I don't know about you, but the idea of a pack of feral toy poodles chasing me sounds pretty horrifying

People send confidential documents via e-mail all the time - I very much doubt Opera's proxies (which in any case are only used if UPnP doesn't work for you and you don't have a direct, NAT-free connection) would bother most of them.

I also don't think Unite will be a big deal, but I don't think people will give a second thought about security.

So why do people care? First time I saw a commercial service that offered that was ca. 10 years ago. Several services like that are still around, but none of them have managed to convince enough people that it matters to actually make it big.

And before you claim London has a "single centre": No it doesn't. My *suburb* of half a million people have a dozen or so small centres. There is a central area of London, but it's only one of many, and only has the distinction of being the densest and the one with most tourists.

I live in London. 7-8 million people, and a few more in the surrounding metropolitan area. I can get anywhere I want with public transport - in fact I don't even have a drivers license (never did).

Cars are only a necessity in the US for most people because most of the US lacks decent public transport system and because cities are planned based on a population that travels everywhere by car. Start building decent transport systems and make planners consider pedestrians and bikes and the number of people who need cars to get around will plummet quickly. With better public transportation, other aspects (such as denser downtown shopping areas instead of megastores spread out over large areas as in some of the more sprawling areas in the US will follow.

Of course the majority of the worlds population now lives in cities, and many of them are huge. In London it's pretty common to have a one hour commute from one part of the city to another.

In Central London you can easily outrun cars most of the time due to traffic... There's a lot of urban environments where typical speeds are low enough that something that's a step up from motorbikes in safety could do quite well.

Anyone that uses EC2 without being set up to handle instance failures are idiots. EC2 instances fail fairly regularly, and Amazon has went out of their way to point out to people that if they do, your instance data is gone so you better design your apps to be resilient against instance failure.

The whole point being that you pay only for the resilience YOU want, not for a bunch of things that may or may not be appropriate depending on your app. Amazon can't know whether bringing an image up is safe or not unless the backup is up to the clock cycle consistent - bringing them up could be disastrous. Different apps require extremely different failover solutions.

The usefulness is that you have the API to do this without pre-provisioning a bunch of servers.

Nitrous doesn't prevent pain in most people to any great degree. It mostly make you care less and react less to it and give a sense of wellbeing.

I've used it while at the dentist (though not any more - it's too expensive to be worth it), and it was nowhere near strong enough to replace a novocaine injection or others for anything but the most trivial stuff that I wouldn't have minded doing without any sedation at all anyway.

It was however a very pleasant addition. When I had nitrous, I was in the chair with headphones listening to relaxing music, some dark glasses and just laid there breathing in the nitrous, mouth wide open, wondering why that silly man kept disturbing me to get me to open wider.

I left the dentist more relaxed than when I came, with the added bonus that it's out of your system in a minute or so.

I *love* Banks, but his ideas are nowhere as revolutionary as PKD's were when he wrote them. I'd love to see them turned into movies, too, and they'd overall be far easier to turn into successful movies - the problem with Banks' stories is that they'd be expensive (the scale), while with PKD's it's that his stories are too complex. I mean, with adaptations of PKD's short stories they've still consistently stripped away layers to simplify.

Describing "Sheep" as "bizarre" is pretty funny, considering it's overall one of PKD novels that are most "mainstream". I don't agree with you that Blade Runner eliminated "unnecessary detail" - it fundamentally altered the story. Doesn't mean it's a bad movie, just not the same story.

I want to see a "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep" movie. You could make one with most of the mainstream audience not even realizing it had anything to do with Blade Runner.

And if you take PKD books literally, you don't end up with something "paced very slowly" - in most cases you'd end up with something that to most viewers would be impossible to follow because of the often non-linear story lines and large number of inter-vowen ideas. If anything, "sheep" is one of the simple ones.

You have to watch those movies under the assumption that they are not as much "adaptations" as they are "inspired by".

I loved reading Minority Report and Paycheck, and I liked the movies too, but they only really have the overall "in your face" part of the story/idea in common with each other - PKD's subtext and deeper stuff largely gets ignored (which makes sense - it'd be a nightmare to try to make something faithful to PKD's vision without making it unwatchable). They look similar if you read a blurb about them, but when you actually read them / watch them their character is very different.

Especially with the stuff being adapted from older PKD short stories that's probably resulting in better movies anyway. There's too little material in many of them to make a full length movie without changing the stories, and as many other writers of the era he had an obsession with nuclear war and various technological hangups that are now really dated. He also wasn't a particularly good writer early on - his ideas were fantastic, but it took him a while to start expressing them well.

By the time he wrote Flow My Tears..., though, his voice was well developed and it could be turned into something really interesting without changing the story all that much.

Yeah I confused your post with another one while replying, but Galileo was still not put in house arrest and forced to recant for disagreeing with the earth being the center of the universe in any case.

He was put in house arrest after repeatedly arguing the point in public writings and mocking the Pope. The Pope (and many others in the church) supported him initially - going so far as to specifically ask him to present both the church view and his own in one of his works, but cautioning him not to take sides.

They went as far as they could without allowing Galileo to undermine their own power base. There's still plenty of reason to criticize them, but they weren't nearly as backwards as they were given credit for. T

It's like the first person to eat lobster - they were either drunk, lost a bet, or really, really hungry

Most "weird" food can be explained by poverty.

He was put in house arrest for arguing that the planets revolved around the sun instead of around the earth and continuing to argue so after having been cautioned by the Pope against advocating the view (though he was originally expressly encouraged to continue discussing the alternative views as long as he did not express a preference) and then (possibly inadvertently) mocking the Pope in his next work, not for claiming the earth was round.

Try again

What the catholic church did to Galileo was idiotic, but there's little basis for asserting that they thought the earth was flat, and that certainly had nothing to do with their actions against Galileo