...more recent posts
I'm all for technology, but I have noticed this never works out well for humans in sci-fi stories.
"Hod Lipson, a mechanical engineer who worked with Pollack on the project, described it as 'nearly a self-replicating artificial life system.'"
Well, no Powerbooks, which is probably a good thing, but only 2 more weeks until OS X. I will be getting and installing as soon as it is out. That should provide update fodder for a few days/weeks/months. I'm actually pretty excited, which is most likely not a good thing to be over a piece of software. But that's how it is.
As much as I don't believe it, I will admit to keeping one eye on Seybold for the possible introduction of the G4 powerbook. Mmmmm. I'm pretty sure they need to wait for the G4e before they can stuff it into that little form factor (although they did it with the cube, so who knows) but like I said, I'm sort of watching. I know of one person who's out there. Any updates from the trenches?
Busy week. Trying to get away for the weekend. Of course this means that a million little things are popping up which have to get done first. I guess that's almost the point of going away. Not just to rest, but to get everything from your real life in order. It's like having to cross a checkpoint. If I never went away, I could just keep letting things slide until tomorrow. Letting things slide until I get back from vacation doesn't seem like as much of an option. We'll see if I'm still feeling like that on Thursday morning. Big night tonight. Bigger night tomorrow. Must work now.
I saw Craig Venter (president of Celera Genomics) on Charlie Rose last night. Seemed like a decent incredibly smart guy. Still, he made me feel very uncomfortable by not answering the questions about why they are filing so many patents.
Did you hear the Verizon strike conspiracy theory? Supposedly their research showed that the new name was not catching on with the public. So they "manufactured" the strike, forcing the name to be repeated over and over for a few weeks in the media. Now everyone knows Verizon. :-p
If you use the internet, you probably already know all about trolls. I keep meaning to write something a bit longer about them, becasue it is a pretty interesting phenomenon. You can see some (arguably very bad) trolls talking amongst themselves here (warning: lots of stupid, juvenille, possibly offensive stuff mixed in with a couple of interesting bits.) Anyway, the longer discourse will have to wait, but I'm bringing this up because I'm wondering if a whole web site can be a troll? I'm thinking of this one in particular. It's perfect troll material (at least for slashdot.) Here are a few of my favorite quotes.
"The settlement in the Cyber Patrol case reported yesterday is in danger since it was learned that the hackers who created the 'cphack' virus are part of a neo-Socialistic cult that renounces individual ownership of software.Neo-Socialistic cult, eh? Well, how about this one:
"This new medium of the Information Superhighway--created by brave Cold Warriors in the struggle against Communist aggression..."Yeah, I know about DARPA, but saying it was...oh nevermind (IHBT)...The insanity continues:
"According to the Rutherford Institute, the number of sites with anti-Christian content has risen by over 350 percent during the period from 1997 to 1999. Most of these sites are created by self-styled Satanists or 'free thinkers'."Isn't there a law against that free thinking stuff? Anyway, my point is (you knew I had a point, right?) if you can't tell the difference between a seriously raving lunatic, and a troll, isn't it better just to consider it a troll? All those politicians aren't really serious (come on, how could they be,) they're just trolling. Once you see things this way, the solution is easy: don't feed the trolls. Don't pay any attention. They are trying to get that predictable rise out of you. I think I like this outlook. Now I can just forget about politics and get back to mastering regular expressions.
I'm guessing this might be enough to make some politician step in and knock a little wind out of these overly litigious corporations. (If you don't know: a judge recently ruled for the MPAA against the "hacker" magazine/website 2600 for linking to the DeCSS software code which makes it possible for people running linux to watch DVD's. Now it turns out that CNN (which is owned by Time Warner which is a part of the MPAA) has links to the same software.)
Another cool thing about google I never knew: if you enter
links: http://www.somesite.org into the search field you get a listing of all the pages that google knows of pointing to somesite.org.
New books:
Permutation City by Greg Egan
Mastering Regular Expressions (O'Reilly - owl) J.E.F. Friedl