It wouldn't work as a film. The reason that Blade Runner dropped about 80% of the material from the book was simply that the book contained far more than would fit in a two-hour movie. It might work as a miniseries though...
Ugh, I had but I'd managed to block it out from my memory. A book with half a dozen great ideas - any one of which could have made a fascinating novel - that managed to spend in interminably long time not doing anything interesting with them.
The idea of harmful memes appears in a lot of fiction though, especially since the publication of The Extended Phenotype. For example, I can imagine a galaxy in which organisms tend to die off if they consume resources without limits, and the only ones that spread out are the ones that heavily regulate their consumption. Humans broadcasting the 'consume consume consume!' meme throughout space could cause one or more of these to regress and start uncontrolled growth. Not very likely, but possibly a good basis for a short story.
Most of PKD's stories shared elements with others. I'm sure that there are a few short stories that could be tweaked very slightly to make them set in the Blade Runner universe.
This is Hollywood. When was there ever a pretence of that? Hollywood was always about stars, rather than actors, and about gimmicks rather than storytelling. It's just occasionally they make something good by accident, and 50 years later everyone forgets the 200 crap films that they made at the same time.
Chickenheads, in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, are people who are intellectually deficient (usually?) as a result of exposure to the fallout clouds that are floating around Earth after the nuclear war. In the book, J. F. Sebastian was a chickenhead, employed by a robot pet servicing company[1], who accidentally kills a cat because he thinks it's a robotic one and tries to recharge it.
In the film, for no obvious reason, he was rewritten as a genius and a confidante of Tyrell.
[1] One of the many subplots that the film deleted: The war was blamed on lack of empathy among human leaders and there was a strong social pressure to demonstrate empathy by owning an animal. Most animals had died in the nuclear war, so the rest were expensive. People who couldn't afford real animals kept electric ones and pretended that they were real.
Last person I met who actually used Lynx for day to day browsing did so on a braille terminal. So, the last time he saw anything was probably quite a long time ago, if ever...
At the time the CEO made the prescient observation that the consumer hardware business is a low-margin, low-profit business, and indeed for IBM, they've made much more money operating as a software and services outfit
Why? Terminal access on the phone is incredibly useful for debugging. Having terminal access doesn't mean requiring the terminal to do things. OS X has a nice terminal, but 99% of users never even know it's there. That doesn't mean that including it was a bad idea.
I really liked the look of WebOS, but their developer site seemed to make it really hard for developers to get involved. I wanted to port an existing toolkit to WebOS. They eventually kind-of let you do that, but only via the games APIs, so no access to half of the things you wanted, so I gave up.
Depends on what you mean by danger. Physical threat, probably not, but what about ideas? Religions, for example, are self-replicating ideas that can spread throughout human populations. It's (barely) plausible that we may be broadcasting something that has a similar effect on non-human minds.
Could you, personally, get the votes from each ballot in the country and verify that the count is correct?
No, but I can watch the box where my vote is cast right up until someone has emptied it and counted all of the votes in it. I've never done this, but I know people who have. I don't have to be able to verify the whole system, I just have to be able to verify that my vote was counted. If another electoral district has problems, they need to sort it out. As long as they don't cast more votes than the electoral roll says that they should, then it makes no difference to me.
If you're trusting a political committee to count your votes, then you may as well trust it to cast the votes in the first place, right?
The election oversight here is made up from volunteers. If I don't trust them, then I can volunteer. As I said, I have friends who have done this.
With an electronic system you could, yourself and nobody else, verify that the source code is correct
Bullshit. Having worked on formal verification of software during my PhD, I can say with some certainty that I couldn't. The closest I could come is to say that there are no obvious bugs that I can find.
Thousands, millions of people could, every one of them do the same check
There are not millions of people in the world who can verify software. There are thousands. Worldwide. This is why companies like Rolls Royce pay them so much as soon as they finish their PhDs, and try to recruit them long before they graduate.
With a well designed system there could exist a way to check that the voting machine has that same software installed.
This sounds like you've never written a complex piece of software.
Once you have a lot of investors' money, there are lots of things you can do. One is to charge a management fee. Do that, and this scam is 100% legal. More shady alternatives include investing the money in your own businesses, or using it to buy shares that you own at an inflated price.
Trust me, in comparison to other European countries the number of cameras in the UK is INSANE.
Last study I read showed that, if you just count the government-operated ones, it's lower than France or Germany, but higher than the rest of the EU.
And you don't see any irony in this statement?
Enforcing a law is totalitarian? No, not really. And we're not talking about laws like 'don't criticise the glorious leader', we're talking about laws like 'don't set fire to your neighbour's house'. If using technology to assist in enforcing laws like that is totalitarian in your mind, then you have a very strange view.
No, just more expensive. Or, perhaps, it's a bit more totalitarian because you can face recognition can be applied automatically. It can also be extended to the recognition of gestures and behavioral patterns, which would lead straight down a slippery slope into an Orwellian nightmare state.
Oh, I see, it's not totalitarian, but if it were something different then it would be, so it is.
Well, I acknowledge that they don't appear right-wing to you, but they do appear so to me and others I've talked with.
Given that my MEP is a member of the Greens-European Free Alliance, which is regarded as left of centre by most of Europe, I'd say that my view is shared.
Wikipedia: "In the UK, spanking or smacking is legal, but it may not leave a mark on the body and in Scotland since October 2003 it has been illegal to use any implements when disciplining a child."
Which is not the same as 'beating up' by any reasonable definition of the word.
You're missing the point. He's not talking about add-ons like network adaptors, he's talking about fundamental core bits of hardware, like interrupt and DMA controllers, which need to be configured by the kernel before it can even bring things like serial ports online for a console.
Every PC, except some early Intel Macs, is capable of booting PC-DOS 1.0. It has interrupt controllers and device I/O configured in the same way and accessible via the standard BIOS interface. You don't get great performance if you use these, but you can bring up a system with them and then load better drivers if you have them. With ARM, every SoC needs its own set of drivers for core functionality long before you get to things like video or network adaptors. Oh, and on the subject of video, you don't even get something like the PC's text console as standard, let alone a framebuffer (via VESA).
If you're hollowing out a large asteroid, you're going to have enough material to construct a huge solar sail. A bigger problem is making it airtight. Over the lifetime of a generation ship, even losing a couple of molecules per hour adds up. Once you get a little way from the sun, you're a completely closed system. Recycling has to be almost completely lossless to work.
There is no real politics or vote buying involved in funding these agencies
Actually, that's not really true. Look at where NASA contracts get awarded - they're very regional. While a lot of that spending is worthwhile, it's also used to buy votes.
Perhaps you'd like to look at the ROI that [D]ARPA gets from its research. For example, take a look at ARPANet. A few million of up-front investment gave the US government all of the tax revenue that every company in the.com boom paid, and the ongoing tax paid by companies like Amazon, ISPs, and so on. That tax income alone is enough to finance all [D]ARPA projects of this nature.
Your analogy would be more accurate if you said 'I owe $12,000 to the credit card company, I'll save my $2 bus fare by not going to work today'.
There's an old scam that works because of this. You set up a few funds, say 30, and make random trades with each one. On average, most of them will do about as well as the market as a whole. A few of them will do much worse. You close these. A few will do much better. You then get people to invest in these (with the obligatory disclaimer that past performance does not ensure future returns).
Slashdot Mirror
Give how little resemblance Blade Runner has to Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, I don't think that's a major concern...
David Brin, a word processor, and an LSD drip.
It wouldn't work as a film. The reason that Blade Runner dropped about 80% of the material from the book was simply that the book contained far more than would fit in a two-hour movie. It might work as a miniseries though...
Google Talk and iChat both use XMPP, so it seems like they've already got an interoperable protocol...
Ugh, I had but I'd managed to block it out from my memory. A book with half a dozen great ideas - any one of which could have made a fascinating novel - that managed to spend in interminably long time not doing anything interesting with them.
The idea of harmful memes appears in a lot of fiction though, especially since the publication of The Extended Phenotype. For example, I can imagine a galaxy in which organisms tend to die off if they consume resources without limits, and the only ones that spread out are the ones that heavily regulate their consumption. Humans broadcasting the 'consume consume consume!' meme throughout space could cause one or more of these to regress and start uncontrolled growth. Not very likely, but possibly a good basis for a short story.
Most of PKD's stories shared elements with others. I'm sure that there are a few short stories that could be tweaked very slightly to make them set in the Blade Runner universe.
This is Hollywood. When was there ever a pretence of that? Hollywood was always about stars, rather than actors, and about gimmicks rather than storytelling. It's just occasionally they make something good by accident, and 50 years later everyone forgets the 200 crap films that they made at the same time.
Chickenheads, in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, are people who are intellectually deficient (usually?) as a result of exposure to the fallout clouds that are floating around Earth after the nuclear war. In the book, J. F. Sebastian was a chickenhead, employed by a robot pet servicing company[1], who accidentally kills a cat because he thinks it's a robotic one and tries to recharge it.
In the film, for no obvious reason, he was rewritten as a genius and a confidante of Tyrell.
[1] One of the many subplots that the film deleted: The war was blamed on lack of empathy among human leaders and there was a strong social pressure to demonstrate empathy by owning an animal. Most animals had died in the nuclear war, so the rest were expensive. People who couldn't afford real animals kept electric ones and pretended that they were real.
What malware should I be worried about on my Samsung Chromebook
ChromeOS.
Last person I met who actually used Lynx for day to day browsing did so on a braille terminal. So, the last time he saw anything was probably quite a long time ago, if ever...
He was lucky to have rich parents who floated him the capital he needed for his company, and connected parents who helped him get a contract with IBM.
Yes, curse those big businesses.
At the time the CEO made the prescient observation that the consumer hardware business is a low-margin, low-profit business, and indeed for IBM, they've made much more money operating as a software and services outfit
Meanwhile Lenovo's profits from the PC division are up 51% and have been increasing for 7 consecutive quarters, during a recession. Great business decision there, IBM...
Why? Terminal access on the phone is incredibly useful for debugging. Having terminal access doesn't mean requiring the terminal to do things. OS X has a nice terminal, but 99% of users never even know it's there. That doesn't mean that including it was a bad idea.
I really liked the look of WebOS, but their developer site seemed to make it really hard for developers to get involved. I wanted to port an existing toolkit to WebOS. They eventually kind-of let you do that, but only via the games APIs, so no access to half of the things you wanted, so I gave up.
They still sell VMS. Not a large market, but a profitable one.
Depends on what you mean by danger. Physical threat, probably not, but what about ideas? Religions, for example, are self-replicating ideas that can spread throughout human populations. It's (barely) plausible that we may be broadcasting something that has a similar effect on non-human minds.
Could you, personally, get the votes from each ballot in the country and verify that the count is correct?
No, but I can watch the box where my vote is cast right up until someone has emptied it and counted all of the votes in it. I've never done this, but I know people who have. I don't have to be able to verify the whole system, I just have to be able to verify that my vote was counted. If another electoral district has problems, they need to sort it out. As long as they don't cast more votes than the electoral roll says that they should, then it makes no difference to me.
If you're trusting a political committee to count your votes, then you may as well trust it to cast the votes in the first place, right?
The election oversight here is made up from volunteers. If I don't trust them, then I can volunteer. As I said, I have friends who have done this.
With an electronic system you could, yourself and nobody else, verify that the source code is correct
Bullshit. Having worked on formal verification of software during my PhD, I can say with some certainty that I couldn't. The closest I could come is to say that there are no obvious bugs that I can find.
Thousands, millions of people could, every one of them do the same check
There are not millions of people in the world who can verify software. There are thousands. Worldwide. This is why companies like Rolls Royce pay them so much as soon as they finish their PhDs, and try to recruit them long before they graduate.
With a well designed system there could exist a way to check that the voting machine has that same software installed.
This sounds like you've never written a complex piece of software.
Once you have a lot of investors' money, there are lots of things you can do. One is to charge a management fee. Do that, and this scam is 100% legal. More shady alternatives include investing the money in your own businesses, or using it to buy shares that you own at an inflated price.
Trust me, in comparison to other European countries the number of cameras in the UK is INSANE.
Last study I read showed that, if you just count the government-operated ones, it's lower than France or Germany, but higher than the rest of the EU.
And you don't see any irony in this statement?
Enforcing a law is totalitarian? No, not really. And we're not talking about laws like 'don't criticise the glorious leader', we're talking about laws like 'don't set fire to your neighbour's house'. If using technology to assist in enforcing laws like that is totalitarian in your mind, then you have a very strange view.
No, just more expensive. Or, perhaps, it's a bit more totalitarian because you can face recognition can be applied automatically. It can also be extended to the recognition of gestures and behavioral patterns, which would lead straight down a slippery slope into an Orwellian nightmare state.
Oh, I see, it's not totalitarian, but if it were something different then it would be, so it is.
Well, I acknowledge that they don't appear right-wing to you, but they do appear so to me and others I've talked with.
Given that my MEP is a member of the Greens-European Free Alliance, which is regarded as left of centre by most of Europe, I'd say that my view is shared.
Wikipedia: "In the UK, spanking or smacking is legal, but it may not leave a mark on the body and in Scotland since October 2003 it has been illegal to use any implements when disciplining a child."
Which is not the same as 'beating up' by any reasonable definition of the word.
You're missing the point. He's not talking about add-ons like network adaptors, he's talking about fundamental core bits of hardware, like interrupt and DMA controllers, which need to be configured by the kernel before it can even bring things like serial ports online for a console.
Every PC, except some early Intel Macs, is capable of booting PC-DOS 1.0. It has interrupt controllers and device I/O configured in the same way and accessible via the standard BIOS interface. You don't get great performance if you use these, but you can bring up a system with them and then load better drivers if you have them. With ARM, every SoC needs its own set of drivers for core functionality long before you get to things like video or network adaptors. Oh, and on the subject of video, you don't even get something like the PC's text console as standard, let alone a framebuffer (via VESA).
If you're hollowing out a large asteroid, you're going to have enough material to construct a huge solar sail. A bigger problem is making it airtight. Over the lifetime of a generation ship, even losing a couple of molecules per hour adds up. Once you get a little way from the sun, you're a completely closed system. Recycling has to be almost completely lossless to work.
There is no real politics or vote buying involved in funding these agencies
Actually, that's not really true. Look at where NASA contracts get awarded - they're very regional. While a lot of that spending is worthwhile, it's also used to buy votes.
Perhaps you'd like to look at the ROI that [D]ARPA gets from its research. For example, take a look at ARPANet. A few million of up-front investment gave the US government all of the tax revenue that every company in the .com boom paid, and the ongoing tax paid by companies like Amazon, ISPs, and so on. That tax income alone is enough to finance all [D]ARPA projects of this nature.
Your analogy would be more accurate if you said 'I owe $12,000 to the credit card company, I'll save my $2 bus fare by not going to work today'.
There's an old scam that works because of this. You set up a few funds, say 30, and make random trades with each one. On average, most of them will do about as well as the market as a whole. A few of them will do much worse. You close these. A few will do much better. You then get people to invest in these (with the obligatory disclaimer that past performance does not ensure future returns).