In related news, following the announcement that South Korea would soon be deploying robotic turrets, North Korea announced that the army would double their production of zerglings and mutalisks.
Really interesting story about a neuroscientist who studies the links between genes, neurobiology, and crime. He's always argued that genes determine behavior: serial killers are killers because of their genes and their brain structure. But one day, at the family barbecue, he learns that his family tree is full of violent criminals and killers, including the infamous axe-murderess Lizzy Borden. So as an experiment, he decides to do genetic testing and brain scans on his family. His mother, his siblings, his kids: all normal. No abnormal genes. No unusual brain activity. Except for *one* family member, one person who was tested and who has both the abnormal genes and abnormal brain activity linked with sociopathic behavior. The person? It's the researcher himself.
So, assuming the dude doesn't have a freezer full of dead hookers we haven't found out about, that would seem to argue that it's a little simplistic to argue that a gene or genes automatically turn you into a serial killer. Studies of mental disorders have long shown that these things are complicated. If you have an identical twin who's schizophrenic, odds are pretty good that you're going to be schizophrenic- but it's not even close to 100% of the time, it's more like 50%.
Let's look at this practically, though. Say that you find out your mother, your father, your brother, or your sister has a gene that is linked with sociopathic behavior. Should they be locked up or prevented from reproducing? What if a routine screening discovered that you had that gene?
Netflix has way more streaming content for that same $10 a month, and no ads, and X-Box, etc. integration. Hulu will be a fail.
My understanding of the situation is that Netflix streaming doesn't actually generate any money for the company directly. What it has done is to generate record growth in the number of new subscribers. It's what in the business world is called a loss leader- something that's either underpriced or free so as to improve the overall business. What's unclear is how they're going to actually make money from streaming. Presumably that means paid subscriptions or advertisements, or both. In theory, iTunes is another possible contender. But when you're charging 2$ for 21 minutes of The Daily Show or $3 for 22 minutes of South Park, I doubt it will cause customers to line up at the metaphorical door.
If you didn't hear, Apple's market capitalization recently surpassed that of Microsoft. That means if you add up all the Apple stock out there, it's worth a total of 234 billion dollars as of last Friday; i.e. if you happened to have a quarter of a trillion dollars just lying around, you could in theory buy the whole company*. Microsoft, meanwhile, is worth 226 billion dollars. True, the stock market is driven as much by fear and greed as any rational forces, and Microsoft still hauled in more money, but as of Friday, the various institutions and individuals out there felt that as a company Apple Computer was worth more than Microsoft. Think about that for a second. Ten years ago, Microsoft was the unstoppable Borg, ruthlessly destroying or assimilating all who opposed them. Now there's a new Borg, and their cube is stylish and made of shiny white lucite and brushed aluminum, and they have millions and millions of brainwashed drones plugged into their machines. It's pretty clearly the end of the Microsoft Era.
The reason for the shift is pretty obvious. Apple has focused on the next generation of consumer electronics, first with the iPod, now with the iPhone, and next (maybe) with the iPad. They realized that the OS wars were done, and focused on the next big fight. A while ago, Jobs declared Apple's mission was to be 'the new Sony', i.e. to own personal electronics the way Sony did in the 80s and 90s. They've done it. Microsoft never really got this.
I know how we can get back at China: Google-bomb them. Like, a search on the words "totalitarian dicks" would bring up the Communist Party web page. Or we could make it so a search on "Communist Party" would link to the web site of Amnesty International, or the Dalai Lama.
Agreed 110% percent. Many of the most successful companies are motivated by values, rather than profits alone. Google is a perfect example- they believe that providing free information, freely, is making the world a better place. Likewise, Apple believes (with cult-like intensity) that making technology easy to use and beautiful makes people's lives better.
The desire to help people and make a positive difference is a powerful one. The Communists were naive to believe that altruism alone could make a society work, and that they could ignore self-interest. But it's equally foolish to think that self interest alone is the best way to run a company or a society. If that were true, why did Wall Street- motivated almost entirely by selfish greed- implode so spectacularly? The entire point of Wall Street is to make money, but in the end, their short-sighted selfishness caused them to lose billions of dollars and nearly cause a second Great Depression.
they'd just end up looking like nosy assholes who just can't seem to stay out of other people's business.
We already give China shit over their human rights abuses, so many people already think we're butting into other people's business. Taking a stance on Google (freedom of information and dissent arguably being a human right) is more of the same. But in the past, the U.S. has been an important force in pushing human rights. The War on Terror has cost us the moral high ground in the international community, but it's something we should try to reclaim.
Incidentally, they took down Columbian drug lord Pablo Escobar in a similar way. Despite his taste for hookers and bimbos, he was actually a devoted family man, and kept in constant contact with his family even as he was on the run from the U.S. and Columbians. They were finally able to track a phone call he made to his family- if I recall, he knew they were looking for him, but he stayed on the phone a bit longer than he should have.
Exactly. If people can't sift through the mass of information (and misinformation) we have today, what hope does a computer have?
An individual person can't, the volume is too large, and the information is often dispersed. However, large networks of people could potentially gather and bring together that intelligence in a timely fashion so that it can be acted on. Obviously, this didn't happen before Pearl Harbor, or 9/11. But can this type of intelligence gathering be done in the real world- can we collect dispersed information, bring that information together, and do in hours, rather than days? The answer is "yes", and to see why, just look at the DARPA balloon challenge.
I really didn't get what DARPA's red balloons were all about until I read this article. It seemed sort of abstract, something about social networks. I suspect that this question (how do we collect and assemble those needles of intelligence from a vast haystack of noise?) is the question that DARPA is trying to answer with those balloons. In the case of Pearl Harbor, or 9/11, or the Fort Hood shootings, there was actionable intelligence. The problem was that there wasn't a mechanism to collect that intelligence; the people who knew the facts, and the people who needed the facts, didn't know each other. What DARPA asked was: how can we collect intelligence when the intelligence is held by different groups of people (think different government agencies, like CIA, NSA, FBI, Customs and Immigration, different governments, or just people in the streets) and those people don't know the people who need the information (higher-ups in Homeland Security or the White House)? We know what failure looks like (Pearl Harbor, 9/11) but what does success look like? How and why do certain intelligence-gathering systems actually work, when they do work?
Their unconventional approach here was to set up an intelligence problem (balloons dispersed all over the country, need to collect info within 24 hours) and then let other people figure out how to solve it. Obviously terrorists will not be painted bright red, clearly marked, and stationary, but the principles of effective network intelligence can be applied to more difficult problems. I suspect that DARPA is going to spend a lot of time studying the data about how the intel came in for these various efforts.
Mice are more of a foraging creature... they look for food and hide from predators, fighting back only when cornered. A FPS, on the other hand, lends itself to predatory tactics...
The implication is that cats would be better FPS players than mice. The problem of course is that cats are sit-and-wait predators, sitting quietly and waiting for their prey to move before suddenly striking. In other words, campers. So playing on a server against a bunch of cats would probably suck. Dogs, which are pursuit predators, would be probably be better opponents. Probably better at playing cooperatively as well, given the pack mentality.
I think it's worth asking: should a corporation be held responsible for the way its products are used? You could argue that the individual is the one who should be held responsible. An individual can pick up a scalpel and use it to perform a lifesaving surgery, or slit someone's throat. The individual can take that laptop and either write poetry or hate speech. Obviously you have to have limits; I don't think any reasonable person could hold a company that makes box cutters responsible for 9/11. They had a reasonable expectation that their products would primarily be used to cut boxes, not to wage jihad. A corporation can't forsee every conceivable use of its products.
But I think that those words are the key- reasonable expectation. What if a corporation knows precisely how its products will be used? I mean, if the Iranian government makes it clear that it wants to be able to monitor and control internet content, would your company be guilty of helping to suppress democracy? Is it OK to say "we're about the bottom line, not the politics"? If so, then where do you draw the line? What if there's ethnic tension in Rwanda again, and the government calls up and says they'd like to buy a few million machetes? Would it be morally acceptable to make a tidy profit selling tools that you have a reasonable expectation will be used to hack apart other human beings? And if that sale isn't acceptable, then why is selling technology to suppress political dissent OK? I know we all have to make a living, but does the fact that you're being paid somehow make it OK?
I guess my take on things is that just because a lot of corporations help dictatorships, that doesn't make it the right thing to do. Likewise, the fact that the United States is guilty of domestic spying on a massive scale and has it's own history of suppressing democracy in Iran doesn't mean that Iran can't be criticized... although it *does* suggest that perhaps other nations, with cleaner hands, should be leading the charge here. Nobody's perfect, but that doesn't justify immoral actions- it just means we all have sins to atone for.
Making the "Delete" key larger isn't a bad idea. But since Windows is still the most widely used operating system out there, maybe they should make the "Control" and "Alt" keys larger as well...
Car batteries are made of lead, that's why they are so heavy.They should use their advanced inflatable technology and just replace the lead batteries with lightweight, inflatable batteries.
Well, that depends. If the ayatollahs show the original trilogy, it could work. But showing the prequels would possibly result in the overthrow of the regime.
The best thing the U.S. can do is stay the hell out of it until such time as a genuine democracy takes root there, at which point they should promptly recognize the new government.
Wrong. If the Iranians will strongly reject any U.S. involvement, then the answer is simple: we need to wholeheartedly endorse Amadinejad. Call him a hero and offer him a medal. And if we really want to turn up the heat, we get Israel to support him as well. He won't last a week.
All I can say is... that is one dorky looking spaceship. Looks sort of like some bike tires in an awkward three-way. I mean, come on! Can you imagine showing up for a space battle in that kind of thing? The rest of the galaxy would just think we were completely uncool. It'd be like the alien commander would take one look at the screen and he would hiss from his fifteen slime-covered mouths, "That's their ship? That thing? Wait, you're sure it's not like a refinery, or a space station, or some kind of orbital exercise facility? Maybe a decoy, and they have like a really awesome spaceship hidden behind it? Wow, so that's really the flagship of the Human fleet? Oh. Man, I feel sorry for these guys... maybe we should go easy on them." And then our admiral would have to lie and be all like, "Uh, it's not really my ship. Yeah, my ship's really badass. But it's in the shop. New photon torpedo tubes and a couple heavy laser banks. And we're putting some bitchin' flames on the side. This is just a rental till my real ship is back from the shop."
I am not saying that every spaceship has to be as awesome as the Millennium Falcon, but is he saying that we can solve the problem of harnessing dark energy, and we can solve the problem of warping the space-time continuum, but we can't figure out how to do it without building something that looks like an intergalactic Segway?
I think the irony here is that not only do some people feel that life has given them a raw deal, on top of all their other problems they are now regarded as mentally ill. Isn't that just going to make them even more bitter?
Wouldn't a red surface provide a substantial cooling effect as well? True, it's absorbing the longer wavelengths such as blues and greens, but it's reflecting the shorter ones, presumably including the infrared, which is where a lot of the heat is coming from. So perhaps those red clay tiles serve a purpose?
Just use white minerals in the asphalt. Quartz and limestone, either as gravel-sized or sand-sized grains, would provide good traction and significantly increase the reflectiveness of the surface. Limestone does tend to dissolve in weak acids, but it's slow enough that it shouldn't decrease the lifespan of the road that much more than standard wear and tear, particularly in drier climates.
This is a movie that was practically ruined by lens flare and/or screen whiteouts in almost every scene.
You guys criticize the lens flare without understanding why it's in the movie. It's not a visual effect so much as a subtle form of foreshadowing. **SPOILER ALERT!** You see, in the next movie all these Federation vessels start disappearing in the Neutral Zone. After investigating, Kirk and Spock discover that the thing that is causing this is a giant lens flare. They initially try to battle the lens flare using photon torpedos, but this is proven to be counterproductive, because on impact the photon torpedos simply cause more lens flares, which add to the strength of the monster. Uhura tries to communicate with it and it turns out that the lens flare is actually a hyperintelligent being formed entirely of optical artifacts, and they have to decide whether they can negotiate with the lens flare creature, or somehow outwit it, before the entire galaxy is consumed by lens flares.
Am I the only person who can't see 'the purpose' of the scene with Kirk getting chased by progressively larger beasts on the ice world other than to show off
I gotta agree 110% on this one. This scene didn't advance the plot, it didn't develop the characters. It introduced a new conflict (Kirk trying to not get eaten) which was supposed to be scary but it completely distracts from the existing conflicts between Kirk and Spock, and between the Enterprise and the other ship. This was more annoying than anything... it's like, 'aw, crap, I gotta sit through a bunch of special effects before I can get back to the story'. If you cut it out, you'd have a better movie.
The one place where the special effects made me think 'aw, yeah!' was the scene where the Enterprise warps into the upper atmosphere of Titan and then slowly emerges out of the clouds. Not because it was visually appealing, but because it was *emotionally* satisfying... in the same way that it's emotionally satisfying when you see the Enterprise slowly rise up behing the Reliant in the Mutara Nebula, or when you see the Millennium Falcon pull that immelman turn and come barreling back towards Cloud City to rescue Luke.
Ulzard was the name of the monster that fought Godzilla in "Godzilla vs. Ulzard the Cybermonster" and later appeared in Ultraman as Ultraman's arch-nemesis, Ulzard, Lord of the Cybermonsters. The costume was made from the body of a bear suit, a samurai helmet, a bunch of tin foil and duct tape wrapped around the limbs, and a keyboard on his chest. He was pretty popular in the early 1960s, I think, before the company was sued and shut down for ripping off a "Gamera" script too closely. There was talk of a movie being made in 2007, with Nicolas Cage to play as Ulzard's creator, Dr. Gohoro. But the studio backed out of the deal and they are now back to trying to secure funding.
Slashdot Mirror
If Milo can't think for himself then he's nothing close to a virtual human.
But he would be part of Fox News' target demographic.
In related news, following the announcement that South Korea would soon be deploying robotic turrets, North Korea announced that the army would double their production of zerglings and mutalisks.
Really interesting story about a neuroscientist who studies the links between genes, neurobiology, and crime. He's always argued that genes determine behavior: serial killers are killers because of their genes and their brain structure. But one day, at the family barbecue, he learns that his family tree is full of violent criminals and killers, including the infamous axe-murderess Lizzy Borden. So as an experiment, he decides to do genetic testing and brain scans on his family. His mother, his siblings, his kids: all normal. No abnormal genes. No unusual brain activity. Except for *one* family member, one person who was tested and who has both the abnormal genes and abnormal brain activity linked with sociopathic behavior. The person? It's the researcher himself.
So, assuming the dude doesn't have a freezer full of dead hookers we haven't found out about, that would seem to argue that it's a little simplistic to argue that a gene or genes automatically turn you into a serial killer. Studies of mental disorders have long shown that these things are complicated. If you have an identical twin who's schizophrenic, odds are pretty good that you're going to be schizophrenic- but it's not even close to 100% of the time, it's more like 50%.
Let's look at this practically, though. Say that you find out your mother, your father, your brother, or your sister has a gene that is linked with sociopathic behavior. Should they be locked up or prevented from reproducing? What if a routine screening discovered that you had that gene?
Netflix has way more streaming content for that same $10 a month, and no ads, and X-Box, etc. integration. Hulu will be a fail. My understanding of the situation is that Netflix streaming doesn't actually generate any money for the company directly. What it has done is to generate record growth in the number of new subscribers. It's what in the business world is called a loss leader- something that's either underpriced or free so as to improve the overall business. What's unclear is how they're going to actually make money from streaming. Presumably that means paid subscriptions or advertisements, or both. In theory, iTunes is another possible contender. But when you're charging 2$ for 21 minutes of The Daily Show or $3 for 22 minutes of South Park, I doubt it will cause customers to line up at the metaphorical door.
If you didn't hear, Apple's market capitalization recently surpassed that of Microsoft. That means if you add up all the Apple stock out there, it's worth a total of 234 billion dollars as of last Friday; i.e. if you happened to have a quarter of a trillion dollars just lying around, you could in theory buy the whole company*. Microsoft, meanwhile, is worth 226 billion dollars. True, the stock market is driven as much by fear and greed as any rational forces, and Microsoft still hauled in more money, but as of Friday, the various institutions and individuals out there felt that as a company Apple Computer was worth more than Microsoft. Think about that for a second. Ten years ago, Microsoft was the unstoppable Borg, ruthlessly destroying or assimilating all who opposed them. Now there's a new Borg, and their cube is stylish and made of shiny white lucite and brushed aluminum, and they have millions and millions of brainwashed drones plugged into their machines. It's pretty clearly the end of the Microsoft Era.
The reason for the shift is pretty obvious. Apple has focused on the next generation of consumer electronics, first with the iPod, now with the iPhone, and next (maybe) with the iPad. They realized that the OS wars were done, and focused on the next big fight. A while ago, Jobs declared Apple's mission was to be 'the new Sony', i.e. to own personal electronics the way Sony did in the 80s and 90s. They've done it. Microsoft never really got this.
I know how we can get back at China: Google-bomb them. Like, a search on the words "totalitarian dicks" would bring up the Communist Party web page. Or we could make it so a search on "Communist Party" would link to the web site of Amnesty International, or the Dalai Lama.
Agreed 110% percent. Many of the most successful companies are motivated by values, rather than profits alone. Google is a perfect example- they believe that providing free information, freely, is making the world a better place. Likewise, Apple believes (with cult-like intensity) that making technology easy to use and beautiful makes people's lives better. The desire to help people and make a positive difference is a powerful one. The Communists were naive to believe that altruism alone could make a society work, and that they could ignore self-interest. But it's equally foolish to think that self interest alone is the best way to run a company or a society. If that were true, why did Wall Street- motivated almost entirely by selfish greed- implode so spectacularly? The entire point of Wall Street is to make money, but in the end, their short-sighted selfishness caused them to lose billions of dollars and nearly cause a second Great Depression.
they'd just end up looking like nosy assholes who just can't seem to stay out of other people's business. We already give China shit over their human rights abuses, so many people already think we're butting into other people's business. Taking a stance on Google (freedom of information and dissent arguably being a human right) is more of the same. But in the past, the U.S. has been an important force in pushing human rights. The War on Terror has cost us the moral high ground in the international community, but it's something we should try to reclaim.
Incidentally, they took down Columbian drug lord Pablo Escobar in a similar way. Despite his taste for hookers and bimbos, he was actually a devoted family man, and kept in constant contact with his family even as he was on the run from the U.S. and Columbians. They were finally able to track a phone call he made to his family- if I recall, he knew they were looking for him, but he stayed on the phone a bit longer than he should have.
I heard the guy was actually turned in by his Facebook friends. They finally got tired of reading all the annoying news about his FarmVille game.
An individual person can't, the volume is too large, and the information is often dispersed. However, large networks of people could potentially gather and bring together that intelligence in a timely fashion so that it can be acted on. Obviously, this didn't happen before Pearl Harbor, or 9/11. But can this type of intelligence gathering be done in the real world- can we collect dispersed information, bring that information together, and do in hours, rather than days? The answer is "yes", and to see why, just look at the DARPA balloon challenge.
I really didn't get what DARPA's red balloons were all about until I read this article. It seemed sort of abstract, something about social networks. I suspect that this question (how do we collect and assemble those needles of intelligence from a vast haystack of noise?) is the question that DARPA is trying to answer with those balloons. In the case of Pearl Harbor, or 9/11, or the Fort Hood shootings, there was actionable intelligence. The problem was that there wasn't a mechanism to collect that intelligence; the people who knew the facts, and the people who needed the facts, didn't know each other. What DARPA asked was: how can we collect intelligence when the intelligence is held by different groups of people (think different government agencies, like CIA, NSA, FBI, Customs and Immigration, different governments, or just people in the streets) and those people don't know the people who need the information (higher-ups in Homeland Security or the White House)? We know what failure looks like (Pearl Harbor, 9/11) but what does success look like? How and why do certain intelligence-gathering systems actually work, when they do work?
Their unconventional approach here was to set up an intelligence problem (balloons dispersed all over the country, need to collect info within 24 hours) and then let other people figure out how to solve it. Obviously terrorists will not be painted bright red, clearly marked, and stationary, but the principles of effective network intelligence can be applied to more difficult problems. I suspect that DARPA is going to spend a lot of time studying the data about how the intel came in for these various efforts.
The implication is that cats would be better FPS players than mice. The problem of course is that cats are sit-and-wait predators, sitting quietly and waiting for their prey to move before suddenly striking. In other words, campers. So playing on a server against a bunch of cats would probably suck. Dogs, which are pursuit predators, would be probably be better opponents. Probably better at playing cooperatively as well, given the pack mentality.
But I think that those words are the key- reasonable expectation. What if a corporation knows precisely how its products will be used? I mean, if the Iranian government makes it clear that it wants to be able to monitor and control internet content, would your company be guilty of helping to suppress democracy? Is it OK to say "we're about the bottom line, not the politics"? If so, then where do you draw the line? What if there's ethnic tension in Rwanda again, and the government calls up and says they'd like to buy a few million machetes? Would it be morally acceptable to make a tidy profit selling tools that you have a reasonable expectation will be used to hack apart other human beings? And if that sale isn't acceptable, then why is selling technology to suppress political dissent OK? I know we all have to make a living, but does the fact that you're being paid somehow make it OK?
I guess my take on things is that just because a lot of corporations help dictatorships, that doesn't make it the right thing to do. Likewise, the fact that the United States is guilty of domestic spying on a massive scale and has it's own history of suppressing democracy in Iran doesn't mean that Iran can't be criticized... although it *does* suggest that perhaps other nations, with cleaner hands, should be leading the charge here. Nobody's perfect, but that doesn't justify immoral actions- it just means we all have sins to atone for.
Making the "Delete" key larger isn't a bad idea. But since Windows is still the most widely used operating system out there, maybe they should make the "Control" and "Alt" keys larger as well...
Car batteries are made of lead, that's why they are so heavy.They should use their advanced inflatable technology and just replace the lead batteries with lightweight, inflatable batteries.
Well, that depends. If the ayatollahs show the original trilogy, it could work. But showing the prequels would possibly result in the overthrow of the regime.
Wrong. If the Iranians will strongly reject any U.S. involvement, then the answer is simple: we need to wholeheartedly endorse Amadinejad. Call him a hero and offer him a medal. And if we really want to turn up the heat, we get Israel to support him as well. He won't last a week.
I am not saying that every spaceship has to be as awesome as the Millennium Falcon, but is he saying that we can solve the problem of harnessing dark energy, and we can solve the problem of warping the space-time continuum, but we can't figure out how to do it without building something that looks like an intergalactic Segway?
I think the irony here is that not only do some people feel that life has given them a raw deal, on top of all their other problems they are now regarded as mentally ill. Isn't that just going to make them even more bitter?
Wouldn't a red surface provide a substantial cooling effect as well? True, it's absorbing the longer wavelengths such as blues and greens, but it's reflecting the shorter ones, presumably including the infrared, which is where a lot of the heat is coming from. So perhaps those red clay tiles serve a purpose?
Just use white minerals in the asphalt. Quartz and limestone, either as gravel-sized or sand-sized grains, would provide good traction and significantly increase the reflectiveness of the surface. Limestone does tend to dissolve in weak acids, but it's slow enough that it shouldn't decrease the lifespan of the road that much more than standard wear and tear, particularly in drier climates.
But if all those computers start malfunctioning, who can we call for tech support?
You guys criticize the lens flare without understanding why it's in the movie. It's not a visual effect so much as a subtle form of foreshadowing. **SPOILER ALERT!** You see, in the next movie all these Federation vessels start disappearing in the Neutral Zone. After investigating, Kirk and Spock discover that the thing that is causing this is a giant lens flare. They initially try to battle the lens flare using photon torpedos, but this is proven to be counterproductive, because on impact the photon torpedos simply cause more lens flares, which add to the strength of the monster. Uhura tries to communicate with it and it turns out that the lens flare is actually a hyperintelligent being formed entirely of optical artifacts, and they have to decide whether they can negotiate with the lens flare creature, or somehow outwit it, before the entire galaxy is consumed by lens flares.
I gotta agree 110% on this one. This scene didn't advance the plot, it didn't develop the characters. It introduced a new conflict (Kirk trying to not get eaten) which was supposed to be scary but it completely distracts from the existing conflicts between Kirk and Spock, and between the Enterprise and the other ship. This was more annoying than anything... it's like, 'aw, crap, I gotta sit through a bunch of special effects before I can get back to the story'. If you cut it out, you'd have a better movie.
The one place where the special effects made me think 'aw, yeah!' was the scene where the Enterprise warps into the upper atmosphere of Titan and then slowly emerges out of the clouds. Not because it was visually appealing, but because it was *emotionally* satisfying... in the same way that it's emotionally satisfying when you see the Enterprise slowly rise up behing the Reliant in the Mutara Nebula, or when you see the Millennium Falcon pull that immelman turn and come barreling back towards Cloud City to rescue Luke.
Ulzard was the name of the monster that fought Godzilla in "Godzilla vs. Ulzard the Cybermonster" and later appeared in Ultraman as Ultraman's arch-nemesis, Ulzard, Lord of the Cybermonsters. The costume was made from the body of a bear suit, a samurai helmet, a bunch of tin foil and duct tape wrapped around the limbs, and a keyboard on his chest. He was pretty popular in the early 1960s, I think, before the company was sued and shut down for ripping off a "Gamera" script too closely. There was talk of a movie being made in 2007, with Nicolas Cage to play as Ulzard's creator, Dr. Gohoro. But the studio backed out of the deal and they are now back to trying to secure funding.