Im sorry but the concept of since its old its very stable is non-sense,
There's a difference between "It's been tested to actually work in under condition X with config Y" and being "old". Also, there's another name for a diehard... Hard to Kill.
Not only this, but you can use the stable Debian version as a base to install / compile whatever new stuff you want (just work your way up the upgrade path tree), this way you can choose stability in some places and newest features in others. Despite sometimes having dependency hell, I've found it even more difficult to go the opposite direction -- Installing the latest stuff, then going after the more stable things in certain places.
I wish google would just fuck right out of the content creation business if they're going to take such a big part in the search, ads, and development platforms, then the should stay the hell away from creating content for it. It's like they're taking a clue from the cable companies here. No. Stop. Focus on your core competency, be the platform -- I don't want to waste my time trying to compete with a company who owns the platform.
Now, if they're just going to focus on discoverability and ease of development to make it easier for gamers and game makers to meet up and get their game on, then that's fine. Soon as they have a vested interest in putting one game ahead of the other, I'm out. I'll release my products as bootable firmware / BIOS images before I let another greedy platform owner bend me over to make their own titles look better by comparison.
This measure of potent greenhouse gas in the atmosphere should spark renewed discussion about the use of fossil fuels.
Uh, isn't burning other fuels just as bad -- I mean, separating C, H, and O chains is separating C,H, & O chains no matter if it came from long dead or recent dead stuff. Just call it "the Burning of Resources", because that's what it is. Oil is so useful we'll be pumping it out of the Earth until every last drop is gone to make stuff out of even if we never burned fossil fuels for energy ever again.
I recently took a position... I will be providing basic IT training to the senior management
You might think that's what you're doing, and you might even make a spectacular job of it, but there's a reason why they're where they are and still don't know anything -- That's what they do. If they knew anything they wouldn't have those jobs. Good luck.
Whatever you do. DO NOT TEST THEM to ensure they know what they've been nodding their heads and agreeing with.... That's why it's you, the new guy, who's tasked with this job. The folks they'd actually listen to are wiser than to risk their job by showing just how dumb the management is. When they come and ask you questions about things that YOU JUST "taught them" about yesterday, just grin and politely show them how. Enjoy your life at the bottom of the totem poll. If you survive the ordeal, maybe you can convince HR to find you an underling you can feed to the wolves one day too.
Yes, but there's the odd chance that I'm not. For those who are alone, great, give 'em a checkbox to unmask the password -- Or at the very least GIVE ME THE OPTION to mask my password. Not having the OPTION to make a password field masked is not just retarding (requiring that I then cover the screen, or wait till I'm alone), but it's it plainly "fucking moronic" on the idiocy scale. Yes, I'll tell it like it is to anyone's face in those exact terms, because that's exactly the response this foolish and ridiculous of a situation calls for.
"Words are absolutely powerless to compel anyone to act violently."
Yes, that's true, but words can provoke, sometimes against our better judgment or will.
The classic example is yelling "Fire!" in a crowded theater. While that's not violence, strictly speaking, under some circumstances words can cause havoc.
In my opinion that classic example is a bad one, and I put it to you that your claims are untested hypotheses which lack any evidence to support them. What is the percentage of times that someone will lapse their better judgment due to a provocational word? No metrics? That's what I thought. Your stance is invalid. Let us test the hypothesis, or begone with laws based on bogus assumptions.
I do have some experience with being provoked and provoking others -- Any school child does. "Teasing" is a human rite of passage that better hones our judgment in the face of provocation. Sure, in extreme cases someone may be provoked to action against their judgement by words, but I'm pretty sure it's the one taking the action that is found at fault -- "Who threw the first punch?" Additionally, outliers do not a law make. In reality, it's harmful to the free society of man to make laws or take action based on a mere minor possibility of something occurring, depending on what the something is and the estimated risk. You need look no further than searching "internment camp" or "red scare" if you need some backing evidence here.
I was actually in a crowded theater once when a man shouted "FIRE!" The immediate response was an overwhelming, "WHERE?!" No one else could see or smell any smoke -- They wanted to know which way to go to escape the fire. Turns out he just though there was a fire -- It was a wisp of dust rising out of a seat cushion in front of him, as a nearby observer pointed out. "Oh, sorry, it was just dust or something, nevermind", he said, and it was on with the show.
You see, If you perceive an event, it stands to reason that others should be able to perceive it too. If he had insisted that there was a fire where there was none it probably would have caused everyone to annoyingly shuffle out of the theater -- It's not like the fire would spread faster than a human could walk away. A guy popping his head in the door and yelling fire might have spooked us more, but it should be the action that is actually caused that is weighed in all these instances of "word abuse". Actions speak louder than words, as they say.
Are you sure Microsoft didn't PATENT the 16 shades of grey in the font rasterizer ?
It's nearly impossible to be sure if they did or didn't, and if you try to find out, then you come to know you're infringing a patent, then 3x damages can be levied against you if they sue... IMO, I would go with a non power of two in order to reduce the likelihood that exact number of shades would be infringing. So, instead of 16, 32, or 64, perhaps 50 shades of grey would be a good compromise.
Oh, well, there's so many holes in this boat, and patching one of 'em takes, you know, effort -- Well, a different kind of effort than I'm used to anyway. So, I think we should just try spending all our time bailing more water -- It won't keep us from sinking eventually, but, I mean, I'm a card carrying member of the water bailer's union, and the Bucket Supply Store gives me a percentage of the sales on referrals... Meh, I'll probably be dead before the boat sinks, so, yeah. Screw the boat, just bail faster!
Programmers make me laugh hysterically sometimes. Seriously, when in the history of man has an entire portion of an industry been dedicated to the following two goals:
1) Obsolescence of all current vocational knowledge in their field on 5-15 year scales.
2) The ultimate goal of their work is the removal of their job position from the market (the singularity which can hack in C).
OK. I'll bite:
0) Machine Intelligence systems are great for helping humans -- Luxury car break controls for when your attention is lacking, Segues, for when your balance is lacking, Self driving car for when you need to take a nap on that long drive, Automatic terrain creation so you don't have to piddle with setting each stone and tree, you can just generate a bunch of settings until you find a cool one, then sculpt the land a bit more way you like to add more visual interests afterwards, Which is how RL stuff is made anyhow -- the universe is an automated environment generation system for you to build your stuff atop -- Imagine placing each molecule of a building manually! Doing this for game rules too is an obvious iteration.
1) There will always need to be someone in charge at some higher level to direct the automated systems, from traffic lights, to power grids, to AI game designing systems. Who do you hire? The guy who just learned how to use the system? Or the guy who can manage it AND FIX IT if need be?
You damn Absolutists make me laugh. Herp, It's got to be one side of the false dichotomy or the other, Derp!
Furthermore:
2) I've got so many other things to do, I'm glad when the job is OVER! There doesn't have to be and endless stream of work for any given task, that's asinine! No one wants to be stuck doing the same thing forever. Even sex gets boring if that's all you do! ( This has happened thrice: Eventually she'll be fantasizing about romance novel scenarios and you'll be wanting to play with hardware and complex pulley systems before too long -- Just hope the novels she likes are sci-fi: "Honey look, my cock has a vibrating slithering Tentacle attachment!"). So, yeah, laugh all you want sucker. I'll be automating my tasks as much as possible, and then when it's a SOLVED problem that any idiot (with a tentacle dick strap on) can do, then I move on to more adventurous Problems.
I could have a hundred clones and we'd never be out of work, even if one of the tasks is to create a hundred more clones to help! Enjoy your monotony, moron.
All we've ever really wanted was a unibiquitous software development platform that wasn't bloated as hell and allowed optional access to the local file system (for save data / load data). Java could have been this, but they didn't make Applets be trimmed down lean and mean for the web, and included the kitchen sink so the attack surface was too large. HTML+JS is becoming what we want, if it wasn't for the horribly designed scripting language -- Its design had no concern for speed since all the heavy lifting was to be handled by Java, hence "JavaScript"... Unfortunately since Sun dropped the Java ball, JavaScript is left to take up the reigns. Instead of redesigning it, or giving us a new language to use in all common browsers that could be compiled to bytecode -- Lua w/ LuaJIT? (well, one that is more friendly, perhaps).
Anyway, as a game developer I've experimented in HTML5+JS+WebGL, but you know what's holding me back? Two things: IE support for WebGL, and HTML5 Audio: Look, It takes just as long to code the thing in OpenGL and C than WebGL and JS, and afterwards I can reach the whole market, not just the FF / Chrome market, and I can control the damn audio pipeline properly -- By whole market I mean my code runs on Linux, Mac, Windows, natively. With a bit of meta programming and some purpose built "platform abstraction layer / runtime" I can create programs that deploy to iOS and Android as well as the desktop OSs... I can add Firefox and Chrome as a target platform, if only AUDIO wasn't screwed. Play a sound, then play it again while it's still playing. There's noticeable lag even if you remember to seek to the beginning so your sound actually plays. To combat this I create 10 or so of the same exact same audio tag for one sound effect and loop through them so that I'm not re-using the same audio tag... And it still stutters and pops and lags -- This time because we've got 100s of audio tags to maintain, and the scripting host is too damn slow to keep buffers full, apparently. Notice how the Citadel demo is lacking any sound effects except a single looped sound playing fades out at either end? And even then it cuts out in the middle instead of transitioning smoothly to the next area -- Shit, even I can pull off a dynamic audio fade transition, with just two audio tags (WTF are you even doing Epic? It's unreal you'd make this newb mistake). Yeah, there's a reason for the lack of interactive audio effects, and that reason sucks -- I guess I'm wearing pillows on my feet?
I think the web is an interesting platform -- browsers can provide access to machine features through OSs (add another abstraction layer: meta programming, ugh), but the only reason the web is interesting at all is because of the huge adoption rate of web browsers which we can leverage. Everything else about them sucks. JS is used because it's there, not because it's any good. Hell, I could say the same thing about HTML -- It's not any good. Come up with a low level bytecode interactive glyph and shape rendering system and allow us to compile sites down into that, then we can have freedom to escape the 1.5 decade long march it takes to get from one version of HTML to the next by creating better markups that compile down to efficient cross platform display and animation bytecode. Yeah, like Flash, but browsers could compile HTML, CSS and JS, or support faster pre-compiled stuff. Otherwise, screw the web, Apps will eat you alive. Text can be embedded there for search spiders, and they'd have an even easier time lexing past bytecode to get at text rather than We can't afford to keep tweaking crap just because a browser changes the way it renders some tags -- Even some designs on CSS Zen Garden are broken in FF now. Ugh. Give us a binary SVG already, with pixel perfect definition for rendering, it's not rocket science.
Interesting, but the web isn't ready for large scale games just yet without plugins because of its flaky audio and inefficient scripting language (even with ASM.js). Stic
My many web design/development clients would disagree with you. I don't even want to recall the times I've had to tell them No for blinking things.
Unfortunately they think blinking == attention getting, whereas we think blinking == f*cking irritating.
<BLINK> tags don't annoy people, people do. Don't give them a blinking tag, they'll just create a.GIF or worse a jittering noisy Flash animation. I used a blinking tag in a non-annoying way: to emulate a DOS like cursor for my temporary landing page.
Firefox supports the blinking text, but Chrome doesn't...
Google's Blink seems to have an apt name. They named their codebase fork after things they actively don't support. The name "Blink" would seem be synonymous with "Dropping Support Of..." I hope they keep this trend up. After all, it's a net loss to spend money developing a web browser when other fully open source browsers exist, so eventually I can see them dropping support for HTML when they don't plan to have to PAY any developers to work on it. Note: Chromium has developers that are not Google Employees. Some of us might have taken up the call to further maintain Math ML, if we were every fucking asked.
It's funny that the answer to the question, "Is there a God?" and "Is there life on other planets?" is interchangeable: "We can't know because there is no proof."
Which is why I always found it hard to trust any teacher who would demerit me for using the excuse, "My dog ate my homework." They're basing actions on unprovable hypotheses!
Slashdot Mirror
"I am altering the OS, pray I don't alter it any further."
— Darth Ballmer.
phppgadmin is not comparable to phpmyadmin. It's a poor copy of myadmin.
Proving once again, the "no true Scotsman" argument can be applied to anything.
The command sucks. I uses a led and a switch connected to my fiber to send commands.
You realize that all of this was part of my plan when I created the initial conditions for this Universe, to populate my database, right?
With Eidos being the name, users will expect interminably long cut scenes in-between short spurts of actually being able to use the product.
Wait, you nick-named yours Eidos?
Im sorry but the concept of since its old its very stable is non-sense,
There's a difference between "It's been tested to actually work in under condition X with config Y" and being "old". Also, there's another name for a diehard... Hard to Kill.
Not only this, but you can use the stable Debian version as a base to install / compile whatever new stuff you want (just work your way up the upgrade path tree), this way you can choose stability in some places and newest features in others. Despite sometimes having dependency hell, I've found it even more difficult to go the opposite direction -- Installing the latest stuff, then going after the more stable things in certain places.
I wish google would just fuck right out of the content creation business if they're going to take such a big part in the search, ads, and development platforms, then the should stay the hell away from creating content for it. It's like they're taking a clue from the cable companies here. No. Stop. Focus on your core competency, be the platform -- I don't want to waste my time trying to compete with a company who owns the platform.
Now, if they're just going to focus on discoverability and ease of development to make it easier for gamers and game makers to meet up and get their game on, then that's fine. Soon as they have a vested interest in putting one game ahead of the other, I'm out. I'll release my products as bootable firmware / BIOS images before I let another greedy platform owner bend me over to make their own titles look better by comparison.
This measure of potent greenhouse gas in the atmosphere should spark renewed discussion about the use of fossil fuels.
Uh, isn't burning other fuels just as bad -- I mean, separating C, H, and O chains is separating C,H, & O chains no matter if it came from long dead or recent dead stuff. Just call it "the Burning of Resources", because that's what it is. Oil is so useful we'll be pumping it out of the Earth until every last drop is gone to make stuff out of even if we never burned fossil fuels for energy ever again.
The better to see them with, my deer.
I recently took a position ... I will be providing basic IT training to the senior management
You might think that's what you're doing, and you might even make a spectacular job of it, but there's a reason why they're where they are and still don't know anything -- That's what they do. If they knew anything they wouldn't have those jobs. Good luck.
Whatever you do. DO NOT TEST THEM to ensure they know what they've been nodding their heads and agreeing with.... That's why it's you, the new guy, who's tasked with this job. The folks they'd actually listen to are wiser than to risk their job by showing just how dumb the management is. When they come and ask you questions about things that YOU JUST "taught them" about yesterday, just grin and politely show them how. Enjoy your life at the bottom of the totem poll. If you survive the ordeal, maybe you can convince HR to find you an underling you can feed to the wolves one day too.
During the install process you're probably alone.
Yes, but there's the odd chance that I'm not. For those who are alone, great, give 'em a checkbox to unmask the password -- Or at the very least GIVE ME THE OPTION to mask my password. Not having the OPTION to make a password field masked is not just retarding (requiring that I then cover the screen, or wait till I'm alone), but it's it plainly "fucking moronic" on the idiocy scale. Yes, I'll tell it like it is to anyone's face in those exact terms, because that's exactly the response this foolish and ridiculous of a situation calls for.
"Words are absolutely powerless to compel anyone to act violently."
Yes, that's true, but words can provoke, sometimes against our better judgment or will.
The classic example is yelling "Fire!" in a crowded theater. While that's not violence, strictly speaking, under some circumstances words can cause havoc.
In my opinion that classic example is a bad one, and I put it to you that your claims are untested hypotheses which lack any evidence to support them. What is the percentage of times that someone will lapse their better judgment due to a provocational word? No metrics? That's what I thought. Your stance is invalid. Let us test the hypothesis, or begone with laws based on bogus assumptions.
I do have some experience with being provoked and provoking others -- Any school child does. "Teasing" is a human rite of passage that better hones our judgment in the face of provocation. Sure, in extreme cases someone may be provoked to action against their judgement by words, but I'm pretty sure it's the one taking the action that is found at fault -- "Who threw the first punch?" Additionally, outliers do not a law make. In reality, it's harmful to the free society of man to make laws or take action based on a mere minor possibility of something occurring, depending on what the something is and the estimated risk. You need look no further than searching "internment camp" or "red scare" if you need some backing evidence here.
I was actually in a crowded theater once when a man shouted "FIRE!" The immediate response was an overwhelming, "WHERE?!" No one else could see or smell any smoke -- They wanted to know which way to go to escape the fire. Turns out he just though there was a fire -- It was a wisp of dust rising out of a seat cushion in front of him, as a nearby observer pointed out. "Oh, sorry, it was just dust or something, nevermind", he said, and it was on with the show.
You see, If you perceive an event, it stands to reason that others should be able to perceive it too. If he had insisted that there was a fire where there was none it probably would have caused everyone to annoyingly shuffle out of the theater -- It's not like the fire would spread faster than a human could walk away. A guy popping his head in the door and yelling fire might have spooked us more, but it should be the action that is actually caused that is weighed in all these instances of "word abuse". Actions speak louder than words, as they say.
Are you sure Microsoft didn't PATENT the 16 shades of grey in the font rasterizer ?
It's nearly impossible to be sure if they did or didn't, and if you try to find out, then you come to know you're infringing a patent, then 3x damages can be levied against you if they sue... IMO, I would go with a non power of two in order to reduce the likelihood that exact number of shades would be infringing. So, instead of 16, 32, or 64, perhaps 50 shades of grey would be a good compromise.
Why doesn't Reddit ever use their hivemind to affect change for any of the real, substantial problems we have in this world?
You mean like the live-blog of the Boston Bombing police scanner reports, being fact checked in real time hours before the network news?
I'm not sure what you're getting at? So, what? You want them to just run the country?
at least in America they have the right, at least until rand Paul shoots them with a drone because they walk out of a liquor store suspiciously
Honestly though, that would be kinda cool. Can we do that now, because, they'll only get the chance once, and I want to be alive to see the shitstorm.
...firms being asked asked to cooperate ...
I think you mean: ...firms being asked, and asked again to cooperate...
Oh, well, there's so many holes in this boat, and patching one of 'em takes, you know, effort -- Well, a different kind of effort than I'm used to anyway. So, I think we should just try spending all our time bailing more water -- It won't keep us from sinking eventually, but, I mean, I'm a card carrying member of the water bailer's union, and the Bucket Supply Store gives me a percentage of the sales on referrals... Meh, I'll probably be dead before the boat sinks, so, yeah. Screw the boat, just bail faster!
Programmers make me laugh hysterically sometimes. Seriously, when in the history of man has an entire portion of an industry been dedicated to the following two goals: 1) Obsolescence of all current vocational knowledge in their field on 5-15 year scales. 2) The ultimate goal of their work is the removal of their job position from the market (the singularity which can hack in C).
OK. I'll bite:
0) Machine Intelligence systems are great for helping humans -- Luxury car break controls for when your attention is lacking, Segues, for when your balance is lacking, Self driving car for when you need to take a nap on that long drive, Automatic terrain creation so you don't have to piddle with setting each stone and tree, you can just generate a bunch of settings until you find a cool one, then sculpt the land a bit more way you like to add more visual interests afterwards, Which is how RL stuff is made anyhow -- the universe is an automated environment generation system for you to build your stuff atop -- Imagine placing each molecule of a building manually! Doing this for game rules too is an obvious iteration.
1) There will always need to be someone in charge at some higher level to direct the automated systems, from traffic lights, to power grids, to AI game designing systems. Who do you hire? The guy who just learned how to use the system? Or the guy who can manage it AND FIX IT if need be?
You damn Absolutists make me laugh. Herp, It's got to be one side of the false dichotomy or the other, Derp!
Furthermore:
2) I've got so many other things to do, I'm glad when the job is OVER! There doesn't have to be and endless stream of work for any given task, that's asinine! No one wants to be stuck doing the same thing forever. Even sex gets boring if that's all you do! ( This has happened thrice: Eventually she'll be fantasizing about romance novel scenarios and you'll be wanting to play with hardware and complex pulley systems before too long -- Just hope the novels she likes are sci-fi: "Honey look, my cock has a vibrating slithering Tentacle attachment!"). So, yeah, laugh all you want sucker. I'll be automating my tasks as much as possible, and then when it's a SOLVED problem that any idiot (with a tentacle dick strap on) can do, then I move on to more adventurous Problems.
I could have a hundred clones and we'd never be out of work, even if one of the tasks is to create a hundred more clones to help! Enjoy your monotony, moron.
All we've ever really wanted was a unibiquitous software development platform that wasn't bloated as hell and allowed optional access to the local file system (for save data / load data). Java could have been this, but they didn't make Applets be trimmed down lean and mean for the web, and included the kitchen sink so the attack surface was too large. HTML+JS is becoming what we want, if it wasn't for the horribly designed scripting language -- Its design had no concern for speed since all the heavy lifting was to be handled by Java, hence "JavaScript"... Unfortunately since Sun dropped the Java ball, JavaScript is left to take up the reigns. Instead of redesigning it, or giving us a new language to use in all common browsers that could be compiled to bytecode -- Lua w/ LuaJIT? (well, one that is more friendly, perhaps).
Anyway, as a game developer I've experimented in HTML5+JS+WebGL, but you know what's holding me back? Two things: IE support for WebGL, and HTML5 Audio: Look, It takes just as long to code the thing in OpenGL and C than WebGL and JS, and afterwards I can reach the whole market, not just the FF / Chrome market, and I can control the damn audio pipeline properly -- By whole market I mean my code runs on Linux, Mac, Windows, natively. With a bit of meta programming and some purpose built "platform abstraction layer / runtime" I can create programs that deploy to iOS and Android as well as the desktop OSs... I can add Firefox and Chrome as a target platform, if only AUDIO wasn't screwed. Play a sound, then play it again while it's still playing. There's noticeable lag even if you remember to seek to the beginning so your sound actually plays. To combat this I create 10 or so of the same exact same audio tag for one sound effect and loop through them so that I'm not re-using the same audio tag... And it still stutters and pops and lags -- This time because we've got 100s of audio tags to maintain, and the scripting host is too damn slow to keep buffers full, apparently. Notice how the Citadel demo is lacking any sound effects except a single looped sound playing fades out at either end? And even then it cuts out in the middle instead of transitioning smoothly to the next area -- Shit, even I can pull off a dynamic audio fade transition, with just two audio tags (WTF are you even doing Epic? It's unreal you'd make this newb mistake). Yeah, there's a reason for the lack of interactive audio effects, and that reason sucks -- I guess I'm wearing pillows on my feet?
I think the web is an interesting platform -- browsers can provide access to machine features through OSs (add another abstraction layer: meta programming, ugh), but the only reason the web is interesting at all is because of the huge adoption rate of web browsers which we can leverage. Everything else about them sucks. JS is used because it's there, not because it's any good. Hell, I could say the same thing about HTML -- It's not any good. Come up with a low level bytecode interactive glyph and shape rendering system and allow us to compile sites down into that, then we can have freedom to escape the 1.5 decade long march it takes to get from one version of HTML to the next by creating better markups that compile down to efficient cross platform display and animation bytecode. Yeah, like Flash, but browsers could compile HTML, CSS and JS, or support faster pre-compiled stuff. Otherwise, screw the web, Apps will eat you alive. Text can be embedded there for search spiders, and they'd have an even easier time lexing past bytecode to get at text rather than We can't afford to keep tweaking crap just because a browser changes the way it renders some tags -- Even some designs on CSS Zen Garden are broken in FF now. Ugh. Give us a binary SVG already, with pixel perfect definition for rendering, it's not rocket science.
Interesting, but the web isn't ready for large scale games just yet without plugins because of its flaky audio and inefficient scripting language (even with ASM.js). Stic
My many web design/development clients would disagree with you. I don't even want to recall the times I've had to tell them No for blinking things.
Unfortunately they think blinking == attention getting, whereas we think blinking == f*cking irritating.
<BLINK> tags don't annoy people, people do. Don't give them a blinking tag, they'll just create a .GIF or worse a jittering noisy Flash animation. I used a blinking tag in a non-annoying way: to emulate a DOS like cursor for my temporary landing page.
Firefox supports the blinking text, but Chrome doesn't...
Google's Blink seems to have an apt name. They named their codebase fork after things they actively don't support. The name "Blink" would seem be synonymous with "Dropping Support Of..." I hope they keep this trend up. After all, it's a net loss to spend money developing a web browser when other fully open source browsers exist, so eventually I can see them dropping support for HTML when they don't plan to have to PAY any developers to work on it. Note: Chromium has developers that are not Google Employees. Some of us might have taken up the call to further maintain Math ML, if we were every fucking asked.
No. Multi User OSs are a pipe dream. Next you'll want file level access restriction. Madness.
Well, it's WebGL, so all they have to do is compile Turbulenz for OpenGL and release it as a native client.
Seriously though, for your IE6 crowd if they can just release the game with a Firefox or Chrome redistributable runtime...
What Congress can learn from Watching PokeMon Cartoons....
Always repeat your name as often as possible so you're more likely to get chosen.
NEXT!
So that covers Battlestar Galactica; What of Beets, and Bears?
It's funny that the answer to the question, "Is there a God?" and "Is there life on other planets?" is interchangeable: "We can't know because there is no proof."
Which is why I always found it hard to trust any teacher who would demerit me for using the excuse, "My dog ate my homework." They're basing actions on unprovable hypotheses!