...it doesn't work at all. Just gives "Connecting to..." forever. I suspect this is a problem related to Authoxy, which protects me from the fnording intrusive password requests of our network. Too bad - I wanted to see if it would help with those one or two sites that Safari still can't handle, but I don't want to live without Authoxy.
Thanks Good point about 'free'. As for the animation, I don't want to go faster than people can read, but I can make it busier I guess - I'm a flash newbie. Getting info in front of people is indeed the point. Actually finding an agent or publisher who doesn't just steam the stamps off my reply envelopes would really be the point...
Anyway this probably counts as/. abuse
Of course not, my point - which is nothing to do with black or white - is that no rational person would be willing to say without a doubt that we are alone, and that the two statements are not equally probable. Life which is vanishingly rare is utterly different from life which is unique. Everything we know suggests that life is an emergent property of matter, and matter is everywhere.
It doesn't matter what natural means - to me, everything real is natural. The idea that human life is not natural implies that we have some kind of priveleged position in relation to the rest of creation. We don't, but ask Bruno Giordano or Galileo - to start with - about the price of saying so. The history of science is the history of humanity's discovery that it is nothing all that special - not at the centre of the universe, not the apex of creation, not, most probably, alone. We are material, ordinary - I find that heartening but the thought terrifies many people.
What if our situation is unique or we are the first? You can't build any assumptions from a sample size of one.
While it's true that we can't do statistics with a sample of one, it's not as if there is no data. The universe (very large) is certainly a datum, and one of the things astronomy has taught us is that it seems everywhere very similar: made of the same stuff and subject to the same laws. And in this one sample we have many subsamples showing how life appears as soon as, and everywhere, it can.
It doesn't matter how probable or improbable life is - even if it occurred less than once in every galaxy that would be far more probable than our being unique. Unique is a big word.
That idea that we are unique cannot be counted as rational in the face of even the little we know - in fact, it is precisely because it is not rational that it is often so passionately defended. What it would mean - and this is the superstition hardly anyone wants to abandon - would be that we were not natural. But we are.
The big problem is that more adult films would need more humans in them, and the great weakness in Pixar's stuff so far is that the humans don't look that great. Toys, monsters, fish: all look fine - it's a question of texture and limited range of expression, and also of our reduced expectations of how these things should look - but the people look like mannequins (I know that hasn't stopped Canoe Reeves). Some of these limitations have technical solutions - subsurface scattering etc - but, speaking as an amateur actor, I'd like to think some do not.
Can you give us chapter and verse for "whacked out of their gord"? (or even "gourd" - perhaps "gord" is the Old testament spelling).
In Soviet Russia, they called crazy if you didn't believe in the system. In Christianity... oh, it's no different. Faith is the enemy of all understanding.
I know of several parents who had to deal with five and six year olds asking "what was that?"
Exactly. In a culture that was not gravely deranged, the question could hardly arise, and if it did, could be answered by "that was a breast, dummy, what did you think it was?". And blaming the press is too easy - they are trying their hardest to reflect what people already think. Pusillanimous, maybe, but that is what they do. Wouldn't you rather live in a society where children ask "what was that?"when they see a gun (or a lawyer)?
I'm not Italian, by the way, I just live here. And I grew up in a culture even more inhibited (New Zealand, 1950's...) You can grow out of these things, it doesn't take much.
... I am still puzzled as to what is so objectionable about the human breast. Find me someone who has never seen one. People who get angry at the sight have a problem they really should not be sharing with the rest of us. Here in Italy the TV is practically nothing but breasts and buttocks. I don't mind that in the least - what I object to is the banality and dullness of it all, but I don't supose the FCC has any standards covering stupidity, lies, hypocrisy or imaginative poverty.
Tell the publishers, the agents, or any of the other bean counters who control what gets printed. There is a wall of conservatism and cowardice surrounding the business that almost guarantees that anything that looks a bit difficult never sees the light of day.
I'm not sure there's more crap in SF than any other genre but it does sometimes seem that way.
I'd like to break a lance for an old-timer who now seems completely forgotten; John Sladek - does anyone remember him?
The Muller-Fokker Effect, The Steam-Driven Boy, Roderick at Random - SF, satire, and literature, dammit.
Mind you, Sladek's great inspiration was mainstream genius William Gaddis, and nobody read him either. Still, at least they got into print.
One of the principal reasons I don't believe everything in the Bible is because I have read most of it. (I skipped all those begats...). Enjoy yur invisible friend; just keep him to yourself.
http://www.lyle.org/mars/ is already belly up.
Nice thought, though.
In other news, I note that Mars was conspicuously absent from Bush Baby's State of the Disunion speech. Perhaps because he has no intention of actually funding that particular pointless stunt, perhaps because by the time anyone is ready to really think about, the USA will be a miltary dictatorship/theocracy and everything will be secret anyway...
God seems about the only answer that doesn't cause your head to go into meltdown.
Read the papers. Read some history. 'God' is the answer that most surely causes your brain to go into meltdown. Yet people seem to think think the argument that goes, roughly:
What is the origin of the Universe?
I don't know
Then why not call that 'God.'
- somehow makes sense. As if 'God' were neutral term, like 'quark', without history or established meaning. But people have been slaughtering each other by the million over the meaning of the term since the invention of monotheism.
I don't know. You don't know. The Pope doesn't know. Stephen Hawking doesn't know. Nobody knows. Get used to it. In this case, the only truth is an admission of ignorance and, as always, the truth will set you free.
Re:That just takes out all the romanticism
on
The Future of NASA
·
· Score: 1
has anybody here not dreamed of being an Astronaught someday?
Harrison Ford's voiceover added tremendously to the overall film.
No, it didn't. It added only the assumption that the audience was too dumb to follow the movie. The only thing better about the original was that there was no unicorn.
"The unicorn is a mythical beast..." James Thurber
Anybody remember John Sladek - one of the great unread SF writers? (The Steam-Driven Boy, Roderick at Random, The Muller-Fokker Effect) He had a hilarious take on the 3 laws somewhere, showing them to be logically inconsistent. His Roderick was a robot that everybody thought was just a little boy with a problem. They even made him go to catechism class ("Sure I understand. God was so keen to see his son up on that cross he was even prepared to give up his plan to burn everybody in hell.")
-------
'History is a bunk on which I am trying to awaken' - John Sladek
try Enkoder (also available as an OS X app), which converts your mailto: link to a javascript thingy which works correctly but cannot be read by bots. It's free.
Not to give my age away but I distinctly remember Jerry Pournelle writing in Byte magazine some time way back when disks were still floppy saying 640K and 5Mb of hard disk was all anyone could ever use. Being wrong was kind of a specialty of his.
According to The Guardian "In his pre-trial interview, the cannibal said that after eating Brandes he felt much better and more stable. Brandes spoke good English, he said, and since eating him his English had improved."
Slashdot Mirror
...it doesn't work at all. Just gives "Connecting to..." forever. I suspect this is a problem related to Authoxy, which protects me from the fnording intrusive password requests of our network. Too bad - I wanted to see if it would help with those one or two sites that Safari still can't handle, but I don't want to live without Authoxy.
Thanks /. abuse
Good point about 'free'. As for the animation, I don't want to go faster than people can read, but I can make it busier I guess - I'm a flash newbie. Getting info in front of people is indeed the point. Actually finding an agent or publisher who doesn't just steam the stamps off my reply envelopes would really be the point...
Anyway this probably counts as
Mine looks better than that, but it doesn't help...
Of course not, my point - which is nothing to do with black or white - is that no rational person would be willing to say without a doubt that we are alone, and that the two statements are not equally probable. Life which is vanishingly rare is utterly different from life which is unique. Everything we know suggests that life is an emergent property of matter, and matter is everywhere.
It doesn't matter what natural means - to me, everything real is natural. The idea that human life is not natural implies that we have some kind of priveleged position in relation to the rest of creation. We don't, but ask Bruno Giordano or Galileo - to start with - about the price of saying so. The history of science is the history of humanity's discovery that it is nothing all that special - not at the centre of the universe, not the apex of creation, not, most probably, alone. We are material, ordinary - I find that heartening but the thought terrifies many people.
While it's true that we can't do statistics with a sample of one, it's not as if there is no data. The universe (very large) is certainly a datum, and one of the things astronomy has taught us is that it seems everywhere very similar: made of the same stuff and subject to the same laws. And in this one sample we have many subsamples showing how life appears as soon as, and everywhere, it can.
It doesn't matter how probable or improbable life is - even if it occurred less than once in every galaxy that would be far more probable than our being unique. Unique is a big word. That idea that we are unique cannot be counted as rational in the face of even the little we know - in fact, it is precisely because it is not rational that it is often so passionately defended. What it would mean - and this is the superstition hardly anyone wants to abandon - would be that we were not natural. But we are.
The big problem is that more adult films would need more humans in them, and the great weakness in Pixar's stuff so far is that the humans don't look that great. Toys, monsters, fish: all look fine - it's a question of texture and limited range of expression, and also of our reduced expectations of how these things should look - but the people look like mannequins (I know that hasn't stopped Canoe Reeves). Some of these limitations have technical solutions - subsurface scattering etc - but, speaking as an amateur actor, I'd like to think some do not.
In Soviet Russia, they called crazy if you didn't believe in the system. In Christianity ... oh, it's no different. Faith is the enemy of all understanding.
I know of several parents who had to deal with five and six year olds asking "what was that?"
Exactly. In a culture that was not gravely deranged, the question could hardly arise, and if it did, could be answered by "that was a breast, dummy, what did you think it was?". And blaming the press is too easy - they are trying their hardest to reflect what people already think. Pusillanimous, maybe, but that is what they do. Wouldn't you rather live in a society where children ask "what was that?"when they see a gun (or a lawyer)?
I'm not Italian, by the way, I just live here. And I grew up in a culture even more inhibited (New Zealand, 1950's...) You can grow out of these things, it doesn't take much.
... I am still puzzled as to what is so objectionable about the human breast. Find me someone who has never seen one. People who get angry at the sight have a problem they really should not be sharing with the rest of us. Here in Italy the TV is practically nothing but breasts and buttocks. I don't mind that in the least - what I object to is the banality and dullness of it all, but I don't supose the FCC has any standards covering stupidity, lies, hypocrisy or imaginative poverty.
You're trolling, right? Come to /. for duff grammatical advice...
Tell the publishers, the agents, or any of the other bean counters who control what gets printed. There is a wall of conservatism and cowardice surrounding the business that almost guarantees that anything that looks a bit difficult never sees the light of day. I'm not sure there's more crap in SF than any other genre but it does sometimes seem that way.
I'd like to break a lance for an old-timer who now seems completely forgotten; John Sladek - does anyone remember him? The Muller-Fokker Effect, The Steam-Driven Boy, Roderick at Random - SF, satire, and literature, dammit. Mind you, Sladek's great inspiration was mainstream genius William Gaddis, and nobody read him either. Still, at least they got into print.
[irony]the truth will set you free[/irony]
Why assume I don't know where it comes from?
One of the principal reasons I don't believe everything in the Bible is because I have read most of it. (I skipped all those begats...). Enjoy yur invisible friend; just keep him to yourself.
http://www.lyle.org/mars/ is already belly up.
Nice thought, though.
In other news, I note that Mars was conspicuously absent from Bush Baby's State of the Disunion speech. Perhaps because he has no intention of actually funding that particular pointless stunt, perhaps because by the time anyone is ready to really think about, the USA will be a miltary dictatorship/theocracy and everything will be secret anyway...
God seems about the only answer that doesn't cause your head to go into meltdown.
Read the papers. Read some history. 'God' is the answer that most surely causes your brain to go into meltdown. Yet people seem to think think the argument that goes, roughly:
What is the origin of the Universe?
I don't know
Then why not call that 'God.'
- somehow makes sense. As if 'God' were neutral term, like 'quark', without history or established meaning. But people have been slaughtering each other by the million over the meaning of the term since the invention of monotheism.
I don't know. You don't know. The Pope doesn't know. Stephen Hawking doesn't know. Nobody knows. Get used to it. In this case, the only truth is an admission of ignorance and, as always, the truth will set you free.
has anybody here not dreamed of being an Astronaught someday?
I think you mean 'Astronought'
Harrison Ford's voiceover added tremendously to the overall film.
No, it didn't. It added only the assumption that the audience was too dumb to follow the movie. The only thing better about the original was that there was no unicorn.
"The unicorn is a mythical beast..." James Thurber
Anybody remember John Sladek - one of the great unread SF writers? (The Steam-Driven Boy, Roderick at Random, The Muller-Fokker Effect) He had a hilarious take on the 3 laws somewhere, showing them to be logically inconsistent. His Roderick was a robot that everybody thought was just a little boy with a problem. They even made him go to catechism class ("Sure I understand. God was so keen to see his son up on that cross he was even prepared to give up his plan to burn everybody in hell.")
-------
'History is a bunk on which I am trying to awaken' - John Sladek
try Enkoder (also available as an OS X app), which converts your mailto: link to a javascript thingy which works correctly but cannot be read by bots. It's free.
Not to give my age away but I distinctly remember Jerry Pournelle writing in Byte magazine some time way back when disks were still floppy saying 640K and 5Mb of hard disk was all anyone could ever use. Being wrong was kind of a specialty of his.
According to The Guardian "In his pre-trial interview, the cannibal said that after eating Brandes he felt much better and more stable. Brandes spoke good English, he said, and since eating him his English had improved."
"What do you keep bringing that book you know I don't like being read to from out of up for?"