OT: This Singularity is Near @ Woodstock Film Festival

[Fairlight]

Oh cool!  Sounds interesting!  And hey...Pauley Perrette...who can
complain about that...she's fantastic as Abby on NCIS.  :)  

The premise sounds interesting, but I really have to wonder just -how-
far into the future, if ever, some of it will be.  If you look at it, we
progressed horribly fast in some ways.  I remember the first hand-held
digital calculators, mobile phones, microwaves, etc.  Personal computers
evolved in a huge burst.  The space program gave us a lot.  But so much of
that progress has slowed.  It's like (is it Moore's Law?) we're running up
against the boundaries of what's doable without a complete paradigm shift.
We're not making huge leaps anymore...just slightly improving on existing
designs.

The who's who of people weighing in for that film is interesting.  I didn't
read -every- single name, but at a glance, I didn't see Steven Hawking, for
which I'm truly grateful.  If you've actually sat down (as I did one night
at a hotel) and watched Steven Hawking's programme on Discovery, well...it
should be pretty obvious that whatever brains the man has are either
overrated, he's a shadow of the genius he was acclaimed to be, or he's sold
out to become a media whore.  I'm truly -not- impressed with Hawking.  The
segment on time travel was simply pathetic, for example.  Not only nothing
new, but it was so dumbed down as to be laughable.  I've read 100x better
science fiction renderings of the subject.  Then he was cited in a CNN
article last week or so as wanting to travel into the future...which is
just a laugh if you watch the segment on time travel in his programme.  For
my money, the guy crossed the line from respectable scientist to media
attention-seeker a few streets back.

But I digress...  ("Mark -never- digresses at home!"  </airplane>)

I hope this Kurzweil movie makes it to DVD though...I'd like to see it.

Speaking of truly geeky things...now -THIS- is a way cool little baby.
Makes /dev/random and /dev/urandom look like jokes:

http://www.idquantique.com/true-random-number-generator/products-overview.html

mark->
-- 
Audio panton, cogito singularis.