DonGateley

The most intriguing character of our times. I hope he portends the future.

The message is pretty much the same but the presentation is considerably different. After the wordy introduction which is more or less the story of his transformation from Richard Alpert to Ram Dass, Be Here Now is as much a work of art as it is a book. It tries to reach around your intellect.

I haven't had a copy for many years and just ordered one from Amazon because you made me think about it fondly again. I first read it shortly after it was published in '71 and it's time to read it again. :-)

There is a trap in the thinking that it took me a long time to understand. The present is a consequence of past behavior that cannot be safely ignored. The future is a consequence of present behavior and cannot be safely ignored. Discarding that caution brought me a lot of trouble I would have been better off avoiding. This is obvious but excess enthusiasm for mindfulness of the present can easily lead one to places that one wouldn't want to be.

This kind of complexity and the esoterica involved is exactly what terrifies me about Python.

Snowden should not be given clemency of any kind. The content of his disclosure is not relevant to clemency. The act of disclosure itself is what justifies prosecution. Precedence and all that.

Having said that, my provisional opinion of Snowden is that he is a self sacrificing hero. Insufficiently judicious, as the Slate article well covers, but still heroic.

Of course it will happen. The fed needs the technology for its ongoing insurrection suppression preparation (DEA, ATF, NSA, etc.) and would have to come out of the closet to develop and deploy a network of sufficient size to be effective at its task. Amazon is the perfect front.

Agreed! It is next to impossible to understand soviet Russia without knowing what is covered in that book. It completely changed my view of the whole Bolshevik experiment, especially Stalin's role. What had been a mystery to me became much clearer.

Warren Buffet credits it for much of his success. I don't much like the bastard but he learned his lessons well.

Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test - Tom Wolfe

Be Here Now - Ram Das

Whole Earth Catalog - Stewart Brand

Infinite Jest - David Foster Wallace

Savage Continent - Keith Lowe

Forged - Bart D. Ehrman

Young Stalin - Simon Sebag Montefiore

Court of the Red Czar - Simon Sebag Montefiore

To someone about to work the other direction, finding some help, this was excellent info. Nice work.

And people do seem to love to contradict and argue.

You must live in a museum. :-)

What of the Python library ecosystem? Usable?

The initiative process will continue to be problematic until it is restricted by the necessity of providing funding for any expenditures it mandates. Witness California.

I look around me and see that everything to which a power cord is attached has evolved enormously since his prediction or didn't exist at all. Yet the cord remains as it was a couple centuries ago.

This has always amazed me and as I look at the incredible rats nest of them around me I do hope for a breakthrough.

An equivalent rant could be written about any system of government that has or does exist. Establishing such hierarchies of privilege is intrinsic to the governing class. Always has been and always will be.

What's wrong with this logic is the presumption that the intelligence community would share any effective results of their work with the public. That would be just plain stupid. Rather than an endless argument over disclosing and justifying results, it is far simpler to simply say there aren't any. Yeah, image takes a hit but those people are much less concerned with image than with doing what they have been chartered to do.

Anyone to whom any of this (other than the capabilities) comes as any surprise at all is naive indeed and probably has no memory of the hostile spy era that spawned and justified it.

Depends on how you interpret "mistake." I don't think that improving the language is necessarily a mistake, but the way they did it is a mistake. It should have been an absolute requirement that, one way or t'other, a user could employ 2.x libraries transparently. No change should have been allowed until and unless a way was found to make it not impact backward ecosystem compatibility. This is a law of nature that was ignored and 3.x is paying the price that anyone could have predicted (and most did.)

Not ensuring library compatibility was lazy, egotistical arrogance and will ultimately relegate 3.x to being a historical footnote.

Backwards ecosystem compatibility is a law of nature, not an option. Guido blithely broke a law of nature and the consequences, which should have been completely obvious to him, are just as anyone with history in the industry could have predicted (and most did.)

I'm at the decision point of which one to learn for a long languishing project I want to use it for. If I could write in 3.x and use the 2.x library ecosystem there would be no glitch whatsoever in my decision process. 3.x seems sufficiently advantageous _as a language_ to make the choice easy. As is, however, since I do not yet know what within the 2.x ecosystem will prove to be important or essential, my only intelligent choice is to maximize my options and go with 2.x. The advantages of the 3.x language don't even begin to outweigh the potential disadvantages of coming up short.

I consider this irrevocable break with backward ecosystem compatibility (given the magnitude of the ecosystem) to be the worst, most egotistical decision I've ever seen in the computer field. Almost a death wish.

The floodgates will open when you can use one as the human interface to your Windows system in the cloud that you've uploaded all your apps and data to and can throw out all its local manifestations once and forever.

There's no longer any excuse or need for OEM Windows machines. Same is true of Mac systems but their walls will take longer to tear down. Nonetheless, fall they will.

Some day historians will only scratch their heads about this long detour away from thin clients that we've suffered for around 40 years and the phenomenon will become a rich research area for behavioral psychologists.

Fabulous! Best of breed for creating ambiance that I've heard and the suggestions here are bound to improve it.

It works from Firefox browser on a phone (sliders don't function with Chrome and it fades out immediately on Dolphin and Android browsers.) An equalizer (even Baxendahl 2 knob tone control) would be cool but would probably be a drag on the server.

FWIW regarding sleeping to ambient sound, I have an extensive collection of 'phones and 'buds of all types for R&D purposes and the hands down winner for 'buds to sleep with is the Sennheiser CX200.

(Irrelevant aside: For $19 at Amazon they are also by far the best bargain I've encountered for pristine sound.)

If there was the shared use of all this intelligence that everyone believes there is then the War On some Drugs would be over and done with overnight. But then maybe that's still in the staging phase.

Get to be 70 and be on (or just over) the edge of the technical breakthrough you've been working toward more than full time for 15 years and part time for 30 years before that. Oh, wait. I guess that means I'd already found that fanatical resolve. :-)

Seriously, I think the only way is unhealthy emotional involvement.

Does this imply that Neanderthals skedaddled to the Americas?

There was equal mention of Neanderthals and native Americans in the article but they seem to have avoided making the connection explicit.

Looks interesting. Thanks for the tip. Need to verify that it's also good for "non-natural" or traditional point and click GUI's.

I'd like something that involves a GUI, perhaps using QT unless you know something you think is better.

Works fine here too now that I disabled my browser's PDF plugin. :-)

I wonder why the study has nothing to say about the longevity of the treated mice compared to controls. Maybe it costs too much for experimenting with extended effects and maybe they want something for their next paper.

The biggest problem of course is sociological with only the top tiny% able to afford it. The psychological divide between have and have not will grow in ways completely unacceptable to the (100-tiny)% and could stimulate revolutionary tendencies among the masses to even things out. The top tiny% really should be considering pouring lots of their money into making the treatment cheap enough to not create a divide so intolerable that it will perish under its own weight.

Me too since I found Oculus Street View for my Rift.

  http://oculusstreetview.eu.pn

It's a pretty amazing experience. This map will be very, very useful.

Wow! Last night I picked up Dirac's little "Lectures on Quantum Mechanics" and stumbled at the start because my '60s mechanics education didn't include the Lagrangian, much less the Hamiltonian.

Today comes this and it should be more than enough for me to give Dirac another solid whack! Maybe enough, even, to come out the other side given another fundamental or two.

How sad. I cut my science teeth on Scientific American in the 50's. What a long and painful fall it's been.