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.