A very interesting article, and rare in that young computer science people might even gain a spark of hope if they read it with an open mind.
Certainly we need more people thinking outside the box, at least being able to see that there is a box and some other things are maybe outside it.
Another example of this kind of thinking to me is Damian's Perl Module Quantum::Superposition which lets you take a swing at a totally new way of formulating algorithms.
When I read Lanier's article I thought (as he noted on his homepage) that 10M is small, but the difficulty of writing good code by professionals is true (Microsoft, NASA,..) and his point about proportionate importance of errors is on target.
I've already started getting some new ideas.. and though that $2K seminar in February he's going to be at disappointed me (hallway conversations probably will be most interesting?) I say THANKS to Jaron (and a couple of Slashdot posts..). Catalysts and cell receptors jumbling in my head.. and meanwhile got me thinking positively about how to make my current programming jobs less arduous.
A. "Transition Metals" is a cool-sounding idea for a product naming strategy. And, the actual elements are conductors of heat and electricity (sounds good and electronic) and many are seen as valuable by the general public (gold, etc.)
B. Titanium -> Itanium. It's been taken.
C. Iridum? Taken, went down in flames (darn!)
D. Zirconium, sounds cheap. Nix.
E. Chromium? Well M$ has already taken it, but thought it sounded cooler as "Chrome".
D. Palladium -> Apallium! Sounds apalling! Can't use it.
E. There are already companies using palladium.com, vanadium.com, technetium.com (tucows got it, good show!), niobium.com's gone, someone called Dragon Information has yttrium.com. Aaand Tungsten's been used recently.
Some icky company with tons of popups stole selenium.com and.net!
Okay, you get the drift. What's left? Some of the names have been taken, or sound too prosaic or downright scandalous (Scandium, though naming after Scandanavia is neat). Some are doomed due to prevaling western opinion; Osmium sounds like Osamaium, Hassium sounds (just a little) like Husseinium.
Obviously high-paid marketgeeks feel they've struck oil with..the periodic chart! Maybe now's a good time to strike a blow for freedom. Anyone want to register remaining ones, I also recommend the Noble Gases because they're.. um, Nobel! I mean Noble! But you can forget Xenon (Intel got that too). Anyone feel like researching good candidates make your posts count!
I've asked for a quote on seaborgium.com. But may I recommend bromium?
Why don't you guys check out some (prior) Art?
on
Peephole Displays
·
· Score: 1
Jeffrey Shaw, one of the most amazing artists alive. His
EVE from 1993 and Golden Calf from 1995 (animation) seem to be good examples of this idea. Techies should study Art!
I was thinking that in addition to google's cache of the destroyed site, there also must be many copies in web caches around the world, for example at general Australian ISPs and proxies at astronomical institutions. Plus there are of course the browser caches of individuals.
I looked around at sites like ircache.net, vancouver-webpages.com, and elsewhere looking for a way to get pages from caches besides of course hitting them from the side of the served network (i.e. with a browser or a spider like wget or wwwwoffle).
There is a hierarchical cache at U. of Melbourne for students there, so if anyone is reading this from a dorm there you might be able to spider the cache of the site to preserve it on your hard drive.
If anyone is familiar with caching protocol and how to query other caches on the net, why not share them here. Much of the data may be on the net. Likewise if anyone knows how much is replicated on other sites it will save people the trouble. I'm just worried that the contents of these caches may expire one day soon..
His lab is here. Please try to stagger your access so you don't slashdot him.
The Japanese side of the main Phonon Device Lab has pdf'd scans of newspaper articles from September 10. The Japanese also uses 1.4 Terabits/sq. inch.
A drawing on the bottom of this page shows that his ultimate goal of 4 Petabits/square inch is based on a bit being stored in a 0.4 nanometer square, the size of one BaTiO3 crystal.
Interesting experiment on his page tells you in English how to make piezoelectric ceramics(in collaboration with Washington U.).
It looks like there are a whole raft of people from Tohoku U. at U. Washington doing nano-bio research, mems, piezoelectrics.. maybe sq. inch came from Washington. Their Center for Nanotechnology looks neat. I wonder if they were involved in this storage technology development.
Thank you for replying! I actually read the site and posted before seeing your post about not being ready yet. Sorry.
That said, I think it might be a really good idea to split the site into two parts, one for home users (Mom) and one for techies. Mom also likes good graphics but I don't think that is going to be the most important thing, the main thing is that people will trust that the product is easy to use if the site is easy to use. A clear and unjumbled presentation, with maybe a screenshot of the installer (I think lindows.com does something there) would be great. Sorry I don't have time to help out but good luck!
P.S. I was serious when I mentioned that if you could do without making linux partitions (one or two distros do this) and even run off the CD you are a mile ahead.
How about this? Give people the option of just popping the CD into a computer wherever they are and have it discover network settings and pull their personal files down over ftp (if they have a private ftp folder somewhere). Neat and not too hard maybe. Luck!
<mass-mode on>
on
Ark Linux
·
· Score: 5, Informative
Take off the tinfoil and a quick read of the site..
- 4 clicks to install = good - giving simplification a shot = good - developed own installer (i guess) = good
- no info about what to do with an iso = bad - explained in terms of red hat = bad - unanswered questions on page = bad - needs:
screenshots
info on hardware requirements
info on supported locales (or is it just English)
info for developers on "why develop for distro x"
needs a "why use our distro" page for users
- might be interesting if you could do work just by popping CD in (without partitioning or doing a big install).. or is that what it does? dunno.
Are developers expected to preserve some kind of rivalry between open code from real and open code from apple?
What would happen if they got mixed together and were "given back" to real/helix? this is confusing, at least the last time I tried to get through the maze of documents on the helix page.
1. Promote interest in mathematics 2. Provide unassailable code publication anywhere in the galaxy (works on Earth too).
Okay, take your decss or whatever and gzip it. What are the odds that this archive exists in the teradigit string (probability indexed by archive length please)?
Obviously you just need to provide the offset in the teradigit string which ought to be available online somewhere.
But even if it isn't publically available, since (thanks to Zapman (2662) 's link) you can get any digit of pi without calculating the whole thing, you can resurrect the archive easily.
If SETI incorporated this kind of analysis we might even have a free distributed client..
I found it hilarious that the story "Professor breaks own record -- for thrill of pi" ended with a link named "Subscribe to the P-I".
And well it should! For it is from the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, whose logo is a globe with the initials "P-I". Someone should get those guys to put it on their top page.
Perhaps they held back since it also was posted exactly 61 years after the invasion of Perl Harbor. Oh well.
FWIW, I've been hoping desperately that they'd find some neat geometrical patterns in Pi. My guess is that the reason the mathematicians cannot prove that all those digits are random is that they aren't.. they are just using an extremely good hash algorithm to encrypt the darn thing.
Date: Fri, 6 Dec 2002 08:36:12 -0500 (EST) From: Matt Rosin To: phil_lelyveld@corp.disney.com Subject: Your post
Dear Sir:
It has been quite amusing to read about the results of your actions as noted in the story "Shocker: Despicable Conduct From a Disney Lawyer" on the front page of slashdot.org.
I would like to say that I have long since stopped buying your company's products as I do not support such duplicity and sheer underhandedness as appears to have become a cancer in your organization. I, representing the hearts and souls of approximately 1 million anime fans, sincerely recommend that you take a day off to reconsider your professional and corporate goals. You can start with doing a search for Disney on slashdot after reading the thread about yourself.
Of course if you choose to refuse this chance at improving your karma then you can just go on living your life as your did before, seems like a spectacular version of hell.
I don't know what happened and don't have the DVD but I've seent he original a few times.
Maybe it's a copy protection experiment.
Maybe it's a wierd attempt to (over)compensate for a phenomenon that is real in the still photo world - popualr images and the characteristics of print film make for much stronger red in U.S. film (e.g. Kodak especially when used in people shots) and much stronger blue in Japan.
Maybe it's a massive screwup (no kidding)
Maybe it's an attempt by Disney to hurt Ghibli (wouldn't put it past them)
Maybe it was made with a cutting edge "superior" technology that unfortunately looks like utter crap on most sets and nobody every tried it at home before going to print
At any rate those screenshots look like utter crap in comparison to the original film and what is considered reasonable in Japan.
Just to say it is a wonder film and you can take your entire family to see it over and over again. Maybe a couple parts could be a little scary for very young children but nothing like what gets by as entertainment for that age group in the U.S. these days.
The story's focus on Disney is completely idiotic. Focus on the company that made the film, not the one that succeeded in getting it after ripping off or destroying as much Japanese anime as it could up to now.
I don't know how the voiceovers are in English. If possible, see the Japanese version with subtitles as well some time, it is quite impressive. Of course Hayao Miyazaki's work is all fabulous. Check out Laputa!
P.S. There is a book of Spirited Away as well, in English I believe. And in convenience stores they also sell segments of the movie as gorgeous shot-by-shot full color glossy manga books. Lots of Spirited Away (Sen to Chihiro) stuff. I believe there is a shop in New York that handles tons of Japanese anime related stuff downtown.
Incidentally the name Sen to Chihiro refers to her name being stolen (I won't say by whom). The only character left can be read as Sen as well as Chi. Sen means a thousand.
Pros -Used for reading books and using astro programs -Clie memory stick (64 mb) with tiny vaio (integral stick port) is awesome. -I know everyone in my brothers' company used to use Blackberries all the time for email.
Cons -Have lost important info several times since if I read for too long, the battery goes dead -Use only the monochrome US version despite owning color Japanese version, due to batteries again -No security of course though I think about it a bit when entering a credit card number or a password (yeah there is software but..) -Always think how it would be 10x more useful with wireless attachment to my CGI todo list but always have something else I want to buy when I have the free cash. (That's my fault sure). -No Perl on it, have to use CodeWarrior to build useful stuff -Too slow to use and can't handle drawings or Japanese like a Zaurus could (even Japan version input method is about 1/100 as useful). -No keyboard
IANA Astrometrician, but I attempted to roll back time in the free software Celestia and sneaking up on the Earth and wagging it back and forth, it sure looks like it would have been coming from the Large Magellanic Cloud, a galaxy 180,000 light years away due south. The LMC made a big hit in the news for the stunning supernova discovered there in 1987.
Really there was no point in rolling back time at all, with the accuracy we're talking about it seems obvious that this ancient quark traveler would likely have been guided toward us by the graviational lens that is the mass of the LMC. That, or some unknown process in the LMC could conceivably have generated the strange stuff. Of course at a velocity of only.0015c it would have passed the LMC around 120 million years ago.
It seems pretty hard to say where it came from especially with this one piece of information, but we might very well be in for some surprises if we get enough seismic data in the future to plot against the COBE map!
It is realistic, not silly, to realize that we need people in space to keep from our eggs being all in one basket (i.e. the planet Earth). It's just not far enough away yet.
Something like the picture in close orbit and supplied by the earth is still a part of the ecosystem and far more vulnerable than a terrestrial installation built with a similar investment.
Making a fund for preservation of the species is a great idea though. Primarily it could be used to provide a "safety buffer" by recognizing the need for specific research and quickly funding it.
Ultimately we need vibrant colonies on other planets (presumably around other stars and not in contact with Earth) to be safe. It might be very difficult to guarantee the "not in contact with Earth" part, but at least a planet-killer meteor impact would no longer be a total loss.
It would be much better to take the money and invest in some targetted areas.
It is VERY CLEAR that a possible answer to the "where are all the radio signals from other civilizations" question is, "most of them killed themselves in a science accident soon after getting to the point where sending signals became economic".
I would off-hand humbly suggest investing in:
-Nanotechnology Research and related Safety Technology (defensive, maybe it will be possible to make mistakes in a safe environment before others in nonsafe environments).
-Astronomy and Astrophysics, in particular development of extremely high-power interferometers (to gain clues as to what distant catastrophes looked like).
-SETI, most bang for your buck and we might get a clue before killing ourselves off.
-Space construction research, not for colonies in space but for high energy research.(iffy, they'll probably build on Earth where the physicists are anyway).
-Risk Assessment and related research in biochemistry, nanotechnology, and particle physics. (Of course it is probably difficult to direct research just at risk assessment but at least to fund researchers so that it is something they spend brainpower on regularly).
-International collaborative research funding and coordination. Basically if all countries could be aligned then there might be less possibility of the defeatist "if we don't study it someone else will".
-Powerful, pragmatic projects to eliminate poverty, hunger, water shortages, and racial hate.
-Risk management programs in AI. Needed in the next 30 years apparently (cf. Kurzweil).
-Stabilization of world politics and maybe even the "War on Terrorism". Don't laugh but I expected this for years. Of course having thousands of people killed is a big impetus but I don't think that is the main reason behind the U.S. administration's actions.
Basically the world cannot afford "rogue states" or "terrorist cells" which as the years go by will gain progressively scarier weapons. War is perhaps not the answer and already I worry that centuries more of hatred could have been instilled in the middle east, but the fact is you just don't want pathological people to be in control of the real heavy shit. Of course we are a few definitions shy here still.. "what's 'pathological'?":(
Still I cannot help but think about some scifi stories, which after all are exercises in imagination and extrapolation. Often a powerful, sneaky alien ship will land on the planet Earth and stop all war, disease, etc. with some strong arm tactics. (sorry can't think of which one now). I'm not advocating such tactics but if you think objectively, as if you were in the ET's place, how would you solve some of the problems you see? You could just let people fight over water, let them die if they have not enough food, create the food and water, or relocate populations. Some things might be solved by giving the UN a set of huge teeth and some imaginitive people. It seems that if the top ten or twenty countries (in money, prestige, population, or whatever) agree they can do most anything. They just never agree very much. So we need money to get researchers to work on how to align many countries on a certain issue. Think about WWII and how Japan was transformed overnight. Why do people think this can't happen in other countries? (No, it doesn't take a bomb!). Groupware and coordinated media might work to feed the same information to the entire world and get everyone literally on the same wavelength. It's just a little bitty world 8000 miles wide, folks!
Hope we make it. I wouldn't mind living forever..
Great! Now if anybody from slashdot lives in any of the states that are still suing Micro$oft, they can make file formats one of the main objects of redress. Force them to open all file formats forever (do it in one state and the whole world loves you). Maybe even force M$ to adopt open standards as defined by another organization (openoffice.org might be nice, ISO would be much slower:) on its monopolistic software.
About the above post from alizard about Community PACs (give your rep a kilobuck and call them) this is really interesting and it works.
I can tell you from experience that my father successfully got congresspeople elected with a PAC and he is no politician. Just a doctor (now retired, this was some years ago) who was fighting to keep his practice alive despite being told by insurance companies what to prescribe. He got thousands of doctors in three states to act (the purpose was to build a doctors' HMO and hospital, and they got pretty far before some sharks took over) and I believe they got a lot of attention (up to the president) and helped get a congressman elected. An anti-bigmusic/anti-closedsource PAC might be interesting if you could convince geeks to 1) put up money and 2) speak out. Of course maybe just sending the money to the EFF is best, not an expert about politics myself.
2. Limited feedback. Would be much more interesting as a tool for discovery if users could grade their findings. Presumably annotation would allow memos to be posted.
3a. Privacy concerns, i.e. this would seem to provide more transparency to crowds. And Slashdotters might become more predictable. (Nah!)
3b. Privacy concerns II. By announcing statistics of aggregate use it might be possible for a repressive regime (China, Scientology) to gain ammunition against individual websites by being able to prove how many visitors they had and (by purchasing an advertisement on an associated server like yahoo) what their IP addresses and demographic profile are (as impled by 3a above). ActiveX or Javascript exploits may also target heavy traffic streams with relatively little effort.
4. Confusing intent. Adding visible backlinks seems quite valuable. However the client still cannot look more than one ply above its current location in what is still an undirected tangle. Is the tangle team (nice name by the way) aware of the large body of work already accomplished in annotation, syntactic web, Xanadu, etc.? What pressures exist to get people to take the less-travelled routes, or is the purpose to increase the traffic of popular sites? In that case are annotations superfluous? More docs please.
Gelernter is not full of shit though he may say some thing which are intended to provoke reactions. Also his main target is not geeks which is actually neat and intelligent for a UI designer. Wish he'd done Linux first but then again, his current strategy is better. Too bad it requires you to have XP..
Lifestreams which I tried a few years ago was extremely interesting although pretty darn slow, it organized docs in windows and seemed to be a java based daemon which you could access through the web. It appears that was the beginning of Scopeware. You can see an article he did in Wired magazine in 1997 here.
Too bad 98% of the posts on Slashdot are so idiotic and conceited. Think about it. The most hyped company for UI on linux fails, the most celebrated UI ideas in Linux are motif, Windows look-alikes and "themes" (spare me), and a guy who has some of the most interesting ideas, plus experience, plus working code, plus what seems like a real strategy or something, gets clobbered.
How many posters actually tried the code before reacting and saying how full of shit he is etc., or is everyone so sure they would do better in an NYT interview? I'm going to install this thing, though I might have to buy a hard disk first..
Anyway consider this little fact. BeOS had some fantastic search capabilities with its queries (automatically updated search results running fast, in real time) but they are toast (well I hope the technology is revived, I need it). Unless you maybe have google for intranet or altavista on your machine, you don't have as usable a search facility probably. Windows searching is terribly slow and dumb. And most of my own efforts and disk space is always spent trying to ensure the longevity of work and files across multiple computer systems, across years of evolving systems.
This guy has a point and even if it isn't the be all and end all we need to help him and other scientists try and solve the problems before Microsoft does. I am no M$ fan but didn't you notice Windows looks nicer than it used to? My hope is Apple liscenses something like Scopeware and this sort of idea sees a lot of work and home desktops. I hope he gets rich!
Slashdot Mirror
Certainly we need more people thinking outside the box, at least being able to see that there is a box and some other things are maybe outside it.
Another example of this kind of thinking to me is Damian's Perl Module Quantum::Superposition which lets you take a swing at a totally new way of formulating algorithms.
When I read Lanier's article I thought (as he noted on his homepage) that 10M is small, but the difficulty of writing good code by professionals is true (Microsoft, NASA,
I've already started getting some new ideas.. and though that $2K seminar in February he's going to be at disappointed me (hallway conversations probably will be most interesting?) I say THANKS to Jaron (and a couple of Slashdot posts..). Catalysts and cell receptors jumbling in my head.. and meanwhile got me thinking positively about how to make my current programming jobs less arduous.
Consider the transition metals in this neat periodic chart (the map seems to be the territory!):
A. "Transition Metals" is a cool-sounding idea for a product naming strategy. And, the actual elements are conductors of heat and electricity (sounds good and electronic) and many are seen as valuable by the general public (gold, etc.)
B. Titanium -> Itanium. It's been taken.
C. Iridum? Taken, went down in flames (darn!)
D. Zirconium, sounds cheap. Nix.
E. Chromium? Well M$ has already taken it, but thought it sounded cooler as "Chrome".
D. Palladium -> Apallium! Sounds apalling! Can't use it.
E. There are already companies using palladium.com, vanadium.com, technetium.com (tucows got it, good show!), niobium.com's gone, someone called Dragon Information has yttrium.com. Aaand Tungsten's been used recently.
Some icky company with tons of popups stole selenium.com and .net!
Okay, you get the drift. What's left? Some of the names have been taken, or sound too prosaic or downright scandalous (Scandium, though naming after Scandanavia is neat). Some are doomed due to prevaling western opinion; Osmium sounds like Osamaium, Hassium sounds (just a little) like Husseinium.
Obviously high-paid marketgeeks feel they've struck oil with ..the periodic chart! Maybe now's a good time to strike a blow for freedom. Anyone want to register remaining ones, I also recommend the Noble Gases because they're.. um, Nobel! I mean Noble! But you can forget Xenon (Intel got that too). Anyone feel like researching good candidates make your posts count!
I've asked for a quote on seaborgium.com. But may I recommend bromium?
Jeffrey Shaw, one of the most amazing artists alive. His EVE from 1993 and Golden Calf from 1995 (animation) seem to be good examples of this idea. Techies should study Art!
of the site ( tried to click on wayback machine's link to their photos).
hmm also looks like they are getting the usual slashdotting..
I looked around at sites like ircache.net, vancouver-webpages.com, and elsewhere looking for a way to get pages from caches besides of course hitting them from the side of the served network (i.e. with a browser or a spider like wget or wwwwoffle).
There is a hierarchical cache at U. of Melbourne for students there, so if anyone is reading this from a dorm there you might be able to spider the cache of the site to preserve it on your hard drive.
If anyone is familiar with caching protocol and how to query other caches on the net, why not share them here. Much of the data may be on the net. Likewise if anyone knows how much is replicated on other sites it will save people the trouble. I'm just worried that the contents of these caches may expire one day soon..
this guy is confused, sorry.
I wouldn't mind having a third as many articles per day if they had more clues and less cheerleading.
Or is this a mutual masturbation and crawling into our navels society? Feh.
His lab is here. Please try to stagger your access so you don't slashdot him.
The Japanese side of the main Phonon Device Lab has pdf'd scans of newspaper articles from September 10. The Japanese also uses 1.4 Terabits/sq. inch.
A drawing on the bottom of this page shows that his ultimate goal of 4 Petabits/square inch is based on a bit being stored in a 0.4 nanometer square, the size of one BaTiO3 crystal.
Interesting experiment on his page tells you in English how to make piezoelectric ceramics(in collaboration with Washington U.).
It looks like there are a whole raft of people from Tohoku U. at U. Washington doing nano-bio research, mems, piezoelectrics.. maybe sq. inch came from Washington. Their Center for Nanotechnology looks neat.
I wonder if they were involved in this storage technology development.
Thank you for replying! I actually read the site and posted before seeing your post about not being ready yet. Sorry.
That said, I think it might be a really good idea to split the site into two parts, one for home users (Mom) and one for techies. Mom also likes good graphics but I don't think that is going to be the most important thing, the main thing is that people will trust that the product is easy to use if the site is easy to use. A clear and unjumbled presentation, with maybe a screenshot of the installer (I think lindows.com does something there) would be great. Sorry I don't have time to help out but good luck!
P.S. I was serious when I mentioned that if you could do without making linux partitions (one or two distros do this) and even run off the CD you are a mile ahead.
How about this? Give people the option of just popping the CD into a computer wherever they are and have it discover network settings and pull their personal files down over ftp (if they have a private ftp folder somewhere). Neat and not too hard maybe. Luck!
Take off the tinfoil and a quick read of the site..
- 4 clicks to install = good
- giving simplification a shot = good
- developed own installer (i guess) = good
- no info about what to do with an iso = bad
- explained in terms of red hat = bad
- unanswered questions on page = bad
- needs:
screenshots
info on hardware requirements
info on supported locales (or is it just English)
info for developers on "why develop for distro x"
needs a "why use our distro" page for users
- might be interesting if you could do work just by popping CD in (without partitioning or doing a big install).. or is that what it does? dunno.
Cross-dressing? Orgies?
This is going to be a bitch.
Are developers expected to preserve some kind of rivalry between open code from real and open code from apple?
What would happen if they got mixed together and were "given back" to real/helix? this is confusing, at least the last time I tried to get through the maze of documents on the helix page.
no jack, ass.
nice circumvention.
1. Promote interest in mathematics
2. Provide unassailable code publication anywhere in the galaxy (works on Earth too).
Okay, take your decss or whatever and gzip it. What are the odds that this archive exists in the teradigit string (probability indexed by archive length please)?
Obviously you just need to provide the offset in the teradigit string which ought to be available online somewhere.
But even if it isn't publically available, since (thanks to Zapman (2662) 's link) you can get any digit of pi without calculating the whole thing, you can resurrect the archive easily.
If SETI incorporated this kind of analysis we might even have a free distributed client..
I found it hilarious that the story "Professor breaks own record -- for thrill of pi" ended with a link named "Subscribe to the P-I".
And well it should! For it is from the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, whose logo is a globe with the initials "P-I". Someone should get those guys to put it on their top page.
Perhaps they held back since it also was posted exactly 61 years after the invasion of Perl Harbor. Oh well.
FWIW, I've been hoping desperately that they'd find some neat geometrical patterns in Pi. My guess is that the reason the mathematicians cannot prove that all those digits are random is that they aren't.. they are just using an extremely good hash algorithm to encrypt the darn thing.
Date: Fri, 6 Dec 2002 08:36:12 -0500 (EST)
From: Matt Rosin
To: phil_lelyveld@corp.disney.com
Subject: Your post
Dear Sir:
It has been quite amusing to read about the results of your actions as
noted in the story "Shocker: Despicable Conduct From a Disney Lawyer" on
the front page of slashdot.org.
I would like to say that I have long since stopped buying your company's
products as I do not support such duplicity and sheer underhandedness as
appears to have become a cancer in your organization. I, representing the
hearts and souls of approximately 1 million anime fans, sincerely
recommend that you take a day off to reconsider your professional and
corporate goals. You can start with doing a search for Disney on slashdot
after reading the thread about yourself.
Of course if you choose to refuse this chance at improving your karma
then you can just go on living your life as your did before, seems like
a spectacular version of hell.
Sincerely yours,
Matt Rosin
CEO Telebody Inc.
I don't know what happened and don't have the DVD but I've seent he original a few times.
Maybe it's a copy protection experiment.
Maybe it's a wierd attempt to (over)compensate for a phenomenon that is real in the still photo world - popualr images and the characteristics of print film make for much stronger red in U.S. film (e.g. Kodak especially when used in people shots) and much stronger blue in Japan.
Maybe it's a massive screwup (no kidding)
Maybe it's an attempt by Disney to hurt Ghibli (wouldn't put it past them)
Maybe it was made with a cutting edge "superior" technology that unfortunately looks like utter crap on most sets and nobody every tried it at home before going to print
At any rate those screenshots look like utter crap in comparison to the original film and what is considered reasonable in Japan.
The story's focus on Disney is completely idiotic. Focus on the company that made the film, not the one that succeeded in getting it after ripping off or destroying as much Japanese anime as it could up to now.
I don't know how the voiceovers are in English. If possible, see the Japanese version with subtitles as well some time, it is quite impressive. Of course Hayao Miyazaki's work is all fabulous. Check out Laputa!
P.S. There is a book of Spirited Away as well, in English I believe. And in convenience stores they also sell segments of the movie as gorgeous shot-by-shot full color glossy manga books. Lots of Spirited Away (Sen to Chihiro) stuff. I believe there is a shop in New York that handles tons of Japanese anime related stuff downtown.
Incidentally the name Sen to Chihiro refers to her name being stolen (I won't say by whom). The only character left can be read as Sen as well as Chi. Sen means a thousand.
Pros
-Used for reading books and using astro programs
-Clie memory stick (64 mb) with tiny vaio (integral stick port) is awesome.
-I know everyone in my brothers' company used to use Blackberries all the time for email.
Cons
-Have lost important info several times since if I read for too long, the battery goes dead
-Use only the monochrome US version despite owning color Japanese version, due to batteries again
-No security of course though I think about it a bit when entering a credit card number or a password (yeah there is software but..)
-Always think how it would be 10x more useful with wireless attachment to my CGI todo list but always have something else I want to buy when I have the free cash. (That's my fault sure).
-No Perl on it, have to use CodeWarrior to build useful stuff
-Too slow to use and can't handle drawings or Japanese like a Zaurus could (even Japan version input method is about 1/100 as useful).
-No keyboard
Really there was no point in rolling back time at all, with the accuracy we're talking about it seems obvious that this ancient quark traveler would likely have been guided toward us by the graviational lens that is the mass of the LMC. That, or some unknown process in the LMC could conceivably have generated the strange stuff. Of course at a velocity of only .0015c it would have passed the LMC around 120 million years ago.
It seems pretty hard to say where it came from especially with this one piece of information, but we might very well be in for some surprises if we get enough seismic data in the future to plot against the COBE map!
Some interesting links here.
Something like the picture in close orbit and supplied by the earth is still a part of the ecosystem and far more vulnerable than a terrestrial installation built with a similar investment.
Making a fund for preservation of the species is a great idea though. Primarily it could be used to provide a "safety buffer" by recognizing the need for specific research and quickly funding it.
Ultimately we need vibrant colonies on other planets (presumably around other stars and not in contact with Earth) to be safe. It might be very difficult to guarantee the "not in contact with Earth" part, but at least a planet-killer meteor impact would no longer be a total loss.
It would be much better to take the money and invest in some targetted areas.
It is VERY CLEAR that a possible answer to the "where are all the radio signals from other civilizations" question is, "most of them killed themselves in a science accident soon after getting to the point where sending signals became economic".
I would off-hand humbly suggest investing in: :(
-Nanotechnology Research and related Safety Technology (defensive, maybe it will be possible to make mistakes in a safe environment before others in nonsafe environments).
-Astronomy and Astrophysics, in particular development of extremely high-power interferometers (to gain clues as to what distant catastrophes looked like).
-SETI, most bang for your buck and we might get a clue before killing ourselves off.
-Space construction research, not for colonies in space but for high energy research.(iffy, they'll probably build on Earth where the physicists are anyway).
-Risk Assessment and related research in biochemistry, nanotechnology, and particle physics. (Of course it is probably difficult to direct research just at risk assessment but at least to fund researchers so that it is something they spend brainpower on regularly).
-International collaborative research funding and coordination. Basically if all countries could be aligned then there might be less possibility of the defeatist "if we don't study it someone else will".
-Powerful, pragmatic projects to eliminate poverty, hunger, water shortages, and racial hate.
-Risk management programs in AI. Needed in the next 30 years apparently (cf. Kurzweil).
-Stabilization of world politics and maybe even the "War on Terrorism". Don't laugh but I expected this for years. Of course having thousands of people killed is a big impetus but I don't think that is the main reason behind the U.S. administration's actions.
Basically the world cannot afford "rogue states" or "terrorist cells" which as the years go by will gain progressively scarier weapons. War is perhaps not the answer and already I worry that centuries more of hatred could have been instilled in the middle east, but the fact is you just don't want pathological people to be in control of the real heavy shit. Of course we are a few definitions shy here still.. "what's 'pathological'?"
Still I cannot help but think about some scifi stories, which after all are exercises in imagination and extrapolation. Often a powerful, sneaky alien ship will land on the planet Earth and stop all war, disease, etc. with some strong arm tactics. (sorry can't think of which one now). I'm not advocating such tactics but if you think objectively, as if you were in the ET's place, how would you solve some of the problems you see? You could just let people fight over water, let them die if they have not enough food, create the food and water, or relocate populations. Some things might be solved by giving the UN a set of huge teeth and some imaginitive people. It seems that if the top ten or twenty countries (in money, prestige, population, or whatever) agree they can do most anything. They just never agree very much. So we need money to get researchers to work on how to align many countries on a certain issue. Think about WWII and how Japan was transformed overnight. Why do people think this can't happen in other countries? (No, it doesn't take a bomb!). Groupware and coordinated media might work to feed the same information to the entire world and get everyone literally on the same wavelength. It's just a little bitty world 8000 miles wide, folks!
Hope we make it. I wouldn't mind living forever..
Great! Now if anybody from slashdot lives in any of the states that are still suing Micro$oft, they can make file formats one of the main objects of redress. Force them to open all file formats forever (do it in one state and the whole world loves you). Maybe even force M$ to adopt open standards as defined by another organization (openoffice.org might be nice, ISO would be much slower :) on its monopolistic software.
only 10 gigs?? how much of this IRIS software and digital photography will fit on it?
I can tell you from experience that my father successfully got congresspeople elected with a PAC and he is no politician. Just a doctor (now retired, this was some years ago) who was fighting to keep his practice alive despite being told by insurance companies what to prescribe. He got thousands of doctors in three states to act (the purpose was to build a doctors' HMO and hospital, and they got pretty far before some sharks took over) and I believe they got a lot of attention (up to the president) and helped get a congressman elected. An anti-bigmusic/anti-closedsource PAC might be interesting if you could convince geeks to 1) put up money and 2) speak out. Of course maybe just sending the money to the EFF is best, not an expert about politics myself.
1. Server load.
2. Limited feedback. Would be much more interesting as a tool for discovery if users could grade their findings. Presumably annotation would allow memos to be posted.
3a. Privacy concerns, i.e. this would seem to provide more transparency to crowds. And Slashdotters might become more predictable. (Nah!)
3b. Privacy concerns II. By announcing statistics of aggregate use it might be possible for a repressive regime (China, Scientology) to gain ammunition against individual websites by being able to prove how many visitors they had and (by purchasing an advertisement on an associated server like yahoo) what their IP addresses and demographic profile are (as impled by 3a above). ActiveX or Javascript exploits may also target heavy traffic streams with relatively little effort.
4. Confusing intent. Adding visible backlinks seems quite valuable. However the client still cannot look more than one ply above its current location in what is still an undirected tangle. Is the tangle team (nice name by the way) aware of the large body of work already accomplished in annotation, syntactic web, Xanadu, etc.? What pressures exist to get people to take the less-travelled routes, or is the purpose to increase the traffic of popular sites? In that case are annotations superfluous? More docs please.
5. (?) a bug in slash they note.
Lifestreams which I tried a few years ago was extremely interesting although pretty darn slow, it organized docs in windows and seemed to be a java based daemon which you could access through the web. It appears that was the beginning of Scopeware. You can see an article he did in Wired magazine in 1997 here.
Too bad 98% of the posts on Slashdot are so idiotic and conceited. Think about it. The most hyped company for UI on linux fails, the most celebrated UI ideas in Linux are motif, Windows look-alikes and "themes" (spare me), and a guy who has some of the most interesting ideas, plus experience, plus working code, plus what seems like a real strategy or something, gets clobbered.
How many posters actually tried the code before reacting and saying how full of shit he is etc., or is everyone so sure they would do better in an NYT interview? I'm going to install this thing, though I might have to buy a hard disk first..
Anyway consider this little fact. BeOS had some fantastic search capabilities with its queries (automatically updated search results running fast, in real time) but they are toast (well I hope the technology is revived, I need it). Unless you maybe have google for intranet or altavista on your machine, you don't have as usable a search facility probably. Windows searching is terribly slow and dumb. And most of my own efforts and disk space is always spent trying to ensure the longevity of work and files across multiple computer systems, across years of evolving systems.
This guy has a point and even if it isn't the be all and end all we need to help him and other scientists try and solve the problems before Microsoft does. I am no M$ fan but didn't you notice Windows looks nicer than it used to? My hope is Apple liscenses something like Scopeware and this sort of idea sees a lot of work and home desktops. I hope he gets rich!