A lot of people who are interested in cults have some heuristics for differentiating cults from "regular" religions.
Question "What's the difference between a cult. . . and my church, my service club, or, say, Alcoholics Anonymous?"
There are lots of differences, but the major difference is that of ultimate goal. Established religions and altruistic movements are focused outward--they attempt to better the lives of members and often, nonmembers. They make altruistic contributions. Cults serve their own purposes, which are the purposes of the cult leader; their energies are focused inward rather than outward (Singer, 1995).
The following website discusses cults, why people join them and stay in them, and the methods used by the leaders of cults to manipulate their members...
If the notion that humans are little more than advanced animals is allowed to lodge in the collective political mindshare, then abuses far worse than what the Nazis did will become commonplace.
Arguably from an animal rights standpoint such abuses are occurring constantly because of the reverse reasoning -- animals are beneath humans and therefore can be mistreated as we see fit.
It's easy to imagine a future society in which slaughter houses, for example, are shown to school children in the same context as Nazi death camps.
I like Ben Stein's TV show, but I'm not sure he's someone who should be steering our nation. His arguments might carry more weight if they weren't dripping with political ideology.
1) Schools
I think many of us can agree that some schools are getting worse. But we might just as easily raise the topic of privatising education, the way that schools obtain revenue, the influence of the religious right on school syllabuses, the easy access to guns, or the hopelessly failed war on drugs as key issues, versus before arguing that it's unionised teachers or a syllabus that questions aspects of US history. If Ben Stein were in Japan he'd probably oppose teaching children about Japanese war crimes during WWII.
2) Trial Lawyers
Another right-wing hobbyhorse. Sure, many on the left probably take pleasure in the trials and tribulations of Big Tobacco. And yes, we're probably hoping that the courts will do what the legislature has consistently failed to do. But why not at the same time argue for campaign finance reform (since it's election-funding that has largely kept Big Tobacco from being dealt with by legislation)? Yes, the courts should not make law. Yes, the polticians should. Fix both.
3) Lack of Personal Responsibility
I have no arguments with Ben on this one.
4) Hard Work and Thrift.
Ditto.
5) Corporate Responsibility.
Ditto.
6) Respect for the Law.
Ditto.
7) Anti-Intellectualism.
Well, I have to say it but the Germans and French have probably got the most pro-intellectual cultures on the planet. This hasn't stopped them providing widespread support at various times for openly fascist regimes, massacring minorities from time to time, or falling behind the US technically.
Today despite its anti-intellectualism, the USA has 3676 engineers and scientists per million people, versus 2891 for Germany and less for France.)
(I can't vouch for these statistics, but they're from http://www.freeworldacademy.com/)
8) Mock and belittle the family.
I think this is Ben's way of being against child care and welfare moms. Go for it, let 'em starve.
9) Suicidal Immigration Policy.
Well if anything US immigration laws have become less inclined to allow "angry, uneducated immigrants" into the country over time. Each wave of immigration to the US has brought with it ethnically flavored organised crime, etc. etc. When we had waves of Irish immigration, many of them were angry and uneducated.
As for "countries that hate us". Countries don't hate people. People hate people. The people who run Iraq, say, may hate us, but that doesn't mean all Iraqis hate us.
10) Tax the Rich
It sounds like a good idea to me. Apparently, in the US the rich pay roughly the same number of cents in the dollar in taxes as the poor. Which is not what a progressive tax system is supposed to do (i.e. tax the wealthier harder) but it's a closer approximation than my former home (Australia) where the rich pay far fewer cents in the dollar than they do here. Still, if that seems harsh and draconian, by all means vote against it.
Note that in general the rich GET a lot more from the government than the poor do. E.g. it costs more to maintain the roads in wealthy neighbourhoods (especially per-capita). Also, poor people don't own defense contractors.
11) Socialised Medicine Destroys Technical Progress
If you look at small countries with socialised health care systems, they contribute FAR more to medical research per capita than countries without. But it's hard to find small, well-run countries that don't have socialised health care systems. Indeed, it's hard to find large, well-run countries except for the US that don't.
We see that from 1991-95 the USA publishes 2388 papers in medical research per million inhabitants, versus 2825 for the UK, 3620 Sweden, 2342 Canada, 2845 Netherlands, etc. etc.
Now this is hardly a perfect measure, but note that all these latter countries are poorer than the US, are probably getting better healthcare outcomes than the US, and have socialised health care.
What the US's health care system does really well is treat "diseases of the rich". Thus, we have a lot of money going into research into chronic diseases of the affluent, and little or none going into acute diseases of the poor. No new vaccines or antibiotics, but a ton of stuff to make wrinkles and acne go away.
Meanwhile for a lot of research, the US's completely disorganised healthcare system has to turn to countries like Sweden, with socialised healthcare, to get useful epidemiological data with which to develop new drugs.
I have nothing but admiration for Nintendo's in-house designed games for kids of all ages, but their strange censorship of other companies' games is another story.
Back in the eighties LucasArts endeavoured to adapt Maniac Mansion (I think) to the Nintendo game console. They had to change one of the puzzles that involved microwaving a hamster (fair enough, kids might try it) and remove all direct references to "death". Bear in mind that the smash hit on the console at the time was Mortal Kombat, a game wherein you pulled your opponent's head off, ripped out their spine, etc. etc..
Tolkien's main characters are white. Why? It's a British epic story, set in Britain 7,000 some odd years ago. The "bad guys" are not actually humans, but orcs. That hardly constitutes racism.
Aside from the lack of resemblance between Britain and Middle Earth geographically, surely, it's racism on a grand scale, against -- for example -- orcs and people of dark complexion.
The Southrons, who I think not coincidentally are described as swarthy, are human allies of Sauron. Likewise the darker wood elves are less noble than the fair grey/high elves. Gandalf ascends from being "grey" to being "white".
So from Tolkien we get the following messages:
a) Purity of blood = purity of spirit. Thus the more Numenorean blood (or better yet High Elvish) in you, the better a person you are.
b) Race = personality. If you're an elf you're good. There are no evil elves. If you're an orc you're bad. There are no good orcs.
c) Dark skinned southerners are evil. (OK, that reflects British immigration policies...)
d) When thousands of orcs are slaughtered by the Riders of Rohan it's heroism. When orcs engage in similar behavior against humans its evil.
Now I don't think there's any real evidence Tolkien was anything more than casually anti-semitic (as were most Anglicans). There's a good deal of evidence that he lived in a world of white male Christian Oxford dons and this is strongly reflected in his novels. (Reread the "Return of the King" from a homoerotic perspective as a drinking game.)
Still, Tolkien was raised in South Africa and fought in WWI. A complete non-grasp of sex, race and politics is not entirely forgiveable in a highly educated scholar. E.g. it can scarcely have failed to negatively impact his professional work as a philologist -- what can be more political than language?
As for finite states, well you can turn this into a state table if you want to (a large number of states to be sure, but not a very large number of bits) but you can only cope with a finite number of soldiers.
Having read the state tables for the alleged solutions I am clueless as to how they're supposed to work. A synopsis of the strategy being adopted would be very helpful.
It seems to me that the initial message to fire MUST take N ticks to propagate to the Nth soldier. The message that the final soldier has been located MUST take N ticks to propagate back to the first soldier. Hence a theoretical limit of 2N + some number.
Exactly how you store the intermediate information ("wait, you'll get another message soon!") is really just a technical detail for folks who want to program a formal finite state machine (I think they live near people with infinitely long spools of tape) which can't store integers. The rest of us would use your (or a similar) solution and get on with our lives.
Optimised for animation is not the same as being optimised for video
QuickTime, for example, offers a ton of different codecs each optimised for a different purpose. Motion JPEG is far superior to MPEG/Sorensen/etc. for stuff you want to be able to edit or play backwards. The Animation codec was their first attempt to handle animations (vs. video). Animation is characterised by a total lack of background noise.
Even digital video has a ton of background noise that needs to be both filtered out (during compression) and simulated (in playback). If you just clamp out the background noise, the end result looks wrong (the way a movie looks if you freeze on a frame instead of film a static scene).
I am sure DiVX has many virtues, but it's not a family of codecs with different capabilities.
Of the original Foundation trilogy, only the first book has a lot of characters to deal with. It essentially covers three significant episodes: the early times, Salvor Hardin's adventures, and Hober Mallow's adventures. Actually I think the real problem in adapting a lot of older SF books is that, as with Lord of the Rings, there is no romantic interest or even a vaguely significant female character to be seen -- not good for potential box office.
None of this should be a serious obstacle to making a movie for the people who turned "We Can Remember it For You Wholesale" into "Total Recall". The fact that "Total Recall" isn't a complete piece of garbage just goes to show how even a bizarre adaptation of an interesting short story will be a lot better than a giving fifty million dollars to someone who says "Arnold Schwarzenegger and Danny DeVito. Twins."
animated versions of this have been around since the seventies
Actually there's an animated version that is incomplete, ends less than half-way through owing to a lack of funding (given the quality of the partially completed work, who can blame people for not paying more to finish it).
I don't see LoTR as being any harder to film than a bunch of other splashy biblical and historic epics. Most of the flashy stuff in Peter Jackson's films does not reflect any great requirement for special effects in the books themselves. It's basically a story with medieval warfare and a few monsters Harryhausen could have done a creditable job with.
You go on to list a large number of fantastic works, but just because a novel is outstanding does not mean it can be translated into a reasonable film. Take Asimov's "Foundation" trilogy, something I am intimately familiar with. Can you imagine the trimming, the skimming, and the condensing that would be required to do just one of the books?
All film adaptations require major changes to the original stories. This is hardly unique to SF. I am well aware of the intricacies of this process. You may recall that War and Peace has been made several times into films and the Les Miserables was made into a pretty decent musical. Gee, do you think they left some stuff out?
Well I'm guessing that as with a lot of OS X Open Source projects (e.g. Chimera) it will become harder to tell where "Apple Official Software" and "Open Source" begin and end as the software gets more mature.
Apple isn't going to put its imprimata on software that doesn't, for example, have a fairly simple and foolproof install process.
I'm guessing Apple value-added versions of Fink and Chimera will appear as "part of the OS" at some future date.
Why not base movies on decent books?
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Critics Pan Nemesis
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· Score: 2, Interesting
What really bugs me is that with hundreds of great SF (and fantasy) novels that have never been made into films, folks spend hundreds of millions making terrible scripts into films. Sure, making Lord of the Rings into a film is a no brainer -- we had to wait fifty years for that?!
Just off the top of my head (and everyone will have their own ideas):
Note: I'm picking big, generally violent, splashy stories that would turn into the kind of movies that Hollywood likes, and not subtle stuff. Most of the books have franchise potential (i.e. they're part of long series).
Isaac Asimov's "Foundation" Iain Banks's "Excession" Greg Bear's "Eon" David Brin's "Startide Rising" C.J. Cherryh's "Downbelow Station" Arthur C. Clarke's "Earthlight" Gordon R. Dickson's "Tactics of Mistake" William Gibson's "Neuromancer" Ursula K. Le Guin's "The Dispossessed" Cordwainer Smith's "Norstrilia" Neil Stephenson's "The Diamond Age" (or get Spielberg to do "Cryptonomicon" since he has this WWII bug) Jack Vance's "To Live Forever" Walter Jon Williams's "Aristoi"
I won't even bother listing fantasy series that could be made into movies once they've finished making every posthumous exhumation of Tolkein's crap into movies (I foresee five films based on the Silmarillion and then there's the volumes and volumes of junk published by his son...)
On a side note: why is it that Philip K. Dick's most obscure novels and short stories that are often boring or make no sense do get made into films? And generally they're stories about someone who is totally passive and runs away at every sign of trouble who ends up being played by Arnold Schwarzenegger... Maybe the screenwriters see a kindred spirit or something. Or maybe the rights were cheap.
If we're going to make Dick's books into movies, what about: "Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said" "A Scanner Darkly"
Hollywood loves dumb action films. Explosions and special effects don't need to be explained or localised.
In general, as game development has become more like movie production, games have become more like movies, i.e. stupid and flashy.
This doesn't mean that good games don't get developed, but they tend to be made -- like most good movies -- by independent producers on shoestring budgets OR by auteurs whose track records allow them the indulgence of the money people.
NeverWinter Nights -- flawed as it is -- could never have been made by people without a track record. There's a few million worth of content, etc., in that game, and that kind of money doesn't get handed over to a couple of overweight guys with a good idea.
Finally, high end graphics and real time game play create design issues that make putting in a lot of nice role-playing detail very difficult indeed. When, years ago, my friends and I were working on Prince of Destruction we omitted a lot of ideas because, having decided to make the game real time and animated, producing graphical representations of things increased the cost (in time) of implementing them.
When you have real time 3D graphics, doing stuff like having a character pull out a sword nicely might cost you two animator days... This means implementing alchemy (think of all the assets you'll need, all the debugging, etc.) is prohibitive.
If you want to allow decent levels of interaction, every time you add options you blow out the amount of voice dialog you'll need to script, edit, record, clean up, check, localise, etc.
So, Bioware goes from Fallout/Fallout2 -- probably the best computer RPGs I can think of -- to NeverWinter Nights: fabulous engine, great graphics, totally linear plot. (Of course their tools and engine let you write your own plots...)
As a usability person, surely brevity is a key feature of usability in prose...
(end sarcasm)
In general, there are two types of usability advice: prescriptive and proscriptive. The most famous usability folks are proscriptive folks (see "The Design of Everyday Things," by Don Norman).
It's easy to be critical ("it's too difficult for some people to skip 20 links at the start of a web page" for example) and hard to provide good solutions ("put a skip link before every navigation block" is NOT an example).
Proscriptive usability advice is entertaining, and often thought-provoking. But it isn't generally usable advice. OK I now know how NOT to do whatever it is I want to do. So that leaves infinity minus one options.
What Macromedia has attempted to do with Flash is a useful step towards allowing accessibility considerations to be handled by Flash developers.
But if I import an image called "Anatomy.jpg" into web page in dreamweaver, you'd THINK that by default it might put Alt="Anatomy" into the image tag. Or, it might put "Anatomy" in the popup menu next to the Alt field in the properties floater to save me typing it in. But no.
There's the accessibility problem in a nutshell. I think many of the accessibility issues are software problems, either with content software or browsing software:
1) Skipping navigation stuff.
Surely this is a fairly simple feature to add to a browser. Any solution that requires extra code to be added to almost every web page in existence is not a usable solution.
2) Alt=" " etc.
Well only a tiny minority of the world's web pages are hand coded. I really don't think this is a problem with web page design, it's a problem with web page design software. If an image has no link, then it should be Alt=filename or Alt=" ". Again, don't expect everyone in the world to hand tune their HTML. Again, 90% of the problem could be handled in the browser anyway (IE tells you an image's filename if you hover the mouse over it).
3) Standard HTML.
It's very hard to find web pages that are 100% standards compliant. Again, here we have a solution that requires modifying almost every web page in the world (and while we're at it, fixing a whole bunch of standards). Solutions need to be usable by both end users and developers.
Conclusion
Maybe the efforts of Joe Clark et al to force web designers to manually implement laborious accessibility solutions will in the end create a market for tools with better accessibility options built-in, but unless you're a likely lawsuit target or have a specific target audience you need to reach, it seems to me you should do the best accessibility job your toolset affords you to do, and meanwhile wait for that market to fix your tools.
I use BOLD tags because STRONG takes longer to type -- even though I know that STRONG is good and BOLD is evil. Now, that's usability.
Bill owns or used to own his own 3D animation / special effects studio... why no questions on that? Surely a lot more/.-ish a question than which SNL skit did he like...
I think you're pretty much on the money. Several of the questions were clearly poorly researched ("I heard blah blah" and "blah blah" turns out to be hopelessly incorrect on several levels...) and there was no follow-up (if Mr. Shatner was dissembling, call him on it).
Some of the questions were downright stupid. Galaxy Quest was originally going to be based explicitly on Star Trek but couldn't get legal permission. Given that fact, putting in a whole pile of detail that was clearly based on Star Trek (e.g. having the bridge crew the same as the Star Trek bridge crew but with different names, or making the personal lives of the actors just like those of Star Trek's actors) would have been a lawsuit waiting to happen. Almost certainly little details like that are the first thing that will change, so that you can make the big idea ("it's just like Star Trek") work.
To put it another way, ask the real question: "Tim Allen's character in Galaxy Quest is an alcoholic, selfish, blow-hard, has-been. To what extent does that resemble you, Bill Shatner?"
And remember that Bill fancies himself a writer, no questions on his writing were asked. Good interviewers try to win over their subjects with questions the subjects are interested in answering. If Letterman couldn't get interesting answers out of Bill, don't expect the kind of questions/. asked to do the trick.
Chimera is a fast IE with tabs that's not a Microsoft product. Well actually it's a fast Mozilla with tabs that's not a Microsoft product which is even better since:
1) Gecko renders pages not specifically and solely tailored to IE better than IE does.
2) It even does a pretty good job with IE-tailored stuff.
1) It doesn't rate Chimera, iCab, or Opera because they're not final release. Frankly these days for most software "final release" is a meaningless phrase. Maybe MacWorld needs to have a provisional rating scheme to make articles like this meaningful.
2) NetScape 7.0 is stated as having "no tabbed windows". Um, what?
In any event, unless you're starved for bandwidth almost all these programs are free. Why not download them and make up your own mind?
And as a final note: tabbed browsing really makes up for rendering issues. You don't notice a new page's loading time nearly as much when it's opened in a background tabbed versus having a blank window shoved in your face...
The obvious benefit of a 64-bit processor for server applications is spewing out data. When you're spitting out a web page or whatever, you don't really care what you're looking at and 64-bits is 2x 32-bits.
Look at the power pc, it takes 5 instructions to load a 64 bit value
This sounds wrong to me, especially if you use floating point registers. I'm too sleepy to look it up but I'm guessing 3 integer instructions at most. (1 on a 64-bit PowerPC, of course.)
Which leads me to the question: if you have a 32-bit processor with 64-bit addressing, a floating point pipeline with 64-bit or 80-bit memory access for calculations, exactly what benefit is a 64-bit processor?
...it turns out that Microsoft users also hate Microsoft. There was a slight difference between the degree of hatred between Microsoft users for Microsoft and Apple users for Microsoft but it was not found to be statistically significant, after removing Microsoft employees and shareholders from the Microsoft users sample.
Actually in Australia Microsoft already lost their "Windows" trademark. They can (and do) trademark "Microsoft Windows" just like they trademark "Microsoft Word" but trademarking a word that is in common use shouldn't be possible.
That's why there are so many products with names that are stupid mispellings of common words, like "Cheez Whiz" or whatever. Even if no-one else produces a product called the "Fornicator" if you want to trademark it you should probably mispell it or stick your already safely trademarked name in front of it.
Well, I can't speak with enormous expertise on the subject, but by and large the rich pay less, proportionately, in income tax than pretty much anyone except the destitute. While in theory the rich are subject to high marginal tax rates, in practice they pay fewer cents in the dollar.
Meanwhile, they are receiving all kinds of corporate welfare (not many poor people own companies that get large government contracts).
"The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor, to sleep under the bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread." - Anatole France.
Was that SGI went into a partnership with MS called Farenheit, which was to succeed OpenGL. (This was as good a move as SGI's attempts to sell NT boxes and its earlier bid to compete with high-end Macs.)
Farenheit was going to be the "high-end" graphics API, while DirectX would serve for "low-end". Well, you can attribute it to malice aforethought or simply reading the times, but MS withdrew leaving Farenheit dead in the water. Meanwhile OpenGL had pretty much stayed still.
Four years is a long time in 3D graphics. It's pretty sad that DirectX hasn't been able to open up MORE of a lead...
Slashdot Mirror
A lot of people who are interested in cults have some heuristics for differentiating cults from "regular" religions.
Question "What's the difference between a cult. . . and my church, my service club, or, say, Alcoholics Anonymous?"
There are lots of differences, but the major difference is that of ultimate goal. Established religions and altruistic movements are focused outward--they attempt to better the lives of members and often, nonmembers. They make altruistic contributions. Cults serve their own purposes, which are the purposes of the cult leader; their energies are focused inward rather than outward (Singer, 1995).
The following website discusses cults, why people join them and stay in them, and the methods used by the leaders of cults to manipulate their members...
http://www.workingpsychology.com/cult.html
If the notion that humans are little more than advanced animals is allowed to lodge in the collective political mindshare, then abuses far worse than what the Nazis did will become commonplace.
Arguably from an animal rights standpoint such abuses are occurring constantly because of the reverse reasoning -- animals are beneath humans and therefore can be mistreated as we see fit.
It's easy to imagine a future society in which slaughter houses, for example, are shown to school children in the same context as Nazi death camps.
http://www.petersingerlinks.com/
I like Ben Stein's TV show, but I'm not sure he's someone who should be steering our nation. His arguments might carry more weight if they weren't dripping with political ideology.
s ch .html
1) Schools
I think many of us can agree that some schools are getting worse. But we might just as easily raise the topic of privatising education, the way that schools obtain revenue, the influence of the religious right on school syllabuses, the easy access to guns, or the hopelessly failed war on drugs as key issues, versus before arguing that it's unionised teachers or a syllabus that questions aspects of US history. If Ben Stein were in Japan he'd probably oppose teaching children about Japanese war crimes during WWII.
2) Trial Lawyers
Another right-wing hobbyhorse. Sure, many on the left probably take pleasure in the trials and tribulations of Big Tobacco. And yes, we're probably hoping that the courts will do what the legislature has consistently failed to do. But why not at the same time argue for campaign finance reform (since it's election-funding that has largely kept Big Tobacco from being dealt with by legislation)? Yes, the courts should not make law. Yes, the polticians should. Fix both.
3) Lack of Personal Responsibility
I have no arguments with Ben on this one.
4) Hard Work and Thrift.
Ditto.
5) Corporate Responsibility.
Ditto.
6) Respect for the Law.
Ditto.
7) Anti-Intellectualism.
Well, I have to say it but the Germans and French have probably got the most pro-intellectual cultures on the planet. This hasn't stopped them providing widespread support at various times for openly fascist regimes, massacring minorities from time to time, or falling behind the US technically.
Today despite its anti-intellectualism, the USA has 3676 engineers and scientists per million people, versus 2891 for Germany and less for France.)
(I can't vouch for these statistics, but they're from http://www.freeworldacademy.com/)
8) Mock and belittle the family.
I think this is Ben's way of being against child care and welfare moms. Go for it, let 'em starve.
9) Suicidal Immigration Policy.
Well if anything US immigration laws have become less inclined to allow "angry, uneducated immigrants" into the country over time. Each wave of immigration to the US has brought with it ethnically flavored organised crime, etc. etc. When we had waves of Irish immigration, many of them were angry and uneducated.
As for "countries that hate us". Countries don't hate people. People hate people. The people who run Iraq, say, may hate us, but that doesn't mean all Iraqis hate us.
10) Tax the Rich
It sounds like a good idea to me. Apparently, in the US the rich pay roughly the same number of cents in the dollar in taxes as the poor. Which is not what a progressive tax system is supposed to do (i.e. tax the wealthier harder) but it's a closer approximation than my former home (Australia) where the rich pay far fewer cents in the dollar than they do here. Still, if that seems harsh and draconian, by all means vote against it.
Note that in general the rich GET a lot more from the government than the poor do. E.g. it costs more to maintain the roads in wealthy neighbourhoods (especially per-capita). Also, poor people don't own defense contractors.
11) Socialised Medicine Destroys Technical Progress
If you look at small countries with socialised health care systems, they contribute FAR more to medical research per capita than countries without. But it's hard to find small, well-run countries that don't have socialised health care systems. Indeed, it's hard to find large, well-run countries except for the US that don't.
In the following paper:
http://www.uibk.ac.at/sci-org/voeb/texte/kolbit
We see that from 1991-95 the USA publishes 2388 papers in medical research per million inhabitants, versus 2825 for the UK, 3620 Sweden, 2342 Canada, 2845 Netherlands, etc. etc.
Now this is hardly a perfect measure, but note that all these latter countries are poorer than the US, are probably getting better healthcare outcomes than the US, and have socialised health care.
What the US's health care system does really well is treat "diseases of the rich". Thus, we have a lot of money going into research into chronic diseases of the affluent, and little or none going into acute diseases of the poor. No new vaccines or antibiotics, but a ton of stuff to make wrinkles and acne go away.
Meanwhile for a lot of research, the US's completely disorganised healthcare system has to turn to countries like Sweden, with socialised healthcare, to get useful epidemiological data with which to develop new drugs.
I have nothing but admiration for Nintendo's in-house designed games for kids of all ages, but their strange censorship of other companies' games is another story.
Back in the eighties LucasArts endeavoured to adapt Maniac Mansion (I think) to the Nintendo game console. They had to change one of the puzzles that involved microwaving a hamster (fair enough, kids might try it) and remove all direct references to "death". Bear in mind that the smash hit on the console at the time was Mortal Kombat, a game wherein you pulled your opponent's head off, ripped out their spine, etc. etc..
Uh, life forms in 6 days doesn't it?
"According to our special aging simulation, the subject should be FIVE YEARS OLDER."
Tolkien's main characters are white. Why? It's a British epic story, set in Britain 7,000 some odd years ago. The "bad guys" are not actually humans, but orcs. That hardly constitutes racism.
Aside from the lack of resemblance between Britain and Middle Earth geographically, surely, it's racism on a grand scale, against -- for example -- orcs and people of dark complexion.
The Southrons, who I think not coincidentally are described as swarthy, are human allies of Sauron. Likewise the darker wood elves are less noble than the fair grey/high elves. Gandalf ascends from being "grey" to being "white".
So from Tolkien we get the following messages:
a) Purity of blood = purity of spirit. Thus the more Numenorean blood (or better yet High Elvish) in you, the better a person you are.
b) Race = personality. If you're an elf you're good. There are no evil elves. If you're an orc you're bad. There are no good orcs.
c) Dark skinned southerners are evil. (OK, that reflects British immigration policies...)
d) When thousands of orcs are slaughtered by the Riders of Rohan it's heroism. When orcs engage in similar behavior against humans its evil.
Now I don't think there's any real evidence Tolkien was anything more than casually anti-semitic (as were most Anglicans). There's a good deal of evidence that he lived in a world of white male Christian Oxford dons and this is strongly reflected in his novels. (Reread the "Return of the King" from a homoerotic perspective as a drinking game.)
Still, Tolkien was raised in South Africa and fought in WWI. A complete non-grasp of sex, race and politics is not entirely forgiveable in a highly educated scholar. E.g. it can scarcely have failed to negatively impact his professional work as a philologist -- what can be more political than language?
That was my impression too.
t io n.html
As for finite states, well you can turn this into a state table if you want to (a large number of states to be sure, but not a very large number of bits) but you can only cope with a finite number of soldiers.
http://xraysgi.ims.uconn.edu/fsquad/firing-solu
Having read the state tables for the alleged solutions I am clueless as to how they're supposed to work. A synopsis of the strategy being adopted would be very helpful.
It seems to me that the initial message to fire MUST take N ticks to propagate to the Nth soldier. The message that the final soldier has been located MUST take N ticks to propagate back to the first soldier. Hence a theoretical limit of 2N + some number.
Exactly how you store the intermediate information ("wait, you'll get another message soon!") is really just a technical detail for folks who want to program a formal finite state machine (I think they live near people with infinitely long spools of tape) which can't store integers. The rest of us would use your (or a similar) solution and get on with our lives.
Optimised for animation is not the same as being optimised for video
QuickTime, for example, offers a ton of different codecs each optimised for a different purpose. Motion JPEG is far superior to MPEG/Sorensen/etc. for stuff you want to be able to edit or play backwards. The Animation codec was their first attempt to handle animations (vs. video). Animation is characterised by a total lack of background noise.
Even digital video has a ton of background noise that needs to be both filtered out (during compression) and simulated (in playback). If you just clamp out the background noise, the end result looks wrong (the way a movie looks if you freeze on a frame instead of film a static scene).
I am sure DiVX has many virtues, but it's not a family of codecs with different capabilities.
Oh sorry to reply to my own reply...
Of the original Foundation trilogy, only the first book has a lot of characters to deal with. It essentially covers three significant episodes: the early times, Salvor Hardin's adventures, and Hober Mallow's adventures. Actually I think the real problem in adapting a lot of older SF books is that, as with Lord of the Rings, there is no romantic interest or even a vaguely significant female character to be seen -- not good for potential box office.
None of this should be a serious obstacle to making a movie for the people who turned "We Can Remember it For You Wholesale" into "Total Recall". The fact that "Total Recall" isn't a complete piece of garbage just goes to show how even a bizarre adaptation of an interesting short story will be a lot better than a giving fifty million dollars to someone who says "Arnold Schwarzenegger and Danny DeVito. Twins."
animated versions of this have been around since the seventies
Actually there's an animated version that is incomplete, ends less than half-way through owing to a lack of funding (given the quality of the partially completed work, who can blame people for not paying more to finish it).
I don't see LoTR as being any harder to film than a bunch of other splashy biblical and historic epics. Most of the flashy stuff in Peter Jackson's films does not reflect any great requirement for special effects in the books themselves. It's basically a story with medieval warfare and a few monsters Harryhausen could have done a creditable job with.
You go on to list a large number of fantastic works, but just because a novel is outstanding does not mean it can be translated into a reasonable film. Take Asimov's "Foundation" trilogy, something I am intimately familiar with. Can you imagine the trimming, the skimming, and the condensing that would be required to do just one of the books?
All film adaptations require major changes to the original stories. This is hardly unique to SF. I am well aware of the intricacies of this process. You may recall that War and Peace has been made several times into films and the Les Miserables was made into a pretty decent musical. Gee, do you think they left some stuff out?
Well I'm guessing that as with a lot of OS X Open Source projects (e.g. Chimera) it will become harder to tell where "Apple Official Software" and "Open Source" begin and end as the software gets more mature.
Apple isn't going to put its imprimata on software that doesn't, for example, have a fairly simple and foolproof install process.
I'm guessing Apple value-added versions of Fink and Chimera will appear as "part of the OS" at some future date.
What really bugs me is that with hundreds of great SF (and fantasy) novels that have never been made into films, folks spend hundreds of millions making terrible scripts into films. Sure, making Lord of the Rings into a film is a no brainer -- we had to wait fifty years for that?!
Just off the top of my head (and everyone will have their own ideas):
Note: I'm picking big, generally violent, splashy stories that would turn into the kind of movies that Hollywood likes, and not subtle stuff. Most of the books have franchise potential (i.e. they're part of long series).
Isaac Asimov's "Foundation"
Iain Banks's "Excession"
Greg Bear's "Eon"
David Brin's "Startide Rising"
C.J. Cherryh's "Downbelow Station"
Arthur C. Clarke's "Earthlight"
Gordon R. Dickson's "Tactics of Mistake"
William Gibson's "Neuromancer"
Ursula K. Le Guin's "The Dispossessed"
Cordwainer Smith's "Norstrilia"
Neil Stephenson's "The Diamond Age" (or get Spielberg to do "Cryptonomicon" since he has this WWII bug)
Jack Vance's "To Live Forever"
Walter Jon Williams's "Aristoi"
I won't even bother listing fantasy series that could be made into movies once they've finished making every posthumous exhumation of Tolkein's crap into movies (I foresee five films based on the Silmarillion and then there's the volumes and volumes of junk published by his son...)
On a side note: why is it that Philip K. Dick's most obscure novels and short stories that are often boring or make no sense do get made into films? And generally they're stories about someone who is totally passive and runs away at every sign of trouble who ends up being played by Arnold Schwarzenegger... Maybe the screenwriters see a kindred spirit or something. Or maybe the rights were cheap.
If we're going to make Dick's books into movies, what about:
"Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said"
"A Scanner Darkly"
Maybe Pixar can make "Ubik"...
Hollywood loves dumb action films. Explosions and special effects don't need to be explained or localised.
In general, as game development has become more like movie production, games have become more like movies, i.e. stupid and flashy.
This doesn't mean that good games don't get developed, but they tend to be made -- like most good movies -- by independent producers on shoestring budgets OR by auteurs whose track records allow them the indulgence of the money people.
NeverWinter Nights -- flawed as it is -- could never have been made by people without a track record. There's a few million worth of content, etc., in that game, and that kind of money doesn't get handed over to a couple of overweight guys with a good idea.
Finally, high end graphics and real time game play create design issues that make putting in a lot of nice role-playing detail very difficult indeed. When, years ago, my friends and I were working on Prince of Destruction we omitted a lot of ideas because, having decided to make the game real time and animated, producing graphical representations of things increased the cost (in time) of implementing them.
When you have real time 3D graphics, doing stuff like having a character pull out a sword nicely might cost you two animator days... This means implementing alchemy (think of all the assets you'll need, all the debugging, etc.) is prohibitive.
If you want to allow decent levels of interaction, every time you add options you blow out the amount of voice dialog you'll need to script, edit, record, clean up, check, localise, etc.
So, Bioware goes from Fallout/Fallout2 -- probably the best computer RPGs I can think of -- to NeverWinter Nights: fabulous engine, great graphics, totally linear plot. (Of course their tools and engine let you write your own plots...)
...but I didn't have time.
As a usability person, surely brevity is a key feature of usability in prose...
(end sarcasm)
In general, there are two types of usability advice: prescriptive and proscriptive. The most famous usability folks are proscriptive folks (see "The Design of Everyday Things," by Don Norman).
It's easy to be critical ("it's too difficult for some people to skip 20 links at the start of a web page" for example) and hard to provide good solutions ("put a skip link before every navigation block" is NOT an example).
Proscriptive usability advice is entertaining, and often thought-provoking. But it isn't generally usable advice. OK I now know how NOT to do whatever it is I want to do. So that leaves infinity minus one options.
What Macromedia has attempted to do with Flash is a useful step towards allowing accessibility considerations to be handled by Flash developers.
But if I import an image called "Anatomy.jpg" into web page in dreamweaver, you'd THINK that by default it might put Alt="Anatomy" into the image tag. Or, it might put "Anatomy" in the popup menu next to the Alt field in the properties floater to save me typing it in. But no.
There's the accessibility problem in a nutshell. I think many of the accessibility issues are software problems, either with content software or browsing software:
1) Skipping navigation stuff.
Surely this is a fairly simple feature to add to a browser. Any solution that requires extra code to be added to almost every web page in existence is not a usable solution.
2) Alt=" " etc.
Well only a tiny minority of the world's web pages are hand coded. I really don't think this is a problem with web page design, it's a problem with web page design software. If an image has no link, then it should be Alt=filename or Alt=" ". Again, don't expect everyone in the world to hand tune their HTML. Again, 90% of the problem could be handled in the browser anyway (IE tells you an image's filename if you hover the mouse over it).
3) Standard HTML.
It's very hard to find web pages that are 100% standards compliant. Again, here we have a solution that requires modifying almost every web page in the world (and while we're at it, fixing a whole bunch of standards). Solutions need to be usable by both end users and developers.
Conclusion
Maybe the efforts of Joe Clark et al to force web designers to manually implement laborious accessibility solutions will in the end create a market for tools with better accessibility options built-in, but unless you're a likely lawsuit target or have a specific target audience you need to reach, it seems to me you should do the best accessibility job your toolset affords you to do, and meanwhile wait for that market to fix your tools.
I use BOLD tags because STRONG takes longer to type -- even though I know that STRONG is good and BOLD is evil. Now, that's usability.
PS.
/.-ish a question than which SNL skit did he like...
Bill owns or used to own his own 3D animation / special effects studio... why no questions on that? Surely a lot more
I think you're pretty much on the money. Several of the questions were clearly poorly researched ("I heard blah blah" and "blah blah" turns out to be hopelessly incorrect on several levels...) and there was no follow-up (if Mr. Shatner was dissembling, call him on it).
/. asked to do the trick.
Some of the questions were downright stupid. Galaxy Quest was originally going to be based explicitly on Star Trek but couldn't get legal permission. Given that fact, putting in a whole pile of detail that was clearly based on Star Trek (e.g. having the bridge crew the same as the Star Trek bridge crew but with different names, or making the personal lives of the actors just like those of Star Trek's actors) would have been a lawsuit waiting to happen. Almost certainly little details like that are the first thing that will change, so that you can make the big idea ("it's just like Star Trek") work.
To put it another way, ask the real question: "Tim Allen's character in Galaxy Quest is an alcoholic, selfish, blow-hard, has-been. To what extent does that resemble you, Bill Shatner?"
And remember that Bill fancies himself a writer, no questions on his writing were asked. Good interviewers try to win over their subjects with questions the subjects are interested in answering. If Letterman couldn't get interesting answers out of Bill, don't expect the kind of questions
Chimera is a fast IE with tabs that's not a Microsoft product. Well actually it's a fast Mozilla with tabs that's not a Microsoft product which is even better since:
1) Gecko renders pages not specifically and solely tailored to IE better than IE does.
2) It even does a pretty good job with IE-tailored stuff.
1) It doesn't rate Chimera, iCab, or Opera because they're not final release. Frankly these days for most software "final release" is a meaningless phrase. Maybe MacWorld needs to have a provisional rating scheme to make articles like this meaningful.
2) NetScape 7.0 is stated as having "no tabbed windows". Um, what?
In any event, unless you're starved for bandwidth almost all these programs are free. Why not download them and make up your own mind?
And as a final note: tabbed browsing really makes up for rendering issues. You don't notice a new page's loading time nearly as much when it's opened in a background tabbed versus having a blank window shoved in your face...
Isn't this an advantage of Windows? Surely once MS stops "supporting" a Windows release all the pointless patching goes away...
The obvious benefit of a 64-bit processor for server applications is spewing out data. When you're spitting out a web page or whatever, you don't really care what you're looking at and 64-bits is 2x 32-bits. Look at the power pc, it takes 5 instructions to load a 64 bit value This sounds wrong to me, especially if you use floating point registers. I'm too sleepy to look it up but I'm guessing 3 integer instructions at most. (1 on a 64-bit PowerPC, of course.) Which leads me to the question: if you have a 32-bit processor with 64-bit addressing, a floating point pipeline with 64-bit or 80-bit memory access for calculations, exactly what benefit is a 64-bit processor?
...it turns out that Microsoft users also hate Microsoft. There was a slight difference between the degree of hatred between Microsoft users for Microsoft and Apple users for Microsoft but it was not found to be statistically significant, after removing Microsoft employees and shareholders from the Microsoft users sample.
Actually in Australia Microsoft already lost their "Windows" trademark. They can (and do) trademark "Microsoft Windows" just like they trademark "Microsoft Word" but trademarking a word that is in common use shouldn't be possible.
That's why there are so many products with names that are stupid mispellings of common words, like "Cheez Whiz" or whatever. Even if no-one else produces a product called the "Fornicator" if you want to trademark it you should probably mispell it or stick your already safely trademarked name in front of it.
Well, I can't speak with enormous expertise on the subject, but by and large the rich pay less, proportionately, in income tax than pretty much anyone except the destitute. While in theory the rich are subject to high marginal tax rates, in practice they pay fewer cents in the dollar.
Meanwhile, they are receiving all kinds of corporate welfare (not many poor people own companies that get large government contracts).
"The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor, to sleep under the bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread." - Anatole France.
Was that SGI went into a partnership with MS called Farenheit, which was to succeed OpenGL. (This was as good a move as SGI's attempts to sell NT boxes and its earlier bid to compete with high-end Macs.)
Farenheit was going to be the "high-end" graphics API, while DirectX would serve for "low-end". Well, you can attribute it to malice aforethought or simply reading the times, but MS withdrew leaving Farenheit dead in the water. Meanwhile OpenGL had pretty much stayed still.
Four years is a long time in 3D graphics. It's pretty sad that DirectX hasn't been able to open up MORE of a lead...