So there's some young stars contained within that glowing green cloud... and that makes me wonder if (should the radiation be low enough that life could flourish) the night sky on the worlds that orbit those stars would glow bright green across the heavens. Also, is the effect inside the cloud enough that it is akin to our daytime atmosphere in that it occludes visibility of the dimmer objects in the sky?

No, it isn't jealousy at all. It is the fact that he is misleading the techno-illiterate down a path that is filled with partial truths, hyperbole, and fatuous fantasizing. Furthermore, he suffers from exceptionally bad lack of judgement when it comes to the rather sophomoric crap that he's pushed in the past... see the old videos of his "Ramona" e-persona for a glaring example of this. If you want some rather more practical and interesting musings about where technology might be going in the long run, try "Report on Planet Three" by Arthur C Clarke. It might not purport the man/machine fusion that Kurzweil is praying for before he dies, but it does delve into the questions of long-term space exploration and AI in a more realistic fashion... and did so from the distant year of 1972. Kurzweil's vision is all about how technology is supposed to transform human existence, while Clarke speaks more to what could plausibly be the future... rather than a self-aggrandizing dream of what he'd like to be true.

That's not correct at all. There are huge sections of the book where Nell is dealing with reality: Having a drugged-up mother, having her mother's boyfriends abuse her, having her brother come to her aid, losing her brother to, essentially, black lung disease caused by the nano-bot "toner wars", learning to survive on the streets for the first half of the book, and so on.

In fact, a good fraction of the story explains how three girls with the same book develop completely differently. And it is implied that this is due to both the raw starting materials (genetic and background experiences) as well as the inputs (having a racter backing the primer's narrative who essentially becomes a distant mother figure.)

Do not forget that the book ends with the foreshadowing that the architect/engineer, the racter, and Nell unite in one big happy family.

***SPOILER***

(Like you care if you haven't read this in the past decade.)

No, that wasn't the point at all. All three girls had racter-driven primers. They simply developed differently due to their inherent personalities and completely different social upbringings. Remember the scene where all three girls were going to pass through the tunnel? (I think this was on the original patron's land.) One girl was brash, the other timid, while Nell was careful but still adventurous.

The girls who were raised *solely* by machine weren't "problems" either. The architect/engineer *specifically* inserted his own sub-programming into their primers that made them into a willing army of the standard-bearer, who turned out to be Nell.

No offense, but you didn't recall correctly. ;)

You're close, but you've got quite a few of the details wrong. Daft Punk did film a couple of their massive Alive 2007 tour dates, but were completely unhappy with the result... it was all just the same overly-slick swooping camera shots. There is at least one live video posted to youtube that comes from this footage, and it's reminiscent of every other concert video out there. The fan-made video is not "available" in Europe, as it's just as bootleg there as it is here... so you have to find a copy to download in the wilds of the internet.

The fan-produced concert DVD (ISO of a PAL-format video of one of the several Bercy, France shows) is a bootleg (that Daft Punk has nodded at in appreciation but has never formally blessed or condemned because they can do neither without either angering their label or their fans) splicing together video from about two dozen high-quality digital cameras that were shot by various fans during the show. Read some of the commentary surrounding their opinions of the fan-made videos over on wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daft_Punk

As a side note, it is incredibly easy to transcode the PAL DVD into NTSC. I used Nero's tools to do it, and it was no hit to the quality since the original is mostly shaky hand-cam to begin with. I've got several copies of the show on a DVD laying around here somewhere... and while you're at it you can insert some proper chapter markers for the "before the show" segment and the "encore" segment, although I went whole-hog and put in chapter markers between the songs as well.

For those interested, the video was originally hosted all over... I got mine from theworldisdaft.com, but it appears it is no longer available there. If you want to roll the dice on the torrent world, it should be fairly easy to get your hands on the PAL ISO and then transcode it to something more Region 1 friendly.

Only eleven years ago, in 1999, forty million fan-boys sat in their mom's basements and were asked the same question that greets you at the start of each Blizzard public relations blitz. Gentlemen, what are the seven pillars?

Off-topic pedanticism here: "Infamous" means that something or someone is famous for negative reasons or for having a very bad reputation, along the lines of "notorious". Methinks that it really isn't the word you were looking for, and that "famous" or some synonym would do nicely.

I've been reading The Codebreakers (the original 1967 printing) and this particular device would rank in the "possible, though time-consuming to solve" category, as a shifting monalphabetic cypher. And, no, most people aren't going to be up to the challenge of breaking it themselves since a good deal of practice and a lot of time is needed to crack apart a given encryption of this kind... more or less time depending upon the volume of traffic and the nature of the data encrypted. (Knowing that a message will begin with the date or a "Dear Sir" can make a huge difference.) I will rely upon the expert opinion of the authors and the cryptographers who no longer use such devices as sufficient proof that such devices are, in and of themselves, not terribly good at resisting cryptanalysis. However, if you use this device to superencrypt and already reasonably secure message consisting of codegroups with many polyphones and homophones, then you'll certainly give the cryptanalysts a run for their money. (Caveat: I may be totally wrong... I don't know enough about the subject or this device to do other than a base comparison of it against similar devices and schemes from the same period.)

If you're going to chime in, please be sure to read the whole tree of the comment thread above the post you wish to dissect. The spelling and syntax issues are directly quoted from the silly punt that Rakishi is trying to correct, so those errors are attributable to Nitage, not Rakishi. My assertion here is: If you're going to snipe, make sure you have the right target.

I understand that, conceptually, people want to talk about how this works like dropping a dome over the top of the leak, but I'm afraid that this structure is in no way even close to a dome. Hell, I'd be more apt to call it a "four sided cylinder" than a dome and be just about as correct. Twenty bucks says they started off with the concept and the label and then didn't bother to change the label when the engineers told them how difficult it would be to build and maneuver a dome around. So they ask the engineers to make it functional and they get an open-ended box with a pyramidal cap... all the while the managers are standing around watching while murmuring, "Yep... that dome is shaping up nicely..." This whole event has made me wonder how many times in ancient history that a sea floor fault has released spills like this (or worse) in the distant geological past. Seems like we should be ready for this type of event even if we aren't the ones punching the hole through the abyssal plain of the sea floor..

I had a similar experience just last year in a Honda Accord, however in my case the cruise control mechanism cam broke and jammed the throttle in a wide-open position. I was doing 90 on the interstate in fairly short order. You could slow the car with the brakes, but you were fighting the engine... and as soon as you let off it would speed back up. Toggling cruise control or turning the ignition on and off had no effect, because the throttle mechanism was physically jammed by the broken cam.

I was able to safely stop by simply popping the transmission into neutral at speed (where the unloaded engine would then race at high RPMs) and brake to a stop on an off-ramp where I pulled off the road and shut off the engine. Had the brakes not worked correctly I would have used the emergency brake to stop. Had none of the brakes worked I would have shut off the engine and rolled to a stop. If it got too dicey I would have jammed the transmission into park, which would have been abrupt and damaging to the car, but is better than an uncontrolled wreck.

It's really too bad about the people who have died, but I just don't understand why the drivers didn't take one of these actions. The one policeman (and his family) who died should have known this... I think perhaps, he didn't want to damage his Lexus? They were on the phone with 911 for a minute and a half before the crash, which is plenty of time to pick a spot to shut off the engine and coast.

Just to expand upon the parent's point: Native Americans most certainly knew of the wheel and applied it where they felt it was useful, however for most tribes it simply wasn't useful. To make it more useful you'd have had to construct decent paths or roads, and the benefits of improved roads would have been of little help save for facilitating wheeled-transport use. It was not that inventing uses for the wheel was beyond them... but that the wheel's continued use requires a level of "buying into" the idea across the entire culture. Frankly, their choice to use canoes and horses was probably optimal for the purposes they wanted to achieve.

Logically define right and wrong.

If you want to speak universally (or at least as universally as you can from the perspective of a given sentient species) then I think that Heinlein's source for moral behavior is correct: right and wrong are judged solely against how the actions impact the survival and advancement of the species. Any other test or condition is just noise against that cosmic imperative. This test of right or wrong is meted out by the universe, so you don't have to worry about a human judgement getting involved.

See http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Robert_A._Heinlein for some better direct quotes on this topic. Include the section entitled "Pragmatics of patriotism" for ideas that build further upon this basic idea.

The problem is the conversation on the tour winds up going like this:

"Is this... uhhh... auto...erotica?"
"No, no, there are no animatronics on this tour. This is the real thing!"

Followed shortly thereafter by running and screaming. It's best to keep science and tours very far apart.