A really geeky joke

(printed by fortune in one of my terminal windows today)

The ark lands after The Flood. Noah lets all the animals out. Says he, “Go and multiply.” Several months pass. Noah decides to check up on the animals. All are doing fine except a pair of snakes. “What’s the problem?” says Noah. “Cut down some trees and let us live there”, say the snakes. Noah follows their advice. Several more weeks pass. Noah checks on the snakes again. Lots of little snakes, everybody is happy. Noah asks, “Want to tell me how the trees helped?” “Certainly”, say the snakes. “We’re adders, and we need logs to multiply.”

Clonus: The Island Horror

I’m not the only one to notice the similarity between The Island (2005) and The Clonus Horror (1979).

Today (1 July 2005), someone posted this comment to my original post regarding The Island. The author of this comment may or may not be Robert S. Fiveson, director of The Clonus Horror.

Then I was right. Job has all his children killed, and Michael Bay gets to keep making movies. There isn’t a God.
— Kyle Broflovski

War on Christianity

…the long war on Christianity in America continues today on the floor of the House of Representatives and continues unabated with aid and comfort to those who would eradicate any vestige of our Christian heritage being supplied by the usual suspects, the Democrats.
— Rep. John Hostettler (R-IN)

Yes, the long war on Christianity. I pray that one day we may live in an America where Christians can worship freely! In broad daylight! Openly wearing the symbols of their religion…. perhaps around their necks? And maybe — dare I dream it? — maybe one day there can be an openly Christian President. Or, perhaps, 43 of them. Consecutively.
— Jon Stewart

Bill Gates warns against reliance on outsourcing

(via Computerworld)

Companies should not outsource their core business functions and staff, Microsoft chairman and chief software architect Bill Gates told a group of Japan’s top businessmen today.

Gates, who was speaking at the Nippon Keidanren (Japan Business Federation), Japan’s biggest and most influential business group, urged IT companies to beware of outsourcing too much to save costs and to keep their key engineering resources and intellectual property at home.

“If you rely too much on people in other companies and countries … you are outsourcing your brains where you are making all the innovation,” he said.

The need to maintain a competitive edge by investing rather than cost cutting was a theme that Gates returned to several times in an address to a group of leading Japanese IT and consumer industrialists that included NEC Corp. Chairman Hajime Sasaki and Tadashi Okamura, chairman of Toshiba Corp., both of whom had front-row seats.

Too many U.S. companies were cutting their research and development budgets at a time when investment in these areas is needed to cope with an increasingly competitive global market economy, he said.

At a national level, both the U.S. and Japan need to train more and better engineers if their economies are to stay at the cutting-edge of technological innovation, which would create value that helps support both countries’ high standards of living, he said.

Gates cast the U.S. and Japan as competing in a global market economy that had grown from about a billion people 20 years ago to 4 billion people. In this expanded, increasingly competitive economy, India and China are training engineers who are driving their economies forward yet Japan and the U.S. are not keeping up, he said.

“The number of students in engineering and IT is going down. … Staying ahead means setting a very high bar,” Gates said.

Two things about this article:

  1. I’m shocked to find myself agreeing with Bill Gates.
  2. Let’s hope his influence can turn the outsourcing trend around.

10 years on the web

It was about 10 years ago when I decided to take advantage of my ISP’s free web space and teach myself HTML. Since then, I’ve maintained a continuous presence on the web, moving my web pages from one ISP to another. Finally, in May, 2000 I obtained my own domain.

More:

Déjà Vu

I recently saw a trailer for Michael Bay’s latest crapfest, The Island. Something about the premise was awfully familiar, then I remembered an episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000 where they gave the movie, Parts: The Clonus Horror the MST3K treatment. Here’s the plot summaries for both movies from the IMDb.

The Clonus Horror (1979):

A young man escapes from a govenment run project called Clonus only to find out that Peter Graves (Jeff Knight) a candidate for Presidency is a conspirator to keep Clonus a secret. Top government officials are aware of it and support the super secret project, because they are cloning themselves to live longer and better lives, at the expense of their clone counter-part, who is no more than a “slave” as far as human rights are concerned. The ethical and moral values are explored as the escapee (Tim Donnelly) known as Richard returns full circle back to Clonus, only to find his girlfriend lobotimized for government security purposes.

The Island (2005):

Lincoln Six-Echo (McGregor) is a resident of a seemingly utopian but contained facility in the mid 21st century. Like all of the inhabitants of this carefully controlled environment, Lincoln hopes to be chosen to go to the “The Island” – reportedly the last uncontaminated spot on the planet. But Lincoln soon discovers that everything about his existence is a lie. He and all of the other inhabitants of the facility are actually human clones whose only purpose is to provide “spare parts” for their original human counterparts. Realizing it is only a matter of time before he is “harvested,” Lincoln makes a daring escape with a beautiful fellow resident named Jordan Two-Delta (Johansson). Relentlessly pursued by the forces of the sinister institute that once housed them, Lincoln and Jordan engage in a race for their lives to literally meet their makers.

Given Michael Bay‘s track record, I don’t expect The Island be any better than The Clonus Horror.

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