...I've got an (I think) original-cast recording of the musical Manhattan Towers.
Not that Clear Channel would touch that kind of nostalgia programming, but if they did, it's dollars to doughnuts that MT would be on the deprecated list.
Assuming these monstrous events were spurred on by religious fervor, I suspect that right now the perpetrators are having a very uncomfortable question-and-answer session with the Almighty.
Does anybody besides me ever wonder from time to time if we could eventually see the two 500-lb. gorillas get together? Maybe it's an aggravated paranoid fantasy, but if AOL ditched Netscape and M$ wanted to roll Hotmail and MSN into AOL...?
...does it mean that AOL would finally have enough bandwidth that it wouldn't have response problems during peak usage times? That's one of the frustrations I had with using it.
...is if Guido and Vito drop off a horse head in somebody's bed.
Seriously, until somebody can get a successful lawsuit so there's a legal precedent established, this kind of baloney will continue. Once there's a severe financial disincentive to engage in spamming, i.e., you'll get your fanny sued off in an open-and-shut case based solidly on law, spamming will move off of e-mail and on to USENET where...gulp, G*d forgive me...it belongs.
I sure hope somebody's fixed the ttim-epoch problem by then so we don't have our OSes screwing up while we're all manipulating Aki around on our respective screens...
Re:Inverse Square Law
on
Optical SETI
·
· Score: 2
I vaguely recall that an experiment to bounce laser light off the surface of the Moon determined that the light's "footprint" had spread out to several km over the distance between the Moon and Earth. Your mileage may not vary.
I can just see it: A "Special Presidential National Security Finding" or some such that gets virus writing equated with more conventionally understood varieties of terrorism.
Somewhere, late one evening, four black-clad operators slip silently into a house, shoot the dog with a suppressed.22, and disable the house security system. Down the hall, in a bedroom, a teenage boy is working on uploading his latest bit of MS Word or Outlook hell. The plastic bag full of ether-soaked paper towels descends swiftly and soundlessly over his head.
His body is never found...
That is, the one between the end of petrochemical-based energy and the advent of sustainable fusion. And whether we're saved or damned as a technologically based culture depends on which alternative gets here first.
In other words, either we get cheap, clean, nearly free unlimited energy, or our future is gonna look uncomfortably like those Mad Max movies.
When you look at the mirrored site, scroll down and look also at the design that was disavowed as bogus. Keep in mind that the coming show is set in the century before the original series; which of the two designs -- the certified one or the disavowed one -- looks more plausibly like a starship that would have existed prior to the original Enterprise?
I'm about to reveal my stupidity: I missed the fact that the beings at the end of the story were evolved from (indigenous?) A.I.s and were not extraterrestrial in origin, if indeed that's the case. And that distinction certainly puts a different spin on the story. So take anything else I have to say in such context as you deem appropriate.
One of the problems with telling this kind of story is pacing -- sometimes the dialogue and the underlying ideas are carrying the freight, not action and noise. If you think you're suddenly about to see the pace pick up and, in fact, it winds up slowing down even more (as happens in this movie toward the end), it's distracting and disappointing to have mentally prepared yourself for one type of situation only to be confronted with the opposite. I think this shortcoming is probably a first for Spielberg, who maintains pretty even pacing through a story but has never tried to follow through on another director's creative vision so thoroughly.
For me this movie has proven very provocative intellectually in a way Spielberg has never managed before, and after I chew on it a while longer, I'll almost certainly go back and see it again.
OK, please be patient & help me understand this.
Isn't there an upside for consumers in letting the companies freely shop the data around? Aren't you more rather than less likely to become aware of errors companies have in their databases, for example?
What is the potential downside of not opting out, if you don't see the companies shopping around your data as a big deal? I ask this as a guy who has bar-code tags from three different grocery stores hanging off my key ring, so they know every time I've bought a copy of Maxim from the magazine stand and the two brands of beer I like best.
Yes...BUT....I think your cost-debunking argument assumes that if I stay with dialup, I'm gonna pay for a second phone line. How likely is that, really? Most people I know who are sticking with dialup don't bother with a second phone line.
More to the point: As nice as it sounds, I don't need continuous high-speed connectivity. At least, not yet. I'm a Joe Sixpack user, not a Linux kernel hackin' geek. About the only real benefit I'd get from broadband would be in the "cheap thrills" department: Listening to music online. For everything else I want, I can dial up, do my thing in about four minutes, and clear out so my wife can go back to talking to my sister-in-law.
I wonder if the ISPs aren't making much of a profit because dialup is commoditized so thoroughly. If it is, it's no surprise it's a de facto standard: At this point, so few home users have a real, practical need for fast continuous connections that it's hard to figure out how to market broadband to them. I know I've repeatedly toyed with the idea when RoadRunner has sent me their stuff and repeatedly concluded that apart from the GCF (geek coolness factor) there's no reason to lay out the extra $$. Hell, if the free services were more reliable, I'd go back to using one of them.
Now I know why I like Neal Stephenson, Bruce Sterling, and William Gibson so much: This story reminds me so strongly of various plots and settings from their works. Highly cooperative high-tech squatter camps? Now if they just moved to the Golden Gate Bridge, or just outside of a high-tech research facility in Lousiana, or a bunch of floating junks orbiting a privately-owned surplus aircraft carrier, I'd really come down with acute deja vu.Cyberpunk is fun to visit, but sometimes I'm not too sure I'll want to live there.
Slashdot Mirror
...for unorthodox input devices like this.
...I've got an (I think) original-cast recording of the musical Manhattan Towers.
Not that Clear Channel would touch that kind of nostalgia programming, but if they did, it's dollars to doughnuts that MT would be on the deprecated list.
Assuming these monstrous events were spurred on by religious fervor, I suspect that right now the perpetrators are having a very uncomfortable question-and-answer session with the Almighty.
Does anybody besides me ever wonder from time to time if we could eventually see the two 500-lb. gorillas get together? Maybe it's an aggravated paranoid fantasy, but if AOL ditched Netscape and M$ wanted to roll Hotmail and MSN into AOL...?
Naaaah. The SEC would never stand for it, right?
I'm waiting for Microsoft and AOL to start swapping spit again...that ought to be the sign of the Apocalypse.
...does it mean that AOL would finally have enough bandwidth that it wouldn't have response problems during peak usage times? That's one of the frustrations I had with using it.
A company like this would have so much power it isn't funny and they need stopping.
Cue the anarchist terrorists with stolen ex-Soviet antitank weapons...
That would give a whole new meaning to the phrase "space opera"!
...is if Guido and Vito drop off a horse head in somebody's bed.
Seriously, until somebody can get a successful lawsuit so there's a legal precedent established, this kind of baloney will continue. Once there's a severe financial disincentive to engage in spamming, i.e., you'll get your fanny sued off in an open-and-shut case based solidly on law, spamming will move off of e-mail and on to USENET where...gulp, G*d forgive me...it belongs.
Mr. Parker, I wonder if you (or your kids) read Slashdot...
Oh, what glorious fun we had with thermite, with a VERY small bit of sodium in chlorine (yikes!), with deflagrated oxygen and red phosphorus.
We never did get around to the filter-paper-soaked-with-perchlorate "land mines" that pop under your sneakers, but we *did* talk about it.
"On a path as clear as it is reliable"
...Certainly true: Zero equals zero.
I can hardly wait for Estes' toy version. Zero to solar escape velocity in three seconds flat!
I wonder if those dead people all sent their letters in alphabetical order, the way dead people usually vote in Bexar County, Texas...
I sure hope somebody's fixed the ttim-epoch problem by then so we don't have our OSes screwing up while we're all manipulating Aki around on our respective screens...
I vaguely recall that an experiment to bounce laser light off the surface of the Moon determined that the light's "footprint" had spread out to several km over the distance between the Moon and Earth. Your mileage may not vary.
I can just see it now -- one Navy SEAL to another: "You mean we made it through BUD/S so we can snuff pimply-faced pencil-necked geek kids??"
I can just see it: A "Special Presidential National Security Finding" or some such that gets virus writing equated with more conventionally understood varieties of terrorism. Somewhere, late one evening, four black-clad operators slip silently into a house, shoot the dog with a suppressed .22, and disable the house security system. Down the hall, in a bedroom, a teenage boy is working on uploading his latest bit of MS Word or Outlook hell. The plastic bag full of ether-soaked paper towels descends swiftly and soundlessly over his head.
His body is never found...
In other words, either we get cheap, clean, nearly free unlimited energy, or our future is gonna look uncomfortably like those Mad Max movies.
When you look at the mirrored site, scroll down and look also at the design that was disavowed as bogus. Keep in mind that the coming show is set in the century before the original series; which of the two designs -- the certified one or the disavowed one -- looks more plausibly like a starship that would have existed prior to the original Enterprise?
And if we ever get an Open Source version of FrameMaker running, it ought to be called Manual Labor!
I'm about to reveal my stupidity: I missed the fact that the beings at the end of the story were evolved from (indigenous?) A.I.s and were not extraterrestrial in origin, if indeed that's the case. And that distinction certainly puts a different spin on the story. So take anything else I have to say in such context as you deem appropriate. One of the problems with telling this kind of story is pacing -- sometimes the dialogue and the underlying ideas are carrying the freight, not action and noise. If you think you're suddenly about to see the pace pick up and, in fact, it winds up slowing down even more (as happens in this movie toward the end), it's distracting and disappointing to have mentally prepared yourself for one type of situation only to be confronted with the opposite. I think this shortcoming is probably a first for Spielberg, who maintains pretty even pacing through a story but has never tried to follow through on another director's creative vision so thoroughly. For me this movie has proven very provocative intellectually in a way Spielberg has never managed before, and after I chew on it a while longer, I'll almost certainly go back and see it again.
For you Oakland Raiders fans, how about sharing around some of the silver face paint?
OK, please be patient & help me understand this. Isn't there an upside for consumers in letting the companies freely shop the data around? Aren't you more rather than less likely to become aware of errors companies have in their databases, for example? What is the potential downside of not opting out, if you don't see the companies shopping around your data as a big deal? I ask this as a guy who has bar-code tags from three different grocery stores hanging off my key ring, so they know every time I've bought a copy of Maxim from the magazine stand and the two brands of beer I like best.
Yes...BUT....I think your cost-debunking argument assumes that if I stay with dialup, I'm gonna pay for a second phone line. How likely is that, really? Most people I know who are sticking with dialup don't bother with a second phone line. More to the point: As nice as it sounds, I don't need continuous high-speed connectivity. At least, not yet. I'm a Joe Sixpack user, not a Linux kernel hackin' geek. About the only real benefit I'd get from broadband would be in the "cheap thrills" department: Listening to music online. For everything else I want, I can dial up, do my thing in about four minutes, and clear out so my wife can go back to talking to my sister-in-law. I wonder if the ISPs aren't making much of a profit because dialup is commoditized so thoroughly. If it is, it's no surprise it's a de facto standard: At this point, so few home users have a real, practical need for fast continuous connections that it's hard to figure out how to market broadband to them. I know I've repeatedly toyed with the idea when RoadRunner has sent me their stuff and repeatedly concluded that apart from the GCF (geek coolness factor) there's no reason to lay out the extra $$. Hell, if the free services were more reliable, I'd go back to using one of them.
Now I know why I like Neal Stephenson, Bruce Sterling, and William Gibson so much: This story reminds me so strongly of various plots and settings from their works. Highly cooperative high-tech squatter camps? Now if they just moved to the Golden Gate Bridge, or just outside of a high-tech research facility in Lousiana, or a bunch of floating junks orbiting a privately-owned surplus aircraft carrier, I'd really come down with acute deja vu.Cyberpunk is fun to visit, but sometimes I'm not too sure I'll want to live there.