I was wondering when this was going to happen. Now that we have Mozilla, we don't need another reference implementation... they probably felt that they weren't needed anymore. Every time a new version of Amaya came out, I always tried it, but uninstalled it within minutes. I never liked it. And they never ever bothered to make typing www.domain.com work, which always pissed me off.
One of the most annoying things about The Matrix is that they supposedly use people as an energy source. First of all, heat is a very inefficient source of energy, and for them to get more energy out of the heat generated by people's bodies than they have to expend in keeping people alive violates the laws of thermodynamics. It's just silly. It doesn't mean that The Matrix is a bad movie. Anyone who reads my site knows how damn much I have my hopes up that The Matrix Reloaded will be the best f'ing movie ever made (I know, I'll be let down). But I think the back story to The Matrix could have been better in two ways.
First, rather than using us for heat, it seems a neater idea would have been to harness our brains' spare processing power and use humanity as a massively parallel neural network-based supercomputer. Even to the advanced computers of the Matrix, the human brain would be recognized as the best "computer" ever designed. This would also sort of lend credibility to the premise of Neo's superpowers - that he harnessed the latent power in his brain and was able to move faster than the agents, etc.
Second, and I think this would have potentially been a much more fascinating premise, could have been that while we built the machines to work for us and make our lives better, the machines wound up deciding that they could make our lives better for us than we could ever do ourselves. So, for our own good they decided to enslave us. This seems to even fit better with Agent Smith's revelation that they tried to create a utopia for us, but we rejected it.
I really like C.S. Lewis's quote:
Of all tyrannies a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies, The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.
I think it'd be so fitting if the machines enslaved us, not for their own purposes, but for our own good. What other cultural analogs would that have?
Wednesday, May 14, 2003
Permalink
new⇒Free image hosting sites
Well, TinyPic has this in itsFAQ:
> Images and videos is inyour accoun...
Keith: Dec 1, 1:13am