Seriously, you don't think that you are somewhat biased?
Here are some facts from the CIA handbook on India. These are more reliable than your very biased observations.
GDP: purchasing power parity - $2.2 trillion (2000 est.) GDP - real growth rate: 6% (2000 est.) GDP - per capita: purchasing power parity - $2,200 (2000 est.) GDP - composition by sector: agriculture: 25%
industry: 24%
services: 51% (2000) Population below poverty line: 35% (1994 est.) Household income or consumption by percentage share: lowest 10%: 3.5%
A growth rate of 6% with a purchasing parity of $2.2 trillion ain't too shabby. The Indian middle class is estimated at 300 million people. Any simple characterization of India is deeply flawed if it does not take into account the wide spectrum of people that you find there.
That wasn't my point at all. Also, the maps of Ashoka and Aurangzeb which I linked to clearly indicate that parts of south India were not centrally controlled.
It cannot be denied that large parts of India WERE under central rule from time to time. The previous poster implied that the british were the first to comprehensively unite India. I was merely pointing out that they inherited Aurangzeb's empire and that Ashoka's empire was pretty big as well.
Umm, I know this stuff about the British being the first to "unite" India is sorta legendary now but I just don't think it is true.
Before the British showed up, Ashoka (circa 300BCE) and Aurangzeb (circa 1700 CE) had massive empires based in the subcontinent. One can even make the case that the British took over Aurangzeb's empire.
Here's a quick example of annoying problems with Mozilla and Konqueror. Go to http://www.microtelpc.com (Yes, the very same company that now sells linux pre-installed PCs via Walmart online) and CLICK on Desktops. You can select among the options only on Opera and Netscape 4.7 on linux but not in Konqueror 3 and Mozilla 0.9.9 (on linux). Why is this?
Or, go to http://www.unitedmicro.com, configure a PC to your heart's content and don't ask for any operating system in the configurator. Then call them up on the phone [I know, I know, that's SO last century] and tell them you'll send them a linux CD. They'll make sure that there are no incompatibilities encountered in a bare minimum linux installation. Since you know that the components are compatible, wipe off their bare linux installation and DIY after the PC arrives.
While I'm not religious about open source, nVidia's drivers in combination with my AMD Athlon CPU and chipset have created numerous problems. For instance, X would randomly lockup leaving no errors in the logs AFAICT. In the end, thanks to the great documentation at http://www.gentoo.org/doc/nvidia_tsg.html, I disabled AGP entirely by using Option "NvAGP" "0" in XF86Config. Earlier, I had fought a losing battle - tinkering with the BIOS, messing around with agpgart etc. to no avail. Finally, I have a stable nVidia XFree86 configuration but it took a while to get there.
You are out of luck for now. Apparently, Office 95 does not work with crossover office and there are serious roadblocks in making it work. However, according to Jeremy White CEO of Codeweavers, Office 95 is his favorite version of Office and if he gets his way....
I have Star Office 5.2 installed. It is good to have more options for.doc and.xls files. Crossover gives me that extra option. I haven't tried any open office builds yet.
I've used Crossover Plugin ever since it was first released and am now running Crossover Plugin 1.1. I find it to be a very useful tool especially for reading proprietary Microsoft formats. Crossover Plugin 1.1 (and 1.0) allows you to install the free Word, Excel and Powerpoint 97 viewers available on Microsoft's website. I now have no need for the extra Windows PC that I have in my office which used to crash each day. Also, my office is a lot cooler these days since the Windows PC has been switched off. One feature I have not seen mentioned which is a killer feature is that I can open a Word document and use the Wine Postscript driver to create a PostScript version of the file on my linux box and then print it. I have now taken to informing colleagues to save and resend Word and Excel documents in '97 rather than 2000 formats so that I can read them on my linux box. Goodbye Citrix MetaFrame, Vmware and Windows!
Tet sez "There are simple answers to this. Sleepycat is a company, WINE isn't."
Please take a look at Gavriel State's idea for a license (http://www.winehq.com/hypermail/wine-devel/2002/0 2/0344.html). It does involve creating a "Wine Corporation" that copyrights can be assigned to and which has the power to issue licenses for a fee. Gavriel is a key figure in TransGaming and before that he was the lead developer in porting Corel WordPerfect Office to linux via wine.
Anand
Re:Wine Mainstream..If you can't beat it...beat it
on
Wired Talks Wine
·
· Score: 1
Rather than get caught up in seeing things either too optimistically or too pessimistically, I think we should try to see things more realistically.
I'll take a stab at such a realistic view:
1. Windows XP and its successors will have enough of a combination of stability, features, security, branding and marketing to hold onto a majority of the desktop for a long, long time. However, as more of the world comes online (Brazil already, Mexico soon, China and SE Asia and then India) important trade agreements will get signed and the currently rampant piracy will be curtailed. When more and more people in non-Western countries find that the latest version of Windows and Office is too expensive, an appropriately packaged version of linux (or the BSDs) will become more attractive.
2. While Office XP will probably continue the dominant position held by previous Office packages, Microsoft may attempt to nickel and dime us to death with.Net subscription and services. To be realistic, a really good scenario for Microsoft would be to partner with major ISPs and cable providers and fold the cost of.Net subscription into the cable or ISP bill. Would you notice it? Developments in this space are obviously going to be interesting to watch and could be an opportunity for distributed and free.Net-like services.
3. Future developments in the PDA and handheld space: While Pocket PC is gaining now, linux could play a role here which may eventually affect what we mean by "the desktop".
4. I just saw Gandhi on TV. Please remember his quote: "When I despair, I remember that all through history the way of truth and love has always won. There have been tyrants and murderers and for a time they seem invincible, but in the end, they always fall - think of it, always." It is unfair to characterize Microsoft as murderous, the movie _Antitrust_ notwithstanding, but I think "tyrant" fits admirably.
There's always been plenty of excitement on the borland.public.kylix.non-technical newsgroup regarding native RAD C++ for linux. John Kaster (from Borland) is the guy who usually confirms or denies rumors. For a while, there was a rumor that the C++ RAD version of Kylix would be called Sylix and he squashed that rumor pretty quickly.
You can access the newsgroup here (sorry for the long URL, blame google not me)
http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=en&threadm=3C 43 71D8.51AB0544%40uk.renaultf1.com&prev=/groups%3Fnu m%3D25%26hl%3Den%26group%3Dborland.public.kylix.no n-technical%26start%3D25%26group%3Dborland.public. kylix.non-technical
Also please check out an earlier message on this topic which may have already been covered on slashdot (sorry too lazy to check at 3:15AM)
http://community.borland.com/article/0,1410,2819 8, 00.html
This one gives you an email address kylixbeta@borland.com where (surprise, surprise!) you may be able to get a beta.
There are huge problems in the current academic research system and pay-per-view online access is just one of them. Here are a few of the problems:
1. Presentation of current research work in a conference is now the preferred way of rapidly communicating ideas. You get immediate feedback and get to stand up and give a talk in front of your peers [usually in Powerpoint:-( ] which is a lot of fun. Guess what: conference publications are not usually valued much in the academic rat race in comparison to journal publications.
2. A conference presentation is usually written up as a paper and placed in a collection. Later, when the author writes a journal article, there's naturally a lot of overlap between the conference publication and the journal publication. Technically, this is a copyright violation.
3. Most of us in the academic community freely share our publications (in.ps formats) and place them online. I don't see how this is different from Napster (since we usually sign away our copyright to some publishing company).
4. Technically, for every figure, table and other content which is repeated in different papers, one needs to get and acknowledge permission from the authors and publishing company before the content can be reproduced. How archaic is this?
I have the Thunder K7 with linux (red hat 7.1 SMP) on it and it is just great. The vendor Net Express (http://www.tdl.com/~netex) who put it together for me did an outstanding job in terms of cooling. Anyway, be careful installing large amounts of memory on this machine. I wanted 2GB DDR 2100 RAM and Net Express had a lot of trouble early on with data corruption in memory. Finally, they got it working with x4 chips (x4 refers to the number of bits per bank: http://www.tdl.com/~netex/ram/ram.html) instead of x8 chips because the latter was slowing the bus down. So, if you're thinking of putting together a server using the Tyan Thunder K7 board, double and triple check for memory corruption.
QT 3.0 is supposed to have a universal component model QCOM (runs across windows/linux/os x). My understanding is that KDE 3.0 is not much more than a recompile against QT 3.0 thereby breaking binary compatibility with previous KDE compiled against QT 2.3.x. However, since QT 3.0 has a brand new component model, future KDE releases after KDE 3.0 could start taking advantage of it I suppose.
Very nice books exploring black holes (both fiction and non fiction)
Fiction:
Heaven's reach by David Brin. The final book in the Streaker saga. Describes a society that has a black hole-centric religion.
Non-fiction:
The life of the cosmos by Lee Smolin. Makes a case for the hypothesis that the fundamental constants in nature (G, h, c, e etc.) are tuned by the universe (actually multiverse) to maximize black hole production.
Three roads to quantum gravity by Lee Smolin. Followup to previous book.
After hearing a lot about Win2K's supposed reliability, I got a Win2K box (Athlon T'bird 1.33GHz, 256MB SDRAM, Geforce 2 MX card with 32MB memory, VIA KT133A chipset, Win2K SP1). It crashes daily inside Mozilla 0.9.3 and I have to reboot the machine since everything freezes.
Do I put this down as a Win2K problem, a Mozilla problem or something else (hardware problem)?
Mozilla 0.9.3 does not crash daily on my linux and WinME boxes which is why I think it might be Win2K related.
As someone who works in the field of computer vision, it is extremely annoying to hear statements like "Face recognition was first developed in the US." As with any field, face recognition is something that international computer vision researchers have worked on for a very long time and it is good to see it partially come to fruition at the present time.
And yes, you can achieve good results from mere grayscale raster images of people's faces as long as you have a good template to compare with. However, face recognition is still an extremely difficult problem due to differences in illumination conditions, differences in viewpoint and scale, etc.
Instead of reading nonsensical books like this one by Evan Walker or anything by Fred Alan Wolf, read Dan Dennett, John Searle, Dave Chalmers and finally Gregg Rosenberg (http://ai.uga.edu/~ghrosenb/toc.htm). We owe a debt to Searle for taking consciousness seriously as opposed to assuming it to be merely a computation. We are indebted to Dennett for clearly showing that there is no single place in the brain or a single point in time where consciousness can be said to occur. We are indebted to Chalmers for clearly showing us that consciousness is not supervenient on the physical and finally to Gregg Rosenberg for showing us that consciousness and causation are intimately connected and that we don't really understand either of them.
So, my recommendations if you're really interested in consciousness:
1. Dan Dennett, Consciousness Explained, 1991. Debunks many mysteries surrounding consciousness especially w.r.t. mind/brain confusion.
2. John Searle, The Rediscovery of the Mind, 1992. Takes the computationalists to task for over simplifying the problem.
3. David Chalmers, The Conscious Mind, 1995. "Consciousness is not logically supervenient on the physical." Or to put it in layman terms, even after you've accounted (in principle) for all particles and fields in the entire universe and for all time, consciousness is still not reducible to the physical. Conclusion: Take consciousness seriously and include it axiomatically to get a new natural (but not purely physical) description of the universe.
4. Gregg Rosenberg, http://ai.uga.edu/~ghrosenb/toc.htm, 1997. "Receptive aspect of causation is also not logically supervenient on the physical". Or in layman terms, the fundamental terms used in physics like mass, charge, etc. are a set of distinctions that are themselves never explained, just assumed. This set of primary distinctions are justified by us based on our own experience. However, it is experience itself that we seek to explain when we seek a science of consciousness. This is circular. Conclusion: Once consciousness itself is made axiomatically primary (see Chalmers above), connect the primary distinctions made in consciousness with the primary distinctions made in physics. You end up with a beautiful dual-aspect theory where consciousness is the interior aspect of causation and physics the exterior aspect.
One of the very best in science fiction
on
Childhood's End
·
· Score: 1
I strongly disagree with the above review of _Childhood's End_.
I read _Childhood's End_ while I was flying to the US for the first time having left India to attend graduate school here in the US. I was and am still blown away by _Childhood's End_. While I can't speak for others, to me it is a classic.
One of the reasons why some people may dislike _Childhood's End_ is due to the left turn taken by the book toward mysticism. However, Clarke is simply exploring the consequences of an evolutionary leap from present-day rational human beings to psychic posthumans. I think he does a great job of depicting this evolutionary transformation. Also, his explanation of the devil is IMHO a masterpiece.
This sort of evolutionary transformation taken by humanity is standard fare in mysticism. It was popularized by Teilhard de Chardin and by Aurobindo. In fact Aurobindo's sequence of evolutionary stages---rational, intuitive, psychic, overmind, supermind---may have influenced Clarke since Clarke uses the term overmind to describe the forces controlling the overlord aliens. For a more recent update on these ideas, check out Ken Wilber's _Sex, Ecology and Spirituality; The Spirit of Evolution_.
Slashdot Mirror
Seriously, you don't think that you are somewhat biased?
Here are some facts from the CIA handbook on India. These are more reliable than your very biased observations.
GDP: purchasing power parity - $2.2 trillion (2000 est.)
GDP - real growth rate: 6% (2000 est.)
GDP - per capita: purchasing power parity - $2,200 (2000 est.)
GDP - composition by sector: agriculture: 25%
industry: 24%
services: 51% (2000)
Population below poverty line: 35% (1994 est.)
Household income or consumption by percentage share: lowest 10%: 3.5%
highest 10%: 33.5% (1997)
Inflation rate (consumer prices): 5.4% (2000 est.)
A growth rate of 6% with a purchasing parity of $2.2 trillion ain't too shabby. The Indian middle class is estimated at 300 million people. Any simple characterization of India is deeply flawed if it does not take into account the wide spectrum of people that you find there.
That wasn't my point at all. Also, the maps of Ashoka and Aurangzeb which I linked to clearly indicate that parts of south India were not centrally controlled.
It cannot be denied that large parts of India WERE under central rule from time to time. The previous poster implied that the british were the first to comprehensively unite India. I was merely pointing out that they inherited Aurangzeb's empire and that Ashoka's empire was pretty big as well.
Umm, I know this stuff about the British being the first to "unite" India is sorta legendary now but I just don't think it is true.
Before the British showed up, Ashoka (circa 300BCE) and Aurangzeb (circa 1700 CE) had massive empires based in the subcontinent. One can even make the case that the British took over Aurangzeb's empire.
Here's a quick example of annoying problems with Mozilla and Konqueror. Go to http://www.microtelpc.com (Yes, the very same company that now sells linux pre-installed PCs via Walmart online) and CLICK on Desktops. You can select among the options only on Opera and Netscape 4.7 on linux but not in Konqueror 3 and Mozilla 0.9.9 (on linux). Why is this?
Anand
Or, go to http://www.unitedmicro.com, configure a PC
to your heart's content and don't ask for any operating
system in the configurator. Then call them up on
the phone [I know, I know, that's SO last century]
and tell them you'll send them a linux CD. They'll
make sure that there are no incompatibilities encountered
in a bare minimum linux installation. Since you know that the
components are compatible, wipe off their bare linux installation
and DIY after the PC arrives.
While I'm not religious about open source, nVidia's drivers in combination with my AMD Athlon CPU and chipset have created numerous problems. For instance, X would randomly lockup leaving no errors in the logs AFAICT. In the end, thanks to the great documentation at http://www.gentoo.org/doc/nvidia_tsg.html, I disabled AGP entirely by using Option "NvAGP" "0" in XF86Config. Earlier, I had fought a losing battle - tinkering with the BIOS, messing around with agpgart etc. to no avail. Finally, I have a stable nVidia XFree86 configuration but it took a while to get there.
You are out of luck for now. Apparently, Office 95 does not work with crossover office and there are serious roadblocks in making it work. However, according to Jeremy White CEO of Codeweavers, Office 95 is his favorite version of Office and if he gets his way....
c e- support/2002-March/000032.html
http://crossover.codeweavers.com/pipermail/offi
And it looks like all the crossover office modifications will make it into the wine tree as well.
/ 03 /0442.html
http://www.winehq.com/hypermail/wine-devel/2002
>Why not install openoffice?
.doc and .xls files. Crossover gives me that extra option. I haven't tried any open office builds yet.
>Jason
I have Star Office 5.2 installed. It is good to have more options for
I've used Crossover Plugin ever since it was first released and am now running Crossover Plugin 1.1. I find it to be a very useful tool especially for reading proprietary Microsoft formats. Crossover Plugin 1.1 (and 1.0) allows you to install the free Word, Excel and Powerpoint 97 viewers available on Microsoft's website. I now have no need for the extra Windows PC that I have in my office which used to crash each day. Also, my office is a lot cooler these days since the Windows PC has been switched off. One feature I have not seen mentioned which is a killer feature is that I can open a Word document and use the Wine Postscript driver to create a PostScript version of the file on my linux box and then print it. I have now taken to informing colleagues to save and resend Word and Excel documents in '97 rather than 2000 formats so that I can read them on my linux box. Goodbye Citrix MetaFrame, Vmware and Windows!
There's a pretty comprehensive list of linux system vendors (scroll down for U.S. vendors) over here . Includes the big OEMS (Dell, HP, etc.)
Tet sez "There are simple answers to this. Sleepycat is a company, WINE isn't."
0 2/0344.html). It does involve creating a "Wine Corporation" that copyrights can be assigned to and which has the power to issue licenses for a fee. Gavriel is a key figure in TransGaming and before that he was the lead developer in porting Corel WordPerfect Office to linux via wine.
Please take a look at Gavriel State's idea for a license (http://www.winehq.com/hypermail/wine-devel/2002/
Anand
Rather than get caught up in seeing things either too optimistically or too pessimistically, I think we should try to see things more realistically.
.Net subscription and services. To be realistic, a really good scenario for Microsoft would be to partner with major ISPs and cable providers and fold the cost of .Net subscription into the cable or ISP bill. Would you notice it? Developments in this space are obviously going to be interesting to watch and could be an opportunity for distributed and free .Net-like services.
I'll take a stab at such a realistic view:
1. Windows XP and its successors will have enough of a combination of stability, features, security, branding and marketing to hold onto a majority of the desktop for a long, long time. However, as more of the world comes online (Brazil already, Mexico soon, China and SE Asia and then India) important trade agreements will get signed and the currently rampant piracy will be curtailed. When more and more people in non-Western countries find that the latest version of Windows and Office is too expensive, an appropriately packaged version of linux (or the BSDs) will become more attractive.
2. While Office XP will probably continue the dominant position held by previous Office packages, Microsoft may attempt to nickel and dime us to death with
3. Future developments in the PDA and handheld space: While Pocket PC is gaining now, linux could play a role here which may eventually affect what we mean by "the desktop".
4. I just saw Gandhi on TV. Please remember his quote: "When I despair, I remember that all through history the way of truth and love has always won. There have been tyrants and murderers and for a time they seem invincible, but in the end, they always fall - think of it, always." It is unfair to characterize Microsoft as murderous, the movie _Antitrust_ notwithstanding, but I think "tyrant" fits admirably.
There's always been plenty of excitement on the borland.public.kylix.non-technical newsgroup regarding native RAD C++ for linux. John Kaster (from Borland) is the guy who usually confirms or denies rumors. For a while, there was a rumor that the C++ RAD version of Kylix would be called Sylix and he squashed that rumor pretty quickly.
C 43 71D8.51AB0544%40uk.renaultf1.com&prev=/groups%3Fnu m%3D25%26hl%3Den%26group%3Dborland.public.kylix.no n-technical%26start%3D25%26group%3Dborland.public. kylix.non-technical
9 8, 00.html
You can access the newsgroup here (sorry for the long URL, blame google not me)
http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=en&threadm=3
Also please check out an earlier message on this topic which may have already been covered on slashdot (sorry too lazy to check at 3:15AM)
http://community.borland.com/article/0,1410,281
This one gives you an email address kylixbeta@borland.com where (surprise, surprise!) you may be able to get a beta.
There are huge problems in the current academic research system and pay-per-view online access is just one of them. Here are a few of the problems:
:-( ] which is a lot of fun. Guess what: conference publications are not usually valued much in the academic rat race in comparison to journal publications.
.ps formats) and place them online. I don't see how this is different from Napster (since we usually sign away our copyright to some publishing company).
1. Presentation of current research work in a conference is now the preferred way of rapidly communicating ideas. You get immediate feedback and get to stand up and give a talk in front of your peers [usually in Powerpoint
2. A conference presentation is usually written up as a paper and placed in a collection. Later, when the author writes a journal article, there's naturally a lot of overlap between the conference publication and the journal publication. Technically, this is a copyright violation.
3. Most of us in the academic community freely share our publications (in
4. Technically, for every figure, table and other content which is repeated in different papers, one needs to get and acknowledge permission from the authors and publishing company before the content can be reproduced. How archaic is this?
Anand
I have the Thunder K7 with linux (red hat 7.1 SMP) on it and it is just great. The vendor Net Express (http://www.tdl.com/~netex) who put it together for me did an outstanding job in terms of cooling. Anyway, be careful installing large amounts of memory on this machine. I wanted 2GB DDR 2100 RAM and Net Express had a lot of trouble early on with data corruption in memory. Finally, they got it working with x4 chips (x4 refers to the number of bits per bank: http://www.tdl.com/~netex/ram/ram.html) instead of x8 chips because the latter was slowing the bus down. So, if you're thinking of putting together a server using the Tyan Thunder K7 board, double and triple check for memory corruption.
Anand
QT 3.0 is supposed to have a universal component model QCOM (runs across windows/linux/os x). My understanding is that KDE 3.0 is not much more than a recompile against QT 3.0 thereby breaking binary compatibility with previous KDE compiled against QT 2.3.x. However, since QT 3.0 has a brand new component model, future KDE releases after KDE 3.0 could start taking advantage of it I suppose.
Very nice books exploring black holes (both fiction and non fiction)
Fiction:
Heaven's reach by David Brin. The final book in the Streaker saga. Describes a society that has a black hole-centric religion.
Non-fiction:
The life of the cosmos by Lee Smolin. Makes a case for the hypothesis that the fundamental constants in nature (G, h, c, e etc.) are tuned by the universe (actually multiverse) to maximize black hole production.
Three roads to quantum gravity by Lee Smolin. Followup to previous book.
Anand
After hearing a lot about Win2K's supposed reliability, I got a Win2K box (Athlon T'bird 1.33GHz, 256MB SDRAM, Geforce 2 MX card with 32MB memory, VIA KT133A chipset, Win2K SP1). It crashes daily inside Mozilla 0.9.3 and I have to reboot the machine since everything freezes.
Do I put this down as a Win2K problem, a Mozilla problem or something else (hardware problem)?
Mozilla 0.9.3 does not crash daily on my linux and WinME boxes which is why I think it might be Win2K related.
Anand
As someone who works in the field of computer vision, it is extremely annoying to hear statements like "Face recognition was first developed in the US." As with any field, face recognition is something that international computer vision researchers have worked on for a very long time and it is good to see it partially come to fruition at the present time.
And yes, you can achieve good results from mere grayscale raster images of people's faces as long as you have a good template to compare with. However, face recognition is still an extremely difficult problem due to differences in illumination conditions, differences in viewpoint and scale, etc.
Anand
Instead of reading nonsensical books like this one by Evan Walker or anything by Fred Alan Wolf, read Dan Dennett, John Searle, Dave Chalmers and finally Gregg Rosenberg (http://ai.uga.edu/~ghrosenb/toc.htm). We owe a debt to Searle for taking consciousness seriously as opposed to assuming it to be merely a computation. We are indebted to Dennett for clearly showing that there is no single place in the brain or a single point in time where consciousness can be said to occur. We are indebted to Chalmers for clearly showing us that consciousness is not supervenient on the physical and finally to Gregg Rosenberg for showing us that consciousness and causation are intimately connected and that we don't really understand either of them.
So, my recommendations if you're really interested in consciousness:
1. Dan Dennett, Consciousness Explained, 1991. Debunks many mysteries surrounding consciousness especially w.r.t. mind/brain confusion.
2. John Searle, The Rediscovery of the Mind, 1992. Takes the computationalists to task for over simplifying the problem.
3. David Chalmers, The Conscious Mind, 1995. "Consciousness is not logically supervenient on the physical." Or to put it in layman terms, even after you've accounted (in principle) for all particles and fields in the entire universe and for all time, consciousness is still not reducible to the physical. Conclusion: Take consciousness seriously and include it axiomatically to get a new natural (but not purely physical) description of the universe.
4. Gregg Rosenberg, http://ai.uga.edu/~ghrosenb/toc.htm, 1997. "Receptive aspect of causation is also not logically supervenient on the physical". Or in layman terms, the fundamental terms used in physics like mass, charge, etc. are a set of distinctions that are themselves never explained, just assumed. This set of primary distinctions are justified by us based on our own experience. However, it is experience itself that we seek to explain when we seek a science of consciousness. This is circular. Conclusion: Once consciousness itself is made axiomatically primary (see Chalmers above), connect the primary distinctions made in consciousness with the primary distinctions made in physics. You end up with a beautiful dual-aspect theory where consciousness is the interior aspect of causation and physics the exterior aspect.
I strongly disagree with the above review of _Childhood's End_.
I read _Childhood's End_ while I was flying to the US for the first time having left India to attend graduate school here in the US. I was and am still blown away by _Childhood's End_. While I can't speak for others, to me it is a classic.
One of the reasons why some people may dislike _Childhood's End_ is due to the left turn taken by the book toward mysticism. However, Clarke is simply exploring the consequences of an evolutionary leap from present-day rational human beings to psychic posthumans. I think he does a great job of depicting this evolutionary transformation. Also, his explanation of the devil is IMHO a masterpiece.
This sort of evolutionary transformation taken by humanity is standard fare in mysticism. It was popularized by Teilhard de Chardin and by Aurobindo. In fact Aurobindo's sequence of evolutionary stages---rational, intuitive, psychic, overmind, supermind---may have influenced Clarke since Clarke uses the term overmind to describe the forces controlling the overlord aliens. For a more recent update on these ideas, check out Ken Wilber's _Sex, Ecology and Spirituality; The Spirit of Evolution_.