Disney is just the distributor. Miyazaki-san is the brains behind this.
While it tickles me pink that this wonderful movie is getting another big-screen release, I doubt it will do any better this time than it did last time.
Spirited Away is just too Japanese/Asian for middle-Americans to get.
I could do three pages of Way Important Stuff which Every Japanese Kid Over Five Already Knows But Gets Glossed Over.
I dragged a bunch of friends to see this during the first release. They left the movie shaking their heads in utter incomprehension. "But don't you see? It all makes sense!" OK. Maybe not.
There are several roasting plants near my place, One of which frequently does waft over my house if the wind is blowing the right way.
I can't say I mind much, but there is a difference between the smell of roasted coffee and the smell of a roasting plant at work.
Very strangely, one roaster is kitty-corner from a crematorium. It may or may not surprise you that burned Seattleites smell a lot like roasted coffee.
The Japanese region 2 Studio Ghibli discs are supposed to be pretty good, and even include an English dub (and dub script subtitles, usually), I just don't have the money to import everything I want to see straight from the source
The Japanese Region 2 discs from Ghibli are awesome, and yes, most of them do include dubs.
Don't want to import from the source? Rent from Scarecrow Video (disclaimer: I have no connection with Scarecrow other than as a fanatic customer).
If you live too far away from them to rent, move. There are no geek jobs to be had in Seattle, but it's still nice here.:-)
As for the US backing in case of a Chinese invasion, it's 100 km from China to Taiwan and 5000 km from the US to Taiwan. If the Chinese want to, they can take it easily. 3 US carriers won't help a bit against a Chinese offensive with 500,000 men.
You sound like you know a little about the internal politics of Taiwan, but judging by the comment above, you haven't been there for more than a few days.
1) The PRC has no way to put 500,000 men on the island in the first place. The boats simply don't exist. Further, in these days of radar, hydrophones, satellite photography, etc. doing a D-Day style attack is infinitely more complicated than it was in 1944. While the 500,000 troops are making their way across the Taiwan Strait on hypothetical boats, the word "sitting duck" comes to mind.
2) The layout of the island makes it hard to invade. The West Coast (the one facing China) is a nearly solid block of concrete buildings, with a few farms to break the tedium. Fighting in urban areas is annoyingly difficult. The East Coast (the one facing the Pacific) is mountainous, with some of the peaks rising from sea level to 13,000 feet (4,000 m) in less than 60 miles. Fighting in heavily forested mountains is also rather difficult.
Rather than listening to me, check with Admiral Nimitz, the WWII military leader. He drew up a battle plan for invading Taiwan as a precursor to the invasion of Japan that everyone expected would be needed to end the war. The Nimitz plan anticipated 250,000 US casualties would be incurred to pry loose 50,000 Japanese soldiers. There are currently about 250,000 regular soldiers on Taiwan, maybe 10 times as many available as reserves. Plus radar, hydrophones, satellite photos, and lots of other stuff that didn't exist in 1944.
Could Taiwan be invaded? Sure. The place could be bombed flat and/or nuked prior to sending the troops in, which would make the entire point of taking the place (getting a reasonably modern, high-tech economy incorporated into the PRC) moot.
In short, it ain't easy. It never has been. If it was, it would have been done years ago.
Since "Purple Rain" was copyright '84 and he wrote like that back then, he can claim some legitimacy to have been annoying for almost 20 years. Can't accuse him of hopping onto an internet trend there at least.
...and Purple Rain was his seventh album. There's an entire catalog of stuff (which also used shorthand), which never got heard in cul-de-sac land...
Interesting. If they're indeed left open for that reason, I'd almost change my opinion of the admins running them...
Another helpful poster pointed out the difference between a web proxy and an open mail server.
A proxy server is only useful if it is outside of the routers which do the filtering, i.e. outside of the PRC.
Most of the open mail relays in Asia are just due to ham-handed systems administration. There are lots of small companies running mail and web servers, and not nearly enough qualified people to administer them.
Every year or so, I get to rewrite this article, because it seems to continue to be regarded as news.
The government of the PRC, through Zhonghua Telecom, continues to filter traffic going in and out of China.
The filters do not work. This is old news. Proxy servers are everywhere.
Here's the secret which doesn't seem to have gotten out of China yet, the filters don't have to work. They're not designed for the users.
Contrary to popular belief, China is not run as an absolute dictatorship. It's run by a circle of maybe a few dozen people who's opinions really matter. Like any good-sized group, there's a lot of disagreeement about how much (or little) openness there should be to the rest of the world.
The filters exist to appease the more close-minded members of the circle and to let them know that the best efforts are being made to keep bad stuff out of the minds of users.
My best guess about Google disappearing is that one or morecompanies who are providing portal and search services in China have been complaining to the Ministry of the Information Industry about loss of market share to Google. The solution? If Google gets blocked, the market share for locally-produced Chinese portals goes up!
Is this good policy? No. Probably not. I've seen protectionist policy used all over the world and it's generally not the consumer or even the producers who benefit. It's a few well-placed friends of the folks in power. At least in this case, there's always another open proxy server which someone "forgot" to close up to work around this bit of government silliness.
The capsule hotels are for real. It exists to fill a market niche.
Subways in Japan are (reasonably) cheap. Taxis by contrast cost a nut. The subway closes down at midnight. If you get caught out after the last subway leaves, and you're living in the 'burbs, you're looking at dropping a Benjamin or two in order to get back home.
So what's a party guy to do other than sleep it off in the gutter?
Like that time they lobbied to prevent microtransmitters?
I know a lot of people give NPR's director flack about that policy. _I_ do not like that policy. However, if you step back one foot it makes (a little) sense.
In big cities, NPR's local transmitter is generally a megastation. At my home, the two stations broadcast at 50,000 and 100,000 watts respectively. When I heard about that decision, it seemed bloody-minded. Why would an organization which broadcasts on those sort of transmitters give a rats about 10 watt community stations?
Then I left Seattle and started travelling in the United States.
The station where I am this week is broadcasting at a power of 2000 watts. At that power level, a 10 watt station on the periphery of your broadcast area can cut a pretty good-sized swatch out of your listening area through interference.
(if someone can find a tutorial on-line which explains the distance-squared rule and the roughly 10-to-1 rule on radiated broadcast power effectively jamming FM broadcast, I'd appreciate it).
Summary: From a freedom-of-speech point of view, it doesn't make sense. From an engineering standpoint, it does.
Why did the judge order him to stay away from cell phones, and fax machines? How is someone going to hack with a cell phone or fax?
Does anybody know if this is a standard "one size fits all" restriction in cases involving computer tresspass?
One could theoretically commit billing fraud with a cell phone. Faxes I'm a little stumped. There's the old put-in-a-loop-of-black-paper-dial-a-fax-number-and -walk-away trick. I suppose if I look at it in the eyes of the law, it's another form of DOS attack, but it's so throughly artless that nobody except a 13 year-old script kiddie would get any joy from it.
The problem expressed in the story has very little to do with the religious bent of many filtration software. This is incidental to the main issue involved, which is the fact that software filtering on a religious bias is being used in schools.
Thanks for responding.
I am at a disadvantage in that I have neither administered nor been, uh, subjected to, any of the pieces of censorware out there. My public school days ended when Reagan was president and that big ol' Information Superhighway was just a dirt road.:-)
Anyhow, because you brought it up, I read the article again. The core points I read in the article were as follows:
1) Symantec, N2H2, and 8e6 (all of which sell to schools), also sell to a lot of Conservative Christian churches. This is fallacious on the face of it. Sun and Cisco sell a lot of hardware to the government of the People's Republic of China. Ergo, do Sun and Cisco's management condone totalitarianism and forced abortions? No. They want to make money.
2) Five other companies (none of which I believe are big players in the school market) have strong ties to right-wing foundations and/or Conservative Christian churches. This is of slightly greater concern, but again, since these companies do not (I beleive) sell much to public schools, this is an issue of a seller connecting with a willing suck////buyer.
3) The author of the report "thinks" there is a bias in the filters, but admits she can't prove it. (I will be happy to give her some ideas on how to look for such a bias if she is interested in looking for this). [1] She makes quite a bit about the fact that the exact contents of the lists are closed. File under "important if true", but she seems to be fishing at this point.
4) The author of the report is curious about some of the filtering categories which can be turned on. They hit her as being overly vauge.
I agree fully with your points, but these were referred to only eliptically in the original article as examples of places there could potentially be problems. There could also be 30-foot-long moles living in giant tunnels underneath California (how else can you explain all the earthquakes?), but absent some more concrete research, it's not here.
It's very important when reading newspaper articles (or any other source material) to look at what they have which is concrete and provable (in the case of this article, almost nothing), and where the author is kicking back and speculating (in this article a lot), and when the author IS speculating, what background the author has to base this speculation on (again, it seems pretty light here).
[1] An interesting project would be to go through some well-organized list of web pages (such as the Google hierarchical directory or the DMOZ with a Perl script and see what percentage are blocked by the censorware programs in different categories. Do this and you'll have something worth writing a paper about.
So somebody's name shows up 666 times on Google. The word starts getting around. Pretty soon, people will start posting pages saying "XXX IS THE ANTICHRIST!"
Then of course, they return more than 666 hits on Google.
Ergo, no longer potential Antichrist material.
Perhaps all the pages accusing them of being an Antichrist will go away (about as likely as a smashed vase spontaneously reassembling, but it COULD happen), which will bring them back to 666 hits, and we start all over again...
I generally refrain from baiting the editors, but this is a non-story.
It's filterware for pete's sake! Whether or not the owners of the software are religious, it's a type of software that a certain group of people who are vocally demonstrative of their piety think is just wonderful. (this is not to say that all pious people like filterware. This has been beaten to death elsewhere).
Next we're going to find out that so many more people per capita in San Francisco own boats than in Wichita, KS. We can post 150 articles debating this bizarre phenomena to death. Pro-boat and anti-boat people can beat each other over the head. Maybe we can bring it full circle and see if Scripture justifies the use of boats for recreational purposes! I have zero love in my heart for censorware or for zealots of any religion. Timothy, please. I know you try to post a lot of "softer" stories which relate technology to human issues. I often enjoy reading these (who cares about the specs of the latest silicon gidget anyhow?), but learn to discriminate between relevant stories dealing with social issues and fishing expeditions like this one.
I'm from the coast, and thus the deserving butt of all those jokes people make about Vancouverites (and their wimpy southern cousins from the Oregon Territory as well). Any place where a nice winter day is -20 is unfit for man or beast. Go ahead and say it's a dry cold. I don't buy it.
i like the "even Canada" statement. said as if it were completely outrageous. "even timbucktwo..."
Going abroad is a big deal for a company, even if "abroad" just means to Canada. It's like Vincent Vega said in Pulp Fiction. "Everything's just a little different over there". New legal system, new patent regime, different accounting standards, blah blah blah.
From a worker's point of view, it's hard to say. I live in Seattle. I go to Vancouver pretty frequently. I think it is one of the world's great cities. Unfortunately, there's a pretty big disjoint between the cost of living and the salaries. Take housing. Vancouver property is similar in real dollar costs to Seattle, while salaries are merely similar in that a tech professional who makes US$n per year will probably also be paid C$n in Vancouver. At the same time, you will be taxed rather heavily.
A techie can make a good living in either place, but even with the quality of services in Canada (health care, education, etc.) it's hard to make the numbers add up.
and i see the "baren glacier as soon as you hit the border" misconception is still alive and well. Vancouver, Calgary, Toronto, Ottawa, Montreal, and others are massive metropolatin centers with similar climate to many US cities. in Vancouver it rarely freezes and typically has winter temperatures in the mid-high 40's. (that's around 8degC... eh?)
There isn't a huge glacier at the 49th parallel? How d'y'all keep yer igloos cold all year then?
Calgary has a climate similar to Chicago I suppose. I never understood folks who lived there either. The salary:cost-of-living ratio is better in Calgary, but the problem is... you're in Calgary.
Obviously it should use the CAMRA (Campaign for Real Ale) database of pub locations, so that you can always be assured of a good beer at the end of your journey.
The question which would come up is what would happen if you took such a device to the United States, where there are swatches hundreds of miles wide with nothing proper to drink?
Disclaimer: I live in the U.S., in a zone which (thankfully) has extremely good beer, so no harping!
Northlake Pizza
Medusa (in Columbia City -- real Italian pizza!)
Portland:
Bridgeport Brewery (amazing pizza which floats off the plate).
Eastside:
Bwahahahaahaa! The Eastside is HELL! The only thing non-toxic to eat there is Chinese food!
(I actually think it's pretty funny. 200,000 people with money coming out of all nine holes, working like dogs, and there's nothing to eat but fast food, sandwiches, and teriyaki).
Re:Begging Questions and Urban Planning
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This is IT?
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· Score: 2
Dude, judging by your comments, you were in Redmond, not Seattle. Be fair.
There is a very nice (but small) downtown here, and a number of pedestrian-friendly neighborhoods. Like almost every other city I know of, there are also a lot of low-density suburbs, because Americans do not like to live one on top of each other (this is an observation, not a slam on suburban Americans).
Just the same, I'm a little skeptical. I am trying to imagine taking one of these units from my house on top of Beacon Hill down to the nearest big bus terminal in Chinatown. This involves a mile of steep hills and some very ratty (and crowded!) sidewalks going through the I.D. (the P.C. term for Chinatown). On a bicycle, it's a fairly intense ride. On something with two wheels side-by-side and some gyros to keep it upright? I think i'd be fearing for my life every inch of the way!!!
Maybe when one of my buddies from Amazon brings one around, a field test will allay these fears. In the mean time... don't invest the kids's college fund on these things.
There are zero science fiction writers who are scientists. There are some scientists who write science fiction.
Almost sounds like a Yogi Berraism. Could you explain this a little further please?
The author most famous for mixing the left-hand and right-hand path is of course, Issac Asimov, who has a large body of cited scientific work as well as an extensive SF bibliography. Is he a science fiction writer who is a scientist, or a scientist who writes SF?
He could be focused on one thing...developing Linux.
Precisely. There was a somewhat longer interview he did a few months ago on NPR. I was a little suprised by his answer about why Linux was free.
He essentially said that yes, Linux could be sold, but that would involve doing a bunch of things that he did not regard as being interesting or fun. Giving Linux away allowed him to focus on fun things, like hacking code. It was a pretty non-ideological decision.
FWIW, I think that's good. Ideology is good for Marxists, drooling supply-siders, Libertarians and the like. They're all right people, as long as they buy the beer while I listen.:-)
Your disclaimer made it complete. Mod up! I wonder if neal reads/. ?
If you go to Neal's Home Page @ http://www.well.com/user/neal/ you would be under the impression that Stephenson doesn't do much except write and maintain something of a social life with his family and circle of friends.
Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe/. is how he gets the weirder characters for his novels.
Are you totally incapable of separating two personas in the same person? I'm sure you have opinions on software. Do those opinions void the value of your political opinions?
Yeah and no.
Stallman is a software engineer of godlike proportions. I don't say this because he's on the side of Free software, or anything like that. Count the lines of code he's produced. If I could crank out in a month what he can do in a day, I would be a happy coder.
Because of his stature, and because of how much code he has contributed to the FSF, and all that, his opinions on other subjects get amplified somewhat past their intinsic value.
Of course I largely agree with Stallman, so it doesn't bother me much.
The question is not whether Stallman is allowed to have political beliefs. Of course he is! The question is how seriously you should take those beliefs.
Slashdot Mirror
Disney is just the distributor. Miyazaki-san is the brains behind this.
While it tickles me pink that this wonderful movie is getting another big-screen release, I doubt it will do any better this time than it did last time.
Spirited Away is just too Japanese/Asian for middle-Americans to get.
I could do three pages of Way Important Stuff which Every Japanese Kid Over Five Already Knows But Gets Glossed Over.
I dragged a bunch of friends to see this during the first release. They left the movie shaking their heads in utter incomprehension. "But don't you see? It all makes sense!" OK. Maybe not.
j.
There are several roasting plants near my place, One of which frequently does waft over my house if the wind is blowing the right way.
I can't say I mind much, but there is a difference between the smell of roasted coffee and the smell of a roasting plant at work.
Very strangely, one roaster is kitty-corner from a crematorium. It may or may not surprise you that burned Seattleites smell a lot like roasted coffee.
The Japanese region 2 Studio Ghibli discs are supposed to be pretty good, and even include an English dub (and dub script subtitles, usually), I just don't have the money to import everything I want to see straight from the source
:-)
The Japanese Region 2 discs from Ghibli are awesome, and yes, most of them do include dubs.
Don't want to import from the source? Rent from Scarecrow Video (disclaimer: I have no connection with Scarecrow other than as a fanatic customer).
If you live too far away from them to rent, move. There are no geek jobs to be had in Seattle, but it's still nice here.
j.
As for the US backing in case of a Chinese invasion, it's 100 km from China to Taiwan and 5000 km from the US to Taiwan. If the Chinese want to, they can take it easily. 3 US carriers won't help a bit against a Chinese offensive with 500,000 men.
You sound like you know a little about the internal politics of Taiwan, but judging by the comment above, you haven't been there for more than a few days.
1) The PRC has no way to put 500,000 men on the island in the first place. The boats simply don't exist. Further, in these days of radar, hydrophones, satellite photography, etc. doing a D-Day style attack is infinitely more complicated than it was in 1944. While the 500,000 troops are making their way across the Taiwan Strait on hypothetical boats, the word "sitting duck" comes to mind.
2) The layout of the island makes it hard to invade. The West Coast (the one facing China) is a nearly solid block of concrete buildings, with a few farms to break the tedium. Fighting in urban areas is annoyingly difficult. The East Coast (the one facing the Pacific) is mountainous, with some of the peaks rising from sea level to 13,000 feet (4,000 m) in less than 60 miles. Fighting in heavily forested mountains is also rather difficult.
Rather than listening to me, check with Admiral Nimitz, the WWII military leader. He drew up a battle plan for invading Taiwan as a precursor to the invasion of Japan that everyone expected would be needed to end the war. The Nimitz plan anticipated 250,000 US casualties would be incurred to pry loose 50,000 Japanese soldiers. There are currently about 250,000 regular soldiers on Taiwan, maybe 10 times as many available as reserves. Plus radar, hydrophones, satellite photos, and lots of other stuff that didn't exist in 1944.
Could Taiwan be invaded? Sure. The place could be bombed flat and/or nuked prior to sending the troops in, which would make the entire point of taking the place (getting a reasonably modern, high-tech economy incorporated into the PRC) moot.
In short, it ain't easy. It never has been. If it was, it would have been done years ago.
Interesting. If they're indeed left open for that reason, I'd almost change my opinion of the admins running them...
Another helpful poster pointed out the difference between a web proxy and an open mail server.
A proxy server is only useful if it is outside of the routers which do the filtering, i.e. outside of the PRC.
Most of the open mail relays in Asia are just due to ham-handed systems administration. There are lots of small companies running mail and web servers, and not nearly enough qualified people to administer them.
j.
Every year or so, I get to rewrite this article, because it seems to continue to be regarded as news.
The government of the PRC, through Zhonghua Telecom, continues to filter traffic going in and out of China.
The filters do not work. This is old news. Proxy servers are everywhere.
Here's the secret which doesn't seem to have gotten out of China yet, the filters don't have to work. They're not designed for the users.
Contrary to popular belief, China is not run as an absolute dictatorship. It's run by a circle of maybe a few dozen people who's opinions really matter. Like any good-sized group, there's a lot of disagreeement about how much (or little) openness there should be to the rest of the world.
The filters exist to appease the more close-minded members of the circle and to let them know that the best efforts are being made to keep bad stuff out of the minds of users.
My best guess about Google disappearing is that one or more companies who are providing portal and search services in China have been complaining to the Ministry of the Information Industry about loss of market share to Google. The solution? If Google gets blocked, the market share for locally-produced Chinese portals goes up!
Is this good policy? No. Probably not. I've seen protectionist policy used all over the world and it's generally not the consumer or even the producers who benefit. It's a few well-placed friends of the folks in power. At least in this case, there's always another open proxy server which someone "forgot" to close up to work around this bit of government silliness.
Happy hunting all!
j.
The capsule hotels are for real. It exists to fill a market niche.
Subways in Japan are (reasonably) cheap. Taxis by contrast cost a nut. The subway closes down at midnight. If you get caught out after the last subway leaves, and you're living in the 'burbs, you're looking at dropping a Benjamin or two in order to get back home.
So what's a party guy to do other than sleep it off in the gutter?
Answer: the capsule hotel.
Like that time they lobbied to prevent microtransmitters?
I know a lot of people give NPR's director flack about that policy. _I_ do not like that policy. However, if you step back one foot it makes (a little) sense.
In big cities, NPR's local transmitter is generally a megastation. At my home, the two stations broadcast at 50,000 and 100,000 watts respectively. When I heard about that decision, it seemed bloody-minded. Why would an organization which broadcasts on those sort of transmitters give a rats about 10 watt community stations?
Then I left Seattle and started travelling in the United States.
The station where I am this week is broadcasting at a power of 2000 watts. At that power level, a 10 watt station on the periphery of your broadcast area can cut a pretty good-sized swatch out of your listening area through interference.
(if someone can find a tutorial on-line which explains the distance-squared rule and the roughly 10-to-1 rule on radiated broadcast power effectively jamming FM broadcast, I'd appreciate it).
Summary: From a freedom-of-speech point of view, it doesn't make sense. From an engineering standpoint, it does.
1) Campaign spending is a growth industry.
2) This idea takes some of the large pool of campaign money and funnels it to deserving computer geeks.
3) More money spent on deserving geeks means less time to be unemployed and griping.
j.
Why did the judge order him to stay away from cell phones, and fax machines? How is someone going to hack with a cell phone or fax?
d -walk-away trick. I suppose if I look at it in the eyes of the law, it's another form of DOS attack, but it's so throughly artless that nobody except a 13 year-old script kiddie would get any joy from it.
Does anybody know if this is a standard "one size fits all" restriction in cases involving computer tresspass?
One could theoretically commit billing fraud with a cell phone. Faxes I'm a little stumped. There's the old put-in-a-loop-of-black-paper-dial-a-fax-number-an
j.
Thanks for responding.
I am at a disadvantage in that I have neither administered nor been, uh, subjected to, any of the pieces of censorware out there. My public school days ended when Reagan was president and that big ol' Information Superhighway was just a dirt road. :-)
Anyhow, because you brought it up, I read the article again. The core points I read in the article were as follows:
1) Symantec, N2H2, and 8e6 (all of which sell to schools), also sell to a lot of Conservative Christian churches. This is fallacious on the face of it. Sun and Cisco sell a lot of hardware to the government of the People's Republic of China. Ergo, do Sun and Cisco's management condone totalitarianism and forced abortions? No. They want to make money.
2) Five other companies (none of which I believe are big players in the school market) have strong ties to right-wing foundations and/or Conservative Christian churches. This is of slightly greater concern, but again, since these companies do not (I beleive) sell much to public schools, this is an issue of a seller connecting with a willing suck////buyer.
3) The author of the report "thinks" there is a bias in the filters, but admits she can't prove it. (I will be happy to give her some ideas on how to look for such a bias if she is interested in looking for this). [1] She makes quite a bit about the fact that the exact contents of the lists are closed. File under "important if true", but she seems to be fishing at this point.
4) The author of the report is curious about some of the filtering categories which can be turned on. They hit her as being overly vauge.
I agree fully with your points, but these were referred to only eliptically in the original article as examples of places there could potentially be problems. There could also be 30-foot-long moles living in giant tunnels underneath California (how else can you explain all the earthquakes?), but absent some more concrete research, it's not here.
It's very important when reading newspaper articles (or any other source material) to look at what they have which is concrete and provable (in the case of this article, almost nothing), and where the author is kicking back and speculating (in this article a lot), and when the author IS speculating, what background the author has to base this speculation on (again, it seems pretty light here).
[1] An interesting project would be to go through some well-organized list of web pages (such as the Google hierarchical directory or the DMOZ with a Perl script and see what percentage are blocked by the censorware programs in different categories. Do this and you'll have something worth writing a paper about.
j.
So somebody's name shows up 666 times on Google. The word starts getting around. Pretty soon, people will start posting pages saying "XXX IS THE ANTICHRIST!"
Then of course, they return more than 666 hits on Google.
Ergo, no longer potential Antichrist material.
Perhaps all the pages accusing them of being an Antichrist will go away (about as likely as a smashed vase spontaneously reassembling, but it COULD happen), which will bring them back to 666 hits, and we start all over again...
j.
I generally refrain from baiting the editors, but this is a non-story.
It's filterware for pete's sake! Whether or not the owners of the software are religious, it's a type of software that a certain group of people who are vocally demonstrative of their piety think is just wonderful. (this is not to say that all pious people like filterware. This has been beaten to death elsewhere).
Next we're going to find out that so many more people per capita in San Francisco own boats than in Wichita, KS. We can post 150 articles debating this bizarre phenomena to death. Pro-boat and anti-boat people can beat each other over the head. Maybe we can bring it full circle and see if Scripture justifies the use of boats for recreational purposes!
I have zero love in my heart for censorware or for zealots of any religion. Timothy, please. I know you try to post a lot of "softer" stories which relate technology to human issues. I often enjoy reading these (who cares about the specs of the latest silicon gidget anyhow?), but learn to discriminate between relevant stories dealing with social issues and fishing expeditions like this one.
(Reading the paper shows a footnote indicating the researcher was a student of Seattle University -- just down the road from my house).
Thanks. Before I thought the firewall and IDS system would keep those hacker kids out of my home network. Now I have to tinfoil the windows.
j.
I'm from the coast, and thus the deserving butt of all those jokes people make about Vancouverites (and their wimpy southern cousins from the Oregon Territory as well). Any place where a nice winter day is -20 is unfit for man or beast. Go ahead and say it's a dry cold. I don't buy it.
:-)
Going abroad is a big deal for a company, even if "abroad" just means to Canada. It's like Vincent Vega said in Pulp Fiction. "Everything's just a little different over there". New legal system, new patent regime, different accounting standards, blah blah blah.
From a worker's point of view, it's hard to say. I live in Seattle. I go to Vancouver pretty frequently. I think it is one of the world's great cities. Unfortunately, there's a pretty big disjoint between the cost of living and the salaries. Take housing. Vancouver property is similar in real dollar costs to Seattle, while salaries are merely similar in that a tech professional who makes US$n per year will probably also be paid C$n in Vancouver. At the same time, you will be taxed rather heavily.
A techie can make a good living in either place, but even with the quality of services in Canada (health care, education, etc.) it's hard to make the numbers add up.
and i see the "baren glacier as soon as you hit the border" misconception is still alive and well. Vancouver, Calgary, Toronto, Ottawa, Montreal, and others are massive metropolatin centers with similar climate to many US cities. in Vancouver it rarely freezes and typically has winter temperatures in the mid-high 40's. (that's around 8degC... eh?)
There isn't a huge glacier at the 49th parallel? How d'y'all keep yer igloos cold all year then?
Calgary has a climate similar to Chicago I suppose. I never understood folks who lived there either. The salary:cost-of-living ratio is better in Calgary, but the problem is... you're in Calgary.
j.
Obviously it should use the CAMRA (Campaign for Real Ale) database of pub locations, so that you can always be assured of a good beer at the end of your journey.
The question which would come up is what would happen if you took such a device to the United States, where there are swatches hundreds of miles wide with nothing proper to drink?
Disclaimer: I live in the U.S., in a zone which (thankfully) has extremely good beer, so no harping!
In Town:
Northlake Pizza
Medusa (in Columbia City -- real Italian pizza!)
Portland:
Bridgeport Brewery (amazing pizza which floats off the plate).
Eastside:
Bwahahahaahaa! The Eastside is HELL! The only thing non-toxic to eat there is Chinese food!
(I actually think it's pretty funny. 200,000 people with money coming out of all nine holes, working like dogs, and there's nothing to eat but fast food, sandwiches, and teriyaki).
Dude, judging by your comments, you were in Redmond, not Seattle. Be fair.
There is a very nice (but small) downtown here, and a number of pedestrian-friendly neighborhoods. Like almost every other city I know of, there are also a lot of low-density suburbs, because Americans do not like to live one on top of each other (this is an observation, not a slam on suburban Americans).
Just the same, I'm a little skeptical. I am trying to imagine taking one of these units from my house on top of Beacon Hill down to the nearest big bus terminal in Chinatown. This involves a mile of steep hills and some very ratty (and crowded!) sidewalks going through the I.D. (the P.C. term for Chinatown). On a bicycle, it's a fairly intense ride. On something with two wheels side-by-side and some gyros to keep it upright? I think i'd be fearing for my life every inch of the way!!!
Maybe when one of my buddies from Amazon brings one around, a field test will allay these fears. In the mean time... don't invest the kids's college fund on these things.
j.
There are zero science fiction writers who are scientists. There are some scientists who write science fiction.
Almost sounds like a Yogi Berraism. Could you explain this a little further please?
The author most famous for mixing the left-hand and right-hand path is of course, Issac Asimov, who has a large body of cited scientific work as well as an extensive SF bibliography. Is he a science fiction writer who is a scientist, or a scientist who writes SF?
j.
He could be focused on one thing...developing Linux.
:-)
Precisely. There was a somewhat longer interview he did a few months ago on NPR. I was a little suprised by his answer about why Linux was free.
He essentially said that yes, Linux could be sold, but that would involve doing a bunch of things that he did not regard as being interesting or fun. Giving Linux away allowed him to focus on fun things, like hacking code. It was a pretty non-ideological decision.
FWIW, I think that's good. Ideology is good for Marxists, drooling supply-siders, Libertarians and the like. They're all right people, as long as they buy the beer while I listen.
j.
Just curious - how much did your college education costed? That's the worse example of english I've seen in a while.
First, I will assume the numerous syntactical errors in your own missive are in fact an attempt at humor.
Second, many of the users of Slashdot hail from countries where English is not the primary language.
Come back and post a message in your second language (if you have one), so that we all get a laugh at your expense.
xie4 xie4 nin3 shou3 kan4 wo3 de5 liu4 yan2
(thank you for reading this message!)
Your disclaimer made it complete. Mod up! I wonder if neal reads /. ?
/. is how he gets the weirder characters for his novels.
If you go to Neal's Home Page @ http://www.well.com/user/neal/ you would be under the impression that Stephenson doesn't do much except write and maintain something of a social life with his family and circle of friends.
Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe
j.
Are you totally incapable of separating two personas in the same person? I'm sure you have opinions on software. Do those opinions void the value of your political opinions?
Yeah and no.
Stallman is a software engineer of godlike proportions. I don't say this because he's on the side of Free software, or anything like that. Count the lines of code he's produced. If I could crank out in a month what he can do in a day, I would be a happy coder.
Because of his stature, and because of how much code he has contributed to the FSF, and all that, his opinions on other subjects get amplified somewhat past their intinsic value.
Of course I largely agree with Stallman, so it doesn't bother me much.
I perceive that damage can be done when people who are well-regarded in one field start remarking on others. The great industrialist, Henry Ford, had some remarks on human behavior (including some well-circulated quotes about the correlation between smoking cigarettes and criminal behavior) which would cause a reasonable person to gasp in disbelief.
The question is not whether Stallman is allowed to have political beliefs. Of course he is! The question is how seriously you should take those beliefs.
j.