What's interesting is that Niven envisioned Flash mobs being a result of teleportation technology, and not as a result of instant communication becoming pervasive. I think in "TLDotPFRC", his characters found out where they were going to teleport to through TV news broadcasts, not IM or cell phone-like devices.
It's fun to see how a lot of old SF talked about transportation, space travel and whatnot revolutionizing society, but the biggest difference in today from the 70's is in media and communications.
What, over a hundred comments and none about Chip 'n Dale's Rescue Rangers? What's wrong with you people? I mean, sure the two title characters are chipmunks, but Monty was all mouse, and Gadget was so totally hot... Oops, did I say that out loud?
C'mon, you can sing it with me, you know the tune...
Some times some crimes Go slippin' through the cracks But these two gumshoes Are pickin' up the slack
There's no case too big, no case too small When you need help just call
Ch-ch-ch-Chip 'n Dale's [sic] Rescue Rangers Ch-ch-ch-Chip 'n Dale When there's danger Oh no, it never fails Once they're involved Somehow whatever's wrong gets solved
Ch-ch-ch-Chip 'n Dale Rescue Rangers Ch-ch-ch-Chip 'n Dale When there's danger Oh no, it never fails They'll take the clues And find the wheres and whys and whos
Ch-ch-ch-Chip 'n Dale Rescue Rangers Ch-ch-ch-Chip 'n Dale When there's danger Ch-ch-ch-Chip 'n Dale
Pffft... they think they've cut me off, and that I've gone clean... What they don't know is, I snuck a Blackberry in by hiding it up my ass and I'm using it to get Slashdot! Gotta get my fix, you know...
That's nothing! In my day, you could only finger yourself - uphill, both ways!
You could Telnet, but only to the local machine!
The "Window Manager" was a creepy guy who was always peeking through the lab window!
Cat was there, but it was always asleep!
We used IPv1 - 8 bits, and MIT owned the first 7!
You don't even want to know how "Daemons" got its name!
Worst of all... We had to use vi!
You kids and your fancy-shmancy VT100s... bah! You don't know how good you got it now! This email shit blows my mind! Now someone tell me how to open this enlarge_manhood.exe attachment in Outlook...
Well, the 1st Amendment protects you if you just report the results of a poll, but I don't think it protects the act of collecting the data to begin with. There are plenty of laws governing behavior in public, including political behavior like protests, leafleting, etc.
Conducting an accurate survey would require going to a lot of strangers in public or calling them up to ask questions, and that sort of thing tends to be covered under solicitation laws.
Of course, one could still conduct a volunteer survey, but that would be known to be inaccurate, so people might ignore those.
If you think about it though, you can probobly make that "screenshot" as small as the original using Javascript. Just take the original sprites for each object, and have a JS program render the scene using a map of where the sprites are placed. Since PNG has a better compression rate than bitmaps, it might even be *smaller* than the original : )
Of corse, it's going to take time.... but it looks like you have plenty to begin with : )
Okay, I'm going to do you a favor, and recommend you check out a film called "Castle In The Sky". It's anime, but it's been released by Disney over here so you can find it in any video store under "animation" or "childrens films". Given what you said you liked about "Sky Captiain", you'll probobly like "Castle in the sky".
It doesn't have the funny irrellevance of the serials, but it does have the sense of adventure and mystery that a lot of action and sci-fi films lack these days. Plus, many of the design elements (flying ships, robots, air pirates) are shared, and the robots even look similar. The main plot is about a girl who has a mysterious jewel and a boy who becomes her friends, as they run from vaious people who want to take advantage of the powers of the jewel.
It's more like Indiana Jones and Star Wars than a direct copy of the old serials, but that's not nessecerily a bad thing. If you think no movie in 70 years has lived up to those, you should try looking harder : )
I must go to Nicaragua so I can join a free love commune of spiritually awakened blind-deaf people and learn to be free of material desires.... from a hot 14-year old:P
Haven't seen the movie yet, but apparently neither have you, so...
The original Ghost in the Shell, at least, was not a 'Frankenstein story', and I doubt this one is given the history of the writer and director. Basically in the GiTS universe, cyborgs are so common that no one really takes notice of them. The plot is about an AI who wants to merge with a human, and the hunt to stop him. It's not about any evil scientists and machines gone out of control than 2001: A Space Odyssey was. They are touched upon, but they're not the point.
The point of the original 'Frankenstein' as written by Mary Shelley was to question the ethics of science by showing an extreme example of scientific progress. GiTS doesn't do that, it is taken for granted in that universe that technological progress should occur, it merely examines the questions that are raised about humanity in the progress.
You've pointed out just why we need this. The problem is, you're still thinking in terms of individual hard drives in individual computers that can only be accessed by the local machine.
What are you going to do when you access all of your data through a network, and the whole world has their storage on the internet, using a global filesystem? You said yourself that one manufacturer makes 2^64 bits of HD space every year, so 64-bit is obviously not enough. We need 128 bits if we want to be able to make use of all the HD space that is going to waste on networked computers today.
Hell, we could do that today, if we had - wait for it - the right filesystem.
The fact that it's Sun that came up with this suggests they're thinking along the same lines. They would benefit greatly if people started using a massively networked filesystem, especially if they own the code to it.
"The lessons from this one will affect all future sample returns," said Gentry Lee, a JPL engineer.
Speaking of sci-fi, does anyone know if this is the same Gentry Lee that co-wrote the latter part of the Rama Series with Arthur C. Clarke? I seem to recall hearing he's an engineer of some kind...
Maybe by "future sample returns", he means a big honking cylinder full of robots and aliens, on a mission for God?:D
Complaining about 'outsourcing' to Japan is kind of pointless, they have an independant animation industry that caters to its own market and isn't trying to make American-style animation. The real outsourcing is being done to Korea, where they work on 'Japanese' and 'American' productions. To use an car analogy, you shouldn't be worried about Toyota selling in the states, you should be worried about Ford building factories in Mexico.
Okay, I think I should let you in on an open secret of the animation industry: a lot of it is done in Korea. Both American and Japanese.
I mean the shows a produced, written, directed, and 'key-framed' in the U.S. or Japan, but the in-between cels and coloring are often contracted out to a animation house in Korea, because animation is a labor-intensive process and Korean animators are cheaper than U.S. or Japanese ones. And I'm not sure that it's entirely a bad thing, since many of these projects wouldn't be made if it weren't for the ability to outsource the 'grunt work'.
Did you like the Simpsons? Korea.
Futurama? Korea.
Most Nickelodian toons? Korea.
Nadesico? Korea.
Love Hina? Korea.
Of course, I'm talking mostly about TV animation, it might be different for movies. Disney certainly can afford to have hundreds of in-house animators working on a film, I don't know if Ghibli can.
If you don't believe me, go buy the first season Simpsons box set, Matt Groening talks about the business process of animation there. Also see if you can find a DVD called 'Animation Runner Kuromi', a anime DVD about how the animation business itself works in Japan.
I'm going to do you a favor and recommend you check out Castle in the Sky by Hayao Miyazaki - Last Exile borrowed a lot of elements from Miyazaki's classic film (though it was good in its own right). Castle in the Sky is one of the best animated films of all time, and I doubt Sky Captain can measure up to it.
It's been released by Disney, and you can find it at most rental places. The english language track had a bad music job though, I suggest you watch it subbed...
To be serious, my current network security teacher at school is a grandma. She claims to have been around since the 'good old days' and known Grace Hopper personally...
Oh, and she can kick your ass if you get out of line : )
I'm tired of this whole "are the docs fake or not" discussion. It seems many Slashdotters are unable to think very logically. Here's a explanation of how logic works:
IF the memos *cannot* be written on a circa 1973 typewriter THEN the memos are fake.
ELSE IF the memos *can* be written on a circa 1973 typewriter THEN the memos can be either fake or real.
Many people seem to be pointing out that typewriters of the era were capable of subscripting, proportional fonts, etc. that means it probobly falls under the second option, that it could be either fake or real, and we need to weigh the probabilities. Personally, I kind of doubt these are forgereis, because that's a lot of trouble to go through to make forgeries and then screw up the fonts, etc. They could have easily just clicked on the 'font' tab and made it Courier or some other 'typrewriter-ish' font, or even just used a real typrewriter. But either way, I don't care whether Bush served well or badly in the ANG 30 years ago.
I think I should interject some of my own experiences.
When I was little, I went to school in Japan for the first bit of elementary school, then went to American schools while taking saturday classes at a Japanese expatriate school until 3rd grade. I noticed a few things:
1) In math and a couple of other subjects, the Japanese schools were about a year ahead of the American ones. This actually hindered me later in life, because I became lazy in the American schools and 'coasted' without putting in much effort, until I started failing classes. 2) Japanese schools had much more regimented and controlling feel to it, whereas American schools actually let kids be kids. I think the American schools were better in that respect. 3) American schools don't expect as much from their kids academically, and seem to act as more of a 'babysitting' service or daycare, at least in the elementary levels. 4) Japanese schools put a lot more pressure on kids academically, and force them to comptete even to get into a 'good' middle school or high school through standardized tests. This puts a lot of stress on kids, and I hope that the U.S. won't become like that with the "No child left behind" act.
I have other things to add, but I have to go for now, will post more later.
Yeah, I remember hearing about "de-schooling" in high school debate club a few years back, when the topic was "Improving U.S. Education". The idea won debates occasionally, but usually it was too radical for the judges to accept.
Slashdot Mirror
What's interesting is that Niven envisioned Flash mobs being a result of teleportation technology, and not as a result of instant communication becoming pervasive. I think in "TLDotPFRC", his characters found out where they were going to teleport to through TV news broadcasts, not IM or cell phone-like devices.
It's fun to see how a lot of old SF talked about transportation, space travel and whatnot revolutionizing society, but the biggest difference in today from the 70's is in media and communications.
What, over a hundred comments and none about Chip 'n Dale's Rescue Rangers? What's wrong with you people? I mean, sure the two title characters are chipmunks, but Monty was all mouse, and Gadget was so totally hot... Oops, did I say that out loud?
C'mon, you can sing it with me, you know the tune...
Some times some crimes
Go slippin' through the cracks
But these two gumshoes
Are pickin' up the slack
There's no case too big, no case too small
When you need help just call
Ch-ch-ch-Chip 'n Dale's [sic]
Rescue Rangers
Ch-ch-ch-Chip 'n Dale
When there's danger
Oh no, it never fails
Once they're involved
Somehow whatever's wrong gets solved
Ch-ch-ch-Chip 'n Dale
Rescue Rangers
Ch-ch-ch-Chip 'n Dale
When there's danger
Oh no, it never fails
They'll take the clues
And find the wheres and whys and whos
Ch-ch-ch-Chip 'n Dale
Rescue Rangers
Ch-ch-ch-Chip 'n Dale
When there's danger
Ch-ch-ch-Chip 'n Dale
"All I can tell the "lesser of two evils" folks is that if they keep voting for evil, they'll keep getting evil."-Lp.org
:P
That's funny, why would the Libertarians care if you buy x86-64?
Pffft... they think they've cut me off, and that I've gone clean... What they don't know is, I snuck a Blackberry in by hiding it up my ass and I'm using it to get Slashdot! Gotta get my fix, you know...
Thank god for wireless, otherwise : )
That's nothing! In my day, you could only finger yourself - uphill, both ways!
You could Telnet, but only to the local machine!
The "Window Manager" was a creepy guy who was always peeking through the lab window!
Cat was there, but it was always asleep!
We used IPv1 - 8 bits, and MIT owned the first 7!
You don't even want to know how "Daemons" got its name!
Worst of all... We had to use vi!
You kids and your fancy-shmancy VT100s... bah! You don't know how good you got it now! This email shit blows my mind! Now someone tell me how to open this enlarge_manhood.exe attachment in Outlook...
Well, the 1st Amendment protects you if you just report the results of a poll, but I don't think it protects the act of collecting the data to begin with. There are plenty of laws governing behavior in public, including political behavior like protests, leafleting, etc.
Conducting an accurate survey would require going to a lot of strangers in public or calling them up to ask questions, and that sort of thing tends to be covered under solicitation laws.
Of course, one could still conduct a volunteer survey, but that would be known to be inaccurate, so people might ignore those.
My dad told me once that rain comes from astronauts emptying the sewage tank on the ships...
:P
I guess there is more truth to it than I thought
If you think about it though, you can probobly make that "screenshot" as small as the original using Javascript. Just take the original sprites for each object, and have a JS program render the scene using a map of where the sprites are placed. Since PNG has a better compression rate than bitmaps, it might even be *smaller* than the original : )
Of corse, it's going to take time.... but it looks like you have plenty to begin with : )
the creation of incoherent language was the first technology. its been downhill since then.
That's why they made Visual Basic, duh... oh wait, nevermind...
Okay, I'm going to do you a favor, and recommend you check out a film called "Castle In The Sky". It's anime, but it's been released by Disney over here so you can find it in any video store under "animation" or "childrens films". Given what you said you liked about "Sky Captiain", you'll probobly like "Castle in the sky".
r m/movies/videos/laputacastleintheskynrharrington_a 0aac9.htm l
It doesn't have the funny irrellevance of the serials, but it does have the sense of adventure and mystery that a lot of action and sci-fi films lack these days. Plus, many of the design elements (flying ships, robots, air pirates) are shared, and the robots even look similar. The main plot is about a girl who has a mysterious jewel and a boy who becomes her friends, as they run from vaious people who want to take advantage of the powers of the jewel.
It's more like Indiana Jones and Star Wars than a direct copy of the old serials, but that's not nessecerily a bad thing. If you think no movie in 70 years has lived up to those, you should try looking harder : )
A couple of reviews here:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/style/longte
http://www.abcb.com/laputa/lap_apga.htm
http://www.btinternet.com/~lawrencium2/laputa.htm
Or....
:P
I must go to Nicaragua so I can join a free love commune of spiritually awakened blind-deaf people and learn to be free of material desires.... from a hot 14-year old
Doesn't anyone read the classics anymore?
You got most of them right, but...
British gov't: Bike owner shoots thief, gov't puts owner in jail.
British gov't: Was going to hunt down thieves with dogs, but thief-hunting ws banned.
Saudi gov't: Bike theft is an offesnse to God! Cut off the scowndrel's hand!
French gov't: Blame the Americans. If that doesn't work, blame the English. If that doesn't work, blame the Germans.
Spanish gov't: It must be ETA, despite the note saying "We have taken your bike on behalf of Allah and Jihad." left at the scene.
New Zealand gov't: "Oh well, I guss we'll have to go back to riding sheep again (grin)"
Haven't seen the movie yet, but apparently neither have you, so...
The original Ghost in the Shell, at least, was not a 'Frankenstein story', and I doubt this one is given the history of the writer and director. Basically in the GiTS universe, cyborgs are so common that no one really takes notice of them. The plot is about an AI who wants to merge with a human, and the hunt to stop him. It's not about any evil scientists and machines gone out of control than 2001: A Space Odyssey was. They are touched upon, but they're not the point.
The point of the original 'Frankenstein' as written by Mary Shelley was to question the ethics of science by showing an extreme example of scientific progress. GiTS doesn't do that, it is taken for granted in that universe that technological progress should occur, it merely examines the questions that are raised about humanity in the progress.
You've pointed out just why we need this. The problem is, you're still thinking in terms of individual hard drives in individual computers that can only be accessed by the local machine.
What are you going to do when you access all of your data through a network, and the whole world has their storage on the internet, using a global filesystem? You said yourself that one manufacturer makes 2^64 bits of HD space every year, so 64-bit is obviously not enough. We need 128 bits if we want to be able to make use of all the HD space that is going to waste on networked computers today.
Hell, we could do that today, if we had - wait for it - the right filesystem.
The fact that it's Sun that came up with this suggests they're thinking along the same lines. They would benefit greatly if people started using a massively networked filesystem, especially if they own the code to it.
Shit, I knew the jobs situation in America was bad, but *this* bad?
All I can say is, they work in Antarctica and they use Linux - obviously, wear a tux to the interview ; )
"The lessons from this one will affect all future sample returns," said Gentry Lee, a JPL engineer.
:D
Speaking of sci-fi, does anyone know if this is the same Gentry Lee that co-wrote the latter part of the Rama Series with Arthur C. Clarke? I seem to recall hearing he's an engineer of some kind...
Maybe by "future sample returns", he means a big honking cylinder full of robots and aliens, on a mission for God?
Complaining about 'outsourcing' to Japan is kind of pointless, they have an independant animation industry that caters to its own market and isn't trying to make American-style animation. The real outsourcing is being done to Korea, where they work on 'Japanese' and 'American' productions. To use an car analogy, you shouldn't be worried about Toyota selling in the states, you should be worried about Ford building factories in Mexico.
Okay, I think I should let you in on an open secret of the animation industry: a lot of it is done in Korea. Both American and Japanese.
I mean the shows a produced, written, directed, and 'key-framed' in the U.S. or Japan, but the in-between cels and coloring are often contracted out to a animation house in Korea, because animation is a labor-intensive process and Korean animators are cheaper than U.S. or Japanese ones. And I'm not sure that it's entirely a bad thing, since many of these projects wouldn't be made if it weren't for the ability to outsource the 'grunt work'.
Did you like the Simpsons? Korea.
Futurama? Korea.
Most Nickelodian toons? Korea.
Nadesico? Korea.
Love Hina? Korea.
Of course, I'm talking mostly about TV animation, it might be different for movies. Disney certainly can afford to have hundreds of in-house animators working on a film, I don't know if Ghibli can.
If you don't believe me, go buy the first season Simpsons box set, Matt Groening talks about the business process of animation there. Also see if you can find a DVD called 'Animation Runner Kuromi', a anime DVD about how the animation business itself works in Japan.
Also: Korean Animation
Even North Korea is doing it
I'm going to do you a favor and recommend you check out Castle in the Sky by Hayao Miyazaki - Last Exile borrowed a lot of elements from Miyazaki's classic film (though it was good in its own right). Castle in the Sky is one of the best animated films of all time, and I doubt Sky Captain can measure up to it.
It's been released by Disney, and you can find it at most rental places. The english language track had a bad music job though, I suggest you watch it subbed...
Don't you see!? You can have a Beowulf cluster of this with the Xbox!
To be serious, my current network security teacher at school is a grandma. She claims to have been around since the 'good old days' and known Grace Hopper personally...
Oh, and she can kick your ass if you get out of line : )
I'm tired of this whole "are the docs fake or not" discussion. It seems many Slashdotters are unable to think very logically. Here's a explanation of how logic works:
IF the memos *cannot* be written on a circa 1973 typewriter THEN the memos are fake.
ELSE IF the memos *can* be written on a circa 1973 typewriter THEN the memos can be either fake or real.
Many people seem to be pointing out that typewriters of the era were capable of subscripting, proportional fonts, etc. that means it probobly falls under the second option, that it could be either fake or real, and we need to weigh the probabilities. Personally, I kind of doubt these are forgereis, because that's a lot of trouble to go through to make forgeries and then screw up the fonts, etc. They could have easily just clicked on the 'font' tab and made it Courier or some other 'typrewriter-ish' font, or even just used a real typrewriter. But either way, I don't care whether Bush served well or badly in the ANG 30 years ago.
I don't care as long as there's an CowboyNeal option, you insensitive clod!
I think I should interject some of my own experiences.
When I was little, I went to school in Japan for the first bit of elementary school, then went to American schools while taking saturday classes at a Japanese expatriate school until 3rd grade. I noticed a few things:
1) In math and a couple of other subjects, the Japanese schools were about a year ahead of the American ones. This actually hindered me later in life, because I became lazy in the American schools and 'coasted' without putting in much effort, until I started failing classes.
2) Japanese schools had much more regimented and controlling feel to it, whereas American schools actually let kids be kids. I think the American schools were better in that respect.
3) American schools don't expect as much from their kids academically, and seem to act as more of a 'babysitting' service or daycare, at least in the elementary levels.
4) Japanese schools put a lot more pressure on kids academically, and force them to comptete even to get into a 'good' middle school or high school through standardized tests. This puts a lot of stress on kids, and I hope that the U.S. won't become like that with the "No child left behind" act.
I have other things to add, but I have to go for now, will post more later.
Yeah, I remember hearing about "de-schooling" in high school debate club a few years back, when the topic was "Improving U.S. Education". The idea won debates occasionally, but usually it was too radical for the judges to accept.
No, it means there will now be a (-1, Nazi) and (-1, Godwin) mod.