I picked this up off of Neil Gaiman's journal today. I wonder how far in advance the light would have to change to stop a Mini going mach 3. BBC article
The general belief with regard to Disney and anime imports is that Disney has no desire to see full length anime flicks succeed in the US because it would force them to change their style of movie to compete (aka dump the formula flicks).
Consequently, every time a anime comes along that might have a chance of succeeding with the mainstream audiences, Disney buys up the rights to it and then undermarkets it so that nobody ever hears about it or even has the chance to see it. This happened with Princess Mononoke and seems to have happened with Spirited Away.
Note that religions do change to adjust with the times. It used to be that all Catholic masses were spoken in Latin; this is obviously no longer the case. Considering the state of the society described in the review, its not all that hard to imagine that the church might change its beliefs in order to better ensure the safety of its members.
In regards to the question of the immortal soul, why exactly can't a soul be transferred to a machine? Strictly speaking, the human body is a machine; its simply biological rather than mechanical.
I dunno, the article is full of 'what if' and 'could be' and 'possibly'. The theory itself seems to be an alternate consequence of the Global warming theory, which in itself hasn't been conclusively proven or disproven.
Actually, the article is based primary on the studies which have indicated that the percentage of freshwater in the North Atlantic is increased substantially over the past couple of decades. This can be attributed to global warming and the melting of the glaciers, but even the scientists in the article admit they are not certain what the cause is.
The Edge.org has an excellent set of articles written by several of the leading evolutionists. They end up covering most of the major theories currently active in the field. Its well worth the read if you have any interest in the genetics and evolution. Here's the link:
A SSN by itself is not that big of a deal since to do anything worthwhile with an SSN requires knowing who its assigned to. If you can make that connection, then concievably you could use it to track someone's movements around campus, but even that's limited since only the dorms and a couple buildings require card access (at least when I was there).
One risk I can see is if the school still uses a points system keyed off of your card. When I went there, you could buy points for your ID which could be used to buy stuff at the campus stores and some of the cafeterias. I imagine someone could potentially pirate your SSN for that purpose, although we're still talking only a couple hundred dollars at max.
Most digital encoding technologies are lossy to some degree, so there is always going to be some loss of quality when compared to the original CD. Admittedly, a lot of people can't tell the difference or don't care, but for those of us who can tell, the CD is still a must have.
In his memoirs, the physicist Richard Feynman spent a fair amount of time discussing the issues with the space shuttle based on the analysis he performed for the government after the Challenger accident. If my memory serves me right, one of the biggest problems he found was that design decisions were often made on the basis of the availability of existing parts. Thus, maximum reliablity/efficiency/etc was sometimes sacrificed in order to cut down on development costs. The result was that you had a mixture of parts manufactured by a number of companies all trying to work together. Needless to say, this has caused a variety of problems over the years.
As has already been commented, Disney does not own the Jim Henson Company. Disney has made several attempts to buy the company over the years, but for various reasons has never succeeded. What Disney does own is the distribution rights to a fair amount of the Muppet materials; this is what often causes the confusion.
Centralized energy generation is by no means the perfect solution, but it does offer one significant advantage over what we have now. By moving the generation of power out of the cars and into that plants, it is possible to optimize the means of generating electricity for the locale. Thus places which can effectively generate electricity from wind power or solar power can use that rather than fossil fuels.
Of course, the electricity would not have to be generated at the plant. Houses equipped with solar panels, etc could generate their own electricity for their cars.
Environmentalists big beaf with SUV's is not necessarily their emissions...its more the lousy fuel efficiency. Cleaning the air is not going to cut down oil usage in any way, shape, or form. Now if you could make an SUV run on an electric motor and generate all of the electricity in central locations, then you might have an argument.
There are some subtle differences here. Aside from a desire to produce back-up copies of your software, there are very few other legitimate reasons for wanting to copy a software cd.
With music CDs on the other hand, there are a number of legitimate reasons to want be able to copy songs off the cd (creating mixes, portable MP3 players, etc). None of these is in any form illegal; however because there are illegal uses of these technologies, the record companies are attempting to shut down all use of them, whether they are illegal or not.
Technically speaking, the effect is the same: you are not able to copy data off of copy-protected cds; but the overall effect is significantly diffent.
Interesting argument. I think in some cases it was the disease, or at least the effort required to overcome it that made the person successful.
Of course if you want to take the argument a step further, at what point do you actually declare a person acceptibly healthy? In other words, if a person has a 50% chance of early alzheimers, but otherwise will be a mathematical prodigy, should they be ruled out just because of that 50% chance?
If you've ever watched the Coda in the extras section of the Gattaca DVD, you might get a partial answer to this.
The gist of it is that, historyically, there have been tons of significant people (Abe Lincoln, Stephen Hawkings, etc) who would never have been allowed to exist because of a genetic predisposition towards certain diseases. Is this a good reason to swear off pre-birth selection completely? Probably not, but it is an important thing to consider.
The guy is right that having Jupiter as a shield definitely has made a difference in Earth's ability to support life over the long term; however, he doesn't touch on what might the more significant fact: our solarsystem is located in the boondocks of our galaxy. What this means is there is a whole lot less debris floating around to smash into earth. The closer you move towards the galactic core, the more crap there is and the less effective a Jupiter shield would be.
You kinda have to view the Potter books like a gateway drug. Even if the books themselves are just middle of the road, they do get kids to read and given the right guidance, those same kids may then decide to try something else.
As for the commercialism, yes, it is fairly rampant, but that is to be expected. Any book that reaches this level of popularity is going to be scooped up by the media/toy companies. The same is true for cartoons and numerous other forms of media (just take a look at the recent blitz of Gundam toys and models). At least in this case there is a reasonably positive side effect.
My only concern is that now that the movie is out, many of the kids who might have read the book will just settle for the movie. Unfortunately, I don't know that there is much that can be done about that.
Well, if the trailer is any indication of Anakin's behavior throughout the movie, then its fairly clear that whining must be a genetic trait in the Skywalker family.
That or Lucas just has a bad habit of picking whiney actors for his lead roles...
Not really, troll's are generally digging for knee-jerk/emotional reactions (eg: flame wars). Discussions stemming from God's Debris can be a bit more worthwhile than that. Note that I say "can be"; the book does touch on religion at numerous points, which means that in the wrong group, the serious discussion might not work out well.
-Mike Wolf
Re:Adams is smug
on
God's Debris
·
· Score: 2, Informative
I haven't read The Dilbert Future, so I can't comment on it, but I did read God's Debris and did not find it overly smug or anything. Adams actually prefaces the book with some comments saying that he in no way claims that the views expressed in the book are the truth or even necessarily what he believes; his primary intent in the book is just to get your mind moving...I think he even refers to the book as a thought experiment. And he does a very good job accomplishing that. Do his arguments hold up to strong discussion? Not really, but at least they provoke the discussion.
-Mike Wolf
Re:GLOBALIZATION IS ABOUT HAVE EXPLOITING HAVE-NOT
on
Globalization
·
· Score: 1
I think you kinda missed Katz point. One of the first things he says is that globalization is a term that has many conotations, depending on where you are coming from. The dominant, and most negative meaning for the word equates to corporatism, which is exactly as you describe: companies forcing their will on weaker sovereign govts in order to make a greater profit elsewhere. However, globalization can also refer to the continuing spread of ideas and community around the world through mediums such as the internet. Although some of these ideas can be negative (American consumerism comes to mind), there are also a lot of ideas that benefit from a wider audience.
Last time I checked you had to pay for support of proprietary software too. True, sometimes you get a free phone number that you can call when it's not busy, but's that's not an enterprise level support.
I think the point that is being made is that a small company is not necessarily in a position to hire additional employees or retask existing employees to fix or enhance an open source project. Not all costs are monetary. Things like time, resources, etc can often exceed the percieved monetary savings.
This is the most blatant piece of FUD that Microsoft trolls keep spouting. Ever read Microsoft EULA? (or a EULA for any other proprietary software for that matter). It reads, in part, something along the lines of: "To the maximum extent permitted by the applicable law, Microsoft hereby disclaims all liability".
You are right in that there is no legal guarantee of a warantee, but there is often a defacto warantee that stems from that fact that proprietary vendors want to make money, and if one of their customers starts complaining about bugs publically, then there is the potential to lose money. Consequently it is in their best interest to address the problem. Of course this doesn't always work since once a software company reaches a certain size, it can ignore the requests of smaller customers since shear momentum may carry its profits along.
longer interested in the product, it can drop it and you can do absolutely nothing about it. Neither you nor anyone else can continue the project. You are solely at the mercy of the vendor. This is actually one of the key arguments *for* open source.
In the long run, this is why open source is better, but in the short term, there is not much you can do if the open source project you were counting on disappears. Of course, you are even more screwed if a proprietary company drops a product.
Odds are then that you'll never be using J#. At least based on what the articles state, J# is only compliant with MS's last JVM, which was 1.1.4 which is hopelessly out of date. Java has undergone some major changes since then (the new Collections API, NIO, etc) and most Java developers are not going to take a step back just to get a natively compiled app on windows.
The other problem I can see is that part of developing in Java is using 3rd party class libraries, particularly JDBC drivers for database apps. Unless MS provides some mechanism for linking to those libraries, J# will largely be dead in the water.
There's a short article over at Sun's Java page that has some decent comments on the debate.
One point that the author makes in particular is that there is nothing wrong in concept with MS having a Shared Source program (Sun's SCSL is similar); its just that they are presenting it as something comparable to true open source licenses that is a problem.
Yes, Sun does release a new JVM version every year or so but generally the new libraries and features are only used in full applications. The standard for a large chunk of the applets still in use is the 1.1 VM, which MS has a compliant VM for. By not including this by default, MS is pretty much saying that they don't want to support any Java code without forcing the user to to take the extra step of downloading the VM.
Putting the computer out in the open would be a bad idea. There are some people who might be doing legitmate research on subjects which are inappropriate for children to see. If the computer was in the main hall, there would be no way to prevent a passerby from viewing the web page.
A better way to handle the problem is to use monitoring software which watches for certain cities and alerts a supervisor if those sites are hit. The supervisor could then take action accordingly.
Slashdot Mirror
I picked this up off of Neil Gaiman's journal today. I wonder how far in advance the light would have to change to stop a Mini going mach 3. BBC article
The general belief with regard to Disney and anime imports is that Disney has no desire to see full length anime flicks succeed in the US because it would force them to change their style of movie to compete (aka dump the formula flicks).
Consequently, every time a anime comes along that might have a chance of succeeding with the mainstream audiences, Disney buys up the rights to it and then undermarkets it so that nobody ever hears about it or even has the chance to see it. This happened with Princess Mononoke and seems to have happened with Spirited Away.
Note that religions do change to adjust with the times. It used to be that all Catholic masses were spoken in Latin; this is obviously no longer the case. Considering the state of the society described in the review, its not all that hard to imagine that the church might change its beliefs in order to better ensure the safety of its members.
In regards to the question of the immortal soul, why exactly can't a soul be transferred to a machine? Strictly speaking, the human body is a machine; its simply biological rather than mechanical.
I dunno, the article is full of 'what if' and 'could be' and 'possibly'. The theory itself seems to be an alternate consequence of the Global warming theory, which in itself hasn't been conclusively proven or disproven.
Actually, the article is based primary on the studies which have indicated that the percentage of freshwater in the North Atlantic is increased substantially over the past couple of decades. This can be attributed to global warming and the melting of the glaciers, but even the scientists in the article admit they are not certain what the cause is.
The Edge.org has an excellent set of articles written by several of the leading evolutionists. They end up covering most of the major theories currently active in the field. Its well worth the read if you have any interest in the genetics and evolution. Here's the link:
The Third Culture
A SSN by itself is not that big of a deal since to do anything worthwhile with an SSN requires knowing who its assigned to. If you can make that connection, then concievably you could use it to track someone's movements around campus, but even that's limited since only the dorms and a couple buildings require card access (at least when I was there).
One risk I can see is if the school still uses a points system keyed off of your card. When I went there, you could buy points for your ID which could be used to buy stuff at the campus stores and some of the cafeterias. I imagine someone could potentially pirate your SSN for that purpose, although we're still talking only a couple hundred dollars at max.
-Mike (CWRU class of '97)
Ummmm...sound quality perhaps?
Most digital encoding technologies are lossy to some degree, so there is always going to be some loss of quality when compared to the original CD. Admittedly, a lot of people can't tell the difference or don't care, but for those of us who can tell, the CD is still a must have.
In his memoirs, the physicist Richard Feynman spent a fair amount of time discussing the issues with the space shuttle based on the analysis he performed for the government after the Challenger accident. If my memory serves me right, one of the biggest problems he found was that design decisions were often made on the basis of the availability of existing parts. Thus, maximum reliablity/efficiency/etc was sometimes sacrificed in order to cut down on development costs. The result was that you had a mixture of parts manufactured by a number of companies all trying to work together. Needless to say, this has caused a variety of problems over the years.
As has already been commented, Disney does not own the Jim Henson Company. Disney has made several attempts to buy the company over the years, but for various reasons has never succeeded. What Disney does own is the distribution rights to a fair amount of the Muppet materials; this is what often causes the confusion.
Centralized energy generation is by no means the perfect solution, but it does offer one significant advantage over what we have now. By moving the generation of power out of the cars and into that plants, it is possible to optimize the means of generating electricity for the locale. Thus places which can effectively generate electricity from wind power or solar power can use that rather than fossil fuels.
Of course, the electricity would not have to be generated at the plant. Houses equipped with solar panels, etc could generate their own electricity for their cars.
Environmentalists big beaf with SUV's is not necessarily their emissions...its more the lousy fuel efficiency. Cleaning the air is not going to cut down oil usage in any way, shape, or form. Now if you could make an SUV run on an electric motor and generate all of the electricity in central locations, then you might have an argument.
There are some subtle differences here. Aside from a desire to produce back-up copies of your software, there are very few other legitimate reasons for wanting to copy a software cd.
With music CDs on the other hand, there are a number of legitimate reasons to want be able to copy songs off the cd (creating mixes, portable MP3 players, etc). None of these is in any form illegal; however because there are illegal uses of these technologies, the record companies are attempting to shut down all use of them, whether they are illegal or not.
Technically speaking, the effect is the same: you are not able to copy data off of copy-protected cds; but the overall effect is significantly diffent.
-Mike Wolf
Interesting argument. I think in some cases it was the disease, or at least the effort required to overcome it that made the person successful.
Of course if you want to take the argument a step further, at what point do you actually declare a person acceptibly healthy? In other words, if a person has a 50% chance of early alzheimers, but otherwise will be a mathematical prodigy, should they be ruled out just because of that 50% chance?
If you've ever watched the Coda in the extras section of the Gattaca DVD, you might get a partial answer to this.
The gist of it is that, historyically, there have been tons of significant people (Abe Lincoln, Stephen Hawkings, etc) who would never have been allowed to exist because of a genetic predisposition towards certain diseases. Is this a good reason to swear off pre-birth selection completely? Probably not, but it is an important thing to consider.
The guy is right that having Jupiter as a shield definitely has made a difference in Earth's ability to support life over the long term; however, he doesn't touch on what might the more significant fact: our solarsystem is located in the boondocks of our galaxy. What this means is there is a whole lot less debris floating around to smash into earth. The closer you move towards the galactic core, the more crap there is and the less effective a Jupiter shield would be.
You kinda have to view the Potter books like a gateway drug. Even if the books themselves are just middle of the road, they do get kids to read and given the right guidance, those same kids may then decide to try something else.
As for the commercialism, yes, it is fairly rampant, but that is to be expected. Any book that reaches this level of popularity is going to be scooped up by the media/toy companies. The same is true for cartoons and numerous other forms of media (just take a look at the recent blitz of Gundam toys and models). At least in this case there is a reasonably positive side effect.
My only concern is that now that the movie is out, many of the kids who might have read the book will just settle for the movie. Unfortunately, I don't know that there is much that can be done about that.
Well, if the trailer is any indication of Anakin's behavior throughout the movie, then its fairly clear that whining must be a genetic trait in the Skywalker family.
That or Lucas just has a bad habit of picking whiney actors for his lead roles...
-Woof
Not really, troll's are generally digging for knee-jerk/emotional reactions (eg: flame wars). Discussions stemming from God's Debris can be a bit more worthwhile than that. Note that I say "can be"; the book does touch on religion at numerous points, which means that in the wrong group, the serious discussion might not work out well.
-Mike Wolf
I haven't read The Dilbert Future, so I can't comment on it, but I did read God's Debris and did not find it overly smug or anything. Adams actually prefaces the book with some comments saying that he in no way claims that the views expressed in the book are the truth or even necessarily what he believes; his primary intent in the book is just to get your mind moving...I think he even refers to the book as a thought experiment. And he does a very good job accomplishing that. Do his arguments hold up to strong discussion? Not really, but at least they provoke the discussion.
-Mike Wolf
I think you kinda missed Katz point. One of the first things he says is that globalization is a term that has many conotations, depending on where you are coming from. The dominant, and most negative meaning for the word equates to corporatism, which is exactly as you describe: companies forcing their will on weaker sovereign govts in order to make a greater profit elsewhere.
However, globalization can also refer to the continuing spread of ideas and community around the world through mediums such as the internet. Although some of these ideas can be negative (American consumerism comes to mind), there are also a lot of ideas that benefit from a wider audience.
I think the point that is being made is that a small company is not necessarily in a position to hire additional employees or retask existing employees to fix or enhance an open source project. Not all costs are monetary. Things like time, resources, etc can often exceed the percieved monetary savings.
This is the most blatant piece of FUD that Microsoft trolls keep spouting. Ever read Microsoft EULA? (or a EULA for any other proprietary software for that matter). It reads, in part, something along the lines of: "To the maximum extent permitted by the applicable law, Microsoft hereby disclaims all liability".
You are right in that there is no legal guarantee of a warantee, but there is often a defacto warantee that stems from that fact that proprietary vendors want to make money, and if one of their customers starts complaining about bugs publically, then there is the potential to lose money. Consequently it is in their best interest to address the problem. Of course this doesn't always work since once a software company reaches a certain size, it can ignore the requests of smaller customers since shear momentum may carry its profits along.
longer interested in the product, it can drop it and you can do absolutely nothing about it. Neither you nor anyone else can continue the project. You are solely at the mercy of the vendor. This is actually one of the key arguments *for* open source.
In the long run, this is why open source is better, but in the short term, there is not much you can do if the open source project you were counting on disappears. Of course, you are even more screwed if a proprietary company drops a product.
Odds are then that you'll never be using J#. At least based on what the articles state, J# is only compliant with MS's last JVM, which was 1.1.4 which is hopelessly out of date. Java has undergone some major changes since then (the new Collections API, NIO, etc) and most Java developers are not going to take a step back just to get a natively compiled app on windows.
The other problem I can see is that part of developing in Java is using 3rd party class libraries, particularly JDBC drivers for database apps. Unless MS provides some mechanism for linking to those libraries, J# will largely be dead in the water.
One point that the author makes in particular is that there is nothing wrong in concept with MS having a Shared Source program (Sun's SCSL is similar); its just that they are presenting it as something comparable to true open source licenses that is a problem.
Anyways, here's the link: Sun's viewpoint
-Mike Wolf
Yes, Sun does release a new JVM version every year or so but generally the new libraries and features are only used in full applications. The standard for a large chunk of the applets still in use is the 1.1 VM, which MS has a compliant VM for. By not including this by default, MS is pretty much saying that they don't want to support any Java code without forcing the user to to take the extra step of downloading the VM.
Putting the computer out in the open would be a bad idea. There are some people who might be doing legitmate research on subjects which are inappropriate for children to see. If the computer was in the main hall, there would be no way to prevent a passerby from viewing the web page.
A better way to handle the problem is to use monitoring software which watches for certain cities and alerts a supervisor if those sites are hit. The supervisor could then take action accordingly.