Kerry.. a strong "critic" of the PATRIOT act who also supported it being passed
I wish you wouldn't; it's getting very, very old.
Why is Kerry the only person on the planet who is not allowed to change his mind based on how past decisions play out? He voted for the patriot act (like over 90% of house and senate members). Then, when he (and everyone else) saw that it was being applied to other situations than it was intended (fighting terrorism was it's goal, it ended up being used to convict drug producers of chemical warfare etc.), he decided that it wasn't such a good idea.
So, he changed his mind. Good for him. It would have been stupid to support it even after it had been shown to remove the rights of citizens.
Kinko's has wierd rules, though. One time, I ripped an image off of an online encyclopedia and took it into kinko's to make a transparency out of it (for a lecture I was giving). Just to cover my ass, I photoshopped it and put on it, in bold 12 point letters, "COPYRIGHT 2002 Encyclopedia Britanica".
The guy at kinkos' said he couldn't copy it because it was copyrighted. And he knew, because in the interest of fair use, I had added the notice, denoting the graphic as not my work. And then, he said that it was just that HE couldn't do it, but he stood there and instructed me while I did it on one of the copiers in the customer area.
Not meaning to flame you or anything, but your comment is typical of many that I see any time Opera is mentioned on Slashdot: "I tried Opera x many years ago and it didn't do y properly or I didn't like the way it does z". In almost every case, I find that y and z were either something trivial that a quick change in the preferences could have fixed or something that was changed several versions ago.
I know you don't mean to flame bait, but this is my answer to your opera X, Y, and Z question.
"I tried opera $NOW and it wasn't FREE, and I didn't like the way it had ADVERTISEMENTS."
Sorry, but that's the problem with Opera. It's not free-as-in-beer, which every other browser ever made has been (from mosaic to ie to netscape to off-by-one to lynx to firefox to...). And if you're not willing to pay for software for something that everyone else on the planet gets for free, it shows you ads, which I find insulting. One, I see plenty of ads in the websites that I visit and on the Television. Two, when I browse the web, I want the current webpage to take up AS MUCH of the screen as possible. I turn off the bookmark toolbar, I move the navigation pieces up to the main tool bar, I use a smaller theme... I want maximum webpage, minimum browser, the browser is only the vehicle.
It's been mentioned before here, too: firefox is free (speech and beer), and does everything opera does. It doesn't do mouse gestures in the default install, but some people don't want mouse gestures, and if you do, it's a 20k plugin. Even if there were some whiz-bang feature that made opera stand out from the others, it still costs money. The fact that there isn't makes it that much more reprehensible.
I'd like to add applications that are almost infinitely scalable. For example, anything that you tell your computer to do and you walk away for an hour. The first thing that comes to mind is trans-coding DVDs. Mabey with a 3.8 it will take 4 hours instead of 7 with my 1800+ AMD.
Eh, kinda-sorta. The Undiscovered Country wasn't that good either, and I think Nemesis is on par with it. Nemesis wasn't bad, it just wasn't Wrath of Khan or First Contact. It's still far better than search for spock.
I think the more they rely on 'green screens' and CGI, the poorer the quality of the movie, specifically the story. And I think when Lucas relies increasingly on the movie to be a big commercial for his merchandising efforts (e.g. Jar Jar Binks) it ruins the movie.
You, my friend, are a person of wisdom. This is the number one problem with star wars: To borrow a phrase from Jurassic Park, they were so concerned with whether they *could*, they didn't stop to think if they *should*.
All of this CGI and whatnot has killed the sci-fi industry. Everyone gets a look at these movies, and goes "woah" as they see the special effects, but no one actually thinks about the quality of the movie its self. So, what we have is a situation in which every single solitary moment of a star wars film is visually beautiful, and utterly devoid of life.
You have cardboard cutouts for your human actors, and CGI characters everywhere. Every background is a living microcosm, but after a while, it just looks cluttered, it looks like people wander into the background just to make more motion. You end up with people talking "in the vague direction" of the CGI character, and other missed visual cues. It's horrible. It doesn't make a movie better.
You end out with the Jedi Master of the known universe flipping his shit and flying around a room in a show of physical prowess and cgi flash, but in Empire, yoda denies the need for raw, brutish strength, in favor of mind-over-matter. Yoda, in my mind, should be a character who is powerful by virtue of his presence, not his actions. But, no. CGI could bring him to life. Whether it should have or not, no one stopped to consider.
Add to the top of that the utter marketability of the movies, and it becomes sickening. The pod race scene in TPM? Exists in order to make video games. Jar Jar? Exists because the other actors have no hope of accomplishing situation comedy, as well as to put on lunch boxes.
Star wars has been killed, and Lucas pulled the trigger.
If you want an example of Sci-Fi done right, look at farscape. Brilliant actors. Excellent script writing. Voice-acted puppets where they are needed. Given a bigger budget, rigel and pilot could have been CGI, but why? They are more convincing as puppets. CGI is used for Moya and other space effects, where it's most effective.
Last original cast ST movie I paid to see was Search for Spock. One shit bucket is enough for me, thank you very much.
I did see Generations in the theatre, then waited for First Contact to hit HBO, and done. Haven't see any of the ST movies since then. Unless I hear some rave reviews from all sides, I'm done with new Star Trek--movies and TV.
I agree with the rest of your post, but come on! This is a really easy one to solve!
1.) Star trek the motion picture. 2.) The Wrath of Khan 3.) The search for spock 4.) The Voyage Home 5.) The final frontier 6.) The Undiscovered country. 7.) Generations 8.) First Contact 9.) Insurrection 10.) Nemesis
The even ones are good. It's as simple as that. There; all your star trek movie problems solved.
I for one don't care whether my President can solve Fermat's Last Theorem, score a 1600 on the SAT or anything like that. They don't need to. The Presidency is not rocket science. It's not a matter of intelligence, it's a matter of wisdom. This applies to both candidates.
It really depends. If your Intelligence is 13ish, and you're human, you can get an extra 4 skill points per level; you can also get Improved Knockdown and Improved Disarm. On the other hand, if you're playing a cleric or a ranger, Wisdom can prove very important, especially for those Will Saving throws.
Oh, what? Election?!? Well, I guess druids are probably liberals.
Actually, USA (~29 inhabitants/square kilometer) has a higher population density than Sweden (~20 inhabitants/square kilometer) does.
You missed his sarcasm, but that's beyond the point. The United States may have an average population density of 29 people per km^2, but that's done (obviously) by taking total area divided by total population. The problem is that there are a lot of places in the US that have FAR FAR less than 29 people per square km. My senior thesis was on the current state of the midwest US, and what to do from an ecological standpoint with the plains states; there are many places (say, west of Kansas City and east of Denver) that have less than 6 people per square mile! If you take out the midwest and alaska from the equation, and you have the south, the eastern seaboard, and california, you've got a much higher density.
~wx
Re:I grew up near Fredericksburg
on
Broadband Bits
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· Score: 1
Not only that, the cable TV around here is run by Adelphia, which is comming up on their deadline to recover from Chapter 11, and hasn't yet got all of their finances in order. There's a Comcast buyout bid on the horizon, so I heard between you, me, and the wall, so they're not really concerned about their quality of service. Their main tech support phone number has been shut off (540.898.6666).
Oh, and they're always showing these commercials, telling us how cable is better than satelite because they don't charge extra per TV, and it doesn't go out when it rains. Well, when Satelite TV is $35 + $5 per extra TV, and Adelphia cable is $52/month, who's saving money? And the TV does go out when it rains around here.
The problem with satellite latency isn't the distance the signal travels, it's the logistics of packet aggregation. The satelite transmits back to earth in packet bursts. Like AC current. It's on for a second, at really really high dense speeds, and then off for a sec.
"During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet. I took the initiative in moving forward a whole range of initiatives that have proven to be important to our country's economic growth and environmental protection, improvements in our educational system."
So, you've been misled. He clearly said he took the initiative in creating the internet. His comment was self-serving, but ALL congressional reps take credit for the accomplishments of programs that they fund, and rightly so.
Whenever a windows 98 machine would come in for a wipe-and-reload, it was fairly standard policy that, if the end user didn't have the key with them, but it was obvious that they had a copy of windows on the machine, my friend would use another windows98 key - they all work anyway, and there's no activation.
So, after doing the install 40,000 times, he had the key memorized, and used it as his password.
There's nothing like seeing someone type 25 random characters as a password.
Dude, greedo is threatening to kill Han, and then says he'll let Han go if Han pays the money he owes to Jabba instead to Greedo. Not to mention, the first thing Solo sees of this guy is him sticking a pistol in his sides, which he keeps trained on Solo during the entire conversation, above the table!
What more could you want saying he is evil?
Han Solo is a smuggler and a scoundrel. He sees that his life is in danger, and the quickest way to an easy out is to just shoot the guy. Not to mention, he knows the area and he knows that he's probably not going to get in trouble for shooting a rogue bounty hunter with an ego problem.
So, he shoots. Problem solved from his end. That's Han Solo.
At my last job, we had a 4x300mhz ultra SPARC II that could compile code faster than our 1.5Ghz Pentium 4, while only using one processor. I think that chip just wasn't very good for... well, a lot of stuff. The branch checks and the pipeline flushes on a missed prediction and whatnot hadn't been intirely sorted out by the time they put it out, I think.
Yeah, that was one of the most amazing things I learned from my chemistry teacher in college. He was doing the standard Liquid Nitrogen funstuffs, like dipping the flower, or the raquet ball, and a couple of other things. Then he was talking about the Liquid Nitrogen, and he pointed out that it's about as expensive as milk, per volume.
So, what I want to know is why don't they sell it at 7-11??!? Imagine the fun, not to mention uses. Other than computers, you can use it to freeze fruits so quickly that their water crystals don't have time to form and poke through the cell walls and make the fruit mushy... I'm sure there are a hundred other uses.
And this was quoted from the article, which isn't talking about speed, which would be gigabits-per-second (sometimes abbreviated gigabits), this is size, as in (quote) Both chips hold far more data than current chips in their respective markets and are smaller, which should make them cheaper and more powerful than existing chips.
Slashdot Mirror
Kerry.. a strong "critic" of the PATRIOT act who also supported it being passed
I wish you wouldn't; it's getting very, very old.
Why is Kerry the only person on the planet who is not allowed to change his mind based on how past decisions play out? He voted for the patriot act (like over 90% of house and senate members). Then, when he (and everyone else) saw that it was being applied to other situations than it was intended (fighting terrorism was it's goal, it ended up being used to convict drug producers of chemical warfare etc.), he decided that it wasn't such a good idea.
So, he changed his mind. Good for him. It would have been stupid to support it even after it had been shown to remove the rights of citizens.
~Wx
Food for thought: The netziens of Everquest make up the 79th richest economy in the world, placing them in between Russia and Bulgaria, per capita.
. ht ml
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.01/gaming
release-early, release-often approach
I'm looking at you, Robert Jordan.
I would trade the Wheel of Time books 24-45 for A Feast for Crows.
farscape - the complete 3rd season - $112.49
Kinko's has wierd rules, though. One time, I ripped an image off of an online encyclopedia and took it into kinko's to make a transparency out of it (for a lecture I was giving). Just to cover my ass, I photoshopped it and put on it, in bold 12 point letters, "COPYRIGHT 2002 Encyclopedia Britanica".
The guy at kinkos' said he couldn't copy it because it was copyrighted. And he knew, because in the interest of fair use, I had added the notice, denoting the graphic as not my work. And then, he said that it was just that HE couldn't do it, but he stood there and instructed me while I did it on one of the copiers in the customer area.
Wierd.
Not meaning to flame you or anything, but your comment is typical of many that I see any time Opera is mentioned on Slashdot: "I tried Opera x many years ago and it didn't do y properly or I didn't like the way it does z". In almost every case, I find that y and z were either something trivial that a quick change in the preferences could have fixed or something that was changed several versions ago.
I know you don't mean to flame bait, but this is my answer to your opera X, Y, and Z question.
"I tried opera $NOW and it wasn't FREE, and I didn't like the way it had ADVERTISEMENTS."
Sorry, but that's the problem with Opera. It's not free-as-in-beer, which every other browser ever made has been (from mosaic to ie to netscape to off-by-one to lynx to firefox to...). And if you're not willing to pay for software for something that everyone else on the planet gets for free, it shows you ads, which I find insulting. One, I see plenty of ads in the websites that I visit and on the Television. Two, when I browse the web, I want the current webpage to take up AS MUCH of the screen as possible. I turn off the bookmark toolbar, I move the navigation pieces up to the main tool bar, I use a smaller theme... I want maximum webpage, minimum browser, the browser is only the vehicle.
It's been mentioned before here, too: firefox is free (speech and beer), and does everything opera does. It doesn't do mouse gestures in the default install, but some people don't want mouse gestures, and if you do, it's a 20k plugin. Even if there were some whiz-bang feature that made opera stand out from the others, it still costs money. The fact that there isn't makes it that much more reprehensible.
~Wx
Yeah, gaming and high-end CAD.
I'd like to add applications that are almost infinitely scalable. For example, anything that you tell your computer to do and you walk away for an hour. The first thing that comes to mind is trans-coding DVDs. Mabey with a 3.8 it will take 4 hours instead of 7 with my 1800+ AMD.
Still not buying one, but there are reasons.
~Will
Eh, kinda-sorta. The Undiscovered Country wasn't that good either, and I think Nemesis is on par with it. Nemesis wasn't bad, it just wasn't Wrath of Khan or First Contact. It's still far better than search for spock.
I think the more they rely on 'green screens' and CGI, the poorer the quality of the movie, specifically the story. And I think when Lucas relies increasingly on the movie to be a big commercial for his merchandising efforts (e.g. Jar Jar Binks) it ruins the movie.
You, my friend, are a person of wisdom. This is the number one problem with star wars: To borrow a phrase from Jurassic Park, they were so concerned with whether they *could*, they didn't stop to think if they *should*.
All of this CGI and whatnot has killed the sci-fi industry. Everyone gets a look at these movies, and goes "woah" as they see the special effects, but no one actually thinks about the quality of the movie its self. So, what we have is a situation in which every single solitary moment of a star wars film is visually beautiful, and utterly devoid of life.
You have cardboard cutouts for your human actors, and CGI characters everywhere. Every background is a living microcosm, but after a while, it just looks cluttered, it looks like people wander into the background just to make more motion. You end up with people talking "in the vague direction" of the CGI character, and other missed visual cues. It's horrible. It doesn't make a movie better.
You end out with the Jedi Master of the known universe flipping his shit and flying around a room in a show of physical prowess and cgi flash, but in Empire, yoda denies the need for raw, brutish strength, in favor of mind-over-matter. Yoda, in my mind, should be a character who is powerful by virtue of his presence, not his actions. But, no. CGI could bring him to life. Whether it should have or not, no one stopped to consider.
Add to the top of that the utter marketability of the movies, and it becomes sickening. The pod race scene in TPM? Exists in order to make video games. Jar Jar? Exists because the other actors have no hope of accomplishing situation comedy, as well as to put on lunch boxes.
Star wars has been killed, and Lucas pulled the trigger.
If you want an example of Sci-Fi done right, look at farscape. Brilliant actors. Excellent script writing. Voice-acted puppets where they are needed. Given a bigger budget, rigel and pilot could have been CGI, but why? They are more convincing as puppets. CGI is used for Moya and other space effects, where it's most effective.
(marked you as "friend")
~Will
Last original cast ST movie I paid to see was Search for Spock. One shit bucket is enough for me, thank you very much.
I did see Generations in the theatre, then waited for First Contact to hit HBO, and done. Haven't see any of the ST movies since then. Unless I hear some rave reviews from all sides, I'm done with new Star Trek--movies and TV.
I agree with the rest of your post, but come on! This is a really easy one to solve!
1.) Star trek the motion picture.
2.) The Wrath of Khan
3.) The search for spock
4.) The Voyage Home
5.) The final frontier
6.) The Undiscovered country.
7.) Generations
8.) First Contact
9.) Insurrection
10.) Nemesis
The even ones are good. It's as simple as that. There; all your star trek movie problems solved.
~Wx
I for one don't care whether my President can solve Fermat's Last Theorem, score a 1600 on the SAT or anything like that. They don't need to. The Presidency is not rocket science. It's not a matter of intelligence, it's a matter of wisdom. This applies to both candidates.
It really depends. If your Intelligence is 13ish, and you're human, you can get an extra 4 skill points per level; you can also get Improved Knockdown and Improved Disarm. On the other hand, if you're playing a cleric or a ranger, Wisdom can prove very important, especially for those Will Saving throws.
Oh, what? Election?!? Well, I guess druids are probably liberals.
~Will
Ahh, the phases of slashdot.
Slashdot -> VA Linux -> VA Software -> OSDN -> OSTG
Simpler times, those were.
Actually, USA (~29 inhabitants/square kilometer) has a higher population density than Sweden (~20 inhabitants/square kilometer) does.
You missed his sarcasm, but that's beyond the point. The United States may have an average population density of 29 people per km^2, but that's done (obviously) by taking total area divided by total population. The problem is that there are a lot of places in the US that have FAR FAR less than 29 people per square km. My senior thesis was on the current state of the midwest US, and what to do from an ecological standpoint with the plains states; there are many places (say, west of Kansas City and east of Denver) that have less than 6 people per square mile! If you take out the midwest and alaska from the equation, and you have the south, the eastern seaboard, and california, you've got a much higher density.
~wx
Not only that, the cable TV around here is run by Adelphia, which is comming up on their deadline to recover from Chapter 11, and hasn't yet got all of their finances in order. There's a Comcast buyout bid on the horizon, so I heard between you, me, and the wall, so they're not really concerned about their quality of service. Their main tech support phone number has been shut off (540.898.6666).
Oh, and they're always showing these commercials, telling us how cable is better than satelite because they don't charge extra per TV, and it doesn't go out when it rains. Well, when Satelite TV is $35 + $5 per extra TV, and Adelphia cable is $52/month, who's saving money? And the TV does go out when it rains around here.
~Will
The problem with satellite latency isn't the distance the signal travels, it's the logistics of packet aggregation. The satelite transmits back to earth in packet bursts. Like AC current. It's on for a second, at really really high dense speeds, and then off for a sec.
~Will
So, you've been misled. He clearly said he took the initiative in creating the internet. His comment was self-serving, but ALL congressional reps take credit for the accomplishments of programs that they fund, and rightly so.
http://www.snopes.com/quotes/internet.htm
~Will
A while back, I ran a Nessus Scan on both Kerry and Bush's campaign sites.
Results are here.
http://elvis.netmar.com/~will/electionsites/
Note that this is a couple of months old.
I know a guy who used to be a computer tech...
Whenever a windows 98 machine would come in for a wipe-and-reload, it was fairly standard policy that, if the end user didn't have the key with them, but it was obvious that they had a copy of windows on the machine, my friend would use another windows98 key - they all work anyway, and there's no activation.
So, after doing the install 40,000 times, he had the key memorized, and used it as his password.
There's nothing like seeing someone type 25 random characters as a password.
~Will
C&C Generals.
see this site for more info.
~Will
Dude, greedo is threatening to kill Han, and then says he'll let Han go if Han pays the money he owes to Jabba instead to Greedo. Not to mention, the first thing Solo sees of this guy is him sticking a pistol in his sides, which he keeps trained on Solo during the entire conversation, above the table!
What more could you want saying he is evil?
Han Solo is a smuggler and a scoundrel. He sees that his life is in danger, and the quickest way to an easy out is to just shoot the guy. Not to mention, he knows the area and he knows that he's probably not going to get in trouble for shooting a rogue bounty hunter with an ego problem.
So, he shoots. Problem solved from his end. That's Han Solo.
~Will
The P3 Katmai had 512k L2 cache, the P4 had only 256k.
The P4 had 256K Level-2 cache, and only like 8K "trace cache" for Level-1 cache. Ugh.
~Will
Heh.
At my last job, we had a 4x300mhz ultra SPARC II that could compile code faster than our 1.5Ghz Pentium 4, while only using one processor. I think that chip just wasn't very good for
~Will
Yeah, that was one of the most amazing things I learned from my chemistry teacher in college. He was doing the standard Liquid Nitrogen funstuffs, like dipping the flower, or the raquet ball, and a couple of other things. Then he was talking about the Liquid Nitrogen, and he pointed out that it's about as expensive as milk, per volume.
So, what I want to know is why don't they sell it at 7-11??!? Imagine the fun, not to mention uses. Other than computers, you can use it to freeze fruits so quickly that their water crystals don't have time to form and poke through the cell walls and make the fruit mushy... I'm sure there are a hundred other uses.
~Will
8 gigabits = 1 gigabyte
2 gigabits = 256 megabytes
And this was quoted from the article, which isn't talking about speed, which would be gigabits-per-second (sometimes abbreviated gigabits), this is size, as in (quote) Both chips hold far more data than current chips in their respective markets and are smaller, which should make them cheaper and more powerful than existing chips.
Smaller, mabey. Higher capacity? No.
Technological neophyte journalists.
~Wx
Kill yourself, and leave a note behind.