Having been in Israel for a year when in college, there wasn't any such law restricting citizenship to Jews as of 1998.
Yes, there are a handful of Arab citizens of the nation of Israel. Pro-Israel commentators point to their existence to demonstrate that the nation is really a progressive, modern democracy. (Even though they're very rare)
But, look at the "Palestinians". They were born in the nation of Israel. Most have lived there their entire lives.
Can they vote in national elections? No.
They are bound by laws they had no part in defining. In North America (around 1770ish), "taxation without representation" was considered fine justification to violently revolt.
However, a Palestinian who is converted to Judiaism (by an Orthodox Rabbi) will gain full citizenship, and be allowed to vote (sounds a little theocratic, there)
It is obvious that current Israeli society would not survive if it did the democratic thing and extended voting rights to all adults born on its soil. 20% of the population of that nation is Palestinian, and Palestinians have more than twice the birth rate of Jewish Israelis. In a few decades there would be no need for a "peace process"- the Muslims could just vote themselves into power.
I know for a fact that when the first few Arab vs. Israel wars happened in the 1960s
The first few wars came in the 1940s. The displacements of the 1960s were minor compared to the amount expelled in 1948, and there was no return permitted then.
could have their land back, no questions asked as long as they behaved like citizens.
They could have some land, but not where they had claimed to live before, and there were many conditions attached. This is why all those Palestinians are living in the "Occupied Territories", instead of downtown Jerusalem (where, inarguably, some of them once lived).
DRM ensures that the creators and producers of works get paid. The work can be "enjoyed" by anyone who pays.
Really? Why? Do you have any guarantee that the author will continue to sell it? If not, then the DRM will allow him to remove old works from the market, and pretend they never existed.
Even if the work doesn't specifically embarrass the owner, he (or his heirs, 75 years later) may not feel its profitable enough to bother selling. Or those heirs may just forget they even own it.
Was Shakespear "hamper[ing] culural progress massively" when he charged people to see his plays?
He had no effective way to prevent copying, and in fact did. If modern laws and systems had already be in place when he wrote, then those plays would still be accumulating dollars to the Estate of Wm Shakespeare after every performance.
Furthermore we can split information into two very broad categories - factual and creative (my categories, I just made them up and I'm sure plenty of you can find fault with these)
Interestingly, according to the US constitution, copyright is illegal on the second category. Protection can only apply to "sciences and the useful arts". The majority of things demanding DRM are works like "The Matrix Reloaded", which is definately not science, and also not "useful".
- when we look at the factual content e.g. news, science, humanities, next to none of it is covered by DRM.
Duh? DRM doesn't exist yet. Nothing at all is covered under it. By DRM I mean (and the Wired author means) strong DRM, where your computer and media work together to keep you from violating a copyright.
However, when/if DRM starts to arrive, you can be sure that newspapers at least will be one kind of "factual" content that will jump to using DRM. Online newspapers already try to give free access to stories less than 48 hours old, and require payment for archival access. If they can stop readers from saving, printing, or forwarding during the 48 hours (and ideally make saved copies expire on a timer) they'll be very happy.
Science is also increasingly commercialized (especially biology and computer science), so those classes of publisher would be attracted to DRM too.
And if we look back over history, the important stuff (Shakespear, Mozart, Picasso and 1000's of others) is constantly reproduced in the latest modern formats.
Reproduced by people without copyright authorization. (Well, except maybe Picasso. Some Picasso works are less than 97 years old, the current duration of copyright)
But, do we want only the "best" (most popular, most immediately acclaimed) stuff to survive? Other things have value too, which isn't immediately apparent.
the good stuff will survive or be rediscovered.
If its rediscovered, though, it may be on DRM media, which is designed to oppose efforts to read it (up to and including the possibility of self-destructing!). Hieroglyphs and cuniform were designed to spread information- DRM is the opposite.
Besides, if these trends continue, copyright will last for multiple centuries. It will be a crime for you investigate recovered, rotting media.
What makes you think Stunt Car Racer is public domain? Pages like this don't say anything about its copyright status.
They call it "abandonware"- which only means that the copyright holder isn't looking for violators anymore. For practical purposes, you can download it for free, even though that's illegal.
However, the point of the Wired article was that in a DRM future, this won't be possible anymore. The game will have been published in a strongly copy-protected way, and 20 years later when the author forgets it, that protection will still keep you from passing it around to your friends. (Even 100 years later, after copyright expires and you can legally share it, the technology might still stop you)
the in-game actions these people did caused real world finacial harm to the game developers.
So if I quested up to level 400 assasin and then begin stealth-backstabbing newbies so they get frustrated and quit the game, I'm also causing developers financial harm...
Not to mention the tarnished reputation, which is also worth damages.
Their reputation got worse because it was revealed they write insecure code. This is absolutely the truth, and they deserve the tarnishing.
It is not. RTCW:ET is a full game on its own, completely separate from the original RTCW. It's not advertising or anything like that.
(I suspect it's a feel-good release of a product that was judged good enough to get played, but not sufficient to be profitable against free FPS like America's Army)
The background of that scene was physically built, not computer generated.
They constructed an entire apartment complex courtyard inside a decommissioned Air Force hangar.
(The amount of set construction used in Matrix Reloaded really seems excessive to me. I don't see why they had to pave a full mile of freeway for their stunts. Paradoxically, the "real world" scenes had more CG backgrounds than the Matrix shots did)
That's a very poorly designed website you indicated (unless one of their goals is to keep the atmosphere "professional" by excluding newbies). I've read it over for 5 minutes, and can't tell what's different between "Pro Mode" and regular Quake3.
The front page says nothing except release announcement (no changeslogs). The "Concept" page says "based on newbie-ness of Quake3, we considered much advice, and tuned-up pro-level gameplay". The "Newbie FAQ" says "Install it this way, then start playing or watching demos" (No thanks! Much too much time investment)
I suppose I could pull something together by reading viewpoints of the multiple "pundits" who contributed to their design (views which are neither unified, nor guaranteed to be consistent)
In short, it's the wrong way to advertise a game patch, and it doesn't provide accessible examples for Slashdot theorizing, either.
Your TI-99/4A must've come from a yard sale. It's from a completely different historical strata than the Nintendo Entertainment system. They weren't marketed at the same time.
The TI was an also-ran in the original home computer / videogame explosion, before the first big sales crash. It dates back with Colecovision and Commodore 64.
After the big sales collapse (that destroyed Atari, and forced other companies to scale back PC development) the Nintendo was what revitalized the sales of electronic entertainment for the home.
A specific advantage is in the near-future military. We joke about it, but combat is becoming more and more like video games. For 40 years, pilots have targeted radar blips with electronic weapons, although they needed tough physical conditioning to withstand the aircraft's thrust.
Now, with remotely operated Predator drones and similar UAVs, a "warfighter" can grab a joystick in his cubicle and go hunt some Al Quaeda.
I assume by "RPG" you mean the pre-computerized, pen & paper variety. (Too many people today think of Final Fantasy VII when "RPG" is mentioned)
I can really believe that reading books like the 1st editions of TSR's AD&D (the Gygax DMG especially) and White Wolf's WOD series could help your vocabulary. Those things are chock full of gratuitously esoteric 10-dollar words ("Lycanthropy?" "Protean!").
The later versions of those game books seemed to aim at progressively wider audiences (the influence of publishers wanting sales and editors wanting readability), so the word choice became more accessible and pedestrian.
Looks rather like you're trying to configure devfsd, not simply devfs. I've never found much of a reason to do that (for removable drives, maybe, but not for something permanent like an IDE zip).
What's so bad about referring to/dev/ide/host0/bus0/target0/lun0/part2 directly in fstab, rather than trying to get/dev/cdroms/cdrom4 automatically symlinked?
Try telling that to the officer when you get a speeding ticket. "Well, I was going as fast as everyone else."
Works absolutely fine. "I was keeping up with traffic" is a highly effective excuse.
In terms of roadway safety, if everyone is going 80mph and you drive 55, YOU are creating a hazard. (If cops really wanted speed limits obeyed, there are more effectively but less profitable approaches than what they use today)
Three events------have me suspecting that the location of Zion, et al, is still inside of the Matrix.
Other events make a stronger case. For example, Neo has prophetic dreams of Trinity's doomed aerial gunbattle. How could he do that, unless still inside the Matrix?
There's also the fact that squid robots swim through the air with no visible means of propulsion. How could that happen, unless it was all a huge video-game?
First, Agent Smith replaces Bane in the world of Zion by killing him in the Matrix.
We don't know that he was really "replaced" in the real world. Yes, he was replaced in the Matrix, but all agents have a power to take control of human minds inside the Matrix. (If the human is still in a pod, it's very easy for them. A freed human is more difficult to convert, but Morpheus was tortured to this end in the original film.) Prehaps the altered Smith has a different, stronger form of this power.
In any event, we saw very little of Zion Bane- certainly not enough to find any sign of Smith's personality. The self-destructive slashing and tortured hesitation of his backstab suggest that, rather than fully transfering his conciousness, Smith has just implanted a strong post-hypnotic suggestion. (We don't really know if ordinary humans who've turned into agents ever recover their own minds, assuming the agent leaves without the body being killed)
If the machines are wily enough to trick someone into dying, maybe they can trick someone into killing to- without taking full control.
one of the children gives Neo a spoon, saying that Neo would understand
There's nothing special about this. The kid remembers being in the Matrix with Neo. Now that he's been released, he finds an old spoon and sends it to the big hero as a memento.
(That scene would've gone better if the actual same kid had delivered it personally. I wonder why they didn't try to get that actor back?)
The ripple effect---seen every time Neo does "his Superman thing" in the Matrix---is also seen when he stops the robots in the world of Zion.
It was also seen when the humans fire off an EMP, which is the normal procedure to stop robots. (There's a slim chance that those robots were halted by an EMP fired from some other ship we didn't see)
It might not have been a total waste of time. Look at it this way: If you're ever a guest on the Rush Limbaugh show, you've already had some valuable practice.
The idea that "Our senses are unreliable, it is possible we are decieved about the nature of the world" goes back to Plato's Republic. The Allegory of the Cave was published 2000 years before Descartes was born.
(If I had to explain virtual reality to a man in 400 BC, I couldn't form any better analogy than a puppet show)
Maybe you missed it, but when the original Matrix came out, anime comparisons were all over. (The whole bullet-time thing, for example, is reminiscent of slowmo anime fight scenes. See, I think, episode seven of "Key the Metal Idol" for an example)
Here's a good comparison, which sometimes focuses on stylistic resemblance to Ghost In the Shell.
A governing political party or a major corporation is actually a kind of machine. It happens to be made up of people, but they're just cogs in a device that's larger than any of them. A party/corporation is mindless, but it's programmed to behave so as to collect the most votes/dollars it can, and will change our lives any way needed to make that happen.
One easy explanation for the sentinel-blocking doesn't require Neo to have any magic or cyborg powers: they stopped because they recognized his face, and they'd been ordered not to kill him.
Maybe the Architect or Oracle wanted The One alive to watch the fall of Zion, maybe Smith commanded them because he wants to defeat Neo himself. Maybe Neo left behind sub-concious ghosts of his own personality in the Matrix, and it's hacking the sentinels. Whatever.
(This explanation would require assuming that Neo's subquesent collapse was due to random over-exhaustion, or accidental electrical discharge from a sentinel. Those are reasonable, but are unlikely to be the authors' actual intent)
The sig inaccurately describes the article it links to. That aricle says nothing to demonstrate that "Matrix within Matrix" is wrong. In fact, it takes that as a given, "Foundations of Criticism #2".
This is an example of begging the question.
I don't believe the final movie will reveal nested Matrices myself. However I think it's reasonable to say that at least some of the characters are lying, particularly when their statements correspond with their personality, but conflict with other facts.
A possibility: she can predict the future, because she has the power to make her predictions come true. Normal agents can override a human and control his actions (and appearance too). Maybe she has a more subtle effect- Neo hit the vase because she impelled him to do it.
This wouldn't directly allow her to predict things outside the Matrix, but post-hypnotic suggestion is a possibility. Plus, her larger scale predictions were more vague and re-interpretable. (The accurate prediction of near-term events might just be a way to establish her credibility, so that the humans take her main Prophecy more seriously)
I won't elaborate more, except to note that the anime "Escaflowne" included fortune tellers who were eventually revealed to be using magic to cause their predictions to come true.
So, what we are left with (if it goes the way I have described) is a series of major plot holes - problems that serious Science Fiction people cannot ignore:
One more plot hole that bothers me: Unplugging from virtual reality without a clean-shutdown will kill you. Why? No explanation is given. Versions of this risk are popular in cyberpunk (it helps make hacking scenes feel exciting), but the author normally makes some attempt to explain.
The rebellious humans were capable of building mini-matrices as their kung-fu training rooms, so they obviously understood the connection protocol. Why couldn't they have an emergency A-B switch to toggle their crew from the full Matrix into a safe staging area (like the place with "Guns. Lots of guns"). That would give the cardio-vascular sytem any needed time to cooldown from the shock (if that's what killed them)
-The human/battery/enerty thing Answer: You can't have the movie otherwise.
That's a dumb idea, but there are other explanations for the pink-pod world. It's possible that the concept is a lie, either invented by a Morpheous-like human, or concocted by the Oracle (She told them "exactly what they needed to hear"). I'm holding out that in the third act of the final movie, Neo will learn the real reason humans are kept in the matrix.
Many explanations are possible that would be better than the energizer-battery spiel (which breaks the laws of thermodynamics so directly, it's not even funny). Any of them would add a welcome, Rod-Sterling twist to the conclusion. (The first movie was good because it had a surprise. They should try for a revelation of similar magnitude in the conclusion)
My personal favorite is that the computers' motives to keep humans in a VR world is the same thing that motivates any real world computer: they are following a program from a human. That is, humanity in around 2100 had developed robots that could handle all needed agriculture, manufacturing, and energy production. With an astronomical population density and abundant electronic entertainment, there was little reason for anyone to leave his 3x3 meter apartment except to buy food.
Solution: get your food from a pipe, excrete through another pipe, and glue eyephones to your face (or plug videofeed into the brainstem). Schedule a visiting robot to check your medical needs twice a week, and now all you need is a good source of quality digital entertainment. Thus the directive is given for an AI to build a virtual world that will keep humanity permantently entranced, and the Matrix is born.
The entire conversation could have taken place in around a fourth of the time. Why use all the big words and draw it out?
I believe that was an homage to anime, which has a tradition of the hero and arch-villain exchanging excited metaphysical poopycock just before a sparkling energy blob engulfs the world and makes everything happy again.
But that SOMEONE (suppose it's the the Architect) has other goals he needs to accomplish. In particular, he needs to keep the matrix running as a simulation of a realistic 1999 earth, with as few discrepancies as possible.
That may limit what the agents can do. Random shootings or crashes are fine. Unexplained airstrikes? Maybe not fine. Atomic bomb attack? Not even mentionable.
You mentioned "computers know how to apply force". Well, why would they even need to apply "force" at all? Why go through all the motions of punching, shooting, or exploding someone instead of just de-allocating his stream handles and freeing his core? (a completely logical and boring way for one piece of software to attack another) Possible answer: they're not allowed to interfere with the Matrix program too much. They can't completely turn off the inertial transfer subroutines, for example, because "the show MUST go on"
However, re: "Why didn't they kill them on the freeway", there's no good answer for that. Morpheus and an agent grappled for 100 straight seconds on the roof of a truck. Only after that battle did they decide to smash the truck. If they'd done this when Morpheus was still distracted (and before the superhero arrived), they'd have been easily successful.
(Which supports the theory that the Agents were under orders to allow the Prophecy to advance, permitting the Key Maker to be delivered)
Slashdot Mirror
Having been in Israel for a year when in college, there wasn't any such law restricting citizenship to Jews as of 1998.
Yes, there are a handful of Arab citizens of the nation of Israel. Pro-Israel commentators point to their existence to demonstrate that the nation is really a progressive, modern democracy. (Even though they're very rare)
But, look at the "Palestinians". They were born in the nation of Israel. Most have lived there their entire lives.
Can they vote in national elections? No.
They are bound by laws they had no part in defining. In North America (around 1770ish), "taxation without representation" was considered fine justification to violently revolt.
However, a Palestinian who is converted to Judiaism (by an Orthodox Rabbi) will gain full citizenship, and be allowed to vote (sounds a little theocratic, there)
It is obvious that current Israeli society would not survive if it did the democratic thing and extended voting rights to all adults born on its soil. 20% of the population of that nation is Palestinian, and Palestinians have more than twice the birth rate of Jewish Israelis. In a few decades there would be no need for a "peace process"- the Muslims could just vote themselves into power.
I know for a fact that when the first few Arab vs. Israel wars happened in the 1960s
The first few wars came in the 1940s. The displacements of the 1960s were minor compared to the amount expelled in 1948, and there was no return permitted then.
could have their land back, no questions asked as long as they behaved like citizens.
They could have some land, but not where they had claimed to live before, and there were many conditions attached. This is why all those Palestinians are living in the "Occupied Territories", instead of downtown Jerusalem (where, inarguably, some of them once lived).
What you're saying is I have no right to do this?
Yes, that is true.
Are you insane?
No, that is not true.
I value honesty. To de-publish a work- to say something once, and then take it back and pretent it had never happened- that's dishonest.
The right to the destiny of my own original work is a tradition extending back at least 50,000 years
This is also not true.
Rights like that have never been respected, anywhere. Some cultures may have paid lip-service to an idea like that, but it was never enforced.
Observe the fact that all these DRM proposals involve NEW laws only created in the past 50 years is only the most blatant evidence of this.
DRM ensures that the creators and producers of works get paid. The work can be "enjoyed" by anyone who pays.
Really? Why? Do you have any guarantee that the author will continue to sell it? If not, then the DRM will allow him to remove old works from the market, and pretend they never existed.
The original Star Wars, the original ET, and the first film to mix live and artficial characters will be lost.
Even if the work doesn't specifically embarrass the owner, he (or his heirs, 75 years later) may not feel its profitable enough to bother selling. Or those heirs may just forget they even own it.
Was Shakespear "hamper[ing] culural progress massively" when he charged people to see his plays?
He had no effective way to prevent copying, and in fact did. If modern laws and systems had already be in place when he wrote, then those plays would still be accumulating dollars to the Estate of Wm Shakespeare after every performance.
Furthermore we can split information into two very broad categories - factual and creative (my categories, I just made them up and I'm sure plenty of you can find fault with these)
Interestingly, according to the US constitution, copyright is illegal on the second category. Protection can only apply to "sciences and the useful arts". The majority of things demanding DRM are works like "The Matrix Reloaded", which is definately not science, and also not "useful".
- when we look at the factual content e.g. news, science, humanities, next to none of it is covered by DRM.
Duh? DRM doesn't exist yet. Nothing at all is covered under it. By DRM I mean (and the Wired author means) strong DRM, where your computer and media work together to keep you from violating a copyright.
However, when/if DRM starts to arrive, you can be sure that newspapers at least will be one kind of "factual" content that will jump to using DRM. Online newspapers already try to give free access to stories less than 48 hours old, and require payment for archival access. If they can stop readers from saving, printing, or forwarding during the 48 hours (and ideally make saved copies expire on a timer) they'll be very happy.
Science is also increasingly commercialized (especially biology and computer science), so those classes of publisher would be attracted to DRM too.
And if we look back over history, the important stuff (Shakespear, Mozart, Picasso and 1000's of others) is constantly reproduced in the latest modern formats.
Reproduced by people without copyright authorization. (Well, except maybe Picasso. Some Picasso works are less than 97 years old, the current duration of copyright)
But, do we want only the "best" (most popular, most immediately acclaimed) stuff to survive? Other things have value too, which isn't immediately apparent.
the good stuff will survive or be rediscovered.
If its rediscovered, though, it may be on DRM media, which is designed to oppose efforts to read it (up to and including the possibility of self-destructing!). Hieroglyphs and cuniform were designed to spread information- DRM is the opposite.
Besides, if these trends continue, copyright will last for multiple centuries. It will be a crime for you investigate recovered, rotting media.
What makes you think Stunt Car Racer is public domain? Pages like this don't say anything about its copyright status.
They call it "abandonware"- which only means that the copyright holder isn't looking for violators anymore. For practical purposes, you can download it for free, even though that's illegal.
However, the point of the Wired article was that in a DRM future, this won't be possible anymore. The game will have been published in a strongly copy-protected way, and 20 years later when the author forgets it, that protection will still keep you from passing it around to your friends. (Even 100 years later, after copyright expires and you can legally share it, the technology might still stop you)
the in-game actions these people did caused real world finacial harm to the game developers.
So if I quested up to level 400 assasin and then begin stealth-backstabbing newbies so they get frustrated and quit the game, I'm also causing developers financial harm...
Not to mention the tarnished reputation, which is also worth damages.
Their reputation got worse because it was revealed they write insecure code. This is absolutely the truth, and they deserve the tarnishing.
It is not. RTCW:ET is a full game on its own, completely separate from the original RTCW. It's not advertising or anything like that.
(I suspect it's a feel-good release of a product that was judged good enough to get played, but not sufficient to be profitable against free FPS like America's Army)
The background of that scene was physically built, not computer generated.
They constructed an entire apartment complex courtyard inside a decommissioned Air Force hangar.
(The amount of set construction used in Matrix Reloaded really seems excessive to me. I don't see why they had to pave a full mile of freeway for their stunts. Paradoxically, the "real world" scenes had more CG backgrounds than the Matrix shots did)
That's a very poorly designed website you indicated (unless one of their goals is to keep the atmosphere "professional" by excluding newbies). I've read it over for 5 minutes, and can't tell what's different between "Pro Mode" and regular Quake3.
The front page says nothing except release announcement (no changeslogs). The "Concept" page says "based on newbie-ness of Quake3, we considered much advice, and tuned-up pro-level gameplay". The "Newbie FAQ" says "Install it this way, then start playing or watching demos" (No thanks! Much too much time investment)
I suppose I could pull something together by reading viewpoints of the multiple "pundits" who contributed to their design (views which are neither unified, nor guaranteed to be consistent)
In short, it's the wrong way to advertise a game patch, and it doesn't provide accessible examples for Slashdot theorizing, either.
Your TI-99/4A must've come from a yard sale. It's from a completely different historical strata than the Nintendo Entertainment system. They weren't marketed at the same time.
The TI was an also-ran in the original home computer / videogame explosion, before the first big sales crash. It dates back with Colecovision and Commodore 64.
After the big sales collapse (that destroyed Atari, and forced other companies to scale back PC development) the Nintendo was what revitalized the sales of electronic entertainment for the home.
A specific advantage is in the near-future military.
We joke about it, but combat is becoming more and more like video games. For 40 years, pilots have targeted radar blips with electronic weapons, although they needed tough physical conditioning to withstand the aircraft's thrust.
Now, with remotely operated Predator drones and similar UAVs, a "warfighter" can grab a joystick in his cubicle and go hunt some Al Quaeda.
See a quote from LtCmdr Shilling (a developer of the Army Game) to this effect in an AP story.
I assume by "RPG" you mean the pre-computerized, pen & paper variety. (Too many people today think of Final Fantasy VII when "RPG" is mentioned)
I can really believe that reading books like the 1st editions of TSR's AD&D (the Gygax DMG especially) and White Wolf's WOD series could help your vocabulary. Those things are chock full of gratuitously esoteric 10-dollar words ("Lycanthropy?" "Protean!").
The later versions of those game books seemed to aim at progressively wider audiences (the influence of publishers wanting sales and editors wanting readability), so the word choice became more accessible and pedestrian.
Looks rather like you're trying to configure devfsd, not simply devfs. I've never found much of a reason to do that (for removable drives, maybe, but not for something permanent like an IDE zip).
/dev/ide/host0/bus0/target0/lun0/part2 directly in fstab, rather than trying to get /dev/cdroms/cdrom4 automatically symlinked?
What's so bad about referring to
Try telling that to the officer when you get a speeding ticket. "Well, I was going as fast as everyone else."
Works absolutely fine. "I was keeping up with traffic" is a highly effective excuse.
In terms of roadway safety, if everyone is going 80mph and you drive 55, YOU are creating a hazard. (If cops really wanted speed limits obeyed, there are more effectively but less profitable approaches than what they use today)
could have simply been the EMP from that other ship.
Couldn't be that. Their ships can't fly within 10 minutes of firing EMP.
Three events------have me suspecting that the location of Zion, et al, is still inside of the Matrix.
Other events make a stronger case. For example, Neo has prophetic dreams of Trinity's doomed aerial gunbattle. How could he do that, unless still inside the Matrix?
There's also the fact that squid robots swim through the air with no visible means of propulsion. How could that happen, unless it was all a huge video-game?
First, Agent Smith replaces Bane in the world of Zion by killing him in the Matrix.
We don't know that he was really "replaced" in the real world. Yes, he was replaced in the Matrix, but all agents have a power to take control of human minds inside the Matrix. (If the human is still in a pod, it's very easy for them. A freed human is more difficult to convert, but Morpheus was tortured to this end in the original film.) Prehaps the altered Smith has a different, stronger form of this power.
In any event, we saw very little of Zion Bane- certainly not enough to find any sign of Smith's personality. The self-destructive slashing and tortured hesitation of his backstab suggest that, rather than fully transfering his conciousness, Smith has just implanted a strong post-hypnotic suggestion. (We don't really know if ordinary humans who've turned into agents ever recover their own minds, assuming the agent leaves without the body being killed)
If the machines are wily enough to trick someone into dying, maybe they can trick someone into killing to- without taking full control.
one of the children gives Neo a spoon, saying that Neo would understand
There's nothing special about this. The kid remembers being in the Matrix with Neo. Now that he's been released, he finds an old spoon and sends it to the big hero as a memento.
(That scene would've gone better if the actual same kid had delivered it personally. I wonder why they didn't try to get that actor back?)
The ripple effect---seen every time Neo does "his Superman thing" in the Matrix---is also seen when he stops the robots in the world of Zion.
It was also seen when the humans fire off an EMP, which is the normal procedure to stop robots. (There's a slim chance that those robots were halted by an EMP fired from some other ship we didn't see)
Please. Take any miracles to this man and he will award you a million dollars. What miracles? Jesus in a wood ring? Miracles are always heresay
Link check.
The James Randi Educational Foundation no longer owns jref.org. Instead, it belongs to a quasi-bank.
However, the million-dollar offer is still valid.
It might not have been a total waste of time. Look at it this way: If you're ever a guest on the Rush Limbaugh show, you've already had some valuable practice.
It's even older.
The idea that "Our senses are unreliable, it is possible we are decieved about the nature of the world" goes back to Plato's Republic. The Allegory of the Cave was published 2000 years before Descartes was born.
(If I had to explain virtual reality to a man in 400 BC, I couldn't form any better analogy than a puppet show)
Maybe you missed it, but when the original Matrix came out, anime comparisons were all over. (The whole bullet-time thing, for example, is reminiscent of slowmo anime fight scenes. See, I think, episode seven of "Key the Metal Idol" for an example)
Here's a good comparison, which sometimes focuses on stylistic resemblance to Ghost In the Shell.
That's somewhat valid.
A governing political party or a major corporation is actually a kind of machine. It happens to be made up of people, but they're just cogs in a device that's larger than any of them. A party/corporation is mindless, but it's programmed to behave so as to collect the most votes/dollars it can, and will change our lives any way needed to make that happen.
One easy explanation for the sentinel-blocking doesn't require Neo to have any magic or cyborg powers: they stopped because they recognized his face, and they'd been ordered not to kill him.
Maybe the Architect or Oracle wanted The One alive to watch the fall of Zion, maybe Smith commanded them because he wants to defeat Neo himself. Maybe Neo left behind sub-concious ghosts of his own personality in the Matrix, and it's hacking the sentinels. Whatever.
(This explanation would require assuming that Neo's subquesent collapse was due to random over-exhaustion, or accidental electrical discharge from a sentinel. Those are reasonable, but are unlikely to be the authors' actual intent)
The sig inaccurately describes the article it links to. That aricle says nothing to demonstrate that "Matrix within Matrix" is wrong. In fact, it takes that as a given, "Foundations of Criticism #2".
This is an example of begging the question.
I don't believe the final movie will reveal nested Matrices myself. However I think it's reasonable to say that at least some of the characters are lying, particularly when their statements correspond with their personality, but conflict with other facts.
so how is she able to still know what lies ahead?
A possibility: she can predict the future, because she has the power to make her predictions come true. Normal agents can override a human and control his actions (and appearance too). Maybe she has a more subtle effect- Neo hit the vase because she impelled him to do it.
This wouldn't directly allow her to predict things outside the Matrix, but post-hypnotic suggestion is a possibility. Plus, her larger scale predictions were more vague and re-interpretable. (The accurate prediction of near-term events might just be a way to establish her credibility, so that the humans take her main Prophecy more seriously)
I won't elaborate more, except to note that the anime "Escaflowne" included fortune tellers who were eventually revealed to be using magic to cause their predictions to come true.
So, what we are left with (if it goes the way I have described) is a series of major plot holes - problems that serious Science Fiction people cannot ignore:
One more plot hole that bothers me:
Unplugging from virtual reality without a clean-shutdown will kill you. Why? No explanation is given. Versions of this risk are popular in cyberpunk (it helps make hacking scenes feel exciting), but the author normally makes some attempt to explain.
The rebellious humans were capable of building mini-matrices as their kung-fu training rooms, so they obviously understood the connection protocol. Why couldn't they have an emergency A-B switch to toggle their crew from the full Matrix into a safe staging area (like the place with "Guns. Lots of guns"). That would give the cardio-vascular sytem any needed time to cooldown from the shock (if that's what killed them)
-The human/battery/enerty thing Answer: You can't have the movie otherwise.
That's a dumb idea, but there are other explanations for the pink-pod world. It's possible that the concept is a lie, either invented by a Morpheous-like human, or concocted by the Oracle (She told them "exactly what they needed to hear"). I'm holding out that in the third act of the final movie, Neo will learn the real reason humans are kept in the matrix.
Many explanations are possible that would be better than the energizer-battery spiel (which breaks the laws of thermodynamics so directly, it's not even funny). Any of them would add a welcome, Rod-Sterling twist to the conclusion. (The first movie was good because it had a surprise. They should try for a revelation of similar magnitude in the conclusion)
My personal favorite is that the computers' motives to keep humans in a VR world is the same thing that motivates any real world computer: they are following a program from a human. That is, humanity in around 2100 had developed robots that could handle all needed agriculture, manufacturing, and energy production. With an astronomical population density and abundant electronic entertainment, there was little reason for anyone to leave his 3x3 meter apartment except to buy food.
Solution: get your food from a pipe, excrete through another pipe, and glue eyephones to your face (or plug videofeed into the brainstem). Schedule a visiting robot to check your medical needs twice a week, and now all you need is a good source of quality digital entertainment. Thus the directive is given for an AI to build a virtual world that will keep humanity permantently entranced, and the Matrix is born.
The entire conversation could have taken place in around a fourth of the time. Why use all the big words and draw it out?
I believe that was an homage to anime, which has a tradition of the hero and arch-villain exchanging excited metaphysical poopycock just before a sparkling energy blob engulfs the world and makes everything happy again.
But that SOMEONE (suppose it's the the Architect) has other goals he needs to accomplish. In particular, he needs to keep the matrix running as a simulation of a realistic 1999 earth, with as few discrepancies as possible.
That may limit what the agents can do. Random shootings or crashes are fine. Unexplained airstrikes? Maybe not fine. Atomic bomb attack? Not even mentionable.
You mentioned "computers know how to apply force". Well, why would they even need to apply "force" at all? Why go through all the motions of punching, shooting, or exploding someone instead of just de-allocating his stream handles and freeing his core? (a completely logical and boring way for one piece of software to attack another) Possible answer: they're not allowed to interfere with the Matrix program too much. They can't completely turn off the inertial transfer subroutines, for example, because "the show MUST go on"
However, re: "Why didn't they kill them on the freeway", there's no good answer for that. Morpheus and an agent grappled for 100 straight seconds on the roof of a truck. Only after that battle did they decide to smash the truck. If they'd done this when Morpheus was still distracted (and before the superhero arrived), they'd have been easily successful.
(Which supports the theory that the Agents were under orders to allow the Prophecy to advance, permitting the Key Maker to be delivered)