is this guy in the accountants union?
on
13 Month Calendar?
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· Score: 3
I can't believe this guy promotes more frequent paychecks and bills payments as a benefit. I know I often find myself saying, "man, I wish I had the priveledge of dealing with bills thirteen times a year rather than twelve". Same with paychecks -- I've worked places that pay once a month, twice a month (1st and 15th), and every two weeks. Are the accountants saying, we'd really like to pay you more frequently, but we just can't figure out how to work things if we pay you on the 1st, 11th, and 21st of each month.
I'm waiting for when we get to Mars. Most likely, we'll adopt some more reasonable system when we get there ( like, number the days of the year, no months ). Of course, we'll need some method to keep in sync with earth as well, so we'll have to adopt a reasonable time keeping system that isn't tied to how long any given planet takes to rotate (how provincial).
It's interesting if you read Vernor Vinge's A Deepness in the Sky. He makes some reference to keeping time in seconds from a date about the time we first got to the moon, but more exactly a few months later, just because that's the date that happened to be used in a certain early operating system.
If someone took out an ad in the newspaper and said, "Bennet Haselton" is a spammer, that would be libel. How is it different to say, "Here's a list of sites run by spammers... 209.211.253.169..."? Well, 209.211.253.169 is peacefire.org, Bennet Haselton runs peacefire.org, so they're saying he's a spammer, which he isn't.
It's not about whether it's reasonable to twist the arms of the hosting companies, it's about misrepresenting what it is you're providing. If a censorware package included a category that said "anti-filtering sites or redirect services", and said you better leave it turned on, that wouldn't be a problem. But when they list all the anti-filtering sites, babelfish, anonymizer and so-on in every category, that's misrepresenting what you're doing.
I read some of MAPS site and it implies that it's pretty hard to get on the list without doing something you shouldn't be. But this isn't the case. "A site being advertised as a target on multiple spam messages may be placed on the MAPS RBL. We assume that the site knows that it is being advertised in this manner". That's a pretty big assumption when you go blocking class C's. I can't find any mention of using the RBL for punishing ISPs as they seem to be doing in this case. Do all their subscribers know they are using it to punish ISPs? Would those subscribers continue to use the RBL if they knew it was blocking large numbers of sites that have no connection to spam other than having the same ISP?
I'm really curious what MAPS contract looks like. They don't have it up on their webpage, and it's the only thing that would exactly address what they claim their service is. Personally, I'd love it if sites would cancel an account if it's at all connected to spamming, even if it isn't where it's sent from. I know geocities does because I've forwarded a few pieces of spam to abuse there. I don't think I'd want the "feature" of being prevented from viewing the sites of anyone hosted on a server that is also used by a spammer.
The first one -- yes, mass is energy is mass. You increase the energy, it requires more force to accelerate it.
The second catch is more interesting. I'm not sure whether this kills the idea. I think it might be possible to synchronize things using springs (or something), so that you bleed the rotational energy out of your storage device and back into the flywheel before you transfer the momentum from the temporary weight (think a piston on springs) to the ship.
So the sequence of events would be:
accelerate the fast flywheels backward
transfer the momentum from the weight to the ship
slow down the flywheels
accelerate the slow flywheels forward
speed up the flywheels
transfer the momentum from the weight to the ship
I'm not really sure this is needed, though. Under the original plan, the flywheels would be sent back when they were heavy and the ship light, and forward when they were light and the ship heavy. Your idea wouldn't work because the mechanism you are pushing against then reeling in can't actually lose mass energy. Think of counter-rotating flywheels moving on axles within the ship itself. With additional flywheels for energy storage that don't move back and forth, a mechanism to transfer rotational energy from one to the other, and a mechanism to toss them back the other way at each end of the ship. This mechanism might or might not have to be isolated from the ship so that it can float back and forth, and be pushed back and forth separately at the right times.
I think maybe I'll draw up some plans over the holidays. It'd be interesting to just assume some plausible specs for materials, then infinitely powerful motors and energy source, and see what kind of acceleration you can get.
Okay, here's a design for a system that would be entirely contained, and yet still allow you to generate inertia:
You have two counter-rotating flywheels bouncing along their axis of rotation forward and back in the ship. As they reach each end, they are accelerated in the opposite direction. As the flywheels are moving forward, increase their rate of spin, as they are moving backward, decrease their rate of spin. Since mass increases with velocity, the flywheels will have a higher mass as they are being accelerated backward than they will have as they are being accelerated forward. So you will accelerate forward.
Admittedly, it's not quite feasible, but it does show that a reactionless drive doesn't violate any physics. Yes, it does violate Newtonian physics, but that's because Newtonian physics is only an approximation to reality (and so might relativity, but a more accurate one).
If we actually understood what gravity is, we might be able to get some interesting reactionless (did Clarke just make that term up?) propulsion methods out of it. I'm thinking along the lines of making space curve like it would if there were a mass there, but whereever you want it to. Assuming thermodynamics, this would take a lot of energy, but it might be more efficient then just dumping burnt propellant out the back. Of course, this is probably impossible.
BTW, can anyone point me to a real discussion of how to build a fusion ramjet? It's a staple of a lot of sci-fi, but I'm curious how you keep from getting slowed down by collecting the hydrogen.
I really liked the overall feel. It seemed sort of theatrical to me, probably a consequence of low budget, but in any case, it makes you concentrate on the dialog rather than the effects. Same thing with the actors. Not necessarily the best for those characters, but it doesn't matter. It's about the story.
Regarding the lack of explaination for the background mythology, I'm guessing this is a conscious choice. Voice overs would be saying too much. I don't want to watch a film of someone reading Dune. I want to see a movie. The only options are to cut a lot of stuff, or to just leave it there but not bother to explain it. Since it will be clear later on, and also because most viewers know what's going on, this is the better choice.
One bit I'm not sure of is Irulan. Reading the first few books, I thought of her as pretty much a nobody. Like, she's just "the emperor's daughter", and doesn't have any personality herself. The character presented here, though, is someone who you really like. She's well suited to Paul, so I don't think the "I love Chani, you're just political" thing is going to work as well.
I totally agree with the changes to the dialog. The only line I was sure wasn't in the book was refering to the council of the great houses, which is called the Landsrat or something in the book. Especially now that I think of it again, would "you'd be singing soprano" make sense outside of our culture? Do the Artreides divide singers into the same groups? Is the association of castration and high voices universal? ( castration would not actually cause ones voice to change )
Overall, Dune has a really good adventure story in it, along with a bunch of neat technology and mythology. The technology can't really be explained on film. You can do scenes like Paul pushing a knife through the shield, but the technology wouldn't be very visible in general. You'd see bombs coming in slow, but you wouldn't know why ( no one would use fast bombs, because they'd bounce off the shields ). Same thing with a lot of mythology. It's complicated, and it doesn't film well. I'm guessing explaining Kwisatch Haderach would have taken at least a few minutes, and I'm not sure if it would have advanced the story any. Probably it will be explained before Paul drinks the water of life.
I don't know why everyone acts surprised when Americans act like prudes. I mean, this country was founded by people who left England (England!) because it wasn't prudish enough for their taste.
Then on the other hand, when the Europeans cut the violence, is it any surprise they have to come whining to us to fight their wars?
He isn't adding memory totals. There's no way he could get two listings in top that add to only 25 megs for netscape. If you have only one window open, mozilla (M18, I think) shows up as one or more identical entries in top. Even opening other windows, I can't get mozilla to show non-identical sizes in top. Threads don't create a new process space, and no way is NS6 using less that 18 megs, so the reviewer is *not* adding entries in top. What I'm saying is that there isn't going to be somethign that says "mozilla: 10 megs; mozilla: 25 megs" and someone adds them. It's going to say, "mozilla: 35megs; mozilla: 35megs", and you say, "mozilla is using 35 megs".
Mozilla is multithreaded, but it doesn't seem to create child processes, except for Java, and almost certainly for plugins. The 20 megs he reports for the Java component probably overlaps a little with the main executable, but I doubt more than a meg or two.
Most people do not have their browsers set to refetch cached pages every session -- they have them set to check whether to refetch cached pages every session. Big difference. You fire up netscape, it asks slashdot.org for the header for "/". www.slashdot.org says, "it was modified 20 minutes ago, it's this big,...". The browser says, "give me the whole thing". The page contains a reference to the header graphic, so the browser asks images.slashdot.org about/title.gif, images.slashdot.org says, "it was last modified January 3, 2000", your browser decides "I've seen it since then, don't bother sending it".
If you're hitting a big page, you'll only actually download it once, though the browser will in fact check with the server each session to make sure it's the correct version.
This isn't technologically related, but for those geeks who are fans of capitalism, Trickle Up is a charity that provides small grants and loans to people in third world countries to start a business. They're about actually improving people's lives rather than just giving them enough to survive 'til tomorrow.
Every movie I've seen from before the 30s, everyone had grey eyes. Blue eyes seemed to pop up shortly after that.
I doubt a few hundred years. I don't think that's long enough to spread. Since blue eyes are common in scandinavia, ireland, and some places in eastern europe, I would guess at least a few thousand years. It seems to be correlated with skin tone also, so I doubt it's a separate mutation. I don't think you'd call someone who's a child of a mutant a mutant themself. Doesn't mutant generally mean first of the line?
On a related note, my eyes are different colors: my left is blue, my right half a slightly darker blue, half brown. I doubt it's genetic, probably just developmental effect (my genes are probably for light brown eyes, but lots of babies are born with blue eyes that change).
If it's heritage, then I'm very sorry that it's too expensive to live out in the country. If it's farming, then I have to say, "food should be more expensive". I hear food is insanely cheap in the states, compared to most of the rest of the world.
What I'm saying is that just because something is desirable, doesn't mean it's worth the cost. It's desirable for everyone in the world to have really top flight health care, but it's probably not worth the cost (I'm healthy, I can do with mediocre health care until I get old). It's desirable to have nice rural communities, but not if they have to be subsidized by the utilities other customers.
Is Harmony worth the cost? To the people in Harmony, no doubt. To the thousands of telco customers who are paying a couple bucks more a month to make sure Harmony has phone service? Probably not. To "society as a whole"? Tough call. If Harmony's benefits outweigh its costs, it should continue to exist, both in the utilitarian moral sense of "should" and in the predictive sense of "most likely will", in a free market. The free market is how you make the two match up. Government should only be there to correct those situations that don't come about because of transaction costs ( national defense, police, uniform law, etc ). In this last, that's "should" as in, "I would like it if", but I think it also corrosponds to the greatest good for the greatest number.
Admittedly, I don't know if Harmony is still in existance. I happened to drive through it about 15 years ago with my parents.
"extremes", of course, are the boundary conditions, which you should always test to make sure your solutions will always hold.
I see a lot of replies along the lines of "the evil free market wouldn't provide the same service to everyone". My reply is, "So what?"
If I live out in the middle of no where, I'm not going to be able to get pizza delivery. It's just not worth it. Oh, but that's not an essential service.
Why is high speed internet? Sure, for me it's essential, so I live in a city. If I wanted to live in a rural area, I would have to consider whether it's worth the extra cost (probably very high right now) to get high speed, or whether I could do without. But it should be a cost that I face, because I should take it into account when I decide where I live.
This is the problem with the bleeding hearts: they can't stand the idea that actions have consequences. They distrust corporations, but trust the largest monopoly of all: the government.
Saying that regulation is ALWAYS bad is nonsense. Lifeline services such as phone, mail and electricity MUST be regulated, otherwise only the convenient-to-service people will have them.
I beg to differ. I consider living in a rural area a luxury, and like all luxuries, it has a cost. That cost is a longer commute, less flexibility in where you work and shop, more money spent on gas, etc. I have no problem with part of that cost being higher utility rates.
Why should I, who live in a city, subsidize the telephone service of someone who lives on a farm? You can say, "because otherwise they won't have it", but that begs the question of whether they are in some way entitled to live where they want without bearing the costs of their actions. I don't think they are. My position is that people should bear the costs of their actions. It costs more money to get food, mail, electricity, and so on to someone in Harmony, CA, pop. 17, than it does to get those same things to someone in San Francisco. Why should the consumer pay the same amount?
It's misguided egalitarianism. We naturally assume, "people should be treated equally", but no one doubts that it's fair for someone who drives a Porsche to pay higher insurance premiums than someone who drives a Taurus, or someone who lives in a big house pay higher rent than someone who lives in a small house, so why does everyone get their panties in a bunch when the possibility that those who live out in the middle of nowhere will have to pay the actual cost of their choices comes up?
Why isn't the phone company on the list? Because my area is now deregulated. I have AT&T local digital service. What do all those have in common? You haven't got a prayer of entering the market because of the red tape. I think Cable is officially open, the other three are offically monopolies. The post office is the only company legally permitted to carry non time critical letters in the United States.
I don't list Microsoft because I don't do business with them. I have a Microsoft mouse, but Microsoft does not have a monopoly on mice. Given that I have a computer and don't do business with Microsoft, it sort of implies that they aren't a monopoly, no doesn't it?
So I've got 3 sort of natural monopolies that are definitely helped along by the government, and one that is in no way a natural monopoly but exists anyway because of the government. Then I have one supposed monopoly that isn't. I don't feel any need to retract my claim.
The point isn't whether the Pentium IV is going to scale up to ungodly speeds.
The point is that the Pentium IV 1.5Ghz is hardly competetive with what's on the market. Let me rephrase: you'd be an idiot to actually purchase a PIV 1.5GHz.
Maybe the Piv will scale to faster clock speeds, but what we have right now sucks. Buying a Piv right now is like buying an early 80s BMW 320 because it's the predecessor to a really nice car. It's irrational. You're better off with the Athlon. Intel better have set aside a heafty chunk of change for advertising, because it's going to take a lot to get people to buy these.
And what if you wanted a service that they couldn't provide at $50/month? "Sorry, nothing we can do..."
Government intervention can provide a benefit in one area ( e.g. some subsidized service ), but it is never without a cost at least as great as the benefit ( e.g. higher tax rates ).
In the abscence of regulation, people do business wherever it is mutually beneficial. Regulation means that people are prohibited from engaging in some mutually beneficial action, therefore it's bad overall.
Monopolies are in some respects a different story, but keep in mind that the majority of monopolies are a product of government regulation, not of the free market.
If "unfiltered" means the obvious, everything it sees, not just stuff pertaining to a single IP/user, then there is a very strong case that it violates the 4th amendment protection against search and seizure without cause. Precisely, if it is intercepting all traffic, they would have to have a search warrant saying "all traffic passing through Earthlink" or whatever. If it can target traffic, they can get a search warrant saying, "all traffic passing through Earthlink originating or terminating at x.x.x.x". No judge would grant the former; the latter would be much easier to get.
In my (layman's) interpretation, "particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized", means that a warrant would have to say something like "all traffic going through Earthlink's network" for it to be legal. This is because it's quite clear to me that anything that is intercepted can be considered searched. Anything that's archived can be considered seized.
The obvious solution is for people to start whipping out the constitution, pointing to the 4th amendment, and telling the police, "go get a proper warrant, or go fuck yourself".
As a suggestion for how to measure progress, consider how long it would take for someone from 100 years ago to adapt to and accept the modern world.
So say we consider how comfortable someone from 100 years ago would feel after 5 years in the modern world. Now we ask, if we took someone from 900 ce, and dropped them into 1000 ce, would it take more or less than 5 years to come to that same level of acceptance? Admittedly, it's really crude, but it does give a qualitative measure of the rate of progress.
But in general, the argument for the singularity (which is the inevitable outcome if progress is in fact exponential) is in the computer field, progress is limited by the tools you are using. These tools are limited because they were the limit of what could be made with last years tools. An easy analogy is that it's much easier to write a really advanced IDE inside of Visual Studio than it is to write a really advanced IDE in notepad in assembly language. So as the tools advance, the next set of tools can become even more advanced, and those tools determine the progress of all other aspects of technology as well.
It's not just compiler writing, of course. There's also better industrial robots allow you to build even better industrial robots, or lots of computer power lets you use really computationally intensive techniques to build the next batch of processors.
I personally doubt the singularity hypothesis because I think there are constraints on progress that are invariant. For example, finite energy constraints, finite limits on the speed of communication, resource limits, and most importantly, the limitation of how fast people can adapt.
"Exponential progress" is not just because that's what's observed. It's because any time the value of the next time step is an increasing function of the value of the previous time step, you have an exponential process. Do you think technological progress is dependent on our current level of technology (i.e. is it faster than the middle ages)? If so, technological progress is exponential.
Assuming "faster than a supersonic jet" is 1500 km/h, this works out to.00014c. I suppose this is pretty fast for natural phenomena, but I think we have already attained over a third of this ourselves.
If it will hit, but cause no damage, it's a zero. If it will completely destroy the earth, with less than 10^-8 probability, it's also a zero. Goes to 1, then 2, then 6, 7, 10 with increasing probability.
The funniest junk mail I'm getting is about Berkeley's measure Y, which would prohibit apartment owners from evicting tenants because they want to live in the apartment themselves.
One piece of mail talks about some evil dot com millionaire who's been living in an apartment since college, and isn't about to give up his $550/month rent control, and his poor, elderly landlord, who wants to move into the apartment.
The other piece of mail I got about it talk about the poor elderly lady and the evil dot com businessman who bought the apartment building and wants to kick her out because he wants to live in the apartment. It doesn't explain why someone who made their money in tech would do something as stupid as buying an apartment house in Berkeley.
You get the feeling Berkeley doesn't like new money?
If you go to the top500 site, you can now get a list just of clusters (which I think is a new feature).
The ones listed as "self-made" are the most likely Beowulfs. Sandia Labs has a 580 processor system (#84). T.U. Chemnitz has a 528 processor PIII system (#126).
Not a cluster, but Charles Schwab is at #15 with an IBM Power3 based system. They also have a 1500 processor 604e based system at #34. Think someone thinks you can predict the market?
It's not government's place to decide what the "future of the country" or "goal of society" should be. When you ask for that, the answers are usually quite unappealing, and look a lot like totalitarianism. Government is only there to allow society to proceed on its own, and the best we can do is keep government out of the way, so that people are not prohibited from achieving their goals.
The arguments Bush uses to support his tax cut are very simple -- it's not the government's money. If the phone company noticed they had been overcharging you for the past few years, would you want them to:
a) Keep it for themselves
b) Give you more services you never asked for
c) Write you a refund check
d) Hand it out to people they like
Gore says (d): he wants to use tax cuts to encourage activities he likes, like putting kids in childcare (but not choosing not to work while your kids are young), paying for your childrens college (but not paying for college yourself), and so on.
Bush says (b): if the federal government is taking more money than it needs from the citizens, then it should stop taking so much.
Do Bush's tax cuts target the rich? No, they do not target the rich. Do the rich get the principle benefit? Depends how you measure it. They will have the biggest savings overall, but this is just because they pay the most in taxes. Percentages wise, I don't know whether it's exactly fair or if the rich or the poor get a bigger benefit.
Gore's "tax cuts" target people so specifically, you will pretty much not get them unless you plan your life around them. I went through the online calculators, using mine and my parents incomes to see who these tax cuts will benefit. I would have saved a few hundred dollars last year with Bush's plan. I couldn't get a single hypothetical to show me a savings under Gore's plan. I guess I have to have kids, start saving for college, buy an electric car, and invest in the trial lawyers association to be elegible for his tax breaks.
As a libertarian, I'm hoping Bush wins, because he at least seems to have some inkling of the idea that government is only there to do certain things, and society is separate from government. Gore on the other hand thinks that government is there to dictate, er, I mean encourage, all aspects of peoples lives. I won't be voting for either of them, of course.
Tom Campbell, senate candidate in California, and one of the handful of politicians who understand economics, says, "none of the above". The "surplus" has just been accounting tricks until this year, and we should pay down the debt while times are good.
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I can't believe this guy promotes more frequent paychecks and bills payments as a benefit. I know I often find myself saying, "man, I wish I had the priveledge of dealing with bills thirteen times a year rather than twelve". Same with paychecks -- I've worked places that pay once a month, twice a month (1st and 15th), and every two weeks. Are the accountants saying, we'd really like to pay you more frequently, but we just can't figure out how to work things if we pay you on the 1st, 11th, and 21st of each month.
I'm waiting for when we get to Mars. Most likely, we'll adopt some more reasonable system when we get there ( like, number the days of the year, no months ). Of course, we'll need some method to keep in sync with earth as well, so we'll have to adopt a reasonable time keeping system that isn't tied to how long any given planet takes to rotate (how provincial).
It's interesting if you read Vernor Vinge's A Deepness in the Sky. He makes some reference to keeping time in seconds from a date about the time we first got to the moon, but more exactly a few months later, just because that's the date that happened to be used in a certain early operating system.
If someone took out an ad in the newspaper and said, "Bennet Haselton" is a spammer, that would be libel. How is it different to say, "Here's a list of sites run by spammers ... 209.211.253.169 ..."? Well, 209.211.253.169 is peacefire.org, Bennet Haselton runs peacefire.org, so they're saying he's a spammer, which he isn't.
It's not about whether it's reasonable to twist the arms of the hosting companies, it's about misrepresenting what it is you're providing. If a censorware package included a category that said "anti-filtering sites or redirect services", and said you better leave it turned on, that wouldn't be a problem. But when they list all the anti-filtering sites, babelfish, anonymizer and so-on in every category, that's misrepresenting what you're doing.
I read some of MAPS site and it implies that it's pretty hard to get on the list without doing something you shouldn't be. But this isn't the case. "A site being advertised as a target on multiple spam messages may be placed on the MAPS RBL. We assume that the site knows that it is being advertised in this manner". That's a pretty big assumption when you go blocking class C's. I can't find any mention of using the RBL for punishing ISPs as they seem to be doing in this case. Do all their subscribers know they are using it to punish ISPs? Would those subscribers continue to use the RBL if they knew it was blocking large numbers of sites that have no connection to spam other than having the same ISP?
I'm really curious what MAPS contract looks like. They don't have it up on their webpage, and it's the only thing that would exactly address what they claim their service is. Personally, I'd love it if sites would cancel an account if it's at all connected to spamming, even if it isn't where it's sent from. I know geocities does because I've forwarded a few pieces of spam to abuse there. I don't think I'd want the "feature" of being prevented from viewing the sites of anyone hosted on a server that is also used by a spammer.
The first one -- yes, mass is energy is mass. You increase the energy, it requires more force to accelerate it.
The second catch is more interesting. I'm not sure whether this kills the idea. I think it might be possible to synchronize things using springs (or something), so that you bleed the rotational energy out of your storage device and back into the flywheel before you transfer the momentum from the temporary weight (think a piston on springs) to the ship.
So the sequence of events would be:
accelerate the fast flywheels backward
transfer the momentum from the weight to the ship
slow down the flywheels
accelerate the slow flywheels forward
speed up the flywheels
transfer the momentum from the weight to the ship
I'm not really sure this is needed, though. Under the original plan, the flywheels would be sent back when they were heavy and the ship light, and forward when they were light and the ship heavy. Your idea wouldn't work because the mechanism you are pushing against then reeling in can't actually lose mass energy. Think of counter-rotating flywheels moving on axles within the ship itself. With additional flywheels for energy storage that don't move back and forth, a mechanism to transfer rotational energy from one to the other, and a mechanism to toss them back the other way at each end of the ship. This mechanism might or might not have to be isolated from the ship so that it can float back and forth, and be pushed back and forth separately at the right times.
I think maybe I'll draw up some plans over the holidays. It'd be interesting to just assume some plausible specs for materials, then infinitely powerful motors and energy source, and see what kind of acceleration you can get.
Okay, here's a design for a system that would be entirely contained, and yet still allow you to generate inertia:
You have two counter-rotating flywheels bouncing along their axis of rotation forward and back in the ship. As they reach each end, they are accelerated in the opposite direction. As the flywheels are moving forward, increase their rate of spin, as they are moving backward, decrease their rate of spin. Since mass increases with velocity, the flywheels will have a higher mass as they are being accelerated backward than they will have as they are being accelerated forward. So you will accelerate forward.
Admittedly, it's not quite feasible, but it does show that a reactionless drive doesn't violate any physics. Yes, it does violate Newtonian physics, but that's because Newtonian physics is only an approximation to reality (and so might relativity, but a more accurate one).
If we actually understood what gravity is, we might be able to get some interesting reactionless (did Clarke just make that term up?) propulsion methods out of it. I'm thinking along the lines of making space curve like it would if there were a mass there, but whereever you want it to. Assuming thermodynamics, this would take a lot of energy, but it might be more efficient then just dumping burnt propellant out the back. Of course, this is probably impossible.
BTW, can anyone point me to a real discussion of how to build a fusion ramjet? It's a staple of a lot of sci-fi, but I'm curious how you keep from getting slowed down by collecting the hydrogen.
spoilers (like anyone hasn't read it)
I really liked the overall feel. It seemed sort of theatrical to me, probably a consequence of low budget, but in any case, it makes you concentrate on the dialog rather than the effects. Same thing with the actors. Not necessarily the best for those characters, but it doesn't matter. It's about the story.
Regarding the lack of explaination for the background mythology, I'm guessing this is a conscious choice. Voice overs would be saying too much. I don't want to watch a film of someone reading Dune. I want to see a movie. The only options are to cut a lot of stuff, or to just leave it there but not bother to explain it. Since it will be clear later on, and also because most viewers know what's going on, this is the better choice.
One bit I'm not sure of is Irulan. Reading the first few books, I thought of her as pretty much a nobody. Like, she's just "the emperor's daughter", and doesn't have any personality herself. The character presented here, though, is someone who you really like. She's well suited to Paul, so I don't think the "I love Chani, you're just political" thing is going to work as well.
I totally agree with the changes to the dialog. The only line I was sure wasn't in the book was refering to the council of the great houses, which is called the Landsrat or something in the book. Especially now that I think of it again, would "you'd be singing soprano" make sense outside of our culture? Do the Artreides divide singers into the same groups? Is the association of castration and high voices universal? ( castration would not actually cause ones voice to change )
Overall, Dune has a really good adventure story in it, along with a bunch of neat technology and mythology. The technology can't really be explained on film. You can do scenes like Paul pushing a knife through the shield, but the technology wouldn't be very visible in general. You'd see bombs coming in slow, but you wouldn't know why ( no one would use fast bombs, because they'd bounce off the shields ). Same thing with a lot of mythology. It's complicated, and it doesn't film well. I'm guessing explaining Kwisatch Haderach would have taken at least a few minutes, and I'm not sure if it would have advanced the story any. Probably it will be explained before Paul drinks the water of life.
I don't know why everyone acts surprised when Americans act like prudes. I mean, this country was founded by people who left England (England!) because it wasn't prudish enough for their taste.
Then on the other hand, when the Europeans cut the violence, is it any surprise they have to come whining to us to fight their wars?
He isn't adding memory totals. There's no way he could get two listings in top that add to only 25 megs for netscape. If you have only one window open, mozilla (M18, I think) shows up as one or more identical entries in top. Even opening other windows, I can't get mozilla to show non-identical sizes in top. Threads don't create a new process space, and no way is NS6 using less that 18 megs, so the reviewer is *not* adding entries in top. What I'm saying is that there isn't going to be somethign that says "mozilla: 10 megs; mozilla: 25 megs" and someone adds them. It's going to say, "mozilla: 35megs; mozilla: 35megs", and you say, "mozilla is using 35 megs".
Mozilla is multithreaded, but it doesn't seem to create child processes, except for Java, and almost certainly for plugins. The 20 megs he reports for the Java component probably overlaps a little with the main executable, but I doubt more than a meg or two.
Most people do not have their browsers set to refetch cached pages every session -- they have them set to check whether to refetch cached pages every session. Big difference. You fire up netscape, it asks slashdot.org for the header for "/". www.slashdot.org says, "it was modified 20 minutes ago, it's this big,...". The browser says, "give me the whole thing". The page contains a reference to the header graphic, so the browser asks images.slashdot.org about /title.gif, images.slashdot.org says, "it was last modified January 3, 2000", your browser decides "I've seen it since then, don't bother sending it".
If you're hitting a big page, you'll only actually download it once, though the browser will in fact check with the server each session to make sure it's the correct version.
This isn't technologically related, but for those geeks who are fans of capitalism, Trickle Up is a charity that provides small grants and loans to people in third world countries to start a business. They're about actually improving people's lives rather than just giving them enough to survive 'til tomorrow.
Trickle Up
Every movie I've seen from before the 30s, everyone had grey eyes. Blue eyes seemed to pop up shortly after that.
I doubt a few hundred years. I don't think that's long enough to spread. Since blue eyes are common in scandinavia, ireland, and some places in eastern europe, I would guess at least a few thousand years. It seems to be correlated with skin tone also, so I doubt it's a separate mutation. I don't think you'd call someone who's a child of a mutant a mutant themself. Doesn't mutant generally mean first of the line?
On a related note, my eyes are different colors: my left is blue, my right half a slightly darker blue, half brown. I doubt it's genetic, probably just developmental effect (my genes are probably for light brown eyes, but lots of babies are born with blue eyes that change).
If it's heritage, then I'm very sorry that it's too expensive to live out in the country. If it's farming, then I have to say, "food should be more expensive". I hear food is insanely cheap in the states, compared to most of the rest of the world.
What I'm saying is that just because something is desirable, doesn't mean it's worth the cost. It's desirable for everyone in the world to have really top flight health care, but it's probably not worth the cost (I'm healthy, I can do with mediocre health care until I get old). It's desirable to have nice rural communities, but not if they have to be subsidized by the utilities other customers.
Is Harmony worth the cost? To the people in Harmony, no doubt. To the thousands of telco customers who are paying a couple bucks more a month to make sure Harmony has phone service? Probably not. To "society as a whole"? Tough call. If Harmony's benefits outweigh its costs, it should continue to exist, both in the utilitarian moral sense of "should" and in the predictive sense of "most likely will", in a free market. The free market is how you make the two match up. Government should only be there to correct those situations that don't come about because of transaction costs ( national defense, police, uniform law, etc ). In this last, that's "should" as in, "I would like it if", but I think it also corrosponds to the greatest good for the greatest number.
Admittedly, I don't know if Harmony is still in existance. I happened to drive through it about 15 years ago with my parents.
"extremes", of course, are the boundary conditions, which you should always test to make sure your solutions will always hold.
I see a lot of replies along the lines of "the evil free market wouldn't provide the same service to everyone". My reply is, "So what?"
If I live out in the middle of no where, I'm not going to be able to get pizza delivery. It's just not worth it. Oh, but that's not an essential service.
Why is high speed internet? Sure, for me it's essential, so I live in a city. If I wanted to live in a rural area, I would have to consider whether it's worth the extra cost (probably very high right now) to get high speed, or whether I could do without. But it should be a cost that I face, because I should take it into account when I decide where I live.
This is the problem with the bleeding hearts: they can't stand the idea that actions have consequences. They distrust corporations, but trust the largest monopoly of all: the government.
Saying that regulation is ALWAYS bad is nonsense. Lifeline services such as phone, mail and electricity MUST be regulated, otherwise only the convenient-to-service people will have them.
I beg to differ. I consider living in a rural area a luxury, and like all luxuries, it has a cost. That cost is a longer commute, less flexibility in where you work and shop, more money spent on gas, etc. I have no problem with part of that cost being higher utility rates.
Why should I, who live in a city, subsidize the telephone service of someone who lives on a farm? You can say, "because otherwise they won't have it", but that begs the question of whether they are in some way entitled to live where they want without bearing the costs of their actions. I don't think they are. My position is that people should bear the costs of their actions. It costs more money to get food, mail, electricity, and so on to someone in Harmony, CA, pop. 17, than it does to get those same things to someone in San Francisco. Why should the consumer pay the same amount?
It's misguided egalitarianism. We naturally assume, "people should be treated equally", but no one doubts that it's fair for someone who drives a Porsche to pay higher insurance premiums than someone who drives a Taurus, or someone who lives in a big house pay higher rent than someone who lives in a small house, so why does everyone get their panties in a bunch when the possibility that those who live out in the middle of nowhere will have to pay the actual cost of their choices comes up?
Why isn't the phone company on the list? Because my area is now deregulated. I have AT&T local digital service. What do all those have in common? You haven't got a prayer of entering the market because of the red tape. I think Cable is officially open, the other three are offically monopolies. The post office is the only company legally permitted to carry non time critical letters in the United States.
I don't list Microsoft because I don't do business with them. I have a Microsoft mouse, but Microsoft does not have a monopoly on mice. Given that I have a computer and don't do business with Microsoft, it sort of implies that they aren't a monopoly, no doesn't it?
So I've got 3 sort of natural monopolies that are definitely helped along by the government, and one that is in no way a natural monopoly but exists anyway because of the government. Then I have one supposed monopoly that isn't. I don't feel any need to retract my claim.
The point isn't whether the Pentium IV is going to scale up to ungodly speeds.
The point is that the Pentium IV 1.5Ghz is hardly competetive with what's on the market. Let me rephrase: you'd be an idiot to actually purchase a PIV 1.5GHz.
Maybe the Piv will scale to faster clock speeds, but what we have right now sucks. Buying a Piv right now is like buying an early 80s BMW 320 because it's the predecessor to a really nice car. It's irrational. You're better off with the Athlon. Intel better have set aside a heafty chunk of change for advertising, because it's going to take a lot to get people to buy these.
And what if you wanted a service that they couldn't provide at $50/month? "Sorry, nothing we can do..."
Government intervention can provide a benefit in one area ( e.g. some subsidized service ), but it is never without a cost at least as great as the benefit ( e.g. higher tax rates ).
In the abscence of regulation, people do business wherever it is mutually beneficial. Regulation means that people are prohibited from engaging in some mutually beneficial action, therefore it's bad overall.
Monopolies are in some respects a different story, but keep in mind that the majority of monopolies are a product of government regulation, not of the free market.
If "unfiltered" means the obvious, everything it sees, not just stuff pertaining to a single IP/user, then there is a very strong case that it violates the 4th amendment protection against search and seizure without cause. Precisely, if it is intercepting all traffic, they would have to have a search warrant saying "all traffic passing through Earthlink" or whatever. If it can target traffic, they can get a search warrant saying, "all traffic passing through Earthlink originating or terminating at x.x.x.x". No judge would grant the former; the latter would be much easier to get.
In my (layman's) interpretation, "particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized", means that a warrant would have to say something like "all traffic going through Earthlink's network" for it to be legal. This is because it's quite clear to me that anything that is intercepted can be considered searched. Anything that's archived can be considered seized.
The obvious solution is for people to start whipping out the constitution, pointing to the 4th amendment, and telling the police, "go get a proper warrant, or go fuck yourself".
As a suggestion for how to measure progress, consider how long it would take for someone from 100 years ago to adapt to and accept the modern world.
So say we consider how comfortable someone from 100 years ago would feel after 5 years in the modern world. Now we ask, if we took someone from 900 ce, and dropped them into 1000 ce, would it take more or less than 5 years to come to that same level of acceptance? Admittedly, it's really crude, but it does give a qualitative measure of the rate of progress.
But in general, the argument for the singularity (which is the inevitable outcome if progress is in fact exponential) is in the computer field, progress is limited by the tools you are using. These tools are limited because they were the limit of what could be made with last years tools. An easy analogy is that it's much easier to write a really advanced IDE inside of Visual Studio than it is to write a really advanced IDE in notepad in assembly language. So as the tools advance, the next set of tools can become even more advanced, and those tools determine the progress of all other aspects of technology as well.
It's not just compiler writing, of course. There's also better industrial robots allow you to build even better industrial robots, or lots of computer power lets you use really computationally intensive techniques to build the next batch of processors.
I personally doubt the singularity hypothesis because I think there are constraints on progress that are invariant. For example, finite energy constraints, finite limits on the speed of communication, resource limits, and most importantly, the limitation of how fast people can adapt.
"Exponential progress" is not just because that's what's observed. It's because any time the value of the next time step is an increasing function of the value of the previous time step, you have an exponential process. Do you think technological progress is dependent on our current level of technology (i.e. is it faster than the middle ages)? If so, technological progress is exponential.
Assuming "faster than a supersonic jet" is 1500 km/h, this works out to .00014c. I suppose this is pretty fast for natural phenomena, but I think we have already attained over a third of this ourselves.
Take a look at http://impact.arc.nasa.gov/torino/pr of. html. It shows a two dimensional chart with probability and likely damage.
If it will hit, but cause no damage, it's a zero. If it will completely destroy the earth, with less than 10^-8 probability, it's also a zero. Goes to 1, then 2, then 6, 7, 10 with increasing probability.
-KDP
The funniest junk mail I'm getting is about Berkeley's measure Y, which would prohibit apartment owners from evicting tenants because they want to live in the apartment themselves.
One piece of mail talks about some evil dot com millionaire who's been living in an apartment since college, and isn't about to give up his $550/month rent control, and his poor, elderly landlord, who wants to move into the apartment.
The other piece of mail I got about it talk about the poor elderly lady and the evil dot com businessman who bought the apartment building and wants to kick her out because he wants to live in the apartment. It doesn't explain why someone who made their money in tech would do something as stupid as buying an apartment house in Berkeley.
You get the feeling Berkeley doesn't like new money?
Anyone think it's funny that like all slashdot polls, this one warns us not to complain about lack of options?
If you go to the top500 site, you can now get a list just of clusters (which I think is a new feature).
The ones listed as "self-made" are the most likely Beowulfs. Sandia Labs has a 580 processor system (#84). T.U. Chemnitz has a 528 processor PIII system (#126).
Not a cluster, but Charles Schwab is at #15 with an IBM Power3 based system. They also have a 1500 processor 604e based system at #34. Think someone thinks you can predict the market?
It's not government's place to decide what the "future of the country" or "goal of society" should be. When you ask for that, the answers are usually quite unappealing, and look a lot like totalitarianism. Government is only there to allow society to proceed on its own, and the best we can do is keep government out of the way, so that people are not prohibited from achieving their goals.
The arguments Bush uses to support his tax cut are very simple -- it's not the government's money. If the phone company noticed they had been overcharging you for the past few years, would you want them to:
a) Keep it for themselves
b) Give you more services you never asked for
c) Write you a refund check
d) Hand it out to people they like
Gore says (d): he wants to use tax cuts to encourage activities he likes, like putting kids in childcare (but not choosing not to work while your kids are young), paying for your childrens college (but not paying for college yourself), and so on.
Bush says (b): if the federal government is taking more money than it needs from the citizens, then it should stop taking so much.
Do Bush's tax cuts target the rich? No, they do not target the rich. Do the rich get the principle benefit? Depends how you measure it. They will have the biggest savings overall, but this is just because they pay the most in taxes. Percentages wise, I don't know whether it's exactly fair or if the rich or the poor get a bigger benefit.
Gore's "tax cuts" target people so specifically, you will pretty much not get them unless you plan your life around them. I went through the online calculators, using mine and my parents incomes to see who these tax cuts will benefit. I would have saved a few hundred dollars last year with Bush's plan. I couldn't get a single hypothetical to show me a savings under Gore's plan. I guess I have to have kids, start saving for college, buy an electric car, and invest in the trial lawyers association to be elegible for his tax breaks.
As a libertarian, I'm hoping Bush wins, because he at least seems to have some inkling of the idea that government is only there to do certain things, and society is separate from government. Gore on the other hand thinks that government is there to dictate, er, I mean encourage, all aspects of peoples lives. I won't be voting for either of them, of course.
Tom Campbell, senate candidate in California, and one of the handful of politicians who understand economics, says, "none of the above". The "surplus" has just been accounting tricks until this year, and we should pay down the debt while times are good.