also The Bohr Maker, and Vast, the prequel and sequel -- though DW reads fine on its own). Nano-infected planet holds keys to all kinds of mysterious stuff, including how this not-quite human person is able to live among the humans.
Limit of Vision by Linda Nagata. OK, I reallyreally like her stuff. This one is closer to present-time, and doesn't quite hit the grey goo phase... but avoids it narrowly. Not her best, but still very entertaining.
Truly, NanoSF is a bit passe. Blood Music dates from '86 (according to Amazon). Current cutting-edge SF tends more towards bioengineering, plagues, eco-crashes (Dust), or truly wonky time travel (Chronoliths).
It's been almost 18 years since college as IT at a big non-IT, but science-oriented corporation, all at the same location (the company's been merged up three times now)... the 'job' has been different things: Grunt programmer, support JOAT (Mac evangelist forced to become Windows migrator), technology pilot...
.NET and Linux, because it's too cutting-edge for a big corp, but most of the other shlubs around me can't seem to find their way around JSP, ASP or even some basic DOM and HTML.
My current title is "IT Architect" which means I do what needs to be done, whether or not the users wrote requirements, pull rabbits out of hats, never say, "It can't be done," and still I manage to get away with the "It'll take eight weeks" and finishing it in one trick.
I don't work 80-hour weeks, I get well compensated, I'm known in the field and respected by my management.
Will it last? Maybe not. That third merger is just happening, and the rumor mill says our facility may close.
But it's never been boring, because I'm always willing to learn something else. No, I'm not doing
If this robot can respond to Tetris' higher levels at reasonable speed, then the next project ought to be a glasses-mounted camera with bluetooth to an iPod-camoflaged CPU that can count cards at Blackjack.
A wide-angle lens ought to be able to pick up the whole table. Watching cards being laid down is relatively easy -- surely no harder than seeing pieces fall down the screen. Then just ID the cards, keep a running total, and put a piezo buzzer in the glasses' arms to let you know when to bet big and when to get the heck out of there.
Maybe a camera in the rear also, to spot pit bosses?
It shows no examples of immortal code. The closest thing they mention is that when Scour got bought, the new company archived the code, but never used it.
That's hardly immortal, that's entombed.
Examples of immortality would be things like
* Bits of BIOS still in use from the original IBM PC through today's pentiums
* Bits of Multiplan that percolated through Excel
* Bits of CP/M still floating through Linux
The article makes a bigger point on how transient software is, and how 99% of what's created is tossed out. How many times, when asked to fix code, do you just rewrite it anyway?
I'm just not sure I can prove it.
Our web store was established 17 April 1996, using static links to content that changed as the catalog is updated.
That's a month before the patent was applied for.
The problem is, the first few months of our business, our backup policies, were, well, nonexistent. I don't believe that ANY of those original pages with any kind of datestamp exist.
I will check with my previous service provider, and see if they might have a backup tape from before May 1996 -- but it's doubtful.
Exactly my point -- ASP isn't the language, it's the environment. VBScript, JavaScript, PerlScript, Ruby? can all be used within HTML pages in IE, I'm not sure about other browsers.
The real missing item is VBScript. Sure, it's 99% Windoze (1% Macintosh -- who probably don't realize they have it). It's the engine behind ASP -- which isn't a language in its own right. It's the replacement for DOS Shell scripts/batch files. It's the preferred platform for management scripts on Win2K/WinXP (see WMI) It's the preferred platform for trojan horse programs... maybe I shouldn't claim that as a positive, huh? Probably Javascript should have been mentioned too, but it's rarely used as shell-style scripting. Why do I use VBScript when I've got Perl and Python on the same machine? Frobbable code at Microsoft's website. If nothing else, I prototype it there, then acces the same COM objects through Python or Perl.
e-Commerce only accounts for about 1% of total retail sales -- see department of commerce: http://www.census.gov/mrts/www/current.html
Traditional catalog mail/phone order sales account for about 10% (I haven't found a definitive internet source for this -- the articles I've found are about a year old, and may include e-Commerce too).
If these are not taxed as well -- and they have a powerful existing lobby much stronger than even Amazon, let alone Ma & Pa Website -- it would be a blatant disregard of the economics, let alone the legality of taxing one kind of interstate commerce over another.
If they can tax all mail/phone sales, then there's a significant income source. Taxing just the internetters is only going to drive them out of business, while those Brick & Mortars already out there with catalogs will endure. They'll just encourage people to call after browsing.
It was certainly an exaggeration. It was more of a complaint about how short the ride is. I was at Cedar Point two years ago in late August, and the lines were not bad most places. I really prefer coaster with more entertainment value than just quick thrill. Favorites include Seaworld Orlando's Kraken, Rock N Roller Coaster at MGM/Disney, Viper at Six Flags Great America. The Mantis rating is actually based on my family's response: stand-up and suspended coasters do not support 6'7" tall people.
Ok, 20 seconds to ride,
60 seconds to load and unload
7014 seconds in line...
Not for me.
Give me an entertaining ride that lasts a couple minutes at least. Millenium Force was down when we were there, but they've got some great rides.
Mantis -- Woot!
Just avoid the indoor dark bobsled-style coaster on days when it's 90 degrees out -- the AC in the building can't keep up.
...and I'm far from liking DRM in most cases. But with digital images so easy to manipulate, I need a trackable, reliable image for: a) Insurance claims -- So the insurance company won't declare that I hacked the 60" plasma TV onto that blank wall, then claimed it was stolen b) Reliably submitting news/crimestopper photos, so that they can't be debunked c) Plagiarized photos can be tracked to their sources This isn't a panacea, and I would certainly want to be able to not mark some images. The audio environment currently has issues where you can't dup your own personal recordings -- this is wrong. But I should be able to fingerprint my own media, and declare its copyright.
[TROLL]Isn't Canada part of the US?[/TROLL] Sorry, I couldn't resist. Regarding schlock, remember Sturgeon's Law: 95% of everything is crap. Regarding biotech, everybody's biotech is perpetually on the verge of breakthrough -- it just rarely materializes. Until you've got a product that puts you in the Amgen/Genentech club, you're small potatoes. There are hundreds of companies like that in the US with nearly the next big thing.
Lupin is mild compared to Japanese tentacle porn, but there's high levels of violence, and a fair amount of sexual content and nudity -- well beyond TOON's standards and practices, where the word "kill" is forbidden on translated shows (it creeps in on some WB superhero stuff without getting edited). What's steaming me, though, is that once again, TOON will not complete a run of Mobile Suit Gundam. Sure it's old an cheesy, but it's classic old and cheesy. They stopped the first run of it after Sept 11, on the excuse that it was a bad time for a cartoon about war. Now, they're going to cut it off about midway (it's tough for a 50-ep anime to run once a week without reruns). I'm catching a few I missed the first time 'round, but I still want to see the newtypes battle.