5 Oct 2000 jameson   » (Master)

ISP
My ISP stopped letting its 'flat rate' customers (including me) log in. This sucks badly.

Nethack problems
The "bugfixes" I did to Nethack (to which, recently, fixes for custom level monsters and altars) were, obviously, workarounds for internal gcc deficiencies. Looks like the state of Debian's version of gcc for the Alpha is pretty bad... If someone wants that patch, drop me a note.

FreeSCI
The FreeSCI new gfx subsystem is almost complete, except for a few bugs that need to be fixed and the actual merge into the main tree (which should take a while). It appears to be considerably faster than the original system (no surprise there) while taking up more memory.

Human embryo stuff
Somehow, this reminds me of the Human Instrumentality Project (note that the boy's name is Adam, too). Is this a good thing or is it not? Well, they want to keep the boy, so I'm leaning towards "good thing" in this case. Of course, the issue is anything but trivial ethically- how would you react if your parents told you that you were chosen to live because you could save your sister's life? It's not that bad in this case, but the idea of arbitrarily letting humans choose which of a set of embryos are to live a life and which are to be discarded makes you wonder whether we're intelligent and wise enough to making decisions about life and death. Personally, I'm quite sure that we are anything but.

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