While not a Christian myself, I also had a discussion about the biblical similarities, and the decision was that Smith was actually Lucifer, aka Satan. He continuously tempts Neo to not save the human race, but rather join him to his cause. Not only that, but if you consider that Neo's shipmates are his disciples, then when Smith entered Bane that could be interpreted as Judas' betrayal of Jesus. In the same line of thought, Morpheus could be considered John the Baptist as he fervently preached his beliefs of Neo being the savior. The meeting of Neo with the crewmates on his decision to travel to the machine city is the last supper, and his "disciples" argue that his choice is madness. This is also biblical.
The assignment of God, the machine ruler as you say, is where the argument starts to fall apart. The correlation of God is best placed with either the machine ruler or the Oracle. The Oracle makes sense only in that she could see everything that would happen, and also eluded directly answering Neo's questions just as God eluded Jesus'. But Smith's interaction with the Oracle doesn't fit. Satan never took over God and his abilities. On the other hand, if the agents were the angels of the machine world, Smith could be seen as the fallen angel who rebelled against God, aka the machine ruler. There is a major issue with trying to assign the role of God to someone, as they are all full of loopholes. The machine ruler being God is counterintuitive to the concept of Neo being Jesus, unless you want to consider that the machine ruler intentially created Neo intending for him to end the war and suchforth. That makes the machine ruler good, and suggests the agents (his angels, a coincidental wording similarity?) are good, and makes everything confusing.
There are a lot of similarities to the biblical scenario of Jesus, but a lot of loopholes as well. Trying to make a 1-to-1 assignment with every character in the Matrix and in the bible is going to run into trouble when you come down to the character of Trinity. If anything, she has to be a personification of Jesus' love for humanity, because there is no counterpart in the Christian story of Jesus.
After a long time of discussion I came to the conclusion that there might be some biblical influence, but the inconsistencies make it far from being a "straight biblical allegory."
You could always use a calling card. onesuite is pretty cheap. It's the phone equivalent of a proxy server and does its job just as good. Just hope they don't put you on hold for too long.
Strange how we have legislation for do-not-call lists and laws against automated sales calls, but we still have to resort to personally-enforced whitelisting to avoid spam. Imagine how different this would be handled if AT&T had problems with excessive phone calls and were requesting specific numbers or exchange codes from their customers and agencies to avoid random, recorded telemarketing.
Imagine what we would be doing right now if Lotus were able to patent the spreadsheet concept it used in 1-2-3 20 years ago (January of 1983, to be precise - source). Admittedly, Lotus was not the first to develop the spreadsheet software concept, but since I'm drawing comparisons to Microsoft I don't see anything wrong there.
Microsoft would never have made its bloatware Excel product, and no one else would have made a spreadsheet app either. We would be stuck using 1-2-3 with Lotus charging and upgrading as it saw fit. Small business and individuals would likely be strapped for cash for such a product. Not much unlike the Microsoft Office suite. I really can't say the computer industry would actually be worse off today with such a patent. I imagine that the Windows platform would not have nearly as massive a footprint as it does now. In fact, 1-2-3 probably would have slowed adoption of graphical interfaces in general, since Microsoft would have been less able to use the Office suite as a driving force to convince businesses to upgrade.
Alternatively, the monopoly could have allowed Lotus' head to swell and, in that scenario, Lotus could be on the same track as Microsoft today. Now go play your Lotus Xbox and imagine what could have been.
I certainly can't deny that there is a strain on the network because of it. I have an ongoing log, for posterity's sake, of refused incoming connections. Very few are anything other than the NetBIOS ports, and generating a 4mb log file daily (anywhere from 1 to 5 attempts every 10 seconds) is rough.
What ruffled my feathers was how they completely denied any throttling of P2P protocols, and blamed it solely on the RPC exploits. The exact statement in the article, which I just retrieved, is, "there was no 'attempt to stop peer to peer file sharing' made by anyone." The interviewed, the head of the IT department, goes on to explain that the connection problems seemed to match up with the filters put in place. And since the P2P applications aren't condoned, they're not going to bother to resolve the problem.
But, as I said, I know people who work there and have plainly stated that they are throttling most P2P protocols.
I will completely agree with you in turn. I'm lucky enough to be good friends with a few of the more intelligent denizens of the computing center at my college, so I get to hear all of the story-behind-the-story as well.
My freshman year was the Year of the Napster, though in the last few months of its existence I felt the pain of my college's pipe when trying to do the simplest things, like typing over ssh. It was simply unusable. They throttled by ports, and the person in charge of it was (and still is) incompetent. Back then, everything that wasn't on port 80 was throttled in one single category, while port 80 was prioritized. An http transfer would fetch 400k/s, while a ftp transfer from the same site would crawl at 3k/s. But using a tunnel for the same ftp connection was nice and speedy through port 80.
They have since instituted packet shaping policies, even though they denied them in the first issue of the school paper (which has yet to be digitized). They blame the slow speeds on Blaster and other incarnations, which is laughable at best. Though this is ironically, indirectly true, because they throttled 443 (https) because some filesharing service (the name of which I forget) uses it. On the upside, I have more time to work on my rubik's cube when I'm trying to look at my credit card balance.
Furthermore, the same incompetent individual in charge of the packet shaping has throttled each specified port in its own individual category. Which means that, say, Kazaa traffic gets 56kbps (the number that I was told), while Gnutella gets its own 56kbps. This is nice and all, but I'm still able to log on to good ol' IRC and download or even upload at 200-300k/s to my heart's content. Since they have the packet table filled, God help them if someone decides to be cute and set up an XDCC server or twelve.
We (my fellow CS majors and I) have ranted about this among ourselves and with our friends from the IT department for years now. The problem is that the college is primarily liberal arts (which was my first mistake, though I had enough coworkers in my future field recommend it to me) so most of the students don't know any better. They just want their porn and mp3s as fast as possible, and legitimate uses be damned.
Errors and inconsistencies
on
Can You Raed Tihs?
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I noticed, while testing the script out with a paper I happen to be in the process of writing, that compound words do not seem to work with this scheme. Though I'm hardly a linguist, it may be a result of the compound word being translated seperately and then placed together when we read it. When the letters intermingle, we aren't able to differentiate the two halves.
Examples from the paragraph I tested with are "worldview", "afterlife", and "humankind". I'm sure iterations that keep the halves partially seperate would be readable, but ones I came up with (like "wirovdelw") simply make no sense.
Other, larger words that I've noticed do not work are "consciousness" and "unenlightened", though I'm sure it wouldn't be too isn't unusual to expect large words to begin to obfuscate themselves too much.
This doesn't explain the shorter words that seem to obfuscate very readily, such as "religion" and "autonomous". Once letters and/or vowels become repitious and clump together, the word seems to be more difficult to readily decrypt.
I can also confirm this is true from my experience of occasionally playing TextTwist on Yahoo! Games.
Slashdot Mirror
While not a Christian myself, I also had a discussion about the biblical similarities, and the decision was that Smith was actually Lucifer, aka Satan. He continuously tempts Neo to not save the human race, but rather join him to his cause. Not only that, but if you consider that Neo's shipmates are his disciples, then when Smith entered Bane that could be interpreted as Judas' betrayal of Jesus. In the same line of thought, Morpheus could be considered John the Baptist as he fervently preached his beliefs of Neo being the savior. The meeting of Neo with the crewmates on his decision to travel to the machine city is the last supper, and his "disciples" argue that his choice is madness. This is also biblical.
The assignment of God, the machine ruler as you say, is where the argument starts to fall apart. The correlation of God is best placed with either the machine ruler or the Oracle. The Oracle makes sense only in that she could see everything that would happen, and also eluded directly answering Neo's questions just as God eluded Jesus'. But Smith's interaction with the Oracle doesn't fit. Satan never took over God and his abilities. On the other hand, if the agents were the angels of the machine world, Smith could be seen as the fallen angel who rebelled against God, aka the machine ruler. There is a major issue with trying to assign the role of God to someone, as they are all full of loopholes. The machine ruler being God is counterintuitive to the concept of Neo being Jesus, unless you want to consider that the machine ruler intentially created Neo intending for him to end the war and suchforth. That makes the machine ruler good, and suggests the agents (his angels, a coincidental wording similarity?) are good, and makes everything confusing.
There are a lot of similarities to the biblical scenario of Jesus, but a lot of loopholes as well. Trying to make a 1-to-1 assignment with every character in the Matrix and in the bible is going to run into trouble when you come down to the character of Trinity. If anything, she has to be a personification of Jesus' love for humanity, because there is no counterpart in the Christian story of Jesus.
After a long time of discussion I came to the conclusion that there might be some biblical influence, but the inconsistencies make it far from being a "straight biblical allegory."
You could always use a calling card. onesuite is pretty cheap. It's the phone equivalent of a proxy server and does its job just as good. Just hope they don't put you on hold for too long.
Strange how we have legislation for do-not-call lists and laws against automated sales calls, but we still have to resort to personally-enforced whitelisting to avoid spam. Imagine how different this would be handled if AT&T had problems with excessive phone calls and were requesting specific numbers or exchange codes from their customers and agencies to avoid random, recorded telemarketing.
How useful. Glad you thought to look for it; I wouldn't have expected such a Q&A to exist.
Yeah VisiCalc was before 123. But like I said, I was just picking 123 as it was the killer app for the PC.
Imagine what we would be doing right now if Lotus were able to patent the spreadsheet concept it used in 1-2-3 20 years ago (January of 1983, to be precise - source). Admittedly, Lotus was not the first to develop the spreadsheet software concept, but since I'm drawing comparisons to Microsoft I don't see anything wrong there.
Microsoft would never have made its bloatware Excel product, and no one else would have made a spreadsheet app either. We would be stuck using 1-2-3 with Lotus charging and upgrading as it saw fit. Small business and individuals would likely be strapped for cash for such a product. Not much unlike the Microsoft Office suite. I really can't say the computer industry would actually be worse off today with such a patent. I imagine that the Windows platform would not have nearly as massive a footprint as it does now. In fact, 1-2-3 probably would have slowed adoption of graphical interfaces in general, since Microsoft would have been less able to use the Office suite as a driving force to convince businesses to upgrade.
Alternatively, the monopoly could have allowed Lotus' head to swell and, in that scenario, Lotus could be on the same track as Microsoft today. Now go play your Lotus Xbox and imagine what could have been.
If you search for Linux on slashdot.org without the www., you'll get the results you were expecting.
I certainly can't deny that there is a strain on the network because of it. I have an ongoing log, for posterity's sake, of refused incoming connections. Very few are anything other than the NetBIOS ports, and generating a 4mb log file daily (anywhere from 1 to 5 attempts every 10 seconds) is rough.
What ruffled my feathers was how they completely denied any throttling of P2P protocols, and blamed it solely on the RPC exploits. The exact statement in the article, which I just retrieved, is, "there was no 'attempt to stop peer to peer file sharing' made by anyone." The interviewed, the head of the IT department, goes on to explain that the connection problems seemed to match up with the filters put in place. And since the P2P applications aren't condoned, they're not going to bother to resolve the problem.
But, as I said, I know people who work there and have plainly stated that they are throttling most P2P protocols.
I will completely agree with you in turn. I'm lucky enough to be good friends with a few of the more intelligent denizens of the computing center at my college, so I get to hear all of the story-behind-the-story as well.
My freshman year was the Year of the Napster, though in the last few months of its existence I felt the pain of my college's pipe when trying to do the simplest things, like typing over ssh. It was simply unusable. They throttled by ports, and the person in charge of it was (and still is) incompetent. Back then, everything that wasn't on port 80 was throttled in one single category, while port 80 was prioritized. An http transfer would fetch 400k/s, while a ftp transfer from the same site would crawl at 3k/s. But using a tunnel for the same ftp connection was nice and speedy through port 80.
They have since instituted packet shaping policies, even though they denied them in the first issue of the school paper (which has yet to be digitized). They blame the slow speeds on Blaster and other incarnations, which is laughable at best. Though this is ironically, indirectly true, because they throttled 443 (https) because some filesharing service (the name of which I forget) uses it. On the upside, I have more time to work on my rubik's cube when I'm trying to look at my credit card balance.
Furthermore, the same incompetent individual in charge of the packet shaping has throttled each specified port in its own individual category. Which means that, say, Kazaa traffic gets 56kbps (the number that I was told), while Gnutella gets its own 56kbps. This is nice and all, but I'm still able to log on to good ol' IRC and download or even upload at 200-300k/s to my heart's content. Since they have the packet table filled, God help them if someone decides to be cute and set up an XDCC server or twelve.
We (my fellow CS majors and I) have ranted about this among ourselves and with our friends from the IT department for years now. The problem is that the college is primarily liberal arts (which was my first mistake, though I had enough coworkers in my future field recommend it to me) so most of the students don't know any better. They just want their porn and mp3s as fast as possible, and legitimate uses be damned.
I noticed, while testing the script out with a paper I happen to be in the process of writing, that compound words do not seem to work with this scheme. Though I'm hardly a linguist, it may be a result of the compound word being translated seperately and then placed together when we read it. When the letters intermingle, we aren't able to differentiate the two halves.
Examples from the paragraph I tested with are "worldview", "afterlife", and "humankind". I'm sure iterations that keep the halves partially seperate would be readable, but ones I came up with (like "wirovdelw") simply make no sense.
Other, larger words that I've noticed do not work are "consciousness" and "unenlightened", though I'm sure it wouldn't be too isn't unusual to expect large words to begin to obfuscate themselves too much.
This doesn't explain the shorter words that seem to obfuscate very readily, such as "religion" and "autonomous". Once letters and/or vowels become repitious and clump together, the word seems to be more difficult to readily decrypt. I can also confirm this is true from my experience of occasionally playing TextTwist on Yahoo! Games.
(end random paper-avoiding post)
I met my present girlfriend a year and a half ago on a MUSH I worked on (coding and administrative duties). Is that close enough?